Werewolf Cop (10 page)

He sat there in the car, the engine running. He hoped he would spot the professor in his headlights. A bird, frightened by the motor noise, shot out of a far tree. It flew the length of the windshield and vanished into the woods. After that, nothing moved.

Zach shut the car off. Climbed out into a fine autumn chill. He felt the earth soft under his shoes: this was no road anymore. He took a few steps toward the edge of the forest, peering into the trees. He was aware of a watchful tension in himself—the same sort of feeling he would have had entering a house where a suspect might be hiding. His hand made a move toward the place beneath his windbreaker where his gun would have been, had he been wearing one—then it fell to his side.

Professor Dankl had told him there would be a trail, and yes, there, he spotted the head of it, a thin dirt path snaking deeper into the forest. He walked it slowly, his footsteps whispering over the fallen leaves, crackling on the dead twigs. The trees gathered closer around him. The beams of sunlight narrowed and flattened and began to fade. The darkness settled down through the crown cover above him and crept in around him through the gnarled branches. A bird cried out as he approached. A stream gurgled. The underchatter of frogs and insects waxed and waned.

The sun went down. Its hazy beams dissolved. The trees blocked the horizon light. The trail sank out of sight. He had a flashlight on his keychain, but it didn't help much. It barely picked out the next few feet of the way.

He wound around a bend and came into a flat clearing. It was brighter here. A circle of tall conifers surrounded him. Tortuous oak and maple branches, silhouetted against the last blue of dusk, pressed in behind them. Zach stood and listened to the croaking frogs and twittering crickets and the underlying silence.

A wooden door shut nearby. He tensed. He heard footsteps on—what?—wood?—stairs—a porch, yes. Now he heard the steps whisper and crunch over the leaves. He saw another flashlight bobbing through the trees.

“Ah, good. You came. And just in time,” the professor said—her familiar voice in the shadows, low, heavy, but with a certain energy that had not been there before.

He had to squint to pick her out of the gloaming, just the shape of her behind her flashlight. Then she stepped from the forest tangle, moved through the encircling evergreens, and came into the clearing with him. He saw that she was dressed as before, in the nondescript skirt and cardigan, only now she also had a dark overcoat thrown cape-like over her shoulders against the cold. She was carrying something under her arm, but the wing of the coat hid it from his view. She hobbled toward him with her strange half-crippled gait, her flat shoes shuffling through the carpet of leaves.

When she was closer, only a few yards away, he could make out her worried-monkey features. He saw fresh depths of pain and sorrow in her bright eyes. It came to him again just how crazy she was, a couple of tacos short of a combination plate.

She stuffed the flashlight in a coat pocket. Drew out the object she had under her arm: an ornate box of some kind. His own flashlight picked out portions of the carving on it. It looked machine-done to him. Cheap wood, stained to appear fancy. Some sort of souvenir box from a tourist shop.

“Here, take this. Open it,” she commanded.

“This is what you brought me out here to see?”

“Open it.”

He pocketed his own flashlight. Took the box. Opened it. Even in the thickening forest dusk, he could see that there was a pistol inside.

“What's this?” he said.

He put his hand on it. Drew it out. An old .38 Smith and Wesson. He tried to make sense of it. Was she going to tell him it was a relic of World War II . . . ?

“Do you know why the bullets are silver?” she asked him.

“What? Oh. Silver bullets. For, like, a werewolf.” Now he got it. It was a magic gun to kill Dominic Abend with. Great.

“Silver is the metal that conducts the best. Heat. Electricity. But not just that. More. More mysterious things too. It is not the bullets that will do the death-work, you see. It is your ‘Yeah, sure.' That. The silver conducts that as well.”

“Right,” said Zach, with a sarcastic drawl. He gripped the gun in his hand and turned it this way and that, from professional habit mostly: he couldn't see it well. “And you want me to have this. To protect myself from Abend. Is that right? Well, I don't know if I can get it back through customs. But thank you kindly for the thought.”

