Bad Company

by D V Wolfe

  I nodded and opened my duffle bag. “Yeah, Walter said they were hunting by day.”

  “That’s not possible,” Mick said, drying his hands and turning to lean against the sink. He was so broad across the chest that one shoulder brushed against the bathroom door. “Werewolves only hunt at night. Unless…”

  “The pack is starving,” Tiff said. “Or…”

  “Something else is controlling them,” Mick said. He pushed off the sink and there was the sound of breaking glass from inside the bathroom. Before any of us could reach the bathroom door, it was torn off its hinges from the inside and a towering grey beast had knocked Mick to the ground. Tiff and Vince launched themselves at the thing and I started frantically digging through my duffle for the .45 and some silver ammo. Fuck. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. We were supposed to go find them. Since when does the pack come to the hunter? I had the .45 and I was digging through clips for the one with the silver bullets. I glanced over at Noah who was standing halfway to the front door, holding a chair in front of him, looking petrified. Mick was screaming and I saw the beast bite down on Mick’s shoulder. Tiff was on the beast’s back, growling continually in its ear, her fingers turned to claws and her hair turning to dark brown fur. I saw the flash of silver and green as her eyes flicked from Mick’s face, back to the beast. Vince was beating at the beast’s gut, trying to pull Mick out from under it. The werewolf lashed out and knocked Vince to the ground. I finally found the right clip and loaded it into the .45. I stumbled forward, tripping over Vince’s leg and fell next to him.

  “Silver!” I yelled and Tiff let go of the beast and jumped clear. Vince moved to the side but wouldn’t let go of Mick and I emptied half a clip into the beast’s chest, hoping I was hitting its heart. It still had its jaws locked onto Mick’s shoulder and it watched me with ice-blue eyes, the pupils growing larger with each shot until it went still. All three of us pushed at the carcass to get it off of Mick but there were too many limbs, still twitching.

  “Noah, give us a hand,” I called behind me. In a moment, I heard Noah’s terror-panting in my ear and I moved to give him my spot while I joined Tiff on the other side to pull. Mick was moaning and he didn’t move, even after we’d rolled the body off of him.

  “Mick,” Vince said softly. “I need to look at it.” Vince turned to Tiff, Noah, and I. “Can you give us some room?” Noah and I backed up and Tiff stood, but stayed close, watching Vince and Mick.

  “Mick isn’t going to turn into a werewolf, is he?” Noah whispered to me.

  I wasn’t sure. I really hoped not. I really didn’t want to have to shoot him. I was about to answer Noah when Vince spoke up.

  “No,” he said, carefully peeling the fabric of Mick’s shirt out of the bite wound. “Being Cynocephali already, the virus won’t turn us.” Mick groaned and covered his face and Vince smiled sadly. “He’s going to be in pain like a massive hangover and the flu had a horrible love child, but that should be about the size of it.”

  That was a relief. “Do you need sutures?” I asked, then I remembered that I didn’t have a suture needle to offer.

  “We’ve got a kit in the Jeep,” Vince said.

  “I’ll go get it,” Noah volunteered.

  “No,” Vince barked as Noah headed for the door. “A werewolf just came through the bathroom window. The rest of the pack could be right outside.”

  We left Noah inside with Mick. I left him with the .45 loaded with silver ammo, planning to stop at Lucy outside the front door and get the .357 and some silver rounds. Vince, Tiff, and I fanned out. I grabbed the .357 and loaded the cylinder with silver rounds before heading over to check on the man in the office and do a sweep of the other units. Vince and Tiff took the backside of the units, looking for any signs that this werewolf hadn’t been alone. The area was quiet and besides some scratch marks on the trees directly behind the bungalow we were staying in, we found nothing. We stomped back into the unit and closed the door behind us. Noah had Mick sitting up on the floor, leaning back against the edge of the bed with a bathroom towel pressed against the wound in his shoulder.

