Cara dashed over to Reuben, who was coughing and hugging his ribs. The front of his suit had been disintegrated.

“Fucker!” He stumbled up.

“Are you okay?” he quickly asked Cara, with terror in his voice.

“I’m fine, but you’ve been shot!”

Reuben kicked open what remained of the doors that led into the manor.

“We’re being attacked!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs. “Defend the manor!”

The party guests didn’t even ask questions. They simply dropped whatever they were doing and shifted into their werewolf forms, with coats ranging from brown to black to cool grey. One by one, they bounded to the windows and looked out. One group of them caught a tank shot, which sent all of them flying and several motionless, strewn across the table that had been used for celebration only moments before.

Somewhere an alarm was raised and started blaring loudly.

Utter pandemonium ensued.

As the tank got closer, it tripped up some of the defense protocols that the manor apparently had, hitting several minefields that rocked it around wildly and tore off part of the treads – but it kept rumbling along in a broken fashion. The part that mattered, the turret, was fully operational and kept pumping the manor full of bullets, shattering windows and bringing down ancient parts of the house. One caught a column, shattering the marble and causing part of the front of the house to collapse.

Right after the tank came creatures – so many of them that they looked like ants emerging from a colony. Cara didn’t get a good look at them as Reuben was trying to get her away from the window, but she saw some vampires and goblins with some sort of other beasts mixed in. When they activated the defense mechanisms, they weren’t as fortunate as the tank. The mines detonated, sending bits and pieces of enchanted creatures everywhere.

She heard shrieking from the advancing hoards, but they just kept coming. The werewolves, completely taken by surprise, scrambled to find weapons and took positions on the windows, firing into the oncoming hoards with assault rifles.

Reuben got Cara as far away as he could. “Stay here!” he snarled.

He shifted into his werewolf form just as Duke flipped the table to provide extra cover for the werewolf gunmen. He was in his werewolf form, but somehow Cara knew it was him. It made no sense, but she knew.

“Get down, son!” Duke ordered before seeing the remains of Reuben’s suit. “Did they hit you?”

“I’ll be fine,” Reuben said, accompanied by a fit of coughing. “I can’t believe Ezekiel’s doing this! He’s more obsessed than I thought!”

Before Duke could answer, another tank bullet zipped through the ancient architecture, bringing down a shower of stone onto everyone inside. Duke shrugged off a piece as big as a man. Cara was starting to see why he was in charge.

The next few minutes were a bit of a blur. Cara had been expecting to go to a nice party with her fiancé. Instead, the manor was ambushed by Ezekiel’s vampires and Widowmaker’s goblins. Reuben seemed certain that none of them would survive. The werewolves weren’t prepared. Soon, the attackers would manage to get through the minefields.

Eddy showed up a little while later. Cara had spotted him at the party, but he still looked perfectly clean like he’d just put on a newly ironed suit. “I just saw outside! There are too many! Our reinforcements are coming from other manors, but they’ll be here too late!”

“This place has its own reinforcements,” Reuben snarled. “Eddy, watch over her!”

Eddy kneeled beside Cara and put his fist to the ground. A shimmering shield formed in the air over Cara and a small group of werewolves. The werewolves formed a circle around Cara, pointing their weapons towards the windows and doors. Where they had all gotten their weapons, Cara didn’t know. Maybe they had an armory hidden somewhere nearby. Not that she cared. She had more pressing things to worry about.

“Give me a gun!” Cara demanded, amazed at how far the pack would go to protect her. They were willing to get between her and a bullet just because she was Reuben’s fiancée.

Most of the werewolves that were at the windows were lying motionless or slowly dying. The ground troops had silver bullets. Apparently, the oncoming hoards weren’t too bad of shots.

A goblin poked its head over the window, using his long claws to scale the vertical wall. One of the werewolves popped off a small stream of bullets into his body. He fell off the tall building to the ground far below with a horrible scream.

Cara couldn’t see much of Reuben, but she saw him running towards the fireplace, throwing off goblins and vampires as they quickly flooded the ballroom despite the best efforts of the werewolves. He got to the fireplace, yelled something, and slammed his hand against the stone fireplace.

The fireplace peeled itself off the wall and collected itself into a huge stone golem. Nothing kept its stone skin together, but when it moved the rocks ground against each other and made a loud, horrible sound.

