Nightshatter

by L. E. Horn

  No sign of his phone, but I lucked out when my wulf eyes spotted mine among the tangled mess of my vet equipment. With a flash of regret about the loss of my previous life, I pulled my phone free and called the first number on speed dial.

  7

  “You were supposed to text.”

  Her voice offered me a welcome surge of normalcy. Sam had been waiting, primed for her enabling phone call, but I’d ended up with a distraction of my own. “We’ve had an accident. Garrett’s hurt.” I gave her the location. “It was deliberate, another mutant. I dealt with him, but he might have backup, I have to scout for it. Listen, they obviously know I’m infected. They might come after Josh and Peter . . .”

  “My dad, bro and sis just arrived. They’d be nuts to take us on now, unless they send an entire squad. But how would they know you’re infected?”

  “Good question, but they’ve changed from observation to elimination, and I don’t have time to assess this. I know you have to stay with Peter and Josh, but we need Doc Hayek out here stat and whomever Jason can send.”

  “Are you okay?” She used her professional voice, but I detected the vibration of concern.

  “I’m fine.” I hesitated. “Maybe send Chris to hold things here until help comes from the city.”

  Silence and an unspoken acknowledgment of what I was about to do. “Okay.”

  “I love you.” The words rolled out, born on the waning adrenaline and my fervent wish that things could be different.

  “I love you too,” she whispered and hung up.

  I pulled Keen’s blanket from the wreckage of my back seat, with a silent thank you that she hadn’t been with us, and walked around to where Garrett lay.

  “Is she sending help?”

  “Chris will come. And Hayek from the city.” I tossed the blanket over him. “Do you have your gun?”

  His eyebrows twitched. “How did you know I had a gun?”

  “It would be the best way to take me out, if I lost it.”

  He stared at me. “It was tucked in my waistband. Must’ve got tossed with the truck.”

  I didn’t have much time, but an injured Garrett would be helpless without a weapon. I searched through the scattered debris and found the gun near the front bumper.

  When I handed it to him, our gazes met. He’d seen me kill a mutant wulfleng and do a partial, both things I shouldn’t have been able to do. He might decide that I was better off dead.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  Garrett laid the gun on the ground beside him and glanced at me. “You’re putting that fool plan of yours into action, aren’t you?” He shook his head. “You’ll get yourself killed.”

  “Yeah, well, what do you think the board will order done with me once they know about the partials?”

  He tilted his head to look at me. “Is that what they are?” His eyes narrowed. “You don’t act insane. You’ve been in control the entire time.”

  “Right now, I am. But we don’t know how long it’ll last.” I clenched my hands into fists. “The only way forward is to get someone inside. I need you and Chris to do your best to convince Jason to leave me alone. I’ll find a way to contact you once I’ve got something useful.”

  Garrett pounded a fist into the ground. “If I wasn’t lying here in pieces, I would stop you.”

  I snorted. “You could try.” I met his eyes. “You and I both know that if they put me in that damned cage, I’m never getting out.”

  I saw the acknowledgment in his expression. He could still stop me—a bullet to the brain would do it. My eyes rolled to the gun.

  He pulled himself more upright and gasped as the movement jolted his leg. It didn’t stop him from talking at me though. “Do you realize that you might be the thing they’re trying to develop?”

  I looked at him but was only half listening. My brain was already miles away, setting goals. And I felt the first wave of exhaustion from the partials passing through me, making me break out in a cold sweat. I had to go.

  “Liam!” Garrett snapped at me, and I focused. “What you did—those claws, killing the mutant, lifting the goddamned truck—can you imagine an army of you? Capable of combining the best of both wulfan and human worlds, with the human in control. You’re what these people are trying to achieve. The ultimate soldier.”

  I stared at him as shock fizzed through me. “But it makes no sense. I look nothing like the mutants. Why am I different? Why can’t they all do what I do?”

  “I don’t know. But if you get recruited, be careful what you show them. Or you’ll end up on a dissecting table, and we won’t be able to find you.”

