The office Nate had was a smallish place in a third-floor walk-up not too far from Battery Park. He kept the private eye business going and I used to give him a hand from time to time but I had mostly used it as a front for anything ARC wouldn’t approve of. There were a lot of nasty things out in the world now. Not all of them were friendly and the time it took the ruling body at ARC to figure that out people could get seriously hurt. If certain parties were willing to shell out large amounts of cash for me to eliminate such a threat before it can become a problem who were I to refuse a little freelance work? This was the source of the final dust-up Nate and I had had the last time I saw him. He was angry at me, saying that he started the business to get away from all the killings and I was using it to cause more. That was a couple of years ago, I still tried to help him out when I could but I had to make sure he never suspected. It was long past time we buried the hatchet.

As I climbed the stairs up to where the office was I made a mental note to get Nate to install an elevator before my next visit. With all the technology we had available in this world forcing people to climb stairs was just unacceptable. I walked down the hallway and paused at the end in front of the office door. Storm Hunter Investigations it read. Nate made up the name, he was a fan of all the old noir detective novels and thought the name fitting. Personally, I thought it made us sound like some sciencey reality show. Sometimes I honestly thought he imagined himself in black and white waiting for a dame smoking a cigarette to hire him for the case of a lifetime. The sound of glass breaking inside brought me out of my reverie and I quickly threw open the door.

The office was a mess. Papers were scattered around haphazardly and I saw a bottle of old brandy roll out from behind the desk. Nate was there, on the floor, next to the chair he fell out of, and some more bottles, some of them broken. He wasn’t wearing more than a pair of jeans and his pale sweaty chest heaved with breaths coming so hard I could hear them across the room. His eyes were glassy as he looked at me and I wondered if he even recognized me. Finally, he broke into a weak smile, his shoulders slumping with resignation.

“Nate! Nate, what the hell happened?” I ran over to him, helping him struggle to a sitting position against the wall.

“Derek.” He panted, some drool trailing down his cheek as a wheezing laugh escaped his lips. “So good of you to show up again right after everything goes all to shit. Always did have the most perfect timing.”

“What? Let me help… let me call someone.” I pulled out my phone, flipping it open to call the paramedics.

“No!” Nate slapped the phone out of my hand. It clattered across the floor, stopping in the corner. The sweat was pouring off of him now, his panting making it difficult for him to get words out. “Too dangerous… people behind… going to kill…” He started coughing, his chest convulsing under my hands. I could feel the bones inside him breaking and moving around. Suddenly it dawned on me what was happening.

“My god, Nate! You’re a were?” I stood up, backing away slowly. “How the hell could that happen? We both took the shots!”

“They found… a way… a were…house… full of…” He shook on the floor, hair growing wildly all over his chest and back. “Can’t… let them… aarrgh!”

I ran into the back where we kept the weapons. Changing during the daylight almost guaranteed that whatever he was becoming was going to be feral and that wasn’t good news for either of us. I ripped the thrift store painting from where we kept the safe and began punching the code into the keypad. That was when the truck hit me. At least that was what it felt like.

The wall of fur and muscles that Nate had become crashed into me. I felt the rib weakened in Paris give up and fully snap. I fell to the ground, dazed. Distantly I felt myself being lifted from the ground and found myself staring into the maw of a snarling wolf. I looked the thing that had until recently been my friend in the eyes and searched for any sign of him left in there. Nothing but the animal looked back. It always amazed me how in life or death situations the oddest thoughts come to you. With Nate’s massive jaw a few inches away from my face only one thing kept coming to mind.

“Come on Nate, how can you‘re breath already smell like Alpo? Aren’t we still pals? Don’t do this, man.” I was stalling, trying to form a plan through the ringing in my head. “What would Michelle think if she saw you like this?”

I wasn’t reaching him, I could tell. Nothing was left of my friend, there was only the thing taking his body out for a ride and that meant I had a job to do. I kicked him hard in the gut, the steel toe in my boot barely causing enough discomfort to get him to drop me. I drove both my fists as hard as I could into the side of its muzzle and dove past. I needed to get some distance from those claws. The wolf spun faster than I could imagine and clawed through the back of my jacket.

