WOLF TALE
HUNTERS IN THE NIGHT
Teresa Tan was furious.
She was driving her red 2010 Mazda 3 Sport Hatchback down Interstate 95 back to Bartlett Bay and her home in Edwards Grove, still wearing the silver dress she’d worn to the party, the low-cut top ruined from coffee until she could get it to the dry cleaners. The window was down, the June night’s wind was blowing into her car, and her rage was in no way decreasing.
It was almost midnight and she was still furious to learn that Thomas Change, her Thomas Change, her ex-boyfriend, was engaged to someone else. They had been in an on-and-off relationship for years but now he finally stayed off.
She could not believe it! He belonged to her!
“Bitch!” she hissed, thinking of Deanna Liu, strutting around, shoving her larger breasts into his face, intent on stealing Teresa’s place! “Bitch, bitch, bitch!” she hissed and shrieked into the night.
Speaking of breasts, what the hell was going on with Nora? Like most of the Tans, she had grown into that boyish, but still very feminine, modelesque look of a Chinese woman. Then, last Halloween, she had somehow turned into Salma Hayek, and now apparently thinks, and is probably right, that she can get away with anything she does with a man.
And Nora has been making unpleasant size comparisons with Teresa ever since.
“Bitch little sister!” she hissed under her breath.
It was a comfort to know that Nora had also screwed up in romance. She dumped Ethan Bartlett in what felt like a week before he became a millionaire and he doesn’t do the “on and off” thing at all. Last Teresa heard, he was trading off banging some German girl and that Anderson slut.
Personally, Teresa found it very hard to believe that anything other than Deanne’s figure was the reason for her recent failure with Thomas Chang. Thomas was Chinese-American and, being American and male, he bought into the idea of huge breasts as sexily important, and, like all heterosexual American men, he went scuttling toward the nearest pair that he could find as soon as they presented themselves.
God, American men made Teresa sick sometimes!
Thomas was a great match for her or any woman. He was going to be a plastic surgeon. He was already through grad school and in his residency, and everyone told Teresa to “be good to this guy because he is going places” but he was so annoying! He wanted children and family and all these things she wasn’t ready for and so annoyingly insistent. He had all these crazy, stupid plans and didn’t want to wait, and today, he told her that Deanna Liu was the one he saw fulfilling those stupid plans.
Teresa shrieked out of the window again.
She was having problems all over the spectrum of her recent life. She had not yet moved out of the house, her parents called her “shiftless,” and then there was trouble with college, which was trouble because she didn’t know what to do with her life, and after losing her boyfriend, her entire family was going to give her ten tons of hell for the next decade of her life or longer.
“Goddamn it!” she cried.
Teresa suddenly realized she had forgotten to eat and that made her even angrier. It was late at night and the only twenty-four restaurant in Bartlett Bay that wasn’t a bar was a Duchess south of the Red Rabbit Theater on Worthington. She went by it but saw, to her surprise, it was dark.
“Goddamn it!” she cried again. “This night is getting worse and worse!” It was obviously too late to go visit her family’s restaurant on Fisher St, and it was out of the way anyway, and she hated it.
She had so much Chinese food all her life that it made her sick just to think of it.
Teresa really should have gotten something back in Stratford but she had been so angry at Thomas! She could not believe he left her for a big-breasted wifey girl! Actually, Deanne wasn’t that big, just bigger than Teresa, but seriously, the girl had nothing going but her breasts!
Just thinking about it made Teresa so mad, she wanted to scream all over again!
She turned left down Edmonton toward the east, thinking about the farm to the west that Ethan Bartlett owned and called “Sorcery and Stick Farm” and how much money Ethan Bartlett was going to be making.
“Stupid Nora,” she said as she drove toward the enclosed tunnel over the Orange River known as Nathaniel Bridge, shaking her head. “If I had grown breasts like hers, I’d have an army of drooling slave boys who would—”
Something appeared in the road.
She jerked from it with a shriek, braked, slid, and slammed into the bridge’s wall, one wheel slipping over the edge as part of the wooden wall went flying in shards over the side.
“Oh God!” she gasped under her breath, feeling the space below her wheel somehow from where she was sitting. All she could do was stare in horror at nothing for a moment and when words came again, they were just, “Oh God, oh God, oh God!”
She saw her.
She saw the Woman in White.
Teresa leaned out of the open driver’s window, looked around, and saw no one was there. She had seen what might have been the Woman in White somewhere before, at some place, at some time, but this time it was different. It had always been in the distance, always in a crowd or out of the corner of her eyes or something weird that she could shrug off. Something she had thought she had seen because of all the stories her parents and grandparents used to tell her.
A pale Japanese woman with long, black hair wearing a white kimono.
“I’m losing my mind,” Teresa said softly, thinking it was just a hallucination to add to her cup of sorrow. “I really am.”
She sucked air through her teeth and started to back her Mazda up slowly. The vehicle moved because she had hit an angle and went mostly alongside the wall as opposed to straight into it, her front left wheel having remained on the bridge. That was lucky. If she had panicked completely and turned sharp right, she could have been stuck partway out with no way back since her car had front-wheel drive or possibly even flown over the edge to drown like those two characters in that movie, Beetlejuice.
She let out a relieved sigh as her wheel came back up onto the bridge.
I didn’t see anything, she thought, thinking back to the way her grandfather used to talk about her, warning Teresa with those intense eyes, while she secretly thought he was an idiot. It was a dream, a fantasy, and she was exhausted and upset. Family members had warned her so often about this “ghost” that it was no surprise she saw things her mind misinterpreted. Obviously, this was no different from—
There was a soft growl from above.
Teresa blinked, leaned out very quietly from her window and looked up at the top of the tunnel. She heard a sound, a thud on top of it and sensed that whatever was up there came with a lot of weight.
She gasped in horror, her hand going over her mouth.
Teresa had forgotten. She remembered it that morning but everything had gone so wrong all at once. The thing with her boyfriend, her coffee slipping from her hand unexpectedly, spilling over her chest like liquid fire while she was talking with her friends, several of whom laughed at her, and she was just exhausted after having the most terrible nightmares the night before.
Somehow, in combination of everything, she had forgotten the moon.
She did not remember her dreams beyond only that in them she had been tormented by something that was hunting her through an endless bamboo forest. Something, she realized, that may have wanted to distract her enough to forget what day it was and make a colossal error in judgement.
And come to think of it, it was rather odd how she found out about Thomas Chang that evening. Her friend Marcy just blurted it out. She looked really surprised, and extremely guilty, when she did. She was no gossip and could very well keep a secret,1` so it was incredibly out of character for her to blurt that secret it. It seemed almost as though someone had been sticking her fingers in her brain and chose to push it out of her mouth at that exact moment.
But why?
To throw her off guard and lure her into the territory of the beast like a steer being herded to a slaughter pen?
That series of thoughts came over her in an instant that drowned under the fear she suddenly felt as she stared up at the ceiling and listened.
The growl came again, softly, like a creature hunting something while being so angry at the same time that it forgot itself a little. It was as though it wanted to keep quiet but couldn’t stop itself from snarling in its anticipation.
The werewolf was up there and it was waiting for her.
Teresa backed her car up a bit, very slowly, and faced the road ahead. She sensed neither direction was better than the other. The wolf could jump out on either side just as easily so her only chance would be to speed forward and hope to God it couldn’t successfully leap onto her.
Sandal Pennington outran it, so why couldn’t she? She just had to start fast and be going fast when that wolf was on the ground.
She backed up some more, but not too much because the edge of the bridge was there and she didn’t want the werewolf jumping down onto her. Teresa then took a deep breath and was about to press her foot down on the pedal when she saw something walk out of the darkness into the edge of the bridge’s yellow lights just beyond. Her jaw dropped and she felt panic rise up from inside like ice through her spine and she covered her mouth with her hands as though to stifle her screams. All her doubts vanished and tales that seemed like Little Red Riding Hood became documentaries in the flash of an instant.
