Put the dildo down!

Chapter 11

Vincenzo 'Van-Dalorian' Rossi

The situation is no good, but I have had worse. Alpha Ethan has access to the road cameras, he will certainly be able to track the van at least inside the town, and the border patrol will be able to intercept it on the highway. Meanwhile I may have the chance to check where they are heading.

I carefully move the buckets away and lie down on the floor behind them. It's not so easy for a big guy like me to hide, but at least if they don't specifically look into the compartment, then I have a chance.

Stupefied by aconite, I lose track of time, but I don't think the van was moving fast and long enough to leave the pack's territory. Judging by jumping of the floor on the bumps, we have been driving along a country road for some time, so we didn't spend that long on the highway. Finally, the van stops and the engine silences. I press myself into the floor and try to breathe as quietly as possible. If their guns are loaded with silver bullets, I'm in deep shit.

The bottom line is, I have no sense of smell, no means of communication with my pack, no health regeneration due to aconite intoxication. No idea when my colleagues arrive, how many enemies are here, what they are armed with, where is this "here". What I do have is an acute headache and burning desire to find out what the hell is going on here and to snap some necks if it is what I think it is.

My best chance is to lie low and wait until there are no people around, and then try to reconnoiter the surroundings and then make decisions.

The van door slammed and I heard footsteps walking away. They didn't even look at the cargo compartment, to my relieve. The men are casually chatting about something, but they speak very fast and with a strong accent and I simply cannot parse and decode what they say.

I wait around 20 minutes to make sure I'm alone here. Without smell the only sense I can rely on is my hearing, so I carefully listen to anything like footsteps or breathing.

I carefully climb out of the van. I'm in some kind of large warehouse, in which there are several of the shabby battered cars and boxes with all sorts of rubbish.

I look out the window and roughly estimate where we are. As I thought, we are still in the pack's territory, which means there is a chance to wait for help. The gray two-story building is clearly an abandoned garment factory. When large companies moved production to Bangladesh due to cheaper prices, local factories went bankrupt. The small village, for which this factory was the main employer, eventually became empty, all the residents moved to Black Lake and other cities. Nobody needs the land, since according to the law only industrial enterprises can be built here, and it is a very unprofitable investment in modern realities. The only positive thing about this is that after the factory closed, air and water actually became cleaner.

To my surprise, no one is guarding the entrance to the factory. If this is really a den of drug dealers, then they are somehow very sloppy about their work. And this contradicts everything I know about them up to this point, they always were smart and careful enough to be one step ahead.

I walk in, trying to press my back against the wall. And immediately I see the bodies of the guards; someone simply strangled them, judging by the strangulation grooves on their necks. The attacker dealt with them quickly enough so that they didn't make a squeak and didn't have time to pull out their guns. Both of their holsters are empty, the one who finished with them is definitely not lax. I feel weird uneasiness, as if something bad is about to happen.

I slowly make my way through the rooms, still not seeing anyone alive, only bodies, some strangled, some shot down with one clean shot. This definitely wasn't some fancy drug-king fortress from the movie. Everything is shabby, dirty and probably stinks like hell. In one of the rooms I see the same buckets as that in the van. This is probably where they added wolfsbane to the base drug to make it effective for werewolves.

To my disappointment, the facility looks nothing like a neon-shining modern laboratory from comic books. It's more like a messy kitchen, with stacks of dirty bowls, spoons, measuring cups, tupperware, random pieces of filthy gauze, resealable plastic bags et cetera. I feel my eyes and my nose burning, despite losing smell I can clearly feel the air is putrid. One of the bottles says "Ammonia". If I could smell, I probably would have thrown up already. Ammonia gives an indescribable stench of rotten eggs. Together with wolfsbane, Lucretia, blood and other bodily fluids from the corpses – I should be thankful for not being able to smell this unholy mixture.

I come up to the stairs and doubt whether I shall go upstairs or downstairs, to the basement. I hear a scream from the basement, and then faint echoes of a voice that I don't want to believe I hear. My hands get cold, I limply go down to the basement and quietly open the doors that says 'Dyeing'.

"Let's talk out, please!" a man screams in despair and panic.

"I regret to inform that the time has come for you to reap to the consequences of your own actions. Nothing personal." Says the most beautiful baritone in the world, the same baritone that called me 'honeybun' in the morning.

I don't want to believe what's happening, it's a bad dream, just a nightmare, I want to wake up. I quietly walk into the room, just in time to see some pitch-black tentacle breaking the neck of a kneeling man, as easily as if it were a wooden ice cream stick. There are several more bodies lying around the room, in awkward poses, like puppets after a performance.

And he stands in the center. Impeccable and imperturbable as always. Silvery hair pulled back into a ponytail. Eyes glowing yellow on a pale face. The embodiment of the grim reaper.

"Honeybun" he says, as if not surprised to see me at all. "I've missed you, baby".