Scarlett’s Claws
Pleased with his day, Joel nearly whistled a cheery tune as he entered Abe’s Subs and Salads. Nobody had needed disciplining or killing and that made his day, which was sliding steadily into evening, wonderful. He got in line behind a young mother and her two school age children. The youngest, probably no more than five, looked up at him with wide blue eyes. He smiled at her. Her lower lip began to tremble. He stopped smiling and tried his damndest not to glower. The child – androgynous in both scent and appearance – turned away and moved in even closer to its mother.
Joel sighed mentally. Nothing like looking like the human version of a big, bad wolf to scare little children and old ladies. Hell, sometimes he even scared the younger ladies. It was the males who liked to antagonize him. Even when he could smell the fear radiating off of them – sour sweat and sweet adrenaline – he knew they would pick fights with him. Some were human. Some were not. He never lost anymore.
He smiled again but darkly. The older of the two children looked at him and burst into tears.
“Jack, what is wrong?”
“Mommy, he’s scary.”
The woman turned to look at him, and he tried to alter his smile to a friendly grin. She glared. “Stop scaring my children.”
Knowing defending himself would result in embarrassing failure, he apologized and turned his face to stare at the hippie paraphernalia on the deli’s walls. He found it difficult to believe Abe was an upstanding businessman with three delis scattered throughout the city after knowing him in the 60s. Abe no longer worked behind the counter at his original deli, preferring to do the office work mostly via telecommuting. In the years of the Vietnam War and protests and free love and blatant racism, Abe railed against free trade, businessmen, and anything vaguely capitalist.
It was on a commune where he’d met Joel, just a few years into being a werewolf and trying to cope with the restlessness caused by a local pack trying to force him into that sort of lifestyle. He’d known it wasn’t him they were interested in so much as his strength. Even for a werewolf, he was strong and agile. He’d tried using the human means of escape – first, alcohol and then pot. His metabolism and healing abilities prevented both from being effective.
Abe simply told him to stand up to “The Man” and not to let “The Man” hold him down. As far as Abe was concerned, pack politics sucked as hard as human politics so fuck them all. Joel had laughed and decided the human, rather wasted on marijuana, had a point. So he’d told the Alpha what to do with his insistence Joel join the pack and walked away.
Not quite fifty years later, Joel was a well-paid pack enforcement officer and Abe was a well-paid businessman. Far from the tie-dyes, communes, and pot-glazed days of their youth. Ordering three sandwiches when it was his turn, he paid the cashier and took his sandwiches to a booth set in a back corner of the shop. It was getting to be full dark, and most people were already home – weeknight and summer hours. Not in any hurry to leave, he savored his food and watched people queue up at the counter.
Abe might decorate like an unreformed hippy but he ran a clean, well-lit establishment. The servers were friendly and efficient and, most importantly, the food was delicious. A couple of nurses, or maybe doctors, walked in still in their scrubs. A young couple, probably barely out of high school, came in behind the medical professionals. A tattooed and pierced young man sat at a table for two with his laptop opened in front of him and a sandwich in one hand. The area was basically blue collar residential with a few businesses and a small hospital nearby so the deli attracted all walks of life.
Included the supernatural kind, he thought in amusement.
Finishing off his last sub, Joel balled up the papers and tossed them, along with his empty cup, in a nearby trashcan and left the deli. He could make out a few stars even with the streetlights and other ambient light doing their best to obscure the view. He crossed the street and sauntered towards his house. It wasn’t particularly close by but he enjoyed the summer breeze lightly ruffling his hair and the leaves on the trees. Inhaling deeply as he passed by an alley, he choked and gasped.
Blood. So much blood. So much pain. The thoughts slammed into his brain as his nose registered the scents. He turned into the alleyway, moving slowly and quietly. He noticed the typical alley scents of trash and decay but only peripherally. Most of his focus was on potential threats. There were no sounds except for some rustling he thought might be papers rustling about in the breeze.
Detecting no threat but seeing a shape on the ground, he moved towards it carefully. It didn’t pay to assume a creature on the ground was down for the count. It was a damn good way to get knifed in the throat. Or the back, in some cases. Not in this case, however.
He stared at the horrific mess at his feet. Blood pooled darkly around the body, with its ribbons of skin and muscle mixed with might have been a purple shirt at some point. The sleeves of it were still intact. More than could be said for the torso the arms, still clad in the sleeves, were attached to. The legs were clad in wide-legged pants. The feet in boots. Either a small or young male. Or a female of indeterminate age. Dark, possibly black, hair covered the victim’s face.
What dumbass wolf ravaged a human and just left them in an alley for any passerby to find? Joel shook his head. Damn. Now he’d have to find the rogue and put it down. If it belonged to a pack, the Alpha was not going to be pleased. Not with him and not with the rogue.
They never were.
Squatting, he sniffed along the body for an incriminating scent. There! He tucked the memory away and lifted the mangled body. As he did, it groaned. Startled, he realized under the overpowering scent of blood and aggression there was a faint scent of life. Not something he could ever describe but one he recognized.
Mixed in the scent was female. He shook his head. One of the laws of the werewolves was to never change an unwilling human. Especially an unwilling female human. Unwilling and unhappy females tended to be scary and dangerous. The wolf he would hunt was even dumber than he’d thought.
In his fixation on scent, he’d also missed the barest sound of a heartbeat. Having a good day obviously made him complacent.