The Woman in White stood on the road directly ahead of her.
She wore the white Japanese kimono, the white obi in the center, her hands resting at her sides, and if her black Asian hair didn’t cover her face completely like that monster in The Grudge, it was close, because she could not see her face, but she could see everything else, as seemingly real as any living woman.
And she did not vanish that time.
Teresa heard something behind her.
She slammed her foot onto the accelerator with a scream, aiming for the bitch who did this to her, manipulated her, and haunted her family for generations, but she got only five feet before something grabbed the back of her vehicle. She grunted as she slammed into her seatbelt and the back of the vehicle was suddenly being lifted up into the air.
She slammed the pedal down in a panic, the front wheels squealing as they spun in place against the ground uselessly.
Teresa jerked her head back and saw the werewolf was standing behind the Mazda, lifting it up with its large, hairy arms, its body covered in the crimson of the rear red lights. Its eyes were intense, huge and full of rage, its lips pulled back over fangs covered in red like they were blanketed with blood.
When it saw her looking, it roared, its mouth opening almost unnaturally wide.
And then it started tilting her car to the left.
Teresa shrieked, reached into her glove compartment, and grabbed the small Walther PP handgun that she got for New York City, which was very illegal but she had somehow managed not to be caught. She quickly yanked it from the holster, leaned out of the car and shot the werewolf.
She very clearly saw the bullet hit the creature in the face somewhere and it dropped her car. The bottom left hit hard, scraping her car against the ground, and then the rest dropped back down on the right with a thud.
Teresa slammed her foot on the accelerator instantly.
The werewolf jerked into a wild scramble, its claws slashing at the back of her car, and ripping off the license plate as the only thing it could grab before she outdistanced it. It soon fell behind, howling at her as it chased after, and Teresa slipped the gun awkwardly down into the cupholder which had space for two.
Teresa sped down Edmonton St through the streetlights, feeling terrified, worried and panicked all at once, not sure what to do. She couldn’t go home. It would follow her just as it had Sandal Pennington.
She soon got her brain under control and thought it was best to take Colm Rd past Edwards Grove through the O’Brian Railyard and then head east through the backroads to the nearest freeway, and then get a room in New Haven. As soon as the wolf was far enough behind her, she would call her family, and then—
The Woman in White suddenly appeared on the side of the road.
Teresa gave her finger as when went flying by. “Fuck you!” she shrieked at her.
And then she saw the Woman in White do something weird. She did an odd, strange, gripping motion with her left hand. Teresa’s left hand gripped the wheel suddenly without her control, making Teresa squeak in surprise, and then before she could stop it, her own arm jerked the wheel to the left.
Teresa jerked it back but too late, unable to gain control fast enough, and flew right into a streetlight near Annebelle St on the left side of the road, the first main road into Maplewood. The airbags hit her in the chest hard, saving her life, and the streetlight was tilted over, still working but flickering a bit.
But her car was totaled.
She grabbed her gun, threw herself out, and barely noticed the bruises that were left on her chest as she stepped out into the flickering yellow light that illuminated her from behind.
Back the way she had come, there it was. The werewolf stood in the darkness, just visible beyond the streetlight before hers, its form shadowed except for its lower legs that were bathed in yellow light.
“Stay away!” she cried and pointed the gun at it. “Stay away or I will shoot you!”
The werewolf stepped into the light of the streetlight, its black fur tinting yellow from head to toe and its eyes locked on her. She couldn’t see them exactly but she sensed them.
“I mean it!” Teresa whimpered and knew that was stupid. She had already shot it once, for all the good it would do.
It started to walk almost casually toward her, the right half of its face curled up in a snarl that looked almost like a sneer.
Teresa knew she was dead. Without a vehicle, there was no way she could outrun it but she didn’t want to die! She almost began to hyperventilate as she aimed her gun and whimpered, “Go away!” She fired once, the bullet hitting it in the shoulder but it didn’t even blink or slow down.
She aimed for its head and its head jerked aside the moment before she fired, dodging the shot.
She fired again, missing, fired again, and that time hit on the forehead. Its head jerked back and Teresa suddenly felt a thrill of possible life. Was it dead? Could anything, anywhere, take a bullet straight to the forehead and live? She felt, for a split moment, that she was going to live and this whole thing would be over. She would be the unlikely hero of Bartlett Bay.
And then the werewolf’s head lowered back down and under the light she saw, literally saw, the bullet fall from its forehead, slip off its snout and fall to the ground.
It landed with a soft clang she actually heard.
Teresa burst into tears and whimpered, “Please don’t hurt me!”
The werewolf’s lips rolled up into a meaner, angrier-looking snarl and then it started to really move toward her, its hands opening and closing eagerly, its knuckles cracking as they did, and she saw its eyes growing wider and wider with anticipation.
It was going to enjoy this!
Teresa screamed, “Get away from me!” and fired her gun wildly at it, hitting it in the arm, the leg, the chest, the head and then, when it was maybe ten feet or less in the darkness, illuminated by her own tilted streetlight, came the dreaded sound.
The sound of a gun clicking empty but she kept pressing.
“Please don’t hurt me!” she whimpered, tears slipping out of her eyes, and as it reached out for her, she continued to press the trigger repeatedly, the gun making the click, click, click—
There was an explosion from its shoulder, splattering Teresa from head to toe in blood.
The werewolf stumbled back, stunned, and Teresa looked down at her Walther PP in confusion, then looked back up and fired at it several more times. Click, click—
There was an explosion of blood from the werewolf’s right leg and as it fell to a knee, it let out an angry, pained, canine moan sintermixed with its rage.
Teresa rushed around the car, hiding there, and saw the werewolf start to stumble away into the street, looking around.
Balloon-like balls, similar to water balloons, hit the creature in the face and chest, and then exploded into clouds of something that made the creature jerk in allergic agony with tears from its eyes and snot from its nose leaking down like two fountains while it sneezed and choked.
And then a tall, older man in metal, plated armor almost like a knight covered in glowing blue runes came rushing out of the darkness with a spear-like weapon. He stabbed the werewolf in the back while it fought with the clouds and yelled out something in French to someone unseen. The werewolf spun around, swinging at him, and he ducked the swing. Then there was another explosion and that time part of the werewolf’s head seemed to fly off.
* * *
Paul watched through the scope on his Barrett M82 that rested on their rented blue Ford truck parked vertically across the road and smiled.
“There you are,” he said in his native language of French. His gun was covered in magical blue runes that made it silent, lighter and its kickback far less, but the scope was normal. Before firing last, he saw Terrance twist the spear and pull it free. The silver-hook head stayed in the creature’s back, connected to the second part of the spearhead by a magical blue-tinted chain, and then Terrance slammed that second half down onto the street and that connected the werewolf to the ground.
The werewolf jerked toward Terrance but he backed up and the werewolf hit the chain’s end and the hook ripped into its flesh violently, making it howl. The tips were magically enhanced silver and designed to amplify pain as well. If a man had been stabbed by one of those, he would have died from agony within moments.
Terrance put on another head to his spear while more balls filled with wolfsbane pollen hit the creature in the face and chest, and clouds of the stuff made it jerk violently in agony, sneezing and screaming from the allergies.
Marcel appeared then, a large, muscular man over six feet tall, with his hands covered in metal gloves that reached up to his shoulders, covered in blue runes that amplified his strength, with matching metal armor.
“Shoot him once and let me have him,” said Marcel through his mouthpiece that connected to their shared intercom.
“Tirer,” Paul said.
Terrance and Marcel moved back, Marcel throwing a ball of pollen into the werewolf’s face.
Paul had fired, hit the werewolf in the chest, and as the werewolf stumbled back, he said, “Continuer.”
