I pulled open the desk drawer and looked for something to swallow. I found a couple of painkillers in the pen rack and threw them back. I was feeling twitchy myself.

“After all of these years of controlling my . . . my state, I have suddenly begun to lose control. I can feel a wildness returning to me. Sometimes I cannot even control when I change”

“That’s fucked up,” I said. “But what can I do about it? If you go wolfman on me, I’m going to have to kill you.”

“Good,” Grimshaw nodded. “That is why I came.”

“You want me to kill you?” I said, trying to hide how surprised I was.

“That and more.”

I nodded and looked right into Grimshaw’s eyes. If he was taking me for a ride, it was the best damn job of slapping on the bullshit I’d ever seen. I don’t know why, but I trusted him.

He explained to me that if he lost control, he would want me to kill him before he hurt anyone. I didn’t say it again, but he didn’t have to worry about that.

But then he went on to the next chapter, as if planning his own death was one thing on a macabre checklist he’d completed. He told me how once the Nazi doctors had tortured his wild side into submission, they turned him over to the SS who in turn began exhaustively training Grimshaw for soldiering. They trained him as man and as werewolf, honing skills from stealth kills to all out-slaughter, from using weapons and setting bombs to disarming attackers.

It was a long, brutal time period in Grimshaw’s life. When it was all over, almost a year had passed, and Grimshaw was a perfect Nazi monster killing machine.

“But soon I would discover that I was not the only one of my kind,” he said. “The good doctors had created a small army of other soldiers like me. I thought I was the only one because they had killed the werewolf which attacked me, but they had others.”

“Werewolves on the battlefield,” I shook my head. “That certainly would have changed the war.”

“It was not on the battlefield they planned for our use. Our use was for right here, in America.”

That got my attention.

“We were trained to do many things. One of them was to hibernate inside specially designed capsules or pods made of the strongest metals available at the time,” Grimshaw said and twitched.

“You okay? How about a drink?”

“Do you have a beer? I rather enjoy American beer.”

I smirked at him. “Do I have beer? Are bears Catholic?”

The joke flopped like a bag of whale blubber. I skulked out of the room and loaded us up with drinks and a bag of tortilla chips. I was kind of starting to enjoy storytime at the McDonald homestead.