Martin unlocked the car and prayed it would start. It did, then he spewed gravel and gunned it onto the dark road, heading for his fleabag a few miles out of town. The dark woods on either side of the road spooked him and he imagined werewolves running parallel to the car, waiting for him to stop so they could tear him to pieces like Caroline. What if there were more of them?
For the first time since he’d started his vendetta, Martin felt fear.
Klug
Customers left the bar in groups, nervous in the spooky light of the rising moon. Klug and Kenny plotted (Wilbur plotted and Kenny nodded) until closing time, at which point they stood carefully and made for the door, the beers and shots they’d had apparently slowing their progress considerably.
At the door, Wil reached out and patted Suzie on the ass. She whipped around to slug him, but his fist caught her hand in a steel grip and he grinned as pain crossed her features.
“Is that any way to say good night?” he drawled, letting his words slur a bit more than they should. Wilbur liked playing at being drunker than he was because it made other men underestimate him. In reality, he wasn’t that drunk at all.
Suzie realized it just as she opened her mouth to speak. Without breaking his grip, Wil leaned in and plastered his saliva-flecked lips over hers.
“Mmmmmm!” she screamed into his mouth as she tried to pull away, dislodge, unbalance or otherwise disengage his disgusting grasp. “Mmmmmm, let go!” she mumbled loudly onto his lips.
“Problem over there?” Harry North called from behind the bar. His name provided the establishment with the pun on the sign outside, but he was damned if he’d let this backwoods Romeo manhandle his waitress like that.
“Keep your drawers on, Harry!” Wilbur said, laughing as he unsmacked his lips from Suzie’s and watched her gag and spit to get the taste of him out of her mouth. “I’m headin’ home to the little woman.”
To Suzie he said, much more softly, “You an’ me got a tad unfinished business, don’t we? I’m gonna want those lips of yours to show me some lovin’, and it’s goin’ to be pretty soon. I know you cain’t wait, but I’ll be back for ya, Suzie-Q!”
He left, Kenny in tow, laughing as she recoiled with disgust.
“What’d you do that for, Wil?” Kenny whined, once out on the porch.
“Quit your bitchin’ and just remember our plan, got it, Kenny-boy? We’re gonna get Buck outta that jail cell. Then we’re goin’ huntin’.”
Theirs was the last car and truck in the lot, Kenny’s tired old Trans Am covered in primer, and Wil’s battered Dodge Ram pickup. As they separated, a series of howls ripped through the night.
“Fuck is that?”
“I think that’s our guy’s little wolfie,” Wil said, his voice a bit uncertain. Wouldn’t do to seem frightened in front of Kenny. In the truck, he had a sawn-off shotgun, and that helped him feel safe.
“Here, wolfie. Here, little wolfie!” Wil called out softly. “Come to Wilbur, boy.”
His eyes widened in anticipation.
Chapter Twenty-One
Lupo
Lupo awoke in the bushes behind his cottage. He was used to it. Though he had managed to reach home all right and the Change had caught him at exactly the right time, he saw from the position of the sun that he had slept much too long. His muscles were sore from the running, and his throat was a parched desert. He found the key in its hiding place and let himself in after collecting his hastily piled clothing. He caught a glimpse of himself in the hall mirror and shuddered. His face and chin were bloodstained, as were his hands. His hair was a matted mess full of twigs and pine needles. The hair that magically grew during the Change had left no trace except its traditional itching. He stared at himself and scratched his cheeks.
Jesus Christ, what a sight!
He made a beeline for the refrigerator. It took a full bottle of water to wash the taste of rancid blood and raw animal flesh from his palate, and a second bottle to quench the thirst he often thought of as unquenchable. In the early days of the disease, he would vomit until his throat was raw, but he had since become accustomed to the bits of flesh that remained from his hunts. Then he washed his hands and set about showering and washing his hair, hoping no one would come visit soon. He half-hoped he would have one specific visitor, however, and it surprised him that he so looked forward to the visit. Nearly noon, he noted with a little yelp of panic, and Jess Hawkins had mentioned checking to see if he wanted lunch today, a near-date he hadn’t been quick enough to get out of and that he hadn’t really wanted to.
