Heather squatted beside the corpse, roughly grabbed one wrist, and lifted it without saying a word. The braver members of the front row got up and approached. The young vet was the first to notice Heather’s point. “It’s wearing a wedding ring.”
The skeptical faction turned to the principal, who had somehow gotten himself appointed as their leader in the last few seconds. “Somebody must have put a ring on the animal.”
“Crap. Why, Phillip?” someone shouted. “Are you retarded?”
Heather glared at Phillip. Then she roughly dropped the limb and reached for the gaping chest wound. “I noticed this while I was cutting the heart out before it could regenerate.”
There was a cluster of people around the werewolf now, looking almost like a football huddle. The soldier spoke again. “What are those bags?”
“Well, Matthew, those appear to be breast implants,” said Nancy as she stepped away from the huddle, rubbing her eyes. “Well, apparently this thing had a boob job.”
Phillip had no response to that revelation.
“There’s more,” Heather said. “Anybody recognize this?” There was a long moment of silence. The people in the circle all exchanged glances. The audience was struggling to see. Several of the witnesses began to swear.
“Rose Greer had that same tattoo, same place. We used to work together at the substation before she went to nights,” said one of them.
It was Nancy that spoke up again, loudly. “Phillip, can you think of any reason somebody would stick a wedding ring on a wild animal, give it breast implants, and then tattoo a little rose on its neck?”
Phillip, obviously, had no response. Earl was about to make a comment about the kind of weird stuff you could find on the Internet, but now was not the time for sarcasm.
Heather walked away from the body and turned to the bleachers. Her voice echoed through the entire gym. “Look at it. Look at her. Yesterday that thing was Rose.…” She let that sink in for a moment. “After she killed everyone at the power company and wrecked the place, she walked home. I caught her eating her husband. That is what we’re facing. There’s more of these out there right now. Some of them are strangers, like the man who tore up our jail. Some of them are our friends, or neighbors, or people you see at the store, or people you go to church with. But not anymore.”
The huddle had broken up so that everyone could see the twisted corpse.
“Now they’re something else.” Heather walked over, angry, shotgun still over one shoulder, and kicked the dead werewolf, brutally hard, right in the snout. Blood flecks splattered down the tarp. Earl tensed a bit, but remarkably Heather seemed to be keeping it under control. “They’re the enemy. And we have to destroy them before they get the rest of us.”
The atmosphere in the room had changed. They were committed now. Heather, a local, had swayed them where he, an outsider, could not. Heather risked a quick glance Earl’s way, as if to see how she’d done. He nodded approvingly. She looked away, almost embarrassed, but not before he caught the flash of gold in her eyes. Tough, to the point, Heather would have made one hell of a good Hunter.
Too bad he was probably going to have to put her down before the night was through.
* * *
The volunteers left ten minutes later. There were three smaller teams, one for each way out of Copper Lake. Earl had made sure that each team had some of his silver ammo and some MHI phone numbers. Using snowmobiles and moving quick, they might have a chance. He suspected that this Alpha would have set some impediments in their way, and would have loved to go with them, but he was needed on offense. Two bigger teams were heading out momentarily to cause trouble and find survivors.
Heather joined Earl as he was strapping into his older suit of armor. It was pocked with burn marks and holes, but he was glad that he’d packed the spare. His leather coat fit over it, too, and he needed the added warmth. Humans got cold really easy. They were in the shadows of the main hall; the lights were out to conserve the juice. Heather stopped, folded her arms, and leaned against the trophy case. She watched him for a while, but didn’t speak.
“This suit has seen better days,” Earl said, trying to make conversation. There was a holster on each hip, gunfighter style. He removed a S&W .45 Nightguard from the bag, checked to make sure the revolver was loaded, and stuffed it into the left holster. “I’m going back out there.”
“I know. And by the way, saying thank-you for me saving your life would be nice. You look pretty healthy for someone who didn’t have a pulse an hour ago.”
Actually, he was feeling all right. Clumsy, slow, less capable than he was used to, but healthy. He had a sneaking suspicion that he should be dead, but that either something had gone wrong, or that amulet had left him alive for some unknowable reason. “Thanks,” Earl answered. “Seriously. Thank you.”
She bit her lip as she summoned her courage. “Harbinger, level with me…”
He already knew what she was going to ask. “You’ve been cursed.” He kept his voice low so it wouldn’t carry into the auditorium.
“You sure?”
He took out the second .45, opened the cylinder, confirmed it was loaded, snapped it shut, and holstered. “I’m positive. Sorry.”
