By the time she was drying her hair, she’d let the anger wash away again. For one thing, Nick had been extremely attentive since those events. And Jessie had pledged to improve her life. She had taken control of her urges—she still had trouble calling it an addiction, even though her medical training told her she was lying to herself—and even though Heather Wilson knew better than to show up in Eagle River or Milwaukee ever again, she’d promised not to hunt down the bitch.
Jessie hummed an old Genesis song Nick loved. Somehow the lyrics of “Entangled” seemed weirdly appropriate.
She grabbed a quick bite from her microwave and was out the door fairly quickly.
Lupo
He drove the distance south in record time, letting his iPod playlists take him through the changing colors of the North Woods. He always felt some strange sadness leaving the north behind, especially when the trees turned from a majority of the coniferous variety to a majority of the deciduous. It was a tangible sign of leaving behind what he considered the idyllic for the pedestrian.
A selection of old New Age music by the likes of Tingstad & Rumble, William Ellwood, Will Ackerman, and David Lanz gave him respite from the harder sound of bands like Spock’s Beard and Porcupine Tree he was listening to these days. The Alan Parsons Project and Eric Woolfson albums he often preferred on the way up. When heading south, he needed softer, more introspective music. Sometimes he threw in some Tangerine Dream to spice things up, or some middle period Marillion.
By the time he reached the city, he was ready to turn off the music and let the urban landscape leach the remaining peace and quiet from his system. The freeway traffic was dense and he couldn’t select a proper accompaniment. Soon he was nosing into his building’s first-floor garage space.
His eastside apartment, a spacious double condominium he’d had the opportunity to retrofit to his needs, seemed empty without Jessie. He tossed his duffel bag on the sofa and flipped on some lights. Her presence was palpable. The Creature within him could catch her scent, and Lupo remembered the time they’d spent together the last couple days.
And the lovemaking.
There had been a lot of lovemaking. Intense, raw, desperate, almost like a last-ditch effort.
But they were going through a rebirth of sorts, he realized. They’d set aside the mistrust—she of his connection to Heather Wilson and he of Jessie’s unlikely gambling addiction, as well as Jessie’s assault of Heather—and instead concentrated on healing both problems as well as their relationship.
The lovemaking had helped. It was communication at its most primal.
When Lupo was in her, it seemed to him nothing else mattered. There was nothing else, only the two of them, united in flesh. Their flesh united.
Sometimes it was okay if the flesh united first and the brain later.
He thought Jessie’s gambling therapy was going well. It seemed the illogical urge to gamble had manifested due to her lack of control over what she thought was happening between Nick and Heather.
Maybe the bloody confrontation between Jessie and Heather, and how Lupo had been forced to break it up before it turned deadly—perhaps that had provided a catharsis of sorts. Sometimes he wished he still had Caroline Stewart, his first lover and a psychology professor, to help him navigate the subtexts of life. He sensed that his subtexts were more difficult than most.
Lupo threw his bulk into his chair behind his massive desk and flipped through his mail, distracted.
Those subtexts were grounded in the worst of his own dark tendencies.
To Lupo’s shame, something had happened between him and Heather, but he didn’t want more of it, despite the television journalist’s many charms. Insatiable in bed (or anywhere, for that matter), adventurous, experimental, sensual, exciting, attractive beyond belief…Heather Wilson had it all.
But she was sex-crazy, what once would have been called a nymphomaniac.
And she was a werewolf, like Lupo.
Accidentally, unwillingly, a werewolf. But not tragically, because she had found almost immediately that she loved it. Loved the shape-changing, the power, the look of herself as a wolf, the incredible strength granted by some sort of science and magic blend. The prolonged life and the nearly endless youth. And the lust, the rampaging sexuality, the insatiable appetites carried by the werewolf gene.
Lupo found her irresistible.
Hell, he found Jessie Hawkins irresistible too, but Heather Wilson was…different.
Perhaps it was because she was like him now. Perhaps it was because she embraced it so completely, whereas he had spent most of his life denying it, fighting it, feeling guilty about it, right up to the suicide attempt that had been foiled at the last second by someone possibly even more fucked up than Lupo himself.
Jessie had snapped. After Lupo and Heather had joined forces to conduct a raid on the Washington, D.C., compound of Wolfpaw Security Services, the mercenary war contractor that traced its roots all the way back to World War II and the Nazis’ last-resort Werwolf Brigade, Jessie had taken one of the two Vatican blades and attacked Heather with murderous intent.
She hadn’t killed Heather (not for lack of trying), but she’d hurt the other woman badly. If Lupo hadn’t caught up to her when he did, and stopped her, she would have been a murderer.
Thing was, he’d had little choice but to enlist Heather.
Wolfpaw had been more than just a mercenary army made up of werewolves. It had also continued the evil experiments first conducted by Nazi scientists in concentration camps, experiments the goal of which was to develop a better werewolf gene, one that would be nearly impervious to silver. They had almost succeeded, but part of what they needed was a chance to study Nick Lupo, for his “condition,” as he referred to it, had come from different origins—and carried with it some inherent advantages.
