“Ryan?” Jo Ann asked. Even her voice was scratchy. Her eyes were closed, and Horst cringed when he saw they were matted shut with a film of green boogers. “That you?”
His initial reaction was to tell her that she looked like death warmed over. “Yeah, baby, I came back for you,” Horst said instead.
“I knew you would,” she said. “Oh, I don’t feel so good.” Then she gagged and threw up all over the carpet. Horst took an involuntary step back.
“Oh, dude, she’s messed up,” Lins exclaimed, covering his mouth with his shirt. “She’s got a disease from being in that scarecrow’s stomach.”
Jo Ann Schneider was seriously ill. Horst tried to remember back to Newbie training. That hot blonde, Holly Newcastle, had run them through a big lecture on all the horrible things you could catch from monsters and what to do about them. Unfortunately, he’d spent most of that lesson ogling Holly and not paying attention. That stuff had mostly been aimed at the eggheads destined to end up in support roles, and Horst had known that he was destined to be a team leader instead. Only now Jo Ann was like melting or something, and it might even be contagious.
“She’s running a fever,” Loco said. “I thought about carrying her, but figured the monsters would’ve smelled her and got us. She needs antibiotics or something.”
“Antibiotics won’t fix that, man. That’s like Ebola or AIDS!” Lins insisted. “Bitch’s got Ebola-AIDS. I’m not getting in there with her. No way. No fu-”
Lins flinched as Loco reacted with surprising speed. One huge hand encircled Lins’s throat. He let out a pathetic squeaking noise as he was dragged eye to glass eye. “Then you can walk.” Loco didn’t so much as raise his voice, but it was obvious that Lins was seconds from getting his windpipe crushed. “Gimme the keys, Larry.” Eyes wide, Lins reached into his coat and pulled out the jangling ring of keys. Loco snatched the keys away, then held him there for another second, like he was contemplating just squeezing a bit harder, but then let go. Lins stumbled away, coughing.
Loco looked at Horst next. “You got a problem, boss?” Those too-small, not-quite-pointing-in-the-same- direction eyes were crazy. He certainly lived up to his nickname.
Embarrassed that he was scared of his own henchman, Horst just shook his head.
“You getting anything?” Harbinger asked her for the third time in as many minutes.
Heather thought about it, but wasn’t sure of how to answer. That buzzing noise had been stronger a little while ago, but it had faded out. “It’s weird. It was strong, but then it tapered off. Now there’s another one, like a background noise. It’s not as loud, but it seems bigger, if that makes sense.”
“That’s the moon,” Harbinger explained as they turned onto another familiar street. The snow chains were making a huge difference in traction, and despite her earlier assessment of Harbinger’s status as another stupid tourist driver, he actually knew what he was doing.
“So I can actually hear the moon?”
“Sorta. It’s complicated.”
“Well, I should probably learn it, don’t you think?” she replied. “Duh.”
“No need for sarcasm. I can spend our limited amount of time teaching you about werewolf minutia that I learned from dusty old books that are probably wrong, or I can stick with the important bits about how not to turn into a complete raving cannibal. Entirely your call.”
“Anybody ever tell you that you’re not a very likable person?”
“Once or twice.” Harbinger relented. “Well, near as I can figure, the Hum isn’t actually the moon itself, but the lunar cycle causes whatever makes it. That’s the Hum that we hear. It’s a low-frequency sound, stronger in some places, though nobody knows why. Even some humans can hear it once in a while, but it doesn’t affect them like it does us. Maybe it’s magnetic fields, and we’re just more sensitive. Maybe it’s something magical. Hell if I know, but whatever it is will trip our internal switch, guaranteed, right along with the full moon. You’ve got three nights a month where you will not be able to control it.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.” She could deal with three lousy nights. Harbinger just scowled and watched the road. “What? There’s a catch. There’s always a catch.”
