Lupo hesitated. This was his baby. Jessie had given in, but Sam had argued against it all the way.
“How can you be sure he won’t hunt you down, like I once tried to do?” Sam had protested.
“I can’t,” Lupo admitted. “But if we help him stop the bastards, he’ll be too grateful.”
“You hope,” Jessie added.
“I could say some crap about hope, but I won’t. I’m too much a pessimist.” Nick winked at them. “Don’t worry, he’ll be all right.”
“It’s not him we’re worried about,” Sam muttered.
Lupo’s hands and scalp tingled unpleasantly. But it wasn’t as painful as the deep scratches in his back where the other wolf had caught him. No, that was a lot worse, and he sensed how close he’d been to a broken back. The wounds had closed, but they still ached sharply deep inside, like arthritis. He’d never tangled with another werewolf before, and now he would have to do so again.
Of course, his early morning session with Jessie in the confined space of the Maxima hadn’t helped. Not his back, anyway.
“Arnow, I know it sounds kooky, but bear with me. You know deep down these murders don’t look right. They’re not normal. So you’ve got to start looking for the abnormal. Reason I have the doctor and Mr. Waters here is to be my witnesses that I’m trying to tell you the truth.”
Arnow tapped his hands on his steering wheel, anger etched on his tired face. “Okay, fine, I’ll grant that nothing looks right. The victims are torn up, there’s no usable evidence at the scene, there’s some kind of motive built into the casino project, but I can’t put my finger on it. And the damned lab’s not getting back to me. I’m in some kind of weird limbo. So when you gonna show me something that’ll start setting me straight?”
“Right now.” Lupo got out of the Maxima and waited for Jessie and Sam to join him. Sam went for the trunk, which he had popped. Lupo could feel the heat radiating from there and stepped away hastily.
Arnow climbed out and stretched his entire length. The weariness lay on him like a blanket. He looked like a man haunted by circumstances. His red-rimmed eyes indicated there had been no sleep within recent memory.
“Fine, now what?” the sheriff said as he watched Sam lift a shotgun from the Maxima’s trunk. The thought was clear as it passed across his features—were they planning to kill him and bury his body near the wayside?
Lupo kept away from Sam and also mostly out of sight of Arnow. “Sheriff, we tried to tell you something about the nature of your murderers. We’re not profilers, but in a minute you’ll see why this case has to be handled differently from what you’re used to. My friend Sam is here to make sure nothing happens to you or anyone else during this little demonstration.” He started to strip, keeping behind the car so the cop couldn’t see him clearly. “Even though I thought it would be the last thing I’d ever do, now I think it’s the only way to convince you.”
“Whatever it is, get it done so I can get back in time to mop up another crime scene.” Arnow looked at his watch pointedly, though it was obvious the trio was beginning to pique his interest.
Lupo gave Sam and Jessie the signal and they stepped closer to Arnow. Sam cradled the shotgun expertly. He was the pistol in the lion-tamer’s belt, ready to take down the beast if necessary.
This was new to Lupo. He’d never had an audience, except for Caroline. He cleared his mind as much as he could, eventually leaving behind human thought. He summoned the Creature from the depths, wherever it hid, visualizing himself on four legs.
At first he thought he couldn’t do it with people watching, but then he felt the mushy invisible wall he crossed from one form to another, and in a few seconds he was running as a human—
The Creature answered the unusual call…
—and then he loped off on four paws toward the woods opposite of the highway.
The sensory blast cleared his nostrils and brought the multitude of smells into his brain. He sensed and remembered the silver in the long gun held by the old man—
Sam, a friend…
—and he could smell the sex of the woman, his mate, and the suddenly frightened presence of the stranger near the cars.
He snarled once, over his shoulder. Normally he avoided humans, but the union of Lupo and Creature was slowly beginning to favor Lupo.
He reached for the woods and leaped into the underbrush, a howl of joy torn from his throat.
