Free The Ultimate Werewolf by Byron Preiss (ed) Page A

four-legged, it ate what it could. Thus, he bounded over a fence and gripped the throat of a barking watch-dog and carried it over the fence into the woods where he slew and ate it. That was not enough. He needed more prey to kill to thrill his nerves with ecstasy and to fill his belly for fuel for the change back into Man. He ran on until he came to a pasture on which horses grazed or slept. He killed a mare and disemboweled her and began tearing at the flesh until the aroused farmers came at him with flashlights and guns.
    Then, in his wide circuit through the woods, he crossed a moonlight- filled meadow because sheep scent drifted across it to him. As he got close to the edge of the woods, he smelled, along with sheep, that flesh he most lusted for. A man stepped out from the darkness of the trees, the moon shining on the rifle barrel. He lifted it as Wolf leaped snarling at him.
     
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    Sheriff Yeager had not joined the hunting party just north of Benger's farm. Instead, outtricking his prey's every trick to detect a shadower, he had followed Varglik to the oak grove. He had sat in his car down the road until the wolf-howl had told him that what he had expected to happen had happened. After ten minutes, he had gotten out of the car and cautiously approached the grove. He was just in time to see the bushy tail disappearing into the dark woods.
    Using his flashlight, he followed the pawprints in the wet earth. After a while, he heard distant shots. Guessing from which direction they came, he cut at an angle through the woods. Just before he got to the meadow, he saw the enormous wolf loping across it. He waited until the beast was almost ready to plunge into the forest, and he stepped out. His rifle cartridges contained no silver bullets. That was bullshit. A
    high-velocity .30-caliber lead bullet would kill any animal, man included, weighing only one hundred and eighty pounds. The werewolf might seem to be of supernatural origin. But it was subject to the same laws of physics and chemistry as any other animal.
    The bullet entered the gaping mouth, bounced off the roof of the mouth, tore down the throat, and angled into the liver. The wolf was dead and so was Varglik. Nor was there a change into the human body such as shown in so many movies. The cells were dead, and the transformation principle could not act on the cells. The wolf remained Wolf.
    Yeager did not want questions or publicity. He skinned the carcass and dug a grave and buried the wolf. In the process of re-metamorphosis, the skin would have fallen off, he supposed, separating from the body and other parts of the skin. But it remained whole now, the process of change having been erased with the end of life.
     
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    Now, the pelt was stretched out against the stone of the fireplace in the sheriff's house. Every night, its light seemed to Yeager to be getting brighter. He considered destroying it. He knew or thought he knew what he would do soon if the skin stayed within his sight or within the reach of his hand. He had to burn it.
    The hungry wolf will try to get at the meat even if it sees the trap. An iron filing does not will not to fly to the magnet. The moth does not extinguish the flame so that it will not be incinerated.

 
ANGELS' MOON
     
    Kathe Koja
     
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    HE thought he might be an angel. Angels had transformations, he was reasonably certain of that: from man to spirit and back again, it was in the Bible. Fear not, they said when they changed.
    On his back, not quite staring up at the ceiling, arms at his long sides like a patient on a table. His hair was short and blond and dirty. He was dirty all over, no wash since winter; there was no more water upstairs in the pipes and he had no idea how to turn it back on. Memory of the change, creep and stutter, rolling up his body like the movement of some relentlessly disfiguring disease. Leprosy. Did people still get leprosy, or was it one of those things of which the