Wolf: A Military P.A.C. Novel

by KL Mabbs

  Faelon stood up and shook herself the way she would if she had been a wolf. Pine needles and ice crystals fell from the clothes that covered her body. She used her hands to brush off the remaining debris as she moved into the open, taking stock of her surroundings. The movement in the trees, the shape of the land, the differences from last night: the rounded shape of the boulders in the area; Chaka’s body, stiff in the cold air. The Whiskey Jack and small animals that pecked at the frozen flesh.

  She noticed the dark stain of Michael’s blood, and the black wolf’s, too. Her footsteps glared at her with the same clarity as the ice and snow around her. She couldn’t hide her tracks as a wolf, but she could blend in to the forest and hide that way. Her human print was a mark of strangeness, something unnatural to the world around her. Like her.

  So be it.

  She raised her nose into the air and breathed in deep. The wind whisked through the valley she was in, taking her spore up the pass towards where Michael had gone. She couldn’t smell her mate, but she could see the long unending break of drag marks from the Deer Man’s carrying bed. She set off at a lope, splaying her feet out in such a way that she was supported by the thick crust of snow that covered the ground. Her pace would eat up the land and let her travel all day.

  It left her thoughts free—left her able to think about the last days and her life with Michael and the not-cub, PAC. Those thoughts left an ache in her belly, a need that was growing. But without her mate, that ache would turn into pain. Already the ache had crawled up to her breasts, leaving her tender.

  And PAC, he had taught her so much, some of which was just starting to impinge itself on her mind, and her behaviour. She was wolf, and she was human. Michael was human only, but she had poured so much healing into him as he sat on the edge of death.

  The same way she had left the black wolf: dying, his wounds full of her saliva.

  Would it work the same way?

  She remembered his hands on her, his lips trailing over the soft skin of her mouth—but only when she was human. He had only kissed her the once when she was a wolf and that had been on the forehead. It hadn’t been enough that day. She had changed form and he had responded to her, so well that it surprised her even now.

  Before she had barely moved away from the area, sound intruded on her thoughts: the whisper that was like wind, but was really the platform that moved on the air. A shout distracted her, Michael’s voice coming from the distance. His growls lost in the wind above her.

  Her heart leapt. He was alive. He was whole. Standing in the distance waving his arms in the air. She wished she could smell the rich musk of his scent, but the wind would have to shift for that to happen. The snow swirled and she looked up. The net that fell around her was cold metal. It snapped like teeth and then she was lifted into the air towards the waiting men. The same men that had tried to keep her from Michael before. A growl left her throat, fierce and deep. The fear of the men above her, stirred by the machine, drifted downward in the wind. She came even with the men, saw their tooth-spitters, guns, and then felt the sharp stab of teeth that had paralyzed her before, the tiny feathers fluttering in the wind.

  She heard her name called, then Michael’s voice closer, piercing the air. “Faelon!”

  She was sure she had heard a howl behind his word, a howl of rage so fierce it left a shudder through her muscles, even at this distance.

  “My mate doesn’t like you.” Her words were thick and slurred, falling off her tongue, but she could smell the fear increase in the small space around her.

  Then she wasn’t even aware of the vibration beneath her body as the drugs in her system took effect.

  Chapter 31 White Bear Dying

  “Grandfather?”

  “You’ll understand later, Grandson.”

  White Bear Dying groaned from the pain in his skull. He raised a hand to probe the spot on the back of his head and then thought better of it; he had given up picking at scabs. His jaw ached and he could feel with his tongue that several teeth had loosened up from the backhanded blow Michael Scott had given him. He dropped his hand and slowly raised his body into a sitting position. The blanket covering him slipped to his lap.

  He hadn’t done that.

  The last thing he remembered was the shock from Michael caving in his skull. It was like the spirit slamming back into the body after too long a walk from the tether that held flesh and soul together.

  The blanket draped over him, that was Michael’s doing. Then he remembered what Michael had said to him.

