Wolf Trap

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  If she could stand up.

  “I will stay here,” she said, for the benefit of those tapes the doctor had told her about. “For…for the record. Of my own free will.”

  With a worried expression furrowing her otherwise smooth brow, James helped Chloe to her feet. But the doctor’s grip made her cry out in agony, after which Dr. James’s expression changed yet again, to one of surprise.

  Chloe didn’t have time to ask about it. Her shaking got rapidly worse until she was sure her insides would explode like a bottle of aggressively mishandled champagne.

  God, she had liked champagne once. The golden color, the bubbles, the sweetness of those bubbles going down. She had liked birthday cake, starry nights and drooling over unaffordable designer shoes. In that order. All fleeting thoughts, like parts of her life flashing before her eyes.

  The fresh batch of tremors nearly took Dr. James to the floor with her. The doctor rallied gamely, yanking Chloe to her feet with astonishing strength, turning, pressing her backward onto a cot riveted to the wall.

  “You told me you were attacked. Your wounds are fresh. The attack was last night?” she asked, releasing Chloe slowly.

  Chloe nodded.

  “How did you come by the wound on your arm?”

  No. Don’t want to think about evil. Don’t want to go back there, into the dark. Please don’t ask me to.

  “Chloe, listen to me. Your answer may make a difference in what you need. I’m trying to understand.”

  Since she was unable to pry her teeth open, the only way to communicate was through charades. She ignored the doctor’s question, instead asking one of her own. With difficulty, Chloe faked typing with her fingers on an invisible, imaginary keyboard. Her hands shook.

  “Computer? You work on a computer?” the doctor asked.

  Ramming herself against the wall behind the cot, this time dislodging the splint on her broken wrist, Chloe cried out, and nodded. Hot tears gathered in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. James said sincerely. “I’ll call for another sedative. I’ll have to restrain you somehow, for your own protection, while I splint that wrist. I’ll wrap your hands to keep them from your face.”

  Chloe typed again in the air, and pointed to the door of the room, which was open.

  “You’re asking to use a computer? You want to write something down?”

  She nodded, knowing her eyes were wild with pain, yet implicit in her need to get this point across.

  Parker. Fairview. She kept focused on that.

  “There’s one at the end of the hallway,” the doctor said. “I don’t know if you can make it, or use it when you get there.”

  Chloe nodded her head vigorously. She damn well would use that computer. She’d type in Parker’s name. If there turned out to be no connection to him and this place, she’d have a message waiting when he returned to the hospital after indulging in his nighttime games.

  Remember me? she’d write. And maybe something a bit more cryptic, such as What the f—?

  “All right.” Dr. James helped her stand, then called for assistance. With Big Jim’s help, bless him, Chloe made it through the door without breaking anything else.

  Parker found himself surrounded by a dark cloud of apprehension much the consistency of mud. He ran at a slower pace now, each movement an effort, each breath an insufficient oxygen draw.

  The group of wolves around him matched his pace, but it also may have been the other way around. Their concentration was centered on the two men they were closing in on. Men who would be no match for such tweaked, wolfish beings.

  Again Parker wondered what would happen when they caught those guys. A terrible, yet necessary consideration. Would Delmonico’s presence mean that justice would be served in the usual way? She didn’t appear to be in possession of handcuffs at the moment. Who here, in their wolfish nakedness, had a cell phone?

  Having seen two of their kind murdered, what were the chances these wolves might actually hand the yokels off to the authorities?

  And what might these two killers tell the cops if they were handed over? That a pack of wild animals had chased them into custody? That the two men they had killed weren’t men at all, really? Such a disclosure might get them sent off to the loony bin for a while, until someone like Detective Wilson came snooping around. They might even be sent to…Fairview.

  Parker’s pace faltered at the same time that another cry went up. The wolves were close enough now that he saw the stiff muscles of the men’s backsides and smelled the anger pouring from their sweat glands. They smelled also of the metal of the guns they had used. Parker could make out the outline of the handles of those guns tucked into the waistbands of their jeans. One each.