Marcel rushed forward, almost as angry as the creature itself and leaped into the air. His boots were enchanted to make him jump higher than normal so he could easily punch down onto its face and when he did, he hit the werewolf right in the jaw. The enchantment was strong on his arms that he could almost rip a man’s arm off, and that hit he made would surely have killed a man and probably sent his jaw flying off his face as well.
There was a crack sound in the creature’s jaw so loud that Paul could hear it from where he was.
While Marcel distracted the werewolf, Terrance stabbed it again in the back with another chain, stabbed the ground, replaced the head, and then did it again, that time in the chest as it was reeling around from another hit from Marcel, and then slammed its head once more into the ground.
“Get the fuck out here, girls!” cried Terrance as the werewolf slashed wildly at him and Marcel, arms swinging everywhere, snot and tears flying everywhere. It pulled against the chain farther than expected and that time when Terrance moved back, the claws managed to slice across his armored chest. Something was caught and Terrance was sent spinning away. He was lifted off his feet, hit the ground on his side, and went rolling across the street. He hit a tree, hard, but he kept the staff in his hand and was already getting up.
Margaux, tall, gorgeous, statuesque, and fast, rushed out of the woods and threw herself right into the werewolf like a madwoman, her French silver sword covered in blue fire. She was armored as well but lighter and more for speed.
She sliced across the wolf’s stomach, blue fire spreading diagonally across, and the werewolf screamed, swung its arm wildly and knocked her helmet off. She rolled, was up again, her sword held out sideways and her long, reddish-gold, curly hair went spilling down around her vibrant blue eyes past her shoulders.
“Tirer,” said Paul, and when they backed up, he raised his gun, saw its eyes, and fired.
Part of the werewolf’s head came off but he missed its eye on purpose. That was the best target for death, what they called “the Silver Bullet maneuver” in English because of the 1985 Stephen King movie called Peur Bleue in French.
But they didn’t want it dead.
“Continuer,” he told them.
Paul smiled in a joyless kind of way. Terrance was back, stumbling forward in pain for a moment before shoving it down, slamming on another head to his spear as Marcel slammed his fist into the werewolf and sent it stumbling away into the chain’s end.
It shrieked when the hooks pulled into its flesh and then went back and swung at Marcel, who ducked it and punched it in the ribs. They looked to have been broken from that hit.
Terrance put another chain in the werewolf and ground while Margaux used the transformation spell to turn her blade into a spear, the silver tip still covered in blue fire, and then she stabbed the thing in the side. Why she used a sword to begin with was beyond Paul but Margaux was always a little insane.
“Tirer,” said Paul again and they moved aside.
Paul shot it in the leg and the werewolf dropped to one knee with a cry. Then he shot it in the other leg, the shoulder, and the arm.
“Continuer.”
Terrance slammed another spearhead into it, slammed down the chain, and then, by the time Marcel slammed it across the face again and Margaux stabbed it in the ankle, Terrance had replaced another head and stuck the wolf on the back again, as hard as he could, and connected it once more to the ground. As their fight continued, he did that three more times, nine chains down in total, each connecting the creature to the ground.
It screamed in rage but there was pain in it now, a canine whine of pain.
Terrance held out his arms and they backed up. He said, “Tirer!”
Paul shot it in the good leg as it tried to get up, and then it fell down onto all fours.
Terrance raised a fist and the chains magically tightened, pulling the werewolf down onto its chest, and it shrieked in agony in what sounded almost like a dog’s high-pitched yip.
“Where the fuck are Chloé and Ambre?” cried Margaux.
Paul looked into the werewolf’s eyes and it looked right back at him, right through the darkness and right into his soul.
Then it jerked its head toward its intended victim.
* * *
Teresa looked over her broken Mazda into the bloodshot, allergy-ridden eyes of the beast and the beast looked right back.
It sneezed hard, spitting out mixed snot and blood onto the ground, and then reached out through those silver-like, blue-glowing chains toward her. It was shot again, jerking from the hit, but it kept reaching for her, its arm seeming to grow longer like a cartoon character’s would. The clawed, furry hand at the end, so much like a man’s, then closed all its fingers with only the index finger remaining.
It was pointing at her.
And did it wink? Teresa almost screamed at the sight of it but then she saw some kind of blue-colored liquid land on its back and the creature shrieked.
* * *
Paul’s twin sister Ambre finally arrived and just dropped a ball of magical acid on the back of the thing, which made it squeal.
“God, I love magic,” Paul said with a dark smile.
Magic wasn’t as good as silver but it was close if you knew how to use it properly and even if it wasn’t fatal, it could cause some real pain to the creature.
Ambre cast a spell over the air around the werewolf’s limbs, one after the other, making the air around it as though it was as heavy as a car. It had to be cast on something around the wolf because the wolf was immune to almost any spell directly cast upon it.
“Continuer,” Terrance said.
“Where the fuck is Chloé?” cried Margaux and she stabbed the werewolf with her spear as hard as she could, pushing it into its flesh, while Marcel got on top of it and began to pound it on the back of its head, slamming it into the asphalt.
Chloé finally appeared, looking scared and disturbed. She looked into the werewolf’s eyes and it sensed her entering its mind instantly.
The werewolf howled and ripped through the magic and forcibly extended the chains out of the ends of the spearheads. It elbowed Marcel, sending him flying, and Paul heard him cry out as he landed wrong. His ankle twisted violently on impact and that sent him rolling across the street. Then the creature jerked to its right, to the south, and in an explosion of blood, it moved so hard that it ripped the hooks out of its body all at once.
Then it fled across the street.
Chloé dove out of the way, rolling onto her feet, and was up as it passed by, a psychic blade of transparent blue in her right hand.
The werewolf stumbled into a tree, half-breaking it on contact, and Paul shot it once before it got its bearings and continued running.
He chased it through the woods with the others, watching them carefully out of the corner of his eyes to make sure he didn’t accidentally shoot them, and fired two more times as the werewolf rushed across some parking lot hidden below the bridge, the kickback brutal but tolerable, and then he shot it in one of its legs.
It did nothing. The werewolf reached the edge of the cliff southward and leaped off, its arms spread wide, and disappeared down into the darkness of that strange, sleepy, American village.
And then there was silence. No sound at all. It was as if nothing at all had happened.
Paul walked up to the edge, his gun ready and pointing down in case the creature was holding onto the cliff face below, and then Terrance, Margaux, Ambre and Chloé all moved up together around him.
The werewolf wasn’t down there, so Paul rested the rifle on his shoulder and the group looked out at what the locals called “Lower Bartlett Bay” for a moment. Soon Marcel appeared limping along the blood trail across the pavement.
Terrance rested the butt of his spear on the ground and frowned at Chloé. He was the oldest there, in charge, and not particularly happy. “Any particular reason you didn’t appear when we needed you?” he asked Chloé.
Chloé looked up at him and seemed very disturbed.
Terrance was about to say more but Ambre’s falcon familiar, Renaud, landed on her left shoulder. “I couldn’t follow it!” he cried. “I saw it fall, I saw where it was going, and then it was just gone! It just disappeared, all seven or so feet of it! I have no idea where it went!
“Father told me that it could do that but I’ve never seen it happen!” His father was another falcon familiar named Roland, who was the familiar of Ambre’s teacher, Marie.
Ambre petted him without a word and asked, “Did you get anything, Chloé?”
Chloé shook her head.
“Damn it, Chloé!” snarled Terrance and Chloé gasped. “This was the best chance we had of finding out who the werewolf here is! What happened?”
“There was something else with it,” said Ambre and Terrance looked at her.
“What do you mean, ‘something else with it?’” he asked.
“I saw a woman in a white kimono,” she told him. “I think it was a ghost.”
