Werewolf Cop by Andrew Klavan Page A

fantastical.
    â€œMy love, my love,” said Professor Gretchen Dankl. “It is for you I have become an abomination.”
    Zach stood for one more second appreciating the beauty of the moon and the moonlit forest. Then he drew a deep breath, resolving that he was finished here. He had humored the loony old woman enough. Enough.
    He turned to her and began to speak, but before he could, she made a sound—and it was such a sound as he had never heard before. Animal in its rumbling depth and savagery but human in its grief, it was a cross between a feral growl and a low moan of mourning.
    â€œProfessor? Are you all right?” he said.
    He took a step toward her. Had an instant in which to begin to realize that she was changing—that she had changed—but it was only an instant, and he only began to realize, because the truth of it was too impossible to imagine.
    Then she spun round and tore him open with unimaginable speed and violence.
    He was flying backward, his torso shredded, even as his mind was forming the image of what he could not in all reason have seen: the small, hunched shadow of the woman in the dark transforming into the great, hunkering beast of a thing that pivoted toward him quicker than the eye could follow. Its massive, blackly furred arm was still expanding, still bursting from its sleeve as it whiplashed through the night at him, its dagger-long, dagger-sharp claws slicing away his jacket, shirt, and flesh in one slashing sweep. The gun and the box it had come in flew from his outflung hands. Then his back smashed into the earth with a force that would have knocked the air out of him if he had not already gasped it all away.
    He felt the life-blood spilling from his core. He choked on the blood rising in his throat. It coughed up out of him and spilled over his chin, and he was full of the primal knowledge that he had been wounded in some deep, essential way, maybe unto death. He did not even have to think this; he just knew it—he had a single second in which he knew it. . . .
    Then the moonlight broke into the clearing in a broad and radiant beam—and the beast rose up above him, raging in the silver glow.
    On his back, bleeding and in an agony more of shock than pain, Zach gaped up at the thing as it continued its metamorphosis. With sounds like the tearing of fabric and the splintering of wood, its muscles and bones were breaking out of themselves and the last traces of its humanity were molting from it. Shreds of what had been its clothes were flying and falling away. Its limbs were lengthening, its core thickening, its face—like some nightmare flower—was blossoming into a fire-eyed, snouted, snarling mass of bared and dripping fangs.
    Another instant and its transformation was complete. It was no longer the little German professor at all. It was a massive monster, rampant against the moon.
    Rearing on its huge hind legs, it raised its forelegs, its talons flashing. It howled— howled! —its muzzle tilted to the sky. The sound sent such an ancient and unholy terror through Zach’s whole body that it seemed to curdle his sinews into milk. Any courage he had, any strategy, any hope, was blasted out of him by that high, primeval cry. The oldest instincts of his brain informed the rest of him that life was over. He was prey. He was food.
    If the beast had fallen on him then—as he was sure it would—he would have died and been devoured like any rabbit paralyzed by a predator’s glare. But the creature hovered above him in the moonlight another long second. He couldn’t tell why. It almost seemed to be pausing, to be relishing its expectation, snarling and slavering and staring in anticipation at the feast spread before it on the ground, its guttural noises full of hunger, nothing but ravenous hunger in its fire-yellow eyes.
    In that moment of the animal’s hesitation—whatever its cause—Zach’s inner man rallied. The soul