by Mia Archer
“Do you have any comment about what happened at the theater last night?” she asked. “How do you feel about gun rights…”
“No comment,” I said.
That brought her to a stop. For a moment, at least. Not a very long moment, but it was something. She hit me with a smile.
“You know that’s not going to work, right?” she said. “The people have a right to know what happened last night. There have been rumors that…”
“I said no comment,” I repeated.
Her lips compressed to a thin line.
“If you would just…”
She stopped. Sighed. Flicked a button on her recorder, and put it back in her purse. Then she looked over her shoulder towards the other reporters who were hanging back.
I wasn’t sure if that was a professional courtesy thing, or if they were merely hanging back and waiting to see if she’d be able to get something.
I doubted it was professional courtesy. I might as well be looking at a bunch of sharks that’d scented blood in the water.
“Listen,” she said, clearly trying to sound understanding. “There’s been a lot of talk and crazy rumors about what happened at that theater,” she said. “Talk of really wild things. Like maybe those people weren’t shot.”
I hit her with my best flat stare. It was pretty good, if I did say so myself.
“If you know something it might provide closure to the people who lost loved ones last night.”
“If you think appealing to my humanity is going to work then you have another thing coming,” I said.
I felt for the people who’d lost family members, lovers, brothers and sisters, but I also wasn’t going to give anything away. Not when the story belonged in supermarket tabloids as far as a “legitimate journalist” like this lady was concerned.
“You can’t tell me anything?” she said. “You’re really going to pull the silent routine?”
I arched an eyebrow. That seemed to be response enough. She let out a frustrated growl.
“So you’re not going to talk about the werewolf last night?” she asked, finally coming out with it. “You’re going to stonewall me the same as the cops?”
I kept that eyebrow up. It was a performance that would’ve made the late, great, Leonard Nimoy proud.
It was another useful trick I’d learned from my dad. Keeping your face impassive when someone was trying to get you to give something away was a useful skill when you worked with the supernatural.
“Fine,” she said, pulling out her recorder again. “But if you don’t talk to me then you’re going to have to talk to someone at some point. One of them is going to corner you and get something out of you.”
I sighed and tried to look like her bullshit logic had finally persuaded me to give something away. She grinned and hit the record button. I leaned forward, glancing at the reporters behind her.
“I suppose you’re right…” I said, drawing out that last word. “So when you put it that way.”
“Yes?” she said, leaning forward with a hungry look that was almost a match for the werewolf the night before.
I leaned down close to her recorder. My next words were screamed at the top of my lungs.
“No fucking comment!”
I had the satisfaction of watching her jump. Good.
I wheeled around and stalked off. Though I could hear her following behind me. At least I had the satisfaction of knowing I was causing her a little bit of annoyance by making her chase me.
I could also hear the other reporters giving chase. I glanced at the woods. I told myself there wasn’t anything in there that could hurt me. Not in daylight, at least.
Besides, I had my gun. I had my sword, for that matter.
I looked back at the reporters. They were getting closer. It wouldn’t be long before I was surrounded. There were campus cops following them at a respectful distance, but they weren’t going to be much help.
So I turned off into the woods.
“Hey!” the reporter shouted. “Where are you going? We’re not done yet!”
I smiled as I made my way through the trees.
This was nothing compared to making my way through the forest on my dad’s property when I was a kid. I hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but traipsing through the woods with him had turned me into a pretty good woodswoman. At least I could do a better job of picking my way through the trees than that woman could.
She was also going to get a surprise if she tried to come in here. She wasn’t exactly wearing hiking shoes, and I could see poison ivy all around. The stuff was easy to avoid if you knew what to look for, but something told me that woman didn’t.
The reporters’ voices were getting quieter the further I went into the little wooded area that was turning out to be thicker than I thought. I pulled out my phone and glanced at the map and realized I was actually moving through one of the wooded areas that ran along one of the many nature trails that dotted campus.
In fact, if I stepped just a little bit to the west I would come out on it…
I jumped and nearly let out a scream as I stepped onto the path and saw a girl in a red hoodie staring at me.
The red hoodie was odd. It was a little chilly at this time of year, but global warming had made sure that what was chilly at this time of year was nothing like what it’d been when I was younger.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “You startled me.”
The girl cocked her head to the side and a little half smile played across her face. Talk about creepy.
It’s not like meeting creepy people on campus was out of the ordinary. You had a bunch of people coming to a place where they were on their own for the first time trying to shed whoever they’d been back in high school. Which resulted in a bunch of people doing some pretty weird stuff.
This girl, though. I’d fought off a fucking werewolf and I’d been confronted with the reality of the supernatural since a very young age, and yet there was something about her that was deeply unsettling.
