Excerpt: Morgan Skylark and the Monster Hunters

Chapter 1
The Werewolf

Morgan Skylark had been thirteen years old for less than eight hours when the werewolf smashed its way through the front door of her house and changed everything, forever.

She was asleep when it happened, and those first waking moments remained forever after a blur of confusion and terror. She would remember screaming, snarling, the crashing of furniture being overturned. Down the hall from her room, her younger brother was calling out for their mother, and from downstairs, Morgan could hear her mother calling back. It was the sound of her mother’s cries, and the sudden way in which they were cut off, that brought Morgan fully awake, forcing clarity to her thoughts, driving her up and out of bed, out into the hall.

The werewolf was hunched over something; perhaps it was for the best that Morgan could not see what, her view blocked by the writhing muscles of the creature’s back and shoulders. It brought its head around at the sound of her footsteps and snarled, yellow eyes peering up at her. Morgan screamed, and the beast roared, twisting completely and preparing to leap, its powerful hind legs coiling like springs. Morgan turned and ran, dimly aware that as she had begun to move the creature had jumped, and must have cleared the staircase entirely in a single arc. She felt the thud of its landing, like she felt the soft, tan carpet pressing into the pads of her feet as she ran for her brother’s room.

She slammed the door behind her, locking it just in time. The werewolf rebounded off of it, howled angrily, and began to savagely beat at the wood. Morgan knew she had only moments before the door gave way. To her left, her brother, barely two years old, was standing up in his crib, gripping the beveled wood tightly in his hands and wailing. To her right there were two windows, but what good they might have done her she couldn’t say, as a leap from either would lead only to an eighteen foot drop brought to an abrupt and bone-crunching end by the patio stones below.

“Oh no, oh no,” she gasped, looking over her shoulder as the first of the werewolf’s gigantic claws blasted through the door in a shower of splinters. It was hard to think with the screams of her brother and the snarls of the monster in her ears, hard even to breathe with her heart pounding so fast. There was a closet to her right, and after a fraction of a second Morgan leapt forward, ripping it open, searching for something with which to defend herself. There was nothing. Toys, clothes ... nothing dangerous. Who would keep anything dangerous in a two year-old’s room?

“Come on!” she cried, looking around in frantic desperation, and her eyes stopped upon the long shaft of wood on which the clothes were hanging. With no other alternative, she reached up, pulling it from its moorings and letting the clothes slide to the ground. She turned, holding the rod in front of her, just as the werewolf crashed through the door. It came to a halt in front of her, growling low in its throat, looking at the stick. Morgan had the distinct feeling that it was grinning at her.

“Leave us alone,” she said, doing her best to sound threatening. She supposed the effect might have been more menacing if she hadn’t been crying, but she could feel the tears making their way down her cheeks. The werewolf glanced over at her brother, who had stopped screaming and was now cowering in the corner of his crib, and licked its lips.

“I said leave us alone!” she shouted, swinging the rod wildly around. The werewolf ducked backward a bit, still giving her that wicked leer which looked so much like a grin. Morgan could see its muscles tensing again, preparing to spring, and in that moment something happened which was unlike anything that she had ever before experienced. Time seemed to slow, stretching out so that every fraction of a second was notable. A veil of cold seemed to drape down upon her, its icy tendrils running through her limbs and dampening the terror and rage and sorrow that threatened to overwhelm her.

She regarded the werewolf from this new, hyper-aware state, noting the mottled grey and brown of its fur, the way the skin of its snout folded as it snarled at her. Its upper body was huge and muscular, with powerful arms that ended in wicked talons. Its lower body and legs were thinner, more lithe, but still knotted with ropy muscle that she knew gave it both tremendous speed and leaping abilities. Werewolves did not run upright, nor exactly on all fours, but used a kind of loping gait in which they kicked out with their hind legs and launched themselves through the air, catching the impact with their powerful arms. This allowed them to go from moving at full speed to attacking in one fluid motion, and made them one of the most efficient and deadly hunters of both humans and livestock that the world had ever seen.

The werewolf began its leap, and Morgan had time to consider the angle of its attack, realizing that there was a direct line connecting the beast, through her, to one of the two windows in her brother’s room. Without effort, as if this sort of thing was something she had done many times before in her life, Morgan sidestepped at the very last second. The werewolf’s clutching talons skimmed past her belly, tearing the fabric of her nightgown but leaving her skin intact, and as he hurtled by Morgan swung the rod from the closet in a great, wide arc.

The piece of wood, now acting as a staff, hit the werewolf in the back of its head hard enough that the rod cracked and nearly broke in half. The force of the blow added to the beast’s already substantial momentum, and with a noise that was equal parts pain, rage and confusion, the werewolf hit the window and crashed through it. Large jets of glass and no small amount of the wooden frame blew outward into the dark, and in her new, hyper-aware state Morgan could hear the first of them tinkling on the patio stones before the sound was overwhelmed by the thud of the beast’s landing.

