Moon Called (4 page)

“Ask her?” Short-hair looked sympathetic. “She kept you here for us. She's one of us, kid. How else do you think we found you?”

Mac smelled of shock first, then defeat. Emotions have a smell, but only in my coyote form is my nose good enough to distinguish more than the strongest feelings. My lips curled back over my teeth—I don't like liars, especially when they are lying about me.

The werewolf's voice was dreamy. “When the moon comes, you can't stop the change.” He swayed back and forth. “Then you can run and drink the fear of your prey before they die beneath your fangs.”

Moonstruck
, I thought, shocked out of my anger. If this wolf was so new that he was moonstruck, he certainly wasn't Adam's, and whoever had sent him out was an idiot.

“I'm not coming,” said Mac, taking a step away from them. He took another step back—putting his back against the bus. He stiffened, drew in a deep breath, and looked around. “Mercy?”

But neither of the men paid attention when Mac caught my scent. The werewolf was still held in his moon dreams, and the human was drawing his gun.

“We tried to do this the easy way,” he said, and I could smell his pleasure. He might have tried the easy way first, but he liked the hard way better. His gun was the kind you find in military catalogues for wanna-be mercenaries, where what it looks like is at least as important as how well
it performs. “Get in the car, kid. I'm packing silver bullets. If I shoot you, you'll be dead.” He sounded like a thug from a fifties gangster movie; I wondered if it was deliberate.

“If I get in the car, I'll be dead anyway, won't I?” Mac said slowly. “Did you kill the other two who were in the cages by me? Is that why they disappeared?”

None of them had noticed that the werewolf was starting to change, not even the werewolf himself. I could see his eyes gleaming brightly in the darkness and smell the musk of wolf and magic. He growled.

“Quiet,” snapped the human, then he looked. He paused, swallowed, and turned his gun, ever so slightly, toward his erstwhile partner.

As a human, the werewolf probably weighed in at about two hundred pounds. Werewolves, fully changed, weigh upward of two hundred and fifty pounds. No, I don't know where the extra weight comes from. It's magic, not science. I'm a little large for the average coyote—but that meant that the werewolf was still five times my weight.

I'd been trying to figure out a way to turn my speed to advantage, but when the werewolf, his elongating jaws stretching around sharp, white fangs, focused on Mac and growled again, I knew I'd just run out of time.

I threw myself off the top of the car and onto the werewolf, who was still slowed by his ongoing change. I snapped at him to get his attention and caught his throat, still barren of the thick ruff designed to protect him from such an attack.

I felt my eyeteeth snag flesh, and blood spurted, pushed by his heart and the increased blood pressure that accompanies the change. It wasn't a mortal wound—werewolves heal too fast—but it should slow him down, giving me a head start while he bound the wound.

Only he didn't stop.

He was hot on my heels as I dashed past Stefan's bus, across the alley that allowed access to my garage bays, and leapt over the chain-link fence surrounding the Sav U More Self-Storage facility. If he'd been in full wolf form,
he'd have cleared the fence easier than I did, but he was hampered by his awkward shape and had to stop and tear through the fence instead.

Spurred by hunting-rage, he was faster than I was, even on two legs. He shouldn't have been. I've outrun my share of werewolves, and I knew I was faster than they were; but no one had told him that. He was catching up to me. I jumped back over the fence because it had slowed him down the first time.

If there had been homes nearby, the impatient, frustrated whines the werewolf made as it was forced to stop and rip the chain-link fence again would have had the police on their way, but the nearest residences were blocks away. The thought reminded me that I needed to worry about innocent bystanders as well as Mac and myself.

I reversed my direction, running down the road back toward the garage, intent on leading the werewolf away from town rather than into it. But before I reached the garage, my pursuer tripped and fell to the street.

I thought at first that the change had taken him completely, but no werewolf rose on all fours to continue the chase. I slowed, then stopped where I was and listened, but all I could hear was my heart pounding with fear.

He was almost finished with the change, his face entirely wolf though his fur had not yet begun to cover him. His hands, lying limply on the blacktop, were distorted, too thin, with an inhuman distance between his fingers and his thumb. His nails were thickened and had begun to come to a point at the tips. But he wasn't moving.

Shaking with the need to run, I forced myself to approach him. I waited for him to jump up and grab me the way they always do in the late-night movies, but he just lay there, smelling of blood and adrenaline.

A trail of liquid stretched out behind him as if he were a car that had blown a radiator hose and slung antifreeze all over the road—but the liquid that glistened under the streetlamp was blood.

Only then did it occur to me that I did not hear the thrum of his heart or the whisper of his breath.

I heard a car start up and took my eyes off the werewolf in time to see the black SUV squeal out of the parking lot and turn toward me. The big car wobbled as the driver fought his speed and his turn. His headlights blinded me momentarily—but I'd already seen my escape route and took it blind.

He slowed a minute, as if he considered stopping by the body on the street, but then the V-8 roared, and the SUV picked up speed.

He narrowly avoided hitting the lamppost I'd dodged behind. I couldn't tell if Mac was in the car or not. I watched the SUV's taillights until it turned onto the highway and blended in with the traffic there.

I walked to the werewolf just to be certain—but he was well and truly dead.

I'd never killed anyone before. He shouldn't have been dead. Werewolves are hard to kill. If he had bothered to stanch the wound, or if he hadn't chased me, the wound would have healed before he could bleed out.

The taste of his blood in my mouth made me ill, and I vomited beside the body until the taste of bile overwhelmed anything else. Then I left him lying in the middle of the road and ran back to the garage. I needed to check on Mac before I took on the task of dealing with the dead werewolf.

