From the journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 16:
I hate it when my conscience kicks in.
I mean, to be honest, why do I have a conscience? What am I, strictly speaking, supposed to do with it? Evolution must have meant me to benefit from it in some way, but for some reason, all it seems to do is to throw me into life-threatening situations for no apparent gain.
This goes against my goals and priorities, which involve living a very long life and gaining lots and lots of money. But despite that, it seems to happen over and over again. The fact that I haven't died yet might be proof that someone up there likes me, but I'm not sure how encouraging that is. He probably just thinks it's funny when I run in terror from one supernatural-energy-enhanced creature or another…
Okay, this entry is starting to look like nothing but a long complaint about life in general. There is a point somewhere in here, though. It was like this…
Catherine had a feeling that she was supposed to do something. She just wished that she had a clue what that was supposed to be.
Up until now, she had actually felt kind of proud of herself. She had spotted the monster and hive glyphs on the wall of the building across the street. So like a good Hunter, she had decided to check it out. But not by just barging in there, like she would have not all that long ago. She was older and wiser now, and so she had decided to keep it under supervision instead, and see if anything out of the ordinary happened.
For that purpose, she had rented this one-room apartment across the street. Under a false name, just in case. The apartment building was practically falling apart, and most of her fellow residents looked more dangerous than a few of things she had seen as a Hunter. Still, it was cheap, and it was less conspicuous than standing in the street. And warmer, of course. A bit, at least.
Well, she had gotten her wish. A few minutes ago, three… individuals… had entered the house she was watching. To most people, they would have looked normal enough. Two men and a woman, barely out of their teens, but already looking worn and hardened. The woman and one of the men wore leather jackets; the remaining man wore only a sort of vest over a naked abdomen that was covered by tattoos. He and the woman had both long, black, greasy hair; the other man's head was shaved. Not the kind of crowd Catherine would want to spend too much time with, but quite possibly very pleasant people once you got to know them.
The Second Sight of a Hunter told another story. Superimposed over the image of the three humans was the image of three hairy monsters. They looked a little like wolves, and a little like humans, but mostly they looked like psychotic versions of Bigfoot. And they were large, easily ten feet tall and heavily musculature. Catherine had seen things like these often enough. To her extreme annoyance, and despite all kinds of sensible thought and scientific fact, they had most of the characteristics traditionally attributed to werewolves.
Only…
Only these ones looked strange. The beast that shared Bald's space was as hairless as he was, without the shaggy coat of fur that most werewolves had. Tattoo's miasma had huge, bat-like wings sticking out from his back. Woman's had teeth that seemed to be too large for its mouth, sticking out between her lips in all possible angles, all of them black and running with some sort of thick, black liquid that could not, surely, be saliva?
Catherine shuddered. Not just werewolves, but mutated werewolves. She had only ever seen two of those before, and she had not been in a state to make any acute observations about them, seeing as they had been shooting at her at the time. She did know a thing or two about the normal, unmutated kind, though, and they were bad news.
At least the ones in her particular part of the world, she reminded herself. She did not know anything about any werewolf societies that existed outside of her home city. The one here, however, were under the command of a man named Rolf Smythe. He wanted to save the world, and he thought that that would be much easier if he first managed to take over the world. Some of her more perceptive fellow Hunters had referred to him as a furry version of Adolf Hitler. And like the good Führer, Smythe did have a frighteningly great deal of charisma, at least in the eyes of other werewolves.
Even he and his cronies, though, were afraid of their mutated cousins.
And these particular cousins were bringing people with them. People who did not want to go. There was no way those sacks they were carrying could contain anything but unconscious people; the shapes that showed through the cloth were far too perfect. They might be dead, but Catherine doubted it. Why drag dead people around? From what she could gather, werewolves preferred meat that was still moving.
She chewed on her lower lip and drummed her fingers against the window sill. Okay, assume her guesses were correct, and these were live people those werewolves had just carried into the building. Presumably something horribly was going to happen to them. Or at least it was hard to imagine that anything nice might happen to them, under the circumstances.
What was she supposed to do about it?
Call the police. The idea appeared suddenly and made her smile. Yes, in this case she could actually do that. She would not have to tell them who she was. She would not have to say anything about werewolves or Hunters. All she had to say was that she had seen three unconscious people being carried into a building by three unwholesome-looking youths, and would the police please look into it, she was afraid that there was a kidnapping or something going on…
She took her black coat off of the doorknob she had hung it on and pulled her cell phone out of its pocket. She had time to dial two numbers before the thought struck her.
Werewolves could not be killed by ordinary bullets.
And that meant that any cop going in there while expecting nothing more than three common thugs, possibly armed and dangerous but altogether human, was going to be so much dead meat. The werewolves were going to take their true form and kill anyone who aimed a gun at them, and then they were still going to do whatever they wanted with those three they had brought in. And Catherine would have innocent lives on her conscience.
There was too much on that conscience already. She was not going to burden it even more.
