Master of Smoke

anything to werewolves.

    Greendale, South Carolina, was a New South town, which meant it was one big suburb and a small city core that included one or two tall buildings with skyscraper pretensions. The Comix Cave lay on the western outskirts, among ranch houses, subdivisions, and so many trees you had to drive carefully to avoid hitting Bambi. It was mating season, and amorous deer and speeding cars made very bad mix.
    But there was something out there that definitely wasn’t a deer. Driving toward the psychic rumble, Eva tightened her grip on the steering wheel. Should I be doing this? What if it’s dangerous? I could be getting myself in real trouble.
    On the other hand, what if somebody else was in trouble? It certainly felt like trouble, and Eva could handle threats other people couldn’t. If, that is, she could figure out a way to do it without scaring the crap out of the innocent bystanders. Most folks found the sight of a seven-foot werewolf seriously disconcerting.
    That included rapists. There’d been the incident last year when Eva had heard a woman screaming near the shop late one night. When she’d gone to investigate, she’d found four drunken frat boys trying to rape a seventeen-year-old girl.
    Eva was strong enough and fast enough to knock all four of them out before they even knew what hit them. Their victim, however, did see her; in fact, she’d screamed louder at the sight of werewolf Eva than she had during the attack. Eva had told her to shut the hell up and hand over her cell phone. She had, shaking.
    She’d looked thoroughly astonished when Eva simply called 911, handed the phone back, and growled, “You never saw me, right?”
    Not surprisingly, Eva did not make the papers, though the kid did tell the cops a very thin lie about a big guy with a baseball bat who’d rescued her from her attackers.
    To Eva’s satisfaction, all four little bastards had gone to jail—after a stint in the hospital.
    Go, Team Fluffy.
    Too bad somebody hadn’t been able to do the same for Eva five years ago.
    The rumble was coming from the left now. She turned into a neat little middle-class development and drove down the darkened street, following the sensation. The vibration had grown so powerful, she could feel it in her back teeth. Howling instincts insisted something evil was up ahead.
    Not just bad. Mwwwwhahahah evil.
    Looking through the trees bordering the yard just ahead, she saw something glowing blue. Eva pulled over and parked, staring through the windshield at the light. Could be a police car. Except police cars didn’t go Mwwwwhahahah.
    “You are such an idiot,” Eva muttered, swinging the car door open. She was starting to feel like the dumb blond baby-sitter investigating the mysterious sound in the basement.
    Don’t be a wuss. If you run into a knife-wielding psycho, you can always eat him. There was a certain comfort in being able to kick a grizzly’s ass.
    Unfortunately, that sense of Mwwwwhahahah—whatever the hell it was—made her think it was something a hell of a lot worse than a grizzly bear. And that she’d do well to be a lot more careful than she’d been with those rapists.
    Still, she had just as strong a sense that she had to investigate. So one way or another, she was going in.
    Time to pop the claws? Eva started toward the glow, her running shoes padding quietly on the pavement. Deciding her chances of scaring an innocent bystander were a little too high, she veered into the trees for whatever cover they could provide instead. If she’d still been human, she probably wouldn’t have been able to see where she was going.
    Eva slipped through the woods until she found a good view between two trees. She promptly wished she hadn’t.
    There in the driveway of a brick split-level, a man in armor writhed five feet off the ground, suspended in a globe of shimmering energy. Blue bolts of force snaked in and out of his helpless body as the globe grew brighter. He grunted in pain as the energy licked at him.
    Eva stared in sickened horror. It’s torturing him! As if that wasn’t bad enough, a huge, white-furred shape stood bathed in the blue glow. Another werewolf, one even bigger than Eva was when she got fuzzy. He’d plugged his fingers into the globe’s shimmering surface, and streams of energy flowed into his claws, as though he was capturing them.
    A vicious grin stretched his thin black lips, displaying a mouthful of very white, very sharp teeth. His eyes glowed