Science and Sorcery

by Christopher Nuttall

  His radio buzzed. “This is Alpha-Five,” a voice said. “Werewolf Seven is going crazy, throwing herself at the bars. Requesting reinforcements.”

  Matt gave Joe Buckley one last glance and then headed for the stairs. Werewolf Seven had been a young woman from Texas before she’d found herself outside her house, stark naked, just after the full moon. It had been nearly a week before she’d reported herself to the local police, who tested her blood and then sent her on to Washington when she tested positive. Unlike Buckley, she’d wanted out from the moment she reached the base, demanding that she be freed at once. Matt couldn't blame her, but he knew the dangers. A single werewolf running loose in a town could be disastrous.

  He heard the howls long before he walked into the holding chamber. Another werewolf, slightly smaller than Buckley, was spinning around in her cage, slamming her entire body against the iron bars. The entire room was shaking every time she crashed into the structure, even though it had been welded to the floor. Matt looked at the sheer power she was displaying and wondered, suddenly, just how he'd been lucky enough to survive his first encounter with a werewolf. He shouldn't even have had time to draw his gun.

  “We started running the tests and she just went crazy,” one of the researchers said, shouting to be heard over the din. One of the SEALs had found some ear-protectors and was handing them out to everyone who wanted one. “I don't know why!”

  “Maybe she sensed the x-rays,” Matt suggested. Dogs did have more capable senses than humans, at least in some respects. Could they sense x-rays? There was no way to know just what a werewolf could do unless they managed to interview someone who remembered being in wolf form. “Can you shut down the active testing and see what happens?”

  The room shook again as the werewolf hit the bars. This time, Matt could have sworn he saw the bars starting to shift. Alarms sounded a moment later, adding to the racket; the SEALs cocked their guns, ready to open fire. Matt reached for his own sidearm, but didn't draw it. Instead, he motioned for the researchers to shut down their equipment and leave the compartment. They’d had safe rooms prepared for them that should have kept them safe against anything from armed commandoes to werewolves and vampires. As the scientists fled the room, there was a final crash and four of the bars simply smashed outwards, crashing against the silver mesh. Matt swore out loud and fumbled for his sidearm as he realised their dreadful mistake. The iron bars would push the silver out of the way, allowing the werewolf to break free without touching the silver at all.

  “Open fire,” the SEAL team leader snapped.

  The sound of gunshots was deafeningly loud in the confined space, almost overwhelming the howls as the werewolf crashed through the bars and slid out into the compartment. A moment later, the werewolf seemed to stop dead in the air, before crashing to the ground, blood pooling around her body. Matt sensed, rather than saw, flickers of blue fire where her body touched the remains of the silver mesh. Golem had never been able to explain why silver burned werewolves – it seemed to be like touching acid for them – but it definitely worked. A dozen silver-coated bullets had brought the werewolf down.

  Matt stared in disbelief as the body twitched, as if she was slowly returning to human form, before there was a final shudder and then nothing more. Carefully, the SEALs approached the werewolf, prodding her with their guns. There was no reaction at all. Matt couldn't see how anything could have survived so many gunshots, even if the bullets hadn’t been silver. He stepped closer and saw that the girl seemed to have died as her body was in the process of shifting back, leaving her trapped eternally between human and wolf. Gritting his teeth, he looked away, fighting down the urge to be sick. The girl hadn't asked to be a werewolf, nor had she asked to be confined and then shot down like an animal. There had been no choice...

  ...But it still didn't feel right.

  As the night wore on, he walked from cage to cage, watching how the different werewolves reacted to their confinement. Some were howling balls of anger and rage, tearing away at the cages and themselves, others just watched and waited for their captors to make a mistake, as if they’d fallen into a different subspecies of werewolf. Golem had said that there were several different kinds of werewolf, including some who could shape-shift from human to wolf and back again at will. Maybe the genes of all kinds had been passed down from generation to generation, none of them knowing of the time bomb buried within their DNA.

  ***

  By the time the sun rose, everyone on the base was tired and worn out. At Matt’s suggestion, Caitlyn called in reinforcements from the nearby Marine barracks and ordered everyone to get some rest before they started to put their reports together. Caitlyn rather doubted that they would make good reading; one werewolf had burst out of an impregnable cage – which proved that their imagination had been more limited than anyone had realised – and two others had injured themselves for no apparent reason. The doctors had noted that the wounds had regenerated almost at once, at the cost of some of their bodyweight. They’d gone on to note that inflicting heavy damage on a werewolf would probably kill it eventually anyway, with or without the silver bullets.

  “Poor girl,” she said, looking down at the images of the dead girl. The preliminary examination suggested that the silver bullets had inflicted massive internal trauma, to the point that the body hadn't been able to return to human form when it had died. Caitlyn had a theory that at least part of the damage had been caused by the shift, just like the werewolf Matt had shot. “What are we going to do with the body?”

