Bad Wolf Chronicles, Books 1-3

by McGregor, Tim

  “Of course I do.”

  “Well?”

  Amy almost laughed at the irony of it. She had had this conversation before, trying to get her father to open up. Three months prior to this, she had watched him grow paranoid and unstable, reeling from a traumatic event that he wouldn’t talk about no matter how hard she tried to get him to open up. And now here she was, repeating his history, post traumatic stress and all. But now she understood his silence and these same reasons kept her own tongue still. “I’m sorry, Gab.”

  “Jesus, Amy.” Gabby finished her glass and then pointed a sharp finger at her. “There’s nothing noble about being stoic. No matter what Mr. Swan says.”

  A rumble from outside snagged their attention. Through the window in the foyer, they caught sight of a Land Rover pulling into the driveway.

  “Mom’s home,” Gabby said.

  “I can’t deal with her right now.” Amy slid off the stool. “Do you want to duck out the back?”

  Gabby shambled back to the foyer. “Nah. I’ll run interference, tell Cheryl you’re sick.”

  “Okay.” Amy made for the stairs.

  Gabby hoisted her bag onto her shoulder as the front door popped open and Amy’s mother struggled inside with grocery bags weighing down each arm. Cheryl Kessler was a bottle blonde with a big flash of a smile. It was easy to see where Amy got her looks from. “Hey, Cheryl.”

  The smile flashed wide as Cheryl’s eyes lit on her daughter’s friend. “Gabby! How are you?”

  “Okay. You want a hand with those?”

  “Thank you. These bags are about to pop my shoulder off.”

  Together they lugged the bags to the counter, Cheryl scanning the room. “Where’s Amy?”

  “She’s not feeling well.”

  “Again?” Cheryl nodded, taking in the open bottle of beer on the granite top. “What happened this time?”

  Gabby shrugged. “She had another, you know, episode.”

  Cheryl sighed with a dramatic flair. Then she shook it off and began unpacking the groceries. “Well, thank you for bringing her home. Do you want to stay for dinner?”

  Gabby peered into one of the grocery bags. “What are you making?”

  Amy sat on the floor of her room with her back to the closed door. The voices of her mom and friend drifted through the crack under the door and she listened to them talk about how sick she was. Later that night when everyone had gone to bed, Amy would creep downstairs and turn the deadbolt on every door and lock every window. Back in her room, she would reach under the bed for a shoebox hidden there and open it. Lifting out her father’s handgun, she would slide out the magazine to check it and then slide it back home. Slipping the Glock under her pillow, she would crawl back under the covers and pray for the nightmares to give her the night off.

  3

  LARA STOOD IN THE hallway, looking through the glass of the hospital room where the girl was being treated. Rather than call for an ambulance, they had driven the girl themselves. The truck bounced crazily over the rutted path as Mason gunned for the highway and Lara treated the little girl as best she could. Suffering from exposure and severe dehydration, the Emergency Room doctor gave Lara no answer as to whether the child was going to survive. Pray, the nurse said as they rushed the girl through ER. Pray and wait.

  Praying and waiting in hospital corridors was nothing new. Lara had done plenty of both in her old life as a police detective in Portland. Part of the job, hospitals never used to bother her until she herself ended up in one. Three days in a coma after a vicious wolf attack, when her entire world turned upside down. She avoided them now.

  “We gotta go back for the body,” Mason said as he came up alongside her at the window. “Sheriff wants one of us to go with him and show him where it is.”

  In the mad rush to get the child out, Lara had almost forgotten about the bloater they’d found near the tank. “Did you tell him where water station four is? Easy enough to find on a map.”

  “Yeah but he still wants one of us to go.” Mason dug a coin from his pocket. “Want to flip for it?”

  Spending forty-five minutes inside a prowl car with the local sheriff was definitely not something Lara wanted to do. Alongside hospitals, police officers were another thing she avoided now. She had answered a few questions for the Sheriff but it had been mercifully brief. The Sheriff, while amiable, was from an older generation and had assumed that Mason, being male, was in charge. She was more than happy to not correct him and let Mason field the enquiry. “Can you do it? I want to stay with the girl and hear what the doctors say.”

