Writers of the Future 32 Science Fiction & Fantasy Anthology (L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future)

by L. Ron Hubbard

  He spun, knife pointing at me. He’d brought steel to a wolf fight. That never went well.

  “It’s none of your business, man!” The guy was coming down from some drug, heroin from the stink, his voice high and desperate.

  “I’m making it my business.”

  I dodged his clumsy, telegraphed swing of the knife with ease and caught his outstretched wrist in the same motion, slinging him face-first into a two-by-six without letting go, then twisted his hand up between his shoulder blades as he let out a pained squeak. I manfully refrained from breaking his arm. This was business, not personal, and I didn’t plan to kill him unless he made me. Pressing him against the bare stud, I leaned in and spoke into his ear. “Apologize to the lady.”

  He made a noise down in his throat, which was echoed by the woman, as they both realized what I was. The exposed fangs might have had something to do with it. I’d made a calculated decision to let them out, to scare him and put paid to the situation as quickly as possible—and show the woman that wolves weren’t all bad. Maybe that was a mistake. “Well?” I asked the bum.

  “I’m sorry, lady! I won’t do it again, I swear, oh God don’t eat me.”

  I snorted with contempt. “I wouldn’t do that. No telling what I’d catch.” I looked at the woman, who stared back at me with wide eyes and an intensifying fear scent. Great. She was more scared of me than she was of the mugger, even though I’d just saved her. I felt suddenly tired. More tired. My teeth shrank back to human-shaped. “Both of you, just . . . leave. Please.” Why had I even bothered?

  She scuttled past me, heels clattering on the concrete. I made sure she was well away before releasing the mugger. “Get help. Idiot.” He ran the other way, and I leaned against a worktable with my face in my hand.

  Later that night in the Snake in My Boot’s lot, I stepped out of my car and turned to lock it. A bullet whined past my ear, shattering a window concurrent with the flat crack of the gunshot. The scent of silver scorched the air, and I ducked behind a pickup truck with an instinctive growl, fur sprouting, nose questing.

  Using vehicles for cover, following the reek of gunpowder, I stalked the erstwhile hunter silently through the lot. Counting shots in this day and age didn’t mean much, but I did it anyway. He had no idea where I was, and he fired at shadows and errant noises, staying put instead of moving. Foolish. The cops would investigate something like that. They didn’t like stray rounds flying through the city, even if they were discharged by someone hunting a wolf.

  I zeroed in on his location and ghosted up behind him as he pulled the trigger the fifth time. Any notion of a fair fight I’d ever held had died with Katrina. Popping claws, I slashed sideways at his back in a move designed to cleave his spine in four places.

  He wasn’t wholly stupid after all. An entire small industry built around wolf hunting made specialized equipment designed to stop us in our tracks, or at least slow us down. Kevlar vests with silver threads stitched into the fabric covering were popular, and this guy wore one under his leather jacket. I’d thought the silver odor had been the bullets, but I found out I was wrong when my claws sliced through the jacket and the fabric of the vest—

  And my claws retracted painfully, smoking, into my fingers.

  However, I’d put significant strength behind my swing, and for a mere and squishy human, it was like getting swatted aside by a pissed-off Kodiak bear. He smashed into the door of the SUV he’d tried to hide behind, leaving a big dent and a cracked window. He lost his gun when he bounced off, dazed and winded and shaking his head.

  But he kept his feet. His right hand whipped a five-inch silver-plated knife from its sheath on his belt, while I popped claws again. He wasn’t slow, and he ducked under the swipe I aimed at his face.

  “You wanna dance, wolf?” he gasped. His temple bled where he’d hit the SUV, and he blinked hard, coming back at me blade foremost.

  “No.” Cool and methodical, I jerked away from the knife and caught his outstretched wrist in the same motion, treating him the same way I’d treated the mugger, with a lamppost doing duty for the wall stud and his hand cranked higher between his shoulder blades. I was far less gentle with him, and he let out an agonized cry as the arm both broke and came out of the socket. His knife clattered to the ground, and his buckling knees tried to drop him to the asphalt, but I held him up by the broken arm. “I want to kill you. Like you just tried to kill me. Like you killed my packmates.”