“Oh, that’s just what we need!” Terrance retorted bitterly.
Chloé burst into tears and ran off toward the street.
“That’s not like her at all,” said Marcel.
“We know the werewolf lives in the south at least,” said Paul. He gestured over the cliffside with his free hand. “Somewhere down there.”
“Yes, well, that’s hardly great news,” said Marcel bitterly and then gasped in pain. “There’s like ten thousand people down there and any one of them could be the creature.” Ambre leaned down, grabbed his ankle, and cast a healing spell that made a distinct snap sound as it healed. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she said and smiled at him while biting her lower lip.
“Olivier is going to be furious,” said Terrance. Olivier was always angry and bitter and he wasn’t going to be particularly happy that the best chance they had to get into the werewolf’s head and learn its human identity was thrown away because one of their own didn’t move fast enough.
The werewolf knew they were there now. It would be more prepared on the next moon. It would be ready for them and much, much harder to catch off guard.
Paul sighed and went back up to check on Chloé and found the beautiful, Asian-American girl the werewolf was trying to kill was still standing by the car. He looked her over, smiled and walked up to her. Then, in his awkward, never particularly great English, he asked, “Are you okay?”
The beautiful Asian girl burst into tears, rushed up to him, and threw her arms around him. She babbled at him in English but was speaking far too fast for him to understand a word. He looked at her, tilted his head, and grinned.
“Don’t even think about it!” Margaux told him. He looked at her with a mock-shocked look but she said, “I know you!” before he could make a witty reply. “Don’t even think about it!”
Paul laughed and patted the American girl on the shoulder with his left hand, his right hand still balancing his rifle on his shoulder. He then looked at his hand, saw it was covered in blood, and then started to say something slowly in English. “You okay, good?” Wait, that’s not right, he thought.
Ambre approached with Renaud on her shoulder and frowned at him. “You never studied,” she told him.
* * *
“Are you all French?” asked Teresa.
“Yes,” said a pretty woman in her mid-twenties. She was an athletic, sexy young woman with the same dark hair and dark eyes as the handsome boy with the giant rifle, her hair hanging straight and down around her chin. “My friend said she saw something else.” Her voice was accented but otherwise fluent. She then said something to a skinny, slender blonde girl there in French and they had a quick back-and-forth. Teresa took a couple years of French in high school but they were speaking far too fast for her to grasp more than a few words. “She said it was the ghost of a woman in a white kimono.”
Teresa’s eyes widened before she could stop them. It was the first time anyone outside the family ever corroborated the existence of the Woman in White and confirmation of that sort felt much worse than she would have ever thought, even after seeing her on the bridge.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Teresa told her instantly, slipping away from the handsome boy. He looked down at himself, covered in blood. “Sorry,” she told him.
“It’s—oh well.”
“Oh well?” asked Teresa.
“He means it’s not a problem,” Ambre replied. “You are lying to us and you are still scared. That ghost frightens you almost as much as the werewolf.”
“I need to call my father.”
“No one is stopping you,” said the woman.
“Please don’t mention the ghost when he arrives,” she told her.
“The ghost fucked us,” the woman said bitterly. “We like to know when the werewolf has friends.”
“It’s not the werewolf’s friend,” Teresa replied. Of that, she was one hundred percent sure. It used the werewolf to try and kill her but that didn’t make them “friends.”
“So, you say,” said the Frenchwoman suspiciously. “But you’re not telling us everything.”
“It’s an old family problem. A private family problem.”
The Frenchwoman looked at her for a long moment, frowning deeply, and then walked away without a word.
* * *
It was over for the moon.
Olivier beat the police, having left the small house they rented instead of the room at the Merrick Hotel which their leader, Étienne, was instantly distrustful of.
Étienne and his protégé Olivier had been in the Hunt for a long time, both since they were young men with the younger Olivier going as far back as the 1960s or so and it showed on his face. He did not look particularly happy as he stepped out of the rented Subaru Legacy and approached them.
Margaux, his granddaughter from his relationship with a woman who entered the Hunt at a similar age and time as himself, was furious. She approached him with her left hand resting on her father’s hilt at her side. “Papi!” she hissed. “Don’t blame me! Chloé screwed us!”
Olivier was a man in his seventies but looked older. His face was lined with pain and rage that made the once handsome face look sour and mean, with only the vibrant blue eyes that Margaux inherited as the one remaining attractive feature. His white-streaked gray hair was short, combed forward toward his eyes, and he sometimes wore a pair of glasses to read, which made him look even older, but despite not being part of the fighting anymore, he was still in great shape. His casual gray dress shirt tucked into jeans belied the fact that he was a high-ranking member of an ancient order of werewolf hunters that went back nine hundred years.
Olivier looked at her without emotion and then looked at Chloé, who looked like she wanted to cry, and then back. “It’s fine.”
“What?” replied Margaux incredulously.
“Seriously?” said Paul. That sure didn’t sound like him at all.
“It’s this town,” said Olivier coldly. He looked over at Chloé and held out his arms. She whimpered and rushed into them and began to fully cry. She had always viewed him as a father figure but it was the first time she acted like it since she was an actual child. It was also the first time Paul ever saw her cry as an adult. She was short, petite, blond and cute, and was always trying to overcompensate against everyone’s instinct to see her as a skinny little girl. “You haven’t been here long enough to understand,” Olivier told them, “But you will.”
“She was in so much pain!” whimpered Chloé and Olivier, out of character, put his arm around her and she began to cry harder.
“Psychics are so damn weird,” Paul told Ambre.
“Agreed,” she replied.
Paul turned his head over to see the flashing lights coming. “Is this going to be a problem?” he asked Olivier as Terrance started pulling out the chains from the ground by using one spell to unlock them from the ground and another to have the chains retract and pull their sections back together.
“Not here,” said Olivier. “Here, they understand.”
“That’s—” Paul blinked “—unexpected.”
“You’re going to get a lot of unexpected things here,” he told him.
* * *
Cailtin Christopherson looked at the French talking among themselves. They were in a corner out of the way, hanging around, a few smoking cigarettes.
“So, they did come,” said Christopherson softly, noting the armor and the helmets. “And look at how they’re armed. They look like medieval knights intermixed with modern soldiers.”
Mary leaned over and said, “All their weapons are perfectly legal. The French government has some kind of deal with us concerning them.”
“Seriously?” They seemed rather extreme to Christopherson. “Parker says that boy over there has a Barrett M82. It shoots fifty BMG rounds.” Parker was a beat cop who had a fascination with the military who just happened to be on duty that night. “He says it’s designed to blow through vehicles or tanks or something.”
“Yeah. They’re high-level monster hunters and they’re backed by the French parliament. There’s nothing illegal about any of this.”
“Checks out, I guess,” said Christopherson. Honestly, she didn’t know what to think except that such a weapon had no business being on anyone but a soldier in military service. That monster looked like it could shoot through an entire school and kill someone when it came out the other side.
And if that couldn’t kill a werewolf, what the hell could?
“They’ve rented an old house Bartlett owns on Nathan Boulevard, so they’re going to be here for a while.”
“Ethan Bartlett rents houses too?”
“Yeah,” Mary replied. “I’m surprised Officer Hotness didn’t know that.”
Several of the officers burst out laughing. “Goddamn it, Mary!” she said but she sensed, with Mary and the other members of the Force, a sense of deep relief among them. A sense that they were much more comfortable now that the hunters had arrived.
Mary laughed and said, “Relax. There’s no death tonight. No victim. We’ve got a month to breathe.”
That was something but only if the werewolf really didn’t kill anyone. The night wasn’t over yet.
Christopherson looked at the French hunters standing there and saw the older man without armor and short gray hair turn his head over his shoulder and look at her. He seemed to know exactly what she was about to say and ask before she did and she sensed he was waiting for her with a pre-written speech he had probably told police officers like herself countless times before.
