His legs ached from the effort when he reached the top. He sat down on the steps for a moment, his back to a slick stone wall. He was breathing hard, but when he groped for his inhaler, it was gone. He’d probably lost it in the woods. He could feel his lungs constricting in panic, but there was no help for it.
Willie got up.
The room smelled of blood and urine and something else, a scent he did not place, but somehow it made him tremble. There was no roof. Willie realized that the rain had stopped while he’d been inside. He looked up as the clouds parted, and a pale white moon stared down.
And all around other moons shimmered into life, reflected in the tall empty mirrors that lined the chamber. They reflected the sky above and each other, moon after moon after moon, until the room swam in silvered moonlight and reflections of reflections of reflections.
Willie turned around in a slow circle and a dozen other Willies turned with him. The moonstruck mirrors were streaked with dried blood, and above them a ring of cruel iron hooks curved up from the stone walls. A human skin hung from one of them, twisting slowly in some wind he could not feel, and as the moonlight hit it, it seemed to writhe and change, from woman to wolf to woman, both and neither.
That was when Willie heard the footsteps on the stairs.
“THE SILVER BULLETS WERE A BAD IDEA,” ROGOFF SAID. “WE HAVE a local ordinance here. The police get immediate notice any time someone places an order for custom ammunition. Your father made the same mistake. The pack takes a dim view of silver bullets.”
Randi felt strangely relieved. For a moment she’d been afraid that Willie had betrayed her, that he’d been one of them after all, and that thought had been like poison in her soul. Her fingers were still curled tight around a dozen of the bullets. She glanced down at them, so close and yet so far.
“Even if they’re still good, you’ll never get them loaded in time,” Rogoff said.
“You don’t need the bullets,” Urquhart told her. “He just wants to talk. They promised me, honey, no one needs to get hurt.”
Randi opened her hand. The bullets fell to the ground. She turned to Joe Urquhart. “You were my father’s best friend. He said you had more guts than any man he ever knew.”
“They don’t give you any choice,” Urquhart said. “I had kids of my own. They said if Roy Helander took the fall, no more kids would vanish, they promised they’d take care of it, but if we kept pressing, one of my kids would be the next to go. That’s how it works in this town. Everything would have been all right, but Frank just wouldn’t let it alone.”
“We only kill in self-defense,” Rogoff said. “There’s a sweetness to human flesh, yes, a power that’s undeniable, but it’s not worth the risk.”
“What about the children?” Randi said. “Did you kill them in self-defense too?”
“That was a long time ago,” Rogoff said.
Joe stood with his head downcast. He was beaten, Randi saw, and she realized that he’d been beaten for a long time. All those trophies on his walls, but somehow she knew that he had given up hunting forever on the night her father died. “It was his son,” Joe muttered quietly, in a voice full of shame. “Steven’s never been right in the head, everyone knows that, he was the one who killed the kids, ate them. It was horrible, Harmon told me so himself, but he still wasn’t going to let us have Steven. He said he’d…he’d control Steven’s…appetites…if we closed the case. He was good as his word too, he put Steven on medication, and it stopped, the murders stopped.”
She ought to hate Joe Urquhart, she realized, but instead she pitied him. After all this time, he still didn’t understand. “Joe, he lied. It was never Steven.”
“It was Steven,” Joe insisted, “it had to be, he’s insane. The rest of them…you can do business with them, Randi, listen to me now, you can talk to them.”
“Like you did,” she said. “Like Barry Schumacher.”
Urquhart nodded. “That’s right. They’re just like us, they got some crazies, but not all of them are bad. You can’t blame them for taking care of their own, we do the same thing, don’t we? Look at Mike here, he’s a good cop.”
“A good cop who’s going to change into a wolf in a minute or two and tear out my throat,” Randi said.
