Fatal Moon

by L. E. Perry

  Carl put a third slide under the eyepiece, “I’m training you. Look again.”

  Jordan placed an eye against the eyepiece and looked. "What's this?" he asked.

  "That's yours, the plain stuff."

  "Oh. Good looking blood, if I do say so myself."

  "Yes – that's what the other two should look like." Carl switched back, giving Jordan a start. He'd still been looking in the eyepiece and the rapid rotation was disorienting.

  "Hmmm. This has to be your old blood, with the broken cells, I assume.”

  “Apparently you can be trained.”

  Jordan gave a disgusted snort. “So, what's the deal, then? It all looks just like the pictures on the computer."

  "But it shouldn't. I mean… my old blood… my new blood… the wolf's." Carl lifted his hands in the air, and huffed out a breath of exasperation.

  "But you already knew it would, didn't you?"

  Carl's folded his arms across his chest. "I don't know what I expected."

  Jordan leaned over the microscope again. "What about this other kind in yours. This is yours?" he looked up.

  Carl responded affirmative, walking over to Jordan.

  "Well, this looks like a crossover sample. The new sample has the well-rounded yellow ones like the wolf's, but I also see broken cells."

  "Let me see that!" Jordan moved aside as Carl leaned over the microscope. "Damn. You're right. When did that show up?"

  Jordan was silent for a moment. "But then… "

  Carl looked at the wall, lost in his thoughts. "Does it explain the rapid healing? Is it going away? How long have I got?"

  Jordan's head whipped around abruptly. "Did you check your weight?"

  "Not tonight, but the doc checked it this morning. I… I've gained a couple of pounds back… "

  Jordan's eyes widened a fraction. "And you've been eating and working out all day, right? Mainly eating, I hope."

  "Yes, I have. And I've been doubling my usual limits on the weights."

  Jordan frowned. "You should have mentioned that earlier. Shit, yesterday you were hardly able to lift what I’d assigned you.”

  Carl grimaced. "I’ve had a lot of information to sift through since we got back home, and this bloodwork has me totally baffled, questioning what I’m seeing even, which is why I need your eyes right now."

  "Well, why don't we get back to the basics for a moment and check your weight?"

  Carl allowed himself to be pulled down the hallway, and stepped onto the scales in the weight room gingerly. Jordan marked it down slowly and looked at the measuring tape.

  Jordan checked and marked for the next several minutes. "You're up by five pounds compared to the same time yesterday. What the fuck?"

  "And I've had tons of energy, all day long, like I used to have. Maybe I'm getting over it… "

  "Think you'll stop turning into a wolf, then?"

  "I guess we'll see in a few weeks."

  Jordan was still thinking about the microscope. His curiosity fought with his pride, which lost. "Can I look at those slides again?"

  "Sure." They went back to the lab, where Carl started pacing.

  Jordan slid onto the stool, leaning over the microscope. He stared at the slide for a while, then looked up. Carl was still pacing, so Jordan picked up a slide sitting to the left of the microscope and slid it into position. "Wait! What's this?" He continued peering into the eyepiece.

  Carl looked over at him. "What's what?"

  "The slide to the left of the microscope."

  "Oh, that. That's a slide I ruined, your blood and mine mixed."

  Jordan jumped up in horror. "That's my blood?" he cried.

  "No. I told you, my blood's in there. Don't worry, you're not infected."

  "No, that's not what it looks like. You look at it."

  Puzzled, Carl walked over and looked into the eyepiece. It was several seconds before he said anything. "Are you sure this was the slide to the left of the microscope?"

  "That's where I got it. Are you sure that's the slide with both our blood?" Jordan tried to control his lurching stomach as he realized that, even if only on the slide, his blood had mingled with Carl's.

  "Yes." Carl looked around the edge of the eyepiece to check the end of the slide, where he had used a pencil to scrawl several letters. "I marked it C, then circled the C and crossed it out." He looked at the slides on the plate that the eyepiece sat over. "See, this one is the wolf's, this is yours, this is mine, and this is… ours." He looked up at Jordan.

