Wolf for Hire

Chapter Forty Seven

Our flight came to an abrupt end.

The corridor outside the canteen was only a few car-lengths wide—just wide enough to tear us free of Sylvester's grip, but not much else.

We barely cleared the doorway—slingshot by Sylvester's tongue—before slamming chest-first into a white pulp tower. A one-two, gong-thunk, as we rebounded off the cylindrical tank and straight into the ground.

If I hadn't already screamed all the air from our lungs—being in charge of the talking meant I was also in charge of the screaming—the impact would've done it anyway. As it was, Virginia and I struggled to breathe.

We just lay there, staring at stars—not the ones in the sky, but the ones twinkling in our skull. Around us, the world spun.

I noticed an oddly werewolf-sized sheen on the side of the tank—an oily smear—grime and sweat from my fur pressed into the metal. It reminded me of the imprint birds made when they flew into a window.

How hard did I hit that?

Our ribs flared with pain as Virginia rolled us onto our side, working to get our feet under us. Pins and needles ran across our abdomen from the bad waxing Sylvester's tongue had performed. A nice keyhole added to our fur coat.

Not exactly the hair removal I'd been in the market for.

Beside us, Sylvester thrashed—our two-ton, apparently half-horse half-amphibian Chimera—still wearing the door like a collar. Virginia could smell his blood, from dozens of shallow cuts caused by the bits of glass and wire mesh still embedded in the frame he'd rammed his head through.

Wearing it as a bib must've been uncomfortable. Shaking it off proved unfruitful, so Sylvester resorted to the next best thing: brute force.

He planted a hoof on the door's edge, neck muscles rippling—and pulled. Metal shrieked as the frame split apart like cardboard.

Move, move, move, I implored Virginia.

But Virginia wasn't firing on all cylinders—moving as if through water. As with Trevor the security guard, who'd suffered a similar fate, it wasn't easy to recover from a Sylvester Stallion Special.

Knocked down, our countdown had started. Ten seconds till Virginia and I were KO'd. And by KO'd, I meant chomped.

Head freed, Sylvester scanned for his quarry—but his search was interrupted by a small white and yellow labeled bottle bouncing off the back of his head. It spun through air before shattering on the ground and splattering Virginia with the red liquid inside.

Sylvester's head snapped in the direction the bottle had come from, and Virginia saw in the doorway of the canteen, the concussed Trevor, arm still outstretched.

She licked at the droplet that splashed her muzzle, and I recognized the flavor.

For some godforsaken reason—TBI-induced heroism perhaps—Trevor had thrown a bottle of Texas Pete at the Chimera.

As Virginia got us to our feet, I shouted, "Trevor, for fuck's sake, get your ass back inside!"

Where the hell did he even get Texas Pete?

From the canteen, obviously. It was the Ketchup of the South.

Behind him, the two other men, Bo and Daniel, seized Trevor under the arms and hauled him back, cursing at him.

Well, thank god two of the three still had working brains.

Sylvester bared his teeth and let out a noise—wet, guttural, and low—but it was cut off by the crack of a gunshot. A bullet bit into his flank.

Sylvester whirled, looking for his shooter. But Virginia was no longer where he'd left her.

We'd jumped to the top of the pulp tower, twenty feet above. The world might be spinning, but up was still up. And she'd taken aim at Sylvester's center of mass, not his foot. So, a significantly larger target this time. Not much of a wound—but it got his attention.

Virginia growled as Sylvester locked eyes with her. In that brief span of a second, I pulled on the mental connection I'd established back in the canteen—and fired a compulsion straight into his mind.

Come and get me.

The thought lanced through him.

No more distractions. I was leading this horse to water.

Virginia leapt from the tower to an adjacent building—a lengthy manufacturing structure that rumbled with machinery—and took off running. Below, the chimera's hooves thundered in pursuit.

At the far end of the facility, a length of scaffolding supported the connector pipes that transported processed wood pulp to the wet end of the papermaking process—where dissolved fibers were sprayed onto fabric sheets traveling at hundreds of feet per second.

All the major facilities at WestRock were connected by similar overhead pipe racks, allowing pulp and other liquids to move between buildings without disrupting operations on the ground. The plant was built in three dimensions, and its elevated infrastructure was knitted together with catwalks and causeways.

