CHAPTER EIGHT

“What do you know about werewolves?”

“They change twice a month, on the full and new moons,” McIntyre said. “Silver kills them. What else is there to know?”

Elise hugged her knees to her chest as she sat in the shadow of a tree outside Northgate’s sole Walmart. She had been looking for a prepaid cell phone, only to discover that the town was small enough that its Walmart only carried groceries. There was no electronics section, and no phones. So she had “borrowed” a cell phone from a cashier instead.

“How aware are they, in wolf form?” Elise asked.

“Not at all.” McIntyre shuffled papers on the other end of the line. “Yo, beaner, hand me that book.” Anthony must have been with him. Elise’s lips quirked into a smile when she heard Anthony’s responding string of curses.

“So they wouldn’t be able to deliberately interfere with the bodies of victims to obfuscate evidence,” she said.

“Hang on, let me look. I’ve got a manual on werewolf hunting here, if Tony’ll stop being a fag and toss it at me.”

Anthony must have tossed it at him, all right, because Elise heard a loud clatter, and the call cut off.

She redialed. McIntyre answered quickly.

“Asshole,” he said. For once, he didn’t mean Elise.

“There’s a manual on werewolf hunting?” she asked, gently redirecting his attention to the task at hand. Sunset was approaching rapidly. Moonrise would follow not long thereafter.

“Yeah. Written by Lucian Wilder. He is—was—the authority on the subject. It’s not easy to get a copy. I had to practically sell my firstborn for it.” McIntyre’s voice went muffled. “Yeah, I’m joking , Tish. Christ. I would never sell Dana for a book.”

McIntyre used to be a hard, uncommunicative man, but he had been softened by two children and a few years training Anthony, whose niceness was infectious. It was still kind of strange hearing McIntyre whipping out the sarcasm.

His end of the call rustled. “Okay, I bookmarked this page. I’m gonna read an excerpt to you. Ready?”

“Shoot,” Elise said.

His reading skills weren’t great. He spoke slowly, as if sounding out each word as he went. “The soul of the wolf eats the soul of the human. By the time six moons pass and the change is complete, all that remains is a monster. ”

“What’s this about six moons?”

“It takes three months to go from getting bitten to becoming an actual werewolf,” McIntyre said. “Two moons a month for three months—six moons. It’s a gradual change, but by the time they’re done, they’re stone cold killers. If you spot this thing, swallow it.”

That was what McIntyre and Anthony had dubbed Elise’s demonic ability to consume everything in her path: “swallowing.” She could wrap darkness around her enemies and absorb every drop of blood and flesh. It was deadly. Terrifying. But the boys liked to turn it into sex jokes half the time. Elise always swallows . Fucking hilarious.

McIntyre’s wife, Leticia, had once told Elise that it was how the men coped with the fact that her inhuman form frightened them. Better to tease her than run screaming. Elise wasn’t a fan of either option.

“Okay,” she said. “One more thing—where can I get silver weapons? Not for me. I’m going to give someone a present.”

“New boyfriend?”

“Nothing so formal.”

“Deputy Pretty Boy?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “All right, hang on.”

McIntyre flipped through a vendor list and gave Elise a name and address in New Jersey. By the time she had it memorized, the sun had disappeared.

She blinked into darkness.

Elise’s falchion could slaughter anything that lived. It had been changed into black stone by the ichor of the mother of all demons at the same time that she had become a demon, and she had bathed it in blood a hundred times since. It never failed to kill.

Even when she didn’t land a mortal blow with the falchion, a cut with its blade spread infernal ichor through its victims and turned them to stone.

She was confident that it could take down werewolves—silver or not.

But silver wasn’t merely a way to kill a werewolf. A silver infection was torture. With Lucinde Ramirez allegedly missing, Elise wasn’t going to take any chances that her quarry might die before she got answers.

That was why she needed Brannigan Lane, incubus and weapons dealer.

The latest law passed by the OPA required preternaturals to display their registration prominently on the front door of their businesses, but Brannigan didn’t have a registration to show. He operated out of a marijuana paraphernalia shop—not, in Elise’s opinion, the best way to avoid the attention of the law—and he had a “We Report Preternaturals” sign next to his “Buy One Vape Get One Free” sign.

