But that night he became a true loup-garou. He and the woman hunted together, and she was delighted with his new strength and speed.
"My wonderful wolf man!" she exclaimed happily when he emerged from the water with a struggling gator draped over one shoulder.
Together they feasted on the gator, still weakly struggling as they tore it apart with their talons and teeth. Thena, he found, might look entirely normal, but she could kill and devour prey like a tigress.
On the way home, she told him to kill the hermit. Then the bayou would be all theirs.
"It already is," Leon argued. "He'll let us do as we please."
"I can't allow him to know what has occurred," Thena said with a heartless shrug.
Leon Grosvenor wanted very much to please her. But kill the old hermit, the only father he had ever known? "Never," he declared.
"You will do as I command!" Thena snapped, suddenly furious.
"Not that," Leon responded. They argued, but Leon stood his ground.
Thena became very quiet the rest of the way home.
THEY PARTED COMPANY that night with short words, and Leon waited in the woods a few hundred paces from the RV laboratory, then realized she might smell him. He moved into the nearest body of water, a stagnant pool of murk, and sank almost completely.
Near dawn he heard the woman emerge from the laboratory and scamper off into the bayou.
When Leon entered the laboratory, he found her notes. "Canis lupus 942 standard dilution too potent. Subject improved to dangerous extremes. Physical traits outstanding but diminished obedience and enhanced self-control characteristics make subordination of subject inadequate."
There was much more that Leon couldn't understand. Latin phrases, something about genetics, but the phrase "termination of subject" caught his eye.
What angered him the most was that she had never liked him. She had just used him. For a damn experiment. And now she was planning to kill him. Leon had thought that he had finally found companionship-someone like him. But every word she said was a lie.
Then Leon got a brilliant idea.
He would make himself some companions.
HE LEFT THE LABORATORY With a specially insulated pouch filled with glass bottles from the little refrigerator. Dry ice packs fitted inside to keep the bottles cold.
Heading for the hermit's cabin, he smelled the blood a half mile away. He found Thena squatting on the sagging porch with a chunk of red, bloody meat in her mouth.
"Join me," she called from the porch.
Leon stood in the trees, great sorrow over the loss of the hermit competing with a savage desire to join the feast. The blood scent called him like a siren song.
Then he saw Thena freeze, her eyes locking on the insulated pack. She knew at once, of course, what Leon had done.
"Give that to me." Her voice was cold and commanding.
"Never."
"Give it to me now!"
Compelled by his need to obey this strange woman, and burning with desire to sink his teeth into the fresh, warm kill, Leon did the hardest thing he had ever done.
He left.
Because to stay, he knew, would somehow mean his death.
The woman came after him.
Leon ran, and he was faster than she was. He laughed at her from the distance. "I am stronger than you are!" he taunted.
He left her behind in the night, running miles into the bayou. Cautiously he returned in the daylight to find Thena and her mobile laboratory were gone. He had scared her off.
The hermit was no longer so attractive a meal. He was cold and growing sour, but Leon filled his belly anyway and put the remains in the water where the gators would dispose of it. Then Leon went looking for campers.
He knew of a university field camp where the grad students spent their weekends taking samples of the water and plants and bugs. They made measurements of the depth of the bayou, set up no-kill traps, set up nets with lights to trap night insects. It all looked pointless to Leon.
Somehow, he liked the idea of using these brainy types for what he had in mind.
He found their camp deserted in mid-morning. A collapsible five-gallon water jug was in the shade. Leon emptied it.
The bottles in the insulated pack were a little different from what he remembered, but the label still said 942. He poured every last drop of the stuff into the water jug.
The students returned, dirty and hot from a morning of toiling in the swamp. There were more of them than he had expected. Mostly men in their midtwenties. Two older men were addressed by the others as "Professor." One beautiful young woman stayed close by the side of a strong, bright-eyed young man.
One by one they began to help themselves to the water. It took fifteen minutes before the first one fell to the ground, screaming in agony. Soon they were all stricken, on the earth writhing and moaning, racked with monstrous pain.
Leon ran through the bayou this way and that, whimpering and whining in panic. By the time he returned to the camp the old men were already dead, their bodies locked in tight, contorted balls. The others were helpless in their agony-or unconscious from the pain.
It had not been like this for him! There was some pain. He still hurt, in fact. But nothing like this! Only then did he bother to consider the labels on the bottles he had emptied into the water jug. They said 942, just like the bottle he had drunk from in Thena's laboratory. But his bottle had said "solution." What did that mean? Why would the word "solution" be on a bottle?
Then he remembered what the word "solution" might mean in that context. What he had consumed was a diluted solution of the 942. And what he had put in the campers water jug was plain, pure 942. Full strength.
What would undiluted 942 do to them? Would it kill them all, like the old men?
Over the next few weeks, a couple more of them did die. The rest of them were in such constant agony that they certainly wished they were dead.
Leon carried them to the hermit's shack, two pain-wracked bodies at a time. Soon the tiny structure was filled with moaning human worms too intoxicated with misery to even get to their feet.
Those who died were fed to the gators.
The screaming really started when their bones began to push through their skin. That was about the second week. There would be blood and thrashing and finally merciful unconsciousness. The wound would close in a matter of hours, but soon another bone would penetrate to the outside world.
The screaming never stopped. Leon thought he was going as insane as the students. He fed them with all the fresh meat he could find. He bathed them with buckets of swamp water to wash away the blood and their own waste.
It was only in the third week that he began to see clearly what was happening. The students were changing, just as he had changed, but they were changing faster and they were changing completely. They were becoming true wolves.
The bitch was the first to be done with it, six weeks after the metamorphosis commenced. She was a real wolf now. She went to her still-prostrate lover, gave him a sniff and then walked unsteadily to Leon.
She licked his foot.
The next day, she went into the bayou with him and they hunted together for less than an hour. She was exhausted and invigorated when she came back with her hare, and she devoured it in front of the others.
Over the next several days, they all began to find their strength. The hunting parties became larger. And then one day the entire group of transformed creatures left the stench-filled hermit's shack all together.
They were a wolf pack.
And Leon was the alpha wolf. And the bitch was his bitch. Life was good.
He had been happy then, and he foresaw a long lifetime of hunting and running with his pack.