Wolf's Edge (The Nick Lupo Series Book 4)

by W. D. Gagliani

  Now Nicky fidgeted, wondering whether Grandma would go to bed or sleep in the chair—which she said soothed her aching back—because her decision would affect his plans greatly. If she slept in the chair, when she awoke and saw what he was watching she would make him turn it off. If she went to bed, however, he and his Grampa had unimpeded television control. To his relief, Grandma was startled awake during the lame newscast and groaned as she raised her tired body out of the armchair and headed for bed. Nicky smiled at his Grampa, who winked and poured himself another glass of wine. WGN’s Creature Features it was!

  By the time the familiar theme came on and “The Wolf Man” started, Nicky and Grampa were all set with crackers, soda, wine and Oreo cookies. From Talbot’s first horrifying transformation, Nicky grabbed hold of his grandfather’s hand and watched intently, occasionally sneaking a peek at his hand to see if a pentagram were visible. Or was someone else supposed to see it? He’d have to ask Grampa later.

  The movie was so scary that Nicky forgot to eat, and when Grandma suddenly threw open the door and stood surveying their criminal behavior, he screamed and jumped out of his seat.

  “What are you watching?” Grandma screeched.

  But her eyes bulged as she saw for herself. The wolf man was prowling the foggy English countryside while a pack of hounds bayed in the distance. A close-up of the wolf man’s tortured, horrifying visage made her mutter under her breath, and her hand dashed off the sign of the cross in quick, desperate motions.

  “Maria,” Grampa said, rising.

  “Turn it off!” Grandma’s scream was so abrupt, so unimaginably loud, that both Grampa and Nicky froze. Grampa stood near the table, and Nicky sat half in and half out of his chair.

  She fixed both of them in turn with a foreign stare, her eyes almost glazed with—

  With what? What’s wrong with Grandma?

  And then he saw it. Out of the corner of his eye he saw on the screen the mob close in on the wolf man, whom they would no doubt kill. His grandmother’s eyes were riveted on the movie, too, but instead of anger they displayed utter terror.

  His grandmother was terrified by the movie, and that made Nicky scared, too.

  He looked at his grandmother and her fear, then saw that Grampa clutched his chest for a long second before stepping around the table to go to his wife. He led her out of the room, whispering soothingly and putting his arm around her shoulders, which now seemed slumped and no longer as strong as they had earlier.

  Nicky turned again to the movie, but his eyes didn’t want to focus on it and so he ran to the set and clicked it off as if the monster inside might get out and attack him.

  Even in his youth, Nicky realized that his fears were twofold now. His grandmother’s fear had scared him, and badly, but Grampa’s sudden movement replayed over and over in his mind. The table seemed strangely prophetic, with the half-empty wine glass on Grampa’s placemat. Nicky heard his grandparents’ urgent voices from the bedroom, and he wondered if he hadn’t just seen the future.

  He didn’t know where that thought had come from, but he couldn’t shake the image until he fell into a dreamless sleep, long after the lights were out.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Nick Lupo

  1970

  Nicky was only ten, but now he read both Italian and English, due to his mother and grandmother’s efforts. Nicky’s father, too, had fueled the boy’s curiosity since he’d been little, stimulating his desire to learn but in a different way, by answering the many questions the boy posed in his childishly serious way. Frank Lupo was hardly ever faced with a question he couldn’t field.

  Though the elder Lupo’s influence in the boy’s life was great, as it often is in an Italian household, his father’s long absences working overseas with one European firm after another had given Nicky reason to grow closer to his grandparents and, later, to his mother and grandmother. Grampa would have read with him, too, but Grampa was gone now—taken by a heart attack in the night the previous February.

  There had been no monster movies since the night of the Creature Features argument, and then a real monster had come for his Grampa and left his Grandma bitter and much older. It had slowly sunk in to Nicky that Grampa would never return.

  Then came the shock of the newspaper article that his grandmother would not let him read.

  The article was in an Italian-American newspaper from New York that his grandmother read religiously in three- and four-day tightly rolled packets the mailman left on the porch.

