Chapter 22: Chapter 20: Loophole Abuse

The room was perfectly still after Susan’s greeting. John barely moved as his eyes flickered between each of the three girls, who stared back at him like hawks.

“You know this guy?” Ruth asked, her eyes flickering to Susan for a moment.

“Unfortunately,” Anne grumbled from her shoulder, her voice shrill thanks to her being in mouse form.

“He’s one of the government stooges at the BSMP,” Susan said with a shrug, then her eyes narrowed. “Who I definitely didn’t give my name to.”

Finally gathering himself, John straightened up. Slowly moving his hand away from the gun, he crossed both arms in front of his chest and took a long steadying breath.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but please remember that you transformed into a dragon and attacked a vampire in the lobby of one of the most surveilled locations in the country.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, now would you mind explaining why you’re currently breaking into a top secret government facility?” John asked with a helpless wave of one of his hands, “I can’t exactly stop you, but it would really help in filling out my report.”

“Uh, we’re not really,” Susan said, a hand moving up to scratch at the back of her head, “unless the BSMP is hunting down all the magical creatures around the Brick?”

She ended with a half shrug and a tilt of her head, to which John frowned.

“Not as far as I’m aware,” he said.

“Oh,” Susan’s shoulders slumped, “dammit.”

“Well, something is hunting them,” Ruth spoke up, “any idea what it could be?”

John looked away for a moment, thinking.

“Wait, you’re actually going to answer that?” Anne blurted out.

“Well yes,” John said, meeting her look, “I am under duress, after all.”

That earned him questioning looks from the other two as well.

“Really?” Susan asked.

“Oh absolutely, I’m terrified for my life right now,” he said, tone utterly deadpan. When none of them responded, he let out a barely audible sigh and continued.

“According to the BSMP rules and regulations, agents are allowed to share up to class one information when under duress. So long as they believe the information will not damage BSMP interests.”

Susan’s eyes turned to meet Ruth’s, then Anne’s. Finding the same considering looks in their eyes, she turned back to John.

“Well, explain away, I guess,” She said.

“Well, the BSMP first noticed the problem two weeks ago when one of our field agents went missing. When an investigation into the occurrence was launched six days later, the trail had gone cold. But the agents sent to investigate found evidence that suggested that several non-magical persons were involved.

“We then lost contact with them, but a follow up team discovered that the people involved had no knowledge of what was happening. Instead the team believed that the cause was some form of sleepwalking, likely magically induced. We then lost contact with that team as well.”

Susan felt her jaw drop, the agency’s staggering callousness seeming unreal despite John’s clear knowledge of the subject. He talked with a deceptive calm that made it easy to forget that he was talking about entire groups of people vanishing to likely horrible ends. The only thing she could feel besides horror was mild surprise that the BSMP even managed to keep the lights on.

“Three days ago,” John continued, either blind or indifferent to her shock. “A follow up team uncovered the source of the problem, an infectious curse that transforms people into monsters. It is spreading fast, but the leadership decided that our best option was to leave the problem alone, and disbanded the investigation. Which leads us to now.”

Susan’s mouth closed with a snap. She turned to the others with a look of incredulous horror, only to freeze at the sight of Ruth.

The other girl was furious, her hands clenched into solid fists while her face turned a deep shade of red. Without a word she turned and walked back out of the cave, disappearing into the sunlight that shone in from the entrance with a worried Anne still clinging to her shoulder.

Susan glanced back at John. The man seemed entirely nonplussed at having driven one of her few friends into a frothing rage, so with a sneer she turned and began walking back out.

“One last thing, Miss Hill?” John’s voice came from behind her.

Briefly warring with herself over whether she was willing to entertain him again, Susan finally sighed and turned around.

“Yes?” She spat.

“Please be careful,” John said, still in his perfect deadpan.

“It’s just an infectious curse,” Susan said, waving away his words and turning away again.

“Please be careful,” He repeated, and Susan stopped.