But that meant that whoever went in there to rescue those people would have to know about werewolves. And that was not something she could tell the police, or, indeed, any other sane person.
Catherine swore, hung up the phone, and started dialling up the local Hunters. Most of them believed that they had been chosen by God to fight evil in the form of Corpses and werewolves and Intangibles and similar supernatural entities. Catherine did not believe in God, but she was perfectly comfortable with humouring them. Especially if she could make them fight the evil that she wanted them to fight.
Unfortunately, she was met by a wall of answering machines. These people had day jobs. So had she, formally speaking, but she had given her supervisor an impeccable explanation for why her current project could not, by any human capability, be finished in less than two months, and probably not in three either. That gave her a certain freedom, since the project could really be finished in about five weeks. As long as no one checked how many hours of the day she actually spent in the lab, she was covered.
What this all meant, unfortunately, was that she was the only Hunter available for this job. She could wait until tonight, she supposed. Then she could drum up a Hunting party that would at the very least stand a chance against three werewolves, albeit a small one. But who knew what would happen to those captives in the meantime?
"I'm not going in there!" Catherine told the empty apartment. "It's suicide! It's madness! I'm not doing it!"
She got no answer, of course. But she had the uneasy feeling that the silence was laughing at her.
"Damn stupid damn ethics and social responsibility…" she grumbled as she put on her coat. Being an idiot would not be so bad if she had not been just sensible enough to realise how stupid she was…
From the journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 16 (continued):
I've spent most of the time since my Imbuing assembling data on werewolves. For some reason, I keep running into them – in fact, during my first twenty-four hours as a Hunter I was a pawn in some overly complicated werewolf scheme which nearly got me killed. Besides, I can't help it feel that werewolves aren't given as much attention by my fellow Hunters are they should. Sure, Corpses and Intangibles and things like that outnumber them a hundred to one, but all they care about is stuffing their faces with blood or emotional suffering or whatever their personal taste is. Werewolves, on the other hand, want something. They want to save the world.
The thing with saving the world, of course, is that it's more important than anything else. More important than laws. More important than lives. More important than the common decency of not abusing and enslaving people just because they can be used as tools or weapons in the war…
But I'm losing my objectivity. I mustn't do that. I'm a scientist; I have devoted my life to studying things without passing judgement. My personal hatred of these people is inconsequential. The point is that their dedication to their cause makes them bloody dangerous.
So what have I to show for a month spent taking insane risks and sticking my nose into places where it's not welcome? Not much. Oh, I know quite a bit about the guy who commands the local werewolf families. But werewolves as a race? I'm fumbling in the dark. All the information I have gathered is inconclusive, biased, fragmentary and at times (I suspect) downright inaccurate.
And mutated werewolves, werewolves who have become what most werewolves hate the most… they're an unknown quantity in more ways than one…
Five more minutes saw a tall, slim brunette skulking around outside of the other house. She felt very conspicuous, but no aspect of her life up to now had ever required her to be stealthy. Hopefully, the werewolves were not going to look out and see her, because if they did, she was in trouble.
Even more than she was in anyway, at least. Werewolves could do stuff. Not just turn into monsters, even though that was scary enough. They had all these other skills or abilities or whatever it was – she was not quite sure about that part. One of them might walk out on the street and tear her to pieces, and she would never see it until it was upon her. A Hunter's vaunted Second Sight had its limits. It let you see more than the supernaturals wanted, but less than you needed to see to survive.
Monster, the Hunter glyphs spray-painted on the wall warned, hive. She wondered who had put them there. If it had been anyone she knew, why had she not been told? As far as she knew, there were less than ten Hunters in the city, and all of them had her phone number. Most of them also thought she was a) a narrow-minded, intolerant, soulless scientist-atheist who was going to go to hell, or b) a wimpy, judgemental, holier-than-thou pacifist who did not have what it took to fight the war against the supernaturals. In her opinion, those people were religious fruitcakes and complete psychos, respectively. None of that mattered, though. She was a Hunter, and that meant they had to work with her, just like she had to work with them. They were just too few – and the supernaturals were too many, too powerful and too hostile – to be picky. If one of them had found a supernatural hideout, she would have been told.
Unless the one who had drawn the glyphs had died afterwards. That was possible, right? Hunters died all the time. They moved within a world where virtually everything was bigger and badder than they, and they did not even have any formal education in doing so. They relied on guesswork and what shaky pieces of data they could scramble together between all of them. Sooner or later, their luck ran out, and they died.
Had one of the people she had tried to call been unable to answer, not because he or she was at work, but because he or she was lying in a shallow grave somewhere?
That's not going to happen to me, Catherine thought as she, as casually as she could, strolled past the building. Nope. Not to me. I'm too smart to die.
Though if I'm so smart, what am I doing sneaking around a house that's packed with werewolves?
She rounded the corner and looked into the back yard of the house. She did not think that the building had ever been meant for people to be living in. It was more like the kind of place that was rented out to various clubs. Catherine doubted that the werewolves paid rent, so it was probably not in use right now.
