Sigfried lay on his back and willed the headache away.
He forced himself to relax, muscle by muscle, first feeling the throb increase as he brought intensity to bear. But then he felt a characteristic melting. He let it wash over him.
Once his muscles relaxed, the rest of his body seemed to follow suit and slowly the pressure abated. He felt more able to face the day’s challenges.
His wife of twenty-seven years, Georgina, had long ago given up trying to occupy his time. His “work” came first, he had explained with excruciating detail.
And now part of his work was defending his company in front of the congressional committee. He had explained that his hours would be irregular from now on, and indeed, when he checked the feed from her bedroom he saw that she had dressed and gone hours ago. Today was a recess day for the hearings, and he had indulged himself last night, knowing he could spend today coordinating the Lupo mission.
Wolfpaw Security Services had now been stung twice by the pesky homicide cop, Nick Lupo. Three times, if one counted the original three ex-mercenaries hired by that idiot, the serial killer mayor. The company had often spiritedly discouraged such moonlighting by its employees, but as they had been “former” employees, there had been no easy way to monitor the three shapeshifters’ new hobby. Their supervisor had been punished for missing the signs.
Besides opening Wolfpaw to media and public scrutiny, the fact that two of the three, Tannhauser and Schwartz, were descendants of revered founders had rankled the council. A shakeup was in order, and a new management team had taken over Wolfpaw. Sigfried had been Wagner’s direct supervisor, part of the old Wolfpaw ultra-secret council, some of whom were board members also. Their ancestors’ identities determined their rank within the company’s hierarchy, which hid the remainder of the werewolf members of the Wehrmacht’s Werwolf Division’s descendants.
And he sat above it all, CEO and chief scientist. In charge because it was his family’s money that had built the company, and his family’s work that had staffed it so…innovatingly.
He climbed out of bed and faced his day, at once worried and excited.
These were interesting times, indeed.
Mordred
He uploaded the video clips from his surveillance to the Wolfpaw safe server. The longest video was of the cop and his lady friend screwing for hours. Well, it seemed like hours. The other clips showed Lupo from other angles, standing at the lake shore, walking in and out of the house, the café where he often ate, the casino—where he met his gambling-addicted girlfriend—and walking in and out of the central precinct, Milwaukee’s main police station.
Mordred figured Sigfried would order him to kill the woman, too, when the time came. It stood to reason that she knew what he knew.
He licked his lips of unconscious drool.
But so far his orders were to hover, targeting anyone around the cop who might know his secret, but make no overt moves. Except he was allowed to send messages, wasn’t he? His orders were contradictory, weren’t they?
He sensed that Sigfried might request a snatch instead of a hit.
Looked like maybe the lab from which he himself had emerged might get more business. What would Sigfried want to learn from poking and prodding Lupo?
It wasn’t his place to question it, or any decisions made by the council. Mordred wondered, though, because his scars still ached from the poking and prodding he had received during those endless years.
Years of glass cages and silver bars, and later the injections, and the torture, and the screaming that had then turned out to be his own, his insides feeling as if they were being melted by hot pokers. Then relief, blessed, sweet relief. And then the melting heat, the torture, the screaming…
All in the name of science…
Mordred’s head started to ache, the band tightening as if Sigfried himself were once again visiting the lab and getting a first-hand look at his scientist’s creation.
His creation—Mordred.
More than first-hand looks. He remembered Sigfried holding the syringe. He remembered Sigfried holding a glowing blade and slicing, stabbing, cutting. Then stepping back and observing, observing, observing.
All while Mordred screamed in mindless, excruciating pain.
Was it so strange that now he enjoyed causing others pain?
Was it so strange he couldn’t wait until Sigfried unclipped the leash and let him have the cop and his lady and everyone else in his sights?
In the meantime, Mordred enjoyed the messages he left for the cop.
He ended the upload and tried to wish the tightening band away with images of Lupo’s woman under his claws. And fangs.
If he’d been in the woods, he would have howled.
Killian
Bakke’s eyes widened at him, and he looked like an overgrown goldfish.
“Wait, you’re running a case on one of my homicide detectives right now, while we got this heater case? Are you nuts?”
He was sitting behind his large desk, looking like a moon-faced fish. His complexion was patchy-red, his nose marked by the thin, red vines of a serious drinker.
If only you knew I’m the guy who made it a heater. And that your cop Lupo’s the boy… No, not something you should find out.
“Chief—”
“I told you not to call me that.”
“Lieutenant, sorry,” Killian said. Good thing you don’t know what your men call you, and why. “Lieutenant, I was given the leeway needed to investigate allegations against anyone, at any time. Your commissioner reiterated this leeway recently. I am not only allowed, I’m encouraged by the City Council. And duty-bound.”
“You have allegations against one of my cops? Don’t tell me! I don’t wanna know yet.”
It’s way more than allegations, fuckhead.
“I’ll work it on the down low until I have something worth bringing you, Lieutenant. You can be sure I’ll keep it under wraps until then.”
Killian hated to sound obsequious, but sometimes you had to go with what worked best.