  It was a matter of another minute at most before the bad guys and the good guys—the latter meaning himself and his companions, at least in this situation—would end the chase.

  A cry came from Delmonico. Her wolfish jaws open, her lethal teeth exposed, she was a blur of movement in the night beside him. Parker felt the heat radiating off her from two feet away.

  And then the silver-streaked wolf lunged at the closest runner, knocking him to the ground. The brown wolf Parker had followed took the second guy down in the same manner. Easy as pie. Humans, even murdering criminals like these two, who had just killed two people in cold blood, were no match for werewolves, after all.

  Parker and the other two wolves skidded to a stop, quickly forming a circle around those on the ground—just as the gangbangers who had accosted his girl and then tried to accost him had done. That similarity struck a nerve.

  Like the others, he stared at the silver wolf, waiting for whatever would come next.

  The night went as quiet as if they had all fallen into a black hole. As unbelievable as it was, the killers didn’t utter a word—an odd thing for Parker to digest. Surrounded by a bunch of big bad monsters in full werewolf form, which ought to have caused cardiac arrest, the two shaved-headed murderers lay facedown on the grass with their mouths shut.

  An eerie premonition washed over Parker, one he saw echoed in the sudden tilt of Delmonico’s head. Why weren’t these creeps making noise? At the very least, screaming?

  When Delmonico snarled, Parker cast a glance over his shoulder, then whirled to face a new terror.

  Chapter 15

  The computer was on, Chloe saw with relief. That would save her some time.

  A wooden chair sat beside the small table holding the PC. Probably this was where Jim, the doctor’s assistant, wiled away his time when he wasn’t tranquilizing patients or standing guard by their doors. She had to hand it to him, though, and award him gold stars for his gentle treatment. He helped her to get seated, then pushed the tiny button to activate the monitor for her.

  There was no time to offer him an appreciative smile. She had to concentrate hard to type, with her body refusing to calm down. She actually felt her synapses frying with each effort, and experienced short spurts of mental blankness following them. Grunting, trying really hard to stop shaking long enough to do this, she pecked at the keyboard with her index fingers.

  I can do this.

  Seconds longer than usual, though in a short enough span of time, she had logged in to Fairview’s mainframe. No Parker Madison. As Dr. James moved to stand behind her, Chloe quickly logged on to Metro Hospital’s mainframe, and accessed her chart. Dr. James read it silently. “Okay,” she said simply, signaling for Jim to help Chloe back to the padded room.

  “Wait!” Frustrated, Chloe held up a hand, pleading for a minute more, and was about to knock out that message to Parker Madison when she stumbled upon a connection to Dr. James’s computer. She pulled up what the doctor had last typed in, hoping it might provide some clue as to what was happening to her.

  A word flashed on the screen. Just one word.

  Werewolf.

  They had visitors. Looking at the three new, fully morphed werewolves that had appeared on the opposite side of the expanse of lawn fel
t like gazing into a mirror.

  Parker’s entire world rearranged in that instant.

  The rust-furred werewolf next to him, the only male besides Parker himself who wasn’t busy attending to a murdering son of a bitch on the ground, snapped his teeth—which in turn drew the attention of the silver and the big brown wolf, each kneeling on the back of their prey.

  Parker tried to glean whether or not these visitors were friendly. Appeared pretty much not.

  The silver wolf howled a menacing warning that no one would have misunderstood, and sprang to his feet, one of which was still pressed firmly in the center of his prey’s T-shirt-covered back. The guns the murderers had used to fell the beasts at the wall swung from the brown wolf’s claws like a woman’s heavy dangling earrings.

  The largest of the three Weres across from them issued a reply, without advancing. What the hell was this? A standoff? Over what?

  Parker’s attention slipped to the guy trapped beneath Silver Wolf’s heel. Although his movement had been slight, his head had turned toward the newcomers. There was a smile of triumph on his face.

  Mother of God. These murderers knew the other Weres, Parker realized. The guys on the ground were waiting for those beasts to rescue them.