  His body shivered. Whether from the head wound or the cold air within the Eco-tree—Choosh'gai—that he lived in, he didn’t know. He hoped it wasn’t from the blow to the head. That would mean a concussion and he had no way to heal from that. It would be two days before the sacred bark would wear off and he could use the abilities of the Skinwalker. He could use the Witchery Way to heal, but that took concentration along with specific rites, so it was the same thing.

  Another Skinwalker was loose, and it was his fault.

  He’d tried to stop it. First with Simon’s mate. Another accident, another victim, a bullet meant for Simon.

  A year later he had found Simon's body at the bottom of an avalanche, mangled by the rocks. That had shown him the way to fight the Yeenaaldlooshii. In the fall, the branches of a tree had pierced his body several times. Those parts had been human. A shudder ran through him then—the grotesque mixture of human and wolf, an evil that shouldn’t exist.

  And the tracks beside that body. He had followed them. He had watched her ways and how she hunted. More importantly, what she hunted. Wolf or human. But he needed to know if she had become evil enough to hunt man.

  White Bear slowly gained his feet. The floorboards under him rocked for a moment, and then steadied up. He laughed to himself. His house hadn’t moved, not even in the strong winds of a mountain storm did it have that much motion. He waited for the nausea to come that would tell him he had a concussion, but it didn’t settle into his stomach. And while his pain took on the feel of his heartbeat again, his head didn’t reel. He took an unsteady step and searched for his staff. He slowly bent and retrieved the sacred wood from the floor where it had sprawled after he was hit. Then, he needed the support of the bed and the staff to raise himself up. The staff left a pain in his hands, but that was normal. It was the strength that told him he could be human enough to fight the nature of the Skinwalker.

  His back twitched the abuse of Michael’s attack.

  He was getting old, even with magic easing him into his eighth decade.

  He remembered the brindle wolf. Though she stayed to herself and only watched humans, from curiosity or wariness, she stayed away from the occasional tourist that fished the remote lakes and rode the ribbon of highway in the valley below. He had even taken the form of a stag to watch her and track her, had gored her that summer to find the temperament of the human inside the wolf, but she had reacted like a true wolf. So he had left her be—now he wondered if that had been wise. Michael Scott was one of the afflicted, now. His cure had shown him that, the bark that he had placed on his hand as it healed had proved that. There might be hope for him yet, for his soul at least. His body was taken, changing.

  White Bear applied a dressing to his head wound and sighed with the warmth of it. He rinsed the blood from the cloth and pressed it gently back on his aching skull, resting his weight on the counter.

  “You shouldn’t have left me alive, Michael Scott. I won’t hesitate to kill you, nor your brindle-coated mate.”

  The blanket that had been thrown over him, showing mercy for an enemy, didn’t change the fact that all who Skinwalked were evil, or would become that way, in time. There was no way around that. The only thing keeping him free from the same fate was the sacred bark he used. Mixed in the coffee he had served to Michael, that was now splashed all over the floor of his bedroom. He reached for the canister that held real coffee beans. It would speed up his metabolism and being a diuretic
it would flush his system faster. As long as he followed it with more water.

  He knew it would bring him closer to his own destruction, but there was no help for that. This was his fault. The death of his son had started him on the Witchery Way. He told himself it had been an accident, but curses and Powers didn’t respect accidents or morals any more than the Eco-tree he lived in did.

  While the coffee dripped into its glass container, and filled the room with the rich spice scent, he went back for the blanket that had kept him almost warm, wondering how Michael Scott had managed to suck all the warmth and power from his home.

  Everything came from a seed of some kind. White Bear Dying knew his own seed to be tainted; it had poisoned all the soil he had planted it in. He had run from his heritage, but the Witchery Way had made demands on him. Commands he had given into and regretted. Enough to desert his gods, and now he was running towards them again.

  It would kill him this time. He knew that.

  He might be able to salvage one life though, if Michael Scott didn’t kill his first human in the meanwhile.