Title
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Teresa Tan was furious.
She was driving her red 2010 Mazda 3 Sport Hatchback down Interstate 95 back to Bartlett Bay and her home in Edwards Grove, still wearing the silver dress she’d worn to the party, the low-cut top ruined from coffee until she could get it to the dry cleaners. The window was down, the June night’s wind was blowing into her car, and her rage was in no way decreasing.
It was almost midnight and she was still furious to learn that Thomas Change, her Thomas Change, her ex-boyfriend, was engaged to someone else. They had been in an on-and-off relationship for years but now he finally stayed off.
She could not believe it! He belonged to her!
“Bitch!” she hissed, thinking of Deanna Liu, strutting around, shoving her larger breasts into his face, intent on stealing Teresa’s place! “Bitch, bitch, bitch!” she hissed and shrieked into the night.
Speaking of breasts, what the hell was going on with Nora? Like most of the Tans, she had grown into that boyish, but still very feminine, modelesque look of a Chinese woman. Then, last Halloween, she had somehow turned into Salma Hayek, and now apparently thinks, and is probably right, that she can get away with anything she does with a man.
And Nora has been making unpleasant size comparisons with Teresa ever since.
“Bitch little sister!” she hissed under her breath.
It was a comfort to know that Nora had also screwed up in romance. She dumped Ethan Bartlett in what felt like a week before he became a millionaire and he doesn’t do the “on and off” thing at all. Last Teresa heard, he was trading off banging some German girl and that Anderson slut.
Personally, Teresa found it very hard to believe that anything other than Deanne’s figure was the reason for her recent failure with Thomas Chang. Thomas was Chinese-American and, being American and male, he bought into the idea of huge breasts as sexily important, and, like all heterosexual American men, he went scuttling toward the nearest pair that he could find as soon as they presented themselves.
God, American men made Teresa sick sometimes!
Thomas was a great match for her or any woman. He was going to be a plastic surgeon. He was already through grad school and in his residency, and everyone told Teresa to “be good to this guy because he is going places” but he was so annoying! He wanted children and family and all these things she wasn’t ready for and so annoyingly insistent. He had all these crazy, stupid plans and didn’t want to wait, and today, he told her that Deanna Liu was the one he saw fulfilling those stupid plans.
Teresa shrieked out of the window again.
She was having problems all over the spectrum of her recent life. She had not yet moved out of the house, her parents called her “shiftless,” and then there was trouble with college, which was trouble because she didn’t know what to do with her life, and after losing her boyfriend, her entire family was going to give her ten tons of hell for the next decade of her life or longer.
“Goddamn it!” she cried.
Teresa suddenly realized she had forgotten to eat and that made her even angrier. It was late at night and the only twenty-four restaurant in Bartlett Bay that wasn’t a bar was a Duchess south of the Red Rabbit Theater on Worthington. She went by it but saw, to her surprise, it was dark.
“Goddamn it!” she cried again. “This night is getting worse and worse!” It was obviously too late to go visit her family’s restaurant on Fisher St, and it was out of the way anyway, and she hated it.
She had so much Chinese food all her life that it made her sick just to think of it.
Teresa really should have gotten something back in Stratford but she had been so angry at Thomas! She could not believe he left her for a big-breasted wifey girl! Actually, Deanne wasn’t that big, just bigger than Teresa, but seriously, the girl had nothing going but her breasts!
Just thinking about it made Teresa so mad, she wanted to scream all over again!
She turned left down Edmonton toward the east, thinking about the farm to the west that Ethan Bartlett owned and called “Sorcery and Stick Farm” and how much money Ethan Bartlett was going to be making.
“Stupid Nora,” she said as she drove toward the enclosed tunnel over the Orange River known as Nathaniel Bridge, shaking her head. “If I had grown breasts like hers, I’d have an army of drooling slave boys who would—”
Something appeared in the road.
She jerked from it with a shriek, braked, slid, and slammed into the bridge’s wall, one wheel slipping over the edge as part of the wooden wall went flying in shards over the side.
“Oh God!” she gasped under her breath, feeling the space below her wheel somehow from where she was sitting. All she could do was stare in horror at nothing for a moment and when words came again, they were just, “Oh God, oh God, oh God!”
She saw her.
She saw the Woman in White.
Teresa leaned out of the open driver’s window, looked around, and saw no one was there. She had seen what might have been the Woman in White somewhere before, at some place, at some time, but this time it was different. It had always been in the distance, always in a crowd or out of the corner of her eyes or something weird that she could shrug off. Something she had thought she had seen because of all the stories her parents and grandparents used to tell her.
A pale Japanese woman with long, black hair wearing a white kimono.
“I’m losing my mind,” Teresa said softly, thinking it was just a hallucination to add to her cup of sorrow. “I really am.”
She sucked air through her teeth and started to back her Mazda up slowly. The vehicle moved because she had hit an angle and went mostly alongside the wall as opposed to straight into it, her front left wheel having remained on the bridge. That was lucky. If she had panicked completely and turned sharp right, she could have been stuck partway out with no way back since her car had front-wheel drive or possibly even flown over the edge to drown like those two characters in that movie, Beetlejuice.
She let out a relieved sigh as her wheel came back up onto the bridge.
I didn’t see anything, she thought, thinking back to the way her grandfather used to talk about her, warning Teresa with those intense eyes, while she secretly thought he was an idiot. It was a dream, a fantasy, and she was exhausted and upset. Family members had warned her so often about this “ghost” that it was no surprise she saw things her mind misinterpreted. Obviously, this was no different from—
There was a soft growl from above.
Teresa blinked, leaned out very quietly from her window and looked up at the top of the tunnel. She heard a sound, a thud on top of it and sensed that whatever was up there came with a lot of weight.
She gasped in horror, her hand going over her mouth.
Teresa had forgotten. She remembered it that morning but everything had gone so wrong all at once. The thing with her boyfriend, her coffee slipping from her hand unexpectedly, spilling over her chest like liquid fire while she was talking with her friends, several of whom laughed at her, and she was just exhausted after having the most terrible nightmares the night before.
Somehow, in combination of everything, she had forgotten the moon.
She did not remember her dreams beyond only that in them she had been tormented by something that was hunting her through an endless bamboo forest. Something, she realized, that may have wanted to distract her enough to forget what day it was and make a colossal error in judgement.
And come to think of it, it was rather odd how she found out about Thomas Chang that evening. Her friend Marcy just blurted it out. She looked really surprised, and extremely guilty, when she did. She was no gossip and could very well keep a secret,1` so it was incredibly out of character for her to blurt that secret it. It seemed almost as though someone had been sticking her fingers in her brain and chose to push it out of her mouth at that exact moment.
But why?
To throw her off guard and lure her into the territory of the beast like a steer being herded to a slaughter pen?
That series of thoughts came over her in an instant that drowned under the fear she suddenly felt as she stared up at the ceiling and listened.
The growl came again, softly, like a creature hunting something while being so angry at the same time that it forgot itself a little. It was as though it wanted to keep quiet but couldn’t stop itself from snarling in its anticipation.
The werewolf was up there and it was waiting for her.
Teresa backed her car up a bit, very slowly, and faced the road ahead. She sensed neither direction was better than the other. The wolf could jump out on either side just as easily so her only chance would be to speed forward and hope to God it couldn’t successfully leap onto her.
Sandal Pennington outran it, so why couldn’t she? She just had to start fast and be going fast when that wolf was on the ground.
She backed up some more, but not too much because the edge of the bridge was there and she didn’t want the werewolf jumping down onto her. Teresa then took a deep breath and was about to press her foot down on the pedal when she saw something walk out of the darkness into the edge of the bridge’s yellow lights just beyond. Her jaw dropped and she felt panic rise up from inside like ice through her spine and she covered her mouth with her hands as though to stifle her screams. All her doubts vanished and tales that seemed like Little Red Riding Hood became documentaries in the flash of an instant.
