He glanced behind him and smiled suddenly.
On the path, just this side of the last lamppost, was a feather. A crow’s feather twice as long as a grown man’s hand. It shimmered almost blue, was caught by the wind, and tumbled toward him.
He waited until it fluttered to a stop against the bike’s rear tire, then shook his head slowly. Boy, he thought, where were you when that kid opened his big mouth?
But as Jeff would say — the story of his life. Honest to god giant crows were not in his stars.
Tanker Falwick swore impotently under his breath. Thorns in the red-leafed bush had snagged his coat sleeve and held it fast, and he couldn’t move quickly without making a hell of a racket. He slapped at them angrily while he rose and peered over the wall. And groaned with a punch to his leg when he saw his last chance for decent prey getting away. The boy was turning, bumping his ten-speed down off the curb and across the street. Away from the park, in spite of the moon.
It was too late. Goddamn, it was too late.
“Shit!” he said aloud, and yanked his arm until the thorns came loose. “Fucking shit!”
A glance up at the moon riding over the trees, and he swore again, silently, hoping that the squirrel he’d killed earlier wouldn’t be the only meal he’d have tonight. There hadn’t been much meat and its heart had been too small, and twisting off its head didn’t give him near the same satisfaction as tearing out a kid’s throat.
Several automobiles sped past, a half-empty bus, a pickup with three punks huddled and singing in the bed, a dozen more cars. None of them stopped, and when he headed back into the trees, he couldn’t hear a thing, except his paperstuffed shoes scuffling wearily through the leaves. He hushed himself a couple of times before finally giving up. He wasn’t listening, and there was, most likely, no one else around to hear.
The whole place had just been filled with damned kids, just filled to the rafters with them, and every opportunity he’d had to introduce himself to one had been thwarted in one way or another.
A large dirt-smeared hand wiped harshly over his mouth, not feeling the stiff greying bristles on his chin, on his sallow cheeks, on the slope of his wattled neck. He sniffed, and coughed, and spat into the dark. Then he drew his worn tweed jacket over his broad chest, hunched powerful shoulders against the wind, and moved toward the center path. He waited in the shadows for a full five minutes, then stepped out and took a deep breath.
He didn’t like it back in there. He didn’t like it at all despite his affinity with the best parts of the dark. There were too many noises he didn’t understand, and too many shadows that trailed after him as he trailed the children who were scurrying after their parents.
A lousy night, all in all — except for the music.
He stopped at the oval pond, checked the path, and knelt on the apron, then leaned over and scooped some of the cold water into his mouth.
The music was nice. Not bad for a bunch of fucking dumbass high school kids, and he had even recognized some of the tunes. He had been hiding behind a patch of dense laurel just to the left of the bandstand, nodding, humming silently, and applauding without sound at the end of each number. He had also been hoping that one of the punks would have to take a leak during the program and wouldn’t be prissy about heading into the bushes. Tonight he wasn’t fussy about the sex; one of the boys would have done just as nicely as one of them young whores.
When that didn’t work and he couldn’t move anyone over to him through the sheer force of his will, he had moved down toward the south entrance since that’s where the fewest of the audience had headed when it was over. He was hoping for a stray, but the little ones were too good, too well-behaved, like those who were at the pond while that other kid, the older one, the punk bastard in black denim, told them a preposterous story about a stupid giant crow.
And the big ones, the punks, the snot-nosed creeps who made up most of his fun, they stuck together like glue right to the street. Especially the whores.
He rocked back on his heels and dried his face with a sleeve.
That had been a close one, that one had, the moment with the black denims. Suddenly the punk had pointed right to the tree where he had been concealed, and he thought for sure he’d been caught, the cops would be on his ass, and he’d be fried without a trial. Then the kid had jabbered on about this dumb creature of his, and there was an argument, and Tanker was able to slip away without detection.
That, he thought smugly, was the easy part — because he was a werewolf.
The realization of his condition had been a long time coming, starting shortly after he had been handed his separation pay and papers. They said he had lost his touch with the new recruits; they said he wasn’t living up to the image of the “new army”; they said he drank too much; they said it was against the new rules to hit the little snots when they didn’t obey his commands. They said. They, who weren’t hardly born when he had first signed his name in that pissant office in Hartford. And they said he ought to be able to find a pretty good job somewhere, that his pension and the job would take care of him for the rest of his life. After thirty years, though, the rest of his life wasn’t all that far away.
He left Fort Gordon, Georgia, as he had arrived — on foot, his belongings slung over his shoulder. Refusing several offers of a ride, he walked into Augusta, put his things into a locker at the bus station, then went out and beat the shit out of the first kid under twenty he could find.
There had been a full moon that night, and though a number of people saw and chased him, he had escaped. He noticed the connection right away because he had been running ahead and behind his shadows the whole time, and he decided then and there that the moon would be his charm. It would help him in civilian life make a fortune and spit on those young bastards who thought they knew what the military was all about.
It didn’t, though. It had plans for him he hadn’t known at the time.
As winter passed, and the jobs passed, and he was constantly in trouble for mouthing off to spineless, candyass bosses usually two decades his junior, he realized that.
As the money ran low, and his friends stopped their loans, and the police looked at him more closely the more his clothes began to fade, he realized that.
The moon had other plans.
Another winter, and a third luckily mild. But the fourth was spent freezing to death in an overcrowded shelter for homeless men in New York City. Humiliation compounded when he was interviewed by a bleeding-heart liberal television reporter and he had tried to explain about his service to the country, and all the reporter wanted to know was if he could get a decent night’s sleep in the same room with fifty other old men.
Old men.
Old man.
Christ, he had turned into an old man and he hadn’t even known it.
That’s when the moon came to him again. Last winter. To save him and show him what werewolves could do.
He had been stumbling along Eighth Avenue, popping into one porn place after another in hopes of getting a free peek at some tits since he hadn’t the stuff to find some piece of his own, when a guy in tight jeans and leather jacket did something to his ass as he passed by. Tanker had frozen, turned slowly, and saw the look in the kid’s eyes. Blank, like they were dead.
He had almost thrown up, but looked up and saw the moon, looked back to the young hustler and let himself smile. He still had good teeth, still tried to exercise when he had the food in him, and it wasn’t hard, in that two-by-four hotel room that smelled like piss and pot, to tear the sonofabitch apart.