Secrets In The Bones: The Curse of Blood Bay

Thirty eight

The night was gone, and the clock was ticking down to whatever eclipse was to come. The sky still covered us in a blanket of blood red. More details beyond what I thought was possible. Much like being stranded in limbo, only to be yanked back with the bullets forcing their way out.

It took a while, but I found the road taken when I followed the two SUVs the other night. It wasn't long before I encountered those signs again as we reached that forked incline in the road. To the right was the arrow for the quarry; the sound of the car crashing over the edge and exploding rocked through my eardrums. On the left was the forest. Along came heart palpitations like before. Panic sweat began setting in as I veered right sharply, recognising where I'd parked at the last second.

Skip and Michael flew sideways, grimacing in my direction before he showed his confusion. Skip wasn't so shocked, as if he knew more about what was happening. The 'how' seemed impossible. Then again, his demeanour had been calm; lucky for us, he came when he did. The timing was too spot on, and I'm not a fan of coincidences.

"Care to share, Georgie?" Michael lurched forward, his hand stretched for the whiskey perched beside Skip. We would need much more before we were done with this hell hole.

"This was where I followed the McNally family. They were with Amos. They came here to dispose of two bodies, one over the cliffs; the other got fed to an imprisoned werewolf."

"Oh, said something about that."

"Yeah, starved of moonlight and prevented from changing back from a part 'shift', it could help me turn. It had blue eyes, though,"

Skip tilted his head back, eyes rolled to the ceiling of my car. He was deep in thought. Before the lightbulb flicked on. I knew little about the eye stuff besides what Skip had told me; I gathered it from research to help him understand what he was long before that side of me was unlocked.

"Then lad, if they're blue and could nudge you into your first evolution, that's a fallen one."

"Fallen one?" I say; hearing that term for the first time intrigued and scared me.

"According to some folklore, I dug up in the beginning when I was navigating this world solo. A werewolf can rise and fall through the pecking order through integrity, courage or sheer act of will. They can also fall if they take the life of an innocent. They captured a seasoned 'Alpha' and forced them to kill. Costing their red eyes and the strength that came with it. But enough to point you to what you needed."

"So, you're saying they will have the knowledge and wherewithal to help us?"

"If they can be brought back. Some don't make it back from the wild. I read that many years ago, one in South America was described as a bigfoot or a long-lost caveman thawed out. It tore through a small village with no relent until it was hunted down and shot dead. Only then did they turn back to human form. This may not be easy, lad; it could go wrong for us. Their eyes aside, imagine an Apex killing machine with a lobotomy. You're plugging his brain and humanity back in. So it's going to depend on how long you have been deprived. The upside is they may have a pack here too,"

I took the whiskey and sat weighing up the situation; the blood-red sky added a haunting haze across and through the trees. Skip made a point I hadn't considered, adding to the many details. The assumption of other captive werewolves being strays McNally had hunted down to use as toys; it hadn't occurred to me that McNally may have caught a pack. Once the 'Alpha' went missing, others went looking and got caught, which made me wonder how big the pack could be. We needed all the help we could get. I was under no illusions about how big the task was.

If we didn't act now, all would be lost. McNally, as the human element, needed to be removed, too. The trouble was, how? So far, they'd used the wolves to dispose of dead bodies. Short of killing them, I didn't see how we'd stop the rot. In a hypothetical situation, we remove the key vampires, stop Ruth, and cut the head off the snake. How would we stop it all from starting over? There's so much out there we didn't know, like what could we do? I mean completely. Ruth passed the buck while highlighting its power connected to the currents.