The Woman in White stood on the road directly ahead of her.
She wore the white Japanese kimono, the white obi in the center, her hands resting at her sides, and if her black Asian hair didn’t cover her face completely like that monster in The Grudge, it was close, because she could not see her face, but she could see everything else, as seemingly real as any living woman.
And she did not vanish that time.
Teresa heard something behind her.
She slammed her foot onto the accelerator with a scream, aiming for the bitch who did this to her, manipulated her, and haunted her family for generations, but she got only five feet before something grabbed the back of her vehicle. She grunted as she slammed into her seatbelt and the back of the vehicle was suddenly being lifted up into the air.
She slammed the pedal down in a panic, the front wheels squealing as they spun in place against the ground uselessly.
Teresa jerked her head back and saw the werewolf was standing behind the Mazda, lifting it up with its large, hairy arms, its body covered in the crimson of the rear red lights. Its eyes were intense, huge and full of rage, its lips pulled back over fangs covered in red like they were blanketed with blood.
When it saw her looking, it roared, its mouth opening almost unnaturally wide.
And then it started tilting her car to the left.
Teresa shrieked, reached into her glove compartment, and grabbed the small Walther PP handgun that she got for New York City, which was very illegal but she had somehow managed not to be caught. She quickly yanked it from the holster, leaned out of the car and shot the werewolf.
She very clearly saw the bullet hit the creature in the face somewhere and it dropped her car. The bottom left hit hard, scraping her car against the ground, and then the rest dropped back down on the right with a thud.
Teresa slammed her foot on the accelerator instantly.
The werewolf jerked into a wild scramble, its claws slashing at the back of her car, and ripping off the license plate as the only thing it could grab before she outdistanced it. It soon fell behind, howling at her as it chased after, and Teresa slipped the gun awkwardly down into the cupholder which had space for two.
Teresa sped down Edmonton St through the streetlights, feeling terrified, worried and panicked all at once, not sure what to do. She couldn’t go home. It would follow her just as it had Sandal Pennington.
She soon got her brain under control and thought it was best to take Colm Rd past Edwards Grove through the O’Brian Railyard and then head east through the backroads to the nearest freeway, and then get a room in New Haven. As soon as the wolf was far enough behind her, she would call her family, and then—
The Woman in White suddenly appeared on the side of the road.
Teresa gave her finger as when went flying by. “Fuck you!” she shrieked at her.
And then she saw the Woman in White do something weird. She did an odd, strange, gripping motion with her left hand. Teresa’s left hand gripped the wheel suddenly without her control, making Teresa squeak in surprise, and then before she could stop it, her own arm jerked the wheel to the left.
Teresa jerked it back but too late, unable to gain control fast enough, and flew right into a streetlight near Annebelle St on the left side of the road, the first main road into Maplewood. The airbags hit her in the chest hard, saving her life, and the streetlight was tilted over, still working but flickering a bit.
But her car was totaled.
She grabbed her gun, threw herself out, and barely noticed the bruises that were left on her chest as she stepped out into the flickering yellow light that illuminated her from behind.
Back the way she had come, there it was. The werewolf stood in the darkness, just visible beyond the streetlight before hers, its form shadowed except for its lower legs that were bathed in yellow light.
“Stay away!” she cried and pointed the gun at it. “Stay away or I will shoot you!”
The werewolf stepped into the light of the streetlight, its black fur tinting yellow from head to toe and its eyes locked on her. She couldn’t see them exactly but she sensed them.
“I mean it!” Teresa whimpered and knew that was stupid. She had already shot it once, for all the good it would do.
It started to walk almost casually toward her, the right half of its face curled up in a snarl that looked almost like a sneer.
Teresa knew she was dead. Without a vehicle, there was no way she could outrun it but she didn’t want to die! She almost began to hyperventilate as she aimed her gun and whimpered, “Go away!” She fired once, the bullet hitting it in the shoulder but it didn’t even blink or slow down.
She aimed for its head and its head jerked aside the moment before she fired, dodging the shot.
She fired again, missing, fired again, and that time hit on the forehead. Its head jerked back and Teresa suddenly felt a thrill of possible life. Was it dead? Could anything, anywhere, take a bullet straight to the forehead and live? She felt, for a split moment, that she was going to live and this whole thing would be over. She would be the unlikely hero of Bartlett Bay.
And then the werewolf’s head lowered back down and under the light she saw, literally saw, the bullet fall from its forehead, slip off its snout and fall to the ground.
It landed with a soft clang she actually heard.
Teresa burst into tears and whimpered, “Please don’t hurt me!”
The werewolf’s lips rolled up into a meaner, angrier-looking snarl and then it started to really move toward her, its hands opening and closing eagerly, its knuckles cracking as they did, and she saw its eyes growing wider and wider with anticipation.
It was going to enjoy this!
Teresa screamed, “Get away from me!” and fired her gun wildly at it, hitting it in the arm, the leg, the chest, the head and then, when it was maybe ten feet or less in the darkness, illuminated by her own tilted streetlight, came the dreaded sound.
The sound of a gun clicking empty but she kept pressing.
“Please don’t hurt me!” she whimpered, tears slipping out of her eyes, and as it reached out for her, she continued to press the trigger repeatedly, the gun making the click, click, click—
There was an explosion from its shoulder, splattering Teresa from head to toe in blood.
The werewolf stumbled back, stunned, and Teresa looked down at her Walther PP in confusion, then looked back up and fired at it several more times. Click, click—
There was an explosion of blood from the werewolf’s right leg and as it fell to a knee, it let out an angry, pained, canine moan sintermixed with its rage.
Teresa rushed around the car, hiding there, and saw the werewolf start to stumble away into the street, looking around.
Balloon-like balls, similar to water balloons, hit the creature in the face and chest, and then exploded into clouds of something that made the creature jerk in allergic agony with tears from its eyes and snot from its nose leaking down like two fountains while it sneezed and choked.
And then a tall, older man in metal, plated armor almost like a knight covered in glowing blue runes came rushing out of the darkness with a spear-like weapon. He stabbed the werewolf in the back while it fought with the clouds and yelled out something in French to someone unseen. The werewolf spun around, swinging at him, and he ducked the swing. Then there was another explosion and that time part of the werewolf’s head seemed to fly off.
* * *
Paul watched through the scope on his Barrett M82 that rested on their rented blue Ford truck parked vertically across the road and smiled.
“There you are,” he said in his native language of French. His gun was covered in magical blue runes that made it silent, lighter and its kickback far less, but the scope was normal. Before firing last, he saw Terrance twist the spear and pull it free. The silver-hook head stayed in the creature’s back, connected to the second part of the spearhead by a magical blue-tinted chain, and then Terrance slammed that second half down onto the street and that connected the werewolf to the ground.
The werewolf jerked toward Terrance but he backed up and the werewolf hit the chain’s end and the hook ripped into its flesh violently, making it howl. The tips were magically enhanced silver and designed to amplify pain as well. If a man had been stabbed by one of those, he would have died from agony within moments.
Terrance put on another head to his spear while more balls filled with wolfsbane pollen hit the creature in the face and chest, and clouds of the stuff made it jerk violently in agony, sneezing and screaming from the allergies.
Marcel appeared then, a large, muscular man over six feet tall, with his hands covered in metal gloves that reached up to his shoulders, covered in blue runes that amplified his strength, with matching metal armor.
“Shoot him once and let me have him,” said Marcel through his mouthpiece that connected to their shared intercom.
“Tirer,” Paul said.
Terrance and Marcel moved back, Marcel throwing a ball of pollen into the werewolf’s face.
Paul had fired, hit the werewolf in the chest, and as the werewolf stumbled back, he said, “Continuer.”
