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  "Now!"

  Max and David yanked outward. David's silver popped from his fingers like a tiny newborn creature and fell in the bayou. They watched the carcass, barely daring to breath ...

  The Beast's eyes flew open, then rolled white. The mouth stretched wide and a wet, sucking gasp pulled air into its lungs. Somewhere behind them, Max heard Millie shriek, "Dear Lord Jesus, it's still alive!"

  The Beast grated out a wail. The torso shuddered and the ragged edges where it had been shot through started stretching. New, red muscle collected, whips of spinal nerves burst from the vertebrae, bone calcified over them, raw, pink flesh rippled across, all spanning, connecting, pulling the nearly severed hind quarters close. The entrails heaped upon the tarp near the wounds were grazed by the growing tissue and pulled inward.

  The dock groaned and swayed. Max heard, much nearer now, "My Dear, Sweet, Lord Jesus, help me, Lord Jesus..." Millie was on the dock and as close as she dared.

  The Beast flung into convulsions. The dock shook beneath them. Max, David and Millie dropped to their knees and hung on for dear life. There was no telling which of the bangs and pops were coming from the strained boards and which were coming from the Beast's body as it flexed and bent in metamorphosis. The wounds were completely sealed now and the bright, silver fur, suddenly dripping wet, began sliding from sweating flesh. The great bushy tail whipped between hind quarters, cracking and shrinking into human buttocks and legs. The mouth gaped as the muzzle grated, receded, the fangs pulling into the gums, the bones of the skull rounding and snapping.

  Feverishly, David was wiping the clumped fur from the newly formed human face; just as he had done for Max, once, all those years ago. And a wail of gut-wrenching heartbreak came from behind them.

  Millie rushed in, muscling them out of the way, her face distorted in torment. She fell to her knees sobbing and pulled the shivering, unconscious man against her.

  "Oh my God, my God! My baby boy! Oh, my poor, precious baby boy!"

  The dock gave up one last, long-suffering groan and dumped them all into the bayou.

  Chapter Two

  Millie's Shack

  The Swamplands of Central Florida

  Early Spring, 1950

  First Night. Full Moon Set.

  There was a table of linoleum and rusted chrome in Millie's little kitchen, and that's where they settled, their shoulders draped in ragged towels, their hands cupping tin mugs. The screen door at the other end of the shack was matted with mosquitoes trying to find an unpatched hole, but the din of the night singers had no trouble coming right through the shack's walls.

  In a shack with David, drinking coffee. Deja-vu.

  At least Millie's cabin held up better than that "rock" of a dock of hers; better than Max had given it credit for when he'd first laid eyes on it. The floorboards had knocked with a satisfying solidity when the men carried in her son. He lay unconscious on an old sagging sofa against the north wall of the shack's other room.

  The two rooms of the shack were nothing more than a single, long one partitioned by a few clapboards to either side. A wide space between served as the doorway. Through it, they could see one bony foot sticking out from under the blanket and Buttercup sprawled beside the sofa. She didn't seem to notice any trace of the Beast within the man.

  Millie was still shivering. But even if they had all been sitting in the middle of a Minnesota winter rather than Florida in early spring, the look on her face would've told Max she wasn't trembling from any chill. After a few moments of sipping in silence, Millie rose sluggishly.

  "I don't know about you boys, but I need a sweetener for my coffee."

  She walked to the only cabinet in her makeshift kitchen, set under a clapboard counter that was built around the chipped basin and indoor pump. Everything else was wall shelving. A couple of army lockers sat on either side of the two-burner wood stove. The half-fried gator meat was still in the pan she had pulled to the side earlier.

  She came back to the table with a bottle of Southern Comfort . Her tin cup was almost empty of coffee, but it filled to the brim when she poured in the Comfort So that was the "whiskey" Max had heard in her voice.

  Millie took a long drink, then dabbed the corners of her mouth with her thumb and forefinger. "Help yourself, boys. You hungry? I can warm that pan up ..."

  "Nah," Max said too quickly.

  David didn't seem as put off by the thought. "Maybe later. Thank you."

