Earl sat in the cab and listened to the blizzard pound the windows and rock the truck around. He could now safely add the power outage and communications blackout to the list of oddness. Nikolai had really opened up a can of worms this time. Without reinforcements, that meant that he needed to stick with his original plan. Find Nikolai and kill the shit out of him.
But where to start? He took the wolfsbane from his pocket, sealed it back into a plastic bag, and put it in the center console. It would make him a bigger target for Nikolai, but he had to take the risk. His own senses needed to be uninhibited-well, besides the smokes, obviously. He wasn’t about to give those up. Earl rolled down the window and was instantly pelted with stinging ice. He breathed deeply, taking in the smells of the town.
Blood’s been spilled.
It wasn’t from the hospital, either, but it was close. Earl put the truck into four-wheel drive and set out after the scent of death.
Chapter 9
I told time by the strength of the Hum.
No one knows why the phase of the moon has the effect on us, but it does. We can hear it. It is always there. When it becomes too much, we change.
When I change while the Hum is weak, I still possess some measure of control over my actions. But when the Hum becomes too strong, I’m at its mercy. It is like there is another thing that lives inside me, a whole different being, and on the full moon, it takes charge. During the nights of the full moon, I become something else. I become the animal.
Every month spent on the island, I got a little better, a little stronger. I missed my wife. I missed my children. I dreamed about them every night. I wondered if they’d moved on. Part of me wished for their sake that they had, but the selfish part of me hoped that they were waiting for me. I promised that I would do this for them, so that I would return as the man they’d loved.
It sounds crazy, but I’d hurt myself on purpose, exposing my body to ever greater stress, until even the most unbearable pain wasn’t enough to force a change. I flung myself from the cliffs, over and over, to land on the rocks below. A werewolf can fall pretty far and live. The worst part was that regeneration uses up calories, which meant I spent a lot of time hungry. I ate so damn much fish that I couldn’t stand the sight of one for about thirty years afterward.
Santiago was as reliable as the tides. Every month he would come with supplies and stay on the island for a few days. Mostly he taught me the things he’d learned from the libraries that he missed so much. He was well read and extremely well educated. I had only three years of schooling, but I did know how to read. I was relatively uneducated, but that didn’t mean I was stupid. Quite the contrary. It was just that most of my education had been on the finer points of monster killing.
I was terrible at chess, but Santiago was worse at checkers. I think I seriously unnerved him the time that I showed I could drive a filet knife through the palm of my hand and out the other side, held it up, and said, “See? Not even twitching.” He was a crafty one, though. I noted that he’d kept that last silver bullet, just in case I turned out to be a failed experiment.
Santiago had not been able to take the old scrolls and books with him when he left Europe, but it didn’t matter. If he didn’t have a photographic memory, then it was damn close enough. He had learned every story pertaining to lycanthropy there was, and he passed on that knowledge to me.
We started at the beginning. No one knew for sure where the curse had begun. There were theories, some of them branching into the downright absurd. There were myths and legends, half of which I knew to be false just from personal experience. From Romans eating their own kids to deals with the devil, it was all a bunch of bunk.
But there were some nuggets of truth in the old stories. I found out how Santiago had managed to avoid detection in Havana as he’d followed me. A small bit of wolfsbane worn on your person can mask your scent from a lycanthrope. You can smell the wolfsbane, but it distorts everything else around it. I’d learned that he’d been told of my presence by a Haitian diviner who knew of Santiago’s past life. Apparently a diviner with actual talent could sense when one of my kind was near. This was information that would prove useful many times over the ensuing years.
One day the two of us were in the shack, perched over a game of checkers. I was beating him soundly, but he’d gotten better over the last year. He was telling me about how in any given region there was always a supreme lycanthrope.
“Well, I ain’t met him yet.”
“How do you know it is a male?”
“It just is,” I answered truthfully.
“Interesting…” he said, pondering on my answer. “We know there is a hierarchy. There is an order. This is something that we’ve learned over time. Anywhere there are many lycanthropes, they will naturally form groups — packs, if you will. One will always become the leader. And yes, every time this has been encountered, it has been a male.”
“The most dangerous will be in charge,” I said, not knowing why.
“Apparently. But there are others, like the men that I’ve told you about, like Sir Cabral, or Monsignor Ratton. They, too, shared the curse, but by not giving into their beastly natures, they were packless, lone wolves. Often they were attacked by other lycanthropes. They are despised with that special hatred reserved for traitors. When you return to the real world, you must be prepared for this. You will be on your own, and therefore, you will be a threat.”
“Power must be out.” Kelley stated the obvious from the back of the Caddy. “Place looks like a ghost town.”
It was true. The emptiness of the roads was expected, since it was nearing midnight and snowing like crazy, but all the street lights were dark. Even the businesses’ signs were dead. Everything was coated in white. Drifts had piled up on nearly every wall. When it snowed in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, it really snowed.
“Anybody with any sense is going to be inside trying to stay warm,” Lins said. “Like we should be.”
“Yoopers don’t feel cold.” Jo Ann snorted when she laughed. “They’re too dumb.”
Horst had to wonder about the chick with the strongest Wisconsin accent he’d ever heard insulting the locals from one region over, but he was a city boy. They all seemed backwoods to him. “Everybody zip it,” he ordered. “You’re giving me a headache. Where’s this stupid hospital, already?”
“I don’t know. The GPS lost signal a few miles ago,” Lins said, reaching over to tap the box that was showing nothing but a blue screen.
Horst swore under his breath. He’d disabled the OnStar, so they couldn’t even fall back on that. He hadn’t liked the idea of the government being able to listen in on his conversations whenever they felt like it-or shutting the engine off, for that matter. His cousin was serving some serious time after the FBI had gotten a warrant and used his OnStar to listen in while he’d been having a conversation about dumping a body in a Jersey landfill.
Horst reasoned that if he ever did anything that would cause him to float to the FBI’s attention, they should at least have to do the work of putting an actual bug on his car. Not that he had to worry about that anymore, since he was a fully legitimate businessman now, which was sort of hilarious since he’d never had this kind of hardware when he’d been running errands for his uncle. And by errands, he meant putting a bullet in someone’s ear or hitting them with a bat until they were smart enough to not want to blab to the authorities anymore.