Page 31

A s a rule, wolves, like coyotes, were not human-size. Then again, as a rule, wolves were not found in the wings of a Seattle theater, much less wearing a three-piece suit and standing on somebody’s feet with their front paws sliding frantically around that somebody’s waist.

I grabbed two fists full of suit jacket at the nominal shoulders, trying to catch enough fur to keep my boss from falling down.

Trying to catch enough to keep him from tearing off into the audience, for that matter, but the combination of clothes and fur made for a poor grip.

On the other hand, neither of us wanted him to be standing upright, so we sank to the floor together, nose to nose as the dancers poured off stage.

Bewilderment faded from Morrison’s blue eyes, panic replacing it.

He jerked violently when the first dancer gasped upon seeing him, and reared back as more of them by turns jolted and pushed to a stop.

I didn’t even need an animal’s senses to catch the fear and confusion in their scents: it was pungent, pouring off sweating bodies and from heaving lungs.

In face of all that, two fists full of suit-covered fur were not enough to keep a hundred and ninety pounds of wolf in place.

His claws scrabbled on the floor—no soft rubber mat here, just black-painted pine—and I was hauled under him, gathering a whole host of splinters in my backside as he lurched toward the rear of the backstage area.

I swallowed a gurgle of pain and held on, determined not to make this worse by allowing my boss to run amok on four legs through the streets of Seattle.

My brain was already shrieking your fault your fault this is your fault!

and miserably, there was no doubt about that at all.

Morrison had the magical aptitude of a horseradish.

This was not a condemnation. It was simply the way of things, and it was probably part of why he could ground me so fast. He was absolutely, solidly connected to the ordinary world.

Or he had been, until last night’s unfortunate thought that he’d make a very pretty wolf had met up with me working a bit of magic on him tonight while two dozen dancers poured out a river’s worth of power meant entirely to soften an audience up for a transformative experience.

God, I was an idiot.

Morrison gave a truly magnificent surge which almost shook me loose.

I snatched at his haunches as they passed over me and managed to de-pants him, which presented me with a much more up-close-and-personal encounter of canine genitals than I’d ever hoped to have.

I said “Aaghg,” and hauled myself over his ribs, trying to crawl up his bony, furry spine.

It gave me a glimpse of our location—the stage’s absolute darkest, farthest-back corner, with nowhere in particular to go, for which I was grateful.

There was a door only a few yards away, but it was closed and I didn’t think Morrison was quite up to knobs just then.

The entire dance troupe was crowded as far away from me and Morrison as they could get without spilling back onto the stage.

Not one of them had made a sound, though several had stuffed knuckles into their mouths to accomplish such silence.

I perversely admired the training that ranked “shut the hell up backstage” above “OH MY GOD THERE’S A WOLF BACK HERE!

” and tried to keep my grunts quiet as I got some leverage, flung myself forward and wrapped my arms around Morrison’s neck.

It wasn’t a particularly natural direction of attack on a wolf, and I had no idea how much of Morrison was in control.

Enough that he hadn’t bitten my face off in the first seconds after transformation, but the panicked retreat to a defensible corner seemed pretty lupine to me.

So did the snarling, snapping, writhing attempt to chew my arms off once I got a neck lock on him.

I’d put sleeper holds on people before. I’d never tried it on a dog.

Somewhere very far at the back of my mind, I whispered wolves aren’t dogs, and that part of me produced a shrill giggle as I folded one elbow around Morrison’s neck and grabbed that wrist with my opposite hand.

Humans tapped out or went unconscious from a well-applied carotid restraint within about ten seconds.

Canines, it turned out, were a whole hell of a lot less obliging.

Morrison slithered backward and to the side, not quite escaping my grasp only because I was pretty much sitting on top of him when he started.

I slid to the side, still trying to keep a grip around his throat, but his neck-to-head ratio was all off, from a chokehold perspective: thick neck, streamlined skull, certainly compared to a human.

