Morgan remained in the dining room while her mother went upstairs to change. On a hunt, Sylvia liked to wear clothes she could move freely in but which weren’t too expensive, since they always got ruined by the time she was finished. Joshua sat in his high chair, nibbling on bits of oat cereal. She stood at the sink, working on the dishes. Or rather, she pretended to wash dishes while she listened to what was being said in the basement. Her werewolf hearing was more than sharp enough to make out what her father and the other men said.
She knew her parents and brothers would want to hunt one of the humans tonight, but to hear that her dad planned to attack the jakkals afterward… She’d wanted to believe that he would give Greg and his family twenty-four hours to leave town, but she’d been foolish to do so. Alan and Sylvia Crowder were werewolves. They believed in solving problems with strength and action, not with conversation and compromise. She figured the only reason her father hadn’t tried to kill the jakkals earlier was because Stuart had been wounded. After eating the heart, he was likely strong enough to participate in a second attack on the jakkals, and naturally her other brother would want to take part as well. Morgan thought they might even make her go. Who was she kidding? Of course they would. Her father would want her to prove her loyalty to the pack by helping to kill the jakkals. Alan would likely command her to kill Greg as a way of punishing her for talking to him in the first place.
She didn’t want to do that. She couldn’t.
She had one thing going for her. Werewolves—or at least the ones in her family—couldn’t resist hunting. As much as her parents and brothers might want to fight the jakkals, they’d hunt one or both of the humans first. It was their nature. That meant she had time to warn Greg. With any luck, he and his family would be able to leave Happyland before the hunt—and the feast that followed—was finished.
Not for the first time, Morgan wondered what made her different from the rest of her family. She had the same instincts and drives they did—she loved hunting and she needed to eat heart meat to sustain herself. But she only ate animal hearts. She didn’t want to hunt humans. More than that, she believed killing humans was wrong. Alan and Sylvia had sneered at Garth’s offer to join his peaceful pack, but it sounded like the perfect life to her. She loved her family, but she couldn’t overlook or accept their cruelty. She’d leave tonight and take Joshua with her so he wouldn’t have to become a monster like the rest of their family— if she thought she could get away with it. But her parents would hunt her down before she could get very far, and punish her so severely she’d regret ever being born. Or worse, they’d kill her outright and bring Joshua back home, to raise him as one of them.
She turned to look at Joshua, tears in her eyes. He was happily chewing on cereal while playing with a couple of bits, maneuvering the crunchy little O’s through the air as if they were planes. Seeing him like this, she had a difficult time believing he was destined to be a monster. If humans had free will—if they could choose who they wanted to be—why couldn’t her kind?
Her thoughts broke off as the basement door opened and her father entered the kitchen. Stuart and Spencer followed, carrying one of the humans. So they’d decided to hunt just one tonight. Why not? she thought bitterly. That way they could make their blood sport last longer.
Sylvia came into the kitchen a moment later, wearing a pair of black leggings and an old T-shirt. Her feet were bare. She looked at Alan.
“You going to change, hon?”
“No, I’ll never get these bloodstains out of this uniform.” He patted his chest. “Might as well keep it on.”
Sylvia turned to Morgan. “Sweetie, would you mind watching your little brother while we’re out?” she asked.
Morgan smiled. “I’d be happy to.”
* * *
The twins carried Sam outside, Crowder and his wife close behind. The boys tossed Sam onto the deck, and he landed hard on his left side. Crowder unlocked the handcuffs, the twins cut through the duct tape around Sam’s legs and Sylvia unlocked the padlock on Sam’s chains. They stepped back, giving Sam room to remove his chains and get to his feet. Both his wrists and his legs throbbed, but that was the least of his worries. All four of the werewolves gazed upon him with dark anticipation, and their nostrils flared as they inhaled deeply.
They’re taking my scent, Sam thought. Getting ready to hunt.
“I can’t tell you how much we’re going to enjoy this,” Sylvia said. “You’re so much healthier than the ones Alan usually brings home.”
