He sated himself twice at their expense, his seed pooling in the dirt below the windowsill, then very quietly extricated himself from the bushes and made his way out to the road.
Shadows were lengthening, and he sure as hell didn’t want to get caught out here, silver bullets or no. When a dog tied up behind one of the houses began to bark at him suddenly, his bladder almost emptied from the shock. He glared at the invisible dog somewhere behind a stand of pines and bushes, wishing he could choke the life out of him. What if Lupo heard all the barking and decided to investigate? Martin hastened to his car and drove off as quickly as he could. He’d wanted to see her again. He would enjoy doing her in the same way as the others, but he might well use her as a bone for the guys first. His guys. From what he’d gathered, they would be very grateful.
Almost as grateful for this as they had been when he’d given them the box from his trunk.
Right now he aimed the car south. There was a loose end in Milwaukee, and he felt an obsessive need to tie up loose ends.
Martin loved loose ends.
He sang his tuneless ditty as he drove into the night.
Lupo
When the barking began, he wondered who might be calling. But then the thought hit him that it could just as easily be somebody leaving. Somehow, the Creature’s senses were manifesting themselves—he thought he’d picked up the guy’s scent, even here, inside the cottage, even with the fireplace smell and the lingering remnants of the sweat and sex smell they’d produced together so often in the last few hours.
He looked at Jessie as she slept peacefully in his arms. Who could have imagined her unbridled passion, even toward the end, when his need had become more physical and more aggressive? Her repressed sexuality had overwhelmed him—maybe her, too—and he’d reveled in it because of his repression. Maybe it was time to let himself go, enjoy what he could in life, instead of doing penance forever. Now her eyes were closed and her hair spread silkily over the rug and his shoulder, and her lips curled upward in a little satisfied sleep-smile that made him want to kiss her and awaken her desire again.
Instead he shifted and watched her wake up, and kicked himself for what he was about to do.
“I’m sorry to wake you, Jess, I really am, but I need to leave for a while.” He managed to hide the urgency he felt.
Her eyes opened wider, then settled into a slight glare.
“More secrets?”
He nodded. “I’m afraid so. Not happy about it, but kind of stuck. Maybe someday…” He let the possibility hang. He hoped she wouldn’t end it right there.
She gathered herself and stood, naked and glorious in the glare of the fire. “Okay, Detective Lupo. I can take a hint. But I’ll want a rain check.” She started to gather her clothes.
Lupo wanted to say more, but his insides were screaming. His extremities itched. His senses boiled.
The Change was not far off, and this time he felt as though he was seeing through two sets of eyes. God, not yet!
The scent of her was exciting, but there was another scent that played under his nostrils, and the Creature wanted at it.
Jessie
Driving home didn’t take long, but her mind raced so quickly through feelings that the ride seemed to last a century.
She still tingled down there, where her policeman from the city had reawakened her senses and they had explored each other over and over, without hesitation or embarrassment. It was really remarkable, she thought, that she had been so liberated, so free with herself, so giving. And so willing to take. Even at the end, when he’d become more like a beast than a man, and she’d accepted and even enjoyed it, though it was rougher than she was accustomed to with her infrequent lovers. She had been shocking, she knew. The sweet scent of their sex still lingered in her nostrils, on her lips, on her fingertips.
And I’m in love! She giggled.
He had been gentle when it counted and rougher when she was ready for it, when she’d indicated she wanted to shed inhibitions like shower water. He had been a thoughtful and caring lover, if a bit hesitant, as if he didn’t share much of himself with anyone. He had a dark past, she understood that, with secrets of some sort. She even thought he might have some kind of power over her, or over others, some kind of magic. She wasn’t sure how she had come up with that, but then she’d always been sensitive to other people’s secret sides. She’d sensed a depth of rage and anger in him, which was understandable because of his friend’s murder and her career and all his repressed feelings toward her. Jessie understood that some of his newfound sexuality may well have been directed at the memory of this friend who’d been killed, but she also knew the connection she herself and he had made long ago and how they had sparred with the possibilities for years.
