2 JAKE

The picture filled the screen, then became the room.

It was a squat brick stack a block off Broadway, wedged between a pawn shop and a barber who did more fades than taxes. The awning was sun-faded, the sign missing a bulb. Inside, the carpet stuck slightly on the lift, the air smelled of old timber and fryer oil, and the jukebox cycled through Midnight Oil and an ’80s mix the barman insisted was retro when really it was just tired. Mid-afternoon brought the usual: a couple of tradies in hi-vis arguing amiably about footy, two students with laptops open to notes neither of them were reading, an older couple sharing a pot pie and silence.

Mediocre—the kind of place you chose when you didn’t want the world to look directly at you.

Jake Michaels sat with his back to the wall, a schooner sweating on the varnish. His pack was looped around his ankle—not because he thought someone would nick it, though that happened too, but because muscle memory never stopped being practical. He wasn’t drinking so much as sharing a table with the idea of it. His eyes were on his phone, thumb frozen on the wrong photo.

Kimberly on their wedding day—sunlight in her veil, wind at the edge of laughter. He could still feel the pressure of her hand, the warm weight of vows, the moment he’d believed leaving a rank on a table would be simple.

He swiped.

Daisy filled the screen—sixteen now, hair the same auburn as her mum, grinning from behind a battered surfboard. Board wax on one knee, zinc streaked across her nose. She’d texted at ten: Lunch? After the lecture. Bar Broadway?

He’d typed and deleted three versions of Can’t wait and sent Yeah.

He was in Sydney to see her properly—to walk her up the hill past the jacarandas and pretend, for an hour, that his life hadn’t been broken into useful parts and edges.

He locked the screen before his face could give anything away.

The glassware behind the bar chimed, a small, high sound. The floor under his boots ticked as if a truck had passed too close. One siren drew a line down the street outside. Then another. Then too many, stacking until the windows breathed red-blue.

The barman raised his brows and reached for the remote. Cricket gave way to a live feed that hadn’t learned what it was yet.

BREAKING — AVOID CBD.

A traffic cam showed a river of emergency lights coiling down George Street. No audio. Just a presenter’s mouth moving in a box.

“What now,” one of the tradies said, half-curious, half-ritual.

Jake slid the phone into his jacket. His toes found the strap of his pack—the kind of habit that lived in the spine. He lifted it smoothly, the weight a comfort. The zipper rasped. The holster snap found itself. The safety settled under his thumb.

He didn’t draw. You don’t put a gun on a table unless you intend to use it.

“Big fella,” the barman began, not unkind, “if you’re—”

“Lock the back door,” Jake said, already moving. “Stay inside.”

He thumbed a text in the doorway, fast.

Jake to Daisy:

Change of plan. Do NOT come into the city. Stay out of Sydney. If you’re already close, turn west and get clear. I’ll call you soon.

He sent it. Then shoved his phone into his Pocket, picked up his backpack and put it on his back. Jake opened the door on the way out cautiously.

Outside, the sunlight had hit his eyes as they adjusted to the bright light; it was hot, sticky to his sweat, and the glare from the sun stuck in his eyes. Drizzle sharpened into needles that didn’t commit to rain from a passing cloud. A helicopter pushed air down in the canyon that is between the buildings; the pressure from the down force was like a hand on the back of your neck. Broadway’s traffic knotted in a way that meant more than an accident. Pedestrians started choosing sides of the footpath by instinct as they ran away.

a woman in a business suit, tall, blonde, dropped her takeaway onto the curb, and it burst like a sauce grenade on concrete.

Sirens rolled north.

A woman dragged a child by the arm and said, “Come on, no looking, Gerald,” because the child was trying to see the thing everyone else wanted to pretend wasn’t there yet.

Jake moved against the tide, cutting diagonally the way you do when you want to go through rather than around. His body fell into the geometry of problems. Ahead, the horizon of buildings pulsed with colour and smoke. The light dipped, came back, dipped again, like someone upstairs couldn’t decide which way to set it.

The sound changed.

Not the sirens. Those held steady, taut as wire. This was a wet rip of metal and a low, ached-in-your-bones whump—the sound steel makes when it stops caring which way it was designed to bend.

Up ahead, at an intersection, a sedan lifted—lifted, not tipped—end over end as a giant backhand had smacked it. It flipped once, twice, came down on its side and slid across asphalt in a scream of orange sparks, kissed the curb, and stopped crooked.

The crowd’s noise inverted. Talk into silence. Silence into shrieks with edges.

People ran and forgot to look where.

