Wolf by Madelaine Montague

kicked.”
    Sylvie gaped at him, discomfited that everyone seemed aware of what had passed between her and Mac—vaguely angered, as well, that they seemed intent on fighting her battles for her. “But … they’ll hurt each other!”
    “I think that’s what they’ve got in mind,” Cavanaugh remarked dryly.
    She stared at the two of them as they settled on either side of the campfire. Beau pulled one of the spits off and checked the meat. “Supper’s done whenever you two get tired of whaling on each other,” he called out.
    Sylvie strained to pierce the darkness to see if it had had any effect on them, but she could see less now than she’d been able to see before and she hadn’t been able to see much then. She could still hear meaty thuds, though, and grunts of exertion and the rattle of bushes as they flung each other around.
    “You might as well sit down and eat,” Cavanaugh said. “They’re probably going to be at it for a while. Hawk’s stubborn and Mac’s as pigheaded as they come.”
    Sylvie sank down weakly, struggling with her emotions. “I don’t see how you can be so … calm about it!” she said accusingly.
    Beau shrugged. “It ain’t me getting’ the shit kicked out of me. Anyway, they can’t do enough damage to make it permanent even if they want to.” He lifted his voice a notch. “They sure as hell are trampling down the jungle all over the place, though, besides making enough noise to be heard all over creation and back. Dumb shits!”
    He winked at Sylvie when the thrashing stopped abruptly. After a few minutes, she thought she heard them moving away. It struck her then that they had an almost unnatural ability to move swiftly and silently. She’d certainly noticed before. They startled her regularly by simply ‘appearing’ without warning. Put together with their ability to see far better at night, though, than could possibly just be put down to ‘great night vision’ she realized abruptly that it was more than their training as she’d assumed before. That might contribute to it, but it indicated abilities far above the norm—for a human.
    She supposed she’d been too distraught to actually take in what Mac had told her before. She hadn’t really believed him when he’d told her that they were the monsters she’d seen. She’d decided that her mind had been so terrorized that it had been playing tricks on her. She knew it was a well known medical fact that, in such situations, people’s sight failed them and their minds were prone to fail them, as well, shielding them from as much as possible for protection.
    She had accepted what he’d said about them ‘catching’ something, but she’d been thinking in terms of the ordinary sort of things they might have caught. That was why she’d dismissed it. She’d assumed she’d already been exposed and would either catch it from them or not and that it was already out of her hands—but she’d still been thinking along the lines of flu or something of that nature.

    48
    She still didn’t see how they could possibly have caught anything that could change their physical appearance. If there was anything like that, wouldn’t someone have run across it before?
    Of course, he’d suggested it had happened in a South American jungle and there were places no man, or damned few, had ever been.
    Even if she discounted the possibility that it could not only physically change them once, but regularly, what kind of something could they possibly ‘catch’ that would account for the other changes they claimed that she’d seen?
    Mac had said parasites. She knew there were some that formed a symbiotic relationship with the host, but, just as often they were harmful, and she’d never heard of one beneficial enough to enhance vision, speed, and coordination—let alone rapid healing as Hawk had suggested, or healing of wounds that would ordinarily be mortal.
    She was inclined to dismiss all of it, found it hard to swallow anything