“I am impressed,” said the voice. “You are tougher than some of my male wolves. Too bad it won’t help you.”
Jessie
She hadn’t meant to laugh. It was more of a nervous laugh, not a mocking one. But the self-styled Don was clearly sensitive to mockery. He was so dapper, even here in the woods, he just had to have an inferiority complex of some sort.
So when she laughed, he rushed up to her and cuffed her across the face.
Hard.
She thought she felt something snap in her nose, and a dribble of hot blood touched her upper lip and crossed it, heading downward.
“No one laughs at me,” he said with a growl, getting into her face. “No one. I don’t care if you’re curing cancer up here in the fuckin’ wilderness. Got it?” He drew a small but more than adequate pistol and pointed it at her.
She nodded, holding her nose and checking for damage and more blood.
She was lucky.
For now.
But she suddenly realized that Nick had been right.
Damn him.
He’d been right that these guys were dangerous. Big money was involved. They didn’t take kindly to being thwarted. Or to being mocked.
She felt his eyes rove over her entire body.
He raised an eyebrow. “You can make it up to me right now. It’s all up to you what happens next.”
She tried to keep herself from trembling, but a shudder worked through her anyway. She was cold suddenly and hugged herself.
The Don paced. “Robb, get Johnny and his briefcase, would you? I think we may need to convince her to talk to us about just what she said to who. Whom. Whatever.” Rabbioso gave her a brief apologetic glance, nodded and left the room.
“Hey, Deuce, you get out too. I want some privacy for the lady.” The thug looked surprised. Bastone waved the gun. “I got this. Go check the doors or something. Take a half hour.” The thug obeyed, and then it was just the two of them.
Jessie had some idea what he was planning, and she pledged to herself that she would make a run for it if she had the chance.
Maybe all she needed was to stall. She’d been out of touch long enough to worry a few people, at the hospital and elsewhere.
Was Nick on his way?
She had counted seven or eight goons. If Nick was coming, would he spring a trap being set for him?
Not if she could help it.
While they waited for the apparent torturer, Jessie observed this Bastone character carefully.
And she just knew, instinctively, that he would turn to sexual violence. What he didn’t know was that she had learned to defend herself out of necessity, because her association with Nick Lupo had led an assortment of monstrous humans right to her.
She fell to her knees.
Bastone stood over her, surprise splashed across his face which changed to delight.
She gave him ideas.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Lansing
He was one of the super-wolves, as they referred to themselves, those who had been genetically engineered to reduce silver’s effect on them. The Nazi experimenters had done the majority of the work, and the idiot Schlosser, the CEO of Wolfpaw, had surrounded himself with a team that had finished it.
Silver affected Lansing less.
Much less.
Which was why he was able to lie above the captured female werewolf—the reporter, wasn’t she? The one who had received the stolen data?—while she was chained across a Roman-style ritual settee on her stomach, her hands and feet restrained by silver-lined bracelets that had to be scorching her and hurting like hell, without actually feeling all that much discomfort himself. Nothing more than a pinching-tingling, anyway.
The woman called Heather came out of her blackout right when he forced his engorged flesh between her buttocks.
She screamed and he pushed harder, expecting the pain to become intolerable as he tore into her nether regions with the abandon he usually reserved for a hunt, or a battlefield action.
His thrusts should have had her damn near fainting, but suddenly he realized that her screaming had started to change in tone.
She was enjoying his brutal invasion.
Clearly she was still in pain from the silver bracelets, and the skin all over her body bore the scorch marks of the silver restraints and cage she had occupied for hours.
But as far as he was concerned, what he was doing to her should have hurt and humiliated her beyond belief, yet here she was, moving under him like a willing participant.
He was momentarily grateful none of his fellow generals were in attendance. He had dispatched them to the other facility, after leaving a skeleton crew here. His anger flared and he increased his pace, slamming violently against her back, forcing her submission—
He paused, flabbergasted.
She was laughing.
She was laughing at his futile effort to torture her. A tortured captive, suffering unbearable pain, and yet she could laugh.
She was laughing at him.
“You’re pathetic,” she said, her tone mocking even though her voice was cracked and breaking up because she had to be suffering.
Lansing lost his head. He forced a change and his DNA realigned in that split-second and suddenly a black wolf was where he had been moments before, sharp fangs going for her neck even as he continued brutally mounting her with his radically altered anatomy.
And in the next moment—while her torturer was engaged in his own hate—she also forced a change, which altered her shape sufficiently and allowed her to tear through portions of her own wrists, which had now become forepaws, so she could slip out of the upper bracelets.
Lansing, or the wolf that had been Lansing, was crazed with hate and lust and did not fully realize what she had done until she managed to perform a half-flip underneath his rutting body, surprising him by going for his eyes.
Her fangs ripped through the top of his lupine head and tore out his eyeballs in a double shower of gore.
Heather
The general’s screeches were cut short as Heather’s snapping snout grasped the older wolf’s throat and first crushed, then demolished it, causing a great gush of arterial blood to wash over them both.
Though still chained by the rear paws, Heather’s mutilated wolf body continued to bite and tear until Lansing’s lay still.
