The pain kept him from speculating. The pain kept his flesh a constant miasma of hallucinogenic reveries interrupted only to drag the screams from his raw, bloody throat.
Schwartz struggled to rise and reach Alpha, for he knew Tef had become ambitious and materialistic. He recognized the signs in Tef and would have warned his old friend, the other descendant of the old order. Tef was a scrappy little mongrel they had thought they could shape into a great future Alpha male, but he had seen the false light of indulgence and instant gratification, and he baldly rejected their notions of the military code crossed with the rule of Alpha and the way of the wolfskin.
No, Schwartz knew he was done. He half expected Tef to finish him right now, but the young one had been distracted by a bright object once again. This time a woman, of all things. A disgusting human. Tef had the right to challenge Alpha and take over, start his own pack, but Schwartz and Tannhauser once thought he would learn at their side.
Now Schwartz knew better. From his single eye he shed bitter silver-acid tears that stung and burned and sizzled the external skin as well as the internal.
He still felt his noble grandfather living through him and his experiences, but now the connection faded. It was time to step aside. Schwartz awaited his fate, grasped by the blinding torturous pain of being eaten alive from the inside out.
Tef
After helping One-Eye Schwartz back down to his bunk, he went into the den to get away from the crybaby’s whimpering.
Christ, you’d think the bastard hadn’t spent all the same months in Iraq.
Yeah, he’d been wounded a couple times. Silver was a bitch. But as a hardened combat veteran, he should have been able to handle it without crying like a girl. Alpha had been hurt, too, by the enemy wolf, but he hadn’t whimpered about it.
Still, that had been a lapse in Alpha’s judgment, hadn’t it?
Tef shook his head in disgust.
Now was almost time for breaking Alpha’s hold. He was hampered by the current financial arrangement. Their employer made payments to Tannhauser’s private Cayman Islands account, which they verified through a secure Web site. For Tef to claim his pay for this and other missions, he needed the account number and password only two people had: Tannhauser and their employer. Tef could torture it out of their employer, but he’d been stymied by all the secrecy.
They had tied up their terrified prisoners, and then they’d tortured the old man, Eagleson, asking him about Cranberry Island until he led them to his leaky old boat. The island idea had come from Mr. XYZ, who decided they could more easily lure their enemies to a remote location. Tannhauser had taken the group of prisoners to the island, and Tef was to lure the other wolf and anyone else who came along into their jaws.
Tef loved missions like this.
Gave him a big old boner, they did.
He conjured up the sexpot Heather Wilson and the hold he’d had on her. Sometimes the werewolf gene affected humans who came in touch with it in bizarre ways, but Tef had had the same effect on humans his entire life.
He grinned, approaching the freezer for another snack.
And went rigid.
The freezer door had been opened. He could tell because it hadn’t closed right.
He Changed and stood on four legs, sniffing the air. He’d tasted the same scent, crossed with that of the wolf who had reconned them. Having another wolf in the area was akin to a challenge for Tef, but there were various threads here in this supposedly sleepy community. The radio preacher seemed ready and willing to incite a riot over the fishing rights. The casino project caused a problem for their employer. And presumably for others in the community. Tef loved strife of all kinds.
But somebody had breached their base.
He left the wounded Schwartz, barely able to control his disgust.
It was almost time to bug out. Every wolf for himself.
Mr. XYZ
Ground mist ebbed and flowed like an ocean tide off the road and down onto the shoulder. Visibility had decreased steadily, but he knew the landmarks well.
He steered off the main road and bumped along through the claustrophobia-inducing pine trunks until he reached the spot. His spot. When he climbed out of his SUV, he displaced the mist around his legs and sent it swirling away into eddies.
He dragged the usual vinyl Christmas tree bundle, unmindful of the sickening crunch heard each time the sagging end thumped over a rock or tree root. The black pond beckoned.
