The Witch and the Werewolf by John Burks Read Free Book Online Page B

from her. And
now it was too late. Her mother was dead. Her mother hadn’t kept
her hidden because of boys. She’d been trying to keep her from the
werewolves. Cassandra had spent her life acting like a spoiled
little girl, never seeing the signs of what her mother was, never
understand exactly what it was her mother was trying to protect her
from.
    And those signs were
there, now that she thought about them. Her mother has always
leaned towards the occult. Cassandra had dismissed it as silly
fantasy leanings and often accused the woman of being a crazy old
cat lady. Worse, she’d been what many called a ‘Prepper’. She’d
always assumed her mother had been preparing for the same sorts of
emergencies everyone else had been… floods, hurricanes, nuclear
wars. She had no idea her mother had been preparing for werewolves.
She needed to go home and look at her mother’s things. She needed
to see if she could learn more about her mother, the
witch.
    “ I don’t want to die,” she
said. She’d told Brad she was okay with it. She’d accepted her fate
then. But there was more now. The burning desire for revenge, for
taking her mother before the woman could tell her what she was, was
intense. And then there the thing in her mind. She felt it
constantly, like a burning pain. She had to know more about a
creature that old.
    But what to do? The van
picked up speed down the street, flood waters pushing it north.
She, foolishly tried to turn the steering wheel and step on the
brakes. The water was rising rapidly and the wall of water grew in
the south, destroying everything in its path. She could hear the
tsunami blasting through homes and refineries, leaving explosions
and destruction in its wake. She had to find someplace to hide and
quickly.
    A werewolf howled at her
from a nearby rooftop, jerking her back to attention. She could
reminisce about her missed chances with her mother later. The
wolves wanted her dead. Another wolf leapt from the roof of a
truck, landing on the hood of the van, driving razor sharp claws
down into the metal. It howled at her and then smashed the front
window in one punch, reaching for her.
    Cassandra screamed,
pushing back into the seat as far as she could while reaching for
one of the silver blades in the passenger seat. She’d been trained
to fight, to shoot… but none of that had ever prepared her for
fighting a werewolf as her van floated down a street. The wolf
pushed its head through the glass, snapping its jaws at her. Its
breath stunk of rotting meat.
    “ Hello little pretty,” it
growled. “You smell so sweet. So sweet like your mommy.”
    The wolves’ voices were
guttural and barely comprehensible, sending chills up and down her
spine.
    Cassandra grabbed the hilt
of one of the short swords and haphazardly jabbed it at the wolf.
She just nicked the wolf’s face but it was enough to send it
screaming backwards, the bloody wound sizzling as if burned. She
grabbed the other blade, and then tried to open the door. The
pressure of the water outside the van, still rising, prevented
it.
    The wolf lunged back in,
head first, snapping at her. She managed to get the silver sword
between the two of them, impaling the creature on it. Its head
smoked ferociously, as the creature howled in pain, and then
exploded, covering her in blood and brains.
    “ Damn it,” she screamed,
clearing the stuff from her eyes. The other half dozen wolves
howled in anger from the surrounding roof tops. She felt their
anger burning like a laser.
    Cassandra pushed against
the massive bulk of the dead wolf, crawling on to the hood of the
van that was picking up even more speed in the rising water. The
tsunami was even clearer then, a twenty foot tall wall of
water.
    “ You want me?” she
screamed at the wolves, standing on the hood of the van like a
surfboard. “Come and get me!”
    A wolf leapt from a roof
top, arching into the air like a comic book hero, but missed the
van, landing in the rushing flood