  Tiff moved back towards the werewolf corpse. “I don’t feel any more of them in the area.” She paused. “Then again, I didn’t know I was feeling this one. I thought I was just picking up on the two of you.” She motioned to Vince and Mick. “And your worries.”

  Vince nodded. “We need to get the scent nailed down if we’re going to track the pack.” Vince helped Mick up and then he, Tiff, and Mick began...sniffing the werewolf carcass. I looked at Noah who, by the look on his face, was caught somewhere between fascination and horror.

  “Noah and I will try to barricade the bathroom,” I said, standing up. “While you three...do that.”

  I put a hand on Noah’s shoulder and gave him a little shake. He seemed to come out of his trance and he stood. The bathroom had seen better days, but it was hard to tell which damage the werewolf had done and which had already been there. The window into the bathroom wasn’t huge but I could see how the werewolf had gotten through it. We found a brush and dustpan under the sink and Noah set to work sweeping up the glass. I stared at the window, trying to think of what we could use to barricade it. I was looking around and then I saw the bathroom door that had been thrown into the shower. It was broken in half, the thin layer of veneer on one side being the only thing still keeping it in one piece. I stepped around Noah and lifted it out of the tub. The top was still pretty stable. I did my best to straighten the door out and leaned it against the hole in the wall that used to be the window. It almost perfectly covered it.

  “No, Bane,” Noah said from the floor.

  I turned to look at him. “What?”

  “No,” Noah said, shaking his head. “Just no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there are at least three of us staying here and we need a door on the bathroom.”

  “Yeah, and we also need to know that a werewolf isn’t going to leap through the window and literally into our laps while we’re on the can,” I said.

  Noah sighed heavily and muttered to himself while I left the room and went back to my duffle bag. I dug around and found the roll of duct tape I always keep at the bottom. I glanced at the three "body sniffers" and immediately wished I hadn’t. Tiff had her nose almost inside the beast’s mouth, Mick was sniffing intently at the thing’s armpit and I quickly looked away before I saw where Vince was sniffing.

  “Carry on,” I mumbled as I went by them, back into the bathroom. It wasn’t completely secure, but the duct tape held the door over the window hole fairly well. Luckily, the werewolf had ripped the entire doorknob out of the door when it had ripped it off its hinges so the flimsy wood was flush against the wall.

  “That’s hardly going to protect us,” Noah muttered.

  I shrugged. “At least you’ll have a second or two of warning before the thing gets in. We’ll just leave the .45 in the can when we’re in the room.”

  “Oh good,” Noah muttered, dumping the glass shards in the tiny bathroom trash can. “I always wanted to shit with a gun in my hand.”

  “Nevermind,” I said. “With no door, we’ll be able to hear you scream and we can just come in from the other room and shoot it. Problem solved.”

  “Yeah,” Noah said, glancing at the door. “About that. We’ll be able to do more than just hear whoever is in here.” He moved over to stand by the toilet. “You know from here, I can make eye contact with whoever is sitting on that second bed.”

  I rolled my eyes and took one of the ratty towels off the counter. I stuffed the corners into the trim around the doorframe, covering the doorway. I turned to Noah and put my hands on my hips. “Happy?”

  “Yeah, now you can’t see my face while I’m on the can, just everything below it.”

  “Well we won’t be able to tell that it’s you,” I said, trying not to laugh.

  “With only three of us in here, it’s not going to be much of a mystery,” Noah sighed. “Fin
e, I’ll just hold it until the job is done.”

  “Tiff and I will just go stand outside when you need to go,” I said as we pushed the towel to one side and went back into the main room. Thankfully, the other three were done sniffing the corpse.

  “Well ‘mystery machine gang’,” I said. “What did our friend here roll in last?”

  Tiff shook her head. “Don’t knock it, Bane. There’s a lot this corpse is telling us.”

  “Like?” I asked.

  “He’s been in the woods for months,” Mick said, his voice weaker than usual. The towel he was holding against the wound was starting to soak through.

  “You need to be stitched up,” I said.