Just a moment ago, John had abused a loophole in the BSMP rule book to give her information to solve a case. So if he was trying to warn her now, then that meant he was aware of a threat against her. Which knowing the BSMP meant…

“Damn it,” She swore, then turned back to John. “Please tell me your agency isn't planning to kill me.”

John met her gaze and held it for a second.

“That is classified,” He said.

“Shit,” Susan muttered, “shit, how dumb even are you people?”

She took a step toward him, then remembered Anne and Ruth and turned back toward the outside. Then her anger won out again and she was turning back to John.

After a few more turns, the immediate problem of the infectious curse won out over her knee jerk reaction to turn the entire area into so many miles of melted slag. There was an army of cursed to cure. She could deal with an uppity secret organization later.

Stalking away before the urge to nuke something overtook her better judgement, she was just outside the door when she paused.

“John?” She said, not looking back at him.

“Yes?”

“Thanks.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about.”

Susan stepped into the clearing outside the cave with a pensive frown covering her face. Then it quickly shifted to worry when she caught sight of Ruth.

She was just as red faced as she had been back in the cave, now stomping around the far side of the clearing with a worried Anne calling for her to calm down.

“They knew?” She screamed out toward the woods, “they knew and didn’t do anything?”

Susan moved closer, but found herself pausing mid step when a growl echoed from the other girl’s throat.

“Ruth?” Anne squeaked from her shoulder, tugging at one ear with a paw.

“What?” Ruth snapped, barely pausing in her pacing.

“It’s okay, calm down.”

“No, it's not!” Ruth growled back, “They could have done something, anything!”

She threw her hands in the air, her speed increasing as she traced a circle around the edge of the clearing.

“Ruth,” Anne’s voice was sharper now, “its… Well, it’s not okay, but freaking out isn't going to help.”

“B-but the boys, they could-”

Ruth stopped when Susan grabbed her arm. Her head whipped around to stare at her, and Susan met her wide eyes.

“They’re going to be fine,” she said slowly, “we’re going to make sure of that, right?”

Ruth let out a breath, and her eyes slowly closed. A few more breaths and they reopened to meet Susan’s eyes.

“Yes,” She said, “we will.”

“Good,” Susan said, releasing her arm and stepping back.

“Just…” Ruth threw her arms in the air, “why not?”

Susan sighed.

“I hate to give them credit for anything,” she said, “but in this case it kind of makes sense.”

“How,” Ruth squinted at her.

“Same reason I thought they wouldn’t attack me,” Susan said, earning an open mouthed stare from Anne.

“Some price tags don’t come in dollars,” she continued, “they come in square miles.”

Ruth’s brow furrowed, and Susan used her stunned silence as an opportunity to keep speaking.

“The Guardians would have taken care of it eventually, so for them all that really matters is keeping the cover up going.”

“…But why not just tell the Guardians now?” Ruth huffed out as the last of the fight drained from her.

“Fat chance of that,” Anne spoke up. “They engineered some sort of catastrophe big enough for the Guardians to show up, and then tried kidnapping one of them. It’s one of Grandma’s favorite stories to tell.”

Ruth’s shoulders slumped and her eyes turned upwards in exasperation.

“Of course they did,” she said in exasperation.

She stayed like that a moment, before her eyes slowly came back down to meet Susans.

“Alright,” she said, “I’m good.”

“Good… now what was that about ‘thought they wouldn't’?” Anne asked, turning back to Susan.

“Eh, normal government stupidity, I’ll deal with it later,” Susan said, “I’d rather see what these werewolves call home.”

----------------------------------------

“A shithole, apparently,” Susan muttered, looking over the crumbling ruin of an apartment complex.

The crumbling three stories of concrete didn’t look like it would survive another day. A single government inspection or even a light breeze threatening to end its continued existence.

It matched the rest of the area pretty well. Ancient self storage facilities sat to either side of the apartments, and across the street lay a strip mall that had seen better days. The only business that still even had the lights on was a car repair shop down the street that had all of its rolling doors firmly shut.

The scenery had nothing on the smell however. The scent of the curse emanating from the apartments in front of them was overpowering, and Susan felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise as she examined it.

