Pocket Apocalypse: InCryptid, Book Four Read Online Free Page B

into lawn statuary.
    Werewolves would unmake you, and make you over again in their own image. It was the ultimate loss of self, and the thought made my blood go cold.
    Shelby looked at me anxiously. “So you’ll come? You’ll come to Australia?”
    “Shelby, I don’t think—”
    “Because it’s my family, you see, and they’re in danger. It’s not like we can evacuate the continent, and I’m not going to say ‘sorry, you’re on your own’ when they’re calling me for help. But I don’t want to go alone, Alex. Please don’t make me go alone.”
    She looked at me pleadingly. I looked back, every inch of me screaming that this was a terrible idea. Then I took a deep breath, and I forced myself to nod.
    “We’ll need to set it up with zoo management. After that, I’ll have to make some calls. We’re going to want people in customs who can look the other way about our bags, and we’re going to want them on both ends.” Neither of us liked to travel unarmed. More importantly, there’s no vaccine for lycanthropy-w, and I wasn’t going into a known outbreak without the herbal and chemical remedies that we knew could make a difference in preventing infection. Australia had good reasons for their strict bans on carrying fruit and dairy products into the country. We were going to have to find a way around them, at least where powdered aconite and dried mistletoe berries were concerned. Better safe than sorry, especially in a situation like this.
    “I can handle the Australian end if you can manage the US end,” Shelby said.
    “As long as we fly out of New York, I can manage things here,” I said. “Verity made a lot of contacts in the area who will help us out.”
    “You still haven’t said. Does this mean you’ll come?”
    Maybe she was like me: maybe she needed to hear the words. I nodded again, this time slowly, as if my head had become too heavy to hold upright. “It means I think I have to.”

    Werewolves both do and don’t exist. They’re one of the great conundrums of the cryptid world, and one of the greatest failures of the Covenant of St. George, which may have—accidentally—created them.
    There was a time when the world’s therianthrope populations had their own ways of handling sickness. Infected individuals would retreat to caves or deep forests, where the majority of them would die without passing their infection along. The viruses that make up the lycanthropy family may be closely related to rabies, but they had to sacrifice some flexibility in exchange for the traits that enabled them to infect shapeshifters: they’re even harder to catch than rabies itself. Most often, the outbreak would claim one or two victims and then burn out, a victim of its own deadly nature.
    The Covenant changed all that when they showed up and started hunting cryptids, like the therianthropes, into extinction. A sick therianthrope looked like an easy target; more and more, they found themselves followed into the places where they tried to hide. Maybe that would have been all right, if we’d been talking about a pox or a flu—the sick therianthrope could have used the Covenant teams as a means of suicide, convincing them that there were no other therianthropes in the area. And maybe the ones who weren’t already sick enough to have become irrational chose that method of death. Sadly, more had reached the stage where they bit and scratched at everything that moved. Some members of the Covenant were exposed to the virus. Most of the time that came to nothing. Jumping between species isn’t easy.
    But it only had to happen once.
    No one knows the name of the first werewolf, or how they reacted when they felt themselves getting sick. Maybe they prayed. Maybe they raged. Maybe they hid their infection out of fear that the Covenant that had sheltered them would now turn against them and put them to death for having become one of the monsters they were intended to fight. Whatever they did, they did it long