Lou Garou is on the road, fresh out of Woodhaven and on his way to HogTown, his not-so-affectionate name for Chicago, to investigate the origin of a strange outbreak of mob violence in his home town. He’s on his own, in his beloved WolfCruiser – the biggest and most unnecessarily tricked-out cop car in three adjacent counties. But things have already started to get weird, and now they’re going to get weirder …

Less than ten miles past the city limits sign, the landscape around Woodhaven got real boring real fast. The industrial parks gradually gave way to the farms, then the farms got bigger and farther apart. Finally the terrain slid into light forest, a tangle of green and brown and pale yellow sunlight, that slipped closer and closer to the road. All in all, it was pleasant, tranquil and bucolic tour that gave Lou way too much time to think.

What a strange bunch of months it had been. He'd spent so many years being a ‘regular’ cop – and not a very good one. Then one crazy night of blood sacrifice which was totally not his fault, and suddenly the whole world had changed. Now – and apparently forever – his world had become a place filled with murderous shapeshifters and five o'clock shadows that just would not shave away, no matter how hard he tried. The new stamina and Wolverinish healing factor was great; the fact that alcohol actually seemed to make him stronger didn't hurt a bit, and the bit with the sense of smell and night vision, that was incredibly cool. Tthen there was the whole thing with the ladies…

But the world was dangerous now, and it was dangerous all the time – not just when he wanted it to be, not just when he made his own kind of trouble. No: every damn day. Things had just gotten weird, goddam--

A gorgeous woman in black leather came screaming out of the woods and threw herself in front of his speeding car.

Her legs were almost impossibly long, wrapped in form-fitting leggings that showed off incredible muscles. Her shoes weren't stripper-high, but clearly not made for fleeing through the woods. Her hair was short and spikey, with an adorable coal-black ducktail that licked at the back of her neck. She wore a snug black tank top under an equally snug black leather jacket, and they worked together very nicely to show off her curves. All her curves. Her lips were full, her eyes round and dark, and her face full but not chubby. Her fingernails were black and wonderfully, dangerously, sharp.

This was all that Lou could get in the two seconds before he swerved across the center line and avoided running her down by a good two inches.

He heard her voice fading away behind him: “Wait! Help me, PLEASE!” … and under normal circumstances, he would have slammed on the brakes in an instant.  But he was on assignment – hell, what could be the biggest assignment of his crappy little cop career – and he just couldn’t spare the time. He could call it in, get Tina to send a unit down...

The WolfCruiser suddenly coughed. Lou had never heard it do that before; it had always given him a low, rumbling purr from the instant he cranked the ignition. But this time it went pock, and then ka-pock and rapidly, almost jarringly, pulled to a stop, as if he'd pumped the brakes.

“What the hell...?” he said, and stared dumbly at the dashboard.

“HEELLLP!”

He looked up, into the rear-view mirror. The long-legged leather girl was standing in the absolute center of the highway, one patent leather shoe on each side of the white line. Her fists were clenched at her side. Her narrow but shapely shoulders were hunched. “I! SAID! HE--”

A six-foot-four biker in full beard and bandanna burst out of the brush and came for her, gnarled filthy fingers reaching up, up –

Lou was out of the car in an instant, his recently cleaned and reloaded Magnum already out and pointing, before he had both feet on the ground. “Hey! YOU! Get BACK!”

“Oh, thank God!” the girl said and ran towards him. The biker-dude pulled up short, disoriented by the cop's sudden appearance. For the first time, Lou could see the strange tattoos on the dude's cheeks and neck: big, round designs, tangles of hooks and knots and spikes, dead black against his pockmarked skin.

“Thank you thank you thank you” the girl said, and ran right past him. He heard the passenger door of the Cruiser open and close, but his attention was still focused on Biker Dude.

The long-hair threw his arms out in front of him and said “Gak!” like a choking moose.

Lou still had his gun up and pointed square at the man's chest. “Stop, man! This is crazy!”

“Gaak! GAAAAK!” He could see the tattoos standing out against the Dude’s skin and throat as clear as scars. There was even one dead center on his forehead; it seemed to pulse as he ran straight for Lou.

Lou held his pose for one more second. Then he said, “Oh the hell with this,” and lowered the gun.  Biker-Dude was about his size. He suspected they were equally good fighters, under normal circumstances. But Lou was anything but normal these days. He had that whole werewolf thing going for him.

So he ran at the guy. Full tilt, boots pounding, he charged straight forward, aimed at the crazed guy with the funny tats, and punched him, hard as he could, square in his stomach.

