“Drop your gun, now,” commanded Sigfried.
Lupo swung his muzzle from the CEO to Simonson, but Simonson’s face seemed to be changing, stretching and distorting. Except it wasn’t, not really. His features weren’t changing, but yet he suddenly looked like someone else.
“Mordred?” Lupo whispered.
“Drop the gun, like he said,” Simonson said, his MP5K now covering Lupo. “I have a clip of silver ammo in here now.”
“You’re one of them?” Lupo shook his head. “If you’re a wolf, that silver would be burning up your hand like a torch by now.”
Sigfried answered. “Mordred is the first of a new strain of werewolves, Lupo. Unfortunate name, really, isn’t it? Yours, I mean.”
Lupo ignored him. He looked at his recent ally. “Were you ever Simonson?”
“Sure, that’s Mordred’s cover identity,” Sigfried said, waving it off. “He just used it to convince you to go along.”
“No,” Lupo said, “I saw it in his eyes. He wasn’t acting. He believed he was Simonson. Didn’t you, Geoff?”
Simonson blinked rapidly, as if he were having trouble following. Sweat broke out on his forehead. His gun’s muzzle wavered.
“It doesn’t matter, Lupo. Simonson or Mordred, he’s mine. He always was, since his first days in the lab.”
Simonson/Mordred’s eyes widened a fraction, and his breath hitched. Even though his features had not changed physically, he still looked different. He glared at Lupo as if examining an insect specimen.
“He is Mordred, my creation,” Sigfried intoned dramatically. He mimed a small Prussian bow. “But my grandfather started the work during the war. He was the first scientist to study the werewolf in a laboratory setting, and he began experimenting with curing the beasts from their silver aversion.”
“It’s more than an aversion,” Lupo said.
“Yes,” Sigfried agreed. “It’s a true Achilles’ heel, isn’t it? But the great Doktor Klaus Schlosser learned how to make werewolves almost immune to the metal. Didn’t he, Mordred?”
Mordred’s face reflected years of pain and torture, but he nodded once, his gun muzzle now covering Lupo again.
“I am Schlosser’s grandson, though I changed my name legally to avoid the connection. After all, he was known as der Schnitter—the Reaper—and I have used his notes to take my grandfather’s experiments farther. My results have been more consistent than what he managed in his primitive facilities.”
Lupo showed his disgust. “He experimented on concentration camp inmates, didn’t he?”
“Chelmno was a transit camp, and they were volunteers who were treated better than the rest.”
“Whatever you say.”
Schlosser went on, unfazed. “It’s too bad my chief assistant was weak and eventually succumbed to his damnable conscience—”
“You mean Gavin, in Minocqua?” Lupo said, stalling for time. “Cowardly murderer of his entire family?” Keep the megalomaniacs talking.
Ghost Sam would approve.
Schlosser showed surprise. “Ah, you made the connection? Never mind. I relocated Gavin to Minocqua years ago to monitor you, Dominic Lupo.”
He was pacing behind the wall now, fully engaged in his subject. In control of the situation, and clearly the victor.
Lupo’s shock was apparent.
“Yes, that’s surprising, isn’t it? You see, there was a silly man who still made some strides of his own. He was a so-called shaman up there in your Indian lands, Joseph Badger. He tinkered with things well out of his intellectual range, that is certain. But somehow he stumbled onto something even I found fascinating. He managed to blend the old, European werewolf gene with a new world, magical version. I confess, I don’t even know how he did it! But it led to you, Lupo, and you’re different. You aren’t immune to silver, not by a long shot, but you are more so than most other werewolves. Your hand is scarred from handling silver ammunition, but what you did on my Georgia compound should have killed you by all rights.”
Lupo looked down at his hand, remembering the pain, the burning-scorching agony of it.
“Yes, I think studying you will definitely accelerate my future experiments. I created Mordred here, but he would probably admit the process was not, how shall I say it, painless. Eh, Mordred?”
“You’re a bigger monster than he is,” Lupo growled.