Marcel rushed forward, almost as angry as the creature itself and leaped into the air. His boots were enchanted to make him jump higher than normal so he could easily punch down onto its face and when he did, he hit the werewolf right in the jaw. The enchantment was strong on his arms that he could almost rip a man’s arm off, and that hit he made would surely have killed a man and probably sent his jaw flying off his face as well.
There was a crack sound in the creature’s jaw so loud that Paul could hear it from where he was.
While Marcel distracted the werewolf, Terrance stabbed it again in the back with another chain, stabbed the ground, replaced the head, and then did it again, that time in the chest as it was reeling around from another hit from Marcel, and then slammed its head once more into the ground.
“Get the fuck out here, girls!” cried Terrance as the werewolf slashed wildly at him and Marcel, arms swinging everywhere, snot and tears flying everywhere. It pulled against the chain farther than expected and that time when Terrance moved back, the claws managed to slice across his armored chest. Something was caught and Terrance was sent spinning away. He was lifted off his feet, hit the ground on his side, and went rolling across the street. He hit a tree, hard, but he kept the staff in his hand and was already getting up.
Margaux, tall, gorgeous, statuesque, and fast, rushed out of the woods and threw herself right into the werewolf like a madwoman, her French silver sword covered in blue fire. She was armored as well but lighter and more for speed.
She sliced across the wolf’s stomach, blue fire spreading diagonally across, and the werewolf screamed, swung its arm wildly and knocked her helmet off. She rolled, was up again, her sword held out sideways and her long, reddish-gold, curly hair went spilling down around her vibrant blue eyes past her shoulders.
“Tirer,” said Paul, and when they backed up, he raised his gun, saw its eyes, and fired.
Part of the werewolf’s head came off but he missed its eye on purpose. That was the best target for death, what they called “the Silver Bullet maneuver” in English because of the 1985 Stephen King movie called Peur Bleue in French.
But they didn’t want it dead.
“Continuer,” he told them.
Paul smiled in a joyless kind of way. Terrance was back, stumbling forward in pain for a moment before shoving it down, slamming on another head to his spear as Marcel slammed his fist into the werewolf and sent it stumbling away into the chain’s end.
It shrieked when the hooks pulled into its flesh and then went back and swung at Marcel, who ducked it and punched it in the ribs. They looked to have been broken from that hit.
Terrance put another chain in the werewolf and ground while Margaux used the transformation spell to turn her blade into a spear, the silver tip still covered in blue fire, and then she stabbed the thing in the side. Why she used a sword to begin with was beyond Paul but Margaux was always a little insane.
“Tirer,” said Paul again and they moved aside.
Paul shot it in the leg and the werewolf dropped to one knee with a cry. Then he shot it in the other leg, the shoulder, and the arm.
“Continuer.”
Terrance slammed another spearhead into it, slammed down the chain, and then, by the time Marcel slammed it across the face again and Margaux stabbed it in the ankle, Terrance had replaced another head and stuck the wolf on the back again, as hard as he could, and connected it once more to the ground. As their fight continued, he did that three more times, nine chains down in total, each connecting the creature to the ground.
It screamed in rage but there was pain in it now, a canine whine of pain.
Terrance held out his arms and they backed up. He said, “Tirer!”
Paul shot it in the good leg as it tried to get up, and then it fell down onto all fours.
Terrance raised a fist and the chains magically tightened, pulling the werewolf down onto its chest, and it shrieked in agony in what sounded almost like a dog’s high-pitched yip.
“Where the fuck are Chloé and Ambre?” cried Margaux.
Paul looked into the werewolf’s eyes and it looked right back at him, right through the darkness and right into his soul.
Then it jerked its head toward its intended victim.
* * *
Teresa looked over her broken Mazda into the bloodshot, allergy-ridden eyes of the beast and the beast looked right back.
It sneezed hard, spitting out mixed snot and blood onto the ground, and then reached out through those silver-like, blue-glowing chains toward her. It was shot again, jerking from the hit, but it kept reaching for her, its arm seeming to grow longer like a cartoon character’s would. The clawed, furry hand at the end, so much like a man’s, then closed all its fingers with only the index finger remaining.
It was pointing at her.
And did it wink? Teresa almost screamed at the sight of it but then she saw some kind of blue-colored liquid land on its back and the creature shrieked.
* * *
Paul’s twin sister Ambre finally arrived and just dropped a ball of magical acid on the back of the thing, which made it squeal.
“God, I love magic,” Paul said with a dark smile.
Magic wasn’t as good as silver but it was close if you knew how to use it properly and even if it wasn’t fatal, it could cause some real pain to the creature.
Ambre cast a spell over the air around the werewolf’s limbs, one after the other, making the air around it as though it was as heavy as a car. It had to be cast on something around the wolf because the wolf was immune to almost any spell directly cast upon it.
“Continuer,” Terrance said.
“Where the fuck is Chloé?” cried Margaux and she stabbed the werewolf with her spear as hard as she could, pushing it into its flesh, while Marcel got on top of it and began to pound it on the back of its head, slamming it into the asphalt.
Chloé finally appeared, looking scared and disturbed. She looked into the werewolf’s eyes and it sensed her entering its mind instantly.
The werewolf howled and ripped through the magic and forcibly extended the chains out of the ends of the spearheads. It elbowed Marcel, sending him flying, and Paul heard him cry out as he landed wrong. His ankle twisted violently on impact and that sent him rolling across the street. Then the creature jerked to its right, to the south, and in an explosion of blood, it moved so hard that it ripped the hooks out of its body all at once.
Then it fled across the street.
Chloé dove out of the way, rolling onto her feet, and was up as it passed by, a psychic blade of transparent blue in her right hand.
The werewolf stumbled into a tree, half-breaking it on contact, and Paul shot it once before it got its bearings and continued running.
He chased it through the woods with the others, watching them carefully out of the corner of his eyes to make sure he didn’t accidentally shoot them, and fired two more times as the werewolf rushed across some parking lot hidden below the bridge, the kickback brutal but tolerable, and then he shot it in one of its legs.
It did nothing. The werewolf reached the edge of the cliff southward and leaped off, its arms spread wide, and disappeared down into the darkness of that strange, sleepy, American village.
And then there was silence. No sound at all. It was as if nothing at all had happened.
Paul walked up to the edge, his gun ready and pointing down in case the creature was holding onto the cliff face below, and then Terrance, Margaux, Ambre and Chloé all moved up together around him.
The werewolf wasn’t down there, so Paul rested the rifle on his shoulder and the group looked out at what the locals called “Lower Bartlett Bay” for a moment. Soon Marcel appeared limping along the blood trail across the pavement.
Terrance rested the butt of his spear on the ground and frowned at Chloé. He was the oldest there, in charge, and not particularly happy. “Any particular reason you didn’t appear when we needed you?” he asked Chloé.
Chloé looked up at him and seemed very disturbed.
Terrance was about to say more but Ambre’s falcon familiar, Renaud, landed on her left shoulder. “I couldn’t follow it!” he cried. “I saw it fall, I saw where it was going, and then it was just gone! It just disappeared, all seven or so feet of it! I have no idea where it went!
“Father told me that it could do that but I’ve never seen it happen!” His father was another falcon familiar named Roland, who was the familiar of Ambre’s teacher, Marie.
Ambre petted him without a word and asked, “Did you get anything, Chloé?”
Chloé shook her head.
“Damn it, Chloé!” snarled Terrance and Chloé gasped. “This was the best chance we had of finding out who the werewolf here is! What happened?”
“There was something else with it,” said Ambre and Terrance looked at her.
“What do you mean, ‘something else with it?’” he asked.
“I saw a woman in a white kimono,” she told him. “I think it was a ghost.”
“Oh, that’s just what we need!” Terrance retorted bitterly.