Had things played out differently, he might have had two bundles to mess with. He was suddenly glad for the less work. His head still throbbed from where the other bitch had smacked him. That was a lapse in judgment. He’d gotten greedy, careless, too wrapped up in his other business. He’d learned a lesson!
Plus she’d been older than his usual preference, even if well preserved enough. She’d looked a lot better behind the wheel of that Lexus than after he spread her out on his hand truck.
No, he’d been lucky there. He knew it.
He threaded the chain through the loops in the bag. He locked the padlock and stood, sighing with fatigue. Then he lifted his heavy burden.
Somewhere, a wolf howled and another answered. He shivered.
A sudden voice startled him, and he dropped the bag at his feet.
The flashlight beam blinded him when he whirled. A burly shape stood behind it.
“Oh, it’s you!”
Mr. XYZ said nothing.
“I was wonderin’ what all the commotion was. The fog’s got me a little spooked, I guess. And those damn wolves. What are you doin—”
The voice faded to a whisper and the light wobbled.
Mr. XYZ looked down and saw that a long strand of bloody hair had somehow poked out through an unzipped portion of the bag. The flashlight beam made the blood glitter black.
“What—But that’s—”
“This is unfortunate, Sabin,” he whispered. “Very unfortunate.”
The light flicked upward.
“Wait! Wait!”
The Taser shot who knew how many thousands of volts into Sabin and turned him into a dancing marionette, then dropped him like a sack of shit.
“Shit!” Mr. XYZ muttered.
He stepped on the flashlight and ground it under his boot. Then he swiftly deployed his Gerber folding knife and, a little sadly, slit Sabin’s throat before he could recover from the Taser’s effects.
He watched the big security guard bleed out, most of the blood hitting the pond. All the while, he wondered how the whole fucking thing had spun out of his control.
Now he had two sacks of trash to dispose of after all.
He set to it. He had other commitments to keep.
The howling intensified and gave him the creeps.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Lupo
Arnow’s call found Lupo and Jessie on their way to Sam’s.
“Listen, I got a council member here. A Mr. Davison. Says he and Eagleson were hunkered down at his place when they were surrounded by wolves. Then there was some sort of scuffle and the things backed off.”
“Yeah, I was kind of there.” Lupo grinned despite his fear for Sam.
“You or it?” Arnow’s voice was crushed gravel.
“Both of us, Tom. Both of us. But I got them away from the house and hurt one of ‘em. But what’s worse is that no one at Sam’s safe house is answering. We’re heading there now, but it looks bad.”
“What the hell’s going on, Lupo? What are these guys—these monsters—doing?”
“Somebody’s pulling their strings, maybe getting revenge for past wrongs. Something like that. Fact is, we’re always a step behind. Reacting instead of acting.”
“What the fuck am I supposed to do about it? How can I stop something that doesn’t even make sense? I’m stranded here—no feds, no lab reports yet, and butchered bodies everywhere.”
“You get some of that silver ammo distributed?”
“A couple of my deputies have it, maybe more
by now. But how are we gonna catch these bastards in one place?”
Lupo looked at Jessie, grimly driving. “We have to ambush them and wipe them out, Tom. No trial, no evidence, no jury. What we showed you today should make it clear that this is no typical crime wave. We don’t know the motive, but it doesn’t matter. They’ll never pay if we don’t take care of it ourselves. Think of it as a disease.” There was a blip in his ear. “Hold it, I got another call.”
He cut off Arnow’s voice and looked at Jessie. “Sam,” he said, clicking in.
“Nicholas, it’s Sam.”
“Hey, Sam,” he said, wary.
“My old friend Eagle Feather stumbled into our safe house,” Sam said. “He told us we weren’t very safe there, that Davison and he had run into the enemy. He convinced me we should move on from my cottage, to let him take us to a safer hideout.”
“Shit,” Lupo mouthed. “They’ve got them all.” In the phone, he said, “Sam, where did Eagle Feather take you and the Grey Hawks? We can meet you there.”
