Near the back of the pack, the largest and meanest-looking of the pack observed the carnage unfolding with beady yellow eyes. Henry was finding it difficult to compare sizes effectively, especially since he already had to squint to make out anything from this vantage. He was something like… twenty stories up? Certainly enough for the ranks of armed guards below to look like specks to him. If they were about the size of a thumbtack, the alpha werewolf was maybe a bit larger than a jawbreaker in comparison.

  Which, as he attempted to scale that back up to a ground floor perspective, was more than enough to stand the hairs on the back of his neck on end. Polar bears would be liable to flee with their tail between their legs at the sight of that thing.

  He wondered how many fights it would have had to survive in order to reach such a stature in the first place. Or which idiot hadn’t bothered to double tap it before, when it had the chance.

  The distance between the speartip of the pack’s charge and the loosely-packed formation of the Club began to edge closer and closer. A bloody brawl was now an inevitability. As much as their suppressive fire and the Harpy’s intervention had softened up their assault, it still proved to be insufficient to stall the wave of apex predators bearing down on them.

  The moment the brunt of the wave crashed into the defenders lines, the pack leader moved. Potholes marred the surface of the asphalt wherever it tread, bounding forward with a speed that belied common conceptions of ‘being big means being slow’. The sound of the impact reached up to his perch a bare millisecond behind what was visible, highlighting both the distance between them and the earth-shattering nature of the impacts to begin with.

  Man, what I wouldn’t give to have my hands on that all-seeing artifact I stashed right now...

  Morale burst like an old dam in a typhoon. Members of the Gentleman’s Club who weren’t immediately caught in the crossfire scattered to the winds in hopes of staying out of the way of the rampaging tide. The Harpy, upon seeing the impending approach of the pack leader, abandoned previous pursuits to keep the other wolves tied down in order to fully focus on the far larger threat.

  An accurate read on the situation, albeit one that left the rest of the defenders high and dry for the time being.

  The Harpy began its counter-assault with tried and true tactics: death from above. It hovered just out of reach of the pack leader, arms stretched out wide as its wings unfurled to their full span horizontally. The faint whine of turbines spinning at top speed could be heard over the din of gunfire below, the air around it shimmering slightly as it released compressed blades of its Domain magic to strike from every angle.

  Shallow cuts along the entire length of the wolf’s hulking frame caused it to flinch mid-stride, sliding to a halt as it stared balefully at the nuisance above it. It roared in challenge to the devil, rising from its quadruped stance to snarl ferociously at the one who dared challenge it.

  With zero hesitation, the beast made to swat the Harpy out of the sky. Juking to the side at the last moment, the monster just barely missed its target. The constant stream of air blades continued to whittle away at the pack leader as it was circle-strafed by its opponent, staying close enough to keep attention focused on themselves while remaining just beyond striking distance.

  The duel dragged out in this fashion for some time. As the seconds wore on, casualties mounted on both sides. An occasional lesser wolf would succumb to accumulated wounds every so often, but not until after it had carved a swath of dead bodies in the gathered ranks of humans. The battle would be costly for either of them, regardless of outcome.

  Unfortunately, human casualties were borderline irreplaceable. Sure, even now there were still a few, neutral pockets of survivors that could be press-ganged by any of the major factions, and every so often a thrall-camp got liberated and gave the beleaguered fighting forces of mankind a desperately needed shot in the arm… but someday, those would run out, too.

  Werewolves, on the other hand, thrived on the battlefield. The phrase ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ applied to them in a quite literal sense. Even as their numbers had thinned over the months, the overall force they could bring to bear had remained more or less the same. A force of nature that continued to fuel the magic arms race within Hallow London to this very day.

  And that’s before you consider the runaway successes like Grimfang…

  Henry grimaced. Blinded though that particular specimen was, it was a right wily bastard through and through. If he never had to face that one again, it would still be too soon.

