by Marc Daniel
The room lighting was dimmed and a close-up photo of Michael Biörn appeared on the screen behind Clemens.
“This man’s name is Michael Biörn and he is the enemy,” started Clemens, his voice crisp with contained rage. “Today, he killed six of our brothers in a single confrontation.”
A muffled rumor could be heard in the room as the wolves started speculating between themselves as to what the revelation implied. There were very few things out there capable of dispatching six werewolves at once. It would, at the very least, have taken a vampire of the strength the world had not seen in many centuries. Even among the Supernatural beings, few had the strength to pull something like this. An elf lord, a wizard of the upper circles, or a particularly powerful warlock, maybe. The list was short.
“What is he?” asked Rachel, a woman of about five feet and a hundred pounds, who had the reputation to make up in viciousness what she lacked in strength.
“He’s a werebear,” answered the Alpha, with pronounced emphasis on the last word.
The rumor in the room grew by an order of magnitude as the wolves expressed their surprise and disbelief.
“But werebears are extinct!” exclaimed Rachel.
“The last one was killed in Spain over two centuries ago,” added another wolf.
“Axel,” said Peter Clemens, looking at the pack’s fourth in command.
Axel Thompkins rose from his chair, one of the closest to the screen, and turned towards the audience. “I fought him in the company of our fallen brothers not four hours ago. He is definitely a werebear, a grizzly type I believe, and he is big, very big.”
“How big?” asked a voice from the back of the room.
“I’d say at least seven hundred pounds, possibly eight hundred,” answered Thompkins.
“How can he be so big? He’d have to weigh like five hundred pounds in his human form…”
“No! Werebears are different from us,” corrected Clemens. “Whereas our body weight typically increases by fifty percent during morphing, the werebear’s mass jumps up a hundred and fifty percent. They are therefore two and a half times bigger as bears than they are as humans.”
“How do we kill it?” asked Rachel in a cold and calculating voice.
“The same way we kill all praeternaturals… We chop his head off!” replied Clemens.
“What are we waiting for?” asked Clemens’ wife Isabella, whose comment sparked a throng of agreeing hollers.
“Quiet!” said Clemens imperatively. “He caught us off guard today. Shame on us… shame on me! But I’ll be damned if I make the same mistake twice.”
No sound came to interrupt the Alpha’s statement this time.
“We will smite him with all our might, when he expects it the least. We’ll hit him with such an overwhelming force that he won’t stand a chance.”
Cheers erupted in the room as Clemens continued, “But today is not the time. He has no doubt vacated his motel and we need to locate him first. Then, we need to prepare for the kill…”
Chapter 69
Ezekiel had taken his leave by the time David Starks arrived at Michael’s motel. Sheila had recovered from her fainting spell and was sitting on the bed still looking slightly dazed. At her request, Michael had explained a few things about werebears and werewolves, but even though she had seen them with her own eyes, her brain refused to accept their reality.
David knocked on the door that the wizard had returned to its original dilapidated but one-piece style, and Michael opened the door.
David stepped through the entrance and took a look around him.
“It doesn’t look like there was much of a struggle in here,” he commented, surprised.
“I had a friend come over to do a bit of cleaning,” explained Michael cryptically.
“I didn’t know you had friends in town,” said David.
“I do.”
“Should I even ask?”
“I’d rather you didn’t…” answered Michael matter-of-factly.
“All right,” said David skeptically. “How many of them were they?”
“Eight werewolves and a witch.”
David looked Michael in the eye, just for a second, “And you killed all of them?” he asked dubiously.
“Only six wolves, the rest escaped…”
Sheila, who could not believe the tone of the discussion, finally intervened. “You seem to find all this perfectly normal,” she said to David, sounding bewildered. “What’s wrong with you? You’re a cop, for God’s sake. When someone tells you about werewolves and witches you’re supposed to send them to a shrink, not believe them!”
“What are you planning on doing with Lois Lane?” asked David to Michael, purposefully ignoring the journalist’s intervention, but before Michael had a chance to reply, Sheila chimed in, “Asked the detective to the bear!”
“Bear, hey? I hadn’t heard of that type before…” said David, sounding impressed.
Michael simply shrugged. “There is a first time for everything…”
“So, what about her?” repeated David.
“I need you to take her away from here. It isn’t safe for her to be around me, and I can’t really trust too many people in town.”
“You two do realize I am still in the room, right?” asked Sheila sarcastically.
“I’m sorry, Sheila,” said Michael. “But you are in danger and you need to take the situation seriously.”
Although she had regained her natural combativeness, she hadn’t forgotten the wolves, or the bear, or the wizard with his pointy hat. She had fallen back into aggressiveness and sarcasm as a defense mechanism because she refused to face reality.
“What are you?” she finally asked David.
“I’m afraid I’m just a cop,” he answered, smiling.
“But you believe in monsters?” she asked suspiciously.
