Suddenly, a rumbling howl recahed the group, coming from their left. They turned their heads and, even with the dust in the air impairing vision, they could clearly make out the figure of the hulking beast.

  The creature was facing away from them, and his head was alternating from reaching up, which always came accompanied of another howl, and then reaching down, to the dissecated corpse of the thrall.

  "It's mourning," said Mila. "That undead wolf, it had to be part of its pack. Family."

  Kurt nodded, looking at the sad display before him, before he spoke, "The screen above the living one's head called him an alpha wolf, while the one above the thrall's called him a beta wolf. In the context of a wolf pack, that means it must have been..."

  "The living one's elder child," Conrad completed, his voice dangerously neutral. Then, he turned to Kurt. "You called that thing, the dead wolf, a thrall, right?"

  "Yeah," Kurt confirmed, nodding. "At least that was what my ability told me. It hasn't misguided me before, so I don't think it was wrong now."

  Those were Kurt's words and he meant them. Nevertheless, he almost wished for his power to have been wrong. A part of him wished that the poor thing that was now lying lifelessly on some godforsaken bleached road, mourned by what must have been its own father, had been just a regular wight instead of a thrall. But he knew it wasn't the case, and not because he blidly trusted his screens.

  Thralls and wights were the two most basic, easy to make types of undead, mere dead bodies animated through necrotic energy. But there was one fundamental differnce between the two: Whereas a wight was an already dead, soulless corpse upon which necromancy had been used, thralls where the result of that same magic being used on a living creature. Dying due to necrotic magic exposure, like the mourning beast before them almost had, meant that the soul had no time to leave the body before the undeath magic took hold of it, anchoring it to the now dead body in a pale imitation of a proper life force.

  This made thralls superior to their wight brethern in two vital ways; first, he presence of a soul meant that thralls were far less dependent on external power sources than wights were, and second, the dregs of will that the drak magic managed to extract from the soul meant that thralls were far smaster than the Romero-esque wights, while also retaining more of their natural instincts.

  The fact that thralls still have their also meant that they sufferd in ways no other undead did. Creating a wight and other necromantic practices was akin to working with nuclear materials: very dangerous, heavily scrutinized, but nowhere near inherently evil, and with the potential to do good if properly used. Creating thralls? That was condemning a soul to experience the pain and horror of becoming an unliving monster shackled to another creature's will, all for the sake of making a more intelligent and efficient wight. There was no moral greyness in that, just a vantablack shade of evil.

  "That makes sense," Conrad said, yanking Kurt out of his thoughts.

  "Why does it make sense that it was a thrall?" Mila asked.

  Conrad sighed, and a sort of weariness colored his face. "Because, Mila... vampires don't usually bite into dead bodies.

  "...what?" Kurt asked, his voice smaller than he had intended. His grip on his sword tightened. "How do you...?"

  "When I got close to that thing to finish it off, I saw that it had marks on its neck. Marks of human teeth." He fell silent for a moment, and his face twisted in barely concealed disgust. "It looked like the bastard had taken a bite out an apple."

  All around them, the dust cloud had all but dissapeared, half disspersed by he wind and half fallen on to the road, revealing the manhole sized crater the red wolf's thrashing had left behind. Kurt looked over at the horizon, first checking the path they had taken, and then the path they were to take. No cars coming from either side.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  "We have to do something about this," Kurt said. Neither Conrad nor Mila said anything in response. "If there is a vampire on the loose, and that vampire got themselves access to a pack of Aura-mutated animals, then we cannot afford not to do something."

  "Definitely," Mila said, still looking at the scene before them. "Something that would do something like this has to be taken down."

  Conrad looked silently at the steaming ruin that had been their ride, and then at the horizon over it. "Phoenix's gotta be less than a hundred miles away. We could make that by foot." He let out a very frustrated sigh. "Which means that all of this is happening very close to a population center. I agree with. We have to do something."

  He stared at the red wolf, which was now simply lying besides his spawn, looking as weak as he had been while poisoned.

  "What do we do with this fella?" Conrad asked. "Vampire victim or not, it's still a very fucking dangerous magic beast."

