Marcus Pelegrimas - Teeth of Beasts

He went straight to the bank to deposit his check. After that, he drove past his old apartment building on Yale Avenue, ate at one of his favorite burger joints, drove past the electronics stores he used to frequent, and even swung past Nora’s place. She wasn’t home, which was probably for the best. It had been a long day, so he checked into a hotel and crawled under the sheets. The next morning, he headed east.

Abby would only be on her assignment for another couple of days, and now that he was so close to meeting her, Seattle faded into mental clutter. Cole covered some serious ground in a short amount of time. After a few strenuous days and several near-misses with maniacal semis, he made it to St. Cloud, Minnesota. Once he realized just how close he was to his exit, he gave Zakk Wylde a rest and checked his hair in the rearview mirror. After fussing with the tussled mess, he swore to buzz it off again as soon as he could get a hold of some shears.

The land on either side of I-94 was thick with trees and took him directly between Middle Spunk Lake and Big Spunk Lake. Cole did a triple check to make sure he’d read the signs correctly, indulged in some juvenile laughter, and checked his GPS. According to the female British voice who’d gotten him this far, he needed to drive for another 1.2 miles and take the next exit. He did just that, followed her prompts along the side roads, and then patted the little monitor lovingly when he realized he would have been irrevocably lost if he’d followed his gut instincts.

“Thank you, Romana,” he said, naming the British GPS voice after the companion from a classic Doctor Who storyline. “Don’t know where I’d be without you.”

The restaurant was a little place that took up the first floor of a two-story brick building marked by a single wooden sign. Judging by the frillier curtains and knickknacks in the upper windows, the second floor was someone’s residence.

Cole parked along the street and got out, leaving his varnished wooden spear on the floor behind the passenger seat. Having been treated with shapeshifter blood, the weapon was able to change its shape when commanded to do so by its owner. It took a lot of practice to get the spear to twitch, but he was getting the knack of it. One of the most practical tricks he’d recently learned was to make the weapon collapse into a more manageable size so it could be carried and hidden much easier. He always kept the weapon close, but decided it could wait in the car for a change while he lived his life. He walked in front of a large picture window, and before he got to the restaurant’s front door, Abby was rushing outside to greet him.

“There you are! It’s great to see you in person!” she said excitedly.

Abby wasn’t much shorter than Cole’s six-feet-and-some-odd inches. Dressed in jeans that wrapped nicely around slender legs and curvy hips, she moved almost fast enough to make smoke appear from the soles of her white sneakers. Despite the fact that it was a warm August day, she wore a thin cotton button-up shirt over a dark brown tee adorned with the logo for the Midwestern Ectological Group. His eyes naturally took in the sight of her smooth, generous figure, but didn’t linger. Long hair flowed in a thick wave past her shoulders and swirled around her face thanks to a gentle breeze. Abby batted it away and smiled while using the back of her hand to nudge the boxy plastic frames of her glasses farther up onto the bridge of her nose.

Cole smiled effortlessly at the sight of her. “Yep. Here I am. You look great.”

Abby immediately shook her head and pulled her over-shirt closed. “I’m in the field, which means I need to wear dirty clothes and these things,” she said, placing both sets of fingertips on the edges of her glasses.

Reaching out to smooth her hair back, Cole told her, “I think the glasses are cute.”

“No you don’t. Nobody does.”

“Did you change the color of your hair?”

“Yeah, I’m going back to the red. Actually, the box says Intense Auburn, but that’s a little too dramatic for me.”

“Well, it looks nice.”

“You’re only used to seeing me on a webcam, so you don’t know any better,” she added, “but thanks. Are you hungry?”

“Starved. All I’ve been eating is road trip food.”

“Burgers and trail mix?”

“More like beef jerky and candy bars,” Cole said. “Your road trips sound healthier than mine.”

Cole had met Abby through Stu, his regular MEG contact, and chatted with her at any opportunity. Phone conversations and the occasional picture weren’t anything like the real thing, however. “We don’t have to do this if you’d rather not,” she said.

He leaned forward to place a simple kiss on her cheek. Grinning as if the gesture had been more of a playful joke, he said, “Let’s just eat.”

Abby’s table wasn’t tough to spot. It was the only one in the quaint little restaurant that looked like a miniature base camp for a surveillance operation. Her laptop was situated upon a chipped wooden table complete with a wireless signal booster, battery pack, and extra hard drive connected to it. A worn black satchel with MEG BR 40 stenciled on it in white lettering was under her chair. Among all that technology, the cup of iced tea and sandwich looked more like an afterthought.

“So have you seen the latest?” she asked as she sat down and curled a leg beneath her.

Cole moved the other chair at the table around so he could sit closer to her. “I don’t know. The latest what?”

Tapping the icon at the bottom of her screen, Abby enlarged a window that filled her screen with a page from the website of a news station local to the Kansas City metropolitan area. One side was filled with photos that had either been taken by locals or leaked from any number of official cameras set up around the city. Unlike the first batch of images he’d seen right after the incident in KC, these were cleaned up enough for the Half Breeds’ gnarled teeth, gangly limbs, and knotted muscles to be seen. One of them even managed to catch a fairly good glimpse of a werewolf’s intensely wild eyes as it ran across a street.

“No,” Cole said. “I haven’t seen these.”

“The story is a riot. Apparently, some of the carcasses were rounded up and taken in for testing. And here I thought you guys cleaned up after yourselves.”

Cole glanced at the other people in the restaurant, who didn’t seem too interested in who he was or what he was doing there. While more and more pictures of the Kansas City werewolves were popping up online, most of them were attached to half-assed speculation or outright lies. “We cleaned up what we could. Paige didn’t seem too worried about the rest.”

“Well, read on and see for yourself.”

Skipping the editorial comments on the chaos surrounding an “urban riot that was all too indicative of troubled times,” Cole found a definite lack of scientific jargon. He scrolled through the story again and said, “This only mentions some tests done on animal remains and hair samples.”

The way Abby leaned toward him was promising, but she only said, “They’ve concluded the remains are canine and that’s about it. Supposedly, those canines were too messed up after the cops shot them to pieces or ran them over with their patrol cars for them to find any more than that.”

“Didn’t they find any blood? There was plenty of it flowing that night from human and werewolf alike.”

That caught the attention of a skinny lady behind the counter who smirked and then whispered something to a bearded, barrel-chested man sitting on one of the stools at the counter. When Cole turned back toward Abby, he accidentally got a face full of her hair. It wasn’t an unpleasant experience, but ended quickly when she gathered it up and tied it back using a band that appeared like a cheater’s ace from out of nowhere.