THE MILLION-DOLLAR HUNT

JONATHAN MABERRY

Jonathan Maberry decided to write about Mustapha, my ex-con lone wolf. To make enough money to give his lover a better life, Mustapha agrees to take part in a reality game show where weres of all stripes hunt one another for nonlethal sports entertainment. But there’s a much darker game running. The real game is an absolute killer.

—

-1-

The trick was to remember that this was a game.

Hard to do when you’re dying.

Hard to do when they’re hunting you.

Hard to do when you are absolutely sure you’re going to die.

A game.

Yeah, sure.

Just not his game.

-2-

Mustapha Khan moved through the forest as silently as possible, doing his best to avoid the cameras mounted high on trees.

Sometimes he ran on two legs.

Sometimes on four.

Different advantages to each.

Different vulnerabilities.

The werewolf could move faster than the man.

But when he was human, the drugs didn’t seem to knock the world sideways as much. Whatever was on those damn claws was clearly designed to disorient the wolf, not the man.

Weird science.

Or, just weird.

He didn’t care.

Besides, at the moment, he needed two legs and two hands. One hand to pull himself up the slope of the ravine—grasping slender sapling trunks and gritty root tangles—the other to keep his wadded-up T-shirt pressed tightly against his wound.

Wounds, really.

Four long, deep cuts. Mustapha didn’t know how bad they were. The pain was less than he expected. Probably shock. And if it was shock, there would be one tossed-bone of a benefit. Shock slows bleeding. Put that in the win column. Kind of.

He smiled weakly at the thought of that “benefit.” It was the kind of good luck he usually had. The universe was always being so damn kind to him.

Shit.

He looked up at the side of the ravine and could swear it was twice as high.

“Come on, goddamn it,” he growled. Not sure if he was mad at the world, mad at himself, or just mad. As in batshit crazy.

A purple-brown root curled out of the slope like a loop of intestine. He reached for it, closed his fingers around it, took a breath, pulled. Pain seemed to explode in every molecule of his body.

“Fuck you,” he told the pain, the root, the slope, the drugs in his blood, and the son of a bitch who’d cut him. Bitterness was something he could grind his teeth on as he climbed, so he snarled with anger and pulled himself another foot upward. And another.

Late yesterday afternoon, when he’d come this way, the ravine was nothing. A twenty-five-degree decline on one side, maybe thirty on the other. Nothing he couldn’t manage in human form without working up a sweat. Now that slope felt like a sheer cliff. He fought for every inch upward.

Twice he slipped and slid all the way to the ravine floor. Thirty-five feet of hidden rocks, sticker bushes, rotted vegetation, and wormy dirt. This was his third try.

Sweat ran in crooked lines down his skin. The rags of his clothes were soaked with it, and with blood. A small fragment of consolation came from the knowledge—the red memory—that some of it was his.

His.

The bastard who’d clawed him.

At least he could bleed.

At least that son of a bitch wasn’t as invulnerable as he wanted everyone to think. Close, yeah, sure. Real close. But if he could bleed, then . . .

Mustapha took a breath, snaked his hand out for a maple sapling. His fingers closed around it but immediately began to slip, gravity and weakness prying his hand open.

“No!” he shouted.

No.

But the day said yes.

And he fell.

He hit every goddamn rock and stone and root on the slope. He bounced twice and rolled over off the edge of an outcrop of limestone. From there it was a straight drop to the ravine floor.

He landed badly.

Far above him was a camera, but its red eye was pointed elsewhere. Maybe it hadn’t seen him. Maybe it was still looking for him.

Or maybe a man bleeding to death in a ravine made for bad television.

As his life leaked out of him he found that he no longer cared.

Mustapha’s grip on consciousness slipped as easily and completely as had his hand.

“No . . .” he said once more, very weakly. The canopy of trees above him lost its form, the leaves smearing into a dark canvas on which was painted absolutely nothing.

-3-

Dreams offered no rest for him. They did not let him forget.

As Mustapha lay in a rag-doll sprawl at the bottom of the ravine, his mind rewound the last few days as if it were all recorded on videotape. Be kind, rewind. Except it was no kindness.

The tape seemed to be damaged. Splotchy. The memories came in chunks, pieces, with scenes unfinished and missing dialogue. As he fell deeper and deeper into the black well, he watched it as if it all belonged to someone else’s life. To a life that could not possibly be his.

Sitting at the Hair of the Dog, drinking unsweetened iced tea from a sweating glass, thinking about the Long Tooth pack. Join, don’t join. Over and over again, looking at it from all sides. And in the middle of that come two guys in city suits. Big white guy, medium-sized black guy. Gray suits. Hand-sewn Italian shoes. Oakleys that they never took off. Big smiles with lots of white teeth. Gold rings and Rolexes. Money, even from a distance. As they come in, Mustapha sees the Lexus LX 570 sitting outside.

Without preamble the black guy says, “KeShawn Johnson?”

Mustapha gave him the look. The look. The one that says Go away while you can still walk in any language you want.

The white guy says, “Our pardon. Mustapha Khan?”

“Who’s asking?” Mustapha replies.

The white guy produces a business card, holds it out, and when it isn’t taken he places it faceup on the tabletop.

REAL ADVENTURE PRODUCTIONS

Expensive card. Embossed.

Name on the lower left is Ronald Hawes. The address is in Hollywood.

“I’m Hawes,” Hawes says, then nods to his companion. “This is Mr. Bell.”

Mustapha still gives them the look, though he changes the frequency to include a clear “so what” vibe. But he doesn’t say anything. Lets them do the work.

“We would like to talk to you about The Million-Dollar Hunt.”

“What the hell is that?”

Hawes and Bell smile their whitest smiles. “It’s how you become a rich and famous man.”