  I clenched my jaw and stepped away. But I worried about leaving him out here in the middle of nowhere.

  Garrett shook his head and waved at me. “If you’re going, then go. Find your answers and bring them back to us.”

  I let the wulf have me, taking the changes the rest of the way. In seconds, I ran on all fours around the accident scene in ever-wider circles.

  I found him half a mile from the accident site. A big man, but I caught his scent—wulfan. He was standing twenty feet into the field from where he’d parked his shiny new pickup truck, watching me come. Until I got closer, he must have thought it was his friend returning from his assigned task.

  When he realized I wasn’t the mutant he expected, he raised his hand, and I caught a glint of metal in the moonlight. I dodged, and the bullet slammed into the ground where I’d been.

  He fired off a series as he backpedaled toward the truck, keeping me pinned in a depression I’d crawled into. When the engine started, I rose and went after him, but he swung the truck onto the gravel and gunned it.

  I didn’t even try to pursue. At least Garrett should be safe until Chris came. With a shake of my shaggy head, I took off like an arrow for home.

  Chris would be only a half hour behind me. At home I jumped into the shower and scrubbed the wulf off my skin. With the water running over me, I extended one claw on my index finger and probed the muscle from my neck to my shoulder. When I felt the bump, I braced myself. It wasn’t easy cutting oneself, and I had to detach myself from the process before I began. I grunted in pain and followed it up with a hiss as I extracted the tracker from the blood and tissue, then dropped it down the drain.

  The cut could use a stitch, but I didn’t have the time. I dried off and slapped on some gauze. I dressed in the stained, threadbare jeans I used for helping Peter around the yard plus a tee shirt with holes in it destined for the rag bin. Quick digging unearthed a hoodie in a similar state of disrepair and a down vest with feathers puffing out of a rip in the side. My old running shoes finished the ensemble to my satisfaction.

  My spare cash jar, hidden in the back of my cupboard, yielded two hundred dollars. I shoved the money in my jeans pocket, granola bars in my vest, and contemplated my ID, deciding to take it with me for now. I could always dump it.

  A glance at the time made me grimace. Jason’s crew coming from the city would take a little longer, but Chris would almost be at Garrett now. My eyes fell again to my watch. It had been a present from Peter, and expensive, with my name engraved on the back. With a sigh, I removed it. I took it to the corner drawer, where my mother’s box of pencils lived. I set the watch down inside and stared at the old box’s inlaid wood. For the first time, I would be leaving these things behind.

  I closed the drawer. Perhaps someday I would be back for them.

  I grabbed the spare keys to Peter’s truck and walked out of the door.

  * * *

  I left Peter’s truck, full of granola bar wrappers and my ID, in a mall parking lot at the end of Main Street before hopping a bus headed for the city center. Despite eating every granola bar I’d brought with me, exhaustion dogged me as I stepped off the bus. My body would give me only so much time before I collapsed. Even though I’d become adept at changing bits of me without losing track of the return to human, the true risk surfaced when everything was over. Sam had drilled it i
nto me—my body used all its resources to perform the impossible. The granola should stave off the worst, but I desperately needed to sleep. I knew from bitter experience that the streets were never benign for the vulnerable, and if I didn’t find a good spot to spend the night, I could become a statistic. So I searched for safe harbor as my feet carried me back in time.

  Large sections of Winnipeg’s downtown core had retained the historic buildings of one hundred years before. I walked past the polished business center surrounding the famous Portage and Main intersection. Just south of me, at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, was the glittering Forks Market. Continue across the bridge, and you ventured onto residential roads lined with majestic elms that arched over the pavement. But in the other direction, a few streets north of the historic Old Market Square, the seedy side of downtown peeked through. The buildings sagged above crumbling foundations and dirt gathered in the nooks and crannies. The farther north and east I traveled, the grittier things became, and I soon rubbed shoulders with people whose eyes were empty when they looked at you.

