Blue Curse (Blue Wolf Book 1)

by Brad Magnarella

  I bounded hard, the lame leg healing but not quickly enough. Each time I planted the foot, it felt like broken glass was being ground into the muscles. Behind me, the White Dragon began to grunt. I took a hard right, but he was above the buildings again. I searched both sides of the street for a door. Nothing. I must have looked like a mouse in a maze to the White Dragon as his grunting grew. He wouldn’t miss this time.

  “Fuoco!” Croft shouted.

  A jet of fire seared through the night. I looked over my shoulder in time to see it explode around the White Dragon. He reared in surprise, coughing out his gathering ice blast in a cloud of wet vapor.

  I made the next street, where there were plenty of doors to duck inside. But I slowed, my gaze backtracking along the trail of smoke until it reached Croft. He’d come out into the open to invoke the fire that had spared me, and though he was retreating into the shadows again, the White Dragon had spotted him. With a pair of sharp wing strokes, the dragon changed course.

  “Meddler!” he screamed.

  I turned and raced toward them. “Hey!” I shouted. “It’s me you want!”

  But the White Dragon’s hatchet face was aimed at Croft. His throat convulsed with a fresh series of grunts. Croft barely had time to shout in alarm before the white plume swallowed him. My heart thundered in my chest.

  When the frost cleared, Croft was a hoary statue, one foot pinned to the street in a running stance, the other poised toward the next step he’d never take. An image of Parker as I’d last seen him flashed through my mind.

  “So much for your assistance,” the White Dragon hissed, turning toward me.

  But I had leapt and seized the end of his tail. With a roar, I swung him through the market stalls and into a two-story municipal building. The building crumbled on impact, concrete bricks crashing over him. I bounded toward him. My horror at Croft’s fate was burning through what remained of the wolfsbane potion, leaving only blind animal rage.

  Before the dragon could lift his head, I was on top of him, hands snapping the long, slender bones of his wings, foam-lathered fangs tearing into the leathery fabric. The dragon thrashed and kicked, screeches of pain renting the air. When his throat began to convulse around fresh grunts, I seized his mouth in a wrestler’s hold and began punching him in the side of the head. If I couldn’t exhaust his dragon form, I would beat all hell out of it.

  And damned if it’s not working, I thought from a distance.

  The white flames in the orbs of his eyes were thinning, fading.

  A shot cracked. My ribs blew open on the right side, and I toppled backward into a pile of broken bricks. Panting, I craned my neck to see Stanick approaching from the far side of the square, smoke drifting from the barrel of an M16.

  I tried to push myself up but collapsed again. When I looked down, I could see my liver glistening through my wounded torso. He’d hit me with a hollow-point round laced with silver.

  “He’s down,” Stanick called. “Take him!”

  The White Dragon rose, shaking the brickwork from his body. He flexed and extended his wings several times, the broken bones snapping back together, the torn leather fusing into faint scars. The white fire climbed back into his eyes as he peered down from his lengthening neck.

  “Well done, white man,” he said to Stanick without moving his gaze from me. “I recant what I said about you earlier. Consider us back in business.” A slippery tongue emerged to lick the dragon’s salivating lips.

  I tried to back away, but his front leg came down, pinning my torn torso. I grunted in pain.

  “I’m truly sorry, Texan. Fate cast you and your friends on the wrong side of the war. You, most of all. Under different circumstances, I might have considered you for a security position.”

  In a dim tribute to my childhood friend, I threw my head forward and spit in his face. The White Dragon began to grin, but as my head dropped back to the bricks, the cube over my chest shifted, drawing his gaze toward it. His grin faltered, and the flames in his eyes wavered.

  Fear?

  He recognized the cube, the object Baba said had spared her. But if he was resistant to magic, why should he fear it? As the almond odor emanating from the wood reached my nostrils, the answer hit me.

  It wasn’t what the cube could do—it was what the cube contained. And though I’d never smelled the exact scent before, I’d heard about it during lectures on chemical warfare agents.