Alan bristled. “I do the best I can.”
She reached out and touched his cheek. “Of course you do, love, and we all appreciate it. All I’m saying is it’ll be nice to hunt someone who isn’t already half dead when they start running.” She lowered her head and turned to Sam. She smiled, showing teeth grown sharp. “And he’s a hunter too. He should prove quite entertaining.”
Sam understood what was going on here. The Crowders’ prey needed to be people who wouldn’t be missed, or whose disappearance wouldn’t come as a surprise. People like Clay Fuller: a drug dealer who might’ve vanished because of an unsatisfied customer or aggressive competitor. As sheriff, Crowder had access to a never-ending supply of small-time criminals, and he could have his pick of the litter.
“So how does this work?” Sam asked. “You guys give me a head start, I haul ass into the woods, and after—what?—five, maybe ten minutes you come after me?”
Sam was calm as he spoke, and the werewolves exchanged uneasy glances. Sam supposed they were used to their prey pleading for their lives, terrified at the thought of what the werewolves would do. Sam was glad to disappoint them.
“That’s about it,” Crowder said.
“What if I decide not to run?” Sam asked. “After all, you’re just going to kill me eventually. Might as well get it over with now and save myself a lot of effort and false hope.”
“But it’s not false,” Sylvia said. “If you manage to find your way out of the woods, you’re free to go. You win, we lose. People need a strong motivation if they’re to run their best.”
“And there’s no stronger motivation than survival,” Crowder said.
“Clay Fuller got out of the woods,” Sam pointed out. “But that didn’t seem to stop you from killing him and taking his heart.”
“You have my word that, in the unlikely event you make it out of the woods alive, you’ll remain that way,” Crowder said.
Sam knew he was lying. Crowder would never allow any of their prey to live long enough to go to the authorities. But there was no point in saying so.
“So what now?” Sam asked. “Does one of you fire a starter’s pistol or do you just shout, ‘Ready, set, go!’”
Crowder gestured to the yard beyond the deck.
“Just start running,” he said, “or we’ll tear you to pieces right now.”
Sam could tell by the man’s tone—and by the way Sylvia and the twins were looking at him—that Crowder wasn’t kidding. So he hopped off the deck and ran toward the woods, the full moon shining overhead, howls of excitement rising into the air behind him.
Near Seattle, Washington. 1992
“Look out!” Sam shouted. He had his seatbelt on, but he put his hands on the dashboard of Bobby’s pickup to brace himself anyway. Dean sat in the driver’s seat, gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white.
“I see it!” Dean said.
They were heading straight toward a light pole. Dean yanked the steering wheel hard to the left, and the pickup swerved away. Sam shouted for Dean to slow down. Dean shot him an angry glare, but he eased his foot off the gas, and Sam began to relax as the pickup slowed.
“I thought you said Dad gave you driving lessons,” Sam said.
“He did.” Dean paused, then added more softly, “Once.”
Now that they were on their way to the hospital, Sam was having second thoughts.
“I’m not sure we should be doing this,” he said.
“You heard Bobby. If we don’t stop the werewolf tonight, it will be a whole month before it comes back. We have to kill it before it attacks someone else! He can’t do it, and Dad’s not here. That leaves you and me.”
“But we’re just kids,” Sam said.
Dean shrugged. “So what? Dad’s taught me how to shoot… a little. And we got Bobby’s gun, which is loaded with silver bullets. Besides, werewolves don’t eat kids’ hearts. They’re too small, and they’re not ripe yet. They taste awful, like green bananas.”
Sam frowned, fairly certain Dean was making this last part up.
Sam would rather have stayed in the motel room with Bobby. The idea of hunting a werewolf terrified him, and it didn’t help that they’d watched part of that stupid movie, Night of the Blood Moon. But in the end, Sam had agreed to accompany Dean for one simple reason. He loved his brother and couldn’t let him go into danger alone.
Dean nearly got them into several accidents on the way to the hospital, but he avoided them all—if only just. They continued driving around lost for a while until they found signs directing drivers to the hospital. They pulled into the visitors’ lot and looked for a place to park.
