He didn’t. He hesitated, then carefully drew away. My heart dropped as I stared at his throat and listened to his raspy breathing. Archer said, “We should wait on that.”
I closed my eyes and rocked back on my heels. Heat flashed through me along with humiliation and the urge to flee to the bathroom where Hopper remained suspiciously silent so I could berate myself for stupidity in peace.
“Shit, Ada, I’m sorry. Hear me out,” he said. He made an aggravated noise and reached for me, trying to pull me in for a hug, but I avoided his embrace and instead planted myself at the kitchen table.
The night would not end soon enough. I couldn’t breathe. I tried to kiss him and he rejected me. I put myself out there and it failed spectacularly. My ego imploded until I went light-headed and had to rest my face in my hands. I couldn’t look at him. If I saw those deep blue eyes with a speck of pity in them…
Hermitage seemed about right. Just retreat into the woods and become one with nature so I never had to face the abject devastation of winding up for a kiss and having the guy literally push me away.
Archer paced in heavy footsteps through the living room, agitated, and spoke through clenched teeth. “I don’t want to mislead you, Ada. There are things you don’t know about us and before you make a decision about what this might look like between us, I want you to have the facts.”
Like a single kiss would have killed either of us. I just waited. Was it possible to feel lower than crushed?
He finally set up the tablet near where I hid my face. His body heat mocked me with the potential of closeness, of touch, of something more. Yet again he withdrew, and the rejection slammed into me like a heavyweight uppercut to the face. Archer said quietly, “Just start the video when you’re ready.”
Nothing would surprise me. He could have rolled out a clip of aliens landing in the desert and it might make me shrug. Why the hell not. Vampires, werewolves, aliens. Throw in some ghosts and lizard-people for extra flavor. Who even gave a shit anymore? The world made no sense and was a shitty place. Fabulous.
But he would stay until I watched the video and heard whatever excuses he offered. Once he was gone… Well, then I could concentrate on Dragomir. I forced myself to look up and play the blurry clip. It focused after a second and showed a wooded area lush with spring growth and a riot of vines and flowers. Water trickled nearby and birds chirped. I waited for something to happen, drumming my fingers on the table.
“Left side of the screen,” Archer said.
Another few seconds passed with nothing more than the swaying of leaves to show the video still played. Then a shadow moved through the trees with a slow, shuffling walk. It paused to pluck a leaf and sniff it. I sat up. It looked like the sasquatch that tried to eat Hopper. Somewhat wider and not quite as tall, maybe seven or eight feet, and not…
It got closer to the camera and that certainty faded. It definitely wasn’t a sasquatch. A human male who’d been out in the woods for a really, really long time, like one of the thru-hikers on the Appalachian Trail. Covered with dark hair but not nearly as much as the sasquatch or the beast that attacked us on the trail. I swallowed as I watched, trepidation building. The birds ceased chirping and an unnatural stillness settled in the background of the video.
The figure stretched and scratched, yawning, and meandered closer to the camera, its attention focused elsewhere. It stepped through what looked like berry bushes and began picking the fruit without concern for the brambles. I didn’t take my eyes off the video. “What is it?”
“Just watch.”
I shook my head. “I’m not going to watch an hour-long nature film, just tell me…”
The hairy man froze, staring off to the side as something else crashed into the brush like a herd of elephants. He growled and crouched, searching for the threat, and I held my breath as the noise grew closer. Far away, a voice shouted about a target.
More noise. The wild man snarled and searched for an escape. It bolted to the side and stopped short, howling. I gripped the table. What the hell was going on? The man struggled against a trap, maybe a snare, but he didn’t yell. He didn’t shout for help. He made animal noises and… wolf howls. No words. Howls. Growls. Snarls.
My heart sank. It wasn’t going to…
The howls turned desperate and pained. Shouts got closer, almost intelligible. The wild man yipped and then dropped to the ground, barely visible through the leaves and thick branches. A split second and then something else stood up. Something terrifying.
An enormous figure with canine features stood up on its hind legs where the man had been. The hair on my arms stood up. I sat back, away from the tablet. My breath came faster as I watched the thing twist and fight. It dropped to four legs and snapped at something tangled around its legs. It must have been special effects of some kind. Monster make-up. Sure, what I’d seen two days before looked remarkably similar to the beast trapped on the video, but that didn’t mean a person actually turned into… that.
I’d pictured werewolves as big wolves, nothing more. The stories talked about people turning into them, but I’d detached that from the process as impossible. Humans didn’t change their shape back and forth. Conservation of mass on its own made it impossible. The beastly figure howling and trying to chew its leg off was objectively larger than the more human-like man had been.
And yet… I watched it. It happened on the video. I’d seen a similar beast in person and smelled its awful breath as it tried to kill us.
I drew breath to ask Archer for an explanation but gasped as half a dozen camo-clad, weapon-toting figures converged on the trapped beast. Oh no. No no no. I shook my head and pushed away from the table. I didn’t want to see it die. It had been a person – or near enough to one – just minutes earlier. They trapped it and walked up to just murder it.
