Everyone was stunned. This news was almost too much to bear. Why had the wolves chosen them, why had they followed them, why had they allowed the ambushes to take place, and…there were so many unanswered whys.

Nick was distraught. He was waiting to get more information on his men but hadn’t expected to find out in a drunken toast they had been decapitated by a werewolf that wanted to have a conversation with Sal about a baby. It was all too much. He stood up from the table and walked outside to get some air. The rest of the group remained behind.

Nick walked away from the cabin towards the lake, not really focusing on a destination, just wanting to be alone. Cicadas and crickets filled the night air with their serenades, joined by the birds and frogs around the lake. The occasional snapping branch or crashing of a limb made Nick look towards the woods, wondering if he had an escort of wolves on his walk to the lake.

As he neared the shoreline, all he could focus on was how defeated he was. David, Mark, and Faraday all gone. David was still allegedly alive but with no way of saving him. The teams in NYC, DC, Miami, and most other metro areas had gone silent, leaving just Jesse, Mikel, and him. What was he going to do? He had never felt so overwhelmed and against the odds in his life. Three against the world was not what he had prepared for.

The lake was smooth as glass. Not even the fish beneath the surface wanted to come up to take a look at the world above. The moon was becoming obscured by cloud cover, and it appeared a storm was on the way. Nick almost hoped it would be strong enough to take him out.

He sat on the grass and put his boots in the water. After a moment, he laid back and stared up at the sky. As he watched the stars, he wished he could go back to a time before everything changed and just…disappear into a crowd and never be seen again. A raindrop splashed on his cheek, quickly followed by another. He closed his eyes and stayed still, lying on the grass with his feet in the lake as the clouds released their rain upon the earth for the next ten hours. Nobody noticed that Nick wasn’t inside until the following day.

#

Sal answered a few questions from his friends before abruptly calling it a night. He stood up shakily from the table, picked up a full bottle of whiskey, said goodnight, and walked upstairs.

“Damn. Never seen him like this before. That ride would have been awful. I couldn’t imagine.” Becka sounded genuinely worried about him.

The festive atmosphere was long gone. Everyone was morose and feeling the weight of everything. They quietly dismissed themselves to bed, and that was it. Nobody straggled behind or made any last-minute pleas for company. It was a long day. They had no idea what tomorrow would bring. Or that they would meet a new and much more complex enemy.

#

The morning found Jesse and Polly in the kitchen, brewing coffee and engaging in small talk about the beauty of the cabin. It was a cloudy, rainy morning with little in the way of warmth to invite them outside. They took their cups in the outroom and curled up on the couch. Polly found a remote that started the fire. Soon, they were chatting away and loving the warmth it provided. Stevie wandered in and joined them about 45 minutes later. She sat at a different angle, looking out at the lake.

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It was Stevie who first noticed Nick.

“Why’s Nick laying out there in the rain? Did he tell you anything before he went out?”

“Didn’t know he was out there.” Jesse moved to a table that held a few pairs of binoculars. She brought him into focus and immediately knew something was very wrong.

Nick was lying on his back with his mouth open. It was full of rainwater that was running down the side of his face into his hair. There appeared to be a tinge of red in the water.

“Somethings wrong,” Jesse whispered as she bolted from the room.

#

Byron was awake and stretching in the hallway when Jesse came up the stairs. She grabbed his arm and pulled him along behind her as she made her way to wake up Mikel. Byron almost fell down with the change in direction, and with the surprise of being caught so off guard, he didn’t get a word out.

Mikel was already up, looking out the window at the woods beyond. He had been attempting to spot the wolf escort they apparently had been assigned. He could see no signs, and he was well-trained at picking up signs of a tail.

With Byron in tow, Jesse came bursting in, giving Mikel a start.

“Somethings wrong. Terribly wrong. Come with me.”

She led both men to the outroom and handed them binoculars. At first, neither man said anything. Then Byron set his down and made for the door. Jesse and Mikel stopped him.

“We have no idea what happened to him, but by all accounts, it looks like poisoning. He could have been poisoned by the rain itself. I know that sounds like a stretch, but we’ve done shit like that in the past. Whole towns in places I don’t want to remember were wiped out in a night. The residents looked just like that. I think they tried it to test on the wolves.” Jesse was holding Byron’s arm, but he wrenched it away and walked off towards the kitchen as she spoke.

Polly and Stevie looked on in horror. Mikel turned to them and shrugged.

“Different life, different rules. There were no kids, no women. The “village” was really an insurgent training camp. The people there had just beheaded three journalists and broadcast it to the world, then raped the female journalists for three days non-stop before doing the same to them. I wouldn’t classify them as human. I think they got off easy.”

Stevie started to cry. This was all too much for her to take in at once. Nick was dead, Jesse and Mikel had wiped out an entire camp of people in their sleep, and insurgents had raped several women for 72 hours straight. How would a sane, functional human being respond to that?

“We wait till the rain passes, then once the grass is dry, we gather Nick up and give him the burial he deserves,” Polly said, leaving no room for debate.

“That sounds like the right move, Polly. Thank you.” Jesse said.

With that said Jesse headed to the kitchen to talk to Byron. She wanted to calm him down and clear up the earlier misunderstanding that Mikel had left wide open.

“I didn’t mean to upset everyone. I just spoke a bit too openly. I have a habit of doing that. The horrible things I’ve seen have been far outweighed by the beautiful. The warmth and love I’ve seen just within this group has more than made up for a lot of the pain I’ve seen others cause. As long as we try to make the lives around us better, we’re doing our part.”

Stevie was still crying, so Mikel hugged her. She leaned in and cried until the world around her disappeared, and she didn’t feel alone anymore. By that time, Polly was there with a cup of hot chocolate full of melted marshmallows to help her calm her nerves. She sat on the couch, this time looking away from the lake, and wrapped herself in a blanket, enjoying her drink.

“Thank you, Mikel. And you, Polly. I feel better. I needed that. Thanks for just letting me get it all out.”