Chương 169: Book Five, Chapter 72: The Stone Fort

~Riley~ I was getting all kinds of footage as we walked back up through the basement path that would lead us into Witherhold Manor. The Dailies triggered around the time the werewolves started transforming. I thought I would zoom through the footage and give the group the highlights.

"There are so many hikers, campers, and people staying at cabins along the river," I said.

"Carousel's been taking footage of them all day, but I think some of them are werewolves. I don't know which ones, though. I can see the way it focuses the camera on some of them, but I'm not sure exactly what the language of film is trying to convey here. Are all of these people werewolves?" I was talking to myself out loud at that point, but the others were listening closely.

"What exactly are you seeing?" Antoine asked.

"Just nature photography mostly," I replied.

"But whenever I see a group of people, sometimes the camera will look at them from a certain angle that in movies means they're evil—exaggerating the size of their head, the sharpness of their features, catching them in shadows. That's how you know someone's bad before you know they're bad." It could be hard to explain, but you knew it when you saw it.

"So you're saying we may be surrounded by hundreds of werewolves? We're going to get our butts kicked?" Antoine asked.

"Or chewed," I said.

"I'm not getting as much footage as I'd like, which should theoretically mean that we have a high-Savvy enemy... but that doesn't sound right at all. Unless Kirst's Savvy is what I'm fighting against, which is a can of worms itself." Maybe one of the werewolf tropes was interfering with The Dailies. I didn't know.

"Are you getting locations with this data?" Andrew asked. He wanted all the facts as much as I did. More facts meant better planning. Even though he was high-Savvy, his tropes were mostly centered around healing, and he wasn't great at finding out information unless he was cutting open a dead body.

"Vaguely," I said.

"They're all situated along the river, and there have been a lot of shots following the river all the way up toward the property the Manor is on. Wait a second..."

"What is it?" Antoine asked. Flashes of carnage flickered in my mind. Was there an attack recently? No. That wasn't it.

"I got footage of the werewolves mauling Logan and Avery," I said.

"It's cut up and pasted together, but I think it's actual footage."

"They're using the footage of when we trespassed onto the monster lair?" Andrew asked.

"That's my best guess," I said. From the way they shot it, it almost felt like they didn't know how it was going to be used in the final film.

"I, for one," Kimberly said, "Am glad not to have footage of someone being mauled in my head." As we made our way up into the Manor from the basement, we were greeted by Kirst's butler, who insisted on leading us outside.

"Wait, you're not putting us outside when we know there are werewolves around, are you?" Kimberly asked the butler.

"I don't think you have anything to fear here, my darling," he said in reply. I didn't know this guy's story, but he had way too much personality for a random NPC. He continued leading us out of the Manor and back onto the property where I could see some type of... well, it wasn't exactly a castle, but there were lots of stone structures and walls. On-Screen.

"What is that?" Kimberly asked. She was always ready for a scene.

"That, my dear, is the palisade—the Fort. Or at least, it was once." Palisades were made of vertical sticks stuck in the ground. This was not. I'd have to let that slide. What I saw in front of me was a network of tall stone walls, many of them crumbling but still upright and imposing.

"That's a death trap," Antoine said.

"A werewolf could clear those walls without even thinking about it." The butler smiled his devious little smile and said, "I think we're counting on that."

"You're planning a trap?" Andrew asked.

"Werewolves are mindless creatures," the butler said.

"Many of the resources we've found confirmed that." What resources were they looking at?

"That's a bad bet," Hawk said. He was mostly quiet. He was one of those men that you could just see the intelligence in his eyes. He understood what we were talking about Off-Screen, whether he spoke about it or not.

"Oh?" the butler asked.

"Then, I suppose you will have no difficulty imparting your wisdom to the captain."

"Imparting wisdom is always the hard part," Hawk said.

"The werewolves around Carousel are not stupid like many of the wolves in other parts of the world. Here, they're as smart as you are—once they mature a bit." That hung in the air for a beat.

"Perhaps you can design," the butler said, pausing as the sound of a wolf could be heard in the distance, "a better trap then. Go straight onto the palisade wall; there's an entrance. You'll be able to see it when you get closer. I should not have to tell you that Kirst's men know you have been infected, and each one of them is ready to take your head off if you cause problems." I really hoped that wasn't a source of drama in this story. That would be lame.

"If the legends are true," I said, "I imagine we won't be the only infected ones soon enough. Something tells me you picked a really bad week to try to antagonize the wolves." I wanted to come back at him in equal force while being vague.

"What are you, some sort of psychic now? I didn't remember reading that in your dossier," the butler said.

"No," I said, "that's my grandmother—that's the psychic. Me? I just have gut instinct. Lots of would-be hunters think it's a werewolf's ferocity that kills, but that's not it. It's their playfulness." I wanted to set this movie up as a battle of the wits, not just a fight to the death. We could win the Savvy and Hustle fight. The werewolves had the advantage in direct combat. For the first time, the butler seemed to have been tripped up by something one of us said.

