"They stormed the Harrison residence! They killed everyone!" Markus' voice boomed in the billiard room, where the werewolves were relaxing.
Christopher looked up from the green table.
"Andy and Ty are on site," continued the Swede.
The foreman clenched his jaw and his fist clenched hard on the splint. "Sabrina." The name came out in a snarl at him. "She must have told Nereus the names of the pack families and where to track them."
"Shit!" Lucian's expletive expressed what everyone had been thinking.
"We must warn the entire pack. Markus, send a communiqué to all the families. Tell them to move away from Oldgrove or at least change their residence. No one is safe and we are too few to protect everyone."
The Swede nodded and disappeared into the corridor.
***
Nereus saw the black SUV arrive. A smile painted on his face as Christopher's two werewolves entered the devastated house. He could have set fire to it, but he preferred his enemies to see what he had done and what awaited them all if the werewolf leader had not retreated and ceded that territory to him. He imagined the horrified expressions of the werewolves at the sight of the mangled bodies, and rejoiced at this. He had sent his fiercest wolves to do the job and had checked for himself the havoc wrought. With a wave of his hand he told the man behind the wheel to leave, and the car pulled into the lane with its headlights off, heading away towards the outskirts of the city.
They would pay for destroying his army. One by one they would have killed - or rather, slaughtered - every family in the Barclay pack. It would be his own wolves who would turn against Christopher, not deeming him equal to the role of pack leader.
Nereus considered that many of his strays had been slaughtered, but he would quickly replace the losses by turning new humans. His were replaceable pawns, not to mention that he had the means to supply and arm a new army. Means that had belonged to the Barclay family. The only real loss had been Sabrina. That she-wolf had been an excellent ally. Trying again with another Trojan horse was too obvious and dangerous: the game could have backfired on him. But he had other resources.
He had in fact discovered that vampire blood worked as a kind of drug on lycanthropes: it increased their speed, strength and resistance to pain, but it was also lethal. And that was what he had set his scientists to work on: making vampire blood compatible with the lycanthropes' bodies without causing their death.
His qualities had been discovered by accident. One of the new recruits had fought a vampire for a human. In the ferocity of the fight he had drunk its blood, which had given him the strength to defeat his opponent. Back at the hut, the wolf had recounted the incident to some of his companions, describing the feeling of invulnerability he had experienced, along with the increase in his powers. During the night, however, he had died writhing in pain.
Upon learning of the incident, Nereus had sent his own wolves on a vampire hunt. They had managed to capture a couple of them and held them captive as long as they had blood in their bodies. Blood on which he had put his own chemists and biologists to work, but without yet achieving good results. Fortunately, the laboratories had not been destroyed by the raid of Christopher Barclay's men. Nereus, in fact, had had the foresight to decentralise his facilities.