Vesper

by Jeff Sampson

  Snarling, we leaped.

  We crashed into a heap with the man beneath us. Both of us went for his throat.

  I don’t know which one of us got there first; it was all a blur of bloodlust and the killer’s high-pitched, terrified shrieks. My teeth tore into some part of him and I wrenched my head from side to side. The man’s screams turned to gurgling gasps, and at last, he fell silent.

  Chests heaving, we backed away from the man’s still form.

  His throat was gone, completely torn free to leave a gaping, jagged wound. Blood was pooling under his head and staining his dark shirt. Which one of us had gone for the throat? The human part of my brain didn’t want to know.

  Rage seeped away and the girl side of me was stunned, ashamed of what we’d done. The wolf was content now, satiated; I let it take over. Its instincts right then were all that would keep me from going insane over the fact that I had just helped kill a man.

  The other werewolf limped back toward his house, whimpering plaintively. He walked partially on his hind legs, one clawed hand on the grass while the other clutched at his wounded stomach.

  I bounded over to him. He sniffed me, inspected me with dark, sorrowful eyes. I nuzzled his neck with my own, patted his back with my claws.

  Shivering, the other wolf fell to his side and curled into a fetal position. Bending down, I nudged away his hand, sniffed at the blood pouring from his chest. I licked the cut, cleaning the wound, soothing it.

  And I sensed something. Sensed them.

  My head darted up from the other werewolf’s chest, craning to look back at the man we’d killed. And there, hovering silently around the body, three man-shaped shadows studied the killer’s remains with featureless, dark faces.

  Terror seized within my chest, and I whimpered. Slowly the shadowmen’s heads turned in our direction. They walked across the grass toward us, their legs moving at half speed as though they were trudging through molasses.

  As the shadowy figures came close, I realized they weren’t solid: I could vaguely see the line of trees through their torsos. My whole body stiffened, the wolf longing to run but knowing that the other werewolf couldn’t run with me, not with his injury. And so, even as my furry limbs trembled, I clutched the other werewolf tightly, protectively, and didn’t move.

  The phantom beings stopped, their heads tilted to the side as they regarded us. After an endlessly long moment, they raised their arms and brought their hands together rapidly.

  Though the action produced no noise, I realized: They were applauding.

  Then they were gone. No poof, no fancy CGI dissipation. One moment there, the next, gone.

  I had no idea what to make of what I’d just seen, and I was so terribly exhausted. Not wanting to be afraid anymore, I gave in to the one good emotion I felt: the incredible sense of ease that washed over me after having finally found the wolf—the boy—I’d been chasing for so many nights.

  I curled up behind the other werewolf and put one long arm over his back to hug his fur-covered chest. He whimpered and I held him close, comforting him as we both fell asleep in the grass, under the stars and the sliver-moon, while just a few feet away the body of the man who’d set out to kill us gazed blankly up at a night sky he could no longer see.

  The Vesper Company

  “Envisioning the brightest stars, to lead our way.”

  - Internal Document, Do Not Reproduce -

  Partial Transcript of the Interrogation of Branch B’s Vesper 1

  Part 5—Recorded Oct. 31, 2010

  F. Savage (FS): Oh. Well.

  Vesper 1 (V1): You look queasy, Mr. Savage.

  FS: Yes, that was all a bit . . . graphic. I don’t do well with blood, I’m afraid.

  V1: I don’t either. Well, at least I didn’t used to.

  FS: I suppose now is a good time to discuss the, ah, “shadowmen.”

  V1: If you want.

  FS: As you were the first of the deviant subtypes to be able to see the shadowmen, please explain how you felt.

  V1: I only ever saw them as wolf-me. And I thought I made it pretty clear how I felt when I saw them.

  FS: You were frightened, yes, but could you sense anything more? Did your, ah, wolf-self sense a purpose in perceiving the shadowmen?

  V1: No.

  FS: No?

  V1: Nope. I pretty much felt afraid and wanted them to go away.

  FS: There were no other . . . emotions? No hope? Or elation? Nothing of that sort?