It meant that there would be a lot of different rooms in it, and there were only three werewolves – that she had seen, anyway. That meant that there was a decent chance they would not hear it if she cracked a window.
Well… a bit decent. Semi-decent. The bare minimum of decent.
She looked around, found the broken pieces of an old lawn chair, and struck it into a window. The first hit caused a network of cracks to appear. The second one sent a shower of glass shards into the room.
Catherine stood completely still for a few moments, listening. If she heard anything, absolutely anything that could be interpreted as a werewolves running over to see what the ruckus was about, she would run. And run, and run, and run. When it came to rescuing the innocents, she was her own favourite innocent to rescue.
She heard nothing, though. She was not sure if that was good or bad. On one hand, it meant that no one was coming after her. On the other, it also meant that she was morally obliged to proceed.
She hesitated by the window. A jagged row of glass still stuck to the bottom frame of the window. After a few seconds, she took off her coat, folded it carefully, and placed it on the window frame before climbing over. She did so rather gracelessly; she did her best with jogging and a vegetarian diet, but the truth was that she was a long way from being athletic. She was a scholar, not a courageous, monster-hunting martial artist!
Well. So far, so good.
The room she had broken into was empty and dusty. Very dusty. With spider-webs in the corners. Catherine grimaced at it. She liked it when things were nice and clean.
She sneaked over to the door, put her ear to it and listened for a moment, then carefully opened it when she heard nothing. Outside was a corridor, dark and windowless. It turned only a few steps away from the door she was peeking out through.
Catherine deeply wished that she had the same Edge as Kevin, the only semi-sensible Hunter friend she had. He could walk right past a supernatural, and it would not see him. Catherine had Edges of her own, but none of them were much use until you were in the middle of a fight – and if she had to fight a werewolf, she would be dead, with or without Edges.
She took a few stealthy steps down the corridor. She wished that she had brought a flashlight. No, scratch that. She wished that she had brought a flamethrower. It would provide her with a bit of light, and it would also be a weapon that might actually be useful against a werewolf. Very much unlike her bare hands, which was all she had right now. She had had a gun for a while, but someone had borrowed it and then gotten herself killed.
Oh, screw it. She had not been any good with that gun, anyway, and she would not have been any good with a flamethrower. The only thing having a weapon might do for her was to make her feel braver, and feeling brave was probably not a good thing right now. She was walking around in a house where three, or possibly more, werewolf kidnappers lived. Fear and cowardice would put her in the right mindset for a small chance of survival.
If I can just find those prisoners, she thought, and convince myself that I don't have a chance to get them out of here alive, and, let's face it, I won't have, then I might be able to get myself out without hating myself tomorrow. That's the best I can hope for here.
Voices. She was hearing voices. Catherine froze in mid-step right before the turn of the corridor.
"… don't wanna just sit here when you two yapper," a woman's voice said. It sounded mature enough, but the tone was that of a childish whine. Catherine scowled. "I wanna play…"
"Oh, shut up," another voice, a gruff, male one said. It sounded absent, like its owner could hardly be bothered to pay the woman any attention. "You'll get to play. You'll get to play all you want when those bitches wake up."
"I wanna play now…" The woman was interrupted by the sound of a slap, and gave off a deep, sudden growl that sounded like nothing human. Catherine flinched. "What the fuck was that for?" she yelled, her voice rising a notch.
"I said shut up," the man growled. "I'm not in the mood for your whining."
"Come on, guys…" This was the other man speaking, Catherine guessed; his voice was lower and clearer. "We've got a great night ahead of us. Don't spoil it, okay?"
"Just keep her off my back," the gruff voice said.
"Why're you so mad at me?" The woman's voice turned husky. "Can't you be nice to me? I can be nice to you…"
Catherine shook her head, a heavy feeling in her stomach. These people were… she shied away from the expression 'not normal' since that sounded way too much like what people tended to say about her… crazy. Not asylum-crazy, maybe, but definitely not what you might call emotionally stable. She wondered what they would do to her if they realised that she was listening.
Play with her, presumably. Whatever that meant. She could think of a great amount of unpleasant possibilities.
For some stupid reason, her feet took this opportunity to walk closer to the corner. This time, it was not her conscience bullying her. It was a much stronger force – the same one which had made her go through all those long years of studying to become a scientist, the same one which made her go out Hunting every day, even though she knew it was stupid. It was her sense of curiosity.
Damn it, her whole personality was conspiring to get her into trouble!
She warily put enough of her face around the corner that she could see what was there. The corridor ended in a large room. It was mostly empty, but three dirty mattresses with blankets on them hinted that this was where the werewolves spent their nights.
The werewolves themselves were there, too. Bald was crouching down on the floor, and Woman was pressing herself against him from behind. She had slipped her hands under his shirt and was caressing his chest, and she nibbled at his neck – though 'nibbled' might not be the right word, as it looked more like she was going to bite a chunk off if she kept at it. He was growling and trying to shrug her off, but to Catherine it seemed like he was warming to the attention. Tattoo was sitting by the wall, watching the other two with condescending eyes.
