Breeds 2 (4 page)

Bailey’s heart quickened as he gave himself over to the transformation, allowing it to flow its course. Skin tightened and stretched as if pulled by hooks. Bones shifted. Joints crackled. His eyes bulged, the whites disappearing, fading into orbs of black. His jaws popped and unhinged, widened, then snapped with grim eagerness. Blood spattered grass, the sound a drumbeat as flesh burst apart at invisible seams. Fluid flowed, splits mended, fur sprouted and thickened. Power thrummed, crackling through his spine. Bailey simpered madly during the scorching, acetylene burn of the change. He retained all sense of self as his limbs lengthened, as his muscles thickened. Claws fastened into the earth, drawing deep furrows, uprooting sinewy chunks.

The pain subsided, replaced by a God-like euphoric rush. Bailey growled and directed his glittering attention to the warden’s cabin. He sniffed the October air.

Badass
.

The little warden shit knew
nothing
of being a badass.

The monstrous werewolf, measuring nearly ten feet from nose to tail, crept toward the front door. His sense of smell led him while his ears twitched. The creature paused for a heartbeat, switching from the entrance to the window. Bailey fully expected Morris to have captured his scent.

For all the good it would do him.

Glass exploded as Bailey launched himself through the picture window. Shards and slivers cascaded upon hardwood flooring. He landed amidst it all with a
wuff
, front paws stopping in an empty easy chair.

No Morris.

Bailey’s enormous head swung left and right before he pulled the chair onto its side, claws slicing deep into the fabric and releasing great gouts of white sponge. When he moved, sleek fur the color of midnight rippled, displaying a powerful chest, shoulders and limbs. Glass tinkled underfoot. Fangs bared and eyes narrowed, Bailey plodded into the kitchen area.

Again, no warden.

The werewolf executioner treaded down a short hallway, following the scent as pungent as fresh shit. A bathroom lay empty, as did a single bedroom. Upon entering the bedroom, however, Bailey’s jaws ached and shivered like a diving rod.

Silver
.

The warden’s dagger. A foot-long saber of edged silver, left unguarded underneath the foot of the bed. Morris had left his authoritative badge. That was fine. Bailey would collect it later.

Puzzled, the werewolf retreated and sniffed his way back to the kitchen.

Back door, not entirely closed.

Bailey shoved his way through with a violent slap of wood on wood and stopped in his tracks.

Clothes
. Morris’s clothes, discarded in clumps along the rear deck and back lawn––everything including a pair of boxer briefs clinging to the neck of a discarded motorcycle boot. Morris had stripped a blatant trail to the tree line. Bailey studied the eerie curtain of Pictou forest not twenty feet away. The warden had changed. Interesting. Bailey licked his jaws and listened, hearing the buzzing absence of noise.

That Morris had transformed didn’t bother or concern him. Wardens sometimes changed with the wolves to better supervise the hunt, but Morris would have known something was wrong when Bailey crashed through the window. He might’ve even confronted Bailey in the living room.

Instead, the warden had vanished into the woods. Perhaps Morris had sensed Bailey’s true intentions. In his experience, the soon-to-be-dead occasionally developed that ability.

Locating the warden’s trail, Bailey crept forward with nose to the ground, the air redolent of spicy wood, blood blots, and animal musk. His prey had
rushed
a change and fled, through a forest hallway where dark birch peels curled off the trees. Bailey stopped and sniffed, listened. The ground was unknown to him, this much he understood. Did the warden suspect him? The werewolf decided it would be wise to assume as much. Probably not the best idea to hunt Morris in his own territory. Bailey might have been a tad overconfident in his approach, but he wasn’t about to pursue the warden across unfamiliar woods. A warden––a careful warden––might have any number of surprises waiting within the forest. Bailey approved. The hunt was about to become that much more interesting.

Fortunately for Bailey, he knew what to do.

He retraced his steps back to his bike––one of the previous century’s best inventions in his opinion––and plunged into the woods facing east.

Bailey would not follow his prey. He would not play his prey’s game. He would bring his prey to him. He’d force Morris to emerge from the shadows and act upon Bailey’s yet-to-come transgressions.

Then, Bailey would murder him.