“Not much interested in becoming famous,” says Mustapha.

“What about becoming rich?” asks Bell.

Mustapha takes a breath. “Yeah. We can talk about that.”

And then only fragments of the conversation that followed. Snatches of sentences.

“. . . whole new kind of reality show . . .”

“. . . like Survivor or The Great Race but with a real edge . . .”

“. . . two players . . .”

“. . . like, not prerecorded . . .”

“. . . subscription only . . .”

After that, it was murkier for his dreaming mind. A flight to Los Angeles to meet with producers and a director. And lawyers. Papers to sign. Checks to deposit. Photos to be taken. Interviews timed for the rollout of the show.

The show.

The Million-Dollar Hunt.

That’s what it was called.

A new spin on The Most Dangerous Game, except that it wasn’t men hunting other men.

It was were hunting were.

Players go into the woods wearing only the clothes on their backs. They live off the land and follow scent markers to find equipment, weapons, and food. The weapons are mock—rubber knives, paintball guns, water-balloon grenades. No killing weapons.

Even in his delirium Mustapha thought, Yeah, right.

The rules were simple.

In round one, it’s all about surviving dummy booby traps. That part was easy, even a little fun. With the tree-mounted cameras recording it all for all the pay-per-view couch potatoes out there, and the possibility of residuals from DVD sales down the road. Maybe even a book deal for the winner.

Then there was round two.

Round two was about weres fighting one another with fake weapons. Each weapon rigged with a little built-in sensor to record wounding blows and killing blows, like in fencing matches. Touch a throat and earn a beep.

And earn a bonus.

Starting pay before Mustapha set one foot into the forest was ten thousand dollars. Serious bank.

Escaping or disarming booby traps earned cash ranging from two hundred dollars to a grand.

Battles with rubber weapons were scaled, too. Disabling injury—a touch to bicep or thigh—was low pay. Getting a beep from touching a throat, a heart, a groin, an artery, was bigger bucks.

All in fun.

The fat slobs in their La-Z-Boys watching from the comfort of their homes would be getting boners imagining that it was them out there. Fighting with skill, fighting with ferocity.

Mustapha still liked that part of it.

Then there was round three.

Round three was what it was all about.

That was were fighting were for real.

No rubber knives.

No splashy water balloons.

Round three was claws and teeth.

Even so, it was supposed to be simulated. A fight with no more reality than the brawling in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Some bruises, sure. A little blood? Why not? It looks great on a flat-screen TV. But at the end of the day, the losers go home with a short count on their paychecks and the winner cashes a check for one million dollars.

His dreaming mind sneered.

Even drugged and bleeding, he knew the difference between a Hollywood truth and a brutal reality.

This was either a scam of the most dangerous kind or a runaway train that was off the rails.

In either case, Mustapha was losing the game.

He lay there, sprawled in the dirt at the bottom of a gash in the earth. Four ragged lines torn in his flesh leaked blood into the soil.

-4-

The memory of the fight replayed over and over as he lay there.

Mustapha had just won a mock fight with rubber hatchets. He and the werefox he’d beaten had stayed in human form for the whole fight. That was the rule for that round. They had to prove themselves as human warriors.

The fox was a tall, wiry Texan with bright red hair and a dozen piercings on his face. Sunlight struck sparks from earlobes, lips, eyebrow, nose, and on the diamond stud drilled through the bridge of the man’s nose.

Little bastard could fight, though.

He and Mustapha had feinted and dueled for almost a full minute—which is a long damn time in a fight. In the movies and on TV a fight can spill out for minutes, but when it’s real—really real, not two guys measuring their junk in a bar—it was all over in seconds.

Mustapha and the fox—he never did learn the man’s name—both knew how to handle blades, and the other guy had the kind of moves you only ever learn in a prison yard. Okay, not hatchets per se, but the dart-and-dodge body movements that kept a blade fighter alive while he deconstructed the other guy. The kind of fighting cons doing hard time pretty much hold a patent on.

It was the prison thing—and all the memories that came with it—that made Mustapha want to win that fight. He did, too. He let the fox guy get close enough to land a solid elbow shot to the short ribs, which was part of a well-known combination to deliver a follow-up close-range shank. Mustapha took the elbow hit, but he was already moving to counter the follow-up. He pushed himself into the hit, taking it too soon, jamming the fox guy’s pivot, spun him around, and wrapped one muscular arm around his throat from behind, kneed him in the coccyx, and reached around to chop him in the crotch with the rubber hammer.

Still hurt, though.

Still hurt like a son of a bitch. Just not as bad as what he’d done to the fox.

Fox guy dropped to his knees, vomited, and collapsed sideways, clutching his balls and turning a nice shade of puce.

That was the first in round two. Each round doubled the number of encounters, and that one wasn’t two guys bashing each other with rubber weapons. It was were against were, and in this case, a werepuma.

That one was quick. Probably too quick for good ratings, and definitely too quick for a top bonus, but it was a win. Mustapha had trapped the puma on the edge of a bluff and when it reared to slash him, Mustapha had simply run into it. The puma went right over the edge and into the water. By the time he climbed out, the current had taken him too far downstream for Mustapha to bother. It wasn’t a simulated big-ticket kill, but it was a win.

Mustapha figured that getting to the end of the game and snatching that big prize was going to do him a lot more good than getting scuffed up in a bunch of piddling duels. Especially if he had an opponent waiting for him who was going to be real trouble. Like a werelion or weretiger.

Or werebear.

Oh, my.

Forty minutes after dunking the puma he ran into a bear.

Son of a bitch.

The bear.

Buoyed by his win, and already counting the bonus money, Mustapha shifted to four legs and ran through the woods, burning off nervous energy, letting the adrenaline dilute as it passed through his racing blood.