Furthermore, humans usually required some degree of training to get out of a sleeper hold, either by learning early on to duck the chin so a lock couldn’t be made, or—more usefully, after the fact—by doing something like slamming their heel into their attacker’s instep, which could easily hurt enough to make an assailant loosen his grip.

Wolves, I discovered, just naturally went for a let me try to disembowel you with my hind feet attack. My bowels were, thank God, not quite in his line of fire, but my thigh was. Denim shredded under his claws and I shrieked like a little girl, letting go so my quadriceps weren’t also shredded.

Morrison leaped out of reach, careening down the length of the backstage with his tie flying over one shoulder and his suit jacket flapping wildly along his back.

I was a moron. I should have grabbed the tie.

This piece of information now solidly in mind, I took off after him without considering the futility of a two-legged creature trying to catch a four-legged one.

The stage scrim rippled wildly as we bolted alongside it.

I hoped the curtains were closed so what audience remained in the theater during intermission wouldn’t see the artistic, shadowy rendition of Woman Chasing Wolf across the stage.

Two legs versus four or not, I caught up to my panicked, shapeshifted boss because there were no open doors at the far end of the stage, either.

He backed into a corner, snarling, and I dropped down low, hands spread wide to make myself as unthreatening an object as I could.

Morrison lowered himself to the ground, his own front paws spread wide and his haunches raised, similar to my own position.

Except on him, it looked familiar. I’d seen wolves do that on documentaries, and I was reasonably certain it was prelude to a dramatic last stand.

I said, “Shit,” out loud and fell over, throat and belly exposed in my very best attempt to project canine body language.

On the positive side, he didn’t rip my throat out.

On the somewhat less positive side, a stagehand flung one of the backstage doors open.

Morrison tore through it—knocking the stagehand to the floor in the process—and disappeared down the bright-lit hallway that led to the dressing rooms. I gave up on any pretense of backstage silence and bellowed, “Close the doors! Close all the doors!” as I got my feet under me and ran helter-skelter after my four-legged boss.

The hall behind the stage was mostly concrete, with an ordinary door directly opposite the one I’d burst through, a thankfully closed giant corrugated steel door at the far end, and a sharp turn just beyond that.

I spasmed with indecision, then yanked the door across from me open to take a look at what lay beyond.

A warehouse-size room with set pieces, costumes, marked-off rehearsal areas and another enormous corrugated steel door—this one open to the world—spread out in front of me.

I slammed my small door shut, breathlessly confident that Morrison’s only escape route lay that way, and that he currently lacked the skills to open the round-knobbed egress.

I pelted up the hall and rounded the corner, increasingly certain he’d come that way when I discovered the adjoining hall to be lined with dancers pressed against the walls and all staring in the direction I was running.

A door slammed somewhere in front of me and my stomach turned leaden with fear.

I skidded around another corner, and there, fifteen feet ahead of me, was a set of double doors with broad press-bar handles.

The same doors, in fact, that I’d propped open earlier so that Morrison and I could slip into the theater’s backstage areas without disturbing anyone.

And like in all public buildings, for fire code reasons, the doors swung outward, making them easy for almost anyone to open.

I crashed through them at top speed, but the last I saw of my boss was a streak of silver and a flapping tie disappearing into a nearby patch of trees.

I wish I could say I swung right into action, but in fact I just stood there for what seemed like an awfully long time, staring after Morrison.

Disasters of every magnitude ran through my mind: Morrison getting hit by a car.

Morrison getting shot by some redneck. Morrison escaping the city and living out his life howling at the moon.

I wondered how long wolves lived, anyway.

Morrison starving to death because what the hell did he know about hunting in wolf form, not that instinctive lupine behavior appeared out of his grasp.

Coyote had said a forced or unexpected shift made it easy, even likely, that you’d get lost in the animal.

I had to assume Morrison’s frenetic fleeing was pure panicked wolf, not the basically unruffleable man who’d become a precinct captain at the tender age of thirty-five.

The doors opened behind me and Jim Littlefoot, cautiously, said, “Detective Walker?”