At that moment, Annie was perched on a catwalk above Calamity Jane and Frank Butler, staring at her rifle in much the same way that Mr. Butler had been contemplating his pistol, because here’s what you’ve probably already figured out: it wasn’t Mr. Butler who shot the garou, but Annie.
Unlike Mr. Butler, Annie had killed lots of things before . . . but never like this.
Before, when Annie had taken the life of a rabbit or squirrel or even a deer, she’d stopped and knelt next to the body, and thanked it for supplying her family with another meal, or a few dollars to help keep their farm running. She’d always been careful—so careful—to shoot to kill instantly, so that the creature felt no pain.
But this was different. It felt different, and she couldn’t stop looking at her gun, at her hands, and the way everything trembled.
If she hadn’t shot the beast, it would have eaten up Calamity Jane and Frank Butler. There was no question, not with the way it had lunged at them with its teeth snapping. Even Mr. Butler had seemed ready to shoot it, despite claiming he wanted to arrest it. Annie just happened to be faster, and so she’d killed it.
Her hands were still shaking.
There’d been a garou. Right. There. (It was still there, but now it wasn’t moving.) Sweat trickled down Annie’s face and neck, even though all her limbs felt cold and numb with shock.
Annie took several long, slow breaths as, below, Mr. Butler recovered himself as well.
“He was bad,” Jane said softly. “You didn’t have a choice.”
“Badd,” Mr. Butler repeated. Then: “Mr. Badd! He’s getting away!” He jumped up and ran after the top hat man, and Jane started to run in that direction too, but Mr. Butler called back, “Check on Charlie and Bill! Something happened down there!”
On the floor below, Calamity Jane hesitated—she clearly wanted to go with Mr. Butler—but then she went back to the stairs.
Annie slung her rifle strap over her chest and followed Jane.
Jane descended to the first floor, where hazy sunlight from the ceiling-level windows barely penetrated. It was a gloomy place, dominated by three huge vats, large wooden crates, and other unidentifiable pieces of machinery. The second floor, where Annie stood now, was a platform against the outer wall—positioned so that supervisors could overlook the main floor—with catwalks crisscrossing the space. Control pedestals stood watch over each of the vats, and as far as Annie could see, there wasn’t much in the way of railing to keep people from falling over the sides.
“How dangerous,” Annie muttered.
Below, Jane was coming off the stairs and heading around to the basement steps—slower now. “Charlie?” Wariness filled her voice as she peered down into the dark. “Bill?”
Annie crept toward the stairs Jane had taken, keeping an eye on the motionless garou body. It was still hard to believe she’d shot it. Plus, all those things she’d overheard—something about a train, about Tuesday, and a person called the Alpha that everyone was afraid of—crowded her mind. Wild Bill Hickok and his posse were definitely not finished hunting garou. No, they were just doing it in secret now.
“Hello?” Jane called ahead.
No one answered.
“I really have to go,” Jane muttered, and Annie felt a pang of sympathy for the other girl. She was alone (or so she thought), in the dark, and this was a really bad time to have to relieve oneself. (Is there ever a good time? Not really. There are only inconvenient times.)
Shoes scraped the concrete as Jane paced, glancing around until her eyes landed on a bucket. “Aha!” she said, but then, from the basement steps, a hulking figure emerged behind her.
The garou was fast. With a terrifying growl, it tackled Jane to the ground before Annie could either call out or shoot it. And now, there was nothing to shoot, because the garou and Jane had rolled behind a vat and out of Annie’s line of sight.
“Drat,” she swore, and scrambled for the stairway, whipping her gun from its place around her chest.
Partway to the stairs, her toe caught on something, and she staggered forward a few steps before looking back. The garou. The one she’d shot. It was still there, while down below, the growling and scuffling intensified.
Which meant that there were two garou.
Two.
Annie ran down the stairs, loading her gun as she went, but it really was much darker down here and she was going to be too late to help Jane unless she did something now.
At the bottom of the stairs, she found a large red button attached to the machines. The label—barely readable in the shadows—read “ON.”
Annie slammed her palm against the button, and immediately a metallic clanging filled the room and the vat began to heat. A sour stench rolled through, like warm animal fat.
“Grr!” cried the garou, and a moment later, heavy (but human) footsteps ran away from the beast—toward Annie and the stairwell.
Annie ducked out of sight as Jane threw herself up the stairs—thook thook thook—and back onto the second floor.
Heart pounding, Annie hefted her rifle and crept around the heating vat.
The machinery clanked and clattered, and the stink of tallow filled the factory, but Annie kept her footfalls quiet as she moved through the gloom.
A low growl was her only warning: the garou ran toward her. Annie swung her gun around as the beast brushed past. She sneezed and reeled back, gripping her gun like her life depended on it (it probably did), but the garou didn’t go up the stairs after Jane. Instead, an exterior door opened, and dim light fell across the garou as it ran out, away from the banging machinery and Annie and her gun.
Was it . . . running away?
Well, maybe it had heard what Annie had done to the garou upstairs. It should be afraid.
It surely wouldn’t be long before Mr. Hickok, Mr. Utter, and Mr. McCall came to investigate the noise of the machinery, so Annie was about to sit on a crate and wait in the shadows when something above caught her eye.
Jane was moving, creeping toward an open window. But that wasn’t the alarming part. No, behind Jane, a garou—the one Annie had killed—was sitting up and shaking its head like it was waking up from the most confusing nap.
Wait, the one Annie had killed? That garou shouldn’t be sitting up at all!
And worse yet, as the wolf shook his head, fur drifted down to the bottom floor. Annie couldn’t see it, but her nose sure knew about it. Tiny wolf hairs tickled her nostrils and—
“ACHOOO!” Annie sneezed so hard her eyeballs hurt.
“Bless you!” Jane said from above, because some things were drilled into a person, and she literally could not stop herself even when silence was important.
Annie rubbed her nose and looked up to see the garou swing around to look at Jane.
Jane let out a yelp and scrambled down one of the catwalks stretching over a vat, but it was too late. The (not-so) dead garou lurched to its feet and lumbered after her.
Quickly, Jane ducked beneath a control pedestal, hiding, but the garou stomped across the second floor and turned down the catwalk, moving straight toward her. The metal swayed beneath its weight, and even over the noise of the machines, Annie could hear it huffing and puffing—closing in on Calamity Jane.
“Well, drat,” Annie muttered. How dare that garou come back to life? She lifted her gun, but there wasn’t a good angle. “Drat,” she swore again.
The garou clomped closer and closer to the control pedestal where Jane was hiding.
Annie did the only thing she could think to do: she whistled.
It was a good, loud whistle, one that pierced even through the banging of the machinery. The garou’s head swiveled in Annie’s direction, and—wasting no time—Jane kicked out with both feet, knocking the beast back just far enough that it lost its balance on the platform.
With a roar, the garou fell backward, and since there were no rails for safety, it dropped directly into the bubbling vat below.
Annie blew out a long breath as she slumped against a crate. Both wolves were gone and—how about this—she’d saved the day.