  Not all of the history I drifted past was made of stone and concrete. Since I’d turned wulfleng, my sense of smell, even when in two-legged form, had sharpened. The shadows stank of dampness, urine, and refuse. The odors carried me back in time, to when I was fifteen and living on the streets.

  Getting there had been a choice, although it didn’t seem so at the time. The foster system had its share of good, hard-working people, but most of the time it wasn’t the workers or the parents that were the problem. Kids ended up in the system through tragic circumstances, and life taught them early how to survive.

  For many, survival meant ensuring one’s place in the social hierarchy. I remembered with perfect clarity the foot plowing into my ribs, two boys holding me down while another used fists and feet to prove he was the dominant force in the household. The rules were simple—avoid the face, anything else was fair game.

  I knew the rules too. If I failed to outwit them and couldn’t outfight them, there were few options. In the early years, I called for help, but I’d learned help led to an increase in midnight beatings, or worse, being moved to a new foster home. Where it often began all over again. I’d lived in fourteen residences over my twelve years in the system, and even though most parents tried hard to provide a home for us, each situation was a new struggle. If the foster parents discovered the conflicts, the troublemakers got booted to a new home. In my experience, the squeaky wheel was usually the one getting the boot.

  I took my last beating when I was fifteen. The other kid was seventeen, already big, and close to aging out of the system without any prospects. There wasn’t anything to do but curl myself into a ball and take it. Just lie there and breathe through the pain. In that moment, I decided that any life would be better than this. So, the next day, when I was supposed to be at school, I packed a small bag, which included the only remnant of my real family, my mother’s box of pencils. And I left for a life on the streets.

  I quickly discovered surviving on the streets meant an even steeper learning curve. Somehow, through a combination of swift footwork, determination, and sheer luck, I avoided the traps faced by many kids. I walked among those who understood my situation because almost half had lived it—they’d escaped conflict or violence at home, just like me. It helped that Winnipeg’s extreme climate meant there were lots of support organizations. I spent months on the streets, eating and sometimes sleeping at shelters, until a counselor reconnected me with my social worker. She found me a family who pushed me to set up a future and made sure I completed school and had access to funding for university. I owed those people my life.

  It was a life currently in jeopardy, if I couldn’t find a safe place to spend the night.

  Old habits came back with a rush. I slumped beneath my hoodie, rarely making eye contact. The dirt I’d rubbed on my face and clothes helped me to blend in, as did my furtive demeanor. These were people with secrets who paid a heavy toll in the keeping of them, and many turned to drugs or alcohol to forget, at least for a few precious hours.

  It was late, and the shelters would be full. So I took a chance on being arrested over getting stabbed. I walked until I reached the fringes of the usual homeless beat and tucked myself into an alcove off a dark alley. I shivered in the spring chill but fell asleep within moments. I was stiff, sore, and cold come morning, but alive.

  I knew the enforcers searched for me, but they had no reason to think I’d be living on the streets, not when I had money—though I wasn’t sure how Jason would roll on this. If he was determined to keep me from my plan, he would send his enforcers into the homeless population to look for me. I had no idea what Jason’s city crew looked like, so I used my sense of smell as much as I could. My human abilities were limited, and if they were as good at hiding their wulf as Chris or Peter, I might end up standing right beside them. I needed my wulf nose in my human face. So I practiced in a gas station bathroom mirror, enhancing it without making unnatural external changes. I found a compromise with a larger, broader, human version lined with the olfactory receptors of the wulf, and it altered my features. I stared at my reflection in shock.

  Holy crap. I can change my appearance.

  I emerged from the gas station with a brow like a Neanderthal and a jaw to match. It was a bit unsettling—what if I had difficulty returning to my default self? Partials involved tapping into and channeling strong emotions like anger. Maintaining them took energy and focus. If I lost either, my body tried to take me to full wulf or back to human. It might try to do both and achieve neither—that was the risk.

  Even the thought of it made me shudder.

