Humans weren’t the only prey the Lycans had feasted on since their emergence in October. Now, they had begun targeting livestock.

  Monica Scales stood at the edge of the Sanderson property just after eleven p.m., her eyes glowing faintly yellow in the darkness. Beside her, Calus Jones crouched low, pulling scent from the humid night air. Pigs. Horses. Cattle. And two humans inside the farmhouse, their heartbeats slow and steady with sleep.

  “Why this one?” Calus asked, his voice low and rumbling, already halfway between human and beast.

  Monica scanned the property. Forty acres of farmland stretching toward the tree line, isolated by a half mile from the nearest neighbor. The Sandersons had owned this land since 1951, passed down through three generations. Christopher and Sally were the last of the line. No children, no heirs. Just two people in their seventies tending a farm that time had forgotten.

  “Because it’s perfect,” Monica said, turning to face him. “When we expand the pack, we’ll need resources. Food. Space. Territory that can’t be traced back to the city. This farm gives us all of that. And after tonight, no one will question what happened here. Just another animal attack blamed on coyotes or wild dogs or whatever they are saying now.”

  Calus smiled, teeth already lengthening. “And the old couple?”

  “Collateral.” Monica’s pupils dilated. “The pack needs to feed. We take what we need and burn the rest. By morning, this place will be ashes, and the land will be put up for auction. I’ll buy it through a shell company within the week.”

  She stripped off her jacket and let it fall to the ground. Her breathing quickened. “Time to turn. We move fast, and we move loud. I want the animals panicked. I want the noise to carry.”

  Calus obliged and began his transformation. Monica’s transformation was smoother, the change flowing through her like blood finding its way into veins. When it finished, she stood beside Calus, both of them breathing steam into the cold night air.

  They made their move.

  The front door exploded inward, wood splintering off the hinges and scattering across the living room floor. Christopher Sanderson jolted awake in his recliner, the TV still flickering with late-night infomercials. He registered two massive shapes filling the doorway before Calus was on him.

  Claws closed around Christopher’s throat. The old man tried to scream, but the sound died in a wet gurgle as Calus’s jaws clamped down on his skull. Bone crunched. Brain matter splattered across the recliner’s headrest. Calus dropped the body and turned toward the hallway where Sally was already running, barefoot in her nightgown, toward the back door.

  Monica intercepted her. One swipe of her claws opened Sally’s stomach from hip to ribcage. Intestines spilled onto the hardwood floor in wet coils. Sally looked down at her own insides, mouth opening and closing silently, then collapsed.

  The house went quiet except for the dripping.

  Outside, the livestock had already begun to panic. The pigs in the nearest pen were shrieking, slamming against the wooden slats, trying to escape. Monica and Calus crashed through the barn door, and the feeding frenzy began.

  Monica grabbed the first pig by the hind legs and tore it in half with one violent motion. Blood sprayed across the stable walls in wide arcs. She buried her muzzle in the carcass and fed, tearing out chunks of meat and swallowing them whole.

  Calus moved through the pens like a wrecking ball. He grabbed a cow by the neck, twisted until the spine separated with a wet snap, then dragged it into the center of the barn and ripped open its abdomen. Steam rose from the exposed organs. He pulled out the liver and devoured it, blood running down his chest and matting his fur.

  The remaining animals kicked and screamed, trapped in their stalls, their terror filling the night air with sounds that would carry for miles.

  When they’d eaten their fill, Monica walked back outside and surveyed the property. The farmhouse sat dark and silent. The barn was a slaughterhouse. Blood pooled in the dirt between the buildings.

  “Burn it,” she said.

  Calus walked to the equipment shed and grabbed the John Deere 9R 640 tractor by its rear axle. The machine weighed over thirty thousand pounds. He lifted it off the ground, muscles bunching beneath his fur, and with one motion hurled it toward the farmhouse.

  The tractor flew through the air and crashed through the front wall. The entire structure shuddered. Gas lines ruptured. Within seconds, flames caught and began spreading through the interior.

  Monica and Calus stood before the fire, watching it grow. As the blaze reflected in their eyes, their bodies began to shrink. Bones reshaped. Fur retracted. They reverted to human form, naked, drenched in blood and sweat.

  With crimson smeared across their mouths and down their chests, the two met in a slow, primal kiss. Monica traced her tongue along Calus’s jaw, licking away the stains of their kill. He returned the gesture, savoring the metallic taste. Behind them, the farmhouse collapsed into the fire, beams crashing inward as sparks spiraled into the night sky.

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  The burn scar of the Sanderson farm still smoked when Derek pulled the truck onto the shoulder. Firefighters wrestled with embers while officers kept the press and neighbors behind yellow tape. Up close, the scene reeked of blood and wet hay, strong enough to turn Derek’s stomach.

  Olivia stepped out of her cruiser, hands on her vest. “Jesus. How do you even explain this?”

  “Because they’re not themselves,” Derek said. He didn’t know if he was pleading or warning. “Do you believe me now?”

  Olivia didn’t answer the way he wanted. She just looked at him, and he saw years of crime scenes stacked behind her expression, the skepticism of someone who’d stopped being surprised by ugly but still needed proof.

  Before she could reply, another uniform approached.

  “What’s up, Hale? You working this?” Detective Charles Harris asked, nodding at Derek. “Who’s the new guy?”

  “He’s helping,” Olivia said.

  Harris shook his head, more weary than angry. “One night, a club, twenty-some dead with the doors locked. Airboat wrecked in the swamp. Now, a farm turned into hell. This is insane.”