  “I think that's your decision,” Chief Warrant Officer Lesage said. The SEAL didn't look tired, somehow. But the parts of his file that hadn’t been classified had spoken of feats that made him sound like Batman. “I’ll tell you something, though; if she hadn't been in a confined space, we might have had difficulty handling her.”

  “You killed her,” Caitlyn pointed out, sharply. She regretted it a moment later. There had been no choice, not when so many lives were at stake. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Lesage said. “Some of the frogmen aren't too happy with what they did either. They didn't sign up to gun down civilians...”

  Caitlyn scowled. She’d seen contingency plans for outbreaks of diseases that made Smallpox look like a harmless cold. The army would be deployed to prevent anyone from fleeing the cities, trying to preserve as much of the countryside as possible. And the civilians wouldn't want to remain trapped in the cities. They’d start trying to break through the barricades and the army would have no choice, but to open fire. What would happen if one of the diseases from Golem’s era got out?

  Coming to think of it, what if someone came up with a magical biological warfare weapon?

  “Leave the body in the freezer for now,” she ordered, finally. “We can have the doctors carry out a full autopsy later. And please thank your men for me. It could have been a great deal worse.”

  It was a great deal worse, she knew. Some reports of werewolf attacks had already started to come in and there would be others, once the reports had finally filtered their way up the chain to the Mage Force. And there were going to be several days of hell for the werewolves, and their families, before the full moon dropped away until the next month.

  Cassie Lang had joked, according to the report. She'd said that now she had two monthly curses, one that turned her into a rampaging monster and one that turned her into a werewolf. And now she was dead, shot down to save others.

  Shaking her head, she turned and headed for the sleeping quarters she’d taken for herself. There was no point in going back to her apartment now. She just needed to sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  New York, USA

  Day 30

  Something was definitely wrong at Fairview High School.

  Misty had been in seven different school since she had qualified as a teacher and none of them, even one within the inner city, had had such a looming sense of fear and desperation. The pupils had seen two murderous
incidents within the space of two weeks, one within the school itself and they could not help, but be traumatised. It wasn't just the teachers who were seriously considering quitting; apparently, over two hundred children were being kept out of school by their parents, at least until the school guaranteed their complete safety in future. That was illegal, technically, but right now there weren't going to be very many consequences. The last thing the Mayor wanted was to unite the parents of New York against him.

  Pupils – and their parents, sadly – often believed that teachers went home just after they did, enjoying themselves for the rest of the day. That wasn't even remotely true; teachers were expected to work on lesson plans, mark completed assignments and supervise detentions, as well as attending endless training sessions that tended to demoralise more than they educated. Naturally, Misty had come into school much earlier than even the first pupils, even though she was only a substitute teacher. It had given her time to walk around the school and take a look at the first murder scene. Her senses had flared into life the moment she’d neared it, but the sheer force of the murder had blotted out all impressions of the murderer. It was very nearly the perfect crime.

  At the suggestion of one of the NYPD officers, she’d gone through the school’s records for everyone in the same grade as the murder victims, but come up with nothing. The male victims appeared to have been bullies – she knew the type well – and it would be easier coming up with a list of people who didn't want to kill them. Sandra Yeager had been reasonably popular, but hardly spectacular; her parents, apparently, kept pushing her to stretch her mind to the limit. Certainly, there was nothing in either set of files that shouted murder, although she could easily imagine the guys getting into trouble with a criminal syndicate. The NYPD officers had told her that some drug gangs recruited schoolchildren to serve as pushers, selling their wares inside the school. It always ended badly.

  Miss Hoover, a literature teacher, had taken a class that included three of the four murder victims, the NYPD had noted after a great deal of cross-checking. They weren't paid to believe in coincidences; it was quite likely that the murderer was one of the forty-five other pupils in the class. The principal had prevailed upon Miss Hoover to take a junior class, allowing Misty a chance to take her class. If anyone in the class was using magic, it was possible that she would sense it. Or she might pick up on something else that was being concealed.

  But first, there was to be an assembly. Misty wandered down to the main hall and took a seat in the back row, watching as the pupils filed in with very little enthusiasm. Judging from their faces, they seemed to expect a monster to jump out at them from the shadows, or death to strike them down without warning. Even the ones who would normally be boisterous and rude seemed subdued, as if the lassitude affecting the entire school was wearing them down quicker than anyone else. But surely someone with half a brain could guess that Moe’s death might have resulted from his bullying habits.

  As always, pupils kept trickling in after the doors closed and the principal began speaking, confirming – for those who didn't already know – that a fourth pupil had died in mysterious circumstances. Several girls began to cry; few had bothered to mourn Moe and his cronies with anything more than crocodile tears, but Sandra had been different. She’d had genuine friends. Misty tried to keep her mind wide open for hints of magic, yet there was nothing, apart from the looming signature of where Moe and his friends had died.

  Poor girl, she thought, keeping her eyes on the pupils. What did she do to deserve that?