Curses weren’t uncommon in the magical world, Susan herself had been cursed plenty of times already. But the stench around the building was like nothing she had ever seen. It was a cloying, rotten smell that permeated the air so thickly that it felt like it was trying to seep through her skin.

The look of utter disgust on Ruth’s face a few feet ahead said that her own magically enhanced nose wasn’t smelling anything pleasant.

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“Are you two okay?” Anne asked, now human again and walking closely behind Susan.

“Nasty curse,” Susan spat out.

“By our standards or yours?”

“Mine.”

“Damn.”

“Come on,” Ruth said, shaking herself before stalking towards the building, the other two following on her heels.

The one upside to the abominable stench was that it was very easy to find the source. It noticeably strengthened the further up the stairs they went, and they were soon walking down a hallway on the third floor.

The shadows were long now, the long hours of running having added up so that the sun now hung uncomfortably low over the horizon. The daylight remained strong, but Susan felt a mild regret at letting Ruth do the transport as she looked at the long shadows around them.

She spotted the apartment that the curse originated from, hidden from the reaching arms of sunlight in one of the corners of the hallway. The curse was almost visible there, the warped mana wafting away from the walls like fog.

“Is anyone here?” Anne whispered from behind her.

Susan looked back to see her examining the doors and windows they were passing. Each one was closed, and every window she could see had the blinds shut.

She frowned, stretching her senses to try and detect any signs of life. Then frowned further when she detected none.

“They’re inside,” Ruth muttered from just ahead of Susan, “deep inside the apartments, and away from the windows.”

“Makes sense,” Susan said, nodding along and earning a confused glance back from Ruth.

“It’s the curse,” she continued in a low voice, now conscious of the cursed residents around them. “One this powerful probably has side effects as strong as lesser curses. Nocturnalism, agoraphobia, heliophobia, it could be anything.”

A hand reached forward to tap on her shoulder, Susan turned to see Anne staring at her.

“English, please,” she whispered.

“That was!”

Anne’s look didn’t change.

“Check the dictionary!”

“Not the time,” Ruth hissed from ahead.

When Susan turned forward again, she resumed her slow march toward the door. Finally reaching it, the group stilled.

Ruth’s hand moved forward slowly until it grasped the handle, then tried to turn it.

“Locked,” she whispered.

“Let me,” Anne said, tapping up to the door.

Crouching, she reached down to the door jam where years of footfalls and warping had created a not insignificant gap in the cheap wood.

Her brows furrowed.

“There’s a barrier here,” She muttered, and Susan sighed.

“Alright, I got it,” She said.

“Wait!” Ruth said quickly, “try to keep it down.”

Susan rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, yeah,” she muttered, before stepping to the side of the door.

She began sketching runes, some in the air and others against the wall. Mana flowing from her and into the world in glowing lines.

“The door’s over here,” Anne muttered confusedly, and Susan turned to her.

“But it's warded,” she said, finishing the last of the runes with a flourish. “And besides, I’m kind of over secret or magic or whatever doors today.”

Her feet shifted to brace her against the ground, and her arm extended forward to press against the wall. Then she stepped forward, and her arm went right through the drywall and into the next room.

Despite the destruction, the noise of the destruction never came. Even as she took another step and her foot smashed through the wall in a cloud of dust the only sound was the whisper of wind through the hall.

A third step sent her entire body crashing through the wall, and the wall caved in to create a roughly Susan shaped entryway into the room. A final step took her fully into the room, and with a shake of her head the clinging dust fell from her to the floor.

Watching the small waterfall of particles, she couldn’t help but notice that she wasn’t making the floor much dirtier. In fact the carpet of dust she was creating seemed to make things look better.

The light shining in from behind her was the only thing illuminating the room, and what little it showed didn’t paint a pretty picture. Dust covered a ruined floor, shattered toys and wood splinters spread over a carpet that had been torn to shreds by enormous claws.

The scent of the spell was even stronger here, and Susan felt a deep pit of dread begin to open up in her stomach.