  His thoughts split into new directions. Had these two men been sent to kill members of a rival group?

  Were these two humans decoys sent to lure a few more wolves away from the Landau lair?

  Could it be a planned attack? A kind of werewolf turf war? Wolf against wolf?

  No time to think on it. Delmonico, the smallest of them all, moved. She grabbed one of the guns from the brown wolf’s hand and backpedaled for tree cover. As soon as she had ducked beneath the shadows, the unmistakable sounds of her reverse transition filled the air. Really quickly. Five seconds, at most, and then a naked Delmonico appeared, crouched on one knee, with the gun aimed at the Weres in the distance. She fired off a warning shot, yelled, “Back off!”

  The largest werewolf opposite them pounded his chest once with a fisted paw, in the same way Parker had seen the brown wolf now standing on the prone guy do, back at Fairview. Silver Wolf mocked the gesture.

  Dana Delmonico shouted, “You know what’s in these chambers, right? And what it can do?”

  The Weres opposite were clearly agitated. The three kept changing positions, like a shuffled deck of cards, without moving any closer. Their teeth were bared, their ears back. Sharp claws swiped at their own fleshy hides, producing stripe after stripe of maroon-colored blood nearly as dark as the night itself.

  Perhaps they hadn’t they been fleet enough to help their friends. Maybe they hadn’t planned on encountering someone with Delmonico’s lightning-swift reaction time. Whatever the case, two things about this situation became relevant to Parker.

  One: the wolves next to him, including Delmonico, knew these others, in a bad way.

  Two: it sure seemed possible, after Delmonico’s brief discourse, that there truly could be silver bullets in those guns.

  More truth to those legends, after all? An important detail for a werewolf to know.

  Parker became aware of the fact that he was snarling under his breath, and that he was shifting his weight continually from foot to foot as if he might cut loose at any minute and run over there to confront those foreign Weres. The sheer intensity of the whiplash energy swirling through him made him acknowledge that he had chosen sides.

  As if reading his mind, the rust-colored wolf next to him stepped closer with his teeth snapping together and his lips curled back. Was anyone here expecting those wolves to make a play? The intruders might fight with other Weres, but against the same guns already used that night to fell a couple of beasts? Was anybody that stupid?

  A spasm of distaste pulled at Parker’s mind. It took another few seconds to hear what Delmonico was saying.

  “Toss a phone here!”

  He glanced at her. They were all naked except for the guys on the ground. His own cell phone had been left behind in his locker, inside his jeans.

  “The phone!” Delmonico again yelled. And this time Parker got it. He stepped back, still eyeing the distant Weres, and crouched down. With one claw, he ripped the back pocket of the closest criminal, and out popped a cell. Giving the phone a good kick, he sent it sliding across the grass and right into Delmonico’s free hand. He heard the trill of numbers connecting, and wondered if it was even possible to dial 911…given what they were.

  “Park. East side. Two down, two g-b’s underfoot, and a bunch of growling,” Delmonico said into the phone. As if that sort of cryptic description would make sense.

  Guess it did. Parker heard the sirens. Multiple sirens, closing in fast, as if they’d been on standby.

  The Weres across from him heard them, too, and yowled in displeasure. In unison they broke from their huddle, running straight for Parker and the rest of his group with intention to do damage.

  Parker and the rust wolf sprang forward to meet them, reacting on autopilot. The three Weres, in a wave, struck, smashing their big bodies into him and the rust wolf as if they had gone berserk.

  Parker fought them off, fury making him mean. The rust wolf was a pro at fighting, and had to have seen this kind of action before, he noted peripherally, just before a claw belonging to the wolf who’d done the chest pounding raked a set of deep grooves into his right forearm.

  Hissing through his teeth, Parker sent those teeth toward the wolf’s swiveling neck and found a hold. With a sharp turn of his head, he tore a decent chunk out of the Were, who made an awful keening sound, half anger and half something akin to demonic possession.