The camera caught low conversation between the men as the werewolf continued to struggle in the trap and lash out at them, and I covered my ears as a sharp volley of gunfire drowned out everything else. When it faded, nothing else broke the quiet.
I swallowed a knot in my throat. I looked at Archer and found him standing in the living room, hands in his pockets, watching me. I couldn’t decipher his expression. “What is…”
“Keep watching,” he said, and pain threaded through his voice. His eyes grew haunted and far away. “Or just listen. There’s more.”
“I don’t want to listen,” I whispered.
“You need to,” he said. “To understand what this is.”
I shook my head, that damn lump in my throat again.
Cursing and breaking branches burst out of the video, making me jump, and snarling echoed in stereo. I dared a look and then couldn’t tear my gaze away as chaos erupted between the trees. The men scattered and swung their guns around wildly as two, then three more beasts leapt into their midst. Screams joined the growling and snapping and yelping, gunfire adding a sharp staccato beat underneath it all. My guts churned. I didn’t want to watch it, but as the men battled for their lives and the beasts battled for theirs…
I couldn’t breathe. I knew intellectually that cryptids could be predators. Some might even be obligate carnivores. But the savagery of the attack on the men who’d killed the first beast made my blood run cold. The beasts demonstrated savvy and intelligence as they circled and split one man away from the others, as they leapt at weapons to disarm the hunters. The hunters attempted to protect each others’ backs but the beasts cut through them and physically knocked them aside. One man fell under a beast’s paws and didn’t get back up.
I walked away. I went into the kitchen as the video kept playing and men kept screaming, and got the last jar of peach moonshine from the emergency cupboard. Ice and moonshine went into two glasses after I put down a few shots, but I stayed far away from the tablet until the noise faded to nothing. I looked at the black screen and wordlessly offered Archer the glass.
He took it, standing close, and said quietly, “They’re a threat, Ada. They’re dangerous. This is a serious business. I need you to know that, to understand why this might not be easy. We lost three guys out of six to the werewolves, and another one died after he caught the virus.”
“The virus killed him?”
“Not exactly.” Archer hesitated, then went on, “He caught it and turned, tried to attack everyone, so we put him out of his misery.”
“You murdered him,” I said slowly. How was he the same man who’d joked with me on the couch about time machines? How could he talk so calmly about ending a man’s life, especially someone he’d known as a colleague, maybe a friend?
“Euthanasia. He was sick and suffering, and would have killed his own family if he got loose.” Archer sniffed the moonshine and jerked back. “What the hell is this? Pink rubbing alcohol?”
“Peach moonshine.” The surreality of the moment expanded until time moved as strangely as when Dragomir hit ‘pause’ earlier to escape Archer’s approach. Werewolves and the morality of euthanizing people who’d been bitten were conversational topics I never envisioned broaching. I swallowed most of mine down without blinking, still watching that tablet like the video would replay on its own and show more horrors.
Archer sipped and coughed, pounding on his chest. “Hoo boy. That is strong.” He shook himself like a wet dog and picked up the tablet to flip through it. “There’s something else I want you to watch.”
“No thank you. I don’t need to see anything else die.” Those things, those beasts, were in the mountains. At least one that attacked us, possibly the crazy old man who attacked me. How long had they been out there? Could Jamie have run across one?
“This isn’t gory. It shows the transformation from man to wolf without background noise and distractions. We rarely catch them going from wolf to man.” He queued up the video and glanced at me. I didn’t get any closer, but I didn’t run. Archer nodded and started playing it.
A broad, somewhat hair man stalked inside a cage like a circus lion. He still looked mostly human, although there was a wildness in his movements and eyes that screamed danger. High-strung, aggressive, and hungry. His hands gripped the bars, the nails yellowed and torn, and watched whoever filmed with bloodshot, jaundiced eyes.
“We trapped it after it attacked hikers out west.” Archer remained standing, occasionally sipping the moonshine and making faces. “There are some folks who do research on the werewolves, so when possible, we take them alive. But not if it means endangering healthy humans.”
I inched closer as the werewolf man went back to pacing and growling. Something banged into the cage and I jumped, sloshing moonshine over my hand, but forgot everything as I stared at the tablet. The noise startled the werewolf, too, and he changed. The man blurred around the edges and faded but darkened at the same time. Hair appeared, dense and wiry, as his limbs snapped and popped. Re-formed into a more canine shape. The face remained vaguely humanoid, though with a snout and pointed ears on the top of its head, and the misshapen body was a nightmare of human mixed with lupine.
I couldn’t take my eyes off it as the werewolf shook itself and got on its hind legs before dropping to all fours. It growled and charged the cage, sending the cameraman stumbling back, and threw itself against the bars without regard for injuring itself. The scary intelligence remained in its eyes but any restraint or humanity that might have existed in the twisted mind had disappeared. Massive teeth broke on the bars until blood and saliva dripped from its jowls, but still the werewolf attacked.
