In the Werewolf's Den

by Rob Preece

  Some ran. Some stood and stared. A few turned and attacked Carl with their bare hands.

  If Carl had been in human form, the half-dozen assailants might have scored hits. In wolf form, he couldn't be touched. He darted between them, contemptuously knocking down anyone who got too close.

  He ripped open the bags of plunder, knocked over bottles of spirits, and tossed the string of ears into the nearby river.

  Oddly, he didn't seem interested in killing. Instead, he created havoc, destroying the carefully planned looting of the Dallas zone.

  A machine gun in the guard tower chattered briefly, then stopped. The gunners couldn't depress the weapon low enough to target Carl while he remained in its shadow, and ricochets stung several in the mob without affecting Carl at all.

  The wolf laughed, whirled to avoid another normal attacker, then howled a challenge to the world.

  He knew this was his last stand.

  If Danielle hadn't experienced Joe's lies, she would have been relieved that someone else would handle terminating Carl. Now, though, things had changed. Carl was the only hope for reconciliation between the normals and the impaired. She needed him alive.

  And he was going to die. The protection offered by the gun tower's poor design wouldn't last. Sooner or later, the normals would regroup. Carl was dancing his last dance.

  She felt only a terrible emptiness.

  A trap door opened at the base of the gun platform and three warders, grim-faced, descended. One carried a silver herder whip. Two bore assault rifles.

  From the way they climbed down the ladder, Danielle could tell they were professionals, possibly even fellow graduates from the Academy.

  Carl was finished.

  He turned toward the descending warders, seeming to recognize and welcome the end.

  His howl split the night air, long, high-pitched, and filled with a sorrow that put a lump in Danielle's throat that no swallowing could dislodge.

  His body flickered from wolf form to human, then back to wolf.

  That brief glimpse of his beautiful human body left Danielle gasping for air. It didn't seem right that it be destroyed. She wished that she had ignored Carl's plot, forgotten her job, and done nothing but make love to him. Now that he was as good as dead, even his habit of turning into a wolf seemed forgivable.

  The warders were halfway down the ladder when the lowest of them, the one with the whip, stopped, pointed, and shouted something indistinguishable over Carl's howl.

  Danielle followed the warder's gesture and saw Arenesol approaching.

  The elf looked like he was walking in a dream. His eyes never wavered from the guard tower. His always-smooth gait almost floated him toward the conflict.

  Holding onto the ladder with one hand, a warder fired a burst toward the elf.

  Arenesol staggered, then smiled and continued his approach.

  His was a brave but pointless gesture. Even if he made it to the tower, he'd be in no condition to help Carl. So why was he doing it? And why, now that he could see he couldn't help, didn't he turn and run? As Mike the Vampire had shown only a few minutes earlier, the magical could sometimes recover from wounds that would destroy a normal. Arenesol might live if he would just run away.

  Danielle found herself saying those words out loud. “Run away, fool. Run away."

  "Run, fool"

  It seemed like an echo, but it wasn't. Over the shouts and gunfire, she heard the elf's words as distinctly as if he'd been talking directly to her.

  But he wasn't talking to her—or himself. He was talking to Carl.

  Which meant—oh, shit.

  "Run, Carl. Bomb.” She screamed the warning at the top of her lungs.

  Arenesol heard her, tipped a sardonic two-fingered salute in her direction, wrapped an arm around one of the supporting legs of the tower, and smiled.

  Even from two hundred feet away, the explosion's overpressure shoved her to the ground. Her ears tingled but all sound seemed distorted, distant, and buried beneath a low roar that seemed to come from within her body rather than from the outside world.

  She pushed herself to her feet and looked at the crime scene.

  The three warders had vanished, blown from the tower like autumn leaves from a tree. The tower remained, but it was supported only by two of its legs now. The third was simply gone. A few of the looters, protected from the explosion by the guard tower or luck, gaped in shock. The wolf had vanished.

