by Tommi Hayes
Werewolf Companion
by Tommi Hayes
© Copyright Tommi Hayes 2014
Let me tell you about me. My name is Izak. You may call me Iz. I'm a whore for the State. An operative. I take my file, home in on a target, seduce him, then recreate him. I'm also a telepath. Most importantly I'm a useful tool. My name is Izak, and this persona isn't who I was three years ago. I've been recreated too.
I know my role, I understand it perfectly. Sometimes a new target fails to do that, seeks to expand it, push past the boundaries and make it something more. Then I have to shut them down, putting an end to their attempt to render a purely professional relationship personal, intimate, raw. It's well within my powers. It's never been a problem.
Never until now, at least. Never until Rajan.
I have had a good deal of practice at this point. I am the foremost, most intensively scheduled, most experienced telepath companion to newly turned werewolves in the Section, in the entire State. (That, after only three years. I'm also a prodigy, renowned.) Izak Faith, twenty-nine years old, identified as a level five telepath at twenty-six. At that age I was teaching college, an adjunct literature professor. But with my gifts discovered, I was too valuable to the State, and my services too much in demand, to continue. Let me put it this way... My own handler and supervisor, Amisa, came to me for the first time, and asked me–very nicely–to write my resignation letter to my employers. That was in order to give myself more time to devote myself to guiding newly turned werewolves through the early stages of control, and conscription.
All because of too much to drink at a department social, and over-casual use of my true abilities. For the most trivial reasons, too. An attractive new department fellow, thinking rather loud thoughts about my ass and what he'd like to do with it. I investigated further. But there'd been suspicions already, it seemed. He was planted, fishing, and I was fairly caught.
Of course, I could have said no. She didn't discuss the possible consequences if I did. The subject was never brought up. I wasn't fool enough to say no in the first place.
I am a very valuable property. Just like a controlled, turned werewolf, with its loyalty to the State beyond doubt, and its claws and teeth properly sheathed. Sometimes I wish I wasn't property at all, however unofficial, that I belonged at all to myself. But then I shake off such foolishness, and wake up to the real world again. I am not so badly off. I am recompensed for my services more than generously. At twenty-nine, I am close to a rich man. I am not required to torture, or to kill, or to oppress the people for the State.
All I do is provide companionship, to the ones who used to be human, and have recently been turned to werewolf. A telepath can recreate what a werewolf needs to fully, easily rein in the instinct to rip and to kill and to destroy. That's the mate bond. Actually finding a true mate, for a wolf or for the rest of us, is a chancy and an uncertain business. Only a telepath can recreate that bond. Or at least, create a synthetic representation of it. And it seems it's enough, to quiet the new wolf, render it no public danger, while it learns control and discipline, and reconciles itself to its new condition. Its temperament is pacified, eased, and it becomes malleable.
A telepath, as well as providing that companionship, that bond that stays blood-lust, can also ascertain the wolf's mental state, its motivations and its thoughts. To report back, in short, whether it harbours seditious, rebellious feelings, whether it's a danger to the people. (Or to the State.) It's rare enough. And if that urge should be found, then that's no problem either. At least not according to Amisa. We are trained, the small but highly able psy-department of the secret service. Trained to nip rebellion in the bud in the newly turned, to root it out and smooth it over.
Werewolves are useful, if controllable. They constitute an elite force that vastly advantages the State over other nations that might prove a threat. But only if controllable.
I am useful, too. I serve my country, aiding in the provision of an elite force. That's merely a side-effect of the rise of a werewolf population that hadn't been suspected until a decade or so back. When the men, who were also wolves, gave up on the steadily-eroded areas of natural forest, and accepted a migration of many of their numbers into the cities, adapting to regular human life, a rise in turnings was inevitable. So the werewolf explosion was exponential, and discovery was inevitable. And then control was an absolute imperative.
So it was an accident, at first. Serendipity, a very happy accident, when some bright spark in the Defence Section of the State mused on how to make best use of a steadily increasing available pool of docile and loyal supernaturally gifted beings. Now, it's standard procedure, the minute a turning becomes known, whether self-reported or called in to the appropriate emergency line by the medical staff dealing with the latest bite victim.
Because the rogue population isn't completely subdued, yet. Otherwise the telepathic cadre would be out of a job by now. Werewolves biting humans–at least non-consensually–isn't standard procedure. They are a variant of the human genotype, that's all, not another species. At least, that's the born ones. While somewhat distinct, they are not another race or order of beings. The two groups can interbreed, and quite often have. The gene–or, more accurately, gene-grouping, which is complex and still not fully identified–is autosomal recessive. Any children born to a wolf/human pairing are fully human. Only two wolves will birth a wolf. Both of them must, also, be born wolves. Lamarck can go figure. There's no inheritance of acquired characteristics, even in the supernatural.
