Thorn (Dark Side Series: Book 3)

3: first, last, and always

Harlowe, you are a werewolf first, last, and always. 

The cat's dead eyes flashed as it limped through the seam of darkness and entered the home. A hand—pale, human, impossible to hazard a gender at this distance—wrapped around the doorknob and shut out the night. The house was dark, the yard tidy, the several times bloodsoaked lawn trim and green. A leaf skipped down the driveway and caught in the reedy corpses of summer-spent irises. It clung there through the breeze, flicking back and forth like a rotted cat's ear. 

Indecision was not a trait that often bothered the sheriff, but he hesitated this evening, looking from the unempty house to the lively driveway at his right. 

"You are a werewolf, first, last, and always," came the under breath murmur of the wolf in human skin. He touched for a second his shirt sleeve, where the serpentine ink twined 'round his forearm. Marcy was not a werewolf. Marcy was not ever going to be a werewolf. Whatever was in that house wasn't a werewolf. It probably wasn't even her. The demon wouldn't be so stupid as to drag his prized possession out where she could get stolen.

He had to tend to Talon Pack's MIA alpha before chasing ghosts. 

In the past, he'd used some truly serpentine logic to wind his way to the conclusion that Marcy came first, but he knew she couldn't always, and didn't tonight. 

He dragged the freshly-sprouted fang over his the edge of his lip and considered going in anyway.

When the subject of werewolves arose, several theories reared their ugly heads. Is it the moon? Like some rocky satellite filled with partially molten iron had the power to make his teeth grow and fall out. Leave the moon to rule its tides, he'd tell folks, and in the same soft tone that drew them in or pushed them away, added that moonlight made it, "All the better to see you, my dear."

"Lobo de la Parca!"

He turned. Evita only cared to call him by his proper title when she was cross.

And oh was she, with her alpha's crime scene several rooms away and the primary investigator halfway up the street before he'd realized where his feet had led him.

"Hey!" she hissed with all the malice of acid rain. "Where do you think you are going?"

His spinal column cracked and realigned into human obligation. "Something's up there."

Evita trotted through the streetlight. Her eyes reflected the greenish yellow promise of wolfshape.

"She's not there," she said, reaching his side. "Cal installed security cams. An alert would come right here to my phone." She lofted the device and flashed him the date and time and otherwise empty screen.

"Someone's inside," he said.

"She is not," Evita said. He could see her eyes skip over the quiet house as if it didn't exist. 

His toes twitched painfully as she took him by the hand and led him to Ms. Finn's. It was always a feet-first transformation for him; it was as good a place as any to start; tucked away in boots or sneakers, where in tense situations no one could quite tell how many links were left on his chain. No one could see the spasmic clench as sinew tore and bones unhinged like jaws set to swallow his humanity. 

One of the others growing up—big bloke with a mean mind and the bulk to survive the frenzy of the fighting pits—had shown the first signs of transformation in his fingers. A werewolf was his or her most vulnerable in the midst of transformation. This fella had twitchy fingers and no self-restraint. Couldn't shoot, but wasn't fully switched into beast mode. It was only a few seconds. Wouldn't matter once the grey evil was unleashed, but when the cage doors opened and the big fella lingered in his cell to buy back the time he'd lose, Caelan had stepped right up and shot him through the eye.