Antoine leaned over to the butler and said, "They're thrill-seekers, werewolves, and my money says they already know we're here. In fact, my money says they've already walked amongst us, watching us. I hope you kept track of the meatheads." He must have understood where I was going. The butler didn't have much to say to that. He just did a strange little bow, turned tail, and walked back toward the Manor. Off-Screen. Before we got to the palisade, Kimberly decided to tell us about her backstory.

She told us about a woman who was her friend and former camp counselor who had somehow survived the attack that Kimberly thought had killed her. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"If she's alive, that means she was turned," Michael said. He didn't make a peep On-Screen. I agreed with him.

"You'll have to play that up," I said.

"Really focus on that relationship. Should take up screen time and make a good subplot." Kimberly nodded. She didn't have a lot of information on the woman—Sarah, so she was probably going to have to make things up, but that was okay. Sarah would go along with pretty much anything Kimberly said and would probably even add to it. Usually.

Once we found the entrance to the Fort, hidden in the stone and not easily visible from afar, we followed a path of overgrown grass and dead leaves that had recently been trampled on. Inside the Fort, a large courtyard was transformed into a battle station. Two dozen armed mercenaries, many firearms, and explosives were set up. In the corner, a blacksmith appeared to be creating silver bullets en masse.

"Cannon fodder," Michael said, looking over the men.

"Dead meat," I agreed.

"Lila's not here," Andrew said.

"I haven't seen a trace of her yet. It's always difficult with her being a wallflower and all. Did you see her while watching the dailies?" he asked me. I shook my head.

"She might have been there, but there were so many different people I didn't notice her. She might not have ever appeared On-Screen yet." I remembered she was good at that.

"It's a pity," Andrew said. Andrew, like Cassie, had the ability to detect the health status of all of his teammates from anywhere, but he had to actually interact in some way with them in the story first. Even a mention from someone who had talked to them might be enough. He hadn't done that yet with Lila. Was he afraid that she had run away or that she was up to something? I didn't know, but I could tell that some of us were thinking it.

"All right," Antoine said.

"Spread out. See if you can get any information. I need to find this captain person and have a talk."

"Get a lay of the land as best you can. Just do some exploring," Hawk said, speaking for the first time Off-Screen.

"I doubt the wolves are going to come out tonight. It's too overcast—they get lethargic without the moon, even with this pitiful little sliver shining through." He was looking up at the sky, and while the moon was not visible, there was a glow through the clouds—just enough to tell where the moon was, but not enough to make it out completely. So Hawk could speak to us—just not out of character. ~Kimberly~ I spent a while looking around the fort. I wanted to know the exits, the people, the vibe.

I wanted to know where we would be sleeping and if I could find a change of clothes. I wanted to think about the story. Egan Kirst was a perfectly charming and polite sociopath, and yet, when I saw the way he looked at his son, I could see he was truly vulnerable. Riley and Antoine didn't trust him—they thought he was going to backstab us again—but I thought he was telling the truth, not just in the way an NPC is when following a script.

I believed that the real man beneath it all felt something intensely during that scene, and that might have been the only true thing he said to us: that he loved his son. That didn't make sense because his son was being played by someone else, but I knew in my heart that Egan Kirst did love someone. I would bet money that he lost them, too. He was using his pain for his performance. I knew a thing or two about that. I heard someone yelling in the distance and snapped out of my thoughts.

"Now, men, listen up! This here is Antoine Stone. He's a third-generation werewolf killer, and he seems to think he knows something we don't. And as I don't want to be werewolf shit in the morning, I say we give him a listen." The man talking was older than the rest. He had kind eyes for a mercenary. His name was Captain Neil Tiber. He was a grizzled military type. Riley had called him a direct stereotype when we first saw him, and I supposed he was, but I thought he had a sense of humor.

Antoine stood next to the captain in front of 26 mercenaries, most of whom were at least as tall as Antoine and twice as muscular.

"We have a bit of an emergency here," Antoine said.

"I've been looking around at your firearms, and you've got them all wrong." Antoine wasn't afraid to butt heads.

"Wolf comes to me, I'll blow his head off," one of the men said with an accent I couldn't place. That got chuckles out of the rest of the men. I stood in the back and watched. All I had managed to accomplish was finding a change of clothes so that I didn't have to wear a dress everywhere I went. I also picked up a gun. They were everywhere.

"That's the exact problem," Antoine said.

"Most of the firearms I see around here are too strong." The laughter didn't stop; it just changed from mocking to curious.

"The goal is to put the silver bullet into the wolf, not to shoot through it. The silver has to stay in the body until morning light," Antoine said.

"If your shot is a through-and-through, that wolf gets right back up 30 minutes later. I recommend handguns for close combat and silver bird shot to keep them sweet. Shoot once to kill, shoot again to make sure they stay dead." The men weren't laughing anymore.

"They'll get right back up if I shoot 'em in the head?" the first soldier asked again. Antoine started to answer, but then Hawk took over.

"They can survive anything, assuming the silver slug doesn't stay in their corpse. Headshot? They'll get up eventually. Shot to the heart takes a little longer. But worse than that, they're gonna play dead and make you think you got 'em. And if you did get 'em, one of their friends—one of the more mature ones, the self-aware ones—they'll come over and dig that silver out. We are up against an enemy that knows its weaknesses. This isn't a big game hunt; this is a war." The men were silent and confused.