“Randi, honey, listen to me,” Urquhart said. “It doesn’t have to be like that. You can walk out of here, just say the word. I’ll get you onto the force, you can work with us, help us to…to keep the peace. Your father’s dead, you won’t bring him back, and the Helander boy, he deserved what he got, he was killing them, skinning them alive; it was self-defense. Steven is sick, he’s always been sick—”
Rogoff was watching her from beneath his tangle of black hair. “He still doesn’t get it,” she said. She turned back to Joe. “Steven is sicker than you think. Something is missing. Too inbred, maybe. Think about it. Anders and Rochmonts, Flambeauxes and Harmons, the four great founding families, all werewolves, marrying each other generation after generation to keep the lines pure, for how many centuries? They kept the lines pure all right. They bred themselves Steven. He didn’t kill those children. Roy Helander saw a wolf carry off his sister, and Steven can’t change into a wolf. He got the bloodlust, he got inhuman strength, he burns at the touch of silver, but that’s all. The last of the purebloods can’t work the change!”
“She’s right,” Rogoff said quietly.
“Why do you think you never found any remains?” Randi put in. “Steven didn’t kill those kids. His father carried them off, up to Blackstone.”
“The old man had some crazy idea that if Steven ate enough human flesh, it might fix him, make him whole,” Rogoff said.
“It didn’t work,” Randi said. She took Willie’s note out of her pocket, let the pages flutter to the ground. It was all there. She’d finished reading it before she’d gone down to meet Joe. Frank Wade’s little girl was nobody’s fool.
“It didn’t work,” Rogoff echoed, “but by then Jonathan had got the taste. Once you get started, it’s hard to stop.” He looked at Randi for a long time, as if he were weighing something. Then he began…
…TO CHANGE. SWEET COLD AIR FILLED HIS LUNGS, AND HIS MUSCLES and bones ran with fire as the transformation took hold. He’d shrugged out of pants and coat, and he heard the rest of his clothing ripping apart as his body writhed, his flesh ran like hot wax, and he reformed, born anew.
Now he could see and hear and smell. The tower room shimmered with moonlight, every detail clear and sharp as noon, and the night was alive with sound, the wind and the rain and the rustle of bats in the forest around them, and traffic sounds and sirens from the city beyond. He was alive and full of power, and something was coming up the steps. It climbed slowly, untiring, and its smells filled the air. The scent of blood hung all around it, and beneath he sensed an aftershave that masked an unwashed body, sweat and dried semen on its skin, a heavy tang of wood smoke in its hair, and under it all the scent of sickness, sweetly rotten as a grave.
Willie backed all the way across the room, staring at the arched door, the growl rising in his throat. He bared long yellowed teeth, and slaver ran between them.
Steven stopped in the doorway and looked at him. He was naked. The wolf’s hot red eyes met his cold blue ones, and it was hard to tell which were more inhuman. For a moment Willie thought that Steven didn’t quite comprehend. Until he smiled and reached for the skin that twisted above him, on an iron hook.
Willie leapt.
He took Steven high in the back and bore him down, with his hand still clutched around Zoe’s skin. For a second Willie had a clear shot at his throat, but he hesitated and the moment passed. Steven caught Willie’s foreleg in a pale scarred fist, and snapped it in half like a normal man might break a stick. The pain was excruciating. Then Steven was lifting him, flinging him away. He smashed up hard against one of the mirrors, and felt it shatter at the impact. Jagged shards of glass flew like knives, and one of them lanced through his side.
Willie r
olled away; the glass spear broke under him, and he whimpered. Across the room, Steven was getting to his feet. He put out a hand to steady himself.
Willie scrambled up. His broken leg was knitting already, though it hurt when he put his weight on it. Glass fragments clawed inside him with every step. He could barely move. Some fucking werewolf he turned out to be.
Steven was adjusting his ghastly cloak, pulling flaps of skin down over his own face. The skin trade, Willie thought giddily, yeah, that was it, and in a moment Steven would use that damn flayed skin to do what he could never manage on his own, he would change, and then Willie would be meat.
Willie came at him, jaws gaping, but too slow. Steven’s foot pistoned down, caught him hard enough to take his breath away, pinned him to the floor. Willie tried to squirm free, but Steven was too strong. He was bearing down, crushing him. All of a sudden Willie remembered that dog, so many years ago.
Willie bent himself almost double and took a bite out of the back of Steven’s calf.