  [Silence. V1 doesn’t respond.]

  FS: Ah, well, as you did not encounter the shadowmen again during this first week, I suppose we can touch upon this subject when we discuss the future accounts you shall write.

  V1: I guess we can.

  FS: For now, let us compare our respective discoveries on the killer, one Doctor—

  [A beeping noise sounds.]

  V1: You have a text.

  FS: I heard, thank you.

  [Silence.]

  V1: What’s it say?

  FS: Hmm? Oh, nothing, it’s nothing.

  V1: Is it about those noises we heard earlier?

  FS: It’s none of your concern. Let’s cut this particular conversation short. I think, since we keep getting interrupted, we should focus on finishing your account. And then I shall resume your questioning at a more opportune time.

  V1: Fine.

  Chapter 17

  But First, Some Clothes

  I awoke the next morning so early that the sun barely peeked over the trees. Sensations overwhelmed me.

  My arm cradled soft skin. My clothes were damp with dew. My mouth tasted rancid, a rotten film coating my teeth and throat.

  I blinked my eyes open and found that my face was buried in messy brown hair. The back of someone’s head.

  No, not just someone. The other werewolf. The guy I’d been chasing and who I’d thought was Patrick, but who most certainly could not have been.

  I sniffed at the boy’s bare neck to be sure. The smell wasn’t as strong as when I was Nighttime Emily or Werewolf Emily, but it was there. A soothing, comforting, musky cologne that made me shiver inside. For a moment I lay there on the yellowed grass, my arm over his chest as it rose and fell with his sleeping breaths. Low, steady heartbeats thumped beneath my hand.

  And then I realized: Though I was still dressed in my pajama pants and the tight black turtleneck, I was lying in some stranger’s backyard, spooning a naked boy while—

  The killer.

  I stiffened and sat up, letting go of the boy and looking behind us. Without my glasses, everything was blurry. But I could see enough to know that the body was where we’d left it, lying so very still. A crow sat atop its chest, bobbing its head down to investigate the dead man’s open neck.

  My stomach roiling with nausea, I picked up a small rock and tossed it at the bird. It cawed, flapped its wings, and flew into the gray sky.

  I closed my eyes and turned away. I didn’t want to see the body. Couldn’t think about what had happened last night, even though part of me was glad for it. I suddenly realized why my mouth tasted so horrible, and I wanted to be sick.

  The sleeping boy who was also a werewolf moaned and started to rise. I opened my eyes and looked down at his pale, bare stomach where he’d been cut. But the wound had healed, leaving nothing but a faint scar. And I realized that my own knife wound—the one on my leg—was gone as well. My eyes traveled up to the boy’s chest before going back down to his waist.

  I stopped myself and immediately snapped my eyes back up to his face, my cheeks burning. Rubbing at his eyes with his hand, the boy blinked up at me.

  It was Spencer. Short, goofy, nice-guy Spencer.

  His thick eyebrows scrunched with confusion. Then, smiling, he said, “Hi, Em Dub.”

  “Hi,” I whispered.

  The past week came back to me, and I felt so stupid for not putting it together sooner. When I’d first smelled the other werewolf in the cafeteria, Spencer had been there, handing me an invitation.
He was there at Mikey Harris’s party, too, the smell disappearing with him when he left to go chase after Dalton and Nikki—two people he’d never caught up with. Because like me, he’d changed the night of the party. He’d run into the woods, and my drunken, wolfish self had chased after him.

  I had spent so much time focusing on the cute new guy I hadn’t even stopped to consider that maybe the smell wasn’t coming from him after all. Patrick had never been the one; that’s why he hadn’t smelled like the wolf-me’s mate in the convenience store. Not because he was the killer.

  Spencer gazed around the yard, his eyes settling on the killer’s body. His face fell, and some part of me wished that he would look away from the terrifying mess we’d made, smile at me again. He had a cute smile, I thought. A nice, broad smile that made his face light up, made him seem friendly and innocent.

