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They were planning on killing the children.
Adam's next three kills weren't so clean after that, nor so silent. He let the fourth one scream because he was sleeping with a smile on his face.
They were planning on killing children, and this one was smiling.
When Adam got through with him, the man's corpse reeked of terror and pain. Adam needed to control himself better; he couldn't afford to lose control of the wolf because he might never regain it. He had a job that no one else could do to his satisfaction, a duty. The thought settled him; he knew about duty, both man and wolf.
The next bedroom was empty, though it smelled of a woman. He memorized the scent because if she'd taken flight, he'd have to hunt her through the dead vineyard. Part of him, the human part, knew he would have to give that hunt to someone less ... eager than he was. Warren. Darryl, Adam's second, was still too much a gentleman to kill a woman without suffering for it. Warren was more practical.
The modern doorknobs designed for handicapped access were so much easier for a wolf to open than the traditional round ones were. The whole ground floor was designed especially for handicapped access, so he made no sound as he opened the next room to discover that there would be no need for him to hunt anyone yet. He'd found the woman from next door, and she and Mr. Jones had evidently found themselves too involved in each other to notice his last victim's cries.
He'd promised Jones to Honey.
It was harder than it should have been to leave them alone, but he closed the door as quietly as he could. There were three more people to kill - he could hear them. He was getting hungry.
He broke the next man's neck with a swat of his paw - like a grizzly. It was quick and clean. The second one was a woman, crouched behind her cot, which she'd knocked over to provide cover. He had a momentary thought that someone had been watching too much TV, because a cot is no kind of protection at all - and then the woman pulled out one of the dart guns and started firing.
The first dart hit badly and bounced off his shoulder. Warned, he dodged the second two and jumped the cot to crush her skull between his jaws. He shook her once to break her neck and make sure of the kill, then dropped the body. He didn't enjoy killing women.
He stopped where he was, the corpse on the ground halfway between his front paws, and fought off the urge to eat her. Woman or not, his wolf was hungry, and dead, she was just meat. He didn't have time for it - and the strength of the urge meant the wolf was gaining the upper hand. When he was certain he had himself under control he headed off to hunt down the next one.
That one had barricaded himself in one of the rooms Adam had visited earlier. The door was ironbound and thick, meant to look like the old colonial Spanish doors. It stopped the bullets that the man shot into the door as soon as Adam touched the doorknob - it must not have been a large-caliber handgun.
But the gunfire did one thing. Mr. Jones opened his door, a gun in his hand. Adam dropped his head and roared at him. It was a sound the lesser wolves could not make, more like a lion than a wolf. The woman behind Jones screamed and screamed. Jones shot twice before Adam hit him, but he hadn't stopped to aim, hadn't been able to control his fear. One bullet skimmed Adam's side, but the other missed him altogether - hitting a moving target isn't easy.
Adam deliberately bumped Jones with his shoulder and knocked him off his feet. The woman's screams intensified, and he pinned his ears at her. His father had taught him only a cowardly man would hurt a woman. But this woman had agreed to kill people because they were associated with his pack, to kill the children.
Still, Adam killed her quickly and as painlessly as he could. And when the silence of her death filled the room, his father's admonitions rang in his ears.
Jones made an incoherent noise and scrabbled with his gun, trying to get his shaking hands to work. Adam left the woman's body and grabbed the gun out of the human's hands and crushed it. He dropped it, now unusable, to the floor.
His jaws ached to finish Jones ... but he'd promised Peter's killer to Honey, even if she hadn't been in a state to know it. Revenge was a dangerous thing, but a quick clean act sometimes allowed the victim closure. So he left Jones for Honey and went to deal with the only other Cantrip agent he'd left alive.
The door was solid wood and locked against him. Adam hit it with his shoulder and cracked the wood, breaking it free of its hinges. It hurt, and he stopped to tear it to bits. Only when the door lay in broken shards did he come back to himself.
The man was on the floor, blood pouring from a bullet wound - either Jones's gun had been a bigger caliber and gone through the door, or it had gone through the wall. His gun lay on the floor beside him, and his hand couldn't get a grip on it.
"Tiger, tiger burning bright," he stuttered, looking at Adam as he choked on his own blood. "In the forest ... in the forest." He drew in a breath, looked Adam in the eye, and said again, quite clearly, "Forest." His body convulsed once more, then he lay still.
Did He who made the lamb make thee? Adam responded silently with the appropriate line. It was a question that he held dearly: Had God made werewolves? How could He have done so and still be benevolent?
Adam stared at the man until a stray sound reminded him that, William Blake's poetry aside, all of the Cantrip agents weren't dead yet.
He called out to his pack, summoning them to the last of the hunt. They came, stumbling and slow, and mostly in wolf form now. The change would help them fight off the effects of the drugs. Warren, Darryl, and a couple of others held on to their humanity. They stopped when they saw him waiting at the top of the stairs.
Warren's nostril's flared, and Darryl ran a hand over his mouth. Adam looked at Honey, and the golden wolf swayed a little. He caught her eye, then glanced behind him to send her hunting.
Only when her impassioned snarl behind him signaled that she'd found what he'd sent her after, did he step aside and motion the rest of the pack on by. When the last of them had passed him, he started his change back to human. There had been a landline in the planning office. His change was faster than usual - whether due to Mercy's meddling or the killing field he'd made of the ground floor of the winery, he didn't care to speculate.
The phone worked, which was nice, because otherwise he'd have had to use one of the Cantrip agents' phones, and with the taste of the hunt on his tongue, that would have been unwise.
He called Mercy first. He needed to hear her voice to remind him that he was not entirely a killer, not entirely a monster. But her cell rang three times. And then a recorded voice informed him that her line was unavailable. He fought down instinctive panic.
