business dealings had been of questionable legality, but he’d never gotten busted or served time for any of his many ventures. He was far too smart for that.
Horst had filed the paperwork, borrowed some money from his uncle Mickey, got his own PUFF charter, got the Title 13 FFL for the weapons, and recruited his own team of badass killers. Now that he had his own license to print money, all he needed to do was start collecting some fat monster bounties. Even with Stark taking his normal cut, this trip could pay a few bills. So far Briarwood Eradication Services had only taken down a few small, local monsters. Killing a werewolf, hell, any shapeshifter, would launch him into the big time. Horst took his time putting his gun back together. He worked the charging handle a few times. Smooth as silk.
“Good work, babe. Now do me a favor and call in the boys. We’re gonna bag us a werewolf.”
Chapter 3
One of the old wives’ tales about werewolves said that if you could destroy the werewolf that bit you, the curse would be broken. Turns out that’s wishful thinking. We know now that it’s an agent present only in the werewolf’s saliva, that must be introduced in quantity directly into the victim’s bloodstream to cause the mutation to human DNA. But in the 20s, it was all just considered black magic and curses. But after I’d been infected, I was willing to try anything.
It took a magic spell, but I found the werewolf that had bit me. I tracked her for nearly a year. Ten moon cycles, at least three nights each time, and occasionally more if I lost control. I had something of a clue by the time I caught up. I knew that I could keep some semblance of control when I was changed, except for during the full moon, so I figured out how to restrain myself during those nights. I’d learned about the weakness to silver by then, but had developed the hope that I wouldn’t need to use it on myself if I could just catch the evil thing that had inflicted this on me.
She went south, deeper into Mexico. Unlike me, she loved the killing. Whenever the trail grew cold, I’d just stay for spell and wait for the next tale of mutilated bodies to reach me. It made her easier to follow. I just missed her in Honduras, where I broke the chain I’d used to tie myself to a tree and ended up murdering a goat herder. She doubled back and headed north. I lost her for a while when she went into the Gulf, but I caught her eventually. The thing about werewolves is that once we’ve got a scent, unless the prey knows a few tricks, we’re almost impossible to shake.
Across the sea, I finally caught her in Havana. Killing her was intensely satisfying, but as soon as it was over I knew it had been for nothing. I could still hear the Hum. When the moon was full, it would be back to the same old thing.
I was dead to my wife, dead to my kin. I was dead to my fellow Hunters. Raymond Earl Shackleford Jr. had ceased to exist after that first night. No one knew where I was or what had become of me, all in the hope that I’d be able cure myself by destroying a single werewolf. I was such a sucker. Now she was dead, but so, still, was I.
Every day was a struggle to stay a man. All I wanted to do was change. Hunt. Kill.
And so at dawn I found myself on the walls of an old Spanish fort in Cuba, with a bottle of fine whiskey in one hand and a Smith amp; Wesson 1917 loaded with a single silver bullet in the other.
Heather knew that if she went home now she’d have time to get a decent amount of sleep before she had to come back in for work, and she still wanted to stop by the hospital again just as a show of support, but for whatever reason she decided to take one last look at the prisoner.
There were only a couple of cells at the Copper Lake station, nothing fancy. If they needed anything bigger, there was the larger jail in Houghton one county over. They still had no idea who this man was. He wasn’t talking sense, had no ID, and there was no match on his fingerprints. Odds were that he’d be taken in for a psych evaluation by the state and that would be the last that the Copper County Sheriff’s Department would ever see of him.
The prisoner was sitting on the thin mattress, staring off into space. Heather stopped in front of the bars and watched him for a second. He was probably thirty, bulky and a little too well fed to be homeless, pale with dark hair and a scruffy beard. For some reason an uneasy feeling settled in her stomach, and it didn’t feel like the expired doughnuts. “Hey!” Heather shouted, but the prisoner didn’t look up. He just kept rocking slightly.
Something wasn’t right about this one, and it wasn’t just the fact that he was batshit crazy and violent. When she’d heard Bill screaming earlier, she’d come in, yanked the prisoner off, sprayed him good, and then, when he hadn’t sat his happy ass down like she’d asked, she’d pelted him with her baton. On the paperwork, she’d called it a pain-compliance technique, and the first few hits to the arms and legs probably had been, but the last one that she’d put alongside his head had been because he’d pissed her off.
Heather was the only female officer in a testosterone-soaked small town filled with unemployed miners. She wasn’t a bully and actually really disliked hurting anyone, but she’d made a career out of not messing around. She wasn’t nearly tough as everyone thought she was, but as long as the local troublemakers thought she was tough, it made life a lot easier. Heather tried to avoid confrontation but she never hesitated to get physical if the job required it. That ASP hit to the face had finally taken the fight out of the guy. Since he’d been wrestling one of her friends, she felt that the nasty welt she’d given him last night had been earned.
The prisoner finally seemed to realize that she was there and turned his head slightly to watch her through squinty eyes, still rocking. Something was odd. It took her tired mind a second to realize what was wrong. There was no bruise on his face. In fact, there was no sign that he’d been struck at all, and she’d really nailed him. Heather walked a few more feet along the bars, just to make sure that she wasn’t remembering wrong and maybe she’d got him on the other side. Still nothing.
Weird. She should have been thankful there was no bruise, because with her luck the prisoner’s brother was probably a civil rights attorney or something, but instead she found herself creeped out. She remembered exactly how hard she’d struck him, and there definitely should have been some evidence of it.
“What’s your name?” she demanded. “It’s hard to help you if we don’t know who you are.”
The rocking stopped. The man paused, as if listening to something in the distance. He smiled, and Heather was astonished to see how perfectly white and straight his teeth were. For some reason she’d been expecting him to have bad teeth. The man looked right through her, and the blankness of the gaze was simply unnerving. “You’re pretty.”
In normal, polite company, she might have said thank you. This company was neither normal nor polite. Here, it was simply uncomfortable. Agreeing with crazy people only reinforced the delusions, and disagreeing only got them riled up. It was better just to stick to business. “What’s your name?” she asked again.
The man slowly rose from the bed. The springs creaked. There was something unnatural about the movement, as if he was far too graceful for someone of his size. “You’re lucky to be so pretty. Does he like redheads? I don’t know. We don’t have any redheads. He’ll probably want to keep you for himself. He’s selfish like that.”
She should have walked away and just gone home, maybe stopped by the florist first to pick up a bouquet for Buckley, but she knew that she definitely shouldn’t be talking to this man. There was just a sense of wrongness about him, but the question came out before she could stop herself. “Who is?”
The prisoner cocked his head to the side. “The Alpha, of course. He picked this place special, you know. They’ll all be dead soon. It begins here. The snow is coming, then everything changes. Then it’ll be like an avalanche. You can’t stop an avalanche. You’ll probably be one of the lucky ones that he’ll keep. Everyone else gets harvested.” His nostrils flared as he breathed deeply, tilting his head back, like he was drinking in the air. “But you…you smell nice.” His eyes grew wide with realization, and the blank look was suddenly replaced with one of desperation. “Your scent! You’ve got the same blood as the one he’s looking for!” Heather stepped back instinctively as the prisoner flung himself hard against the bars. “Where is it? He has to have it!” Spittle flew from his lips as he reached for her. “Koschei’s treasure! Where did the thief hide it? Where?”
Having finally had enough nonsense for one day, Heather turned and left the cells. The lunatic continued shouting at her, but she just kept on walking, mentally damning bears and crazy people, both.
