The Wolf Who Cried Girl

by Geonn Cannon

  The Wolf Who Cried Girl

  Book Ten of Underdogs

  Geonn Cannon

  Smashwords Edition

  Supposed Crimes LLC

  Matthews, North Carolina

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © 2021 Geonn Cannon

  Published in the United States

  ISBN: 978-1-952150-68-5

  Cover adapted from an image by joiseyshowaa, located at

  https://www.flickr.com/photos/joiseyshowaa/3227714309/

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Prologue

  Kloesterle Castle

  The edge of the Black Forest

  Six Months Ago

  Milo Duncan walked to the chest-high stone wall, put her hands on top, and leaned over to look down at the unpaved road below. The ground fell sharply away on the opposite side of the road and, in the distance, she could see the cluster of white buildings inside a grid of curving lines that she assumed were roads. Even with these signs of modern civilization, the endless green hills veiled by thick fog made her feel like she’d been transported back in time.

  She ruined the illusion by taking out her phone to take a photo, framing the town at the bottom of the screen.

  “Milo?”

  “Up here on the...” She turned and examined the walkway on which she’d found herself. “I don’t know what this is. A parapet?”

  She heard footsteps from the stairwell. The castle must have been built when humans were much smaller, because Milo considered herself fairly slight and still had to stand at an angle to prevent scraping her shoulders on the stone walls as she’d ascended. Gwen Willow appeared in the doorway with her body similarly twisted before she stepped out into the open air.

  The wind caught Gwen’s hair and tossed it across her face, and she tucked it behind her ear as she looked out over the hills. “Wow, this is absolutely gorgeous.”

  Milo smiled, now seeing nothing but her lover’s profile. “Yeah, it’s pretty swell.”

  Gwen caught the tenderness in Milo’s voice, looked at her, and smiled. She walked forward and rested her elbows on the wall. Milo joined her. For the past month, they’d been slowly making their way south from Potsdam trying to find a safe place for the Magnusson book of essays. They still didn’t know how Isaac Hayden found its previous stronghold, but they weren’t taking any chances. The book had almost turned Dale Frye into a hunter. Anything that powerful should never be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. Milo thought they should destroy it, but Henrik Bayer, their host, was adamant that it had to be preserved.

  “That’s like keeping a bottle of poison on the shelf and hoping it never falls into your food. What good is it doing by existing?” Milo had asked at one point while they were driving south, following a lead about a potential safe place to leave the essays.

  Gwen shrugged without taking her eyes off the road. “Why is Mein Kampf still being published?”

  “Why is that book still being published?” Milo had asked.

  “The ideas in Mein Kampf weren’t invented by that book, and the monster who wrote it wasn’t the first man to have them. The writing gives us insight into an evil mind, so we can recognize one when it rears its ugly head again. The same goes for Magnusson’s essays. We learn from the monsters we’ve vanquished so we can defeat the ones who follow in their footsteps.”

  Milo still didn’t buy it. “I think it’s a lot less likely to have people following in his footsteps if we just erased him from history. Maybe the Nazi book has been spread around too much to get rid of it forever, but there are only a handful of copies of these essays. We can wipe it off the face of the planet and just be done with it.”

  Gwen said, “It’s tempting. But it’s not up to us.”

  Milo had let the subject drop, but every night since then, she’d imagined climbing out of bed and taking the essays outside with a bucket and a lighter. Even now she was tempted to suggest the safest place to hide the book was at the bottom of an ash pile. They could do it up here in the tower of an ancient castle. It would be poetic and ensure no one would ever lay eyes on it again.

  “We can’t burn it,” Gwen said.

  “Gah, stop peeking in my brain.”

  Gwen smiled and reached over to put her hand on top of Milo’s. “Ignoring the hunters won’t make them go away. Hayden is proof of that. He was a bad man long before he laid eyes on the book.”

  “And he killed a lot of wolves to get his hands on it.” She grunted. “Look, I get what you’re saying. Learn from the past, understand the baddies, learn how their brains work so you can fight them. But this book is actively harmful. I don’t see how the benefits of having it outweigh the dangers. We came all this way because some monks allegedly lived here and fought ghosts a thousand years ago.”

  “It was eight hundred years ago,” Gwen corrected, “and the last known sighting of them was in 1860. There’s a reason the Black Forest is the setting for so many fairy tales and legends. The monks fought ghosts, witches, and werewolves. Only the bad kind, obviously.”

  “Obviously.”

  “It seemed like our best shot.” She sighed and looked over her shoulder at the ruined castle behind them. “I guess there’s a reason they haven’t been mentioned in a few decades.”

  Milo blew air out past pursed lips. “Okay. So how long are we going to keep up like this? If we’re out here chasing down mythical monks, it seems pretty clear that we’re running out of options.”

  “We have to find a safe place for the book.” She looked at Milo. “It means a lot to me that you’ve stuck with me all this time. I know if you had your way, the book would’ve been ashes a long time ago and we’d be back in Seattle.”

