With Woodrow’s bones still mending and the second Wampus eye not getting any fresher, Bill Jones figured they should go ahead and schedule the next surgery for the day after Sal’s funeral. Woodrow didn’t object. Sometimes, the anxiety he felt lying in the guest room pulled at the recesses of his mind, but it was getting easier and easier to push it away. More than anything, he just wanted to take down the next beast and get his next upgrade. The Wampus eyes were nice, and made him a hell of a shot, but this next part, he knew, would make him a whole new type of mean motherfucker.

  Once he had the arms of a Whirling Whimpus, nothing as meek as a Not Deer would ever cause him or his friends trouble again.

  So, in the sorry state he was in, he laid back down on the garage table and let Bill Jones pluck out the innards of his eyeball. Practice had done the amateur surgeon some good; he didn’t need to reference his notes and he placed the Wampus eye in with finesse. The opiates Woodrow got for his broken bones made the recovery a breeze too. Everything went just about as smoothly as it could.

  The new eye brought more than just clearer eyesight. Once the swelling went down, he found that the symmetry between the two eyes, as crazy as they might look on their own, made him look much better overall. Finally, he didn’t look like he was borrowing someone else’s parts — they were his eyes.

  Even beyond that, something was happening to him that he didn’t expect. His mind seemed to sharpen, his mental capacity for observation increased. Looking through the eyes of a Wampus Cat made him start to think like one, if only just a little.

  Six smooth weeks of nothing passed. Woodrow’s bones and eye healed up nicely, and the wound of losing his friend was no longer quite as fresh; the open wound was now a scar, ugly and tough in his mind. He had plenty of those and was much better at dealing with them.

  It was an icy December morning, with blackened, sludgy snow lining the roads. Woodrow, Bill Jones and Chuck trundled through the woods to speak with the Cat Mother.

  The den was much more sparse than Woodrow remembered it being. Most of the Wampus Cats that previously crowded the place were nowhere to be found.

  “They moved into the old Not Deer territory,” Woodrow told the other two boys after exchanging glances with the Cat Mother. “They’d been forced into this little patch of territory for too long, and it had become overcrowded.”

  “Sal died so that y’all would have more room to stretch your damn legs?” Chuck said. His words were like a metal pick poking at Woodrow’s still-forming scar.

  “No, we did what we needed to do to get information,” Woodrow retorted. “So we can do what we set out to do.”

  “We?” Chuck said. “I don’t remember agreeing to any of this bullshit.”

  “You’re still here, ain’t you? I thought we had dealt with all this already, Chuck. How many times do we have to go back and forth about this?”

  Chuck looked down at the grass. “Yeah, yeah, alright. Just… shit… I wish we could’ve gone about it another way.”

  “Me too, Chuck. Me too.”

  “Ask her to tell you everything she knows about the Whimpus. Not just his whereabouts,” Bill Jones cut in. “How big he is, his habits, weaknesses, all that.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Woodrow looked at the Cat and nodded periodically.

  “It’s a she, actually, and she ain’t too big. A little smaller than your average Whimpus, which is probably good if I’m gonna be carrying those arms around the rest of my life. Might not be a knuckle dragger after all. She moves around a lot, but she can scratch me out the area they’ve seen her. We brought the map, right? And I should be able to track her down once we’re close enough, I suppose. She says that my eyes should make me more than capable of that.”

  “You suppose?” Bill Jones inquired.

  “I can do it,” Woodrow replied. “As for weaknesses,” he paused for a moment, “there are none. No big red button on her back. The best thing we can do is not let her know we’re there. Catch her by surprise. But that will be easier said than done. She has many alliances in the woods, including the Not Deer.”

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  “You mean the motherfuckers we just killed? Don’t think they’ll be helpin’ her much,” said Chuck.

  “Alliances?” said Bill Jones.

  “We didn’t kill every Not Deer in the world last month. We didn’t even kill all of the Not Deer in that herd, apparently. Just, when you take out their leader, they scatter like roaches and go lookin’ for a new herd. The Mother Cat reckons they would’ve found ‘em by now, including the one the Whimpus works with. She’ll know we’re comin’.”

  “Don’t mean she’ll see us comin’,” said Chuck. “Just gotta do better than last time.”

  “A lot better,” Bill Jones agreed. “Compared to a Whimpus, a Not Deer is about as tough as a tissue paper.”

  “Reckon we can take her down, just the three of us?” Woodrow asked.

  “I hope so, though a few more Bigfoot Boys might be nice right around now,” Bill Jones replied.

