Blue Curse (Blue Wolf Book 1)

by Brad Magnarella

  “Because of this?” I gestured to myself. “Sorry, but I don’t plan on staying this way beyond the weekend.”

  “I confess to not knowing why you came to New York. We had eyes on you, not ears.” His eye-slitting grin returned. “Yes, even the mighty Centurion has its limits. But a little deduction told me it had to do with finding a cure, which you’re now confirming. That’s where Centurion can help you.”

  “How?” I challenged.

  “Not all of the work of Centurion’s bioengineering division is made public, but they’ve had some astonishing breakthroughs in the past few years. Tissue regeneration, for example?” When he cocked an eyebrow, I understood he was referring to Olaf, Baine’s sidekick whose arm had practically grown back overnight. My eyes must have betrayed the connection because he nodded. “And cases like his are just the tip of the iceberg. Give the bio division a year, and I’m confident they can restore you to your former self.”

  “I don’t have a year,” I said. “And anyway—”

  “You’re going to take care of it this weekend,” he finished for me. “What I’m offering, then, is a contingency plan. If for some reason this weekend doesn’t pan out as planned, you have a second chance through Centurion.”

  I thought about what Nafid had told me about the portal to the Great Wolf depending on her critically-wounded great-grandmother remaining alive. Even if I succeeded in killing the White Dragon, I could remain stuck as the Blue Wolf.

  “In exchange for what?” I asked.

  “A year of your service.”

  “And what would that entail?”

  “Heading a division of special operatives,” he said.

  “No matter what I’ve become, I’ll never be a mercenary.” My lips wrinkled around the word. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  “What if I told you that you wouldn’t be fighting people, but monsters?” he called as I stepped past him. “Like the ones who killed your childhood friend.”

  I stopped.

  “What was his name?” Mr. Purdy asked, as though to himself. “Billy Young?”

  “How in the hell do you know about Billy?”

  “Before making offers of employment, we do extensive background checks. The police report with your testimony remains on file at the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department. Make no mistake, Captain Wolfe, those boys who thrust a knife into Billy’s neck and took their turns sucking him dry were not human. They were a breed of vampire. Those are the kinds of creatures your division would be pursuing. Creatures who hurt people like Billy.”

  For a moment I was back on the river bank, watching Billy’s dimming eyes beside the blood-slurping leader, the one with the scruffy blond beard and dirty John Deere hat. The local paper had called them Satanists. But breed of vampire?

  “I’ve thrown a lot at you, so here,” Mr. Purdy said, holding out a business card with his name and number in small print against the Centurion logo. “For right now all I ask is that you hold onto this. Regardless of how things turn out, give me a call. We’ll talk some more. And as a gesture of good will, today’s flight is on us. The money you paid up front will be refunded.”

  I nodded for no other reason than that my men would no longer be on the hook.

  “Can we offer you a ride somewhere?” he asked.

  “I’ll catch a cab.”

  “Very well. At the bottom of the ramp, take a left. There will be one waiting for you at the end of the big warehouse, beyond the security gate. My men will let you out. And, Captain Wolfe…”

  I turned.

  “I do hope we hear from you.”

  21

  I asked the cabbie to wait while I drew money from an ATM then ducked into a used clothing store. I picked out a large trench coat and floppy hat and then had the cabbie drive me through Chinatown, street by street.

  Coming from Waristan, where most of my assignments had been in rural or mountainous areas, the crush of buildings and traffic was overpowering. I had been to New York City only once before, and briefly, while attending a training at Fort Bell on Long Island. I vaguely remembered the smell of traffic, but now my nostrils flared at the multiple layers of exhaust streaming through my cracked window. And that was to say nothing of the other scents: fish, incense, hot grease, stagnant water, garbage, and people.

  Lots of people.

  Picking out the White Dragon’s scent was going to be more challenging than I’d thought. For right now, though, I just wanted to get the lay of the neighborhood. General recon.

  “Pull over here,” I said after about thirty minutes.

