I folded the paper and slipped it into my pocket.
“Gosh,” I said, “I’m really embarrassed that you think I’m a bully. You think I’m being mean? I certainly don’t want to convey that impression.”
He glared at me, not falling for it.
So I put a button on it for him. “It’s just that I’m pretty sure you knew that girl was underage. I’m actually showing a great degree of restraint here, ‘cause my real instinct is to wail on you until I feel better. The only reason I’m not is because you’re cooperating — after a fashion. And,” I added before he could say anything, “because I don’t know for a fact that you’re her pimp. If I knew for sure that you were making a fifteen-year-old girl sell herself, then I think we’d have to explore how really mean I can get. Believe me… neither of us wants to let that dog off the leash. You reading me here?”
“Yeah,” he said. He meant to say it tersely, but it came out like a wheeze.
I patted his cheek. “Good.”
I could feel George Palakas’s glare of hatred as I turned and left.
As I passed through into the bar toward the exit I saw the two men in dark suits watching me, and I saw their eyes flick from me to the hallway that led to the office. They stood up. The guy on the left was about six foot but had to go two-fifty, most of it in his chest and shoulders. The guy on the right was slimmer but also four inches taller. Big and Tall were not giving me friendly looks. Then Big crossed to the hall and disappeared in the direction of the office while Tall stood there and kept his eyes on me.
Not good.
There were too many people around in the bar, so I began walking toward the exit. Tall saw me and started heading in the same direction. My choices were these — I could wait for them to do something here in the bar, which meant risking injury to civilians. Nope. Or I could let them chase me outside, which opened this up to witnesses with cell phone cameras. Also not good.
Or…
The door to the men’s room was closer than the exit door. I gave Tall a smile and ducked through the door.
It took Tall about four seconds to come bursting through. He had an old fashioned black-jack in his right hand. You don’t see them much anymore. It’s a big slug of lead sitting on a spring and wrapped with thick leather. You use it with a snap of the wrist. In skillful hands it can brush the skull and send a person into dreamy land and when they wake up they’re sick, disoriented and tractable.
Used wrong it’s a skull crusher.
Tall was already starting to raise his for a heavy overhand swing before he was all the way into the bathroom. He was going for the full impact.
I stood with my back to him and saw all this in a mirror.
The blackjack whipped up and was just starting the accelerating drop that would end me when I turned.
I don’t just mean that I turned around. Sure, I did that, too. But when I say I ‘turned’, what I really mean is that I changed.
He swung the blackjack at a man.
It wasn’t a man he hit.
His eyes flared wide and his mouth opened to scream in total, sudden horror when I crashed into him and dragged him down to the floor.
The music outside was so loud, nobody heard him scream.
Nobody heard me snarl.
I was thirteen the first time I changed.
The first time took almost half an hour. I thought I was being torn apart. Guess I kind of was. Torn apart and put back together beneath the skin. Muscles melting into jelly and reassembling; bones reshaping, hair jabbing like needles through my flesh, mouth reshaping, new teeth bursting through the gums. And all of it in a paroxysm of screaming, inarticulate agony. Maybe it feels like dying. Maybe it feels like being tortured. While it was happening I begged God or whoever else is at the help desk to kill me right there and then.
My grandmother was with me through it.
She’d been making that change for nearly seventy years, since she was eleven. Almost everyone on her side of the family had been through it. And, yeah, it actually killed some of them. Depends on your blood line, or maybe if you have the right genes. There are several families like ours and whenever possible we’ve interbred. Not enough to go all Arkansas back-country, we’re not looking to turn out a bunch of moon-faced, slack-jawed brother-cousins. Just enough to strengthen the DNA.
What are we?
There’s a lot of folklore out there. A lot of legends. Lots of stories about things like me.
Lot of names.
Lycanthrope.
Berserker.
Vargulf.
Loup-garou.
Werewolf.
We call ourselves the Benandanti. That’s an old Italian name that means ‘good-walker’. It can also be translated as ‘those who go well’. Or even those who ‘do good’.
Yeah. Werewolf. Good guy. Same package.
They don’t make movies about my kind. You don’t see them in too many books or comics. We’re not like the Hollywood werewolves, but we’ve left claw marks all through history. One of us, an eighty-year-old guy named Thiess from Jurgenburg, Livonia, was even arrested by the Holy Inquisition in 1692 and put on trial. Not my direct bloodline, but we all know about him. He’s kind of a hero to us. The Inquisitors used every kind of torture, every manner of ‘enhanced interrogation’ to try and force Thiess to say that he was a servant and agent of the Devil. Lot of people would have cracked and said anything to stop the pain. Lot of people did, which probably accounts for every single signed confession of Satan worship those fruitcakes ever obtained.
Not Thiess, though. That one was one tough, stubborn fucker. And he was eighty!
He admitted that he was a werewolf. But he also told them that the Benandanti fought evil on the side of heaven. It was what we always did. It was who we were.
That story didn’t go over too well, so they really went to town on Thiess. Thumbscrews, hot irons, the rack. All of it, the works. He should have broken. He should have died.
He didn’t.
And he never once wavered in his assertion that the Benandanti have been fighting the true ‘good fight’. Against monsters.
Actual monsters.
The Inquisitors tried and tried and tried.
And failed.
Eventually they got to a point where they simply ran out of shit they could do to him. It was down to kill him or let him go.
And… they let him go.
The church court issued a letter saying, in effect, that no servant of the Devil could endure the ‘tests’ imposed on it by the Inquisition. Thiess, having survived, must have done so with the grace and protection of God Almighty.
Not only did they let him go, but they even gave him a nickname. A label of honor.
The Hound of God.
Not to say that the church was all kissy-face with us after that. The official result of the trial was exoneration for Thiess. The actual result is that they were embarrassed and probably scared of us. So, in secret and way off the record, they began hunting us down. Not for trial but for quick, quiet execution. There were never many of us, and there were a lot of killers working for the Inquisition. We were very nearly wiped out, and for a while the gene pool was so shallow that whole centuries passed before the wolf once more began screaming in the blood.
My grandmother is the strongest of all of us. Sweetest little old broad you ever wanted to meet. Most of the time. Frail-looking dame with blue hair and a bit of a dowager’s hump. But… she can make the change faster than you can snap your fingers, and when the werewolf emerges from beneath the wrinkles of the human, anyone giving her problems — or bothering someone to whom she’s offered her protection — is literally in a world of hurt.