  “He’s dead,” Spencer said flatly.

  “Yeah. We . . . we killed him last night. We . . .” I let out a gulping sob and had to bite my lip. It hit me just then, all of a sudden, what had happened.

  I was a monster, after all. A vicious creature, just like the movies and the books told me I was.

  “Hey,” Spencer said, his voice low. He sat up and brushed a finger under my eye, wiping away the hot tear that had started to fall down my cheek. “No, don’t cry. We had to, you know? He was coming after us. We had to keep each other safe.”

  Swallowing back the tears, I met his kind brown eyes. He smiled again; not the broad, energetic smile, but a small, reassuring smile. My insides fluttered, and I found myself reaching out to grab his hand. I never in a million years thought I’d be brave enough to do that, be so near a boy as regular old Emily Webb without transforming into a jittery motormouth. But being around Spencer felt right.

  Like we were meant to be together.

  And he had said “us.” I wasn’t alone. Even though Emily Cooke was gone forever and Dalton would be in the hospital for who knew how long, I had found another person like me, someone who knew exactly what the past week of my life had been like. Someone I could talk to about everything without having to keep any secrets.

  “Spencer,” I said. “How long . . . did you know about me? Do you know why we’re like this?”

  He shook his head, his longish bangs falling into his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I was sort of hoping after I saw you change last night that you’d have all the answers.”

  I laughed despite myself. “Yeah, I know the feeling. There’s so much I want to talk about. All of this, it’s like we’re in a movie or something. I totally expect soft music to play right now as we go to the closing credits.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He stood up, put his hands on his bare hips. “We need to figure out what to do with him. Maybe . . .”

  His eyes went wide and he glanced down. Immediately his hands shot down to cover his exposed crotch and he spun away from me. I caught a glimpse of a little more than I should have, half of me feeling completely mortified and the other half wanting to laugh uproariously at the awkwardness of it all.

  “Uh, but first, some clothes.” He ran off toward his back door, disappearing inside and leaving me sitting on the grass.

  I saw the killer’s black trench coat lying in a heap on the grass. The right arm was torn to shreds and stained with blood.

  Standing, I walked over, wet grass squelching between my toes. I picked the coat up, wrinkling my nose at the stink that rose from it, then dug through the inside pockets.

  My hand hit something smooth and cool. I lifted out a leather wallet and dropped the coat at my feet.

  There was little inside the wallet: a few dollars, a scrap of paper with some names written down that I didn’t recognize. Also in the wallet was a worker’s badge from the same local bioengineering firm that had come up when I Googled Emily Cooke and Dalton McKinney: BioZenith.

  “Agriculture, huh?” I muttered.

  The badge was fuzzy to my lens-less eyes, so I squinted and held it up close. It had the dead man’s picture on it, though in the photo he was slightly younger and not quite as pale, his cheeks shaved smooth. Beneath the picture was the name “Dr. Gunther Elliott.”

  And then the pieces came together, because though I’d had the answer for what had been happening to me, I still didn’t have the answer to how or why. Now the connection between the other Emily, Dalton, and the killer was clear: a company devoted to biological engineering. A place that, even though it seemed completely outside the realm of possibility, could perhaps biologically engineer . . . werewolves.

  Someone had done this to us. Many someones. I still didn’t know the why, but I knew the how. This place, this BioZenith, had done something to us. When or for what purpose, who knew? Because they apparently never bothered to, y’know, tell us what was going to happen. They changed us, and they set us loose, and then sent one of their employees to come kill us.

  I glared down at Dr. Elliott’s ID, my hand trembling, my jaw clenched. I felt it again—the anger of the night before. The rage I’d felt toward the killer had faded when he died. But now I knew: There was more going on here than I had imagined. More people were involved who had messed with us—with me—without even asking.

  “What’s that?”

  I jumped and turned to find Spencer standing there in a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt and holding two glasses of water. He flinched, sending water sloshing over his hands, and I realized how furious I must have looked.

  I breathed out and forced my expression to soften. It wasn’t hard. For some reason, Spencer’s presence made a rush of calm come over me.

