This night, the rabbit was an appetizer. There wasn't enough of it to go around, and he wasn't inclined to offer any of it to the pack. They leered and grumbled at him, little whiny noises from the bitch, but he ignored them. They would all be feeding soon enough.
And so would he.
In truth, he could have passed by the rabbit and waited for the main event, but they had time to kill, and there was no point wasting food. If life had taught him anything, it was that you could never count on getting lucky. When you saw a free meal lying on the center strip and failed to stop, you could just as well go hungry down the road.
He twisted off the rabbit's shattered skull and slit it down the belly with a ragged talon, disemboweling it before he peeled the skin. A glance in each direction told him that he had the highway to himself, no traffic at the moment, but solitude was like luck.
It didn't last.
The leader of the pack wasn't inclined to reminisce in any great detail, but there were times, like now, when he considered the peculiarities of life. A simple accident of birth had made him stand apart from others of his kind, shunned even by his father and his older siblings. When his mother stubbornly refused to give him up, the old man thrashed her and expelled them both, to live or die according to their wits. His mother had been smarter than the old man reckoned, though, devising ways to make ends meet. Survival was the first priority, pursuit of food and shelter, leaving little room for dignity. They had survived, all right, but it had worn his mother down by degrees, with physical exhaustion, personal humiliation, finally disease, until the beast-child found himself alone at ten years old.
He had never been to school in all that time, of course-it would have been impossible, unthinkable-and there was no thought of it now that he was on his own. His mother loved him, but she recognized that others would not share her sentiment, so she had concealed him from the world at large. So skilful was the deception, that at her death, no social workers had come sniffing after him to place him in a foster home. Nobody came at all, in fact, until the next month's rent was two days late, and Mr. Landlord used his master key to let himself inside the miserable two-room flat. Later, when he was babbling to the lawmen, they smelled whiskey on his breath and would have locked him up to sleep it off, if not for the ragged bite marks on his arms.
There was no living in the big town after that. His mother had been Cajun through and through. Her roots were in the bayou country, and she used to take him there sometimes, on the rare occasions when she had some free time on her hands. Not to visit her people, mind you-they would certainly have viewed her monster offspring as a curse from God-but to show him the ways of nature, teaching him by bits and pieces how the greater system worked. It wasn't long before he had the basics figured out.
Kill or be killed.
Once he was on his own, he went back to the bayou country. It was touch and go, the man-child trying to compete with predators who had their act down cold. He lived on carrion at first, and precious little of it, but he learned. And it was almost good enough.
Almost.
A careless accident had nearly ended it, when he was coming up on twelve years old. He should have seen the moccasin, its thick body draped across a drooping mangrove branch, but he was concentrating on the fish that darted just beneath the surface of the brackish water. When the snake struck him, going for the face, there was no warning but a blur of motion and the stinging impact as its fangs sank home.
Between his panic and the poison coursing through his system, he had nearly died. He would have died were it not for the old Cajun hermit who had found him and decided it was worth a try to save the boy-thing's life. He had recovered, slowly, and the old man let him hang around, taught him the fine points of survival in the swamp ...and other things.
It was the hermit who had taught him he was special, blessed with certain powers that made other people cringe from him in fear. It was the old man who had shown him what it meant to be a loupgarou.
By teaching him to accept and even embrace his true nature, he had been prepared for the next great change that came over him.
Years later, when the hermit was too old to scrape a living out of the harsh and merciless bayou, his young protege was more than skilled enough to provide for them both. But the hermit was worried for the young beast he had adopted. The beast was mature, full-grown and vibrant with energy and vitality that should not be confined to their isolated corner of the swamp.
Then fortune, for the first time, smiled on the hermit. The strange woman appeared out of nowhere and offered the hermit cash money. In exchange, he gave her a piece of paper allowing her to set up her house trailer on their lonely bayou for three months.
She wasn't on vacation, and her mobile home was different from any RV the hermit or his ward had ever seen before. It was a living machine, always humming with energy. There were generators and air-conditioners and other roof-mounted machinery. The smells that came from inside were not to be believed.
The woman was fascinated with the hermit's young beast. She spoke to him without pity and exhibited no fear of him or his bizarre appearance.
She was a scientist, she said, and she recognized the young man's condition as nothing more than a standard case of hypertrichosis. Well, maybe a little more extreme than the cases she had heard of. "All victims of the condition are covered with dense hair all over their bodies," she explained matter-of-factly.
Aside from his mother and the hermit, this scientist woman was the only person he had ever known who treated him as something other than a freak.
When he told her he liked being what he was, the scientist smiled and asked, "Why?"
He told her about his love of the hunt.
The scientist began to show a glint in her eyes. Suddenly, the young man knew. It seemed impossible, but he knew. The woman scientist also enjoyed the hunt, strange as it seemed.
"What if you could be more of what you are?" she asked him then.
He was confused.
"What if you could be faster, stronger? The ultimate hunter? The leader of your own pack?"
He wasn't even sure what she was talking about. But of course he answered, "Yes."
WAY NORTH, from the direction of La Vista, the leader of the pack saw headlights coming, shining like a distant pair of luminescent eyes. He finished with the rabbit, tossed the clean-picked bones aside and walked back to the van. His brothers and the bitch all crowded in to lick his bloody fingers, and he left them to it. It would whet their appetite for what was coming.
The final target lived near Elmwood Park in Omaha, a few blocks from the College of St. Mary.
Cruising in his Dodge Ram cargo van, the leader of the pack watched street signs, checking them from time to time against the map he had draped across the shotgun seat. His eyes were keen enough to chart a course without the dome light, following the trail that he had marked out with a yellow felt pen on the map when he was laying out the hit. The others huddled close behind him, bright eyes peering through the van's bug-speckled windshield as he drove.
This was the last one. When this night's work was completed, he could go back home, rejoin the rest of his pack and recuperate for a while from the stress of being on the road. The balance of his money would be paid as usual, delivered by a pair of jumpy shooters who would drop the satchel at a designated point and speed away to minimize their risk of meeting the recipient. So far, the system had worked well enough. If he was lucky, there might even be some roadkill waiting for him on the highway near the drop.