It was at this point that wiser men would run away. Unarmed and unprepared against a fully grown feral werewolf could only have one likely outcome. I knew, however, that the other occupants in the building would have even less of a chance against the beast than I currently had. Nate or not, I couldn’t let the creature kill that many innocents.

I grabbed a piece of Nate’s shattered desk and ran forward slamming it into one side of the beast’s head and then the other. The wood snapped in my hands and I was forced to throw myself backward to avoid the huge, kitchen knife-like teeth descending towards me. I scrambled away as the beast stalked around the office, closing the distance between us. Then something unexpected happened, the wolf staring me down licked its lips.

“Oh god… that’s just… that’s just wrong.”

I felt behind me for a weapon and my hand closed on an old trophy of Nate’s. I brought it out and wielded it like a clumsy club and noticed the trophy’s silver plating. With a snarl, the beast leaped forward towards me and I stepped aside. As the claws of the thing shredded through the cabinet, I had been standing before I drove the trophy with all my strength into the exposed back of the wolf. It cried out in pain as the small object pierced its flesh, reaching back in a vain effort to try and dislodge it from its shoulder. It wouldn’t gain me much time, but hopefully, it would be enough… the beast’s quick recovery proved what I had feared. The trophy wasn’t silver…. Probably chrome or painted plastic.

I ran back to the safe, hurdling the broken desk, and punched the last numbers into the keypad. The safe opened and I quickly grabbed the sawed-off shotgun inside. Turning back to the wolf I pumped a round into the chamber and silently hoped Nate kept the ammo the same. I fired the shotgun and watched in relief as the silver buckshot nearly tore half the monster’s face off. The beast spun with the force of the shot and I pumped another shot into its side. The now bleeding creature turned and swiped its claws at me, with much less effort than moments ago and I fired one last time. The round punched clear through the wolf’s chest and it fell to the ground. The only sound left in the office was the quiet sound of the shotgun’s ejected shell hitting the ground. I stood staring at the remains of what was left of my best friend as the silver ammunition filled the small office with the scent of burning flesh.

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Bit by bit his body was reverted to the Nate I had known most of my life. That is with the addition of a fist-sized hole through his chest and half his head missing. His remaining eye stared back at me, accusingly. How the hell had any of this happened? ARC had developed an immunization compound for lycanthropy and as an employee, even a former one, Nate would have been up to date on those shots. Something about this whole situation didn’t sit right with me.

I went back out to the front of the office, looking through what was left of Nate’s desk as quickly as I could. I kept from looking at the body as I searched through the papers scattered on the ground among the splintered wood. I found a few notes of Nate’s as he was looking into a werewolf that had gone on a rampage in the old meat-packing district a few days before I got home. There had been three fatalities and more than twenty injured before two squads of police showed up and gunned the creature down in the street.

No matter my problems with the weres they normally did a fairly good job of policing their own. Two feral weres in a week would not look good for them. Definitely something to keep in mind as I dug further. This whole mess made me more than a little uncomfortable. Normally I was given a target and there was no more investigating needed than to figure out what hurt my prey. Whoever caused the change in Nate was going to pay in a way most lethal, but first I had to learn whose chest I should bury my bullets in first.

~ * ~

As I made my way back down to street level I called in a report to ARC. They would need to know what happened. Company policy insisted all dead employees be reported immediately. A few years back there had been a couple of agents that went missing only to show up for work a few days later as if nothing happened. Turned out they had been killed and\or replaced in an effort to get people on the inside at ARC. Now the higher-ups worried about a repeat performance but with more deadly results. Paranoid, maybe, but in this world where magic could change the rules as quickly as most changed the channel, it was a necessity. Nobody wanted any alternaturals getting a toehold in the one group assigned to keep them in check. Unsurprisingly, Blake didn’t pick up at his extension so I keyed in the code for my boss.

“Hunter… what the hell is this I hear about you going through yet another assistant. There’s only so many people willing to work with you as it is.” That was my boss, Tony Johnson, one of the few people taller than me at the office. At six foot four, he was a wall of muscle that I hoped someday I could claim to be. He had come over from Africa not too long after the Paras made their announcement and worked jobs like mine. That is, till he lost his leg fighting a group of trolls and it pushed him behind a desk.

