Warren Murphy: Wolf's Bane

Leon didn't pause to feed, but rather thrust the dead man from him after he had swallowed enough blood to quench his sudden thirst. If he was going to retrieve the moment, find his quarry in the milling, shrieking crowd, he had to get down there among them, on the main floor of the auditorium.

Each moment wasted gave his targets that much time to get away.

Without hesitating, Leon charged the footlights and leaped off into space.

MERLE BETTENCOURT KNEW something had gone wrong the moment he heard screaming from the auditorium. There was no sound of gunshots, so he had to figure that his men had not yet connected with their targets, and that meant something else had roused the audience to screaming panic in the time it took for him to cross six feet of sidewalk and approach the double doors out front.

It wasn't Jesus-screaming. It reminded Bettencourt of what you expect to hear inside a crowded theater if fire broke out.

Entering the smallish lobby of the auditorium, Bettencourt was greeted by a tide of frightened-looking people running in the opposite direction, toward the exit and the street beyond. He ducked behind a concrete pillar, braced himself, then plunged into the crowd, prepared to slug his way upstream if necessary, anything to find out what the hell was going on and what had happened to his crew.

He hadn't drawn his pistol yet, preferred to wait until he had a target or the stampede of humanity required more drastic handling than mere fists and elbows. As it was, Merle took a few knocks going in, but he was gaining ground. He guessed that there were other exits at the rear or to the sides, draining a portion of the crowd. That meant his targets could have wriggled through some other loophole, but he wasn't ready to give up on them just yet. He had to find his shooters first, and try to figure out exactly what was happening.

In fact, he literally stumbled on the first one, several yards inside the main room of the auditorium, where total chaos reigned. Merle caught himself before he went down on his face, and recognized the ape mask Terry Joslin had been wearing to disguise himself. Still, there was something odd...

It took Merle Bettencourt another moment to decipher what was troubling him. His soldier lay facedown, arms splayed as if to clutch the earth, but the ape mask he wore was facing upward, toward the ceiling. Reaching out to prod the rubber with a shaky index finger, Merle could feel his supper coming back as he discovered that the shooter's whole damn head was turned around like something from The Exorcist.

Merle drew his pistol then, stepped back from Terry Joslin's corpse and started looking for his other boys. Where were they, damn it? How could they have missed their targets, even in a zoo like this, when they had been so close behind them and the marks wore no disguises?

The crush was clearing out where Merle stood, and he spotted two more of his boys where they had fallen, not just side by side, but one atop the other, stacked. Benny Foch and Gilles Petiot, he recognized from their respective masks. A skull and a long-haired Fabio, for Christ's sake, stretched out dead together on the concrete floor.

That left three to do the job, if they were still alive. Merle didn't know if he could get to them in time, if they were even still inside the auditorium, but he couldn't cut and run, no matter how he longed to do exactly that. Rank had its privileges, but they were balanced by responsibilities.

He started toward the nearest aisle that led between the rows of seats, down toward the pit and stage, sidestepping as an old man charged directly at him, wild-eyed, running for his life. More panicked Christians followed, jostling Merle, unmindful of the automatic pistol in his hand. He slashed at one of them, a farmer type, opened his cheek and sent the damned hick reeling off into an empty row of seats, where he collapsed.

Merle was suddenly alert to a snarling sound that emanated from his left. He turned in that direction, toward the stage, and found himself confronted with a canine apparition from his wildest nightmares.

It was larger than a German shepherd, smaller than a Dane, with blood smeared on its muzzle and its matted, tangled coat. Bright eyes regarded Bettencourt as nothing more than food, lips curled back from a set of yellow fangs streaked crimson from a recent taste of flesh and blood. Behind the monster, he saw bodies scattered-two, three, four of them, all missing pieces of their throats and faces, crimson spilling from their wounds onto the sloping floor.

"You wanna piece of me?" the Cajun mobster challenged, but his voice cracked and he felt his bladder straining toward release.

The wolf-thing snarled again, in answer to his question, gliding forward with a click-click-click of claws on concrete, picking up its pace. Merle tried to raise his pistol, but it seemed to weigh a ton all of a sudden, and he knew he was too late as the demented hound from hell sprang toward his throat.

AURELIA BOLDISZAR was worried. There had been no warning this time that the loup-garou was coming, and she wondered if her powers might be failing her, perhaps disoriented by her feelings for the man called Remo. Or maybe she had been distracted by the fear of being shot by those who hunted her contemptible companion, the crude Jean Cuvier.

Whatever the excuse she chose, this time the wolf man had surprised her absolutely. She hadn't been listening attentively to Reverend Rockwell, but rather feeling out the crowd, wondering what had distracted their Korean baby-sitter and where he had gone off to after warning them to keep their seats. When the crowd started screaming, scrambling from their seats in panic, she turned once more to face the stage.

And saw a nightmare in the flesh.

It had been dark the first time, in the Gypsy camp, and she was fleeing for her life at the hotel on Tchoupitoulas Street when he had come for her the second time, but she saw every detail of the monster now. He was indeed a wolf in human form, the denim overalls and boots he wore looking ridiculous with hairy shoulders, chest and arms exposed. And then there was the face-the hideously distended muzzle and the snarling fangs.

By the time the monster rushed at Reverend Rockwell and swept him off the stage, Cuvier was on his feet and shoving toward the nearest aisle, elbowing frightened Christians left and right. She caught him by the shirttail, yelling at him, "Wait! Chiun told us to stay here!"

Rounding on her furiously, Cuvier spit back, "You stay here, then! Be damn dog food, all I care. I'm gettin' out while gettin's good!"

She followed him unwillingly, as much in fear of staying where she was as from a need to see that he was safe. She had distrusted Cuvier on sight, despised him since he made his clumsy move on her, back at Desire House, but if Remo wanted him alive, she was prepared to help the Cajun stay that way. Aurelia only hoped it wouldn't cost her life.

She slipped in behind him as he started bulling through the crowd. One thing about the Cajun, she decided: he made a fair human battering ram. It made no difference if the individuals who blocked his way were men, women or children-he shoved them to the side to save himself.

Twice in their stampede toward the street, Aurelia paused to help one of the people Cuvier had toppled in his rush. The first one was a little girl, no more than six or seven years of age; the other was a woman old enough to be his grandmother, who may have tipped the scales at ninety pounds if she had weighed in with her cane and orthopedic shoes. Aurelia mumbled vain apologies but kept moving in the Cajun's slipstream.

They were within sight of the lobby doors, and there was still no sign of Chiun, when suddenly Aurelia glimpsed a door off to her left. It stood in shadow, with no Exit sign above it, and incredibly, it seemed that no one in the crowd had spied it yet. Once more, she grabbed at Cuvier's loose shirttail. "What now?" he snapped.