“You must’ve been shitting,” I said.

“Yes, I was quite afraid. I thought I would die,” he said. “I had no weapons of any kind, and I was alone against an unnatural predator of extraordinary skill.”

“And then what?”

“I was hunted . . . and attacked by the werewolf.”

There was a long silence as Grimshaw remembered what must have been his death. It must have been horrible remembering when and how you died. I know Mo’Lock rarely speaks of his death and when he did, he would usually skip the details.

For the gentleman monster sitting in front of me it must have been painful beyond belief. Werewolves primarily hunt for food, and they like it hot. They like the blood flowing and the flesh as warm as possible. To do this they will literally rip a person apart piece by piece, skillfully avoiding major arteries or any major organs, and stave off death as long as possible. People who fall prey to werewolves are usually alive through the worst of it.

“I thought I would die in that awful, fabricated forest, but the doctors had other plans for me,” Grimshaw went on. “At the moment I thought I would breathe my last, a Nazi sniper shot the head off the werewolf and freed me from its grasp.”

Grimshaw went on to explain that the Nazi doctors rescued him and nursed him back to health. They didn’t want a dead man; they wanted a fresh werewolf attack victim to nurture, to bring to full health and then train.

“And you were a werewolf?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“How did they control you when you were transformed?”

“Torture,” he said. “They tortured me as a man and they tortured me as a wolf with one goal: to join the two, to create a monster with a man’s mind, a soldier’s mind.”

I shook my head. “Christ. Did it work?”

When I looked up, Grimshaw had not only transformed into a werewolf, he had done it without so much as wrinkling his clothes. He removed his monocle and stared at me as he changed his face into a perfect blend of man and monster. He had the eyes and hair of a gray wolf, but not the extended snout. Instead he had a fairly wide but normal nose and mouth. Then he smiled and I saw two rows of the sharpest teeth I’d ever seen.

“What do you think, Mr. McDonald?”

“Looks like it worked.”

Suddenly, Grimshaw jerked in his chair. His eye twitched and a sound damn close to a growl rose from his throat. He reversed the transformation quickly and when he was almost all human again he replaced his monocle and looked at me like he was embarrassed.

“I apologize,” he said. “That is one of the reasons I contacted you.”