Prologue

Listen up, y’all. We’re gonna tell you the story of Calamity Jane. You might have already heard of CJ—she’s one of the most famous names of the Old West. She was quite the character, if you believe the stuff that was written about her in the dime-store novels and newspapers of the day. They say she dressed up in britches like a man, shooting and swearing with the best of them; that she was a Pony Express rider, a stagecoach driver, a pioneer, a scout for the US Army, a spy, a showgirl, and the love interest of many a notorious gunslinger. “The Heroine of the Plains,” they liked to call her, and if all this wasn’t exactly true, well, it made a good story, so Jane never did try to set the record straight.

Historians, for their part, claim that in “reality” Calamity Jane was an illiterate, foul-mouthed alcoholic. They paint her as a lone wolf, a wanderer, a perpetual screwup who eventually drank herself to death and died alone and friendless, a tragic end after a lifetime of self-destruction. Not exactly a happily ever after.

We, your faithful narrators, think Jane had a good heart and deserves a better ending, so (as usual) we have a different tale to tell. Hold on to your hats, because we’re going to take you back to 1876.

Now, we want to warn you that the America of this tall tale doesn’t exactly resemble the history books. We’ve improved upon it, naturally. We changed people’s names when it suited us, combined a bunch of guys named Bill into one, and messed around with dates and ages. As we do. In our story, Calamity Jane’s been working in a theatrical production called Wild Bill’s Wild West (say that ten times fast). The show was one part demonstration—sharpshooting and rodeo-type tricks—and one part storytelling, in which Wild Bill Hickok, America’s first gunslinger and all-around stone-cold badass, thrilled audiences with accounts about his great adventures hunting garou.

If you’re not familiar with the term garou, we can hardly blame you. It’s an old word, derived from garolf, which had been, over centuries, modified from yet another, even older word: werwulf.

You see where we’re going with this.

The garou had always been around, but they were good at hiding in plain sight. A garou looked like a human, walked and talked like a human, and really was a human . . . most of the time. But in 1876, garou bites were on the rise. There were whispers of an evil garou gang known as (wait for it) the Pack, which was headed up by a mysterious figure called (you guessed it) the Alpha. Understandably, the US government was concerned about all these people getting turned into werewolves, so they hired Wild Bill Hickok and his posse of undercover garou hunters to bring the Alpha to justice, a job that would lead to one of the wildest adventures in the history of the Wild West.

That brings us to the three not-so-typical teenagers this story is really about: a dashing young feller trying to follow in the footsteps of his famous father, an ambitious-but-charming sharpshooter determined to prove herself, and a hotheaded but tenderhearted girl who’s fixin’ to get tangled up in a few dangerous plots of her own.

Get ready to meet the real Calamity Jane.