  The cabbie laid on his horn and swerved his cab past a line of street vendors to the front of the store I’d indicated: Mr. Han’s Apothecary.

  I paid the cabbie and stepped out. Thick currents of pedestrians streamed around me as I adjusted my coat and hat, the second meant to cast shade over my bandage mask. But everyone seemed to have places to go and things to do. No one gawked at the strange seven-foot-tall figure.

  I strode toward the apothecary, rereading the hand-written sign I’d spotted in the window: “Room for rent.”

  A sharp tring sounded as I ducked beneath a string of paper lanterns and into the pungent-smelling shop. The inside was a crammed arrangement of shelves holding dried herbs, powders, and an assortment of oddities that made no sense to me. I edged my way around a fish tank filled with live scorpions and found myself in front of a small Chinese man perched behind a register.

  “How can help you?” he asked. “Have good, good sale on raven beak.”

  “Yeah, no thanks,” I said. “I’m actually here about the room for rent?”

  “Yes. Upstairs room with bathroom and Wi-Fi. Good view back alley. One t’ousand a month.”

  “How about for the week?”

  “No rent for week. Only month.” When he saw me hesitate, he added, “Come with free energy juice.” He ducked beneath his counter and reemerged with a large mason jar. When he opened the lid, a greenish liquid inside hissed and released a fermented gas. The smell almost knocked me over. “Made with tiger testicle. How you say, fill you with piss and vinegar.”

  “I’ll pass on the energy juice, but I’ll take the room.”

  “Good. I show you now.” He shouted something into a curtained back room and then led me out of his shop. After locking the door behind him, he walked to an adjacent door and unlocked it.

  The room was at the top of a narrow flight of steps. It was simple, and the bed had been built for someone half my height, but it was in my target area and discreet. Anyway, I didn’t plan on spending much time in the room. I paid him the thousand, and he handed me the keys and a slip of paper with the Wi-Fi code.

  “Energy juice be ready for you after unpack and chill out,” he said, forgetting that I had declined it.

  When he left, I set my pack and rifle case on the bed and walked over to the window. I gazed over the steam-shrouded rooftops of adjacent buildings, then down at some children kicking a ball around an alley with a narrow creek of swill running down its middle.

  I had no intel sources here, just a spec ops background and my enhanced senses. Assuming Orzu had flown here immediately after the attack, he’d have an eight hour head start on me. With the advantage of mid-air refueling, I’d probably trimmed that lead by a couple of hours, but I was still behind.

  With the memory of the flight came Mr. Purdy’s offer to join Centurion in exchange for a cure. I quickly shoved the thought back down. I needed to focus. And anyway, it wasn’t going to come to that.

  Pulling the laptop from my pack, I set it on a small desk in the corner. As the screen powered on, I felt an urge to check on my team, but Hotwire had warned that any communication I sent or accessed would be stamped and likely flagged by the military’s system. Even with the laptop’s login and GPS disabled, the chain of servers would tell them I was no longer in Waristan.

  Maybe it was just as well—again, for purposes of focus.

  I logged onto the Wi-Fi and pulled
up a map of Chinatown. I’d already formed a good internal map of the neighborhood’s layout during the cab ride, noting street names as well as the smells associated with them.

  Now I planned my route on the screen, eating a couple of MREs as I did so. I would start on the neighborhood’s perimeter and spiral my way inward. The redundancy would give me second and third chances to pick up the White Dragon’s scent, versus starting at one end of Chinatown and working my way toward the other.

  “Time to get moving,” I said, closing the laptop.

  I polished off a third MRE and drank a half gallon of water straight from the bathroom’s tap. I then stepped into a pair of camo pants and strapped a ballistic vest over my shirt. I covered everything with the huge trench coat. If I stood in a hunch, the coat’s skirt covered my feet. A good thing because the bandages were starting to go ragged, revealing sections of blue hair and black claws.

