by L. E. Horn
“Chris’s partner is a plant maniac,” Peter mentioned as he noticed me gawking.
“His partner is wulfan too?”
“Thought I explained that already.”
“Right.”
The door opened and my jaw, which had yet to properly close, gave up the effort. I had expected a typical retiree, perhaps with a better, wulf-induced fitness level. What stood in the doorway more closely resembled Rambo. Chris was shorter than me, but where my muscles were long, lean and hugged my frame, his sprouted hard all over his body. Even his muscles had muscles. I thought his skin had red-brown indigenous undertones, but considering his build, Viking seemed more likely. His hair hung in shaggy layers around his face, with twin grey streaks growing from the temples. A faint silver line ran along his cheekbone and interrupted one thick eyebrow. I contemplated the possible source of the scar when Peter slapped me on the shoulder.
“Chris, this is Liam,” he said.
I extended a hand. I’d forgotten about Keen, who now pushed past me to sniff Chris. Mystified, I watched my dog wag her tail—at a wulfan she’d never met.
Peter must have noticed my expression. “Wulfan have years to master their wulf. If we focus, we can bury it as deep as we need to. Keen never reacted to me.”
That was true, but I had assumed it was because she’d known him since she was a puppy. I reflected on my vet career and the animals I’d scared the piss out of. “Will I learn how to do that?”
Chris answered, his voice matching his physique. I wouldn’t want to mess with this guy, either in wulf or human form. “I can teach you how,” he said, exchanging a look with Peter. “Have you heard from Dillon?”
Peter cleared his throat, hesitating on the step. “Chloe got a text. He ended up at the garage. It’s closed today, so I think he’s alone.”
Chris’s pupils shrank to pinpoints, and for a microsecond, his eyes glowed gold. “Text me if things escalate.”
I blinked. Had I imagined the glow? Then my brain focused on another incongruity. Text? Peter doesn’t text.
Peter pulled a phone out of his pocket.
“You have a phone?” I asked, incredulous. “You text?”
“It was Chloe’s old phone; she gave it to me. Which would be okay, except now she’s making me use it. I don’t have a clue what I’m doing.”
“Get her to show you how to text me, too,” I said. “You have my number.”
“Yeah, okay.” His face expressed only doubt as he and Chris moved to help me unload Keen’s stuff.
“Lucky dog,” Chris said, laughing and shaking his head.
“Tell her that,” I commented, glancing at her wiggling body.
In the front hall, Peter set down Keen’s bag of toys and shifted his stance, looking uncomfortable. “I’d better get back.” He extended his hand and I took it. Before I’d even thought about it, I pulled him into a swift, one-arm man hug, releasing him quickly. “I’ll see you in two weeks,” I said, embarrassed when my voice cracked.
He held up his phone. “I’ll stay in touch.” Back ramrod straight, he walked to his truck, got in, and drove off without looking back. I ached to go with him, Dillon or no Dillon. Like an arrow from the darkness of my past, I relived the tearing sound my heart made when someone I trusted handed me over to strangers. Followed by frustration that these things kept attacking me at vulnerable moments. I thought I’d buried them long ago.
No doubt sensing my inner turmoil, Keen whined softly at my feet, and I swore I saw recognition in those mismatched eyes. She too, understood abandonment.
I realized Chris was staring at me. “Josh will be back soon; he’s gone for groceries. Raising wulfleng is a hungry business.” He led me down the hall. “Let’s get you settled,” he said.
Picking up an armload of dog paraphernalia, I followed him, Keen trotting at my heels.
8
So how does one prepare for turning into a werewolf? Apparently, one stares at naked men. Who knew?
We stood in my new training area/cage in Chris’s old barn. It looked like a large horse stall, roughly the size of a single car garage. Metal sheeting ran from the floor to about chest height, and above that were thick steel bars that were welded to steel plates at the ceiling. The floor was also metal, although part of it was lined with wooden boards. Wood had been bolted over the sheeting inside the stall. The door swung on silent, heavy hinges, and there was a locking system that would have done Fort Knox proud.