"How are we supposed to know these things are dead if what you say is true?" the captain asked.

"Shoot 'em dead, then shoot 'em with silver birdshot like the young gun said. That'll work. What I like to do is plant this sucker in their heart, make sure they stay down 'til morning," Hawk said, producing a large hunting knife made entirely of silver. From there on, I half-listened to the conversation between the soldiers, Antoine, and Hawk. Something else had caught my attention—a blacksmith. She was a woman, easily in her 60s, wearing a mask to save herself from the silver fumes.

On the red wallpaper, her name was Hetty Morgan. I'm not sure what drew me to her. Maybe it was the calluses on her fingers I noticed when she took off one of her big blacksmith gloves or the way she kept glancing up at Antoine as if she wasn't surprised at all at the things she was hearing, unlike the soldiers. I approached her, but before I could ask her anything, she walked to the back of her little forge setup and tinkered with something I couldn't see. I thought it was just a piece of wood.

Soon, I understood what was happening—Antoine and the others were On-Screen, and this interaction I was about to have needed to be On-Screen. And yet, Carousel stuck to its rule that only one thing was On-Screen at a time. Sure enough, when Antoine went Off-Screen and the soldiers disbanded, the silversmith gracefully walked back over to her workbench and began gathering little bits of silver into a thick cup made of something that could be put into the furnace. A crucible, I thought it was called. On-Screen.

"Do you think we have a chance?" I asked, trying to play it cool, like Anna would have. I looked over the weapons she was making with extreme interest. The woman looked up at me, wiped the sweat off her brow, and said, "This is a foolish thing to do."

"Mr. Kirst is desperate," I said.

"Most fools are, eventually," she answered as she picked the cup up and moved it over into the furnace.

"Still, we have to try."

"Do we have to try?" Hetty asked.

"I say you either kill a werewolf or you set it free. The wolves around Carousel are peaceful—for wolves. They only kill once in a blue moon, and I'm old enough to remember it could be much worse. Wolves without a pack ain't much better than wild things. This thing we're doing—even if we succeed—a lot of people in Carousel are going to die for it." She had clearly been thinking about this for a while. She sounded angry. But why help if she thought it was a bad idea?

"Killing the pack leader," I said.

"Do you think that's a mistake?" She was quick to answer.

"I do," Hetty said.

"You kill her, and all these wolves won't be no better than any of the others. She keeps 'em in line."

"She?" I asked.

"The pack leader is a female—a woman?" Hetty laughed.

"A she-wolf," she said.

"You don't think a man could do that job, do you? Always been a woman since before I was a child. Since my mother herself was a child, the she-wolf roamed these hills and gathered her pack, and there was peace. But the wolves ain't always so peaceful, and when she ain't around to stop it, some of her little boys go a bit crazy. They go killing just to kill, just to eat."

"And she doesn't have them do that?" I asked.

"Not her," Hetty said.

"You can hear it in her howl. She's the most lovesick wolf you ever heard. She's looking for love, not blood, but she ain't found it yet." I listened as close as I could and I let those words affect me for a moment.

"I was attacked not far from here. My friends were killed," I said after a few seconds.

"I finally got the courage to come back here." Hetty turned and finally looked me in the eye.

"I know who you are, girly," she said.

"And you should never have come back here." Chills went down my spine as the wind picked right when she said that.

"Why?" I asked.

"The wolves never forget a scent," she said. I cleared my throat.

"You seem to know a lot about this," I said.

"I only know what I've been told."

"What can you tell me about the Manor house? How does it fit into the legend?" I asked.

"Well, everything's got to start somewhere," she said.

"Everything's gotta end somewhere too."

"You're saying the werewolf curse actually did start here, just like they're saying?" I asked. Hetty pulled the crucible from the fire and poured the silver down into a metal box where it would form into bullets.

"You'll have to ask the she-wolf about that. She was here when it happened. She's been looking for love ever since." I didn't know where this was going, but it sounded important.

"My colleague Riley Lawrence over there says that all werewolves are in love." He had seen in on footage in his head.

"Oh, yes," the woman said with a cackle.

"Ever since the first." She grabbed the newly formed batch of bullets and hauled them to a different part of her tent. She was done talking. Off-Screen. We continued exploring, and while we didn't find a whole lot inside the palisade walls, we did get a good understanding of their layout in case we were suicidal enough to actually have a fight out under the stars. We were given sleeping quarters in a chamber underneath the palisade, and the first night drifted away peacefully.

First Blood was still long enough away that we could feel safe. All werewolves were in love, I thought to myself as I lay on my cot. I looked across the room to where Antoine was sleeping. Everything was so much better when you were in love. Even a place like Carousel couldn't break you if you could be with someone who cared about you above all else. So, Carousel told stories about love, huh? Did that mean love still had power here? I hoped so.

I drifted off to sleep, only waking once to what I thought was the sound of a wolf howling—but it was just the wind.