Bitten

Regression

I left Stonehaven after everyone had gone to bed. I dressed in the dark, jumped out my window, then rolled my car a half mile down the road before starting it. I hadn't told Nick my plans. He was better off not knowing.

I'd gone to my room early and spent the evening in bed, thinking. My meeting with Daniel had been a mistake. By refusing his offer, I'd only made things worse. Jeremy had been buying time for Clay. I'd stolen it away. To fix things, I had to act now.

For several hours that evening, I'd tried mentally contacting Clay. Of course it didn't work. I wasn't even sure how to do it, but I'd held out some small hope that our connection might be enough. Maybe it would have been, but it was like demanding special effort from a muscle I'd ignored for too long. Nothing happened. When I couldn't get into Clay's mind, I decided to work on getting into the minds of the mutts who held him captive. Get into their minds figuratively, I mean. If I put myself in their position and tried to imagine what they'd be feeling or thinking, maybe I could find a weakness. Daniel and Marsten were easy to understand. I knew what they wanted and I knew how they operated. Marsten wouldn't leave any openings for me to slip through. Daniel's weakness was his obsession with Clay and with me. I could work on that, contact him again and try reeling him in with lies and smiles, but it would take time and I didn't have time. That left the new mutts. Here I was on unfamiliar ground. They weren't werewolves, I reminded myself. Not real ones. So how could I get inside their heads?

For the longest time, I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, overwhelmed by the impossibility of understanding these two. Then it came to me. They weren't werewolves, but they were human. I'd been human. I was still trying to be human. Why couldn't I get into their heads? All I had to do was strip away my wolf side, something I'd been trying to do for years already. Yet there was more to understanding these killers than that. I couldn't be the sort of human I'd been trying to be-even-tempered, passive, and caring. I had to be what I had been before.

Every defense mechanism in my brain threw up barriers at the thought. Be what I'd been before Clay bit me? But I'd been even-tempered, passive, caring. Clay had changed that. Before him, I was different, I wasn't like this. That's what I wanted to believe, but I knew it wasn't true. I'd always had the capacity for violence. Clay had seen that. The child-werewolf looked at the child victim and saw a soul mate, someone who understood what it was like to grow up alienated, our odd behavior scrutinized by adults and mocked by children. By the age of seven Clay was a full werewolf with an inherent capacity for violence and a temper to match. By the same age my foster families had taught me how to hate, developing my own capacity for violence, though I'd been better at hiding it, turning it inward and struggling to show the world the passive little girl it expected to see. It was time I confronted that. Clay didn't make me the way I was. He only gave me an outlet for the anger and the hate. I had to go back there, back to the mistrust and the hatred and the impotence and the rage, most of all the rage, against everyone who had wronged me. There I'd find the mind of a killer, a human killer.

LeBlanc hated women. Maybe he'd been mistreated by his mother or laughed at by girls in school or maybe he had such low self-esteem that he needed to feel superior to some group of people and chose women instead of blacks or Jews. If it was self-esteem, I could use that. But to find the truth, I'd need to research his life, looking for some road sign to his psychopathology. Again, I didn't have time.

What about Victor Olson? I started to dismiss the idea without a second thought. After all, I'd never even met the man. But did I need to? I pulled the two Internet article printouts from my dresser drawer and studied them. What did they tell me about Olson? He was a stalker. A compulsive stalker. In one article, he'd admitted to going out every night to watch his victims sleep, said that seeing their peaceful sleeping faces relaxed him and helped his insomnia. Would becoming a werewolf cure that compulsion or that insomnia? Of course not. Which meant there was a very good chance Olson hadn't abandoned his old patterns, that he was still watching young girls sleep, here in Bear Valley.

I'd left Stonehaven to find Olson. The articles said he targeted girls from middle-class homes. I assumed he'd be looking for single-story homes, so he could peek through a first-floor window. There were only two such subdivisions in Bear Valley. All I had to do was cruise the streets and sniff him out.

After driving around Bear Valley for over an hour, I began to realize how big a task this was. Sure, there were only two subdivisions, but each contained a dozen or more streets with at least a hundred homes. I only had several hours before dawn. To cover as much ground as possible, I drove slowly with all the windows down-except the smashed driver's window, which was now permanently down. Sometimes the wind favored me. Mostly it didn't and the only thing I smelled was the musty interior of my little-used car. Making matters worse, the police were out in full force, still looking for a killer. They were pulling over every car out that late that night, so I spent as much time avoiding them as looking for Olson. After two hours, I finished both subdivisions. No sign of Olson. For all I knew, he wasn't even out that night.

I was circling the second subdivision one last time when I saw a lone car in the parking lot of a convenience store, now conveniently closed for the night. As I passed, I noticed the rental sticker on the car's back bumper. Of course. If the mutts weren't hiding in town, Olson would need transportation to Bear Valley. I swung my car down a side road, parked and got out. I didn't even make it halfway to the convenience store when I caught the scent of an unfamiliar werewolf.

I jogged around the corner and stopped short. A heavyset, middle-aged man in a windbreaker walked along the sidewalk, less than twenty feet from the corner. Fortunately, Olson had his back to me. He was heading toward his car. I hurried back around the corner and ran for my car. He drove by as I was turning the car around in a driveway. Keeping my headlights out, I followed.