I sat on the cot along a wall, observing Chris strip. Okay, I wasn’t into watching men strip, but there was a logic behind all this. Chris pulled his shirt over his head, his shoulder and chest muscles bunching and flexing as he did so. He was one hairy guy.
From an artistic point of view, I admired the definition along his rib cage. When he snapped open the button on his jeans, I was glad he turned around. Until I saw his back, and the world spun to a halt.
Scars. Scores of them, small and large, some so old they had faded to faint silver lines, others pink and puckered at the edges. Now that I looked, his arms were the same, and lines ran down his bare buttocks and the backs of his legs. His front was likely just as bad, only less noticeable due to the hair. Seeing the rest of him, I was surprised he had only one scar on his face.
Chris was retired from the RCMP, but no cop would end up with that many scars. I guess wulfan played rough. Really rough. But Peter was older than Chris, and he didn’t have them.
As he twisted to remove his jeans, I saw five fine silver marks running from beneath an arm across his ribs to above his kidneys. Claw scars. They spanned ten inches, and the injury must have almost split him in two.
Chris turned around without even a hint of self-consciousness. Comfortable in his own skin, like a wild animal, with clothing only an afterthought. Which is not far from the truth.
After a quick glance at his chest to confirm my theory, I looked away. “You’re an enforcer,” I said, my voice remarkably controlled, considering my racing heart. Peter brought me to an enforcer?
“Yes.”
Peter gave me to the man who will kill me if I can’t keep it together over the next few weeks. The ground opened beneath my feet.
Chris must have sensed my emotional overload. “You’re here because I’m your best chance to make it through this sane and alive.”
I met his eyes. “But if I don’t, you’ll kill me.”
“That won’t happen.”
“Have you done this before?”
“Many times.” His expression remained calm as he stood there, stark naked, in a cage.
“How many have you lost?”
I saw the shadows in his eyes and braced myself for a lie. But instead, he held my gaze, although a muscle jumped as he clenched his jaw. “That I guided to their first change?”
I wondered at the qualifier but nodded.
“Two.”
“In how many years?”
“I’ve been an enforcer for the last sixty-four.”
Sixty-four years? Chris had a face that looked ageless; I hadn’t been able to nail it down. But sixty-four years? How was that possible?
Chris interpreted my bewilderment. “Peter didn’t tell you?” I must have looked confused because he laughed. “Trust him to scare the piss out of you with all the bad stuff and not tell you about any of the perks.”
I was careful to keep my eyes on his face. “There are perks?”
“The virus not only helps you heal. It also maintains your health over the years, slows aging. I’m ninety-seven.”
My jaw dropped, and I couldn’t stop my eyes from doing a quick body scan. Ninety-seven? “How old is Peter?”
“A hundred and twenty-three, I think. Might have lost track of a year or two.”
Seriously? It jarred with everything I knew, including . . . “So Chloe isn’t really his niece, is she?”
“She’s family. Trying to track the exact relationships within wulfan families will give you a headache.”
This w
as messing with my head. Focus, Liam. “So if I make it through this, I’ll live a long, happy life howling at the moon.” Chris didn’t reply and I didn’t expect him to. “If you only lost two, how did you get so many scars?”
“Most aren’t from training wulfleng. I spent the first fifty years as an enforcer in Texas. I helped put an end to many uprisings.”
Okay, I’ll bite. “What’s an uprising?”
Chris held my gaze as he spoke. “Sometimes, when a wulfleng is created, the wulfan involved doesn’t confess his indiscretion. If the wulfleng survives the first moon, they might infect others, and what follows is what we call an epidemic. Sometimes, the infections are done on purpose. It is disgusting how many wulfan wish to gain power or influence by infecting humans to create their own little empire. When these spin out of control—which many do—we call them uprisings. Usually by the time the enforcers crash the party, it’s too late to save them. We have to clean house as it were.”
