Then he heard the squeal of tires and he sped off in search of it, into the street and then another alley. He was behind the Desire House.
There were human bodies scattered at the far end of the alley where a vehicle had gone through the crowd. Some of those people looked like they wouldn't be getting up again.
Remo had a new path to follow and sprinted along the trail of victims around another building. Another narrow street.
There had been revelers in the street, but the werewolf's vehicle hadn't even slowed. There had been nowhere for the revelers to run. Remo saw an astronaut and a green alien and a belly dancer, their costumes making a mockery of their crushed and lifeless bodies.
Remo found the werewolf's vehicle a block later, but the werewolf was gone.
There were people dead underneath the van. People were screaming and shouting while only twenty feet away the drunk partyers were oblivious to the horror. A wounded woman wearing a coconut bikini top and a grass skirt was sobbing over a pair of man's legs that were attached to a pelvis that was pinned and flattened under the front tire of the van. Remo smelled the animal odors from the vehicle. He reached out his senses fervently again, and for a moment, through the steady clamor of voices, he thought he heard the canine panting. Then it was gone.
The hula girl started screaming. She was screaming at Remo Williams. "He's one of them! That's one of the dogs!"
Remo had virtually forgotten his prisoner, who was hanging limply in one hand, paws groping weakly at the air.
Remo moved fast into the nearest alley, too fast to be followed.
How many dead? Innocent, stupid party drunks. Just a bunch of people out having a good time, and now how many were dead?
How many of them wouldn't be dead if Remo Williams, Reigning Master of Sinanju, had put a stop to Judith White once and for all? It wasn't as though he hadn't had the opportunities.
The blood of the dead parryers was on his hands. "And you," he said menacingly, swinging the dog underhanded and sending him flopping down the alley, scoring a perfect strike on a collection of overstuffed garbage cans. The beast scrambled to his feet with amazing speed, but his speed wasn't nearly amazing enough.
Remo was on the beast and struck with both hands at his forelegs. The legs didn't just break. They broke off. The dog yowled and frantically tried to make his front stumps work.
"I know what you are," Remo said. "Come on. Show me."
"Ohmigod! What are you doing to that poor dog?" A rotund woman in a great purple paisley muumuu and purple face paint moved to intervene. "Stop it this instant!"
Remo ignored her. His hand snicked at the beast and came back with a bloody ear. "Show me!" The huge purple woman tromped down the alley with an illuminated wand of some sort. "Stop it! Stop torturing that poor animal!"
Remo was in a fury and when he turned on the massive purple blob, she stopped cold. Nothing she had seen in all her years of Mardi Gras prepared her for the eyes that radiated death.
"Oh, yeah? A poor animal?" He took the whining beast off the ground with one hand and slammed him against the brick wall. The blood from the severed front legs flew in twin arcs. "Show us!" Remo raged at the creature.
"Stop! Stop!" the woman sobbed.
"Show us both, you freak!"
The blazing red eyes of the dying beast looked into the black dead eyes of the Destroyer. "Who... you... callin'... freak, freak?" the dog said.
Chapter 13
The bitch howled until the stolen station wagon overflowed with her mournful cry.
"Shut up!" Leon Grosvenor growled.
She howled again, a desolate canine figure collapsed against the door in the passenger seat.
"I said, shut up!" he groused, clawing the air at her.
The bitch responded with a vicious snarl and she chomped at his hand, which he quickly withdrew to the steering wheel.
Leon Grosvenor, the alpha male, had just been subdued by his own bitch.
The other male in the car witnessed the alpha's submission.
The bitch raised her head at the roof of the Toyota and wailed like a lonely graveyard wind.
The male, with a disdainful glare at Leon in the rearview mirror, raised his voice to join her.
The bitch had forgotten how to cry real tears. There had been a time when she could truly weep, but that was before, when she was a normal.
The time of pain had changed everything.
Once she had been human. Then came the time of pain. She still didn't understand what caused it, but the time of pain was hell on Earth. It was agony beyond endurance, and yet she endured. Day after day. Week after week. She never knew how long the pain went on.
The leader was always there during that period, nursing his pack through the agonies of the change. The bitch hated him in the early days, when the pain had just started and she was still mostly normal.
Soon she forgot her reasons for despising him and she learned to love the leader. He brought her fresh meat and water. He stroked her hair as she writhed against her torment. She felt her bond growing with the alpha male.
Her human side and her wolf side both admired his compassion as he cared for his pack during that marathon of suffering that went on night after night, as the moon went from full to new to full again.
Some of them didn't survive. She saw the leader take their clenched and contorted bodies away. But those who survived the time of pain were remade, no longer normal. Now they were these very special beasts, and together they made up a very special pack. The alpha male was accepted as the pack leader without question in those early days. He protected them and fed them and commanded them.
But he protected them no longer. Instead he took them away from the safety of their isolated bayou home and, for reasons none of them could comprehend, he transported them into the open where they were exposed. The feeding was good, but they could feed in the swamp.
They had been discomfited by the danger, but none dared oppose the alpha male.
But now he had brought them death.
The bitch understood death. And she knew that tonight, one of the dead beasts from her pack had been an individual she had known well when she was human.
Back when they had both been human, before the time of pain, before the change, before she had become the alpha male's bitch, she had been a... a wife. That was the word.
There had been a human who had been herman? No, the word was "husband."
She and her husband had come to the bayou, back when they were human. They had come with all the others to sleep in small cloth houses and see the trees and the animals.
The husband had a name when he was a human. He had been Jasper.
The bitch didn't understand why she cared so much about Jasper. She was the alpha male's bitch now. That was simply how it was, after the time of pain. Jasper had become just another member of the pack.
Now Jasper was dead. The inexplicable pain she felt now was almost as bad as the pain of the change. It was also the most human feeling she had known in all those long months since she had stopped being normal.
"YOU MEAN it wasn't even a dog?" Remo asked incredulously.