A Pack of Two 3 (Patreon)

Lycanthropy (noun) – The medical condition of being a werewolf. Rare and little-understood, this condition had a low pathogenicity of less than two percent. Spread could only occur to persons with a recessive gene making them vulnerable to infection. In 2004, this recessive gene—NRLCC3—mutated in Edgar Cantrell (see Patient Zero). When Mitchell was exposed to the lycanthrope pathogen in 2022, Cantrell’s Disease was born. 97% of the human population was vulnerable to Cantrell’s Disease. The extreme social unrest and mayhem caused by the rapid spread of Cantrell’s Disease is known colloquially as the Werewars.

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Five minutes under the shower spray. Ten. Fifteen. Until Wagner felt only the heat instead of the hair on his body like some scummy residue. The burning, scouring water went under his skin, into muscles that it massaged and relaxed until they forgot their once-shape and remembered only the form they were in now.

When he opened his eyes, they’d let go of the wolf-stare. Now the colors not blue or yellow were familiar instead of foreign. And he could feel that there was no more eye shine… that amber glow that kicked back with any light at all on a wolf’s tapetum lucidum. Wagner couldn’t put into words that feeling, or its lack. Why would a human need words for something only a wolf knew?

He turned the shower off a tick before the hot water ran out. When he stood up from the stool, his muscles knew themselves once more. They easily took his two hundred pounds of weight. He toweled himself dry and went at his face and scalp with electric clippers, buzzing his hair down until it was just stubble clinging tightly to the skin where it grew.

He never bothered with a safety razor. There was no point: by noon he would have an inch of hair and the beginnings of a beard. After a week he’d look like a Viking. And since LAPD grooming standards called for an officer’s hair to be well-trimmed and well-groomed, the only thing for it was to bald himself every morning and do it again the next day.

At least in the evenings, no one would think he was balding. It’d do wonders for a social life, if he ever found someone he wanted to be social with.

Dressed, Wagner checked on his father. Cracked the door to his room and saw a pale shadow on the bed, swaddled in sheets that somehow seemed even whiter than he was. The figure had such a tremulous hold on his vision that it seemed perverse that his hair was still dark, his eyes bright enough to have been borrowed from Wagner’s reflection.

It struck him that this would be his lasting memory of his father. The man had left when he was too young to remember. Now, this… cocoon for a ghost was all Wagner could picture when it came to the source of his own name. It seemed fitting, in some ways. Unspeakable in others.

Wagner shook it off. Downstairs, he ate quickly, slowed only by Hannah pressing a glass of orange juice on him to go with his coffee. First taken by mug, then in a thermos for the drive to the station. It woke him the rest of the way up, but he knew he’d need more to keep fatigue from creeping in as the day wore on.

Lycanthropy usually meant endless stamina, at least for anything he was likely to actually do. But the mental strain of his three days in captivity—that it couldn’t do anything about.

Hannah reached out to him. He felt the presence of her hand behind his back, almost touching him. About to, what, rub his shoulders? Wagner tried to think of the last time he’d been touched. Probably the second day at the Kennel. He’d woken up on the floor, something in his back that hadn’t shifted human yet, and the guard had helped him to his feet after unlocking the door to his cell. Yeah. That was it.

He could tell, somehow, that it wouldn’t feel the same if Hannah touched him.

What would it be like? He wasn’t curious enough to find out. He wasn’t much of anything after three nights in a cage—even with days off for human behavior. He stood, carefully keeping his back to Hannah so he didn’t see her snatching her hand back. He wouldn’t want to embarrass her by letting her know she’d almost…

“Thanks for cooking,” he said. Had to be nice, even when you weren’t feeling nice. His mother had taught him that and if she couldn’t be there to counterbalance his father, he’d have to bring her with him.

“Anytime,” Hannah said in her giddy, gilded accent. “I love cooking. You keep buying steaks, I’ll keep cooking them.”

“Grill. In America, we grill steaks.”

“Yes. At tailgate parties? You bring the barbecues to the parking lot and you cook… grill it… and then, after you’ve eaten all this, you go inside the stadium and they sell you beer and hot dogs. Which you buy, even though it’s even more overpriced than the stuff at the grocery store.”

“Trust me, some days the beer is priced just the right amount.”

“It all sounds very American. I’d love to go to one.”

“Stick to soccer,” Wagner advised her. “If you get snagged on the tailgate parties, you’ll never make it through a game.”

“Oh, I couldn’t go to a soccer game in America. I’d feel so colonial.”

“Every Spanish speaker I meet, I get more and more grateful to you people for your colonialism.”

Hannah blushed. “Perhaps it’s simply the accent.”

“Maybe it’s simply that you always have such nice things to say.” Wagner popped his neck. There: now everything felt like it was in the proper alignment. “I’ll buy some more steaks on the way home. Now that I know I’ve got a chef living with me.”

“Mr. Wagner, if you’re going to commend British cooking, I’m afraid I’ll lose all respect for your taste.”

“Shit, you got me there. I can’t come up with a brash American quip for your cool British wit.”

“Don’t give me too much credit. There’s only so much I can screw up in hospice care.”