Jake added, “The humans see what they think they should see. Most aren’t ready to see monsters. It’s part of how vampires have only been portrayed as fiction rather than reality.
“If they’re told that coyotes may be moving back into the area, then that’s what they’ll believe first. Do you plan to check out every story? Werewolves aren’t likely to be bound just by a hunting territory. They are human as well. I doubt that they will be found living in the woods.”
Nick shrugged. “I was thinking of following up on the most likely reports. The ones involving forest rangers should be most accurate. Once I find a likely area, then I suppose I just have to stake out the area on a full moon?”
The vampires laughed at that. Marek explained why as he said, “You don’t think they run around just on a full moon, do you? Young werewolves may be bound to the cycles of the moon, but older ones learn to change when they want. It’s why vampires can’t just hunt them out when they would be in human form for twenty-seven days. They are not that vulnerable.”
Seeing Nick’s surprise at their supposed knowledge of werewolves, Nicola added, “We had a run in with a pack a few decades ago and learned a lot. We had seen the old movies. A few maybe even read horror books, though I won’t name names,” her eyes glanced to Marek. “Anyway, we found out that they could change form by day and any night. Full moons are simply a night they can’t control themselves.
“If you planned to stake out a full moon, you might very well find them returning to the area, but they are as intelligent as any human in either form. Well, except the moon madness times, and then they still retain at least some control. That means they could realize they’ve been too obvious or noticed and then they could change their haunts.”
Nick leaned back into the couch in thought. Being reminded that these weren’t just monsters was a reason for coming. He had been thinking of the creatures as just beasts, but still he had little more to go on for finding a pack. If they didn’t have at least some of the instincts and habits of the wolves they became, the voran was going to have a near impossible time of finding them.
Chapter 4-Ghosts
Morning arrived and Nick was still up by the time the sun weakly crept over the horizon to lighten the clouds. A typical winter day in Chicago meant there was likely to be no sun viewed through cloud cover. The lamps remained on in his home for most of the morning as Nick continued his research.
With what he believed were his best chances in hand, the man played detective and began phoning the various ranger stations. He pretended to be a newspaper reporter doing a follow up on the balance of nature in the area and how safe the public was. Wolf and coyote packs could be dangerous, but only if they became emboldened enough to take on man. Men being hunters may have been an easy fact for humans to remember, but nature had a short term memory. If there was weakness shown, then weakness could be exploited. Creatures that killed a human, tended to try and do so again for some reason. He didn’t know if it was a primal thing or something bred from circumstance, but it did seem to happen until men stepped in to put them down.
It was the continual struggle of man to subdue nature and nature’s refusal to remain subdued. He sniffed with deprecating humor as he wondered if vampires and werewolves were simply another part of the balance. If the truth of the existence of these creatures was made known, would mankind send its hunters to kill them like any other creature they viewed as a threat? He believed they would. Even vampires like Marek’s crew, that found a way to avoid killing humans, would be targets simply because of what they were.
Grabbing what he needed, Nick didn’t worry about cleaning up his notes. It was Geni’s day off, so there would be no questions as long as he took care of the mess before her next visit. He probably didn’t have to worry over the girl, but the voran felt it was still best to avoid uncomfortable conversations.
After getting into his car, Nick headed out of the city into the suburbs. Chicago’s parks and bits of forest were unlikely to be of much use to a pack of wolves. They would draw too much attention this close to the congestion of the city proper so it was a doubtful area to search. He felt the girl in his vision had to be close enough for him to find, but she was not as close as that.
Southwest of the city was some of the largest preserves. Man had a strong presence for miles around the city, but the woods protected from building pushed them away and nature thrived within those boundaries. Reports of deer and the predators that hunted them were strongest there. Written sightings of evidence of wolves killing in the woods from the forest rangers were still listed more off hand than as a worry. The fact that no one ever seemed to be able to find the actual wolves to capture or even get a picture of for proof, was a key factor preventing a hunt from being needed.
That was the current word from the network at least. Nick would have thought that any sign of wolves would have brought more attention down on them, but perhaps the bureaucracy inherent in Illinois politics was their savior. Chicago and its surrounding counties were notorious for the red tape they put out, especially when dealing with each other and the state they resided within.
If the park district made too much of the wolf situation, there was the likelihood that the county or state would have pressure on them to investigate and that would step on the toes of the officials in charge. Big or small, those who ran their districts never wanted to look weak or inept. If they did, they feared losing money as much as any power they held.
Pulling onto the driveway that led into the compound, Nick looked at the set of buildings with a couple county vehicles parked near to them. Old snow, gray nearest the road and parking lot, was still white in the grass surrounding the buildings. The station’s placement at the border of the woods gave a great view of the week old snow highlighting skeletons of trees and bushes. Just past midwinter meant there would be no green hiding his prey in these woods.
“Mr. Steel?” a woman’s voice called out as a door was pushed open. Dressed in her dark brown ranger jacket and hat, her auburn hair hid in a ponytail trailing down her back.
