And Ollard arrives, emerging from the back corridor, swollen with fury, eyes wild, teeth gnashing, shrouded in wreaths of crackling black energy. Billy turns the hate-stare on Ollard at the same time that Ollard directs a sheet of deadly-looking violet light toward Billy. The counter, caught between them, detonates. Broken glass and scones spray everywhere. Even though he has all four feet on the ground, the force of the blast still skids Billy away, into the floor plan, tables and chairs catching him painfully in his ribs.
He prepares to leap but Ollard is too fast; he strides from the wreckage first, his left hand held in the gang-sign configuration that freezes Billy, gets him aloft in the air. It’s the same trick Ollard used the first time he met Billy. But it takes more effort now; Billy flexes against the spell with all the wolf-might at his disposal and can feel Ollard struggle to maintain.
And then the dark wolf that is Elisa comes out of the vestibule, leaps at Ollard from the side.
Ollard gets his right hand up, freezes her also. Billy rears his body again and nearly gets free, the force around him beginning to flicker and fail. He watches Ollard’s face contort with the effort of holding them both, scans it for a sign of when the grip will finally give. Veins bulge in Ollard’s forehead; both his nostrils have begun to leak blood. Yet his facial expression is a grin, the grin of a man who still has the advantage.
And then the white wolf that is Jørgen enters the room and leaps at Ollard, jaws snapping, and it is then that Ollard’s grin goes away. He drops his left hand, throws it up again, freezes Jørgen in place.
But Ollard only has two hands.
And so Billy is free.
In a second he’s on Ollard, knocking him down to the floor. Ollard’s head bounces off the broken concrete and his throat slides into Billy’s jaws like it was the final piece of a puzzle, designed to slot there.
And all Billy needs to do is exert a particular amount of force.
Which he does.
Ollard gets no final words. Instead his throat gives one horrible throb and then bursts in Billy’s mouth, gushing fluids. Billy’s teeth sunder the entire network of crucial vessels and tubes in there. He crushes vertebrae. He takes a human neck and reduces it to rupture and spillage.
He’s larger. He’s stronger. He’s more powerful.
He doesn’t give a good goddamn about anything else.
He drinks like a quart of Ollard’s blood. He drinks it until Ollard’s heart stops pumping it.
That’s it, then, he thinks. It’s over.
And then he thinks, Oh my God, you killed a man.
If he’s having these thoughts, if they’re at the forefront of his brain, then he must be changing back, and sure enough he is. His tail retracts and his skull shortens; his thumbs come back; he loses his fur. And then he’s there, naked, hunched over Ollard’s mutilated corpse, a quart of hot human blood swimming in his stomach. He moans, rises to his feet, turns away.
In the wreckage, Elisa is beginning to change back as well. Billy doesn’t like watching her twist, doesn’t like the disturbing way her form surges, so he looks back at Ollard, at the sobering sight of Ollard’s wounds. Billy wonders what new conception of himself he’ll need to come up with in order to manage the knowledge that those wounds were a thing that he himself caused.
You saved the world, he tells himself. You should feel happy. Ollard was a bad dude. He wanted to die anyway. You did him a favor.
And maybe you’ll even get your book published.
None of these thoughts seem to make it okay to have made the mess that he’s looking at. He begins to run through them a second time, but before he completes the litany Elisa shouts “Billy, look out!”
And Billy turns, and sees Anton Cirrus, standing there with a small duffel bag in one hand, and a gun in the other.
“Hands up, fucker,” says Anton. Billy complies. He wishes he had his orange jumpsuit: it can’t stop a bullet, but being naked in front of the barrel of a gun doesn’t exactly make him feel less vulnerable.
“Everybody just hold still for a second,” Anton says.
These are clear instructions, and even though Anton’s voice is choked with rage and maybe even something like sorrow, he nevertheless says them loudly enough for all to hear, and if everyone in the room was human everyone in the room might even be willing to obey. But Jørgen is still a massive hell-wolf, and massive hell-wolves don’t particularly care for human instructions or for the nuances of hostage situations. He gathers himself up and prepares to spring.
Anton, for his part, is smart enough to perceive that shooting Billy won’t protect him, so he turns the gun onto Jørgen.
He fires twice.