The Biker bent double like a cheap-ass action figure. Lou turned as the man collapsed, swung up his free arm and brought his fist down hard on the back of the falling thug’s head. Biker-Dude hit the asphalt with an audible crunch.

“I don't know what your beef with the lady is,” Lou said, low and hard, “but if you don't want a permanent hole in you, you gotta stop now. Got it?”

“Gak,” Biker Dude said, using what little air he still had in his lungs.

“I thought so.”

He left the biker guy writhing on the tarmac as he heel-and-toed it back to the WolfCruiser. The beautiful girl in black whispered “Thank you. Really,” one more time as he slammed the door and turned the ignition key. He didn't even remember the engine had been having a problem just three minutes earlier. The Cruiser just roared to life on the first try, as it always had before, and he tore away with a squeal and a rooster-tail of gravel.

He was way too far down the road to see the strange circular tattoos on the man's forehead and cheeks fade away like dew in the sunshine. And with the disappearance, the beaten man's voice returned.

“Bitch,” he wheezed as the Cruiser faded from view. “Bitch tried to… steal my... my bike.” He got up on his hands and knees, head pounding.  “Bitch tried to kill me,” he said to no one at all.

*   *   *

“Isadora Tree,” she said. Lou took his eyes off the road long enough to give her a confused frown. It sounded like she was talking gibberish.

“My name,” she said as if she was trying to communicate with a very slow dog. “Isadora Tree. And thanks for helping me back there.”

Understanding dawned, but slowly. “Oh,” he said, and returned his attention to the road. “Yeah. Sure. Hey, you gotta pick your boyfriends more carefully.”

They hit a long straightaway, and Lou took the time to give her a good, long up-and-down. Everything he'd noticed in those first two seconds still held firm. Now he got a few additional details: half a dozen ornate and glistening rings on most of her fingers, at least that many ear piercings, daring but not overdone eye make-up that set off her blazing sapphire eyes. She was some weird and wonderful cross between Fairuza Balk from The Craft and some of the better comic book renditions of Catwoman, and it worked very well together. Very well.

Even better: she seemed to enjoy the attention.

“He wasn't my boyfriend,” she said, and her voice was surprisingly sweet, not the sultry Michelle Pfeifferesque purr Lou had half-expected. “Not at all. Barely even a traveling companion. I just made some... assumptions I shouldn’t have made. You know what happens when you make assumptions, right? It --”

“It makes me wish you'd never started that sentence. Yeah, I've heard that.” He looked back at the road, and silently thanked his recently enhanced nose-parts. He had to admit, this girl smelled good. “So where are you headed?” he asked, careful to keep his voice light and nonthreatening. “I'm going all the way to HogTown, but I could drop you anywhere along the way.”

“No,” she chirped, apparently putting all that nasty assault-and-battery unpleasantness behind her with a cute li'l shrug. “No, that's good. I like HogTown. Are you going there on business?”

“Police investigation,” he said shortly, willing her to drop it. “And you?”

“Oh... traveling. Pleasure. Traveling.”

“You know,” he said, looking her over again, “you really gotta work on your flat-out lying skills. You're really bad at it.”

They whooshed past a road sign that told them HogTown was a little more than an hour's drive away. The terrain still didn't show it: long, lazy curves through hill and dale, light forest and dappled fields, with the occasional curvy drop-off into a deep ravine, just to keep things interesting. If Lou wasn't already preoccupied with the case and the fragrant girl in black leather, he might actually have enjoyed the view. And traffic was light – very light, in fact, in either direction.

Isadora Tree ran her well-decorated fingers through her short spiky hair, and Lou got a good look at the medallion she wore around her neck – something like an ornate Indian mandala or a Celtic knot, though somehow more pointy and harder to see clearly, even when you squinted. All he could tell for sure was that it was built around a perfect circle and made from cold iron – he could smell that – and it hung from a thin cord made of black... hair? Wow. He could smell it now: Human hair.

Almost in retaliation, Isadora seemed terribly interested in Lou. “So,” she said, giving him a sly sideways smile. “You're a cop?”

Lou glanced around the interior of the Cruiser: the guns, the radio, the badges. “What gave you your first clue?” he asked.

“I mean, you're like a cop in that town back there, what do you call it.  Your town.”

“You mean Woodhaven?” he said. “The town you were either going towards or running from just now, the one you're pretending not to remember?”

The whooshed past a second sign, promising only 45 for minutes to Hogtown.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, about that. I --”

A deafening truck horn, loud enough to shake the whole car, blasted right behind them.

“What the fu--”

A black and silver eighteen-wheeler rammed into the trunk of the WolfCruiser, hard.