  Mason swung his gaze to the girl in the room. She looked tiny in the hospital bed. “Even if she lives, they’re just going to bus her back across.”

  “Someone should be here when she wakes up. I think the other person we found was her relative.”

  “Hell of a thing to wake up to.” The weight of it settled slowly onto both of them and they were silent for a moment, watching the little girl in the bed. Mason touched Lara’s arm. “Okay. I’ll go with the sheriff.”

  “Yo!” The voice bellowed up behind them and they turned to see a man with broad shoulders and long hair swept up into a top-knot, for which Mason had dubbed him the ‘urban samurai’. He waved and hollered up, “Score another one for Luna County Rescue!”

  Mason nudged Lara’s ribs. “Oh look. It’s your boyfriend.”

  “Bellowing through a hospital.” Lara’s expression fell as the man approached. Derek Trumbo was another member of the Luna team, one whom Lara tried to avoid whenever possible. Trumbo was loud and overbearing and his arrogance set Lara’s teeth on edge. She disliked arrogance but could abide it when it was warranted. A skill or an ability or experience, something to back up the arrogance. In Trumbo’s case, there was no qualifier. He simply thought he was God’s gift to the team and was often confounded that others didn’t see it as well.

  “Boyden called, told me you were here.” Trumbo thumped Mason on the back and nodded coolly to Lara. “You guys shoulda called me.”

  “We were in a bit of a hurry, dude,” Mason said. “Next time we find someone near death, we’ll call you before the ambulance.”

  “Always the funny guy, huh Mason?” Trumbo peered through the glass at the girl in the room. “How’d you find her?”

  “Lara worked her magic,” Mason said, nodding at his team-mate. “We’re were checking number four and Lara went all quiet and spooky on me. Then she marched straight out and finds a body. Bloated one too.”

  Trumbo wrinkled his nose. “It didn’t pop, did it?”

  “No, thank God. I’m trying not to lose my lunch and there’s Lara’s taking a closer look, cool as a cucumber. Like she finds them all the time.”

  “No shit? You got a nose for bloaters, Lara?”

  Lara didn’t even look at him. “Just got lucky.”

  “Lucky?”

  Mason went on. “So we’re dealing with that, then Lara goes all spooky again like she’s picking up a scent. Marches off to this big rock and finds the little girl.”

  Trumbo looked Lara up and down, all but sneering. “Is that so?”

  “The woman’s a bloodhound.”

  Lara bristled. She liked Mason, she honestly did, but he talked too much. But it was Trumbo’s stare that got under skin. She often caught him staring at her with a weird intensity. At first she thought he was simply leering, the way some men do, but later saw how his eyes squared her with contempt. Like she had done something to offend him.

  Trumbo clucked his teeth. “No shit? Guess someone is gonna get a gold star on their report card.”

  Lara said, “I’m gonna have it framed for the office wall too.”

  Mason held up a hand. “Okay, you two. Play nice.”

  “What’s your secret, Lara?” Trumbo asked. The ire in his voice dialed up a notch. “That’s the third time you sniffed out a survivor that everyone else missed.”

  “Like you said. Just lucky.”

  “Shit. I’d
be playing the slots if I had that kinda luck.”

  Mason stepped away in a huff. “To hell with you guys.”

  A doctor stepped into the hallway, glancing between Lara, Mason and Trumbo. “Are you the people who brought the girl in?”

  “That’s us,” said Trumbo, jumping credit.

  “How is she doing?” Lara asked.

  The doctor dropped his hands into his pockets. “We’re treating her for severe dehydration now. The risk here is brain damage. Do you know how long she was out there in the desert?”

  “No,” Lara said. “Is she awake? Can I speak to her?”

  “We don’t know when she’ll wake up, unfortunately. Or if she’ll be able to speak when she does. It’s that serious.”

  Lara took a step closer to the window, looking in at that tiny form under the thin hospital sheet. “Can one of you stay with her for her now?” She looked to Mason and Trumbo. “We can take shifts sitting with her.”