  “In a minute,” Mick muttered, waving me away.

  “So he’s been in the woods for months, in this form?” I asked, nodding at the dead werewolf body.

  Tiff shook her head. “I doubt it, but he hasn’t been living indoors in any form.”

  “Since werewolves usually prefer a more urban lifestyle,” I said, meeting Tiff’s gaze. “Isn’t it pretty likely he was a part of a pack on the move?” Tiff nodded and I sat down hard on the bed. “So do you think his pack was starving?” I looked at Tiffany, Vince, and Mick, hoping one of them would nod in agreement. No such luck.

  “This guy,” Tiff toed the body on the floor. “Was well-fed and recently.”

  “It seems pretty obvious,” Vince began, his voice soft. “That they’re being controlled by something and there’s just too many coincidences, Bane. This has to be related to the demons.”

  I shook my head. “How could it be? I mean, what are the chances that it knew Noah and I would just happen to be coming to Iowa to hunt this pack? I mean, we didn’t know ourselves until we heard the weather report yesterday.”

  Vince shook his head. “You’ve got it backward, Bane. The demon is creating traps. Hunts that it knows you’ll take because you’re running out of time. It’s controlling the supers to try to supercharge them so that they can kill you.”

  “So it doesn’t matter that I have the soul stone,” I said.

  Vince narrowed his eyes at me. “No, that was still a shit decision you made in hanging on to that. It still means the demon can track you.” He shook his head and looked back at the corpse. “It just means that he’s not feeling the need to come find you himself yet. How long will that last? Who knows?”

  I shook my head. “A demon,” I said, getting to my feet. “Couldn’t control all these supers. Festus said they wouldn’t even bother with controlling fae. We have to be wrong about this. And a super controlling an entire pack of werewolves? That has to be impossible.”

  “A Duke could,” Noah said quietly. We all turned to look at him. Noah sat up straighter. “At Stacks’,” Noah said. “I read a lot about the different demons in that Key book and some of them could control animals, other spirits, and dark creatures.”

  I shook my head. “Nya said it’s not a Duke, King or President.”

  “Didn’t she also say that the other demon-hunting you didn’t give a shit about titles?” Noah asked.

  I was done with the assumptions and the freaking-ourselves-out portions of the day.

  “Ok, let’s put a pin in the demon thing and focus on the werewolf thing,” I said, turning back to the corpse and then looking at Tiff, Mick, and Vince. “Are you able to pinpoint where the pack is, based on the way he smells?”

  “There are a lot of pine and fir trees where they are,” Mick said.

  “And they’re near a sewage plant,” Tiff said, wrinkling her nose.

  “Well, that narrows it down.” I turned to Noah and pointed at the nightstand drawer between the two beds. “Grab the phone book out of there.” I turned to Vince. “We have time to stitch Mick up. Do you want to do it? Or I can give it a shot.”

  Vince shook his head. “I’ve got it.” He slipped out the front door for their medkit and Tiff stood and opened her shoulder bag.

  She pulled out a cloth bag marked with a triskele and met my gaze. “I’m going to prepare.”

  I nodded. “Take your time.” Noah dropped the phone book in my lap and I flipped it open. “I’ve got some shit to find.”

  9

  The Clear Rapids Sewage Treatment plant was not in the phone book, surprisingly. At least, not under that name, so I had to call information. I had a very awkward conversation with the elderly woman operator when I couldn’t give her the name of the place I wanted an address to and I just kept telling her it was the sewage treatment plant. She kept asking me why I needed the address. I couldn’t tell her the truth, so of course, I told her the first thing that came to mind. I told her I had a job interview there and in my hurry that morning, I hadn’t thought to write down the address and I really needed this job and could she just help me out. Reluctantly, she told me the West Foothills Sewage Treatment plant was on Dickey Road, two miles west of town. She gave me rudimentary directions, I thanked her and hung up.

  While I’d been on the phone, Noah had gone to the office to see if there was a map of Clear Rapids that we could borrow. He’d come back and spread the map over the little table. I found Dickey Road and marked the approximate location of the sewage plant.