Lou gripped the wheel as the g-forces punched him against the seat. He heard Izzy squeak in surprise, but at least she didn’t start screaming as the impact as he pulled the car heavily to the right, towards the dangerously narrow shoulder and the deep drainage ditch beyond. Lou’s knuckles turned bone-white as he struggled to keep them on the road. He looked back through the rear-view mirror and could see nothing but a darkened cab and tinted windows coming closer, very slowly. The truck was gaining on them, making itself ready for another whack.

Lou stamped on the accelerator and took off, carefully veering into the empty lane of opposing traffic, trying to get away.

The semi followed, still gaining.

“This is impossible,” he grumbled. “It can’t go that fast.” The bed must be empty. He couldn’t carry helium balloons and reach this—

There was a tinkling SMASH as it rammed into the rear bumper a second time. Lou held on and gritted his teeth as the car jumped under him, remembering with mad gratitude all the hours he’d spent in the shop reinforcing the Cruiser’s chassis and adding extra shielding, while simultaneously ruining the gas mileage. Still…

He kept peering in the rear-view mirror.  What the hell did this dude want?

“Lou…” Izzy said. He ignored her and kept peering.

He could barely make out the silhouette through the windshield. It was all blinding silver and midnight blue, the chrome shining so bright it made his eyes hurt.

“Lou!”

He finally pulled his eyes away from the mirror and looked forward…

… and saw the pick-up coming right for him. He started to brake and turn, almost reflexively. Then he stopped himself.

He kept the WolfCruiser straight. He didn’t get out of the way. Not… quite…

“LOU ARE YOU IN—“

Now. He hauled on the wheel and twitched the Crusier back into its proper lane, giving the big rig not time to follow. The pick-up thundered past him, screaming as the driver swayed to the far side of the road and missed the eighteen-wheeler by a sweet two inches, no more. And damn it, a heartbeat later the huge hauler was right back under control and swaying to fit in right behind the Wolfcruiser again, coming on as strong as ever.

Damn. He’d been hoping for a head-on collision.

No such luck: he knew he now had maybe thirty seconds before the black-and-silver rig would ram his trunk again.

Time to go on the offensive.

He gave Izzy a hard glance. “Can you take the wheel?” he asked.

She didn’t miss a beat. “Yeah,” she said. “I can.”

He nodded tightly. “Do it.”

Her glittering fingers shot out and gripped the steering wheel from the driver’s side. Lou turned to face her – too close for a moment, and it made him catch another dizzying whiff of her. Then he wriggled between the bucket seats and threw himself into the back.

She was fast and smart. The instant his shoes cleared the well, she hopped over the central gear shift and put her foot on the accelerator. The car didn’t even know there had been a change. They lost no speed at all.

Lou didn’t waste any time talking. He simply turned in the seat, popped the hidden latch next to the headrest, and jerked down the rear seat’s back rest, exposing the interior of the WolfCruiser’s trunk from the inside.

And what a wonder it was. He thrust his hands into the familiar darkness and found exactly what he was looking for in just a few seconds. One item fit perfectly to his right hand; he snugged the other item neatly into his windbreaker. Still crouched over, he started to crank down the rear passenger window as he called over his shoulder: “Any oncoming traffic?”

“It’s still clear!” she called back, not bothering to turn around.

“When I say go, twitch into the oncoming lane and brake, fast. I wanna get alongside this guy.”

When it was all over, Lou wondered why he even thought of doing this. He’d only met this Isadora Tree woman literally minutes earlier, and what he was asking her to do was something most stunt drivers would refuse to try. But he didn’t even think about that at the time. For some reason, it didn’t even surprise him when she said, “Got it!” like this was something she did every day. He just took her at her word, straightened up halfway and started to push his shoulders through the open window, arms first.

“GO!” he said.

She moved like a pro. The WolfCruiser lurched to the left in one smooth, completely controlled swoop. In the next instant she barely tapped the brakes, bleeding off ten miles per hour in a heartbeat. The truck didn’t have any time to react: in the blink of an eye, the big rig wasn’t two feet behind the cop car. They were side by side.

Lou was hanging out the window from the waist up. Now he pointed his right fist, the one with the MAC-10 in it, at the eighteen-wheeler and sprayed its tires with a rattling barrage of bullets and no small sense of satisfaction. He always thought the MAC was kind of dorky-cute, with a barrel that looked like a black box of chocolates with a pistol grip and a perky little nose; it was always fun to fire. Not that he thought it would do much damage in this case; too much wind, too much speed, a moving target. Still, he thought, worth a try as he emptied the last of its magazine into a sweep across the side of the van. He was rewarded with a neatly stitched line of bullet holes, but nothing more: no gouts of smoke or gas or liquid. He’d been right: the rig was empty.