Moving swiftly out of the alley and through the shadows, the ravaged body cradled in his arm and protected from prying eyes, Joel felt some small gratitude it was a residential district instead of the shopping/party district. Easier to avoid nosey individuals at night in an area where everybody human was tucked into their homes, either watching television or in bed. The not-so-human creatures tended to either run the wilds or the lively party district.
He also wasn’t so far from his house as to make it problematic to get there quickly. At the leisurely pace he’d been anticipating, it was a decent length walk. At werewolf speed, it wouldn’t take more than ten minutes. It also helped she was a lightweight that barely registered on his werewolf strength. Though he felt rage building that some pup had the nerve to break pack law within his district – the bastard-, Joel thanked luck and fate it was a quick trip to his modest house. The additional privacy of old trees and decent yard space between neighbors screened him from prying neighbor eyes.
Assuming any of his neighbors were awake, much less cared what he was doing.
He knew the old lady in the small single story house on the right was probably watching the game show channel on cable. She’d told him, one day when he’d walked to his mailbox and she was outside weeding the small flowerbed by the sidewalk, she had a fondness for reruns of The Match Game. The married couple in the two-story Victorian style house on the left introduced themselves when they’d moved in ten years ago. They tended to avoid him – the wife only reluctantly because her husband was jealous of her lust for Joel. It wasn’t ego that told Joel that but the husband when he’d knocked on Joel’s door to inform him not to be neighborly for just that reason.
As for family of six in the small, single story house across the street, they were too busy making ends meet and corralling four children to give a damn about Joel’s life. As long as he didn’t eat their kids, they were fine with him.
Unlocking his front door, easily able to maintain his hold on the lightweight human cradled in his arms, he stepped inside and flicked on the hallway’s overhead light. Considering his rather nice white leather couch through the archway to his right, he continued down the hallway and turned right into his office-cum-guest room just before the staircase to the second floor. Easing the butchered woman onto the twin bed he kept for just this purpose, he wondered if she’d survive the attack. Ravaged so badly, she’d either die or survive as a newly minted werewolf.
Even whether she’d survive being a werewolf was anybody’s guess. Some newly made wolves drowned or shot themselves in the head. He’d stood guard over a few failed gunshot victims.
In the small hall closet, he gathered up first aid supplies, stopped in the guest bathroom for towels, and headed back to the room. He might not be able to save her but he would give it a damn good try. Pausing in the bedroom doorway, he heard her moaning and winced. Buried deep inside his memories were the flashes and burns of his own unwanted savaging. It wasn’t a pretty process when the person was willing. It seemed even worse when the person wasn’t.
He hurried to her side and dumped the supplies on the bedside table. He grabbed one of the towels and started wiping away the blood. There were likely fibers from her clothing in the deep scratches and bites. Not much he could do about those since he wasn’t a doctor.
If she died, infection from those fibers wouldn’t matter. If she survived, her were healing abilities would push out any fibers before infection set in. All he could do was clean her up to the best of his abilities, try to keep her alive for the Change to take hold, and make her as comfortable as possible for the duration.
After cleaning her ravaged chest and neck, he began to disinfect the wounds with a saline solution from the first aid kit. Packing gauze against the deeper wounds, hoping to prevent her death due to blood loss, he applied surgical tape. The job was rough but, hey, he wasn’t an EMT or a doctor.
Aside from random gasps of breath, the woman (girl? He still couldn’t judge her age) hadn’t made any noise while he’d been doctoring her. Now she began to moan and thrash. Concerned she’d do more harm to herself – and after all his hard, unskilled work – he ran to his kitchen and rummaged the bottle of whiskey from its high shelf in the pantry. He preferred beer to the harder liquors.
Back in the guest room, he slid into a sitting position behind the unconscious woman, propping her against his chest. Tipping the whiskey bottle to her lips, he murmured words of encouragement for her to drink. She did, coughing a bit and then moaning. After a healthy dose of the alcohol, though, she seemed to relax and drift into a sleep. Easing out from behind her, Joel set the bottle on the bedside table amongst all the other crap from his nursing stint and stood over the supine form.
Stay or go, he wondered. Staying seemed like the right thing to do but maybe she’d find it a bit scary if she woke up. Nothing like waking up to see a strange and rather large male in your room, he thought. Especially after getting viciously attacked.
Just as he decided to leave her alone, she turned her head on the pillow. He noticed her face for the first time. She wasn’t a young girl – no teenager here. Her face was lightly golden; her eyebrows dark lines over her closed eyes. Her nose was straight, her lips slightly plump but not wide. Her cheekbones were sharp and so was her chin. He noticed the faint lines at the corners of her eyes, the creases on the sides of her mouth. No way to know if the lines were due to age, sun, character, pain, or a combination.
It was a face he thought held strength. Or maybe he was just being fancifully hopeful.
Glancing down, he noticed his shirt was stained with her blood and other substances he probably didn’t care to identify. He’d found her lying in alley, and the more business area of the neighborhood wasn’t known for its spotless alleys. Since he felt compelled to watch over her for the rest of night, he needed to at least clean himself up. No point in scaring her by being gruesome when – if – she regained consciousness.
He gathered the dirty towels and bits of trash created by his first aid. Dumping the towels in the washer tucked into alcove in the hallway, he ran up the stairs and into the master suite. He tossed the trash in the en suite bathroom can as he walked towards the shower. He wondered if his shirt was salvageable. Deciding the internet could help him figure out how to remove blood stains, he stripped down and stepped into the cubicle. A flick of his wrist and hot water streamed down from multiple shower heads.