  "You're sure?" Jordan looked hopefully at him. Carl nodded, and Jordan chewed his thumbnail, still feeling rather ill. "But… "

  "I know. It looks just like the wolf’s, and just like the new one used to. Not a single flat or broken cell to be found."

  Jordan blew out the breath he discovered he'd been holding. He started chewing his nail again, and it got on Carl's nerves.

  "Would you stop that?" Carl snapped irritably.

  Jordan looked up innocently. "What?"

  "Chewing your nails. It’s like scraping your fingernails on a blackboard."

  Jordan put his hands on the counter behind him and leaned against them, crossing his ankles. "Well, you want to try and do that again?"

  "Good idea." Carl retrieved the ampoule of Jordan's blood from the refrigerator and set it in a stand, then pulled out another slide from a drawer. He rinsed the slide and let it air dry in a slide rack while preparing his finger.

  It gave Jordan the creeps to see his blood sitting on the counter and Carl preparing to bleed himself again, so he decided to go upstairs.

  His voice trailed back down the stairway. "Want some coffee?"

  Carl yawned. "Thanks for the reminder, mate. Now, you better get me some or I'll fall asleep."

  "Right." Jordan was almost to the kitchen when a thought occurred to him. He turned around and went up the next set of stairs, then tapped quietly on Diana's door. There was no answer, so he tapped louder. Still no answer. He raised his hand to knock, then thought better of it and went downstairs to make some coffee.

  For the next two hours Jordan made several large pots of coffee and Carl tried to reproduce the effect, but it didn't work. He looked up at Jordan finally. "No go. There's something different in this batch of blood."

  Jordan scowled. "You're not gonna make me give blood again, are you?"

  Carl had to stifle a grin. "Tell you what – let me re-puncture your finger and I'll give you an extra week off after this is over."

  Jordan considered. "With or without the truck?"

  "Christ. That truck is going to be the death of me." Carl moaned. "Okay, I'll throw in the truck."

  Jordan felt better. It was as if things were going to be normal again someday, and considered visiting his mom again soon, and Kira. To avoid having Carl do it, he pricked his own finger and shed several drops of blood onto a slide. Carl added a few drops of his own blood after setting the computer up to record the results. Carl stared at the monitor for several minutes, but nothing happened.

  “Let’s give it some time,” Carl said.

  Jordan nodded, and went to the kitchen to get the coffee. When he came back, Carl played back a recording for him, and he watched as the flat yellow cells knit themselves back together and inflated to become fat yellow cells. Carl looked over at Jordan as he took a swig of coffee.

  Jordan leaned back against the counter with trepidation. "What does that mean?"

  Carl's face wore a troubled expression as he answered, "I need another sample."

  "We are not poking my finger again, dammit!" Jordan swore. Every cut he had – every time he bled – brought him closer to contracting this bizarre curse that Carl had.

  "No, I'm not," Carl answered steadily.

  "Then what?"

  "Your arm. The only other thing I can figure is the refrigeration. I need to get enough to do another one fresh, and a second refrigerated from the same blood, to se
e if that’s the difference."

  Jordan looked sick. "So, refrigerate a slide… "

  Carl shook his head. "The reaction has already occurred on the slide. I need your blood again."

  "Why mine?" Jordan clutched his elbows.

  "Because it works." Carl looked at Jordan's arms, considering where to place another needle.

  Jordan shook his head. "Do you have any idea why it works?"

  "Not yet. Give me your arm."

  Jordan realized he'd just heard the front door open and close again. He used the excuse to go upstairs, his shoulders still shuddering at the thought of their mingling blood. Diana was taking tall leather boots off her bare legs, her cloak wound loosely around her.

  He’d lost track of her, but he’d been with Carl, and now he knew right where she was, for the moment.

  "Coffee?" He watched her eyes, carefully.