He toweled himself dry and allowed that he felt almost human again.
He barked a laugh. Almost human! He hadn’t felt human since before Andy Corrazza’s completely instinctive attack. Lupo didn’t really hold it against him. He’d probably been frightened to death, finding himself altered and in such a strange body. Lupo knew well enough by now what it felt like.
He brushed his teeth three times. Suddenly, he sat on the edge of the old-fashioned tub. Dizzy, he grabbed the vanity and waited until the spell had passed. But with the spell came a strong memory, a certainty, from his romp in the woods. A memory that made his neck hairs tingle. He felt the growl in his throat and suppressed it. It was him. He—Martin Stewart, if that’s who his enemy was—had been here. At the cottage. Last night.
Last night.
All at once, memories of his outing crashed upon themselves and overloaded his circuits, making his head spin. Could it be that he’d made another breakthrough? Could control over his Change be far behind? But before dealing with these greater questions, he needed to sort out the animallike memories, half image and half impulse, that bunched together into packets of raw data. All he needed was the key to unraveling it. He stood and stared into the foggy mirror. The haze seemed to help, and he listened to what the Creature wanted to tell him.
The scent was present all around the cottage—the one that included the scent from long ago. Caroline.
There was also the scent of another predator, a male wolf who must have wandered south from the Upper Peninsula. He was an enemy, too, aware of Lupo’s scent and challenging his dominance. He would have to be dealt with.
Lupo pondered the other wolf’s presence. The UP was where a couple packs had sprung up after efforts to restore the wolf population eradicated by farmers in the previous hundred years.
Why’d you have to choose my woods? Lupo thought. Of all places… As if he didn’t have enough trouble.
Someone knocked at the door and Lupo swore, dropping his towel. He fumbled with his fresh cutoff jeans and hurried to the door, still wet.
“Rise and shine!” Jessie Hawkins said, holding up a wicker basket. “I have handmade muffins!” Then she realized that he was barely out of the shower and giggled. “You really take your vacation seriously!”
He noticed she was checking out his physique and waved her inside. “You don’t know the half of it,” he muttered. He sniffed the cold, pine-laden air outside and shivered, then closed the door. “Let me, uh, get some clothes on.”
“If you insist.”
Pondering the meanings layered there, Lupo finished drying and dressed in long pants and a loose shirt. As he thought of her, standing in his doorway with a basket of baked goods and a smile on her open, wonderful face, all his resolve seemed to dissipate. He wasn’t sure he could fend off her charms, and he decided that was no bad thing after all.
“Did you have a good meal last night?” she asked from the other room.
He nodded. Very satisfactory. “Yeah,” he said for her benefit, then rejoined her, fully clothed and groomed.
She smiled again at the sight of him. “I was going to bring you some fresh food, but I don’t eat that much meat and I figured you’d have a steak or something.”
“Yes, I like meat. Very rare.”
She let that go, and he wondered if she’d looked in his freezer. Of course she had—she’d have to, to make a proper appliance check.
“I
bribed my assistant into keeping an eye out at the clinic, but I’m on call if they need me.”
Lupo thanked her. Her smile had him nearly tongue-tied, and certainly flustered. Like a schoolboy with a crush. He hoped the Creature was indeed asleep.
He set the table awkwardly, barely remembering where anything was. She watched, amused, but didn’t offer to help. She seemed to be measuring him, or perhaps weighing her options.
Tension increased within him, and by the time they sat to eat, a cold glass of white wine from her basket before each of them, Lupo thought it would drive him crazy.
He’d put on a CD, the romantic side of Emerson Lake and Palmer’s Works, Volume One, and Lake’s edgy ballads swirled around them.
They chatted about the weather and the season to come, and he muttered a few words about Corinne, but his lack of enthusiasm for the subject cooled them a bit. Then Jessie relayed her encounter with Buck Benton, which concerned him a great deal.