  They left the cordoned property and the smell of rot behind. The drive to Baton Rouge was long enough for radio talk to thin into static. Derek stared at the horizon, at the morning sun lying across the interstate, thinking of the woman who’d held him off the floor with a single hand. Olivia watched him out of the corner of her eye, one hand steady on the wheel, the other tapping against her thigh.

  Dr. Marsh’s cottage sat half hidden in a hollow of cypress, the porch sagging under boxes that reeked of old paper and lab reagents. When they arrived, he opened the door before they could knock.

  “Tell us everything,” Olivia said. “Short version.”

  Marsh rubbed his temple, then clasped his hands together. “The explosion didn’t create what we were working on; it freed part of it. Bill and I were developing a regenerative, adaptive serum derived from a lupine genome recovered decades ago. In careful hands, it was a grotesque kind of miracle: strength, rapid healing, endurance. But the strain we studied had one more feature, and we only discovered it when we cross-analyzed the leader’s sequencing.”

  Derek leaned forward. “The leader?”

  “A werewolf pack leader. They retrieved the sample in 1979. Its genome, call it Lycan, carries a neural architecture that creates behavioral dominance: subliminal synchronization, hive-like control. In short, it can bind other hosts into a single will. That’s not a metaphor. It’s biochemical and neurological.”

  Olivia’s face went pale. “So infected people are being controlled.”

  “Not always, not completely. The virus behaves differently in different hosts. Some get the physical traits with little cognitive change, others get the mental tether. But the dangerous part is that tether. It spreads like a command chain. It can marshal people into packs.”

  Marsh’s fingers twitched against each other. “We thought we could isolate the code, but the serum was unstable. Carroll knew. He did what he thought he had to do.”

  “You mean when the lab burned?” Derek asked.

  “Carroll didn’t die by accident. He destroyed the samples because he realized how lethal the vector was. A portion escaped anyway. That’s the strain we’re chasing now.”

  He let out a long breath. “It’s self-healing, extremely resilient. Conventional trauma won’t finish them. Silver will. But silver is the blunt answer.”

  “And the cure?” Olivia asked.

  Marsh’s mouth flattened into a line. “We built a countermeasure as a failsafe. Compound 47. It’s not a perfect cure. Think of it as a biochemical interrupter: suppress the Lycan gene expression and sever the neural tether that ties hosts to a pack leader. It won’t eradicate the infection in every case, but it will break the hive lock and stop immediate commands. Memory loss of the Lycan-controlled period is a side effect, not perfect, but often useful.”

  “How do you give it?” Derek asked.

  “Direct aerosolization works. We made grenades, smoke canisters filled with a formulation of Compound 47. We don’t want to kill them; we want to neutralize the linkage so we can isolate and treat. I kept some. I kept protocols.”

  He tapped a battered metal case at his feet. “Fifteen canisters. I’ll give you seven.”

  Derek’s fingers shook around the grenade case when Marsh handed it to him. “Seven?”

  “Seven gives you options. But it may not work on everyone. If it fails, the alternative is silver rounds. I’m sorry. That’s the truth. If you want to stop the spread, you aim for containment first, then elimination as a last resort.”

  Olivia rubbed her temple, already calculating logistics. “Routes, masks, safe houses, smoke deployment patterns, public safety. We have to think through where we can do this without hysterics, without civilians inhaling the compound. We’ll need Marsh to be secure. If the pack learns he’s here...”

  “They’ll come,” Marsh said. “They’ll know.”

  They layered plans: who would carry what, where they would deploy, how long the smoke lingered, escape routes, contingency codes.

  Derek’s voice was lowwhen he spoke. “If this doesn’t work, if I have to...”

  “You don’t,” Olivia said, flat and decisive. “You don’t pull the trigger unless I say so. I’ll get you through this, kid.”

  He nodded, grateful she’d chosen for him.

  They drove back toward Bayou Mounds under a sky that had lost the softness of dawn and grown clinical and bright. In the car, they spoke logistics, which parks to avoid, where to hold Marsh if they had to move him, and coordinating with a handful of contacts they trusted outside the department.

  They agreed: Sheryl and Karen would be the first targets. They were anchors. Remove the anchors, you fracture the chain.

  Across town, a different kind of meeting took place over the phone. The line buzzed, and Sheryl answered, her voice calm.

  “Sheryl,” Karen said, careful and clipped. “Update.”

  Sheryl squinted at the kitchen window. “Go.”

  “I followed Derek. He met a cop. Olivia Hale. They went out to Baton Rouge.” She paused. “If she pokes, she finds. She’s got teeth.”

  Sheryl’s smile was cold. “Hale? The detective? She’ll be in over her head.”

  “She’s persistent. She’s asking questions. Derek looks like he’s carrying the whole world on one shoulder.”

  “Let him carry his guilt,” Sheryl said. The kitchen light carved her face into planes. “We’ll remove the burden.”

  Karen laughed, a sound that had gone thin at the edges. “You’d kill them both?”

  “We’ll do what must be done,” Sheryl said. “We won’t run. We choose where they fall.”

  Karen’s reply was soft and dangerous. “That’s too easy.”

  They hung up.

  In two different parts of town, people made the same small, terrible choice: one side preparing a last-ditch intervention, the other aligning its teeth and setting a trap.

  The road back to Bayou Mounds, already tight with urgency, felt impossibly shorter.

  And far more lethal.