He rolled on his back and thrashed his head backwards and forwards until he could feel the phone under his ear. It was making the long drone that tells you the call is over. He whimpered, squirmed and kicked until he was on his feet – four of them, goddammit – and tried to figure out what to do.
Leave, you idiot. Get out, now. Fine. A slight twitch of his nose told him exactly where the doughnut was; also what it was made from, how old it was, who had baked it and when they’d last had sex – it was on the bed, slightly squashed but still in one piece. Wonderful. All he had to do was lift it up and look through the hole –
Um.
Making the wolf body do what he wanted wasn’t easy. It was a bit like trying to fly a plane for the first time, blindfolded, with large jellyfish superglued to each fingertip. It wasn’t like crawling on hands and knees, because his hind legs were convinced he was standing upright, and trying to make them walk in a straight line was like the first time you try and reverse a car with a trailer. He could smell the doughnut to within a thousandth of an inch, but because it wasn’t moving he couldn’t see it, only a vague pixillated area, like people’s faces on TV when they don’t want to be recognised. He tried to jump up on the bed, but the wolf’s hindquarters were far more powerful than he’d anticipated, and he found himself sailing through the air and splatting himself against the opposite wall.
Come on, he ordered himself, you’re a top physicist, you can do this. He sat (good boy, sit!) and tried to work out the geometry of the problem, but it proved to be harder than he’d thought. Something to do with a different degree of depth perception; distances were different, somehow, and the pre-loaded wolf software in his head kept telling him to forget about looking for the doughnut, just smell it and pounce. He tried that and ended up in the corner of the room, in the wreckage of a small table, with a lamp flex tangled round his neck like spaghetti on a fork.
No wonder, he thought, werewolves are so aggressive. Five minutes of this, and Gandhi would be ready to rip someone’s throat out. He stood up – he was just starting to get the hang of the tail’s function as an aid to balance – and fixed his full attention on the fuzzy patch that was the doughnut. Then he opened his jaws and got a firm grip on the bedclothes, while his mind ran the calculations: velocity, mass, vector, air resistance, delta V. It wasn’t easy – being a quadruped, the wolf instinctively calculated in base four – but he made the best estimate he could manage, dug his claws into the carpet, and tugged hard.
It worked. The bedclothes shot towards him, the doughnut flipped up into the air and immediately became properly visible. He jumped, jaws open, tracking the doughnut in flight and adding forward allowance, not forgetting to compensate for the delay in its trajectory due to the Earth’s gravitational field. There was an audible click as his teeth clashed together, but he was definitely holding on to something. He landed and squinted down his nose, and saw a semicircular blur in the foreground of his vision. All right!
The urge to chew was almost overwhelming, but he forced himself not to. He dug deep inside and excavated all he could find of Theo Bernstein. The next bit was going to be the tricky part.
He could hear voices: angry, scared, men shouting orders, the banging of car doors. Not the sort of thing you want to hear when you’re a to-be-shot-on-sight monster cornered in a room with only one door. Think, he ordered his brain, but all it seemed capable of recommending was hurling himself at them and tearing them into tiny shreds, which he really didn’t want to do. On the other paw – no, hand – he had to do something; in a universe where werewolves and humans coexist, it was only logical to assume that on every cop’s belt there was at least one clip loaded with silver bullets. Nothing for it; he’d have one chance, and that’d be it.
Deep breath; then he lowered his head and lifted it sharply, opening his jaws to