That suited me just fine. Virginia and I would take the high road. Sylvester could take the low one. And we'd reach the same destination—without ever coming within tonguing distance.

"Nevermore!" I shouted.

"I am here," came the reply from above.

"Fly ahead. Make sure there are no more imbeciles between us and the south side."

"Shall I do anything with our three gentlemen?"

"Forget them. We don't have time."

Virginia ran for the catwalk ahead as I replied.

Gentlemen—he meant Trevor, Bo, and Daniel. Probably intending to somehow bind them to secrecy. Fat chance. That ship had sailed.

If I wasn't already caught on a dozen security cams during my stint in the Culinary District, I'd still have the six eyewitnesses—the three pool kids along with the three men—to worry about. It was becoming painfully obvious I couldn't be subtle to save my life.

But keeping my secret was the least of my worries. I just wanted to survive the night.

And, if I could actually pull this off—toss Mich and the DOA a bone, keep things from spiraling further—maybe they'd go easy on me once they hauled me in. Felt like an inevitability at this point.

"Allison, look out!" Nevermore cawed.

A shadow fell across Virginia and me as Sylvester launched himself into the air. Because of course—frog eyes, frog tongue—why not frog legs too? This nightmare came spring-loaded.

Virginia dove aside as Sylvester landed squarely where we'd just been. The roof groaned, then tore beneath him. All that weight concentrated on such a small area—he might as well have been standing on paper.

But before he disappeared into the facility below, his tongue lashed out—and caught Virginia by the foot.

No! Not again! I thought, as we too were yanked off our feet and dragged down into the facility.

The building below held the paper-spinning wing of the mill—one of the few parts of the facility still in operation.

WestRock had stopped cooking pulp, so the sulfur stink was gone—but there was still plenty of stockpiled slurry left to push through the lines.

Print paper made money.

Here, that pulp was sprayed onto thin fabric sheets moving at breakneck speed and fed through a gauntlet of high-pressure rollers.

We landed atop the boxy metal hood, designed to trap superheated vapor and flash the moisture from the sheets—steam-dried into something that looked roughly like paper.

That was, until Sylvester crashed through the roof—and then through the hood—neither of which were designed to support a two-ton chimera.

He hit the hood like a wrecking ball, crumpling the seafoam-green metal like a tent under a boulder. Steel groaned. Rollers screamed.

Superheated vapor surged from ruptured seams. Nearly invisible at first, the escaping steam condensed into dense, rolling white clouds that billowed outward, quickly engulfing everything around us.

Unless someone had been staring straight at us, no one would've seen what fell into the assembly. First the beast. Then the smaller, darker shape tumbling after.

Virginia and I landed directly on top of Sylvester, his bulk cushioning the fall.

The heat was searing. She tried to scramble to our feet, but Virginia slipped—Sylvester's skin sloughing off beneath us. What looked like hide felt wrong under our paws: filmy, waxy, and slick. As though the steam were melting it away.

It coated our fur like oil, and underneath the film, there was a different skin entirely.

And here I thought he was already disturbing enough—now his skin had liquefied.

A hammering clatter echoed through the facility as the emergency stop mechanisms slammed into place, halting the paper assembly. Alarms blared. We could hear shouting—hard-toed shoes clambering as workers evacuated.

Steam at that temp was basically invisible—and it'd burn the shit out of you. God forbid you inhaled it.

I relayed the warning, pushing Virginia to hurry.

Sylvester was still trying to get up, tangled in warped metal and dislodged cylinders. He wasn't as quick to recover. Bigger they are, the harder they fall, and so forth.

Through our link, I sensed his frustration and anger—but not so much pain. Despite the scalding heat and broken ribs, the chimera's irritation was mostly at being stuck.

It seemed his sense of pain had been dialed back a bit.

Find a safe perch, I urged Virginia. I need time to work.

Virginia managed to get our feet under us and leapt to an intact section of the dryer hood—yelped as the metal burned the pads of our feet—and leapt again.

She landed on the factory floor, putting a healthy distance between us and the venting steam.

She ran.

Further down the line, a large pair of double doors led off into another processing wing of the facility.

Behind us, steam swallowed the room. All that remained was the dented outline of the green enclosure vanishing into fog.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

So much for keeping things from escalating.

My plan had unraveled fast. A new personal record.