Being an enforcer didn’t do much for his popularity but it paid pretty well. Werewolves, among a number of other supernatural creatures, might be accepted but only as long as they policed their own. Humans could be fragile creatures. They could also be ingenious and inventive in ways that proved, all too often, downright deadly. Even werewolves didn’t survive atomic bombs or fiery plane crashes. So Joel policed local packs. The packs paid well, if begrudgingly, for the service. The humans paid well, and willingly, for the service. He lived in his modest looking house with its creature comforts. Lonely, perhaps, if he bothered to consider being lonely. Mostly, he was busy.
Werewolves, especially the new ones or the really old ones, tended to suck at self-control.
He lathered his hands and arms generously, taking the time to scrape any blood or grime from under his nails. Probably he should’ve done this before he doctored the woman in the other room. If she’d been savaged by anything else, he would have. It wouldn’t have likely helped her survive the injuries but at least he would’ve tried. With the amount of werewolf parasite (not that he was sure what caused the shift) in those wounds, she’d die or turn. There was no middle ground in a werewolf attack.
After rinsing off, he turned off the water and opened the cubicle door. That’s when he heard the moaning. Even super sensitive doggy hearing didn’t make him able to hear through wood and running water. He was, he reminded himself, a werewolf. Not a superhero.
Grabbing his robe from the hook behind the door, he belted it on without bothering to dry off. The agonized sounds downstairs seemed more important than a few wet footprints on the floor. Or the uncomfortable feeling of his robe against wet skin. Moving quickly, he entered the guest room and found the woman curled on her side, arms wrapped around her torso. Her golden skin looked ashy and deeper lines than before bracketed her lips. How internal organs weren’t sliding out of the rips in her flesh and onto the bed, he didn’t know. He did hope it meant the wolf virus –that’s how he thought of it even though other wolves considered it magic since there was no proof for either theory – was slowly starting to mend her wounds from the inside out.
“Shit.” He squatted down by the bedside and stroked a hand over her forehead and cheek. She was burning up. “Well, luv, have some more whiskey. It’ll hopefully blunt some of the pain.” He stood, shifted her onto her back, and forced the alcohol down her throat.
She protested both the movement and the whiskey. Feeling like an ass as she moaned, sobbed, and stayed curled into herself, he forced himself to do what he could to ease her pain. Crouching so he was level with her face, Joel began to caress her hair and face again. He hoped the touch was comforting. He swore he’d heard or read somewhere that human touch was necessary for survival. He might not be human per se but his touch would still register as human. If he owned any prescription strength pain meds, he would give her a couple but he didn’t. Most of the people he doctored were also weres of one type or another. They felt pain intensely but metabolized medicine so quickly pain meds were basically a tease of relief. Plus weres healed quickly.
He didn’t know if with great power came great responsibility. He did know that with greater healing capacity came greater pain.
Murmuring soft, meaningless noises to the woman on his guest bed, Joel caressed her neck and noticed the minor scratches along her collarbone were vanishing. “Now we know how this scene is going to turn out. No dying on me, luv. That just wouldn’t be sporting of you since your minor wounds are healing. It has to mean the more serious ones are healing, too. Don’t give me false hope. I ruined a perfectly good comforter for you, after all.”
She gave a low groan.
“Just a joke, luv.” He rocked back on his heels and began removing bandages.
Her breasts were healing nicely. He hadn’t been sure if she’d had any to speak of because they’d been lacerated into oblivion. Her abdomen also seemed to be healing, though slower than her chest since it was not as central to her heart. He’d been able to see her intestines through the ribbons of skin left on her torso. Chances of internal bleeding and other damage were high. And the digestive system was a bitch to heal. Even with wolfy superpowers.
All Stories
Scarlett’s Claws
Pleased with his day, Joel nearly whistled a cheery tune as he entered Abe’s Subs and Salads. Nobody had needed disciplining or killing and that made his day, which was sliding steadily into evening, wonderful. He got in line behind a young mother and her two school age children. The youngest, probably no more than five, looked up at him with wide blue eyes. He smiled at her. Her lower lip began to tremble. He stopped smiling and tried his damndest not to glower. The child – androgynous in both scent and appearance – turned away and moved in even closer to its mother.
Joel sighed mentally. Nothing like looking like the human version of a big, bad wolf to scare little children and old ladies. Hell, sometimes he even scared the younger ladies. It was the males who liked to antagonize him. Even when he could smell the fear radiating off of them – sour sweat and sweet adrenaline – he knew they would pick fights with him. Some were human. Some were not. He never lost anymore.
He smiled again but darkly. The older of the two children looked at him and burst into tears.
“Jack, what is wrong?”
“Mommy, he’s scary.”
The woman turned to look at him, and he tried to alter his smile to a friendly grin. She glared. “Stop scaring my children.”
Knowing defending himself would result in embarrassing failure, he apologized and turned his face to stare at the hippie paraphernalia on the deli’s walls. He found it difficult to believe Abe was an upstanding businessman with three delis scattered throughout the city after knowing him in the 60s. Abe no longer worked behind the counter at his original deli, preferring to do the office work mostly via telecommuting. In the years of the Vietnam War and protests and free love and blatant racism, Abe railed against free trade, businessmen, and anything vaguely capitalist.
It was on a commune where he’d met Joel, just a few years into being a werewolf and trying to cope with the restlessness caused by a local pack trying to force him into that sort of lifestyle. He’d known it wasn’t him they were interested in so much as his strength. Even for a werewolf, he was strong and agile. He’d tried using the human means of escape – first, alcohol and then pot. His metabolism and healing abilities prevented both from being effective.
