Warren Murphy: Wolf's Bane

"This way!" she urged him, pointing toward the other door.

"We at the lobby," he reminded her. "It's this way to the street."

"And anyone who's looking for you knows it," she replied. "They'll be expecting you, but suit yourself. I'm going out this way."

With that, she turned her back and heard the Cajun cursing, screwing up the nerve to follow her. She glanced back once, to make sure he was coming, and it cost her, as she stumbled over someone's prostrate body, stretched out on the floor.

Aurelia caught herself, face inches from a leering vampire mask. It was an incomplete, almost pathetic costume, worn as it had been with a sport shirt, windbreaker, denim jeans. Not that it mattered to the man behind the mask what other people thought, since he was clearly dead or dying, his head cocked at an impossible angle, fresh blood leaking from one ear she could see.

Aurelia was recovering her balance, scrambling to her feet, when she saw the shiny automatic pistol tucked inside the dead man's belt. She grabbed it without thinking twice-he wouldn't need it now. She identified the make and made sure she had the safety off.

There was a great deal more to being Gypsy than just reading tea leaves, after all.

Jean Cuvier was past her, almost to the exit, as Aurelia scrambled to her feet. The bastard would have left her, she was sure of it, but he wouldn't get rid of her so easily. In fact, if he had any plans for ditching Remo and Chiun, she now had means to stop him and make sure he didn't slip away.

She was perhaps ten feet behind the Cajun when he reached the door and threw his weight against it.

Nothing. With a curse, he seized the knob and shook it, shouldering the metal door again.

"Try pulling," she suggested.

"Merde!" He pulled, without result. The door held fast.

"They can't do this!" he raged, and pointed at a message stenciled on the flat gray steel that barred their way: This Door Must Be Unlocked At All Times During Business Hours. "Jesus, man! They breakin' they own rules."

Aurelia thought about blasting the lock with her liberated pistol, as Cuvier started back to the lobby, then froze.

"Shee-it!" the Cajun blurted.

Before him stood a wolf-dog like the ones that had attacked her family's camp and the hotel suite. This one was smeared with blood, its muzzle gleaming crimson. Dark eyes shifted constantly between Aurelia and the Cajun, watching both of them at once, deciding which of them it should kill first.

Aurelia wondered if she ought to fire, risk missing, maybe hitting someone in the crowd still shoving, milling at the lobby exit. It was a long time since she had actually fired a gun, and if she didn't score a vital hit with her first shot.

The beast made the decision for her, yelping furiously as it sprang to tear the Cajun's throat. Aurelia raised her gun and fired once while the wolf was in midair, then saw its jaws clamp onto Cuvier's right arm, raised to protect his face. The two of them went down together, thrashing, with the animal on top.

Recovered from the first explosion of the pistol, fired by reflex more than anything, Aurelia Boldiszar lunged forward as the wolf-dog sank its fangs into Cuvier's arm and shook him as a terrier might shake a rat. The Cajun was screaming, his face flecked with blood, raw panic in his bulging eyes.

Aurelia dared not risk a head shot first, for fear of hitting Cuvier by accident. Instead, she moved to skin-touch range and fired two rapid shots into the creature's rib cage. The explosive impact blew her living target sideways, spraying blood from ugly blow holes, its fangs releasing the Cajun's arm.

Mortally wounded but still primed to fight, the savage canine turned on Aurelia, lunged for her on wobbly legs, jaws gaping. When the beast was three feet from her outstretched hand, she fired twice more into its gaping maw, slamming it backward like a tumbling sack of rags:

"Get up," Aurelia said to Cuvier when she could find her voice. "We're getting out of here."

REMO KNEW he had been suckered when a mob of screaming Christians started pouring through the front doors of the auditorium. Nothing in the preacher's repertoire would prompt such a reaction, even if he passed the plate three times instead of two. And then there were gunshots audible in the crowd noise.

No one had even sniffed around Justine's while he stood waiting on the sidewalk. Somehow, the enemy had zeroed in on Cuvier and Aurelia Boldiszar in the auditorium with Chiun, and now the racket from across the street told him that death had found them there.

Remo sped across the street, avoiding the sluggish traffic and finding a path through the panicking crowd.

Inside the auditorium it was a battlefield. Remo saw the first body as he cleared the threshold from the lobby, entering the main room of the auditorium. A gunman with an E.T. mask lay stretched out on the floor, the fingers of his right hand curled around a weapon he had never found the time to use. No blood was showing, but Remo didn't have to guess about the cause of death.

Off to his left, some thirty feet away, Chiun was finishing the last two members of the Cajun hit team. Remo might have reached the scene in time to help the Master of Sinanju, but no help was necessary. Chiun demolished his hulking adversaries with sublime economy of motion. Both of them were down and dead as Remo turned to scan the auditorium, ignoring scattered bodies and the walking wounded, searching for Aurelia and Jean Cuvier.

The howling told him where they were.

Remo slipped around a corner and down a narrow passageway that led him to an exit on the north side of the auditorium. Aurelia and his witness huddled back against the door, not using it for some reason, a bulky figure looming over them and snarling like a rabid dog.

This wasn't another of the Cajun shooters in a Halloween mask. The creature had a hairy back and shoulders, dark fur covering a power lifter's arms, long blackened talons at the tips of clutching fingers.

About time, Remo thought, and whistled like a man calling his dog. "Hey, Bigfoot! Someone forget to lock the cages at the zoo, or what?"

The loup-garou swiveled to face him, dark eyes blazing in a countenance as shaggy as the creature's arms and shoulders. The snout was distended just enough to be unnatural. The eyes were animal eyes. Dark, thin lips curled back from yellow fangs, as crooked and rotten as a long neglected picket fence.

"No orthodontists back in Transylvania, I guess."

The wolf man snarled at him, then spoke. "You wanna die before these two, it make no never mine to me."

"Use caution, my son. He is more than the others." It was Chiun who spoke, several feet behind him.

Remo nodded just barely in understanding. He sidestepped to see Aurelia, standing firm with both hands clutched around a semiautomatic pistol with the slide locked open. Empty. Cuvier was crouched behind her, fingers clawing at the concrete wall as if he longed to tunnel through it and escape.

"I hear you talking, Leon," Remo told the wolf man, pleased to see the savage eyes blink in surprise. "Is talking all you do? Or do you save the muscle for the ladies?"

The loup-garou sprang at Remo, arms outstretched to seize his throat. There was no planning to the move, and precious little skill, but there was animal speed and agility that shouldn't have been present in a brute that was six foot five or six and way better than two hundred pounds.

Remo had battled the mutated, half-animal creature created by Judith White, and he knew their capabilities.

Leon was better. Leon was faster.

Leon came at him like a bolt of hairy lightning. Remo watched him come and waited until the final instant, then stepped to the side and struck with his right hand, fingers rigid, hooking solidly into the wolf man's side.