Unnatural Creatures

He looked up through the brilliant lighting effects of smashing his head on the sidewalk and saw his old nemesis, the policeman who had been cheated of his beer.

“So, Rover!” said the officer. “Got you at last, did I? Now we’ll see if you’ll wear a proper license tag. Didn’t know I used to play football, did you?”

The officer’s grip on his hair was painfully tight. A gleeful crowd was gathering and heckling the policeman with fantastic advice.

“Get along, boys,” he admonished. “This is a private matter between me and Rover here. Come on,” and he tugged even harder.

Wolf left a large tuft of fur and skin in the officer’s grasp and felt the blood ooze out of the bare patch on his neck. He heard a ripe oath and a pistol shot simultaneously, and felt the needlelike sting through his shoulder. The awestruck crowd thawed before him. Two more bullets hied after him, but he was gone, leaving the most dazed policeman in Berkeley.

“I hit him,” the officer kept muttering blankly. “I hit the—”

Wolfe Wolf coursed along Dwight Way. Two more blocks and he’d be at the little bungalow that Emily shared with a teaching assistant in something or other. Ripping out that telephone had stopped Fearing only momentarily; the orders would have been given by now; the henchmen would be on their way. But he was almost there….

“He’o!” a child’s light voice called to him. “Nice woof-woof come back!”

Across the street was the modest frame dwelling of Robby and his shrewish mother. The child had been playing on the sidewalk. Now he saw his idol and deliverer and started across the street at a lurching toddle. “Nice woof-woof!” he kept calling. “Wait for Robby!”

Wolf kept on. This was no time for playing games with even the most delightful of cubs. And then he saw the car. It was an ancient jalopy, plastered with wisecracks even older than itself; and the high school youth driving was obviously showing his girlfriend how it could make time on this deserted residential street. The girl was a cute dish, and who could be bothered watching out for children?

Robby was directly in front of the car. Wolf leaped straight as a bullet. His trajectory carried him so close to the car that he could feel the heat of the radiator on his flank. His forepaws struck Robby and thrust him out of danger. They fell to the ground together, just as the car ground over the last of Wolf’s caudal vertebrae.

The cute dish screamed. “Homer! Did we hit them?”

Homer said nothing, and the jalopy zoomed on.

Robby’s screams were louder. “You hurt me!! You hurt me! Baaaaad woof-woof!”

His mother appeared on the porch and joined in with her own howls of rage. The cacophony was terrific. Wolf let out one wailing yelp of his own, to make it perfect and to lament his crushed tail, and dashed on. This was no time to clear up misunderstandings.

But the two delays had been enough. Robby and the policeman had proved the perfect unwitting tools of Oscar Fearing. As Wolf approached Emily’s little bungalow, he saw a gray sedan drive off. In the rear was a small, slim girl, and she was struggling.

Even a werewolf’s lithe speed cannot equal that of a motorcar. After a block of pursuit, Wolf gave up and sat back on his haunches panting. It felt funny, he thought even in that tense moment, not to be able to sweat, to have to open your mouth and stick out your tongue and…

“Trouble?” inquired a solicitous voice.

This time, Wolf recognized the cat. “Heavens, yes,” he assented wholeheartedly. “More than you ever dreamed of.”

“Food shortage?” the cat asked. “But that toddler back there is nice and plump.”

“Shut up,” Wolf snarled.

“Sorry; I was just judging from what Confucius told me about werewolves. You don’t mean to tell me that you’re an altruistic were?”

“I guess I am. I know werewolves are supposed to go around slaughtering, but right now I’ve got to save a life.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“It’s the truth.”

“Ah,” the cat reflected philosophically. “Truth is a dark and deceitful thing.”

Wolfe Wolf was on his feet. “Thanks,” he barked. “You’ve done it.”

“Done what?”

“See you later.” And Wolf was off at top speed for the Temple of the Dark Truth.

That was the best chance. That was Fearing’s headquarters. The odds were at least even that when it wasn’t being used for services it was the hangout of his ring, especially since the consulate had been closed in San Francisco. Again the wild running and leaping, the narrow escapes; and where Wolf had not taken these too seriously before, he knew now that he might be immune to bullets, but certainly not to being run over. His tail still stung and ached tormentingly. But he had to get there. He had to clear his own reputation, he kept reminding himself; but what he really thought was, I have to save Emily.

A block from the temple he heard the crackle of gunfire. Pistol shots and, he’d swear, machine guns, too. He couldn’t figure what it meant, but he pressed on. Then a bright-yellow roadster passed him and a vivid flash came from its window. Instinctively he ducked. You might be immune to bullets, but you still didn’t just stand still for them.

The roadster was gone and he was about to follow when a glint of bright metal caught his eye. The bullet that had missed him had hit a brick wall and ricocheted back onto the sidewalk. It glittered there in front of him—pure silver!

This, he realized abruptly, meant the end of his immunity. Fearing had believed Gloria’s story, and with his smattering of occult lore he had known the successful counterweapon. A bullet, from now on, might mean no more needle sting, but instant death.

And so Wolfe Wolf went straight on.

He approached the temple cautiously, lurking behind shrubbery. And he was not the only lurker. Before the temple, crouching in the shelter of a car every window of which was shattered, were Fergus O’Breen and a moonfaced giant. Each held an automatic, and they were taking pot shots at the steeple.

Wolf’s keen lupine hearing could catch their words even above the firing. “Gabe’s around back,” Moonface was explaining. “But it’s no use. Know what that damned steeple is? It’s a revolving machine-gun turret. They’ve been ready for something like this. Only two men in there, far as we can tell, but that turret covers all the approaches.”

“Only two?” Fergus muttered.