Three limp bodies were lying on the floor. They seemed to belong to teenagers, two girls and a boy. All of them had faces that looked like they had been beaten with great enthusiasm by strong people.
Be dead, Catherine silently begged. Please, be dead, so I can get out of here. See, if you're alive it means I have to rescue you, and then they'll catch me, and then I will be dead.
But no; all three chests were rising and falling, slowly but steadily. Catherine felt like tearing her hair. There was just no way she could bring herself to get out of here and leave these three kids behind. Not when she knew that they were going to get, ahem, played with.
Well, okay. Fine. She had then eliminated the sensible approach (though to be honest, she had done that when she entered the house). What remained? She was not a strong woman, and neither was she a fighter. Had she still had her gun, loaded with silver bullets… no, to be honest she could not have done it then, either. There was no way she could take out three werewolves before one of them ripped her to shreds. Not with a gun, not with anything short of a grenade launcher – and probably not then, either, because in order to be close enough to hit with a grenade launcher, she would have had to close enough to blow herself up along with the werewolves. And the prisoners, of course.
There was no way she could physically beat three people on her own. Not any three people. The fact that they were werewolf badasses only added to that fact.
A thought entered her mind: No, but how about a way that isn't physical?
Her eyes widened. Oh, come on, that would never work… would it? They would find her out and kill her. There was just no way…
But if she could not stand the thought of running away, what choice did she have but to try the best plan she could think of? Even if it was not all that good?
And the werewolves did not seem all too bright. She hung on to that thought. She might yet succeed, if she did this well.
Hands on hips, assuming an expression of haughty anger, Catherine stomped around the corner and let her glare sweep over all three werewolves.
"And just what the fuck do you think you're doing?" she snapped.
"Who're you?" Tattoo said. He sounded unfriendly, but not exactly aggressive. That did not make Catherine feel any better. She had a feeling that Tattoo was not aggressive because he did not need to be aggressive. He felt sure that he could, if he felt like it, rub her face in her own comparative puniness. And maybe he would, later – but meanwhile, there was no reason to waste energy on her.
Bald drew back his lips and snarled at her. Woman gave her a pouty look that hinted that she did not appreciate this interruption. But amazingly, none of them had attacked her yet. She did not act like an intruder, so for the moment they were willing to accept the possibility that she actually had a valid reason to be there.
Cool!
Catherine made her expression look even fiercer.
"'Who're you'," she said, making a mocking imitation of Tattoo's voice. "Never mind who I am! I asked you what you're doing! You want to answer that, or do I have to beat it out of you?"
Tattoo's eyes narrowed. Tactical error there, Catherine realised. The insinuation that a skinny woman could beat him up was more of an insult than he was willing to take.
"Beat it out of me?" he said. His voice was soft. Far too soft. "Yeah. Yeah, you have to beat it out of me. Come on." He got up from the floor in a smooth, graceful motion. "Beat it out of me, bitch."
Attacking him would get her killed. Backing down would get her killed.
"Yeah, you'd like that," she said, giving him a disgusted scowl. "Fuck that. I'm not showing up at my meeting tomorrow all bruised because you felt like playing. Bad enough that his nibs," she put as much sarcasm into the words as she could, "made me get down here just because you bunch of sorry bastards can't follow orders."
Tattoo looked a little uncertain. She was not fighting, but she was not really backing, either. Instead, she seemed to be chewing out both them and their boss. The implication was that she could not be bothered to fight him, and that sort of thing was unnerving. Or so Catherine hoped.
She also hoped that there was a boss. If these three were working on their own, this would not work. But one thing she knew of werewolves was that they were social creatures. They found it natural to team up. Hopefully that went for mutated versions, too.
"Oh, for our Father's sake!" Bald snarled. "What does that motherfucker want now?"
Yes!
"He wants you down by the park!" Catherine said, spinning around to nail him down with another furious stare. "Now now now, not when you fucking feel like it! You got a message about that three fucking hours ago!"
If she had to say 'fucking' another time, her tongue was in serious danger of turning black. But somehow, she did not think that envoys from mutated werewolf overlords were particularly soft-spoken.
"We were out three hours ago," Woman said sulkily. She was resting her chin on Bald's shoulder, and the looks she was giving Catherine were unpleasant. Bald was angry and Tattoo was mean, but Woman would be more vicious than either if she got the chance. Not because of any abstract – well, slightly abstract – notions of face and turf and respect, but because Catherine was bugging her, and she didn't like that.
"Out." Catherine facepalmed and shook her head. "Our Father have mercy! Well, get there now, and just maybe he won't take the time to play with you!"
"Bitch," Bald muttered under his breath, though loud enough that it was obvious he wanted her to hear it. He got to his feet – Woman gave off a protesting sound as he shook her off – and headed off for the opposite side of the room, where there was a door. Woman got up and stomped off after him. Catherine heart skipped a beat. It was working! It was working!