“This guy sounds like big trouble.”
“He’s been one of those troublemakers you just expect to read about every other day. If there’s a fight or an assault, he’s bound to be there. If there’s a car theft or some pot confiscated, he’s nearby. If there’s violence against native fishermen, he’s one of the ringleaders. Him and this Klug guy he hangs out with.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Well, I’m the res doctor, so I hear about all the misbehaving. And these trailer-trash whites are always stirring up trouble around spearfishing time, so everybody knows their names. It’s never anything good, though. Always some negative deal in which somebody got hurt. They’re the reason redneck stereotypes exist up here.”
“And elsewhere,” he pointed out.
“Right! These guys think they’re in the bayous or something. They want to be, pardon me, backwoods assholes. Klug’s been up on charges for beating his wife, but sure enough, she stays with him. He’s a monster. This Buck guy’s not married, but I know Sheriff Bunche wanted to arrest him on some rape charges last year, but no one would testify. Buck’s the name of his knife, see, and—”
“Oh, I get it. How original! He must be some piece of work. Forgive my saying so, but it’s even worse in the city. And now they’ve got us watching for terrorists, so petty crimes seem to go unnoticed.”
“Shame,” she said as she held out her glass for more wine. “Might as well drink more! What else can we do?”
He poured the sprightly Zeller Schwarze Katz for both of them, finishing the bottle—and letting her question hang in the air between them.
He wasn’t sure how it happened, or exactly when, but like teenagers in a parked car, their chairs seemed to edge closer together, until either the wine or the tension or the combination brought their lips together again.
He tasted the chilled sweet grape on her lips and felt the passion rising in his loins. There had been so much sadness in him for the last few days, and so much unresolved sexual and emotional longing—he knew that now—for Corinne, sweet Corinne, who was gone, that he began to feel as if he would burst. They kissed passionately, intensely, for a while, and when they adjourned to the floor, it was as much a surprise as it was inevitable. On the warm rug spread in front of the silent fireplace, they slowly undressed each other like gifts, accepting the beauty and joy of the moment with no restraint.
He nuzzled her lips and nose, and then her downy neck, his tongue leaving a hot-cold streak behind until he found her hardening nipples and tasted them one at a time while she purred her pleasure at his touch. His hands caressed and massaged, and his lips brought her to the brink, and then he moved lower, opening her and tasting of her secret folds while she touched his head gently, allowing him this most intimate of moments.
Lupo felt a rainbow of emotion as he raised her to a fever pitch. He felt a repressed lust, a love he’d not known was there, and a fondness for her he had to suspect had been there all along, and—
fear
—for what if he did to Jessie what he had done to Caroline?
He felt so much a prisoner of the moon… Was he wise to engage his lust so thoroughly when the Creature roamed so close to the surface? Was he tempting Fate, gambling with Jessie’s life? His hands and feet itched, but he ignored them and concentrated on the soft, warm body beneath him until her voice rewarded him with the sounds of her pleasure and she melted completely and without restraint at the tender touch of his tongue.
Then they shifted and he looked into the dark pools of her eyes, seeing that she saw something in his, but the moment passed and she slid down along his tense body and they tangled again, but now she took him between her lips and maneuvered him slowly into hot and cold regions, using her tongue to test, taste and judge, caressing him with a firm, wet gentleness until he was ready to burst.
But they dissolved and recoalesced into a different orientation, and when he entered her, his passion grew fiery and she matched it stroke for stroke, until they rose together and crested the wave, their mouths locked and their voices speaking in tongues together, rising in volume, riding the lovely turbulence in joyous tandem as if it were an endless waterfall, roaring in their ears until their need finally began to ebb. They coasted in mutual satisfied silence, content in each other’s arms, the sweat drying coolly on their skin in the afternoon chill.
“Mr. Lupo,” Jessie murmured into his neck, “I think you’re trying to avoid paying the rent.”
