Out there, he could be himself, an alpha strain werewolf. Here, on Earth, he had to pass for an ordinary man and, after years in space, it no longer came easily to him.
I mixed cinnamon, sugar, and lemon juice into my peeled, sliced apples, added a bit of flour, layered them on top of the dough, popped the pan into the oven, and exhaled. Halfway there.
“Thirty minutes,” I told the inn.
The inn creaked in acknowledgment.
Sean wanted to get the firewood. I offered to go with him, but he declined. I couldn’t make it easier for him while he was out, but I could greet him with his favorite cake when he came back.
A gentle chime rolled through my mind. A familiar presence entered the boundary of the inn. I motioned with my fingers and the wall sprouted a screen. On it, Officer Hector Marais carefully maneuvered his Red Deer PD cruiser up my driveway. Usually, he parked on the street. Driving up like that meant he had a special delivery.
I wiped my hands with a kitchen towel and headed to the garage. No rest for the wicked.
Officer Marais opened the trunk of his cruiser and bent down to give Beast a pet. In his mid-thirties, bronze-skinned, athletic, with blue-black hair cut short and a clean-shaven jaw, he was the very definition of the modern police officer. Everything from the collar of his uniform to the soles of his boots was “squared away” as Sean said. If the police department ever needed a model for a recruitment poster, there was nobody better.
He truly was a model police officer, completely committed to protecting residents in his jurisdiction. Which was why once he found out that aliens existed, and that Earth enjoyed the special protected status, he took it upon himself to add extraterrestrial policing to his regular duties. If any normal Earth mechanic ever popped the hood of his cruiser, they would faint on the spot. We were very fortunate that Red Deer made its officers buy their vehicles through a subsidized program.
I looked into the trunk. A woman lay inside it wrapped in a stun net. She was a little older than me and wore a gray combat suit. In good shape, lean, with attractive, bold features. On Earth someone would think she was a star athlete, track, or tennis maybe. Her tan skin had a slight cinnamon tint, her hair was dark red and braided away from her face, and her green eyes regarded me with open hostility.
The stun net, one of the fun modifications Sean and Marais had added to the police cruiser, was self-guiding and acted like a taser on contact, short circuiting the neural pathways. Marais had practiced firing it on Sean in an abandoned warehouse parking lot. He’d chase him with the cruiser and Sean would do his best to evade, while I served as a lookout and tried not to have a heart attack every time I heard a car coming. Marais hadn’t had a chance to use his new gadget until now.
The net should have stunned the woman into a mild coma. Instead, it seemed to just piss her off. She glared at me like I was everything that was wrong with her life. I leaned closer. A faint golden sheen rolled over her irises.
A werewolf. Made sense.
“Where did you find her?”
Marais nodded at the car. “I’ll show you.”
I nudged the inn. A thin wooden tendril slipped from the floor and brushed against the hood of the vehicle, accepting the transmission from the cruiser. Gertrude Hunt produced another screen showing the view from Marais’ dashcam camera. He had two sets in his car, one the standard issue from Red Deer PD and the other bootleg from us.
The street looked familiar. He was on Rattlesnake Trail, by the high school, heading east, with the walled subdivision on one side and the school’s baseball diamond on the other. Bright summer sunshine flooded the mostly empty road. The record temperatures chased the kids inside or to the pools, and their parents were still at work.
A dark humanoid shape shot past the car. Marais was going at least 35. Top human speed was 28 miles per hour and whatever that was blew by his vehicle like it was standing still.
“Someone was running at superhuman speeds in broad daylight for all the honest world to see,” Marais said. “Apparently, she thinks the Earth Treaty doesn’t apply to her.”
The Treaty applied to everyone.
I motioned to Gertrude Hunt. A much thicker tendril emerged from the ceiling and plucked the woman out of the trunk. The stun net dropped to the floor. The inn’s tendril split into smaller branches, wrapping around the woman, and spun her in the air, rifling through her clothes. Weapons rained to the floor of the garage: a short-range energy sidearm, two knives, a monomolecular cleaver short sword, and three small sticky bombs, each the size of a large grape. When attached to a door and detonated, they could blow a hole through the strongest terrestrial safe.
Nice.
The tendrils twisted my captive upright and lowered her to the floor, anchoring themselves through the floorboards. She glowered at me and snarled.
Beast snarled back by my feet.
The werewolf woman didn’t seem impressed. In her place, I wouldn’t have taken the seven-pound shih tzu seriously either. It was a potentially deadly mistake.
“You are in violation of the Earth Treaty,” I told her. “Do you know what that means?”
She didn’t answer.
“The Treaty expressly forbids exposing the human population to the existence of extraterrestrial life. Any traveler wishing to visit Earth must make arrangements with an inn like this one. Have you made such arrangements?”
No answer.
“She knows,” Marais said. “I read her the rights on the way. She was heading this way when I apprehended her. Probably to see you.”
“Not you.” The woman sneered.
Oh. Another one.
“Thank you, Officer,” I told Marais. “I’ll take it from here.”
“Never a dull moment.” He opened the front door of his cruiser, reached for a hidden button in the dashboard, pressed it, and the net slid back into the trunk, primed and ready to be reused.
“Oh! I have something for you.”
I held out my hand. The ceiling parted and a vacuum-sealed parcel landed in my hand, two skeins of wool yarn, shimmering with blue and green. “For your wife.”
“Thanks. She’ll love it. What kind of wool is it?”
“Tell her it’s muskox.” It was close enough unless someone did a microscopic analysis. It was a gift from a guest, and Officer Marais’ wife ran a knitting blog. She would enjoy it much more than I would.
“Thanks again.”
I watched Officer Marais get into his vehicle and drive off. A moment later I felt him cross the boundary of the inn.
It was just me, the female werewolf, and her undying hatred for me. I didn’t take it personally.
The werewolves of Auul were poets, and storytelling was in their blood. Sadly, the saga of their planet had turned out tragic, the way sagas often do. They were invaded by an overwhelming force, so they bioengineered werewolfism to repel it. Then decades later, the enemy made their own version of supersoldiers and invaded again. The people of Auul built teleportation gates, knowing they would destabilize their planet, and created even better werewolves, the alpha strain, more dangerous and deadly, to guard them as they evacuated.
The alpha strain werewolves protected the gates to the bitter end, until the cosmic forces that powered them tore Auul apart. Almost all of them died in that last stand.
Sean was the son of two alpha strain werewolves who somehow made it out just before the cataclysm. He was born against all odds, he was freakishly powerful, and after serving in the military, he met me, learned where he came from, and caught a glimpse of the galaxy. It had beckoned, and Sean had followed its starlight. Everything he had done since had become the stuff of legend.