skonen_blades | Entries tagged with werewolf

The wolves are closer now.

Dog-friendly bodyguards are saying that I’m on the list and that I can go right in. Bessie Harmful greets me in Portuguese as I cross the threshold. I walk past her without a glance. It’s a very rude thing to do but I’m too angry to care.

I have what privacy they let me have. I’m looking to cut my leash off. This bar’s thick air is clogged with wet signatures. I can taste the emotions and the desperation. I’m in a mood to burn something down. Everyone looks like a rabbit to me right now. I have no sense of danger. I walk up to the manager’s door.

Tenny Tenkills and Larry Fingers are guarding the door. They look down at me with the emotionless glare of predators wondering idly if they’re going to have to kill me. No eagerness or fear, just idle curiosity. They wait for me to say something.

“GET OUT HERE!” I yell at the door. I can smell the pheromones behind that locked door snap to attention and become acrid and alarmed. Tenny and Fingers each reach for my throat. There’s a second when they look at each other with a small question in their faces. They’re not sure who gets to kill me. Not too bright. It saves my life. I’m waiting for them to attempt rock, paper, scissors when the door opens.

There he is. Magnus Hide. A giant of a man. Silverback and cunning. His lips are peeled far back, exposing long teeth that have seen the innards of many foes. The waft of sheer experience in matters of killing washes over me and I almost lose my nerve. I have disturbed his peace. Every waft on this doorstep is screaming ‘this better be good’.

Tenny and Fingers snap to attention. It’s my show. The likelihood of me being dead within two minutes is very high.

The bar is starting to notice a transgression taking place. The musicians quiet down. Heads are sniffing the air and focusing on us. The bar slows down to a whisper.

“Hey, Tuffy. You smell like you’re about to piss yourself. Please don’t. I just had this rug cleaned. I was just on the phone with Tina from Pack Six. She said that you’d be by. She hung up when I asked her why. You have my attention.” says Magnus.

His claws start to slide out slowly. I could hear them rasp against his flesh. I didn’t have long. I felt the sexual threat of battle shiver through me.

“I’m leaving, Magnus. With your daughter. We’re in love. Tina is letting us go.” I say to Magnus. “She’s in hiding. If you kill me, you’ll never find out where she is. She’s pregnant with a litter.”

Magnus looks at me from beneath a deep brow. His eyes glitter. He is sniffing the air for any sense that this is sarcasm or a suicidal joke. All he smells is truth.

I hold my breath and wait for his reaction.

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Fairly Bloodless, the hunter of werewolves, knew one thing:

Dead men have no tails.

The other thing he knew, looking down at the body of the naked seventeen-year-old girl on the rain-soaked pavement in front of him, was that it was really hard to tell what sex a werewolf was before you started shooting. He’d never killed a woman before.

She was pale and pristine except for the four perfect little holes, two in the front and two in the back, when the silver had let out her life.

She was well-muscled and beautiful in that magnetic, savage way that most Weres had by day; quick to sneer, moody, decisive, and sexual. No problem letting their anger get the best of them in a fight. Loyal to their other Were-friends for life.

Good creatures to have on your side. Some breeds would turn on you but for the most part, they made great bodyguards, soldiers, and border patrol units as long as you kept them well-fed and scratched their bellies when they wanted it.

Not great creatures to have around if you ran out of food or felt like mistreating one of them. The pack-mind took over if you felt like, for instance, executing one of them before they got wind of the fact that your empire was about to go belly-up.

Like maybe the hot little seventeen-year-old Were you’d been having a fling with who’d heard too much with those sharp ears of hers while you were having a business meeting in the hall outside of the master bedroom.

In an instance like that, you called Fairly Bloodless. Fairly had ingested a serum of silver nitrate for years. His skin was blue but his blood and flesh was like burning acid to werewolves. He had many other names: Papa Smurf, Blueblood, Huckleberry Sharkfin, The Noble, and a few others. They all boiled down to the same thing:

He got the job down when you wanted a werewolf dead.

And now here he was, scared at how much he was feeling. Her long legs were getting colder in the street. Her armpits and long legs were slightly hairy liked she’d never shaved. Probably had Were-parents. Probably a trueblood with a lineage.

Fairly Bloodless was starting to get angry. They’d never told him that it was a woman. Werewolf women were out of bounds. He was in trouble.

