Strewn all over the cavern's floor were the chopped up remains of six humanoid creatures covered in rune-engraved cloths and masked with black porcelain faces, like some sort of parody of a mummy.

  Amidst the chaos of limbs and death were both Alfred and Buck, and each one was embracing something. In Buck's case, he was protectively looming over three pups whose fur was the same red as his, and nipping and licking at them in joy.

  Alfred's case was a lesss picturesque one.

  He was one his knees, his weapon dropped and forgotten, and he was hugging a lithe, pale, raven-haired to his chest, which rose and dropped erratically with his sobs. The girl's eyes were closed tightly, her face sweaty and strained with effort. Kurt's eyes caught a glimpse of red on her pants leg, and he saw a bite mark on Amelia's shin, the blood oozing from it staining her jeans.

  "Alfred," Kurt called to no avail. His voice was swallowed by the man's cries. "ALFRED!"

  His voice rumbled through the small room like a gunshot, shocking everyone there. Alfred's eyes opened, all bloodshot and shiny, and turned to him.

  "K-Kurt," he said with his trembling voice. He hugged Amelia even tighter. "I-It happened to fast. One of these things's head fell near her and...and..."

  Kurt knelt besides Alfred, raising Amelia's wounded leg with one hand. "It bit her all on is own, I know. Undeads are tricky like that. You think you have killed them and then something like this happens." He pinched at the hem of Amelia's pant leg with two hands, resting her ankle on his knee. Then, in a mild burst of Pneuma-given strength, he tore a gash on it that reached up to the girl's knee, exposing the wound.

  "Goddamnit," Kurt cursed at the sight. The outline of human teeth had been stabbed onto the poor girl's flesh, and dark blood poured from the wound, thick and hot like molten lava. But what Kurt really cared about were the thin, black veins that rose from the wound and up and down the leg. They had reached her ankle already and, though he couldn't see it, Kurt knew it had also extended at least to her waist.

  To his side, Buck bellowed a soft, memory-charged whimper.

  Of course she had a necrotic infection. Kurt had hoped that the teeth of the thrall/wight/whatever-the-fuck that had bitten her wouldn't have pierce deep enough through the cloth of her pants, keeping its ssence away even if she had been wounded, but of course that hadn't been the case. That would have required for them to have some luck.

  Knowing what to do next, Kurt unsheathed his sword, much to Alfred's and Buck's panic. The direwolf barked at him desperately, while Alfred put his body between Kurt and Amelia, pleading to the boy all the way, too rapidly and disjointedly for Kurt to understand.

  "Not gonna kill her!" Kurt bellowed, cutting through both barks and pleads. "I know what to do next, but I need to strengthen her life force first, okay? Last time I did this was with Buck, and he barely withstood it." Looking Alfred dead in the eye, Kurt gave the order, "Give me her thumb and tell her to breathe."

  Alfred's eyes shot open, and he complied hurriedly, holding his girlfriend's hand out for Kurt to put a slight cut on, and, when Amelia whimpered weakly at the sensation, reasuring and pleading for her to just 'take deep breaths'.

  The familiar voice cut through the haze of the fever like a knife, and the girl complied, starting to breathe deeply and labouriously, as though se were giving birth. Without missing a beat, Kurt cut his own thumb for a third time, reopening the slight wound, and pressed it against Amelia's own, flaring the Od in his hand as he did so.

  It took nearly a minute for the reaction to occurr, but when it did, and Kurt saw the number above the girl's head jump up to 16, the effect was immediate: color returned to her skin, and her pained expression receded a bit. For a moment, she looked like she was sleeping.

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  Sadly, Kurt couldn't let that last, if he was to heal her.

  From his inventory he procured both Melalo's Claw and the Wyldfae's Amber. He took a chip out the claw, and sunk it on the girl's bite wound. The flesh on her leg immediately strained against the black veins, which rapidly began receding, conerging towards the wound. When the poison came out, it was a much less spectacular affair than it had been with Buck, on account of the girl's lesser life force and less advanced infection: a thin spurt of congealed blood, a lazy flaring of green flame, and it was done.

  If it wasn't for Amelia's agonized screams, it would have looked easy.

  Kurt then took hold of the amber, chipping away a small shard of it with his nail, and plucked it at the wound. Amelia took yet another deep breath as the pain went away, which aided the amber's work. The bleeding stopped, both muscle and skin knit themselves back calmly, and soon enough all trail of harm on Amelia's flesh had vanished into nothing.

  The girl opened her eyes for the first time. They were big and dark blue. She looked up at her boyfriend, smiled and, with some effort, pushed herself onto a seating position, slouching forward from the effort.