A thought occurred to Sam then. “Have you ever parked before?”
“Sure I have,” Dean said. “Nothing to it.”
But he looked nervous, and Sam figured he was lying.
They found a space between an SUV and a van, and Dean painstakingly attempted to park between the two vehicles. There wasn’t a lot of room between them, and Dean had to back up several times and make another attempt to fit the pickup in. During his final try, he scraped the side of the van, but the pickup was parked, more or less, and he turned off the engine.
“See? Nothing to it,” Dean said.
Sam rolled his eyes. The pickup was squeezed in so tightly between the SUV and the van that they couldn’t open the pickup’s doors wide enough to get out. They had to roll down the windows and crawl out that way.
It had started to rain again, although it wasn’t much more than a sprinkle. They’d put motel towels on the driver’s seat because of how much Bobby had bled on the drive back from the hospital. But some blood had soaked through anyway, and Dean’s pants had a few splotches on the bottom. Ordinarily, Sam might have teased his big brother about this, but not now, not here.
Dean carried Bobby’s gun in his right jacket pocket. The pocket wasn’t deep enough to conceal the whole weapon, and its handle stuck out. It didn’t look secure in the pocket, and Sam was afraid the gun would fall out if Dean wasn’t careful. Sam carried Bobby’s silver knife. He didn’t have the sheath for it—he had no idea where Bobby kept it—and no way was he going to stick this sharp thing in one of his pockets. Sam knew that, like Bobby, they’d have to keep an eye out for hospital security making the rounds. Two adults hanging out in the visitors’ parking lot in the middle of the night would’ve been suspicious enough, but two kids? If security spotted them, the guards would come running to make sure they weren’t lost or in some kind of danger.
We are in danger, Sam thought. But not the kind any security guard can help us with.
The moon was hidden by the cloud cover overhead, and Sam was grateful. He knew werewolves didn’t need to see the moon to be affected by it, but as scary as being here was, it would’ve been worse if a full moon hung in the sky above them. It would’ve been too much like Night of the Blood Moon. He was also glad they were in a well-lit parking lot instead of an eerie forest, like in the movie. But then he realized that the lot was kind of like a maze. They couldn’t see between the vehicles, not until they stood close to them, and anything could be hiding in the spaces between. Suddenly, a spooky old forest didn’t sound so bad.
“What do we do now?” Sam asked Dean, whispering.
Sam was surprised when his big brother didn’t answer right away. He was used to Dean always knowing what to do, or at least pretending to know. But Dean had to think a minute.
“I guess we go slow through the lot and see if we find the werewolf.”
“Or it finds us,” Sam said.
“Or that,” Dean agreed.
So they began walking, keeping close to the vehicles, crouched low. Dean took the lead, but Sam was right behind his brother, so close that he bumped into him several times. But Dean didn’t complain. He just kept moving forward, attention focused and sharp. Sam periodically glanced behind them to make sure they weren’t being stalked from the rear. Each time he turned to look, he expected to see a wild-eyed creature with fangs and claws racing toward them, but he saw nothing. He listened for any sounds of movement but the rain had picked up, making it difficult to hear any other sounds.
Sam told himself that the werewolf probably wasn’t in the area anymore, that Bobby had scared it away when he’d wounded it. Like Bobby had told them, the werewolf would move to a new hunting ground, and it wouldn’t be heard from until next month. They were wasting their time. On the one hand this was reassuring, as Sam didn’t particularly want to tangle with a werewolf. But on the other hand, he couldn’t stop thinking about what Dean had said back at the motel. If they didn’t stop the werewolf here and now, more people would die next month. Maybe a lot more. He’d never considered the responsibility that rested on a hunter’s shoulders. Every action they took had the potential to save lives or lose them, depending on how things went down. No wonder his father and Bobby worked so hard and rarely took time off. Every moment they weren’t hunting was another moment when someone was potentially dying at the hands of a supernatural creature.