“I thought you were absolving me,” he whispered back, and then they laughed, because it was more the way they were used to speaking to each other. But there was no denying that the nonverbal communication between them had been stellar the last half hour.
They held each other for a while, breathing rhythmically as one, enjoying the closeness.
Greg Lake was on Repeat, singing “C’est la Vie” with Emerson’s evocative accordion solo, and it was the most romantic thing Nick Lupo had ever heard even though he knew this album very well. Jessie seemed to feel the moment too, and the music made them one again. And as the disc hit Repeat for the third time, they melted together in a repeat of their own.
Much later, in front of the crackling fire Lupo had started, he tried to tell her that he would have to be alone in just a few hours. And for the first time since Caroline, he considered confessing why.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” he began.
“Is it a secret? I know you have secrets.”
“You do?”
“Yes, but I haven’t been a snoop, really I just—I can sense it. I’ve always sensed it, with you. There’s a part of you that you don’t share with anyone.” She chuckled. “Not the part you’re thinking of. That you shared to my great satisfaction.”
“Then what?” Lupo looked at her in the dim lighting. She was an exquisite creature, full of the outdoors and tough and tender, and he wondered at the Fate that had brought them together. For how long?
“Well, I don’t know, Detective Lupo.” She paused. “Your name means wolf in Italian. But you know that… Do you speak Italian?” She nuzzled his shoulder and licked at his sweaty skin.
“Si,” he said. “Parlo Italiano molto bene.” He wondered what connections she’d made.
“Very sexy! We’ve had wolves here again, did you know that?”
“Again?”
“They’d all been killed off by the idiot farmers and ranchers. The native wolf population was down to zero for a long time. But then they were reintroduced and 1 guess they’ve been doing well, mating and running in packs. Not so much here, but farther north. Also in Minnesota. But we’ve had a wolf here for years. I think they never got him, and he’s almost—almost comforting, I guess, because he seems to appear almost once a month, you know, when the moon is full.”
“What do you mean, appear?” His breathing had gone very quiet, and the itch in his hands and feet intensified.
“I don’t mean appear. I’ve never seen him, but you can hear him at night, howling. It sounds lonely and tragic,
and it seems as though he’s running. Maybe running away from something or someone. Maybe he knew they would have killed him if they’d caught him taking the livestock.”
Lupo wanted to tell her. He’d never taken livestock. He knew he only tracked wild animals during his hunts. But he wasn’t sure how he knew.
He felt the Creature straining to leap out of him. The timing was all wrong. He should have been alone, waiting for the Change. What was he doing? He felt that he was developing feelings for this woman, and yet he was jeopardizing her life, in more ways than one.
The fear grew inside him even as the clock wound down toward nightfall, and he felt the Creature stirring just beyond his reach. The sexual emotions had echoed deeply inside him, and he felt that the Creature was aroused, too. Lupo held his new love and choked back tears.
“Secrets,” she whispered. “We both have secrets.”
Dusk entered the windows, and Lupo almost began to speak.
But he didn’t.
When he took her again, this time from behind and not as gently, he wondered if it was him or the Creature. And he cursed the side of him that could hurt her.
They writhed together in ecstasy until, spent, he lay across her back and wondered what she thought of this last coupling, where its implied violence had come from.
Martin
Safely tucked inside several leafy arborvitae bushes that hugged the side of the cottage along the hillside, Martin couldn’t help himself. He blended well into the dark shadows, and the black lipstick he had rubbed football player-like over his cheeks helped him avoid reflecting light from inside. His hands stayed busy, watching those two. He wanted so badly to kill them, but he wanted to torture them, too, and there was plenty of time for that. Besides, he wanted to know whether this Lupo fucker was really a werewolf, as his lovely sister Caroline had believed. Martin believed the cop had killed her, but he still harbored doubt as to whether he had used teeth or some sort of destructive device.
Watching these two go at each other like rutting animals, though, he could almost believe that they were both supernatural creatures.
Wolf's Trap (The Nick Lupo Series Book 1) Page 25