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The waxing gibbous moon hung so low it was perilously close to getting caught in the trees. The light shining through the bare winter branches created long gashes of shadow on the ground.
The boy ran through the woods, heedless of any beauty the night might hold. His pursuers were still following him; he could hear them in the distance. His mom had taught him what to do when this happened: find a place to hide, let himself heal, and wait until help arrived. Yet, every time he had tried to stop and hide, his pursuers had seemed too close.
And he was so scared.
That fear was probably why he didn’t realize where he had run to until his high school loomed above him. It made perverse sense. He walked to school every day, because he didn’t like how the bus smelled. He could have found his way here in his sleep.
He hesitated for only a moment at the front doors. He reasoned he had to know the school better than the hunters did. There wouldn’t be a better place to hide.
~*~
Sometimes, Lucy wondered what in the hell she was doing here. Yeah, she had learned that there were werewolves and other monsters, and there were people who needed to be protected from them. She had wanted to be someone who protected people.
Sometimes, she just had to wonder if the others were actually interested in protecting anyone at all.
The whole squad stepped out from beneath the eaves of the wood and into the parking lot of the local high school. They followed Hank because he was the oldest, had more skills, and was closest to Ms. Monroe. Lucy didn’t know why he had got involved with hunting; he didn’t talk about his past.
Tucker, on the other hand, couldn’t shut up, spewing excitement with almost every exhale. He was easy to understand; he wanted to be the fucking antagonist from The Most Dangerous Game, which she had read in school. For all his statements about monsters, it was clear to Lucy that his fondest wish was to kill something that could speak.
While Chaz was just as bloodthirsty, he, at least, was here to avenge his uncle, who had literally been turned to stone by some creature in Beacon Hills. Ms. Monroe had recruited him personally.
On the other hand, the last member of their squad, Billy, was a lot like her; he didn’t seem sure what he was doing here. Early on, he had been caught up in the excitement, but now it looked like he was following them around because he didn’t know what else to do.
Hank studied the building. “Well, that makes sense.”
“What does?” Billy asked.
“Animals like to hide in familiar territory. It goes to school here.”
Every time Hank called the person they were following an ‘it,’ Lucy shuddered. The werewolf’s name was Monty. Short for Montgomery. She pulled her jacket closer with her free hand.
Hank suddenly barked an order. “Radio check.”
They each been issued walkie talkies for coordination. Monroe had insisted on it; she had explained her reasoning by sharing the story about how some werewolves had used the ‘Beau Geste’ effect to slip through a trap.
“Lucy,” Hank said after the check was finished. “You’re on watch. Keep an eye on the parking lot.”
“By herself?” Billy asked, confused. It might have been concern or misplaced chivalry.
Hank didn’t answer him but looked Lucy straight in the eyes as if he knew she was having second doubts.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, firmly.
Turning to the others. “Once inside we split into two teams. When you find it, don’t engage. Signal the other team. Understood?”
Tucker frowned but didn’t disagree openly. Chaz and Billy agreed enthusiastically. The four men headed in through the front doors.
Lucy looked around the parking lot for the best place to spot incoming cars. Moving over to a low stone wall, she climbed on top. She would be able to see any approaching vehicles coming from the street or probably anyone coming out of the woods.
Strangely enough, she was glad to have something to do other than chasing a werewolf through a moonlit forest or a darkened school. When tonight was done, she’d go talk to Ms. Monroe. Lucy always felt better after she talked to their leader.
She jerked around so suddenly she nearly fell off the wall. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw something moving through the trees.
Lucy stared between the trees. She hadn’t gotten a clear view of the figure. Maybe it hadn’t really been there at all.
None-the-less, she readied her weapon as if there was something there. Taking her eyes off the woods just long enough to hop down from the wall and put the radio to her ear. “I think we’ve got a problem!”
Hank’s voice crackled over the radio. “What is it?”
“I think there’s something in the woods.”
“You think?”
“I saw something!” Lucy voice came perilously close to a shout.
“Make sure. I don’t want this little bastard to get away.”