  “Going after you was sheer self-defense, at this point! I haven’t killed a wolf in aahh!” Something else let go in that arm, grinding unpleasantly.

  “I’m sure you haven’t. Doesn’t mean you didn’t.” I snarled into his ear. It was meant to sound enraged, but all I felt was hollow. “I was done, you dumbass. The Caine brothers were going to be the last. But now? You’ll all get to know what it’s like to be afraid. Right. Before. You die. Alone.”

  He squirmed, the sharp scent of terror filling the tight space between us. “I got a family, man, don’t—”

  “I had a family.” My voice was utterly calm. “People like you exterminated them. Like they were no better than rats.” I grasped his hair in my free hand and smacked his forehead against the post. Once. Twice. Harder. A dull crack, and he went limp, but I kept mechanically pounding until his face was a ruin of blood and bone and his heart no longer beat.

  He fell, and I let him, not even breathing hard. Still weighed down by blank resignation. I’d have to go after the rest of the hunters now; the cycle of retribution wouldn’t stop with him. A small inner voice asked if I felt sure about what I was doing, if there maybe wasn’t a better way, if I would lose myself in the pursuit of pointless, indifferent vengeance.

  With a weary sigh, I turned and walked back to my car without a backward glance at the body.

  Iann watched the whole thing. His jaw tightened, and he shook his head slightly with his mouth pulled down on one side. I shouldered him as I passed. “Mind your own business.”

  His words knifed me like a silver blade. “What do you want, Nate?”

  To not feel like the failure I was, was what. I couldn’t have that either. I didn’t answer, and just walked away, carrying an aching black hole of loneliness that sucked up my emotions, leaving me an empty husk.

  The municipality wasn’t big enough to support a large contingent of hunters, and with the wolf population down to, well, me, most of them started laying low and trying to let the reek of silver fade out. By the time two more fell under my fangs, the news picked up the story, but police didn’t get involved with hunter/wolf internal politics as long as I studiously kept civilians out of it.

  Iann, though. He showed up again. And again. Watching with calculated non-aggression, not doing anything, pricking at the withered thing I used to call a conscience. I finally twigged to what he was.

  The last hunter in town, playing some kind of sick game.

  It had to be a game. No hunter was actually sympathetic to a wolf. Ever.

  Unfortunately, he was ready for me when I caught him by himself, walking his dog a few blocks from his apartment. The dog, some kind of spaniel, took one whiff and bolted home through the darkness, yelping, but Iann remained unruffled as he noted my expression. He pulled a nine-mil semi-auto from under his calf-length leather duster and pointed it steadily at me. I could smell the silver ammo, but I didn’t have anything left to lose.

  He stood in the spotlight of a streetlamp, which left his lived-in face shadowed under the ever-present cowboy hat. “Walk away, Nate,” he said gently. “Your quarrel ain’t with me.”

  I glided forward, more wolf than human. “Isn’t it? The city will finally be safe once you’re gone.”

  “I been telling them numbnuts for years that indiscriminate killing is downright dumb, but they won’t listen to an old man.” The gun didn’t waver. “I don’t wanna hurt you, son, but I will defend myself.”

/>   “That’s what I’m doing. Defending myself.” And I launched, clothes shredding as four hundred pounds of timber wolf took the place of two hundred pounds of man.

  He shouted my name, and the gun went off twice in rapid succession. One of the bullets fanned my fur, and the second sent a fiery graze along my ribs. A head or a heart shot would have been instantly fatal, and I could have bled out from an artery severed by silver, but at this point it didn’t matter. He was the last. I was the last. It had a certain poetry to it.

