Kelley Armstrong - Bitten

"Shit, shit, shit," I muttered.

From behind the closed door, there was a deafening roar of pain, one that even the music down the hall couldn't drown out. Two passing women turned and stared.

"My boyfriend," I said, trying to smile. "He's sick. A bad batch. New dealer."

One of the women looked at the closed door. "Maybe you should get him to a hospital," she said, but continued walking, advice dispensed, duty done.

"Clayton," I whispered. "Where are you?"

I wasn't surprised that Clay hadn't busted down any doors when Brandon cornered me. Clay never underestimated my ability to defend myself. He'd only come to my rescue when I was in real danger. I wasn't in danger now, but I needed his help. Unfortunately, wherever he was hiding, he couldn't possibly see me in this hallway.

A crash echoed from inside the storage room. Brandon was done with his Change and was trying to get out. I had to stop him. And to stop him, I almost certainly had to kill him. Could I do that without causing a scene? Another crash resounded from the room, followed by the sound of splintering wood. Then silence.

I yanked open the door. Tattered scraps of clothing covered the floor. On the south wall was a second door leading back into the warehouse. In the middle of the cheap plywood was a gaping hole.

I raced into the main room. There wasn't any screaming. Not right away. The first sounds I heard were voices, more annoyed than alarmed. "What the-" "Did you-" "Watch it-" When I rounded the corner, I saw a path of toppled chairs and tables looping a tipsy half circle from the storage room to the dance floor. People milled around the overturned tables, collecting coats and purses and broken drink glasses. A boy well under legal drinking age sat cross-legged on the floor, cradling a broken arm. A woman stood on a chair, thrusting an empty glass toward the swath Brandon had cut across the dance floor and demanding that the "damn bastard" pay for her spilled drink, having somehow failed to notice that the "damn bastard" had fangs, fur, and no obvious place to carry a wallet.

I was still making my way toward the dance floor when Brandon roared. Then came the first scream. Then the thunder of a hundred people stampeding for the exit.

The stampede really didn't help matters, especially when my goal lay in the exact opposite direction of the human flow. At first, I was polite. Really. I said "excuse me," tried to squeeze through gaps, even apologized for stepping on some toes. What can I say, I'm Canadian. After a few elbows to the chest and more than a few obscenities shouted in my ear, I gave up and cut my own path. When one hefty bruiser tried to shove me back, I grabbed him by the collar and showed him the express route to the door. Things got a bit better after that.

Although I was no longer in danger of being trampled, I was still progressing by inches. I couldn't see anything. I'm not short-5' 10" to be precise-but even an NBA superstar couldn't have seen over that seething mass of humanity. If there was a back door or emergency exit, no one knew about it. They were all heading for the main entrance and getting jammed in the narrow front corridor.

Not only couldn't I see, I couldn't hear anything but the sound of the crowd, curses and shouts and cries melding into a Babel's tower of noise, nothing clear except the universal language of panic. People shoved and hammered at one another, as if being one step closer to the door meant the difference between life and death. Others weren't moving of their own volition at all, but were carried along by the tide of the mob. I looked into faces and saw nothing there. They were as white and expressionless as plaster masks. Only the eyes held the truth, rolling and wild, the instinct for survival taking over. Most didn't even know what they were running from. It didn't matter. They could smell the fear rising from the crowd as well as any werewolf could and the scent of it seeped into their brains, infecting them with its power. They smelled it, they felt it, and they ran from it. They were giving Brandon exactly what he craved.

I was midway across the dance floor when I stumbled over a woman lying in a pool of blood. Blood still jetted from her neck in a fountain, spraying anyone who came close. People tripped over her and slid in her blood. Not one of them even looked down. I shouldn't have looked down either. But I did. Her eyes rolled, meeting mine for a second. Bloody froth trickled and bubbled from her lips. Her hand convulsed off the floor as if trying to reach up. Then it stopped in midair, paused, and fluttered down into the pool of blood. Her eyes died. The blood had stopped spurting and was now streaming. A man tripped over her, looked down, swore, and kicked her out of his way. I tore my gaze away and kept moving.

As I stepped over the body, glass shattered overhead. I looked up to see Clay's feet shooting through a high window near the bar. He swung in and dropped to the floor. It was a good twenty-foot fall, not something Jeremy encouraged us to do in front of a crowd, but considering no one was paying any attention to a dead body beneath their feet, surely no one was going to notice a man vaulting through a window behind them. Clay climbed onto the bar and surveyed the crowd. When he saw me, he waved me over. I pointed deeper into the throng, where I assumed Brandon was. Clay shook his head and motioned again. I picked an angle roughly in line with the crowd flow and made my way toward him.

"Love that entrance," I shouted over the dm as I climbed onto the bar.

"Have you seen the front door, darling? I'd need a blowtorch to cut through the crowd. The only other exit is bricked over."

I looked above the crowd. "So Brandon's not back in that corner?"

"Who?"

"The mutt. Is he there?"

"Oh, he's there all right. But you're wasting your energy trying to get to him."

I spotted Brandon. As I suspected, he'd fully changed into a wolf. He seemed to be bouncing between the corner walls, leaping and pouncing and slashing at nothing. I was about to say that it looked as if the mutt had snapped. Then the crowd parted enough for me to see that he was attacking more than air. A man lay in crash position on the floor, back up, knees to his chest, head down, hands linked to protect the back of his neck. His clothing was shredded and drenched with blood. He was motionless, obviously dead, but Brandon wasn't leaving him alone. He leapt at the man, grabbed his foot, and spun him in a circle. Then he danced back, tail high. He crouched and mock-lunged, then feinted to the side. The man now lay twisted half on his side, letting me see more of his injuries than I wanted. His shirt was ripped open. His torso was streaked with blood, his stomach solid red. The end of his belt dangled to the floor. Then I realized it wasn't his belt, but a loop of intestine. As I was turning away, the body moved. The man rocked, as if trying to flip back on his stomach to protect himself.

"Oh god." I whispered. "He's not dead."

Brandon leapt at his prey again and sank his teeth into the man's scalp. He yanked him up, tossed him aside, and pranced away again.

"He's not even trying to kill him," I said.

"Why would he?" Clay said, curling back his lip. "He's having fun."

Disgust dripped from every word. This wasn't killing for food or killing for survival. That Clay could understand. This was, to him, a display of another incomprehensible human trait-killing for pleasure.

"While he's busy, I'll do some scouting," Clay continued. "Give me five minutes. When the crowd clears, make your move. Drive him toward that side hall. I'll be waiting."

Clay jumped off the bar and vanished into the mob. I looked back at Brandon torturing his prey. Again, I didn't want to look, didn't want to think about what was going on below me, that a man was dying horribly but was still alive and I wasn't doing a damned thing about it. I reminded myself that it was almost certainly too late to save him and, even if he did survive, he'd have to go to the hospital, which we couldn't allow because, having been bitten by Brandon, the man was now a werewolf himself. Although rationally I knew I couldn't risk going to him, I felt compelled to, if only to end his suffering. Sometimes I think it would be better if I could be like Clay, to acknowledge that what Brandon was doing was wrong but equally acknowledge that it wasn't in my power to right that wrong and to walk away without regret. But I don't ever want to be like that, that hard, that tough. Clay had an excuse. I didn't.