I’d say movies and television did a fair job of documenting the process of a were-transformation. I suppose that made a certain sense if you thought about it. Since transformations were a real thing, someone working in the special effects department may have seen it happen. Or maybe they were mythical monsters themselves.

In any case, the big-screen portrayal is a faithful recreation of what I witnessed in that alley. The lengthening limbs, the sprouting hair, protruding snout. Those were all there for sure. Hollywood had missed a few details, though. The first and most important was the speed. This transformation was not Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I’d say beginning to “go time” took about four to five seconds, maybe less. I was too busy holding down 3 pounds of beef, cheese, and chili to check my watch.

The second thing was the sound. It was not a silent process. It turns out bones, ligaments, and tendons breaking and reforming is a noisy business. The wet pops and snaps were almost as bad as the stretching skin and growing hair.

The third thing was the one that finally got me. Certain parts of Juan’s body were not as much transformed as they were replaced. I watched as Juan’s fingernails fell off and menacing-looking claws sprouted from his fingertips. Then Juan spit out an entire set of human teeth. And that, I am sad to say, was when I finally experienced the reversal of fortune. Chico’s red hots tasted a hell of a lot better going down than they did coming up. I had the presence of mind not to get any on my shirt, however. Rules are rules, and I hate losing.

In the end, Teddy and I faced down a transformed Mexican lycanthrope gang member and an impressive pile of partially digested chili dogs. The WereJuan looked a little different from what I had imagined. I reminded myself he was a coyote rather than a wolf. His fur was a nice silky brown color you might find on a family dog catching frisbees in the park. His snout was long and narrow, and his ears were pointed and very pronounced. He wasn’t the hulking monster I was expecting. The WereJuan was just over six feet tall, and while that was much bigger than regular Juan, he was still in the “I can take this guy” range.

Any thought of it being a fair fight immediately went out the window as soon as he moved. The WereJuan was fast. Really fast. Prom date to the punch bowl fast. He closed the distance between us in the blink of an eye. I had my right Ruger about half out of the holster when the entire weight of the beast barreled into me, knocking me to the ground with him on top. His claws dug deep into my ballistic vest, and only the fact that I was able to get my left arm up and across his throat kept the WereJuan from biting into my face and neck. His jaws snapped just inches from his nose, and I could smell Juan’s breakfast burrito. He went with chorizo this morning.

But I had survived the shock of the initial attack, and I was far from defenseless. I finished the draw with my right hand, positioned the barrel of my Vaquero flush against the WereJuan’s rib cage, cranked the hammer back, and pulled the trigger.

Here’s the thing about contact shots. When you put the muzzle of a firearm directly against a surface, you aren’t giving the gas that propels the bullet anywhere to go. And there’s a surprisingly sizeable amount of gas. That’s why a lot of gunshot suicides are so messy. You are filling your head with gas like blowing into a balloon. All that gas has to go somewhere, and your head doesn’t inflate.

That’s how it went for the poor WereJuan. My .357 bullet tore a terrible hole in his guts, and the force of the powder discharge scrambled his insides. I pushed with the barrel of my gun and rolled him off of me. To my surprise, the WereJuan went with my momentum and deftly twisted off of me under his own power. As he got to his feet, I could see the hole in his side was not nearly as big or bloody as it should have been, and it was closing up before my eyes. Then the WereJuan was moving again.

Teddy had his enormous revolver out now and was gamely trying to score a hit, his Rhino thundering in the tight alley. But the Werecoyote was too fast. He darted this way and that, staying one step ahead of Teddy’s fire. As I struggled to my feet, I wondered why he didn’t attack again immediately, and then I realized he was waiting until Agent Ruthersford’s revolver went dry. If he pounced on me again and stopped moving before then, Teddy could ventilate him.

“Silver,” Teddy grunted through his teeth as he squeezed off rounds.

Of course! The WereJuan shrugged off my shot because it had been just a regular bullet. Earlier in the day, I had loaded the special silver rounds into my left pistol. I positioned my left hand over my left holster and tracked the monster with my eyes. Teddy might be too slow to hit the Werecoyote, but I didn’t think I would have that problem.