  As she watched, the damaged gun tower wobbled, straightened, then collapsed to the ground.

  Danielle staggered forward. It was her duty to do something. Frankly, duty was the farthest thing from her mind. Still, she headed toward the scene of destruction.

  She hadn't gone more than ten feet when she saw movement.

  A soft whine greeted her as she knelt beside the injured wolf.

  * * * *

  "So what do we do now?"

  Of the four of them, Mike the Vampire seemed to be in the best shape. Considering his condition the last time Danielle had seen him, that said something about both a vampire's ability to recover and about the state of the rest of them.

  She had only a vague memory of carrying two hundred pounds of wolf through the streets of the Dallas zone until she'd found Snori and Mike. They'd gone underground in a prairie-style frame house, apparently abandoned because it was too close to the zone border.

  Carl moaned, but said nothing.

  Snori flexed a powerful arm and muttered something about stopping a few more looters.

  Danielle slammed a fist into a built-in bookcase and then wished she hadn't. She hadn't recovered from the damage she'd taken in her fights. The explosion had only added to her general misery. She was just as happy there wasn't an intact mirror in the remnants of what had once been a house. She felt like a single bruise extended over her entire body.

  She gave herself a moment to wince, then glared at the others.

  "Oh, yeah. Going after the looters is a brilliant plan. Look where it's gotten us so far. Arenesol is dead. Carl is barely conscious. Mike would be dead if Snori hadn't opened up his own arteries and nearly bled to death himself. And what did we accomplish with all of that? We scared a couple of warders, threw some ears in the river, and blew up a guard tower. Well, big deal. The warders will come looking for revenge now, and they won't particularly care whether they find the people who did it. One impaired is as good as the next for their purposes."

  A week earlier, Mike's vampire smile would have chilled her to the bone. His extended canine teeth were still discolored by traces of the troll's blood. His normally pale lips were filled with the crimson flush of life.

  Even now a residual fear gibbered at the back of her mind—Vampire.

  She shook her head. A vampire had killed her mother. But that vampire had been her stepfather, not Mike. As far as she knew, Mike was as much a victim as her mother. She'd too long accepted the common wisdom that all of the impaired were evil. That none of them could be trusted. That they thought only of themselves and would sacrifice anything for continued life.

  The previous night, she'd seen an impaired whom she'd believed to be purely evil sacrifice himself to save Carl. She'd seen warders indiscriminately killing and looting. She couldn't go back to her old life, but where could she go? She didn't belong with the impaired and couldn't live with the normals and their lies. Mike reached out a calming hand, then stopped when Danielle involuntarily shuddered. Intellectually she was aware that this vampire was another victim. Her gut hadn't adjusted to that reality yet and she certainly wasn't ready to let him touch her.

  "You've got a point,” Mike agreed. “But Snori has a point too. We've got to do something."

  "You don't understand how Carl's work has transformed the zone, because you didn't see it before,” the vampire continued. “For these few months, we've had hope that we could create something special and unique and wonderful. But this riot will shake that belief. Another one, and everything will be destroyed. Unless we c
an stop the warders and their pet rioters, there won't be anything for us. And after what happened to the Tigers, there aren't going to be a lot of volunteers to escape."

  Danielle wanted to slap him down, to tell him that the rioters didn't belong to the warders. But the icy realization that she had been wrong, willfully blinding herself to the evil her own organization was doing, had descended over her. She'd dedicated her life to a lie. And now it was up to her to fix it.

  "Well, we can't eliminate the normals,” she reminded them.

  "We could.” Carl struggled to his feet, then sank into a dilapidated chair the home's owners had abandoned when they'd fled. His voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well. But at least it was comprehensible and not the pained babble he'd spoken while she staggered through the streets of Dallas.

  "What?” A war between normals and impaired would cause millions of casualties, but most of those casualties would be impaired. The warders had the numbers, the weapons, the training, and the strategic positioning to cripple any impaired attacks.

