Close Enemies

by Marc Daniel

  “Try and stop me.”

  Chapter 53

  The contraption looked rudimentary, but Olivia felt confident it would do the trick. She’d secured the chainsaw handle into a vise on the edge of Michael’s workbench. The shotgun was resting against the bench ready to use. She simply needed to wrap the bungee cord around her neck, attach its hook to the two fifty-pound weights she’d purchased in the morning and shoot herself in the head. The weights and bungee cord would then bring her neck onto the chain saw that would finish her off before her brain had a chance to heal from the gunshot.

  She felt bad at the idea that Michael would be the one cleaning up the mess, but who else could she count on for the job?

  “Olivia?” called Daka’s voice outside the tool shed.

  She remained silent, holding her breath so as not to attract his attention.

  She heard him knock on the door of Michael’s cabin and try the handle. But the door was locked. His footsteps were getting closer now.

  “I knew I heard some noise,” he said, opening the door of the shed. “What are you doing in there?”

  His eyes immediately went to the chainsaw and the gun poorly concealed behind Olivia’s back.

  “Hey, Daka. What’s up? I wasn’t expecting you today,” she said, trying to sound cheerful.

  “Michael asked me to come check on you. He was worried about you. But to tell you the truth, I’d have come even if he hadn’t asked me to. Now can you tell me exactly what you’re doing with this chainsaw?”

  She looked away, suddenly feeling ashamed of what she’d been about to do.

  He grabbed the gun out of her hand, ejected all the shells and placed them in his jacket pocket before putting the weapon down on the workbench.

  “Come, Olivia, we need to talk.”

  “I don’t need a lesson from you, Daka,” she replied defensively.

  “On the contrary. I believe you do!”

  She sighed heavily but followed him onto the cabin’s porch.

  “I know how you feel Olivia, but th—”

  “How do you know? Was it your sister we burnt to ashes yesterday?” she interrupted angrily.

  “No, it wasn’t. My own sister was burnt to a crisp three years ago. But don’t think for a moment I don’t remember the pain. You don’t have a monopoly on suffering, Olivia. You’re not the first one to lose a loved one and you sure as hell won’t be the last.”

  She’d never heard of Daka’s sister. She’d always thought he was an only child.

  “You have no right to take your own life, Olivia. This isn’t how things work. You don’t get to make people around you even more miserable than they already are simply because you feel sorry for yourself.” His voice was imperative, but not angry. He was simply stating facts, not arguing.

  “What do I have left to live for, Daka? Please tell me.”

  “What about Michael? He cares about you. You know that.”

  “I know he does, but he doesn’t need me. I’m nothing but a pain in his side. He’d be better off without me.”

  “What about me? Would I be better off without you?”

  The question took her by surprise. She’d never thought of that before. “I don’t know.”

  “But I do. And the answer is most definitely no. I don’t know if you’re aware of that, but when it comes to relationships with the opposite sex, you and Michael have a lot in common. You’re both completely oblivious.”

  Was he saying what she thought he was saying? She really didn’t want to think about this right now. He was a friend, a very good friend, but she’d never seriously considered the possibility of him becoming anything else. And now wasn’t the time to entertain this kind of idea. “Since you’re so smart, why don’t you tell me what I’m supposed to do, Daka? How am I supposed to react to my sister’s murder?”

  “You’re a goddam werewolf, Olivia! You’re supposed to fight! Catch the bastards responsible and make them pay. My sister died in a home fire, I had nobody to blame for her death. Nothing but the crappy sixty-year-old wiring in her piece of shit house. I had no way to right this wrong. But you have this luxury, Olivia. So drag yourself out of that self-pity pool in which you’re wallowing and do something about it. Avenge Lucy!”

  Daka was looking at her with an intensity she’d never seen in him before, his eyes smoldering, as if he were trying to will her into reason.

  “You gave me a lot to think about, Daka,” she said after a moment. “I need some alone time to ponder all this.”

  “I can’t leave you alone, Olivia. Not after what I’ve seen in the shed.”

  “I’m going to go on a walk in the mountains. I’m not taking any kind of weapon with me and I promise you I won’t try to harm myself. You can stay here and wait for me if you want.”

  “Fine. I’ll wait for you here. But don’t make me regret this, Olivia.”

  “Scout’s honor,” she said, raising three fingers.

  Chapter 54

  The place was even worse of a dive than she’d expected, but the vampire didn’t care. She was starving and knew she needed to feed. She was confident she’d find just what she was looking for amongst the low-life hanging out in a strip club at 2 P.M. in the afternoon.

  She sat at the bar and ordered a glass of water she had no intention of touching while scanning the room for a potential target. The pickings were slim. Only a half-dozen perverts sat in the dive, absorbed by the voluptuous tits of the dancer spinning around the pole on the central and only stage.

  But beggars couldn’t be choosers. One of them would have to do. She hadn’t fed in days and she was starting to feel particularly weak.

  She’d been sitting at the bar bored out of her mind for about fifteen minutes when a trucker entered the club. He gave a circular look around the room and, noticing the gorgeous woman at the bar, came to sit beside her.

  He ordered a beer and spun his stool towards her. “What’s a pretty thing like you doing in a dive like this?” His smile had a wolfish quality that she instantly distrusted. The man emanated perversion from every pore on his body.

  “I got into a fight with my boyfriend. He dumped me a mile back. I walked here and now I’m trying to figure out how to get back to Boise.”

