Wolf's Trap (The Nick Lupo Series Book 1)

by W. D. Gagliani

  Sam found himself sitting; his back up against a tree, holding his shoulder and watching his own blood squirt almost comically from the hole the 5.56mm military slug had just made. He felt numb now, but pain began creeping up to his brain, both from the hole he could see and from the one he couldn’t, the exit hole, which seemed to have taken a melon-size chunk out of his shoulder blade.

  Sam tried to stand up, but instead he blacked out.

  Lupo

  Lupo was aware of everything that happened around him, but it seemed as if he were watching an IMAX movie. The pain had subsided into a long, continuous burning in each of his wounds, and he felt almost lucid even though he could tell he was running a high fever.

  He watched as Jessie tried and failed to spring the trap open. Then he reached down with both hands and also tried to open the jaws, but the burning intensified and scorched his skin. Doggedly he kept at it, trying to gain some leverage against the sprung metal. He gripped the trap tightly and sweated out the pain, attempting to dig deeply into his reserves. Jessie pitched in and they both tried to lever the jaws open.

  The sweet-sour smell of his burning flesh wafted up to his nostrils, and when he couldn’t stand it anymore he fell back, panting, his eyes closed. Part of him sought blessed relief then.

  Jessie

  The gunshot surprised her. Who were they shooting at? They were still far into the trees, but now she heard them approaching again. Whoever it was hadn’t stopped them.

  Nick appeared to be unconscious. He wasn’t blurring back and forth anymore, but that didn’t make the whole thing any less weird for her. Still, she was obligated to help him, surely all the more since Nick had sustained two horrific wounds trying to help her.

  Jessie turned from the impossible trap and tried to reload the crossbow, but she needed too many pounds of pull to snag the latch and, after everything that had happened to her in the last twenty-four hours, she simply couldn’t do it. She strained and almost had it twice, but her fingers refused.

  She gave up.

  There just wasn’t time.

  Buck’s UZI lay on the ground, but too far away and partially buried under his body. By the time she got it and figured it out, they’d be in the clearing. She looked frantically about for another weapon, and saw the rusted axe near the woodpile. She bounded over and snatched it up by its rough handle, finding its weight almost too much for her, and dragged it over to where Lupo lay, amid the smell of blood, singed fur and skin.

  As she watched, Nick opened his eyes.

  Lupo

  They locked glances for a second, and then when she smiled at him, tentatively at first, his heart leaped. Trite, perhaps, but it lifted his heart and for a moment he forgot their situation, basking instead in the possibility of a better life.

  He saw the axe and raised an eyebrow. He could hear the thrashing in the trees. Martin and Klug, coming for the kill.

  “I’ve got one good swing left in me, Nick,” she whispered. Lupo calculated. “They’ll be here any time. I think I have the answer, but you’re not going to like it.”

  “What?” Her eyes sprung leaks, tears coursing suddenly straight down her blood-flecked cheeks.

  She knew.

  He had to talk fast. “I think my, uh, wolf side is more powerful than I even know. I think the magic, whatever fuels it, is strong and I think it can do things I’m just learning. Use the axe! Get me out of the trap, I’ll be able to hold them off. It will be able to hold them off…”

  “No, Nick, I can’t do it! I won’t!”

  He looked at the clearing’s edge, where the two would appear any second.

  “There’s no time, Jessie,” he hissed. “Do it! Do it now! I’m ready!”

  “No! I can’t…” But she half-lifted the axe, her eyes a mass of confusion and anger.

  “Jessie, you’re a doctor! You know where—what to do! Do it, now! Or we’re both dead!”

  Martin and Klug called to each other, sounding barely yards away inside the trees.

  “Jessie, even if you get one of them, the other one will kill us both. There’s no other way! Do it now! Now!”

  Jessie

  All the years of chopping wood came back to her in a rush, and every surgery performed, every autopsy at which she had assisted, every horrible and grotesque scene she’d witnessed as a doctor who routinely stitched up bizarre accident wounds, fight wounds, and self-inflicted wounds.