Abe simply told him to stand up to “The Man” and not to let “The Man” hold him down. As far as Abe was concerned, pack politics sucked as hard as human politics so fuck them all. Joel had laughed and decided the human, rather wasted on marijuana, had a point. So he’d told the Alpha what to do with his insistence Joel join the pack and walked away.
Not quite fifty years later, Joel was a well-paid pack enforcement officer and Abe was a well-paid businessman. Far from the tie-dyes, communes, and pot-glazed days of their youth. Ordering three sandwiches when it was his turn, he paid the cashier and took his sandwiches to a booth set in a back corner of the shop. It was getting to be full dark, and most people were already home – weeknight and summer hours. Not in any hurry to leave, he savored his food and watched people queue up at the counter.
Abe might decorate like an unreformed hippy but he ran a clean, well-lit establishment. The servers were friendly and efficient and, most importantly, the food was delicious. A couple of nurses, or maybe doctors, walked in still in their scrubs. A young couple, probably barely out of high school, came in behind the medical professionals. A tattooed and pierced young man sat at a table for two with his laptop opened in front of him and a sandwich in one hand. The area was basically blue collar residential with a few businesses and a small hospital nearby so the deli attracted all walks of life.
Included the supernatural kind, he thought in amusement.
Finishing off his last sub, Joel balled up the papers and tossed them, along with his empty cup, in a nearby trashcan and left the deli. He could make out a few stars even with the streetlights and other ambient light doing their best to obscure the view. He crossed the street and sauntered towards his house. It wasn’t particularly close by but he enjoyed the summer breeze lightly ruffling his hair and the leaves on the trees. Inhaling deeply as he passed by an alley, he choked and gasped.
Blood. So much blood. So much pain. The thoughts slammed into his brain as his nose registered the scents. He turned into the alleyway, moving slowly and quietly. He noticed the typical alley scents of trash and decay but only peripherally. Most of his focus was on potential threats. There were no sounds except for some rustling he thought might be papers rustling about in the breeze.
Detecting no threat but seeing a shape on the ground, he moved towards it carefully. It didn’t pay to assume a creature on the ground was down for the count. It was a damn good way to get knifed in the throat. Or the back, in some cases. Not in this case, however.
He stared at the horrific mess at his feet. Blood pooled darkly around the body, with its ribbons of skin and muscle mixed with might have been a purple shirt at some point. The sleeves of it were still intact. More than could be said for the torso the arms, still clad in the sleeves, were attached to. The legs were clad in wide-legged pants. The feet in boots. Either a small or young male. Or a female of indeterminate age. Dark, possibly black, hair covered the victim’s face.
What dumbass wolf ravaged a human and just left them in an alley for any passerby to find? Joel shook his head. Damn. Now he’d have to find the rogue and put it down. If it belonged to a pack, the Alpha was not going to be pleased. Not with him and not with the rogue.
They never were.
Squatting, he sniffed along the body for an incriminating scent. There! He tucked the memory away and lifted the mangled body. As he did, it groaned. Startled, he realized under the overpowering scent of blood and aggression there was a faint scent of life. Not something he could ever describe but one he recognized.
Mixed in the scent was female. He shook his head. One of the laws of the werewolves was to never change an unwilling human. Especially an unwilling female human. Unwilling and unhappy females tended to be scary and dangerous. The wolf he would hunt was even dumber than he’d thought.
In his fixation on scent, he’d also missed the barest sound of a heartbeat. Having a good day obviously made him complacent.
Moving swiftly out of the alley and through the shadows, the ravaged body cradled in his arm and protected from prying eyes, Joel felt some small gratitude it was a residential district instead of the shopping/party district. Easier to avoid nosey individuals at night in an area where everybody human was tucked into their homes, either watching television or in bed. The not-so-human creatures tended to either run the wilds or the lively party district.
He also wasn’t so far from his house as to make it problematic to get there quickly. At the leisurely pace he’d been anticipating, it was a decent length walk. At werewolf speed, it wouldn’t take more than ten minutes. It also helped she was a lightweight that barely registered on his werewolf strength. Though he felt rage building that some pup had the nerve to break pack law within his district – the bastard-, Joel thanked luck and fate it was a quick trip to his modest house. The additional privacy of old trees and decent yard space between neighbors screened him from prying neighbor eyes.
Assuming any of his neighbors were awake, much less cared what he was doing.
He knew the old lady in the small single story house on the right was probably watching the game show channel on cable. She’d told him, one day when he’d walked to his mailbox and she was outside weeding the small flowerbed by the sidewalk, she had a fondness for reruns of The Match Game. The married couple in the two-story Victorian style house on the left introduced themselves when they’d moved in ten years ago. They tended to avoid him – the wife only reluctantly because her husband was jealous of her lust for Joel. It wasn’t ego that told Joel that but the husband when he’d knocked on Joel’s door to inform him not to be neighborly for just that reason.
As for family of six in the small, single story house across the street, they were too busy making ends meet and corralling four children to give a damn about Joel’s life. As long as he didn’t eat their kids, they were fine with him.
Unlocking his front door, easily able to maintain his hold on the lightweight human cradled in his arms, he stepped inside and flicked on the hallway’s overhead light. Considering his rather nice white leather couch through the archway to his right, he continued down the hallway and turned right into his office-cum-guest room just before the staircase to the second floor. Easing the butchered woman onto the twin bed he kept for just this purpose, he wondered if she’d survive the attack. Ravaged so badly, she’d either die or survive as a newly minted werewolf.