The light behind her flickered as Ruth ducked through the ‘doorway’, followed by Anne who took in the room with a muttered, “yeesh.”

“Quiet,” Ruth hissed, “Do you hear that?”

Susan’s ears perked, but she just frowned and shook her head back at Ruth. Then Ruth’s eyes widened as they flickered to something past Susan.

Her head turned only to be greeted with the flash of steel as a sword flew straight toward her head.

She locked eyes with the person wielding it, and watched as their eyes widened.

As she watched,the blade began to pull back from its arc, shifting away from her even as the bulk of the attacker still continued rushing forward uncontrolled.

Instead of being bowled over, Susan stepped forward. Ducking past the blade, she swept a magically enhanced leg beneath the swordsman’s.

He crashed to the ground at her feet in a tumble of limbs, and Susan quickly checked the rest of the room for more attackers. Her eyes landed on a tall dark figure in the previously empty doorway, their hands glowing as they gathered mana for a spell.

“Mattie?” She asked, stopping them mid movement.

Susan’s head tilted downward to look at the swordsman, as the glow left Mattie’s hands and her mouth fell open in shock.

“Hey Cole.”

“Susan?” Mattie shouted from the doorway. “What the hell?”

“What the hell yourself?” Ruth shot back, “why are you attacking us?”

“We thought you were werewolves!”

“Werewolves?” Susan raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah,” Cole groaned as he pushed himself to his feet, “isn’t that why you’re here?”

“We were here hunting a group of magically cursed humans responsible for depopulating the forests around the Brick,” Susan said, then paused. “So now that I think about it, probably.”

“Great,” Cole said as he rose to his full height and slid the longsword he held into a sheath at his side, “because we're totally in over our heads.”

Susan couldn’t help but note the transformation he had gone through. Her grandmother had chosen to take the boy under her wing, and the results already showed.

Much of the fat covering his frame had been burnt off, now replaced by a wiry muscle that already promised to develop into a physique worthy of a Schwarzenagger movie.

“Really?” She asked, poking him in the chest with a finger.

“Yeah,” he replied, “it all started when a friend of mine told me that he thought his girlfriend might be cheating on him…”

As he began talking, Susan had a terrifying premonition of exactly why Hilda had chosen Cole as a student. It wasn’t just the budding seed of heroism that burned within his chest. It was also the way he told the story, delivering it exactly the way he would one of his anime rants. No matter how rudimentary a detail or stupid a comment, it was told with perfect emotion and emphatic glee.

Hilda hadn’t just chosen Cole to train because he was a hero, she had chosen him because he perfectly displayed the qualities she desired in a hero. Namely: epic storytelling.

Her eyes drifted to the side to meet Mattie’s. The other girl was looking at Cole with an expression of perfect contentment as she began to relax against the doorway.

Susan gave Cole a minute to explain, then another as he went on to describe how an interrogation of his friend had revealed that the wayward girlfriend was in fact vanishing at night under mysterious circumstances. An emotional confrontation led to the revelation that the girlfriend was under a dreadful curse, one too powerful for Mattie to cure.

An improvised harness and a tracking app downloaded to the girl’s phone led the duo to the werewolve’s base of operation. Which had led to now, where an interrupted investigation of the summoning circle had led to an unexpected meeting.

“So yeah, sorry for attacking you,” Cole finished awkwardly, scratching at the back of his head. “Uh, Susan?”

“Hm?” Susan snapped out of the fog she had slipped into halfway through the tale.

“You okay?”

“Yes,” she snapped, “uh, let's go investigate the curse!”

She bustled past a frowning Cole, but the chorus of agreements from behind her said that Ruth and Anne appreciated the distraction as well.

Stepping past Mattie and into what looked like a dilapidated bathroom. It was pitch black, but she was able to spot a lantern flashlight perched on the sink that Cole and Mattie must have been using.

Flicking it on, she took in the grisly scene. A circle had been drawn in blood on the floor, one that oozed power. From the mana surrounding it alone she was able to draw multiple conclusions. None of them good.