  "We could eliminate the normals,” Carl continued. His tone was neutral, as if he wasn't talking about the biggest genocide in the history of the world.

  "I don't know, boss.” Doubt filled the troll's voice. “Killing rioters is one thing. Slaughtering all them normals is something else. Lots of them are just kids. I don't think I could do that."

  Carl's laugh rattled in his chest. “Not kill them. Just make them not normal."

  "Are you talking about what I think you're talking about?” Mike the Vampire leaned closer to the Were. “Your cure, except in reverse?"

  "We've isolated the RNA sequence of the original virus and replicated it in the lab. I've run some vector tests. I think I could come up with a way to transmit it that wouldn't involve getting every normal to come in for a shot. With a few months of mass production we could blanket the world with a second return-of-magic plague.” Carl's voice grew stronger as he described a plan to eliminate violence against the zone by turning the entire world into a larger version of the zone. A world where vampires could walk freely, but where normal human life would be extinct.

  But it wouldn't be right.

  "That's not the answer, Carl,” Danielle insisted. She had lost her naive faith in the warders, but she hadn't abandoned her belief that the world could be made better—and not by massive murder or even the controlled introduction of a plague.

  Mike and Snori eyed her cautiously. She'd already beaten Snori in a fair fight. Mike hadn't even been one of the contestants in the martial arts competition. She thought she could take them both. But she didn't want to. She needed them on her side. She certainly needed Carl on her side.

  "Let's go back to Carl's original plan,” she urged. “We finish the cure to magic. But then we surprise everyone. We don't turn it over to the warders. We use it ourselves. Every zone in the world takes his drug at the same time. The next morning the world wakes up and finds that it was all a bad dream. The return of magic is over. We tear down the zone walls and walk out. All normal. All ready to reintegrate into normal life. It's the perfect solution."

  She stopped and looked at her three colleagues, waiting for, expecting, needing some sort of affirmation, of applause. This was the obvious and best answer. Certainly Carl would second her. After all, this had been his vision from the first.

  She didn't think that a vampire could pale, but Mike certainly looked as if he had. He shook his head, slowly at first, then with gathering speed. “No way, Danielle. I won't give this up. I wouldn't if I were the last magical in the universe."

  Carl struggled to stand, collapsed, then tried again, this time succeeding.

  "Mike is right, Danielle. My original plan was based on a paternalistic misunderstanding. The return of magic doesn't impair people, it enhances them. I've started to think that maybe the DNA is in us for a reason. The loss of magic, not it's return, was the problem. You can't ask the magical to give up the powers that make them who they are. Spreading the return of magic virus wouldn't be like a plague, it would be a gift."

  "That's ridiculous. Killing and drinking blood is no special enhancement, it's a disgusting impairment.” As was turning into a wolf when you made love. Danielle barely managed to hold herself back from adding that out loud, but even in her angry state, she knew that some things were best left unsaid.

  "We don't have to kill to drink blood,” Mike said. “You'll notice that Snori is still alive."

  "Snori weighs four hundred pounds. He could probably feed a dozen vampires. But I've seen what vampires do to normals. I never want to see it again."

  Mike leaned closer, deliberately putting one hand over hers. “You've got to let go of your pain, Danielle."

  She fought back the urge to yank her hand away from his. “So you're some kind of blood-sucker therapist now?” she mocked.

  "You know, that's kind of funny because he was a headshrinker until the magic cured him,” Snori told her. “Made good money at it. ‘Course everyone knows that the best shrinks are all crazy."

  "It is true that there isn't much of a job for a psychiatrist amongst the magical,” Mike said. “Carl's research is pretty convincing. The chemical imbalances that lead to schizophrenia and depression are simply missing in every magical being we've examined."

  Danielle knew better than that. “But—"

  Mike released her hand and shook his head. “You're right. A good number of magical are plain sociopaths. It turns out that the percentages are about the same as among the untalented. It's one thing that magic doesn't seem to cure."