Even whether she’d survive being a werewolf was anybody’s guess. Some newly made wolves drowned or shot themselves in the head. He’d stood guard over a few failed gunshot victims.
In the small hall closet, he gathered up first aid supplies, stopped in the guest bathroom for towels, and headed back to the room. He might not be able to save her but he would give it a damn good try. Pausing in the bedroom doorway, he heard her moaning and winced. Buried deep inside his memories were the flashes and burns of his own unwanted savaging. It wasn’t a pretty process when the person was willing. It seemed even worse when the person wasn’t.
He hurried to her side and dumped the supplies on the bedside table. He grabbed one of the towels and started wiping away the blood. There were likely fibers from her clothing in the deep scratches and bites. Not much he could do about those since he wasn’t a doctor.
If she died, infection from those fibers wouldn’t matter. If she survived, her were healing abilities would push out any fibers before infection set in. All he could do was clean her up to the best of his abilities, try to keep her alive for the Change to take hold, and make her as comfortable as possible for the duration.
After cleaning her ravaged chest and neck, he began to disinfect the wounds with a saline solution from the first aid kit. Packing gauze against the deeper wounds, hoping to prevent her death due to blood loss, he applied surgical tape. The job was rough but, hey, he wasn’t an EMT or a doctor.
Aside from random gasps of breath, the woman (girl? He still couldn’t judge her age) hadn’t made any noise while he’d been doctoring her. Now she began to moan and thrash. Concerned she’d do more harm to herself – and after all his hard, unskilled work – he ran to his kitchen and rummaged the bottle of whiskey from its high shelf in the pantry. He preferred beer to the harder liquors.
Back in the guest room, he slid into a sitting position behind the unconscious woman, propping her against his chest. Tipping the whiskey bottle to her lips, he murmured words of encouragement for her to drink. She did, coughing a bit and then moaning. After a healthy dose of the alcohol, though, she seemed to relax and drift into a sleep. Easing out from behind her, Joel set the bottle on the bedside table amongst all the other crap from his nursing stint and stood over the supine form.
Stay or go, he wondered. Staying seemed like the right thing to do but maybe she’d find it a bit scary if she woke up. Nothing like waking up to see a strange and rather large male in your room, he thought. Especially after getting viciously attacked.
Just as he decided to leave her alone, she turned her head on the pillow. He noticed her face for the first time. She wasn’t a young girl – no teenager here. Her face was lightly golden; her eyebrows dark lines over her closed eyes. Her nose was straight, her lips slightly plump but not wide. Her cheekbones were sharp and so was her chin. He noticed the faint lines at the corners of her eyes, the creases on the sides of her mouth. No way to know if the lines were due to age, sun, character, pain, or a combination.
It was a face he thought held strength. Or maybe he was just being fancifully hopeful.
Glancing down, he noticed his shirt was stained with her blood and other substances he probably didn’t care to identify. He’d found her lying in alley, and the more business area of the neighborhood wasn’t known for its spotless alleys. Since he felt compelled to watch over her for the rest of night, he needed to at least clean himself up. No point in scaring her by being gruesome when – if – she regained consciousness.
He gathered the dirty towels and bits of trash created by his first aid. Dumping the towels in the washer tucked into alcove in the hallway, he ran up the stairs and into the master suite. He tossed the trash in the en suite bathroom can as he walked towards the shower. He wondered if his shirt was salvageable. Deciding the internet could help him figure out how to remove blood stains, he stripped down and stepped into the cubicle. A flick of his wrist and hot water streamed down from multiple shower heads.
Being an enforcer didn’t do much for his popularity but it paid pretty well. Werewolves, among a number of other supernatural creatures, might be accepted but only as long as they policed their own. Humans could be fragile creatures. They could also be ingenious and inventive in ways that proved, all too often, downright deadly. Even werewolves didn’t survive atomic bombs or fiery plane crashes. So Joel policed local packs. The packs paid well, if begrudgingly, for the service. The humans paid well, and willingly, for the service. He lived in his modest looking house with its creature comforts. Lonely, perhaps, if he bothered to consider being lonely. Mostly, he was busy.
Werewolves, especially the new ones or the really old ones, tended to suck at self-control.
He lathered his hands and arms generously, taking the time to scrape any blood or grime from under his nails. Probably he should’ve done this before he doctored the woman in the other room. If she’d been savaged by anything else, he would have. It wouldn’t have likely helped her survive the injuries but at least he would’ve tried. With the amount of werewolf parasite (not that he was sure what caused the shift) in those wounds, she’d die or turn. There was no middle ground in a werewolf attack.
After rinsing off, he turned off the water and opened the cubicle door. That’s when he heard the moaning. Even super sensitive doggy hearing didn’t make him able to hear through wood and running water. He was, he reminded himself, a werewolf. Not a superhero.
Grabbing his robe from the hook behind the door, he belted it on without bothering to dry off. The agonized sounds downstairs seemed more important than a few wet footprints on the floor. Or the uncomfortable feeling of his robe against wet skin. Moving quickly, he entered the guest room and found the woman curled on her side, arms wrapped around her torso. Her golden skin looked ashy and deeper lines than before bracketed her lips. How internal organs weren’t sliding out of the rips in her flesh and onto the bed, he didn’t know. He did hope it meant the wolf virus –that’s how he thought of it even though other wolves considered it magic since there was no proof for either theory – was slowly starting to mend her wounds from the inside out.
