Gulliver Chase fought for breath—then wondered why he bothered. The creature on his back, crushing his face and ribs into rain-slick asphalt, was everything it smelled like.

Wet dog and death.

A lycan—fully matured, savagely at home in its mutated body. No clumsy, newly bitten 'pup'.

Its breath roiled hot with the fetor of past kills and the iron of its most recent. Strings of drool dangled past his hiking jacket's hood. His mini LED torch, dropped amongst the city street's weeds, supplemented the wet moonlight, revealing glints of red.

Blood in saliva.

Ramesh's blood.

His scavenger partner hadn't got a single shot off. The tough Colony soldier assigned to watch his back had lost half his throat before he'd even known he was prey. His body, a shadow beyond the torchlight, sprawled beside what should've been the night's only victim, a lycan mutt they had tracked and taken down; had mistakenly thought was alone.

Gull strangled his grief with the knowledge his friend hadn't suffered. As another foul snort tossed damp copper hair across his eyes, he prayed his own end would be as swift.

That was how shit his ambitions had become.

In his late teens, a sports scholarship, running a four-minute mile, and climbing the world's wildest rock formations had been his top goals. Now, he just wanted his jugular to be torn out without fanfare.

Bitterness should've accompanied that knowledge. But he was no longer the smartarse nineteen-year-old who'd believed life owed him success and high-octane thrills.

At twenty-five, he'd lived six years longer than most.

Five years longer than his father and three siblings—half his motley, unruly adopted family gone. 

Along with nine-tenths of Bell Harbour's population. Maybe the world's. Lycanthropes had hunted for centuries in the shadows, staying under everyone's radars, their number few. Just enough to spawn legends and B-grade fiction, such as werewolves ruled by the moon or the French's loup garou, a more accurate portrayal of creatures able to change form at will and keep their human intelligence. But then, in the cursed cells of some mutt's blood, a random mutation in the virus they carried changed the status quo.

Few people had survived the first year of the Emergence, either succumbing to the more virulent strain or becoming food for those who had.

The Changed now consumed the world.

A stuttering growl, heart-attack close to his ear.

A bloody canine muzzle moved past the edge of his hood.

Teeth—millimetres from his cheek.

Heart slamming his ribs, Gull stared past the russet strands of his hair to eye—wistfully—the puddle in front of his slightly too generous nose. A person could drown in only a couple of inches of water. And he really did not want to face what came next.

A moist snout against his jaw, grating across four-day stubble.

Simultaneous urges hit him: to pass out; to puke. Clenching fists on the wet road, he fixed his gaze on a fallen street sign: 'Mariners Ave'. A mundane port-town label for what'd been a low-rent strip of debauchery. He and his friends had frequented the central-city street back when pool-hall, nightclub, and peepshow neon had lit its length.

Those signs now hung cracked and dull above rusted cars and sodden weeds.

A tongue—wet, rough—across his temple.

Fuuuuck. Gull closed his eyes, his pulse making the most of its final sprint. God, how had his heart not exploded yet?

Too much fucking cardio. Salvaging supplies from the dead city took leg work and the agility to bolt up, down, or along a dozen pre-mapped escape routes. If he'd been smarter, he'd have spent his days smoking cigarettes and zeroing his long-range rifle like the Colony's watchtower guards did, then maybe a convenient cardiac arrest could've taken him now.

Another huff of putrid breath. Then a blunt click—canine teeth closing a hair away from his eyebrow. Bone-grinding sounds came next—a jaw distorting, reshaping—until panting exhalations became a recognisable word: "Mine."

Gull's heart stopped.

Unfortunately, it started again, full tilt.

Lost in its thunder, he almost missed the dull pop of a car bonnet deforming under weight a few metres away. But his unconscious mind, attuned to threats, caught the warning.

As did the creature pinning him.

It tensed; then hunched low, a heavy, stifling blanket. A predator possessive of its prey. But instead of gnashing teeth to defend its prize, it whined.

A splash. Soft footfalls. Something moving across the rain-drenched street.

A guttural rumble. Deep, malevolent.