  In front of the mirror I hesitated before putting on my bandage mask and scarf. The hairy face peering back at me was impossible, with its peaked ears, yellow eyes, and lethal muzzle, but there it was, and it belonged to me.

  For now.

  I dropped the SIG into a pocket, distributed grenades and magazines into the others, and then hefted the gun case. I was almost through the doorway when the satellite phone I’d left in my pack began to ring. I hesitated. Could be Team 5, I thought. And they’d only be calling if there was trouble.

  I returned into the room and dug out the phone. “Hello?”

  “Is this Jason?”

  “Daniela? How did you get this number?”

  “You called me a couple of days ago, remember?”

  “Right, yeah.” I didn’t think satellite calls showed up on caller ID, but apparently they did. It was good to hear her voice, so good, but I could feel the second hand ticking away. “What’s going on, baby? Is everything okay?” Her tone had sounded strained.

  “That’s what I’m hoping you can tell me. Where are you?”

  “Still on that assignment I told you about. In fact, I’m sort of in the middle of it.”

  “No you’re not.”

  Her words landed like a slap across my face. “Say again?”

  “You’re not on an assignment, Jason. I just got off the phone with your colonel. He says you’ve gone AWOL. He wanted to know if I’d heard from you. Now will you tell me what’s really going on?”

  Colonel Stanick had found out about my absence? How? And what did that mean for Team 5? The light through the window seemed to go gray, and the room wavered. I sat down hard on the bed, nearly breaking the frame.

  “Jason?”

  “Yeah, I’m still here. I need you to listen to me, Daniela. First off, I’m fine. There’s just something I need to do. Something important. When I finish, I’ll report back to duty and be home shortly. You don’t need to worry.”

  “But you were on the verge of being transferred. I … I don’t understand.”

  “I know you don’t.” Hell, I barely understood. “But I’m asking you to trust me on this.”

  “I want to trust you, Jason, but this doesn’t sound like you. Not your voice, not the things you’re saying, not the things you’re doing. There are military police watching the house.”

  “Military police?” But that was standard procedure. They were there to apprehend me should I turn up.

  “I have this feeling in the pit of my stomach that something’s happened to you, something awful, and you’re not telling anyone. If you need help, baby, you need to tell someone. You need to tell me.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “But you won’t,” she said flatly when I didn’t answer. “Can you at least tell me where you are?”

  “I’m in the States.”

  “The States! Where?”

  I didn’t want to lie to her, but I wasn’t going to put her in a position where she would have to lie for me.

  “I can’t say right now.”

  “Don’t do this to me, Jason. Don’t shut me out.”

  Daniela didn’t deserve this. Not after two years of solid commitment. But even as I thought this, the muscles over my body cramped and tensed. I could feel my heart rate picking up. The animal in me was getting agitated, restless for the hunt. “If I told you, it wouldn’t make sense right now,” I said. “I’ll explain everything when I get home, baby. I promise.”

  “That’s my fear. That you’re not coming home.”

  Without warning, a blood-red fury jagged through my head. “I’m just asking you to fucking trust me!” I roared.

  A stunned silence fell over the line. I panted into the receiver, dizzy, wondering what in the hell had just happened. I had never yelled or swore at Daniela before. But she was standing between me and the hunt, and in that red bolt of rage, I’d had an image, a horrifying image, of slashing her aside with a clawed hand.

  It’s the wolf. I’m losing control of him.

  As though coming to the same conclusion, Daniela said, “You’re not Jason,” and hung up.

  As I lowered the phone from my ear, I considered calling her back, but not like this. Not with my heart pounding a mile a minute, my mouth bone dry, and a high ringing in my ears. I couldn’t trust what I would say. I might lose it even worse. I needed to find and kill the White Dragon before whatever I had become consumed me. Then I would explain everything to her.

  Slamming the door, I bounded down the steps to begin the hunt.

  22

  Though I maintained enough presence of mind to follow my pre-planned route through Chinatown, I couldn’t prevent my wolf nature from moving at a rapid trot.