  She could visualize his ankle, where the teeth now dug painfully into bone, probably having cracked or fractured the tibia outright, and where the silver had apparently sizzled the skin and flesh as if it were bacon.

  She turned once more toward the sounds of approach and saw a flash between the trees.

  They were here.

  She cried out an oath, and half-raised the axe over her head. She did not want to see, but saw anyway, that Nick had prepared himself, closing his eyes and doing something with his mind… He seemed to be pushing in onto himself, waiting for the blow while summoning up the magic or whatever it was that made him what he was.

  She raised the axe the rest of the way. Tears burst from her eyes in a torrent and she ignored them.

  She aimed, then took one strong, perfect swing.

  Lupo

  When the blade bit, finishing what the trap had started, Lupo was in the midst of a Change.

  He pushed and it passed over him like a shiver, and then the blade hit home true, right on the tibia-talus connection, and both Lupo and the wolf howled in pain as the rusty blade seemed to sever foot and paw simultaneously.

  A shower of blood splashed the constricting metal jaws. But though the wolf was now three-legged, he was still dangerous.

  And free!

  Fueled by the blade’s cruel, screaming distress, the wolf ignored the weeping Jessie, who had sunk to her knees, and leaped instead for the attackers, invaders of his territory.

  The wolf snarled its pain and anger and pounced on Klug, going for the throat.

  The big man screamed and put up his hands as if to ward off the animal, but the wolf’s momentum and his agony catapulted them both onto the ground.

  In one great swipe, his foreclaws ruined Klug’s hands and tore the gun from them. His jaws clamped on the man’s throat, bit down hard, then tore it out in a mass of shredded bloody tissue and nerve.

  Before Klug could even shudder and die under him, the wolf had spun and leaped at Martin, his fangs snapping at the man’s wavering gun hand and tearing into the exposed forearm. Martin screamed and dropped the silver-loaded weapon. He reached for it desperately with his other hand, but the wolf pressed his attack and the two careened off the spot. They stared at each other, for a moment frozen in time, and then Martin grasped his bloody arm and slithered away from the snarling, drooling beast Nick Lupo had become. Before the wolf could pounce again, Martin turned and ran headlong out of the clearing.

  The wolf howled its victory and took a few steps to give chase, but he wavered and staggered instead to a stop. He sat down hard and began to lick at his severed paw, whimpering. Inside the Creature, Lupo wept at the intensity of the pain and pushed, willing himself back over the line that separated his two sides, though as he regained his human form and the still-gushing stump touched the ground, he wished he hadn’t.

  And then Jessie was there with her belt for a tourniquet and the calm words of a doctor, as well as the caring words of a friend and lover.

  Lupo smiled at her as she administered to him. Then he blacked out.

  Martin

  He ran all the way back to the first cabin, where they had left their gear.

  Blubbering, his mind on the verge of a complete data dump, he couldn’t stop seeing the man turn into a wolf. He’d waited years to see it so he could end the charmed, magical life of his sister’s murderer, but he’d frozen for a second, when the wolf leaped on Klug, he’d frozen and then the wolf was on him, and now he was on the run.

  This was not how it was supposed to turn out.

&n
bsp; Where is it? Where the fuck is it?

  He tore through his duffel bag.

  Caroline, I wanted revenge for you!

  Martin cried. He wanted his Case.

  Jessie

  Nick came in and out of consciousness, but at least he had settled into human form and she could administer some first aid.

  “We’ve got to get you out of here,” she said. “You need a hospital now. Come on, Nick, wake up! You need a hospital and then you’ll be all right. Please, help me help you.”

  She worked at placing her body partially below his so she could lift him to a kneeling and then slowly standing position, though he threatened to pass out once again as soon as she had him upright.

  Lupo

  “He’s—”

  He tried again to speak, but the blood loss had weakened him too much.

  “He’s back…” A hoarse whisper was all he could manage.

  The Creature’s instinct had broken through to Lupo the man for a split second.

  “He’s back,” he said and, as if to prove him right, bullets splattered all around them.

  Jessie

  Ducking, wanting to drop flat on the ground but also attempting to keep Nick from falling, Jessie managed to turn just in time to see Martin Stewart standing only a few yards away, a tiny submachine gun stuttering in his hands.

