Dark and Stormy Knights

by P. N. Elord

  This was a Catholic church and school.

  He preferred the jobs where the wolf was an outcast who fled to the wilderness—no witnesses.

  At the end of this, he’d have to kill someone. There’d be a body, and the cops didn’t take “He needed killin’ ” as an excuse. He could try to tell them the thing was a werewolf, but the end result wouldn’t be much different. Prison, psych ward, same thing.

  The fewer people saw him lurking around, the fewer people he talked to, the better. He needed to keep it so that the people who did spot him wouldn’t be able to point the cops at him. When the body turned up, Harrison wouldn’t turn him in. Harrison understood.

  Cormac walked along the street, passing the school’s grounds and trying to get a feel for the place. He walked by only once, normal, as if he had someplace else to be. Several buildings made up the complex, including a couple of homey brick blocks that seemed to be dorms. Around back was a sports field, and a group of girls in matching gray sweatshirts and green sweatpants played soccer. Maybe aged fifteen to seventeen. So, girls’ boarding school, high school. It was a Saturday; they wouldn’t be in class. There looked to be a couple of adults out with them, women in sweatpants and jackets. During the week there’d be teachers as well and a priest and staff for the church. They’d live on campus, too. In fact, behind the church he spotted what must have been the rectory, a small, square clapboard house attached to a meeting hall.

  The werewolf could be any of them. A hundred possibilities, at least. He didn’t know where to start.

  When he was done with his quick survey, he cut back a couple of blocks, made his way to the highway again, and returned to Harrison’s ranch. Dusk was falling.

  Joe Harrison must have seen him coming through a window and met him on the porch.

  “You get it? Is it dead?” Harrison said.

  Cormac didn’t nod or shake his head, didn’t say yes or no. “I’m working on it. Wondered if you could tell me anything about the Catholic school up the highway.”

  “Saint Catherine’s? It’s a reform school. All girls. Full of troublemakers.”

  “Really? I didn’t see any fences.”

  Harrison chuckled. “Look around. Where are they going to run off to?”

  “I tracked your killer there,” Cormac said.

  “You think it’s one of them kids?” The rancher donned an eager, hungry look.

  Cormac frowned, hoping it wasn’t. He didn’t want to have to go shooting a kid. “I guess I’ll have to find out.”

  Harrison shook his head. “Wouldn’t that just figure?”

  “You know about any rumors, any suspicions about anyone there? Hear about anything odd?”

  “They’re Catholics,” he said with a huff, as though that explained everything. “You know somebody’s always talking about the priest there, if you want rumors.”

  Cormac rubbed the back of his neck and looked to the distance, to the flat horizon. The sky was deep blue, turning black with the setting sun. “That’s not a lot of help.”

  “I’m just telling you what you asked for. Hey, how long’s this thing going to take? When am I going to be able to let my herd graze again?”

  “I’ll let you know when it’s done. By the full moon for sure.”

  “That’s a week away.”

  “Sure is. But I’ll finish when I finish.” He turned away.

  “I wish Douglas was here working on this,” Harrison called after him.

  Douglas was Cormac’s father. Harrison had known him—that was how he’d known to call Cormac.

  Cormac didn’t slow down. “Yeah. Well. You got me instead.”

  He kept watch on the ranch through the night; the werewolf might return to where it had found easy pickings before. Harrison had penned up the cattle since last night’s attack, and the animals crowded the corrals, milling and murmuring unhappily. Cormac kept walking the plains around the ranch house, covering half a dozen miles over the course of a couple of hours. He didn’t see anything. He didn’t even get that crawling feeling on his neck, as though something were watching him. It was just another cold night.

  In the morning, he reclaimed his Jeep and found a ratty motel at the edge of town, where he talked the desk clerk into letting him have a room early. The clerk gave some bullshit about the rooms not being clean, but Cormac counted only three cars in the lot and at least two dozen rooms. Places like this didn’t have check-in times, he told the guy, and paid cash in advance.