A pram stalled. A stranger shoved it clear, because sometimes we remember we are a species.

It arrived as if it had been there all along.

A shadow vaulted from somewhere you didn’t remember seeing and landed lightly on the sedan’s flattened roof. Steel crumpled under digitigrade weight like foil. Black fur drank daylight; rain beaded and rolled. Muscle bunched and slid beneath a hide that wanted to be night.

The head turned, slow and deliberate, eyes finding the sun and squinting as if noon were something to hate.

Phones went up.

The crowd breathed in.

No one breathed out.

The thing threw its muzzle back and howled.

It shouldn’t have been worse in daylight.

It was.

The note stuck in the air and buzzed office glass. A pigeon shot from beneath an awning in shock and folded into the wrong flight pattern. The howl threaded under the sirens and through everyone’s ribs, an old shape the body recognised before the brain did.

A werewolf.

Jake’s jaw set. The bitterness surfaced before the fear, dry as a laugh that didn’t deserve to be heard.

“Not again,” he muttered.

Amber eyes swung to him across the spilled street. Curiosity. Recognition. Hunger that had learned patience.

The wolf flexed and leapt at him.

Jake had already moved into position. You meet force at an angle.

He slid left, shoulder turning, letting the weight pass, and hooked a hand under what passed for an armpit as the thing overreached. The knife cleared leather and went up, steel finding the soft line behind the jaw hinge.

He shoved.

The mouth clamped. Teeth sparked on the blade.

He lost the hilt as he dropped under its reach and felt claws rake sparks across the back panel of his jacket instead of his spine.

“Back!” he snapped—not just to the wolf, but to the crowd, to a world that forgot the simple physics of teeth. “Move away, now!”

Most people moved when told like that.

Two didn’t. Students, maybe twenty—one in a hoodie, one in a band tee that had seen better gigs. They froze prettier than deer.

The wolf pivoted on the ruined roof, eyes looking like a metronome between meat and the man with the wrong posture.

Jake stepped once and clapped twice. “Here!”

The ears twitched. The head tilted, filing him under interesting.

Then it buried itself into a dive.

Just like a spring uncoiling. It dove at Jake in with its muzzle wide open, ready to bite.

Jake went under again, shoulder rolling, coming up with his off-hand locked on a shattered wiper arm torn from the sedan’s hood. It wasn’t a weapon. It would serve a purpose.

“This will do nicely.”

The wolf swiped with its paw. Jake batted the hand aside, felt the rod vibrate like a tuning fork. The second swipe came low—a scythe for his thighs.

He jumped it and drove the rod across the bridge of its muzzle in a hard, ugly cross-check.

Something crunched.

The wolf hissed like a tyre losing patience.

“You will pay human,” it hissed.

A cruiser slewed sideways and stopped hard. Driver low. Passenger high. Textbook.

The tall officer brought his pistol up two-handed. “Police! Hands where I can—”

The wolf turned politely, as if granting an audience, and punched the door in, “Back up whatever you are!”

The werewolf snarled and stood up to intimidate him.

“Pittiful,” he snarled.

The officer fired—three neat centre-mass shots—and got rewarded with the wrong liquid misting the windscreen. The wolf went from polite to annoyed. It backhanded the officer across the bonnet and left him there, broken and knocked out in a pool of blood.

The partner’s radio squealed, then fell silent, as someone cut its throat.

“No, you don’t, leave them alone! Me, it’s me you want. keep your eyes on me.”

Jake stepped into the arc, let the wiper rod go, throwing it to the side and grabbed his lost knife by the sticky hilt where it lay in glitter and grit. The werewolf’s teeth had scored the steel. He wiped it on his sleeve. The fabric came away darker.

“Come on, attack me!”

Then the city’s pulse shifted.

It was not the werewolf howl.

Something under it—a bass-buried note that rolled through glass and spine. Older. Colder. larger.

Across three blocks, wolves paused mid-step, muzzles tilting to the same invisible point on the compass.

“What the?” Jake thought. “What the hell is that?”

A second howl braided with the first—cleaner, knife-edged. It was the Queen.

Not deference. Acknowledgment.

Orders received.

The pack moved like a tide choosing a new shore.

The wolf in front of him cocked its head as if a memo had arrived, “Later, Human.” Then slipped into a seam between buildings and was gone.

The crowd remembered how to scream.

Jake walked over to the police car and dragged the tall officer off the bonnet by the vest. “You with me?”

“Wish I weren’t,” the officer coughed, as he wiped blood from his mouth.