The pain was immeasurable, but Heather Wilson had already suffered the worst the Vatican blade could do—thanks to the Jessie-bitch—and she had survived.
She damned well could survive this.
She knew Lansing would start healing if she didn’t finish the gruesome task she had set herself.
So she scrabbled from underneath his dying body and rapidly gnawed through her own hind legs, enough to also slip those bonds. The silver in the bracelets burned her snout like hellfire, but she was determined to survive this motherfucker. Her brain was overloaded with pain messages from all those mutilated spots on her body, but she was stubborn and willing to do anything to cling to life.
There was always the magical healing. Once again, she was counting on the healing.
With a mental scream, she ripped into her own body and chewed her own flesh. She hoped she wouldn’t pass out.
The inhuman screeching of her bones, skin, and muscle united to cloud her thinking.
But once free, though nearly fatally wounded herself, she was able to drag her body off the settee and away from the blasted silver, where she could begin healing. She dragged her attacker closer, then buried her grotesquely wounded snout into his belly and ripped through his flesh until she was nearly drowning in his bloody entrails.
When he barely resembled a once-living being, she crawled away from him and gathered herself in a corner, mewling from the pain that lanced at her brain from a thousand wounds, each worse than the other. She curled into a bloody ball and forced her body to begin healing, wondering whether she’d manage to recover enough to find her way out of this hellhole.
&n
bsp; “Fuck you,” she spat, but it was a hallucination because she was still in wolf form, and her snout could barely have formed a whimper let alone words.
Heather’s consciousness blinked in and out. And then just out.
Chapter Forty
Lupo
“Goddamn it, Dee, what the fuck are you doing?”
His earpiece was silent except for a continuous hissing. What had happened to DiSanto and Colgrave?
“What’s going on there?”
Hisssssssss.
“Maybe they’re being jammed. That place looked like a techie’s wet dream in those photos.”
Charlie was nearly invisible beside him in the evergreen undergrowth that spread across the rear of the Bastone house. The red and white pine trunks that dotted the area around them and a stand of black spruce created a natural camouflage into which their black BDUs effectively disappeared. Their faces were covered by night-vision goggles.
They’d driven at speed in Lupo’s rented Mustang. He’d armed the car with a portable lightbar and used it extravagantly. He’d also called a connection at State Police headquarters who had agreed to alert patrols his friend Lupo was on the job and to let him pass unhindered. Yeah, this would come back to bite him. He imagined the DHS guy, Hart-Bart or whatever, getting a call next. Lupo was used to working on the edge, but this was ridiculous even for him. Who did he think he was, Lucas Davenport?
Ghost Sam had hovered in the backseat, a grim expression on his permanently lined face. Lupo saw him in his mirror but said nothing. And by then Charlie was squeezed and folded into the passenger seat after being picked up. He’d helped by checking local realtors and had made a list of several large mansions sold recently. They’d crossed off three and the fourth had been the obvious one.
He checked his watch. Time was running out. Had they cut things too close?
Still nothing but a hiss in his ears.
Lupo grunted. It was possible DiSanto and Colgrave were trying to get out a signal from across the western Wisconsin border, but couldn’t. He was almost shaking with rage. Things were getting out of control—no, had been out of control almost from the start. Right from when Heather had shared the contents of that drive, damn her to hell. Now he didn’t even know where she was.
But he knew where Jessie was, and there wasn’t all that much time to get her back safe.
He thought about what they’d likely done to Bill Grey Hawk. Inquiries had come up empty. Who knew how many body parts had been dispersed?
No, they were too serious to have deemed her involvement as anything but dangerous.
Maybe it’s already too late.
Shut the fuck up.
He tried to keep tears out of his eyes. Like the song said, he made a stone of his heart.
There was work to do.
Jessie
She knew she presented too much temptation for Bastone while on her knees. Her eyes were closed but she sensed he was stalking closer.
She felt the gun muzzle on her forehead, a cold circle that chilled her blood.
“Just like that,” he said, his voice cracking. “Stay just like that.”
Jessie didn’t know much about him, but waves of undiagnosed sexual addiction seemed to wash off him like liquid grease.
She shuddered.
She heard his clothes rustle. She could smell him. His breath ruffled her hair.
No, he isn’t really!
She squinted and saw enough.
His pistol in one hand, he was struggling to loosen his pants with the other.
So much for that romantic, dashing look he affected in his clothing. Somehow she knew that even his henchman, the safari-dressing not-Bruce, wasn’t this crass.
But she’d had enough of men at the moment, and instead of being frightened she sensed she’d been emboldened.
Riding a wave of surging adrenaline, Jessie went for his open fly and his gun hand simultaneously, reaching in for his groin and grabbing whatever she could with strength and authority.
As Bastone squealed in hurt surprise, her other hand wrestled his pistol away, and she was up and still squeezing him with all her strength and shoving him into the wall of empty bookshelves. The back of his head smacked loudly into the edge of a pine shelf and he went down in a heap. She released his mushy genitals as he fell and ended up with the gun.
The door opened and the slick-haired thug, Johnny, entered with his briefcase in hand, and dropped his jaw as he faced the steady muzzle of Bastone’s gun which Jessie now held.
