Blue Howl (Blue Wolf Book 3)

by Brad Magnarella

  “Yes, Ms. McKinnon was talking to the she-wolf. I could not hear what they were saying, but very soon she comes out of the van and asks whether I can cast a reveal spell. When I asked why, she said we would need it to see where the Prod had put Ms. Welch. And then the creature appeared. Ooh, I never see anything that big and scary. I hit it with the bolts, but they did nothing.”

  Nadie must have recovered enough to tell Sarah the meaning of the creature’s name, a meaning Sarah had interpreted.

  “Did Sarah tell you the name of the Prod?”

  “No, Mr. Wolfe.”

  I waved Olaf over and screwed a fresh fuel canister into the port of my MP88. “We’re going to start a search for our teammate,” I announced. “The Prod doesn’t like fire. There are flamethrowers in the other van.”

  Using my sat phone, I called the quick reaction force and ordered them to perform flyovers of the area. Visibility was shit, but it was what it was. The rest of us set out on foot in pairs, me and Yoofi and Takara and Olaf. I felt responsible for Sarah as a teammate, but with Nadie, I felt a strange loss. It was our lupine connection, I told myself. There one moment—a growing, organic presence that embraced the being I’d become—and snatched away the next.

  After an hour of finding nothing, and conditions worsening, I called a halt to the search. We were going about it the wrong way. As I squinted into the vast expanse of a wilderness cut through with wind and driving snow, my captain’s mind was telling me we needed to regroup, to form a coherent plan. I judged our distance to the cave where Aranck was waiting. Could he and his pack help, or would they attack us for failing to return Nadie?

  I’d consult Prof Croft, I decided. He’d know what we were up against. Plus, Sarah’s exchange with Yoofi suggested that magic would be essential to mission success.

  “Back to home base!” I called.

  18

  “I am so sorry, Mr. Wolfe,” Yoofi said through chattering teeth.

  I looked over at him. Even though I’d bent the passenger door back into place and turned up the heat, snow blew in through the seams. A powdery frost gripped Yoofi’s braided hair. I’d wanted him to ride in the cargo van with Takara and Olaf, but he insisted on coming so he could explain himself. I turned my face back to the onrushing road.

  “We’re not going to dwell on it,” I said. “It’s done.”

  “I thought Dabu would protect me,” he pressed. “That was what he was telling me, but now he is telling me he has set a trap for Muluku. He wanted Muluku to get the staff. He put bad magic into it—that was why it was acting funny at the cabin. He kept it a secret to trick Muluku.”

  “Is he going to give you a replacement?”

  “No, but he is promising that when he has defeated Muluku and sent him away, he will return the staff.”

  “Does he have an estimate on when that will be?”

  Yoofi giggled.

  I glared at him. “Something funny?”

  “Sorry. Dabu just tell good joke.”

  “Well, I’m glad someone’s in a happy mood,” I growled.

  “He does not know when, Mr. Wolfe.”

  I grunted. I was annoyed, of course, but Yoofi wasn’t entirely to blame. He was a pawn in a squabble between gods. Caught up in their own shit, they couldn’t care less about our mission. It was the price of Yoofi being able to channel Dabu’s powers in the first place.

  We all had our tradeoffs. Olaf’s body could heal from almost anything, but someone who preferred death could well be trapped inside that body. Takara wielded awesome powers, but they came with disfigurement and excruciating pain. I thought of my change into a wolf—one with mind-boggling abilities, but there was my isolation from Daniela, not to mention my recent reckless behavior. I could still feel a desperation to recover Nadie and restore our connection. It clawed at the back of my mind like an unfulfilled need. Or was it desire?

  “Then we’ll hope for the best and work with alternative resources,” I said. “Just stop beating yourself up.”

  “I will try, Mr. Wolfe.”

  We arrived at the lodge a few minutes later and piled out of the vans. Even before I opened the front door, I could hear Rusty swearing inside. I directed the others to the kitchen when we entered. “Hydrate and calorie up. We’ll meet at the planning table in five.”