  Chapter 32 Michael

  The heat radiated out from the stone and sand around Michael Scott and his team, causing the air to shimmer in waves, though they were too close to see it. A thirty metres in front of them, the effect was apparent. Their combat suits kept them cool, cooler than a normal suit with the new P.A.C. units plugged in and controlling the temperature and all the other enhancements of the modern military “Bright Armour,” as it had come to be called.

  Michael Scott loaded a special round into his rifle and fired it into the air. A silencer kept the noise to a minimum, but the sound still echoed through the desert hills and rock. Technology couldn’t alter the laws of physics, not yet anyway. As the bullet’s trajectory neared the ground, it let out a burst of noise inaudible to the human ear.

  “Boyen, run the interface program and let’s see if there are any holes in the planet that shouldn’t be there,” Michael said, keeping his eyes on the area, the same as Huer and Ariyan. The hills and crevices of the area offered solid concealment for any bandits or military that might be near.

  “Aye.” Boyen crouched down and read the computer screen attached to his forearm.

  Smart bullets had been in theory and in reality for years. Now, the uses for them had grown. The first had been developed in the early twenty-first century, a bullet with a chip that that could relay data from up to seventy metres from its target. Today the range was better, and this particular bullet sent out a type of sonar to spot geophysical structures in the earth. Most of the world used the same tech—shields and shimmer-cloth camouflage, smart bullets, data retrievers, and thruster units for increased range or damage. All the pretty lights in a war.

  “Nothing here, not directly. The edges are fuzzy on this reading, three hundred metres, or so.”

  “So we move out. On foot, people. Let’s test out the new tech. PAC, watch the chatter on the radio and the sky, conceal us as needed.”

  “Scanning,” said PAC.

  Playing hide and seek with a bullet as the reward for faulty behaviour made forward movement slow. Three hundred metres took forty minutes to cover. It was worth the time.

  Michael was getting used to his P.A.C. unit. He knew his father was intelligent—the survival scenarios they had played at after he had decided to join the army were proof enough of that, along with the solutions—but this tech was brilliant. His father had a nasty mind.

  PAC learned from him, not only his speech and mannerisms, but from his actions, and some days, it seemed, his thoughts as well.

  “There is an echo pulse in the area. Shifting the sound spectrum,” said PAC.

  “Jesus, Captain.” Ariyan said.

  Michael understood, so did the rest of the team. Without being asked, PAC mimicked the sound of the natural surroundings to hide from the echo location alarm in the area. And the three P.A.C. units with his team learned from each other. Michael was glad they had a power limit and a software governor. And a human conscience to use them with.

  “Thank you, Dad,” said Michael.

  “For what?” Ahmed said.

  “Trusting me. And you, by extension.”

  Michael watched Ahmed’s eyes, finally seeing the awareness he had been looking for all these weeks in training with the P.A.C. units.

  “Sweet mother of Mohammad,” said Ariyan. “How smart are they?”

  “Aye,” said Boyen.

  “He’s got it, Boss. We’re walking time bombs. A P.A.C unit without control . . . Boom, and the world is fucked,” said Huer.

  “Why didn’t you ever become a poet, Huer?” said Michael.

  “I am . . . with a knife.”

  “There’s the mercy, Captain. He’s on our side,” said Boyen.

  “I’m glad for that. Let’s move, before the tears form a lake and give our position away.”

  “Right, Captain.” Three soldiers echoed the reply and Michael said a prayer, though none would have heard it.

  Node One: Name, PAC. Primary Interface: Michael Scott. Suit parameters: unchanged. Weapons update: smart bullets. Tracking movement by wind vectors, resistance, satellite, and GPS positioning. Environment: damn hot. Bloody hell, doesn’t it ever end? Media: holo-feed interface. Behaviour files updated. Emotional files updated. Morals file updated. Orders absolve responsibility for killing, taking of a life. The earth has a resonance, echo resolution. Pinging for survival context. Adapting.

