The Devil You Know

“Yeah, it does, doesn’t it? Only if we hit the wrong key, he’ll turn around and tear our throats out.”

“He” was a loup-garou, and I was moonlighting. John’s call had come in at seven in the morning, when I was just surfacing from shallow sleep and another set of very nasty dreams. Pen had relayed the message, expecting me to say some pithier equivalent of “No, thank you”—and was amazed when I passed back the answer that I’d be there inside of an hour.

It’s a character flaw, I know. When I’m unhappy about something, I pick a fight, and that morning, I was in such a lousy mood, I’d have taken a swing at John “The Quietman” Ruiz. So all things considered, the other John’s invitation to come and help him corner a werewolf at Dunstable Zoo had come as something of a relief.

Were-something, anyway. They didn’t know exactly what they had, because all they’d seen were the savaged carcasses of five animals: three wallabies, a zebra, and most recently a lion. So we were talking about something vicious and fast that didn’t care what it killed, and now they thought they had it cornered in a stand of trees at the back of the site between the rhino enclosure and a high wall that backed onto the main A-road beyond. The keepers had closed in with tranquilizer guns, but they couldn’t flush the loup-garou, and they didn’t want to go in blind.

So here I was. It was therapy, really—a way of keeping busy without facing the things that were really bugging me. If it left me alive and in one piece, I’d be laughing.

I skirted the back of the zebra house, staying in close. I wasn’t worried that he’d see me—there wouldn’t be any line of sight until I got to the corner—but the rank zebra-shit smell ought to hide my scent from him while I got in closer.

When I got to the corner, I peered cautiously around it, scanning the distant line of the hedge. After a moment or two, I made out Gittings; he was padding silently along, zeroing in on the area where we’d seen the suspicious rustling of leaves.

I waved to him, and he waved back. But when I started the countdown on my raised fingers, he made a negative sign with his left hand, the right gripping his tabor. John’s a music man, like me: strictly percussion, but it still puts us close enough in our exorcism technique that we can work well together. Now he was signaling that he wanted to get in closer. I shook my head emphatically. We were only trying to flush the beast with generalized psychic static, not to exorcise the spirit that was animating whatever flesh we had here. We didn’t need to be right on top of the damned thing.

But John had other ideas, obviously. Ignoring my vote of no confidence, he took another few steps forward along the hedge. Then he went down on one knee, pointed to me, and indicated that he’d do the countdown himself. I wasn’t happy about it, but I didn’t have any choice. I shrugged and nodded.

On zero, I started to pipe. I opened low and soft, let the wind pick it up, and then started to layer in the dips and rises that ought to get the loup-garou’s ghost-passenger hurting.

For a minute, and then a minute more, nothing. But patience was the key. I glided up and down the scale, confident that sooner or later, I was going to hit a nerve. John knelt, nodding encouragement to me, his left hand dancing like a conductor’s baton. But he still hadn’t started to play.

There was movement in the box hedge: branches trembling, then bending, seemingly only a foot away from where John was kneeling.

I was expecting something to burst out of the hedge. The thing leapt over it and hit the ground already running—running toward me. Rifles popped, but the keepers had been aiming low to the ground; I could actually see the scatter and swirl of leaves as most of the darts ripped harmlessly into the hedge.

The beast was a nightmare. Even now that it was out in the daylight, I couldn’t see what animal it had been. The ghost inside it had bulked out the torso and the legs and turned the gape-mouthed head into a tooth-bristling, mythical obscenity. Of course it didn’t help that I was seeing it full-on; teeth filled most of my line of sight.

Gittings was standing now, and his fingers on the tabor made a loud, rapid stutter of sound like machine-gun fire. The beast didn’t slow, and it was coming in so quickly, it would be on me in seconds. I had two choices: run and be brought down from behind, or stand my ground and get my throat ripped out.

I went for option C. Since the thing could jump like a flea, that was probably what it was going to do. When its upper body came down low to the ground, tensing for the spring, I dropped and rolled forward. Its flying leap took it over me while I finished my roll on my back and got in a lucky kick that caught its hind leg and made a mess of its landing trajectory.