“Take a room with a real door,” Jake told the partner. “Not made of glass. Take people inside. Lock the door shut. And don’t be a hero.”

“And you?”

“I’ve been an idiot longer than you.”

He killed the cruiser’s siren, dropped the radio on the seat, and raised his voice to the surrounding people.

“Go west out of the city! Don’t take the main streets—that’s where the danger will be; whatever it is, it’ll want you there. Take the back streets!”

“What is it?” asked a tall, lanky man.

“I don’t know? But I will find out, soon enough.”

People and the police officers left, and were joined by others. As the convoy left, cars started up and rolled out. cabs, trucks and coaches began to leave the city.

Jake went after the pack.

He cut north, as he followed the pack of werewolves, with their shadows strobing ahead of him, the city became a concrete jungle. On the roofs, the wind tasted of copper and rain; billboards on the rooftops with advertising for Coca-Cola:“Live the life.” At street level, it tasted of fear as people scattered everywhere. Jake thought for a second and chose to get to the rooftops. there it would let you see the plan of the area.

Jake ran to the side alleyway of a six-storey building and found a service ladder that fought him halfway, then remembered its purpose and rattled him onto the roof of a chemist’s warehouse.

Tar blistered under his boots as he ran on the rooftop. He stopped at the ledge and looked down George Street. The pack ran down to Circular Quay and the rocks.

Jake jumped from one building to the other, landing on an awning of the opposite building. Beyond George Street lay out like an artery. He ran down the length of it, until the scaffold let go, and tilted downwards “Oh, shit!” Jake screamed, and he slid down to the ground. Rolling onto the ground, he got back up and began to run again.

‘Where are they going?”

Then he ran across the street to climb to another building’s ladder, on the opposite side of the street, finally reaching the top. Jake jogged the parapet and crossed a gap that had no right to be crossed. As he caught up with the pack, a wolf landed ahead on a delivery bay below as he jumped the gap between buildings. It paused, raised its muzzle, then slid into an alley into the darkness as it patrolled the area. Jake kept going.

At Park Street, he dropped to the pavement—the roofs had quit being cooperative. Tram lines shone like wet wire. A tram lurched across the intersection, doors yawning open on reflex. He swung in long enough to shove three passengers out again, westward, away from the water.

“Go to the depot and turn the lights off.”

The driver nodded, pale, and made himself small.

Jake took Elizabeth Street the wrong way, then a lane that smelled of bad fish and yesterday. A roller door was half-up. A family crouched behind a couch as they dragged it sideways across the concrete.

“Hey! You! Close the roller door and bolt it,” he said without stopping.

The father nodded like a drowning man nods to air.

He got height again near Wynyard. From the roof, the map was legible: blue smears of emergency lights, black bites where power had lost its argument, the rain undecided. Wolves ran the parapets—sure-footed, elegant, wrong. The Queen was a rumour among them: bigger shadow, smoother gait, moving with the quiet contempt of something that had never had to ask permission.

They weren’t scattering anymore.

They were forming.

Two streets from the Quay, the wind twisted sideways. Flags snapped. The Queen took the roofline of a sandstone building like a stage, rain beading along her spine. She ranged the city—west to campus, south to Surry Hills, north along the bridges—then fixed on the harbour as if the water itself were prey.

Jake took a breath behind a chimneystack and inventoried. Knife. Two spare mags that solved the wrong problems. One flare. One tourniquet. Paracord. Zip ties. Three energy bars. No plan.

He could peel off and run a rescue corridor inland. He could harry strays. He could wait for a better man.

The Queen flicked an ear. The packs repositioned as one, pinning choke points, building a bowl from shopfronts and awnings.

Like hunters making geometry.

What the hell are they doing? he said to himself.

Jake went with them. Not close. Close enough.

The next roof ended early—human gap, not wolf gap. A scaffold tower made an alternate if you didn’t mind rust. He didn’t. Down a level, across a sill, up into a construction spine where rebar stood like pews.

A wolf crouched there, licking a torn foreleg. It smelled him and stood without the courtesy of fear.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Jake suggested.

It did.

He stepped inside the reach and let the swipe have the space it wanted. Without hesitation, the knife worked short and ugly along the inner arm. The wolf tried to pivot; the leg answered only in blood as it pooled out in spurts and down Jake’s arm.

“I told you not to.”

He finished it quickly with a stab to the throat, severing the carotid artery. He was not a cruel man, the body turned back to a human male, tall, skinny and still youthful.

He dragged the body into the shadow and moved on.