The rain grew worse, coming down faster and harder now, accompanied by lightning flashes and booms of thunder. Sam figured they’d been at it for at least an hour, maybe longer. He was cold, wet, and tired, but one thing was good: he was too irritated and uncomfortable to be scared anymore.
“Let’s go back to the truck and sit inside until the rain lets up,” Sam said. He would’ve preferred they ended their stakeout and returned to the motel room. The warm, and above all, dry room. But he didn’t trust Dean to drive in the rain. Better to sit in the truck and wait for the storm to blow over than end up wrapping Bobby’s truck around a telephone pole on the way back to the motel.
Dean scowled, clearly unhappy with the idea of giving up. But he said, “Okay.”
They were currently on the west side of the lot, just about as far as they could be from the pickup. They turned and began heading back the way they’d come. But they stopped after only a few steps. There, standing in the middle of the lane between two rows of vehicles, stood a woman. Her long white hair was wet and plastered to the front of her brown sweater, which was soaked and hung limply on her slight frame. She wore blue slacks and a pair of open-toed brown shoes, which revealed her toenails were sharp werewolf claws. Her hands were clawed as well, and her mouth was filled with wicked-looking fangs. Her eyes were those of an animal, bestial and shining with bloodlust.
It’s an old lady, Sam thought, surprised, although he couldn’t have said why. Monsters had to get old too, didn’t they?
The sweater’s right arm had a ragged tear through the sleeve, just beneath the shoulder. Sam figured that was where Bobby had wounded the werewolf, but she didn’t appear any the worse for wear. Maybe the silver wound had healed, or maybe she was too excited by the prospect of two fresh, young hearts to care about her injury.
She bared her teeth in a half-snarl, half-grin, and then she ran toward them, claws out, ready to rend their flesh.
* * *
Present Day
“I’m really sorry I got you into this mess,” Garth said. He sat next to Dean, his back to the wall.
Dean wanted to tell Garth not to feel guilty, that it wasn’t his fault. But he was too worried about Sam—out there in the night, running for his life—to think about anything but escape right now. Sammy was as smart and resourceful as any hunter ever born, but he was being hunted by a family of werewolves. And he was unarmed. Those weren’t good odds, no matter how you sliced it. Sam needed backup, and Dean was determined to get out of this damn hole in the ground and give it to him. But how? Garth had started working on loosening his bonds as soon as the Crowders had closed the basement door, but he’d made little progress. At the rate he was going, Sam would be dead and his heart divided among Crowder’s pack before Garth managed to break out of his chains. Dean felt helpless, and he hated it.
The basement door opened, and someone started coming down. Dean felt his stomach drop. Had they already finished with Sam?
It was Crowder’s daughter, and she was alone. She hurried over and knelt next to them, an expression of guilt and concern on her face.
“You come down to take a nibble or two while the rest of your family is out chasing my brother?” Dean said.
The girl—Morgan, if he remembered right—didn’t answer. Instead, she raised her right hand and sharp claws emerged from her fingers. She swung her hand toward Garth, and at first Dean thought she meant to attack him. But instead she cut the duct tape away from his chains with a few quick swipes. Then she transformed completely and pulled on the chain around Garth’s wrists while he struggled to break them from the inside. Together, they were successful. The chain broke, and Garth’s hands were free. The first thing he did was rub the dried blood—Melody’s blood—from his mouth and chin. Then they broke the chain wrapped around his legs. Working swiftly, the pair moved onto Dean, broke the handcuffs around his wrists, and then freed his legs.
When they were all standing—and Garth and Morgan were human again—Dean looked at the girl and said, “Not that I’m complaining, but why did you free us?”
“I’m not like the rest of my family,” Morgan said, her words coming out in a rush. “I don’t like hurting people, and I won’t eat their hearts. I want to go with Garth and join his pack. I want to live like them. And I want to take my baby brother with me. I want him to grow up in a good place, surrounded by good people.”
Dean looked at her a moment before turning to Garth.
“I’ll be damned. It looks like you made a convert after all.”
Garth smiled.