Lucy clipped the radio back onto the loop on her jacket. “God damn it.” She took a few steps toward the trees. “This is fucking stupid.”
“Then don’t do it.”
She whirled around, panicked; while the voice didn’t sound hostile, it sounded far too close. “Who’s there?” Her jaw clicked shut but not quickly enough to catch the cliche before it escaped.
Standing behind her was Scott McCall.
If Lucy hadn’t seen the picture that Monroe kept with her, she wouldn’t have recognized the young man as an alpha. He didn’t seem angry; he seemed sad. That is, until his eyes glowed. She yelped and went for the radio on her jacket. It wasn’t there.
Scott had the radio in his hand; he had been so quick he had snatched it away from her without her knowing. His eyes shone bright red in the darkness as he glanced at it. “You went for this. Why didn’t you go for your gun?”
Lucy tried to talk around her heart in her throat. “Uh … I don’t know.”
“You want to know what I think?”
Of all the ways Lucy had imagined facing down an alpha, this had not been one of them. She couldn’t do anything but nod.
“It’s because you don’t really want to kill anyone,” the werewolf said. “I get that.”
She should lift up her gun and shoot him, but he was standing only a few feet from her. Monroe and her trainers had stressed to never let a werewolf get within arm’s reach.
Also, Lucy didn’t know if she could. It was one thing to kill something that was trying to kill you, but this man wasn’t.
“You can go. I won’t try to stop you.” McCall offered her a slight smile. “If you do one little thing for me.”
“What?” She tried to control herself; she realized she was trembling. She was going to take the offer.
He held up the radio until it was right in front of her face. “I want you to scream.”
~*~
Monty had made himself as small as possible, pushing himself into the corner. It was filthy in here, but that was the least of his worries. When the high school had first been built in the 1970s, smoking didn’t have the same stigma as it had in the present day. This had been a smoking lounge for teachers. After smoking had been banned in all public buildings, the administration had always kept the door locked, some enterprising student had managed to procure a copy of the key. It had been passed down from one class to another ever since, stored in a particular nook in the library.
The faculty had never realized that the smoking lounge was still being used that way. It was a carefully guarded secret.
Monty hoped it would save him now.
With his hearing, he had been able to track the four hunters after they entered the building. He knew they had split up into two groups. He could smell the gun oil and the wolf’s bane on them. He had to be confident they wouldn’t be able to find them. He prayed that they wouldn’t be able to find him.
He was so scared.
He heard a woman scream faintly. Then he heard the roar of an alpha.
~*~
Hank snarled. He didn’t think the girl was able to answer. Pushing the button again, he hissed his orders. “Tucker and Chaz, we’re on the top floor, Room 203. Get your asses here now.”
Tucker started to argue, arguing that they would cover more territory, but Hank let him eat static.
“Fucking children.”
Speaking of children, Billy looked stricken and pale, standing his back against a chalkboard as if for support. “I can’t believe … I can’t believe she’s dead.”
“We don’t know that.” Hank walked between the chemistry stations in order to think. It had been decades since he had been in school. “All we heard was a scream. She could have seen a snake, for all we know.”
Hank expected Billy to say something inane, babbling something about the werewolves coming for them. He didn’t have any time for that nonsense. They were hunting monsters, monsters that could be stopped. He’d learned that much in the last few years.
However, Billy had stopped talking, though he was making a choking sound. Hank turned around to follow Billy’s eyes, which were fixed on a point outside the classroom windows.
On the roof of the south wing of the high school, across the courtyard, a figure with glowing red eyes was watching them. Hank realized that it could see them as much as he could see it.
While Billy was inexperienced, he had quicker reflexes. In a paroxysm of fear, the younger man started shooting as fast as he could.
“Stop firing.” Hank calculated that between the windows and the distance to roof would make the chance of any shot hitting the alpha slim to none. Wolf’s bane ammunition wasn’t cheap. Nor was the supply endless.
Billy, however, distraught by his apprehension of Lucy’s death, kept firing.
“Stop, you moron!”
It took Hank almost yanking the shotgun out of Billy’s arms before the shooting stopped.
