Page 13 of Her Eternal Mate

No!Will called out, forcing me out of my unconsciousness. I opened my eyes to see Will standing in front of me, defending me from the soldier. Somehow, and I don’t know how Will had managed to take the helmet off the soldier’s head.

The soldier’s skin was pale and purple, with many veins showing on his forehead and cheeks. His eyes were unnaturally dilated. He was by no means a natural man. He reached down to pick up the helmet and then put it back on his head, fitting it tightly.

I realized that my intuition had been right about someone being out there. It just wasn’t vampires. It was this inexplicable soldier armed to the teeth and seemingly invincible. As much as I admired Will for standing his ground and continuing to fight him, I could see no way either of us could beat this relentless goliath of a human being.

That was, if he was a human being at all.

Chapter 6

Will

The soldier moved like a robot. His reflexes were faster than those of a snake. I was certain that if I got a look under his armor, I’d find pistons and gears pumping and turning. There was no way that this was a human soldier. His armor was beyond a military-grade. It looked to be the stuff that astronauts wore when they were going on their spacewalks.

It did not matter how many times Alexis and I struck him. He never wavered. There was not so much as a stagger in his steps as he advanced upon us, blocking our strikes as if they were nothing. I was in my feral form, and even then, my attacks were barely scratching his armor. Alexis and I struck in a rhythm. Whenever my strike fell upon the soldier, Alexis followed right after. But instead of staggering or reeling, the soldier kept moving forward.

I was not scared. I had faced tougher foes in the past, Griswold being the most recent one. Ralph, Maurice, Blair, and even my own brother—they were all foes that had tested my mettle time and again, sometimes physical, sometimes mental. And I had vanquished them. Well, almost all of them. If I knew one thing about my tenacity, it was that I’d never let this soldier win this fight. Not while I was still the alpha wolf of the Grimm pack.

Alexis, I’ve figured out his weakness, I said. In all my unsuccessful strikes, I learned one thing. This soldier didn’t stop when he was hit at any major body part. But when struck at his joints, he became perplexed. He would stand still, wondering how to advance while his joints were jammed.This armor that he’s wearing, it’s more than just a suit. It’s an exoskeleton granting him strength. That’s why he’s moving like this.

That’s just perfect;Alexis sounded agitated.How do we take off what appears to be welded to his skin?

By ripping off his skin,I responded. It was what needed to be done. In regular battles, the normal rules of fighting apply. Even when involved in a life-and-death battle with a foe, I had to be humane. If I had to kill them, it had to be swift. If I needed to maim them, I’d do it in such a way that they’d surrender, and the fight would end.

This was no regular battle. Those rules did not apply here. If this soldier could act as a juggernaut, so could I. It had just taken me a little while to realize that. But at that time, the soldier had taken out a gun the likes of which I had never seen before. For one, the gun glowed with an electrical surge that ran across its length. And another thing, the weapon did not have a hole at the end of its barrel. I wondered where he’d shoot from, and in the next second, I seemed to get my answer in a painful way.

He pressed the trigger while still standing ten feet away from me. Instead of bullets, a jolt of electricity zapped from the barrel and hit me square in the face, enveloping my whole body in the deadliest shock I’d ever experienced in my life. I limped to the ground, completely paralyzed by the agonizing pain coursing through my body in the form of megavolts. I could even smell my fur burning.

It was at this moment that I saw from the corner of my eye as Alexis grappled with his gun using her mouth. She took the gun, and despite the shock that it was delivering to her face, she broke it free from the soldier’s iron grip and threw it in the forest. But the soldier was relentless. He wouldn’t simply give in without a fight. I rose from the ground, recovering quickly from the attack, and it wasn’t before I had risen that I saw that the soldier now had a gauntlet on his forearm aimed at me. There were rockets emerging from that gauntlet. Having just suffered from one lethal attack, I was in no position to take a flurry of rockets to my face.

As he unleashed those rockets, I jumped around, dodging every single one and watching as they exploded all around me, creating plumes of smoke and flame everywhere till there was nowhere where I could escape except above. So I leaped into the canopy of the trees, trying to hide from the soldier’s line of sight. He had ditched his gauntlet for yet another weapon. It was some form of a long baton that also had electricity surging through it.

Before he could smash the baton into Alexis’s torso, I climbed down from the canopy and came up behind him, ready to rid him of his weapon and his armor.

First, I slashed at his hand that was holding the baton. Even as my blow struck, I got a fair dosage of a shock to my claw, rendering it weakened for my next attack. At that time, I figured out that if I had to take off some of his armor, I had to do it with my teeth.

Despite the soldier’s lightning-fast reflexes, I leaped on him from behind and dug my teeth into his helmet. I could feel my teeth crossing beyond the armor plates in his helmet and digging into the skin of his head, drawing blood.

For the first time since his altercation with us, the soldier screamed. It was a harrowing sound that did not belong to a human. Rather, it was a monstrous scream as if it was coming from some ghoul or undead creature raised by a necromancer.

Alexis, noticing what I was doing, did the same to the soldier’s forearms. He had many weapon systems in his gauntlets that he’d have used had Alexis not torn off his armor from his hands. I could see that she had rent his skin free, leaving behind giant red patches on his forearms where once his skin used to be. Now, without a gauntlet and a helmet, the soldier did not resemble a robot any longer.

Now he looked like some horror conjured from the deepest recesses of hell itself. His eyes were red and lacked irises. His whole skin had a webwork of blackened veins running across it, making it look like he had been submerged in a vat full of boiling tar. The soldier’s skin was not white or black. It was an unnatural shade of blue, making him look like he had died and then his corpse was forced to go through some unholy ritual that had morphed him into the being that he was now.

As I had initially suspected, there were gears and pistons in his armor. This was an exo-suit, a mechanical machine designed to make him stronger and capable to bear the attacks from a werewolf. Whoever had sent him knew a little too much about werewolves, it seemed.

Could it be Blair? Could it be perhaps that there was some other enemy tucked away in some dark cleft of the world, ready to attack from the shadows?

Looking into his eyes, I could see no signs of life, and yet this man drew breath and snarled and screamed as Alexis and I beat him into submission, tethering him to the ground. Alexis put her paws on his arms while I shifted the weight of my body on his chest so that he wouldn’t be able to move, resist, or retaliate.

Now it was time for me to turn back into a human and interrogate this soldier. Ask him where he’d come from, which master he served, and why did he want to kill us when we had done nothing to him in the first place?

But while I was still shifting back into my human form, I noticed the soldier wedging his tongue into his teeth. I had seen this before almost a hundred years ago. Soldiers loyal to the Nazis had cyanide capsules in their teeth that they used to kill themselves whenever they were caught by their enemies. It was clear to me that this soldier intended to do the same.

As Alexis was holding him down and I was shifting back, neither of us could stop him from swallowing his hollowed-out tooth that contained the cyanide capsule. And so, it was with helplessness that we observed him writhing and foaming as he died.

Alexis shifted back as well and said, “Well, that was a load of bullshit.”

“Now we’re never going to find out where he came from,” I said, feeling defeated in spite of the fact that we had just beaten him together.

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