  Nicky had been lying on the floor, drawing one of his elaborate military dioramas. Sheet after sheet he carefully filled with two-dimensional renderings of a waiting, dug in army, followed by separate drawings showing an advancing, challenging army. The final series always showed the battle in snapshot-like flashes, with explosions and flying bodies just like in the movies. It was a childish blend of art and propaganda-bred militarism.

  On days like this, in the middle of a fantasy war as real as the Vietnam images he saw daily on television, Nicky wanted to add realism to his drawings. He reached out and snatched one of Grandma’s papers from where it lay, beside her armchair. She was busy reading a different one, wearing a hand-crocheted shawl over her rounded shoulders and her cheap, large-framed man’s Woolworth’s reading glasses.

  Maria Saltini herself was still a large-framed woman but her aches and pains had finally forced her to retire—her arthritis and rheumatism made walking and the handling of objects difficult. She used a cane and could barely lift her silverware off the table. But there was no sharper card player and no social drinker quite like her in the family. As a young girl, she had traipsed the hills of her native village in northern Italy and sung lusty songs of sweet love and bitter parting with her friends, sharing many a flask of hearty wine in the process. The love she had for life was almost as profound as that she had for her family, and her grandson especially.

  But when she saw his hand remove the newspaper from the pile near her chair, she reached out much more quickly than her years and her physical condition should have allowed, grasping the crinkly pages and removing them from Nicky’s grip in one smooth motion.

  “Non oggi, Nicolino.” Not today.

  “Why not? I want to read about the battles.”

  She began handing the paper back, but then she looked down and read something near the bottom of the front page and made up her mind. “I’m sorry, no. You can read another one.” Her voice was stern.

  Nicky was a smart boy. He had seen where she’d looked.

  He noted also the strange gesture she had made with her left hand and quickly hidden.

  “Okay, Grandma,” he said, sinking back down to the floor and his battle drawings. He kept the corner of his eye on the coveted newspaper. When she shuffled the pile of newspapers and slid that particular issue into the middle, Nicky could still tell its wrinkled corner apart from the others. He would see that article she wanted to keep from him. If not now, then later. He was persistent and cunning. And he knew it.

  Nick thoughtfully drew an explosion that tossed coolie-hat-wearing bodies all around. Howitzer, he thought, sketching it in inside the good guys’ fortress with a series of practiced pen strokes. They just forgot they had it.

  Later, the house was quiet and Nicky had finished his battle and started on another. It was afternoon naptime, and he was supposed to rest just like the adults. The afternoon nap was sacrosanct, a holdover from the Italian custom of taking a long lunch and a nap and then being productive later into the evening. Nicky knew that in parts of Europe you couldn’t even find an open store from noon to three. He liked that custom, and he enjoyed being alone for a while as his elders rested.

  He knew his grandmother had forgotten about the newspaper she’d intended to keep from him because she had left the stack of newsprint near the armchair. Nicky pretended to nap until he heard gentle snores and deep breathing coming from the bedroom and the den.

  He held his head up for three full minutes,
ready to lower it immediately and feign sleep. Then he rolled to the chair and waited for any sound that might signal he was about to be caught by Grandma, awakened from her nap by the urgent need to keep him from…from what?

  His curious fingers located the newspaper in question, and he pinched and gently tugged it out from between the others.

  Mission accomplished—just like Mr. Phelps and the IM team.

  He rolled back to his original spot and shuffled some of his diorama scenes onto the majority of the unrolled newspaper, whose edges kept curling until he finally tamed it with his own body weight.

  Now, what was he not supposed to see?

  Nicky could read the Italian words well enough to get the gist of most stories. Common, everyday news stories and reports from Vietnam were simple for him, and his parents or grandmother were always ready to help with unfamiliar words.

  The front page headlines this day were political, so he skipped them. There was a brief report of some engagement in Vietnam, but there weren’t enough details for him, so he scanned it and moved on.

  The bottom of the page. A small, boxed item.

  Nicky’s heart raced as he read it.

