“Kitty, thank you,” Shumacher said, before the craft’s pounding engine made talking too difficult. “This has been a huge help. I’ll call you.” She went to join Stafford to help with the prisoner transport. I kept thinking of them as prisoners.
Ben, Cormac, and I started the hike back to our car. I was glum and scratching at the blood on my arm. I’d have to stop off somewhere to get cleaned up. I thought I had a change of clothes in the car. That would help.
“These are the kinds of werewolves I went after,” Cormac said. “They can’t control themselves. They’re monsters. You can’t argue with that.”
I couldn’t. “You’d advocate just putting silver bullets in them and being done with it. That seems like a crappy homecoming after everything they’ve been through.”
We walked a dozen more yards, picking our way through the woods.
“I bet you Flemming knew,” Cormac said finally. “I bet you could look through his notes and find out that he expected this to happen. That you could use werewolves as soldiers and maybe they’d be great, invincible, bloodthirsty, whatever. But you’d ruin them for anything else. They’d never be human again. I’m guessing Flemming knew that and that getting rid of those soldiers was part of his plan.”
And again, I couldn’t argue. Not just because I’d met Flemming and knew that his plans never took individual fates into account. But because the whole government bureaucracy was like that and Flemming had been, if nothing else, a government bureaucrat. “Well, Flemming sucks.”
Back at the car, we didn’t talk much. I found a roll of paper towels and a bottle of water to wash off the worst of the mess. I made sure I had the backpack with Becky’s clothes, then we went in search of Becky.
As I’d hoped, she was at our usual den, tucked into a hillside in the mountains west of Denver. She was still a wolf, curled up and asleep. She must have just gotten here. She didn’t seem to be hurt. I made Ben and Cormac wait back in the car.
Approaching her from upwind, I moved slowly. She’d catch my scent, maybe even hear me, and I hoped she wouldn’t be startled. She’d stay asleep and slip back to her human form. Then we could all go home.
When I was still a dozen feet away, she started awake, bracing on four legs like she was ready to run.
“Shh, shh, it’s okay. It’s just me. I’m just going to hang out and keep watch, okay?” I said, staying low, staying calm. Becky eased, tension leaving her spine, the fur on her back flattening. She crept forward until she was next to me and nuzzled my shoulder, and I breathed into the fur of her neck. She smelled scared and tired. I couldn’t blame her. “It’s okay, we’re all okay,” I murmured.
She circled once then curled up again, nose to tail, and went to sleep. I sat with her, my hand resting on her back, and waited.
After a time, maybe half an hour or so, the flesh and muscle under my hand began to shift. I drew away, and almost couldn’t watch as her body seemed to melt, her bones losing shape, molding into something else. Bit by bit, fur vanished and skin emerged. This happened to me every month; I’d watched it happen to others often enough, but I still had a disconnect: I still had trouble imagining this happening to me. I didn’t like to picture it.
At last, Becky was back, a human shape, naked and tucked into a fetal position. I looked her over—any wounds she had were already healed. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully enough.
I let her sleep for another half hour before gently squeezing her shoulder. “Hey, Becky.”
She moaned a little, then sat up all at once, fully alert, looking around as if she expected an attack.
“It’s okay, we’re alone out here, everything’s fine,” I said, trying to sound calm.
The memory must have come back to her, because she groaned in annoyance and ran hands through her hair. After looking around a moment, squinting sleepily into the trees above, she rubbed her arms and legs, and hugged herself. Feeling the shape of her own body, bringing herself to the here and now.
“Are you okay?”
“Don’t ever ask me to do something like that again,” she said, glaring. “Those guys were—” She shuddered, then just shook her head. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Carl wasn’t even that bad.”
“Carl didn’t do tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan on top of being a pissed-off werewolf,” I said. Carl was the old alpha male of our pack. He’d had something of a temper.
“So what’s going to happen to them?”
“I don’t know. I’m afraid Colonel Stafford may just lock them up and throw away the key.”
“You don’t think maybe that would be for the best?”
It might end up being the best of a bunch of really bad solutions. But it didn’t seem fair. This wasn’t what they’d signed up for when Gordon recruited them for his little independent project. I kept forgetting that life wasn’t fair. I kept trying to make it fair. I said, “I guess I’d like them to at least have a chance.” A chance to decide, a chance to get their lives back, if they wanted them.
That alpha. Vanderman. I wanted to look him in the eyes as a human—see if there was anything human left in there.
“Do you have my clothes?” Becky said after a moment.
I handed her my backpack, and she sighed gratefully.
We didn’t say much on the drive back. Ben drove, Cormac sat in the passenger seat