“It’s complicated…Three nights you have to change, but you’re going to want to change all the time. Like a dog, when something runs, they want to chase it down. That’s us, only worse. Something pisses you off, you want to kill it. You want something, you just take it. Something turns you on…” He stopped himself, glanced over at her, and began to blush. Heather was surprised, but Harbinger seemed downright old-fashioned. “Sorry.”
“I’m a cop, Harbinger, not a nun. I started on a big-city department, and the attractive ones always get loaned out to vice on prostitution stings.” Heather had never thought of herself as beautiful, but she knew that she at least qualified as pretty. “You’ve got assets, you work them. Thirty-six D, baby.”
Harbinger coughed politely. “Gotcha.”
Mr. Tough-guy-monster-slayer hadn’t struck her as a prude. “I’ve seen things that would blow your mind. Just a word of advice: The hooker with all her teeth? That’s the undercover cop.”
“Ahem. Well, let’s just say it can get ugly. New moon, with some practice, you can control yourself, even changed if you have to. The closer it is to the full moon, though, the harder it gets, and on the full moon, it’s tough as a human, and changed, not a chance. I’ve had years of practice, and I still lock myself into a vault on those three nights…Well, I did. I’m still not used to thinking I won’t have to do that anymore.”
Heather went back to looking out the window. They were covering a lot of ground, but it was all neighborhoods where the scouting parties had already checked. She’d taken a map and a marker and had split Copper Lake’s tiny neighborhoods into sections for the other groups to check. Nobody had questioned her authority when she’d given out the assignments. Apparently, if you acted as if you were in charge, everyone just assumed you were. “Turn left up here.”
Harbinger complied. “You getting something?” he asked hopefully.
“Confused. That’s about it.” Heather was feeling pretty good right then. The bouts of rampaging hunger had settled down, as had the out-of-nowhere anger. She didn’t feel too different, though every light on the dash seemed too bright, the engine was too loud, the air flow from the heater was obnoxious against her exposed skin, and she was being assaulted with so many confusing smells that she could taste the air. “Level with me, Harbinger. How hard is this going to be?”
“That depends entirely on you,” he answered, completely evading her question.
“Don’t be such a chickenshit. Give it to me straight.”
Harbinger didn’t respond for a long time. This seemed really difficult for him. She started to say something else, but he cut her off. “You need to know I am, or was, I guess, a rare one. Honestly, there’s only been a handful of us ever to control it. It takes an iron will. It gets easier, but I’ve worked at this for a really long time. Almost everyone turns pure evil. Most that keep it contained, it ain’t because they want to. It’s because they’re afraid of someone like me coming along to take them out, so they keep it low key. I’d say ninety percent are dead within a few months of getting turned, another nine percent make a year, tops…” he trailed off. “That one percent left, though, they’re the dangerous ones. Most of them don’t give up the hunt-they’re just clever enough to hide it.”
“And then there’s a few like you.”
“I suppose. We’re an odd breed.”
Heather wasn’t the quitting type. The trophy case she’d broken back at the school had held a bunch of items with her name etched on them. She’d made the boy’s hockey team out of spite just because somebody had once told her girls couldn’t play. It was similar reasoning that had caused her to become a police officer. Life had beat her down at every opportunity, but she still sucked it up and got along. There had been plenty of opportunities to give up. She’d lost so many people, so quickly. After the personal tragedies of the last few years, nobody would have batted an eye if she’d just given up, but having inherited an Irish temper and Finnish stubbornness, she was just too damned obstinate to let life win. So, if Harbinger could beat this curse, so could she.
“You said that you’ve been doing this a long time?”
He chuckled as he glanced over at her. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you…” She didn’t blink. “Hell. All right. I was born in 1900.”
“And?”
“Nineteen and nothing. One-nine-zero-zero,” he explained. Heather stared at him blankly. “Nineteen hundred A.D. You know, the one after 1899. I fought in World War One. I’ve got grandkids older than you. You’d like this one great-granddaughter of mine, though. I think you two would probably get along great. She don’t take no crap off