Never mind, he said, and tossed the empty gun over his shoulder, back into the car. “FORWARD!” he bellowed to Izzy. “BRING ME UP TO THE CAB!”

Now he was hanging half out of the car with no weapon in either hand, the wings of his windbreaker snapping in the air stream. He aimed a broad, stupid grin at the tinted passenger window and made a little twirly gesture with one finger, the universal sign for “roll down your window.”

Come on, asshole, he said, twirling madly. At least be polite. He knew a wave of oncoming traffic could smash him against the side of the semi at any moment.

Finally, as the WolfCruiser crept even closer to the cab, the truck’s driver-side window rolled down. Halfway. Five, maybe six inches. Just enough for Lou to see the visor of the driver’s baseball cap and his smoked aviator glasses, fresh from the 1980’s.

“DUDE!” he shouted, spreading his empty hands. “WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM?”

The driver looked annoyed. “Nothing personal,” he said, barely loud enough to be heard over the roar of the wind. “You gotta die.”

Lou tried to look disappointed or confused, though he was neither. Just what I wanted to hear, he told himself. Aloud he said, “Oh. Okay. As long as it’s not personal.” As he spoke he darted his hand inside his windbreaker, snatched out the hand grenade he’d hidden their earlier, and tossed it with expert accuracy, right through the four-inch gap of the open window. The moment it cleared the glass he yelled, “BRAAAAAKE!” and lunged backwards into the interior of the ‘Cruiser, as Izzy stood on the brakes and still managed to keep them on the tarmac.

The second truck, twin to the first, had clearly seen the whole thing. It slammed on its brakes as well, and they were both half a mile back in fifteen seconds. Truck #1 weaved back and forth, tires squealing. He could imagine the driver seeing the grenade, struggling to keep on the road as he tried to find it, grab it, get rid –

Truck #1 exploded in a single, mottled sphere of yellow-white flame. Burning and smoking, driverless, now, it wobbled across the shoulder into the roadside ditch and exploded a second time.

The WolfCruiser and Truck #2 swooped by without so much as a brake light between them. A moment later Lou was humping his way back into the front seat. Izzy didn’t argue; she just made way from him and hopped into the passenger seat as he took control.

“Okay,” he grumbled as he settled in. “One down, one to go. This time we’ll –“

“Oh, no,” she said. “My turn,” and reached up to open the sun roof.

Lou couldn’t help staring. After his first transformation, with a kind of compulsion he couldn’t quite control, he had spent hours, weeks, modifying, reinforcing, tricking out his own squad car, turning it into the legendary WolfCruiser, a masterpiece of pursuit and destruction. But in all that time, with all that work, he was sure, absolutely positive, he had never even thought of installing a sun roof. Not once.

But there was Izzy, tapping a little gray square he’d never seen before in the ceiling of the car, right over the dash, and smiling as the sun roof ratcheted open, smooth and silent. It was directly above the passenger seat and just wide enough for a set of human shoulders.

“What the hell are you doing?” she said as she turned around in her seat and brought up her knees.

“Having fun,” she said, grinning sideways at him. “Aren’t you?”

She stood up in one smooth, long-legged gesture, exposed to the elements from the waist up and facing backwards, looking at Truck #2, while Lou got a tremendous profile view of her butt.

She was clearly loving it. “HEY!” she shouted into the wind, squinting at the tinted windows of the big rig. “HEY, YOU WANNA GO?”

The truck HONNNNNNKED as if in response.

Izzy threw her ringed fingers over her head and twisted them into strange shapes. Lou couldn’t quite  see what she was doing – bad angle, what with driving the car at insane speeds on a curving road and all – but he had a sense of something odd: the smell of electricity, the wicker of twisting space, a sub-aural hum that made his wolfishly sensitive ears ache.

“NYARLA-THOG!” she screamed. “ACH-LABA-TOI!” She threw her hands forward, pointing straight at the truck, and a huge, flat, perfectly circular shape, black as midnight, flew out of her hands and straight towards the attacking big rig, growing and turning as it raced forward and tipped upwards, showing its writhing, arcane face to the truck and slamming into it, full force.

The big rig’s windshield shattered into a million tiny pieces, and the whole cab rang and crunched like a broken bell.

“What?” Lou said, trying to look up and back and forward all at the same time. “What?”

The truck weaved a little, shuddered, but it kept on coming – even closer, in fact. “Fine,” Izzy said. “Fine, if that’s the way you want it!” She threw her hands to one side, as if she was about to swing a baseball bat, and did something more with her fingers.