He also carried every kind of weapon imaginable coated in silver.

“You look like the type that’d be good with a whip,” Brannigan said with a leer. He offered her a cat o’ nines with silver spikes on the tips. “I’d be happy to let you try it out on me.”

“Just the knives,” she said, ignoring his come-ons. He was dumping sexual energy into the air of his shop, as thick as the stench of pot smoke, but she was unaffected. A petty incubus’s power was nothing in comparison to that of the father of all demons.

“I have orgies every Friday night,” he said, opening the glass case to remove a set of silver knives. “You should come.”

Elise could think of few things she wanted to do less than join a weapons dealer’s orgy. “I need bullets, too,” she said.

She found the right rounds for Lincoln’s sidearm, haggled over prices for a few minutes, and deflected a few more unwelcome invitations.

Then she returned to Northgate.

Elise rematerialized near Lincoln's duplex and stood in the center of an empty two-lane highway. The moon had risen early that night. It hung huge over the mountains, as if swollen by the lingering summer heat. Its light bathed her skin, a mere reflection of the sun’s painful rays, and the sensation ached.

There were myths that said that the gods of animals lived on the moon, in much the same way that the gods of man dwelled in ethereal realms. Inaccessible, distant, and detached. Maybe there were werewolf gods interested in how Elise would address their children that night, stirred from a centuries-long slumber by her hunt.

She had taken the time to look at a map of the county again while she was at Walmart. Northgate was positioned at the crook of the river, which swept wide around an uninhabitable patch of the Appalachians—a place where there were no roads, no towns, and not even any trails. According to the elevation maps, there should have been a deep, craggy valley between two of the peaks, occupied by nothing but trees.

Werewolves were flesh-hungry monsters, but they were flesh-hungry monsters that liked their privacy. They denned in seclusion between moons, hiding out for two weeks until the next transition occurred. They were vagrants, outcasts.

Even if this werewolf, this handsome guy wandering around town with his kopis brother, had yet to shun society completely, he would instinctively seek out safe places to create a den. There was nowhere safer than the inhospitable valleys of the Appalachian Mountains.

It narrowed her search area to a few hundred square miles. Not a bad place to start.

Elise peeled back her skin and poured into the darkness.

There was too much wilderness in the Appalachians for Elise to cover on foot. That meant spreading herself over the dark canopy of deciduous trees, suffusing the space between the branches, clinging to the trunks, and opening her senses to every scrap of information the night had to offer.

As she rushed over the forest, she processed the location of thousands of squirrels, rabbits, and hikers camping near human trails. She saw towns on the outskirts of the uninhabited land that she had picked out on the map. She saw sleeping birds, sleeping mortals, sleeping towns.

And then she saw a wolf.

It was gray, dappled with hints of brown—the perfect camouflage for the forest. But Elise’s vision didn’t stop at its fur. She saw the pounding of its heart, the magic-rich blood streaking through its arteries, and, most importantly, its gold-rimmed eyes: a werewolf.

Elise drew her attention away from the rest of the forest, narrowing it upon the point of the wolf. She watched the places that its paws kneaded the soil. She studied the flick of its tail-tip as it darted through the underbrush. She inhaled the air it exhaled and savored the taste of animal blood on its breath.

There was nothing mundane about the creature. The average wolf was slightly larger than a domestic dog. This was the size of a small pony.

She followed it.

The werewolf darted through the underbrush as easily as the night carried Elise on its back, and she followed, slithering between the leaves as a black mist. She chased the flash of paw pads and white rings on its hind legs without ever touching it.

Together, Elise and the werewolf ran along the trail, then angled into the valleys, following a deer trail. The musk of fur and feces hung in a rich haze near the ground. Nose to the earth, the wolf tracked the smells as Elise tracked the wolf.

As impressive as the beast was, she had a hard time reconciling the shaggy gray wolf with the young man she had seen outside the sheriff’s department. She would have expected him to be larger. Meaner-looking. This wolf was kind of beautiful, in a way. Elise struggled to imagine its face fur stained with blood, shreds of human flesh dangling from its jaws, murder in its eyes.