“Shit.” He squatted down by the bedside and stroked a hand over her forehead and cheek. She was burning up. “Well, luv, have some more whiskey. It’ll hopefully blunt some of the pain.” He stood, shifted her onto her back, and forced the alcohol down her throat.
She protested both the movement and the whiskey. Feeling like an ass as she moaned, sobbed, and stayed curled into herself, he forced himself to do what he could to ease her pain. Crouching so he was level with her face, Joel began to caress her hair and face again. He hoped the touch was comforting. He swore he’d heard or read somewhere that human touch was necessary for survival. He might not be human per se but his touch would still register as human. If he owned any prescription strength pain meds, he would give her a couple but he didn’t. Most of the people he doctored were also weres of one type or another. They felt pain intensely but metabolized medicine so quickly pain meds were basically a tease of relief. Plus weres healed quickly.
He didn’t know if with great power came great responsibility. He did know that with greater healing capacity came greater pain.
Murmuring soft, meaningless noises to the woman on his guest bed, Joel caressed her neck and noticed the minor scratches along her collarbone were vanishing. “Now we know how this scene is going to turn out. No dying on me, luv. That just wouldn’t be sporting of you since your minor wounds are healing. It has to mean the more serious ones are healing, too. Don’t give me false hope. I ruined a perfectly good comforter for you, after all.”
She gave a low groan.
“Just a joke, luv.” He rocked back on his heels and began removing bandages.
Her breasts were healing nicely. He hadn’t been sure if she’d had any to speak of because they’d been lacerated into oblivion. Her abdomen also seemed to be healing, though slower than her chest since it was not as central to her heart. He’d been able to see her intestines through the ribbons of skin left on her torso. Chances of internal bleeding and other damage were high. And the digestive system was a bitch to heal. Even with wolfy superpowers.
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Scarlett’s Claws
Pleased with his day, Joel nearly whistled a cheery tune as he entered Abe’s Subs and Salads. Nobody had needed disciplining or killing and that made his day, which was sliding steadily into evening, wonderful. He got in line behind a young mother and her two school age children. The youngest, probably no more than five, looked up at him with wide blue eyes. He smiled at her. Her lower lip began to tremble. He stopped smiling and tried his damndest not to glower. The child – androgynous in both scent and appearance – turned away and moved in even closer to its mother.
Joel sighed mentally. Nothing like looking like the human version of a big, bad wolf to scare little children and old ladies. Hell, sometimes he even scared the younger ladies. It was the males who liked to antagonize him. Even when he could smell the fear radiating off of them – sour sweat and sweet adrenaline – he knew they would pick fights with him. Some were human. Some were not. He never lost anymore.
He smiled again but darkly. The older of the two children looked at him and burst into tears.
“Jack, what is wrong?”
“Mommy, he’s scary.”
The woman turned to look at him, and he tried to alter his smile to a friendly grin. She glared. “Stop scaring my children.”
Knowing defending himself would result in embarrassing failure, he apologized and turned his face to stare at the hippie paraphernalia on the deli’s walls. He found it difficult to believe Abe was an upstanding businessman with three delis scattered throughout the city after knowing him in the 60s. Abe no longer worked behind the counter at his original deli, preferring to do the office work mostly via telecommuting. In the years of the Vietnam War and protests and free love and blatant racism, Abe railed against free trade, businessmen, and anything vaguely capitalist.
It was on a commune where he’d met Joel, just a few years into being a werewolf and trying to cope with the restlessness caused by a local pack trying to force him into that sort of lifestyle. He’d known it wasn’t him they were interested in so much as his strength. Even for a werewolf, he was strong and agile. He’d tried using the human means of escape – first, alcohol and then pot. His metabolism and healing abilities prevented both from being effective.
Abe simply told him to stand up to “The Man” and not to let “The Man” hold him down. As far as Abe was concerned, pack politics sucked as hard as human politics so fuck them all. Joel had laughed and decided the human, rather wasted on marijuana, had a point. So he’d told the Alpha what to do with his insistence Joel join the pack and walked away.
Not quite fifty years later, Joel was a well-paid pack enforcement officer and Abe was a well-paid businessman. Far from the tie-dyes, communes, and pot-glazed days of their youth. Ordering three sandwiches when it was his turn, he paid the cashier and took his sandwiches to a booth set in a back corner of the shop. It was getting to be full dark, and most people were already home – weeknight and summer hours. Not in any hurry to leave, he savored his food and watched people queue up at the counter.
Abe might decorate like an unreformed hippy but he ran a clean, well-lit establishment. The servers were friendly and efficient and, most importantly, the food was delicious. A couple of nurses, or maybe doctors, walked in still in their scrubs. A young couple, probably barely out of high school, came in behind the medical professionals. A tattooed and pierced young man sat at a table for two with his laptop opened in front of him and a sandwich in one hand. The area was basically blue collar residential with a few businesses and a small hospital nearby so the deli attracted all walks of life.
Included the supernatural kind, he thought in amusement.
Finishing off his last sub, Joel balled up the papers and tossed them, along with his empty cup, in a nearby trashcan and left the deli. He could make out a few stars even with the streetlights and other ambient light doing their best to obscure the view. He crossed the street and sauntered towards his house. It wasn’t particularly close by but he enjoyed the summer breeze lightly ruffling his hair and the leaves on the trees. Inhaling deeply as he passed by an alley, he choked and gasped.
