The Ultimate Werewolf by Byron Preiss (ed)

sometimes he would filch their power to listen for a precious hour to the Top 40 station; he loved the bright thump and screech he found there, he could repeat word for word the DJs' promos. He had three shirts, two summer and one winter, and two pairs of socks which he wore together; when he was not wearing the shirts he kept them rolled into neat balls; he liked their shapes, like little animals curled and burrowed against the cold. Sometimes it got so cold in his room that he could not bend his hands.
    When he was changed, though, no weather could touch him, nothing disturb that heedless fierce insouciance. Dirty winds, thrown bottles, broken glass scattered on the pavement, the bravado snarl of lesser dogs: less than nothing. It was hard to remember, at first, how things felt, but he was getting better at it, the angel-time memories bright with sparkling dread. Each time it happened, and it had happened three times so far since the first gibbous wax of autumn, he found the memories both easier and more fantastical, as if waking drowsy and bemused from a dream of kings and terrors to find in one hand a scepter and in the other a bloody ax. He knew that all of it should have frightened him more, been more horror than horrible pleasure—another brick in the highrise tower of self-loathing—but knew also that this terror's edge was born blunted from other, blacker troubles. Once the worst has happened, perspective changes to reflect the new reality, and evil, like pain, is more relative than ever.
     
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    Sitting on a parking block in the co-op lot, carefully peeling the secret sweet layer of foil from a candy bar found like a jewel on the sidewalk outside the store. The smell released from paper was nearly overpowering, rich as gas in his nose. Since becoming an angel he had found his sense of smell raised to a disturbing level of precocity, his appetite provoked now by ant-crawling dog-chewed hamburger rinds as well as more pedestrian treats, like candy bars. Yesterday he had had an almost unbearable impulse to eat a dead bird.
    Chewing slowly at the candy, letting it melt unto dissolution between his sore teeth, he was aware of the people around him, passing on the sidewalk, parking their cars, loitering outside the store. A complex threnody of scents: the sour explanations of old men, dusty fart of a starting car's exhaust, cigarette smoke, flat stink of grease, unexpected flower of menstruating women, tumbled skein of food odors as the store door opened again. Young woman, red shoes, an odor like unease beneath the false mask of perfume that never covered entire. She paused to step past him; he was sitting on the parking block next to her car.
    "Excuse me," she said, rote courtesy, but responded to his smile. Looked at him, as people rarely did; the mad, or even mad-appearing, are anonymous by virtue of false perception, fear of potential danger; don't make eye contact, he might do something. Still their mutual smile held until something, some thought, fluttered under her skin to break the pleasant tension into wariness and he began, slowly, to wrap the uneaten candy back in its wrinkled jacket of foil, prefatory to flight.
    She was not smiling at all, now.
    "You're Ethan Parrish," she said, and he bowed his head.
     
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    Ethan?
    What.
    Ethan, it's important we do this.
    Scowl, the pick and flutter of his fingertips against the grainy wale of his oversize corduroys, and the waistline cinched with a woman's chain belt, cheap goldtone and flashy buckle filigree. She could smell the unfresh odor of his clothing from where she sat, carefully not across the desk from him, too distancing, too formal, too authoritarian. Instead she sat in the chair not quite next to him, legs calm together at her ankles, expensive shoes. The micro recorder open on the table did not disturb him; he liked to pick it up and watch, hypnotic smile as if the tiny whorling of the wheels mimicked in some more orderly