The moment I got to the frontlines, the wrongness hit me like walking face-first into a wall of rotten meat. Normal rogues smelled wild but recognizable—werewolves gone feral but still fundamentally lupine. These smelled... corrupted. Like someone had taken werewolf DNA, run it through a CRISPR with toxic waste, then forced the resulting abomination back into something vaguely wolf-shaped.
"They're coming," Roxy reported, materializing beside me with a twelve-gauge double-barrel shotgun locked and loaded in her hands. "And they're nightmare fuel on legs."
"Define nightmare fuel," I requested, drawing my silver knife as we jogged toward the east perimeter.
"Size of small bears, built wrong, moving like their joints are made of broken glass," she replied grimly. "Some have extra limbs.