The blood filled his mouth, exploding inside him. Steven reeled back. Willie jumped up, darted forward, bit him again. This time he sank his teeth in good and held, worrying at the flesh. The pounding in his head was thunderous. He was full of power, he could feel it swelling within him. Suddenly he knew that he could tear Steven apart; he could taste the fine sweet flesh close to the bone, could hear the music of his screams, could imagine the way it would feel when he held him in his jaws and shook him like a rag doll and felt the life go out of him in a sudden giddy rush. It swept over him, and Willie bit and bit and bit again, ripping away chunks of meat, drunk on blood.
And then, dimly, he heard Steven screaming, screaming in a high shrill thin voice, a little boy’s voice. “No, Daddy,” he was whining, over and over again. “No, please, don’t bite me, Daddy, don’t bite me anymore.”
Willie let him go and backed away.
Steven sat on the floor, sobbing. He was bleeding like a sonofabitch. Pieces were missing from thigh, calf, shoulder, and foot. His legs were drenched in blood. Three fingers were gone off his right hand. His cheeks were slimy with gore.
Suddenly Willie was scared.
For a moment he didn’t understand. Steven was beaten, he could see that; he could rip out his throat or let him live, it didn’t matter, it was over. But something was wrong, something was terribly, sickeningly wrong. It felt as though the temperature had dropped a hundred degrees, and every hair on his body was prickling and standing on end. What the hell was going on? He growled low in his throat and backed away, toward the door, keeping a careful eye on Steven.
Steven giggled. “You’ll get it now,” he said. “You called it. You got blood on the mirrors. You called it back again.”
The room seemed to spin. Moonlight ran from mirror to mirror to mirror, dizzyingly. Or maybe it wasn’t moonlight.
Willie looked into the mirrors.
The reflections were gone. Willie, Steven, the moon, all gone. There was blood on the mirrors and they were full of fog, a silvery pale fog that shimmered as it moved.
Something was moving through the fog, sliding from mirror to mirror to mirror, around and around. Something hungry that wanted to get out.
He saw it, lost it, saw it again. It was in front of him, behind him, off to the side. It was a hound, gaunt and terrible; it was a snake, scaled and foul; it was a man, with eyes like pits and knives for its fingers. It wouldn’t hold still, every time he looked its shape seemed to change, and each shape was worse than the last, more twisted and obscene. Everything about it was lean and cruel. Its fingers were sharp, so sharp, and he looked at them and felt their caress sliding beneath his skin, tingling along the nerves, pain and blood and fire trailing behind them. It was black, blacker than black, a black that drank all light forever, and it was all shining silver too. It was a nightmare that lived in a funhouse mirror, the thing that hunts the hunters.
He could feel the evil throbbing through the glass.
“Skinner,” Steven called.
The surface of the mirrors seemed to ripple and bulge, like a wave cresting on some quicksilver sea. The fog was thinning, Willie realized with sudden terror; he could see it clearer now, and he knew it could see him. And suddenly Willie Flambeaux knew what was happening, knew that when the fog cleared the mirrors wouldn’t be mirrors anymore; they’d be doors, doors, and the skinner would come…
…SLIDING FORWARD, THROUGH THE RUINS OF HIS CLOTHING, SLITTED eyes glowing like embers from a muzzle black as coal. He was half again as large as Willie had been, his fur thick and black and shaggy, and when he opened his mouth, his teeth gleamed like ivory daggers.
Randi edged backward, along the side of the car. The knife was in her hand, moonlight running off the silver blade, but somehow it didn’t seem like very much. The huge black wolf advanced on her, his tongue lolling between his teeth, and she put her back up against the car door and braced herself for his leap.
Joe Urquhart stepped between them.
“No,” he said. “Not her too, you owe me, talk to her, give her a chance, I’ll make her see how it is.”
The wolf growled a warning.
Urquhart stood his ground, and all of a sudden he had his revolver out, and he was holding it in two shaky hands, drawing a bead. “Stop. I mean it. She didn’t have time to load the goddamned silver bullets, but I’ve had eighteen fucking years. I’m the fucking police chief in this fucking city, and you’re under arrest.”
