Page 69 of Helsing: Demon Slayer
“Because once is enough. You give someone everything, and when it goes sideways—” He cut himself off. “You learn not to go there again.”
Dianne sucked in a breath and took a step back, her free hand going up as if to ward off a blow. His words had been a punch to her gut and a stab to her heart.
“I was your principal," she said, voice barely above a whisper. “Was that all?”
Ryan exhaled. His gaze was distant now. In fact, he looked over her head at a point farther along the shooting gallery. He might have been sighting a target that looked like her. “Yes.”
She’d sensed the wall rising between them, slow and silent, but now he’d built it high enough to shut her out completely, leaving her questioning everything.
Dianne barely noticed the crunch of gravel as Ryan turned from her, favoring his injured side with every stiff, pained step, as if walking away cost him more than he let on.
Beta, who’d waited nearby, ear protection slung around her neck, while they spoke now observed her, not with pity, but with something steadier.
“Do you still think it is only about aim?” asked the formidableElioud, her dark eyes watching Dianne closely, as she returned to Dianne’s side.
Dianne shook her head slowly.
Beta nodded, satisfied. “I did not think so.”
She didn’t wait for more. Turning, she walked down the line to another target, leaving Dianne alone with her questions—and the charged silence Ryan had left behind.
Nineteen
Thedirewolvesarrivedin the early evening some weeks later in the valley where Fushë-Arrëz sheltered among the bordering mountains.
Great beasts, they towered over their lesser relatives, the Old-World grey wolves, who at their largest and most fearsome—legendary animals from history—reached a measly one-hundred-seventy-five pounds and less than three feet tall. And who had been hunted mercilessly since the Middle Ages until they only dared hunt among humans when their hunger drove them.
These unreal and untimely monsters stood five feet at the shoulders and two-hundred-fifty pounds. Larger than most men. Lean and sinewy with dark, hollow gazes filled with a void-like shimmer as if something else looked through them, harmonic distortions laced their growls, making the very air itself vibrate unnaturally. Hardened patches of chitin mottled their fur, and their limbs were slightly elongated, giving them an ungainly, insect-like gait.
As they loped through the forests and rocky slopes of the Accursed Mountains, tendrils of harmonic distortion flickered along their unstable bodies, shifting them in and out of physical form. They were a misshapen, ruined echo of what a wolf should be.
The first to see them were the villagers of Breg, south of Fushë-Arrëz nearly ten kilometers and just outside the harmonic mesh system that served as both a means of public address and intrusion detection for the Kastrioti estate. The creatures prowled back and forth along the very edge of the harmonic defenses, their growls especially grotesque as black wisps of discord rolled off of them only to be pushed away by the mesh system. And, at first, the terrified villagers believed that the animals feared crossing thezoti’s invisible barrier.
And they grew complacent, coming out in small groups to watch the beasts, studying them at first before daring to approach the harmonic perimeter, seeing how close they could get to the ugly animals. The creatures neither approached nor retreated, their hollow gazes unreadable. The villagers mistook this for indifference. A few rowdy teen boys even darted across theElioudboundary, staying beyond it longer and longer during the daylight hours. The dire wolves only watched, unmoved by the boys’ antics.
Until the evening that they howled in prolonged, discordant triumph and tore through the barrier surrounding thezoti’s demesne, bursting from a cloud of warped shadow and flickering in and out of the visible plane.
Their first casualty was a farmer tending his horses in early evening. His wife, who’d come to their front door, wiping her hands on her apron, stood in frozen horror as she saw the monsters creep from under the trees at the forest’s edge, their approach eerily silent and focused, and her husband with his back turned to them as he rubbed his favorite horse’s muzzle, unaware of his impending doom.
The horse caught their scent first, rearing, its front legs flashing and its hooves connecting with the farmer’s face. He went down, hard, stunned. And then the dire wolves were on him, still silent, still focused. Still vicious and thorough.
In a final act of dominance, they stopped ravaging her poor dead husband to stare at her, to let her know that they chose not to maul her as well. The largest beast then growled and whipped his head around, taking off at a trot for the forest with the others at his heels.
That moment haunted her for the rest of her life. It was the moment the farmer’s wife realized that these creatures don’t just kill. They understand the spiritual loss that they inflict.
William DeVries finished his quick shower and change of clothes, the weight of his current duties pressing on him, each task layering itself over the rising discord of the world around him. His harmonic signature felt inflamed, an ache just below awareness, like a low-grade autoimmune reaction.
He stepped from the large walk-in shower, its unpolished stone tile floor warm and wet, into the damp chill of the bathroom, and shivered.
Perhaps it was autoimmune. He hadn’t entirely shed the aberrant harmonies that marked him as human.
Fallen. Incomplete.
The thought hung there, dissonant and unwelcome, as if Willem’s very being resisted the idea that his corporeal nature might still hold sway over him despite working side by side with the otherElioudand on the same redemptive mission. Yet he felt those splintered chords and unfinished melodies in his spirit, lingering in the background, faint but persistent—like a harmony waiting for its counterpoint, unresolved.
It made him see the world differently, feel it differently.
He found himself framing reality in strange new ways: harmonics and medicine, frequencies instead of structures.