  “FAELON!” The scream ripped from Michael’s throat taking breath and stamina with it. He dropped to his knees, his muscles paralyzed. His breath ragged and course. Finding breath became difficult. His rage flared up and slid over his flesh like a gas fire igniting—consuming him.

  He had watched the net drop on his mate. Helpless. For all the strength he had, all the weapons at his disposal, he could do nothing but watch the copter take his mate. He knew that Faelon could heal from massive injuries, but he didn’t dare try to shoot the copter from the air. An almost impossible shot anyway. He didn’t know what the crash would do to her.

  He couldn’t risk it.

  “Track them, PAC.” The growl of his voice stilled the air around him, as if the wind cowered, and the molecules had stopped dancing. The heat of his body grew with the rage that consumed him. He opened his clothing more, let the cold air in to cool his body. He slipped from the snowshoes that held back his pace. Packed his shoes away so his feet could spread out in the snow and his muscles could react properly. He had watched Faelon do this, seen how her weight had shifted and balanced to keep her on top of the sun-licked snow.

  Then he started off, slow at first, to get a feel for the ground beneath him, increasing his pace until he was fairly flying over the snow. It seemed a natural progression to add his arms to his stride and run with four limbs instead of two. In moments, he was loping through the mountains with the same grace he had seen Faelon produce. The five hundred metres where Faelon had been taken disappeared, and he was standing, panting in the cold air. He looked around, taking in the scene. He saw things he hadn’t the first time through here with Faelon and their skirmish with Blackwater. The tracks were the first thing; they stood out on the ground like words, a story to tell him what had happened. The boulders where he had made a stand, the blood on the ground and a depression in the snow that told where the black wolf had lain after he had killed it. The footprints that went between where his body had lain and where the wolf’s body had fallen. Prints that had that body being carried away. Spore came to him, of men, three at least, though there could be more. They had taken the black wolf. Not the same people who took Faelon. The boots different from the two factions.

  Then the scuffle of prints that were Faelon’s and the Shaman’s—it looked like a fight. He said he had driven her off. The marks from the travois that led back to the Shaman’s cabin were clear.

  He could see the blood, a thick puddle heavy in the snow. Heavy with scents: the clean smell of the snow, the metall
ic hue of the earth, and the rancid odour of the black wolf, like carrion gone bad. Then he noticed his own aroma, and the rage that boiled off from his body had the same sour edge that the black wolf did. But, underneath it was the crisp scent of pine boughs and musk that told him he belonged more to Faelon than to the other.

  But why both of them?

  The wind twisted, and he could smell the musk of hay. His horse, on the rise of the slope a hundred metres away. Frost had claimed the darkness of its hide and he had barely noticed it in the distance. He could smell its death from here; even in the cold, the scent of decay was prevalent.

  He walked over and took in the damage that had been done to it. The cut edges of the flesh where a knife had sliced into it. The missing meat. The contents of its saddlebags riffled through. Clothes missing. He took what was left, and while doing so a piece of the puzzle clicked into place for Michael. The sacred wood would have taken some of Faelon’s abilities away, the way it had stopped his hand from healing properly. That’s why the rest of his wounds had healed so well. PAC just hadn’t had the power reserves after he had been attacked.

  “Good girl.” Chaka’s death hadn’t gone to waste.

  She was smart, with her natural skills, and the ones he and PAC had given her; she would be able to understand her captors, and because of that, they might underestimate her. She would stay alive until he could get to her.

  “Which direction, PAC?”

  “Southwest.”

  “Periodic checks of the area, PAC, and use alternate power sources.”

  Michael Scott ran. He spread his limbs out over the terrain and found a pace that would let him shed his excess heat and sweat and not leave his breath devastated. One use for the excessive furnace that had become his body. He was sure he could do sixty to eighty kilometres a day at the pace he set. And the kinetic energy he exerted was a form that PAC could soak up to boost his systems. None of which eased the itch at the back of his skull and along his spine that told him he was being watched.