By Circular Quay, the horde had doubled—not just in numbers, but in discipline. They took quarters without looking, cleared sightlines, left lanes that read like escape and ended in teeth.

The Queen ghosted along a parapet, pausing to study her reflection in office glass.

For a heartbeat, the pane held four Queens—past, present, the one she’d be under a full moon, the one that remembered before cities.

She seemed to like the math as she turned to her pack, which was growing, and this was good. As the large pack of ten thousand strong werewolves filled the quay.

Jake cut into a service lane feeding into the plaza. It smelt of Oil and was damp from the rain that began to fall. A wolf guarded the exit to the quay. Jake picked up a glass Pepsi Max bottle and threw it to the opposite side of the opening. It smashed. The head of the werewolf twitched and looked that way.

Jake slid past the beast in the shadows, stealthily and into the open.

Rain slapped his face. He took cover behind a stone plinth and looked.

The Queen stood on the top of an abandoned bus like a herald on a dais. Around the square, wolves took positions on awnings and balcony rails, shaping the kill bowl out of tourism.

Jake stealthily walked by a bus, knife and pistol at the ready.

He boarded from the rear, passed empty seats and a lunchbox with cartoon sharks. He could hear the werewolf pacing on the roof with its claws pinging the roof of the cab. The front door hung half-open. The Queen’s head was a metre away, up and left, close enough to count raindrops trembling on her whiskers.

“What the bloody hell am I doing?” he mumbled to himself.

There was a crack and then a hiss. He slid the flare free and put his back to the driver’s partition.

“Not yet,” he said to himself.

A ripple ran through the wolves. That sub-bass rolled again—this time ice-cold. The Queen’s ears flattened for a fraction of a second, then lifted. She let out a low lying growl. The other werewolves lowered their heads in submission and started to circle.

Orders received.

The bowl tightened.

Jake lit the flare and threw it high in the air.

Rain turned the light into red swords. The Queen tracked the arc. Three wolves broke from the pack. “Come on, take the bait!” Jake said in anticipation. Then five. Then more, because instincts predate them all. As the werewolf pack circled the flare, one gave it a curious sniff.

“Come on, take the bait!”

The Queen sat on the roof of the bus cabin, observing her pack snort and sniff at the flare while they circle it. She didn’t take the bait, although Jake used the second they gave him. He carefully shoved the door wider, dropped to the ground, and ran west along the colonnade, the red hiss in his hand dragging part of the pack like a hook drags a school of fish.

Two of them took the bait. “Come on! Take the bait.” Then six. Then too many.

“Perfect,” he said to himself. “This is a terrible fucking idea.”

He hit the top of a stair run and took it three at a time. The colonnade ended in a blank wall and a maintenance door with no outside handle.

“Always a door,” he said, and chose speed.

At full tilt, he planted a boot on the jamb where the handle to the glass door was and smashed it in with one kick. The weakened pane gave way and recoiled back. He hit it with his left shoulder and elbow, his elbow that would complain later. Glass shattered and went everywhere. He went with it. The door buckled as he jammed the flare into the crack.

The sound outside turned sharp and personal as the werewolves howled out instructions.

Jake let the door take the weight and stood in a hallway that smelled of mops and staff-room coffee. He breathes in heavy and deep breaths.

“Okay,” he told the dark. “What the hell are you doing, Jake? Werewolves in Sydney, not again!”

A soft emergency light flickered awake deeper in the hall. He followed it past storage cages and a forgotten Christmas tree still wearing tinsel.

Jake spotted some stairs, and they went up.

“Ok, here we go.”

On the next roof, rain blurred the city into motion. Below, the bowl held. The Queen turned slowly, checking lanes before a push. Somewhere out beyond sight, that Dire note rolled again—a cold bell tolling strategy.

Jake’s phone buzzed.

Daisy: Still out west. I’m safe. Don’t be a hero.

Jake: Too late. Stay put. If anything changes, you run.

He slid the phone away and felt lighter for lying to both of them.

The Queen stopped turning. Her head lifted toward the western roofs—toward him. “There you are.” She loosed a single, clean note into the rain.

Not the rally howl.

The hunt.

Half the bowl pivoted in his direction.

“Right,” Jake said to the weather, to the city, to the part of himself that had always known this day would come. “We do it your way.”

He ran.

He ran along a gutter that had forgotten what to do with water, over a skylight that flinched, across a sagging clothesline where someone’s shirts learned about storms. Behind him, claws took purchase where human feet shouldn’t. Ahead, a narrow span waited over an alley that didn’t care if you missed.

He didn’t look down.

He didn’t slow.

He ran.