  Still full from the moose, I followed the trail of choice words to Rusty’s command-and-control center.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “We’re offline is what’s going on, boss,” he said, attacking a keyboard with his fingers.

  Anger gripped my neck. “Did Beam take us down?”

  “Not exactly…”

  I had already picked up my private sat phone to call Beam. I paused.

  “What do you mean ‘not exactly’?”

  “I was playing with the workaround. I had a model for testing and a block of code on standby. I was running a test on the model—I thought. Turned out it was the real McCoy. Which would have been fine if Centurion’s system hadn’t detected it. Locked us out of the subnet. We lost the commo system, access to the databases, and the linkup to the drones. I was able to land Drone 1, but I lost contact with 2. Probably crashed somewhere.”

  “Yeah, near me.”

  “I’m trying to get us back up, but the system thinks I’m a hacker now.”

  “Stop,” I said, not wanting him to make a bad situation worse. “I’ll call Beam and have them restore it on their end.”

  “Yeah, but then they’ll know what I did.”

  “What I ordered you to do,” I reminded him. “This is on me.”

  I stepped from the room and dialed Beam.

  “Yes?” he answered.

  “It’s Captain Wolfe.”

  There was a pause as my voice went through a recognition protocol. A click followed. “Security pin?”

  I recited it to him.

  “Are you calling to explain why I don’t have any new updates?”

  “No, I’m calling because our system is down. We need it back up.”

  “The system’s down?”

  I took a deep breath. “I ordered my team to create a workaround in the event of a shutdown.”

  There was a pause on his end. “Oh, you mean in the event I shut you down.”

  “I wasn’t going to have my team made vulnerable mid mission.”

  “And now look what’s happened.”

  “The workaround triggered some sort of kill switch,” I continued, trying to ignore his condescension. “We need it reset ASAP.”

  “I’m sure you do, but here’s the thing, Captain. There’s a built-in protocol on that system. When it senses it’s been compromised, not only does it shut down the subnet, it goes into lock down. You can’t just turn a key to restore it. It’s one of the most secure systems in the world. The process takes time.”

  “How long?”

  “Probably a question you should have asked before ordering your team to illegally hack the system. Not only did you violate my trust, Captain. You violated your contract. And so did anyone who followed your order.”

  “Leave them out of this,” I growled.

  “I wish I could, but they’re bound by the same terms as—”

  “Sarah’s been taken, goddammit.”

  “Taken?”

  “The Prod we’re hunting has her.”

  “How did that happen?” he demanded.

  “How do you think? During a confrontation with the Prod 1.” When he tried to cut in, I said, “You wanted the latest SITREP. Shut up and let me give it to you. Our communication is down, and with the storm, we’re facing near white-out conditions. I need your engineers to restore the system. I have a sat phone and can requisition other modes of commo in the meantime.”

  “Secure modes?”

  “Not a priority. We need to ID the Prod 1.”

  “They’re werewolves,” he said, as if Centurion’s early assessment was infallible.

  “Not werewolves,” I snarled. “Pret
ty fucking far from it, in fact. Which brings us to the next item. Sarah seemed to have an idea what we were facing, but with her not here, I need two things: a contact number for someone who can access the Prod 1 database, and permission to use an outside expert.”

  “I’ll get you the first,” he said begrudgingly. “Who’s the second?”

  “Everson Croft, a magic-user based in New York City. He gave us crucial intel during the El Rosario mission. Sarah submitted a clearance request following, but at last check it was still working its way through your pencil pushers. I need him cleared in the next ten minutes.”

  “How critical is Croft to this mission?”

  “If we want to recover Sarah and Ms. Welch, very.”

  “Yoofi’s a magic-user,” he pointed out.

  “With limited knowledge, and he’s currently without his staff.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Do I have permission to contact Croft or not?”

  He sighed in a way that said he knew I’d call him anyway. “I’ll give a tentative okay, but I’m not happy, Captain. I’m not happy about any of this. I don’t imagine Berglund is either. Is he still safe, at least?”

