Chapter 55: Death or Marriage

Deputy Mark Brighton’s POV

Hermantown Heights Apartments

“Mom, I need your help with this,” I told her as I walked into the kitchen. I needed a shower badly, but my bandages and cast couldn’t get wet.

“Of course, dear,” she said as she put the cleaned frying pan in the sink. Mom was listed as my emergency contact and had immediately driven up from St. Paul when they told her about my injuries. She’d shooed my Chief and my buddies away, telling them I needed rest, and Mom would take care of everything. She had moved in with her boyfriend last year after finally moving on from a bitter divorce with my father. My sister was married and living in Virginia with her husband, a Chief Fire Controlman on a cruiser out of Norfolk, while I wasn’t leaving my Deputy job.

I handed her the plastic tube, and she carefully put it over my right arm before wrapping it above the cast and taping it closed. “Are you in pain?”

“It throbs, but I’ve had worse,” I said. “I can’t take another pill until eight.”

She looked at me, pulling me closer as I hugged her with my functional left arm. “Let me know if you need any help, and take your time. You’re too big for me to haul around the house.” At six-foot-two and two hundred and twenty pounds, she had no chance. She was five foot nothing and barely a hundred pounds, but she still looked damn good for a woman in her late forties.

“I don’t think you can help with my hot date tonight,” I said as I held up my injured right hand. “Rosie DePalma canceled on me, but maybe her sister Letty is available?”

She snapped the dishcloth at me as I laughed. “Don’t tease your Mother like that, Mark. There’s a nice girl out there waiting for you to find her, I can feel it,” she said.

“You’ve been saying that for two years now,” I said as I turned my back.

“ONE OF THESE DAYS I’LL BE RIGHT,” she said as I walked down the hall to my room. My apartment wasn’t much, a one-bedroom unit of about 800 square feet. I walked into my bedroom, pushing off my athletic shorts and underwear and tossing them in the hamper, then walking through the door into the single bathroom in the unit. I turned on the water, waiting for it to warm up before carefully stepping in and turning on the shower.

“Damn, that feels good,” I said as I washed the dirt and grime off of me with my left hand. The doctors told me I’d have the cast for eight weeks, and it would take half that long for the cuts to heal up. That big fucking dog had used me for a chew toy, his teeth ripping into my forearm. They didn’t think I’d have any permanent damage, which was good. I spent a good ten minutes in the shower before I stepped out and dried myself off. I was able to pull the tape off and drop the plastic sleeve into the garbage before I went back into the bedroom to dress.

I pulled on shorts and a t-shirt, then slipped on the sling and my favorite lined moccasins. I walked back out and froze at what I saw.

Mom was sleeping out on the couch, and a man I didn’t know was sitting at my small kitchen table.

I cursed as I spun around to get my gun, but another man had stepped behind me, and unlike me, he had a gun in his hand. I froze, frantically thinking of what weapons I might be able to get to instead. He was between me and my pistol on my bedside table.

“Come sit down, Mark. Your mother will be fine; we gave her a sedative she will sleep off in a few hours. Trust me, the last thing we want to do is hurt you.” The other guy was young and fit, and he gestured with his gun for me to turn around. I slowly turned, my left hand in the air, and walked towards my kitchen. “Please, sit.”

I sat at the chair opposite him as the other man leaned back against the wall. “Who are you?”

“My name is Doctor Olson, and I’m here because we need to talk quickly and frankly if we are to save your life.”

“Right now, the only thing threatening my life is your associate behind me,” I said. “The doctors at the hospital said I’d be fine, although I have to go through rabies shots.”

“Rabies is the least of your problems. That bite on your arm is. Tell me what happened this morning.”

What the hell, it wasn’t like it was a secret. “I was covering the back of the store when Jack Coffey came out. I drew and ordered him to freeze, but he took cover behind a dumpster. Next thing I know, this huge-ass wolf hybrid runs out of there, turns at the fence, and attacks my dog and me.” I looked down at my arm. “I dropped my gun when he bit me, and I couldn’t get a shot off before he was over the fence. The rest of the day was ambulance and hospital.”

“That was no dog, Mark. You were bitten by a werewolf today. Unfortunately, the bite of a werewolf is fatal to humans.”

I looked at him and burst out laughing. “Werewolves?” I looked at the guy behind me. “Come on, who set this joke up? Did James put you up to this?”

“I’m completely serious. Show Mark that we’re telling him the truth.” The other man walked over and handed Doctor Olson his pistol, then stripped naked as I looked away. “Watch him, Mark. This is important.”

One moment he was standing, the next he was falling forward as his body contorted and changed. When he landed on my carpet, he wasn’t a man anymore. He was the biggest damn wolf I’d seen in eight hours. “Fuck me,” I said as I shrank away.

“He won’t hurt you,” Doc said. “Touch him, convince yourself this is happening, and then we can talk about what it all means.”

The animal approached and sat in front of me. It was almost twice the size of Max, my police dog, but his eyes showed a depth and intelligence Max didn’t have. I held out my left fist, letting him sniff before my fingers moved to his cheek and ears. His fur was soft and thick, and as I scratched, I found the sweet spot that got his right rear leg thumping on the ground. “I think he likes me,” I said.