He ran up and down hills, delighting in the mental rush of power that came from winning. Even though there was no kill. Even though this was not fighting for inclusion in a pack. A win was a win was a win.

Put it in the bank.

He never saw the bear.

He smelled it, though, about a half second too late.

It was waiting for him. Patient, the way good hunters are. Silent. Snugged down in a tangle of fallen pine boughs that were clumped beside a well-worn game trail. Hiding amid all of those other scents. Deer and elk and raccoon. Invisible for that extra half second. Cameras in the trees recording it all.

Mustapha was in midstride, his senses just beginning to alert him to a wrongness in the air. Then there was a blur of movement. Brown fur, white fangs, and yellow claws.

The impact was terrible.

Mustapha was a powerful wolf. Lean and muscular.

The werebear was bigger.

Much, much bigger.

And it was in full motion when it blindsided him.

The impact knocked him sideways and they rolled over and over together, both of them growling and snapping, claws reaching for flesh. They struck a pine tree and broke apart, landing on either side of it. Mustapha whipped around and hunched down, showing his teeth.

The bear got to its feet without haste.

As if it knew this was a kill, not a fight.

They stared at each other from fifteen feet apart, with only the torn bark of the pine between them.

The rules of the Hunt had been clear.

You can bite to break skin.

You can cut only skin deep.

No kills.

No muscle-deep wounds.

Blood was fine.

Nobody dies.

Those were the rules.

But as he crouched there, Mustapha could feel his stomach begin to burn. He dared not take his eyes off the bear to look. But he could smell his own blood.

Too much of it.

Too much.

Too deep.

The bear had nearly gutted him.

The brute’s mouth was open. Hungry. Waiting to bite.

Dark brown eyes stared at him.

Three things happened in the next moment.

They changed the game. They cracked the world open.

The first thing was that Mustapha knew those eyes. He knew them in bear form. And he knew them in human form.

His wolf mouth was not constructed for human speech; otherwise he would have blurted the name. He would have spat it out as a statement, a question, an accusation of betrayal. The name burned in his mind, though.

Gundersen.

Gundersen?

The big werebear was from his days before Shreveport. They were from his prison days. This was Dutch Gundersen. A guard on his cell block. Not exactly a friend, but not an enemy. Gundersen had treated him fairly. He wasn’t the kind of screw to vent his problems on prisoners. He was tough, but he was always stand-up. He wasn’t the kind to do this. The game, maybe. But not to break the rules.

The second thing that happened in that same fractured moment was that Mustapha saw something on the side of the bear’s muscular neck. Two somethings.

They looked almost like hummingbirds. Bulbous bodies with brightly colored feathers. Mustapha had only seen the things on nature shows. When field biologists or zookeepers have to subdue a large and dangerous animal.

Tranquilizer darts.

Two of them, their needles buried so deep in the bear’s neck that they hadn’t torn loose during the attack.

The third thing—the last thing that moment could afford to tell him—was that Gundersen’s eyes were filled with all of the wrong emotions. There was hate. There was bloodlust. But there was also absolutely no sign of recognition.

And over those burning eyes was a narcotic glaze.

The bear was drugged.

While he slept and bled and remembered, Mustapha knew that the drugs were now in him, too. Through bite and spit and claws, whatever had been in the bear’s bloodstream was now in his.

He feared it as much as he feared the bear and the broken rules of the game and the wounds in his body.

He dreamed of the rest of the fight. Of how he had torn and slashed at the bear, wounding it in turn. Of how they had fought to the edge of a drop-off. How they’d chased each other through a sudden downpour. And how Mustapha broke away and ran for his life during the heaviest of the rain.

The dream played over and over again. Each time the fear was worse. Like the hoofbeats of something approaching.

Fear pushed him down deeper into the dreams.

Fear was the claw that tore at him while he lay there.

-5-

Saying a name out loud woke him.

“Warren.”

His lover was not in Mustapha’s dream, but it was a reason to come back to the light. To open his eyes.

To be alive.

He lay there and looked up at the canopy of trees as if he could see Warren hiding among the boughs and leaves.

“Warren . . .” he murmured.

There was no answer.

Of course there wasn’t.

Warren was hundreds of miles away. Back in Shreveport. Maybe watching all of this on TV. Watching him die out here in the woods.

Mustapha briefly closed his eyes, embarrassed and ashamed of his weakness. Of his defeat. Of letting Warren down.

The money from this gig was supposed to be their out. Their exit strategy from all the games in town. The packs and all of that. It was supposed to be a million-dollar ticket to the quiet life far away. Maybe down in Florida. Or way, way out in California.

Not up here.

Not in the endless forests of Washington State.

This was a million damn miles from anywhere.

A million miles from Warren.

And Mustapha could feel his exit door swinging shut.

In his mind’s eye—in that cruel lens through which he could always see the trail of mistakes and small failures that led him from who he had been to what he was now—he thought he saw Warren. The slim, small man with the killer’s eyes and the gentlest hands. Warren was there, standing on the far side of the exit, and as it closed he made no move to keep the door open. Lines of sadness were carved onto his face. His eyes were wet with disappointment.

“Warren . . . ?”

The door closed and so did Mustapha’s eyes.

Once more the world went away.

This time, however, he did not dream.

Instead he lay unmoving, his chest barely rising, as night slowly closed its fist around him.

-6-

Mustapha did not wake up.

The wolf did.

-7-

In wolf form he rose.

The pain was there. The wounds were still there.

The wolf didn’t care.

The man was submerged. Deeper than he had ever been. So deep that the thing that climbed slowly up the side of the ravine wasn’t a werewolf at all. In wolfshape Mustapha was still Mustapha. His mind, his will.