“I have seen things. Just like you… Things one cannot ignore.”
She remained silent for a moment, and Michael took advantage of the opportunity to do a bit of lecturing. “I know you’re a journalist, Sheila, which means you will want to write about what you’ve seen as soon as you start accepting it yourself. This cannot happen; you cannot write a word about this. Do you understand?”
She looked at him defiantly. “Or what? Are you going to kill me too?”
He stared at her with a surprised look on his face for a minute before answering, “I’m one of the good guys, Sheila, I would never hurt you. But as you have seen for yourself, there are some bad guys out there, and I assure you they won’t hesitate to kill you to keep their secret.”
It took him an additional twenty minutes to convince Sheila to leave with David before the bad guys came back, but in the end she accepted.
“What are you going to do?” asked David, a hand on the doorknob.
“I am not sure yet,” replied Michael. “I need to think this through.”
Chapter 70
The car stopped in front of a brick veneer one-story house that looked cute and unassuming at the same time. A cookie cutter house surrounded by enough other styles of cookie cutter houses that there weren’t two identical homes on any given street of the neighborhood. This created the illusion you owned an original house when, in reality, there were two dozen homes identical to yours in the subdivision.
Michael checked the address David had given him and got out of the car. He had been surprised to find himself driving to suburbia this morning, to a city called Sugar Land, located southwest of Houston. He would have expected her to live within Houston proper, to be an inner looper, as the locals called those living within the Interstate-610 belt that surrounded the heart of the city.
“I believe we need to talk,” said Michael as soon as Sheila Wang opened the door. She was wearing a pair of light pink, tight-fitting cotton shorts and a white tank top that stopped just above the shorts waistband. No makeup was visible on her still bruised face, and Michael rightly concluded he had caught her fresh out of bed.<
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He could smell fear on her, and knew he was the one causing it. He could also detect a hint of excitement; Sheila was a reporter and she simply couldn’t silence her natural curiosity.
She only hesitated a second before stepping aside and let him through the door. He noticed that she had not locked the door but simply shut it… an easier escape route, he assumed. The smell of fear emanating from Sheila grew stronger, and Michael also started smelling fresh perspiration, but as they entered the kitchen, these odors were quickly diluted with the aroma of brewing coffee and fresh toast.
The house had an open floor plan, where the kitchen and living room were only separated by a bar-height counter equipped with bar stools on the living room side. Michael pulled up a stool and sat at the bar while Sheila went to stand against the fridge. By doing so, she was placing a counter and a good eight feet between herself and Michael; one didn’t have to be too observant to get the message.
“Would you like some coffee?” she asked in a cold voice. Her pronunciation was a lot better than it had been the day before, but still not perfect.
“I don’t drink coffee, but I’ll take tea if you have honey,” he replied, before adding cheerfully, “You sound like your jaw is getting better.”
Ignoring his last remark, she opened a cupboard and started rummaging through it. She pulled out a jar containing a honeycomb half submerged in liquid honey and placed in on the bar in front of Michael.
“I thought the whole bear and honey thing was a myth.”
Michael thought he detected a touch of wryness in her voice. Wryness was good! It beat fear by an order of magnitude…
“It’s not,” he replied, smiling. “But I’m not truly a bear either, as you may have noticed…”
She gave him a look that stated I beg to differ, as she started boiling some water for his tea.
“After what happened yesterday…” Michael started hesitantly, “you probably deserve some explanations.”
“I would say so indeed!” replied Sheila vehemently.
“I don’t have this type of discussion very often, you see,” he said, looking sheepish. “I usually try to keep a low profile… stay under the radar, if you know what I mean.”
“I believe I do. Please do go on.” Sheila spoke half sarcastically, half encouragingly.
Michael looked particularly uncomfortable, both figuratively and literally. The bar stool had been designed for a normal human being; beneath him it looked like a replica belonging to an oversized dollhouse.
“I don’t really know where to start…”
“Maybe you could start by telling me what you are exactly, and what those things that tried to kill you were?” she offered in a slightly less sarcastic voice.
“What I am has many names, which vary with time and geography. In this country, today, I would be best described as a werebear.”
The kettle started emitting a high-pitched whistle, but Sheila didn’t seem to notice.
“And what is exactly a werebear?”
Michael got up and walked around the bar to the island in the center of the kitchen to remove the kettle from the stove.
“A werebear is a praeternatural being, similar to a werewolf,” he started, as he poured the hot water into a mug containing a bag of black tea and a spoon Sheila had set on the island by the stove, “except that his animal form is bearlike.”
Sheila was listening attentively, so he continued his explanation as he returned to his undersized seat. “We spend most of our time in our human form. Although even in our human form, we are never entirely human—”
“What do you mean by that? Is it just a disguise? Are your thoughts completely alien? Do you eat raw meat?” she interrupted, as her journalistic training kicked into gear.