It hadn't been a great plan—maybe even a little slapdash—but Eugene and Nevermore had still signed off on it, cautious but confident I could pull it off. On paper, I had everything I needed to succeed.

But in practice…

Well… It wasn't my fault. Everything was falling apart because of factors I couldn't control. Couldn't have known about. It was as if the world of magic itself was mocking me.

Surely the DOA—and WestRock's insurance carrier—would understand I was just trying to help.

I'd been told to expect a chimera. Though, if you thought about it, if a chimera referred to any creature created by magically combining two or more animals, then that had a fuckton of variety. How was I supposed to know that Sylvester's biomancer had woken up one morning with the bright idea of combining a frog with a giant draft horse?

Cronenberging them together like The Fly.

There had to be a better way to classify chimeras—chimerae? Because at this point, the term 'chimera' itself was pretty goddamn useless.

A dark form shifted in the fog. Sylvester had gotten to his feet. His head turned, searching, vision obscured by steam.

But for me, visibility didn't matter. Our link remained. Distance meant little now. Nor did line of sight.

Virginia pressed us against the wall, concealing herself in the clouds of steam, as I focused, reaching out towards Sylvester's mind. Attempting to once more manipulate the mental strings left by the Puppeteer. I'd been deprived of the opportunity back in the canteen, but now that Sylvester was isolated and disoriented, I had another shot.

Reaching in with my mind, I expected those strings—those mental chords—to hang slack. The loose strings of a puppet, abandoned by his puppeteer.

But they weren't slack at all.

Each one thrummed with tension, drawn tight between emotion and instinct. Sylvester's hunger, his aggression—each mapped neatly to a behavior, a target. Not the limp strings of a puppet—but a well-tuned instrument. A fiddle to be played. Each taut thread translated instinct into motion—hunger into pursuit, rage into focus. Together, they played a melody in his mind.

When I plucked at them before, I hadn't disrupted the Sylvester Symphony—I'd played right into it. Each mental nudge only made the song louder. I'd strummed his hunger and focus, and Sylvester responded in kind. His mind refocused on the purpose he'd been designed for. To hunt his quarry.

Commanding him to follow hadn't diverted him. It had crowned me as his one and only target.

So: Mission Accomplished.

Great.

Now I just had to figure out how the hell I was keeping myself off the dinner menu. And I didn't have an obvious way to change it.

The puppeteer controlled Sylvester by directing his focus on specific targets. Thanks to my oh-so-clever compulsion, his focus was locked in. Squarely on me.

I'd shot myself in the foot.

Again.

A surprise I could even walk at this point.

But, even if I could shift his target, I'd have to choose someone else to take my place. And while I wasn't above prioritizing my own survival over others, I didn't exactly have a list of acceptable sacrifices on hand.

I felt the grim satisfaction radiating from his mind. He was enjoying the thrill of the chase. Savoring the steam-saturated air. It invigorated him. That thick, wet blanket of heat made him feel more alive, more alert.

Better able to breathe.

Better able to smell.

The scent of his prey cut through the warehouse's chemical fog like a beacon—wet fur, grease, sweat, something floral and sharp. Her breath, shallow and tremulous, caught in her throat when she realized he was listening.

To Sylvester, it was music to his ears. The missing piece to his hunting melody.

The voice of the hunted.

She was just out of sight—close enough to savor. He'd take his time now. She wouldn't escape. Not after she'd touched him.

The thought sent a shiver through Virginia and me.

Touched him? What had he meant by that?

My mind shot back to the oily slick of his skin. How Virginia had landed on him. And how we'd gotten covered in the stuff.

I pulled my awareness back to our shared body—realizing the tingling burn wasn't from the heat of the steam, but pins and needles radiating from the oily film coating our fur, seeping onto our skin.

Get Away! Now! I shouted to Virginia, aware that we were in deep shit—and sinking fast.

Virginia didn't respond. Not right away.

Her limbs dragged with unfamiliar weight—like Eugene's jacket all over again, only this time the heaviness clung to our bones. Virginia's mind dulled too under this weight, her urgency dissolving into detachment.

I could feel it too, even with my awareness floating separate from our body. A strange calm settled over her like a shroud.

Colors danced in the clouds of steam as Sylvester emerged. His skin glistened—sparkled even.