  ***

  Calvin skipped assembly completely; indeed, he would have stayed at home if his mother hadn't ordered him to get out of bed and escort Mindy to school. The email from the principal had said that they would be honouring Sandra and he didn't want to risk showing anything that might be taken as evidence of guilt. Marie putting two and two together and concluding that he’d been the murderer had been a nasty surprise; he’d always taken her for a dumb bimbo. Who, but an absolute idiot, would seriously consider hanging out with worthless guys?

  The memories rose up in his mind as he waited for first period to begin. Marie had been soft and warm and yielding, although he could tell that her heart wasn't in it. Harrow had taught him spells that would induce more interesting mental changes, but she’d warned him not to use them unless he wanted to attract attention. One spell that seemed to work as a love potion – except without the potion – also caused a significant IQ drop for the subject, as long as she was under the influence. If Marie wasn't the bimbo he’d taken her to be, he couldn't risk having her scrutinised by the cops, or anyone else.

  Now that the lust had faded away, terror flickered through his mind. He’d ordered her to clean herself up, but what if she’d forgotten something that would make her wonder, later, what had happened? The commands he’d inserted into her head should ensure that she would clear it up without ever even thinking about it, yet what if they didn't work? He’d done something terrible, something unforgivable, stepping right over a line. And yet, everything about his life told him that the line only existed for those who didn't have the power to do whatever they wanted to do. Why should he not do what had been done to him?

  No one ever raped you, part of his mind pointed out.

  But that would have been preferable, a different part said. Moe might have been jailed if he’d raped you.

  Carefully, Calvin called on the mental disciplines Harrow had hammered into his head and put them into place, one by one. There was no choice now, but to proceed with Harrow’s plan, which meant finding another victim to kill and then one more, before heading to a place where the unlocking ritual could be performed. Harrow had had him reading about places of mythical power, but most of them appeared to have been sealed off by the military. Calvin might have had enough power to slip by unnoticed, yet he didn't want to take unnecessary risks. There would be somewhere unnoticed where the spell could be carried out and then...

  ...Part of his mind wondered if Harrow intended to betray him just after she was freed. The rest of him knew that it no longer mattered. He’d crossed the line and now no one would ever trust him again, certainly not knowing the power he held. They’d either find a way to strip him of his power, the first taste of real power he’d ever enjoyed, or kill him outright. And he was too frightened to die.

  He barely noticed Gayle until she appeared in front of him and poked his arm, hard. “You should have gone to the assembly,” she snapped. “Sandra is dead and you’re just sitting here.”

  Calvin felt a hot flash of anger, which he controlled as best as he could. Gayle was right; in hindsight, it might have been stupid not to go to the assembly. Besides, she wasn't quite the bitch that Marie had acted, someone willing to kick him after he’d been knocked down by Moe and the other bullies. She didn't deserve to die.

  “I came in late,” he said, finally. It was a weak rejoinder, but he’d often been late for assembly in the past, normally because Moe or someone else had waylaid him on the way to school. “And I will pay my respects later.”

  Gayle looked as if she would have liked to say something more, but the substitute teacher appeared at that moment, striding into the classroom as though she owned the place. She looked formidable to Calvin’s eyes, something tickling at the back of his mind that suggested that he should find the new teacher familiar. The class seemed pretty subdued, unsurprisingly. Sandra had been popular, if not as popular as Marie, and they’d taken her death pretty hard. He looked over at Marie and wondered just how she could look so...normal. But she'd forgotten what he’d done to her.

  “Good morning, class,” the substitute said. “My name is Miss Reynolds and I am here to take Miss Hoover’s class for this morning. I understand that you have all been reading The Importance of Being Ernest?”

  There was a general chorus of assent from the pupils. Calvin, who had read ahead as well as watching the production Miss Hoover had shown them on the TV, found the whole play to be funny at first, but t
hen boring. There were just too many plot holes in the whole story, starting with two men both pretending to have imaginary friends and then the haughty bitch refusing to permit one of them to marry her niece until discovering that he’d actually been born into the English aristocracy. Calvin had never been anywhere near an English aristocrat, but he’d had enough of the school’s sporting aristocracy to last him a lifetime. And he was pretty sure that all aristocratic families, if one went back far enough, started with one person stealing plenty of gold from his neighbours, building himself a castle and declaring himself the master of the world.

  “Excellent,” Miss Reynolds said. “So, let us consider the meaning of the ending.”

  Contrived, Calvin thought, as the class did their best to respond. Having one of the heroes unwittingly being called Ernest...somehow, it didn't seem very plausible. If Oscar Wilde had intended to point out the fallacies of noble blood, he could have done it by having Gwendolyn marry Jack anyway, while leaving Lady Bracknell alone eating her cucumber sandwiches, in the knowledge that playing Miss Grundy had cost her everything.

  “We could also take note of the choice of name; Ernest,” Miss Reynolds said, towards the end of the lesson. “To be earnest means to be sensible and serious; the lesson Jack learns is that he would have gotten into a great deal less trouble if he’d been honest and truthful right from the start.”