“You can call me, Nick or Nicholas, if you prefer. And you are…?”
“Raina Thorn,” the woman said tipping her cap. “The office asked me to talk to you and maybe even show you where we found evidence of the wolves in the forest. Officer Blackburn will be joining us in a moment. He was wrapping up inside when I saw you pull up. Quite the car you have there. Being a reporter pays well?”
Smiling politely, Nick answered, “Reporting’s just a sideline of mine. I used to be a stock trader. The money from that let’s me be a reporter without the worry of the pay.”
The ranger sighed, “Must be nice.”
A creak announced the third member of their group. The door opened and shut letting a middle aged man in a ranger’s uniform join them in the cold. “Mr. Steel, welcome. We hear that you’d like to do a little story on our forest.”
Nick nodded, “Preferably on the potential threat of wolves in our local preserves. I had heard that, to keep the deer population in check, wolves have been introduced into the forest preserves in the past. Are you looking at a controlled situation like that or has a pack of wolves somehow roamed into the area?”
“Well, you’re getting straight into it already,” the ranger stated looking a little taken aback.
Chuckling, Nick apologized, “Sorry, I am getting a little ahead of myself, aren’t I? It’s just something that I am actually passionate about. I have an interest in protecting rare species. There’s even a little pet project that I keep up on in the city.”
“Oh?” Raina questioned him in turn. “What project is that?”
Kicking himself inside for getting too tongue in cheek, the man answered as close to the truth as he could, “I’m quite the night owl and have found myself working with bats as well as some other creatures of the night. It may sound strange, but man’s heavy saturation in this area altered a lot of nature so there’s many species affected.”
“Bats?” the woman questioned as she exchanged a quick glance with the other ranger. “That’s an interesting choice, but I suppose those and owls have both lost habitats and adapted to what is here now. They’re not the typical species that most people seem to follow.”
Blackburn interjected, “There are researchers into virtually every creature on the planet though. He’s at least thinking about the environment. Too few bother to really do more than say they’re worried about it.”
A few flurries began to drop from the sky. At Nick’s glance skyward, the older man asked, “It’s a little cold out today. Are you sure that you want us to run you out there? We could go inside and tell you what we can around the table instead if you’d rather.”
Shrugging, Nick replied, “The cold doesn’t bother me much. I’m good as long as you two are.” His resistance to temperature extremes was nearly that of the undead he hung out with, though the vampires being undead had little worries of frostbite.
Blackburn shook his head and Raina equaled his answer with her own. “We can talk on the way,” the elder ranger stated as they moved to one of the garages. “Have you a preference of snowmobile or four wheeler?”
Shortly after, the three moved out into the forest. Using three quads, Nick followed after Blackburn with the second ranger taking the rear. It was slower going than Nick had hoped, but it was definitely better than walking. The quads wound up being easier to maneuver as they wound their way through fallen branches and trees, mounds of snow, and the various natural obstacles. The tires climbed over limbs that the runners of a snowmobile wouldn’t so they could continue a straighter line to their destination.
Pulling up a little back from the area in question, the three finished the last stretch walking. “So this is the most recent pieces of evidence, how many times have you spotted them so far?”
“Well,” Raina began, “they’ve never officially been spotted by anyone. We have found evidence of three kills over four months. Unfortunately no one’s been able to discover evidence of a lair, but then again no one’s seen them to be attacked either. They’re like ghosts.”
Nick looked around them. A deer carcass, little more than bones though it was found only four days ago, lay in a small clearing between the trees. Snow covered the ground here, but it was cleared away in several places as if something had pawed at the ground.
Officer Blackburn watched the man searching the clearing and said, “A couple of the bare spots are from the deer looking for grass under the snow. It’s getting late in the season so anything they can find preserved helps maintain their weight.
“These other spots look to be from the wolves. It’s actually odd the way they created them. Usually wolves should be a bit neater, according to the specialists we’ve called on, but these moved the snow quite a bit. Not every spot looks like paws and hooves either, but that may just have been some of the melt and wind.”
Nick merely nodded at his words. His vision told him a bit more. Whether the rangers were merely poor at tracking or they were holding things back from a reporter, he did not know, but the voran’s past gave him knowledge that they didn’t realize he had either. He had been a hunter and tracking was one of his hidden skills.
With vision keener than a human’s and his knowledge, Nick saw more than they were telling him. The deer carcass had been dragged here first of all. Deer may have pawed this ground, but it was from this particular deer on the day it was killed. The wolves had all eaten from the kill. Teeth marks on the remaining flesh were few. Much of the flesh had been torn away with their teeth as was to be assumed of wolves that could only paw or bite. Moving closer to the carcass, he noted a couple spots that appeared cut by a knife.
Maybe the girl had been with to share the kill. His face crinkled with the idea of eating raw meat, but she must have. There were no signs of a fire and, like vampires, werewolves killed like this for the blood. Cooked meat may be part of their diets throughout the month, but this was a wolf kill.