“What’d you do that for?”
“Look!” Hank jerked a thumb over towards the roof. “Do you see anything over there now?”
Billy face melted into chagrin.
“It baited you.” Hank didn’t say it out loud, but he began to be worried. It had been clever, acting to take advantage of the terrain and the emotional reaction to both Lucy’s scream and its own howl. “How many shells you got left?”
“Just one.”
Hank grumbled. “Fantastic.” This was going south quickly.
~*~
“I don’t know why we’re running,” Tucker bitched over his shoulder.
Chaz started at Tucker. This guy was a psycho. “Didn’t you hear Lucy scream?”
“So what?” Tucker moved down the hallway like he had played too much Call of Duty, checking the corners like he was a black ops operative.
“Didn’t you hear that roar?”
“Just another dumb animal to kill.” Tucker smirked but then he froze in his tracks. “Wait.”
“What?”
“Look down that hallway.”
“We’re supposed to be—”
“Just look!”
Chaz stopped and peered in the direction Tucker was looking. He didn’t like going against Hank, because he had faith in the older man’s experience, but the quicker he did as Tucker asked, the quicker they could regroup with others. He peered down the shadowy hallway. Was that a man standing there? He couldn’t be sure. Was it the werewolf?
Tucker grinned. “Got you!” He ran down the hallway. This wasn’t the direction he was supposed to be going in.
“Wait! Tucker, wait!”
The figure disappeared through a classroom door, with Tucker in pursuit. Chaz had no choice but to follow. He couldn’t let his partner go alone. When they got to the double doors, Chaz grabbed his colleague by the sleeve.
Tucker pumped his shotgun. “We checked this room. There’s no exit.”
Chaz opened his mouth to say something. “But--”
“We got him. Cover me and I’ll go in first.”
Wincing, Chaz could do nothing to agree. Had his uncle felt this way? He brought up his rifle to cover the doorway as instructed though suddenly he wanted to be anywhere else. Tucker was braver than him; Chaz had to give him that much.
Tucker kicked the door in, ready for anything. When nothing happened immediately, he flipped on the light, probably hoping that it would freak the werewolf out.
“There’s no one here. I swear I saw someone.” Tucker moved deeper into the room. “You saw him, right?”
“Yeah.” Chaz couldn’t understand. They had indeed checked that room earlier. There was no other way out. Not even a window to break through.
“Are you hiding behind that desk, monster?” Tucker taunted. He moved out of Chaz’s line of sight.
Chaz was tempted to call Hank on the radio, but he didn’t want the older man to get mad at him. How could the werewolf have gotten out of the room?
A creak answered him. Chaz looked up. Something was moving up in the drop ceiling, the weight pushing down on the tiles. “Tucker …”
“Where the fuck did he go?”
The werewolf had outmaneuvered them. It was above them!
“Tucker!”
With an explosion of particulate and metal superstructure, the alpha dropped down from the room to stand right in front of Chaz. With one smooth motion, the werewolf slammed the door shut with one hand, trapping Tucker in the room, while the other hand plucked the gun from Chaz’s hands before he could even pull the trigger.
“If I were you,” the alpha said in a confident voice. “I’d run.”
Chaz didn’t think; he bolted. His uncle would have been so ashamed of him, but Chaz didn’t think he could do this. He didn’t want to fight monsters. He wanted to go home.
The loud bang from behind him echoed through the halls. Tucker must have gotten off a shot, but Chaz didn’t stop to look back. He didn’t stop until he was out of the high school and down the road.
He was going to go home.
~*~
“We need to get out of here.” Billy was sure of it. They were being picked off, one by one. First Lucy, and now Chaz and Tucker weren’t answering their radios.
Hank grunted in annoyance.
“You saw that kid, didn’t you?” Billy demanded.
“I saw it.”
“His name is Monty.” Billy snapped back. “He wasn’t doing anything like this when we found him. Do you think he suddenly became a Terminator? There’s something else here.”
“You saw the eyes. There’s an alpha here Doesn’t matter.” Hank pushed open the double doors that led to the school’s gymnasium.