  Because of his lack of expertise, he’d emptied the magazine of its thirty-two rounds, most of them harmlessly over their heads when the gun’s sharp recoil had forced the short barrel upward. Now the breech was empty as the gun fell silent.

  Jessie gasped at the sight of Martin.

  He had painted his lips a deep violet, making them grotesquely larger, almost clownlike. Tears had slid down his cheeks and he had wiped at them, smearing the dark color bruise-like across his face. He screamed incoherently.

  Then she was able to make out some of the words he repeated in a litany from hell.

  “Not me! Not me! Not me! Not me! Not—”

  Suddenly, his head exploded in a curtain of brains and blood and cranial matter. Without much ado, his body slumped to the ground and quivered once, only the echo of the lone blast remaining.

  Sam Waters lowered his shotgun and staggered, leaning on a young pine at the edge of the clearing.

  Jessie noticed for the first time that a warming sun had begun to burn off the morning chill. She tightened her hold on Nick, whose head hung low as he struggled to keep his eyes open, his naked, battered body clearly wanting to shut down.

  “Doc, please tell me this is our Protector, and not somebody else I’ve gotta shoot,” Sam said.

  Jessie wasn’t sure exactly how, but she managed to smile.

  “No,” she said softly. “He’s our Protector, all right.”

  She noticed the blood covering Sam’s chest, but before she could ask him about it, he dropped the shotgun and dug into his pocket.

  “Here’s my cell phone,” he said. “I hope to hell I charged the sonofabitch recently.”

  Jessie laughed and laughed. For some reason, she thought she’d never heard anything as funny.

  Epilogue

  Requiem

  Jessie and Lupo

  Jessie helped him hobble to the gate. He’d become accustomed to the flesh-colored prosthetic device that had replaced his foot, but he still felt unstable on uneven surfaces, and the long concourses at Milwaukee’s Mitchell International were on enough of a slant that he’d almost gone sprawling once before she had taken his carry-on bag on her own shoulder and given him her arm. He swung the cane almost jauntily with his other arm.

  “Thanks, Jess.”

  “Least I can do, considering,” she said, eyes downward.

  “Will you stop beating yourself up about the foot? It’s been months. I told you to do it, and neither one of us would be here now if you hadn’t, so don’t carry this guilt anymore, okay? We’ve got so much other stuff to fix, both of us, the foot’s gonna be okay all by itself.”

  He was right, of course. It would take her more months, maybe years, to get over everything that had happened. She could still feel Klug’s slime on her and his enormous erection about to batter through her buttocks. Thank God he hadn’t been allowed to finish. She still had nightmares.

  But she still had the memory of making her daddy proud with that crossbow, too.

  She still had the knowledge that Martin Stewart was dead, wiped from the universe he seemed to hate so much.

  And she still had Nick Lupo to hold her and make her better, by making sweet and considerate love to her when she wanted it and leaving her alone or holding her silently when she wanted that, too.

  Everything heals, she thought, if you let it.

  She watched Nick hobble rather well, barely needing her help. She had seen for herself that in his wolf form (unbelievable for her as that still was), the foot—or paw—seemed almost to have grown back. She guessed there was something to the magic of which Sam and she had spoken on that fateful day. She guessed old Sam was right, maybe someday they’d wake up and Nick’s human foot would be healed, too, through the same magic that should have made him a monster but didn’t. Who knew?

  She wondered if Sam Waters was kicked back right now, watching a classic Connery James Bond DVD with a frosty Corona in his hands. He’d gotten them hooked on Bond and Corona, too, while Nick had been recovering from his wounds. And David Lynch movies, and Hitchcock and Dario Argento, and even the bizarre Ken Russell. Jessie had never known he was such a strange movie buff, and the revelation somehow made her like him all the more. Sam had taken the silver buckle off his belt, and had shown them the emptied-out shotgun shells. “I melted all the shot down and had a football trophy made for the res high school,” he’d said to Nick one day. “They deserve the silver; you don’t.”