  “We’re in this together,” Milo said. “And hell, a couple years ago, I was working eight to four delivering packages around Canary Wharf. Now I’m standing in a fairy tale castle trying to hide a cursed book with the woman I love. The last part of that sentence is the most important. I don’t care what the first half is as long as the second half stays the same.”

  Gwen turned to face Milo. “We’ll give it another week. We’ve traveled around most of Germany looking for a place to leave this damn thing. If we can’t find it in a week, we’ll head back to Potsdam to brainstorm with Henrik and his pack.” She brushed her thumb over Milo’s cheek. “I love you.”

  “I love you,” Milo said.

  It was close enough to nightfall that they decided to camp out in the castle. There was a room on the lower level where they would be protected from the winds and any wild animals that might wander through the area overnight. They made love, considered going for a run, but eventually decided they were both too exhausted and fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  Milo didn’t know how long she’d been asleep when she heard movement elsewhere in the castle. She pushed herself up on her elbow and listened carefully, scenting the air. It could have been any number of creatures: deer, elk, a badger... She didn’t smell anything, though.

  She pulled on her T-shirt and shorts, slipped out from under Gwen’s arm, and went t
o investigate. Her bare feet didn’t make any sound on the stone floor, and she stayed close to the wall so the shadows would conceal her. The entrance to the foyer was an archway and she paused at the threshold to listen for more movement.

  “You might as well keep coming, dog.” The man’s voice was shockingly loud in the silence. She heard it echo off the stone corridors. She tightened her jaw and looked back the way she’d come. “We had someone waiting outside the room. They already have your woman.” He let out a painfully shrill whistle, and Milo heard sudden movement from the way she’d just come.

  Milo tensed. “I would have smelled anyone lurking.”

  “You rely too much on your dog senses,” the man said. “Leaves you vulnerable.”

  A light came on down the hall, its beam appearing from around the corner. It bounced, which meant either someone was carrying it or it was mounted on their body. Milo braced as the man stepped into sight. He was with another man, both of them dressed in full tactical gear that covered their faces. The man with the light had a vice grip on Gwen’s upper arm, forcing her to walk alongside him. The second man, who was mostly in the dark, walked behind them. Milo could see the gun he was holding on Gwen’s back. Gwen caught Milo’s eye and gave her a look that screamed run.

  “Why don’t you come on out here?” the man said from the foyer. “This will all be a lot easier if we’re all in the same room.”

  Milo considered Gwen’s plea, tried to imagine herself running away from this decrepit castle and leaving her behind.

  She stepped away from the wall and put her hands up. Gwen closed her eyes and let her head drop. The second hunter came forward and grabbed Milo’s shoulder, shoved her through the archway into the foyer.

  The speaking man was standing near the large double doors to the castle. He was dressed in gear like the other men, but his face was exposed. His hair was silver in the moonlight, and his eyes were shaded by his brows, giving him the appearance of a bleached skull. The hunters forced Milo and Gwen to their knees, pulling their arms back to restrain their wrists.

  “The book is hidden,” Gwen said. “We don’t have it with us. You kill us, you’ll never find it.”

  It was a lie. The book was in their car, wrapped in a blanket in a compartment under the backseat. They hadn’t thought they would need to take more precautions than that given how isolated the castle was. As it turned out, their bluff apparently didn’t matter.

  “We don’t need the book,” the leader said, stepping forward. “And we have no intention of killing you. At least not yet.”

  Milo sniffed the air. “Gwen, do you smell anyone in this room?”

  “Just you, love,” Gwen said.

  The leader smiled. “We have a lot of things to discuss, and a long time to have those discussions. But right now we should get a move on. We’ve got a very long trip ahead of us.” To one of the guards, he said, “Go gather their things. Load it all into the truck. I want to be out of here in fifteen minutes.”

  “Where do you think you’re taking us?” Milo asked.

  “Home, Miss Duncan,” the man said as he walked to the door. “I’m taking you back to Seattle.”

  Milo looked at Gwen, so her face was the last thing she saw before the remaining guard slipped a black bag over her head.

  Chapter One

  Seattle, Washington

  Now

  Ariadne Willow didn’t know, or care, how many traffic laws she broke on the way to Dr. Frost’s house. Milo crouched in the passenger seat, knees up and hands on the dashboard, head on a swivel to keep an eye out for anyone who might be coming after them. She was still wearing the hospital johnny, thankfully the kind that came with pants, and she looked like she had just been dragged out of the woods.

  “Where the hell you been, Milo?” Ari muttered as she blew through a red light.

  Milo swung her head around at the question. Her hair hung over her eyes, but Ari could see there was only a wolf’s intelligence behind them. Milo’s brain thought she was in wolf form, thought she was incapable of speech or sitting properly. It was hard for Ari to look at, as if just seeing it was enough to make it contagious. It was probably better to keep her eyes on the road given the way she was driving.

  “We’re going to figure this out. Don’t worry.”

  Milo spun in the seat, gripped the headrest, and watched out the back window for the rest of the journey.