"Oh, come on!" Tattoo shook his head. The other two stopped.
Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. And so on.
"We've got prisoners here!" Tattoo said and gestured to the kids on the floor. "We're going to use them for a major rite tonight! We can't just rush off because Gregory's got it into his head that he has to go off and kill something and need us along to hold his hand!"
Gregory? Interesting. Archive that, under 'Mutant Werewolf Overlords'.
"Whatever," she said with a shrug. "I mean, fine by me. I'll just get back there and tell Gregory that you've got much more important things to do than to follow his orders. I'm sure he'll understand. I'm sure he won't send some of his goons here to ram your balls down your throat…"
Tattoo's expression made it obvious that he was a little less sure about that.
"We can't just run off and leave them," he grumbled. "They'll wake up and run. And they saw us. You know. Changed."
Catherine glanced briefly at the winged, monstrous image superimposed on Tattoo's frightening but mundane form. Yes, she knew. She knew all too well.
She shrugged.
"Got any rope?" she said. "Tie them up."
He grimaced.
"Fine." He walked past her into the corridor beyond, presumably to get some rope.
Catherine tried to look like her heart was not pounding. She was doing it! She was actually doing it! The werewolves would leave, she would get those kids out of here, and she would actually have gotten away with approaching three werewolves on her own! Heck, she was getting good at this Hunter stuff…
"Who're you, anyway?" Bald said. "Haven't seen you around Gregory."
"I'm new in town," Catherine said with a shrug. "Got transferred in to replace the casualties from last month."
"What fucking casualties?"
Catherine made a great show of looking at Bald like he was slightly less intelligent than the common tick.
"Big explosion?" she said. "Vampires running amok? Your bunch shooting wildly into a crowd? Any of this ring a bell?"
This was a gambit, and she knew it. The only other werewolf mutants she had seen had been with Aesop. Were these ones of the same crowd? She thought there was a good enough chance, but…
"Oh, that." He made a disgusted face. "You're a scientist bitch."
Catherine shrugged.
"What're you doing running errands for Gregory?" he insisted.
"I've got this policy of not talking back to people who can have me shot," Catherine said flatly.
"Yeah, but…"
Somewhere a few rooms away, Tattoo suddenly screamed. The sound was mixed with that of a savage roar that had to come from a very large chest. Several savage roars. Bald swore and…
… Changed.
Catherine supposed that there had to be some sort of transition. The nails had to grow into claws, the face had to twist into a mix of wolf and bear, new mass had to appear from nowhere and make the werewolf grow… but she just did not see it. To her, it was just as if one of the pictures that were superimposed upon each other disappeared, and the other one remained.
Catherine quickly backed away from the monstrosity that now stood before her. Its hairless skin was glossy and somehow obscene, in a way that had nothing to do with nakedness as such. It was like seeing a newly hatched bird, or newly born rat; there was something fundamentally disgusting with seeing skin where you knew deep in your heart that you should be seeing feathers or fur.
The werewolf sank down on all four and ran through the doorway Catherine had entered through. Woman sent Catherine a last hateful glance, Changed into her own monster form and followed him.
Right. She had wanted to get the werewolves out. This was an improvement. Of course, now there was something else in the building besides them, which was less fun, but even so…
She knelt down by the closest one of the teenagers and slapped her, hard.
"Wake up!" she hissed. "I can't carry all three of you!"
There was a great deal of roars and screams coming from the other end of the house. Catherine felt scared enough to cry. Not riding-the-wave-of-panic afraid like she had been before, which had made her perform better due to the desperate energy surging through her. This was pure, will-sapping, nightmarish I'm-going-to-shit-my-pants afraid, the kind that overloaded the senses and made you scream or throw up or pass out. Somewhere near was something that wanted to kill her, and she could not get away!
She slapped the girl again, making her head rock, but her eyes did not open.
"Wake up!" she whimpered.
Hopeless. She moved on to the next and repeated the process. One, she just needed one, one of them awake who could carry one of the others while she carried the last. The boy she was trying to wake remained out cold, though. Catherine had to fight and urge to howl like a wild animal and bang his head against the floor.
No! Focus! You're a scientist! What's more, you're a physician! Start thinking like one!
Right. Sure. She looked at the three captives, really looked at them, at their bruises and their breaths and their skin tone, and compared it to what she had learned in medical school. She had not really used any of that knowledge, except in internships – she had gone straight to work at Aesop Research, and then gone straight from there to Van Dorn Pharmaceuticals, at no point working as an actual doctor. But she remembered most of it, and what it told her was discouraging.
Concussions. Internal bleeding. Shock. Possible coma. None of those three were moving anywhere on their own for the foreseeable future. She would have no help in any rescue attempt she might make.
