She climbs back into the front seat and they drive on for some more minutes, all of them silent.
Finally the van rounds the final corner of its route. Jørgen visors his eyes with his hand and peers through the windshield. “That’s it, isn’t it?” he asks. “I think I can see it.”
“Yeah,” Billy says. “That’s it.” The cloak no longer works on him, for some reason. He sees the tower, as menacing as it’s ever looked, maybe more so. It seems to be palpably crackling with import, as though it is siphoning relevance and meaning from the surrounding city, which has begun to seem fake somehow, a generic urban setting from a film set in New York but shot in Toronto. The gallery with the Styrofoam art-shapes is now displaying prints of Instagrammed photos of food.
Jørgen yanks the steering wheel to the right and pulls two tires up onto the sidewalk. He cuts the engine and gets out of the van, and right then everything seems to go dim for a second, to waver slightly, and Billy feels a variant of nausea stir in his guts. He stifles a burp. It tastes like roast beef.
“This is what it feels like, isn’t it?” Billy says. “When it happens?”
“Absolutely,” says Elisa, wriggling out of Jørgen’s leather coat.
Jørgen opens the van’s side door. “Clothes,” he says to Billy, pulling his shirt over his head and throwing it into the back. “Off.”
“Okay,” Billy says. He kicks off his shoes and begins to work the zipper on the jumpsuit, while he still has hands.
He cracks and extends.
This time, the change isn’t as bad: breaking the bounds of his body seems easier now that he’s already done it once; it’s as though he has permanently limbered himself somehow. He does not vomit.
He hops out of the van and lands on all fours.
The others have changed, too. The three of them stand there for a moment, hell-wolves, bristling on the sidewalk in the Chelsea dusk, wind-borne trash whirling around them. Two pedestrians at the far end of the street pause in their stride, turn and go the other way.
It is time.
Billy leads the charge. Loping again, straight toward the red door. Somewhere in the back of his mind the part of him that is Billy wonders how, exactly, they’re going to open the door: it would be his typical luck for them to get this far, this close to saving the world, only to be undone because none of them could work a doorknob.
But the wolf knows what to do. The wolf stares at the door, focuses on its surface, and something demonic rises in it. Something with powers.
His vision goes tunnely at the edges.
He intensifies his glare and channels hellish force out of the holes in his skull. It is as though his vision is a blade. It is as though his vision is a cold steel push knife being punched into the door again and again. The thought that a door could stop him seems ludicrous. It’s just wood. It’s just base matter, crude, destructible. The door trembles and warps and creaks and splinters. The red paint pulverizes; flakes of it now coat his shaggy muzzle. The brass knob smokes slightly, deforms, pops free. It takes all of ten seconds for the door’s hinges to give way.
The second door is made of metal but it yields even easier. And then Billy’s in the Starbucks. His jaws are open. It is fair to say he is slavering. Billy watches alarm crack through the blank look of the entranced employees. They scatter, their aprons billowing, the spell broken, apparently. But Billy doesn’t care about them. He’s here for Ollard.
And Ollard arrives, emerging from the back corridor, swollen with fury, eyes wild, teeth gnashing, shrouded in wreaths of crackling black energy. Billy turns the hate-stare on Ollard at the same time that Ollard directs a sheet of deadly-looking violet light toward Billy. The counter, caught between them, detonates. Broken glass and scones spray everywhere. Even though he has all four feet on the ground, the force of the blast still skids Billy away, into the floor plan, tables and chairs catching him painfully in his ribs.
He prepares to leap but Ollard is too fast; he strides from the wreckage first, his left hand held in the gang-sign configuration that freezes Billy, gets him aloft in the air. It’s the same trick Ollard used the first time he met Billy. But it takes more effort now; Billy flexes against the spell with all the wolf-might at his disposal and can feel Ollard struggle to maintain.
And then the dark wolf that is Elisa comes out of the vestibule, leaps at Ollard from the side.
Ollard gets his right hand up, freezes her also. Billy rears his body again and nearly gets free, the force around him beginning to flicker and fail. He watches Ollard’s face contort with the effort of holding them both, scans it for a sign of when the grip will finally give. Veins bulge in Ollard’s forehead; both his nostrils have begun to leak blood. Yet his facial expression is a grin, the grin of a man who still has the advantage.
And then the white wolf that is Jørgen enters the room and leaps at Ollard, jaws snapping, and it is then that Ollard’s grin goes away. He drops his left hand, throws it up again, freezes Jørgen in place.
But Ollard only has two hands.
And so Billy is free.
In a second he’s on Ollard, knocking him down to the floor. Ollard’s head bounces off the broken concrete and his throat slides into Billy’s jaws like it was the final piece of a puzzle, designed to slot there.
And all Billy needs to do is exert a particular amount of force.
Which he does.
Ollard gets no final words. Instead his throat gives one horrible throb and then bursts in Billy’s mouth, gushing fluids. Billy’s teeth sunder the entire network of crucial vessels and tubes in there. He crushes vertebrae. He takes a human neck and reduces it to rupture and spillage.
He’s larger. He’s stronger. He’s more powerful.
He doesn’t give a good goddamn about anything else.
He drinks like a quart of Ollard’s blood. He drinks it until Ollard’s heart stops pumping it.
That’s it, then, he thinks. It’s over.
And then he thinks, Oh my God, you killed a man.
If he’s having these thoughts, if they’re at the forefront of his brain, then he must be changing back, and sure enough he is. His tail retracts and his skull shortens; his thumbs come back; he loses his fur. And then he’s there, naked, hunched over Ollard’s mutilated corpse, a quart of hot human blood swimming in his stomach. He moans, rises to his feet, turns away.
In the wreckage, Elisa is beginning to change back as well. Billy doesn’t like watching her twist, doesn’t like the disturbing way her form surges, so he looks back at Ollard, at the sobering sight of Ollard’s wounds. Billy wonders what new conception of himself he’ll need to come up with in order to manage the knowledge that those wounds were a thing that he himself caused.
You saved the world, he tells himself. You should feel happy. Ollard was a bad dude. He wanted to die anyway. You did him a favor.
And maybe you’ll even get your book published.
None of these thoughts seem to make it okay to have made the mess that he’s looking at. He begins to run through them a second time, but before he completes the litany Elisa shouts “Billy, look out!”