"Stay back," Daemon whispered, though his voice cracked on the words. "Just... stay back."
The werewolf's lips pulled back in what might have been a grin.
It had been toying with him, Daemon realized with growing horror as he hurriedly backed off.
All this time, it could have ended this quickly, but it preferred the hunt. The fear.
The creature's muscles bunched beneath its white fur as it prepared to lunge.
Daemon closed his eyes, pressing himself harder against the splintered wood of the cart. This was how it ended, then. Not in glory or purpose, but cowering in the snow while monsters...
The impact came from the side, sending both Daemon and the werewolf sprawling.
Someone had slammed into the beast with desperate force, though the collision barely seemed to register beyond annoying the creature.
The werewolf rolled with fluid grace, coming to its feet with ears flattened against its skull.
"Run!" Chang's voice cut through the wind as he scrambled backward through the snow. "Daemon, run!"
The man from the train car.
Daemon's mind struggled to process what he was seeing. Chang's grey gown was torn and bloodied, his usually immaculate appearance reduced to that of a desperate survivor. But his eyes...those held the same determined gleam they'd carried when they spoke about humanity.
"Chang, no..." Daemon started to rise, but another shape moved in his peripheral vision.
A second werewolf, this one darker with patches of gray through its fur, had circled behind Chang while his attention remained fixed on the white one.
The trap closed with ruthless efficiency.
"Behind you!" Daemon's warning came too late.
Chang spun, but the gray werewolf was already moving.
Massive jaws clamped down on the man's torso with a wet crunch that seemed to echo across the frozen wasteland. Chang's scream cut off abruptly as teeth pierced through cloth and flesh and bone.
The white werewolf joined its companion, seizing Chang's legs.
What followed next would haunt Daemon's dreams for whatever time remained to him.
The creatures pulled in opposite directions with methodical cruelty, their combined strength tearing through muscle and sinew until Chang's body gave way with a sound like ripping canvas.
Blood sprayed across the pristine snow in arterial patterns, painting abstract designs of violence and death.
Chang's eyes remained conscious for several horrifying seconds as his organs spilled into the snow. His mouth moved silently, perhaps calling for help, before the light finally faded.
The werewolves stepped back from their work, the white one casually spitting Chang's skull toward Daemon.
It bounced once in the snow before rolling to a stop near his feet, empty sockets staring up at him accusingly.
Something shifted inside Daemon's chest.
The terror that had paralyzed him moments before began to transform, reforming into something far more dangerous.
Heat built behind his sternum, spreading outward through his limbs like molten metal replacing his blood.
Considering his greatest sin was treachery, from the little Daemon got to know him,he seemed like a good guy.
The rage came like a physical force, pressing against the inside of his skull until his vision began to blur at the edges.
Everything else; the cold, the other survivors' distant screams, even the approaching werewolves faded into background noise.
There was only the fury, feeding on everything in his mind.
Daemon's consciousness fled like smoke before a hurricane.
The werewolves launched themselves forward in perfect synchronization, claws extended to end their game. Before they could complete their leap, their bodies simply... ceased.
One moment they were airborne predators; the next, they exploded outward in a spray of gore that painted a twenty-foot radius in the snow.
The sudden silence that followed felt oppressive.
Across the battlefield, the few hundred survivors who remained turned toward the disturbance. Even the other werewolves paused in their slaughter, primitive instincts warning them that something had changed in the nature of their hunt.
The predator was becoming the prey.
At the ramparts, the guards stopped their chattering and curiously stared.
Whatever they had expected to see, this wasn't it.
Daemon's body stirred in the center of the carnage, his consciousness returned slowly.
When his eyes opened, the left one blazed with crimson light that seemed to pulse with its own heartbeat.
He rose with fluid grace, no longer the cowering man from moments before.
The bloodlust hit him like a physical weight, pressing down on rational thought until only base instincts remained.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, a small voice screamed warnings, but it was easily drowned beneath the roar of unleashed fury.
The lead werewolf; black fur marked with distinctive blue eyes responded to the challenge with a howl of pure rage.
It charged across the intervening space with supernatural speed, claws carving furrows in the frozen ground.
But Daemon was already moving to meet it.
His hand closed around the creature's skull just as it reached him, fingers digging into fur and flesh with inhuman strength.
The werewolf's momentum carried them both forward, but Daemon remained anchored, immovable as a mountain.
"Too slow," he said, though his voice carried a gutteral sound that belonged to no human throat.
The werewolf thrashed in his grip, claws raking across his arms and chest, but the wounds closed almost as quickly as they opened.
Daemon lifted the creature above his head with casual ease, ignoring its increasingly desperate whines.
When he brought it down across his knee, every bone in the werewolf's spine shattered simultaneously.
The sound echoed across the plain like breaking timber.
He tossed the paralyzed creature aside without a second glance.
The remaining werewolves clustered together, their earlier confidence evaporating.
One, braver or more foolish than the rest, let out a challenging growl.
Daemon was beside it before the sound finished echoing.
His hand plunged through fur and muscle and bone, closing around the still-beating heart within. The werewolf's eyes widened in disbelief as Daemon's fingers tightened.
"Can't see," he whispered as he crushed the heart to pulp.
The werewolves shifted with unease. Another tried to flee, but distance meant nothing now.
Daemon caught it in three strides, lifting it effortlessly into the air. His other hand found the base of its spine and pulled.
The werewolf's scream cut off as its nervous system separated from its body in a shower of blood and bone.
Using the severed spine like a whip, Daemon turned toward the next creature.
The improvised weapon cut through its midsection with surgical precision, bisecting it cleanly.
One of the werewolves, younger than the rest, with white hair that looked rough had transformed back to human form in his panic.
He swung a desperate fist at Daemon's head, animal strength behind the blow.
Daemon caught the arm without effort and twisted.
The limb separated at the shoulder with a wet pop. Before the man could even scream, Daemon's fists were moving; twenty impacts in the span of a single heartbeat, each punch driving completely through flesh and bone until the man resembled a door full of holes.
The remaining four werewolves pressed against each other in terror, their muzzles still red with the blood of innocents.
They had become the prey now, and they knew it.
Daemon took a step toward them, then another. The crimson light in his left eye pulsed brighter with each heartbeat.
Then the pain hit.
It came from everywhere at once, his bones, his muscles, even his blood seemed to burn with acidic fire.
Daemon doubled over with a gasp, the inhuman strength leaving him as quickly as it had arrived.
The rage that had sustained him evaporated, leaving only a hollow ache behind.
The werewolves didn't hesitate. They turned and fled across the ice plain with their tails literally between their legs, abandoning their hunt entirely. Behind them, the survivors found their voices, hurling curses and handfuls of snow at the retreating forms.
Daemon wobbled on unsteady legs, his left eye returning to its normal color. The full weight of what had happened, what he had done pressed down on him like a physical force.
Chang's lifeless face stared up at him from the snow, a final reminder of the cost of survival.
His knees buckled, and he collapsed face-first into the bloodstained snow, unconscious before he hit the ground.