  “Uomo-Lupo Siciliano.”

  Sicilian Wolf-Man.

  His breath caught in his throat as the headline sank in. His eyes wide, Nicky read the story from Palermo. His heart quickened and his pulse throbbed in his throat. This had to be what Grandma didn’t want him to see.

  But why?

  Various witnesses swore they had been attacked by a creature that was not a man and yet was too large to have been a wolf. Others reported seeing a naked man in the vicinity of the attacks, fueling speculation that the creature was indeed a man in wolf form during the full moon. Livestock had been butchered and partially eaten. Children had disappeared. Hunting parties armed with the lupara, or wolf-gun, had criss-crossed the nearby hills to no avail. Perhaps the wolf-man had swum to the mainland, one hunter said.

  Nicky felt the shiver in his back. This was too good!

  He’d loved “The Wolf-Man” and the other Universal movies when he managed to see them, but here was a real newspaper talking about a real wolf-man. He wondered how long of a swim it was from Palermo to the mainland. And from mainland Italy—could such a creature take a plane to North America?

  Why, there could be hundreds of wolf-men on this side of the Atlantic already!

  Now Nicky understood why Grandma didn’t want him to see the story. Maria Saltini made no bones about her beliefs. She had seen things in her life. He had heard her hushed whispers over the years.

  He remembered the story of a suspected witch who was forced by townspeople to attend holy mass in the village church only to break down into hysterical fits when given Communion, and then spitting out a sacred host while shouting obscenities in French, a language she didn’t know. He wasn’t supposed to have heard that story, of course, but Nicky was accomplished at feigning sleep and enjoyed listening to adults talk when they thought he couldn’t hear.

  Grandma also told the story of a village witch who sold love potions and revenge spells, and what Italian partisans had done to her when they accused her of betraying their leaders to the German occupiers. Grandma said they had “passed her around” until she was torn and bloody, then they had decapitated her battered corpse and buried it in two graves filled with salt and holy water. Everyone knew that witches could transform themselves into other creatures, and you had to make sure they couldn’t come back to their bodies.

  While he wasn’t quite sure what “passing her around” meant, he was sophisticated enough to let his imagination do the rest. He almost wished he didn’t know as much as he did. His bedroom would seem twice as dark tonight, and not nearly safe enough.

  Now Nicky reread the news story and let the delicious waves of goose bumps wash over him. Maybe the wolf-man of Sicily was even now stepping off a plane in Chicago. If Grandma had seen such things—and he was certain she had—then his fear of a traveling wolf-man couldn’t be so far-fetched. The way his grandmother had tried to keep it from him confirmed his suspicions.

  If Grandma’s scared, then it has to be true!

  Later that night, when the house whispered of darkness and of things too frightening to think about in a bedroom lit only by the crack under the door, Nicky understood why his grandmother didn’t want him exposed to the stories of her youth.

  He made his usual check of the window, latched and covered by the old-fashioned drawn shade; the sliding closet doors, closed, showing no black gaps; the space under the bed, still vaguely like a dark cavern to Nicky, a cavern out of which some slimy, tentacled thing could crawl.

  The Sicilian wolf-man whispered threats to him with a gravelly Italian accent. He had just arrived from the Old Country, menacing all. Nicky was unable to defend himself in any way. The man’s gaze, under one long and bushy eyebrow, fixed Nicky with its intensity. The flared nostrils were those of a wild animal.

  Nicky knew with absolute conviction that the man could turn into a giant wolf, yet he approached the shadowy form and held out his hand. For a moment the man’s face emerged from the shadows and softened, a look something like pity crossing his strong features. He reached out a large hand, slowly, but suddenly it was a claw, and Nicky drew back, frightened.

  By the time he looked up again, the man’s face had changed—his nose had become a snout, and his clean-shaven cheeks were covered with long, scraggly hair. But it was the eyes which held Nicky entranced… The man’s eyes had turned from brown to a shimmering green. In the instant it took for the green eyes to register, Nicky was ensnared by the wolf-man’s claws. Fangs had grown in the Sicilian’s mouth, now framed by his snarling lips, and he bared the drooling teeth only inches from Nicky’s neck.

