Chapter 17
As the days passed, the fear grew. Webster had assured Ryan that they’d have discovered Hess’ plan in a matter of days. It had been almost a week.
Ryan had lived in nearly constant fear. He found himself checking over his shoulder whenever he entered a building. He checked the backseat of his car before getting into it. He double and triple-checked door and window locks before going to bed, and most nights he couldn’t get to sleep unless he also wedged a chair beneath the doorknob.
To make matters worse, Ruby’s prediction had come true: the investigation into Hess’ operation was taking longer than expected and the bracelet was beginning to crumble. Interwoven strands came apart like seconds clicking down on a timer until the inevitable explosion. Ruby hadn’t had the best ingredients in the first place, and when the bracelet first started to come apart Ryan had called her to ask about repairs. She had used the last of even her makeshift materials to fashion the bracelet Ryan now wore, and she had nothing left with which to fix it. She had promised Ryan that she would scour the countryside and the black markets for more ingredients, but so far her search had turned up nothing. With each update and voicemail she left, her tone seemed to become more and more desperate.
There was nothing he could do to help Ruby or Dr. Webster and the others, so Ryan was doing his best to keep his mind occupied with other things. He was not succeeding.
Training had become almost impossible. Not only was Ryan unable to focus, he was too afraid to close his eyes for more than a few seconds at a time. He was making no progress with the wolf, now when he needed it the most. Ryan knew all he could do was wait, impatient and on-edge, for either Ruby or the others to come up with something to save his life.
Tonight he was waiting at Eli’s house, and the company was going a long way towards lifting his spirits. Still, his friends had a hard time talking about anything other than his imminent doom.
“So you’re like ‘strapped’ now?” Eli asked.
“What?”
“The gun, where is it?”
“It’s in my car.”
“What?” Eli demanded. “You’re caught in the middle of some supernatural version of The Wire, you’ve got a bloodthirsty monster on your tail, and you leave your piece in the car?”
“Tell me you at least ‘keeps one in the chamber’…” Vanessa added with a smile.
Ryan rolled his eyes. “Not like I can shoot it straight anyway.”
“Yeah, we’ve played enough Halo to know that for a fact.” Eli replied.
“Look,” Ryan began, “I’m just trying to kill time until either the warehouse guys figure out a way to keep me alive, or Grayle tracks me down and eats me.”
“What do you think he’d taste like?” Eli asked Vanessa.
She gave him an appraising glance. “Chicken?”
“Hamburger?” Eli ventured. “Tofu?”
“Well if you are what you eat, that would make Ryan what, a gigantic 2AM bowl of Lucky Charms?” Vanessa asked with a smile.
“I’m glad you’re all having so much fun with my inevitable and gory demise.”
“Well, laughter is the best medicine.” Eli pointed out.
“I don’t think that applies to being ripped limb from limb.” Ryan retorted.
“I guess we’ll find out.” Eli replied with a smile. “Come on, you need to relax. You’ve got your magic jewelry, which is doing wonders to bring out your eyes, if I might add. There’s nothing to worry about, let’s play.”
The game was Blind Man’s Bluff, a group favorite, and everyone put their antes into the pot as the rain clattering against the basement windows began to subside. Vanessa dealt a card to each of them and they reached into the middle of the table to pick it up.
As Ryan extended his hand to pick up his card, he felt a tug and then heard a snap. He looked down and saw his wrist bare. The protective bracelet had caught on the corner of the table and had finally broken. Ryan was exposed.
He looked up at his friends, horror written across his face, and he raised his wrist to show them what had happened. The terrible truth dawned on Vanessa and Eli almost simultaneously.
All three dove to the floor in unison, and were disappointed. The woven bracelet had come apart into hundreds of different strands that were scattered all over the small area of floor. Ryan knew that even if they could somehow collect the materials and fix the bracelet, he had now been out in the open for almost half a minute. He didn’t know how long it took for someone to psychically track him, but he didn’t think it was very long.
“What do we do?” Vanessa asked, doing her best to keep the edge of panic out of her voice.
“You’ve got to get out of here.” Eli said.
Ryan shook his head. “If they show up here and find just you guys, you’ll get hurt. We’ve got to stick together. If they do find me, they can have me and maybe they’ll leave you guys out of it.”
“We’re not letting you give yourself up for us.” Vanessa said. “Get out of here now. We can handle it if anybody shows up.”
Ryan looked at her. “No. You can’t.”
“Well then what’s your plan?” Eli asked.