Envisioning scenes of the imminent slaughter, the smell of melted cheese hooked the killer’s ultra-sensitive nose and pulled him deeper into the woods.

Deer hunting in Pictou County was a tradition in Dale Hutchinson’s family. His grandfather had taken his father out on hunts when he was a boy, and some of Dale’s fondest childhood memories were spent crouching in the bush with his dad and grandfather, enjoying the solitude of the Nova Scotian wild. Things had changed to a degree over the years. The hunts were a little more regulated, his grandfather had long since passed away, his dad no longer accompanied him, and Dale had a daughter who was more interested in apps and boy bands than trudging over woodland seeking wild game. Not that any of that bothered him. The yearly hunt had become an excursion for the boys anyway, a weekend retreat from their various jobs. An escape to the country cabin where they drank and played poker until passing out before dawn, only to rise a few scant hours later, bleary-eyed and hungover, to track down deer.

Dale’s cabin was not so distant, at least not anymore. Claymore Lake was located about three klicks from the coastline, off a dirt road branching away from the 104. When he was a kid, the area was untouched by townspeople. Unspoiled. His father had the foresight to buy whatever crown land he could afford, but he didn’t anticipate the full magnitude of the property boom around Claymore Lake. Over the years, more and more cabins went up around the shoreline. Traditional one-story bunkers, two-story homes away from homes, and the not-so-odd but coveted A-frames that rose majestically above all others and somehow heralded the end of an age. The area had become a familiar, not-so-quiet getaway for several families. Loud parties were the norm on summer weekends. Speedboats cut waves across the lake’s broad surface. Fresh air and other earthy scents had been replaced by wafting barbeques––not that Dale had a problem with barbecuing, but it did sadden him at times when he remembered hiking around the lake with his father, over hills and through bush that had since been cleared and developed.

There were perks, however, as Dale remembered the sight of four women jogging along the main dirt road. Four young ladies dressed in tight exercise suits and everything just a’ bouncing. Trade-offs. Dale didn’t mind trade-offs. The good Lord tooketh the reclusive feel of the lake, but he gaveth weekend boobs. No sir, Dale didn’t mind trades like that at all. And his father had managed to buy up several acres of crown land. A thick, undeveloped barrier of timberland hid and protected the family cabin, acting as a natural defense to hikers from the back roads, and still half a kilometer away from party central situated along the eastern part of the lake. A system of old trails led west, away from the cabin, into deep forest. The land there was crown land but nowhere near a lake, thus undesirable to people looking to build more weekend retreats. Two kilometers into backcountry, the place was filled with wild game.

Even though the game had retreated from the growing human presence around the lake, Dale could still access it by all-terrain quads. His cabin was his base camp, a bastion of mountain men holding out against the recent rise in development, and a gateway to some prime hunting.

For a while, anyway, as Dale suspected the nine acres his father had managed to snap up had grown considerably in value, perhaps even surpassing two or three million dollars. When the advancement of cabins, marked by festive patio lanterns and fire pits, stopped on his property line, Dale intended to call in a real estate professional and sell the land off in huge bountiful chunks.

Tonight, however, Dale decided to forget it all and have some fun with his friends.

Well past a quarter to shit-faced, they sat around the old family table that Dale’s grandfather and father had fashioned from oak. Five friends ringed a table covered in discarded playing cards, individual bastions of beer bottles, and snacks of gut-widening goodness. Nachos, cheese dip, chili dip, sour cream, salsa, cured beef strips, and potato chips. As the night wore on, the remaining friends would decide to play cribbage. They played with bottle caps for markers, each one valued at a nickel. The lads had decided long ago that the stakes would be cheap but the laughs and sense of camaraderie … priceless.

“Whaddaya got there, Johnny?” Cory LeBlanc asked of John Willis. Both men wore heavy-metal T-shirts already stained with various dips, the cotton material resembling the messy palette of a chemically enhanced artist.

“Ain’t got nuthin’,” Johnny Willis replied, his face covered in a graying shroud of a beard best suited for scrawny sorcerers. His belly touched the table’s edge, even though he had leaned back.

“Whaddaya got?” Cory asked again. He sniffed hard enough to clear all the dust collected by his brain over the years. He then regarded Johnny with a wholly sober expression that seemed borderline miraculous, given his present orbit amongst imaginary stars. His bald head gleamed with sweat against the overhead incandescent light.