“Words, Lupo. Soon you’ll be screaming when I start injecting silver-infused blood into your veins.”
Lupo shuddered despite himself.
But he let the insane CEO continue to rant.
“You represent a quicker solution to my goal. My destiny. Wolfpaw has hundreds of werewolves in its ranks, Lupo, and a few are like Mordred. We have taken on a large percentage of this country’s defense under various contracts, as you know. But—”
“And made a lovely fuck-up of it, too,” Lupo blurted out.
“A mere distraction, those hearings. Soon those idiots in congress will cower when our name is spoken. We’ll slowly take over more and more functions of the U.S. military, until we are the U.S. military. I already have numerous congressional stooges ready to introduce bills that will merge us with Pentagon-directed services. My super-wolves will do the rest.”
“You’re insane,” Lupo said. “Fucking nutcase.”
Ghost Sam would have laughed and called this bastard a wanna-be Bond villain.
“Except he’s doing what he says,” Ghost Sam said. The specter was standing between Lupo and Simonson. “Not all of this is new to you, is it?”
Meanwhile, Schlosser lost his cool. “Silence! You’re not in a position to call me names. I need you alive, but I can send Mordred here back to your den and have that doctor lover of yours brought here minus a few key parts. To inspire your cooperation.”
Lupo felt a jab of fear then, knowing he was in a precarious situation despite his preparations. Jessie was safe in the hotel, but not impregnable.
Schlosser calmed himself. No doubt by thinking of himself as a supreme commander of werewolf armies or some such garbage.
The descendant of Klaus Schlosser, the Reaper, smacked his palm with a fist. “Once in command and control positions, it will not be difficult to further infiltrate the government. The coup, when it comes, will be quick and briefly savage. My grandfather’s vision of a Fourth Reich will be realized after all these years.”
“What happened to him?”
Schlosser frowned, caught between talkative and ruthless. “He was caught in an air raid. He chose to stay in his Chelmno apartment one night near the end of the war. He had company, a weakness of his, and he stayed with her…”
Schlosser seemed to be far off in his mind. But then he recovered. “Your family history was also of interest to me, Lupo, with those very interesting daggers used against my countrymen’s werewolf soldiers. Of course we wrested possession of those two weapons from some drunk old priest, and they were useful in some of my experiments. But that idiot Gavin had already started unraveling some years ago. He gave an elder of that…that tribe, one of the daggers as a gift—because he was conflicted about Badger’s intentions. Those daggers were not his to give away!”
“I disagree,” Lupo said. “My family’s contact with them during the war makes them as much mine as yours.”
Schlosser laughed derisively. “No matter, they are both mine again.”
“You’ll have to take one from me.”
“I don’t have to. Mordred will.”
Lupo looked at Simonson. The man who was also Mordred had him covered, but his mind seemed elsewhere. His eyes were troubled.
“Simonson, come back to me.” Lupo guessed there were complexities in the werewolf’s brain that he could barely comprehend.
He’d studied enough psychology to remember the concept of dissociative identity disorder, stress-induced amnesia that affected identity and resulted in memory loss and distinct personalities. It was the basis of the so-called multiple personality disorder, and it was a safe
bet that what Simonson—or Mordred, whatever his real name was—had seen in Iraq combined with Schlosser’s torture had fucked him up royally.
For a moment, it seemed that Mordred’s stone face was breached by Simonson’s, the intense soldier who’d approached Lupo for help destroying Wolfpaw, his tormentor. The two faces flickered back and forth, even the eyes changing from the swirling spirals of the werewolf Mordred to the cold, soldier’s eyes of Geoff Simonson.
“You committed those murders to warn me, didn’t you?” Lupo said softly. “The wolf references were the Simonson identity’s influence on you, which you hoped would raise my alarm like coded messages. I missed the reasoning, but they did get my attention.”
“Ah, Mordred,” Schlosser said with false sadness, “you let your Simonson cover take over your head?” He seemed intrigued by the concept.
“Apparently what you did to him shattered his mind into separate identities and caused him to try to both hurt and help me.”