  I brought both hands to the cube and tugged and twisted.

  The White Dragon thrust his mouth down in an attempt to stop me, but not before the cube’s bottom released and I was holding the end of a short spine infused with concentrated cyanide—the poison I had been smelling.

  His teeth crunched around my wrist. With a grunt, I rotated the hand and thrust the spine into his pale tongue.

  The White Dragon stiffened, eyes wide. In the next moment he was shrinking back to his flabby human form. Hissing through pain, I seized him and spun on one knee so he was covering my body.

  Stanick, who had been poised to shoot again, raised his head slightly.

  “He’s paralyzed, not dead,” I growled. “But if you want to finish the job, go ahead.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Stanick called.

  “What’s that?”

  “Your girlfriend? Your teammates?” He pulled out a cell phone and held it up. “I give the word, and one’s dead and the rest are ruined. Is that what you want?”

  The pain goring my side was making me see spots, but as a distant sound entered my hearing, I managed to grunt out a laugh. “The problem with you, Stanick, is you always sucked at reading people. Your assessments were all over the map. We were just too professional to say anything.”

  “I’m serious, Jason.”

  “Oh, you were right about my loyalty to Daniela and my teammates,” I continued, the thumping sound continuing to swell in my hearing. “I’d do anything to protect them. Die for them, even.”

  “Release him, Jason, and the deal still stands.”

  “You didn’t count on me taking a hard right, though. You figured that for Captain Jason Wolfe, committed U.S. soldier, there were avenues he wouldn’t consider, moral boundaries he wouldn’t cross.”

  Stanick could hear the arriving choppers now too. He craned his neck around before returning his apprehensive gaze to me.

  “What did you do?” he demanded.

  “Well, Colonel, you were wrong,” I finished. “I called in the mercenaries.”

  The four black choppers swooped down, flooding the intersection where he stood with spotlights. “Colonel Stanick,” a voice echoed from the loudspeaker. “This is Centurion United’s Enforcement Division. You’re under arrest for the killing of Centurion associate Baine Maddox, pursuant to Article Four, Section Eight-Two of the Public-Private Cooperative Defense Agreement. Lay down your weapon.” Gunmen leaned from the bay doors with rifles. “I repeat, lay down your weapon, or you will be shot.”

  Stanick stared around at the hovering choppers, his gray hair whipping in the rotor wash. He made a decision then. Setting his mouth in a determined line, he dropped his rifle and ran. For someone who had always appeared dignified, his limbs kicked from his body in an ungainly dance. He made it all of ten feet before a wall of light flashed in front of him.

  Stanick struck it face first and collapsed onto his back, out cold.

  “What did I miss?” Croft asked, rounding a corner, his staff dimming.

  Relief poured through me. I started to move toward him before realizing I was still holding the paralyzed body of the White Dragon. I lowered my grizzled muzzle to his ear. “The thing about Texans,” I whispered, “is that we like to settle up the old-fashioned way.”

  I snapped his neck and slung his corpse aside.

  30

  As two of the helos set down in the square, Prof Croft hustled over to meet me.

  “How did you survive the ice blast?” I called, the words thick in my mouth. My right elbow was p
inned to my side, trying to hold in the shredded tissue, but blood was soaking into my camo pants in a torrent.

  “Why don’t we worry about you right now, tough guy,” Croft said, arriving in front of me. “Let’s take a look.” He helped me lift up my arm, then drew his breath in sharply. “All right, this is going to sting a little.”

  I stared above his head to where men in black uniforms were emptying from the helos and aiming their rifles at Stanick, who was still down. Croft uttered a word as he passed a hand over the wound. The silver-infused bullet fragments tore free, but there was already so much pain, I hardly felt it. He then seemed to speak to his staff until the embedded stone pulsed with white light. The light wrapped my wound like gauze, sedating the pain. When I looked down, the ribs were reconstructing themselves, tissue growing back in healthy layers.