He needed to find a safe place to hide out.

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A woman once told me that I would never understand the allure of the moon. Not like she did, she said. Women have a special lunar connection, she said.

I don’t disagree. However, her connection seemed to be based on peace and an all-knowing universal inclusion.

My connection is about violence.

There are two moons up in that the sky. One for people like me and one for people like her. When that white circle is fat and bursting at the seams with a month of days ready to leak out across the sky, my hair gets thicker and words seems hard to follow. I can smell the blood in people. I understand their need to rut, to kill, to instigate.

I’m a millionaire werewolf hoarding silver. I avoid the moon by chasing the sunset across the world. I’ve been in daylight for six years. I let my surging, repressed predatory instincts chase dollars in the marketplace. I go for the kill on the Dow Jones and the Nikkei. I chase herds of startled Euros to cliff edges and bark them over into my accounts. I take small companies and teach them the way of the hunt, fanning my initial investments into bonfires. I no longer limit my stalking to the weak and the young.

Lately, I’ve been targeting the strong, the long-lived. This is worrying to me. This is the lobo-solo burnout that people talk about. The hunger that forgoes reason. I have been away from the moon so long. I’d forgotten what it’s like. Have six years of repressed violence, six years of no blood on my tongue, six years of strolling in sunglasses through plazas instead of running naked through dark forests finally taken their toll? Am I making my own moon inside of me?

Maybe I should reverse my course. Chase the night instead of the day.

Arrive at 4PM in the dark of November, off work at 5, to a store that closes at 6, to a café that closes at 7, to a restaurant that closes at 9, to a bar that closes at 11, to a club that closes at 2, to an after hours that closes at 4, to someone’s house party until 5, to the airport.

No. That is not the way of me. I must keep going in the sun. I must avoid the moon. I must be measured and precise. To lose control now would spark an endless well of flight within me. My memory would go into hibernation and I'd be killed eventually, death after death calling the police to me. I must keep posing behind these expensive suits and drive these expensive cars. I must smile on my yacht at visiting dignitaries and smile politely at their trophy wives without ever revealing the sea of instinct that pulses down my veins.

That woman was right. I will never understand the allure of the moon. I fear the moon for the power she brings me.

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It’s a little ticklish when the needles go in but the anesthetic keeps her from moving. It keeps her laughing on the inside.

Grown from a vat of jaguar with a splash of greyhound and a swirl of human, she’s extremely thin and toothy. This is her last treatment before she’s shipped off to Overman Ranker’s Field Farms for training.

She’ll be part of an Assassin’s Guild nick-named The Circus. All of the killers are animal hybrids. The term ‘guild’ is a bit of a misnomer. ‘Kennel’ would be more accurate. The assassins are little more than happy pets that are conditioned to be stealthy and to kill without mercy.

An animal’s nose full of the scent from the victim’s clothing is much more efficient than a photograph/dossier when it comes to tracking a man down in the dark.

Tyrania is two years old. She’s either happy or in pain. No other emotions exist within her. The pain of punishment tells her what not to do. Right now, she’s happy. The spinal tap keeps her immobilized while the nano-somes do their knitting and pearling to the building blocks of her epidermis.

After training, she’ll be able to pass for human. The skeletal creature on the table with dark spots dotting the long, grey fur will become something more akin to feral super model when the process is finished.

She’ll be killing in the higher classes. It’s the bear-and-croc mods that they send to the poor places.

Her long nails are retracted and painted a garish red. The newborn killers always choose cosmetics that look like blood on their nails and lips. It’s comforting to them. It’s frightening to see them smile in the mirror after their first reward of makeup. More often than not, they’ve smeared a line of lipstick around their lips. Their eyes glass over with the dreams of blood as they tilt their head at their reflection.

They get trained to be human on the Field Farm. I mean, they get trained to kill people in any number of ways with the aid of mental downloads and grueling days of physical training but they’re also told how to act at the dinner table and how to keep a conversation going.

We teach them to be background. They’re expendable so there’s no exit routes planned when they’re sent on missions.

I miss the ones that don’t come back. I don’t like the ones that do. They change after a successful mission.

This one here, Tyrania, is looking straight up at the ceiling as I prepare the depilatory cream. I’m in her peripheral vision. I give her a wink.

I feel like a dentist operating on a child.

