Misery County

Chapter 2 - Part 3

Chopper was no longer walking backward. He was now standing his ground.

Cassie lifted her spray bottle to give him another dose, but with unbelievable haste, the wolf lunged forward and knocked the bottle out of her hand.

He was transforming before her very eyes. How was this happening? He'd gotten not one, but two shots of silver to the face. The solution was supposed to burn its way into the skin and remain there for hours, crippling any normal werewolf. But he was no normal werewolf. He wasn't even normal by alpha standards.

Cassie made a rush for the door. The wolf jumped after her and grabbed onto her heel. She fell over, but quickly shook her ankle loose and scrambled to her feet. She slammed into the door, not risking any deceleration before impact. The handle - it turned, but the door didn't budge. Of course not. It was locked.

She swung around to face the wolf. He had almost fully transformed, his canine figure ripping through his now-undersized clothes.

"I think we got off on the wrong foot," Cassie blubbered, her words struggling to push through the lump in her throat.

The man that was once Chopper stared at her, a low growl rumbling from behind his dagger-like teeth.

There was no sense in attempting diplomacy now. She knew full well that, in spite of all the boons that transforming brought about, there was one malus - a transformed werewolf's brain diminishes compared to its human form, its mental capacities along with it. Rule one of hunting werewolves - you cannot reason with them any more than you could hold a conversation with a feral dog.

The wolf lunged at her throat. She threw herself to the ground, barely escaping his assault. He smashed through the glass that adorned the top half of the door. Cassie hoped that a giant wolf's head sticking out of the front door of the house would attract some attention, but this residence wasn't the only one on the street that was abandoned. In fact, the whole street had seemed dead. She supposed it made perfect sense. What better place for a werewolf to haunt than a street where no one lived or went?

Bad Cassie. No thinking. Only action now. She dove around the wolf's legs and toward the bottle of colloidal silver that was sitting patiently on the floor not very far from her. The wolf had dislodged his head from the ruins of the door in the meantime. He turned around and pounced on Cassie, who was already on all fours on the ground. She wormed her way through his grasp, turning around to face him. He opened his mouth wide, whether to howl or to take a bite out of her, she didn't know, but she took the chance to shove a now-opened bottle of colloidal silver down his throat, pulling her hand out just before the wolf's jaws snapped shut.

Scrambling out from under the creature, Cassie turned to look at him. He was gagging, probably trying to dislodge the tiny bottle from his throat. If his exterior was anything to go by, the bottle must have been in the process of draining down his gullet. He was rapidly transforming back into his human form. His fur was withering and falling, coming off him like he was a shedding animal. His snout was deforming, flattening, the beginnings of his nose the only feature that was still protruding.

Cassie managed to let out a relieved laugh as she crawled to her purse. "I have to say, Mr. Chopper, that was all a lot closer than I'm used to. I didn't think it was possible for your kind to be as resistant to silver as you were. Oh well, you learn something new every day." She picked up her handbag and reached inside. "Now I'm going to do something that I probably should have done when the conversation started going cold."

The struggling wolf watched as a Saturday night special, Cassie's little handgun, came out of her purse.

"Now let's see if you're resistant to silver bullets."