Cuvier stood up fast when he heard the very nonKorean name amid the otherwise unintelligible conversation. "Leon? You didn't tell me Armand got Leon Grosvenor after me."
"You know the guy?" Remo asked.
"I hear some story," said the Cajun, sounding even more depressed. "Reckon I'm dead." He turned to Aurelia Boldiszar.
"That was no man," Aurelia said. "I saw it, felt it. We were in the presence of a devil."
"Well, he ran like one," Remo said.
Chiun made a small, exasperated clucking sound and shook his head.
"What about them other wolves?" Cuvier demanded.
"I took out a few before they slipped off. I don't know how many got away with him."
Another cluck from Chiun.
"Go shove it, Chiun, you couldn't have done any better," Remo griped.
To Cuvier he said, "Get packed."
"What?" Jean Cuvier had gone from frightened to confused, with no real change in his expression.
"Get your things. We're clearing out before the cops get here."
"Cops! Merde!" he blurted, and rushed to pack his suitcase.
Aurelia Boldiszar had come to Remo with nothing but the clothes she wore. She was as ready to bail out, right then, as she would ever be. While the Cajun completed his hasty packing she stood over one of the dead creatures, staring at the lolling tongue and the half-open eyes.
"These weren't ordinary wolves," she said. "They're not werewolves. Still, they may share the werewolf's spirit and commune with him in other ways. They are familiars."
"Like a witch's cat, you mean?"
"Perhaps."
"So you think this is witchcraft, whatever made the werewolf?" Remo asked. "You're saying these are spirit wolves? I told you, they're science experiments. Laboratory freaks."
"You are not listening," she said. "The loup-garou is closer to an animal than normal men. It doesn't matter what created them-he still may commune with others of his kind, draw strength from them."
"Collaborate?"
"Perhaps."
"So, he's the alpha male? Top dog?"
"The others followed him," Aurelia said. "That's all I know."
Cuvier rejoined them then, his heavy suitcase dragging down one shoulder. "Where we going?" he asked.
Remo had formed the answer in his mind already, without knowing it. "Your friend Lafite told me where we can find this thing," he said. He could have added, "more or less," but kept it to himself.
"Where is that?" The Cajun sounded gravely ill at ease.
"Where do you think? We're going on a camping trip," he said.
Remo stripped the blankets off the bed Cuvier had used and quickly wrapped the wolf corpses.
Aurelia asked, "What will you do with those?"
"Present for a friend."
ONLY WHEN THEY WERE safely back on the hermit's land, deep in the swamp with the rest of the wolves, did the leader howl with his pack. His grief was at last allowed to come out, and the sound of it echoed among the cypress trees for miles around.
For almost a year his pack had lived and run and thrived together. None of them had ever been lost, no matter what the dangers. But tonight the tables turned. So many of his brothers cut down, dead, in a matter of just minutes.
What had gone wrong?
The old Asian should have been the first to die, an easy target, but he stood his ground as if the sight of hungry wolves in his hotel room was nothing new. When the little old man struck, it came with speed that Leon's eyes could barely follow, wielding lethal force the wolf man's brain still couldn't comprehend. Within a fraction of a second Leon saw his proud young brother stretched out dead on the floor.
Another of the pack pursued the Gypsy woman as she tried to run away, when the Chinaman had struck again!
Leon couldn't have honestly described the way the old man moved from one point to another, traveling some twenty feet to intercept the second wolf before it reached the woman. Another flurry of the old man's fists-or was it feet?-and Leon saw a second brother crumple lifeless on the hotel carpet. It was then that Leon knew fear.
Before Leon could react to the old man, his warning instinct shrilled and he knew help was coming for the old Asian-someone else who carried death in bloodstained hands. Leon's nerve broke.
He retreated, knowing that the bitch would blame him-possibly the others, too-and that they would be right.
He led his brothers and the bitch in a coward's retreat-and they were struck down like cowards by a foe even more lethal than the Chinaman. Leon had caught a glimpse of the horror and still couldn't believe what he had seen. The younger man with the dead eyes had ripped the tail right off one of his brothers, then had launched the wolf into the side of the building. With one hand. And had done it with enough force to shatter the beast.
He and his brothers bullied their way through the crowd, but the mass of normals slowed them down. The one with the dead eyes caught up in seconds. Another wolf dead from a single blow to the spine. Another wolf snatched up by the scruff of the neck like a housecat!
That was when a lucky break in the crowd allowed Leon to streak back to the van. He was already blinded by his own tears, which blurred the shapes of the people that got in the way of his vehicle. He simply drove through them and remembered feeling the thump of bodies bouncing off the van. Screams followed in his wake, but all Leon could think of was that his brothers were dead.
Another crowd. He didn't even try to slow. Just let the van slam into the mass of costumed humans and come to a stop-then he and his companions emerged and fled through the city of horrors.
He had taken fully half the pack with him on this trip, and now there were just two wolves remaining-the bitch and the guard wolf he had left with the van during the hotel incursion.
It took the pathetic trio twenty minutes more to find another vehicle, because most Mardi Gras participants were roaming aimlessly on foot. At last they came upon a normal in a Toyota Tercel station wagon, just emerging from an all-night liquor store. He had a paper bag in one hand, a twelve-pack in the other, and he never knew what hit him, dying on his feet before he had a chance to be afraid.
They were too frightened to feed. They scrambled into the car and raced back to the bayou to mourn. Those were his brothers-dead!
More than that-those wolves were his children. He had created them.
THE WOMAN WHO CAMPED on the Hermit's land, who called herself Thena, had asked Leon to come visit her laboratory on wheels.
Leon liked Thena. She didn't flinch from him. She had something of the animal in her, too. He had begun thinking that maybe, somehow, he and the woman...
Was such a thing totally out of the question? He, Leon, the loup-garou, the killer and hunter, was shocked when he entered the laboratory. Thena had been busy collecting animals of all shapes and sizes from the bayou, and parts of them littered the interior of the laboratory. Many parts were stored in glass laboratory freezers. Other parts were chewed to the bone and tossed in plastic bins or simply scattered on the floor and the counter.
That was when the woman, Thena, made him the offer he couldn't refuse. With one simple sip of a solution, she could make him into a true hunter-a genuine, more-than-human loup-garou.
Leon accepted the offer without hesitation. Thena laughed delightedly, showing her strong white teeth, and then she made him something to drink.
She took a small glass laboratory bottle from one of the little refrigerators-the one with the label 942 Solution-and poured the contents into a paper cup. "Just drink," she said.
So Leon drank.
"What's the matter?" she asked as he sat heavily down on one of the folding chairs.
"It hurts," he said.
She looked confused. "Bad?"
"Not too bad."
But it lasted a long time. Hours. And he felt sore for weeks afterward. His face and his arms. His very bones hurt. He didn't know it that night, but his bones were changing. Lengthening.