THE WOLF THAT WALKED

Chapter 2: The Man in the Chair

He was old in a way that didn't make sense. The lines on his face said seventy, maybe eighty. But the stillness of him, the way he occupied my chair like he'd been sitting there since the building was built, that felt older. Much older.

His coat was gray wool, ragged at the cuffs, patched at the elbows. Work boots with soles worn thin. Hands that looked strong despite the liver spots. A scar ran from his left temple down to his jaw, old and white, the kind of scar you get from something that should have killed you.

He was drinking from my mug. The blue one with the chip on the handle.

"What the hell are you doing in my apartment?"

"I told you." He took a sip of coffee. "Sit down. You've had a long night."

I didn't sit. I grabbed my phone off the counter and dialed 911.

The old man watched me do it with an expression that was almost patient. Almost bored. The dispatcher picked up on the second ring.

"911, what's your emergency?"

"There's a man in my apartment. He broke in. I need police at—"

The old man moved.

I didn't see him get up. One moment he was in the chair, the next he was standing two feet in front of me, and his hand closed around my phone with a gentleness that made my skin crawl. He didn't snatch it. He just took it, the way you'd take a sharp object from a child.

He raised the phone to his mouth and spoke three words. Not English. The sounds were wrong, too low, like stones grinding together at the bottom of a river. The words vibrated in my chest.

The dispatcher went silent. Then the line clicked and died.

The old man handed the phone back to me. "That won't work again for a few hours. Electronics don't care for the old tongue."

I stared at the dead screen. My hands were shaking. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to run. My body couldn't decide which, so I just stood there like an i***t while he walked back to the chair and sat down like he owned the place.

"Who are you?"

"People call me Grey."

"Is that your name?"

"It's what I answer to." He gestured at my couch. "Sit, Caleb. Your legs are about to give out and I'd rather not have to pick you up off the floor."

I sat. Not because he told me to. Because my legs were about to give out.

"How do you know my name?"

"I know a lot of things about you. I know you work nights at the meatpacking plant on Ashland. I know you've lived in this apartment for fourteen months. I know you don't have any family to speak of. Grew up in the system. Five foster homes before you aged out." He took another sip of coffee. "I know you've been waking up in places you don't remember going, wearing clothes you don't remember putting on, with blood under your fingernails you can't explain."

The coffee I'd smelled earlier was sitting on my kitchen counter, still steaming. He'd made a full pot. Used my filters. My grounds. Like he'd been here for hours.

"Are you a cop?"

"No."

"A stalker."

"That's closer." The corner of his mouth twitched. "But not quite accurate."

"Then what?"

Grey set the mug down on the arm of the chair. He reached inside his coat and my whole body tensed, waiting for a weapon, a knife, a gun. What he pulled out was a photograph. Four by six, glossy, the kind that comes from a crime scene photographer who's seen too much to care about focus.

He set it on the coffee table between us and pushed it toward me with one finger.

I didn't want to look. Every instinct I had, every survival mechanism I'd built over twenty-four years of being alone in the world, told me to walk away from this room and never come back.

I looked.

Three bodies. A man and two women, from what I could tell. They were laid out on what looked like a warehouse floor, surrounded by evidence markers and pooled shadows that I knew were blood because nothing else photographs that black. Their clothes were torn. Their bodies were torn. Someone had opened them up the way you'd open a package you were impatient to get into.

The wounds were bite marks. Human-shaped, almost. But wrong. The jaw that made those marks had been too wide, the teeth too long, the gaps between them too large.

The same marks that were on my arm.

"That was three weeks ago," Grey said. "Warehouse district. Homeless couple and a security guard who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The guard was new, first week on the job. His wife had just had a baby."

I pushed the photograph away. My hand was shaking so badly I nearly knocked it off the table.

"That wasn't me."

"No."

"Then why are you showing me this?"

"Because whoever did this made you. The bite on your arm is a signature, Caleb. A calling card. You're part of this now, whether you want to be or not."

I stood up. My legs held, barely. "I want you to leave."

Grey didn't move. "You've been losing time. Hours at a stretch. You wake up in the woods with blood in your mouth and you tell yourself it's a medical condition, a brain tumor, something you can get treated. But you know that's not true. You've known since the first blackout. You just haven't been ready to say the word."

"Get out."

"Twenty-nine days," Grey said. "That's how long you have until the next full moon. The first full moon after infection. It's the one you don't walk away from unchanged. The one where you lose yourself completely. The one where you become what bit you."

I grabbed the door and pulled it open. The hallway was still empty. The fluorescent light was still flickering.

"I don't know what kind of cult you're recruiting for, but I'm not interested."

Grey rose from the chair. He moved slowly this time, deliberately, giving me a clear view of every motion. When he reached the door he stopped and looked at me, and something in his face shifted. The amusement was gone. What was left was harder to read.

"I'll be outside when you're ready to talk," he said. "Not tonight. Not tomorrow. But soon. When the hunger gets worse. When you start hearing heartbeats through walls. When you look in the mirror and your eyes aren't the color you remember." He stepped past me into the hallway. "You'll have questions. I'll have answers. And Caleb?"

"What?"

"Stop eating the deer. Raw organ meat will give you parasites."

He walked down the stairs without looking back. I stood in my doorway for a long time after he was gone, listening to his footsteps fade, smelling the scent of wet fur and smoke that lingered in the air like a warning or a promise or both.