Werewolves vs Cheerleaders

by Mia Archer

  I’d always wondered if I’d have the guts to do this. Dad had always said when the time came I’d know what I was capable of, that I wouldn’t have any trouble taking out a son of a bitch who deserved it.

  I grudgingly had to admit that my dad had been right. I felt no pity for the thing as I reached into my purse and pulled out something that would’ve looked odd to anyone who wasn’t, say, at a convention where there were a lot of crazy people walking around in cosplay.

  It looked harmless enough. Like a children’s toy or a more fantasy/horror-themed lightsaber.

  I held the hilt out and heard a confused murmuring from the crowd. I shouldn’t get this thing out here where so many people could see it. It’d make more sense to pull out my gun and switch out the bullets. It’s not like the werewolf was escaping very fast.

  Only I was annoyed. This thing had come interrupted my date night. It’d forced me to kick it in the nuts and punch it with that impossible strength. A strength that told me there was something changing in me, and I liked that even less than I liked the idea of this thing interrupting my date night.

  I pressed a button on the hilt. A blade of pure silver materialized, like it was dissolving in reverse. When I held it up the thing gleamed in the light.

  I approached the werewolf. The werewolf must’ve realized death was approaching. Maybe it was its sense of smell or something, because it sure as hell wasn’t looking at me.

  Though Lord knows I was wearing enough perfume that I could’ve been picked out from a mile away by any werewolf that was so inclined. My dad wouldn’t have been happy about that, but fuck him. I wanted to look good and smell good for my date, and this hairy motherfucker had just ruined that, hadn’t he?

  It tried to snap at me, and I kicked it again. My foot made contact right on the underside of its jaw, and I heard another crack as something broke.

  The creature looked up at me. It let out another one of those whines that sounded like a dog that’d been kicked and it didn’t understand why.

  Of course this wasn’t a dog that had been kicked by its master and didn’t understand why. No, this was a horrible monster ripped from the pages of a horror novel that was upset it wasn’t going to kill as many people as it’d thought. It was a hunter frustrated that it’d missed the prey and gotten as good as it gave. It was a serial killer who’d missed out on the opportunity to kill their latest target. It was an animal that had to be put down before it could hurt anyone else.

  I didn’t feel a moment’s regret for the person this thing might’ve been during the day. Hell, it could’ve transformed back from a werewolf and revealed itself to be my dear grandma and I still would’ve done what needed to be done.

  The thing’s mouth moved again. Like it was trying to speak.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that,” I said.

  I wasn’t sorry, but fuck this thing.

  “What… Are… You…” It finally managed to say, barely getting the words out.

  I cocked my head to the side and thought about how I should answer that. I was a lot of things to a lot of people. I was a daughter. A granddaughter. I was the pretty cheerleader on the sidelines the basketball players looked at for inspiration. I was the unattainable goddess to that quiet nerdy guy in the back of my history lecture who couldn’t stop looking at me but never worked up the courage to talk to me despite being kind of cute in a nerdy sort of way.

  Not that it would’ve done him any good since being kind of cute as a guy wasn’t going to cut it with me.

  I figured this werewolf wasn’t asking any sort of existential question like that. No, it’d just been bested by a cute girl with blue eyes, blonde hair, and glasses. It was wondering what the hell had happened to bring it to this point. It was supposed to be the one doing the terrorizing.

  I really wasn’t in the mood to get into all of the myriad reasons why I was able to beat the shit out of a werewolf. So I shrugged and went with the simplest answer as I raised my sword high.

  “I’m a cheerleader,” I said, and I brought the sword down on the thing’s neck.

  It was a clean cut. One moment the werewolf had a head attached to its body, and the next it didn’t. The werewolf’s body twitched a couple of times, its claws moving as though they were looking to rend and tear whatever had done such catastrophic damage to the body they were attached to, but they couldn’t do anything without whatever passed for a brain in this werewolf’s head.

  I stared down the thing for a long moment, breathing heavily from the exertion. Hey, I’d just killed a werewolf. I figured that was way more intense than any of the exercises we had to do during practice.

  I half expected the thing to jump up at me, Silver Bullet style, but it merely twitched a final few times, and went still.

  I looked up to the crowd staring in disbelief. Then down to the silver blade in my hand, dripping with werewolf blood. Finally I looked up to find Katie in the crowd, and with a sinking feeling I knew date night was over.

  She was staring at me as though I was every bit as monstrous as the monster I’d just killed. Fuck.

  Flashing reds and blues appeared outside the lobby, and a moment later the police came rushing in with their guns drawn. Guns they immediately pointed at me.

  I probably did look a suspicious standing there with the only weapon in the room in my hands. I was annoyed that they were pointing those guns at me rather than at the werewolf who…

  I looked down. The werewolf had transformed to a headless young guy in tattered khaki shorts, and I was holding a sword dripping with blood.

  “Drop it!” one of the cops yelled.

