Ilona Andrews - Dark and Stormy Knights

He went across the street and found a place near a dusty, unused garage, a hundred yards or so away, to hunker down. He let his gaze go soft, taking in the whole scene, keeping a watch on the bait and the paths leading to it.

Time passed. The moon rose, just a few days from full. However much the werewolf might resist the urge, might control itself until then, at the full moon it would be forced to come out. Then Cormac would have it.

Midnight came and went, and the wolf never showed up to take the bait. It must have satiated the bloodlust on the cattle. It was being careful, now.

After a couple more hours of waiting with no results, he dismantled the trap—took down the meat and brushed his boot across the flour until it was scattered and ground into the dust and lawn. Covering his own tracks.

The sky was black. It was that time of night when streetlights—and even this town had a few—seemed to dim, unable to hold back the dark. In just a couple of hours, the night would break, the sky would turn gray, and the sun would rise pink in the east. He’d stayed up and watched it happen enough nights that he could almost set his clock by the change in light. But right now, before then, the night was dark, cold, clammy. Three A.M. had a smell all its own.

He switched off the headlights as he slipped into a parking space in front of his room. The motel was a one-story, rundown strip, a refugee from 1950s glory days, with peeling white paint and a politically incorrect sign out front, showing a faded screaming Indian holding a tomahawk: the Apache. All lights were out, the place was dark, not a soul awake and walking around. No witnesses.

Cormac set foot on the asphalt and hesitated. He listened to instinct; when his gut poked him, he trusted it. Something wasn’t right. Something was out there. Slowly, he pulled the rifle from under the Jeep’s front seat.

There wasn’t anyplace to hide out here; the land around the motel was as flat as a skillet, with no trees, only a few buildings, and the motel itself. The two-lane highway stretched out in either direction straight and empty. Cormac didn’t hear footsteps, breathing, a humming engine, nothing. He didn’t see a flicker of movement except for grasses touched by a faint breeze. He had no sign that anything was out there, except for the tingling hairs on the back of his neck screaming at him that something inhuman was watching.

It thumped onto the roof of the Jeep, slamming the vinyl, rocking the whole vehicle. Cormac ducked, hitting asphalt, as the oversize wolf skittered across the roof and leapt to the ground in front of him.

The door to the Jeep was still open; Cormac jumped inside, scrambling backward, and slammed it shut as the wolf crashed into it on its next attack. Its front claws scraped against the window, digging against the slick surface, snapping at the glass with open jaws and spit-covered teeth.

The damn werewolf had tracked him. No—it hadn’t even needed to track him. The Apache was the cheapest motel in town. It just had to lie in wait.

It hadn’t made a sound, not a growl or a snarl. It had just pounced, ready to rip him apart. On its hind legs now, it was as tall as the Jeep, larger than a natural wild wolf, because it weighed as much as its human form—conservation of mass. A wild wolf might be around a hundred, hundred twenty pounds. A big werewolf would be close to two hundred. This one was maybe a hundred sixty, hundred eighty. However large it was, however shocking it was to see a wolf as tall as his Jeep, this wasn’t the largest he’d ever seen. Not a two hundred pounder. It was thin, rangy. It had speed rather than bulk. Its coat was mostly gray, edged with beige and black. Prairie colors.

The werewolf backed off a moment, then sprang at the Jeep again, crashing full force into the window. The glass cracked.

Cormac couldn’t stay in here forever. And he wasn’t going to get a better shot than this. He fired.

The rifle thundered in the closed space of the Jeep, rattling Cormac’s ears to numbness. The glass of the driver’s-side window frosted with a million cracks radiating from a quarter-sized hole in the middle. The wolf had vanished.

He couldn’t hear a damn thing, and he wasn’t willing to bet he’d blown the thing’s head off that easy; he couldn’t spot any blood. He looked around but couldn’t see much, lying back across the front seats, peering out the remaining windows, mostly into sky.

After rolling to his knees, he broke out the driver’s-side window with the muzzle of his rifle, dropping a rain of glass outside, and looked out. Shards of glass glittered across the asphalt. He didn’t see the wolf. Definitely didn’t see blood. Which meant it had ducked and run. Making his life harder.

He made a quick three sixty, looking out every window, hoping to see where it had fled. Werewolves were fast, but he should have seen something, a flash of movement, the low lupine form dashing madly to safety. Otherwise it was still here, hiding low and out of sight next to the Jeep. He wasn’t going to go outside until he knew.

Even if he did manage to kill the thing in a head-to-head fight, facing it down meant risking getting bitten or scratched, which was as good as dead as far as Cormac was concerned. No sense in taking stupid risks; that was the trick.

He started the engine and backed away. Right away he heard a thunk against the side and saw what he was hoping for—the wolf scrambling away from the vehicle, turning tail, and running across the parking lot.

The other trick was realizing werewolves didn’t generally take stupid risks, either. Instinct told them to flee when a hunt stopped being easy.

Cormac shoved open the door, stepped out, took aim with the rifle, and fired. The wolf disappeared around the side of the building.

“Damn,” he murmured. He’d have known right away if he’d even clipped the wolf. All he had to do was clip it. The silver in the bullet only had to touch the monster’s blood to poison it, killing it in a matter of moments. That wolf hadn’t slowed down. Cormac had just plain missed. He could kick himself. He didn’t miss very often, even when his target was running.

But he’d flushed the thing into the open. That was something. The game wasn’t over yet.

The engine on the Jeep was still running, and Cormac got in and headed back toward the Catholic school. Maybe he could run the thing down. Not to mention he didn’t want to be around when the cops arrived to investigate the gunfire. Assuming they did. He glanced in the rearview mirror, and the motel was still dark. No lights had turned on. He had to smile—small town on the plains, random gunfire in the middle of the night, and nobody bats an eye. They probably thought it was some kid out shooting street signs. Good enough.

He couldn’t hope to follow the wolf in the Jeep—the beast traveled overland, in a straight line. Cormac had to stick to streets. But that was okay. The sun had started to rise. Monday morning the school would be busy, just starting its day. Good. Easy for Cormac to tell who was missing then.

He was too close to identifying the wolf to worry much about his low profile. Parked in his Jeep, he watched the campus come to life, girls in their uniforms spilling from the dorms in clumps—packs, almost—hanging around on the lawns, filing into the classrooms.

Then came his turn. He kept the rifle under the seat, automatically felt for the handgun under his jacket, and headed toward the newer school building, where most of the activity was. He scanned the faces quickly, efficiently, recognizing many of them from the church service yesterday. His wolf was around a hundred and seventy pounds, and he searched his mental catalog for anyone he’d seen who fit that description. That ruled out most of the students. But a number of the adults were that size. It would all depend on who was missing, who was away, sleeping it off.