THE WOLF THAT WALKED

Chapter 3: The Parking Lot, Revisited

I didn't sleep that night. I sat on my couch with every light in the apartment turned on and stared at the photograph Grey had left on my coffee table. I hadn't noticed him leave it. He'd known I would look at it again.

The three bodies stared up at the ceiling with eyes that weren't eyes anymore. The wounds on their torsos matched the scar on my arm with a precision that made my stomach clench. Same spacing between the punctures. Same angle of entry. Same tearing pattern where the jaw had clamped and ripped.

At five in the morning I went outside. Grey was sitting on the front steps of my building, exactly where he'd said he'd be, reading a paperback with a cracked spine. He looked up when the door opened and folded the book into his coat pocket without marking the page.

"You lasted longer than I expected."

"Shut up." I sat down next to him on the cold concrete. The street was empty. The sky was starting to lighten at the edges. "Tell me what's happening to me."

Grey looked out at the street. A newspaper truck rumbled past, its engine too loud in the pre-dawn quiet. "Tell me what happened to you first. The night you were bitten. All of it."

I hadn't told anyone the full story. Not the police who found me in the parking lot, not the ER doctor who stitched the wound, not the therapist the hospital made me see for three sessions before I stopped going. I'd told pieces. Fragments. Nothing that made sense.

"Three months ago," I said. "End of my shift. Two in the morning. I was walking to my car in the employee lot. It was cold. February cold. The kind of cold where the air hurts to breathe."

Grey nodded. He didn't interrupt. He just listened in a way that made me feel like he was recording every word.

"I heard something behind me. Between the cars. Not footsteps. More like something dragging. Something heavy. I turned around and there was nothing there. Just the lot, the lights, the shadows between the parked vehicles. But the shadows were wrong. One of them was too big. Too dark."

My throat was dry. I swallowed and it didn't help.

"It came out from between two SUVs. I don't know how to describe it. It was shaped like a wolf but it wasn't a wolf. It stood on two legs but hunched forward, like its spine was built wrong. Its arms were too long. Its hands had claws instead of fingers. And it was looking at me. Not at my movement, not reacting to noise. Looking at me. Choosing me."

"And then?"

"It crossed the distance between us in about half a second. Fifty feet. Half a second. I didn't have time to scream. I felt its jaws close on my arm and then I felt my bones break and then I didn't feel anything at all. I woke up in the hospital two days later."

Grey was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was softer than I'd heard it before.

"His name was Aldric. He was the last independent First Fang in North America. Four hundred and thirty years old. He'd been dying for the past decade. Silver poisoning. Someone put a silver knife in his back about twelve years ago, and the wound never healed properly. Silver stays in the bloodstream. It works its way toward the heart eventually, no matter how much you heal around it."

"Aldric."

"The bite wasn't random, Caleb. He chose you. He was searching for someone in his final months. I don't know what he was looking for or why he found it in a twenty-four-year-old security guard working the night shift at a meatpacking plant. But he did. He gave you the gift. The last gift he ever gave anyone. A week after he bit you, the silver reached his heart and he died alone in a drainage tunnel under the expressway."

I wanted to feel something about that. Relief that he was dead. Anger that he'd done this to me. Instead I just felt cold.

"You keep talking about 'gifts' and 'First Fangs' like any of this makes sense. What are you talking about? What am I becoming?"

Grey held up his right hand. The skin was wrinkled, the knuckles swollen with age. He flexed his fingers once, twice. On the third flex, something moved under the skin.

Bone. Restructuring itself.

The fingers lengthened. The nails thickened and darkened and curved into points. Fur pushed through the back of his hand, silver-gray and dense, spreading up toward his wrist. The sound of it was wet and grinding, joints popping out of sockets and reforming, tendons stretching like old rubber bands.

I watched his hand become a claw. Not an animal's paw. Something in between. Something that had never been human and never been wolf but existed in the space where both met.

Then it reversed. The fur withdrew into the skin. The claws retracted. The bones shortened with a series of clicks that sounded like knuckles cracking in reverse. Within ten seconds, it was just an old man's hand again, liver spots and all.

I vomited onto the steps.

Grey waited while I emptied my stomach. He didn't offer comfort. He didn't look away. When I was done, he spoke again.

"That's what's in you now. The same biology. The same change. On the night of the full moon, it will take you completely for the first time. Your body will reshape itself into something new. The pain will be extraordinary. You will have no control over your actions. You will hunt whatever is near. You will not remember any of it."

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. "How do I stop it?"

"You don't. You learn to ride it. Or it rides you until someone puts silver through your heart. Those are the only two exits."

I sat there, tasting bile, feeling the cold seep through my jeans, listening to the city wake up around us. Somewhere a block away, a car alarm went off. Birds were starting to chirp in the scraggly tree by the curb.

"Aldric chose me," I said. "But why? I'm nobody. I'm a foster kid who never got adopted. I work night security because I can't hold down anything better. I have no family, no connections, no money. What could I possibly have that a four-hundred-year-old whatever-the-hell-you-are wanted?"

Grey turned to look at me. His silver eyes caught the early light and held it.

"That's the question, isn't it?" He stood up, brushing dust from his coat. "Your family history. Your foster system records. The circumstances of your birth. There's something there, Caleb. Something Aldric found. Something I haven't been able to trace."

"Wait. You've been looking into my past?"

"Since the night he bit you. The moment his blood entered your veins, you stopped being anonymous. You became part of something old and dangerous and very interested in self-preservation. The question isn't why he chose you. The question is what you are that made you worth choosing." He started walking toward the street. "Get some sleep. We'll talk again."

He was gone before I could ask anything else. But his words stayed with me like a splinter I couldn't dig out. Not what I was becoming. What I already was.