Not now.

Now he was nearly all wolf.

The commingled aspects of man and monster were disconnected, victims of the drug and blood loss and exhaustion. Now it was the wolf that clambered over the edge of the ravine and stood trembling at its edge. The forest was filled with shadows, but darkness was no veil to him. Not anymore. His eyes seemed sharper. Far more acute. Seeing this forest with a different spectrum. Its eyes could track the wavering flight of a moth through the densest shadows. Its ears could track the fall of a leaf from a tree half a mile away. And stripped of human thoughts, this wolf’s mind was simpler, more pure, less confused by distractions. The clarity was a powerful thing.

For a moment it stood there, reveling in these new senses. The inrush of sensory information was incredible and yet the wolf’s mind could process it. On some level, down where Mustapha still dreamed, he knew this was wrong. Wolves are not able to do this. Their senses are sharp, but not this sharp. Not anywhere near this sharp. This was wrong.

Wrong.

But it felt so incredibly right.

It felt correct.

As if this was how it was supposed to be before . . .

Before what?

His dreaming mind could not answer the question. The wolf did not want to. It accepted.

The wolf began walking away from the ravine, slowly at first, listening to what was happening inside. Tasting pain to understand damage.

When Mustapha changed from man to wolf, that wolf had the same mass and weight. It was larger than ordinary wolves. It was no different now. He was the same size wolf—but this wolf was not the wolf he had always known. The muscles felt different. Leaner in parts, bulkier in parts. And his jaws and throat were heavier. Whatever was happening to him had created a new matrix, a new kind of wolf.

But what was it?

Mustapha knew the answer, though it made no sense.

Canis dirus.

That came to him from all the reading he’d done on wolves. On their nature, their physiology. Their history.

Canis dirus.

Something older than gray wolves.

A proto wolf.

A dire wolf.

Stronger and faster than the wolves that lived and hunted today. With sharper senses and a much more powerful . . .

Bite.

But that was impossible. The dire wolf was gone. Extinct. Lost ten thousand years ago.

Except that it wasn’t.

Somewhere, locked inside the DNA of all wolves, was that code. That potential.

What did it mean? Why, after all these years as a werewolf, had this new and much older aspect of the wolf emerged?

The answer leaped at him.

The bear. Its claws.

Whatever was on those claws had done something. Sparked something.

Something so wrong.

Something that felt so right.

These thoughts swirled in the dreaming mind. They were fueled by the instincts of the werewolf. And man and werewolf were still qualities in this animal, but it was pure dire wolf mind that governed it as it moved deeper into the forest. Exultant in its power. Newfound or reclaimed? That was an impossible question. Healing with every step. Sniffing its own backtrail to follow the blood scent to where the fight had taken place, to the point where it had received those wounds.

To the place where the thing that delivered those injuries had last been.

It took an hour to find it.

The wheel of night turned, dragging cold stars across the sky.

The moon—a white face in the silky blackness—stared down at the wolf, and in her glow the wolf felt powerful again.

The wounds barely ached now.

It reached the clearing where the werewolf had fought the werebear. The ground was torn. There was blood that smelled of chemicals. There were claw marks on ground and trees. There was the smell.

The big animal was still out there. Still hunting. It, too, would be healed by now. Or near enough.

For the wolf, it was a simple choice that required no thought. Be hunted or go hunting.

The scent was strong on the air and in the ground. Stronger still in the trail of blood.

The wolf bent and sniffed the blood. The richer, more exotic blood of a bear.

The wolf lifted its head and uttered a long howl. It sounded lonely and lost.

But it was not.

The cry was filled with promise.

The wolf lowered its nose to the ground to reclaim the scent, and then it ran. All memory of injury and fear forgotten.

It ran in the direction of the wounded bear.

-8-

Mustapha wasn’t sure when he came back to himself.

It all felt like a dream.

He knew it was probably the drug.

Maybe.

Or something else. Some quality of his Were nature that he didn’t understand. There were always new things to know. Always surprises because it seemed to him that reality was hardly real.

He was a werewolf.

He worked for a vampire.

There were faeries and telepaths and other things in the world.

As gruff and stoic as he tried to be, as cool and casual about it all as he pretended, he was constantly amazed by the world.

And now this.

The last thing he remembered was thinking about how his death here in these vast woods would disappoint and hurt Warren.

The next thing he knew he was in wolf form, running free and wild in the woods. Not really werewolf anymore. Not in any way Mustapha understood. It almost felt like the wolf owned this flesh and that he was an unwelcome stowaway. He never felt that way when he ran as a werewolf. The werewolf and the man were the same person, the same being.

This was different.

Then it hit him in a moment of insight and clarity.

This was what a wolf felt like.

Not a werewolf.

A wolf.

There was a simplicity to it. A purity that he had never known as either man or werewolf. Nor was it anything he perceived among the stronger or older members of the pack he was considering joining.

This was . . . different.

This was such an ancient feeling.

And . . . a healing one.

Mustapha rode along in the body that was his and not his, feeling the muscles work, appreciating an efficiency and economy of movement that was different even though the body was the same. His body. But with a different hand at the controls.

The wolf ran, picking up speed as it followed a strengthening and freshening scene. The bear was close now.

So . . . why wasn’t the wolf afraid?

He certainly was. Man and werewolf. Definitely afraid.

Not the wolf, though.

Not the wolf.

Not the wolf.

-9-

It was there.

On the other side of the hill.

The wolf moved around the base of the hill to keep its own scent off the wind.

It could smell the bear.

The wolf sniffed the air.

Definitely a bear, but not currently a bear.

The change happened so fast that Mustapha wasn’t aware he was going to change.