Okay, so chose one. Doesn't matter who – just pick one of them and drag him or her out of here. You'll have a little time, whatever it is attacking those werewolves will have to kill them first, and killing werewolves isn't a walk in the park. Besides, it might stay here and…and eat the other two…
Catherine had to admit to herself that she could not. There was just no way that she could abandon two people to die while saving one. Or abandon all three while saving herself.
Once again, it came down to finding a semi-decent tactic within the courses of action that she could make and still live with herself afterwards.
So a few minutes later, when four bloody-furred werewolves burst into the room, Catherine was standing over the three prisoners, holding a piece of broken chair in a two-handed grip, and said:
"You're getting to them over my dead body, chumps."
From the journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 16 (continued):
Don't look at me like that. I survived, didn't I? If I'm writing this, I obviously made it out of there alive. That means that I must have done something right, doesn't it?
Okay, so really means that God loves fools and philosophers, but let's not get into that…
The werewolves stopped. They were used to people running in terror as soon as they came charging in full battle-form glory. The kind of people who did not run in terror at that point were usually people who grinned maniacally and sprouted claws, or people who grinned patronisingly and pressed a button under their desks which unleashed massive destruction in the general area of the charging werewolves.
Skinny, girl-next-door attractive women holding makeshift weapons and wearing the goggle-eyed expression of someone who knows that she is doing the absolute stupidest thing she could be doing, but is doing it anyway… well, it was not unheard of, of course. Very little was. But it was not exactly common, and certainly not expected.
One by one, they Changed, turning into three men and a woman. To Catherine, it looked like a human form suddenly appeared in the middle of the monstrous man-beasts. Not for the first time, she wondered what the process looked to someone without the Second Sight. What did the between form look like – for surely, it could not be an instantaneous transformation?
The hell it could not, to be honest. Taking on and shrugging off matter that way should be impossible in either case. The werewolves operated under laws of science that Catherine had not been taught about at school.
"Who're you?" one of them men said. He was unshaven and rugged-looking, even in his human form. His voice was rough, and he did not sound overly friendly. These werewolves looked healthy and as natural as walking violations of mankind's collective knowledge could be expected to look, but they did not like her any more than the mutants had. Big surprise there.
"Catherine Faller," she said with a shrug.
"That's no answer."
"Then ask a more specific question."
He scowled.
"I'll tear some specific organs out of you if you don't…"
"Jake!" The woman stepped in front of him. She was tall, blonde and looked unspectacular. If not for the bright-furred man-beast miasma surrounding her, she would have looked like anyone you could meet on the street and not give a second glance. "That's enough." She smiled at Catherine. She was plain, but it was a very nice smile. "Miss Faller…"
"Doctor." Catherine had not studied for all these years to have walking bags of fur and superstition call her Miss. "It's Doctor Faller, if you don't mind."
The werewolf woman nodded politely.
"Doctor Faller," she corrected herself. "Are you a prisoner here?"
"No."
"You're a collaborator of the freaks we just fought, then?"
"I'm not that, either."
The werewolf studied her under silence for a moment. Jake gave off an impatient snort, but did not speak. Apparently, this woman commanded a lot of respect among her peers.
"Then I'd like to return to Jake's question," she said. "Who are you? If you're not a captive of those brutes, and not a friend of theirs, why are you here?"
Catherine made a gesture towards the teenagers lying on the floor.
"I'm here to rescue them."
"Alone?" Jake sneered. "Unarmed? Against three fucking Dancers?"
Dancers. Archive that. Is it like a gang name or something? Those three did look kind of like a youth gang…
"I was doing fine until you showed up," Catherine said.
"She is alive and unharmed," one of the other men mumbled. "That's saying something, in itself…"
Jake shot him a nasty glance. The woman gave him a smile and a nod of recognition.
"You're a relative to one of the people in town, then?" she said, smiling at Catherine in what the Hunter thought was a rather patronising way. "A Smythe? A Rothchild? I'm Jessica Rothchild, could we be distant cousins or something?"
"No." Catherine shook her head. Her heart had sunk a little bit when she heard the name Rothchild. The only other werewolf with that name she had met was Tanya Rothchild, who was frankly insane and spent her time summoning up demons and sending them at people who annoyed her boss, sorry, her pack Alpha, Rolf Smythe. She and Catherine were not really on friendly terms. "As far as I know, none of those are related to me."
"Well, you must be related to someone," Jessica said mildly. "Otherwise you'd either be on the floor or out the door by now. Unless you're the enemy, but somehow I just can't picture you as one of those…"
Catherine shrugged. She could not really argue. She had done a little family research when she was sixteen, but if any of her ancestors had had a habit of sprouting claws and fangs and go out and battle the forces of darkness, it had not been put to record.
"I'm going to have to ask you some questions, Doctor Faller," Jessica said. "Some may be a bit sensitive. I hope you understand."
"Go ahead," Catherine said. As long as this woman was talking, she was not tearing Catherine to pieces. That had to be counted as a good thing.
"Did you accept any gifts from any of those three people that lived here? Did you borrow anything from any of them and then use it?"