Julia Barrett
Jabbing pain in her head awoke her.
She groaned, but the sound was swallowed by the duct tape stretched across her lips.
Her crusted eyelids opened slowly, but as her eyes focused, they bulged at what she saw.
She was immobile, her head facing sideways. A few feet away, a girl—what used to be a girl—lay duct taped to a red hand truck, flaps of skin folded down, slashes across her body at irregular intervals, and wounds too grotesque to even contemplate. Barrett’s breath hitched in her throat, and she almost choked.
Breathe through your nose!
Breathe!
She recovered, snatched some air through her nostrils, then continued to check her fellow prisoner.
She had to be dead.
Barrett no sooner thought this than the girl’s eyes popped open in a monstrous blink, like something out of a horror movie.
Barrett jumped, startled, and felt a trickle between her legs.
Apparently you really could piss yourself, she observed in her professional mode. In her personal mode, she started to thrash around, realizing soon enough that she, too, was duct taped to what was probably a hand truck. The rigid metal bars that cradled her were cold and harsh on her bony frame. They were frighteningly unyielding. Like the one nearby, her hand truck was angled about forty-five degrees by being hooked to a kind of saw horse bar.
She sagged, giving up the thrashing to conserve strength. She looked around. Long fluorescents above gave everything in the cone of light a harsh greenish tone. It was a typical farmhouse basement, bare walls and a dirt floor. The walls were painted with spattered blood that had dried black. A cart held a small flat-screen tele vi sion, which now showed silent gray snow. A TV tray held grimy implements of a surgical nature.
Tears squeezed from between Barrett’s lids.
This was an experienced torturer.
Christ, whatever Lupo was into up here, she sure wished she could see him now, bursting through the door and rescuing her and the poor wretch nearby.
But he didn’t even know she was here, spying on him, and if he did, he loathed her enough that he would probably have let her die.
She prided herself on her toughness. But now she cried like a helpless child.
In essence, that’s what I’ve become. Complete reversion.
The girl taped to the next hand truck stared through her. The eyes might as well not have been open at all. Her facial muscles seemed to have been severed. She was a living corpse.
I must have showed up just when he was trolling for his next victim. He probably used to space them apart by long periods, but now he’s given in to his urges and has started to overlap them. He can’t help himself.
Maybe she could use that knowledge.
She fixed his features in her memory. The reddish hair, an obvious hairpiece. Large frame, tallish. Thin legs. Very average. A typical American. He’d slide under most radar screens as if he wasn’t there. The perfect serial killer.
And here he had an assembly-line torture factory.
Barrett circled her eyes to their widest angle, ignoring the thrusting pain in her head. Whatever he’d hit her with had laid her open and scrambled something in the side of her face, but she could still use her brain.
Dear God, was that her purse lying on the dirt floor near her feet?
If he hadn’t opened it, her Glock was still there.
She slowly rolled her legs and body in order to loosen the duct tape. If he bought cheap, she might loosen enough to squirm out from under it. Her clothing was loose, so
there was a chance to slip out of the garments and leave them behind. She set her mind to working toward that goal and had been doing it a half hour when a shaft of light fell on her from behind, and she sensed a door opening.
She went limp, pretending unconsciousness.
“I’m back, Courtney and guest!” His voice sent shivers down her back. If only she hadn’t stopped for gas. She should have ignored the tailgating asshole!
He was babbling now, mostly to the other girl, whose eyes and body no longer acknowledged anything. Her beating heart seemed a mere formality.
He likes to know their names. If he goes into my purse, I’m done for.
She felt him sidle near. He breathed over her for a few minutes, watching. She faked being out, and he must have bought it, because he started to undo her tape job. As tape fell off, she felt metal touch her skin. He was using shears to cut through both tape and clothing.
Careless idiot!
A mouth-breather, too.