“Can I help you?” I asked when the girl kept staring at me without saying anything.
“You’re the girl,” she said, showing some teeth.
There was something about her smile that unsettled me. I knew it was a sign of aggression with great apes, which technically I was if you talked to someone in the biology department, but humanity had evolved way past that. We showed our aggression by waving weapons at each other, thank you very much, not by baring our teeth. In fact, our species was so metal that we bared our teeth at each other to show we were happy.
Only there was something about the way this girl was baring her teeth at me that sent a shiver running through me.
“Were you there last night?” I asked.
“You were a very naughty girl last night,” she said, wagging a finger at me.
I looked her up and down again. The girl was pretty enough. She had big dark eyes and brown hair. And yet there was something off about her. Something about…
Then it hit me. I shook my head and rolled my eyes, then reached into my bag and pulled out my gun. The thing looked like a miniature hand cannon, and had been a gift from my father. It was a little bit of special work he’d had made custom for his work, and he’d gotten the same for me.
I didn’t point of the thing at her, never point a gun at something you don’t intend to end in the very near future, but I also didn’t exactly keep it lowered to the ground.
“I’m loaded with silver,” I said.
She glanced at the gun, but if she was nervous she didn’t let on.
“I know after last night,” she hissed.
“Then you know what I did to your friend last night,” I said. “And you know I’m going to do the same to you even if you’re in your human form.”
Her eyes darted to the gun again. Good. She was worried even if she was trying not to show it. It was gratifying to know the things that went bump in the night were worried about me.
“I have a message for you
,” she said.
“And I don’t give a shit,” I said.
The girl blinked. Clearly she wasn’t used to people talking to her like that when she was delivering one of her “messages.”
“I know what you’re doing here,” I said. “The red hoodie is a nice touch, if you want to be the werewolf equivalent of a basic college bitch.”
Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t look too happy about being called out as the werewolf equivalent of a basic college bitch.
The corner of my mouth curled up as I wondered if basic werewolf bitches enjoyed pumpkin spiced victims, but I figured it wasn’t funny enough to give voice to that thought.
“You should watch your tone with me,” she said, snarling as her smile slipped.
“I’m sure you think you’re being all creepy, but I’m not intimidated.”
She finally managed to regain some of her composure. That creepy smile came back, and she cocked her head to the side.
“But you should be,” she said. “The things we’ll do to you…”
I frowned. The things they’d do. Plural. Like there was a pack out there. I didn’t need a pack coming after me, dammit.
I held my weapon up. This girl wasn’t the only one who could pull the whole intimidation routine, and I was the girl with the gun.
“This isn’t going to work. I’ve known about things that go bump in the night for a hell of a long time, and you’re not scaring me. If any more of you come after me I’ll do the same to you as I did to your friend last night. Got it?”
She blinked a couple of times, and even took a step back. Then she let out a low growl. A growl that sounded more animal than human.
The girl leaned forward and held her hands out at her side. I’m sure it was supposed to look like she was getting the claws out, but in her human form it merely made her look like she was trying to do her best Hugh Jackman impression.
Which made her look fucking ridiculous as she charged at me.
I racked the slide putting a round in the chamber. I was nothing if not safety conscious about walking around armed.
Plus I was aware of the effect of racking the slide. It’s not something that had to be done after every shot like some ridiculous Hollywood movies written by idiots who’d never touched a gun, but it definitely had some intimidation factor.
The reaction was immediate. She skidded to a stop and stood there panting, her shoulders heaving, as she glared at me.
It was the kind of situation that might’ve been kind of hot if she wasn’t an unholy monstrosity who would’ve ripped my lungs out given the opportunity.
“I’m glad we could come to an understanding,” I said.
The girl glared at my gun. It was a glare that said she wasn’t accustomed to people threatening her. It was the kind of glare that said she’d love nothing more than to mutilate me late this night, but that was the rub, wasn’t it?
She’d confronted me during the day, and that was tough shit. I knew I probably should’ve drilled her, all the evidence was there that she was a fucking werewolf threatening me in human form, but there was that little bit of uncertainty that was enough to save her.
It was another rule dear old dad had drilled into me time and again. If I met a monstrosity that shouldn’t exist then I should have no trouble ending that monstrosity and keeping it from hurting or killing anyone else, but if there was even a tiny sliver of a shred of doubt that the person confronting me might actually be a human then I should verify prior to fragging.
And unfortunately I didn’t have time to hang around this crazy bitch until later when the moon came out to see whether she was or wasn’t a werewolf.
“Are we done here?” I asked.
“You’re going to regret this,” she said, her voice again going low like she was growling at me.
“I’m sure I will,” I said. “I’m totally not intimidated right now, but I’m also late for my next class.”