  So I found myself in another public bathroom. I transformed my face back to normal and enhanced the nose just enough to give me a better sense of smell. I would have to let it go before I slept, and redo it once awake, but it wasn’t a huge modification. Although it wasn’t likely the recruiting organization knew what I looked like, the enforcers would be given a description of me. So I did the one thing that wouldn’t be a permanent drain on my resources—I grew hair. It cost me to grow it, but once there, it cost nothing to keep it. I covered my head in an unruly mop and rubbed it until it was a tangled mess. Like many blonds, my hair had a wide variety of hues. By concentrating on growing out the hair most sheltered from the sun, it ended up looking much darker than usual. It helped that my beard was normally more brown than blond. In the end, I hardly recognized the face staring back at me from the mirror. The enforcers wouldn’t find me based on looks alone.

  Satisfied with my disguise, I spent Friday reacquainting myself with homeless life. I started by buying a cheap bottle of booze and sharing it with a new friend on a street corner. He had an ancient dog with him, covered with a blanket and lying on an old quilt to protect its joints from the concrete.

  “I like your friend,” I said.

  “Been together since I found ’im as a shiverin’ pup in an alley,” he said, accepting my offer of the bottle. His tone was friendly, but the dark eyes remained wary.

  I observed the strong bond of affection between the two. This man gave everything he had to keep his old friend comfortable and safe. My heart ached as I thought of Keen. Did she fret about my absence?

  “You look after him well,” I noted. There were many pets in privileged households who longed for this kind of attention.

  “We look after each other,” he replied with a nod.

  I promised myself that if I ever returned to life as a vet, I would donate time to those who couldn’t afford care for their furry best friends. Everyone deserved to experience the soul-strengthening magic of connecting to another living being, whether it walked on two legs or four.

  As we traded stories, I spilled more alcohol on me than I swallowed, so by the end of the day I reeked—check off one point for cheap wulf disguise. I left the dog man with the bottle and ate with my fellow homeless at Siloam Mission on Princess. Afterward, I drifted over to the Sa
lvation Army locations on both Logan and Henry, checked out The Main Street Project on Martha Street, the Union Gospel Center, and the Andrews Family Center. Many offered meals, some beds. Some had sign-in sheets at the front door. I used the name Lee Hunt. One of the workers told me about a new digital system designed to track the homeless by linking the shelters’ sign-in systems. Considering how many of these people preferred anonymity, was it successful? I had to appreciate their point of view.

  I wandered the streets, slipping into my old routine with ease. Which was the true me: the animal doctor or the streetwise foster kid? I guess I’m kinda both. Until this moment, I hadn’t realized how much of my past still lived within me. I moved between the groups, saying little but keeping my ears and eyes open. They saw me as a stranger and therefore not to be trusted. I called on the instincts honed by my youth, when I’d become an expert at judging humans pushed to the brink of survival.

  The patterns were familiar. During the day, most homeless searched for food or the oblivion of drugs or booze. By evening, their demeanor and energy changed, and the focus switched to surviving another night—they either found shelter or a place to hide.

  I figured if someone was recruiting people off the streets, it was most likely happening at night, in a place where people gathered. So I spent Friday night under the Norwood Bridge, hunched against concrete, listening to and observing the passage of people around me. Nearby, the Forks Market gleamed with shiny glass windows and swept paving stone paths, casting glittering reflections into the swirling waters of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. Closer to the beautiful Provencher Bridge’s suspension cables was the Human Rights Museum, an odd bit of architecture. Only feet away were those in need of those basic rights.

  Tonight, in May, the temperature was not an issue. But the same conditions that make it easier for the prey also enable those who hunt them. As I sat with my arms wrapped around my legs, my head cushioned on my knees, I noticed a few men prowling through the scattered people bedded down for the night—predators but mid-rank at best, pushy without being outright dangerous. Grouped for intimidation, three approached me. I pretended not to notice, but I watched them from the shadows of my hood.