The wolf leaped off of a ridge of rocks and landed lightly beside a spring. Elise lingered on the rocks. Let it have a head start—as long as night shrouded the mountain, it couldn’t escape her.

Here it was: a murderous beast responsible for six mostly-masticated bodies. McIntyre had said that there was no human left inside by the time they fully shifted into wolf form, and this creature was well past its sixth moon. The soul—such as it was—would have been replaced by beast.

There was no point in hesitating. It was a murderer. Elise could swallow it on the spot without guilt.

But the girl was still missing. Lucinde Ramirez.

What would a flesh-crazed werewolf do with a nine year old girl?

What were the odds she was even alive?

The wolf stopped to lap water out of the spring. When it lifted its head, crystalline water hung on its neck ruff.

It would be so easy to wrap herself around it. Suck it out of existence.

Then she heard the howl.

It pierced the night, echoed over the trees, bounced off of the rocks in the shadowed valley. It was a haunted cry, the wail of a lonely beast searching for its brethren.

There was another werewolf.

This beast stood on a ridge overlooking the spring. It was smaller than the other wolf, almost more feline than canine, with sleek golden fur. Despite its delicate bone structure, power poured off of it. The wolf’s eyes burned with the fury of the sun.

The moment of shock quickly dissolved to annoyance, then resignation, as Elise realized she had made a huge mistake.

She had come to Northgate expecting to hunt a lone werewolf. Instead, she had found a pack.

A human stepped onto the ridge beside the golden-furred werewolf, resting a hand on its flank with comfortable familiarity. He was dark-skinned, short-haired. It was the kopis, Seth, and he barely even looked at the wolf at his side, much less acted like he was afraid of it.

It greeted him by nudging its muzzle into his arm. He scratched its side.

Concealed among the trees, Elise pulled her physical form together once more, reassembling her toes, legs, hips, breasts. It took a conscious effort to piece herself into a solid figure. But it was easier to think on a human level, a mortal level, when she wasn’t drifting through the forest in a black fog.

Once Elise had two arms, two legs, and a physical brain, she struggled to sort through the puzzle presented to her.

Seth, the kopis, was traveling with a werewolf pack.

He was petting one of the werewolves. It wasn’t trying to maul him.

There were at least two of them—probably three, since Elise didn’t think that the gray wolf was Scarface after all.

And one or all of them might be murderers.

“What the hell have I found?” Elise whispered, clinging to the tree with human hands. It didn’t make any more sense to her in corporeal form than it did as an omnipresent shadow.

She drew one of the silver knives from her boot, balancing it on two fingers. Elise had been practicing with throwing knives. All it would take is a flick of the wrist, and she could slide its blade into the gray wolf’s flank. It wouldn’t get far with silver poisoning. Elise could get all the answers she wanted after that.

Elise narrowed her eyes, poised to fling the knife.

“Drop it,” said a voice behind her.

She hadn’t heard anyone approach.

Elise spun, raising the knife. She turned in time to see the missing werewolf, Scarface—still in human form, despite the full moon—shoot her point-blank in the face with a handgun the size of a small cannon.

Getting shot was an experience that Elise ranked on the “unpleasantness” scale right around “trying to survive a week without coffee.” It was an annoyance, but not deadly, and definitely not as difficult as walking around in full daylight.

But it sure as hell pissed her off.

She felt the metal enter her near the inner corner of her right eye. It slid through her sinuses, entered her cranium, and rattled around for a moment before finding its way into the back of her throat. Elise swallowed down the hard lump of the slug and felt it drop into her belly.

Later, her body would reject the metal, and she would throw it up with whatever tissues had been damaged by the gunshot. Elise would feel shitty until she ate enough to heal, and then life would resume its normal routine.

There were benefits to being a godlike demon, even if she couldn’t go tanning anymore.

So it wasn’t getting shot that made Elise have a really, really bad night. It was the blaze of white light that followed.

The light filled her skull with the chorus of a thousand voices. It slammed into Elise, ripped apart her flesh, and made her incorporeal before she could scream.

She tasted apples.

And then she came back to consciousness in a cage.