“It doesn’t matter?” Billy followed him, if only to not be alone.
The older man whirled on him. “Did you think that you were signing up to play Laser Tag? We’re hunting things that are faster, stronger, more vicious than we will ever be. They’re a threat, a threat to all of us. The only way to deal with a threat is through determination and conviction. Why else would I be running around in the middle of the night with a bunch of snot-nosed brats.”
Billy’s eyes dropped to the floor in shame, only to look up again when another voice spoke.
“I think you’re afraid.”
Hank brought up his gun, his eyes scanning the large open area. He motioned for Billy to get behind him. “Watch our flank.”
Suddenly there was movement on the other side of the gym where the wooden bleachers had been pulled out. Hank fired off a shot only to realize that he had missed a basketball, which bounced slowly across the floor.
“Someone once told me that basketball was a real sport.” The voice came from somewhere in the gym. Billy couldn’t place it. “But I guess that the real sport is hunting. It has the best prize. If you win, you don’t have to be afraid anymore. At least, until the next time you encounter something you don’t understand. If you win.”
As the voice kept speaking, Hank started moving toward a set of wooden bleachers, the type used during basketball games, which had been pulled out. The werewolf must be hiding behind them. Hank was slowly making his way toward one end, with Billy following in his footsteps.
When they reached the corner, Hank stepped around quickly to look under the bleachers. He cursed. Billy had had forgotten to cover their flank; he had been trying to crane his neck over Hank’s shoulder in order to find the source of the voice. When there was nothing there, he turned around, only to duck as another basketball came hurling at him.
But it had been aimed at him. It hit Hank so hard that it bounced the older hunter’s head off the bleachers. Hank went down.
Billy shrieked, pulled up his gun and fired at the red-eyed werewolf standing near a ball rack across the gym. The shot missed completely.
The werewolf waited, but Billy froze. He had used his last wolf’s bane round. Hank had refused to give him more out of pique, keeping it, so he said, for the better hunter. Now Hank’s gun lay a few feet away from Hank’s body.
Billy glanced that way, but when he glanced back up the werewolf was shaking his head back and forth, slowly. It was a warning not to go for the gun.
Slowly, deliberately the alpha pointed one long claw at the glowing green Exit sign.
Billy ran for it.
~*~
Monty pressed himself into the corner of the room. He had heard gunshots, but he couldn’t make himself move.
Then someone was at the door.
Monty swallowed. He had the key. They couldn’t get in.
Unless they somehow could.
“Monty?” A voice called out. He didn’t recognize it. “I know you’re in there. I followed your scent.”
The boy didn’t say anything. They could be lying.
“Okay. If you’re not going to let me in, I’m going to have to break it open. But that is all I will do until you say I can do more.”
True to his words, the owner of the voice shattered the door with one shoulder push. No other student would be able to hide out in here and smoke during school hours again.
Monty looked up at red eyes glowed in the doorway. “You’re an alpha.”
“Yeah.” The young man waved it off. “May I come in?”
Pushing himself up, Monty nodded. He felt safer already.
The alpha stepped carefully over the remains of the door. “My name’s Scott. I’m here to help. Are you hurt?”
“I haven’t been hurt, but there are hunters!”
“I know. They’re not going to bother you anymore.” Scott held out his hand.
Monty remembered how scary his uncle could be when he was angry. Scott didn’t seem angry at all. He seemed sad. “Are they dead?”
They stepped out into the darkened hallway of the high school.
“That wasn't necessary. I broke one guy’s wrist, and I think I gave the other one a concussion, but no one is dead. The rest ran away.”
Monty was amazed and a little ashamed. He was sure that they would kill him. “They had guns and wolf’s bane. How did you do it?”
“Practice.’ Scott’s drifted off as if remembering. “Someone taught me how to turn someone’s fear against them a long time ago. I don’t like to do it, but it’s better than the alternative.”
“Where would you learn something like that?”
Scott chuckled and put a hand on Monty’s shoulder, squeezing it. “At school, where else?”