The WereJuan leaped onto the wall of the alley and immediately rebounded to the opposite wall as Teddy’s sixth and final shot ricocheted into where the monster had just been. I heard a hammer fall on an empty cylinder with a *click* as the WereJuan bounced off the second wall with a roar and lunged directly for me. Time seemed to slow, and I felt my left hand bring the pistol level with my hip. I could count the teeth in the WereJuan’s mouth as my thumb leisurely worked the hammer to my large revolver once. Twice. I was in no hurry as I lifted the barrel of my big iron just a fraction of an inch and worked the hammer a third time. Bang.

The world snapped back into motion, and the WereJuan collapsed to the ground a few feet short of me. The booms from the Ruger echoed off the red brick walls of the back street, and a thin line of blue smoke trailed lazily from the barrel of my pistol up into the air before fading into nothing.

I held my gun on the fallen beast and rolled him over with my foot. Now that he wasn’t bouncing around like a pinball, I could appreciate why Juan dressed the way he did, besides being gangster chic. Most of his clothing had stayed with him during his transformation. The baggy t-shirt had stretched to accommodate his larger size. The shorts still fit him, but now looked like a tighter pair you might wear to the beach instead of a baggy fashion faux pas. His clawed toes had burst through the end of his socks, but his slides were still on his feet. As we watched, the WereJuan turned back into an ordinary Juan. But this Juan had two neat holes in the center of his chest and another in his forehead.

Agent Ruthersford was on his phone. “Yes. We had a 661 at my current location now have a dead 2W-2. Send me a single clean-up unit. No witnesses. Correct. Ten rounds total, 4 in the DB. Right. Oh, and a code V.” He eyed the remains of my lunch.

Teddy pocketed his phone and turned on his heel. “Come on, Cash, back to the car.”

“What?” I holstered my pistols, and a gentle breeze blew into the alley. A door like the one Teddy came out of the first time I met him opened up, and two men in white Tyvek coveralls walked out. I gawked at them for a moment, but they ignored me. Then felt a tug on my shoulder.

“Cash, the other guy is getting away.”

“The other guy?”

“The tall Caucasian male? He ran off before the attack.”

My mind finally snapped into gear. “Yeah, but the alley’s a dead end.”

“He jumped over it.”

I stopped and looked back. “Teddy, it’s like 20 feet of smooth brick and barbed wire. No way he climbed that.”

Teddy pulled me again, more insistently this time. “He didn’t climb it. He jumped over it. I saw him. Come on.”

“What the fuck, how?”

“Magic, probably.”

We left the men in the alley and got back into my car. Teddy was refilling his pistol with a speed loader. “Another reason we favor revolvers, no shell casings,” he remarked as he put the spent cartridges into his coat pocket.

We zipped around the corner and turned out onto the street the alley would have emptied onto had it not been a dead end. It was a busy six-lane road. The suspect could have gone anywhere. I parked on the side of the street, and we got out. Agent Ruthersford pulled out his monocle and examined the wall of the alley.

“Air magic,” he said.

“You can see it?”

“Yes, see near the top there.” He pointed at the top of the wall. “And again here.” He pointed to a spot on the sidewalk in front of us. “But, it’s distorted.” He returned the monocle to his pocket.

I was still puzzling things out. “So, the perp used the wind, to what, blow himself over the wall.” I mimed my hand taking off like an airplane.

Teddy smiled. “Something like that. It’s a simple trick, really. But this man wasn’t a mage. Not a regular one, anyway.”

“You can tell because of the distortion?”

He nodded. “I think we are dealing with another one of our tattooed friends.”

“The warehouse is a good lead then.” I grinned. But Agent Ruthersford didn’t look happy. “What happens now?” We got back in the car.

“What happens now, Agent Renshaw, is we go back to the office and get yelled at.”

“You have that here too, huh? We had that back at my old job.” I gritted my teeth and fired up the Wildcat, but left the car idling.

Teddy looked out the window at nothing. “I think they have that at every job.” He sighed and massaged his temples. “Let’s go. No sense in putting it off. Best to take your medicine straight away.”

I’d taken plenty of this particular medicine, and it tasted shitty every time.