Wolf's Cut (The Nick Lupo Series Book 5)

by W. D. Gagliani

  Lupo thought he felt the sensing equipment mapping his features, comparing, deciding. And then it would release its Reaper missile, heat-linked to his target coordinates, even if he moved…for it would move with him, tracking him like a heat-seeker.

  They were nearly impossible to see, however, in the dark.

  At that moment, the nearby French doors burst open and gunfire erupted from inside, where a few thugs took cover and began to hose down the deck with flying lead. Lupo aimed his loaded crossbow and watched the bolt take one of the thugs in the side, flipping him around. The other guy did a double-take, then dropped an empty magazine and reloaded. In that time, Charlie Bear felled him with a burst from his MP5.

  Lupo dropped the crossbow and switched to his own MP5 because the thug he’d wounded was firing now, too, taking chunks of railing out from behind them, his aim just slightly off.

  If he gets it together, he’s got us.

  Lupo’s first burst caught the thug in the chest and almost cut him in two. He looked like the guy Jessie had described as the slick-haired one she’d overheard.

  Jessie!

  Where the hell was she?

  Jesus, had they killed her already?

  More shooters had taken cover inside the house and were pouring out a withering handgun fire, but Charlie’s and Lupo’s MP5 controlled bursts ate into the drywall and bookcases, destroying cornices and moldings, shattering windows.

  Charlie shouted once, “Shit!” and half-sat on the deck, his gun falling silent.

  Lupo looked over. A round had taken him below the vest, mangling his thigh.

  The stain below him was spreading fast.

  Fuck, it had nicked his artery.

  Charlie looked at Lupo and shrugged, smiling crookedly. “Gotta go sometime, man!” he shouted.

  “No!” Lupo screamed, emptying his MP5’s magazine with a long burst that kept the thugs’ heads down.

  But Charlie was still firing too, drawing their fire away from Lupo.

  Lupo reloaded, but then his ears were filled with the renewed insect-like buzzing of the drones, which had circled the house as they hunted his face with their infrared sensors.

  And now they’d found him.

  The first Reaper missile missed Lupo because he flattened himself, still firing at Bastone’s men, who were if nothing else obstinate. The missile may have missed its intended target, but it blew up just as well when it hit the wall inside the den.

  Screams indicated what had happened to the gunmen.

  A second missile was fired and missed a rolling Lupo, who was trying to get to Charlie so he could apply a tourniquet. Another explosion rocked the house, and flames started to lick upwards inside and out of the shattered windows.

  “Hold on,” Lupo shouted. “I’m coming!”

  “Fuck it, Lupo, I gotta cover you so you can duck out before those fuckin’ wasps catch up with you.” He emptied another magazine at the house, where someone had started shooting again. He screamed, half-laughing, “This was some helluva plan, Lupo!”

  Another missile zoomed past, this time barely missing its target but blasting open a crater between Charlie and Lupo. They could still return fire, but now they were separated. Lupo knew Charlie’s life’s blood was rapidly seeping out between the deck planks, but there was nothing he could do.

  There was an eerie silence for a moment as the fire that was destroying the beautiful house was the only thing they could hear. No one was shooting anymore.

  Lupo started to make his way around the jagged crater to aid Charlie, but then they heard growling and screams from the woods just out of sight to the rear of the house.

  Jessie…

  The only other thug Lupo knew about was that Rabbioso guy, so he had to be wherever Jessie was. This was bad. He’d figured on her being in the house.

  Lupo looked back at his companion, the dilemma clear on his face.

  “Go! Get her back!” Charlie called out, but his voice was weakening. The flames were drowning him out.

  Suddenly there was more buzzing—a new wave of drones?

  And more shooting. Someone had a shotgun in there. The booms echoed over the lake no one could see.

  A new Reaper took out the corner of the house he’d almost reached , and Lupo saw Charlie and the thug shotgunner engulfed in a ball of flame.