  "Thank you..." she said between ragged breaths. The three pups, each one the size of a house cat, all rushed to her side, yelping and barking at her for attention. The girl, far from being scared, just laughed and picked them up, placing them on her lap. Kurt checked Buck for any signs of agression, but found none. The direwolf simply looked at the clear delight on his pup's faces, then at Kurt himself, let out a relaxed sigh through his snout, and then proceeded to slump down, closing his eyes.

  Mission accomplished, uh?, Kurt though with a smile. He approached Buck's fallen form, seeing the beast's chest rise and fall smoothly, then picked him up in his arms. He took a second to marvel at the warmth and softness emanating from the direwolf's fur before he beckoned the college lovebirds to the tunnel, walking off as soon as he saw them stand up.

  Alfred picked up the electric lamp he had taken down, and used it to illuminate their path from his place behind Kurt. Amelia began, understandably, asking questions, and luckily for a rather emotionally drained Kurt, it was Alfred who answered them all.

  It wasn't long before they reached the main chamber, and their exit from the tunnel was marked by light and the smell of charred meat. Kurt grimmaced, then placed Buck softly on the ground, careful not to disturb the direwolf's sleep.

  "My God," gasped Amelia, her voice soft. Kurt turned to her, and saw she was looking at MacArthur's dead body. "Is that...the vampire?"

  "His name was Rudy MacArthur," said Kurt as he walked to the room's corner, picking up the tarp MacArthur had been sleeping on before their arrival. Then he returned back to the tunnel. "Wait a second here, please."

  He entered the tunnel's darkness, and returned a couple of minutes later, carrying the tarp over his shoulder like a sack. A full sack.

  "Kurt," Alfred called. Kurt looked at him. "Are those the...?" He made a face, clearly not wanting to finish that sentence. Instead, he limply rose his arms and let out a ghoulish moan.

  Kurt rose an eyebrow at the display. "Is doing that more respectful than just calling them zombies?"

  "...True," Alfred admited embarrasedly. "Anyway, what are you doing with that?"

  Kurt shrugged, giving Alfred a tired smile. "These guys were people once, Alfred. Victims of that fucking alchemist back at the manor. They deserve at least the dignity of a proper burial." His head turned to the corpse at the other side of the room. "And so does he."

  "That guy?" Alfred asked incredulously. He looked so confused that he almost came off as offended.

  "That guy, yeah," confirmed Kurt. He then proceeded to relay the conversation he had had with MacArthur, and suddenly Alfred didn't seem so scornful.

  "He didn't kill me," said Amelia. She was carrying all three pups on her arms, an uncomfortable position that the little ones didn't seem to mind in the least, chirping in delight when she gave them a small tug. "And he didn't hurt these guys, either. He said he was 'saving them up for later' but... maybe he just couldn't bring himself to eat them. To eat me." She looked at the corpse sympathetically. "He didn't chose this any more than we did. We should at least give him a grave."

  Kurt chuckled softly, and smiled at Amelia. "I like you. No wonder you got this big guy head-over-heels with you."

  Then, still carrying the sack, he walked up to the corpse, conjured his wand, and materialized a wide and thin Air Cushion underneath it, like a mat. He grabbed the 'mat's' edge, and dragged it behind him as he walked for the exit tunnel.

  "Oy, Alfred," Kurt called. "Could you carry Buck up, please? Amelia and I kinda have our hands full."

  Alfred answered with an unamused 'yeah' and complied. Then, they began the slow walk into the outside world. What received them there, alongside the sunlight, was the evacuation team, all four of them sans Maxell looking very battered, but all alive.

  Things after that were a haze. There were hugs exchanged, crying, cheering... the whole 'mission accomplished' package. After Kurt had given Conrad some of the Amber to heal his broken foot, the group of now eleven made their way to the manor, to retrieve the corpse of Buck's child.

  As if reacting to the proximity with it, Buck sprung back to life in Alfred's arms, scaring the hell out the guy. Before they existed again, Kurt bolted to the lab upstairs and grabbed the silver cannisters filled with Red Aura, feeling they should not be gone with the place. It took some time to retrieve the other three corpses, and they were not in a pretty state, but neither of those setbacks seemed to matter in the end.

  They dag up three graves: one private for Rudy, and two communal for Buck's family and the bandaged undead, respectively. That took quite a bit, even with all of them working together.

  A surprising amount of that time was spent keeping the pups away from the corpses of their mother and siblings. In the end, Amelia, who had really taken to the three rugrats, volunteered to babysit them.

  The burials were done by twilight, and each grave was marked by a patch of wild flowers Mila had grown. As a final farewell to the deceased, all eleven of them, Kurt shot a hail of Fireballs into the manor, setting the whole thing on fire until the building crumbled down, erasing any trace of the evil that had inhabited it.

  And finally, as night began to set, the group of eleven got onto the van and, with a small stop where Kurt had welded the missing door back via a Blowtorch spell, they parted from the accursed mining town, and towards Phoenix, Arizona