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That’s the thing about going out with a werewolf. Janine can smell everything and she’s jealous. I belong to her. Most of the times I like it but today, I’m finding it trying. I sat too close to another girl on the subway and I’ve come home stinking of subway girl’s perfume.

There’s no way I would cheat on Janine and it’s not just because she’d tear me to shreds if I did. I love her and that’s that. Right now, though, I’m started to get scared.

It’s that time of the month with her. During these days, the backs of her hands are thick with hair and she’s very well muscled. The fridge is full of meat. There are a couple of dead squirrels in the garbage can. Janine feels freakish and unattractive when the moon is nearing fullness and she always gets a little extra paranoid that I’m going to run off with someone else at these points.

It’s not Cage Night yet but it’s getting close so I have to be careful about what I say to her. I need to put as much sincerity into my voice while not trying to convince too hard because that might come across as lying. Above all, though, she’ll see nervousness as an admission of guilt right now so I need to keep my voice firm and my heart rate down. She can smell fear.

Her teeth are longer. She’s snarling softly but I don’t think she realizes that she’s doing it. Her nails are thicker. Her nose is just a little bit longer and right now, it’s wrinkled up and ready to bite.

“Janine. Baby. Come on. You’re the one I love. I was just sitting next to some girl who had to slather on a ton of perfume. Do you think I’d want that? You’re the only one for me. Come here.”

There’s a moment when Janine takes a deep sniff of the air and judges me with her increasingly animal mind. It’s almost thrilling. I know that wolves don’t hand out second chances. They act. It’s the human part of Janine’s mind that’s trying to wrestle with increasingly alien concepts of self-doubt and unconfirmed suspicion. I know that I might be running for my life in a second but right now I’m standing my ground and smiling with open arms.

She softens.

She’s still tense when I take her in my arms. She apologizes and smiles and licks my neck. It’s a sudden movement and it takes all of my self-control to not flinch like food when she does that. The thing about female werewolves is that besides growling, they also purr. I know everything’s cool when I can feel her purring a few seconds later as she snuggles into my hug.

There’s a lot of raw steak and Hagen Daz in my grocery bag right now. It’s going to be a good night.

But I know that after she goes to sleep, I’ll be double checking the locks on the cage in the basement and making sure that the emergency silver bullets are all dry and that the gun is oiled. We’re getting close to Cage Night.

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It was Greyhound who gave us the news. He was almost skeletal from the methedrine, his mangy skin stretched too tight on his skull, becoming a permanent teeth-baring rictus. His dark eyes glittered from the depths of his eye sockets. Quicker than any of us, he’d been able to get away from the Hunters.

We’d sent out a patrol of six. Greyhound was the only survivor. This had happened three times now. The first patrol had just never returned. Greyhound was the only survivor of the last two patrols. He was unfocused, twitchy, and haunted. His speed habit looked like it was going to kill him soon. He kicked in his sleep with nightmares of death. He’d howl himself awake and claw with a whine at the satchel that kept his drugs.

We were a loose pack born of necessity rather than familial links and mating pairs. Our kingdom was nearly gone. It was possible that we were the only ones left. No one answered our howls.

Twenty-six dogboys in the fen and eighteen bitches. Three of the women were ready to litter. They were treated like fragile sheets of glass. With them lay the hope for our race. Cross-breeding, once frowned upon as deeply as lone wolves, was now a necessity. No pure races would survive this purge if any of us survived at all.

It was Killkennel in the moving cities that was tracking us down and putting us in the Extermination Pounds. We could give ourselves up for lobotomization, training, registration and eventually be given to a human as a bodyguard or a pet. The only other option was death.

We wild lycanthropes were being taken out of the gene pool.

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His breath reeked of ammonia. His eyes were black and bleeding. The Change had come upon him. His screams filled the kitchen as he lay clutching his stomach on the white linoleum floor.

The were-ware was increasing his thirst for electricity and metal. The moon was full and the earth’s magnetic fields were being plucked hard enough to wake up the lycananotech deep inside his infected pathways.

The Vir-OS must have come through the plug during his last run. Silver pathways were tattooing his skin in arcane technical glyphs. His teeth were being capped with metal points. His voice was starting to modulate.

He staggered to the counter on his knees and pulled out both cutlery drawers, scattering all the silverware across the floor. He dragged the knife-block over to the edge and let it fall.

