Authors: Carrie Vaughn
“All this for one guy?” I said in awe.
“I’m guessing they’re a little freaked out,” Ben said.
Tyler shook his head. “Stafford never understood us. He thought this was just like any other training—that we can turn it on and off, that we can control it, when it’s really the other way around, isn’t it?”
All the men in Gordon’s unit ever wanted to do was their job. Serve their country the army way, and all that. Now look where they’d ended up.
Then we were through and making our way along the road to the hospital. The escort Humvee swerved past us and led the way. Other than that, we didn’t see any other cars or people. No sign of life, whether because of the blizzard or the lockdown.
“Sir,” Tyler said to Ben, which was kind of odd. “You said you had a weapon?”
“Yeah, in the glove box.”
“May I?” Tyler asked.
He would make better use of it than either of us, assuming Walters showed up in a murderous rage and wouldn’t listen to us. Which was what everyone was apparently assuming would happen. I handed
the weapon, a matte-black semiautomatic pistol, to him grip first, along with the box of ammo.
“Be careful,” I said. “Silver bullets.”
The box felt warm, as if the silver was burning me through the plastic case. Tyler took the gun, ejected the magazine, and started inserting bullets into it—after wrapping his hand in a corner of his T-shirt. Even encumbered by the shirt, he loaded the gun with expert skill and speed. After he’d finished, he returned the box of remaining bullets to me, tucked the gun into the back of his waistband, and let his T-shirt fall over it. He gave a nod as if saying,
now I’m ready
.
“Can you really shoot your teammate if you have to?” I asked.
Tyler wouldn’t look at me. “We take care of our own. Last thing any of us want is to hurt anyone. What did you say at the start of all this—that if we couldn’t shape up then you’d pull the trigger on us?”
“That was a metaphor,” I said, frowning.
“I’m just taking responsibility,” he said, his voice flat.
We arrived at the hospital behind our escort. A dozen or so cars were parked in the lot—people who’d arrived before the lockdown and now were stuck. I was thinking worst-case scenario.
“Any ideas?” Ben said as we climbed out of the car. We had to squint into the wind blowing at us. Driving snow stuck my arms like needles. The two
soldiers climbed out of their Humvee and took up positions on the sidewalk outside the hospital’s main entrance, looking outward, rifles at the ready. I wondered how much Stafford had really told them about what to expect.
Tyler looked around. “We secure the perimeter—take a walk around the building and figure out if he’s been here yet. If he hasn’t, we go in and wait for him to show up. And if he has—we go in after him. How does that sound?”
My grin felt wry and stiff. “Sounds like a real military operation, sir.”
He glanced at our escorts, who nodded. I wondered if they’d done time overseas, they seemed so wary.
We moved forward at a careful pace—a hunting pace. Our chins up to take in the air, nostrils widening, we breathed. Mostly, the area smelled like exhaust, gun oil, and anxiety. Cold air stung my lungs. A sheen of icy mist covered my face, making my hair stick to my cheeks.
I caught the tang of blood, sharp, incongruous against the clean chill of the winter wind. Rich, heady—a treasure in this landscape, a promise of injured prey in hard times. Or so the Wolf thought. But I smelled a dead body. I bit my tongue to keep my mouth from watering and trotted ahead to the front door of the hospital. Ben and Tyler were right with me.
At some point this morning someone had tried to shovel the walks, leaving snow piled along the path. Since then, the storm had gotten the upper hand, sending drifts of snow sloping along the building. Recently, there had been a fight in front of the front door. Instead of a smooth plane of snow, there were trenches, rifts, snow kicked and swept aside. Not footprints as much as body prints, as though someone had charged through.
We found him a few feet off the sidewalk, facedown in a mound of snow that had been shoveled off the walk. Spatters of blood had sunk into the snow around him. They weren’t visible from the surface, which still looked clean, as if he’d just slipped and fallen. The guy couldn’t have been more than twenty or so. His black beret had been knocked off; his scalp showed through a pale crew cut.