“We’ll go to the warehouse. They might be tracking me, but at least they’ll think twice about attacking us there.”
“Good enough for me.” Eli agreed.
They crossed the basement and clambered up the narrow stairs as quickly as they could. They reached the top and Ryan put his hand on the doorknob when everything suddenly went dark.
Ryan blinked twice in the blackness and his eyes slowly began to adjust. Hazy contour and shape began to emerge from shadow as his eyes grew more accustomed to the lack of electric lighting. He knew it was too much of a coincidence: they had found him.
Vanessa had instinctively grabbed his arm. He turned around to his two best friends and put a finger to his lips. They crept back down the stairs as quietly as they could and stayed huddled together in the darkness.
Not a sound reached their ears besides their own ragged breathing, though each heard their own heartbeats as clearly and loudly as a bass drum. The water heater in the far corner of the basement gave off a low hum, and the midnight breeze whistled through trees beyond the windows set high in the wall, but Ryan heard none of it. His ears were strained for any sound in the house above them, any footfall or scrape or squeaking stair. Eli’s mother and sisters were out at a movie, and so the three were alone in the house. At least Ryan hoped they were alone.
Ryan knew the basement like the back of his hand: where the couch and chairs were relative to the TV, where the fridge stood, where the washing machine was, where the water heater sat. He was more comfortable here than any other place in the world but tonight, this room was his enemy. The shadows seemed darker, the corners, deeper. Dim orange light from the street lamp outside made its way through the windows but did not begin to penetrate the darkness around them.
They were in the middle of the room in the center of the pale halo of lamplight. The light made them feel safe, or as safe as they could feel, but Ryan knew it also left them much more visible. He took Vanessa by the hand and led his two friends out of the light and into one of the corners. He was dreading walking into that corner; he knew better than they did the evils that shadows could hide. Ryan, however, saw no other option.
They crept into the corner furthest from the basement door and the steps that led up to it, but it didn’t feel nearly far enough. The wind had picked up and it rattled the windows in their panes, masking the sounds of anyone approaching the house. Ryan knew however, that what was coming for them would not make a sound. It could slip into the house and make itself a pina colada and they’d never hear a thing. It could be in the room and they wouldn’t hear it. None of that stopped Ryan from listening as hard as he possibly could.
Their vantage point wasn’t ideal. Crouching in the corner meant they had a perfect view of the basement door, but the windows were on the wall above them, which made it im
possible to watch both places at once. Ryan could only hope that if Grayle or whatever else was after him came through the window, some sound would betray their entrance. Otherwise they could be dragged out the window and off into the darkness.
The power had been cut only seconds after Ruby’s bracelet had broken and the spell had faded away. Since then however, nothing had happened. Ryan couldn’t help but wonder: if Grayle was outside the house, or even if he was in the house, what was he waiting for? They had no defenses and no way to protect themselves, and they were already entombed: trapped in a dank concrete hole. For the briefest of moments, Ryan allowed himself to hope: maybe it was a coincidence, maybe they did have enough time to make it out to the Jeep. He felt the burden of fear lighten.
A sudden crash and shattering of glass from above them sent all three teenagers onto their hands and knees trying to cover each others’ heads. The glass however, had not come from the windows, but rather the flickering orange streetlamp. The bulb that hung twenty feet above the ground had been smashed and the murky darkness was turned instantly to utter and complete black.
The wind had died down. The house was still and everything was silent. Ryan gripped Vanessa’s hand, closed his eyes, and waited for the end to come in whichever way Grayle chose. He waited.
And he waited. Nothing happened. Not for thirty seconds, not for a minute. Ryan opened his eyes and, although the blackness and silence were still in place, as far as he could tell, he was alive. Vanessa’s grasp on his hand had never faltered and both their palms were slick with a cold sweat. Then the front door of the house squeaked open.
It was a sound that could have been a hundred other things, but Ryan was sure of what he had heard. There was no shuffling on the hardwood floors above them, no footfalls on the kitchen tile, but Ryan knew they were no longer alone in the house. He knew there was only one thing that moved absolutely silently. It wasn’t a vampire or a psychic, it was Grayle.
The seconds dragged on and the silence seemed to close in on them from all sides. They waited, in the blackness, for death: a killing blow that could come at any moment. The seconds ticked into minutes, and the minutes became a blur. Ryan didn’t know how long they had crouched there with their legs and ankles burning from the strain, but none of them dared move an inch, save Vanessa’s terrified trembling.