“Blake will be back after his little tantrum is over. In the meantime, I’ll need someone else to work with and fast.” I took a deep breath. “Something happened to Nate.” I filled Tony in as I finished my way down the long stairs. He would make arrangements for the body and the burial, with full honors likely. I was heading home.

I hung up the phone as I left the building and walked out into the street. Maybe it was the adrenaline still in my system, maybe it was paranoia of my own but as I reached the far side of the road I got the feeling I was in trouble. In the movies, you often see the hero duck out of the way as someone swings at them from behind, almost seeming psychic. What they don’t show you is the twenty or thirty times they duck that way and there is no one there. You deal with the little bit of embarrassment those moments create because of the one time that feeling is real. This was one of those times.

As I hit the pavement I was bathed in the kind of heat normally reserved for church sermons. A fireball the size of my head flew through the air where I had been standing just moments before. I rolled over and scanned the direction the attack had come from and saw a thin little man gesturing wildly at me. My guess is he wasn’t done. I hate casters, don‘t think the whole magic thing is very fair. I got to my feet as quickly as I could and charged at him. Blue-white electricity began forming around his hands and I knew there was no way I could make it to him before he got the spell off. So I threw my phone at him. The small device hit him right between the eyes, stunning him for a second before falling to the ground and shattering. The kid shook his head quickly to clear it and resumed his chanting. But by then I was close enough to hit him with the only counterspell I knew, a solid left delivered to his gut. His chanting, in whatever language it was, stopped abruptly as his eyes rolled back and he crumbled to the ground.

I picked the mage up off the ground and took a better look at him. He couldn’t have been older than twenty with a skinny, awkward-looking form. He wore a pair of ripped jeans and a plain T-shirt without any kind of logo on it. He seemed more the type to have glasses and braces rather than jeans and electric shocks. He probably had started trying to learn magic to combat bullies or something. Too bad he was pretty far from the schoolyard now.

“Who the hell sent you here?” I screamed at the boy. All I got as a response was a glazed look in his eye. No wonder he relied on surprise, he couldn’t take a hit at all. I shook him a little before trying again. “Why are you here? What did you do to Nate?”

“What? Who?” Reason was slowly returning to him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Some guy hired me and said take out anyone coming out of that building over there.” He gestured weakly at Nate’s office. “Man, making my rent this month ain’t worth this kind of hassle, I swear.”

“Who was it that hired you?”

“I never met him.” The boy finally got his feet under him again. “He didn’t even contact me through the Tower like normal hires. This morning, I get an envelope with the cash in it and an address. I show up here and see you… that‘s it.”

The Tower was what passed for a governing agency on magic. They claimed to have the names, if not the capabilities, of all magic users worldwide. I somehow doubted the truth in their statement the third or fourth time I had been called on to take out someone who had been trained by a rogue, unknown faction out in the wilds somewhere.

“Still got the envelope?” He looked like he had essentially rolled out of bed and came straight here. He obviously hadn’t had enough time to comb the mop of brown hair atop his head. Hopefully, he was awake enough to help me trace the money back to whoever paid him.

“Dude, I need that cash. Late on the rent as it…” I raised my fist again and glared down at him. “Yeah, yeah… I got it. Just don’t hit me again. Won‘t do you any good though, tried a scry on it to find out who sent it and came up with nothing. Gotta be better magic out there…” He rummaged around in his pockets and came up with a plain white envelope. “Here… you know anger management can do wonders for a guy like you.”

“What’s your name and ID kid?” I looked through the envelope quickly. If what was in here covered the would-be assassin’s rent he must have a one-bedroom in a really bad part of town. I took the cash out and noticed what might have been a hair left inside. Probably just from the kid’s pocket but worth looking into.

“Theodore…er… Ted… Ted Ashter. ID238...uh…515...sir.” There was next to no chance of a clean print on the bills so I tossed the cash at the mighty wizard and flagged down a cab as he scrambled to pick it up again from the sidewalk.

“If I hear of you messing around with people on the street again I’ll off you myself.” I picked up the scattered remains of my phone and got into the taxi. So far my welcome home had left much to be desired, to say the least.