Walking around the circle, she looked it over and the sinking feeling in her stomach she had felt earlier became a lead ball sitting in her gut.

A hand raised into the air as if on instinct, sketching a rune with frenzied grace. The rune flashed, and at her feet the summoning circle faded. The tile it sat on did as well, creating a circular indent in the tiling that revealed the bare wood underneath.

Her eyes rose back up until they met the startled expressions of the rest of the group. It took her a moment to find words as she wondered whether or not to tell them the full truth of what lurked in the dark corners of the world. In the end, she chose to give them the cliff notes, leaving out the worst of what she had heard from the Guardians.

“Well,” she began, “I have good… well no. I have bad news, and worse news.”

The explanation was short and succinct. ‘An insanely powerful Vampire got summoned here and we’re all very lucky he didn’t decide to blow up the town for shits and giggles, but he did leave us with an army of homicidal werewolves to deal with,’ could never be called good news but it could be called the lesser of two evils if you were feeling optimistic.

She finished and paused to take in the groups’ reactions. Ruth looked darkly determined, Mattie looked to be a reasonable amount of terrified, and Cole was trying to look calm. Anne barely looked ruffled, having taken the news in with a disinterested stoicism.

“So… what do we do?” She asked with a shrug.

Susan shrugged back at her.

“Depends on how many werewolves there are,” she said, “we could take a couple hundred ourselves, but if there are too many we’ll need to call in the Guardians.”

“Wait, we’re not going to hurt them right?” Cole burst in.

“They’re trying to kill us, of course we’re going to have to hurt them,” Susan said, “But no, we're certainly not killing innocent people caught up in a curse.”

“Oh,” Cole deflated with a relieved sigh, “Okay.”

The group started as a jingle echoed from his pocket, and Cole blanched.

“What’s that?” Susan raised an eyebrow at him.

He met her eyes slowly.

“That means it’s five minutes to sunset,” he said quietly, and a hush fell over the group.

Mattie drew in a breath, but reached up to pat Cole on the shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “we have Susan.”

“You aren’t just going to piggyback off me, right?” Susan asked, not sure how to react to the unasked for confidence in her.

The lack of eyes that met her face was damning, except for Anne who was choking back laughter.

“Fine,” Susan said, stalking out of the room, through the entryway and back into the outdoor hallway. She turned to the side, where she could barely see the sun kissing the horizon from the other end of one of the long corridors.

She turned back to the others who looked out at her from the apartment.

“We wait.”

----------------------------------------

The first sign that the sun had set wasn’t the dark. It was the cacophonous howl that echoed out from outside of the apartment complex. It ripped through the air like an explosion, rattling the windows and making the group clap their hands over their ears for relief.

It was followed by a thunder of doors opening and feet stomping against the concrete floors. The apartment complex finally coming alive for the first time since the group had arrived.

Susan and the others sat within relative safety of the bathroom, looking out the door and through the hole in the wall as enormous hairy forms rushed past outside.

Once the clamor ended, Susan turned and signaled for the others to follow her. Every one of them wore cloaking runes, capable of seeing and hearing each other, but invisible to the outside world.

Careful steps took her out of the apartment and she started down the hall as the noise of the werewolves grew ahead of her. Grunts, howls and barks echoed through the air, seeming to grow in number and noise as she continued down the hall. By the time she reached the end of the hallway that overlooked the outside of the building, the sound had grown to a collective roar that buffeted her ears just as much as the earlier howl had.

She stopped at the railing, and her jaw fell open at the sight of thousands of werewolves. They filled the street in front of the apartment in a single mass, the grey fur stretching for hundreds of feet in every direction in a flurry of bodies so thick Susan felt she could walk across it.

“What the-” Cole gasped from where he crept up beside her, “how have people not noticed this?”

“What do you think?” Anne whispered back. “Everyone in miles must be werewolves by now.”

“Maybe,” Susan muttered, “or…”

“Or?” Cole asked.