His mind started to convince him that he had not heard the door open at all: that there was nothing in the house and that they were completely safe. Ryan wanted desperately to believe, but he couldn’t. Not without proof.
His legs and back screamed in protest as Ryan stood up straight for the first time in what felt like hours. Vanessa tried to pull him back down, but Ryan slipped his hand from hers and began to pick his way across the inky black sea of the basement floor. He reached the wooden stairs and crept slowly upward.
A sudden creak behind him and Ryan felt the adrenaline explode through his body. He whirled around, ready to fight with nothing but his bare hands if he had to. His heart hammered in his chest as he realized that it was not an enemy behind him, but his friends.
Ryan took his voice as low and soft as it could possibly go, the faintest shadow of a whisper. “No.”
“The bastard’s in my house. I’m not going to sit around in my own basement and wait to be killed. At least let him kill me in the living room.” Eli whispered back.
Ryan opened his mouth again but Vanessa stopped him. She was still shaking from head to toe, but her gaze was steely and she spoke through teeth clenched tight in fear. “Just open the damn door.”
He didn’t like it, but he couldn’t argue without wasting more time and risking being heard. Ryan wanted to go out there in order to save his friends, not serve them up on a plate. They didn’t understand what was beyond that door, he did.
Ryan’s hand groped for the heavy doorknob and closed around it after a few blind moments. He turned it as slowly as he could, but nothing could stop the gentle scrape of the latch retracting. He took a deep breath and tried fruitlessly to calm his nerves, which felt like they were bouncing around at a mile a minute. Ryan pushed the basement door open and stepped out.
The door opened onto the kitchen, which appeared deserted. There was more light here as the sliver of moon that shone through the windows was caught and reflected by the stark white tile and countertops of Eli’s kitchen. They fanned out, keeping as low and as quiet as they could.
Ryan eased open the china cabinet and pulled out a thin silver steak knife. He hoped the same rules applied to silver knives as did silver bullets, but he would have felt much better with the Colt in his hand rather than a four-inch dining utensil.
Vanessa pulled open a countertop drawer and withdrew a small flashlight that spread a feeble beam not more than a few feet in front of them.
Eli rummaged through the little league bag that one of his sisters had left on the kitchen table. His face was triumphant in the light of Vanessa’s beam as he produced a wooden baseball bat from the bag. Vanessa rolled her eyes.
This is insane. She mouthed to them. Ryan had to agree.
Then go back downstairs. Eli replied.
Not likely. She scoffed silently.
Eli choked up on the bat and Ryan handed Vanessa another silver knife. He figured if they were going to mount this pathetic offensive, he at least wanted to give everybody an equally pitiful chance.
They fell in behind Ryan and Vanessa swept the beam to and fro in front of them. The front door of the house stood ajar and spilled moonlight over the threshold. They moved slowly into the living room and the light bounced over couch and lamp and plant and revealed nothing that wanted them dead. There was only one floor of the house they hadn’t checked, and the staircase that rose into complete shadow did nothing to bolster their courage.
They edged up the stairs one at time and strained their ears for any foreign sound. Even with the flashlight, the darkness was so oppressive that an attack could come at any moment, from any side, and the three knew they’d never see it coming.
On the upstairs landing, Ryan gripped the puny knife tightly as he eased open the door to the bedroom Eli’s sisters shared. Vanessa’s light fell over beds and clothes and stuffed animals, but revealed no monster.
They knew now that if the thing was here, it was in either the master bedroom or Eli’s room. The three crowded around his mothers’ bedroom door and took a collective deep breath. Ryan’s hand fell to the doorknob and he began to turn it.
A noise sounded from the door behind them. Eli swung around and delivered a savage kick to his own bedroom door, which burst open, rattling on its hinges. Something huge and dark blocked out the moonlight streaming through the open window and then vanished in an instant. Ryan rushed to the sill and saw the monstrous shadow streak off into the night.
“Jerk was in my room!” Eli exclaimed.
Ryan stared at the spot in the street where he had last seen the shadow and he felt a cold anger begin to rise inside of him. Grayle could have killed them at any time, but he hadn’t. Instead the werewolf had toyed with them. He had allowed his entrance to be heard. He had made the noise in Eli’s bedroom on purpose. Grayle was playing with his food and Ryan was sick of the game. He wanted to know why.
“Screw this.” Ryan muttered, and he put a hand on either side of the open window and launched himself out of it. He didn’t fall more than eight or ten feet and he hit the soft, wet grass and rolled to absorb the impact. In a flash Ryan was on his feet and sprinting full-tilt after the terrifying creature that wanted him dead. Ryan would have answers, even if it killed him.