To my relief, Mac was leaning on Stefan's van when I loped into the parking lot. He held a gun loosely in his hand, the barrel bent.

“Mercy?” he asked me, when I approached, as if he expected me to talk.

I ducked my head once, then darted around the front of the garage where I'd left my clothes. He followed me. But when I shifted back, and he saw that I was naked, he turned his back to let me dress.

I pulled on my clothing quickly—it was cold out. “I'm decent,” I told him, and he faced me again.

“You have blood on your chin,” he said, in a small voice.

I wiped it off with the bottom of my T-shirt. I wasn't going shopping tonight, so it didn't matter if I got blood on my clothes.
Don't throw up again,
I told myself sternly.
Pretend it was a rabbit.
It hadn't tasted like rabbit.

“What are you?” he asked. “Are you one of theirs? Where is . . . is the wolf?”

“He's dead. We need to talk,” I told him, then paused as I collected my scattered thoughts. “But first we need to get the dead werewolf out of the street. And before that, I guess we should call Adam.”

I led him back to the office—this time turning on the light. Not that either of us needed it for anything other than comfort.

He put his hand on top of mine when I reached for the phone. “Who is Adam, and why are you calling him?” he asked.

I didn't fight his hold. “The local Alpha. We need to get the body out of the road—unless you want both of us disappeared into some federal laboratory for science to pick over for a few years before they decide they can learn more from us dead than alive.”

“Alpha?” he asked. “What's that?”

He
was
new.

“Werewolves live in packs,” I told him. “Each pack has an Alpha—a wolf strong enough to keep the others under control. Adam Hauptman is the local Alpha.”

“What does he look like?” he asked.

“Five-ten, a hundred and eighty pounds. Dark hair, dark eyes. I don't think he has anything to do with your wolves,” I said. “If Adam wanted you, he'd have you—and he'd have found you a lot sooner. He can be a jerk, but competence is his forte.”

Mac stared at me, his brown eyes looking yellowish in the fluorescent lighting of my office. Truth to tell, I was surprised he was still in human form because watching one wolf change tends to encourage others. I met his gaze
calmly, then dropped my eyes until I was looking at his shoulder instead.

“All right,” he said, slowly removing his hand. “You saved me tonight—and that thing could have torn you apart. I've seen them kill.”

I didn't ask when or whom. It was important to take action in the right order to avoid worse trouble. Call Adam. Remove body from the middle of the street where anyone could see it. Then talk. I punched Adam's number from memory.

“Hauptman,” he answered, with just a touch of impatience, on the fourth ring.

“I killed a werewolf at my garage,” I said, then hung up. To Mac's raised eyebrows I said, “That will get a faster reaction than spending twenty minutes explaining. Come on, you and I need to get the body off the street before someone spots it.” When the phone rang, my answering machine picked it up.

 

I took Stefan's bus because loading something large into a bus is just easier than loading it into my little Rabbit. The bus smelled of Mac, and I realized he'd not lied to me when he said he had a place to spend the night. He'd been sleeping in it for a couple of nights at least.

The bus was without brakes until we fixed it, but I managed to get it to drift to a stop next to the body. Mac helped me get it in the bus, then dashed back to the garage while I drove. When I arrived, he had the garage open for me.

We set the dead man on the cement floor next to the lift, then I parked the bus back where it had been and pulled down the garage bay door, leaving us inside with the body.

I walked to the corner farthest from the dead werewolf and sat down on the floor next to one of my big tool chests. Mac sat down next to me, and we both stared across the garage at the corpse.

Half-changed, the body looked even more grotesque under the harsh lighting of the second bay than it had
under the streetlight, like something out of a black-and-white Lon Chaney movie. From where I sat I could see the slice in his neck that had killed him.

“He was used to healing fast,” I said, to break the silence. “So he didn't pay attention to his wound. But some wounds take longer to heal than others. He didn't know any more than you do. How long have you been a werewolf?”

“Two months,” Mac said, leaning his head back against the tool chest and looking at the ceiling. “It killed my girlfriend, but I survived. Sort of.”

He was lucky, I thought, remembering the suppositions I'd had while overhearing his phone call earlier. He hadn't killed his girlfriend after all. He probably wasn't feeling lucky though, and I wasn't going to tell him that it could be worse.

“Tell me about your life afterward. Where did those men come from? Are you from the Tri-Cities?” I hadn't heard of any suspicious deaths or disappearances in the last six months.

He shook his head. “I'm from Naperville.” At my blank look, he clarified. “Illinois. Near Chicago.” He glanced at the body, closed his eyes, and swallowed. “I want to eat him,” he whispered.

“Perfectly natural,” I told him, though I have to admit I wanted to move away from him. Heaven save me, stuck with a new werewolf in a garage with fresh meat was not anyone's idea of safe. But we had to wait here until Adam came. It could have been worse: it could have been nearer the full moon, or he could have been as hungry as he'd been that first day.

“Deer not only tastes better, it's easier to live with afterward,” I said, then reflected that it might be better to talk about something other than food. “What happened to you after that first attack? Did someone take you to a hospital?”

He looked at me a moment, but I couldn't tell what he was thinking. He said, “After . . . after the attack, I woke up in a cage in someone's basement. There was someone in
the room and when I opened my eyes, he said, ‘Good, you'll live. Leo will be happy to see it.' ”

“Wait,” I said. “Leo. Leo. Chicago.” Then it came to me. “Leo James? Looks as though he ought to be a Nordic skiing champion? Tall, long, and blond.”

Leo was one of the Chicago Alphas—there were two of them. Leo held territory in the western suburbs. I'd met him once or twice. Neither of us had been impressed, but then, as I said, most werewolves don't take kindly to other predators.