by MJ Compton
Luke looked nervous, as he should. “Restin ordered me to come back and make sure you two stay in your room. The blue pickup truck from New Sinai drove by the recording studio a little while ago.”
Lucy made a small, distressed sound, which slashed at Stoker’s conscience.
“We’re delta, not stupid,” he snapped at Luke then slammed the door in his face.
“Maybe you can sneak into New Sinai right now,” Lucy said, sounding both breathless and hopeful.
Stoker braced himself before he turned to face her. “It isn’t safe.”
He hated the way her bright expression dimmed.
“We don’t know who is in the truck,” he explained. “We don’t know if they just got into town, or if they’ve completed their business and are going back. We don’t know enough to do anything.”
She opened her mouth, as if to argue, but nothing came out.
He sat next to her on the mattress, and she twitched, as if tempted to inch away so his thigh no longer grazed hers. He couldn’t let her shut him out again; not now, not when he’d finally breeched her defenses.
That’s all her anger was: self-preservation.
“How did you get out of the car? Were you hurt?” he asked.
Lucy shrugged, as if the answer were inconsequential. “When the cops went to the house to notify Mom about the accident, she asked about me. Or so she said. I don’t remember anything except being in the trunk, and this sort of thing isn’t exactly a warm and fuzzy story a family retells in greeting card moments. Not that my family had many of those, either.”
He hated asking, but he had to know. “How long were you in there?”
She waved him off, her expression a cross between annoyance and a grimace. “I don’t know. I was eight years old. Time didn’t mean anything.”
A non-answer. He covered her hand and waited.
She shrugged again. “The car was towed to a body shop. They found me there, or so I’ve been told. I really don’t remember.”
“Until something triggers your claustrophobia. Your real problem is that you can’t forget.”
He cradled the back of her head in his hand, fingers combing through the short, silky fluff of her yellow hair. He held her steady as he leaned in for a kiss, the one thing that was always good, always right between them.
Lucy didn’t struggle, didn’t try to push him away or break free. “This won’t solve anything,” she said, coming up for air.
“I don’t expect it to. It’s a kiss.”
“Your kisses are pretty potent,” she said, her voice a little shaky.
A compliment. That was a good sign.
“Forgive me?” he asked. “Learning curve and all that,” he added, requesting from her what she’d demanded from him. “I didn’t understand.”
But she didn’t respond.
He sighed. “Look, I’m feeling pretty rotten about what happened earlier. But you never said no.”
She stared at him, as if he’d sprouted horns. “What?”
“You only said you weren’t in the mood, that you couldn’t breathe. You never said stop. You never said no.”
Lucy clenched her fists and brought them to her cheeks. “I’ve tried to forget about that accident all my life,” she said, her eyes unfocused and glazed as if covered with a protective film.
Talk about denial. Her father locking her in the trunk of his car was intentionally cruel, not an accident.
“I want to forget about needing to go to the bathroom so badly that I wet myself, about being so cold and so hungry. So completely helpless. I cried, Stoker. I cried, and nobody heard me.” Her voice cracked.
He thought he was going to embarrass himself by being sick. He wanted to hurt, to maim and kill someone. He needed a physically violent outlet for the helpless rage her words evoked.
He wanted to howl at the moon.
She blinked and the distance in her gaze disappeared. “You didn’t hear me. I don’t care if what you tried to do to me is mandated werewolf law or was just you being selfish, you didn’t hear me. I’m more selfish, Stoker. I had to learn to be in order to survive. Michelle is a statistic. Children of abusers tend to repeat those kinds of relationships. But not me. I’m a survivor. I can’t, and I won’t let you or anyone one else take that away from me.”
Dusk enhanced their fear.
If not for his allergies, General Butler believed he would smell the terror shimmering off the citizens of New Sinai. He liked them afraid, but they were supposed to fear divine retribution and himself, not the creatures outside the fence.
And that annoyed him.
Somehow, he had to regain the upper hand.
Sending a couple of soldiers into town for a few days worth of provisions helped restore a portion of the trust he’d lost when they’d run out of food. No one was yet hungry enough to trust Mattie’s foraging. Ever since he’d sent her offspring to the children’s center, she’d been unstable. Not even Reuel, one of his most steadfast soldiers, could control her. Something needed to be done about her, and soon.
“What if the wolves come back?” someone asked.
He glanced at the citizens clustered outside the door of the Tabernacle.
“They’ve shown up right before dawn two mornings in a row,” someone else said.