A trick of the light? Or was it something else?

His hide had slid away in slick, oozing sheets—like melted varnish stripped by the steam—revealing the mottled, pulsing skin beneath. It shimmered with green-brown tones and dark undulating patterns.

Almost like the skin a—

Recognition clicked.

I'd regularly watched Animal Planet—having taken an interest in animal behavior after getting a wolf stuck inside my head—and knew the Americas were populated with countless species of amphibians known to secrete toxins through their skin.

Most notably were the poison dart frogs of South America, but, as colorful as Sylvester seemed, he wasn't that colorful. There were, however, just as many, if not more, species of toads able to secrete bufotoxin, a potent cocktail of neurotoxins that people would smoke for its psychedelic effects.

They were lethal, in the sense that after reaching Nirvana and seeing the face of God, you'd aspirate on your own vomit and die. Not poison dart frog deadly, but its dissociative properties were enough to incapacitate a full-grown man. Perhaps even a werewolf.

Whatever the Biomancer had used to build Sylvester, they needn't have imported anything exotic or traveled to the Amazon. Florida had all the specimens they would need—home to more species of toxic amphibians than coherent voters.

Sylvester's eyes locked with mine. He trilled again—less a warning, more an invitation. It tugged at us like a siren song spun from mist.

He started forward.

Virginia!

Now it was my turn to seize the wheel and spin our car around. This snapped her out of her stupor, like waking from a dream.

Virginia went into motion and bolted through the double doors behind us into a darkened wing of the facility, shifting into wolf form as she slipped into the darkness.

The doors slammed behind us, sealing out the alarms, the steam, the flickering light.

For a heartbeat, the only sounds were our panting breaths and the staccato click of claws on concrete—the sound of prey pursued.

We ran in between vats once used for dissolving wood chips with a myriad of acids and other chemicals.

Only traces of the sulfurous stench lingered.

Then, a beat later—

Thunk.

The doors swung open.

Alarms. Steam. Light. All streamed into the darkened facility.

Then silence again.

There was a moment of stillness. Then the chimera sniffed the air—

—and released a low, throaty trill as he resumed the hunt.

The clicking of hooves followed.

Virginia's heart pounded in our ears.

She crept forward, but not quite as silent as a shadow. Even with padded feet, our claws clicked against the concrete.

Our breath—though shallow—seemed to echo in the vast stillness inside the building.

In the dark, a thought occurred to me: without the lights, the steam, the clamor and chaos—he'd have an easier time finding Virginia and me.

Sure, I'd pulled him away from people he could hurt.

But hadn't I forgotten that I was still one of those people?

My status as a human may be up for debate, but I was still a person.

And I could definitely be hurt.

Why the hell had I talked myself into this?

Stick to the plan. Stick to the plan, I told myself.

Virginia was starting to panic.

Not because of the chimera—at least, not directly.

It was the fog seeping in around her thoughts that terrified her.

That creeping blankness behind her eyes.

She remembered this feeling.

The weightless drift, the sense of her limbs moving without volition, her thoughts too quiet to hear.

It was how things used to be—before the moon was strong enough to give her mind form and her body shape.

Before she was Virginia.

When she was just instinct and claws and teeth.

And now she felt herself slipping again.

Slipping away from the self she'd only just begun to inhabit.

I could feel it too.

Her fear tangled with mine.

She didn't want to go.

Didn't want to disappear.

Frankly, neither did I—dying was firmly at the bottom of my bucket-list.

Up till now, she hadn't actually been afraid.

Part of her knew that, with her strength, and her speed, she could likely escape if things went south.

But now, neither her body nor her mind was working the way she wanted.

And she couldn't think clearly enough to figure out how to stop it.

She looked inward—probing me for answers.

Why are you looking at me? I thought, equally panicked. You're the one with the handle on our were-business. Can't you regenerate your way out of this?

Virginia didn't know. She never thought about our abilities—she just used them.

Well, I'm gonna need you to start thinking about them too! I snapped.

Because if Virginia couldn't pull a lycanthropic miracle out of her furry ass, I was going to have to resort to more desperate actions.

You see, I still had a plan.

But, like all my plans, it wasn't a particularly good one.

Not because it wouldn't work—on the contrary, I was pretty sure it would.

Really well, in fact.