Perhaps he’d been in a hurry and had intended his tape job on her to be temporary. He wanted her nude while still knocked out. Then he would retape her, and the torture would begin. She prepared for the right moment.
As soon as he’d removed most of her skirt and the tape, she sprang off the hand truck, naked but motivated by an adrenaline rush of fear and determination.
Arnow
Later he would feel embarrassed. He was shocked seeing the naked cop running, and instinctively he turned to make a lame joke about living in the city too long.
But then the air rippled around the running man, and just like that! he disappeared and in his place was an animal on four paws, a black wolf larger than any he had ever seen.
Arnow sat down on his ass hard enough to feel the cracked asphalt dig into his buttocks through his uniform pants. It felt weird, as if moving in slow-motion.
“Jesus Christ!” he blurted. “What the fuck?”
He looked around for some sort of CGI rig. What kind of smoke-and-mirrors gag was at work here? But the grim faces discouraged him.
“What—what was that?” His voice was a croak. “What the hell was that?”
Jessie Hawkins turned her lovely face toward him, and he tried to focus on what she said. She seemed very uncomfortable. He couldn’t shake the sight of the man he knew as Nick Lupo blurring and then turning into a wolf. Jesus, this was more than he could handle.
Jessie was still talking, trying to get his attention. “Tom. Tom, that’s what you’re up against, except that Detective Lupo is not the enemy. He’s not one of them. But there is a group—a pack—and they’re killing the tribal council one by one.”
“What—what is he?”
Sam still cradled the shotgun as he scanned the trees. “I’m sorry, but we call that a werewolf, Sheriff, and it’s not something any of us wanted to acknowledge, either.” Sam’s eyes welled up. “The story’s long and tragic, and I won’t bore you with it now. My son was infected with a disease many years ago, and it eventually passed on to an innocent youth—Nick. I had to put my son down with my own hands, Sheriff. I know how this must look, but we really haven’t got time to tell you everything.”
Arnow shook his head to clear it. He rolled himself slowly, painfully, to his feet. “What—How the fuck am I supposed to fight that?” he growled. “Assuming I accept any of what you’re saying?”
Sam tilted up the shotgun. “Silver buckshot in my shells, Sheriff. That’s how, just like all the B movies. But there’s no shooting at Detective Lupo, even when he looks like that. He’s one of the good guys. I hope we can convince you.”
Arnow reflected that perhaps the only two people in the entire county who might were standing in front of him.
“When is he coming back?” he asked.
“He’s going to hunt and work on tracking the other werewolves, Tom. We’re leaving him be for a while.”
“Can he control that thing?” He waved a hand. “That thing he turns into.”
“Not always,” Sam said. “Hence the shotgun.”
“Jesus,” said Arnow again, staring at the trees where the wolf had disappeared. “All right, fill me in.”
“Let’s get back to town first,” Jessie said. “We have to try to keep the remaining council members alive. Eagle Feather and Davison, and the Grey Hawk family. We’ve got Grey Hawk covered. He doesn’t know it, but he’s got just the right ammo.” She handed him two boxes of Remington shells. “Take these now. Twelve-gauge. Maybe you can issue these to your men, or sneak them into their guns. Tell them to use their riot guns. Otherwise they’ll never kill the wolves.”
Stunned, Arnow took them. “You’re telling me regular ammo won’t—”
“Nope,” Sam said.
“Why is this shit happening? Why in my county?”
“We don’t know,” Jessie said. “Something to do with the casino?”
“Not sure what’s slated to happen after the council is gone,” Sam added. “There’s got to be a motive for all this death, but—”
“Yeah,” Arnow said, “you don’t know it.”
Jessie had Lupo’s keys. “Let’s get back, Tom.”
Arnow looked at the two of them, hysteria rising in his throat like a bitter column of bile. He was shaken, his world tilted, his understanding of reality was now warped forever. He wasn’t sure he’d ever recover.