After Reuben had touched the stone, he’d been utterly overrun by goblins and vampires. Cara jerked the gun up to her shoulder, hoped she wouldn’t shoot Reuben, and unloaded the clip into the attackers that were still coming in through the windows. They exploded into dust left and right, but each one that Cara or her defenders shot, two more piled in. Reuben hadn’t been exaggerating when he said Widowmaker had a “small army” of goblins.

The fireplace monster bellowed and tore into the attackers, who squealed and tried to get out of the way to no avail. The fireplace creature wasn’t a beautiful fighter and was rather slow, but the gunshots simply deflected off the stone. It smashed some of the monsters that were covering Reuben, leaving Reuben to stumble up with streaks of golden blood all across him.

“Get upstairs!” he ordered as he came back towards them. “There’s too many of the bastards! Go!”

The remaining werewolves, Cara, Eddy, and Reuben all made a mad dash for the staircase that led upstairs with the attackers not far behind them as a swarm of attackers tackled the golem out the window, killing all of them and crushing a dozen more below. Cara was reminded of the Viking berserkers, who were known to ingest dangerous, hallucinogenic painkillers before battle, lending them nearly supernatural pain tolerance. The goblins and the vampires each took several shots before they evaporated.

The surviving defenders stopped at a staircase that led up to the roof through a hatch. Eddy kept the shield up to stop the attackers from shooting at them, letting the werewolves focus on laying fire into the death trap of the long staircase. The attackers didn’t wait for cover. They just kept charging with fanatical devotion to either Ezekiel or Widowmaker, soaking up the bullets to let their fellow attackers get an inch closer every time one of them died. It was like a poorly made zombie movie, except there was no pause button. Cara was scared out of her mind; she kept shooting, but they just kept coming.

Finally, a werewolf opened the hatch and everyone piled up to the roof. As Cara’s head broke through, the wind almost took her off the edge before she caught herself. They were four or five stories up, meaning they could see the land for miles around even through the waving trees. She could see that more goblins were coming.

Most of the vampires had already been eliminated, but Widowmaker’s troops kept pouring out of the woods to scale the manor like bugs. Dangerous, bloodthirsty bugs.

Reuben slammed the hatch down and several of the other werewolves helped to keep the door closed, but goblins had figured out how to get on the roof from the outside. Only a few of them had made it so far. It was a dangerous climb. Most fell before making it to the top, lending the dwindling number of survivors a brief respite.

Cara could see at the tree line, by the tank, two distinctive men. One she guessed was Widowmaker. He wasn’t wearing a helmet and he was too far away to see his features, but he was clearly not a goblin and he looked like he was in charge.

The other was Ezekiel, who was screaming at the top of his lungs for the goblins to kill anyone inside.

“Ezekiel!” Cara announced. “He’s here!”

Reuben snatched a gun from one of the werewolves and dropped to his stomach like a professional sniper. He looked down the scope, aiming presumably at either Ezekiel or Widowmaker, breathed deeply, and squeezed the trigger.

In what was to be one of the most impressive and terrifying moments of Cara’s life, a goblin showed up out of nowhere and jumped onto her. She jerked up the gun and sprayed him with bullets. He exploded like a sandcastle in front of a jet turbine and drifted down onto her beautiful dress. She could just barely follow the bullet from Reuben’s shot as it zipped through the air.

It vanished from her sight quickly, but she saw Ezekiel stumble, clutch his chest in surprise, and fall to the ground. He writhed a few times before he slowly disintegrated.

“I got the bastard!” Reuben cheered. “Fuck yeah!”

Immediately, Widowmaker turned and made some sort of signal. All the goblins nearby instantly stopped and retreated, except for the unlucky few that were already climbing the manor and had to continue the assault or that didn’t see the signal. Those few were met with deadly force from the team of survivors.

Soon, the last goblin vanished into the woods. Even the tank was deserted, barrel smoking. The field was disturbingly quiet. The green grass was dusted lightly with the dust of dead goblins and vampires. Reuben scrambled up and checked Cara from head to toe.

“Are you okay?” he asked urgently. “Did any of them bite you? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she choked. “I’m fine…”

But she wasn’t fine, covered in the dust of a dead goblin with the memory of war still so fresh in her mind. She wasn’t fine, and a part of her doubted if she’d ever be fine again.