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 was 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—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.

There had been a time when he would have taken the other seats for his mates without thinking. Back to the wall, room to move, enough space for an argument over

whose round it was. Today, the spare chairs stayed empty.

Kimberly would have told him to ring someone. Daisy

would have taken his phone and done it herself.

He rubbed a thumb along the edge of the table. The

varnish had worn through beneath other people’s

elbows. Someone had scratched initials into the wood

and tried to fill them with black pen. A whole afternoon

could disappear in a place like this, if you let it. He

wasn’t sure whether that was why he’d chosen it or why

he wanted to leave.

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

lay between the buildings; the pressure from the

downforce 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 if 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 werewolf 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—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 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 werewolf swiped with its paw. Jake batted the

hand aside and 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 werewolf hissed like a tyre losing patience.

“You will pay, human,” it hissed.

A cruiser slewed sideways and stopped hard, then a

second parked next to it. Driver low. Passenger high.

Textbook. Both officers in the second car hopped out

and stood behind their doors with pistols out, ready.

The six-foot-tall officer, brown hair and built like a

tree trunk, brought his pistol up two-handed. “Police!

Hands where I can—” The werewolf turned politely, as if

granting an audience, and punched the door in.

“Back up, whatever you are!”

The officer fired—three neat centre-mass shots. The

werewolf snarled and stood up to intimidate him.

Standing twelve feet tall, overshadowing him, it growled.

“Pitiful,” it snarled. With a swipe of his claw, the officer

got rewarded with the wrong liquid misting the

windscreen. The wolf went from polite to annoyed. The

second police officer was a woman, young, pretty and in

shock; she caught a backhand across the face, launching

her across the bonnet of the second car onto a

foundation wall of a building site, where she was left,

broken and knocked out in a pool of blood.

Another police car rolled up at the same time this was

all happening, and two other officers climbed out of the

car. There was a young officer and his partner; he began

to talk with the other officer who witnessed everything.

“What the fuck is that?” said the young officer.

“I don’t know, Jim!”

“Whoa! Stay in the fucking car!” Blood spurted all

over the windscreen.

“Officers down! Request backup!” said the other

police officer.

The third police officer, a brunette-haired woman,

heard her partner’s radio squeal, then fall silent as

something cut his throat, big, sharp, dangerous.

“What the hell!” she said, hiding under the side of the

car. She was scared, too scared to do anything. She knew

that she would be next if she stood up and opened fire,

cringing behind her car door. “Come on, Jolene, deep

breaths.”

“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 Zu Bladeworx F7

H2HFW hand-to-hand combat knife by the sticky hilt

where it lay in glitter and grit. “Come on, attack me!”

The werewolf dove in quickly, leading with its mouth

wide open, lunging in; its teeth had scored the steel as

the blade cut deep. Past the jawline, then a second stab

into the side of its head with a twist. And then the body

fell lifeless to the ground. Jake wiped the blade onto his

sleeve. The fabric came away darker red than

camo-green.

Then the city’s pulse shifted. It was not the werewolf

howl.

Something bigger, deeper, under the city—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,

heading towards Circular Quay. The sound of cars shaking, tin crumbling, a stampede as werewolves

massed towards a new destination. Then among the

pack of werewolves, the Direwolf appeared in front of

Jake, larger than the other werewolves, brutish, more

muscly, and it arrived from the shadows; it had observed

the battle with the sentry werewolf. One sniff, then two

sniffs of the lifeless werewolf, then it cocked its head as

if a memo had arrived, “Later, human.” Then it slipped

into a seam between buildings and was gone.

The crowd remembered how to scream as they began

to run to take cover from whatever that was.

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 and sweat from his brow.

“Take a room with a real door,” Jake told the young

officer. “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.

“Werewolves. But I’ll find out what they’re doing 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 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 as 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 chimney stack 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, they made their way to the monumental

stairs of the Opera House.

“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 werewolf 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

werewolf tried to pivot; the arm 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. 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 werewolf 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 circled 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, snatched up the flare from the

wet pavement, 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

missing handle should have been 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

breathed in heavy, 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.

“Okay, 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 towards

the western roofs—towards 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.