  "Then I'm ready for those answers you been promisin' all damn night."

  Both men nodded and added a dollop to their coffees; as usual, Max more so than David.

  "Ask away," David said.

  As quickly as Millie seemed to regain her bravada, she lost it again. Her chin quivered and she asked, "My poor boy in there's possessed of a demon, ain't he?"

  "No," David replied, "not the way you mean it. Your son will be all right. The Beast won't emerge from him again. Millie ... have you ever heard of something called lycanthropy? When a human takes on a form that some mistake as a wolf?"

  "You mean ... like Lon Chaney Jr? In the Wolfman movie ...?"

  "Sort of," Max said.

  Millie shook her head, and in a stricken whisper replied, "What I seen tonight wasn't nothin' like that. Nothin."

  "Perhaps, before tonight," David said, "it was all folklore to you. The effect of the full moon, the killing properties of silver ... the bite of the Beast that creates others like it ..."

  Max picked up: "But what the Beast really does with its bite is move from host to host. Are you sure you weren't bitten when the Beast attacked you, Millie?"

  "'Course I'm sure. In my business you better be careful 'bout bites and cuts. Things infect real easy out here. I'm good, don't worry."

  Max leaned on the table. "Even a nick from those fangs, Millie --"

  "What, you want me to strip so you can see for yourself?"

  Max considered it a moment. He looked at David. But David said, "No, we believe you."

  "Hell, I wasn't serious!" Millie looked utterly disgusted and went for her coffee-laced Comfort . She swallowed, dabbed the corners of her mouth again and asked, "So ... what happened to him, then, if he ain't possessed of a demon? You're sayin' my Jackie got bit by a ... by a werewolf ?"

  "That's what many call it, yes," David replied. He leaned his elbows on the table and brushed a hand across his mouth, glancing at Max. Trying to explain what the Beast was, or was not, never got easier. "But, its form is deceiving. The Beast is more than one, single monster. It's not really born of this world. It's a malevolent, omnipresent entity that breaks through to our world ..."

  "A mali-omni- what ...?"

  David nodded sympathetically. "I'm sorry. The Beast is as hard to explain as it is to understand. It isn't just one physical creature. It emerges everywhere. It's very ancient and very powerful. It thrives on human fear. Not our little day-to-day anxieties, but our real terrors. The ones we feel in our bones. In our blood. The Beast needs our fear to exist. It starves without our terror.

  "But to feed, it has to take on flesh and blood. To become flesh and blood, it must wait for a rupture between its plane and ours. The rupture happens during the first night of every full moon. All over the world, every First Night. The Beast erupts through its human hosts and, for as many First Nights as it can get out of each of them, hunts down the victims that it's drawn to. It maims and tortures, stoking the terror for as long as its victim can survive the torment. Then, just at the point before death ... it feeds."

  Now came the awful revelation. Max could see it in Millie's face.

  "No. Uh-uh. That couldn't of been my boy who did that to those people. That wasn't him that done those things. .."

  "It was the Beast he hosted, Millie," Max said. "He was there, but trapped inside. It came from him, but -"

  "No!" Millie pushed out of her chair and the towel fell away from her shoulders. Buttercup, startled, jerked her head up from where she lay in the other room. "No, Damn it! He'd
never do such a thing, he'd never allow such a thing!"

  "He wouldn't have been aware, Millie," David said. "Those who are bitten, the Beast's Chosen, usually aren't strong enough to recognize it."

  " He wouldn't have no part in that! " She shouted, pacing and looking toward the room where her son lay.

  "He would have to recognize what's living inside him," David insisted. "I can't describe how difficult such a thing is to know. Usually you don't know you're being used until the Beast is ready to move on. Then it has no interest in keeping the memory of its kills from you. Even better for it, in fact, if the host remembers. Once the Beast is done with you, it benefits from a former host's arrest and execution. Or suicide."

  "Or insanity," Max added. "We've never seen a time when those weren't the result, unless somebody intervenes. Once it's moved on, death or madness in its former hosts play to the Beast's advantage. Hell, nobody believes in werewolves any more. Nobody wants to believe we've all got something inside us that's starved for terror, that thrives on it. Nobody recognizes it, nobody remembers ... until it's too late."