And now I’m in love! She couldn’t help herself.
Even when the reality of the darkness that surrounded him came back to her, she still had to figure that as an adult she had the choice to either explore this relationship or let it fizzle, and she had already chosen.
Jessie Hawkins had been married once, to a perfectly stable man with a decent job and no real black marks against him.
Except that he had been passionless. Somewhere along the line that had been their three-year marriage, she’d realized that their biggest hurdle was the strength of her passions and the utter lack of Paul’s. He barely tolerated sex, and then only if she initiated. This had eventually infuriated her to the point that she no longer initiated—begged—at all, preferring to seethe as he cruised through life apparently none the worse for wear without the sex life so many other men craved. She had divorced Paul with an almost businesslike coldness, and he had moved on, apparently neither broken up nor angry. Passionless.
She was not passionless. She’d had a few affairs, a few “dalliances,” as they used to say. Her job kept her busy, and she did feel guilty about letting it slide the last day and a half, but she really did have a sick friend, as she’d told her assistant and the nurse down at the clinic. Jessie liked to think today had gone a long way toward healing that sickness.
She still tingled, and the feeling was so prevalent that she almost considered turning the Pathfinder around and surprising him. She slowed, in fact, and waited for a set of headlights behind her to pass, thinking she would make a U-turn and head back. What man could resist a wanton, willing woman on his doorstep?
She braked, checked the mirror, and began to swing around. But after a couple feet she braked again.
“What am I doing? He wants to go slow, and there’s nothing attractive about a desperate woman looking for a sex handout!”
She straightened the SUV and headed home, still happy, and now more settled. She hummed the instrumental from the Alan Parsons Gaudi album, wishing she had it with her to play. Ian Bairnson’s Flamenco-style guitar solo would have fit her mood just fine right then.
She drove on, unaware that the car that had passed her a few moments before had now pulled over and waited in darkness for her to pass again.
Moments later, Jessie Hawkins pulled into her own cottage’s driveway.
As she climbed out of the truck, she swore she heard a wolf howl in the distance. It was that rogue wolf again! She shivered a little, but felt excited, too, wondering at her strange, sudden mixture of feelings.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lupo
The Change had come upon him quite unexpectedly, in a sense, because it was early. The moon still hid. He shed his clothes just in time, and then—just like that!—he was over and the Creature was aware of his confusion. As if to respond, the Creature seemed to pass on the Scent—yes, that scent—so that Lupo the man could understand.
And then on four strong paws he had gone bounding out the door and into the evening dusk, scenting the tied-up dog who suddenly wanted to go inside, and then catching the scent again of the man who had been at the window. He cautiously approached the spot through the bushes, smelling the man’s seed that had been spilled into the dirt and wrinkling
his snout, growling.
Inside the Creature’s head, Lupo regained enough control to find himself thinking about Jessie Hawkins, and what this discovery meant.
The Creature howled and headed off in the same direction the man had taken, to where a car had been parked. Then he entered the woods and crept through the undergrowth, aware that the scent of another male wolf was lingering, too.
Lupo’s awareness grew and he became aware of it and suddenly he commanded the Creature to stop. And it did, sniffing softly at the base of a tree he had marked the night before.
Mark, Lupo commanded.
The Creature lifted its leg slightly.
No, stop!
The Creature stopped.
Lupo wanted to laugh with glee. He was conscious inside the Creature’s head! He was able to tell the Creature—himself—what to do and what not to do.
Then the Creature marked the tree.
Well, there was something to be said for instinct.
He bounded off in search of food, Lupo aware and feeling as though a weight had been lifted, a burden removed. Could his feelings for the beautiful doctor have helped clear the logjam?
He set off in search of the interloper. Not the human, not yet. The other one.