“They’ve gone away hungry both times. They have no reason to believe there is anything here for them,” Randy pronounced.
“We can expect them back,” Mattie shouted.
Reuel grabbed her arm, but she jerked it free.
“And on the seventh morning, the walls will come down,” she said. “Have all of you forgotten your Bible in your zeal to–”
Reuel backhanded Mattie across the mouth. Drops of blood flew like dark insects swarming around her head in the deepening twilight.
“We’re prepared should the beasts return,” Randy said, his booming voice echoing in the silent aftermath of Reuel’s blow. He gazed at his followers. His people. They’d come to the Tabernacle, to him, for reassurance.
“God is testing us,” he told them. “Testing our faith. If we have faith, if we believe, He will keep us safe.”
“That’s why we have guns,” someone at the back edge of the crowd muttered.
Randy glared in direction from which the infidel spoke, but he couldn’t see who had dared defile this sacred moment with their blasphemy.
“We have seen with our own eyes what becomes of those whose faith is weak.”
“We’ve heard the pre-dawn singing before the wolves begin to howl,” the voice came again.
This time, it sounded as if it came from behind him, from within the Tabernacle itself, which made no sense at all.
Men had died to keep the secret of his Tabernacle, a tradition he fully intended to honor. As soon as he could disperse the crowd, he’d investigate to make certain his personal escape hatch remained hidden.
“We’re ready to protect New Sinai,” Randy repeated. “We’ve been preparing to defend our country since the moment we separated from the United States.”
Several of his soldiers shouted their agreement, and some of the stabbing tension between his shoulders eased. “If we are ready to take on a super power, how dare you doubt that we can handle a few animals?”
He wished it were light enough to see individual faces instead of a sea of pale blurs. Most of his followers weren’t sophisticated enough to keep their emotions and thoughts from their expressions. He’d have to manipulate generic fear instead of focusing on specifics.
“These animals are wolves.” He waited for his message to sink through thick skulls. “Doesn’t anyone remember how the wolves got here?” he prompted.
“The gov-ment brought ‘em back, even though folks didn’t want ‘em,” someone said
. “They kill livestock.”
Still, no one connected the dots. “The wolves are part of the United States government conspiracy.” He spoke softly in order to emphasize his words. “And what have we been doing since we founded New Sinai?”
“Getting ready to fight off a gov-ment invasion! The wolves are part of the gov-ment invasion!”
Randy smiled.
Sleep eluded Michelle, lurking in the darkest corners of the room she shared with Randy, taunting her like a nightmare.
Terror lodged in a gooey clump in her throat, and tense foreboding thrummed in the atmosphere like a fleet of heavy duty refrigerator motors, which was ridiculous because New Sinai had nothing as convenient as electricity.
She shifted, jostling Randy, who muttered an unintelligible response.
The last thing in the world she wanted to do was rouse him. The impromptu gathering in front of the Tabernacle had left him sexually charged, and he didn’t care if his demands disturbed the baby or not. Michele barely endured his attention.
Her eyes were dry and gritty, the lids like sandpaper when she blinked. Each punch of her heart against her ribs only heightened the sense that the too-quiet darkness was literally the calm before the storm.
She should have left when Lucy’s piano player and his hunky friend offered.
Right. The hunky friend with the bushy blond moustache couldn’t possibly be interested in her in any way except to pity her. So why did she tingle every time she saw him? She was a married woman. She shouldn’t be fantasizing about another man while Randy snored next to her.
The baby kicked her ribs in agreement. Or for her stupidity.
Michelle measured the passage of time heartbeat by heartbeat. She nearly nodded off once or twice, but the irregular rhythm of Randy’s snores jarred her awake.
The darkness gradually eased, which only wound her tighter. Fear weighted her chest and lungs. She shifted on the mattress, and the springs creaked. Randy’s snores ceased, and she sensed that he was awake.
“Have they started yet?” he asked.
“Not yet,” she whispered. “What are you going to do?”
There was a time when he’d shared his plans with her, but he hadn’t been open with her in months, before New Sinai had attracted so many followers, so many others to dazzle and awe with his brilliance.
“Never mind what I’m going to do. Concentrate on what you’re going to do, and see that you do it right.” He then proceeded to outline her role for the next few hours.
Day three of Operation Jericho started exactly like the first two, right down to Lucy’s mumbled hope that the residents of New Sinai would get a clue soon.