  “I had to detain him.”

  “Detain? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “He contracted a second team of hunters that attacked while I was meeting with an asset. They critically wounded her. I had no choice but to neutralize them. Berglund’s lucky to be alive.”

  I could hear Beam’s breathing pick up as he realized his payment was in jeopardy. “Listen to me, Captain. You need to release him this instant.”

  “He’s a liability. We already have five dead mercs that we’re going to have to explain.” Now that I was back in control, my conscience was prickling me about the hunters—former military, like me. Not that they would have fared much better against Aranck’s pack. “I’ve made mistakes, but I’m not the only one. Telling Berglund that werewolves had taken Ms. Welch and then letting him write himself into the mission are on Centurion.”

  “Captain—”

  “I want him out of here,” I said over Beam. “I’m going to give you his location. Have the backup force retrieve him. He has a head wound so they can hold him under the pretext of treatment.”

  “Where is he?” Beam demanded.

  “First I want your assurance that there’ll be no repercussions for the system going down. Not for my teammates. Not for anyone.” But for Daniela, I wouldn’t have cared what they did to me.

  “We’ll discuss it after the mission.”

  “It was just an unfortunate misunderstanding,” I added.

  “You violated the terms of the contract, Wolfe.”

  “Then what do I have to lose?”

  “A lot,” he said in a lowered voice. “Believe me.”

  “Did I mention Berglund was chained up in the back of his vehicle?”

  “Goddammit,” Beam barked. “All right, I’ll give you your damn pass, but on the condition you complete the mission and Berglund comes through with the rest of the payment.”

  “Smart move,” I said, and gave him the coordinates of Berglund’s Suburban.

  I could hear him tapping them into a device. “I already have a team working to restore the system,” he said in the distracted voice of someone texting. “It’s going to be an hour or two. Until then, I’ll have someone contact you so you can query the database.”

  “Glad we’re on the same page again.”

  “This isn’t over,” he promised.

  I ended the call and stepped back into the computer room, where Rusty was staring at the main monitor with a hangdog expression. “It’s going to take time, but they’re working on getting everything back up,” I told him.

  “I fucked up again, boss.”

  “No more than I did. There’s nothing any of us can do in here till the system’s restored. C’mon.”

  I led the way to the planning table, where the others were waiting. Olaf and Takara were eating from pouches of MREs, while Yoofi clasped a steaming mug of tea in both hands.

  “Here’s the situation,” I said, leaning my fists against the spread-out map and looking around at my teammates. “Sarah is missing, our system is down, and we need three crucial pieces of info. One, what the Prod 1 is. Two, how to find where it’s keeping its prey. And three, how to kill it. The creature’s pattern suggests we have a window to reach Sarah, but not much of one. Rusty, before the system went down, did you overhear anything coming through Sarah’s feed? The she-wolf might have told her what this thing’s name means.”

  Rusty perked up so suddenly that under different circumstances I might have cracked a smile. “I had an eye on the drone monitors, so I was only half listening, but yeah, yeah, the she-wolf said a word and Sarah repeated it. ‘Cannibal.’ Then the system went down, and I forgot all about it.”

  “I think Sarah knew what that meant,” I said. “She stepped out to ask Yoofi about one of his magical capabilities.”

  “Yes, when I still had my staff.” Yoofi took a sullen sip of tea.

  “We’ll work with what we have,” I reminded him. “I’m going to start by calling Croft, the wizard who helped us with the El Rosario case. Keep eating and getting fluids down.”

  I dialed Croft’s number from memory and waited, but not even his cat picked up this time. The call went to his voicemail. Dammit. I knew he was busier than ever these days, but I’d been hoping to catch him in. I left a message explaining our situation and ended by giving him my number.

  Moments later, my phone rang. “Captain Wolfe,” I answered hopefully. But I recognized the pause and subsequent click of Centurion’s voice recognition protocol.

  “This is Megha Shah,” a woman’s voice said in a British accent. “I’ll be assisting you with your queries.”

