Free The Changing (The Biergarten Series) by T. M. Wright, F. W. Armstrong Page B

agitation, into her apartment.
    It was the blood, of course. He'd seen the blood. She hadn't gotten it all off. Some of it had clung around her fingernails, maybe, or in the lines on her palm, or in her shoes—God knew where!
    And that meant, simply, that she'd have to scrub harder, much harder. And then she'd have to look very, very closely, with a magnifying glass, into each pore, into each cell if she could.
    Damn him! Goddamn him!
    She turned the shower on. Hot. And got in.

Chapter Ten

    Eugene Conkey figured the chances were about the same that The Park Werewolf would get him as they were that he'd win The New York State Lottery (into which he had faithfully, and in vain, plugged fifty dollars a month for the past six years). Number one, it was called "The Park Werewolf" because its territory was Kodak Park, not here, five miles away on Bayview Drive. Number two, even if it strayed out of The Park for some reason, Christ, it had a couple of hundred square miles to mess around in; the chances that it would somehow find him were about the same as the chances that a meteorite would plummet from the sky and take his ear off. And number three, he was prepared. If any creep who thought he was a werewolf interrupted his nightly jogging routine, then he'd find his guts somewhere far behind him in the weeds. Sure the forty-five was illegal, sure it was hard to run with it tucked into his jogging pants, sure he'd never used one before. But those were small considerations indeed in the face of his own self-defense.
    Eugene heard a car round the bend a hundred yards behind him. He glanced back into the car's headlights, saw they were on high beam. "Fuck you!" he breathed. The headlights dimmed. He looked back at the road in front of him—poorly lighted because here, in Irondequoit, one of Rochester's more fashionable neighborhoods, streetlamps were looked upon as a little gauche; no one walked anywhere anymore—and angled to his right, onto the shoulder, just in case the car's driver didn't see him. He was thankful there was a full moon tonight; it lit the gravel shoulder well enough that he could see the occasional pothole or rock.
    He idly watched the car as it passed him. He saw that it was dark gray in color (though that was hard to tell in the dark, he realized) and that it had a whip antenna on the back—an unmarked police car, he decided, and felt grateful that it was prowling the neighborhood. He watched it round the corner onto Briarcliffe , which ran into Bayview , then he angled back onto the road.
    The neighborhood was awfully quiet. He'd noticed that as soon as he'd left his house, because at this hour—it was 9:30—there was usually still a good amount of traffic—people coming and going to the big twenty-four-hour grocery, Wegman's , at the Culver Ridge Shopping Plaza or heading to one of the half dozen bars that dotted the area or to one of the five theaters at Eastway Plaza just a couple miles north. He liked the quiet, especially for jogging, because he jogged not only, he claimed, "for the health of it," but also, "for the peace of it," and the roads had rarely been as peaceful as they were to-night, with most people shut up in their houses away from the threat of the full moon. He thought, wryly, that there was some good to be found in any situation.
    His breathing as he jogged was heavy, especially toward the end of his routine, and the sound of it often covered up small sounds around him.
    So he didn't hear the low, ragged growling from the weeds just to his right. Or the weeds themselves being squashed underfoot. Or the gravel at the shoulder of the road crunching under an awful weight. And by then he was past the thing that was making all this noise, so he didn't see it, either, as it fell in behind him and kept pace with him just a couple of arm's lengths away.
    And when the thing was nearly upon him his nose twitched, because the smell wafting over him reminded him of the open sewers in Williamson,