  The pack leader continued to relentlessly swipe at the Harpy. At first, he’d figured that it was just following its tried-and-true instincts of overwhelming aggression, but apparently there was some semblance of strategy to its actions.

  Made readily apparent as the Harpy found it hemmed in on both sides, with the wolf in front of it and the wall of a building to its back. A razor-bladed claw swiped down at it from overhead, leaving only one option remaining for the fellow devil.

  The harpy dove to the ground, changing targets to the beast’s legs and engaging it in one-on-one melee. Where it had hovered only moments ago, concrete was pulverized to dust, leaving deep furrows in the wall where the attack had seemingly only grazed the surface.

  A strike as powerful as that would leave anyone six feet under in an instant. Sheer agility was the only thing that was allowing the Harpy to stand toe to toe with the beast, and even then it would most certainly be a slugging match between the two.

  Despite multiple attempts by the larger creature to grapple it, the Harpy’s nimbleness was proving too much to keep track of. Where the pack leader slashed low, it would leap high and rain cuts on it from above. When the beast tried to swat it out of the air, it would shift its momentum in mid-air with a gust of wind, propelling itself straight back toward the ground to repeat the cycle all over again.

  Henry got the sense that he would have been beaten at least seven times over by now, had he actually fought it head on before his ‘unplanned’ capture.

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  The battlefield looked like it was about to fall into a pattern once again. This time, it didn’t seem quite so favorable an outcome for the defenders.

  < -|- -|- >

  Elsewhere in the building

  The mission was clear. Get word out to the remaining duplicates, no matter what. On foot was out of the question, even with the ongoing raid nonwithstanding. It simply wouldn’t be feasible for him to sneak past two elevators, their respective security stations, and whatever thugs were being kept in reserve at the moment.

  Wait, why does the second elevator not reach all the way down to the ground floor, anyway? Better yet, why even have two elevators to split the difference with in the first place if the whole building is only twenty-some stories tall?

  Seemed like a weird, superfluous design choice, now that he thought about it a bit deeper. Had the buildings original owner had a reason to keep the two sections separate?

  Who knew. Besides, now wasn’t really the time to be contemplating the hidden meaning behind the building’s floorplan. He needed to find something to communicate to the outside world with before he was found out.

  Voices and double-timing footfalls caught his attention from further ahead. Ducking back around the corner, he counted two sets of footsteps from the direction of the lower floor accessways. Considering he’d only gone down a few floors via the stairwells himself, they must be of relatively high clearance in the gang’s organizational structure. Perhaps underbosses of some kind?

  Shame that stairwell didn’t go further down than a few floors. I swear, it’s like whoever made this building secretly had a crush on Daedalus and his labyrinth plans, then drafted the blueprints as their idea of a fanfiction…

  Idle frustrations about the layout continued to nag at him as he waited for the presences to leave. After he was certain they had moved on, he continued his search through the upper floors, one room at a time.

  You’d think an office such as this would be riddled with landlines! But no, someone had to go and rip out all the cubicles to make room for-

  He paused. As it so happened, he knew exactly who that someone is. Not quite sure where he was currently, but those two high-ranking minions that had just rushed through not too long ago might have some idea where Guillaume’s panic room was.

  And it seemed exactly in that scumbag’s controlling nature to be holding a monopoly over anything he could within his little sand castle. That man’s mugshot could pass for the dictionary’s definition for ‘micromanager’.

  Probably was part of the reason he hated Henry’s guts so lividly, actually. Personal experience told him how easy it was for members of the Devil’s Dozen to cave to bad habits provided by their significantly enhanced Domain spells. For himself, that was recklessness brought on by freedom from consequence. He could easily see Guillaume going bonkers over the fact that there was now something that was physically incapable of fitting perfectly into his meticulously planned image of his empire.

  Step by step, the duplicate retraced the path the other two men had taken. Well, more like used the direction they had gone in to systematically rule out options until one was left, but that bothered him little.