  She nodded, and went upstairs. Jordan caught her putting contacts in the upstairs bathroom as he brought her a cup. He’d continue to find excuses to check on her until she slipped up. The door was open and she turned to him, one eye blue and one eye brown. It was eerie. Obviously, she used blue contact lenses; it made her very strikingly attractive, but it wasn’t real. The real Diana was the darker one, he thought.

  Chapter 19 – Reasserting Dominance

  Luke scanned the hillside where wide tire tracks disappeared into the tree line. According to the brief news clips he’d seen, this pack of feral lupanthri had to be the source of the reports of wolf-cattle incidents that had the local people up in arms. He’d been very clear with them, more than once, that they were free to live in this area for as long as they could keep their presence entirely secret, according to the primary law of lupans. He had been quite clear that any wolf sightings would be immediate grounds for withdrawal of permission, and possible eradication of the pack, as always.

  The mechanic had turned out to be another dead end, and he was close enough to this pack location that he figured he’d better check in now while it would only take a few minutes. Sarah, his contact in this pack, had told him that her sister had attacked a human, and the pack had responded by executing her for her folly, but then they’d refused to take responsibility for the cub, against law and common sense. She had deftly maneuvered them into shifting their territory enough that she could watch over him while he was in wolf form, but without the pack, she could do no more and had sent a message to Luke to come help the boy several months ago. He had used the opportunity to teach Dwayne, his protégé, how to receive and respond to reports of mutinous behavior, as well as teaching him about the crystal skulls, but Dwayne was turning out to be insufficient for the job. Once again, the skills he looked for in the ranks just didn’t seem to be turning up in the population. He shrugged off the weariness that always followed this observation, and got back to the task at hand.

  He had to tread carefully where mutiny was concerned, but he needed to talk to Sarah, and find the boycub if he could. His stomach felt sick as he watched for any movement in the trees. He hated to face the possibility of executing pack leaders, and was angry with them for putting him in such a position, but the existence of the entire species required absolute adherence to the laws given to them by their masters. Obey or die; sometimes eliminating those who couldn’t fall in line was the only way to save the rest of them.

  He rotated his position so that his left hip was under him rather than his right. Where were they? They weren’t cave dwellers, and he was nearly on top of them. He should at least hear something, someone moving around in the woods somewhere, bringing wood in or some other endless homestead chore. He didn’t want to go into the woods without seeing at least a few of them first. He was a cunning old wolf with sharp senses, but even a cub could get lucky occasionally, and he hadn’t grown to be so old by letting his guard down. He watched a hawk hunting small game. It came soaring from behind an outcropping of rock and circled the meadow between him and the dark forest on the other side of the clearing. Minutes passed by, but Luke’s attention remained on the spaces in between the trees, looking for the slightest shift in the shadows that would betray a living creature. There was nothing, though, and eventually, he had to shift his position slightly, once again, as he continued to watch. Rome wasn’t built in a day, no one knew that better than himself, and miscreants were rarely caught in an hour. It chafed him that he must sit here and wait when the clock was ticking on the werewolf hunter and the cub that he would have to execute as well.

  In addition to basic responsibilities, the pack should also be scanning the area at night to determine all life forms for many miles around them, and here was the loner, apparently living in a building by himself, and a hunter, or cryptoclast as they called themselves, right in the heart of their territory. He wasn’t sure which was worse. Every single time that boy interacted with humans was a chance for information to leak, and those leaks could snowball. If the human population became aware of the existence of lupans, it was all over when the overlords returned to check on their creations. Luke had fought too hard and too long to see all his people die.

  Luke brought his focus back to the trees once again. He had to fight for his concentration every moment, these days. He was a bit out of sorts from losing the crystal skull, and bad news on top of bad news was making him very irritable. He took a moment to still his mind, breathing gently; in… out… in… out… and refocused on the spaces between the trees, watching for movement. The slightest change in the fall of the light. His nose sifted all the scents around him, but the air was very still today.

