Ms. Santiago,

I’m afraid we got off on the wrong foot.

I apologize for anything I may have said that offended you. I ask that you give me the opportunity to apologize in person, and to tell me what you would like to see from me moving forward.

I only ask that you please allow me to continue my work.

Sincerely,

Dr. Malcolm Book

Soraya Santiago.

The woman who’d driven him to the brink of insanity, kept him awake for nearly two weeks, and pushed him to heights of pleasure he’d never experienced before. Shifting into wolf form always drove him to the brink, but that was a brief spike into the territory of madness. Over within a few moments, nothing more. Her forays of dragging him to such heights looked more like a plateau than an isosceles. Far more often, far more frequent.

Soraya Santiago.

She’d said that Mr. Ruiz was her cousin, but now he knew it was not in a direct relation; it was just part of her culture. She wasn’t truly related to the nefarious man. Perhaps she was a victim of his appetites as well. It would explain her desire to be in control, to prove to herself over and over again that she had power over something or someone, regardless of who that happened to be.

Ruby had told him her name, via text. After the sun dipped below the horizon, he was in constant contact with his nocturnal assistant, demanding she tell him everything she could find out about his assailant. He needed to know more about his enemy than what she smelled like, how soft her skin was, how beautiful she looked in certain moments of calm…

Now that Malcolm was upstate, out of her clutches, he’d been able to rest and recover. He had more freedom to move about simply because there was nowhere to go. His estate sat in the middle of 500 acres, and armed guards manned the perimeter every fifty feet. The fence was of a design that would impress John Hammond, were he a real business man keeping dangerous predators. Malcolm had designed the security himself for protection. Not to keep out intruders, but to keep his wolf confined every full moon. That was when the beast ripped its way from an ethereal dimension to this one using his body as a portal. There were wolves he'd studied that contained the change until the third twilight, but Malcolm found it easier to allow the change all three nights of the full moon.

Nolan Lucas was in charge of the Luna Protocol, an operation he executed every twenty-eight days. He was paid a handsome stipend to hunt down Malcolm in his wolf form across the woods every month. Mr. Ruiz had not hidden his sadistic glee at the idea of Mr. Lucas’ job, and had actually joined him once, from Malcolm’s understanding.

He didn’t remember it.

Under Luna's waxing reflection, he always let his dark passenger have control. The beast hunted, and then was hunted.

His was a unique experience — the agony far worse than any other wolf he’d spoken to about it. Most likely due to the origin of his condition. He’d not been bitten and infected as was custom among the culture. The disease had entered his bloodstream through a needle. His first attempt at a vaccine. There wasn’t one particular strain of the virus. Malcolm had taken multiple zoanthrope strains and created a mixture to prevent an infection of any of them. Of course now he was a werewolf, so obviously his calculations had been terribly incorrect.

Soraya Santiago.

With armed guards all over, and him moving between wolf and man, the collar seemed unnecessarily risky. The shift expanded the diameter of his neck by quite a few decimetres, and silver laced titanium won against flesh every time. Malcolm looked at the collar, in the library and surrounded by books. He was messaging furiously with one of his employees, Colin ‘Codes’ Espinoza, about all the details he could share, and what he could do to get around the locking mechanism. In the end, without Codes having his hands on it, the collar remained perfectly secure. It could still only be unlocked with a fingerprint. So, they turned towards locating the means by which it could be programmed.

While he worked, Malcolm could ignore the outside world and imagine he was free once again. All of his security at the estate knew him far better than those at Botwin, as he wasn’t entirely buried in work while on the grounds. The Library also had a few whiteboards with his thoughts and equations, along with numerous magnetic construction toys he used to build shapes. Manufacturers had such wonderful tools that both taught and engaged children nowadays, some of which he'd wished he'd had as a young boy. Perhaps he and his brother River wouldn't have gotten into such trouble using the real world for their experiments.

A noise paused his exploration of the device, and he slid it between two stacks of books, turning his attention to the three-dimensional cube sketched on the whiteboard. Someone was coming.

“Still working on that Doc?” Alejandro asked, setting down the meal shake. He rested his arms casually on the modified CM-127 tranquilizer gun. Malcolm had made some improvements on the original design that Colin Murdoch had invented in the ‘50s. It now had a hair trigger with a far more aerodynamic projectile that delivered its chemical payload so quickly it would shred a human’s veins. Malcolm bit back a sigh as he took a step from the board, pretending to need a broader view. Typically, if he launched into a lecture, they'd leave him to it. Alejandro, however, was a wild card. He was actually able to grasp some of his concepts and carry on a relatively decent conversation. 

“Yes. I know I'm missing something. You see, when velocity increases, so does gravitational mass. Therefore, in order to plot a point on the x-axis above zero, one must also place the point above zero on the y-axis in some sort of direct relation,” he said.

“So you're representing the whole of the universe as a closed system?” Alejandro asked. Malcolm turned to look at him, not understanding the question. “You have black hole there on the top right, infinite velocity and mass making it the other corner of the cube. What is that for Z? Time? So the three dimensions are mass, time, and velocity. That's all the universe is in your theory?”

This was exactly the type of brilliance that made Malcolm wonder at Alejandro’s chosen profession. The man had plucked out the simplest concepts of all the math on the board and honed in on his very crude representation by way of a cube. There was no need to falsify his smile.

“Not if both of these points are zero-zero-zero.” Malcolm circled the two corners, and the mercenary smiled.

“Ah. A loop.”

“A Möbius strip loop, to be precise. Where each axis changes at a specific degree.”

“I did one of those with a piece of paper once. Can't imagine it in 3-D. Well good luck Doc.” He gave him a smile before leaving, and Malcolm waited until he no longer heard his footsteps. He went back to work on the collar, only now he occasionally glanced up to his ‘closed system’, wondering if there wasn't something to that.

It was time.

The itch that originated somewhere between beneath his skin and some adjacent dimension of energy had become a scratch, and would soon rip through his flesh in a violent act of metamorphosis. Malcolm strode into his bedroom, looking out over the lush backyard forest. He was dressed casually, not wanting to destroy a perfectly good suit when he knew what his evening entailed. He carefully set aside his clothes, and stepped out of the sliding glass doors. The last vestiges of the sun peeked through the trees, and he felt the change even as he started a quick jog. Behind him, even as blinding pain broke bones and twisted his form, he still heard Alejandro from the third floor balcony.

“This is Sierra One. Big Bad has entered the woods. Execute Luna Protocol.”

“10-4 Sierra One, Luna Protocol initiated,” a distorted voice replied from his radio.