  Charlie kept his finger on the trigger to the end.

  Lupo snorted, snot flinging from his nose, his eyes burning from more than just the smoke and cordite.

  No time to grieve…

  Leaping off the deck, he rolled once as he landed and came up running toward the woods, praying to a very indistinct God that what he’d heard was Jessie—and that he would be in time.

  He thought he saw Ghost Sam pointing the way, so he followed the old man’s directional and found Jessie besieged by a werewolf.

  His instinct was to fight the demon as an equal.

  He shucked his clothes as he ran.

  Don’t be too late, don’t be too fucking late…

  And then he was Over.

  Jessie

  He’d killed the two thugs who had been out to rape her, tearing out their throats with savage effectiveness.

  Now he was standing in front of her, growling, his huge snout full of displayed fangs. He’d backed her into the pine trunk and, even though he had saved her life, she had no reason to think there was any sense of decency to override whatever loyalty her so-called not-Bruce might have had to Don Bastone.

  She couldn’t help remembering how gigantic his erect penis had been before he’d changed and gone after them, a frighteningly surreal image forever burned in her memory.

  She wanted to talk him down, but he was close enough that he could almost just open his jaws and snap them over her hands.

  His kaleidoscope eyes held hers with intelligent malevolence.

  When he growled, his fur shivering, she felt his hot breath on her shaking hands.

  Suddenly another black wolf came bounding into her view and leaped onto the lighter-hued wolf, his jaws biting and paws going for the rib-snapping landing that might slow down the other.

  Nick!

  She recognized Nick’s own Creature, his beast within, also oversized and quite ferocious.

  Oh, Nick…

  The arriving black wolf took the other wolf by surprise, but the enemy was experienced and he twisted to take Lupo’s lunge on his side, almost harmlessly. His flesh and muscles there were deeply scraped, but otherwise he was unhurt.

  Now the two wolves went after each other like vintage Harryhausen stop-action dinosaurs, each taking the offense and winning the round for a few seconds, then relinquishing. Blood bloomed like grotesque flowers on both their bodies as they tortured each other with their vicious jaws and supernaturally sharp claws.

  Jessie didn’t know what to do.

  No gun, no silver ammo, nothing.

  She started to hobble away from the dueling wolves, desperate to find some way to help the wolf that had to be Nick.

  But her eyes settled on Lupo’s clothes, which he’d tossed in a half-pile, probably when he thought he’d be saving her from a human threat. She saw something peeking out from one of his abandoned boots.

  One of the Vatican daggers.

  She jumped for it, staggering due to the shooting pain in her right leg. She tried to avoid the snapping, growling wolves as they charged each other and tore flesh and fur. They were too busy to see her, but they were working their way back in her direction.

  Then Jessie had the dagger firmly in her hand, but she hesitated.

  Should she call out to Nick, or wade in?

  She unsheathed the ancient weapon, with its uneven silver-coated blade and mysterious runes and symbols carved on the grip, and attempted to lunge in for a slash at Rabbioso. She missed when her leg almost gave out on her. But then she gritted her teeth and forced herself to ignore the pain of whatever had torn in her leg, and slashed again, this time connecting. The blade zipped through the
monster’s fur and skin. Then she regained her balance and repositioned herself for a thrust, which she executed flawlessly. This one went home, deep.

  The wolf howled in extreme agony as Jessie began to needle him with repeated small but highly painful wounds.

  Even a super-wolf couldn’t easily survive the blade’s mystical magic. Though Rabbioso had protected her from the others, he was now engaged in trying to kill her Nick, and she was damned if she’d let him.

  Her Nick.

  Meanwhile, Lupo forced a change back into his human form, and then—naked, muscles gleaming with sweat and blood—he swept in and plucked the dagger from Jessie’s tenuous grip and in one graceful motion dug the blade deeply into the Rabbioso-wolf’s side, cutting through bone and tissue and muscle…

  The other wolf screamed in pure agony, its sides heaving and its blood running from dozens of burning wounds where silver had entered his system.

