The impact was terrible.
Mustapha was a powerful wolf. Lean and muscular.
The werebear was bigger.
Much, much bigger.
And it was in full motion when it blindsided him.
The impact knocked him sideways and they rolled over and over together, both of them growling and snapping, claws reaching for flesh. They struck a pine tree and broke apart, landing on either side of it. Mustapha whipped around and hunched down, showing his teeth.
The bear got to its feet without haste.
As if it knew this was a kill, not a fight.
They stared at each other from fifteen feet apart, with only the torn bark of the pine between them.
The rules of the Hunt had been clear.
You can bite to break skin.
You can cut only skin deep.
No kills.
No muscle-deep wounds.
Blood was fine.
Nobody dies.
Those were the rules.
But as he crouched there, Mustapha could feel his stomach begin to burn. He dared not take his eyes off the bear to look. But he could smell his own blood.
Too much of it.
Too much.
Too deep.
The bear had nearly gutted him.
The brute’s mouth was open. Hungry. Waiting to bite.
Dark brown eyes stared at him.
Three things happened in the next moment.
They changed the game. They cracked the world open.
The first thing was that Mustapha knew those eyes. He knew them in bear form. And he knew them in human form.
His wolf mouth was not constructed for human speech; otherwise he would have blurted the name. He would have spat it out as a statement, a question, an accusation of betrayal. The name burned in his mind, though.
Gundersen.
Gundersen?
The big werebear was from his days before Shreveport. They were from his prison days. This was Dutch Gundersen. A guard on his cell block. Not exactly a friend, but not an enemy. Gundersen had treated him fairly. He wasn’t the kind of screw to vent his problems on prisoners. He was tough, but he was always stand-up. He wasn’t the kind to do this. The game, maybe. But not to break the rules.
The second thing that happened in that same fractured moment was that Mustapha saw something on the side of the bear’s muscular neck. Two somethings.
They looked almost like hummingbirds. Bulbous bodies with brightly colored feathers. Mustapha had only seen the things on nature shows. When field biologists or zookeepers have to subdue a large and dangerous animal.
Tranquilizer darts.
Two of them, their needles buried so deep in the bear’s neck that they hadn’t torn loose during the attack.
The third thing—the last thing that moment could afford to tell him—was that Gundersen’s eyes were filled with all of the wrong emotions. There was hate. There was bloodlust. But there was also absolutely no sign of recognition.
And over those burning eyes was a narcotic glaze.
The bear was drugged.
While he slept and bled and remembered, Mustapha knew that the drugs were now in him, too. Through bite and spit and claws, whatever had been in the bear’s bloodstream was now in his.
He feared it as much as he feared the bear and the broken rules of the game and the wounds in his body.
He dreamed of the rest of the fight. Of how he had torn and slashed at the bear, wounding it in turn. Of how they had fought to the edge of a drop-off. How they’d chased each other through a sudden downpour. And how Mustapha broke away and ran for his life during the heaviest of the rain.
The dream played over and over again. Each time the fear was worse. Like the hoofbeats of something approaching.
Fear pushed him down deeper into the dreams.
Fear was the claw that tore at him while he lay there.
-5-
Saying a name out loud woke him.
“Warren.”
His lover was not in Mustapha’s dream, but it was a reason to come back to the light. To open his eyes.
To be alive.
He lay there and looked up at the canopy of trees as if he could see Warren hiding among the boughs and leaves.
“Warren . . .” he murmured.
There was no answer.
Of course there wasn’t.
Warren was hundreds of miles away. Back in Shreveport. Maybe watching all of this on TV. Watching him die out here in the woods.
Mustapha briefly closed his eyes, embarrassed and ashamed of his weakness. Of his defeat. Of letting Warren down.
The money from this gig was supposed to be their out. Their exit strategy from all the games in town. The packs and all of that. It was supposed to be a million-dollar ticket to the quiet life far away. Maybe down in Florida. Or way, way out in California.
Not up here.
Not in the endless forests of Washington State.
This was a million damn miles from anywhere.
A million miles from Warren.
And Mustapha could feel his exit door swinging shut.
In his mind’s eye—in that cruel lens through which he could always see the trail of mistakes and small failures that led him from who he had been to what he was now—he thought he saw Warren. The slim, small man with the killer’s eyes and the gentlest hands. Warren was there, standing on the far side of the exit, and as it closed he made no move to keep the door open. Lines of sadness were carved onto his face. His eyes were wet with disappointment.
“Warren . . . ?”
The door closed and so did Mustapha’s eyes.
Once more the world went away.
This time, however, he did not dream.
Instead he lay unmoving, his chest barely rising, as night slowly closed its fist around him.
-6-
Mustapha did not wake up.
The wolf did.
