“Why, Grandmother,” I murmured just under my breath. “What big teeth you have.”

The thing that had been hiding under the sheets of my grandmother’s bed [i]moved[/i], uncoiling with a howl of rage as it leapt.  If the feral beast had hidden anywhere else and jumped me when I first came into the house, it might have had a chance.

Trying to make a leap from a waterbed was its last mistake.

The sawed-off shotgun I had concealed in the picnic basket went off with a roar, dumping both barrels into the beast’s chest.  Contrary to movie physics, the bulk of the wolf-creature kept moving in my direction, making me drop the shattered picnic basket and roll to avoid being clawed to death as it spasmed.  The heavy Colt .45 felt like a feather when I pulled it out from the small of my back where it had been concealed, but the roar when it went off was just as deafening in my grandmother’s living room as the shotgun had been a few seconds ago.  

I put three rapid shots in the spasming beast’s center of gravity where the combination of silver and cold iron shot had chewed open its chest, then cocked the heavy pistol and aimed.  The single-action shot blew brains and skull matter all over grandmother’s clean linoleum floor, and the beast quit moving.

A second shot to the head was overkill.  I did it anyway.

“Reload, reload,” I muttered, grabbing the double-barrel shotgun out of the remains of the picnic basket and scattering the paper-wrapped sandwiches and apples that it no longer could hold.  Two shells from the holder on the stock fed into the action almost automatically and I snapped the action closed, placing it beside me as I reloaded the heavy Colt with gleaming silver shells.

“Grandma!” There was not much hope of getting a response, but I called out anyway.  “Are you in here?”

Over the ringing in my ears, I could barely hear a noise which I tracked down to a nearby closet.  Grandma normally stored galoshes and umbrellas in it, although after carefully opening the door with the barrel of the shotgun, it obviously now held a slightly overweight elderly woman, who was matted with blood and tied up.

“Werewolf,” she managed to say once I got the gag out of her mouth.  Grandma spat once to the side and took a trembling breath.  “Caught me outside.  Foolish old woman.  Harbinger said I should have never retired.”

“It was newly turned,” I said, trying to look in all directions at once since werewolves liked to sneak up when you were distracted, and my grandmother was distracting the heck out of me.  “There’s an old wolf working its way up the valley, making spawn to cover its tracks.  Cost us two Hunters so far.”

I froze with the knife just inches away from the bloody ropes that bound up my grandmother.  She obviously knew why, because she rasped, “I can’t tell.  It could just be claws.”

“Or it could be a bite.”  It took considerable physical and mental effort to pull my grandmother out of the closet and get her up on the couch, still wrapped in her ropes.  “I’ve got a medical kit for this,” I babbled.  “There’s a injection in there and everything.  It’s supposed to work at least some of the time—”

There was no way that I could meet her eyes.

We talked for a while that evening while I did what I could.  She told me some old stories about Earl Harbinger, and her years with the agency.  I told her about how things had changed since she retired.  She made a few phone calls, a very few, with me holding the receiver.

She did not cry.  I did not either.

Then the sun set.

The moon rose.

A wolf howled.

And a single shot rang out.