  A hoarse, haunted voice said, "I remember."

  They all turned. Jackie, weak and pallid, was standing in the doorway. One sinewy arm braced him there, the other barely managed to keep his blanket around his waist.

  "Oh, Lord God, Mama. I remember."

  * * *

  Max and David gave them some privacy, pulling on their hats and gloves and going to the porch while Millie helped her son dress. They stood there a moment, listening to the night chorus and the mosquitoes, then stepped down to the clearing.

  They finally smiled at each other, too tired and shaken to feel good just yet over their success. But at least they could smile.

  "That one was touch-and-go," David said. "I can't believe he made it."

  "Me neither. David ... in there earlier, did you really like the idea of Millie's cooking?"

  "I was being polite, Max."

  "Damn, that's a relief, because I couldn't-"

  "But if she had put something in front of me, I'd have eaten it. How long have we known each other, eight years? You know I wouldn't insult someone by refusing a gesture ..."

  "Okay, okay ... don't get so hepped up."

  They both fell quiet, thinking over the night's events, listening to the chaos of the swamp songs and the murmurings of a traumatized mother and son.

  Finally Max said, "What I can't figure out is how Millie wouldn't know her son was bitten."

  David nodded. "With them living like this in such cramped quarters, how did she survive his inaugural First Night, let alone two of them?"

  Unlike my wife , Max thought, unlike yours . First Night. Feeding night. His throat clenched and, looking at David, sensed he was thinking the same. Max cleared his throat and wandered a little farther out into the clearing around the shack.

  "Y'know, it must've been more like this for the Beast, ages ago. Look how remote this place is. And look what these two do for a living. Either one of them off poaching -especially during the three nights of a full moon."

  "And she being its Chosen." David walked from the porch steps toward Max. "Maybe easier to go undetected, if only for a little while, since the Beast was saving her as its next host. Even so .. she's his mother ... do you suppose she could've been protecting him?"

  "I dunno ... you ever hear of something like that?"

  David shook his head.

  Max looked up to where the sky and cypress met. For eight years, now, his eyesight had been as sharp as before he'd been bitten; when the Beast's jaws had cracked the bones of his skull and corrupted his vision. And still he looked to the stars to assure himself he was no longer half blind.

  "Nah," he said. "That's not how the Beast does things, we both know that. That's not the kind of protection it needs." Still ... "What about old man Stanislov, while he had you caged. He mention anything like that?"

  "No. Never."

  "Don't remember seeing anything like that in his journals ...?"

  David shook his head. They fell silent again, mulling it over, though they already knew why Millie hadn't seen what had taken over her son. They knew what lengths those who were bitten would go to, unwittingly, hiding the metamorphosis as the full moon approached. They had done it themselves -the Beast within sending them into identical habits even though they were separated by culture and years- David bitten long before Max. Hunting trips. Sick leaves. Sweat lodge retreats. And, of course, it was easy for two men, each grieving widowers, to gain the understanding and sympathy needed to live remote lives.

  Always easy, when those bitten didn't recognize what was inside.

  * * *

  Millie wanted Jackie to eat something, but he said he didn't have the stomach for it. Max was glad to hear it, until Millie turned her attention to him and David again.

  "You two sure you don't want somethin'?"

  "No, uh-uh," Max replied, "we're fine, thanks."

  Jackie was dressed now and sitting at the table. Or, more to the point, slumped at the table, a tin coffee mug shaking in his grip. From time to time he'd smooth a palm over his bald head. Max remembered what that felt like.

  It made him put a hand to his own hair, still mostly black in spite of a life that should have turned it white years ago. Mostly black except for a few wisps here and there ... and the large, silvery sides; the permanent reminders of what he once had been. He wondered how the silver had shown in Jackie's hair, after he'd been bitten.

  Everyone carried that mark. But it was easily shrugged off as natural graying -or the natural trauma of being attacked by a wild animal- even if the one bitten was young like Jackie. David's was less obvious now, his hair cut shorter than it used to be and more heavily streaked with gray as the years passed. Even so, his mark was still the broadest band of silver there. As with the pentagram, you just had to know what to look for.