-7-
In wolf form he rose.
The pain was there. The wounds were still there.
The wolf didn’t care.
The man was submerged. Deeper than he had ever been. So deep that the thing that climbed slowly up the side of the ravine wasn’t a werewolf at all. In wolfshape Mustapha was still Mustapha. His mind, his will.
Not now.
Now he was nearly all wolf.
The commingled aspects of man and monster were disconnected, victims of the drug and blood loss and exhaustion. Now it was the wolf that clambered over the edge of the ravine and stood trembling at its edge. The forest was filled with shadows, but darkness was no veil to him. Not anymore. His eyes seemed sharper. Far more acute. Seeing this forest with a different spectrum. Its eyes could track the wavering flight of a moth through the densest shadows. Its ears could track the fall of a leaf from a tree half a mile away. And stripped of human thoughts, this wolf’s mind was simpler, more pure, less confused by distractions. The clarity was a powerful thing.
For a moment it stood there, reveling in these new senses. The inrush of sensory information was incredible and yet the wolf’s mind could process it. On some level, down where Mustapha still dreamed, he knew this was wrong. Wolves are not able to do this. Their senses are sharp, but not this sharp. Not anywhere near this sharp. This was wrong.
Wrong.
But it felt so incredibly right.
It felt correct.
As if this was how it was supposed to be before . . .
Before what?
His dreaming mind could not answer the question. The wolf did not want to. It accepted.
The wolf began walking away from the ravine, slowly at first, listening to what was happening inside. Tasting pain to understand damage.
When Mustapha changed from man to wolf, th
at wolf had the same mass and weight. It was larger than ordinary wolves. It was no different now. He was the same size wolf—but this wolf was not the wolf he had always known. The muscles felt different. Leaner in parts, bulkier in parts. And his jaws and throat were heavier. Whatever was happening to him had created a new matrix, a new kind of wolf.
But what was it?
Mustapha knew the answer, though it made no sense.
Canis dirus.
That came to him from all the reading he’d done on wolves. On their nature, their physiology. Their history.
Canis dirus.
Something older than gray wolves.
A proto wolf.
A dire wolf.
Stronger and faster than the wolves that lived and hunted today. With sharper senses and a much more powerful . . .
Bite.
But that was impossible. The dire wolf was gone. Extinct. Lost ten thousand years ago.
Except that it wasn’t.
Somewhere, locked inside the DNA of all wolves, was that code. That potential.
What did it mean? Why, after all these years as a werewolf, had this new and much older aspect of the wolf emerged?
The answer leaped at him.
The bear. Its claws.
Whatever was on those claws had done something. Sparked something.
Something so wrong.
Something that felt so right.
These thoughts swirled in the dreaming mind. They were fueled by the instincts of the werewolf. And man and werewolf were still qualities in this animal, but it was pure dire wolf mind that governed it as it moved deeper into the forest. Exultant in its power. Newfound or reclaimed? That was an impossible question. Healing with every step. Sniffing its own backtrail to follow the blood scent to where the fight had taken place, to the point where it had received those wounds.
To the place where the thing that delivered those injuries had last been.
It took an hour to find it.
The wheel of night turned, dragging cold stars across the sky.
The moon—a white face in the silky blackness—stared down at the wolf, and in her glow the wolf felt powerful again.
The wounds barely ached now.
It reached the clearing where the werewolf had fought the werebear. The ground was torn. There was blood that smelled of chemicals. There were claw marks on ground and trees. There was the smell.
The big animal was still out there. Still hunting. It, too, would be healed by now. Or near enough.
For the wolf, it was a simple choice that required no thought. Be hunted or go hunting.
The scent was strong on the air and in the ground. Stronger still in the trail of blood.
The wolf bent and sniffed the blood. The richer, more exotic blood of a bear.
The wolf lifted its head and uttered a long howl. It sounded lonely and lost.
But it was not.
The cry was filled with promise.
The wolf lowered its nose to the ground to reclaim the scent, and then it ran. All memory of injury and fear forgotten.
It ran in the direction of the wounded bear.
-8-
Mustapha wasn’t sure when he came back to himself.
It all felt like a dream.
He knew it was probably the drug.
Maybe.
Or something else. Some quality of his Were nature that he didn’t understand. There were always new things to know. Always surprises because it seemed to him that reality was hardly real.
He was a werewolf.
He worked for a vampire.
There were faeries and telepaths and other things in the world.
As gruff and stoic as he tried to be, as cool and casual about it all as he pretended, he was constantly amazed by the world.
And now this.
The last thing he remembered was thinking about how his death here in these vast woods would disappoint and hurt Warren.