She cocked her head to the side. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I want to get out of here, but I also don’t want you to think it’s because I’m afraid of you,” I said. “So if you could get out of my way?”
Her eyes darted to the gun in my hand one final time, then she turned and disappeared into the woods. The trees didn’t even make a rustling sound as she slipped through them, which I figured was more confirmation she wasn’t totally human.
I was tempted to go after her, but the last thing I needed, on top of worrying about that sliver of a shred of doubt that she might be human, was to drill someone in the forehead and then have those reporters decide a gunshot was worth risking a few scrapes and some poison ivy, which would lead to them tracking me down and seeing me standing over the corpse of a girl who looked very human.
No, unfortunately she was getting away on a technicality, though as I turned and continued through the wooded area, staying on the path and keeping a sharp ear out for someone sneaking up behind me, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was going to seriously regret letting that girl go before this all was over.
I hated that I was thinking in terms of this whole thing not being close to over.
10
Cara
I huddled in my chair, rocking back and forth. Every once in a while I rocked back far enough that I worried about the thing tipping over, but compared to what I’d seen the night before the thought of busting my head on the hard tile floor held no terror.
I looked out my dorm window to the grassy area that led to one of the many wooded areas that dotted campus. I’d crossed that grass the night before on my way back to the dorm.
It didn’t seem possible that something as big as that creature could’ve made it across that grassy area without being seen by someone. Only no one had screamed or raised the alarm like that guy at the nature preserve entrance.
Maybe I was going crazy. I kept thinking I was going to get a call from one of those two assholes and it’d turn out last night had been a prank. That it’d been someone in a werewolf suit, a very expensive and realistic werewolf suit, and not an actual werewolf.
Maybe they weren’t lying in the middle of the nature preserve gathering flies. If it’d come for me rather than finishing the job then there was probably a lot left out there for hungry critters.
I thought of all the missing people they’d mentioned, then turned back to my laptop and the articles I’d pulled up.
There were twenty missing persons cases in the last few years alone. Like there was something out there hunting people that didn’t leave witnesses.
I glanced out the window again and shivered. They weren’t supposed to be able to come out during the day. I was going to have a hell of a time getting to my one night class now, because I had no intention of going out after dark.
“You’re acting like an idiot, Cara,” I muttered.
I clicked over to the campus police social media again. So far there hadn’t been anything about an attack in the nature preserve. There was plenty about the attack at the movie theater.
A horror movie marathon had turned into real horror when a shooter had opened fire, killing dozens. It seemed insane that something like that could happen on our campus, but then again if you’d asked me last night whether or not werewolves existed I would’ve said that was insane too.
I clicked back to my research. I’d found a few things about the dogman, basically a version of a werewolf that could appear in daylight or at night and it was more of a werewolf shaped animal than it was a monster that transformed under the full moon, but I still couldn’t find any reports of the thing before some radio DJ up in Michigan made up a song no matter what Griffin said last night.
Sure there were plenty of people who tried to backdate stories about the creature to before that song, but I thought it was interesting and telling that none of those stories came out until after the fact.
I shivered. No, I was fooling myself as much as Griffin last night if I thought that thing was anything other than
exactly what it was: a fucking werewolf.
I clicked back to the campus police again. It was an obsessive anxiety thing that’d taken control of my brain clicking back and forth between researching cryptozoology shit, something I never would’ve been interested in before last night, and then back to the campus PD to see if they were saying anything about the nature preserve.
I had visions of some poor jogger finding an unpleasant surprise on the trail. Well, the most unfortunate thing aside from a jogger being unlucky enough to be out on the trail after dark when the thing that’d turned those guys into steaming piles of carrion was on the prowl.
I had no intention of calling the cops and implicating myself, for all that I also knew there was a chance there was camera footage out there on the forest floor somewhere that would put me at the scene of the crime.
Though if they were able to recover footage of me at the scene then they’d also recover the footage of that asshole staring at a werewolf like a fucking idiot and not running until it’d torn out his spine, which would probably be exonerating. Not to mention I didn’t have the strength or claws to shove a furry hand through someone’s stomach to rip out their spine.
I shivered. I wondered how many people on this campus had died that way over the years. It wasn’t exactly the kind of statistic they’d include on any campus tours. Something told me discussions of the local indigenous werewolf population wouldn’t be good for recruitment.
Only this time when I clicked back to the campus police department there was something new. They were naming the girl who’d gunned down the shooter. My eyes narrowed.
She looked familiar. Like I’d seen her somewhere before, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. Maybe we’d had a class together. She was the kind of pretty girl I’d appreciate from afar without working up the guts to talk to her in class.
So I went over to the campus newspaper to see if they had any news.
“Who are you,” I muttered, looking at the top headline.
College cheerleader shoots gunman