  I sighed. “I don’t suppose your chief is here? I really need to talk to him.”

  I’d like to say I was a cool customer standing there staring the cops down as they pointed their guns at me, but everything was catching up with me. All the panic. All the terror.

  So with that one final quip my eyes rolled into the back of my head and the world went dark around me.

  3

  Kirsten

  I woke up to a bright light shining into my eyes. I put up a hand up to block it out.

  That wasn’t enough to get the light to go away, so I reached up and slapped it away in irritation. I heard a loud yelp followed by glass shattering. Followed by the sound of several things breaking as something came crashing down.

  I blinked a couple of times in the sudden darkness and tried to get my bearings. As I blinked the haze away I got a better idea of my surroundings.

  “An ambulance?” I said. “Seriously?”

  “We wanted to make sure you were okay after your ordeal,” a guy at the entrance said.

  “I bet you did,” I muttered.

  “Come on lady,” the ambulance dude hovering over me said. “It’s not like that and you know it.”

  “Not like what?” I said, batting my eyelashes and hitting him with my sweetest smile.

  That got me an eye roll. “You’re cute, but not worth my job.”

  “That’s nice,” I said. “But I’m feeling better now, so I think I’ll be heading out if you don’t mind.”

  I tried to get up, but was stopped by thick straps holding me in place.

  “So much for not being interested in that sort of thing, Fifty Shades,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t get up so soon after your… difficult time,” the guy said, glancing at the straps and licking his lips. Like he wasn’t sure they’d be able to keep me down.

  I wondered what these guys had heard about me that they were worried I could snap a thick leather strap. It’s not like they knew about the family business, that was kept on a strict need to know basis, but they looked like they had some idea of what’d happened to me during that werewolf fight.

  Then again, they were emergency services. Emergency services tended to be on the bleeding edge of shit going down, which naturally meant they were always there to clean up after the things that went bump in the night had done some bumping.


  Not that I gave a flying fuck what these guys knew or suspected about me. Or what they’d been told. I suddenly had a memory of a bunch of cops pointing weapons at me before I’d passed out, and that had me even less inclined than I normally was to deal with any sort of authority figure.

  So I pulled on one of those leather straps. The thing didn’t give right away, but it didn’t take long. There was a snap, followed by a ping as whatever piece of metal was holding the strap in place went flying with all the force of a bullet.

  It ricocheted a couple of times, and the guy beside me cried out in pain.

  “That hurt!” he said.

  “I’d say sorry, but…”

  “But what?” the guy at my feet asked.

  “But she’s not sorry,” the guy who got hit said.

  “It was nice chatting with the two of you,” I said. “But I get the feeling I’d better get out of here before…”

  I sat up and found myself face to face with an old cop standing at the exit to the ambulance. I hadn’t been able to see him while I was strapped down. He wore a bristling white mustache and the kind of muscular body with a layer of fat over it that said he’d been in pretty good shape once upon a time, but the donuts had taken their toll since he started riding a desk.

  “So nice of you to wake up,” he said, his mustache bristling. “That was a hell of a thing you did in there. I’m Chief Reynolds.”

  He didn’t offer a hand, but he wasn’t talking to me like I was a freak show. Maybe this cop had seen some shit.

  “I wish I could say it was nice to see you, Chief,” I said, trying to walk the razor’s edge between being polite and making it clear I didn’t give a flying fuck that this guy was the Chief of Police. “But I was just heading out, so if you don’t mind getting out of my way…”

  I’d hoped that would be enough for him to take the hint and get out of my way, but no such luck. He merely frowned and crossed his arms. He gave me the sort of stare that said I wasn’t moving until he was done with me.

  “Let’s have a quick chat, why don’t we?” he asked.

  “What makes you think I’d want to have a chat with you?” I asked.

  “Why wouldn’t you want to have a chat with me?” he asked.

  “Maybe I have a problem with authority,” I said. “And having a chit chat with the local chief of campus rent-a-cops is a pretty high on my list of things I don’t want to do after…”

  I shut up. Lessons drilled into me over and over until I wanted to scream and tell my dad I was just a kid kicked in. I smiled and wagged a finger at him.

  “You’re good. You almost had me there.”

  “Almost,” he said. “I have some experience with this kind of thing, believe it or not. Back in my younger days when I was still in the military, but I’m sure you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t,” I said, my voice flat.

  The less said about that sort of thing, the better.

  “So how about we do it this way,” the Chief said. “You’re going to sit and have a chat with me, and in return I’m going to keep you safe from them.”

  “Them?” I asked.

  “Lean forward,” he said.

  He glanced down at the leather holding my ankles in place. He let out a gruff noise that might’ve been a grunt, or it might’ve been a chuckle.

  “I think we both know those aren’t going to keep you in place, so go ahead.”

  I sighed, then yanked them up. I leaned forward to see a crowd gathered. Great. Witnesses. Just what I needed on top of everything else.

