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“Hide!” His was a roar that strained the boundaries of human vocal chords. He dropped to his knees, shoulders rolled back, and tore at the pulsing veins of his throat. Where his nails punctured flesh, blood and steam flowed together as his skin sloughed off in wet piles.
A shadow filled the doorway.
The werewolf pressed its claws on the door frame to leer in at us. Shoulder oozing, it shoved the dresser aside and entered, beady eyes focused on the sheriff, who had dropped onto his side while his bones cracked into new shapes and positions.
Glancing from the bathroom, where Samson and Igor were no doubt scared out of their minds, to the helpless sheriff, I lifted the revolver. “Hey! Hey, over here!”
Ignoring me, the invader’s drooling grin widened. The monster rose onto its hind legs, the tips of its ears bent against the low ceiling. As it drew even with Caelan, who had staggered up on four inhuman limbs to block me, one clawed hand struck the side of the sheriff’s saturnine features. With a sickening crack, the muscles and bones of a half-formed wolf snapped into human position, and the sheriff lay still and wreathed in smoke.
“You okay, Caelan?” I backed toward the ruined window. “Sheriff?”
Silence.
Head swaying with serpentine intensity, the werewolf advanced. Pus-slimed maggots dribbled from a gash across its stomach where my second bullet must have grazed. The stench of rot was nigh unbearable. With half the room still to cross, the werewolf lunged forward on a braying howl, claws extended, jaws widening in preparation to latch around my throat.
On the exhale of a deep, steadying breath, I fired – then dropped to the floor.
With no target to disembowel, momentum flung the werewolf three-quarters of the way out the gaping hole that had once been my window. Claws raked the siding as it tipped further and further toward the wreckage of my deck. I rolled out from beneath its legs and, with its gnashing teeth and hands trapped outside, yelled in a stupid fury, “Down, boy!” and pushed. It tipped further out, but not enough. I backed up for a running start. With every ounce of strength in my body I shoved its gore-slicked mass. “I. Said. Get. Down!”
The monster crashed onto the deck with an ear-splitting yelp. My shoulder glanced off the wall at an angle that scattered stars across my eyes. I fell backward onto wet carpet.
“Hey, moron!” a rough voice hissed. The sheriff writhed on the floor in a pool of blood. He clutched at his back, where bones bulged and muscles tensed underneath a blossoming cherry stain. “You shot me.”
I glanced out the window—the deck chairs were flattened, speckled by wriggling maggots, and absent one pissed werewolf— then rushed to the man on my bedroom floor, grabbing his arm as he slipped in his own blood. I helped him into the bathroom.
“Pull it out!” he howled, clawing at his back. The right side of his shoulder had swelled to unnatural dimensions.
“Hell, no!”
“I’m not human. I’ll bleed out if you don’t remove it,” he snapped. Pain rimmed his eyes red. “Where the fuck—ah, pardon my language, Miss Davins—where in the blazes did you find silvered bullets on short notice?”
“My grandma,” I said, flinging open the medicine cabinet while Caelan huffed and puffed on the edge of my tub.
He paused with his fingertip sunk into the entry wound. The surrounding skin tore with disturbing, papery ease. Fur glistened underneath. “Your grandma?”
“She taught me a lot.” Gram may have skipped the firing range lessons, but there were a few skills she’d drilled into me, from survival techniques like starting a fire, to self-defense, staying calm under stress, lock picking and hot wiring my old car. “I’m starting to believe she was more lucid than her doctors thought. You can’t shift, can you?”
“Pry this bullet free and I will present you the bastard’s head within the half hour,” he promised. “I can do it in this skin but it’ll take longer. . . Real sorry for my language, Miss Davins. Preacher man I am not.”
“Don’t worry about it. I have it on good authority that the moron homeowner who shot you is cool with whatever the fuck you want to say to or at her.”
He smiled. One of his canines was longer than the other.
I surveyed my medical inventory. Disposable gloves, Band-Aids worthy of a papercut, cotton balls, q-tips, grooming scissors, tweezers. Yeah. Eyebrow tweezers were gonna remove a bullet. “There’s a trauma kit in the downstairs coat closet. If we can—”
“The enemy could be waiting,” he said. “Dig it out. It ain’t far into the wolf flesh.”
Not knowing proper procedure, I pulled on a pair of gloves. There was the knife in the bedroom closet, but I hoped not to need that. “Does silver halt the shift in both directions? ‘Cause I might've lodged one in his shoulder.”
“Pull. Goddamn. Bullet!” Caelan hissed.
The cabinet hissed back.
The almost-werewolf’s pupils expanded. He reached down.
“No.” I swatted his hand. “I'm not trained for—”
He repositioned himself in front of the sink, gripped the counter and hunched beneath the light. “Now.”
