I was bleeding, panicked, and desperate. Wolf scraped her claws down the inside of my body. Stabs of pain seared my gut, but I had to ignore it, I couldn’t shift, I couldn’t. I looked around, assessing. The alpha had slowed; he looked like he wanted to attack, but his limbs kept slipping out from under him. Good.
Becky and her opponent didn’t seem to notice the commotion. She kept extricating herself from his grip, and he kept attacking her, pouncing, trying to get his teeth over her neck. He’d get his body over her, and she’d slip away. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to rip her up or rape her. I wanted to jump in and tear at the guy myself. That would only make the situation worse; they couldn’t hit the male with the tranquilizer while the two wolves were tangled up.
“Becky, back off! Get away from him!” I shouted.
Twisting, she bit at his face, kicked away from him, and ran. He got up to chase her, but more darts followed. He flinched and yelped as they struck his haunch. He tried a few more steps. Then he fell.
It seemed to take a long time for calm to settle over this corner of the forest. We all paused, waiting for something to happen. We only started moving when nothing did.
Tyler had turned before the tranquilizer took hold. He was a reddish-tawny wolf, huge like the others, half tangled in his clothes, slumped to his side, tongue lolling. I stood in the middle of a group of drugged-out wolves.
Across the carnage, Becky looked at me, her back and tail low, panic in her eyes. Blood marred her snout. I couldn’t tell if it was hers or his. I nodded at her and whispered, “Go. We’ll find you.”
She ran. Running for a few miles—or ten or twenty—would calm her down. We were close to home; she’d find our den and settle down. And I didn’t want Stafford and Shumacher getting their hands on her.
“Wait a minute—” Stafford called, pointing at her.
“She’s mine, you can’t have her!” I shouted at him, baring my teeth.
Everybody froze. I took it all in, each person: Dr. Shumacher, wide-eyed and frightened; Stafford, tense and uncertain, along with a pair of accompanying soldiers; and Cormac, holding the rifle loosely in both hands. Classified each as predator or prey, ones I had to worry about and ones I didn’t. Wolfish thinking. Shumacher: prey. Stafford: wasn’t worried about him, which struck me as ironic. But Cormac—I could imagine him raising the weapon and firing in a heartbeat. Despite the set, unflinching expression on his face, I could see him deciding whether or not to fire.
Then came Ben, sauntering down the slope toward me, gaze down, ready to circle me, all of his signals calming. “Kitty. It’s okay. Pull it together,” he said gently. Mate to mate, he spoke to me, and I listened. I stood for a moment just breathing, pulling myself back into myself.
I could look around and see past the chaos. This had probably gone as reasonably well as I could have expected. But I had secretly hoped the rogues would actually listen to me.
If it had just been Tyler, we’d have walked out of here without a scratch. As it was, my right arm was covered in blood.
Ben reached me, and we stood face to face. The look on him was wry, full of worry and exasperation. “Are you okay?”
I tried to scrape off some of the blood and more welled up. “Yeah.”
“He got your face, too.” He rubbed a thumb across my jawline; it stung. Ben’s hand came away bloody. The alpha must have nicked me there when he sideswiped my cheek. I kept telling myself it could have been worse. I leaned my face on Ben’s shoulder and let him pull me into a hug.
“Mr. O’Farrell,” Shumacher said, her voice panicked. “Be careful, her blood’s contagious!”
I hadn’t told her about Ben. She hadn’t spotted him as a werewolf. I giggled into Ben’s shoulder.
“It’s okay, Doctor,” Ben called to her over his shoulder. “I’m not worried.”
“But—”
“I think you should be worried about them.” He nodded at the unconscious wolves, bulky shadows in the fading daylight.
Shumacher had to leave us alone. In Ben’s arms, I came back to myself.
When I was finally ready to stand on my own, I pulled away. But I kept hold of Ben’s hand.
“Was all this worth it?” he said.
“I don’t know. Tyler—he actually listened to me. He was almost lucid. But the other two . . .” I shook my head. I wouldn’t know until I saw them as people. I wanted to hear their side of it.
Shumacher and Stafford oversaw the next part of the proceedings. This involved Stafford’s soldiers bringing out their nets and ropes, laced with strands of silver, to “secure” the wolves. That was the term they used. This basically involved bundling them up until they couldn’t move. I didn’t want to watch.
Instead, Ben and I joined Cormac, who remained on the fringes of the proceedings.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to have any guns,” I said, nodding at the rifle in his hands.
“It’s technically not a gun,” Cormac said.
“Why do I even argue with you?” I said.
“Somebody has to, I suppose,” Cormac said, calm as ever. I couldn’t tell if he was joking.
Ben held out his hand. “Why don’t you give that to me, just in case your parole officer happens to wander by.” Cormac handed him the gun without arguing.
“Were you really going to shoot me?” I said.
“What makes you think that?”
“You looked like you were going to shoot me.”
His frown was long suffering. “I didn’t shoot you. Why are we even talking about this?”
I didn’t know, so I turned away, still in a huff, still on edge. Ben was watching us, looking amused.
“We need to find Becky,” I said to him.
“Don’t you think you should clean up first?” He looked me over.
I was still drenched in blood. The wounds had clotted and itched now rather than hurt; they were already healing. But yeah, I should probably change clothes.
“Kitty, are you all right?” Shumacher marched toward us, away from where Stafford and his men were checking over the knots securing the wolves.
“Do they have enough room to shift back?” I said, looking past her to the captured wolves. “Now that they’re asleep they’re going to start shifting back.”
“We’ll have them out of the nets before then,” Shumacher assured me. “What about you?”
Yeah, the covered-in-blood thing, right. “I’m fine,” I muttered.
She seemed doubtful, wincing in sympathy but also curious. She wasn’t looking at me, but was studying the wounds, the rows of claw marks streaking my arm. If she watched long enough she’d see the skin close over as the wounds healed. I self-consciously tucked my arm in and held it protectively.
Shumacher said, “Kitty, what happened here? What’s your assessment of them?”
I didn’t want to say. I was worried. I’d dealt with some pretty messed-up werewolves before, but never ones this strong and this far gone. I wasn’t sure they’d be much more likely to talk once they were human. I wasn’t sure they wanted to be human. If they didn’t want to be human, but they couldn’t control their wolf sides, where did they belong?
Finally I said, “I want to talk to them as people. See how much they really want help.”
“Would you do that? Would you come to talk to them?”
I couldn’t say no.
A rhythmic thumping sounded in the distance. Ben and I heard it first and looked up and around.
“Is that a helicopter?” Ben said.
“Colonel Stafford called it in to carry the squad back to Fort Carson.”
They really had this worked out, didn’t they?
“Kitty, thank you,” Shumacher said, before the craft’s pounding engine made talking too difficult. “This has been a huge help. I’ll call you.” She went to join Stafford to help with the prisoner transport. I kept thinking of them as prisoners.
Ben, Cormac, and I started the hike back to our car. I was glum and scratching at the blood on my arm. I’d have to stop off somewhere to get cleaned up. I thought I had a change of clothes in the car. That would help.
“These are the kinds of werewolves I went after,” Cormac said. “They can’t control themselves. They’re monsters. You can’t argue with that.”