One moment he was the wolf. Sturdy, strong, four-legged. Then there was a blur as if he were going blind and deaf all at once.

Suddenly he was Mustapha again, kneeling on the ground, trying to see what a wolf sees but with merely human eyes. The night sounds changed, smeared out, just as the shadows were smearing. Becoming blander, confused, less precise.

He stayed there, breathing, almost gasping, from the speed of the change.

There was no pain. Just the disorienting shift from the pinnacle of perception to the blandness of what human senses could take in.

And yet . . .

As he rose to his feet he realized that this was not entirely true. The darkness should have been far darker than it was. The night sounds should be meaningless beyond the pulse of crickets. The smells should be a nonsensical olio without depth.

That was not the way it was.

Somehow, something of the wolf remained with him. It shouldn’t have, but it did.

His senses were not human senses.

They were not the wolf’s superb perceptions, nor were they the hunting senses of the werewolf. But they were not entirely human, either.

He stood in the darkness and tried to absorb it all. Process it.

He was seeing with human eyes, smelling with a human nose, hearing with human ears. And yet . . .

How had all of this happened? What drug was it on the bear’s claws? It seemed to have driven Gundersen into a mindless rage state, but that wasn’t how it was affecting Mustapha. Had its passage through Gundersen’s bloodstream changed it? Was the effect different for bears and wolves? Mustapha was a long way from being a science geek. He could remember less than half of the basic chemistry he’d learned in school.

Besides, this could be something new. A designer drug.

Or an ordinary drug whose effects were warped by combination with were blood.

So many questions.

No fucking answers at all.

He sniffed the air and could smell the bear. Sweat and piss and blood on the air as separate smells.

Was this an anticipated side effect of the drug? Did whoever shot Gundersen with those darts know it would do this? Had that been the goal? Or . . .

Or was this all something coming at everyone from the blue? Even the asshole with the dart gun?

Mustapha couldn’t tell.

Then he had a crooked thought.

What if this was part of the game? What if that drug was introduced to make the players stronger in order for them to play a more dangerous game?

That sounded possible in his head, but felt wrong in his gut.

What, then, was this?

Why had he become a wolf instead of a werewolf? How was that even possible? And why was his human aspect not quite . . .

Human?

In a moment of panic he touched his face, afraid that he would encounter an alien shape. Something primitive and wrong, like the sloping brow of a Neanderthal.

His face was his face. Normal. Wrinkled with concern, but his.

He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath until he felt how long and hot the exhale was that burst from his chest.

Then he froze.

It had been too loud.

Loud as a whisper and whispers were like shouts to the were.

“It’s okay,” said a voice from over the top of the hill. “I already knew you were there.”

A voice.

Gundersen.

Damn it.

Mustapha held his breath. He’d come to kill. Not to fight, not to talk. He wanted to cut that backstabbing bastard to pieces. Eat his heart. Claim his power, drugs or no.

“It’s Mustapha, right?” called the voice.

Shit.

“Gundersen?”

“Yup.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. Come down here.”

“And walk into another ambush. No thanks.”

“Is that what happened?”

“You know it is.”

“Actually . . . I don’t. Come on over,” said Gundersen. “I’ll explain.” There was a heavy pause and what sounded like a soft groan of pain, then Gundersen spoke again. “Believe me . . . you’ll want to hear this.”

-10-

Mustapha moved very carefully. The wolf was just beneath his skin the whole time. The werewolf, too. It gave him a strange new feeling of confidence to have both aspects, the old and the new, riding shotgun with him.

When he reached the top of the crest he shifted to one side and crouched, peering between a couple of low shrubs, cautious, ready to bolt if the bear was ready to pounce. Mustapha had no illusions about how a second fight with this brute would turn out. It’s no accident that there are no wolf packs in areas where bears roam free. If there were bears in Africa, even lions wouldn’t be king of the jungle.

Mustapha was tough, but one of the keys to survival was to know the exact dimensions of your personal power. Without self-deception. No sane person lets his ego write a check his ass can’t cash.

He bent low and peered through the shadows.

He saw Gundersen.

He also saw a lot of blood. Smelled it, too. A delicious smell.

Slowly, slowly, Mustapha stood up.

He let out a slow breath, and then walked down the hill.

-11-

“You’re a damn mess,” he said.

Gundersen smiled. Even his teeth were bloody.

“Yeah, well, life’s a mess,” he said.

“What happened to you?” asked Mustapha as he crossed his legs and lowered himself to the ground. “I didn’t do all that.”

“You wish,” laughed Gundersen, and then his face twisted as first a spasm of pain and then a string of ragged wet coughs tore through him. It took a long time for the coughing fit to pass and when it was done, Gundersen settled back, pale and sweating. His chest, stomach, and left hip were soaked with blood, and Mustapha could see torn flesh through the dried blood and dirt caked on the man’s naked skin. Some of the wounds had begun to scab over—evidence that the were genes were still firing, still working overtime to try to repair damage at speeds no human physiology could match. However, other, deeper wounds still gaped. From the scuffed nature of the ground and the layered smears of blood on the tree trunk against which Gundersen sat, it was evident he’d been here for a while. Hours.

Gundersen nodded to Mustapha’s own wounds. “Aren’t we a pair?”

“What happened?” Mustapha repeated.

“The jackals, what else?”

“Jackals? What jackals?”

“You telling me you didn’t see them?”

“Since the game started all I’ve seen was that little fox guy, a pussy of a werepuma, and you.”

Gundersen grunted. “Which explains why you’re still walking.”

“Tell me.”

“Not sure where to start.”

“What came first, the darts or the jackals?”

“The darts.”

“Okay, start there.”