“Told ya, I ain’t got nothin’.’” Johnny plucked a nacho shard out of his beard and ate it immediately.

“I said whaddaya
got
, y’fuckin’ chunky-assed monkey.”

“Y’wanna know what I got? I got this,” and Johnny proceeded to scratch at his junk below the table, same fingers he’d been feeding himself with all night. “Got some for your wife too, if she wants it. Plenty to go around. Chunky-assed monkey style with a complimentary serving of dick cheese and taint-tickling. Butter up them giblets too while I’m at it. Give ’em a moo-cow squeeze guaranteed to please. Make her dairy white go all chocolate.”

Those still conscious around the table exchanged looks of
what the hell?
No one knew where Johnny came up with his lines. They suspected it was frustration from his job finally bubbling to the surface, like the magma underneath Keystone National Park. They did know that the reserved banker usually delivered his odd euphemisms and metaphors after his eighth beer. When the dead soldiers ran into double digits,
anything
came out of that furry mouth.

“Don’t know where you get your muse, man,” Dale said. “But that woman is fuckin’ unstable.”

“Don’t know where she came from,” Johnny said and tossed out two cards. “But I hope she sits on my face.” He motor-boated. Spit flew. “We do our best work them times.”

Heads shook around the table.

“How many, Cyrus?” Dale asked, correcting his listing to the left. He was smoking some of Pictou’s finest pickled shit along with his beer and while he dealt out cards he suddenly knew, just fucking
knew
, that the recently discovered monster black hole at the galaxy’s center was a cosmic pipeline to some serious undiscovered civilizations. He also wondered what aliens did to get high.

Cyrus didn’t answer. The middle-aged mechanic studied his cards at arm’s length, one eye widening while the other narrowed to a slit in a continuing, alternating pattern. Cyrus, with his ash-colored hair and stylish goatee he habitually groomed with his front teeth, appeared one more magic puff away from leaving reality’s highway and waving, queen-like, at passing planets.

“Cyrus?” Dale asked again.

No response.

The action within Cyrus’s orbital cavities increased, to where the man’s upper face resembled a half-baked but still functioning accordion.

“Cyrus is out,” Dale announced in a sedated voice, relieving his zonked friend of the social burden of answering. In the state Cyrus was currently experiencing,
anything
might have come out of him if he’d talked. Stoned fucker might have started reciting Shakespeare in perfect Portuguese.

“One,” Blake said as he tossed a card into the table’s center. Blake Reeves rubbed his black-stubbled chin which, coupled with his naturally dark complexion, made the dentist resemble an axe-murderer. He inspected his cards with a grim consternation as if they were prophetic tea leaves. Of them all, Blah-Blah Blake was the least conversational. And the scariest-looking around the card table.

“One?” Dale asked.

“One.”

“You want one?”

“One.”

“So you’re saying you want only one?”

“One.”

“All right. I’m giving you one. One card. Just to clarify. That’s one, right?”

Blake nodded. Once.

“There are three muses,” Johnny started, his eyes looking as splendid as freshly blown glass. “Some even say there are as many as nine, depending on what you read or believe.”

“Here,” Dale said, placing Johnny’s comment on hold and dealing Blake his card. He tried to keep drunk conversations to a personal limit of one at a time.

“Folks sometimes call them the
Pierides
.”

“Pie o’ what?” Cory asked in a blend of disbelief and contempt, massaging his hairy neck with the same wet fingers he fed himself with.

“There were nine of them,” Johnny went on, squinting thoughtfully as he took an enlightening drag off a joint, holding it European style. The joint’s tip flared and died.

“Not one?” Cory asked.

“Depends on who you ask,” Johnny squeaked.

“Oh yeah, my wife and I were talkin’ about this same thing the other night,” Cory said casually, flashing a
holy shit
look at Dale.

“I like pies,” Cyrus muttered from somewhere to the left of Jupiter.

“Nine daughters,” stated Johnny, “all from the loins of a guy called Pierus. Of Pella. But I don’t … subscribe to that particular myth.”

“And it’s a good thing, too,” Cory remarked sternly and studied his cards. “Fuckers lose
eyes
over that shit.”