“I’ll keep you in sight, but don’t go looking for me. Got it?” Cormac patted a couple of pockets, as if checking for something. He nodded, apparently satisfied, and walked off in the opposite direction from us.
In ten minutes, Ben and I reached the waterfront around Fisherman’s Wharf. The place was crowded, chaotic, lots of traffic, cars crammed together in makeshift parking lots, a mix of buildings from every decade for the last century, restaurants and junk shops, hotels and offices. Piers crammed with boats: sailboats, fishing boats, tour boats. And people. This late in the day, there seemed to be a ton of screaming children who were too tired and hungry to be interested in cotton candy anymore. I stuck close to Ben, our arms touching as we walked.
“No werewolf in his right mind is going to be stalking us here,” Ben said. “This place is a zoo.”
“Well, we know that now,” I said. In fact, this area might be a good place to hide if we wanted to avoid werewolves.
I had a vague sense of Cormac walking about a block behind us. I had to resist an urge to glance over my shoulder, to check my hunch. My senses were going haywire with all the sensory input. Cars, trucks, buses all made different sounds, had slightly different-smelling exhausts. Music from distant radios clashed. Streetlights, traffic lights, signal lights. Dozens of buildings, and every one had a different set of signs, and rows of windows looked down on us. And the people. Hundreds of people, who all looked and smelled different, who spoke a half dozen different languages. It felt like getting trapped in the middle of a herd of cows.
All big cities shared certain characteristics—lots of buildings, lots of cars, a myriad of scents, from gas fumes to pigeon droppings. It was what made them big cities. So I was amazed at how different San Francisco smelled from Denver. I probably would have noticed it even if I hadn’t been a werewolf, but having a werewolf’s sensitive nose made the odors obvious. In Denver, I could always catch hints of mountains and prairie around the smog and steel of the city. The wind brought tastes of the surrounding countryside. Here, I could hardly even smell the concrete and asphalt smells of the city. Mostly, I smelled the ocean, saltwater and fish, a slightly rotten smell of decay in the water, pollution from all the shipping and traffic. The smell was strange, alien; my nose constantly twitched, trying to define and recognize its various textures. I walked with my shoulders bunched up, tense.
“I can’t smell anything but fish,” I said. Anything upwind of us would be invisible under the breeze from the water.
“Yeah. It’s going to be tough spotting anything sneaking up on us from the wrong direction.” He scanned the streets ahead of us, noting the people and storefronts we passed. He wasn’t hiding his nerves any better than I was.
“I’m not even sure what we’re looking for.”
“Anything that doesn’t smell right,” he said.
“That’s everything here. Makes me want to go home.”
He squeezed my hand. “It’s kind of making me hungry. We’re going for seafood for dinner, right?”
“It would be a crime not to, I think.”
We ducked down a side street—a length of boardwalk along a pier, really—to get away from the crowd for a moment, catch our breath, and take stock. The air seemed a little fresher away from all the people, but the ocean wind still wouldn’t tell us anything about what was lurking in the city.
Across the water, toward the west, I spotted the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge silhouetted against the setting sun. There was a sight to mark off the bucket list.
Further on, I was drawn by a guttural, animal noise. I wouldn’t have noticed it, or I’d have written it off as a weird dog barking, except that it was so strange.
Ben and I turned a corner, looked over a wooden railing, and saw a blanket of brownish, rubbery sea lions splayed out on a series of anchored platforms floating on the water. They were all gurgling and bellowing, craning their necks back and wriggling whiskered snouts.
“Huh,” Ben observed. Both of us were native Coloradoans. The scene before us—the massive marine creatures lounging and stretching, shaking their whiskers and blinking up at the pier full of gawking tourists—was completely alien.
“I wonder if any of them are lycanthropes?” I said.
“Excuse me?” Ben said.
I was studying the smaller ones that seemed as if they only weighed as much as an average person as opposed to the massive ones that weighed hundreds of pounds—and trying to catch the right smell to indicate that there was something supernatural going on.
“You know, were–sea lions.” I’d met a were-seal once, and was open to endless possibilities.
“Why would a were–sea lion hang out with a bunch of the real thing?”
“Hiding out? Maybe Roman has were–sea lion minions.”
“I think you’re stretching,” he said.
We continued on, leaving the waterfront and sea lions behind to enter the grid of streets and buildings with kitschy souvenir shops, crowded restaurants, and tourist traps. Telegraph Hill and its ornamental Coit Tower lay to the south. If we kept walking, we’d enter the hills and warrens of the next neighborhood. So far, no werewolves. This wasn’t exactly werewolf territory. I wasn’t disappointed. We had plenty of other neighborhoods to check.
After a couple of blocks, Ben’s phone rang. He answered, and Cormac’s voice responded.
I waited while Ben made yes and no noises and suggested getting back to the car and heading to Chinatown. We’d left the crowds behind on the Wharf. The sun was setting; dusk fell faster among the buildings, away from the water. Lots of corners, shadows, and hiding places here. It made me think of a forest, with wide trees and deep ravines. We were strangers here, outside our territory. My shoulders stiffened, like hackles rising. All I could smell was city and ocean. I paced a few steps up the street and ba
ck, as if that would make me see into the shadows more clearly.
“You okay?” Ben said, shutting off his phone and slipping it into his pocket.