“They don't plan to hide.”

Cole gulped.

Then, as one the small army stopped and turned in a single direction. The thousands of snouts pointing directly toward the still lit garage. The glass walled lobby within still seemed empty, a notion quickly dashed when a grey clawed hand the size of a table slid beneath one of the rolling doors and pulled it up.

What stepped out was an entirely different creature from the werewolves that filled the street in front of it. The size of a shed, each of its steps echoed over the noise of the other wolves, and the gnarled fur and flesh that covered it managed to look even more revolting than the others.

The sea of fur parted around it as it made its way toward the center of the street directly in front of the apartment complex. Once there, it stopped and turned in a circle to examine the crowd around it with two glowing eyes the size of baseballs.

A single glance was all Susan needed to know that this thing was the source of the curse. The mana inside of it was a riot of confused flows so awful it was plainly clear that this was no natural creature.

“Susan?” Mattie whispered.

“Yeah?”

“How the hell do we break the curse on that?”

Susan watched as a single labored breath from the enormous torso made the hunched back rise and fall entire feet. Impressing the simple truth that no matter how much of a disaster the magics fueling it were, it was still big enough to kill a man by casually stepping on him.

“Let’s find out.”

The rest of the group took a step back as the two of them quickly began sketching a mess of runes around them. Mattie using chalk and paints pulled from almost invisible pockets on her clothes, and Susan drawing on the air itself.

As they worked, the werewolf reached the center of the crowd. Pushing itself to its full height, it threw both gnarled arms out to the sides and roared. The crowd around it joined in, the cacophonous noise continuing for a second before ending.

The world seemed silent after, the only audible noise following the collective roar being its echo coming from off in the distance. The great werewolf grinned in the silence that followed.

“Minions,” it rasped, “my fellow creatures of the night. Tonight we enact the first part of my ultimate plan.”

Susan swore under her breath but still kept writing runes. She had to force herself to alternate between strengthening and protection runes for the others around her, as well as diagnostic runes to better understand the cursed being in front of her.

“To those new here, I am Lupus. The origin of our kind. It was my brilliance in summoning the great Demon King that granted me this incredible power, and under my guidance our breed shall rise to even greater heights.”

“The hell?” Mattie muttered with narrowed eyes as she watched the speech.

“What?” Susan shot back.

“He controls the whole damn crowd, he’s basically talking to himself.”

The two shot each other equally exasperated looks.

“This world has a low bar for megalomaniacs,” Susan spat, and turned her attention back to the crowd of werewolves, which were taking in the speech with rapt attention.

“For the past month we have grown in numbers, and now we ready ourselves to spread the curse to everyone who lives in this insipid town. With our numbers increased to the tens of thousands, we will finally be ready to challenge our real enemy. The Bureau of Supernatural and Magical Protections.

They are the fools that have held the secrets of magic from the deserving, and by the end of the night we will be ready to challenge the seat of their power, the Brick. Once it is fallen, and the Bureau vanquished, we can spread unimpeded until I rule the entire country!”

Susan’s mouth fell open at the sheer audacity of what she was witnessing.

“But first,” and here Lupus’s grin turned into a rictus of glee, “we must deal with our guests.”

“Uh oh,” Anne muttered, and the group took a collective step back from the army of werewolves.

“Well, at least we don't have to listen to him talk anymore,” Cole said as he slid his blade from its sheath with a whisper of leather.

Then a scream echoed from the other side of the street. Susan started, leaning forward over the railing as she tried to catch sight of the source of the scream.

The werewolves made it easy to spot, dozens of them climbing the facade of the strip mall on the other side of the street. A half dozen small figures danced around atop the building, weaving in and out of the blocky air conditioning units to avoid the snapping jaws of the werewolves that had interrupted their spying.

The blood drained from Susan’s face as she recognized one of them, a young boy dressed in exercise clothes ducking beneath the swiping claws of a werewolf.

Ruth made a strangled, half-animal sound as she saw them. A moment later she was charging forward, leaping over the railing and into the crowd of werewolves.