Evidence of human footprints in the scuffed areas was visible to his eyes, though the scuffings made them very hard to make out. In the snow there were mainly paw holes, but there were more human shaped holes as well. He could not be sure who had made those, however, since the rangers had stepped in the clearing. He suspected there had been prints from the girl in his vision also, but time and weather made divining the truth impossible.
There were paw prints in the snow outside of the clearing that he could make out. Whether they were coming or going was impossible to tell, however, thanks to the snow and hard ground of winter.
“I assume you tried to track them down?”
Blackburn nodded, “They would find a stream or road and suddenly their tracks couldn’t be picked up again. It happened every time we’ve found signs of them. The first month there wasn’t even snow to conceal tracks. The ground was softer for prints even.”
“Were there any human footprints mixed in with the wolves?”
The rangers glanced to each other in surprise.
Nick threw out an idea designed to throw off any thought of the nature of werewolves. “We’ve all been operating under the conception that the presence of these wolves is a natural occurrence. What if they are being introduced by humans? It would explain how they could disappear. Maybe they get released from a vehicle and are trained to return again?”
Raina frowned and Blackburn’s face nearly echoed her look as the woman was the first to react, “Well, that seems kind of farfetched. I mean, why would anyone want to raise wolves then drop them off to kill a deer and then take them home again? They’re not dogs going for a walk on a leash!”
Shrugging at her words, Nick knew the idea sounded unrealistic, but then again telling them that he believed this was the work of a pack of werewolves could only make it sound more realistic by comparison. The thought played in his head so he threw that out there full of sarcasm. “Well, maybe they’re werewolves and they disappear because they turn into people in the morning.” He laughed and the rangers reluctantly joined him.
“OK, now that is truly farfetched,” Raina said laughing.
The elder ranger seemed a little more reluctant in his laughter. “This is real life not a horror movie, kid. Werewolves are just from fear of wolves. They were created to add to the wolf’s mythology.” He paused and added, “Your idea of someone dropping them into the woods may have some merit. People drop off pets that they don’t want all the time. There are dog fights and cock fights. If this is someone’s perverse take on hunting, that could possibly explain some of it, but I still believe that it’s simply a matter of weather and time working against us.”
Nick chuckled as he replied, “Well, I’m glad we’re not going to have to worry about werewolves then. Though the mystery of where they are disappearing to is still there. Any ideas?”
The rangers looked a little stumped by the simple question. Finally, Blackburn stated, “I’m sure we’ll find them in the spring. It’s just the weather making it harder now, but once the ground softens so we can track them we’ll be able to follow them to wherever they’re hiding.”
There was little more to do at the site. Nick asked to see the other areas from the previous two attacks. He was hoping to sense a pattern in their kill areas, but if there was anything there, after visiting all three sites, Nick couldn’t see it. The rangers had little more to give him. The wolves had come and gone and the rangers had very little to go on. If there was something more, they weren’t forthcoming.
The drive home had Nick thinking. There were werewolves. Did they have at least one person that couldn’t shape change? Would they hide in the city or suburbs? He figured they wouldn’t be out in the country. Living in the country wouldn’t require a drive to the woods for their sport.
The final question was, if he were a werewolf, where would he be when he didn’t need to be a wolf?
Chapter 5- Cold Feet
Even by daylight the Lair the looked quite unassuming. The grey stone wall
s rising thirty feet into the air looked short compared to its length. The warehouse exterior design from its past easily hid the night club within, but even that was more obvious than the true lair further in that was inhabited by vampires.
The early flurries turned into a steady downfall. His sports car’s rear wheel drive was beginning to give him issues by the time he arrived. If the weather continued to make the roads slippery, Nick thought that he might have to stop home and pick up his back up vehicle. He had a cheap SUV for the worst of winter’s weather. It was one thing to have money to buy nice things, but it was another to waste it risking damage on bad roads.
His early life hadn’t known riches. Now well over a century later, Nick still found a need to be frugal. It was a personality trait that he could never shake.
A rap on the steel door brought a slow response, but eventually a young woman came to the door. The redhead with blue eyes was known to him, though he rarely visited Marek or his crew during the day. “Hello, Scarlet, I need to talk to Marek.”
The girl nodded to him, “Hello, Nick, I think they’re sleeping still.”
Moving through the open door, Nick began to cross the empty club while Scarlet secured the door. The girl hurried to catch up. She was merely an employee of the club and didn’t know her employers’ true secret. Along with a couple other workers in the club, she was merely maintenance for the public part of the building.
“They said that we should never disturb them when they’re not in the club. I can get the day manager for you,” the girl informed him as she grabbed his arm.
Nick simply smiled and gently pried her hand from his arm. “Don’t worry about it. We’re very old friends. I get a free pass to bug them even during the day. You can leave Kyle to whatever it is he’s working on,” he said of the day manager. Kyle was the only one of the day workers who knew the secret of the owners. The man was bound to them as a day guardian.
Vorans and Vampires (Book 1): Voran the Night Guardian Page 3