They were sitting in Bakke’s office, but Killian felt out of place. His little hole downstairs had become home, and the cloying smell of his snacks of choice had become a comforting presence that gave him the sense of separateness on which he had come to rely to do his job. Sure, he was hated by the rank and file, but they feared him and that was best.
All except Lupo. He didn’t seem afraid at all.
And that rankled Killian probably most of all the things he could list he had against Lupo.
But Bakke was a strange fish—overgrown guppy or blowfish or whatever he resembled—who was more on top of things going on with his cops than he seemed to be. He was more competent than he appeared, too, and now his trust seemed to lie with Lupo.
Killian figured he’d have to catch Lupo doing something very bad, indeed.
Which also rankled, because he knew he himself could get Lupo for murder, but his prints on his gun would be hard to argue with. Lupo had checkmated him, but Killian still thought there was more. But what was it?
Bakke was talking at him and he tuned back in.
“Everybody’s in agreement your IA has done an excellent job cleaning up the typical problems in the department. The MPD is better for it, Killian. But you don’t want to go too far, take things to a personal level, know what I mean?”
Killian felt his face heating up.
He opened his mouth, but Bakke went on.
“I have heard rumbles from some corners that you have a personal gripe against one of my best detectives. A decorated detective. A fucking hero, Killian. I don’t care if the two of you can’t stand to be in the same room, or if you’re constantly comparing your dicks in the john, or if you don’t like the way he looks, or whatever the fuck.”
Bakke showed some of his rarely seen hardass attitude right then, leaning forward and staring at Killian intensely with those pop-eyes which suddenly didn’t seem so comical.
“I don’t ca
re what it is that’s between you, but I’m warning you. You come at that particular cop with some half-baked shit you can’t back up, without a case so solid you could hammer a roof on it and call it a vacation house in a hurricane zone, and I will have your ass and your badge and your career hung out on the flagpole.”
He smiled for the first time, and Killian now thought he looked more like a shark.
Fuck.
Killian hated getting his legs cut out from under him like this.
“Do you, ah, understand where I’m comin’ from?” Bakke said, clearly demanding a response more definite than a stare.
“Got it, Lieutenant.” Killian tried to smile, but he could tell it looked as if he’d swallowed a lemon.
Bakke’s smile widened, and Killian swore he could see those multiple rows of shark’s teeth set like triangular razors in Bakke’s mouth.
Killian hadn’t misjudged somebody this badly in quite a while. And he had expected his reputation would have carried more weight.
He left the office stiffly, as if Bakke’s shoe were still embedded in his ass. It sure felt like it.
This made Killian twice as determined to stick to Lupo and see what the fucker was doing now. Chances were it was something. He’d already had his little twerpy DiSanto running some names.
He took the stairs and went straight for his office, where he could nuke something, anything from his stash.
His hands shook, and his breathing was rapid.
Marcowicz, here I come.
The Grim Reaper was back.
Chapter Ten
Simonson
Ever since he had removed the second silver dagger from the Minocqua massacre crime scene, Simonson had followed the Watcher.
Sleep-deprived and bone-tired, Geoff Simonson had made Wolfpaw Security his life’s work.
Destroying Wolfpaw.
He had served in Iraq as a Ranger, but left the military under shadowy circumstances. He’d found himself recovering from a near-fatal head wound, fighting off massive, unpredictable headaches, and later—when in need of employment—sucked into the war machine that Wolfpaw Security Services had cranked up between its training capacity and actual security services.
Simonson couldn’t remember signing the agreement. He’d been in the throes of a miserable, head-rattling, sharp pain jabbing at his temples. But he was well positioned as an asset to a company like Wolfpaw. As soon as he had recovered completely, according to the company doctors, he was already in country and trained to the gills for the very kind of campaign being fought in the streets and alleys of the Iraqi cities.
He advanced through the ranks of Wolfpaw despite his streak of blackouts and forced downtime.
And his anger built.
Anger turned to rage.
Working for Wolfpaw in Iraq, Simonson witnessed not only many of their day-to-day infractions—such as the use of prohibited explosive ammunition, indiscriminate shootings, gun smuggling and even killing for sport, the procuring of prostitutes for employees and other contractors and the occasional diplomat, plus the cover-ups all those required to keep them out of the news—but also the fact that a number of Wolfpaw mercenaries were lycanthropes.
Goddamn werewolves.
Monsters out of cheap horror movies.
Except these were real. He had seen them transform, starting out as humans and then suddenly shimmering, seeming to ripple in mid-air, and then becoming larger than average wolves whose fangs went for the throats of their victims, then disemboweled them and consumed the contents of their stomachs. And their limbs.
He had become an expert at recognizing werewolf attacks.
He had witnessed the slaughter caused by werewolf employees of the company, who seemed to hold all the power.
As werewolves, besides killing enemy combatants and identified jihadists, they also made sport of killing innocent people.
Conflicted, Simonson went into a tailspin. Both a moral and physical one that drained him of energy and will.
He’d awakened a month later in a Baghdad flophouse (and that was saying something), feverish and unemployed, cut off by his employer and from the normal world. From then on, nothing had been normal.