  "We do the one thing that can be done right now," Kurt said as he stepped forward. "Approach him, try and show that we are not hostile, and hope for the best. Conrad, you go get your sword, in case stuff goes to hell." Conrad nodded, and immediately began making his way to the car's trunk. " Mila, you better hold to the amber, just in case things really go to hell." His gaze went to Mila's hands, which were still clutching the golden sphere, and stopped at the dark red stains of dried blood between her fingers. "Maybe you should use it, if you are not..."

  "I'm fine, promise," she said quickly, before she tapped twice at her nose. "It's not broken or anything. Just a short-lived nosebleed."

  Kurt nodded. "Fine then. Take care here, then."

  "And you take care there," she said with a smile and a nod.

  Clutching his sword, Kurt made his way towards the lying beast. The wolf took notice of him almost immediately, his ears rising in alarm, and it was when Kurt stepped within ten feet of where both him and his child's corpse were lying that it truly reacted.

  Once again, red energy began pulsating from within the beast's body, and his muscle's seemed to inflate with it. It rose to his feet and moved, not towards Kurt, but backwards, so that his cub's corpse was encased between his hind and fore legs, with Mr. Anderson's torso casting a shadow on son's face, as if to protect it's now unseeing eyes from the harsh son.

  The wolf growled at Kurt, his lips pulling back to show rows of glistening white fangs, and unlike his first attemp, this one was extremely intimidating. The beast leaned forward as it getting ready to pounce, and the bleached asphalt cracked beneath his paws.

  At this display, Kurt raised his sword, letting the silvery metal to glow on the sun. Then, taking a deep breath, Kurt brought his sword down, and rammed half its length on the road, so fast and cleanly that the dead stone didn't even crack.

  This put a stop to the growling, but the wolf father grew, if anything, even more tense. It looked at Kurt with his big, sharp eyes, and the amber eyed warrior could clearly see that the beast's rage and paternal protectiveness had, while not dimished in the least, then definitely been mixed with a fair share of cautiousness.

  Without a word, Kurt sat himself on the road, and locked his eyes with the beast's. Then, he extended his arms at either side of his body, with his open palms faced at the beast, baring his chest in a gesture of non-agreesion that the wolf seemed to catch onto, if the way his lips pulled over his teeth and the slits of his eyes softened were of any indication.

  Kurt let a few seconds to pass and, once he saw that the wolf wasn't going to drop his guard anymore than it already had, he talked. "We know what did this to your child," he said, knowing that the animal before most likely wouldn't understand a word out his mouth, but saying them nonetheless. "We want to help you kill it."

  He tried to speak in the most soothing, conspirational way he could, hoping that the non-human before him would get atleast that much. This strategy proved only partially successful, as while the beast's guard droped further, it was a very slight change.

  With a sigh of frustration, Kurt went for his plan B: Non verbal communication. First, he pointed at the dissecated corpse, only to then bring two fingers to his own neck. The red wolf's eyes narrowed dangerously, in a manner that told Kurt that he knew exactly what type of wound had been the one that did his son in. Ignoring this, Kurt conjured his wand in one hand, and glamour quickly began to pour out of it in fat, pale plumes of white. A thought was all it took to give these featureless clouds shape and color, and they quickly took the form of a shadowy humanoid figure with exageratedly big, pointy teeth that were stained red. And to this creature's feet, the corpse of a wolf with red fur.

  The beast tensed again, and Kurt froze still until it had calmed down . Them, calmly and measuredly, trying not to provoke another response from the beast, he swiped his wand, and four additional figures appeared all around the 'vampire': a copy of each quest member, and one of the red wolf. They moved in unison, lunging at the shadow and tearing it apart as one, until all speck of its dark form dissapeared.

  Once he was done, he yanked his sword free and put it down on the road before he pushed it forward, causing it to spin towards the crimson-furred creature, who easily caught the blade beneath its paw. The beast looked at him with something like suspicion, a look that Kurt answered with the most earnest and non-aggressive face he could muster.

  The beast relented, letting a deep breath out his nostrils, and he swatted Kurt's sword back at him. The boy caught it and, as slowly as he could, he got up and gestured at his friends.

  "We reached an understanding."