Even the details of her features were sinking into the darkness now, but he thought he caught a glimpse of some strange tenderness in the sadness of her smile. She reached up and briefly gripped his elbow, as if with true affection. Then she turned away. Turned her back on him.

“You know the word
liebestod
?” She could not have seen him begin to shake his head, but she went on anyway before he said
no
aloud. “Love-death, it means. A song or story about lovers who must together die. Romeo and Juliet—these you know, yes? But Americans do not tell such stories. Each one is everything to himself there, so I think. And always they believe they will make for themselves the happy ending. They do not know about
liebestod
.”

A wind moved, the fallen leaves rustling on the ground, branches creaking overhead. Zach shivered and looked around him. The woods were now draped in such sable night that the trees beyond the conifer circle had vanished into a general black and twisted thickness. Even the nearby evergreens were becoming mere suggestions of themselves. In such full darkfall, Zach's eyes were quick to make out the odd star-like gleam that had appeared on the far rise to his left, to the east. In the moment or two that he watched it, wondering what it might be—an airplane? the evening star?—it expanded into a brighter blast of radiance, and then took shape: a curving silver crescent, the top edge of the rising moon.

“And yet it has been like that for me and my country,” Professor Dankl went on, her voice still deep and hollow but full of feeling too, full of a world-weary fondness that struck Zach as somehow particularly European. “
Liebestod
. I have sacrificed even my immortal soul to defend her—to defend her from evil and from death—to chase them through the centuries of unbelief, alone in my understanding of them.
Umsonst
. For nothing. I have failed and she is gone. My country . . . my continent . . . my culture. . . .”

Zach stood fascinated by the moon as it rose and rose, as it became a half circle illuminating the romantic silhouetted skein of branches and forest vines beyond the clearing, and then still kept rising from behind its far hill. He felt Professor Dankl glance over her caped shoulder at him, and looked at her—but she had turned again, was facing away from him again, and he went back to watching the moonrise, only half listening to her mad ramblings.

“Now she is gone, I cannot bear what I have become for her. Why should I fear what I must now do? Why should I fear hell even? I am
in
hell.”

Taking another quick look her way, Zach saw her shake her head at the earth beneath her feet. From where he was, she was little more than a shadow, frail and hunched. He turned his eyes to the moon again. It had crested the rise. It was full and glorious. The forest was magical with its glow. The deep interweavings of the branches had grown mysterious and fantastical.

“My love, my love,” said Professor Gretchen Dankl. “It is for you I have become an abomination.”

Zach stood for one more second appreciating the beauty of the moon and the moonlit forest. Then he drew a deep breath, resolving that he was finished here. He had humored the loony old woman enough. Enough.

He turned to her and began to speak, but before he could, she made a sound—and it was such a sound as he had never heard before. Animal in its rumbling depth and savagery but human in its grief, it was a cross between a feral growl and a low moan of mourning.

“Professor? Are you all right?” he said.

He took a step toward her. Had an instant in which to begin to realize that she was changing—that she
had
changed—but it was only an instant, and he only
began
to realize, because the truth of it was too impossible to imagine.

Then she spun round and tore him open with unimaginable speed and violence.

He was flying backward, his torso shredded, even as his mind was forming the image of what he could not in all reason have seen: the small, hunched shadow of the woman in the dark transforming into the great, hunkering beast of a thing that pivoted toward him quicker than the eye could follow. Its massive, blackly furred arm was still expanding, still bursting from its sleeve as it whiplashed through the night at him, its dagger-long, dagger-sharp claws slicing away his jacket, shirt, and flesh in one slashing sweep. The gun and the box it had come in flew from his outflung hands. Then his back smashed into the earth with a force that would have knocked the air out of him if he had not already gasped it all away.

He felt the life-blood spilling from his core. He choked on the blood rising in his throat. It coughed up out of him and spilled over his chin, and he was full of the primal knowledge that he had been wounded in some deep, essential way, maybe unto death. He did not even have to think this; he just knew it—he had a single second in which he knew it. . . .

Then the moonlight broke into the clearing in a broad and radiant beam—and the beast rose up above him, raging in the silver glow.