Stoker didn’t enjoy getting up before sunrise any more than she did, maybe even less. He was a creature who slept after moonset; a professional musician whose live performances weren’t over until long after midnight. This predawn hour usually saw him climbing into his bed, not out of it.
The bus ride was silent, as if everyone stole a few extra moments of sleep. Then the rituals of stripping, shape-shifting, and farewell hugs from Lucy. He loved the way she buried her face in his ruff, inhaling deeply as if to imprint his scent on her brain.
As he and Hank loped through the forest, he noticed the way seemed easier than it had yesterday. Two days of travel hadn’t created paths in the wilderness, and they were careful to use different routes both coming and going, so there would be nothing for the humans to follow, yet the ground seemed almost groomed to allow for easier passage.
Stoker bent his head to the earth and sniffed.
Activity. A lot of it. He recognized a couple of scents from New Sinai. He wished he had time to explore this phenomenon. He hadn’t smelled anyone from inside the compound on the outside on any of his other excursions in these woods. Why now?
Hank veered off, heading for his own position for the operation.
It was all Stoker could do to concentrate on Operation Jericho and not on his personal issues.
The clouds faded from charcoal to pewter, and the sound of Lucy’s voice filled the air, his cue to begin forcing his howl.
Maybe the residents of New Sinai had searched for the speakers. That would explain why so many of their scents lingered on the ground outside the fence. The roadies had hidden the speakers well. Even Hank, whose hearing came closest to perfection, hadn’t been able to pinpoint the source of Lucy’s mechanical song.
Mechanical or not, the sound of her voice did things to Stoker that shouldn’t have happened, not while he was in wolf form and Lucy was human. He needed her so much, but she hadn’t relented in her refusal to let him near her.
Yet she’d hugged him, hadn’t want to let him off the bus only moments ago.
His frustration continued to mount.
Too bad he was stuck on this mission. He was mated. He should be alone with his wife. There was a reason for the rules. His current situation was an excellent example of why his ancestors had made mated males exempt from the treaty with the government.
“. . . and the walls came tumbling down.”
He raised his muzzle to the cloud-littered sky as Lucy’s song faded into the predawn stillness. Howling was supposed to be joyful, but this felt so empty, so useless.
He hoped something would happen . . . soon.
Michelle tensed. She didn’t know why Randy insisted she rouse the children and bring them to the yard when the wolves began howling, but she wasn’t in any position to tell him no.
There weren’t that many children living in New Sinai, so finding Mattie’s little boy was easy. Randy insisted she personally escort little Joseph.
The children were already awake, as if they’d been waiting for the wolves. The woman in charge of the children’s center seemed grateful that Michelle had arrived to help. Together, they herded the pajama-clad youngsters into the cold morning.
Mattie swooped down on Joseph and her daughter, whose name Michelle had forgotten, and took them away from the group.
Exactly as the General had predicted.
The adults huddled together as mournful howls, so close to the stockade fence, chilled deeper than the air, penetrating past skin and muscle and even bone to a body’s very core.
“I told you they’d be back,” Mattie said. Although she spoke softly, her voice carried.
Murmurs of agreement betrayed several, and another youngster started sobbing.
“Silence that child,” Randy ordered, his voice a low growl against the backdrop of howls.
There was a definite pattern to the baying, almost as if the beasts harmonized their vocals.
Randy shouldn’t underestimate them.
Michelle stepped back from the group, not wanting to be sucked in by the growing vortex of fear. Someone had to remain rational, detached. She’d played her part.
A hand clamped over her mouth and pulled her into the shadows.
General Butler surveyed the shivering forms of his followers and wondered not for the first time why he hadn’t recruited anyone with a spine. If mere animals could reduce his army to quivering blubber, what would a true confrontation with government forces do to it?
All he could think about was the humiliation of Saddam Hussein’s elite republican army surrendering en masse to US troops during the first Gulf War.
Maybe it was time to show his followers that their moment of glory was drawing near, that this harassment by wolves—animals the government had reintroduced into the wild—was only a taste of what was to come. It was definitely time to show them that he remained in control.
“I prayed about our problem,” he announced, immediately garnering everyone’s attention. “The Lord gave me a sign. This plague of wild beasts was sent to us as a test of our faith.”
“Or a test of your leadership,” someone muttered.
>
No matter. There would be a different sort of howling in just a moment.
“The Lord demands our innocence,” Randy said. “The faith of innocence. Innocent, child-like faith.”
He looked around, trying to spot Michelle, but although the darkness faded with every word he spoke, he couldn’t locate her distinctive profile in the crowd.