“You’re under arrest,” said Bill to the wax-covered man in the vat. The garou had almost instantly reverted into his human form upon coming into contact with the hot tallow, which was a good thing, Jane thought, on account of all that hair. The wax had been hot enough to bind him, but not really burn him, which was also lucky.
“Jane!” Frank panted, running up to her and grabbing her by the shoulders. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I will have you know that I have single-handedly captured this here garou.” A great feat of derring-do if she’d ever heard it. Minus the hiding and the cowering, but those details didn’t matter. What was important was that she—Jane, not Bill or Frank or Charlie—had saved the day.
“Well done, Jane,” said Bill, and she beamed.
“How about the other guy?” she asked Frank. “The one in the top hat?”
Frank sighed. “I couldn’t catch him.”
Jane turned to the man in wax. “Where’s your friend?”
“He’s not my friend,” said the man.
“Where’s Mr. Badd?” she yelled.
“I’m Mr. Badd!” he yelled back.
“You’re Mr. Badd. Well, then who was the man in the top hat?” she asked, but Mr. Badd refused to say.
“What about the Alpha?” Bill asked. “What can you tell us about him?”
Mr. Badd laughed. “You’ll never find the Alpha. Never.”
Jane was getting awful tired of these cagey garou minions.
“Where’s Charlie?” Frank asked. “And Jack McCall?”
“Charlie and I got separated from Jack McCall,” said Bill. “Then later a huge pile of pipes came down on us. I was able to spring back, but Charlie got caught in it. He’s hurt pretty bad—busted his leg and some ribs, and he’s probably concussed, but I think he’ll pull through. I got him outside and flagged down someone to fetch a doctor.”
“Poor Charlie!” exclaimed Jane.
“Mr. Badd, if you’d be so kind as to give us the key to the cage downstairs,” Bill said to the man in the wax. “It will go better for you at this point if you cooperate.”
“It’s around my neck,” said Mr. Badd. “But I can’t move my arms.”
Bill retrieved the key. Then he left Frank to wait with Mr. Badd for the police to arrive and went with Jane back down to the basement, where they unlocked the cage.
“As I’m sure you’re aware,” Bill said, before they let the prisoners go free. “You folks have all been bitten by a garou, which means that you will become one yourselves. You must be thinking, ‘Now what?’” He laid a hand gently on the shoulder of the boy with the bushy eyebrows. “I’m here to tell you, your life can still go on, almost as usual, as long as you’re willing to follow a few rules.”
Jane leaned against the wall. This was a speech she’d heard Bill give many times before. She called it: “SO YOU’RE A WEREWOLF—NOW WHAT?”
A man in back raised his hand. He was missing his trigger finger. “There are rules to being a garou?”
Bill nodded solemnly. “Well, these are more like guidelines. It’s not illegal to be a garou. You can’t help that. But there are some restrictions that come with it, the first being, Don’t bite anybody. Makes sense, right? If you bite someone, enough to draw blood, you will infect that person, and they, too, will become a garou. That is illegal. So watch your mouth.”
“What about the full moon?” asked the boy with the eyebrows. “Is that when we’ll change?”
“Yes. That’s rule two, in fact. Beware the moon,” Bill affirmed. “I think it best if you lock yourself up during that time, to be safe, and remember that the moon is full three consecutive nights every month, not just one night. But that’s not the only time you can turn, which brings me to rule three: Be mindful of your temper. If you lose your cool, you could change and do something you regret. Any strong emotion—but fear and anger, mostly—can bring the wolf to the surface. It’s best to go off by yourself for a while. Don’t spend time around people until you get the wolfy side under control. And that’s the last rule: Protect the people you love.”
The group appeared to take this all pretty well. Maybe it seemed better than the cage and the uncertain future they had faced before they’d been rescued.
Jack McCall came loping up. He was out of breath, and his clothes were a bit raggedy, as if he’d been in a tussle himself.
“What happened to you?” Jane asked.
He smiled through his panting. “I got lost, is all. I have a terrible sense of direction. And then I got, well, scared. Sorry.”
Jane had a feeling that Jack McCall wasn’t being completely honest about being a seasoned garou hunter. But who was she to judge? She nodded. “It’s all right.”
“What’d I miss?” he asked.
Later, still with twenty-seven minutes to go before the Wild West show, Jane sat down at the bar across the street from the Coliseum Theater and allowed herself to take a breath. She’d finally found a bathroom, thank the Lord. Charlie was with the doctor, who’d said that he was going to be fine, eventually, but out of commission for a while. Frank and Bill had gone back to the hotel to gussy up before the show. But Jane just wanted to sit. It had been some day, and her entire body was hurting. Getting through the show would be a chore.
She rubbed at a particularly sore spot on her left arm. Then she frowned and rolled the sleeve of her shirt up to the elbow. What she saw there should have shocked her, but she felt oddly numb as she gazed down at it.
A bite.
She could see the exact outlines of the garou’s teeth. It didn’t actually look that bad, considering what it was, but it was scabbing. Which meant the garou had drawn blood.
When did it happen? she wondered dazedly. It must have been when the garou jumped her from behind. She hadn’t felt it then, but that was the only time she’d been close enough to get bit.
She rolled her sleeve back down and gestured to the barkeep.
“I’ll have a whiskey,” she murmured when he came over.
He put the glass in front of her and filled it with the amber liquid.
(Your narrators here. We’d like to pause to admit that, yes, we’re talking about a seventeen-year-old drinking whiskey, but this wasn’t strange or—cough—illegal for the time. People back then drank alcohol because bottled water didn’t exist yet, and the only available water was likely to be contaminated with things you don’t even want to know about. Jane herself had been drinking for pretty much as far back as she could remember. She’d decided a long time ago not to let whiskey get its hooks into her the way it did with some—cough, her parents—but tonight was turning out to be a drink-it-up sort of night.)
Jane lifted her glass and drank the whiskey all in a gulp, the firewater burning a trail from her throat to her stomach. She gasped and nodded at the barkeep. “Make that two.”