“You son of a bitch.” Kerkonen reached for him, the ends of her fingers had begun growing into claws, but she was having a hard time since by now the room was spinning and she was probably looking at three of him. He had to hand it to her though, she almost got him. Launching herself across the desk, her claws tore four deep gashes through the leather of his chair. Only he’d already disappeared and was standing a few feet to the side.

“How?” Heather spotted him, but she was so dizzy that she couldn’t let go of the desk without collapsing.

“Precautions, Kerkonen. I have access to every contraband magical artifact the government has ever confiscated. I was doing this sort of thing before you were born. I’m not stupid.”

Heather was much tougher than expected. In testing, a few aerosolized molecules of this stuff had knocked out even a strong werewolf in thirty seconds. Her regeneration rate was impressive. He would have brought more of the stuff, but this was the only capsule in STFU’s inventory. Procurement was a bitch when it came to alchemical solutions made from rare flowers that bloomed only on out-of-the-way mountaintops under a full moon. So he reached into his suit, pulled out the tranquilizer gun and shot her in the chest.

Heather looked down at the dart. “I’ll kill you.” Her words were slurred. It took her a couple of clumsy tries to pull the dart out, but it had already delivered a dose of drugs sufficient to drop a rhino.

“You’re not walking this one off, Red. I had this stuff worked up in case I ever needed to put down Adam Conover.” It was hard to use tranqs on humans to take them alive, since a dose sufficient to take them out in a timely manner was also strong enough to possibly kill them, but werewolves were absurdly resilient, so you could go a little nuts with the chemistry. “Don’t worry. I’m not killing you yet. You still might be useful.”

Her knees buckled. She hit the desk, then slid to the floor and lay there gasping for breath. Barely conscious, her body was stuck mid-transformation. She wasn’t quite so pretty now, all deformed with fangs and body hair.

The door opened. His secretary stuck her head inside. “Is everything alright, Mr. Stricken?” She saw the werewolf sprawled on the carpet, but didn’t show much of a reaction. She’d seen stranger things working here. “Would you like the cleaners to come up?”