  "It'll all grow back," Max said to Jackie. "Hair, eyebrows, whiskers, armpits ... every bit of it. You're gonna itch like ivy in a few days."

  Suddenly, Jackie buried his face in his hands. Max's throat knotted. He glanced at David. They both remembered how that felt, too.

  "They're hard to live with at first," he said. "The memories ... the images. Like a movie in your head."

  His face still covered, Jackie nodded. Max reached over and pulled his hands away. "Look at me," he ordered, old military training kicking in. "Look me in the eyes. Don't look away until I'm done talking. You hear me?"

  Jackie fixed his gaze on Max like a man clinging to the edge of a steep drop.

  "You will learn to live with this. For the next few months, you're gonna be ass deep in the fires of Hell. But there's an end to it. You'll never be as happy as you might've been once. But there is an end to it. You believe me?"

  Jackie worked his lips a moment, loose, moist and rubbery, before words finally made it through. "I wanna. I wanna believe you."

  "Then believe me. I've been where you are." Max nodded toward David. "We both have."

  "Sweet Jesus," Millie said, sitting quick and hard in her chair. "You sayin' ... you two were possessed of that thing?"

  Max nodded. "David's the one who saved me. He and a woman who ... God only knows why she did. She had every reason not to. What I did while the Beast was emergent ... to people in her care and to the man she loved..." He couldn't bring himself to finish.

  Mercifully, David interrupted. "We both have scars," he said, laying a hand against his belly, "right here where, in one form or another, the Beast in us was killed with silver. The weapon doesn't matter, only the metal. Silver that makes a fatal wound to the pelvic basin, to the chest or head area, is the only thing that destroys it. But the killing blow must be in the pelvic basin if the host is to survive. If it's to the chest or higher ... both the Beast and the host die. The host never re-emerges, then, even in death. It's a last resort."

  Millie and her son froze, aghast and in awe, as if they were looking at the dread and glory of archangel
s.

  "You did that on purpose?" Millie finally managed. "You meant to save my boy? You meant to kill that monster and save my boy, and you don't even know us?"

  David went suddenly stern. "Understand two things. One, we didn't know Jackie was the host. If we had, we would have kidnapped him long before now and held him until we could strike the saving blow. Two, we always intend to kill the Beast. No matter what. If that had meant Jackie died along with it, we wouldn't have hesitated. In fact, you probably noticed, we didn't." He softened a little. "But we're very, very glad we hit the underbelly. We're not always so lucky."

  With his glassy stare back on his coffee, Jackie accused more than asked, "You done this before, then ..."

  "You're Number Fourteen for me," David said, "and Lucky Thirteen for Max."

  "So there're others out there like you?" Millie asked.

  Like us , Max thought. Of the handful who had survived Max and David's killing silver, which should he think of as like us ? The two who could barely live with themselves, let alone become hunters, who disappeared, never to be heard from again? Or the one that committed suicide while still in Max and David's care? Or the ones that had joined Max and David, who could only live with what they had done -while they had been in the Beast's grip- by hunting it down, Chosen by Chosen? "If you mean other hunters, yeah. Three of the hosts we stalked are hunters now, too. "

  Millie stared at them a long moment. "That ain't much of a trappin' average."

  "Yeah, well, you try your hand at it," Max said. He stood up and took his cup to the coffee pot sitting between the stove's burners.

  "So ... you keep tabs on these others?" she asked. "They on the hunt now?"

  The fatigue was thick in David's voice. "We always are. The Beast may be one entity, but it incarnates and emerges all over the earth, every First Night. This isn't the sort of thing you can take a vacation from."

  Millie snorted. "Vacations're for rich people anyhow."

  David almost smiled. "If you don't mind," he said, "we'd like to stay on for a while." He looked at Jackie and said to him, "Max is right about these next few months. They're going to be hard for you. But we won't be staying for that long. Just a week or two. Also, in your case, I think you should be monitored closely for infection. It happens from time to time. I almost lost Max during his first days after the save."