  Spencer handed me one of the water glasses and explained, “For your mouth.”

  I took a sip of the water, swished it in my mouth, then spat into the grass. It helped a little to get rid of the aftertaste, but not nearly enough. I longed for my toothbrush, then remembered Spencer’s question.

  “It’s his ID,” I said, holding up the badge. “He worked at a place called BioZenith. I’d never heard of it until a few days ago, but two guys with the last names Cooke and McKinney also worked there. I think . . . I think they may have had something to do with the way we are.”

  Spencer nodded, his thick brows furrowed. “Yeah, maybe. There’s definitely a connection.”

  Putting the badge back into the wallet and shoving the wallet back into the coat, I asked, “What about you? Anyone you’re related to work there?”

  “Not that I know of. You?”

  I shook my head as I stood back up. “No.”

  “Weird.”

  We stood there in silence for a moment, shuffling our feet and sipping our water. I realized as I did that the turtleneck I was wearing was far more formfitting than anything I’d ever before dared wear outside of my house, by day at least. Part of me, the part of me that hadn’t experienced the last week, wanted to blush and cover myself, make myself invisible or something.

  But I didn’t. I felt . . . comfortable in my own skin, I guess. For once, I didn’t feel so horribly misshapen or embarrassed, at least not with Spencer, the nice, slightly dorky guy who I never before gave a second thought, but who now made me feel more at ease than any other person had since I was a kid.

  “So . . . ,” I said, breaking the silence. I wanted to broach the subjects of everything that had happened—the werewolf change, BioZenith, the killer, the creepy shadowmen I kept seeing when I was a wolf. But I didn’t know where to start, especially not with a dead body so close by. It was all so overwhelming.

  Spencer laughed nervously. “Yeah, sorry. I’m not used to this whole killing-in-self-defense thing, got kind of lost in my thoughts.” Spencer bit the inside of his cheek, tilted his head at the body. “What should we do with him?” he asked.

  Covering up a murder, even in self-defense, wasn’t really something I made a pastime, so for a moment I stood there with my mind blank. And then I remembered that I actually, somehow, had recently made the acquaintance of a guy at the local police station.

&n
bsp; “I think,” I said, “that I can take care of it. Can I use your phone?”

  I had to wake Megan’s brother up incredibly early in the morning to get Jared’s phone number, but luckily Lucas was so groggy that he didn’t ask questions. I then made a quick phone call to Jared. All I had to do was say I needed help and he offered to stop by. Stand-up citizen, that guy.

  Spencer’s house was quiet and empty. I sat in his living room, alone, as I waited for Jared to arrive. Everything in Spencer’s house was sort of low-rent and musty, like the beige couch and the shaggy rug and the tan entertainment center had all been bought at a flea market or Value Village or something. Little decorative tea sets were arranged all around the room, chintzy porcelain cups and plates with pictures painted on them that were fuzzy smudges to me without my nighttime vision.

  Spencer’s mom and dad were gone visiting his older brother at college in another state, which was good for us, I supposed, since explaining the screaming from last night, the dead body, and the need to wash off the dried blood on our faces would have been sort of awkward.

  Next door, from Patrick’s house, I heard a car door slam and an engine rev. As it did, the back door to Spencer’s house creaked open and he hustled inside. He was still in his sweatpants and T-shirt, though he’d now accessorized the ensemble with a plastic grocery bag over his hand.

  “Is your cop friend here yet?” He balled up the plastic bag and tossed it in a trash can near the back door, then came and plopped on the couch opposite me.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Did you . . . you know . . .”

  “Yeah, it’s all rearranged.”

  “Wow, rearranging a crime scene,” I muttered. “First breaking into nightclubs, now covering up murders. Wonder what’s next for crazy Emily Webb.”

  Spencer gave me an appraising look. “You broke into a nightclub?”

  My stomach sank. I suddenly really, really did not want to seem like a wild-child freak to him. But I was saved having to explain by a car pulling into the driveway.