  Nick too screamed, because the Vatican blade was now too close and out of its protective sheath, so it was also scorching his arm and hand, melting his skin like a torch.

  The stench of burning human flesh permeated the air.

  Behind them, Don Bastone’s new house blew up in a series of huge fireballs that lit the night like the sun at noon.

  The shockwave knocked them both violently to the ground. Debris rained around them.

  When they were able to reopen their eyes painfully, Rabbioso was gone, having stumbled into the woods and disappeared in the shadows. The house was a blazing ruin.

  The buzzing reached a peak level and they looked at each other, resigned.

  Jessie stifled a groan as her very bones seemed to crack and all at once she collapsed into Nick’s arms.

  Sudden silence spread across the wooded lot, leaving a vacuum that made their ears pop painfully.

  Then…

  Together they watched as one by one the drones blew up in midair, their missiles exploding, until a dozen fires were raging on the grounds where the hot debris fell.

  Rabbioso

  Burning with the liquid fire of the magical silver weapon in his veins and throughout his body, he ran unsteadily on three legs and never looked back.

  The explosions behind him were bound to occupy the humans, and this wolf had had it.

  Rabbioso ventured more deeply into the woods and searched for a place he could curl up and either begin healing or die—and right then he didn’t care which.

  As far as he was concerned, he no longer worked for Don Gus.

  The late Don Gus?

  When he finally collapsed, he was miles away. He needed hours before he could get up again, and even then he staggered like a drunkard.

  The fever tipped him over, and he rolled and screamed as the silver blazed through his veins.

  He made a vow. A solemn vow.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  DiSanto

  When they reached the control room, they didn’t need the plans to be certain they’d found it. A row of screens flickered, with a remote pilot seated behind each one, a joystick in one hand and a row of articulated arms bearing tablet devices that provided read-outs and virtual keyboards.

  Here there were sentries, several of them, and they opened up with pistols when the door burst open.

  Colgrave and DiSanto returned fire with their MP5s, raking the room with bursts that took out pilots and their drone pods.

  If any of them were werewolves, at least they were taking deadly silver loads. DiSanto felt no guilt, knowing what the pilots were doing. They went down bloody and didn’t get up.

  He hoped they were in time.

  But several sentries dropped their guns and clothes and turned, lunging after the raiders in their wolf forms.

  DiSanto glanced at Colgrave as he drove a new magazine home. Her eyes were wide and glazed, still in shock at what she had witnessed yet again—the whole lycanthropy magic, the DNA near-instant realignment that turned men and women into wolves with inhuman strength. Her gun had fallen silent as she stared at the incredible transformation.

  But the wolves were attacking.

  “Colgrave!” he shouted. “Shoot the fuckers!”

  They stood side by side and provided such withering silver-bullet gunfire that most of the lunging wolves were shot to bits, chunks of flesh exploding off their bodies as the scorching silver slugs dug deeply into their vital organs.

  When one wounded wolf reached DiSanto after his magazine had emptied, he calmly unsheathed his Vatican blade and proceeded to carve that remaining monster like a Thanksgiving turkey, slicing into its belly and disemboweling it until it burned from the inside out and flickered back to a scorched human form, the stench of cooked human flesh cloying in their nostrils.

  Their guns fell silent and the ejected brass casings stopped rolling around their boots.

  Within minutes they had made short work of the drone control center, and DiSanto hoped fervently that the timing had helped Lupo and Charlie—and Jessie, if they’d gotten to her in time.

  They planted C4 charges, then backed out through the empty corridors and retrieved Heather Wilson, who had waited for them in the torture room but as a badly wounded human.

  Colgrave snapped out of her daze, managed to conquer her shock, and rounded up a coat for Heather to wear. Then they planted the rest of their charges and covered each other’s back until they were out of the mostly deserted house.