Schlosser sneered. “Impossible.”
“Is it? Look at him.”
They both did.
“Mordred, please overpower Lupo and bring him to the cage.” Schlosser pressed a button on a remote he’d been hiding in his hand, and a panel slid open behind them. Inside a concrete cell stood a cell. The bars were silver-plated, Lupo knew—because he felt the intense heat from a distance.
But there was a war going on in Mordred’s head, and he seemed to be alternating from one identity to the other.
Which identity would win?
Mordred
The liquid fire in his veins rendered him into a screaming mass of exposed nerve endings, the invisible flames licking their way through every limb, every muscle, and every individual hair on his body.
Memory of Schlosser’s torture threatened to give Simonson the edge, but the CEO’s presence was strong, and the soldier’s identity was a fake, after all. Mordred’s memory was full of gaps. Perhaps they represented when he’d been Geoff Simonson. Perhaps he was losing what was left of his mind.
But as he looked at Schlosser, he remembered that he was a soldier with a mission.
And he would be tortured again if he didn’t follow orders. After so many years spent in a cage, he knew that soldiers followed their orders. And he knew what hurt werewolves.
He turned the submachine gun on Lupo.
Mordred was in charge.
Lupo
He had carried the silver dagger in his boot, but while entering the conference room he had stealthily slid it out and, protected by its magical scabbard, held it close to his leg.
The silver’s proximity would have seared his skin like a torch, but the wooden scabbard’s special qualities shielded him until he unsheathed the blade.
Which he did, at the same time dropping the Glock and whirling on the man who was the werewolf Mordred.
The blade glowed close to his hand.
The searing began…
Mordred, for his part, was caught by surprise because he thought he held the upper-hand weapon. But he dropped the HK when Lupo’s sudden lunge speared his forearm and sliced a jagged cut toward his elbow.
He screamed. Apparently even Mordred wasn’t altogether immune to the silver of the special weapons.
From the letter his grandmother had left, Lupo was now certain that it wasn’t the silver alone, but the provenance of the silver that had its effect on werewolves.
His own hand shrieked in burning pain, but he kept the blade in motion and pierced Mordred’s side. The blade slid into the muscular body without resistance, and Mordred screeched as the scalding hot tip pierced organ and sinew.
Lupo withdrew the blade and was in the process of seeking a new target when Mordred managed to unsheathe his own silver dagger, and though Lupo threw up an arm to block its trajectory, the blade’s edge made a long slit on his forearm.
Lupo hissed as the blade sheared through his skin and flesh and scorched the wound like a propane flame.
They traded slices and stabbing thrusts as men, neither of them transforming to werewolf form. The clothes inhibited them, but Lupo also suspected the dagger in his hand was a better edge against Mordred’s dagger than his wolf’s jaws—after all, the daggers had proven astonishingly effective against werewolves in their animal form.
They squared off, thrusting and parrying like swordsmen of old, except the length of their blades necessitated coming in close, inside the enemy’s reach.
Schlosser stared at the contest between the cop and the soldier from behind his protective barrier.
Lupo heard the Creature inside howling, urging a Change so he could wade into the fight. The wolf wanted to fight, lusting for blood.
But Lupo’s control had improved, and he managed to overcome the Creature’s influence.
Mordred went on the attack, and his thrusts and slices drove Lupo back toward the conference table, where he became tangled in the rolling chairs and almost fell sideways.
The slip was fortuitous, however, because Mordred’s thrust would have been on target had Lupo still stood in the same spot.
Kicking the chairs out of his way and into Mordred’s, Lupo grunted with effort as he heaved himself to his knees and thrust out blindly, feeling his blade tip find Mordred’s lower belly and slip in even as the big man swept sideways with his own blade.
The silver edge scorched Lupo’s hair and nearly scalped him, separating a flap of skin from his skull.
He screamed as the heat seared through his brain, and he nearly blacked out.