  “I invoked a shield,” Croft said, straightening.

  “Huh?” I blinked, groggy from the healing magic.

  “That’s how I survived the ice blast. An instant before it hit me, I invoked a shield. But with the temperature differential, the shield shrunk over my body like cellophane. It was enough to insulate me, but it took a while to form the word to disperse it.” He moved his jaw around, as though still trying to loosen it up.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I said, clapping his shoulder. “Just glad you’re still with us, buddy.”

  Croft looked from Orzu’s body to where the Centurion agents were dragging Colonel Stanick toward one of the choppers. “So I guess this is mission accomplished then, huh?”

  I stared at Croft for a moment. Parker had said something almost identical not too long ago.

  Before I could answer, one of the Centurion agents came trotting over. He was middle aged with a serious face and white hair at his temples. He studied my wolfish face for a moment before thrusting a hand forward to shake mine. “Captain Wolfe? I’m Agent Dunn, the one in charge of this operation.”

  I thought back to the moment in Croft’s apartment when I had stood by the phone, turning Reginald Purdy’s business card over in my hand. A core part of me had rebelled at calling in the mercenaries, but if I wanted to protect Daniela and take down Stanick, Centurion was my best option. When Purdy answered, I detailed Stanick’s crimes against Centurion. Purdy assured me that Centurion’s forensic technicians would get on it that night. If there had been communications between Stanick and Baine, Centurion would uncover them—and move to apprehend Stanick immediately. I gave them the location of Fort Bell, where Stanick would be.

  I also explained how he was using Daniela as leverage. Purdy promised to deploy security agents from Houston to Beaumont. Even had Stanick carried out the threat to make his call, the agents would have nailed his goons before they moved against Daniela. That was my other reason for reaching out to Centurion—they offered a global reach.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said to the agent.

  “You were right,” he said. “Colonel Stanick and Baine communicated through an encrypted network. Stanick promised him a hundred grand for the air strike, then had him arrested and executed. The techs found additional links to drug lords, but that’s all being passed on to your military high command.”

  “Ouch,” Croft said. “Sounds like someone’s going to be spending his retirement in maximum security.”

  I nodded as I watched the men load Stanick on to the chopper.

  “I understand we’re flying you back to Waristan,” the agent said to me. “The plane leaves at 0300. We have a helo heading past JFK. We can give you a lift.”

  “I appreciate that, but we have a cab to return.”

  When the agent’s brow furrowed in question, Croft added, “We sort of borrowed one from a friend to get here.”

  Yeah, I thought, as well as the tuft of hair to make your transmogrification potion. Like the cataleptic spell Croft had cast on me, he had pulled that off too. He had actually become Kumar long enough to fool the perimeter guards and gain access to the base. And now Colonel Stanick was in custody and the White Dragon was dead. To that extent, it was mission accomplished.

  “Well,” the agent said uncertainly, “I guess I’ll let you two get going, then.”

  We arrived back at Croft’s apartment to find Kumar snoring on the couch and Tabitha flattening her ears in irritation.

  “I’ll have you know,” she said, “I came this close to eating his soul.”

  We awakened Kumar, paid him generously, dropped his keys into his hand, and bid him farewell. As Croft ushered the confused driver out, something told me he was going to take the next couple of days off.

  I looked over my blood-matted body. “Mind if I grab a shower?”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Tabitha muttered, wrinkling her nose.

  “Go for it,” Croft said. “Spare towels are in the closet beside the sink.”

  As I stooped beneath the steaming jets of water, a soup of blood, dirt, and suds swirling around my wolfish feet, I rolled the wooden cube between my fingers. I felt a strange but powerful bond with Nafid’s great-grandmother now. She had foreseen my confrontation with the White Dragon and helped me. I had no way of contacting Nafid—I had taken her satellite phone—so I didn’t know the old woman’s condition. But something told me she would hold on long enough for me to return, for the da’vat ceremony to restore me. Following, I would spend as long as needed in Waristan to meet with military officers regarding Stanick’s activities and to ensure my men were exonerated.