"Not counting this?" Catherine held up the piece of broken chair. It was a downright pathetic weapon to be used against werewolves, but the same could be said about an UZI, so why fret over it? "No, nothing."
"Did any of them read any incantations while you were near? Or say something that sounded strange, and which made you feel ill for no apparent reason?"
"They sounded nuts." Catherine shrugged again. "And a lot of what they said made me feel scared. But I don't think that was magic."
"Did you sleep with any of them, voluntarily or otherwise?"
Catherine gave Jessica a long, dark stare. The werewolf woman returned it evenly, patiently waiting for a response.
"That's none of your effing business," Catherine said. "And no."
Jessica smiled.
"That should be all right, then," she said. "Now, I'm sure you have a lot of questions, and I'll do my best to answer them when we're done here, if you've got a few hours to spare. There's a lot you need to know, and the families in this town seems to have been… neglectful."
They think I'm a member of a werewolf family, Catherine thought. Some distant branch that hasn't been under proper Changer supervision for a while. And now they want to explain to me what is really going on. How they see the world, how their powers work, what the state of their war is…
If I can just ask some intelligent questions, this could be a great chance! Fine, I'll play ignorant…
"Yeah, there is a lot I'd like to know," she said truthfully. "Things have been a little… weird… today."
"I'm sure it has," Jessica said warmly. "Don't worry about it, Doctor Faller. We'll take care of you. These days, people like you are far too rare for us not to. Jake, Dennis, would you tend to the prisoners, please?"
Jake and one of the other werewolves Changed – Catherine noticed Jessica studying her face for signs of instinctive panic, but Hunters did not feel the blind dread that ordinary people did when faced with werewolves – and started walking over to the teenagers. They bent over them, raising one big, clawed paw each…
"Hey, wait a minute!" Catherine yelped. "What are they doing?"
"You probably escaped uncontaminated," Jessica said. "They have most likely been tainted in some way. They must be dealt with."
"Dealt with?" Catherine said. She was not exactly yelling, but her voice was somewhat higher than usual. "You mean killed!"
"Very often, that's the only way to eradicate taint. You will understand once I have explained."
Catherine lifted the makeshift club and struck one of the werewolves – Dennis, she thought it was – on the nose. He recoiled with a surprised whine.
"I told you that you can't have them," she snarled between her teeth.
"Doctor Faller," Jessica said, "I must ask you to be reasonable here…"
"Screw that. Leave them alone."
There was a moment of stunned silence, as the werewolves tried to get it into their heads that this… this mundane had just defied them, and Catherine, on her part, tried to get it into her head that she had just effectively turned down an offer of knowledge and survival – two things which she valued very highly indeed – in order to save three strangers. She regarded the fact very dispassionately. She had gone way past fear at this point. Her whole head felt blank.
She wondered faintly if this sort of thing granted you a nice place in Heaven. She doubted it, on the whole. If God even existed, he was probably all in favour of werewolves. They were battling Evil, after all. Catherine was just battling – very reluctantly, at that – things that were simply not right. That probably did not count for as much…
"But they're very probably infected," Jessica said. "If they live, they'll turn into… well, a sort of twisted, mutated…"
"I'm familiar with the concept," Catherine interrupted. "It's still better than being dead. And if they disagree, there are plenty of high places to jump from in this town."
"Doctor Faller," Jessica said with an increased intonation on every syllable that hinted that her patience was running out, "I'm sorry, but no matter what you know or think you know, you're going to have to trust me when I say that we know best here. If you just cooperate, we'll get out of here in two minutes and I'll explain it all to you. Right now, it should be enough to inform you that we're fighting a war against an enemy that's more ruthless and terrible than you can possibly imagine. These people are in jeopardy of being turned into frontline soldiers for the other side, and we won't allow it. You saw those three brutes that lived here. They brought these people here to rape and torture them. Even if you're unaware of the full scope of what is going on here, you have to understand that with enemies like that, we can't afford anything that makes us less than fully efficient."
"Oh, I've never heard that before!" Catherine snarled. Her head was not blank anymore. It was being filled with red-hot rage. Every snarling monstrosity that had chased her during the last month, every haughty lecture on how she was interrupting the rightful struggle for the Earth's very survival, every piece of neo-pagan bullshit that she had had to listen to seemed to come back. She was dead, and she did not even care. Better to stand up these bullies who proclaimed themselves heroes and die than to shrink back and let them keep believing that everyone who mattered agreed. "Or wait, have I? Could it be that everyone who has ever waged a war has used that same rhetoric? What do you think new 'Dancers' are told?"
"Actually…" Jessica said. For the first time, she seemed a bit taken aback. For someone who could break a person's back with a single punch, seeing Catherine mad was like being attacked by a rabbit. It was not the least bit dangerous, but it was a little scary just because the world was not supposed to work like that.