“Stop right there,” she said, her voice quavering more than she wanted it to.
The catch in her voice must have given him the wrong impression, because he smiled widely…
And went for a shoulder holster under his jacket.
“No!” she shouted, but it was too late. She saw his hand come back out with some kind of black handgun and he was bringing it up when she fired.
Bastone’s gun was a hammerless snubnose 5-shot .357 Magnum, small but powerful, and Jessie was a crack shot. The bullet took the thug high in the chest and flipped him into the wall, where he slid on exit-wound blood and lay still. Blood also seeped through his clothing with amazing speed.
Jessie’s first reaction was the urge to cry. Really, as a doctor she wanted to help people.
But he’d gone for his weapon and she’d seen and been through too much to let some two-bit thug get the drop on her. She realized, a little sadly, that Nick had rubbed off on her.
Bastone was groaning in the corner, blood streaming from his head wound, rolling around and holding his groin.
The gunshot had been a bad thing.
There was a commotion out in the hall. Not knowing how many thugs were out there, rushing toward the den, Jessie only had one option. She unlocked the French doors and found herself on the sprawling deck, from which a staircase led down to the ground. Gun in hand, she made for the nearby jagged line of dark woods.
She ran.
When someone opened a window and took pot shots at her, she turned and fired back once, hoping to pin them down. With three rounds left in her cylinder, she reached the trees and melted into the forest.
Behind her, shouting and running footsteps.
Ahead of her, perhaps survival.
DiSanto
“We’re cut off, I can’t hear Lupo anymore.” He was whispering in Colgrave’s ear flesh to flesh—and it was a very nice ear, but he held his erotic thoughts at bay, or any jokes he might have based on them.
“Christ, now what?” Colgrave looked around as if she could spot the problem, her goggles making her resemble some kind of sensual android.
Earlier she’d pointed out an array of aerials and radio towers protruding from a corner of the building, and a radar dome. He didn’t say so, but the thought hit him that maybe their comm units were being jammed.
“I dunno,” DiSanto said, scraping his scalp beneath the itchy black watch cap that helped make him nearly invisible in the intense Minnesota night. There was no moon and it was cloudy, and they were far from city lights in any direction.
Thanks to Google Earth, their approach had been easy enough, on ATVs to a distance of two miles away, and then they’d packed in the rest of the way, through the thick woods. They had taken their time, had spotted and avoided dozens of cameras, but God only knew how many they hadn’t seen at all. Thing was, the cameras they did see had appeared dead.
How likely was that? They’d looked at each other and shrugged.
Plus Nick had reiterated that if these guys were all werewolves, they might look upon an attempted raid as a training exercise. Release the hounds. He’d explained how the Wolfpaw compound in Georgia had been a training ground and they’d specifically released prisoners just to hunt them down. The thought would have given DiSanto shivers, except he was beyond that point because on the way in they’d come across remains that bore witness to the likelihood that the same practice applied here.
More than once.
Colgrave
had been horrified at the first grouping of remains, but by the third pile of gnawed bones a grim look had washed over her face, making it seem rock-hard in the gloom. Whatever had happened to her in life had already turned her to stone.
DiSanto couldn’t help wondering about her. What made her so willing to go off the books?
He could barely believe all Lupo had had to do was ask, and she’d willingly risked her career for somebody she didn’t even know. On the other hand, she seemed to relish the commando stuff and he wondered again what else she’d been involved in that made this little foray into illegal demolition seem not so much strange as eccentric.
DiSanto patted the sheathed Vatican dagger on his belt strap. Colgrave had eyed it uncertainly, and DiSanto hadn’t offered an explanation. She also hadn’t been told they had filled her MP5 and Glock magazines with silver-loaded ammo. Better to protect her without risking her faith in them.
DiSanto wished they’d opted for more body armor, but they were wearing the latest Dragon Skin thanks to a CIA connection of hers. She’d borrowed one for Lupo, too, but DiSanto would have bet his partner wasn’t wearing it. Being a werewolf was like wearing “Kevlar from God,” Lupo had once told him, back when Kevlar was the thing.
The composition of the woods surrounding the high-tech cantilever house was an almost identical twin to that near Eagle River, with a high concentration of conifers interspersed with elm, ash, and poplar, most still winter-bare. The Superior National Forest was next door, but this property wasn’t on any detailed map. Only the satellite view proved it existed at all, and then only if you knew where to look.
“Maybe some kind of jamming device?” DiSanto ventured. Now that he thought about it, the quiet was downright eerie. He’d expected patrols made up of werewolves. He’d had waking nightmares about it.
“I thought the same thing. They sure seem to be set up for it, based on all that antenna crap.” Colgrave idly scratched a nonexistent itch. “No fence or anything, though? Isn’t that weird for people you’d think would want their privacy?”
DiSanto shrugged. How could you tell someone about werewolves and how they wouldn’t be needing normal protection and expect her to believe it? Hell, he wouldn’t have believed it. Not if he hadn’t been shown. He was something of a Thomas, the disciple who’d had to stick his hands in Christ’s wounds to believe. So the story went, anyway.
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