  I dodged around traffic and hordes of pedestrians, colorful storefronts passing in a blur. I only plowed into one person, a wasted man mumbling about soft pretzels, but I caught him, set him on his feet, and was gone before he knew what hit him. Before long, the bandages unraveled from my feet. Even so, no one gave me a second glance—maybe a case of New Yorkers having seen it all.

  The only ones that seemed to know what I truly was were the dogs that cowered on leashes and the cats that hissed and bristled at me from alleyways. But that was all peripheral—as well as everything that had happened in the last three days. All of my neurons were on peak alert for a single reptilian scent.

  It was just after six o’clock when I caught a trace of it.

  I stiffened to a stop at an intersection on the western side of Chinatown and raised my muzzle. Testing the air in each direction, I pivoted toward the south. There. The scent was leading down Mulberry Street. I chased the scent through the din of odors, past several intersections, the signal growing stronger.

  When I was almost on top of it, I forced myself to slow to a walk. I was in a quieter part of the neighborhood now. A park lined with ginkgo trees appeared to my right where old men played board games on picnic tables and women practiced Tai Chi in the grass. Something told me a seven-foot man with wolf feet might attract more attention here.

  I hunkered down as I continued to stalk the scent—a scent I could almost see. Like tendrils of smoke, they drew me toward an unassuming cluster of tenement apartments opposite the park before slipping beneath a large roll-down steel door. The White Dragon is inside. My heart slammed in my chest, the wolf begging me to sprint across the street and burst through the door.

  No, I thought, digging my talons into my palms. We may only get one shot at this. Need to recon the building, identify entrances and exits, see what kind of security is set up.

  If Orzu was inside, he was likely meeting with Bashi. That there was no one pulling security outside didn’t mean anything. During my research I’d read that Bashi was so paranoid he never slept in the same place two nights in a row. In which case he probably wouldn’t want a bevy of armed guards announcing his whereabouts. They could be monitoring the entrance in plainclothes or concealed behind the building’s dark windows.

  I continued past the roll-down door and circled the block. On the south side, beside a dumpling shop, a brown metal gat
e separated the sidewalk from a back alley that ran behind the tenements and street-level businesses. I completed my circuit, finding no other access points to the building.

  Back at the roll-down door, I caught my captain’s mind going to explosives and split teams, but it was just me now. I could climb an adjacent building, create a sniper’s nest, and wait for the White Dragon to emerge, but where would that be? Front entrance or back alley? It was a coin flip, and if I chose wrong, I could lose my shot.

  That left either attempting to sneak inside or forcing my way in and trying to reach my target as quickly as possible. I didn’t like either option, frankly.

  “Yo, big man!” someone called.

  I peeked over a shoulder to find a group of Asian teens in white suits and slicked-back hair walking toward me. I recognized them from one of the articles I’d found online. They were enforcers for the White Hand, the ones who made sure the residents and businesses in Chinatown paid their protection taxes to Bashi. They were also in charge of general security in the neighborhood. Black pistol grips protruded from their waist bands.

  As I lowered my head, the enforcer in the lead sped his pace. “Hey, I’m talking to you!”

  I talked my wolf down. Wasting them would only draw unwanted attention—especially here. Pretending not to have heard him, I made sure my feet were hidden and started in the other direction. Another group of enforcers rounded the corner ahead of me and spread across the sidewalk.

  “Shit,” I muttered.

  “What’s your hurry?” the lead one asked as the two groups merged into a circle around me. Though they all looked similar enough to pass for cousins, he stood out for being taller and possessing one of those things a person couldn’t fake—the dead eyes of a killer.

  I felt the wolf in me interpreting his stare as a challenge. Against every instinct, I lowered my gaze and slouched further down. “Just walking,” I said.

  “This is a residential area. You’ve got no business here.”

  “Guess I got lost. I’ll head back up this way.” I was trying to sound as docile as I could, which was hard when adrenaline was dumping into my system and every word emerged a deep growl. I went to edge past the leader, but his hand clamped down on my gun case.