"I'm so very sick of you!" Catherine almost screamed. "I'm not one of your effing relatives! I'm not one of the horrible, evil monsters who're trying to destroy all life, either! There are things that aren't either of those, you know!" She took two steps closer to Jessica, and realised with a distant sense of startlement that she was taller than the werewolf. Sure, the miasma towered over her, but as a human, Catherine was about two inches taller. "You and your war! You and your Gaia! You and your bloody rugged-salt-of-the-earth-working-class-hero-tragic-misunderstood-saviour routine!"
She was actually kind of proud of having improvised that last bit on the fly. Jessica's jaw had dropped, so apparently it had had a certain impact on that end, too.
"I'd rather have you bite my head off now than have to listen to more of your crap!" she yelled. "Have any of you even once stopped to ask if maybe the other side has a point? Have any of you even once thought that just because something isn't natural, it doesn't mean it's wrong? Did you ever think that maybe you're not totally, one hundred percent, unquestionably right? The hell you did!" She drew back her lips and squinted with her eyes to look as cavewoman-like as she could. "'Growl, growl, growl. Us good. Everyone else bad. Us kill bad people. Growl, growl!'" She dropped the parody of primitivism and glared at Jessica. "You look down your noses at us, but at least we're trying to be something more than jumped-up apes! You never even try to be something else than wolves, and you think that makes you better than us!"
She gasped for breath, her face burning.
"Are you done?" Jessica snarled. And it was a real snarl, one that sounded like a wolf that had learned how to talk. Had her eyebrows been that furry a moment ago? Had her eyes not been a deeper brown, rather than that almost-yellow colour…?
"Yeah," Catherine said, half-choked. Her head felt light.
"Well, then." Jessica glanced at the two man-beasts standing in front of her. "It seems she's a fomor of some kind after all. Kill her."
Catherine squeezed her eyes shut and waited for the end.
The end did not come.
Instead, she heard the werewolves talking. She was pretty sure it was talking, at least. It was no language she had ever heard before her Imbuing – rather, it was a series of grunts and growls, forced up through throats not meant for any human speech. She listened for a moment, trying to make sense of any of it without succeeding. Then her courage failed her.
"Do it already!" she screamed and opened her eyes.
Then she saw that all four of the werewolves were walking away, Changing into human form and marching out through the door they had come in through. Catherine blinked. Then she checked herself over for any fatal wounds she might have missed. There were none.
"Why?" she said dumbly.
Jessica turned around and gave her a cold glance.
"It appears," she said, weighing every word carefully, "that you carry a Ban, Doctor Faller. It… changes your scent. You are forbidden prey to all who have a proper sense of right and wrong."
Her voice and expression left absolutely no doubt about who did not have such a sense.
"A Ban?" Catherine said. "Who put it there?"
Jessica shrugged.
"How should I know? Some misunderstood working-class hero, perhaps?" she said.
Then she left.
Catherine remained where she was for a moment, staring dumbly at the doorway and trying to get it into her head that she, despite all the suicidal decisions she had made during the last half hour or so, miraculously had failed to die. Gosh.
She looked down on the teenagers on the floor. She thought about what Jessica had said.
Tainted? she wondered.
"Heck, who isn't, these days?" she muttered. Then she picked up her phone and called the ambulance.
From the journal of Doctor Catherine Faller, entry # 16:
I called the hospital about an hour ago. All three of those kids are going to be all right, it seems. They were beaten up pretty badly, and they're going to have to stay there for a long time while they recover, but they won't have any permanent injuries. Nor, as far as anyone there can tell, were the girls raped. Thank God for small favours.
None of them have yet started to sprout tentacles or grow six-foot-long tongues. I'll keep my eye on them as best I can without getting noticed by the authorities, though. If they do… turn… then I suppose they may need to talk to someone who knows what it's like to be thrown into a world you never thought existed, and to become something that might not be entirely human.
As for me? Well, I survived my attack of conscience again. I guess I should be grateful. How many has managed to pour that much venom in the face of a werewolf and live to tell the tale? But thinking about the reason for it… well, it's hard to feel much triumph.
A Ban, she said. I've got a Ban on me. Some other werewolf put it there, and now no one else may touch me.
And I think of Rolf Smythe telling me that I would pay, I would pay for what I had done to him, that death was much too good for me but one day he'd give me far more than that…
There is a war. It's waged between two noncorporeal entities that go by the names of Gaia and the Wyrm. Maybe they are real, or maybe they are just the invention of some guy who had very vivid dreams and decided that they were probably true. What's important is, both parties have devoted followers, and for a longer time than we can probably imagine, they have been cheerfully killing each other, both sides convinced of the righteousness of their respective causes. Convinced that granting mercy is the same as letting everything that is good and right die.
Being a Hunter – a real Hunter, not a racist, xenophobic maniac like some I could mention – is, I suppose, being the person who walks up to those two factions and says "To be honest, fellows, you look exactly the same to me."
Is it a wonder that both sides hate our guts? Is it a wonder that they are always so quick to kill us as soon as we show up? Even so, I think I'd choose to be a Hunter instead of a werewolf any day of the week.
I choose for myself which wars I fight.