  When they were far enough away, Colgrave took out one of the burner phones and texted the sequence that blew all the C4 charges simultaneously. The place went up in a series of fireballs hundreds of feet high. The shock wave tossed them aside like a hot wind.

  “Like the end of a Bond movie,” DiSanto muttered, as they watched burning debris fall back to earth like lava bricks in a volcanic eruption. Lupo’s old pal Sam Waters would have loved it.

  Colgrave went to punch him, but she had no strength left.

  Soon they were driving the ATVs back toward the border, where they’d stashed their SUV. Heather groaned and cocooned in the coat.

  When the comm units finally worked again, the two teams related their mostly happy outcomes. But it was DiSanto who asked the question they all thought.

  “Nick, why were most of the Wolfclaw people out of here? Where did they go, and who tipped them off?”

  Lupo growled. “Dee, if you get any fuckin’ idea, let me know.”

  Jessie

  After they crossed the water in the pontoon boats, they collapsed on a rocky beach and watched the bruised sky overhead. Far away a glow was visible against the dark purples and browns that swirled above. They hoped volunteers from the Eagle River and rez fire departments would get there before the forest went up, but they were too drained to do anything about it. Presently they dragged themselves up the beach and leaned against a tree trunk as they watched the fire raging across the channel.

  “What happened, Nick? How…?”

  “It’s kind of a miracle it worked, Jess.” He let out a half-sob. “I thought I was too late. That bastard was going to kill you.”

  Angry as she had been, she was once again reminded how he tried to take care of her.

  She nodded. She wasn’t going to tell him everything. She hated showing weakness, and this time it had been her turn.

  Nick made a visible effort to let it go and instead explained concisely the desperate plan he’d concocted—to lead the killer drones to Bastone’s compound, where they could rain death from above, theoretically while he himself avoided the crosshairs. He’d figured the technology was good enough to lock in on his satellite-spotted image, but like all technology it could still be out-thought by a human…a desperate human. The synchronized raids, he’d hoped, would allow him to use the drones as weapons and the others to destroy the drone command facility before they could reprogram themselves and hunt down their target again. All he had to do was try to avoid the missiles in the meantime. Wineacre had described the technology fairly well, and hidden the information deep in his stolen
materials.

  She shook her head at the foolhardy risk and the outsized level of optimism he’d had to juggle to even think it could work.

  “Hey, I’m a positive kind of guy,” he said, chuckling through his fatigue.

  She would have laughed, but the shadows that passed over his features stopped her.

  He took the call with a new look of unbelieving relief.

  “Yeah?” Then he smiled a moment.

  The restored communications helped ease the pain of Charlie’s death. At least they knew immediately that DiSanto, Colgrave, and Heather had all made it out of the Wolfclaw house. Though they were told Heather was in bad shape. When Nick signed off, they grinned weakly at each other because he’d cut off one of DiSanto’s clichés in midsentence.

  They stared at each other in silence, a minute passing and then two.

  Before they knew it they had melted into each other’s arms and let their lips do all their talking for them, albeit silently. And for a while, there was no one else in the world besides them.

  Some time later, Jessie raised her head from where she’d been resting it along the curve of his muscular neck. He gently traced the bruise on her face, obvious pain in his eyes.

  She laid her hand on his.

  “I love you Nick,” she said. “Make me a werewolf too.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Franco Lupo

  December 1945

  The Jesuit had managed to leave the ship and return within the hour with Corrado, who appeared to be as angry as he had been the last time Franco had run into him.

  “Tranelli tells me you’ve fucked up one of our operations yet again. Congratulations, now we will not learn what we need to know about this most valuable escape route for the cursed Nazi wolves. Che testa di cazzo!”

  “You can insult me as long as you want, but right now I am your only chance to get back on track.”

  “How’s that? You don’t look like the courier.”

  “I don’t think it will matter, but I’m willing to take a chance. Tranelli tells me you won’t risk anyone taking the courier’s place.”