And his family history contained more than was at first apparent, too. He learned his grandfather had been a young father caught up in the Italian partisan campaign during the last days of the war. The partisan brigade he had unwillingly joined had a pair of secret weapons—daggers that allowed humans to kill werewolves…but also allowed werewolves to kill others of their kind with less damage to themselves. The history of these daggers stretched farther back than anyone could have imagined, and it had been a Jesuit priest, Father Tranelli, who had obtained them from the secret Vatican vault next to the Archives, a chamber almost no one knew existed.
The Vatican blades had been separated after the war, and the tribe who occupied the reservation near Eagle River had obtained one of them thanks to a shaman named Joseph Badger.
Lupo shook his head.
As far as he knew.
Because there were still gaps in his knowledge. He expected Ghost Sam to show up and tell him the gaps were large enough to drive a truck through, but the clichés were more DiSanto’s department.
It was too much, all of it was almost too much to process. He’d suffered so much since he’d been bitten by a neighbor boy as a teenager, never realizing that the universe had somehow placed him in this position. Never realizing that he was fulfilling some kind of destiny already laid out for his grandfather, who had succumbed to the bite of a werewolf even though he had become the partisans’ best and most fanatic werewolf killer.
Giovanni Lupo’s end had come at an unexpected hand, and Nick Lupo’s own destiny had been set then, many years before he was born.
But Nick Lupo had never embraced his werewolf side, his Creature, the way Heather Wilson embraced hers.
Now he reshuffled the small pile of accumulated junk mail, circulars, political ads, and a few letters, dumping the disposable stuff in the trash. He flipped through the regular letters and spotted one that came from one of his mom’s cousins.
This is weird, he thought.
His mother had recently succumbed to lung cancer, like his father several years before. In fact, it had happened in the middle of the Wolfpaw case, right when he was about to bring down the company and its
board of trustees, and its CEO, the vile Schlosser. At the time, Lupo had been shocked to learn that the grandmother he had thought was his mom’s mother had actually been his father’s mother, the result of a long deception he had not quite understood. But a letter left for him and given to him by his mother on her deathbed had set him straight and informed him of events that, during the faraway war, had shaped his present situation—and indeed his entire life.
Over and over he flipped the envelope that had caught his eye, surprised by the return address. It was strange that his mind was turning over all these events, and here—at the same time—was a letter by his mother’s estranged cousin, reaching him just now.
Somehow, Lupo felt he knew there was something of importance in his hand. He didn’t know how he knew, but the feeling was there nonetheless. He’d always been susceptible to hunches.
In a sudden move, he tore the end of the envelope and tilted it. A key tumbled out and rattled onto the desktop. And then a folded sheet of paper fluttered out as well. He checked, but there was nothing else inside. He set the envelope aside, picked up the paper.
Your mother wanted you to have this.
It was signed with a single name. Not very forthcoming, his family. A duty fulfilled, perhaps, and nothing more.
He turned his attention to the key.
At first glance it was just a brass-tone key. It could have belonged anywhere. Maybe a padlock. It had a manufacturer’s name on one side, and a number on the other in raised digits: J158. So, not a typical key at all—one with a specific purpose. Lupo thought, airport or bus station locker.
But why would his mother have had one of those? If she’d been a thief, or con artist, maybe. But He knew his mother had been none of those things. Now, his grandmother—the one who had pretended all his life to be another woman…well, that lady had secrets. Maybe this was her key? But that didn’t feel right.
And it hit him.
Maybe this key belonged to his father.
He pulled out his iPad and started searching. Yes, he would try the airport and the bus terminal downtown. They’d added lockers now that the city had merged it with the Amtrak station.
But he had another, different hunch.
Google was helpful, but there were literally dozens of self-storage companies and locations.
This was going to take a little while.
Chapter Four
Franco Lupo
Genova, Italy
August 1945
The staircase was steeped in shadows, so he was forced to find a dark doorway that still allowed a full view of the rickety steps. The weak light at the top flickered with the inconsistent electricity, but it would be the only way to spot his quarry when he stepped out of the dingy second-floor apartment to go on his hunt.
Franco Lupo was now huddled in that deep doorway, a brick arch with a rounded door set in it that led to some sort of warehousing facility that had survived the Allied bombing runs. He hoped his slight figure wasn’t visible from either the badly lit street or the staircase.
His quarry was careful.
He had to be.
As far as Franco could tell, his quarry had been a captain in the Wehrmacht but toward the end of the war he had been sucked into the Werwolf Brigade, and the story went that he’d found he liked it. This is what his source, an old guy wearing a greasy cap, had told Franco for a few hundred lire and a few glasses of red wine. Usually his information was solid enough.
Franco didn’t care whether it was true, or where the old drunk had learned it. There were ex-German soldiers all over Europe in the days following the Liberation and many were left to live in peace. Some had formed family ties or cultivated important friendships while they were occupiers, and now they were protected.
Of course, some had been hunted down and outright executed, others prosecuted especially if they’d been either SS or Gestapo, or if their handprints had been connected in any way with any of the numerous atrocities committed even here, in relatively civilized Italy. The average German soldier who might have impregnated an Italian girl and later returned to claim his new family held no interest for Franco, even if some others might have been outraged enough to kill. In most cases, Italians lived and let live.