Blood. So much blood. So much pain. The thoughts slammed into his brain as his nose registered the scents. He turned into the alleyway, moving slowly and quietly. He noticed the typical alley scents of trash and decay but only peripherally. Most of his focus was on potential threats. There were no sounds except for some rustling he thought might be papers rustling about in the breeze.
Detecting no threat but seeing a shape on the ground, he moved towards it carefully. It didn’t pay to assume a creature on the ground was down for the count. It was a damn good way to get knifed in the throat. Or the back, in some cases. Not in this case, however.
He stared at the horrific mess at his feet. Blood pooled darkly around the body, with its ribbons of skin and muscle mixed with might have been a purple shirt at some point. The sleeves of it were still intact. More than could be said for the torso the arms, still clad in the sleeves, were attached to. The legs were clad in wide-legged pants. The feet in boots. Either a small or young male. Or a female of indeterminate age. Dark, possibly black, hair covered the victim’s face.
What dumbass wolf ravaged a human and just left them in an alley for any passerby to find? Joel shook his head. Damn. Now he’d have to find the rogue and put it down. If it belonged to a pack, the Alpha was not going to be pleased. Not with him and not with the rogue.
They never were.
Squatting, he sniffed along the body for an incriminating scent. There! He tucked the memory away and lifted the mangled body. As he did, it groaned. Startled, he realized under the overpowering scent of blood and aggression there was a faint scent of life. Not something he could ever describe but one he recognized.
Mixed in the scent was female. He shook his head. One of the laws of the werewolves was to never change an unwilling human. Especially an unwilling female human. Unwilling and unhappy females tended to be scary and dangerous. The wolf he would hunt was even dumber than he’d thought.
In his fixation on scent, he’d also missed the barest sound of a heartbeat. Having a good day obviously made him complacent.
Moving swiftly out of the alley and through the shadows, the ravaged body cradled in his arm and protected from prying eyes, Joel felt some small gratitude it was a residential district instead of the shopping/party district. Easier to avoid nosey individuals at night in an area where everybody human was tucked into their homes, either watching television or in bed. The not-so-human creatures tended to either run the wilds or the lively party district.
He also wasn’t so far from his house as to make it problematic to get there quickly. At the leisurely pace he’d been anticipating, it was a decent length walk. At werewolf speed, it wouldn’t take more than ten minutes. It also helped she was a lightweight that barely registered on his werewolf strength. Though he felt rage building that some pup had the nerve to break pack law within his district – the bastard-, Joel thanked luck and fate it was a quick trip to his modest house. The additional privacy of old trees and decent yard space between neighbors screened him from prying neighbor eyes.
Assuming any of his neighbors were awake, much less cared what he was doing.
He knew the old lady in the small single story house on the right was probably watching the game show channel on cable. She’d told him, one day when he’d walked to his mailbox and she was outside weeding the small flowerbed by the sidewalk, she had a fondness for reruns of The Match Game. The married couple in the two-story Victorian style house on the left introduced themselves when they’d moved in ten years ago. They tended to avoid him – the wife only reluctantly because her husband was jealous of her lust for Joel. It wasn’t ego that told Joel that but the husband when he’d knocked on Joel’s door to inform him not to be neighborly for just that reason.
As for family of six in the small, single story house across the street, they were too busy making ends meet and corralling four children to give a damn about Joel’s life. As long as he didn’t eat their kids, they were fine with him.
Unlocking his front door, easily able to maintain his hold on the lightweight human cradled in his arms, he stepped inside and flicked on the hallway’s overhead light. Considering his rather nice white leather couch through the archway to his right, he continued down the hallway and turned right into his office-cum-guest room just before the staircase to the second floor. Easing the butchered woman onto the twin bed he kept for just this purpose, he wondered if she’d survive the attack. Ravaged so badly, she’d either die or survive as a newly minted werewolf.
Even whether she’d survive being a werewolf was anybody’s guess. Some newly made wolves drowned or shot themselves in the head. He’d stood guard over a few failed gunshot victims.
In the small hall closet, he gathered up first aid supplies, stopped in the guest bathroom for towels, and headed back to the room. He might not be able to save her but he would give it a damn good try. Pausing in the bedroom doorway, he heard her moaning and winced. Buried deep inside his memories were the flashes and burns of his own unwanted savaging. It wasn’t a pretty process when the person was willing. It seemed even worse when the person wasn’t.
He hurried to her side and dumped the supplies on the bedside table. He grabbed one of the towels and started wiping away the blood. There were likely fibers from her clothing in the deep scratches and bites. Not much he could do about those since he wasn’t a doctor.
If she died, infection from those fibers wouldn’t matter. If she survived, her were healing abilities would push out any fibers before infection set in. All he could do was clean her up to the best of his abilities, try to keep her alive for the Change to take hold, and make her as comfortable as possible for the duration.
After cleaning her ravaged chest and neck, he began to disinfect the wounds with a saline solution from the first aid kit. Packing gauze against the deeper wounds, hoping to prevent her death due to blood loss, he applied surgical tape. The job was rough but, hey, he wasn’t an EMT or a doctor.
Aside from random gasps of breath, the woman (girl? He still couldn’t judge her age) hadn’t made any noise while he’d been doctoring her. Now she began to moan and thrash. Concerned she’d do more harm to herself – and after all his hard, unskilled work – he ran to his kitchen and rummaged the bottle of whiskey from its high shelf in the pantry. He preferred beer to the harder liquors.
