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“What did you call me?” Ben asks, stunned. “Qay’in,” Negi answers instead of Shiroda-shishou, lifting his bowed head. “The First Lycan.” Ben finally realizes that Negi’s eyes are glowing a fierce white. Shiroda-shishou’s are too, but yellow instead. “That’s the purpose and result of our travels in the Middle East,” Negi explains in fluent English and Ben’s mouth hangs open. Negi has never spoken perfect English before! “We hunted down antiquities,” Shiroda-shishou explains as Negi places all the luggage on a table and lowers the shutter again, throwing the restaurant in pitch-blackness. None of them are bothered by it. “Both in war-torn ruins and in the black market, in museums and private collections. We came across an ancient book, written in Aramaic by a Catholic monk. It has recorded several Hebrew legends. One of them attests to Qay’in having differently colored eyes. One blue and one brown.” Ben’s left hand slowly rises to his face and stops short of his blue eye. He opens
Marcus takes Ben onward, deeper into the forest and into a natural clearing where New Pack has set up an illegal camp. Jeremias Lazaro is there, in human form and standing in front of a large cabin tent. He’s wearing the red ceremonial tunic that he uses during the Night Hunt, minus the kitsune Noh mask. On either side of him are Robin and DJ, both snarling in bipedal lycan form. Marcus, who has brought the captive to them, is in the same bipedal form. What’s more, because they were bitten by the same Pureborn, all three Batch ’19 Howlers share a distinct look: long, black fur and erect long ears high up on their heads. Because of the thick mane of black fur cascading down and swallowing the neck, the ears look almost as slim as antennas. The Howlers are panting hard too, because of the tropical heat. Little wonder because their kind has essentially been transplanted from the Swabian-Franconian Forest and the mountains of the Black Forest. Even without the distinct telepathic voic
{I… am… Qay’in!} Ben roars deafeningly inside all their heads. Ben shape-shifts into bipedal lycan form and grows seven feet tall. In this form, he retains his opposable thumbs and continues gripping the katana. To his enemies and to Maricar, he’s fearsome, but because of his short ginger fur, it doesn’t look incongruous at all that he’s holding a sword. He looks no stranger than Anubis, who has long been depicted standing upright and holding a was-sceptre in books and on the Internet. Both Jeremias Lazaro and Dr. Ortiz reflexively transform as well, in a flight or fight response. Jeremias Lazaro’s lycan form is like that of his spawn except that his is, well… uglier. Ben realizes, not without an undercurrent of fascination, that this is the ancient form of Grendel that terrorized the Scandinavian peninsula in the 6th century. Dr. Ortiz’s wolf form, on the other hand, was already aptly described by Vidi last year: like Eren’s Titan form on Attack on Titan. The same creepy, mirthles
Albert Diego Villalobos Sr., the last Howler, is lying low inside the panic room of his mansion. No one has any idea where he is, and no one will, because the panic room is ingeniously tucked away behind a tasteful and innocuous granite wall. The door is like some door-to-the-Lonely-Mountain shit. It’s camouflaged like a solid wall of cladding tiles, but a doorway with jagged edges opens and locks electromagnetically; impenetrable to any lock manipulation. The bulletproof vault door also has one-inch steel shear pins and the walls and ceilings of the panic room are all reinforced. But Albert Diego Sr. never planned on holing up like a rat. Security for him doesn’t mean compromising on style and creature comforts. The room has dark wood paneling, a pool table, a pinball machine, a curved sofa that rotates to give him the best possible view of a wall-mounted, 84-inch television. Or, at the moment, the bank of CCTV monitors on the opposite wall. Albert Diego Sr. can’t bring himself to p