But instead he felt the bubbling warmth of magically heated blood gushing over the hand that held his dagger, which was buried deep in Mordred’s body, pointed up. He felt the blade sawing upward like a jigsaw almost out of his control, as if the Creature had taken over, and then Mordred’s intestines poured out, smoking as the heat cooked them.
Lupo retched and tried to withdraw the dagger, but he couldn’t.
Then he looked up into Mordred’s eyes and saw that Geoff Simonson looked back at him. Gone were the swirling, cold werewolf eyes.
“Thank you,” the big soldier mouthed, blood bubbling out from between his lips.
Lupo understood then that Simonson had taken the thrust intentionally and kept himself skewered on purpose, killing both himself and his evil Mordred personality.
Simonson folded over and died, his body twitching and his inner wolf attempting to Change, fluttering between human and wolf.
He collapsed at Lupo’s knees, and Lupo finally withdrew the blade from the corpse, his own pain suddenly intolerable. Panting, he found the scabbard and sheathed his blade, his hand and arm and wounds overwhelming him. His vision blurred.
He drew himself to his feet with the help of a chair and fixed his eyes on Schlosser, who was still behind the glass.
He was no longer smug, seeing that his champion had been vanquished.
Lupo advanced on the glass wall, trying to think past the pain.
How to get at the fucker?
“You’re still vulnerable, Lupo,” Schlosser said, his eyes betraying his sudden fear.
“No,” Lupo spit out. “You are vulnerable. And you’re mine.”
“Not quite, Nick.”
Lupo was startled by the familiar voice.
“Margarethe?” Schlosser said. “What are you—”
“Heather?” Lupo said, his hands on the glass.
Heather
She had waited until the opportune moment to take Sigfried-Schlosser by surprise.
Her stolen cards had provided access. After all, the CEO himself had given her unparalleled freedom in his house, trapped by his own weaknesses, the sadistic lust that had undone his family throughout the ages.
Now she had sneaked up behind him and snatched the remote out of his hand from behind.
“What the hell?” Lupo’s voice came through the speaker.
He was staring at her as he held his wounded arm, blood streaming down his face.
He was staring because she w
as nude—magnificently nude and incredibly alluring, waves of lust cascading off her glowing skin.
“Margarethe?” Schlosser said again. “What—I don’t have time to—I don’t know what you—”
His tongue tied itself up and he backed away from her.
She smiled at Lupo. “I told you I had sources,” she said. “I was the source.”
“You?” Lupo shook his head, wishing he could break down the glass partition and tear the CEO limb from limb.
“He knew me as Margarethe, the woman who bought his favorite dom business. I became his personal dominatrix, Nick, at his beck and call twenty-four seven, and he was so besotted with me that I managed to break his security from the inside.”
“So that’s how you—” Lupo nodded. Her calls made sense now. He thought she’d been using her investigative journalist skills, but actually she’d been using her body. And her own lusts.
Schlosser’s face now showed that his confusion had been replaced by rising fear. Maybe some latent lust, too, as he eyed the formidable woman before him.
But she was backing him toward the cage. She knew her eyes were changing, colors swirling.
And that he saw, and understood.
She pressed a key on the remote.
The glass partition began to retract.
“No!” Schlosser shrieked, turning to run, but there was nowhere to go because now Lupo was standing on this side of the room. And the remote, with which he could have summoned help, was in Heather’s hand.
She smiled widely.
And her body shimmered, turning into a sleek and muscular gray wolf.
Lupo caught the remote in his good hand and studied it.
The cage door opened, but Lupo stopped it. They were only two yards from the cage, but the heat from the silver bars was becoming intense.
“I can’t put him in there,” Lupo said, his voice cracking with pain. “It’ll protect him.”
The she-wolf looked at him. She understood. He pressed a button and a section of wall closed, hiding the cage from sight and shielding them from the silver.
Lupo left Heather’s wolf guarding the trembling CEO.
“Margarethe, I’ll give you anything you want,” he pleaded.
The she-wolf growled and showed her fangs.
Wolf's Edge (The Nick Lupo Series Book 4) Page 31