  Delmonico shouted, “I have these two,” shifting her aim to the guys on the ground, releasing Silver Wolf and Big Brown from their duties. Silver Wolf came on like a fifty-ton truck, pushing in on Parker’s action. The brown wolf did likewise. The attacking Weres didn’t seem particularly happy to see reinforcements, and turned away.

  Another howl split the night. A harrowing, haunted cry. Parker spat out the chunk of flesh in his mouth with disgust. His body rippled when he saw who had made the sound.

  A ghostly pale werewolf stood in the distance, across the grass. There was no mistaking this guy. Parker’s heart lurched.

  The pale wolf was fully shifted this time, and menacing in his stillness. A nightmare come to life. But it wasn’t his size that seemed so threatening; in fact, he didn’t appear to be any larger than Parker or the rest of the silver wolf’s pack. What made him stand out was the gathering of darkness around him. That darkness licked at his body in the same way that a man lapped the private place between his lover’s thighs. Waves of hatred shot out from him, thickening the air.

  Parker blinked, taken aback. When he opened his eyes, the ghostly apparition was gone.

  A closer sound snapped Parker out of his stupor. He glanced sideways to see that the three invading wolves were running off, chased by Parker’s pack mates.

  Only then, when the silver wolf came back to stare down his long muzzle at them, and the sirens were loud enough to burst eardrums, did the two werewolf slayers on the ground start to whine.

  Parker’s hackles rose as the sound of doors opening in the distance reached him. Cops! He fired a glance to Delmonico, saw her nod her head. She would stay to see that the wolf slayers got what they deserved. She stood at the edge of the shadows with her legs splayed, naked as the day she was born.

  His instinct was to run, and in doing so, keep his secrets and his medical degree. Then again, he really needed the answers he’d been seeking, now more than ever. If he left the pack now, would he be allowed back in?

  The silver wolf barked at Delmonico, and after that to the others. Strangely enough, Parker understood that bark to mean “Go.”

  Swiftly, Silver Wolf stepped into the safety of the shadows. A single crack, as brief and innocuous as the sound of somebody cracking a knuckle, was the only hint that the mighty Were had changed back to his human guise. Nevertheless, there he stood,
next to Delmonico—a tall, well-built man in his sixties, with angular European features punctuated by bright blue eyes, short-cropped silver hair and the regal bearing of a Viking.

  Parker recognized him at once. Anyone in Miami would have. The silver wolf was none other than the Honorable Judge James Landau himself. The man who owned the secluded property behind those stone walls. The man that Miami law enforcement trusted to dish out justice, and good citizens trusted to uphold their rights, was a genetic mutant.

  Unable to help himself, Parker looked toward the distant boulevard, wondering if the entire Miami justice system might draw its strength from the goddamn moon.

  At least he was in good company.

  He laughed at the unlikelihood of it all. Well, howled actually.

  “Go,” Judge Landau repeated. “Gather the rest. We’ll take it from here.”

  With that, the judge hauled the two pathetic, murdering gangsters to their feet and ordered them to strip. They did, no questions asked. Landau was beyond formidable. So, Parker guessed, was the gun pointed at them.

  Landau threw a T-shirt and a pair of jeans to Delmonico, and each of them hastily dressed. They looked ridiculous, probably smelled even worse, but who was going to question such things, to their faces?

  The brown wolf Parker had chased bumped him. Time to go. Leaving the scene, as they had been directed to do, Parker ran beside the two Weres he had fought beside this night, quiet now as they headed back the way they had come.

  Back toward that genteel Southern house and its damned stone wall.

  The room was a blur of white and red and black. A swirling, moving mass that kept Chloe sick to her stomach and barfing up bile that tasted of meds.

  She felt trapped, isolated, angry. She’d lost the use of her fingers. Her hands were swaddled in tight white bandages that gave them the appearance of Q-tips.

  Now and then a face appeared at the door. Sometimes Dr. James would bring in a needle. Chloe lost all sense of time, as well as the ability to speak, protest and even think clearly. In between the random moments of mental firepower resided a white fluffy haze of pain and blinking lights. Like being in Vegas on a bender.