Headaches lanced through his brain with alarming regularity, and he suspected a brain tumor would bring him down like a bull elephant in the crosshairs of a .50-caliber rifle.
Geoff Simonson went “off the grid” and pledged to fight Wolfpaw and its lycanthropes. As part of his surveillance one night, he was surreptitiously observing their Georgia compound when one Dominic Lupo infiltrated it. He’d watched with interest as the rogue cop Lupo took on one of the wolf training teams by enduring pain the level of which Simonson could only imagine, efficiently executing a few of the rawer recruits. Their shapeshifting abilities were no match for Lupo’s experience and determination. Even so, Lupo had barely escaped the compound and the state with his human skin intact.
Lupo’s actions had given Simonson a direction to follow, but complications with his gear and the sudden onset of one of his lance-like headaches had forced him to the sideline temporarily.
Later, Simonson followed Wolfpaw’s reinforced Alpha Team north, which led him directly to Nick Lupo and a strange sequence of events. There, too, he managed to be perfectly positioned and equipped to observe the bloody battle at the new casino. Intrigued by the fact that Lupo was a werewolf but also a sworn enemy of the evil Wolfpaw corporation, he decided to make Lupo the focus of his surveillance. By tailing Lupo and witnessing the events in the casino parking lot, Simonson had spotted the unusual dagger that saved Lupo and his team, but not the poor ex-sheriff, Tom Arnow.
And then Simonson had spotted the Watcher, who also kept surveillance on Lupo and those around him.
Simonson had no doubt the Watcher was one of Wolfpaw’s weapons. Why was he holding off like that, observing from afar?
The game’s complexity increased.
Simonson bided his time, but looked for the moment he would approach Nick Lupo. When the opportunity came, he could be Lupo’s best chance.
And so now he found himself outside Wolf Liquor & Wine, wondering if he could approach Lupo when he came out. Simonson knew the Watcher had butchered the people in that store, but if he approached Lupo now he’d be an obvious suspect. He had to find the right moment. He had to keep an eye on Lupo, but continue tracking the Watcher, too.
And what was up with the dark-haired chick with the make-believe boyfriend? He’d seen through that ploy without much trouble, while the two cops just looked at her rack. He watched her eyes, though, and her lips, and he knew she was spinning a cover story. A spur of the moment cover story, but not one of the worst he’d ever heard. She had experience using her chest to bedazzle men into doing her bidding, and though this hadn’t worked, she’d gotten some sort of info. He wasn’t sure what, but the partner had gotten a vibe of sorts from her.
Simonson melted through the crowd in the opposite direction from the inquisitive woman. Not sure how he knew, but he figured he’d be seeing her again.
Killian
They met at an Albanian-owned diner a few blocks down, one of those with huge servings and menus that might as well have been photocopied, all offering the same idealized American fare. It was slightly better than that local chain with the twin clocks, but he didn’t really like the way they made their hot dogs here—cutting them in half along their length to press them into rolls rather than hot dog buns. As a New Yorker, he hated anything outside of tradition. The diner had a Philly steak, but he’d made the mistake of trying that once and—never again. He ordered a generic hamburger, yanked the over-nuked bacon, left the fried onions and slathered on the mustard. Marcowicz ordered an omelet the size of his plate. Killian snagged the check so the doc would be grateful and talk more.
They went over the same topics as in their phone call.
He started with the usual questions and let the weaselly psychologist talk on, his mouth disgustingly full of eggs flecked with green and r
ed.
Killian wanted material he could use to make his case against Nick Lupo, but it was a delicate balance because of Lupo’s stature in the squad—and the department. The wishy-washy Lieutenant Bakke was a jerk, but he seemed willing to allow Lupo rope to hang himself, as all good task force heads are expected to do when things go wrong. The downside of all that rope was that Lupo could easily get himself out of most kinds of trouble with it exactly because it was so loose, and he had plenty of wiggle room.
“What about this whole seeing dead people thing?” he asked the doc, hoping the idiot would stop chewing before answering.
Mordred
He watched the New York cop with the weird name chatting up the bowlegged police psychologist. He wasn’t far away, tucked in a booth of his own and slouched behind the figures of an overfed family of four hanging over the edges of their booth in front of him.
The fact that Killian was pumping the little snitch of a doctor meant there was something there for him to learn, about Lupo and about whatever he was forced to waste his time on in therapy.
Mordred flipped on the tiny unit that looked like a bluetooth earpiece, and what appeared to be a cell phone in his hand was an advanced parabolic microphone he positioned just right.
Their words popped into his ear, and he listened intently as he worked on a chunk of gristly, rare meat most humans would have sent back.
What was this about seeing dead people?
The psychologist swallowed a huge mouthful of food. “He hasn’t talked about seeing Ghost Sam, as he calls the apparition, for quite a while. As a matter of fact, I was encouraged by his progress. The delusion seemed to be slipping away.”
“That’s good,” the cop said sarcastically. “What about that foot?”
“I have seen him limp less on occasion, but that could be related to the weather. Understand, I can’t just ask him to prove he’s injured. I have noticed some new scarring on his right hand, however.”
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