  More of the basic underpinnings of Danielle's life were being torn away. She glanced at Carl who looked back at her, his eyes filled with hope. Despite the mistakes she'd made, he still had faith in her. With so much of her life a shambles, Carl's faith and certainty meant a great deal.

  "All right, that's enough talking. You two get out.” She gestured toward the door. “You go rustle up some food or something. I'll take care of Carl."

  Snori bristled, clearly wanting to protect the injured Were.

  "She's not going to hurt him,” the vampire told him. “Come on, I don't think Carl will thank you if you insist on staying."

  Danielle watched the two magical beings step from the room. They were completely unalike. Snori had leather-dark skin, moved like a lumbering elephant, and presented to the world a face with craters that would make the moon jealous. Mike had his perfect and pale vampire facade, a build so thin he looked like he would vanish in a stiff breeze, and a walk that seemed to float over the ground rather than ever set foot in one place. Still, the two both seemed content with their magical selves. The whole thing was a mystery to her—a mystery that she needed to solve but was afraid to touch.

  "I was starting to think they would never leave.” Carl snagged one of her hands and pulled her toward him.

  * * * *

  Danielle sobbed once, suppressed it, then buried her face in his chest.

  Well, she had good reason to be upset.

  Carl just failed to suppress his hiss of pain. What she'd meant as a comforting gesture had only caused more pain.

  A part of her wanted to back out of there and hide somewhere. But she'd been hiding from reality for too long without knowing it. She intended to start doing things differently.

  "What you did was brave and stupid,” she said.

  He nodded. “I won't disagree."

  "But I think you're right."

  He looked her in the eye. “What?"

  "It's obvious that the impaired have been given a raw deal, and that the warders have been lying about it."

  As they'd lied about so many other things.

  "I'm going to fight them, Danielle.” His low-spoken word held a promise harder than diamonds. “I knew Arenesol's little girls, and there's no way they deserved to die. And I'll fight you if I have to."

  "We already know what happens when you and I fight.” She hated to admit it, but he'd beaten her fair and
square. Not that she would ever let that happen again.

  "I caught you by surprise."

  She shook her head. “Snori told me what I did wrong, if you can believe that. I can't believe I thought he was stupid just because he's a troll."

  "He puts on a good act,” Carl said. He turned his head to the wall. Tuning her out. Or trying to. Danielle didn't intend to let him get away that easy.

  "Come on, Carl. You've got to talk about it."

  "About what?"

  She sighed, then slammed one fist against an open palm. “As if you didn't know. You've never killed anyone, Carl. Right? Before now, I mean."

  He shook his head slowly.

  "Then let me tell you a story from back when I was an intern.

  "A vampire had escaped the L.A. zone. He'd killed a couple of women and left another dying. It came down to him or me. He needed to be stopped and he'd certainly given up any right to expect mercy. But do you know what?"

  He leaned closer, stared into her eyes. “Tell me."

  She swallowed down the lump in her throat. This wasn't the time to get sappy. “I still see his face in my dreams. I wonder whether he had children who were waiting for him to come back. He was a killer. What Mike would call a sociopath. But he was a person and I killed him. I've wondered if there was something else I could have done. Some way to disarm him. I've had almost a year to get used to that. You've had what, six hours? You need to talk about it."

  He tried to turn away again but she grasped his head and held it. “Talk."

  "I didn't have to kill anyone."

  "Go on."

  He told her the entire story. His growing frustration. His sense of betrayal when he'd realized that Danielle had bugged him. And then the way that the warder had shot down that little elf girl, like she was a cockroach that had just skittered across his chocolate cake.

  Danielle nodded, asked a few questions to keep him talking, and kept his head cradled in her arms so that he had to look at her, letting him unveil a soul nearly as tortured as her own.

  He finished with his guilt at putting Mike in danger and getting Arenesol killed.