As we drove out of Bear Valley, my heart pounded. I was right. They were staying in the countryside. Olson would lead me right to them. We'd been heading northwest for almost twenty minutes when Olson turned into an overgrown drive carved into deep forest. He stopped the car past the edge of the woods. I was about to enact part two of my plan when I realized Olson wasn't getting out of his car. Staying well back, I killed the engine and waited. Ten minutes passed. I could see the outline of his head in the car. I leaned over, carefully opened my passenger door, and slipped into a ditch.

I crept to the end of the drive. The forest was black. Even when my eyes adjusted, I could see no sign of a house. As I turned back toward Olson's car, I saw that the driveway went nowhere. It was only a turnaround or a one-car parking spot for a nature trail beyond. I moved into the woods and snuck closer to the car. When I was parallel to the driver's side, I stopped and squinted through the darkness. Olson's head was resting against the headrest. His eyes were closed. Asleep. I briefly wondered why, but the question was irrelevant. Maybe he couldn't sleep near the others. Or maybe he liked to be alone after his spying trips. It didn't matter. Victor Olson wasn't leading me back to Clay. At least not tonight. But I couldn't wait until morning. Come morning, Jeremy would know I was gone. The Pack would be looking for me. Even if I managed to elude them for another day, that would be another twenty-four hours for Daniel to kill Clay. And what if Olson wasn't just taking a break from the mutts? What if he wasn't ever going back to them? He knew where Clay was. I had to know-tonight.

A plan formed in my head as I watched Olson sleep. Even as I contemplated it, I rebelled at the thought. I hesitated, then forced myself forward out of the trees before I could change my mind. I crept to the side of the car, then pulled my fist back and smashed the driver's side window. Even as Olson was bolting awake, I was reaching through the window. I jerked the seat belt. It slid through my fingers as it tightened around him. He snapped his head back, away from my hand, but I was already reaching past him. Leaning into the car, I grabbed the seat belt buckle, twisting the metal and breaking the plastic, jamming the buckle closed. Then I pulled my head out of the car.

Olson whipped his head around, following my hand as it moved past him. He looked up at me. For a moment, he just stared, fixing me with the wide eyes of a coward bracing for the first blow. Even as I stepped away, he flinched. When he realized I was backing off, his brow furrowed, then his eyes lit up with a flash of malevolent cunning and he started to smile. Keeping his eyes on me, he lowered his right hand to the seat belt lock. He pushed the release button, but nothing happened. Realizing what I'd done, he grabbed the seat belt strap and yanked, but it was locked tight against his chest.

I knew what I had to do, but again I hesitated. Could I do it? Thoughts of Jose Carter flashed in my brain. This was different, I told myself. This wasn't some human con man, but a killer. Still, what I was about to do was beyond what I'd done to Carter. Way beyond. This was Clay's territory. Could I do it? Detach myself from my feelings and do it? Olson's a killer, I told myself. More than a killer. A sick pervert who'd preyed on little girls, little girls like the one I'd been so many lifetimes ago. I closed my eyes and concentrated, feeling the serpent of anger whiplashing through my body.

Olson struggled against the seat belt, but it held, the fabric made to withstand more punishment than even a werewolf could deal out. I ignored him and focused all my energy into my left hand. It started to throb, then twist, the pain shooting up my arm. I opened my eyes and watched. When my hand was half changed, I stopped. With my right hand, I reached into the car and grabbed Olson's right wrist. I slashed it with the claws on my left. He screamed, a high-pitched rabbity squeal. A red line opened on the underside of his wrist. Blood gushed. I grabbed his left hand and did the same. He screamed again and squirmed wildly. Blood sprayed the steering wheel and dashboard.

"Moving will only make it worse," I said, keeping my voice calm and willing my hand back to normal. "If you want the bleeding to slow down, hold your hands up."

"Wh-wh-?"

"Why? Why am I doing this? Or why am I telling you how to slow it down? I shouldn't need to answer the first. Obviously you know who I am. That's answer enough. As for the second, I'm not trying to kill you. I just want information. If you give it to me, I'll undo the seat belt. You can bind your wrists and probably have time to get to the hospital. If you don't tell me what I want to know, you'll be killing yourself."

"Wh-" Olson gulped. "What do you wa-want to know?"

"Again, I shouldn't have to answer that. But since you might be going into shock and not thinking too clearly, I'll humor you. Where's Clayton?"

I won't report the rest of the conversation. Olson was in no shape to bargain or argue and he knew it. As I expected, he didn't give a damn about the others. Only his own life mattered. He told me everything I needed to know and more, babbling madly as if every word he spoke would improve his chance of survival.

When he was done, I left him sitting in his car. I thought about undoing the seat belt and giving him a fighting chance to escape. After all, I'd promised him that. I'd never reneged on a deal before. Then I thought of all the girls he'd victimized and imagined all the times he'd made promises to them, promising not to hurt them, promising never to do it again. He hadn't kept his promises. Why should I?

I walked away and left Victor Olson to bleed to death in the forest.