Klug
He had finished packing the things he would need, taking a few boxes out of the sport cab on his truck. Wilbur Klug hadn’t owned much. A few tools, some clothes, a safe full of guns, and some small, rickety furniture. He was leaving the furniture behind, along with Shelly in the freezer.
He chuckled.
Yessir, he was going to leave this place with a full band playing some loud song, that was for sure. He couldn’t believe what the city boy had given them, and the promise of more, just for—for what? Another murder. A cop. Big deal. If the guy was like a monster movie, then he’d deal with that, too. First there was Buck to bust out. He’d learned that they’d be transferring him from the lockup at the sheriff’s office to the courthouse the next night for an arraignment two days hence. Yes, indeed, it was time to get rolling. He owed Buck for a couple things, not least of which was a throat-slashing that had saved Klug’s life once, years ago.
He stacked the boxes in front of the great tarp-covered hump that sat like a black wart beside his ramshackle garage. When he was finished, he climbed the six-foot rickety stepladder he had built out of used two-by-fours back when he’d had his half-assed business idea, the same idea dumb-fuck Shelly had shot down so many times that finally he’d given it up. He climbed the steps and stood on the swaying platform, reaching out to grab hold of the heavy tarp and pulling it until it slid off the vehicle that rested underneath.
It was a 1944-model DUKW, otherwise known to everyone in Wisconsin as a “Duck,” an original US Army amphibious vehicle in better-than-average shape. It was Klug’s proudest possession, and he had dreamed of operating it like the legendary Wisconsin Dells Ducks, which gave tours up and down the Wisconsin River in the Dells, an area of unusually beautiful sandstone rock formations in the center of the state. Klug had bought the vehicle for a song from an old soldier who’d managed to salvage the beast after it had been used in the WWII invasion of Sicily, and he had intended to operate his own tourist business. But Shelly would have had to provide the rest of the capital and she had steadfastly refused, forcing Klug to seek the money elsewhere and, when no one ponied up, having to abandon the idea.
The thirty-two-foot long, seven-ton Duck could be driven on a highway, on a dirt road, on a path, and then directly into the ocean or a river. Its two-hundred-and-seventy-cubic-inch engine generated one hundred horsepower and could drive the monster fifty mph on a road or seven knots in the water, where a large propeller engaged by the driver would take over the propulsion duties.
Wilbur Klug had learned to drive the metal beast from the old soldier himself until he died, and then had hired one of the Dells’ drivers to teach him further tricks. After Shelly had killed his dream, though, KIug had used the Duck only as a self-propelled duck blind (ha ha) during the legal season, and more often than not as a hunting vehicle during the “off-season”, when deer-shining became his friends’ and his favorite sport. The spotlight he’d installed near the driver’s seat was specifically to catch the deer unawares, and he’d eaten a lot of state duty-free venison because of it.
Suddenly, a howl split the night not far away, and it made Klug’s flesh crawl. He looked around for a weapon, but realized that he had left everything on the ground near the steps.
Klug had heard the howling before, of course, every few weeks as if the wolf were some sort of tourist. But he hadn’t ever thought of hunting it. When Martin Stewart had mentioned his wolf hunt, Klug had immediately flashed on to the use of the Duck as a platform, sort of like an elephant on a tiger hunt in India. The height of the vehicle would likely prevent the rogue wolf from springing up and attacking them, while they could shoot it at their leisure. Klug wanted the wolf, now—it was a matter of pride.
But then a second howl came from a different direction, and a series of growls. What the hell? There were two wolves out there, and from the sound of it, they were going to slug it out.
It was illogical, going hunting after what he and Kenny and the city boy had planned for Buck’s release, but he’d glommed on to the idea and now he wouldn’t have given it up for a lifetime’s supply of Rhinelander.
He listened as the wolves tore into each other out there, somewhere in the cold, black woods.