  Trumbo shrunk back from Lara’s eyes. “I can’t. Got shit to do.”

  “There might be a few volunteers I could wrangle to help you. I’ll see what I can do.” With that, the doctor nodded and marched off down the corridor. The three members of the rescue team contemplated the intervening silence.

  “I got to go take a ride with the sheriff,” Mason said. He strode down the hallway. Lara and Trumbo followed him out, cutting through Emergency to get to the exit doors. “You still gonna stay, Lara?”

  “Yeah. I’ll sit with her for a while.”

  Mason nudged Trumbo’s arm. “You wanna come along? We got to go collect the bloater we left in the desert.”

  “Sure. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find another survivor.”

  A commotion at the automated doors snapped their attention away. Two paramedics barged through, rushing in with a gurney. The man on the gurney was covered in blood. An oxygen masked strapped over the flapping wet tissue of his torn face. A gruesome sight. Lara and Mason leapt sideways to get out of the way. A woman with a blasted expression followed the melee through the doors. In her hands was clutched a plastic Tupperware tub spilling over with ice. “Where’d they go? Where!”

  Mason reached out and took the woman’s elbow. “Through that door. What happened?”

  “My stupid cousin and his pet.” The woman’s hand shook badly and ice tumbled from the container.

  “His pet did that to his face?”

  “Pet tiger,” she spit. “He’d raised it from a cub. I told him it was dangerous but he just laughed. Thought he was real badass having a pet tiger. It just turned on him.”

  Everyone’s eyes fell to the tub of ice in the woman’s hands. Lara spoke up, “What’s in the ice?”

  “His nose. I think.” She ran after the gurney, ice tinkling to the floor after her.

  Mason looked at his comrades, eyebrows arching in disbelief. “Pet tiger?”

  “Serves him right,” Trumbo grumped. “What the hell kind of fool keeps a tiger locked up at home? Dress it up, call it a pet but then pow. Nature kicks in and the damn thing rips your face off.”

  Mason shook his head. “Dude shoulda stuck to pit bulls. Shit.”

  Lara watched but said nothing. Her brow knit up with a stitch of consternation. Trumbo caught sight of it and laughed. “You can’t keep a wild animal,” he said. “Sooner or later, it’s gonna turn and eat you alive.”

  Trumbo guffawed all the way out the door. Lara remained where she was, unwilling to follow the man. Mason didn’t like the look on her face and it took him a moment before realizing why. He had never seen Lara look troubled before.

  4

  IT WAS THE SHIVERING that woke Amy. Blinking in the dark of the bedroom, she realized she had kicked the blankets off in the night and the chill had goosed her flesh. She reached for the duvet when a noise stopped her. A dull thud, then a scratching noise. The pale light washing in from the window swiped dark as if something blocked it out. She didn’t want to see what it was but her eyes were already turning upwards.

  The wolf was there. Its eyes glowed red and blood dripped from its jaws. Its pelt was cindered and still smoking as if it had crawled out of Hell itself. Its snout thudded the glass of the window, testing it. Then it coiled back, ready to burst through the pane.

  Amy reached under the pillow for the gun but it wasn’t there. As she hit the floor, a hand snaked out from under the bed and snatched her ankle. Like the wolf, the hand was blackened from fire. Raw bone peeled through the charred skin as it clutched harder, pulling Amy under the bed with it. Then the window exploded as the wolf burst through the glass.

  Feverish with a cold sweat, Amy knew it was a nightmare before snapping awake. Her head knocked against the dresser leg and she realized she was on the floor. No wolf, no ghostly hand reaching out from under the bed. The window remained whole and undisturbed. Something was clutched in her fingers and when she raised her hand she saw the gun. The safety was off and her index finger curled tight over the trigger piece.

  She didn’t move, didn’t dare breathe for a full minute. Thumbing the safety back on, she laid the piece on the floor. It could have gone off so easily, thrashing around in her nightmare. Having the Glock tucked under pillow gave her a thin shred of security when she closed her eyes but she’d have to rethink that strategy. She could have let off a round so easily. What if her mom had come into the room? The nightmares were getting worse all the time, the violence of them. This wasn’t the first time she’d woken up on the floor.