“Kill them?” I tried to imagine such a battle, and my mind shied away from it. His body provided all the evidence I needed. It was only slightly less terrifying than the thought of a multitude of crazed wulfleng loose on the world.
“I didn’t always agree with verdicts of the wulfan board,” Chris said, his mouth straightening into a hard line. “It was one reason I moved to Canada. Peter too. I joined the RCMP. Peter . . . retired.”
“But Peter wasn’t an enforcer.”
“No. But he lost someone he cared about, who was.”
“Oh.” I glanced again at the terrible scars on Chris’s body. How many enforcers died during such battles? Someone Peter loved. Was that why he lived alone?
“Wulfan mate for life,” Chris said, and for a second, the pain showed in his expression and his voice. He scrubbed a hand through his shaggy black hair and his face changed. “Peter tells me you’re quite the artist.”
The sudden change in topic caught me off guard. “I draw. Peter likes my work and has a few pieces on his wall.”
Chris’s eyebrows rose. “Those are yours? You’re good.”
“Thanks,” I said, wondering when Chris had seen them. I didn’t think Peter had visitors, but it seemed Peter had an entire life I knew nothing about.
“Your understanding of anatomy will help you shift,” Chris said. “One of the main reasons wulfleng fail during the change is they panic. They can’t go in either direction, so they get stuck in a cycle of agony. Their heart can’t take it.” He changed his stance, turning sideways. “To stop that from happening, it’s best if you visualize every step of the change to wulf form and back. This should be easier for you, since you’ll understand what’s occurring beneath the skin. I need you to observe closely.”
I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to watch this, let alone closely, but I got the gist of how important this would be. “How can you know I will change?”
“I don’t,” he said. “We won’t know for sure until the night of the full moon. But you need to prepare, just in case. For the record, I have a good sense for these things, and I think you’ll transform.” He shook his arms and rolled his shoulders. “Okay. The first thing to remember is to keep your muscles as relaxed as possible. Much of the manipulation that occurs is soft tissue, if you tense against the change, it will be more painful, and you can tear your muscles and ligaments.”
Muscle tears. Pain. Right. Relax.
“Now, the transformation usually starts with the extremities: the head, hands and feet. Although the better you get at it, the more control you have over it.” He held up a hand for me to see. As I watched, his fingers curled—the fingernails lengthening and thickening, and the skin and soft tissue beneath reforming into long, hard pads. His fingers had also thickened, and I realized the tendons holding the bones together had grown stronger, preparing them to bear weight rather than just hang from the ends of his arms.
After the initial clenching of my stomach, the artist in me slipped into the driver’s seat. I became fascinated with the alterations to Chris’s body. He waited until he seemed satisfied that I wouldn’t faint, and allowed the change to take him.
The only thing that made me queasy was when his skull transformed, primarily his jaw. The remainder of the skull barely did anything; it was all soft tissue changes, like the ear cartilage. But the upper and lower jaw made pretty strange noises as they elongated. I understood now why the wulfan possessed a shorter jaw than a real wolf—the bone itself had to grow to form the carnivore snout. And when the sharp wulf canines pushed through, his gums bled. Rather than altering the existing ones, the wulf teeth dropped from above the regular dental arcade. The human teeth stayed human, inside and around the others.
Other things happened behind the skull, where the muscles that held the human skull upright expanded to form an arched neck capable of holding a head out from the body. A popping sound made Chris grunt. His chest changed as the collarbone gave way—permitting his shoulders to drop forward and his shoulder blades to hang more vertically like a wolf’s. I knew the collarbone to be rudimentary in many animals, especially those that required flexibility of the shoulder girdle for running.
Chris crouched, bringing his curled fingers to the ground. The change compromised between the human and true wolf anatomy: his shoulders much wider than a wolf’s and articulated differently. His arm, from shoulder to elbow, hung free from his body. Unlike most running animals, wulves could swing their arms in a circle and outward. I had a brief mental image of a wulfan swinging in the trees and snorted.
