He’d expected a slash, not a tackle. The air whooped out of him for a second time as he backpedaled blind through the garden. Lights flashed out on Wagner, the bright swing of high-powered torches, as backup arrived.
It didn’t take long to gut someone, though. He could be dead by then.
The wolf lifted him off the ground, ready to smash him back down again. Marlow grabbed one tufted ear and twisted viciously. The shock of pain made the wolf’s grip on him loosen, and he got his feet up. He braced them against her stomach and shoved hard, his knee a sharp “fuck sake” jolt of pain as it absorbed the pressure to free himself.
Marlow hit the ground, got a mouthful of muddy dirt, and rolled back to his feet as he fumbled one-handed at his belt. Claws smacked into the ground where he’d been, dug in, and ripped up a chunk of sod. The wolf shrieked in frustration and threw the clod of ground at him. It hit his shoulder and sprayed sandy dirt and worms down his front, under his shirt, and into his boots.
The wolf’s claws were silhouetted against the moon as she cocked her arm back for the last blow. Marlow sprayed her in the face with aerosolized aconite. Where it touched, she broke out in wet red blisters and welts as the wolf tried to peel back from the human within. White scales crusted over her eyes, blind as the moon.
She yelped and pawed at her face, and the inflamed skin split under her claws. Her ears flapped as she shook her head and staggered away in a rough circle.
Marlow unholstered his gun and clicked off the safety. He gripped it in both hands, held it low against his thigh as he waited. The silver bullets would take out a joint if he went for a nonfatal shot, but that wouldn’t necessarily put her down.
He didn’t need to decide. The wolf pawed roughly at her face one last time before she broke, dropped back onto all fours, and ran blind—or good as—toward the road.
“Charlie-thirty,” he said into the radio, the call sign for Bennett’s team, as he picked his way through the destruction. “This is Charlie-forty. Let her go or pen her. Package dropped off.”
Static and silence dragged out too long for his comfort. Then Bennett came over the air with a curt, “Copy.”
Marlow clambered over the broken slats of the fence. It was the only damn house in the row that didn’t have a security light. The garden was blurred shades of gray and black. He grabbed his torch and flicked it on to illuminate a single long bar of the garden.
The curtain was easy to find, caught up in the branches of a dry little pear tree, and ripped to shreds once the wolf realized that was what had slowed her down. Marlow panned the light down to a muddy rag next to a flowerbed. Except, once the light hit it, the dull stains turned red.
“Not tonight,” Marlow said. He hurried over and dropped onto his knees to shove the thick green stems of the lily of the valley aside. “I did not come out here on four hours sleep for a dead child. Come on.”
He found the baby rolled under a rose bush. It was bloody and covered in mud and manure, but when he pulled it out, the rough handling startled another wail from a screwed-up red face. Alive.
“Okay,” Marlow said as he got back up. He gave the little ginger head an awkward pat. “You’re going to be okay. Those are the rules, right? Bennett! Over here. I’ve got it.”
Bennett boosted herself over the last panel of intact fence in the suburb, lean and dangerous in the Night Shift’s full uniform. Even the helmet which Marlow had left in the car.
“I see that,” she said as she dropped down on the other side. “She okay?”
Marlow shrugged. “Alive.”
“Good enough. Give me a hold.”
He handed the baby over and left Bennett to cuddle it while he went to let the medics in. Cameras flashed in his face as the gate opened, a glare of bright light that illuminated Bennett with the infant held against her bulletproof vest.
Very heroic. The picture of a Night Shift sergeant.
She caught his eye for a second and shrugged unrepentantly as she headed for the medics. “She’s alive,” Bennett answered to the shouted questions from the press. “And tomorrow, she’ll be back in his mother’s arms. Round here, we call that a win.”
Whatever. Marlow brushed dirt off his cuffs. Let her have it. She was right about the win.
An hour later, once the circus had gone, Bennett handed him an energy drink.
“All’s fair in love and PR,” she said as she lit a cigarette. It was as close to an apology as she’d get. Gray smoke wreathed her face as she exhaled it down her nose. “Good hands, though.”
Marlow leaned against the side of the armored van, black metal cold against his shoulders, and took a drink as he listened to the pitch of howls that rose from the city streets. The next call would come in soon; they just didn’t know where yet.
“Plenty of night left to impress,” he said dryly. She laughed and flicked ash into the gutter.
The rookie who hovered awkwardly on the outskirts of their conversation drained his can and crushed it down into a disk. “I don’t get it. We aren’t charging the mom with a Depraved Heart felony? It’s, like, textbook.”
Bennett plucked the cigarette from her lips and let smoke eddy from her mouth. “Only if it’s a shit textbook,” she said. “Jesus, do you even know how to read?”
“Depraved Heart is when a wolf tries to use the limited amnesty of the full moon to get away with murder or insurance fraud,” Marlow said. “That’s not what happened here.”
