Inside the engine room, the fire inside the furnace glowed redder and hotter with every scoop of coal the werewolves shoveled. King Zeke, back in human form, tipped the back of his chair against a wall and attempted to get some shut eye.
His rest was interrupted when the scent of two intruders entered his nostrils.
Zeke’s boots clanked across the metal floor as he left the engine room. With two werewolves in tow, he marched to Blythe’s personal cabin and knocked on the door.
“Yes?” Blythe asked as he poked his head out of the door.
“Trouble a-brewin,’ Hoss,” Zeke said.
“Slade?” Blythe asked.
“Yup,” Zeke said. “I’m picking up his stink. And the boy werewolf.”
The vampire nodded. “Dispatch the boy posthaste will you? And bring Slade to me.”
“Gonna cost ya,” Zeke said.
Blythe grimaced. “Put it on my bill,” he said as he slammed the door.
Zeke busted out of his clothes, morphing into his gray wolf form. He and his two henchwolves took off.
Inside the cabin, Blythe massaged his head and mumbled a litany of complaints to himself.
“Blasted werewolves always nickel and diming me,” Blythe said as he sat down on a couch. “Does anyone care about a job well done anymore?”
The muffled screams of the captive woman lying on the couch next to him interrupted his train of thought.
“I’m sorry my dear,” Blythe said. “I suppose the last thing a person in your predicament needs is to hear me carrying on about my problems.”
Blythe’s prisoner was wrapped up from head to toe in a white bed sheet, with chains wrapped around her arms and legs. She screamed but her words were unintelligible.
The vampire brushed his hand over his prisoner’s head through the sheet.
“Hush now. This will all be over in a moment.”
Bookshelf Battle 
I like the intrigue about which woman slaxe really loves, but be careful because people will be rooting for one or the other and if you drag it on too long, readers become angry. Lol
Ah – well did you catch it a few chapters ago? Blythe said he’s bringing the woman Slade really loves, but he didn’t name any names. Hmm. Does that mean anything? Am I just a bad writer?
I hope with his captive being covered up the reader might wonder if he’s up to something.
Also, I’m not entirely a fan of the late appearance of “King Zeke.” He’s basically here as someone for Miles to face to prove his wolfyness as the running joke throughout the book is that he’s terrible at werewolfing.
Initially, I’d only intended the only two evil wolves to be Becker and Hewitt and that Miles would have to face them in the end.
But then Miss B made short work of them and the scene where Blake is being a jerkface and gets unexpectedly crushed by a werewolf corpse was too funny (to me anyway) not to go with.
In the rewrite, there could be a scene in the beginning where Zeke whips the zombies towards a Fort or a town further out west and somehow the reader learns that he’s been paid to be like a cattle rancher to drive all of the zombies back east.
(I know this all sounds very dumb)
But finally, we’re getting to the payoff going back to the beginning of the book. People were like, “where are the zombies? When are the zombies coming? What’s up with this dumb romance taking up so much time?”
I basically wrote the romance for the sole purpose that I wanted it to end with a train chase scene as all badass cowboy movies end with a train chase scene and it seemed like it would up the stakes if Slade was forced to choose.
Gunther at least helped him get his head straight by telling him he had to not think about the women but rather his priority had to be to stop the train from unleashing zombageddon.
I hope people get all this. I have all these ideas of what people should take away but I don’t know if they do.
Of course I caught it back then which is why I say be careful dragging it along too far
A lot of this would work better in a movie.
When it is written it seems like it is all taking so long but in a movie several pages can come down to a few minutes.
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