  He tried to sidestep my charge, but I anticipated that. My head snaked sideways, and I grabbed his knee in jaws that once had cracked a moose’s femur. My teeth didn’t shear through the leather of his duster, which he’d probably gotten from one of the hunter outlets, designed to be resistant to wolf fangs. Cartilage and bone crunched, though, and a powerful toss of my head hurled him to the sidewalk. The gun fired twice more. He couldn’t miss at this distance; both rounds burned into my chest—but not my heart—as I stood over him, grunting with the impact. But they went through-and-through, and I kept the wolf form by main force and dove at his throat.

  He got an arm up, and my fangs closed on that instead. “You’re a better man than this, Nate,” he said between clenched teeth. Radius and ulna snapped like matchsticks, though the leather held. “This is no different than what they did to you. Stop. And think. About what you want.”

  I spat his arm out. . . .

  And hesitated.

  “No matter what you decide,” he panted, dropping the gun. “I forgive you. I understand. And I forgive you.”

  What I wanted—

  I wanted my pack back. I wanted to belong again. I wanted to feel more than this vacant, vengeful shell, going through the motions of life without actually living it.

  Iann reached his uninjured arm up and buried his fingers in my ruff. I was a wolf who’d nearly killed him, and he petted me the way he would his dog. It felt ridiculously good. Wolves constantly touch each other, and I had no idea how much I’d missed the contact until I got some of it back. “Nate. You can stop now. You can rest, son.” His soft voice caressed me as much as his hand. Maybe he was lonely too.

  I huffed out a single, sobbing whine and dropped my head to his shoulder.

  Slow applause made me jerk my head up. A werewolf I didn’t recognize stepped out of the shadows. “Well done, my friend.”

  I cast a glance at Iann, who wisely let his arm fall, closed his eyes, and played dead. Bristling, I ranged myself between him and the new guy, my body language radiating “my meat” under no uncertain terms. Blood dripped from my jaws. It was mine, but I was downwind from the wolf and he didn’t need to know that.

  Strange wolves in new territories are bad for loners. The odor of his pack covered him, along with the scent of a fresh, human kill. He had the authoritative air of an alpha.

  Wounded and alone I may have been, but I was still an alpha in my own right. I lowered my head, lifted my tail, and showed him my fangs, even as my hindquarters sank under me. He squatted on his heels and smiled. It was a terrible expression. “Sending in one of my more bloodthirsty pack members worked better than I could have imagined. Both you and the hunters were laughably predictable.” He dusted his hands off. “Very nice of you to take out all the hunters, Nate. Humans are sheep, and now they’ll get to find out just how vulnerable they are.”

  His words made me feel something, finally—sick dread coiling in the pit of my stomach as I realized I’d just engineered the ruin of the city’s ecology. No more hunters meant that rogues like him—and the serial killer who’d started the entire cycle—could move in and wreak as much destruction as they wanted. I shifted back to human and wiped the blood from my mouth with the back of my hand. “You can’t do that.”

  “Sure I can. Who’s going to stop me?” I straightened from my crouch and fixed him with a glare. He barked out a laugh. “You? But why?” He waved wildly. “It’s not like they lifted a finger to help you when your pack was being annihilated. Did anyone speak a single word of caution Say ‘boo’? No. They cheered.” Contempt twisted his features. “Bunch of oblivious, bleating morons. And now they’ll get theirs.”

  I started to say something, and stopped. Because he wasn’t wrong, at least not completely. He saw me wavering and turned conciliatory. “Join us. Find a place in my pack. You’re clearly good at hunting. I could use someone like you as my second.”

  A shudder ran through my body. We didn’t do well by ourselves, as demonstrated by my little murder spree. A new pack—the idea was viscerally appealing. But . . . “We shouldn’t. It’s wrong.” I knew this, down where I lived. I’d spent my life fighting a good fight, or trying to. Turning around and slaughtering humans just because I could was out of the question.

  “Wrong? Is it wrong for a lion to eat a gazelle? It’s nature. We are nature.” He stood abruptly. “Come with me, or don’t. It’s up to you. But sheep are good for one thing, and they’re about to find out what it is.” He turned around and walked away, whistling through his teeth, the psycho.