Chloé burst into tears and ran off toward the street.
“That’s not like her at all,” said Marcel.
“We know the werewolf lives in the south at least,” said Paul. He gestured over the cliffside with his free hand. “Somewhere down there.”
“Yes, well, that’s hardly great news,” said Marcel bitterly and then gasped in pain. “There’s like ten thousand people down there and any one of them could be the creature.” Ambre leaned down, grabbed his ankle, and cast a healing spell that made a distinct snap sound as it healed. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she said and smiled at him while biting her lower lip.
“Olivier is going to be furious,” said Terrance. Olivier was always angry and bitter and he wasn’t going to be particularly happy that the best chance they had to get into the werewolf’s head and learn its human identity was thrown away because one of their own didn’t move fast enough.
The werewolf knew they were there now. It would be more prepared on the next moon. It would be ready for them and much, much harder to catch off guard.
Paul sighed and went back up to check on Chloé and found the beautiful, Asian-American girl the werewolf was trying to kill was still standing by the car. He looked her over, smiled and walked up to her. Then, in his awkward, never particularly great English, he asked, “Are you okay?”
The beautiful Asian girl burst into tears, rushed up to him, and threw her arms around him. She babbled at him in English but was speaking far too fast for him to understand a word. He looked at her, tilted his head, and grinned.
“Don’t even think about it!” Margaux told him. He looked at her with a mock-shocked look but she said, “I know you!” before he could make a witty reply. “Don’t even think about it!”
Paul laughed and patted the American girl on the shoulder with his left hand, his right hand still balancing his rifle on his shoulder. He then looked at his hand, saw it was covered in blood, and then started to say something slowly in English. “You okay, good?” Wait, that’s not right, he thought.
Ambre approached with Renaud on her shoulder and frowned at him. “You never studied,” she told him.
* * *
“Are you all French?” asked Teresa.
“Yes,” said a pretty woman in her mid-twenties. She was an athletic, sexy young woman with the same dark hair and dark eyes as the handsome boy with the giant rifle, her hair hanging straight and down around her chin. “My friend said she saw something else.” Her voice was accented but otherwise fluent. She then said something to a skinny, slender blonde girl there in French and they had a quick back-and-forth. Teresa took a couple years of French in high school but they were speaking far too fast for her to grasp more than a few words. “She said it was the ghost of a woman in a white kimono.”
Teresa’s eyes widened before she could stop them. It was the first time anyone outside the family ever corroborated the existence of the Woman in White and confirmation of that sort felt much worse than she would have ever thought, even after seeing her on the bridge.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Teresa told her instantly, slipping away from the handsome boy. He looked down at himself, covered in blood. “Sorry,” she told him.
“It’s—oh well.”
“Oh well?” asked Teresa.
“He means it’s not a problem,” Ambre replied. “You are lying to us and you are still scared. That ghost frightens you almost as much as the werewolf.”
“I need to call my father.”
“No one is stopping you,” said the woman.
“Please don’t mention the ghost when he arrives,” she told her.
“The ghost fucked us,” the woman said bitterly. “We like to know when the werewolf has friends.”
“It’s not the werewolf’s friend,” Teresa replied. Of that, she was one hundred percent sure. It used the werewolf to try and kill her but that didn’t make them “friends.”
“So, you say,” said the Frenchwoman suspiciously. “But you’re not telling us everything.”
“It’s an old family problem. A private family problem.”
The Frenchwoman looked at her for a long moment, frowning deeply, and then walked away without a word.
* * *
It was over for the moon.
Olivier beat the police, having left the small house they rented instead of the room at the Merrick Hotel which their leader, Étienne, was instantly distrustful of.
Étienne and his protégé Olivier had been in the Hunt for a long time, both since they were young men with the younger Olivier going as far back as the 1960s or so and it showed on his face. He did not look particularly happy as he stepped out of the rented Subaru Legacy and approached them.
Margaux, his granddaughter from his relationship with a woman who entered the Hunt at a similar age and time as himself, was furious. She approached him with her left hand resting on her father’s hilt at her side. “Papi!” she hissed. “Don’t blame me! Chloé screwed us!”
Olivier was a man in his seventies but looked older. His face was lined with pain and rage that made the once handsome face look sour and mean, with only the vibrant blue eyes that Margaux inherited as the one remaining attractive feature. His white-streaked gray hair was short, combed forward toward his eyes, and he sometimes wore a pair of glasses to read, which made him look even older, but despite not being part of the fighting anymore, he was still in great shape. His casual gray dress shirt tucked into jeans belied the fact that he was a high-ranking member of an ancient order of werewolf hunters that went back nine hundred years.
Olivier looked at her without emotion and then looked at Chloé, who looked like she wanted to cry, and then back. “It’s fine.”
“What?” replied Margaux incredulously.
“Seriously?” said Paul. That sure didn’t sound like him at all.
“It’s this town,” said Olivier coldly. He looked over at Chloé and held out his arms. She whimpered and rushed into them and began to fully cry. She had always viewed him as a father figure but it was the first time she acted like it since she was an actual child. It was also the first time Paul ever saw her cry as an adult. She was short, petite, blond and cute, and was always trying to overcompensate against everyone’s instinct to see her as a skinny little girl. “You haven’t been here long enough to understand,” Olivier told them, “But you will.”
“She was in so much pain!” whimpered Chloé and Olivier, out of character, put his arm around her and she began to cry harder.
“Psychics are so damn weird,” Paul told Ambre.
“Agreed,” she replied.
Paul turned his head over to see the flashing lights coming. “Is this going to be a problem?” he asked Olivier as Terrance started pulling out the chains from the ground by using one spell to unlock them from the ground and another to have the chains retract and pull their sections back together.
“Not here,” said Olivier. “Here, they understand.”
“That’s—” Paul blinked “—unexpected.”
“You’re going to get a lot of unexpected things here,” he told him.
* * *
Cailtin Christopherson looked at the French talking among themselves. They were in a corner out of the way, hanging around, a few smoking cigarettes.
“So, they did come,” said Christopherson softly, noting the armor and the helmets. “And look at how they’re armed. They look like medieval knights intermixed with modern soldiers.”
Mary leaned over and said, “All their weapons are perfectly legal. The French government has some kind of deal with us concerning them.”
“Seriously?” They seemed rather extreme to Christopherson. “Parker says that boy over there has a Barrett M82. It shoots fifty BMG rounds.” Parker was a beat cop who had a fascination with the military who just happened to be on duty that night. “He says it’s designed to blow through vehicles or tanks or something.”
“Yeah. They’re high-level monster hunters and they’re backed by the French parliament. There’s nothing illegal about any of this.”
“Checks out, I guess,” said Christopherson. Honestly, she didn’t know what to think except that such a weapon had no business being on anyone but a soldier in military service. That monster looked like it could shoot through an entire school and kill someone when it came out the other side.
And if that couldn’t kill a werewolf, what the hell could?
“They’ve rented an old house Bartlett owns on Nathan Boulevard, so they’re going to be here for a while.”
“Ethan Bartlett rents houses too?”
“Yeah,” Mary replied. “I’m surprised Officer Hotness didn’t know that.”
Several of the officers burst out laughing. “Goddamn it, Mary!” she said but she sensed, with Mary and the other members of the Force, a sense of deep relief among them. A sense that they were much more comfortable now that the hunters had arrived.
Mary laughed and said, “Relax. There’s no death tonight. No victim. We’ve got a month to breathe.”
That was something but only if the werewolf really didn’t kill anyone. The night wasn’t over yet.
Christopherson looked at the French hunters standing there and saw the older man without armor and short gray hair turn his head over his shoulder and look at her. He seemed to know exactly what she was about to say and ask before she did and she sensed he was waiting for her with a pre-written speech he had probably told police officers like herself countless times before.