  The hawk suddenly dove on a patch of grass, then rose back into the sky. A miss. Nothing was going right for anyone today, it seemed. He had to mull over the scent he’d caught while moving toward the ferals. She had brought them near enough the boy that he’d caught his scent, a sick odor of a failed transformation, the type that would kill the boy in the end. What was the loner doing in that big stone building that looked like a house? He should not exist at all unless he’d been vetted and adopted, but there he was, by himself, and he smelled morbidly ill.

  The sick ones had to be shown the mercy of swift death. Letting such creatures live tempted fate, and they could be turned to dark purposes and adopted by the vampiric blood drinkers who defied the law in the dark corners of cities, far from the forests that the packs had to inhabit. The fact that the boy was alone in the woods was probably a good defense against that, but he would die a wasting death that no one should have to experience soon enough. No werewolf had ever safely survived more than half a year once the wasting began, except by consuming human blood, and that was something Luke would never allow. It turned a lupan; once a hybrid broke the instinctive taboo against consuming human flesh or blood, other laws fell, and soon their superior powers were controlled by nefarious motivations.

  Where were the damned ferals? Luke shifted his weight one more time, then caught the slightest movement through the trees to the right. That was it; a woman was walking through the underbrush and into the field. She wore a plaid shirt and faded jeans, with leather work boots. She looked around, then lifted a hand to place a blue and green stem in the crook of a tree. It was clearly a stalk of purplish-blue flowers, each tipped with white. A safe signal, then. That was a form of lupan, one of many signals used to message silently, from a distance, without the need to be present. He tilted his head up and gave a quiet call into the air; not a full-blown wolf howl, he didn’t want to alert anyone beyond the clearing. She stopped, and looked straight at him, then walked back into the woods. He soon heard her coming through the brush behind him, and turned to see her walk quietly through the brush.

  “Are you safe?” He whispered, and she nodded.

  “They’re assembling. I’ve been trying to get them to take responsibility for this youngling for months, and they have finally decided to follow the law. I don’t know if they’ve figured out that you’re in the area, but they certainly couldn’t deny their responsibility
when I had to report that a cryptoclast has joined him, and is living right under his roof. I don’t know if she plans to kill him, or what, but she’s far too close for us to ignore. They’re gathering their guns, making a plan, and they’ll leave any minute to go kill them both.”

  “Faex! The hunter is in his house? The damned fools, they let this go too long. Finally they do what would have saved me the trip. They should know the law is not an arbitrary inconvenience. Follow the law or die!”

  “They don’t see you often enough. You are gone from us for so long, sometimes they wonder if you are still alive, even. They think perhaps we’re alone, perhaps we need to make new laws. They don’t understand.”

  She was right about that. A leader must be seen occasionally, or anarchy would encroach upon the outskirts of his rule. It frustrated him that he had to act as a dictator, but the truth was that he was one of just a few lupans old enough to remember the last time the overlords came down from the heavens, as they did once every 500 years or so. He remembered with grief the decimation that ensued as they brought their creatures back into alignment with the laws, to the degree that the species had strayed from them.

  “I cannot be everywhere on this entire earth at once. I am trying to find skilled and willing assistants who can lead and regulate, but technology is wreaking havoc with attention spans, and this job takes relentless focus. My latest protégé should have had this under control. I could use you, Sarah, if you would step up—”

  “Stop it. I’m not leaving Joe, and I don’t want that kind of responsibility. I don’t even like having to take the lead on this problem.”

  Luke shook his head. “You have the traits of a good alpha—”

  “But I’m not one! This argument is old, Remy, and I need to get back to my pack. Tell me what you need from me, then tell me what you will do. I deserve, at least, to know if there will be death.” Sarah called Luke by his true name – the one he’d been born with twenty-eight hundred years ago. Only those closest to him knew this name, and she was one of them. Sarah was his strongest ally here in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. He had known her all her life.