The rain started up again and it wasn’t long before he was caught in a torrential downpour. He didn’t care.
Ryan ran as hard and as fast as he had ever run in his life. He knew there was no way he’d ever catch up to a werewolf, but anger and stubbornness spurned him on as he raced through the freezing night. If he didn’t end this tonight, Ryan knew that they’d only have to go through it all over a
gain. He didn’t know how long Grayle would pick and poke at him and his friends before getting bored and killing them. He didn’t know how long he would have to wait patiently just to die. Now that Grayle had the scents and locations of Ryan’s friends, he didn’t know how many of them the werewolf would kill, just for the fun of it, before he got to Ryan. He ran faster.
He was sick of the waiting, the wondering, and most of all, the worrying. Ryan had known he didn’t have a great chance at survival, but the one thing that had kept him going, kept him training and working and hoping, was the possibility that Grayle might spare his friends and family. Ryan saw now that wasn’t in the cards. Aaron Grayle would come after them all, one by one, and emotionally torture Ryan to the brink of madness, simply because he could. Ryan tore after Grayle, the wind roaring in his ears, his shoes slapping wet pavement, because he knew that if he didn’t, the people he loved most in the world would meet a terrible fate. It was the only thought in his mind: the singular purpose for which he ran and, at this moment, even existed.
The first thing to change was the sound of the hoarse lungfuls of air being sucked in. Ryan felt a second wind come on, as though he could now hold more air than before. Moments later he realized it was true.
His sopping wet shoes were flung off his feet at opposite angles, whipping water droplets in all directions as they spun off into the darkness. Ryan stumbled and nearly came to a crashing halt, but recovered and kept on running. He ran and he ran and he ran and completely ignored the outside world and the things happening in it. Ryan ignored the sensation of a hundred new sounds opening up to him. He ignored the fact that the tree-lined suburban streets were now whipping past him as if he were driving at freeway speeds. He ignored the bizarre change in his sight that made the night around him not brighter but somehow clearer. Ryan kept running even until he was on all fours and racing through the streets as fast as a cheetah.
What finally gave him pause was the sense of smell. The realization that he had transformed into the werewolf sent him tumbling to the ground. The sense of smell was almost overwhelming: Ryan knew instantly what each of the houses on the block had served for dinner. He knew which houses had kids and which had pets and whether the families preferred turkey burgers to hamburgers. He knew, like a giant neon arrow in the sky above him, which way Grayle had gone.
The smells, however, were the last thing on Ryan’s mind. He looked down at his massive, hairy paws and tried desperately to discover whether his mind was still his own, or if the wolf had taken over once again. But it was Ryan thinking. And he knew it was him thinking he was thinking. He curled his thick fingers into a giant, hairy fist and then back out again. He ran his rough tongue over massive teeth, each with a razor’s edge. He used muscles he’d never before used to rotate his ears in almost every direction. There had been no pain to the transformation at all; that he would have noticed. Somehow, Ryan had transformed into the wolf and somehow, he was still Ryan.
He didn’t know how he had done it, but he knew why. Daniel’s words floated through Ryan’s mind. A man needed two things to weather a storm: singularity of purpose, and friends by his side. For Ryan, those two things were one and the same.
He raised his newly-formed snout to the air and caught Grayle’s musky scent. Ryan launched himself from the pavement and leapt ten feet down the road in a single jump. He looked behind him from the spot he had just left, and he looked down the dark road before him. Without another thought he darted off into the night at full speed and watched as trees and houses became blurs once again.
The trail zigzagged through six neighborhoods and Ryan traversed them in less than three minutes. The rain was pounding even harder now and although the coarse gray fur that covered his body kept him comfortably warm, breath streamed out of his long nostrils in wispy clouds of vapor. Even with this nose, the rain was too much: he was losing the scent. Ryan circled a few of the nearby blocks but ended up at the same intersection. The trail was strongest here, but Ryan couldn’t tell which way it pointed him next. He stood in the rain-swept intersection for a long time, but discovered no more clues.
He had lost his quarry, but Ryan was far from discouraged: now he had what he needed to fight back. Grayle could come after him any time he wanted; Ryan knew he’d be ready. The monster could go after Ryan’s friends or family or even the warehouse, Ryan would be there in a flash. He knew he still didn’t have the experience he needed to truly defeat Grayle, but the wolf was mastered, the enemy had disappeared, and that was good enough for one night.