  But when Nicky tried to bring up his lupara, the gun was useless, unloaded or jammed. An empty weight.

  He dropped the gun and screamed as claws and teeth tore into his skin, shredding layers of fat and flesh, hot wetness flooding from the ragged wounds as he flung himself away from the grasping, red-flecked jaws and into a wet embrace he couldn’t identify.

  He screamed again as the monster’s claws tightened on his arms and he felt the flood at his groin, the sickening hot wetness of his urine released unintentionally into the bedclothes and fouling his underwear and pajamas.

  He opened his eyes, his breath coming in hitches.

  “No more scary movies for you, Nicolino!” Grandma’s voice came from the shadow hunched over his bed, and the claws on his arms were her arthritic hands. Now she pulled away and made the sign of the cross, and that other gesture he had come to know so well.

  Her hand made a set of horns. The gesture, his mother had explained, used to ward off evil. He started to cry.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Lupo

  Christ, I haven’t thought about any of that in years.

  At the nursing home, the sympathetic administrator led him to his mother’s room, where she left him to meditate. Although he wished to do that, he also wanted to find the letter she’d told him about before dying. He opened drawers, closet doors, and then he turned and Ghost Sam stood before him, his finger pointing at the bedside radio on which his mom had listened to operas before the dementia claimed her interest.

  “There?” he asked, and the ghost seemed to nod sadly.

  Lupo hefted the old-fashioned radio and flipped it, and there was an envelope duct-taped to the underside.

  “Thanks,” he muttered, but Ghost Sam was gone.

  I’d have found it without his help, he assured himself.

  He sat on his mother’s bed, smelling her missing presence in the air, and read through the thick sheaf of numbered, yellowed papers covered in his grandmother’s spidery hand.

  It took him a while, and when he was finished he bowed his head, trying to keep his eyes clear of the tears that clamored to come.

  Now he knew so much, and he understood many things no one had ever told him.


  He took one last look around at his mother’s belongings, all that marked her time on earth other than his memory.

  He had to find Jessie. He couldn’t lose both women most important to him in one day.

  He drove to the casino, his heart heavy.

  And his rage building.

  Jessie

  She turned away from her place at the roulette wheel and there was Nick, staring at her.

  It was new to her, the betting on the green felt, and she’d actually doubled her money by judiciously betting on red and black, odd and even, and various spreads on the number columns. She learned by watching, and her chip piles grew. Looked like about five hundred dollars in winnings, give or take a few tens.

  The irony was that winning wasn’t making her feel better. The opposite—she was miserable.

  Could it be that the pathology of her gambling problem centered around her losing? Maybe the gambling worked for her only when its effects were negative. Winning, she felt somehow unfulfilled, unhappy. Losing, she felt as if she deserved what she got.

  She left a big tip for the croupier, then stepped away while wiping her face in frustration.

  How messed up am I, anyway?

  Then she saw Nick.

  He looked grim, and his eyes radiated sadness.

  “What’s happened?” she asked, her voice catching.

  And he told her about his mother.

  Jessie started to cry and lay her head on his shoulder as he led her away from the roulette’s rattling ball.

  But she smelled Heather on him, her perfume, or her make-up—or shit, maybe that was her musky scent?

  An image intruded. An image of them romping in the forest as wolves, fucking, like dogs in heat.

  And then her bitter tears represented an entire array of emotions. A surprising coldness overtook her, making its way up her arms and into her heart.

  Mordred

  After receiving the new orders via the secure laptop connection, he felt the shudder working its way through his body.

  The prods burned and stung his flesh again and left him powerless again. The people on the other side of the glass or outside the silver-plated bars stared and pointed, took notes, drank foul-smelling coffee, and occasionally laughed as he curled into a ball in the corner and whined like a whipped dog, his body blurring as it partly transformed, human to wolf and back again, his fur smoking where they burned him to see how he would react.