The experiment, I am told, has been made previously.
To them we are kin, not prey. But that applies only to most, not all wolves, even in the born wolves' version of civil society. There are always the extremist groups, for every religion, political persuasion, special interest group. With turned wolves, much depends on after-care and training of the new pup by the wolf who turned him, and that wolf's pack.
If a turning is involuntary, that is almost certainly done by a born-wolf extremist or a badly-turned wolf. There are also volunteers to the extremists from human society, converts who dream of the power and social cohesion of the pack, who salivate over a werewolf-dominated society. They have no idea, when they dip their heads and wait for the bite, what they're getting into.
So. Although most wolves, both born and turned, would not bite a human – not even under the influence of the moon – that's not a hard and fast rule. Even among free wolves eschewing human society, it is a taboo, though one with a thin hold upon the wolf mind. That taboo may weaken, at least, under stress, or under the moon, or if subject to undue influence or certain drugs. So we still have–the State has–an issue with newly turned wolves, if abandoned, or part of a proscribed group, or volunteers not well-managed by a civilized pack.
And the larger part of the wolf community lives quietly, not government employees or property, law-abiding citizens content with their extremely-unofficially recognised existence. The population is too big, now, for the state to co-opt them all as its special force. At least currently. There are no plans to do that, that I am aware of. But then I am a very minor civil servant.
But the newly turned and abandoned, by a renegade, or the ones our forces liberate from extremist cells, they are fodder. They are targets twice over. First for the wolf who turned them, and then for the State. Most of them are managed and guided through the change, as they should have been by the wolf and pack they originate from. Then they are released into society, free, only a discreet surveillance maintained. Some are exceptions. Some are conscripted.
A loyal wolf army, the Wolf Unit, it is an immensely useful thing. I do my part.
For the present, at least.
Until the state is overturned.
***
I am a grade epsilon servant of the state, salaried and highly supervised. I exaggerate, a little bit. But there's more paperwork than you would think, involved in the glamorous job of Wolf Unit Control Officer. Glamour. I speak with the utmost wryness. Working on an assignment, there's more drama, and stress, and emotional upheaval, than glamour. A sight too much for my taste. I'm not the type, for the kind of work they recruited me for. But then, I wasn't given the option of refusing the job. They pulled me away from the beginnings of a cosy academic career, published in my field and close to the tenure track. And I was dumped into a post that approximates a combination of high-class escort, with informant and human muzzle.
Oh, my apologies, I didn't say? There it is, the essence of the job for you. The Section – the highly unofficial sub-partition of the already low-profile secret government department to which I belong – takes wolves (usually newly turned), either abandoned or from restricted organisations – suspected lupine terrorists, one may as well say it – and turns them over to me. Me and a number of others. Quite a small, select number of others, to be perfectly honest. My skills are not common. They command a premium on the market. (The unofficial market, for the existence of psy-ability is no more than a matter of public rumour, private State-classified certainty.)
Or they would do, if I was allowed to actually tout them on the open market. But my skills have been commandeered by the State, and are not mine to offer to any other employer. I am a valuable bit of property, not much more. To them.
So, hypothesize this. A newly minted wolf is turned over into my hands, say. Not that I get a free hand with him. Both location and activities are highly prescribed, but I am the only one who can apply the procedures, and deliver the required results. At a secret government location–and I will admit, it gives me a little bit of a thrill to be able to say that–we spend an awful lot of highly concentrated time together. He has no more choice in the matter than I do. Although I have at least the illusion of autonomy. Security is excellent, with numerous specialised methods of dissuasion regarding any escape attempt. Research regarding substances and methods effective in subduing the wolf threat – including lethal force – has come quite some way, under the current regime. I don't inquire too closely regarding the research techniques involved in getting those results. I doubt very much I would like the answers regarding werewolf test subjects, with respect to either sourcing or end destination.
So, for the duration of the intensive treatment period, the subject is stuck with me, and I with him. And I fulfil my duties and process him. That being a term which summarizes, well, certain tasks and objectives. I analyse him, first and foremost, so that I know what I'm dealing with.
You might ask how that is to be achieved. Perhaps you have visions in your head of a psychiatrist's couch, an expensively appointed private office, a medical pad and a bearded, bespectacled old sage, probing a patient's more interesting dreams for sexual symbolism.
No, that's not it at all, laughably far from the case in fact. I'm a telepath after all. It makes sorting and rummaging through a brain and its nooks and crannies so much simpler. This isn't, or shouldn't be, a matter for concern for the general populace. Honestly. Unless you have been assigned to me as a case, then I have no interest in the deep dark recesses of your brain, and all your nasty little secrets. Everyone has them. To the point where it's of little interest, unless it's of personal or professional interest.