Morgan knew better than to assume that she had killed the werewolf. The creatures were highly uncommon, but she had studied them in school just the same, along with the other basic classes of monsters. Werewolves had thick skins and heavy muscles, and could withstand a great deal more physical punishment than normal humans could. She had not won the fight, only bought herself a few minutes, at best. She would need something more dangerous than a simple closet rod. A gun would have helped, but even better would be something made out of silver. Werewolves were highly allergic to silver. Most of them fled at the sight of it.

Morgan’s eyes widened, her feet already beginning to move as her brain began to form a plan. Her father’s study. The big, oak desk at which he sat most nights, after she and her brother had gone to bed, reworking whatever column he had written that morning. There was a silver letter opener in that desk; she had seen it once, only a few months ago, the metal giving off its signature dull gleam. Her father had said it was a gift, for being the Best Man in his friend’s wedding, and that he didn’t really use it very much, but he liked to keep it out for the good memories.

“Come on, Toby,” she said as she scooped up her brother, who had begun screaming again as soon as the immediate threat of the werewolf had passed. She slung him around, holding her against his side, and stepped over the shattered remains of the bedroom door. She had to reach the office, and get the letter opener. It wasn’t much hope, but it was something, and it was all that she had left.

Her father was probably dead, she thought, as she ran for the office. This made her want to curl up in a ball on the floor and cry until her body had exhausted itself of tears, but there was no time for that now. Already, she was sure, the werewolf was either returning to the front door or preparing to leap back into the bedroom. Either way, she must be ready by the time it found her. The door to the office was slightly ajar, and Morgan didn’t slow down as she entered, extending her hand to hit the wood and swing it away from her. She glanced around for a place to put Toby, decided that the closet was safest, and stowed him inside. Trapped in the dark between old shoe boxes (full of papers, report cards, and the odd macaroni-and-glue valentine) and a metal filing cabinet, Toby continued to howl. Morgan did her best to ignore him, worried more about their survival than his momentary discomfort and fear.

“Please still be here, please still be here,” she muttered to herself, over and over, as she raced to the desk. From the hall she could hear snarling and crashing, and knew the werewolf was only moments from finding her. When it did, if she wasn’t ready, it would kill her and her baby brother, like it had killed their parents.

The center drawer of the desk slid open easily, its rollers well-oiled, revealing the clutter that one so often found in drawers of its type. Morgan growled in frustration and began pawing aside the pens, paperclips, loose slips of paper and other useless items. Her fingers brushed something cold and metallic, closed around it, drew it out, held it before her eyes.

The letter opener’s blade was nine inches long, the handle another three and a half. Not sharpened, it was nonetheless a dangerous object; its blade tapered to a wicked point that she knew could easily pierce even the thick skin of the beast that was stalking her. Engraved upon it were the words “For Thomas, My Best Friend and Best Man.” She wondered if her father’s friend, Kenneth, had ever in his wildest dreams expected that his gift might someday be the last line of defense between Thomas’s daughter and the slavering creature coming to kill her.

The werewolf burst into the room roaring, and Morgan jumped backward in fright, holding the letter opener up before her with her right hand, steadying herself by placing her left hand on her father’s leather executive chair. Despite its toughness, the beast had not escaped its journey through the upstairs window unscathed, and Morgan took savage pleasure in seeing that its body was dripping blood in multiple places, and that its left arm hung in a crooked way that suggested either a break or a dislocation. The creature paused in its attack and cocked its head when it saw the letter opener, assessing both the weapon and the girl holding it. Morgan drew some level of confidence in this, and brandished the letter opener before her.

“Go away!” she shouted. “Go away or I’ll ... I’ll stab you!”

The werewolf made a noise that sounded like chuckling, but did not advance. Morgan, now steady on her feet again, shoved the rolling chair away, keeping the desk between her and the werewolf. In the closet to her left, trapped in the dark, Toby screamed and screamed.

“It’s silver,” Morgan told the werewolf, her breath hitching, the effort of fighting off tears making her throat ache. “It’s silver and it’ll kill you. Go away!”

But would it kill the creature? Of this she was unsure. She knew that silver would do the beast great damage, but kill it in a single blow? It seemed impossible that something so large and powerful could be brought down by a thing so small as the blade she held before her.

The werewolf seemed to be thinking along the same lines, because it suddenly dropped back into a ready stance, extending its arms out to the side and craning its neck. It howled at her, a long and excruciatingly loud noise that wound up and up in pitch, seeming to go on forever before at last dropping into a low and guttural roar.

And with that, the creature leapt.

* * *