Klug knew that he’d take down the winner.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Lupo
The Creature stalks the interloper tree by tree, following his trail in the cold woods and preparing for a fight. Riding along, his awareness greater than it has ever been, is Nick Lupo, who finds it easier to let the Creature’s instinct take control than attempting to give it direction. But he has learned that his will can influence the Creature, defying instinct and making the animal more subservient. Part of his brain is occupied still trying to understand why the Change came earlier, but the rest is tasting all the Creature’s senses and learning to enjoy the steady stream of information—the cold breeze ruffling the hair on his back, the prickliness of pine needles under his pads, the pungent scent of the other wolf’s urine, and the night sounds that seem to quiet at his passing.
He lopes within scenting distance of a few human dwellings, knowing the smells—places he has visited before—and willing the Creature to move on, to pass them by. He knows this one has pets, who now cower inside their master’s sleeping room, while that one feels great fear. And this one, this one smells like danger, raises the hair on his neck, reminding him of someone, long ago, someone he thinks he should remember, but he does not. He gives this house a wide berth, too, sensing that its owner knows too much and wants to use his knowledge. He growls slightly at the danger behind those dark windows, knowing there is someone there, watching him, taking his measure, and he remembers something that came before his own memory, but that he is aware of nonetheless. He backs away from the windows, from the gaze he feels on his fur, and from the feeling that the human behind the glass knows far too much.
It is an elderly man, the Creature can smell this and his fear, too, but also the knowledge that makes him so dangerous. There is silver here, and it is for him. He knows this, and he retreats, as he has so many times before.
When the house is out of sight, hidden among the trees, the moon’s rays give him the view he has sought. The interloper wolf is there, waiting for him, fangs bared and fur ruffled upward like a porcupine’s quills. He approaches quickly, without trickery, letting the interloper smell his magic and his strength. The other won’t back down, however, tilting his head a bit and letting out a challenging growl.
The Creature responds with an unearthly growl of his own, then quickly crosses the ground between them, lunging for the interloper in a flash that startles the opponent and leaves him unprotected for the Creature’s jaws. The Creature’s snout seems to grow in size a
s his jaws grasp the opponent’s neck and bite down, tearing, while the other’s claws slash harmlessly at the air around them.
Snarling and growling, the two bodies hurtle toward one side of the clearing, the Creature’s controlling their flight. His jaws rip and shred the other’s throat without mercy and suddenly the other seems to surrender, going limp in submission, as if hoping the Creature will slacken his attack.
But the magical Creature presses his attack and tears out the other’s throat with one last twist of his clamped jaws. Blood sprays into his throat. The other whimpers as he sees the light in the Creature’s eyes, realizing too late that he has challenged something other than a fellow being.
The interloper dies, his throat and neck a bloody mess. The Creature’s snout is blood-flecked and his fangs continue to rip and tear until his enemy is hardly recognizable.
I am greater than you! As he feeds, he now realizes that he the Creature and Nick Lupo can nevermore be separate…they are one, together, inseparable, and dominant. These woods are his to control and to protect.
Nick Lupo feels the thrill of the kill, the blood tang arousing his lust. He is completely aware, awake now inside the Creature, in tune with its instincts and its needs. He howls, long and loud in triumph, then lowers his snout. Much later, when he is done feeding, his paws find the way home unerringly. But it is Nick Lupo’s feet that cross the threshold of home just as dawn begins to lighten the tops of the trees.
Sam Waters
Hugging the silver-loaded shotgun, the old man listens as the fight progresses not far from his boundary.
The two wolves snarl and growl, and he can imagine their slashing jaws and knife-sharp fangs glinting in the fading moonlight. Then in a huge crash of bodies and growls and whimpers it appears to be over, with one the winner and the other—the other dead, apparently. No quarter given. The old man knows it’s the monthly visitor who has won the contest, and he shivers a bit. Yet his instinct tells him not to worry, that the Creature out there even now tearing into the carcass of his enemy is not concerned with humans here in these woods, at least as long as humans aren’t concerned with him. Sam wonders whether it’s true. Whether it was the other wolf who took the pets and livestock. Whatever the case, now there is only one.
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