Gull's veins iced. He forced open his eyes.

A silhouette against the street's lightless high-rises and dull night sky.

Another lycan. A large male in human form.

The creature prowled forward into the torchlight, feet bare and clawed, eyes the reflective discs of a dog at night. Matted ropes of hair obscured a long, gaunt face, and a sparse pelt darkened naked skin. Except for one muscular arm.

Someone had painstakingly removed filth and hair to reveal the coiling, inked lines of a Chinese-style dragon.

Eyeing the tattoo's snarling face, not the real teeth bared above it, Gull felt his chest lock. Lycans weren't human, their DNA mutated into something both more primitive and more sophisticated. But they had once been fully formed individuals with passions and interests. Sometimes, in a creepy psychological echo, they maintained an affection for things they'd valued in their former life.

But with mutts, nothing was sweet and innocent; nothing calm and measured. Anger meant bloodshed. Affection equalled obsession. A lycan who preserved his tattoo likely tore out his own hair as a compulsion and slept in a rotting nest of inked skin taken from his kills.

Stomach taut, Gull recalled the macabre collections he'd come across while foraging: piles of wedding rings still attached to fingers; a gym locker stuffed with high top sneakers, all expensive brands—all stained with their last owners' blood. Eyeing the lycan's pristine tattoo, he was grateful his artistic sister, Mika, had never made good on her threat to 'join the dots' to see what pattern his freckles made.

The male lycan planted clawed feet before Gull, disturbing shallow, moonlit water. "Stroya, off!" Lisped words, hindered by fangs.

The mutt pinning Gull froze. The next instant, it latched its rank maw on his shoulder. Canines punctured his battered jacket and the long-sleeved sport T-shirt beneath.

But they didn't pierce skin.

Dread sank Gull's gut like a stone. When a lycan chose to play with its food, leave it whole... That meant bad things.

An ominous warning rippled up the other lycan's throat. "You dare defy your alpha?"

Fuck. Gull closed his eyes in disbelief. In a world literally plagued with aggressive man-dogs, he just had to end up nose to toe with one of the worst kind. Bell Harbour had four known packs, each centred around their most brutal member. Alphas ruled with violence, and they survived by being a few IQ points up on those they subjugated.

A whine from the subordinate wolf—the malodorous Stroya. Her mouth remained locked on, teeth just scratching skin, but aggression had turned to quivering tension.

"No, Destroyer," the alpha growled. "Bad meat. Attacked your sister. Chew it and shit it. "

Stroya, a.k.a. Destroyer, released Gull's shoulder. "Mine." Another pitiful whine. "My playmate to bite."

Gull tasted his stomach's acid. Playmate? That sounded like he'd be alive for the games. And as for 'bite'... Every centimetre of his rangy frame tensed in rejection of the word. There'd been recent interpack violence, and when a pack suffered heavy losses, some of its members could shift their psychotic drive from mindless slaughter to recruitment.

"Nope," he found air to gasp. "I'm all good with the current order of the food chain. Feel free to chow down."

Another chilling growl.

The alpha folded down muscular legs to crouch, reflective eyes silver-green in the wet gloom. "The meat has some balls telling the teeth what they must do. Meat confuses who is hunter, who is prey." A lunging snarl—a pulse-jolting display of the aforementioned teeth. "You hunted what is mine, human. I will rip out your spine and grind it to its marrow."

"Was that mangy mutt your girlfriend?" Gull dragged the taunt from his spitless throat. "Dude, my bad. Thought she was single." No lie. He and Ramesh had targeted the lycan because she'd looked to have gone lone wolf. In the week they'd tracked her, the mutt had not interacted with her own kind, preferring the company of prey, mostly deer in the large city parks.

A lightning motion—fangs a mere inch from his face. "Mine," the alpha reiterated, gaze losing all rationality.

Gull fought the instinct to cower, fear threatening to shut down his own ability to think—strategise. "She didn't act like it." He recalled the ragged creature that'd sulked through the city, snarling at feral dogs and cats. She'd limped the first day; got stronger the next, but had not returned to her pack. Injured lycans sometimes needed time out from their bullies. "Did your girlfriend need a break from you smothering her?"