On his back, bleeding and in an agony more of shock than pain, Zach gaped up at the thing as it continued its metamorphosis. With sounds like the tearing of fabric and the splintering of wood, its muscles and bones were breaking out of themselves and the last traces of its humanity were molting from it. Shreds of what had been its clothes were flying and falling away. Its limbs were lengthening, its core thickening, its face—like some nightmare flower—was blossoming into a fire-eyed, snouted, snarling mass of bared and dripping fangs.

Another instant and its transformation was complete. It was no longer the little German professor at all. It was a massive monster, rampant against the moon.

Rearing on its huge hind legs, it raised its forelegs, its talons flashing. It howled—
howled!
—its muzzle tilted to the sky. The sound sent such an ancient and unholy terror through Zach's whole body that it seemed to curdle his sinews into milk. Any courage he had, any strategy, any hope, was blasted out of him by that high, primeval cry. The oldest instincts of his brain informed the rest of him that life was over. He was prey. He was food.

If the beast had fallen on him then—as he was sure it would—he would have died and been devoured like any rabbit paralyzed by a predator's glare. But the creature hovered above him in the moonlight another long second. He couldn't tell why. It almost seemed to be pausing, to be relishing its expectation, snarling and slavering and staring in anticipation at the feast spread before it on the ground, its guttural noises full of hunger, nothing but ravenous hunger in its fire-yellow eyes.

In that moment of the animal's hesitation—whatever its cause—Zach's inner man rallied. The soul of a hero cop broke through his age-old mammal-shock, and he thought:
the gun
.

He didn't know where it had fallen. It had been in his right hand. It must have flown off to the right. He didn't know if he could find it. He didn't know if he could reach it. He didn't know if he could move at all, with his midsection torn apart and the gore still burbling out of him. Even his cry of effort gurgled with blood—but he did cry out—and he rolled.

The monster roared. It sprang at him. Zach reached desperately across the clearing's floor, his fingers scrabbling blindly through the leaves. The beast was on him. Its huge claws sank deep into the flesh of his lower leg, spearing his calf through and through. Zach shrieked in wild agony—and his palm touched metal. His fingers clutched the .38.

The wolf-beast dragged him across the earth. He twisted his bleeding body round. He saw its eyes—enormous, and a color like no other thing: viscous yellow depths of extinction. The beast's mouth was wide, its fangs were bared and ready to clamp on Zach's throat. Its other paw was already swinging down to swipe the last life out of him.

Zach brought the gun to bear. He didn't even know he was pulling the trigger until the third shot fired and the fourth and fifth. He screamed in pain again as the beast's claws were wrenched out of his leg, ripping away chunks of him—and the enormous creature staggered back, reared up again, and wavered in the broad, mellow swath of moonlight.

Zach steadied his gun hand with the other and fired his last bullet, aiming center mass. The monster took one more faltering step backward, then stood still and swayed. It looked down at the meat-man on the earth beneath it. The great yellow eyes blinked, and Zach thought for all the world he saw some recognition in them, some bizarre ecstasy of feeling that he couldn't begin to name.

For what seemed forever, the beast swayed there above him. He thought it might—he thought it must—pounce on him again, and him now weaponless. Finally, though, it began its slow collapse. It sank down almost gracefully, one hind leg bending under it until the knee-joint planted itself in the leaves, one forepaw bracing itself against the earth. It panted rapidly, its huge tongue hanging over its fangs.

Coughing up some last bits of something—some essential organic matter from his deep entrails—Zach pushed himself off the forest floor, propping himself on one hand, so that, for a second or two, he and the beast were in almost the same position, the man rising, the creature sinking down. Their eyes met on a level, and Zach could've sworn that he saw something human there, some tenderness or gratitude in their savage depths.

Then the great wolf fell, toppling onto its shoulder with a thud that Zach felt in the ground underneath him. The creature made a high, weak, and sorrowful noise like the yip of a wounded dog. And as Zach watched—too badly wounded, too badly shocked, too thoroughly amazed to think much of anything—the thing began to change again.