Also, theoretically, I don't have the power to scan your mind. Not without chemically mediated assistance, and a couple of technological tricks to enhance my naturally endowed telepathic gifts. In most instances, telepathy is very weakly endowed. And quite frequently it's quiescent and dormant prior to being identified, brought out, trained and expanded.
In most subjects. I test a little stronger than most telepaths. And I did so even before training, when the State department responsible first tracked me down and winkled me out from my blameless and happy mundane existence. The scientists who ran the tests classified me as a level five, which they account really very strong, impressively so. There are only five levels. Or at least, there are only five levels on their scales. A level five requires minimal drug assistance, almost no brain-wave standardization, in order to carry out the tasks prescribed with a case subject.
You may have guessed the punch-line at this point. I'm no level five. I'm off the scale, or at least off their scale, at any rate. There is no scale which can hold me. I cannot be contained within their criteria. If they knew what I could actually do, then I would never be allowed to leave the lab. Or up, and loosed from my restraints, on a lab table, with electrodes drilled into my skull.
My mother was a very very wise woman. She was also a telepath like me, and a strong one too. I don't know if she was stronger than I am, or similar, or perhaps less so. I lost her too young. But she was canny, as well as wise. She could make sufficient deductions, from the early days of the current regime, to know that allowing and surrendering to capture would be unwise, that captivity would be terrible, and that a surface of bland normality was the best policy. She was also smart enough to realise that detection and eventual capture couldn't be ruled out as a possibility, and to train me up from childhood to have procedures and back-up plans in place, for every eventuality.
Thus I was calm, relatively calm, when they stumbled over me–more by luck than by extraordinary skill. It was sufficiently unexpected that I gave myself away, even so. In their labs, their little offices, under drug regimens to constrain my co-operation, I gave them the answers they wanted. Those answers were pre-prepared, and so were the screen-shot results of my brain-waves, the detections of range and penetration, the images I projected onto their screens. Drugged and vulnerable and at their mercy, a poor squeaking rat in their trap, I gave an excellent show. I had trained myself long enough, after my mother's initial preparations, that it was automatic, however pinioned I might be, body and brain both.
They had me, but they didn't know what they had. And they still don't. And if my skill and my luck holds, then they never will.
If they ever find out, then perhaps I will be forced to become more ruthless than I would like. I've spilt no blood, melted no minds in my white-knuckled, fisted hold on some measure of freedom. But if I had to, then I probably would. I'm human after all. Just exceptionally gifted, with it.
Therefore, I, a very strong telepath, analyse the minds of my case subjects, as they are provided to me, along with notes and files. It should require a matter of days, of careful repetitions of scans and comparison of results, effortful and with assistance from the lab geeks. Of course I make a pantomime of requiring and utilizing just that. But a performance is all it is. In fact one quick run-through, seated with the resentful and chemically subdued new wolf in a pleasant sitting room, in a lodge overlooking a ski-slope–they always use the same place, at least with me–is all I need. And then I have everything they'll ever require, sucked out of an unwary mind.
How they hate me, the wolves, at first. Those first moments. It doesn't worry me over-much, or probably less than it should. The circumstances of their selection make radicalization a probability, and often enough a fact. As far as that goes, I'm genuinely performing a service to the general public, as well as to the State. I neutralize the threat that they pose. That isn't all I do, though.
The analysis of a werewolf mind requires an extremely specific, careful synchronization of brain waves with the subject. It's far more accurate, and intensive, and honed in to specific brain functions and areas, than meditation or biofeedback could ever produce. It requires more detailed telepathic manoeuvres also, but any discussion of all that would get extremely technical, to the point where the average lab-geek would have no idea what I was talking about. The not-so-average too. In effect I am a pioneer, out on my own in my study of the werewolf brain and psychology. The same applies to other telepaths in the program, also, but not to the same degree. T
hey would understand some of what I was trying to convey, if we discussed it, but miss more than the finer points. They haven't the power. What little I've seen, anyway, since we are not encouraged to socialize together. (A band of assembled telepaths, levels three through five, after all. However weak, they might, conceivably, be strong enough to constitute a threat to the State, combined and working in unison. Sufficient to require putting down, or other extreme measures, even, perhaps).
We are watched carefully, in any case. And kept in relative isolation, even out in the workaday world. I'm used to having a permanent surveillance detail, having my activities monitored, being barred from meeting with my peers. It beats not being allowed out. It beats being strapped down and drugged to the gills. Perhaps they could subdue me, body and brain both, if they brought sufficient brute force to bear. I have no enthusiasm to make the experiment, try and see if I could withstand and overpower all their forces and resources.