She nodded slowly. “I just thought maybe…never mind.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “It’s not fair.” Heather stepped away from the trophy case, hands curled into fists. “Shit!” She slammed her fist into the heavy cabinet. The wood splintered, the glass shattered, and trophies and plaques spilled out. It made a terrible racket. Heather drew her hand back, shocked at the hole she’d put through the case. “How—”
“You’re gonna have to be a little more careful with your temper,” Earl suggested. “Super strength and hitting stuff when you get angry don’t go well together.”
Half a dozen townsfolk led by the principal converged on the noise within seconds, ready to blast the intruders. Earl waved them off. “Sorry. Kicked your case,” he explained while Heather hid her damaged hand behind her back. Phillip already didn’t like him, so he wasn’t out much taking the rap. “By accident…so back off.”
“Well, when this is over, you owe us a new one,” Phillip muttered as he stomped away.
When they were alone again, Earl went over to Heather. “Let me see your hand.”
Reluctantly, she held it out. “I didn’t hit it that hard.” Sure enough, the scratches were already pulling closed. Her hand was quivering. “I can’t believe this. This is just too much.”
On a purely technical level, Earl was astounded by the regeneration rate of the werewolves created since the surge. On a strictly practical level, he was holding the injured hand of a woman whose eyes were welling up with tears because she’d just realized that her life was over. “It’ll be okay.”
“No, it won’t.”
“Yes, it can,” he insisted. “You don’t have to end up like them. It can be controlled.” And if you can’t control it, I’ll have to kill you. Earl quickly dismissed that unpleasant thought.
“How do you know?” she sniffed.
He was not good at comforting. It was hard to say, but he didn’t think it mattered now. “Because I’m a werewolf, too.”
Surprised, Heather jerked her hand away. “What? Get away.” Her nose crinkled as she instinctively smelled to see if he was telling the truth. “No. No, you’re normal…Oh shit, what did I just do?” Her eyes widened. “I’m smelling people now! Oh God!”
Earl raised his hands apologetically. “Well, I was a werewolf. Up until that big magic light sucked it out of me.”
“Why? How? And why the hell do I believe you?” Heather asked, taking another step back. She folded her arms defensively. “That’s why you’ve got that cage in your truck. That’s how you moved so fast back at the station. But, but why aren’t you…evil?”
So she was getting the urges already. She was hiding it well. “Listen, Heather.” He took a step closer. “I know what you’re feeling right now. You aren’t what you think, you’re what you do. You can fight it.”
“But I want to kill everybody!” she hissed, then looked around to make sure nobody could hear them. She lowered her voice. “I want to just tear their stupid faces off. I want to break their bones with my bare hands.”
“That part doesn’t ever really go away, but it does get easier to tune out. The guy that helped me learn this stuff suggested prayer and meditation. So I took up smoking. That seemed to help. Crap…I might have to be one of those annoying people that tries to quit and then whines about it,” he muttered. “I hate those people.”
“You said you were cured by magic.” Heather’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. It did sound ludicrous, even by Earl’s standards. “Hell, why not? I didn’t believe in werewolves, either, so why not magic, too? But you said at the station that there was no cure. You said that people have been looking forever!”
“What can I say?” Earl shrugged. “Up until an hour ago, I didn’t think there was one.”
She responded with a sad little laugh. “You know that running joke, about how when a girl talks about her problems, the man just wants to solve the problem, and the girl doesn’t want it solved, she just wants to talk about it?” Heather wiped her eyes. “Screw that noise. How do I solve this?”
Earl hadn’t thought of that as an option. A cure had always seemed like such a pipe dream, it was either endure or die, but now he was living proof that there was a way. Could that amulet actually cure other werewolves? The possibilities took his breath away. “That amulet, the one your prisoner talked about. That’s the key. It cured me. We’ve got to find it.”
Having been given some small bit of hope, Heather latched on with both hands. “I can kind of feel it, I think. It’s like this weird buzzing noise that won’t go away.”
As a regular man, Earl could no longer sense the real Hum, let alone the false one. He was groping blind. The only way he was going to find that thing was with Heather’s help. There was still the matter of the Alpha and his forces to deal with, but Earl had been a damn effective Hunter before he’d been cursed. He still had a few tricks up his sleeve. “We’ll head out with the teams, then break off and follow the trail right to that amulet. We find it, and we find the asshole behind this.”
“Cure me, waste him, save the town. Sounds like a plan.”