  “Pin?” I asked mechanically.

  The electronic distortions that squiggled around her alphanumeric response were another layer of security from her end to ensure no one could eavesdrop on our conversation.

  When she finished, I said, “Thanks for helping out. Do you have the case information?”

  “Yes, it’s already entered.”

  “Then let me give you a description of what I saw.” I went on to tell her everything I remembered from our encounter—the Prod 1’s appearance, abilities, fear of fire. I made sure my teammates could hear me as well. I’d only had time to give them basic info prior to our search. As I spoke, I could hear Megha tapping through the connection. “A local asset told us its name means cannibal,” I added. “Query as many iterations of that info as you can and get back to me.”

  “Our software does that automatically,” she said before I could disconnect. “Nothing’s returning from the main databases, but hold on.” Her young voice carried a note of interest I was unaccustomed to hearing among Centurion’s rank and file. “We have another database that contains Prod 1s whose existences have yet to be verified,” she explained. “A skunk database.”

  “I’m going to put you on speaker so the rest of my team can hear.”

  “Go ahead … There!” she exclaimed. “Your Prod 1 is returning 94.9 percent for Wendigo.”

  “Wendigo?” I couldn’t remember Sarah ever talking about a creature by that name. “What can you tell us about it?”

  “According to the data, it comes from the myths of the Algonquin-speaking people.” Which would include Cree, I thought as I pictured Megha reading from a monitor on her end. “A person becomes a Wendigo in a ceremony that involves eating human flesh. And the description here lines up with what you told me. Large and gaunt, head with horns, empty black eyes, cannibalistic … Now this is interesting.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Per the myths, it grows in proportion to what it eats, which keeps it from ever being sated. In fact, eating only makes it hungrier. Knowing this, it stores its victims to stretch out the time between meals.”

  That jibed with Nadie’s intel. It also
explained why the sizes of the claw-marks were different between the abduction scenes.

  “The Algonquin-speaking people don’t like to say its true name,” Megha continued, “so they call it ‘the Evil Spirit that Devours Mankind’ or simply ‘the Cannibal.’” The more she talked, the more animated her voice became. If most of her work involved data entry, getting to contribute to an actual case was probably a thrill for her.

  “Where does a Wendigo keep its victims?” I asked.

  She fell back into her data-skimming voice. “Wendigo is a spirit … Someone has to call it into them for it to take form … ceremony with human flesh … The Wendigo enters and leaves its host as its hunger dictates…”

  “Why would anyone invite a Wendigo into them?” Yoofi interrupted.

  “Its exclusion from the main database suggests it’s not common,” I replied. At the same time I remembered Aranck’s remarks about stupid men from across the water, suggesting there had been an episode in the past. Knowing how that episode had ended could be a big help.

  “Let’s see … victims … victims …” Megha was saying. “Ah! It says here that a Wendigo makes its lair in a cave between the material and ethereal planes where it, and its victims, are hidden from both. Exposing a Wendigo’s lair requires special magic.”

  “Explains why no one’s located the vics,” Takara said.

  Must also have been why Sarah was asking Yoofi whether he could cast a reveal spell, I thought. But how had she known about the Wendigo if it wasn’t on the main database? Had she known about the skunk database, and if so, why had she never mentioned it? If it hadn’t been for this call, I wouldn’t have known the database even existed. But this wasn’t the time to dwell on it.

  “Are there places that lend themselves to that kind of transparency between planes?” I asked.

  “I’m not seeing anything in the database,” Megha replied.

  “Yes, there are, Mr. Wolfe,” Yoofi said. “Back home, the priests do their best magic in the sacred places. These are where rituals have been performed for many, many generations. The magic passes back and forth much easier.”

  I nodded. We’d seen something similar in El Rosario, where the shaman had gone to a special mountain to invoke a local god, but unwittingly called forth an ancient creature that had infiltrated the god’s space. It made sense that the Cree’s sacred places would offer a similar thinning of the layer between worlds—and the most opportune spaces for something like a Wendigo to lair.