Randi put her hand on the door handle, eased it open. For a moment the wolf stood frozen, baleful red eyes fixed on Joe, and she thought it was actually going to work. She remembered her father’s old Wednesday night poker games; he’d always said Joe, unlike Barry Schumacher, ran one hell of a bluff.
Then the wolf threw back his head and howled, and all the blood went out of her. She knew that sound. She’d heard it in her dreams a thousand times. It was in her blood, that sound, an echo from far off and long ago, when the world had been a forest and humans had run naked in fear before the hunting pack. It echoed off the side of the old slaughterhouse and trembled out over the city, and they must have heard it all over the flats, heard it and glanced outside nervously and checked their locks before they turned up the volumes on their TVs.
Randi opened the door wider and slid one leg inside the car as the wolf leapt.
She heard Urquhart fire, and fire again, and then the wolf slammed into his chest and smashed him back against the car door. Randi was half into the car, but the door swung shut hard, crunching down on her left foot with awful force. She heard a bone break under the impact, and shrieked at the sudden flare of pain. Outside Urquhart fired again, and then he was screaming. There were ripping sounds and more screams and something wet spattered against her ankle.
Her foot was trapped, and the struggle outside slammed her open door against it again and again and again. Each impact was a small explosion as the shattered bones grated together and ripped against raw nerves. Joe was screaming and droplets of blood covered the tinted window like rain. Her head swam, and for a moment Randi thought she’d faint from the pain, but she threw all her weight against the door and moved it just enough and drew her foot inside and when the next impact came it slapped the door shut hard and Randi pressed the lock.
She leaned against the wheel and almost threw up. Joe had stopped screaming, but she could hear the wolf tearing at him, ripping off chunks of flesh. Once you get started it’s hard to stop, she thought hysterically. She got out the .38, cracked the cylinder with shaking hands, flicked out the shells. Then she was fumbling around on the front seat. She found the box, tipped it over, snatched up a handful of silver.
It was silent outside. Randi stopped, looked up.
He was on the hood of the car.
WILLIE CHANGED.
He was running on instinct now; he didn’t know why he did it, he just did. The pain was there waiting for him along with his humanity, as he’d known it would be. It shrieked through him like a gale wind,
and sent him whimpering to the floor. He could feel the glass shard under his ribs, dangerously close to a lung, and his left arm bent sickeningly downward at a place it was never meant to bend, and when he tried to move it, he screamed and bit his tongue and felt his mouth fill with blood.
The fog was a pale thin haze now, and the mirror closest to him bulged outward, throbbing like something alive.
Steven sat against the wall, his blue eyes bright and avid, sucking his own blood from the stumps of his fingers. “Changing won’t help,” he said in that weird flat tone of his. “Skinner don’t care. It knows what you are. Once it’s called, it’s got to have a skin.” Willie’s vision was blurry with tears, but he saw it again then, in the mirror behind Steven, pushing at the fading fog, pushing, pushing, trying to get through.
He staggered to his feet. Pain roared through his head. He cradled his broken arm against his body, took a step toward the stairs, and felt broken glass grind against his bare feet. He looked down. Pieces of the shattered mirror were everywhere.
Willie’s head snapped up. He looked around wildly, dizzy, counting. Six, seven, eight, nine…the tenth was broken. Nine then. He threw himself forward, slammed all his body weight into the nearest mirror. It shattered under the impact, disintegrated into a thousand pieces. Willie crunched the biggest shards underfoot, stamped on them until his heels ran wet with blood. He was moving without thought. He caromed around the room, using his own body as a weapon, hearing the sweet tinkling music of breaking glass. The world turned into a red fog of pain and a thousand little knives sliced at him everywhere, and he wondered, if the skinner came through and got him, whether he’d even be able to tell the difference.
Then he was staggering away from another mirror, and white-hot needles were stabbing through his feet with every step, turning into fire as they lanced up his calves. He stumbled and fell, hard. Flying glass had cut his face to ribbons, and the blood ran down into his eyes.