Jessie’s face was ghostly pale in the dark car. One hand was on Lupo’s knee, gripping hard.
“Turns out there’s a perfect hiding place on Cranberry Island,” Sam said. “You know it, Nicholas?”
“I know of it. Never been there.”
“Eagle Feather has a boat. We’re at the north end of the island. There’s a construction site here.”
“How the hell are we supposed to get out to you there?”
“You don’t have to come here at all, Nicholas.”
There was some commotion, a sound that might have been a slap, and then Sam hurriedly said, “If you want to meet us here, you can find a boat. Jessie has one.”
She nodded.
“All right, hang on. I’ll see what we can do. Call you back?”
“Sure, Nicholas, anytime.”
The line was cut. Lupo clicked back to Arnow. “Shit, man, they’ve been grabbed—Sam, Eagle Feather, Bill Grey Hawk and his family.”
“How do you know?”
“Sam called me Nicholas, but he knows my given name is Dominic. They’ve got them stashed on Cranberry Island. The fuckers’re using them as bait. Probably they want to get rid of us because we know what they are. They figure there are too many of us clued in. This is their chance to fi nish the job and take out the witnesses, too. Of course, they don’t know we told you about the werewolf thing.”
The werewolf thing.
Jessie’s hand was scalding.
“The disease? But you have the disease.”
“Don’t I know it.”
He added, “Jessie does have a boat. We’ll wait for you.”
“Davison tells me he has a boat here at the marina. Go in separately and meet on the island? Wait.” There was silence for a minute. “They’re developing the island. The north end has piers for the construction site, but the south end has an old one too. Meet at the south pier and go in together, or squeeze them? I have two of the special shotguns here. No time to clue in my deputies, except I can tell them to follow us in and mop up.”
Lupo thought hard. An obvious trap, but if they showed up in greater strength and from two directions, they might turn it into a trap’s trap. “Hell of a gambit, Arnow.”
“This whole thing’s fucked, far as I’m concerned.”
Prey: Halloran and Morton
The patrol almost over, they swung out toward the marina. Last stop before turning over the shift to Faber and Arrales. They’d been doubled up since the killings began, but Halloran kept complaining.
“All we do is drive around and around, and then we clean up a crime scene.”
“You want to be there when it goes down?” Morton was close to retirement. He preferred cleanup duty than getting involved in some kind of weirdo killing.
“‘To protect and to serve,’” Halloran quoted. “It’d be nice to actually manage that sometime.”
“You’re a good cop, Hal. I’d rather be a live cop.”
“At your age.”
Morton laughed, but he was serious. “Damn right at my age. I’ve earned some free time. I like fishing.”
“You fish every weekend.”
“Yeah, but I’d fish every day if I was done.”
“You’re done, old man.” Halloran liked Morton, but he was beginning to tire of this retirement talk. Got in the way of the job.
“By the way,” Morton said, “Jerry said something about switching our 12-gauge slugs for some new stuff at the station.”
“What?”
“Don’t know what it’s about. The boss said we’ve got defective ammo, I guess.”
“Figures! We’ll be back in about fifteen minutes. Do it then, I guess.”
“Hey, look at that,” Morton whispered.
Halloran squinted where Morton was pointing. At the wa-ter’s edge on the ramp, a figure was wrestling one of the marina boats into the channel. He had it half in, almost floating, and soon he’d start winching it off the trailer.
“Christ, he’s stealing the boat,” Halloran said. His hand went for the radio, calling it in.
“We better grab him.”
They slid to a stop near the top of the ramp, and Halloran hit the lights. “Police!” Morton blared out over the PA. “Hold it right there, next to the boat! Hands where we can see ‘em!”
The figure froze and held up his hands.
“Keep them high up!” Halloran said. They popped the doors and stepped out, Halloran with his Glock in hand and Morton with the pump gun.
It was a young guy, blond, wiry looking. He was smiling.
“What’s he smiling about?” Morton muttered. They approached cautiously.