I could smell that he was dead and quickly cooling. Putting a hand on his shoulder, I intended to turn him to see how he’d died, but I didn’t have to. His throat had been torn by something sharp and not very precise. Claws, teeth.
“What the—” one of Stafford’s soldiers exclaimed, peering over our shoulders.
Tyler stared down at him, lips pursed. Ben let out a sigh. I looked around. Wind had altered the tracks, making it harder to decipher what had happened. But I didn’t smell Vanderman. And the snow was only disturbed in one direction. I could almost see it:
this poor guy had been walking by on some other duty. He spotted a crazed maniac, probably naked in freezing weather, running across the sidewalk. He’d yelled at the guy to stop. Threatened, his target had run at him. The soldier may not even have had time to fire the handgun now lying in its own bed of snow nearby.
Tyler retrieved the pistol, slid back the chamber, then threw the gun away.
“He got shots off,” Tyler said. “But the bullets aren’t silver.”
I crouched in the snow and rested my hand gently on the soldier’s body, as if it mattered. Taking a careful, searching breath, I learned what I needed to and quickly moved away.
“It was him?” Tyler said. He must have been hoping for a different outcome.
I nodded. Walters’s scent was all over the body.
W
ALTERS, TRAILING
blood across the snow, had gone inside. No one else had come back out. He and Vanderman were still in the building.
“Where is he? Where is he now?” one of the escorts said swinging his rifle around.
Tyler glared at them. “You two—go back and tell Colonel Stafford that Walters is here, at the hospital.”
The pair hesitated. One was searching wildly for the unseen killer. The other was staring at the bloody body. Tyler touched this one on the arm. “Go on. Tell Stafford.” He spoke it like an order.
The soldier nodded, grabbed the other, and they ran back to the Humvee.
“Thanks,” I said, relieved. I’d started to worry that they would either shoot us—or that we’d have to rescue them.
“They’re safer this way,” Tyler said.
The three of us went inside the hospital and locked the door behind us.
The building was quiet. The cars in the lot meant that people must have been there, and while I could smell them, none were out and about. I hoped that meant they were safely locked away in rooms and offices. A heater vented somewhere, a distant hissing. We found stairs leading to the basement—I didn’t want us getting stuck in an elevator. Ben was at my side, face tight with concentration, looking all around us. He kept flexing his hands, as if feeling claws instead of fingers. Tyler walked behind us, turning to scan all directions, above and below in the stairwell.
Before we reached the downstairs level where Vanderman was being kept, a noise began to echo. The crunch of something metal breaking, the scuffle of a fight. Of a body smacking against tile. Then more quiet.
“Hoo, boy,” I muttered.
Slowly, I opened the metal door and emerged into the corridor.
Tyler stepped in front of me—
taking point,
the term was. He and Ben kept me between them, a protective shield, which was sweet, but made me growly because I couldn’t see past them very well.
“I don’t need bodyguards,” I said, stepping away from them to get some breathing room.
A tangy-sweet smell cut sharply through the
chilled air, stabbing from my nose to my brain, and lingering on the back of my tongue as a familiar taste. More blood, freshly spilled. The second time in ten minutes—we were too late.
Part of me wanted to leave—this was army business. Not our territory, not our fight. But it was—I’d promised to protect Walters, and he’d seriously overstepped his bounds. That meant he was also my responsibility. I should have stopped him, I should have stopped
this
.
Ben and I stood back to back, a natural defensive posture, as we scanned the area, looking for the body. Or bodies. Tyler ranged a couple of yards ahead, glancing down the hallway and back at us—scanning for danger, and looking to us for cues about what to do next.
The smell came from an intersection ahead. I approached it slowly, breathing deeply and listening, and turned right to follow the scent of blood.