  That day Sam had used his silver buckshot to assure no one else would Change, killing their bodies all over again.

  When Nick and Sam had shaken hands, Jessie had sensed that some sort of destiny had come full circle. Sam’s son had been a victim, too, of the man who had been responsible for Nick’s disease. Now there was a good chance that Nick Lupo could finish what Joseph Badger had begun in hatred, taking his rightful place as Protector of the tribe—but on the law’s side this time. If everything went well. There was still a lot to learn about the Change and the fascinating physiological alterations it caused. But there was plenty of time.

  Everything heals, if you let it.

  Nick had finally allowed some of his scars to heal. The two women he had loved before her, Caroline years ago and Corinne more recently, had died horrific deaths and he’d allowed himself to take the blame. He realized now that he’d been innocent, unable to change things. About Ben Sabatini, though, it would take a long while. Jessie knew he was still thrashing himself and his health over having overlooked the danger for his partner. He had spent much of his free time since he could walk again with Marie and the kids, giving them an Uncle Nick if he couldn’t give them back their daddy…

  They would all heal, too, someday.

  If they let themselves.

  She wiped a tear from her eye.

  Others had died, and they had families too. They’d found Martin’s uncle and Stacey Collins frozen together in death. An innocent man, killed for his cell phone. And some woman had come forth, an aging blonde from another escort service, traumatized because she’d met Martin Stewart and he had inexplicably let her live. She’d sold her story to Fox for a TV movie.

  Jessie wasn’t sure how, but Nick had managed to arrange things so the feds attributed the crime spree to homegrown terrorists led by Martin Stewart. With Sam’s testimony and hers, it had worked. His prior connection was lost among what CNN dubbed the “bizarre factor” of the terrorist attack, which the networks played for all it was worth.

  Finally he cleared the tightened security and she watched him surreptitiously, out of the corner of her eye, as he headed for his gate.

  Everything heals, if you let it.

/>   Nick was boarding a plane to see his parents for the first time in years. She knew how much this meant to him, and she wanted him to go. Still, she would miss him. Miss his touch. But she wanted him to take this step almost as much as he himself wanted to.

  The time was right.

  Everything heals…

  In the car she had Alan Parsons, “The Turn of a Friendly Card.” She smiled and started humming.

  From The Eagle River Post-Press

  (The “Local Lore” Section)

  November 26

  While engaged in his annual Thanksgiving Day deer hunt, former Milwaukee police lieutenant Donald A. Bowen came face-to-face with an animal he described as “the largest black wolf I have ever seen.” Though North American timber wolves are rarely black in coloring, Mr. Bowen becomes visibly agitated when he describes the encounter, which left him so paralyzed with fear that a rescue team was forced to airlift him from his location in the Nicolet National Forest. Mr. Bowen called for help on his cell phone, claiming to be ill and unable to hike out of the largely uninhabited area north of Eagle River (Vilas County). Asked about his ordeal, Mr. Bowen said only that the wolf made clear his intent to do him harm but backed off when the recently retired police sniper with the Milwaukee PD’S Tac-Team laid down his weapon, swearing that he would never hunt again. Mr. Bowen, a decorated Special Forces specialist sniper in Vietnam, has also earned many honors in various police shooting competitions.

  Right now, Mr. Bowen claims to have liquidated his trophy collection. “I have no need to be reminded of hunting,” he explained, “and all those heads did was stare at me.” He is also in the process of selling his extremely valuable rifle collection. “I won’t hunt again,” he insists, a determined look on his craggy features. “Even if I hadn’t promised myself and God, I’d have nightmares about this wolf waiting for me in the woods.” Mr. Bowen’s spokesman, lawyer and family friend Larry Bolton, refuses to admit that this crisis of conscience may be a reaction to the breakup of his client’s longtime marriage to his wife, Helen “His privacy deserves to be guarded,” the attorney explains. As to the wolf apparition, it should be noted that local lore does indeed mention a lone wolf regularly romping through the woods in the vicinity of Eagle River during the full moon. But most natives scoff saying it’s a Halloween scary story they’ve told their children for years. Beyond that, no one is talking. Happy Thanksgiving!