  Ari realized she should have called ahead, but the front door opened as she was getting Milo out of the car. Dr. Frost was canidae, retired, and the man who saved her life on too many occasions for her to count. She owed him far more than she could ever repay, and now she gave him an apologetic look as she walked Milo up the driveway. Milo was on all-fours again, palms flat on the pavement with her knees tucked against her flanks in a way that a human skeleton really shouldn’t have allowed.

  “What seems to be happening here?” Frost asked, tilting his head to regard Milo.

  “Her brain thinks she’s in wolf form.”

  Frost’s eyebrows arched. “Well, Miss Willow, you certainly do bring me the most interesting patients. Bring her inside.”

  Frost took them into the house and guided Milo into the office he kept near the kitchen. Ari stayed behind in the living room and took out her phone. She planned to call Dale, but she had no idea what she would say in the call. There was just too much to sum it all up in a quick message when all she really wanted to say was “Milo and Mom are both alive, Mom’s still missing. I’m at Dr Frost’s. Please come be with me.” So she just sent that.

  Dale replied within a minute. “On my way.”

  Ari sat on the couch and slid down until she could rest her head against the back. She closed her eyes and gave herself a second to absorb everything that had happened in the past half hour.

  Her mother was alive, but still missing. Milo was alive but afflicted with something horrifying, bizarre, and possibly permanent. Isaac Hayden was back. And the last time she’d seen Diana, she was surrounded by a bunch of people who were probably hunters.

  She’d been foolish enough to think she’d eliminated the hunters as a threat years earlier when her father tried to get wolf manoth going again. Jacob Keighley had gotten some of his rich and powerful friends to fund a drug called wolfsbane that caused canidae to go feral. It had caused a few deaths before Ari and Dale tracked down the members of his little Venatorial Club and convinced them to back off. They folded without much pressure once confronted by the reality of what they were doing, and Keighley had gone to prison. Since then, hunters hadn’t been much of a concern.

  Now, with Hayden and that damned book of essays, they appeared to be making a comeback. She didn’t even know what an actual war between hunters and wolves would look like. She’d always hoped she would never find out. And given the state Milo was in, she dreaded what new tactics they might have picked up since their last dust-up.

  She was aware of drifting off, but she only knew she’d fallen asleep when she heard the front door open. Dale came into the living room and went directly to Ari, embracing her.

  “Milo’s safe?” Dale said.

  “She’s... yeah. Something isn’t right with her, though. She’s in human form, but the wolf is in charge.”

  “How does that happen?”

  Dr. Frost came out of his office.

  “I’m hoping he’s about to tell us,” Ari said.

  Frost sighed and gave Dale a tired nod of greeting. “I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve never even heard of anything like this. It shouldn’t be possible. But I think it’s similar to automaticity. Driving home from work, day after day, the same route, your brain focuses on other things while you go through the motions of safe driving.”

  “Like muscle memory?” Dale said.

  “More like hypnosis,” Frost said. “Miss Duncan’s conscious mind is, um, asleep. Shut down. Whether that’s due to trauma or something else, I can’t say. But rather than leaving her catatonic, the wolf simply to
ok control.”

  “Milo’s catatonic?” Ari said.

  Frost nodded. “It seems so. I’ll need to examine her further, but at the moment it seems to be the only conclusion that makes sense. I don’t know what effects this will have on her in the long-term, but her hands don’t show evidence that she’s been walking on all fours. It may be short-lived. It may fix itself when she transforms into the wolf and then back into her human form. We simply have to wait and see.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “She’s sedated, resting. There’s a chance that’s all she needs and she’ll wake up being her old self again.”

  Ari said, “When will she wake up?”

  “A few hours.”

  “Okay. Diana said the uniformed cops found her on Alaskan Way by the stadium. I’m going down there to see if I can pick up her scent, backtrack to wherever she came from.”

  “Are you sure that’s safe?” Dale said.

  Ari shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll be as safe as I can be, but we need to know where she’s been this whole time. If we’re not going to get answers from her...”

  “Right. Do you want me to go with you?”

  “I’d rather have you here in case Milo wakes up.”

  Dale nodded and squeezed Ari’s hand. “I’ll call you if anything happens.”

  Ari kissed her, thanked Dr. Frost, and headed out. She didn’t like that she still had Diana’s car, but she didn’t know if it was safe to return to the medical center yet. She sent Diana a text, asking for an update, then drove south through the city. Just before she reached CenturyLink Field, traffic narrowed to a single lane thanks to the crews finishing up the demolition of the viaduct. Cranes, excavators, and water trucks spraying down the skeletal remains had been cluttering up the waterfront for months, and she was glad the project was finally nearing an end.

  She pulled into the ferry waiting zone and parked as far from the main road as she could. She checked to make sure she was alone, then quickly undressed and opened the door a crack. She transformed while she was still sitting in the car, rolling to her left and falling onto the pavement with the elegance only a wolf could achieve. She shook out her fur, stretched, and bumped the car door shut with her shoulder.