We found the body a few feet in, hidden around the corner. In a white uniform, he might have been a nurse or an orderly. His blood streaked across the linoleum floor. I knelt beside him, started to turn him over, and got as far as seeing his ruined neck and face before letting him be. The muscles on my back twitched, Wolf growing in my awareness, listening for enemies, waiting for an attack. This time, I smelled both Walters and Vanderman among the blood.
“I assume that’s Vanderman,” Ben said. “Walters got him out.” He looked in the opposite direction I did, and his breathing quickened. The two rogues could be anywhere now.
“I’m assuming,” I said.
“I could have stopped this,” Tyler said. “I should have kept better track of Walters. I should have made sure none of us got out. We shouldn’t have—”
“Stop it,” I said. He lowered his gaze. But I knew how he felt—I was the one who argued to let Walters out in the first place.
“Kitty,” Ben said, whispering. “Can you really talk them down?”
A couple of Special Forces–trained werewolves on the loose? I had to shake my head. I didn’t think I could, not with blood spilled. I remembered Vanderman in his cell, endlessly pacing, glaring out at me, murderous and unrepentant.
“We’ve got the gun,” Tyler said. “We can take them.” He sounded bitter, but determined.
That somehow didn’t make me feel any better.
“Come on,” I said, and retreated back around the corner from the direction Walters and Vanderman were likely to come at us. I hoped it gave us a more defensible position. It would at least give us some warning before the two werewolves launched an attack. “We need backup for this.”
The soldiers should have contacted Colonel
Stafford, who would be here any minute now, but I wanted to make sure. Then I realized I didn’t have the first idea how to get ahold of Colonel Stafford. So I pulled out my cell phone and called Dr. Shumacher.
She answered before the phone had finished ringing. “Hello? Kitty?”
“Hi, Dr. Schumacher. I was wondering, could you give me Colonel Stafford’s phone number? I mean, if he even has a cell phone. Or if he has a secretary who has one. Or whatever.” My phone voice sounded like my radio voice, I realized—I came across far peppier than I was really feeling.
“Kitty, where are you, what’s happening, what’s going on?”
I hesitated a beat. “I expected Colonel Stafford would have called you the minute I showed up.”
“No, he didn’t,” she said, sounding frustrated. I couldn’t blame her for being put out. She probably thought she and Stafford were partners on equal footing. Stafford probably wasn’t thinking about her at all.
I sighed. “Fort Carson’s under lockdown. I managed to talk Stafford into letting us through because I thought I knew where to find Walters, and I was right.”
“He’s at the hospital,” Schumacher said. “He’s trying to release Vanderman.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He already has.”
“I should be there, I should have found a way there, this never should have happened.”
“Are you snowed in in Denver?”
“The news says it’s a storm of the century.”
“Hey, we usually get those every ten years or so,” I said. Ben was watching me, smirking—so I was still being too chipper. Tyler was braced like he was going to pounce on the first thing that came around the corner. He hadn’t drawn the gun yet. Maybe he wanted to do this with his bare claws. “Doctor, I need to get ahold of Stafford. I need to tell him what’s happening here.”
“I’ll call the colonel,” Shumacher said firmly, determined to be back in charge. I wanted to growl at her. That wasn’t what I asked, that wasn’t what I wanted to have happen.
“Doctor, how are you going to know what to tell him? You have no idea what’s going on here—”
“It’s my project. I’ll call him.” She hung up.
We were all going to die. I slammed my phone closed and shoved it back into my pocket. I didn’t want to think about what version of the story Shumacher was going to tell the colonel. He might just gas the place the place and call it a day.
“Someone needs to go outside and catch Stafford on the way in, tell him what’s happening,” I said.
Tyler said, “If we get to a land line we can call the front gate. They’ll be in radio contact.”
I smiled. “That’s so low tech it’s cool.”
“And in the meantime, we do what? Wait for our guys to stroll along and ask them to stop by for coffee?” Ben smelled twitchy, sweat breaking out despite the chill. He tapped his leg and looked like he was ready to start pacing.