Pearce had had his suspicions because of my brilliant insights into the suspicious deaths of several people. He, unlike all the other rubes on the force, happened to realize that most of the town’s disappearances occurred on the night of the full moon. Maybe it was only natural to watch me, to see if the guy he’d taker under his wing was, in fact, a serial killer himself.
What he saw shocked him so badly he pissed in his jeans. He hadn’t been so scared since he saw a bear attack someone when he was a boy. Not even the hostage situation at the jewelry store had scared him that bad. But now he knew. Now he knew why some people got mauled, why some people just simply vanished, why there were some nights I just didn’t feel like talking on the phone. Why I didn’t want anyone in the house. Why I’d never had a tattoo, even though I seemed like the type that would be covered with them—the tattoos would never grow back after the change. He never tried to put me down, and he never tried to stop me. Why? I closed my eyes and rummaged around in my brain to figure that out.
Pearce, upon discovering my true nature, knew that no one would believe him. He knew that what I did, and how, were things that could not be explained by science or legitimately discussed in a court of law. Arresting me for being a supernatural killing machine would have been ridiculous. No one would have believed it, and if so, how would I be prosecuted? Further, the only evidence that I had been the one who had killed all these people would have been the microscopic flecks of blood in and around my house. Everything else would have been circumstantial. Any case against me wouldn’t have held up under close examination.
After having thought about my dilemma in purely legal terms, Pearce began to contemplate this unique issue in another light. He was a man who had never approved of vigilantism because he was a man of law and order through and through, both because of his military service and his career as a cop. However, even he wasn’t immune to a certain duality of character. Knowing I could never be stopped, he didn’t so much see my continued freedom as a way for the town’s trash to be eradicated as it was a way to ensure the fact that the criminals his police force couldn’t catch wouldn’t be able to commit their particular crimes over and over again. That was how he rationalized allowing me to live.
In his darker moments he admitted to himself that he was in a way living vicariously through me. After all, I was wholly capable of crossing those lines that he, as a police officer, had to steer clear of. He sometimes envied me for this, which, when his head would clear, disgusted him.
I wondered if Pearce and I had ever really been friends, but I knew we were. However, the purpose of this friendship was twofold. One, he liked my company, and two, he felt obligated to keep tabs on me. Feeding me information about cases he knew he wouldn’t be able to solve was his way of manipulating me, and I didn’t even know it.
Why, I asked myself, was he up at the Crowley property if he knew the wolf would be out that night? Did he see it as two heads working toward the same end?
Pretty much. He thought he’d at least be safe.
And why did he leave me the envelope? To rub my face in it? To prove he wasn’t as bumbling as I might have thought? No. It was so if anything ever happened to him, I could avenge his death.
“Well, knock me the fuck down.”
I looked down at my hand and saw it explode, but it was all in my head. It was time. The wolf was going to give me the memories of that night that I’d been hoping for.
They say birds can see colors in the spectrum that people can’t, and that dogs can smell things that people can’t too. The wolf experienced the world more fully than any man could ever imagine, and on those occasions in which its memories would bleed out and seep into mine, it was as if I was given the power and the privilege to see this world through the eyes of God, or at least a notable competitor to his title and throne.
In living day-to-day, I see the world as I always have, but because I know of how it could look, it has lost its shine, its flare, and its magic. It is dull, lackluster, and rusted, and I always know that there are things that dwell just below the surface that I, in my human form, could never put my finger on. The taste of metal filled my mouth. I tasted … I tasted blood … I changed.
The beast rose on its own two legs from the murky red puddle that still steamed on the floor. It howled low, grunted, and quickly swept the house for signs of life with its ears, its nose. It smelled my detergent, it picked up the mouse living under my kitchen sink by the rustling of dust bunnies, the minuscule pitter-patter of tiny feet.
The beast made the decision to leave it be. It knew it had a target in the Rose Killer, and even if it didn’t have a target, it would not have settled for the death of an animal. It smelled the collected smoke from my years of cigarettes, permanently clogging the air in the house, and living in the walls and fabrics. The beast wrinkled its wet nose and let out an animal sneeze.
It lurched through the house slowly and left through the front door, stooping its shoulders to fit under the frame of the door. Once it was outside, its ears perked up; it breathed deep and bellowed. The night glowed and screamed with life. Like I’d trained it to, it closed the door behind it before taking off into the night.
It ran at speeds beyond my comprehension, faster, perhaps, than the great cats that prowl the prairies of faraway lands. Through backyards, dark roads, then the woods that surround the town of Evelyn, and finally, the open road, it ran. Wind kissed it, streaking trails through its thick, dark hair. The moonlight came down, washing over it like a mother’s love.
The sounds and smells of an entire world enticed it, beckoned it, pulled it in a million different directions, but the beast was focused. The beast knew what it had to do. It was hungry for it. It had the intent. Thank God for that.
The wolf reached Edenburgh and quickly found the spot where that poor girl had been found over there, the backyard to the house with the swimming pool. As it had done countless times before, it got down low on all fours and smelled the ground, leaving drips of snot and spit on the crushed blades of grass. With its tongue, it picked up the soil, rolled it around in its mouth, all with the purpose of picking up the scent, the taste, the smell of the perpetrator. Once it had that, the bells would toll and it would be only a handful of minutes or hours before the target would meet his destroyer.
After several seconds, the wolf wrinkled its brow, clenched its giant fists, and growled somewhere deep inside it. It spit out the soil and howled. It was mad. It was a feeling, a sensation, an instance that had never occurred before, and the beast didn’t know what to make of it. The beast was frustrated. It hadn’t picked anything up.
How is that possible?
The beast angrily went on to what it felt was the next possible spot to help it along, using the same kind of reasoning skills one would expect only real people to be capable of. In the blink of an eye, it stood upon Judith Myers’s grave, breathing heavily. With fingers stretched and claws bared, it went to the business of digging out the coffin, hoping in its own, animal way to get a scent off the dead girl’s body.
When it got to the shell of the coffin, six feet down, it pulled the lid off the casket. The beast looked down, and there rested the young, dead lady. Like a burnt piece of paper, she had begun to turn a darker shade around her edges—her eyelids, her fingertips, her lips. She was discolored, as if she were covered in a fine layer of soot. Her dress was stained by dirt now, and as the beast took her by the back of her neck more carefully than I ever imagined it could handle something, the stitches in the dress where they had sewn it around her stiffened form began to pop open.