  “What about a few more Cats?”

  Bill Jones raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh, hell nah,” Chuck started. But Woodrow wasn’t listening. He was deep in silent conversation with the Mother Cat. A slight turn of her head suggested she was intrigued by what he was think-saying. Bill Jones looked irritated to not be included in the discussion, but Woodrow ignored that too.

  After a few minutes of awkward silence, Woodrow turned to the boys.

  “She says she’s willing to formally align with us, and that a few of the younger Cats would be itchin’ to join us in hunting down a Whirling Whimpus,” he said.

  “Formally align?” Bill Jones said.

  “There are alliances all through these woods,” Woodrow explained. “Every critter here is bound to some other critters. If we do this, we’ll have easy access to some parts of the woods and be pounced on in others the second we crack a twig in their territory. But for now, we’ll get the full support of the Wampus Cats; the young Cats will help us out, we’ll get the whereabouts of different cryptids we might want to snag, and information on anything else they see out there that they think might interest us.”

  “And what do they get in return?” Chuck asked suspiciously.

  “The best damn alliance any of them have ever made, I reckon,” Woodrow said. “One with humans.”

  “We’ll need some time to think about this, no doubt about that,” Bill Jones said. “There’s a lot we need to consider before we commit to anything.”

  “She says ‘Then ask your questions instead of staring at the trees, annoying human’. Her words, not mine.” Woodrow grinned. Bill Jones sniffed and made eye contact with the Mother Cat. Her pupils contracted into slivers of black against a backdrop of glowing yellow.

  “Who else are y’all aligned with?” he asked.

  She listed out the Wampus Cat alliances to Woodrow, and he relayed them to Bill Jones, who relayed them to a notebook he had in his pocket. As of right now, the only allies the Cats had were the Goatmen and the Grafton Monster.

  “That’s it?” Bill Jones said while scribbling words onto paper. “And how many enemies will we be makin’ here?”

  “We’ll be making most of our enemies on our own, given we’re setting out to harvest them for parts ‘n all,” Woodrow said. “The Cat’s biggest enemies are the Not Deer, who are friendly with the Whimpuses, Snallygasters, Woodboogers, and the Hellhounds — but they don’t exactly love us already, after what we did to the Buck.”

  “Funny that she didn’t tell us all this before she sicced us on the Buck,” Chuck grumbled. Woodrow looked at the Mother Cat. Her expression remained as stoic as ever, but the slightest twitch of her ears gave Woodrow the impression that she was feeling some satisfaction hearing Chuck’s realization.

  “She says we never asked,” Woodrow said. “And that she’s much more forthcoming with allies than she is with strange, reckless humans that stroll into her den with one of her children’s eyes stuck in their head.”

  Chuck scoffed, but said nothing else. He was never the best with complex situations; he was more of a point and shoot kind of guy. In fact, Woodrow had never seen him trying so hard to wrap his head around something. He could almost smell the smoke from the man’s gears turning.

  But Woodrow knew exactly what was going on. The Wampus Cats were cunning, and would likely betray them as soon as it seemed worthwhile to do so. They were playing a game that they wanted to end with them at the top of the totem pole. The rest of the cryptids were well aware of this, surely, which is why the Cat’s only allies were the feckless Goatmen, the Grafton Monster — who was dumber than the rock that he slept under — and now a gang of humans that couldn’t give two shits about ruling the woods.

  And if Woodrow understood that, Bill Jones surely did as well, and would undoubtedly appreciate the Wampus Cat’s tact and penchant for scheming.

  “Whelp, that about settles it for me. I think we should do it,” Bill Jones said. He put his notebook away. “The Cats are exactly what we need.”

  “Yep,” agreed Woodrow.

  “Yep,” Bill Jones replied.

  They both looked to Chuck, who was silent for a moment, still thinking about it.

  “Mmhm,” he said finally.

  It was unanimous; they would officially align themselves with the Wampus Cats.

  Alright, do I shake your paw or somethin’? Woodrow thought loudly to the Mother Cat. If cats scoffed, she probably would’ve.

  Again with this? No, she replied. If you all agree, then it is done. Just go up to the Whimpus territory. We’ll be waiting for you there.

  How will you know where we’re at in the territory?

  We will smell you.

  Woodrow sniffed his pits and nodded. Bill Jones took a pen and folded up map out from his pocket and drew a squiggly border around where the Mother Cat hovered her claw. The Whimpus was all the way up in southern West Virginia — it was going to be a long drive.