  He brought his weapons case into the room and looked over his collection one more time. A revolver, two semiautomatics, a shotgun, and a pair of rifles. The revolver was mostly to show off. He wore it when he needed to cop attitude, when a potential client expected the tough guy, the Old West gunslinger. And the boxes of ammunition for each of them: 9 mm silver rounds for the semis, silver filings in the shotgun shells, and so on. If he couldn’t take down the quarry with this, he likely couldn’t take it down at all. He’d never needed more than this. He also had a Bowie knife with silver inlay. The bone handle was worn. His father had told him it had belonged to his grandfather. His family had been doing this a long time, apparently.

  He couldn’t be sure; his father hadn’t finished telling him all the stories when he’d died, when Cormac was sixteen. Harrison was right: it ought to be his father out here doing this.

  After a quick shower and a change into some slightly less grungy clothes, Cormac went to church.

  He hadn’t been to church—any kind of church—since he was in high school and living with his aunt and uncle. They were some flavor of born-again Christian, and services had involved sitting on hard metal folding chairs in a plain room—rented office space—listening to fire-and-brimstone lectures. He hadn’t been back since he went out on his own. He’d never been to a Catholic church at all. He used the tools, of course, holy water and crosses, when he had to. But they were just tools. Any God he believed in wasn’t like the one most preachers talked about.

  The service had already started when he arrived. He stepped softly and found a seat on the bench in back. No one seemed to pay any attention to him. The church smelled of old wood, melted wax, and incense. The architecture was maybe a hundred years old, lots of dark wood, aged and smooth. The benches—pews—might have been mahogany, but there were pale scuff marks around the edges, where generations of bodies had banged into them. Pale stained glass decorated the tall windows along the walls.

  He had a good view of the congregation: a hundred or so girls in front, identical in pressed uniforms; a bunch of plain folk from the town; the priest in a white cassock, standing in front, leading a prayer; and nuns, maybe a dozen, in prim black dresses, sitting in the rows with the girls. Their heads were bare—short and simple haircuts for the most part, no veils—which surprised him. He’d expected them to look the way they did in the movies, with the weird hats and veils.

  There were altar girls instead of altar boys. Probably students from the school. Cormac didn’t know there was such a thing as altar girls.

  During communion, everyone stood, filed down the central aisle, faced the priest with hands raised, accepted the host, and marched back to their seats. Cormac was able to look at nearly every person there. Sometimes he could spot a werewolf in human form just by looking. The way they moved, the body language—more canine than human, hunched over, glaring outward, walking as if they had a tail raised behind them. The gleam in their eyes, as if they’d kill you as soon as look at you. Ones who were losing control, like Harrison’s cattle killer, had a harder time hiding it.

  He didn’t spot anyone who made him suspicious.

  The service ended, and the priest and altar girls processed out as the congregation sang, accompanied by one of the nuns playing a piano that sounded tinny in the big space. The congregation followed, filtering down the central aisle and two aisles to the sides. Cormac made his escape as part of the crowd. He lingered at the corner of the church building, watching. He still wasn’t getting a sense off
anyone. In his experience, werewolves didn’t do well in crowds. They sometimes lived in packs of their own kind but didn’t cope well around normal human beings. They saw people as prey. A werewolf wouldn’t go to church and be part of a crowd like this, unless his absence would be out of the ordinary and noted. He’d followed the tracks back to town—this wolf was trying to hang on to normal. Maybe he was here and hiding really well. Maybe Cormac would have to stir things up a bit to flush him.

  But not right here. Not right now.

  He was about to walk away, back to his Jeep and the next part of his plan, when he caught sight of someone coming toward him. One of the nuns. He felt a completely irrational moment of fear. Too many stories about nuns in the collective unconscious; he wasn’t even Catholic. It wasn’t a mistake—she’d broken from the lingering crowd and came toward him.

  Tall, solid, with short gray hair and soft features, jowly almost. She might have been as old as the priest and had the air of an aunt rather than a grandmother. Stern, maybe, rather than kind. Someone who had spent a lifetime bullying girls at a reform school, rulers smacking knuckles and all. But he was letting stereotypes get the better of him again.