“IMHO-CLARG!” she shrieked. “HAPT-AGA-SHAK!”

She swung forward, arms stiff, and another huge black solid-energy shape, even more complex and just as perfectly circular as the last, blossomed from twisted fingers and grew as it flew. This time it was on edge, exactly vertical to the ground. Lou caught a glimpse of it in his side-mirror, saw it spinning almost lazily as it arced back to the truck.

It hit the rig right in the middle of its left headlight and kept going without a wobble or pause, a scimitar passing through smoke, slicing off the truck’s fender, the passenger door, the back of the cab and the whole length of the van’s left side, all the way back. Midnight blue steel and plastic flew in every direction; the flexing wall of silver metal peeled back under the force of the wind and flapped away, screeching.

But the truck kept coming.

Izzy put her hands up over her spiky-haired head one more time, spread her fingers, and brought them down fast and hard right in front of her, as if hitting with a sledge. “CH’GRAAA!” she bellowed, and a shape as wide as the truck itself flared out and flew forward, exactly parallel to the ground. It hit the truck right below the roof of the cab and just kept going. The roof exploded and danced away. The whole top of the van separated along the precise horizontal incision the mandala had made. It twisted up and up, tore off and flew free, driven by the wind. Lou caught a glimpse of it slamming against the highway a half mile back, twisted and sparking as it landed.

And still the driver kept coming, hunched down behind the wheel, grimacing like a madman. He had aviator sunglasses just like the other guy, and he was clearly, obviously scared out of his mind.

Fucking rednecks, Lou thought bitterly. He glanced up and called out to the crazy woman with the super-powers. “Izzy?” he said, struggling to keep the car on the road, “you think maybe—“

She wasn’t paying him any mind. “Ohhhh, no no no,” she said, almost chuckling as she wriggled her fingers at the truck, like a child casting a pretend spell on her doll. Smaller mandala, still dead-black and etched with impossible patterns, bubbled from her fingers and soared towards the truck. Some were big as saucers, some as small as eyeballs; they darted and wheeled from her hands and hit the grille and engine block in ten different places with a series of deep, multiple thunk thunk thunk sounds. The engine went ping and ffft and a plume of steam or smoke rocketed out the far right side.

And that was it. The driver was giving up. Lou could see him clearly now through the emptied windshield, hunched in his exposed chair, jittering and bouncing as the truck died under him. Dimming sunlight, turned orange by the oil smoke, glinted off the driver’s shades as he started to brake, to drift carefully towards the shoulder, trying to get away…

“Oh, no you don’t,” Izzy said, hissing it so only Lou could hear. “No way.” Still standing in the seat, her back still to the driving wind, she rolled out her hands, palm up, and one last huge disk manifested in front of her – flat and horizontal again, but this time low enough to hit the rig just above the tires.

It cut the engine clean in half, right across the middle. It penetrated the cab just inches below the driver’s feet… and then Izzy curled her fingers and drew them up, and the disk echoed her movement.

It stopped, right under the diver. Its leading edge curled, like loving fingers. And when Izzy jerked up her hands, the disk ripped the driver’s seat right out of the hurtling cab and lifted it into the air.

Even behind the cheap-ass aviator sunglasses, his astonishment and fear were obvious. He opened his mouth to speak, maybe to plead, but it was far too late. Izzy rotated her wrists and the disk flipped over, taking the seat and the driver with it. But before gravity could take hold and the driver could fall, the disk helped him.

Under Isadora Tree’s direction, it slammed the driver flat into the asphalt with a wet, screaming, crunch. It hit so hard the mass of metal, cloth, and human flesh barely even skidded.

The destruction of the remains of Truck #2 was almost an anti-climax. It rattled across the shoulder, driverless, and nearly rolled over when it hit the ditch. A beat later it collided grill-first with a hundred-year-old oak tree that was barely able to take the impact despite its size. But it stood tall. The truck wrapped itself around its trunk, and in a half-second the gas vapors from the perforated tank caught a spark and the big rig blew in a blast of fire that was huge and black and yellow and hot as hell itself.

Lou caught the fire cloud in his rear view mirror as Izzy lowered herself back into the passenger seat. She turned and settled as the window above her slid shut.

Lou just stared at her. His mouth opened to demand an explanation.

She sighed. “Later,” she said. “Let’s just get to Hogtown.”

He looked at her a moment later… then nodded. Good idea, he thought, and stamped on the accelerator.

They swooped away from the double wreckage, and never even heard any emergency vehicles. Maybe none ever came.