He expected violence—got it. Teeth snapped shut an inch from his face.

"You wish to die?" The alpha stared directly into Gull's eyes. "Has life become too tedious for you, human?"

Gull regained breath. "You know, after six years of stepping in dog shit, the lack of training and manners has got a little old. Do you mutts have to take a dump right in the middle of the pave—?"

A punch to his head that sent his senses reeling.

Gull gasped; fought pain. "Should I also mention the aggression issues and your habit of rolling around in dead things? When did you last take a damn bath?"

"I will take one now, in your blood."

"Scooby, you misunderstand the concept. Bathing is meant to get the remains of your last victim out of your fur."

The alpha's eyes gleamed. "I think I will shit you out on the street after I eat you."

"Way to prove a guy's point. Were you a debate champion in your past life?"

Another heart-jolting snap of teeth. Gull braced for the lycan to tear his head off—to get access to his spine.

The male did worse. He smiled, cocking his shaggy head in a way that suggested he'd clawed back temper and, with it, his intelligence.

Lifting a hand, the lycan gestured to someone out of Gull's line of sight.

Another male mutt slunk out of the night in human form. Without ceremony or care, the lycan grabbed his unconscious packmate's ankle and dragged the female across course asphalt to the waiting alpha.

The grimy human body Gull found dumped before him was unfamiliar, the quarry he'd stalked an unkempt animal. But he recognised the Taser wound on the female's back. In wolf form, she'd shaken it off like an insect bite. It'd taken another four darts to bring her down—hits to her neck and flanks. Wounded loner or not, she'd been dangerous prey; a powerful, rage-filled creature.

Now, with her mutant stress hormones low, the beast had subsided, revealing a physical ghost: the individual the virus had destroyed. Hints of olive skin under dirt and blood. Black hair snagged with twigs and leaves. A small tattoo on the side of one glute. For a second, Gull thought it a dragon, a tribute to her alpha, then realised it was something else, something unexpected.

A cartoon T-rex chasing a butterfly.

An echo of the personality lost.

Gull didn't resist pity as it burned his throat: regret for the past and for his part in the night's ugliness. He was a scavenger, not a soldier or hunter.  After tracking the mutt over multiple nights, plotting her movements, watching her cunningly stalk her prey, he'd gained no satisfaction from making the predator a victim.

But his job was to go out into the city and find whatever resources the Colony needed.

That included test subjects for his mother's research.

She swore she'd developed a cure.

She'd been saying that for the past three years.

The alpha turned to his unconscious packmate; jerked a small hypodermic needle from the lycan's flank, muscle that had been heavily furred when Gull had stabbed his mother's latest batch of crazy into it.

Not for the first time that night—or year—Gull cursed himself for humouring his mother's obsession. The drugged lycan might look human now, but that meant nothing—was no proof the gene therapy had worked. Thousand to one, the female's first act on waking would be to kill whatever was closest to her.

The alpha pointed the hypodermic at Gull's eye—the tip mere millimetres from puncturing pupil. "What is this, meat?"

"Dewormer." Gull hardened himself to the fear crawling in his belly. He would die, take the truth with him. If he didn't, the people he loved would be slaughtered en masse. "Mutt bowels are ninety per cent tapeworm and hairballs. You guys need to stop licking each other's rears. I mean, your breaths for a start."

The alpha lunged forward, lips peeled back. "Shall I tear you open? See what lies in your bowels?"

"I've already evacuated them in abject terror. Check my pants."

The alpha's snarl morphed into something more gruesome—a grin that promised bad, bad things. "The meat talks a lot, but not what the teeth want to hear. Perhaps, meat is right. It is time for some house training." The lycan raised his gaze to the wolf pinning Gull down. "Destroyer, bring your chew toy to the den. No biting 'til he's with pack. This meat is too puny to survive the Change without assistance."

The Change.

"No." Gull's pulse thundered as the lycan on his back leapt to her feet, howled in lupine joy. "No. Just fucking gut me!"