  He supposed he could have just ignored her and walked away. What was she going to do, run after him? But the last thing he wanted to do was raise suspicions. It wouldn’t cost him anything to find out what she wanted.

  “Good morning,” she said when she stopped in front of him, hands folded before her, pressed to her skirt.

  “Hi,” he said, then waited for her to say what she wanted.

  “We like to welcome visitors who might be new to the parish,” she said. “I wondered if I could answer any questions for you, about the parish or the town.”

  He probably shouldn’t have been instantly suspicious of anyone who showed him the least bit of friendliness. Some people might accuse him of paranoia. But the woman wasn’t smiling.

  “I’m just passing through, ma’am,” he said.

  “Oh? Where are you headed?”

  He couldn’t blame her for looking a little confused there. Lamar wasn’t really on the way to anywhere else.

  “Denver, eventually,” he said.

  “Ah. Well then. I hope your travels are safe.”

  Cormac left. She continued to watch him; he could just about feel it.

  Back at his motel room, he slept for a few hours, getting ready for another long night. He dreamed; he always dreamed, vague images and feelings, a sense of some treasure just out of reach or some danger just within reach. That if he was just a little faster, just a little smarter, he could make everything—his life, his past—better. He usually woke feeling nervous. He’d gotten used to it.

  Later that afternoon, just before business closing time, he found a butcher shop in town and bought a few pounds of a low-grade cut of beef, bloody as he could get it. At an ancient Safeway, he picked up a five-pound bag of flour.

  Around ten P.M., well after sunset, when most folk were heading to bed—when someone else might be trying to sneak out—he returned to the school. At the edge of the campus, along the trail of claw prints he’d followed back from the ranch, he staked out the bait.

  A wind blew in from the prairie, almost constant in this part of the state, varying from a whisper of dry air to tornado-spawning storms. Tonight the breeze was occasional, average. Cormac marked it and moved across it, away from the meat he’d hung from a low branch on a cottonwood. The wind would carry only the meat’s scent, not his. The hunter scattered flour on the ground underneath the meat, forming a thin, subtle layer. If the wolf ran away, this would make it easy to track.

  He went across the street and found a place near a dusty, unused garage, a hundred yards or so away, to hunker down. He let his gaze go soft, taking in the whole scene, keeping a watch on the bait and the paths leading to it.

  Time passed. The moon rose, just a few days from full. However much the werewolf might resist the urge, might control itself until then, at the full moon it would be forced to come out. Then Cormac would have it.

  Midnight came and went, and the wolf never showed up to take the bait. It must have satiated the bloodlust on the cattle. It was being careful, now.

  After a couple more hours of waiting with no results, he dismantled the trap—took down the meat and brushed his boot across the flour until it was scattered and ground into the dust and lawn. Covering his own tracks.

  The sky was black. It was that time of night when streetlights—and even this town had a few—seemed to dim, unable to hold back the dark. In just a couple of hours, the night would break, the sky would turn gray, and the sun would rise pink in the east. He’d stayed up and watched it happen enough nights that he could almost set his clock by the change in light. But right now, before then, the night was dark, cold, clammy. Three A.M. had a smell all its own.

  He switched off the headlights as he slipped into a parking space in front of his room. The motel was a one-story, rundown strip, a refugee from 1950s glory days, with peeling white paint and a politically incorrect sign out front, showing a faded screaming Indian holding a tomahawk: the Apache. All lights were out, the place was dark, not a soul awake and walking around. No witnesses.

  Cormac set foot on the asphalt and hesitated. He listened to instinct; when his gut poked him, he trusted it. Something wasn’t right. Something was out there. Slowly, he pulled the rifle from under the Jeep’s front seat.

  There wasn’t anyplace to hide out here; the land around the motel was as flat as a skillet, with no trees, only a few buildings, and the motel itself. The two-lane highway stretched out in either direction straight and empty. Cormac didn’t hear footsteps, breathing, a humming engine, nothing. He didn’t see a flicker of movement except for grasses touched by a faint breeze. He had no sign that anything was out there, except for the tingling hairs on the back of his neck screaming at him that something inhuman was watching.