Back in the guest room, he slid into a sitting position behind the unconscious woman, propping her against his chest. Tipping the whiskey bottle to her lips, he murmured words of encouragement for her to drink. She did, coughing a bit and then moaning. After a healthy dose of the alcohol, though, she seemed to relax and drift into a sleep. Easing out from behind her, Joel set the bottle on the bedside table amongst all the other crap from his nursing stint and stood over the supine form.
Stay or go, he wondered. Staying seemed like the right thing to do but maybe she’d find it a bit scary if she woke up. Nothing like waking up to see a strange and rather large male in your room, he thought. Especially after getting viciously attacked.
Just as he decided to leave her alone, she turned her head on the pillow. He noticed her face for the first time. She wasn’t a young girl – no teenager here. Her face was lightly golden; her eyebrows dark lines over her closed eyes. Her nose was straight, her lips slightly plump but not wide. Her cheekbones were sharp and so was her chin. He noticed the faint lines at the corners of her eyes, the creases on the sides of her mouth. No way to know if the lines were due to age, sun, character, pain, or a combination.
It was a face he thought held strength. Or maybe he was just being fancifully hopeful.
Glancing down, he noticed his shirt was stained with her blood and other substances he probably didn’t care to identify. He’d found her lying in alley, and the more business area of the neighborhood wasn’t known for its spotless alleys. Since he felt compelled to watch over her for the rest of night, he needed to at least clean himself up. No point in scaring her by being gruesome when – if – she regained consciousness.
He gathered the dirty towels and bits of trash created by his first aid. Dumping the towels in the washer tucked into alcove in the hallway, he ran up the stairs and into the master suite. He tossed the trash in the en suite bathroom can as he walked towards the shower. He wondered if his shirt was salvageable. Deciding the internet could help him figure out how to remove blood stains, he stripped down and stepped into the cubicle. A flick of his wrist and hot water streamed down from multiple shower heads.
Being an enforcer didn’t do much for his popularity but it paid pretty well. Werewolves, among a number of other supernatural creatures, might be accepted but only as long as they policed their own. Humans could be fragile creatures. They could also be ingenious and inventive in ways that proved, all too often, downright deadly. Even werewolves didn’t survive atomic bombs or fiery plane crashes. So Joel policed local packs. The packs paid well, if begrudgingly, for the service. The humans paid well, and willingly, for the service. He lived in his modest looking house with its creature comforts. Lonely, perhaps, if he bothered to consider being lonely. Mostly, he was busy.
Werewolves, especially the new ones or the really old ones, tended to suck at self-control.
He lathered his hands and arms generously, taking the time to scrape any blood or grime from under his nails. Probably he should’ve done this before he doctored the woman in the other room. If she’d been savaged by anything else, he would have. It wouldn’t have likely helped her survive the injuries but at least he would’ve tried. With the amount of werewolf parasite (not that he was sure what caused the shift) in those wounds, she’d die or turn. There was no middle ground in a werewolf attack.
After rinsing off, he turned off the water and opened the cubicle door. That’s when he heard the moaning. Even super sensitive doggy hearing didn’t make him able to hear through wood and running water. He was, he reminded himself, a werewolf. Not a superhero.
Grabbing his robe from the hook behind the door, he belted it on without bothering to dry off. The agonized sounds downstairs seemed more important than a few wet footprints on the floor. Or the uncomfortable feeling of his robe against wet skin. Moving quickly, he entered the guest room and found the woman curled on her side, arms wrapped around her torso. Her golden skin looked ashy and deeper lines than before bracketed her lips. How internal organs weren’t sliding out of the rips in her flesh and onto the bed, he didn’t know. He did hope it meant the wolf virus –that’s how he thought of it even though other wolves considered it magic since there was no proof for either theory – was slowly starting to mend her wounds from the inside out.
“Shit.” He squatted down by the bedside and stroked a hand over her forehead and cheek. She was burning up. “Well, luv, have some more whiskey. It’ll hopefully blunt some of the pain.” He stood, shifted her onto her back, and forced the alcohol down her throat.
She protested both the movement and the whiskey. Feeling like an ass as she moaned, sobbed, and stayed curled into herself, he forced himself to do what he could to ease her pain. Crouching so he was level with her face, Joel began to caress her hair and face again. He hoped the touch was comforting. He swore he’d heard or read somewhere that human touch was necessary for survival. He might not be human per se but his touch would still register as human. If he owned any prescription strength pain meds, he would give her a couple but he didn’t. Most of the people he doctored were also weres of one type or another. They felt pain intensely but metabolized medicine so quickly pain meds were basically a tease of relief. Plus weres healed quickly.
He didn’t know if with great power came great responsibility. He did know that with greater healing capacity came greater pain.
Murmuring soft, meaningless noises to the woman on his guest bed, Joel caressed her neck and noticed the minor scratches along her collarbone were vanishing. “Now we know how this scene is going to turn out. No dying on me, luv. That just wouldn’t be sporting of you since your minor wounds are healing. It has to mean the more serious ones are healing, too. Don’t give me false hope. I ruined a perfectly good comforter for you, after all.”
She gave a low groan.
“Just a joke, luv.” He rocked back on his heels and began removing bandages.
Her breasts were healing nicely. He hadn’t been sure if she’d had any to speak of because they’d been lacerated into oblivion. Her abdomen also seemed to be healing, though slower than her chest since it was not as central to her heart. He’d been able to see her intestines through the ribbons of skin left on her torso. Chances of internal bleeding and other damage were high. And the digestive system was a bitch to heal. Even with wolfy superpowers.
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