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Mr. Keelan held his giant sword up in the air, let out another howl and jumped down. His pack followed except for the bouda who laughed again and moved to stand next to me.
Great. I didn’t need a babysitter.
“You can go with them,” I told her. “I got this.”
She shook her head. “No offence, kid, but your dad and my alpha say otherwise. Sucks for us but at least we get to watch the show.”
“My name’s Conlan.”
“Yeah, I know.” She held out her hand with very long, pink nails. “Jynx. With a y.”
I shook her hand with the long, pink nails.
“Anything happens, stay behind me. If things get really bad, be a good boy and call for backup.” She sighed dramatically and pointed down to the ground in front of the gates. “By the look of it, neither of us is going to have any fun tonight.”
Below us Dad was crashing into bodies. His huge paws were swatting at everyone in his path, but his claws weren’t out. He was holding back.
A man stabbed at him from behind with a spear. Dad twisted, pawed the weapon away, and leaped onto him. His weight forced the man down to the ground. He put the spearman’s whole head into his mouth but didn’t bite down. He just held it gently and then released him. The man scuttled back, got to his feet, and started running back toward the forest.
“Wow, kid,” the bouda gasped. “I thought Keelan’s stories were just bullshit, but your dad is a beast!”
Beast lord. Heh.
“Why isn’t he killing them though?”
It was obvious. “It’s worse,” I said.
“What’s worse?”
“Living with it. They will remember this, being beaten and mauled. Being so scared that they couldn’t even run away. They will never be the same again.”
“Killing them is cleaner.”
“Some of them are not here by choice. Some of them were forced. There is no way to tell who is who. Those who’ll survive get a chance to change their lives and be better. If they don’t, we can always kill them later.”
She squinted at me. “How old are you again?”
“Eight.”
“That’s a hard eight, kid. Still, they have the right idea.” She nodded at Mr. Paul and his archers, who were shooting into the crowd.
“They are entitled. Those people took Darin, Mr. Paul’s nephew. They have a blood claim.”
She shook her head at me.
Several feet away from Dad, Mr. Keelan was wading into the crowd swinging his sword back and forth in front of him like it was a giant club. People ran at him, but he was beating them back with the flat side of the blade. His pack was taking down anyone who tried to get behind him.
It was almost over now. They weren’t a mob anymore. They were just a herd of people panicking. All of them were scared, some were bleeding badly, and running in every direction to get away from the monsters mauling them. Many were heading back the way they’d come.
A deep bellow tore over the sound of the battle.
At the forest tunnel, trees shuddered, shaking their branches. Something was coming, Something big, moving toward us down the road through the tree tunnel we’d carved out of the woods.
The humans stopped running.
Dad raised his head and looked in that direction.
A stench washed over me. Sour, musky, and wrong somehow.
“That can’t be good,” Ms. Jynx murmured.
Another bellow. Closer now.
Closer.
The trees shuddered, and a nightmare from old stories stomped out of the forest.
It had to be ten feet tall and held an axe as big as Mr. Keelan’s sword over its horned head.
“Holy fuck,” Ms. Jynx gasped. “An actual goddamned minotaur!”
No, three minotaurs. Two massive monsters, slightly smaller than the first but with axes of their own, lumbered out to stand next to their leader.
One of the humans ran toward the largest creature, and it cut him in half with one swing of its axe.
“Kill them,” it roared. “Kill the cat, kill the dogs, kill the humans behind the walls! Kill them all!”
Dad changed into warrior form and dashed toward the minotaurs.
Grandfather told me about minotaurs. They were not shapeshifters. They were chimeras, and they came from Crete.
A series of deep grunts sounded from behind us.
Ms. Jynx whirled around.
A section of the back wall, the one facing the sea and still under repair, exploded. Stones and mortar came flying toward us, and two big, ugly shapeshifters appeared in the ragged gap. They squeezed into the hole. Jagged, broken portions of the ruined wall tore at their shaggy hides. Wereboars in warrior form. Their eyes were small and red, their tusks huge and yellow.
They forced their way in and paused, pawing the ground with their hoofed feet, trying to gouge it.
Mr. Paul and his wife turned and fired.
Two arrows sprouted in the larger werehog’s chest. The other one looked at them, grunted, and swiped the shafts away with his huge hand.