  He’d used to play Clue by staying in a single room and ruling out every combination of person and weapon one by one. The fact that he rarely ever won that board game was besides the point.

  Right now, there was only one room left to check, anyway. And it was still slightly ajar.

  < -|- -|- >

  Henry blinked in surprise as the first wolf burst into a flaming conflagration below. Then a second. Then a third. It wasn’t apparent what was going on down there until he saw what happened to the fourth one.

  Just when the beleaguered men and women of the Club had been about to break ranks and run, the decision had been made to call in their ultimate sacrifice play. From his distant perch in the confines of the top floor, he could just barely make out the form of a man, seemingly covered head to toe in material that glowed a dull orange that managed to pierce the mist of the night.

  As soon as the man got within three paces of one of the wolves, the orange lights flashed white all at once. A short delay of not even a half second later, and a fireball centered on where they had once stood erupted. The massive release of heat and light charred everything in its path to ashes, leaving a perfectly circular hole in the omnipresent fog as the moisture in the air flash-boiled.

  The wolf didn’t die – not immediately, at least. It didn’t take a genius to see that it was living on borrowed time, though. Flames licked at the far side of its massive frame, and the parts of it that were directly in the path of the blast had been torn open, cauterized, only to be torn open again and cauterized once more.

  It writhed on the ground howling in agony as the blazing remnants clung to its fur like dry tinder, scar tissue scraping against asphalt as the surrounding thugs threw everything they had at it to finish it off quickly.

  With a whimper, the wolf fell to the ground lifeless. Other wolves began meeting similar fates all across the frontline, shifting the tide of battle past the point of victory for the attackers.

  The pack leader, evidently, recognized this too. With one last jab at the Harpy, it backed off a few steps and barked several times into the air. Some sort of signal to the rest of the pack, though Henry had no idea how it differentiated from any other midnight outcry the beast made.

  The surviving pack fled back down the streets they came from, lumbering past the leader as it used its teeth and claws to prevent both the Harpy and the remaining humans from landing a final opportunistic kill in their escape.

  Dear God… it understands the concept of a fighting retreat…

  He hated that they were starting to learn tactical awareness. Though not as much as the sight of the dead they left in their wake.

  All of this for a bloody stalemate. Countless dead in exchange for a handful of small fry in return. The issue of Hallow London’s ever-increasing manpower shortage loomed in the back of his mind once again.

  We need to get out of here. There’s just no way we can outlast this.

  He turned away from the aftermath, unsure of what to do but certain that he needed to do something more. As it had done so frequently in the months prior, a gnawing sense of helplessness crept into the back of his thoughts, whispering that any course of action was either hopeless or suicide.

  He’d gotten very proficient at pretending that voice didn’t exist in that time. Plenty of opportunities to practice.

  “Some devil I turned out to be…” he moped as he pushed the last of his gripes away. “All I’m good at is dying over and over again.”

  The door to the chamber slammed open with a dreadful clatter, causing him to spin to face the new entrant. In the doorway stood Guillaume of all people, with the copy he had sent into the building earlier in his grip.

  Or, well, what was left of him, anyway. The corpse’s tongue lolled over the side of the splintered lower jaw, the top 70 percent or so of the head missing entirely and leaving the rest as a ragged stump. Callously, the old man dropped the body to the floor at his feet with a wet thump, ignoring the bloodstain that began to ooze from the destroyed cavity.

  Guillaume tossed something small and plastic into his hands, which Henry was only barely able to catch before it hit the ground.

  As it turned out it, was a battered mobile phone. It lit up, a sent text message flashing on the screen as it powered on.

  Guillaume addressed him with deliberate slowness, any icy undertone layering into his voice as he spoke.

  “You have thirty seconds to tell me who this message was sent to, and what it means, before I turn your skull into a canoe for the second time today.”

  On the plus side, his copy had completed the mission he’d had in mind for it. On the downside, it had completed the mission at any cost.