A werewolf among us Read Free Page B

behind each front. He supposed this was a relatively minor feat for Climicon on a planet where costs were no object. After all, in recent years they had graduated from weather control to complete terraforming of worlds once unsuitable for human settlements.
    Lightning forked between the behemoths overhead.
    A moment later, thunder cracked down the valley, a thermal whip that brought an auditory punishment.
    Across the valley, in the foothills at the ankles of the next spine of gray mountains, sheets of rain obscured the trees, sliced quick gulleys in the exposed earth, and gushed forward toward the stream below.
    And out of those fluttering curtains of rain rode a man on horseback, bent low over his mount's neck, slapping its shoulders with his free hand. He dug his knees into the beast's sides, as if he were riding without benefit of a saddle, but he seemed in no danger of falling off.
    St, Cyr stood, now oblivious of the storm except as it was a backdrop to the rider. The approaching figure carried with it an air, a mood, that somehow made him uneasy—something he had noticed with the aid of the bio-computer but which he was as yet unable to pin down and define.
    The rain lashed at the rider's back, pushed by the winds, which had once again kissed the earth. Yet he managed to remain ahead of the worst of it, still slapping his mount's neck and shoulders, still bent low so as to be almost a part of the four-legged creature under him.
    As the rider drew nearer, taking the slopes of the valley toward the lowest step of the Alderban house,
St. Cyr saw that he carried a rifle strapped across his broad back, Slung across the shoulders of the horse were two objects: a saddlebag made of dark leather—and a pair of bloody boar's heads, which dripped crimson and glared out at the passing world with bared fangs and rigor-mortised snarls.
    The man took the last hundred yards toward the swiftly irising doors of the stables, and as he drew close to St. Cyr's position, the cyberdetective saw tangled black hair, a broad and Slavic face, fierce dark eyes. The hand that slapped the horse, urging it on, was as large as a dinner plate and looked, consequently, too large to eat with. Beneath the tight-fitting black shirt, muscles bulged and twisted as if they were sentient creatures in their own right.
    The hunter was laughing, heedless of the blood that spattered over his trousers from the dangling boars' heads, unconcerned about the lightning that chattered down to the earth all across the valley. The only thing in the world, at that moment for that large dark man, was the race. And he was laughing at the elements because he knew that he had won it.
    He disappeared through the stable door.
    The door winked shut.
    And the storm broke over the house with the force of a small hurricane, almost taking St. Cyr off his feet as he staggered back into the safety of his quarters.
    Inside, he listened to the rain and the pea-sized hailstones as the deluge battered the roof and snapped against the patio doors. Curiously, its fury seemed pale now. He had watched the hunter defeat it; the hunter was now more charged, more fiercely powerful than any storm.
    Only a man
, the bio-computer said, without speaking.
    But who had he been? The laughing giant, bringing home two bloody pig heads as trophies, did not fit any of the descriptions of members of the Alderban family that he had obtained from his own reliable sources before setting out for Darma, and certainly not with anything that Teddy had told him. It was evident to
St. Cyr that the hunter had never undergone psychiatric hypno-keying to stimulate
his
creativity. He was elemental. He was blood, the fight, the stalk, rain and fire. He was positively no historical novelist like Dane, no sculptor like Jubal.
    St. Cyr walked to the communications board in the wall by his bed and called the house computer.
    "May I be of service?" a voice asked overhead.
    "I wish to speak to Teddy," he said.
    A moment