“Shift back,” Doc said. He did, standing up and walking back to get his clothes. “Now that you know we’re not bullshitting you about what we are, let’s talk about what that bite means.”

Thirty minutes later, my entire worldview had changed as I faced my impending death and the unknown. “Let me summarize what you’ve told me,” I finally said.

“Go ahead,” Doc replied.

“A werewolf bit me, and that bite is fatal to humans.”

“Yes. The fevers will start before midnight. If you went to a human hospital, they would be powerless to do anything but treat the symptoms. You would slip into a coma and expire tomorrow morning.”

“Two humans did survive the bite, but only because they got werewolf blood and found their werewolf mates.”

“Yes. It’s not much of a track record, but I was there for both cases. They survived and became werewolves themselves.”

I looked over at my Mom. “You’re gathering female werewolves in the hope that one will be my mate.”

“Exactly. It’s a long shot, but we are hoping Luna will grant you one. We don’t want you to die, Mark.”

“And this mate is my other half, my perfect wife, and we will live together and love each other forever.”

“She will, as will your wolf when you get him. Your human side might take more time, but you will fall in love quickly, I’m sure.”

Love at first sniff? “What if she’s a real bitch? Or, God forbid, she’s two-coyote ugly?”

Both men just laughed before Doc responded. “I suppose they are all real bitches in wolf form, but I wouldn’t recommend saying that if you want to keep your balls intact. Now, what is two-coyote ugly?”

“It’s a term from my bartending days. There’s one-bag ugly when you put a bag over the woman’s head while banging her. Two-bag, you wear one, in case hers breaks. Three-bag, in case you run into a friend.” I paused to let them stop laughing. “One-coyote is when you wake up in the morning, see what’s next to you, and chew your arm off, so you don’t wake her up. Two-coyote is where you chew the other arm off so it can never happen again.”

Both were laughing hard now. “I think Mark will fit in,” Doc said.

“His poor mate,” the other man said with a laugh. “She won’t know whether to smack him or fuck him.”

“She’ll probably do both,” Doc said.

It was too much to believe, but it couldn’t be worse than some of the blind dates and Internet matchups I’d tried. “You change me, I get a wolf, and join a Pack, kind of a big family headed by an Alpha pair.”

“Yes. We call the leaders the Alpha and Luna; under them are the supervisors, the Betas, then warriors and Omegas. Your wolf will only be happy within the Pack structure.”

He made it sound so easy. “After the change, I’ll live for centuries, have better health, and a chance for children.” I looked at my Mom again. “I have to abandon my family?”

“No, but you do have to protect our secret,” Doc said. “Eventually, your family will notice you aren’t changing like they do and start to ask questions. Every four or five decades, we change identities, even locations, to avoid that.”

I looked over at his partner. “What if I say no? Do you shoot me?”

“Too many questions,” the other man said.

“We’d drug you, wait until the fevers had you in a coma, then leave you to be found. Your mom would wake up and see your car gone.”

“So, the choice is death or an arranged marriage?”

“If we’re lucky enough to find your mate among our people. If you agree, we will begin the transfusions and take you to where the females are waiting. Each of them will sniff you and see if their wolf claims you. We are all praying it works, because we know you are a good man, Mark. You would make a good mate and wolf too.”

I couldn’t give up hope, and I couldn’t let my Mom get hurt. “Can you hand me a pen and paper from my desk,” I asked. “I have to leave a note behind for my Mom, so she doesn’t worry.”

“Of course.” I scribbled a note, part of me knowing that it might be the last thing she hears from me. I told her I loved her and Milly with all my heart and asked her to pick up Max from the vet if I wasn’t back before ten in the morning.

“How do we do this,” I asked Doc.

“You can ride with me, and he’ll follow in your car,” Doc said. “We should go. We need to get you to the Clinic and start the treatment.”

FBI Special Agent Lana Black’s POV

Outside Hermantown Heights Apartments

To say that I’d fucked up would be to understate the case. My boss, Senior Agent-in-Charge Lucas Smallwood, had been furious when he found out I hadn’t secured the video files on the backup server. The IT people at Gander confirmed the files were missing, and now the main suspect was missing too.

Billy Andrews had made it to his Mom’s house but never made it to the door.

Lucas wanted eyes on everyone involved, and he exiled me to watching the least-dangerous person on his list, Deputy Mark Brighton. I’d been parked across the street from his apartment for four hours now, watching as people came and went. Of course, Mark had a cast on his arm and was probably high as a kite from painkillers, so he’d be going nowhere farther than his bed.

I did a double-take when I saw him walking out with two other men. Thinking fast, I grabbed the camera and used the telephoto lens to start taking pictures. One man was older, another young; the young man got into Deputy Mark’s car and drove off, while Mark walked around the corner towards the back lot.

I grabbed my phone and speed-dialed my boss. “It’s Agent Black. Deputy Brighton is leaving with two men.”

“Is he going willingly?”

“It looks like it.”

“Follow him and report back.”

He was the passenger in a dark green Ford Expedition, and I followed them as they skirted Duluth before heading north on Highway 61. When they finally pulled into private property on Arrowhead Lake, I kept going and called my boss back. “We have eyes on him,” Agent Smallwood said. “There have been people by the dozens arriving all day.”

“Do you want me to wait?”

“No. Go get some sleep, rookie, let the experienced agents take this now.”