“It’s the game. It’s how it’s played,” said Gundersen. “You know it’s rigged, right?”

“I figured. But how? By who? And why?”

“Like I said . . . the jackals.”

“You’re not making sense, man.”

Gundersen nodded. “Probably not. My head’s all scrambled. Those damn darts. God only knows what was in them. At first I thought it was a tranquilizer. Something to knock me down a peg. You know—werebear and all. Odds were pretty much in my favor from the jump.”

“Really?” said Mustapha dryly. “I’d have never figured that one out.”

“So when I got hit I thought it was that. Something to level the playing field.”

“But it wasn’t?”

“Nope. Got a needle stick from ketamine once a while back. One of the convicts smuggled it onto the block. This was before your time. They were running K as a party drug.”

“Heard about that shit.”

“People call it a horse tranquilizer, but it’s used for all sorts of things. Point is, when I got hit the symptoms came on the same way, so there’s probably some K in there. Maybe as a base. But there was something else, too. LSD, maybe. Something like that.”

“So, basically, I had my ass handed to me by a stoned bear?”

Gundersen grinned. “Life is a complete bitch, isn’t it?”

“Testify.”

“Anyway, the drugs kick in and suddenly I’m Timothy Leary the Bear. Can’t see straight, can’t think worth a damn, but at the same time I felt my were self in a different way.”

“Stronger, right?”

“Not just stronger,” agreed Gundersen. “It was something else, too.”

Mustapha hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “I know. I felt it. Or, maybe feel it. When I changed . . . I became a wolf, you dig? Not a werewolf. A wolf. Like I was sharing headspace with an actual animal. Some weird-ass shit.”

Gundersen closed his eyes. “God, yes. That’s it exactly. For a while there I was a bear. Kind of a . . . What do you call it? Not just a real bear, it’s more of a . . .”

He fished for a word until Mustapha provided it.

“A primal bear.”

“That’s it. It felt weird. It felt older, if that makes any sense.”

“It does. But what I want to know is why they’d put something like that in the drug? I mean, I can see dialing you down to make the fights more even. These assholes are gamblers. People are getting rich betting on us. There’s somebody out there now taking bets on what we’re going to say or do to each other right now.”

Gundersen shook his head and gestured weakly to the edge of his clearing. Three video cameras lay there, each of them comprehensively smashed. “No one’s listening. Mind you, they might come and fix that, but for now, it’s just us.”

“Good to know,” said Mustapha, then he prompted, “Jackals.”

“Right, right,” said Gundersen, wincing at a spasm of pain. “After we beat the shit out of each other, I limped off to lick my wounds. For real, which is something I wouldn’t ever admit to someone who wasn’t like us.”

“Yup.”

“I tried changing back and forth, you know? To see if I could clear my head? Seemed like the drug effect got worse when I was a bear. When I was human I could think better, but the injuries were worse. I had to risk it, though, ’cause I needed to think this through. Understand it. I drifted around, trying to spot and dodge the cameras. Avoided a couple of fights, too. There’s another werewolf—some clown from Arkansas, and there was a werewarthog, which is something I never even heard of before.”

“A werewarthog? Jesus.”

“I know, right? Anyway, I was just starting to get my act together. Wounds were healing well enough for me to make some good time. I wanted to get to the end zone.”

“I thought they wouldn’t let us go there unless we wanted to opt out of the game.”

“What the hell you think I was trying to do? I was going to opt out and then get to the first phone I could find and call the cops. Maybe the FBI. If this game is as rigged as it seems, then soliciting us from all over the country—and following that up with interstate phone calls and e-mails—makes this a federal conspiracy to commit. I mean, this whole game couldn’t be legal. I did a pretty thorough net search and there’s nothing about this for TV. There’s no preorder pay-per-view website. Nothing in the cable guide. No production company listed on the Internet Movie Database. These guys aren’t legit. I figure this whole thing is really about the blood fights, the were-versus-were stuff. And it’s probably subscriber-only, going to a very select clientele. People will pay big bucks if they think someone’s going to get maimed. Or die. There was something like this with vampires over in Thailand. Anderson Cooper did a story. Even had some human assholes climbing into the ring against vamps on the odd chance of winning a big purse. Lot of people died. So . . . sure, this was crooked from the jump.”

“Which makes me wonder why you’re even here, Gundersen. Upstanding prison guard and all that shit.”

“Yeah,” said Gundersen with a sigh. “Everybody makes mistakes. You know that much.”

“What was your mistake?”

Despite his wounds, Gundersen colored. “Doesn’t matter,” he mumbled.

“Come on, man. Out with it.”

“You’re going to laugh at me.”

“I probably am.”

Another long sigh. “Shit. Online poker.”

“What?”

“Ran up a tab. Big tab. Nine thousand. No way I could pay it off, and the interest was insane. I could have lost my house.”

Mustapha didn’t laugh. “I can understand it. I did it to get me and Warren the hell out of Dodge. For good.”

“Warren—?”

Mustapha hesitated. He’d kept his sexual orientation under wraps while in prison. A gay man could quickly become everybody’s punch in the joint, and he didn’t want to do all his time on his knees. And he didn’t really feel like baring his soul to Gundersen. On the other hand . . . fuck it. What could this man do with that knowledge? Not a goddamn thing.

“He’s my partner,” he said.

Gundersen didn’t even blink. “Cool. He a good guy?”

“The best.”

“Cool,” the guard said again. “Good to have something worth fighting for. Someone to go home to.”

“What about you?”

“Wife left me, took the kids. But I get them on weekends and every other Christmas. I wanted to get clear of my debts so I could . . . I don’t know . . . so I could be the dad they think I am.”

They looked at each other, nodded at the way the world spins.

“Jackals,” Mustapha said again.