  Vince and Mick were chuckling on the other bed. Mick was putting a considerable dent in my bottle of Stitch’s whiskey, while Vince sewed him up.

  “Why was the address so hard to get?” Vince laughed as he grabbed the bottle of Stitch’s from Mick and poured more over the wound. Mick protested both the taking of the whiskey and Vince pouring it over exposed muscle tissue.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe she thought I was a terrorist trying to blow it up. Regardless, this,” I pointed to the mark I’d made on the map, “is about where she said it would be. She gave me some directions so I think I can get us there.”

  “What did the woman at the restaurant say about the bodies that were found?” Noah asked.

  “Bald Crest,” I said, scanning the map. “She said they were hikers killed out at Bald Crest.” I found Bald Crest State Park, about ten miles north of Dickey Road.

  Vince came to join us, wiping his hands on a clean towel. He leaned over the map and put a finger on each of the marks. “There are about fifteen miles between the two points. We need to ask Tiffany, but it’s always been my understanding that werewolves rarely ever go beyond five miles in any direction from the pack when they’re hunting.”

  “What about our bathroom-dwelling friend? We’re more than fifteen miles from the den here.” I pointed to the map.

  “I think he was sent here.” I felt myself suck in some air. “Bane, I know you don’t want to hear this,” Vince continued. I raised my eyes to meet his gaze. “But I think he was sent to finish you off, thinking you were alone and easy prey.”

  “And when he doesn’t come back?” I asked, glancing over at the corpse.

  Vince gave me a palms up. The room door banged open and Vince snatched the .45. Luckily, he didn’t fire right away. Tiff stood before us. She was half-transformed, looking like she was wearing a fur coat on her back. She was marked with blue woad and her eyes were back to their silver and green.

  “Have you found them?” She asked, turning to look at me.

  “Uh,” I said, pulling my stare away from her eyes. “We think so. Sort of.”

  I pointed out on the map where the sewage plant was as well as Bald Crest. “Vince thinks there’s too much distance there because,” I looked at Vince to make sure I was saying it right. “They never hunt more than five miles from the pack?”

  Vince and Tiff nodded. “Usually,” Tiff said. “But two factors might have come into play. The outflow from the treatment plant could be a few miles from the plant itself and that could put the pack closer to Bald Crest. Or, if the pack, like your friend the Puca, is fighting against the thing possessing them, then they could be traveling all the way to Bald Crest to hunt, just to avoid hunting in the town and exposing themselves. They may be tethered here and the weaker wolves may
be completely under the spell of whatever is holding them, but the Alpha controls the hunting and if they are fighting against it, I have to speak with them. Maybe they can show me where the possession lies and we can break it.”

  I looked at Tiff. “Tiff, they’re still werewolves. Even if we break the chain on what’s holding them, I’m still going to have to kill them. They still feed on innocents.”

  Tiff nodded. “I know. Just let me talk to them first.”

  “As long as they don’t decide to reply by biting out morse code on your neck,” I said.

  “Fair enough,” Tiff agreed.

  I looked around at the crew. Mick was on his feet but looked terrible. Vince was loading his pair of Colts with silver ammo. Noah was holding my .45 and looking like a kid in line for his first rollercoaster ride and Tiff was stoic.

  “Alright,” I said. “The sun’s getting low. We probably should get this show on the road.”

  “Wait,” Noah said. “I thought werewolves only changed under the full moon or whatever.”

  Tiff, Vince, and I chuckled and Noah looked around at us in confusion.

  “Old wives tale, Noah,” Tiff said. “That legend about werewolves only changing on the full moon started hundreds of years ago because werewolves could only be seen on the nights lit by a full moon. That was back before artificial light like flashlights and street lamps. The truth is, werewolves can shift on command but the longer they stay in their wolf form, the harder it is for them to shift back to appearing human. And they hunt every night, but if they’re good, no one ever sees them.”