The air rippled around the guy, and then a wolf stood in his place. He growled and lunged.
The deputies let loose with their guns, but the wolf didn’t seem to feel the bullets at all.
The wolf was upon them, his jaws tearing Halloran’s throat out before the cop could bring his hands up. Morton turned and lumbered up the concrete ramp, puffing and blubbering in panic, dropping the shotgun. But the wolf caught him and brought him down in seconds, ripping out his jugular. He sampled the hot blood and howled.
A distant siren seemed to answer.
Moments later Tef floated the boat, climbed aboard, then headed for the middle of the dark lake.
Heather Wilson
She’d been driving around, ready to give up and go to the courthouse to grab Arnow when Lupo’s black Maxima roared past, screeching around a slow-moving pickup.
Jesus, what the hell was he doing?
She turned behind him and started laying on the horn.
Her skin was flaming hot, but she felt cold as she negotiated the curvy road, trying to catch up to him and make him pull over.
Suddenly his brake lights flashed, and the car slewed to the side, rocking to a stop.
Lupo leaped from the passenger seat, Glock in hand and pointed at the Lexus. “What? What’s the deal? Hands in sight!”
She slid her window down and smiled grimly. “Is that an official police greeting, Detective?”
“What the fuck are you doing?” The gun barrel didn’t waver.
She felt irritation coloring her cheeks. “Hey, I’m trying to tell you. That guy I was, uh, seeing. I think he’s the killer.”
“Helluva reporter,” he muttered. “So, why tell me?”
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but it looks to me like things are fucked up around here. I was going to tell the sheriff, but frankly I’m not sure he’s the right person.”
They stared at each other.
A car drove by and swerved, seeing the gun in his hand.
“Shit,” he said. The Glock disappeared. “What’s your interest? Journalistic?”
“Hell no, not anymore. Personal. I can’t prove it, but I think he killed my camera guy. Almost killed me.”
“Look, we don’t have time to discuss this. We’re helping Arnow with this thing, but unofficially. It’s dange
rous. People are dead.”
“I can handle a gun.” She held up the Beretta 92F she’d kept in the glove box.
He leaned into the Maxima and spoke to the driver. Then he said, “Follow us. We’re taking a boat ride. Keep that gun handy.”
She gulped. Had she hoped he’d laugh at her, tell her everything was normal? When she got in behind them, it was all she could do to keep up.
She tried to ignore her hot and cold flashes.
Lupo
Getting the boat uncovered and gassed up took longer than he expected. Damn good thing it was already in the water. Heather seemed to shiver and shake the whole time he and Jessie worked. Jessie was clearly not happy with Heather’s presence. But there was too much at stake.
At Sam’s cottage they had found blood and a mess, the results of a struggle. Lupo felt the silver pellets embedded in the wood and had to wait outside.
“Looks like they tortured somebody in the bedroom,” Jessie said grimly.
So they’d torn out of there and driven like demons until the sleek silver Lexus pulled up, honking like mad.
Now Jessie handed Heather the silver-loaded shotgun, explaining curtly that it was not to come close to Nick. They loaded up with extra shells—did she have a never-ending supply?
Jessie piloted the aged tri-hull expertly through the narrow channels and along the darkened shores of Lakes Catfish and Cranberry. Dark huddled shapes indicated where the historic Eagle River boathouses rose out of the lake surface. One boathouse had hosted T.S. Eliot himself in its second-floor apartment. It was a story Lupo had found fascinating, but now the characteristic buildings were nothing but hiding places for the enemy.
Without Jessie’s knowledge of the night-shrouded landmarks, they never could have found their way to their twin targets.
First they swung out north to Voyageur Lake, where Lupo jumped off and waded to shore. Inside the tree line, he shed his clothes and Changed. The Hemlock house was quiet, but lights were on. The Creature caught the scent—the wounded black-and-gray wolf, with silver sizzling away inside his many festering wounds.
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