The microscopic bodies within him tugged the reins of his pain and pleasure centers to send him towards first the fork and then towards the socket.

With a savage snarl that whined up into the supersonic, he plunged the tines of the fork into the outlet. With a flash and a pop, electricity arced up his trembling arm to wake up the freshly-built batteries lying dormant in his chest.

The normal implants he’d had installed at birth to communicate through the net were being subsumed by the e-disease. He was becoming a Silverwarewolf.

He starfished on the dark kitchen floor, humming like a refrigerator with caged power. His muscles spasmed with the incoming charge. All he needed now to complete the change was raw material. The fingertips of his free hand cored themselves painfully and become electromagnets. The cutlery on the floor sped towards his outstretched fingers.

Like a fly spitting acid onto its food to digest it, the pores of his hand opened to leak out a powerful clear gel filled with disassemblers.

The spoons sizzled at his touch. The knives bent and shrieked with stress fractures. The room filled with light before the bulb exploded in a shower of sparks raining down on the wreckage of blood and growing technology on the floor.

It was dark for an hour while the virus ran its course. Electricity pumped into the quivering body as it changed size and shape.

Coiled monomers exploded out like party streamers to land on anything metal in the room. The lines went taught as toasters, taps and mixing bowls were reeled in. The sink and the blender followed. The fridge was last.

The spike in power had been noticed by the grid but counterprogram measures had fled into the net from the wolf’s connection to retard their emergency signals.

Neighbours who banged on the walls about the noise were ignored. The ones who called the police found their calls rerouted by watchdogs from the virus in the building’s system. Soon enough, all went quiet.

In the darkness, there was a scrape followed by the whining charge of a power up.

The Warewolf was not allergic to silver. It was a Wolf 2.0.

It needed to find the rest of the pack.

Its head rolled back on newly created bloody pistons as it sent out a howl in netspace and reality. The call to assemble echoed down the phone lines. Trigger codes sounding like white-noise whispers embedded themselves in emails. Address books were rifled and used as starting points.

Soon, the warewolfs would run free in packs across the face of the world. Sentient nightmares made real from binary puppetry.

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“Different parts of the world give us different types of werewolves.” the professor at the front of the meeting said. He clicked his control button to move the projection carousel one slide forward. Blackness and then we were looking at a shantytown on the Ivory Coast.

“For instance,” he continued, “In Africa, it’s not uncommon for werewolves to turn into something more closely resembling a large hyena.”

Click. Darkness. Another slide. This time of a forest with mountains in the background.

“While in the North American wilderness, they very much look like large, thin coyotes.” He stated.

He gestured to the man near the lights. The lights came on with a stuttering ping to a brief rustle of suits as people readjusted in their seats to look like they were paying attention. With a sigh, the professor pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and rested his hands on either side of the lectern.

“Now, the traditional werewolf of legend originated in Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages and they look like massive timber wolves. Definitely the strongest and the fiercest we’ve encountered. Not as smart as the African werewolves but then the African werewolves seem to attack mostly the weak and look for a comfortable niche in the community. The Europeans tend to revert to nature. They are forest creatures.” He was going over what we already knew and it was clear that he was losing the audience.

If this boring man in a white jacket was the best that the eggheads could come up with for public speaking, we gave him our attention as much as our pity and inwardly begged him to tell us something new, like a good reason for being here.

“This brings me to the reason for being here.” He said. We all leaned forward in our seats. “We have recently uncovered evidence that leads us to believe that our viewpoint of werewolves as stragglers, loners and bitter fighters may have been wrong all along.”

Raised eyebrows greeted his next comment. “There is a simple fact in nature that has always seemed at odds with the werewolves we have hunted down. That is that in nature, dogs and wolves run in packs. Werewolves that we’d killed have always been found alone and angry.” He adjusted his feet and looked down at his notes for a second. We could smell bad news.

“Gentlemen and ladies,” he said, “We were wrong. Werewolves do run in packs. The ones we’ve caught have been thrown to us. We’ve been played. They own almost everything.”

The implications sank in around the room. Implications of implications started to dance around in the recesses of our dark military minds.

The scientist checked his watch. He had very sharp cheekbones.

We were not elite hunters. We’d been fools.

Howling erupted from the woods outside. I recognized them from some time I’d spent in Milan.

Greyhounds.

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