“Very few people are in the know, Sheila, and those who do know are bound to secrecy,” he said, looking at her so intently that she dropped her gaze. “I am about to tell you things that could get you killed if you were to go around repeating them. Do you understand me?”
She nodded slowly, acquiescing. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee to which she added sugar and milk and went to the living room, where she sat on a black leather loveseat.
“Maybe you should move to the couch,” she said, extending a hand towards the empty sofa located at a ninety-degree angle from the loveseat. “You look like a G.I. Joe on a Lego stool sitting on that thing…”
Chapter 71
Michael accepted Sheila’s offer and moved to the empty sofa, bringing his tea mug along with him.
“What I meant was that even in our human form our senses are different, our instincts are different. We face a constant struggle between our humanity and our bestiality.”
“And sometimes your humanity loses the battle?” she asked in a whisper.
“Sometimes…” he answered, his mind projected a millennium in the past, reliving the events which had cost him his wife, Isibel, and so much more. He had woken up in his human form, covered in blood, with no recollection of what had happened… until he saw the body.
Sheila saw the change in his eyes, and could tell he was no longer with her. She waited what seemed like an eternity but was only a minute for him to come back to the present world. When his eyes were once more focused on her she asked, “And what happens when the animal wins the battle?”
“Bad things,” he answered after a few seconds, “but you don’t have to worry about that, not from me at least. As one grows older, one learns to control the beast within. I have not lost control to my bear side in a very long time.”
“What exactly do you call a very long time?” she asked skeptically. “Are we talking years or hours? Because yesterday, at least from where I stood, it didn’t look like your human personality was in much control…”
“If my human form had not been in control yesterday, you would be dead. I morphed and killed those men because I did not have a choice. They would have killed both of us without hesitation. I could not allow it.”
“Alllrriight…” she said, not completely convinced. “So when was the last time you lost control by accident?”
“During the winter of 978,” he replied placidly.
“What do you mean? September 1978?”
“No, 978 is the year.”
She stared at him, clearly not convinced. “You’re telling me that was over a thousand years ago?”
“Yes, that’s what I am saying,” he answered stoically.
She was ready to call him a liar, or worse a lunatic, but then she remembered the man’s transformation into a bear and thought better of it. The man might very well be a lunatic, but then so could she be!
“How old are you exactly?” she asked, trying not to sound too suspicious and failing miserably.
“I was born in the country now called Norway in the year 956.”
“OK, so you are a thousand years old, give or take. And you are what you are because you got bitten by a bear on your way back from pillaging a school as a young Viking, right?” she asked dubiously.
“Nothing bit me, bear or other. I was born that way. My parents were both werebears, and against all odds, they transmitted their curse to me.”
“Why do you say against all odds?”
“Because werecreatures usually suffer from fertility issues. It is very rare that two werebears, or werewolves for that matter, manage to conceive. They typically have children with humans, but in that case the kids usually turn out human.”
Sheila was now sitting on the edge of her seat and the smell of fear was no longer present on her.
“But where do werecreatures come from? I mean initially, how were they created?”
“No one knows…”
“And you’re not curious?” she asked, sounding slightly bewildered.
“Of course I’m curious, but that’s not the type of information you can find online. And if I may say so, nobody knows for a fact where humans come from either…”
She contemplated his reply for
a minute before answering, “Touché… although the theory of evolution offers some pretty compelling evidence.”
“Not about where the very first species to evolve came from…”
“Fine! But this isn’t the subject of our discussion. How do you transform? There was no full moon last night…”
“That’s not how it works,” he replied, placing his empty mug on a coaster on the glass end table to his right. “The folklore legend about men turning into werewolves under a full moon is based on a simple but misinterpreted fact. The full moon is the time of the month when morphing is the least painful. For this reason, werebeings tend to morph more often during that time. As a result, in the middle ages, werebeing-caused mayhem peaked significantly at the full moon, so folks erroneously concluded that the full moon was required for the morphing process.”
“So what you’re telling me is that all the old folktales about monsters are actually factual and not due to overactive imaginations?” Her voice was dripping with skepticism.
He did not hold her incredulity against her. He had been a werebear for over a millennium, and he still had a hard time believing some of the things Supernatural beings could do. He had witnessed Ezekiel do things that would make a man turning into a bear look like the most natural thing in the world.
“A few stories are completely bogus, and the others are draped in so much exaggeration that it’s hard to tell the truth from the fiction, but there is often a hint of truth in the old tales.”
“All right, just tell me if these are real or fake,” she said defiantly. “Vampires?”
“Real… unfortunately,” he replied seriously. She hesitated to ask a follow-up question and finally decided to move on.
“Witch, wizard, sorceress, etcetera?”
“Real.”
“Faeries?”
“Real… although their family has many subcategories and some of them, like the orcs, are purely fictional.”
“Bogeymen?”
“You’re just being silly now,” he said with a smile, as his phone started ringing loudly inside his pocket.