It had been only days since the second of two futuristic American bombs had brought the Japanese nation to its knees amidst the flare of a mushroom-shaped cloud of destruction. Even in Italy, the news had spread like a forest fire. People speculated how easily the Americans could have used such a devil’s weapon against them, had not the Italian monarchy surrendered in September 1943.
Even for a people who had coined the word vendetta, the bombs seemed like too much.
But not to Franco, who understood.
Franco had smiled grimly when news of the death of the detested Adolf Hitler had been reported in April. Although, later, rumors indicated the possibility that a double had been used to fake a suicide and even now a diabolically resurrected Führer directed secret operations against an unsuspecting Allied invasion force. Franco could believe the murderous bastard had found a way to cheat death and continue to rain down destruction on his enemies. But the papers spoke of the reality of the bunker demise of the supreme dictator, and Franco turned his nose back to what he had been doing for over a year.
And his nose had been supremely successful indeed.
His nose was sensitive. His heart was not.
His heart hardened to an incredible degree, he now looked at the watch he had taken off a German corpse. The leather band was fraying, but the hands ticked their way around the steel dial with typical German efficiency. Clearly it was a watch produced in the early days of the war, when high-quality materials were plentiful to German industry. He rather enjoyed the irony.
It was almost time, if his information panned out.
A cool breeze off the Mediterranean ruffled his hair. The harbor, much of it still in ruins after numerous Allied bombing runs, was not far. This section of the city had been built up with factories and warehouses during the ill-fated alliance with Germany, the industry which later was usurped by the German war machine.
Franco stiffened at the sound of a single sharp click.
The door was nearly hidden on the landing and now it opened and a slice of yellow light stabbed out over the stairs.
He gripped the gnarled handle under his open wool coat and waited, his muscles tensing.
The steps were quiet, but Franco’s ears had become sensitive. He knew his quarry was descending to street level, but slowly and with caution.
He faded back into the arched doorway, praying the shadow was large enough to cover him completely. He wasn’t worried about scent, not yet: the footsteps were of the biped variety.
The steps reached the cobblestones and the man who made them headed directly for Franco’s hiding place.
Franco started to pull the sheathed blade from under his coat.
The footsteps approached, coming closer, closer, and then Franco’s quarry passed the arch and kept on the jaggedly uneven sidewalk slabs. Franco watched the matted hair but faded back into the shadows until the walker was well past, and then he slipped out and began to follow the ramrod-straight figure.
This one had to live.
For a brief while, anyway.
Chapter Five
Heather
As she drove away, she saw the glow of the burning car in her mirrors. She had driven the counterfeit cop’s cruiser into the cornfield and debated whether to just leave it. Then, in a fit of anger, she’d torched it. There wasn’t a town or village for twenty miles in any direction, so she’d be long gone by the time anyone came to investigate. They’d find blood traces of the ersatz officer, but probably not a whole of his body. She’d fed well and she’d covered her tracks, but didn’t mind if they found the blood—that was the last they’d see of the guy.
And it tickled her sense of humor that they’d put the evidence together pointing to his creative sideline as a costumed performer�
�and that was it, everything else would be a dead end. The wolf had seen to it. They’d have to dig far into the corn and wheat fields to find anything at all. The irony of the predator finding a greater predator who turned the tables was right up her alley and she chuckled as she saw the dark smoke clouding the night sky.
An hour later she still hadn’t passed any sort of rapid response to the burning vehicle. She knew from her own experience that the fire she’d set would burn out—possibly already had—and that the dew-dampened fields were not likely to catch fire.
Scanning through the buttons, she found some classic rock on the satellite and sang along to a Styx song in which she could lament having too much time on her hands.
She was heading east for a meeting and then farther east for a reunion of sorts.
And she’d used her time rather well, actually, even if some of it was painful enough for her to scream in anger and frustration into the night.
That bitch really sliced the hell out of me. If Lupo hadn’t intruded, though, I might have taken her with me…
Her scars were finally starting to fade, though they still itched and burned like fuck and occasionally drove her crazy, mostly in the middle of the night when she was trying to sleep—or trying to play sex games with some anonymous new partner. The scars would never fully disappear she suspected, but they were almost invisible in subdued lighting, so she didn’t get many questions…but she was definitely touchy about them. She had once almost lost her temper with a particularly cocky pseudo-cowboy from a roadhouse she’d taken home to her motel who kept tracing the lines that crossed her hard belly, not realizing that he was inciting not only her anger but pure burning pain. She’d almost crushed his head between her muscular thighs and broken his neck, a move she’d practiced with certain others until she could pull it off easily enough. She didn’t even need to wolf out to end the guy’s spin on the planet. He’d had no idea how lucky he was.
The anger could sneak up on her sometimes.
She set it aside until a Pink Floyd song reminded her of Nick Lupo. She did, indeed, wish he were there.
Wolf's Cut (The Nick Lupo Series Book 5) Page 5