My sound caught his attention, and he looked at me with his dark, all-too-human eyes. Long hair sprouted in a thick mane around his head and chased the changes down his spine. Another weird, wet noise announced the tail, at first naked like a rat’s, then bushing out. His pelvis did not appear to alter shape, except to rotate, and his legs grew thicker rather than shorter—the muscles bulked up along the thigh and calf, and the tendons became stronger, suspending his foot with the heel in the air and leaving only his toes on the ground.
In a surprisingly short time, Chris stood before me in his wulfan form. Not counting the gray streaks in his mane, he was as black as Dillon, but my trained eye noted the differences in his build. Dillon’s extra height as a human translated into longer legs as a wulfleng. Chris’s musculature made him wide everywhere, and his hind legs—being shorter—were not as angulated as Dillon’s but were more in balance with his front legs.
I found the differences more fascinating than the similarities. Does that mean Dillon can jump higher, but Chris can run faster? How do the variances in human form translate to abilities as a wulf?
As soon as the change completed, Chris began to reverse it. In moments he stood naked in front of me as a human, surrounded by a cloud of dark hair that drifted to the barn floor.
“I had no idea it could be that fast,” I said, amazed. My gaze dropped to the tufts of hair surrounding him. “Or that messy.”
Chris seemed pleased at my ready acceptance of the morphing process. “I slowed it for you. We vary in terms of how long the change takes, but wulfan usually do it faster than wulfleng. Some of that has to do with experience over time. By my age, we can do it fast.” He changed again, but everything happened almost simultaneously, far too rapid for me to observe. He went full cycle, returning to human. More hair swirled on its way to the ground.
“Wow.” The word was as much an exhalation as statement to express my awe. In fact, I had a hard time breathing, so I concentrated on the expanding pile of fuzz. “Keen has nothing on you. Wulfan must keep vacuum companies in business.”
One corner of Chris’s mouth quirked up. “The hair is the visible end product of the change, and when we shift back to human, the finer human hair pushes the animal fibres out.” The lips straightened and he made a point of catching my eye. “One other thing about changing: it’s hard work. Cells are being built to make the wulf and also destroyed to make the human. Your body uses energy at an incredible rate. That’s why you don’t
see many overweight wulfan. Too many changes in too short a time can put you in a world of hurt. So, lesson one: fuel your body. If you’re in a weakened state, you might not be able to complete the shift, and wulfleng have died that way.”
He grimaced at me, which was when I noticed his canines were still in place. I took a step back.
The grimace became a grin. “Some features can be controlled with practice.” The teeth made him terrifying, but without any apparent effort, they pulled up into his gums with a gush of blood. Chris licked his lips. “Let’s go get something to eat before we move on.”
* * *
We found Chris’s partner, Josh, in the kitchen, feeding Keen. My greedy dog had a knack for spotting the soft touch in any room, and as she wiggled at his feet, it was obvious she’d done it again.
“I already fed her breakfast,” I protested, but I had to smile at the obvious enjoyment on Josh’s face.
Josh looked younger than Chris, but considering the recent revelations about age, I wasn’t sure what that meant. Not tall, but well proportioned, he had the long muscles of a runner, like me. Only he had more upper-body development, and he moved with the languid grace of a cat. But he had an intensity to him that made you think he didn’t miss much. His eyes—an unusual pale hazel, which was striking against his dark skin—reflected a deep-rooted, thoughtful intelligence. He had tightly kinked black hair hanging almost to his waist, currently tied back in a ponytail. Would I be the only blond wulf around? If I make it to becoming a wulf.
Keen trotted over to us, but one whiff of Chris and she backed away again, growling. I had to entice her to him for a closer sniff.
“She smells the wulf on me, from the change,” Chris explained. “She’ll have to make the connection between me and my hairier self and learn to trust that smell.” Keen returned to her second breakfast with enthusiasm but continued to send wary glances at Chris whenever he moved.
Josh turned his attention from my dog to Chris and me. “How’d it go?”
