"I've seen German shepherds that look a lot like that."
Chiun shook his head. "But this is a wolf. As much as it was anything."
When Remo switched to Korean he got stares from Aurelia Boldiszar, who was standing off to one side of the room silently, her arms folded beneath her breasts. Cuvier was on the threadbare couch trying not to go fetal. "The thing talked to me, Chiun," Remo said.
The old Korean showed surprise. Just for a moment, he froze. It was such a brief reaction that the Romany beauty and the Cajun ugly missed it entirely. "Spoke?"
"I forced it to."
Chiun looked at him questioningly.
"I knew the minute I saw them that they weren't natural dogs. Or wolves or whatever."
"As did I," Chiun said, looking seriously at one of the beasts sprawled dead in the hotel room. "And yet I was not inclined to converse with it."
"I wasn't after some polite chitchat. I was trying to prove something."
"What?" Chiun looked at him.
Remo switched to English without realizing it. "You know goddamn well what. That it was human."
"You kill old loup-garou," Cuvier interjected, "he change back to what he was before."
Remo shook his head morosely. "Don't count on it."
"How could one of these things talk?" Chiun continued in Korean.
"Well, it didn't do it very well, but it was good enough for me to understand," Remo insisted. "They used to be human, Little Father. Anyway, none of them was Leon Grosvenor."
Cuvier stood up fast when he heard the very nonKorean name amid the otherwise unintelligible conversation. "Leon? You didn't tell me Armand got Leon Grosvenor after me."
"You know the guy?" Remo asked.
"I hear some story," said the Cajun, sounding even more depressed. "Reckon I'm dead." He turned to Aurelia Boldiszar.
"That was no man," Aurelia said. "I saw it, felt it. We were in the presence of a devil."
"Well, he ran like one," Remo said.
Chiun made a small, exasperated clucking sound and shook his head.
"What about them other wolves?" Cuvier demanded.
"I took out a few before they slipped off. I don't know how many got away with him."
Another cluck from Chiun.
"Go shove it, Chiun, you couldn't have done any better," Remo griped.
To Cuvier he said, "Get packed."
"What?" Jean Cuvier had gone from frightened to confused, with no real change in his expression.
"Get your things. We're clearing out before the cops get here."
"Cops! Merde!" he blurted, and rushed to pack his suitcase.
Aurelia Boldiszar had come to Remo with nothing but the clothes she wore. She was as ready to bail out, right then, as she would ever be. While the Cajun completed his hasty packing she stood over one of the dead creatures, staring at the lolling tongue and the half-open eyes.
"These weren't ordinary wolves," she said. "They're not werewolves. Still, they may share the werewolf's spirit and commune with him in other ways. They are familiars."
"Like a witch's cat, you mean?"
"Perhaps."
"So you think this is witchcraft, whatever made the werewolf?" Remo asked. "You're saying these are spirit wolves? I told you, they're science experiments. Laboratory freaks."
"You are not listening," she said. "The loup-garou is closer to an animal than normal men. It doesn't matter what created them-he still may commune with others of his kind, draw strength from them."
"Collaborate?"
"Perhaps."
"So, he's the alpha male? Top dog?"
"The others followed him," Aurelia said. "That's all I know."
Cuvier rejoined them then, his heavy suitcase dragging down one shoulder. "Where we going?" he asked.
Remo had formed the answer in his mind already, without knowing it. "Your friend Lafite told me where we can find this thing," he said. He could have added, "more or less," but kept it to himself.
"Where is that?" The Cajun sounded gravely ill at ease.
"Where do you think? We're going on a camping trip," he said.
Remo stripped the blankets off the bed Cuvier had used and quickly wrapped the wolf corpses.
Aurelia asked, "What will you do with those?"
"Present for a friend."
ONLY WHEN THEY WERE safely back on the hermit's land, deep in the swamp with the rest of the wolves, did the leader howl with his pack. His grief was at last allowed to come out, and the sound of it echoed among the cypress trees for miles around.
For almost a year his pack had lived and run and thrived together. None of them had ever been lost, no matter what the dangers. But tonight the tables turned. So many of his brothers cut down, dead, in a matter of just minutes.
What had gone wrong?