“Huh.” I eased back into my chair and started the video over, rolling through it in slow motion to watch the transformation again. It reacted to the loud noise, some kind of startle reflex, and immediately changed to an aggressive semi-canine form.
“I expected a ‘eureka!’ instead of just a huff, you know.”
I waved over my shoulder at him. “I didn’t huff. Do you have anything closer than this?”
“Nothing that shows the whole process.” Archer sat next to me, though he focused on my face instead of the tablet and its gross but mesmerizing videos. “Do you believe me now, Dr. Montgomery?”
The gentle teasing made me shiver, and reminded me again of that conversation we needed to have. Watching the video and zooming in on different frames was far safer than looking at him. “I reserve the right to change my conclusions as I examine new evidence.”
“I expect nothing less.”
“How does it happen? You mentioned a virus. Have you isolated the virus? Do you know what mechanisms alter genetics or somehow affect their mass?”
“I was hoping you would have some theories.”
I frowned at him. “What do you mean? I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Archer picked up a handful of papers on the table at his elbow, and I choked when I saw the titles: the vampire math articles, genetic editing, biomedical engineering… The weirdest of the weird. “Your… varied interests make you uniquely suited to think about problems like this.”
Exactly what Dragomir said. I got up and walked away, shivering. “Is that the real reason you’re out here?”
“No,” he said. “Finding you was serendipity.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. Not exactly what I’d have called it, even with him sitting at my table and the memory of that kiss hot enough to curl my toes. I got more ice and sat back down to investigate what other information they’d put on the tablet. Maybe they’d run blood panels or other tests. “I don’t know what to tell you. This should be impossible, just based on conservation of mass, like I said. You can’t take a human body and then somehow transform it into a larger wolf body. It is literally impossible unless it somehow takes mass from the environment during the change and then expels it when returning to human form.”
I snorted and slapped my forehead. “What the fuck am I saying. You cannot break the laws of physics. Bend them at a subatomic level, sure. But this… You might as well just say you need to turn gravity off for it and only it.”
“I thought you studied quantum stuff. Alternate worlds or parallel universes. Time travel and matter existing in two states at the same time. Right? Didn’t you run experiments on that alive and dead cat thing? If something can be in two places at once, surely there’s a possibility, however remote, that a werewolf could break the law about saving mass.”
I eyed him. “What do you know about quantum anything and the principle of superposition?”
“I read some of your papers.” Whatever he saw in my face made him laugh. Archer held his hands up, surrendering. “Okay, I tried to read some of your papers. I understood every fourth or fifth word, but I could mostly translate the abstracts. I phoned a friend for the details. Come on. You believe in cryptids. Why not werewolves or vampires?”
I choked when he said “vampires.”
Archer’s expression grew guarded. “You don’t have to laugh.”
“I’m not… this isn’t funny.” I pounded on my chest and sipped my drink, though the moonshine didn’t do much except clear my sinuses. “You can’t possibly think… You want me to believe there are vampires? Blood-drinking vampires?”
Before he answered, I popped open a folder of lab tests and scrolled through them, frowning as I checked for abnormalities. A change of topic was definitely safer than talking about vampires. I couldn’t let anything slip about Dragomir, and I wasn’t great at playing dumb. “Was the blood taken while they were in wolf form or human form?”
“I have no idea.”
Amateurs. “The next time they do it, they should note that down. Different values in blood from the same creature in each form could provide insight into what causes the change.” I found x-rays and kept searching, rotating the tablet and images. “And cryptids evolved, thank you. We can trace a logical path from hominids to sasquatches, to bigfoots, to yetis. We can see links from ancient dire wolves to canine or lupine cryptids. None of which change their shape at will.”
Although saying it felt intellectually dishonest. Despite the impossibility of the videos I’d watched, there was only so long I could deny. Confronting Dragomir’s existence left me susceptible to just saying “fuck it” and accepting werewolves could somehow violate the law of conservation of mass. They probably violated all kinds of shit and I just hadn’t found it yet. Dragomir could talk in my head, for fuck’s sake, and apparently slowed my – and Archer’s – perception of time to enable his getaway.
I massaged my temples. More moonshine didn’t help, but it took the edge off the hysteria bubbling up in my chest. Werewolves. In Chilhowee. Attacking people. And the wild man who attacked me had characteristics of a werewolf in human form, according to Archer and his people. Had the wild man managed to bite me? Was there some chance that I would go crazy in the full moon? It was just a couple days away, so at least I wouldn’t have to wait long to find out.
“Ada,” Archer said, tapping on the table near my hand. “I know this is a lot to take in, but I need you to know about this before there’s any other conversation. About personal matters.”
My ears rang as he wrenched me back around to that uncomfortable decision I dreaded and needed to hear. I waited.
His warm gaze studied me as he leaned on the table. He chose each word with care and laid them out slowly, piling up bricks to build a wall between us. “I look for the unexplained the same as you do, just… for a different reason.”
I knew where he headed. There was only one explanation. But my heart still raced and the urge to flee kicked in.