“Jackals. So I’m making my way to the end zone when half a dozen guys step out of the woods. Pretty nice ambush. I’m so into my own pain and still half in the bag from the drug and suddenly there they are. None of them that big, but there’s six of them, you know?”

“Sure. What happened?”

“Exactly what you think happened. They shifted into a pack of jackals and went for me.”

“Damn, son. How’d you get away? Six to one, why ain’t you dead?”

Gundersen gave him a small shrug. “Still a bear.”

“There’s that.”

“Jackals versus bear. If I hadn’t been hurt, there’d be six dead goddamn jackals and me on the phone to the feds.”

“But—?”

“But I was hurt and I was still whacked out on the drug. So now there’s one jackal dead and five jackals who didn’t have the kind of afternoon they wanted.”

Mustapha grinned. “I’d have paid to see that.”

“Somebody probably did. There were plenty of cameras in the trees. That’s probably why they chose that spot. Lots of coverage. Must have looked great on TV.”

“Unless you were betting on the jackals.”

“Yeah, well, I can’t claim to have won every fight I’ve been in, but I never went down without a fight.”

“Heard that.”

“So, I got out of there. I had enough strength left to run, and I guess maybe I scared them bad enough so they didn’t follow. At least not right away. Getting here, though, that took some doing. I’d spotted this place earlier today. The cameras don’t really have a good view here, and I kind of nudged the ones around here to give me a bigger blind spot. Not something so obvious they’d send someone out to fix. I needed to rest up. The jackals, though, they cowboyed up after a while and came hunting. The five survivors and a few more. Maybe eight in all.”

“That many?”

“Yeah. But there could be more.”

Mustapha grunted.

“What?” asked Gundersen.

“You know, man,” said Mustapha slowly, “maybe this is something more than a handful of these jackal jerkoffs messing with us out here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe this is their game. Maybe the deal is that they get the rest of us to beat the shit out of each other, kind of take the edge off. Maybe they film that, maybe they don’t. Then they wait until one of us comes along—tired, weaker, maybe hurt—and then they attack. If you’re a jackal—and let’s face it, they’re smaller, and one-on-one they’re not worth a wet fart—and you’re on camera taking down a werebear? Or a werewolf? Even if you have buddies helping you, that’s status. That’s going to get you laid by some jackal honey or some were groupie. If you’re doing it on some kind of pay-per-view murder channel, it’s going to get you laid and rich. Who knows how many werejackals there are around the world with cable access and a PayPal account.”

Gundersen thought about it. “Shit,” he said.

“That’s what I think’s happening. And I think you killing one of them isn’t going to help ratings.” Then Mustapha corrected himself. “No. I’m wrong. It’s going to jack up the betting ’cause this shit’s real now. You killing one of them made this a real life-or-death show.”

“Balls.”

“Kind of sucks that you just made the game better for them. Worse for us.”

“Goddamn it.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, chewing on the facts. The night deepened around them and the moon was moving toward the mountains. Soon it would be pitch-black. Gundersen flexed his legs.

“Cuts are healing. Hurts like a bastard, but better all the time.”

“Faster than usual?”

“Much faster. I think I could walk again soon.”

“Same thing with me. Those slashes you gave me should have put me down for the night, or maybe down for good. But now . . . all they do is itch.”

“That’s weird.”

“It’s weird I don’t mind,” said Mustapha. “Don’t understand it, but I don’t mind, that’s for damn sure.”

“You think it’ll last?”

“I don’t know,” said Mustapha. “But I doubt it. It’s a drug. It’ll pass through us. I think we got this for now, but not for long. So we’d better use it.”

Gundersen nodded.

An owl inquired of whatever passed in the night.

After a moment, Gundersen said, “You think they used the drug on anyone else?”

Mustapha chewed his lip for a moment. “Maybe. That werepuma I fought. Much as I’d like to take credit for kicking his ass so easy, I think maybe he was whacked out. He fought sloppy and I took him out like he was nothing. But, shit, man, he was a puma.”

“So he was drugged?”

“Don’t know, but I’d bet he was. Maybe there was some asshole sitting in the bushes with a blowgun.”

“Pretty sure they use rifles.”

“Not the point. I think they wanted to amp all of us weres up. Make us go crazy and beat the shit out of each other. Then maybe they’d hunt the winner.”

“That would be risky for them, though.”

“Would it? If we’re all doped up and going ass-wild on each other, what are the odds any of us would be in perfect shape afterward? Shit, look at what we did to each other. If the jackals had caught up with me a few hours ago they’d have been able to bitch-slap me all over this forest. Maybe they already took down the puma and whoever else. The people watching TV wouldn’t know the jackals were fighting a doped were. All they’d see is jackal versus puma, or jackal versus wolf. That’d be some big shit on a high-def TV.”

Gundersen ground his teeth. Then he cocked his head to one side and said, “If that’s true, then I think that proves they don’t know about the side effects. About what that stuff did to you and me. Amping up the primal versions of what we are.”

Mustapha nodded. “Yeah. You’re right.”

“You think anyone else’s figured it out? Any of the other poor dumb schmucks like us?”

Mustapha grinned. “Be kind of fun to find out.”

“Fun? How the hell would that be any fun?”

“How could it not be, man? You think any of them are going to be happy about what those jackal dickheads are doing to us?”

“No, but . . . it still leaves us six miles up shit creek. The jackals are holding all the cards right now.”

“Maybe not. Maybe they done stuck their dicks in a doorjamb.”

“How so?”

“Because I think I just figured out how to win this game.”

-12-

The jackals moved in a pack.

Gundersen had been wrong about the size of the pack. There were twelve of them. All average-sized men. Maybe on the smaller side of average. Five-seven, five-eight. One-sixty or thereabouts. Individually, nothing. In a pack?