The next thing he knew he was in wolf form, running free and wild in the woods. Not really werewolf anymore. Not in any way Mustapha understood. It almost felt like the wolf owned this flesh and that he was an unwelcome stowaway. He never felt that way when he ran as a werewolf. The werewolf and the man were the same person, the same being.
This was different.
Then it hit him in a moment of insight and clarity.
This was what a wolf felt like.
Not a werewolf.
A wolf.
There was a simplicity to it. A purity that he had never known as either man or werewolf. Nor was it anything he perceived among the stronger or older members of the pack he was considering joining.
This was . . . different.
This was such an ancient feeling.
And . . . a healing one.
Mustapha rode along in the body that was his and not his, feeling the muscles work, appreciating an efficiency and economy of movement that was different even though the body was the same. His body. But with a different hand at the controls.
The wolf ran, picking up speed as it followed a strengthening and freshening scene. The bear was close now.
So . . . why wasn’t the wolf afraid?
He certainly was. Man and werewolf. Definitely afraid.
Not the wolf, though.
Not the wolf.
Not the wolf.
-9-
It was there.
On the other side of the hill.
The wolf moved around the base of the hill to keep its own scent off the wind.
It could smell the bear.
The wolf sniffed the air.
Definitely a bear, but not currently a bear.
The change happened so fast that Mustapha wasn’t aware he was going to change.
One moment he was the wolf. Sturdy, strong, four-legged. Then there was a blur as if he were going blind and deaf all at once.
Suddenly he was Mustapha again, kneeling on the ground, trying to see what a wolf sees but with merely human eyes. The night sounds changed, smeared out, just as the shadows were smearing. Becoming blander, confused, less precise.
He stayed there, breathing, almost gasping, from the speed of the change.
There was no pain. Just the disorienting shift from the pinnacle of perception to the blandness of what human senses could take in.
And yet . . .
As he rose to his feet he realized that this was not entirely true. The darkness should have been far darker than it was. The night sounds should be meaningless beyond the pulse of crickets. The smells should be a nonsensical olio without depth.
That was not the way it was.
Somehow, something of the wolf remained with him. It shouldn’t have, but it did.
His senses were not human senses.
They were not the wolf’s superb perceptions, nor were they the hunting senses of the werewolf. But they were not entirely human, either.
He stood in the darkness and tried to absorb it all. Process it.
He was seeing with human eyes, smelling with a human nose, hearing with human ears. And yet . . .
How had all of this happened? What drug was it on the bear’s claws? It seemed to have driven Gundersen into a mindless rage state, but that wasn’t how it was affecting Mustapha. Had its passage through Gundersen’s bloodstream changed it? Was the effect different for bears and wolves? Mustapha was a long way from being a science geek. He could remember less than half of the basic chemistry he’d learned in school.
Besides, this could be something new. A designer drug.
Or an ordinary drug whose effects were warped by combination with were blood.
So many questions.
No fucking answers at all.
He sniffed the air and could smell the bear. Sweat and p
iss and blood on the air as separate smells.
Was this an anticipated side effect of the drug? Did whoever shot Gundersen with those darts know it would do this? Had that been the goal? Or . . .
Or was this all something coming at everyone from the blue? Even the asshole with the dart gun?
Mustapha couldn’t tell.
Then he had a crooked thought.
What if this was part of the game? What if that drug was introduced to make the players stronger in order for them to play a more dangerous game?
That sounded possible in his head, but felt wrong in his gut.
What, then, was this?
Why had he become a wolf instead of a werewolf? How was that even possible? And why was his human aspect not quite . . .
Human?
In a moment of panic he touched his face, afraid that he would encounter an alien shape. Something primitive and wrong, like the sloping brow of a Neanderthal.
His face was his face. Normal. Wrinkled with concern, but his.
He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath until he felt how long and hot the exhale was that burst from his chest.
Then he froze.
It had been too loud.
Loud as a whisper and whispers were like shouts to the were.
“It’s okay,” said a voice from over the top of the hill. “I already knew you were there.”
A voice.
Gundersen.
Damn it.
Mustapha held his breath. He’d come to kill. Not to fight, not to talk. He wanted to cut that backstabbing bastard to pieces. Eat his heart. Claim his power, drugs or no.
“It’s Mustapha, right?” called the voice.
Shit.
“Gundersen?”
“Yup.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. Come down here.”
“And walk into another ambush. No thanks.”
“Is that what happened?”
“You know it is.”
“Actually . . . I don’t. Come on over,” said Gundersen. “I’ll explain.” There was a heavy pause and what sounded like a soft groan of pain, then Gundersen spoke again. “Believe me . . . you’ll want to hear this.”
-10-
Mustapha moved very carefully. The wolf was just beneath his skin the whole time. The werewolf, too. It gave him a strange new feeling of confidence to have both aspects, the old and the new, riding shotgun with him.
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