  It thumped onto the roof of the Jeep, slamming the vinyl, rocking the whole vehicle. Cormac ducked, hitting asphalt, as the oversize wolf skittered across the roof and leapt to the ground in front of him.

  The door to the Jeep was still open; Cormac jumped inside, scrambling backward, and slammed it shut as the wolf crashed into it on its next attack. Its front claws scraped against the window, digging against the slick surface, snapping at the glass with open jaws and spit-covered teeth.

  The damn werewolf had tracked him. No—it hadn’t even needed to track him. The Apache was the cheapest motel in town. It just had to lie in wait.

  It hadn’t made a sound, not a growl or a snarl. It had just pounced, ready to rip him apart. On its hind legs now, it was as tall as the Jeep, larger than a natural wild wolf, because it weighed as much as its human form—conservation of mass. A wild wolf might be around a hundred, hundred twenty pounds. A big werewolf would be close to two hundred. This one was maybe a hundred sixty, hundred eighty. However large it was, however shocking it was to see a wolf as tall as his Jeep, this wasn’t the largest he’d ever seen. Not a two hundred pounder. It was thin, rangy. It had speed rather than bulk. Its coat was mostly gray, edged with beige and black. Prairie colors.

  The werewolf backed off a moment, then sprang at the Jeep again, crashing full force into the window. The glass cracked.

  Cormac couldn’t stay in here forever. And he wasn’t going to get a better shot than this. He fired.

  The rifle thundered in the closed space of the Jeep, rattling Cormac’s ears to numbness. The glass of the driver’s-side window frosted with a million cracks radiating from a quarter-sized hole in the middle. The wolf had vanished.

  He couldn’t hear a damn thing, and he wasn’t willing to bet he’d blown the thing’s head off that easy; he couldn’t spot any blood. He looked around but couldn’t see much, lying back across the front seats, peering out the remaining windows, mostly into sky.

  After rolling to his knees, he broke out the driver’s-side window with the muzzle of his rifle, dropping a rain of glas
s outside, and looked out. Shards of glass glittered across the asphalt. He didn’t see the wolf. Definitely didn’t see blood. Which meant it had ducked and run. Making his life harder.

  He made a quick three sixty, looking out every window, hoping to see where it had fled. Werewolves were fast, but he should have seen something, a flash of movement, the low lupine form dashing madly to safety. Otherwise it was still here, hiding low and out of sight next to the Jeep. He wasn’t going to go outside until he knew.

  Even if he did manage to kill the thing in a head-to-head fight, facing it down meant risking getting bitten or scratched, which was as good as dead as far as Cormac was concerned. No sense in taking stupid risks; that was the trick.

  He started the engine and backed away. Right away he heard a thunk against the side and saw what he was hoping for—the wolf scrambling away from the vehicle, turning tail, and running across the parking lot.

  The other trick was realizing werewolves didn’t generally take stupid risks, either. Instinct told them to flee when a hunt stopped being easy.

  Cormac shoved open the door, stepped out, took aim with the rifle, and fired. The wolf disappeared around the side of the building.

  “Damn,” he murmured. He’d have known right away if he’d even clipped the wolf. All he had to do was clip it. The silver in the bullet only had to touch the monster’s blood to poison it, killing it in a matter of moments. That wolf hadn’t slowed down. Cormac had just plain missed. He could kick himself. He didn’t miss very often, even when his target was running.

  But he’d flushed the thing into the open. That was something. The game wasn’t over yet.

  The engine on the Jeep was still running, and Cormac got in and headed back toward the Catholic school. Maybe he could run the thing down. Not to mention he didn’t want to be around when the cops arrived to investigate the gunfire. Assuming they did. He glanced in the rearview mirror, and the motel was still dark. No lights had turned on. He had to smile—small town on the plains, random gunfire in the middle of the night, and nobody bats an eye. They probably thought it was some kid out shooting street signs. Good enough.