Deadly.

Mustapha watched them from beneath a pile of pine boughs he’d torn down. They moved along a firebreak cut into the vastness of the big forest. One of them walking bold as balls down the center, the others split into two smaller subpacks that ranged forward just inside the forest walls. One pack, nicely placed for an ambush.

Twelve of them.

Mustapha cursed under his breath.

He was bone tired and bleary-eyed. It had been a long damn night. First the fight, then the ravine, then Gundersen. After that . . .

A long night.

Now the red eye of morning was opening. It was one of those mornings where the sun seemed to light a match to the streamers of clouds. The sky looked as if it were too hot to touch.

Mustapha took a deep breath, mouthed a silent promise to Warren, and stood up. The pine boughs fell away as he rose and the bloody sunlight painted him crimson from head to toe.

He took another breath, then bolted across the width of the firebreak, running as fast as two human legs could carry him. Even tired and recovering from wounds, Mustapha was fast.

“There’s one!” came the cry from the jackal walking point. “He’s making a break for it.”

Mustapha cut a look over his shoulder and saw them all freeze and turn their eyes his way. Twelve men. Naked, painted in camouflage military greasepaint to let them blend in with the forest.

Bet they think it looks great on TV, thought Mustapha. He thought they looked like a pack of damn fools.

And then the men were gone.

The air around them shimmered as if heat were rising from the ground.

The men changed. The features of each man seemed to melt and run. Painted skin stretched over bones that were reshaping. One by one they dropped to all fours. Skin ruptured with a wet glop and bristled along their sides and shoulders and legs. Tails stretched out, ears elongated.

Mustapha staggered to a stop to watch, his chest heaving, body aching.

Twelve men had been there.

Now a pack of jackals faced him.

And with a chorus of mocking cries, they charged.

“Shit,” he breathed. He whirled and ran as fast as he could.

There was a winding trail that spurred off from the firebreak and snaked its way through the forest. Mustapha reached the trail one hundred fifty paces in front of the pack.

One hundred fifty paces was no distance at all.

The jackals were fast. Damn fast. In bursts they could run thirty-five to forty miles an hour, and they could run at ten miles per hour all damn day.

“Catch me if you can, assholes,” growled Mustapha as he crumpled to the ground, his bones grinding within him as he changed. His mouth opened to scream, but that sound changed as the shape of his throat and jaw, neck and teeth changed. The colors of the day changed, the visible spectrum broadening as man became werewolf and werewolf became dire wolf. It happened fast. So much faster than ever before. Maybe, if these drugs were going to pass through him, this was the fastest it would ever be for him. If so, what a rush. His hands became paws as they struck the ground.

The jackals were almost on him.

If he could have laughed, he would have as the wolf launched itself forward.

His speed increased. Forty-five miles an hour.

Fifty.

The jackals howled as they fought to catch up.

The wolf ran on, delighting in its own power, however temporary. Drawing on resources Mustapha could not even guess at. The dire wolf tore through the forest, miles burning away beneath its feet.

The jackals barked and cried as they struggled to keep their prey in sight. They knew—as the wolf knew—that if they caught up, their numbers would matter more than speed or purity of nature.

In the end it was always numbers.

The wolf ran on.

Above the forest, the rays of the sun slashed at the clouds, soaking the morning with blood.

Then the wolf began to slow.

As it ran up the side of a steep mountain, it slowed.

Its mass and speed warred against gravity, and lost. And it slowed.

Exhaustion that was too deep, too comprehensive for even its power dragged at it, and it slowed.

And the jackals caught up.

The wolf staggered into a clearing that was already splashed with blood. A man lay sprawled against a fallen log, his body crusted with dried gore.

The wolf finally stopped, sides heaving, spit flecking the corners of its mouth.

With howls of delight the jackals burst into the clearing and raced toward the two weak and spent victims.

High on a tree above them, a camera saw it all.

That should have been the first warning.

The camera should not have been there.

The camera belonged to a different tree in a different part of the woods.

It was here now, though. Watching. Recording. Transmitting. Everything.

The man.

The wolf.

The pack of jackals.

The microphone mounted on the camera could capture every yip and gasp and grunt and hunting cry as the jackals closed in for the kill.

Just as it captured—with excellent clarity—the words spoken by the man as he, despite apparent injuries, suddenly rose to his feet. The words were spoken in the split second before man became werebear and werebear became primal bear.

The words were spoken with deliberate clarity and projection. The man wanted each word recorded.

“Payback’s a bitch,” he said. “Take ’em, boys.”

The woods suddenly burst apart in a fury of snapping branches and torn leaves as body after body lunged out.

Fox and puma.

Warthog and coyote.

And bear and wolf.

The camera captured it all with its unblinking eye.

The screams. The blood. The pieces that flew everywhere.

The camera missed nothing.

Around the world, on big-screen TVs, on tablets and laptops, and in a private theater belonging to the leader of this pack of jackals and the humans who clung to them and followed them, the video feed played with high-definition clarity and perfect audio.

It was not the show they had paid for.

It was not the show they wanted to see.

But, damn if it didn’t make for an exciting fifteen seconds of reality TV.

Worth every penny of that million dollars.

Mustapha hoped the sons of bitches enjoyed it.

He sure as hell did.

And he was damn sure going to collect every single penny owed to him.

Yes, indeed. Even if he had to bring his pack along to make sure those jackal sons of bitches paid up. Not the Long Tooth pack.

This pack. Temporary, sure. Strange and unlikely, absolutely. But for now, this was his pack.

He let thoughts of money drift inside his head as the wolf howled out its killing cry and joined in the slaughter.