But he couldn’t deny the evidence seen with his own eyes. He brushed off his uniform pants and headed for his cruiser, feeling somehow diminished in the face of the universe.
Now anything was possible.
Julia Barrett
Hampered by the angle, she fell off the cart sideways—but under his desperate grasp.
She rolled away, her cart moving backward and striking the other hand truck. The implement tray went flying in a shower of clanging metal. Her captor was tangled up in the metallic mess, but already gathering himself for pursuit.
She faked him out by rolling back toward him, and he overshot her naked body just as she snatched up her purse and felt the weight of the Glock still inside.
After fumbling with the zipper, she reached in while her attacker grasped a metal bar. He swung it, and its long reach caught her a glancing blow on the shoulder. The gun, barely clutched, flew into the shadows, and she growled in frustrated pain and anger.
They faced each other briefly, his eyes crazed, and then he attacked with the bar and feinted, this time catching her across the side of the head when she fell for it.
She felt her skin rip open and hot blood rush down her face like a warm caress.
He pressed his advantage and backed her toward the wall, where bare cinder block ground into her shoulder blades. Keenly aware of the bloodstains behind her, she realized she was adding to the grotesque art gallery with her own life’s blood.
His rancid breath and bulging eyes came closer as he pressed the bar two-handed into her throat.
She kneed upward and caught his groin hard enough to throw him off, grabbing the bar from him and giving him a backhand stroke across the side of the head that sidelined him into the wall headfirst. She barely noticed her feet being slit open by the spilled scalpels and sundry blades that littered the floor.
The Glock lay behind him, and he was already recovering. He grasped the bar before she could swing it again and tore it from her grip. Assessing the situation, Barrett let the Glock go and made for the doorway he’d come from, slipping through only seconds before him. She turned and kicked him with a bleeding foot, sending him flying backward into the basement.
Regretfully, she reached ground level and followed the hallway to the front door and out, stumbling down off the porch and into the woods.
Regretful because she wanted to recover her Glock and empty it into him.
But out was out, and she wasn’t going back until she had the local cops with her. If she found her way through these damned trees.
Her feet throbbing, sliding, leaving bloody chunks behind on the forest floor, she ran blind, letting
whiplike branches slit her skin further. Ragged breathing flew behind her, and she realized it was hers.
Unmindful of the slashing undergrowth, she ran on into the woods.
Lupo
From his cover in the trees, Lupo watched them go. It had gone better than he expected. After racing nearly a mile in the Creature’s body, he had pulled the reins and returned to the wayside, Changed again, and waited to see what would happen. The Creature was confused, questioning, but it accepted. His clothes would go home with Jessie, so he would head back out into the forest to seek out the enemy.
Jessie’s jealousy of Heather Wilson aside, would he be able to save the reporter from the bastard? She seemed in control of whatever was happening between them. Maybe she was a part of it. But her ambition was narcissistic—she wanted television fame, not the tabloid kind.
For now, Lupo accepted that they were still at a disadvantage. No evidence, no chance of a judge granting warrants against the Altima driver or the kid. Or the anonymous older man he’d seen lecturing the kid. No way to legally search their house on Hemlock, if that was their base. No, even with Arnow marginally on board, they were now vigilantes. Nothing else. There was no other way to deal with this situation, and now was the time. If Arnow’s reinforcements suddenly arrived in the form of state police or even feds, they’d get in the way and nothing would get done, and everybody on the death list would die. Lupo was sure there’d be no chance of subjecting these killers to regular justice. He and Jessie had gone back and forth on this, but even though she was right—his approach was risky and not constitutional—he couldn’t come up with a better way. Would feds and state cops ever be convinced to use silver ammunition? Would they acknowledge the obvious when it threatened to rattle their rational outlook?
Doubtful.
In fact, it was fucking unlikely.
Lupo’s method was the only way left.
And Lupo’s method was to ambush the bastards and kill them all. No quarter.
He wondered if Jessie would ever look at him in the same way again.
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