  And then I would return home to Daniela.

  When I emerged from the shower, my mouth watered at the smell of steak and onions sizzling on the range. Croft was just hanging up the telephone. “Notice anything different about yourself?” he asked.

  “Besides feeling like I just lost ten pounds worth of filth?”

  His mouth leaned into a smile. “No, your wolf nature. You’re controlling it.”

  Now that he mentioned it… I turned inward. The snarling, bristling presence was still there, but distant, no longer threatening to overwhelm me as it had been for the last several days.

  “That was the Order,” he said. “With the death of the White Dragon, balance was restored to the twelve Guardians. Orzu’s power was warping the polarity between the Great Wolf and Great Dragon. That was the reason for your deteriorating control, not the quality of the binding spell.”

  “So I’m out of danger of succumbing?”

  “The Order said intense stress could still lead to episodes of control loss. But as far as a permanent slide…?” He shook his head. “Apparently your particular makeup was a good fit for the Blue Wolf. ”

  I remembered the Great Wolf’s insistence that I had been born under his star.

  “Look, I know you’ve got a lot going on,” Croft said, walking into the kitchen, “but I’m going to put this out there anyway. What we did tonight is what I do for a living. Protecting our world from interplanar beings, especially the nasty ones. Because of the rips in our world, my Order is outmanned right now. Outwomanned too, but you get the point.” The pan sizzled loudly as he flipped the steaks and stirred the onions. “I’m under orders to assemble a team, and I could really use someone with your knowledge and skills.”

  He was peering at me through the smoke above the range, one eyebrow cocked expectantly. We had made a good team tonight. And though a tad on the disorganized side, Croft was someone I could definitely see working with again.

  “I appreciate the offer,” I said. “I really do. But my priorities right now are to my fiancé and team.”

  Croft nodded in understanding. “I had to ask. I’ll give you my number before you go. If the Order can help you in any way, let us know.” He snapped off the flames. “In the meantime, let’s chow.”

  I broke into a toothy grin that made Tabitha wince.

  “Hell, yeah.”

  31

  Shaggy sheep scattered in all directions as the Black Hawk I was a passenger in descended and set down in the green pasture. It was early, the
sun just peering over the mountains along the Wari Corridor to the east. Peach-colored light spread over the orchards destroyed by the dragon’s frost, the dead trees since removed and replaced with saplings. The same light highlighted the top of a complex of wooden scaffolding that rose around the compound’s destroyed buildings.

  I allowed a tired smile. The Kabadi would endure.

  Several child shepherds watched as I disembarked and strode through the grass toward the compound. Their hair was blue. I waved to them, the next generation of warriors, defenders of the valley.

  Ahead, a familiar figure emerged from the compound gate and descended the path toward me. Her headdress and tailored robe were dark, signifying mourning. It wasn’t until we arrived in front of one another and I saw the sadness in her green eyes that I knew for sure.

  “She passed away,” I said.

  Nafid nodded. “Early this morning. I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” I said, hugging her gently. I half expected her to resist the gesture, but she gripped my low back and pressed her head against my stomach. For the next minute her body shuddered quietly. She took a moment to wipe her eyes dry before standing back.

  “He’s gone, isn’t he?”

  I nodded. “Orzu the White Dragon is no more.”

  “I felt it. I believe his nephew did too. Ozari killed himself trying to shift.”

  “And the man who ordered the bombing is being punished.”

  Nafid lowered her eyes. “Then you have done all you said you would … and yet, there is no way to hold the da’vat, no way for the Great Wolf to restore you. You will remain the Blue Wolf.”

  I thought about my last mission in Waristan, training and then executing Zarbat, assigning his number two to leadership. My job had been to shift the men like pawns, all in the service of a more powerful agent. And now I had become one of those pawns, a soldier conscripted into a cosmic struggle between the Great Wolf and Great Dragon. I’d never known what to make of karma, but something told me it was staring me in the face.