The entire dance troupe was crowded as far away from me and Morrison as they could get without spilling back onto the stage. Not one of them had made a sound, though several had stuffed knuckles into their mouths to accomplish such silence. I perversely admired the training that ranked “shut the hell up backstage” above “OH MY GOD THERE’S A WOLF BACK HERE!” and tried to keep my grunts quiet as I got some leverage, flung myself forward and wrapped my arms around Morrison’s neck.
It wasn’t a particularly natural direction of attack on a wolf, and I had no idea how much of Morrison was in control. Enough that he hadn’t bitten my face off in the first seconds after transformation, but the panicked retreat to a defensible corner seemed pretty lupine to me. So did the snarling, snapping, writhing attempt to chew my arms off once I got a neck lock on him. I’d put sleeper holds on people before. I’d never tried it on a dog.
Somewhere very far at the back of my mind, I whispered wolves aren’t dogs, and that part of me produced a shrill giggle as I folded one elbow around Morrison’s neck and grabbed that wrist with my opposite hand. Humans tapped out or went unconscious from a well-applied carotid restraint within about ten seconds. Canines, it turned out, were a whole hell of a lot less obliging.
Morrison slithered backward and to the side, not quite escaping my grasp only because I was pretty much sitting on top of him when he started. I slid to the side, still trying to keep a grip around his throat, but his neck-to-head ratio was all off, from a chokehold perspective: thick neck, streamlined skull, certainly compared to a human. Furthermore, humans usually required some degree of training to get out of a sleeper hold, either by learning early on to duck the chin so a lock couldn’t be made, or—more usefully, after the fact—by doing something like slamming their heel into their attacker’s instep, which could easily hurt enough to make an assailant loosen his grip.
Wolves, I discovered, just naturally went for a let me try to disembowel you with my hind feet attack. My bowels were, thank God, not quite in his line of fire, but my thigh was. Denim shredded under his claws and I shrieked like a little girl, letting go so my quadriceps weren’t also shredded.
Morrison leaped out of reach, careening down the length of the backstage with his tie flying over one shoulder and his suit jacket flapping wildly along his back. I was a moron. I should have grabbed the tie. This piece of information now solidly in mind, I took off after him without considering the futility of a two-legged creature trying to catch a four-legged one. The stage scrim rippled wildly as we bolted alongside it. I hoped the curtains were closed so what audience remained in the theater during intermission wouldn’t see the artistic, shadowy rendition of Woman Chasing Wolf across the stage.
Two legs versus four or not, I caught up to my panicked, shapeshifted boss because there were no open doors at the far end of the stage, either. He backed into a corner, snarling, and I dropped down low, hands spread wide to make myself as unthreatening an object as I could. Morrison lowered himself to the ground, his own front paws spread wide and his haunches raised, similar to my own position. Except on him, it looked familiar. I’d seen wolves do that on documentaries, and I was reasonably certain it was prelude to a dramatic last stand.
I said, “Shit,” out loud and fell over, throat and belly exposed in my very best attempt to project canine body language.
On the positive side, he didn’t rip my throat out. On the somewhat less positive side, a stagehand flung one of the backstage doors open. Morrison tore through it—knocking the stagehand to the floor in the process—and disappeared down the bright-lit hallway that led to the dressing rooms. I gave up on any pretense of backstage silence and bellowed, “Close the doors! Close all the doors!” as I got my feet under me and ran helter-skelter after my four-legged boss.
The hall behind the stage was mostly concrete, with an ordinary door directly opposite the one I’d burst through, a thankfully closed giant corrugated steel door at the far end, and a sharp turn just beyond that. I spasmed with indecision, then yanked the door across from me open to take a look at what lay beyond.
A warehouse-size room with set pieces, costumes, marked-off rehearsal areas and another enormous corrugated steel door—this one open to the world—spread out in front of me. I slammed my small door shut, breathlessly confident that Morrison’s only escape route lay that way, and that he currently lacked the skills to open the round-knobbed egress. I pelted up the hall and rounded the corner, increasingly certain he’d come that way when I discovered the adjoining hall to be lined with dancers pressed against the walls and all staring in the direction I was running.
A door slammed somewhere in front of me and my stomach turned leaden with fear. I skidded around another corner, and there, fifteen feet ahead of me, was a set of double doors with broad press-bar handles. The same doors, in fact, that I’d propped open earlier so that Morrison and I could slip into the theater’s backstage areas without disturbing anyone. And like in all public buildings, for fire code reasons, the doors swung outward, making them easy for almost anyone to open.
I crashed through them at top speed, but the last I saw of my boss was a streak of silver and a flapping tie disappearing into a nearby patch of trees.
I wish I could say I swung right into action, but in fact I just stood there for what seemed like an awfully long time, staring after Morrison. Disasters of every magnitude ran through my mind: Morrison getting hit by a car. Morrison getting shot by some redneck. Morrison escaping the city and living out his life howling at the moon. I wondered how long wolves lived, anyway. Morrison starving to death because what the hell did he know about hunting in wolf form, not that instinctive lupine behavior appeared out of his grasp. Coyote had said a forced or unexpected shift made it easy, even likely, that you’d get lost in the animal. I had to assume Morrison’s frenetic fleeing was pure panicked wolf, not the basically unruffleable man who’d become a precinct captain at the tender age of thirty-five.
The doors opened behind me and Jim Littlefoot, cautiously, said, “Detective Walker?”
“There’s a six-foot-three man in the audience wearing a bright blue zoot suit. He’s with a Hispanic woman a foot shorter than he is, wearing a black satin fitted Veronica Lake-style gown. I need you to get them, please.” I didn’t sound like me. I sounded like my head had been hollowed out and then refilled with worry so profound all it left was a scary degree of calm.
Littlefoot hesitated audibly, then exhaled an agreement. The door closed, but didn’t latch. I reached for my cell phone, rediscovering in the process that the right leg of my jeans was shredded. Welts had risen on my thigh, for that matter, big thick red strips which probably should have torn into muscle. I’d been lucky, or Morrison hadn’t really been trying to hurt me, or the magic within me had dealt with a more grievous injury while I wasn’t even paying attention. All three seemed equally possible.
I dialed Dispatch while my mind made all those little observations, and gave my name and badge number when the operator answered. I still sounded like someone else as I said, “I need Animal Control and the citywide police force to be on the lookout for a giant silver wolf in the West Seattle golf course area. It is absolutely fucking critical that the animal not be shot. Tranqs are all right, but mostly if it’s sighted and can be corralled, I need to be notified immediately.”
A long, long silence met my demand before the dispatch operator finally said, “Just how big of a wolf are we talking about?”