For me, I can get pretty cranky, too. On both sides of the skin change, but I do everything I can to keep that change from happening. I don’t trust my level of control when I’m a wolf. Bad things have happened, things have spun out of control more than once. It’s why I’m not a cop anymore.
But there are times…
I’m telling you all of this so you’ll understand what happened in the bathroom at ViXXXens. Tall expected to beat the shit out of some schmuck asking the wrong questions of the wrong person. He had every reason to expect to win that fight. He even scored his hit with the blackjack.
It just didn’t do him any damn good.
The blackjack hit my shoulder as I turned. It hurt. I’m a monster but I still had nerve endings, I’m still meat and bone, and I could still feel pain.
It’s just that as a werewolf it takes a lot of damage to slow me down. A whole hell of a lot. Decapitation will do it. Fire will do it. Maybe a machine gun, I don’t know. It hasn’t ever come to that.
A blackjack?
Oh, please.
And pain is like gasoline on a fire. It dials everything up.
I slashed at his arm and the tough double-stitched leather of the blackjack ripped apart. The lead slug bounced off the ceiling and dropped into a sink. The tips of my nails stroked his hand and wrist and blood splatted the metal toilet stall.
I could have taken the guy’s head off.
Easily.
But here’s the thing about werewolves. In the movies we’re ravening, blood-mad, mindless monsters.
In real life, not so much.
Sure, there’s rage.
Sure, there’s a lot of animal urges. Lots of subliminal kill-kill-kill impulses.
And, sure, there’s a big temptation to chow down because we’re predators and humans are tasty prey. Yeah, that’s gross, I’m well aware of that. And I’ve had a lot of next-day puke sessions after I’ve done some chomping. Less so these days because I have more control. At first, though, I went after the bad guys like they were blue plate specials. Live and learn.
It was Tall’s good fortune that I had that control now. And that I’d eaten a couple of quarter pounders on the way here. Otherwise he might have been missing some juicy parts.
Instead, all I did was slam him against the wall over the sink. Kind of hard.
He crashed down onto a row of three filthy sinks, ripping two of them off the wall. He crashed to the floor in a quivering heap, covered with porcelain debris, bleeding from a lot of little cuts. Alive, but not enjoying it.
That’s when Big pushed through the door.
The first thing he saw was his friend. I was off to one side. He didn’t see me until I got up in his face and made him see me.
He started to scream.
I threw him into a toilet stall. He hit the back wall hard enough to turn his eyes blank and knock him all the way to the edge of la-la land. I got to him and caught him before he fell.
Even as I grabbed him I shifted back. I jerked the chain on the wolf and made him go away before he did something we’d all regret. Takes a lot of effort to do that, though. The wolf does not like to go back into the kennel. Not one bit.
It was with human hands that I shoved him onto his knees and stuck his face in the unflushed toilet.
I held him there until my personal disgust told me to stop. Maybe three, four seconds. Then I pulled his dripping head out, spun him around and stuffed him down into the corner between the toilet and the wall.
I squatted in front of him, watching a piece of toilet paper slide down his cheek. He coughed and sputtered and stared at me in total confusion. This wasn’t the face he’d seen a second ago. His eyes shifted to find the big bad wolf, but he couldn’t know that the monster had already left the building.
Oh, yeah… that whole cycle of the moon thing? That’s mostly fiction. During the three days of the full moon we’re a little more aggressive, our rages are harder to control, but that’s all. We can make the change anytime we want. Into the wolf and back to our own skin. Just like that. On a dime.
A few seconds ago there was a snarling monster with black hair and lots of fangs. Now there was a skinny guy in a baggy Viking’s windbreaker. If you don’t come from a home life like mine, that’s pretty hard to process, and Big was blowing a lot of mental circuits trying to make sense of it.
I crossed to the door and locked it, then squatted down again in front of Big. He was borderline catatonic with fear.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
He started shaking his head. Either refusing to answer or in denial of what was happening.
“Your name.” I said it slower, but got nothing.
A slap across the chops would probably have helped unscramble his grits, but, y’know, he was just bobbing for turds, so… no thanks.
For his part, he started flapping his arms around. At first I thought he was trying to fight me or fend me off. But that wasn’t it.
He made a half-fist, extending his index and little finger so he could fork the sign of the evil eye at me.
Fair enough. Even though he looked more German than Italian, I figured what the hell. He had just seen a monster. Besides, I’ve met wiseguys and wiseguy wannabes who did that sort of thing. They were every bit as superstitious as cops and ball players.
Then he began mumbling something. It first I thought it was Italian, but it wasn’t.
It was Latin.
“… defende nos in proelio; contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium. Imperat illi Deus; supplices deprecamur: tuque, Princeps militiae coelestis, Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute in infernum detrude…”
Unfortunately I don’t speak Latin. I mean, who needs to? Even priests don’t use it much anymore. But you can tell when something is Latin. It doesn’t really sound like anything else. Sounded like church stuff. Sounded like stuff you hear in movies.
“Hey,” I snapped. “Hey, asshole.”
He kept rattling on with the Latin. I yelled at him again. No change.
If I hadn’t destroyed the sinks I might have belted some sense into him and then washed my hand. Instead I reached around and under him and took his wallet. He didn’t try to stop me. He was totally freaked out, kept pointing the horns of his fingers at me, kept muttering church stuff at me.
The driver’s license in the wallet told me that Big’s real name was Kurt Gunther. German, like I thought. Or German heritage. All his I.D. was American. There was about four hundred in mixed bills in the wallet, a bunch of credit cards, membership cards from everything from Sam’s Club to the library in Doylestown. I smiled. Am I prejudiced because I don’t expect thugs to have library cards? Not sure.
There was a glassine flap that had something that really caught my eye. There were two items in it. One was a card the size of a credit card, but it was blood red and had no markings on it except a magnetic strip on the back. But as I turned it over I caught a flash of something. I held it close to my eye and turned it over more slowly, and this time I could see a symbol hidden on the front. It was very subtle, a hologram, like they put on driver's licenses. Only this one was red upon red, with but the slightest 3D effect. It was too small to see clearly, but I could tell that it was circular, with a symbol in the center and lots of radiating spokes. There were other symbols between the spokes, but I couldn't make them out. It reminded me of one of those astrological wheels, but there were more than twelve spokes. Although it was difficult to count, I think there were eighteen symbols around the edge.
The other item was a business card. It had the name, business address, email and contact phone number of a broker at one of the big-ticket national chains. Dunwoody-Kraus-Vitalli. The broker’s name was Daniel Meyers.