  Hurt, heartsick, and hopeless, I watched him go. Thinking. Was I a ravening wolf, like humans thought? Or was I better than that, a border collie saving them from their own folly, even though they’d never thank me for it?

  A cough made me swivel my head around. Iann sat up, wincing. “So he’s an asshole.” He tilted his head at me. “I take it you ain’t killing me tonight.”

  I stared at the ground. My voice was low and hoarse, and I shook my head, just once. “No. You’re right. You’re not my enemy.”

  “Glad you finally came to your senses.” He shrugged out of his duster, wincing, and draped it over my naked shoulders. “What’re we gonna do about him?”

  A tiny thrill shot through me at that “we.” I shivered, recognizing a kindred spirit, a fellow border collie. He hadn’t murdered us indiscriminately; hell, he’d had every opportunity and plenty of reason to kill me out of hand, for weeks. I stared at the ground, still, and tilted my head, a subtle and submissive throat-baring gesture that anyone not a wolf might have missed—but Iann noted it, and nodded. I didn’t want to be an alpha anymore, and he understood.

  “Someone has to protect them,” I said. “There’s no one left but us.”

  “That’s so. Then I guess we ought to get to it, once we patch up our hurts.” He rubbed his chest with a speculative frown.

  “Yessir.” I shifted to wolf again and jacked myself to four feet.

  Reclaiming his duster, he stood and smoothed back my ears before resting his hand on my ruff. My knee and foreleg ached, throbbing in tandem, no doubt, with Iann’s. An ember of hope kindled in my heart. A pack link with an ordinary human was new . . . but I’d take it.

  We limped after the new wolf. Hunting with renewed purpose. Together.

  A Glamour in the Black

  written by

  Sylvia Anna Hivén

  illustrated by

  Brandon Knight

  * * *

  about the author

  Sylvia Anna Hivén was born in Sweden and moved to the U.S. when she was twenty years old. She writes all kinds of speculative fiction, but loves dark fairy tales and weird westerns a little more than the rest. Her fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Escape Pod, and others. She is passionate about her faith and holistic living, and in her free time she enjoys organic cooking, cycling, and practicing yoga.

  about the illustrator

  Brandon Knight was born in Shropshire, in the heart of the UK. Surrounded by small towns and green fields, Brandon spends most of his time developing ideas, which are usually inspired by a piece of narrative, either fictional or historical.

  When not drawing or painting he’s reading, finding inspiration for another creation.

  When it comes to art he can spend hours studying works of master illustrators. The golden age o
f illustration is by far his favorite period, as he feels the work that was produced is unprecedented in terms of technical prowess and storytelling.

  Brandon intends to graduate with a degree in Visual Communication with a keen focus on illustration.

  “Being included in the Illustrators of the Future,” he says, “is an achievement I’ve been aspiring to. I saw it as an incredible experience and stepping stone into the world of illustration. I am so honored and thankful to have been included this year.”

  A Glamour in the Black

  Keani’s parasite, nestled between her shoulder blades, always ached in the rain. Even the smallest of droplets slipping beneath Keani’s cloak would remind her that the knotted creature was there, its shimmery form visible beneath her skin. It would shiver and burn, crackle and groan, jitter and flare. Spring drizzles annoyed it, and the rain season maddened it: when purple-smeared skies rumbled and torrents thrashed the volcano city, the parasite even split Keani’s flesh open and bled crisscross marks over the embroidered hibiscus flowers on her tunics.

  The rain season was almost over now, but the pain was not, and it wouldn’t be for a while. As Keani slipped down the slick volcanic paths to the clam caves, the ocean roaring in through jagged crevices, there were to be many days of wet, and many days of pain, and many days of being many things but herself.

  Far down the rough-hewn steps, one of the clammers appeared out of the darkness to meet her as agreed. The woman was young and barefoot, braids tangling on either side of her face like black eels. Crude knives clinked where they hung at her hips. She stopped ten feet from Keani, squinting her pale-cloudy eyes.