  She started to reach under the bed for the shoebox when she remembered the ghostly hand that had clawed her ankle. She bent low and peered under the bed. Dust bunnies and the shoebox, a stray sock. No burned hand, no monsters waiting to drag her under. She slid the box out, laid the piece inside and pushed it back. When she saw how badly her hands trembled she folded her arms to stifle them and leaned back against the wall.

  This wasn’t going to get any better, not on its own anyway. She had watched her own father suffer through the symptoms of post traumatic stress before he was forced to confess the awful circumstances behind it. Working as a detective in the homicide detail, he and his partner, Lara Mendes, had pursued a suspect who turned out to be a monster. Not a metaphorical one, not a psychopath or serial killer. Ivan Prall, the suspect in question, was a lycanthrope. An honest-to-God werewolf, who, when cornered by Lara, transformed into the wolf and attacked her. Infected her. Lara disappeared and her father spent three months tracking her down. Two days before Christmas, all three of them were trapped in a ghost town in the wilds of British Columbia and set upon by more wolves. They fought them off but the three of them were outnumbered and outgunned until her dad done something terrible to even the odds. Triggering a rigged-up explosive, he managed to destroy most of the monsters but sacrificed himself in the process. She and Lara had escaped and returned home; she to Portland and Lara to New Mexico. Life went on but nothing was ever the same. Now, four months later, Amy could barely cope.

  When she closed her eyes, she could see with brutal clarity the flash of spark and resulting fireball that took her father’s life. One second he was there, surrounded by werewolves with his back against a vehicle. Their adopted but nameless dog clutched in his arms, then nothing. The white of the explosion, the mushroom cloud of smoke and he and the dog were simply gone.

  Amy understood why he had done it but she couldn’t forgive him for it. The grief was unbearable and smothering, like drowning in molasses. Piled atop that was the terror and the PTSD. There were monsters under the bed and wolves waiting around every corner. She startled at every small sound and slept with a loaded gun under her pillow and the terror never let up. It exhausted her.

  In the month after the incident, she had gone over the details of that night a thousand times; grasping at some other way that the events could have played out. Some other option that didn’t involve her father incinerating himself to save her. The phrase ‘if only’ began to haunt every thought and second-guess her every move. If only she had
n’t choked when the first wolf attacked. If only she had taken better aim with the massive fifty caliber handgun and scored the silver-tipped round into a monster’s skull instead of strafing the monster’s hindquarters. If only her father hadn’t become obsessed with finding his missing partner or if only Lara had fled beyond his reach. It was a futile, tragic game to puzzle over but she couldn’t stop running the scenarios in her head. Worse still were the quiet moments when she’d forget that he was gone. She’d hear something funny at school and want to tell him when she got home only to remember with a flattening crash that he wasn’t at home. Or at the office or out on a case or anything. He was just gone.

  She wiped her eyes when she caught the sound of footfalls shuffling sleepily outside her door. Her mom was up and Norm would follow soon after and the awful, foggy, dreadful new day would start. Amy glanced at the clock and then closed her eyes, wanting nothing more than to cocoon inside her room and never come out again.

  Cheryl was dicing fruit at the counter as she crossed the kitchen towards the gurgling coffee maker. Norm sat on a stool at the island and when both of them wished her a good morning, Amy replied with a polite return. Maybe, she thought, if she was as cloyingly pleasant as they were, her mom and Norm would be satisfied and stay the hell off her case this morning.

  “We missed you at dinner,” Cheryl said as she chopped almonds on a battered cutting board. “For a moment there, we were worried you’d miss breakfast too.”

  Wishful thinking, Amy reminded herself, was a slow boat to hell. “I had this idea of going all anorexic, you know? Just to fit in and improve my social standing. But I’m starved so maybe I’ll give bulimia a shot instead.”

  Norm laughed. “That’s so last century. Try smoking. Kills the appetite.”

  “Why don’t you comedians set the table.” Cheryl waved the knife at him. “You can destroy your health on your own time.”