Which was the problem.

Virginia couldn't see clearly—not with her eyes open or closed.

Colors and textures bled together, muting the warehouse around her.

She could only hear.

The whisper of claws on concrete.

Panting breath.

And voices. Of her pack and Sandy's dogs.

She was in the woods again.

But this time, she wasn't in the lead.

She was left behind.

And this time, she wasn't the one hunting. She was being hunted. By something faster. Larger. And stronger than her.

And instead of weaving through underbrush, Virginia found herself caught in briars—thorned vines tugging her backward, binding her limbs. Pins and needles flaring across her body as they dug into her.

Virginia—queen of the night, Disney princess of strays, who could leap to rooftops in a single bound, and toss men like play toys—whimpered.

Hang in there, Virginia. I'll get us out of this. Just keep moving.

She moved.

More on instinct than conscious thought. But she moved.

Her mind was regressing to the autodog she had been only days before.

No sense of self, only impulse.

Her paws stumbled over the uneven floor of the deserted pulping facility, weaving her through a maze of rust-stained pipes and past enormous steel vats.

In her eyes, they were the trunks of fallen trees, and looming stone cliffs.

She didn't know where she was going—following only her drive to flee.

And Virginia's feet, slow and heavy, carried us deeper into this dark forest, leaves crunching underfoot.

Trying to lead her home.

I couldn't tell if the forest she saw was memory or hallucination—but I urged her forward.

She saw something—low, wide, and shadowed—a space beneath a heavy piece of machinery. A den, maybe. She crawled under it, squeezing herself into the narrow gap, limbs sluggish as she wedged herself underneath, and then remained still.

Her breaths were ragged. No matter how she tried to quiet them, they came in short audible rasps.

In the distance came the slow and methodic clip-clop of hooves.

Sylvester was on the move.

He'd given us time to hide, waiting for the clicking of claws to cease. A sign that his quarry had succumbed to his touch.

Now the countdown had ended.

It was: "Ready or not, here I come."

Fog thickened in Virginia's mind as I severed our connection. She resisted, not wanting to be left alone. But just as I had cut her off to protect her from the thrall's infection curse, I now needed to cut myself off to shield my mind from the toxin afflicting hers.

To get us out of this mess, I needed to be able to think clearly.

Shutting myself off from her senses would have normally sent me into unconsciousness, but my mind was still tethered to another. I felt myself shift. Slipping from the body I shared with Virginia, until I found myself fully in the mind of Sylvester.

I didn't so much enter into his body as park my awareness in his thoughts—the process likely made easier by the sheer amount of bufotoxin coursing through my real body.

Small wonder that licking toads was used in mystical practices.

I was like a mechanic slipping underneath the chassis of a car, able to reach deeper into the mechanisms of Sylvester's mind.

And tinker around a bit.

His mind was an instrument—tuned to stalk, hunt, and kill—and all I'd done was play myself into the center of his attention.

If I wanted to survive, I needed to stop playing his tune. I needed to find a different rhythm. One that didn't end with me in his stomach, or stuck between his teeth.

But Sylvester's mind had been gutted. Every emotion but aggression, hunger, and the satisfaction for killing things, had been stripped away or carved into something unusable.

All except one.

I could sense it now. Not everything had been cut out or cleanly rewired. It lay just under the surface, likely ignored by the Puppeteer, and left behind by the Biomancer. Not by choice, but by necessity. A byproduct of a required process—and a limitation of the magic that created Sylvester.

Biomancy, as Eugene explained, was the magical manipulation of a creature's existing biology. The actual rules were murky at best, but if a biomancer wanted a creature that was needlessly aggressive and physically strong, they'd want to take that creature's natural testosterone production and cranking it up to eleven.

It helped build muscle. And it would make animals territorial and prone to violence.

And considering this nightmare wasn't a mare, that meant overstimulating a particular set of organs.

A particular pair, if you would.

No points for guessing which.

And if what Sylvester had done to the truck hadn't been clue enough, I could more than sense now that Sylvester's pair was in full function.

Because, as I reached down into the part of his mind left unused and untouched, I found a slew of raw emotion ripe for manipulation.

And it was sticky.

Just like Rudy's mind had been.

A cesspool of untapped potential.

Oh, fuck me.

I was already regretting what I was about to do.