  Most had the shellshocked look of college students who’d been in the theater when everything went down. They had the kind of haunted looks that said they’d just seen something that shouldn’t be, and their minds were trying to come to terms with that even as they started to check out because sometimes that was the only thing you could do when you were confronted with something as sanity breaking as a real-life werewolf.

  Shellshocked college students weren’t the only ones standing out there. There were also older people in tears. Probably locals who’d had a loved one on the inside. The university had plenty of townies who saved money by living at home while they went to school, and I’m sure some of them had been at the horror movie marathon tonight to get away from home for a few hours.

  What really worried me were the reporters barely being held back by campus cops who clearly weren’t equipped to deal with this.

  “You look like you’re about to have one hell of a problem, Chief,” I said.

  The last thing I wanted was press attention. It was the kind of attention that… Well, best not to think about my past catching up with me because word got out that I’d been involved in a shootout.

  “They’re about to be your problem if you don’t play nice,” the Chief said.

  I met that gaze and held it. Maybe he thought I could be intimidated by a look from an older guy wearing a gun and a badge. Only I’d been stared down by far better, far more intimidating, than him.

  “Not gonna work,” I said.

  “Fine,” the Chief said. “In that case you’ll have no problem with me letting those reporters come over here. They’re eager to talk with the hero of the hour.”

  “The hero of the hour,” I said, my voice flat.

  The Chief glanced to the two EMTs. “Why don’t the two of you take a break?”

  The command in his gravelly voice made it clear that wasn’t a request. They hopped to it, scrambling out of the ambulance.

  “Neat trick you have there,” I said.

  “Being the chief of police, even for campus rent-a-cops, does have some advantages,” he said, glancing over his shoulders at the press. “For all that it mostly comes with headaches.”

  “So what’s going on here Chief?” I asked. “You know what really happened in there. There’s a whole crowd who saw what happened in there, for all that a lot of them are going to do their best to convince themselves what happened in there didn’t actually happen.”

  The Chief sat down on the edge of the ambulance and ran a hand across his face.

  “I thought I was done with this shit when I got out of the military,” he muttered.

  “That’s the problem with this shit,” I said, my voice as tired as the old man’s. “It comes to find you whether you want it to or not.”

  “You’ve got that right,” he said, but then a smile spread across his face. The kind of smile that said he’d come up with something, and I wasn’t sure if I liked that smile.

  “The beauty of it is you made things easier for me,” he said.

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what you were doing with silver bullets and a military issue supernatural slicer, but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  My eyes narrowed, and I decided to ignore that the good Chief had just used the informal nickname for the sword I carried. He’d said he spent time in the military dealing with this shit, so maybe his time involved the kind of stuff he couldn’t share with the world.

  If that was the case then I’d understand why he was pissed off that the supernatural world had just come knocking on his nice quiet campus where he was living out a semi-retirement heading up the campus PD.

  “So you’re going to pin this all on a psycho?” I asked.

  “We had a terrible shooting at the theater tonight,” he said, sounding very tired. “That’ll mean a lot of closed caskets so people won’t realize their relatives were ripped to shreds. This isn’t my first rodeo.”

  “And me?” I asked.

  “You’re the big hero. The good guy with a gun, even if you’re a girl.”

  “Now wait just one damned minute Chief,” I said. “I have no desire to be in the middle of the latest national gun control debate. I like my life nice and quiet.”

  “I imagine you do,” he said. “But I like my life without a bunch of people asking me why I’ve got crazies saying a wer
ewolf attacked people in a theater, so this is the way it’s going to be.”

  “What about all the people who saw that werewolf?”

  The Chief hit me with a look. “Don’t insult me. You know those people are busy convincing themselves they didn’t see what they saw in there tonight. They’ll be glad to internalize the official line so they don’t have to think about a world where werewolves are real.”

  “It’s never going to work,” I said.

  “That’s really not my problem,” he shot back.

  “And if I talk?”

  He hit me with a look that was a little too knowing.

  “You’re not going to talk,” he said. “You don’t want attention any more than I do.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Get your EMTs back and get me the hell out of here and I’ll forget about how pissed off I am right now.”

  The Chief grinned and waved the EMTs over again, though as they approached the campus cop barricade broke and the press surged forward like something out of a zombie movie.

  “Excuse me!”

  “Miss! Did you really shoot the shooter!”

  “How do you feel about gun control laws ma’am?”

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here now!” I shouted.

  The EMTs looked at me, eyes wide, then one hopped in and slammed the doors shut as another got in the front and turned the lights on.

  A moment later something slammed against the door. Fucking reporters. Meanwhile I leaned back against the cot and closed my eyes.

  The reporters were emergency services’ problem right now. I was going to take a little rest and try to forget all the bullshit that’d just gone down tonight.

  One werewolf was enough for a lifetime, thank you very much. At least I could rest assured that I wasn’t going to get in the middle of anything else supernatural.

  4

  Cara