An Apple for the Creature

when I rose.”

“And you were the new ghost on the block?”

“I was the only ghost on the block. We’re rare—we have to have the arcane gene and either suffer a traumatic death or die with some sort of unfinished business. Weren’t you listening during the doc’s talk today?”

“Yeah, not so much.”

“Wasting time playing games,” he said in disgust.

“Hey, you were the one telling me which cards to put where.”

“Is it my fault that you couldn’t see moves that were right in front of you?”

“Did you ever consider playing your own game?”

“I would have if I could have.”

“Oh, right. Sorry.” I didn’t want to feel bad for the old so-and-so, but I sort of did. How sad was it when a guy couldn’t even play solitaire? The other werewolves weren’t exactly eager to hang with him, so Angie and I seemed to be the only ones who talked to him. “Hey, how does Angie see you anyway? I thought you needed the arcane gene to see a ghost.”

“If that were true, why would there would be so many ghost stories? Any human can see me if in a receptive frame of mind.”

“Like at a séance?”

“Or in a house believed to be haunted, or late at night.”

“Or in a cemetery.”

“Exactly. Plus the doc got a witch to make her an amulet to help her see ghosts.”

I wondered if I could get an amulet to keep me from seeing ghosts. Then I had a thought. “Hey, Bob—”

“Captain Bob!”

“Captain Bob. You said you can appear in any of the forms you had in life, but how do you know what you looked like when you were dying? Were you attacked in front of a mirror or what?”

He squirmed a bit. “No, it was dark and I didn’t see anything. I don’t know how I can take that form without actually having seen it. The doc can’t figure it out, either.”

“I guess it’s no weirder than me being able to Change into any breed of dog. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”

“My name isn’t Horatio!” he said, but I was fairly sure he was kidding.

“So why do you look so old?” I asked.

“What do you mean? This is how I looked before I was killed.”

“I get that, and you look pretty good for a man your age. What were you, seventy-something?”

“Sixty-six,” he said, glaring.

“And you didn’t look a day over sixty,” I lied. “It’s just that if I could control my appearance, I’d go for something younger.”

I saw the wheels turning, and he started shifting outlines. The result was a lot more scenic. He was still tall, but no longer stooped. The potbelly was gone, and his barely-there gray fuzz had become a full head of dark brown hair. Without the wrinkles, I could tell that he had cheekbones to die for.

“Is that better?” he asked.

“Whoa! Captain Handsome!”

He looked absurdly pleased, but when he saw David and Angie coming toward us, switched back.

Angie was chattering away, and I could tell David was just managing to stay polite.

He said, “I will try to make time to answer more of your questions, but it’s time for Joyce and me to retire for the night.” He gave me a look that I had no trouble interpreting.

All thoughts of cheesecake fled, replaced by anticipation of beefcake, and we beat a hasty retreat to our cabin. It turned out that David had missed me as much as I’d missed him.

Afterward, we got David safely ensconced in the cabin’s closet. It was a good-sized one, and after I took my stuff out and found him a pillow and blanket, he said it was perfectly acceptable. He used a bit of rope I’d had in my car to tie the door shut from inside, just in case somebody got the bright idea to open it in the middle of the day.

Since everybody had been up late for the run and buffet, there were no sessions scheduled until the afternoon of the next day and I’d planned to sleep in. So I was still asleep when someone yelled my name. I jerked awake and sat straight up—luckily I was wearing an oversized Adventure Cove T-shirt that covered all the essentials, because Captain Bob was standing next to the bed.

“You’re a heavy sleeper,” he commented.

“You promised to stop haunting me.”

“This isn’t haunting. The doc sent me to invite you to breakfast.”

“Are you kidding?” I looked at the clock by the bed. “It’s eight o’clock.”

“Which is breakfast time.”

I wanted to blow Angie off, and I really wanted to blow him off, but I knew he wouldn’t leave until I agreed. Besides, breakfast sounded good.

“Fine. Just go away and I’ll get dressed.”

“I’ll wait for you outside.” He looked around the room. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

“None of your beeswax.”

“Cranky in the morning, aren’t you?”

I threw a pillow through him, and climbed out of bed to get showered and dressed.

When I joined Captain Bob outside, he led me away from the main building and said, “The dining room isn’t open yet, so the doc ordered breakfast in her cabin.” Angie’s cabin was the mirror image of mine, if you subtracted the vampire in the closet and added a boatload of food on the table.

“Good morning,” she said. “I hope this is enough to eat.”

“It’s a good start,” I said, my mouth watering from the tantalizing aroma of bacon and eggs.

“Then, help yourself. I’m not a big morning eater.” She wasn’t kidding. All she had on her plate was a piece of toast. “I hope you don’t mind me waking you so early, but I knew you’d be free. David has to sleep during the day, right?”

“He’s a real bear if he doesn’t get his full day’s rest.”

“Then he can get by on less sleep?” she asked eagerly, reaching for a notepad.

“Just a joke. When the sun comes up, he goes down, and doesn’t wake again until dark.”

“Fascinating. Another thing . . .”

I stifled a sigh, and dug into the food. At least it was fresh, even if the questions were stale. Angie asked me the exact same things as she had the day before, and I still didn’t have answers. Did she think I’d quizzed David the night before so as to be ready for her? It was so boring that I was yawning like crazy, and I could barely keep my eyes open wide enough to see the plate in front of me.

By the time I reached the obvious conclusion that I’d been drugged, it was too late to do anything about it except pass out.

I woke up in a cage. It wasn’t the first time that had happened, but this instance was considerably more frightening. I smelled death.

Superior sense of scent is part and parcel of being a werewolf, even when in human form, but it isn’t always a good thing. Somebody had died in that cage, maybe several somebodies. I smelled werewolf, and human, and beings I couldn’t identify. It was all I could do to keep from whimpering.

Okay, I lied. I whimpered.

The cage was enough to make any werewolf whimper. It was bare of furniture or comfort and the mesh of which it was built was woven so tightly that no dog on earth would be small enough to escape.

The room in which it stood was just as bleak. The walls and floor were bare concrete, and there were tables and shelves covered with medical and chemistry equipment, a computer, a bookshelf of serious-looking tomes, and a refrigerator. Add it all together and you got a low-rent animal research facility, but the only lab rat was me.

A few minutes later, in walked Angie.

“Oh good, you’re awake. I knew that drug would work on werewolves, of course, but I had to estimate your weight so I wasn’t sure how long you’d be out.”