  “Going to Idaho? That’s where I’m heading. If you need a ride, I could use some conversation.”

  Liar liar pants on fire, thought the vampire, but the man’s lie served her perfectly. “If that’s not too much trouble, I’ll take you up on your offer.”

  The man drained his beer in a couple gulps, paid the bartender, and got up. “Let’s go then, I’m already behind schedule.”

  But you had time to stop for a drink. You could at least try to sound credible, you moron. “OK. Thank you so much, sir.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he said pompously.

  He spent the first fifteen minutes of the drive chatting amicably, like the nice guy he wasn’t. But when he pulled into the first highway rest stop they encountered, she was less than surprised. She knew his type, she’d seen the way he was looking at her.

  She was used to men staring. She’d been very pretty alive and had kept her beauty as a vampire. But the trucker’s eyes hadn’t reflected an average Joe’s appreciation for a beautiful woman. No, it’d been more like an average predator’s appraisal of a potential victim.

  As was to be expected of a rest stop in the middle of Montana, the place was deserted.

  He parked the eighteen-wheeler in a corner of the lot and turned towards her. “Now it’s time to pay for the ride, sweetie.”

  “But I have no money,” she said, doing her best to sound scared. She was enjoying herself quite a bit.

  “You know I ain’t talking about money,” he replied, groping her breast.

  That she didn’t like, and she let him know in no ambiguous fashion.

  “Boy, did you pick the wrong girl to assuage your sick little craving,” she said, pulling his hand away from her and breaking a couple fingers in the pro
cess.

  The man screamed in pain and tried to fight her off, but she was much too strong for him. She ripped him out of his seat and forced him into the cab’s sleeping area. She pinned him to the mattress and hungrily bit into his jugular. The sweet taste of blood invaded her mouth and she lost herself in ecstasy. This was better than alcohol, better than sex, better than anything. Words couldn’t describe the fizzy warmth that spread through her body. The experience was indescribable.

  The man wriggled like a fish out of water, trying to wrestle his way out of her embrace. She wanted to ask him how it felt to be in the position he’d wanted to place her in seconds earlier. If he enjoyed being on the bottom. If that’s what he had in mind when he’d picked her up in that dump. But she was too busy draining the life out of him to bother.

  She made sure to drink the very last drop out of the man. She didn’t want the bastard to become what she was. He didn’t deserve the privilege.

  Her stomach satisfied and her body invigorated by the fresh blood flowing through it, she set the truck on fire and waited for the flames to engulf the cabin completely before walking away. She couldn’t afford to leave any evidence behind. The skinwalkers couldn’t know a vampire was in the region. Her life depended on it.

  Now she needed to get back to Yellowstone and stalk Olivia. If she were lucky, maybe the wolf wouldn’t even be with her. All she needed was a five-minute window to… introduce herself.

  Chapter 55

  The slope was getting steeper, but Olivia barely noticed. Her mind was completely absorbed by what Daka had told her an hour earlier.

  Was she simply being selfish? Wasn’t unbearable pain a good enough reason to wish to end it all? Daka had lost several packmates in the fight, too, but it wasn’t the same. No matter how close he’d been to his mates, that couldn’t have compared to the bond she shared with Lucy. The two of them had gone through so much together.

  She deviated from the trail she was following and headed for a small lake Michael had shown her on a previous visit. The terrain was rough, but nothing she couldn’t handle.

  She heard the sound of rustling trees somewhere behind her. Lost in thought, she subconsciously associated it with a deer or other pronghorn. The birds’ chirping suddenly ceased, but she paid no heed to that either.

  She reached the lake and bent down to assess the water’s temperature with her hand. It was cold but not freezing. She crouched and, cupping her hands into a bowl, collected some water which she passed onto her face. The cool liquid felt good on her skin, vivifying.

  As she got back to her feet, the wind shifted, and she caught a whiff of a scent she knew all too well. The scent was strong, very strong. She slowly turned around to find a grizzly erect on his back legs staring straight at her. The bear couldn’t be more than fifteen feet away.

  The animal fell back on all fours and started huffing and snorting, clacking his teeth from time to time while swaying slightly: all clear signs of aggressivity.

  Olivia knew she couldn’t outrun a bear, not in her human form at least. And morphing under the circumstances could prove dangerous. The problem was that she might not be able to avoid it. She didn’t possess enough control over her wolf to prevent an involuntary morphing if the stress of the situation got too intense.

  The bear wasn’t particularly big—under 300 pounds, if she had to guess—but enough to seriously injure her. She’d fought a black bear before and had come out on top, but she’d been in her wolf form. This was a grizzly, however. A much tougher opponent.

  The bear suddenly charged, and she readied herself to jump to the side at the last second. She knew eighty percent of charges by a grizzly were bluff charges where the bear would stop a few feet short of his target, but she didn’t think she’d get that lucky.

  Jumping into the lake wasn’t an option either; bears were excellent swimmers.

  As the grizzly closed in on her, she rolled to the side and got back to her feet more gracefully than she’d thought herself capable of doing. The bear, carried by his momentum, was knee-deep in the water before he stopped and turned around looking for his slippery prey.

  He quickly found her and resumed the chase while Olivia tried to remember everything she knew about bears. Grizzly were poor tree climbers and like every bear, they were slower going downhill due to their shorter front legs. Unfortunately, the area around the lake was as flat as it got in Yellowstone and the closest trees too far to reach.

  The bear quickly caught up with her. As the pain of his jaws closing on the back of her thigh radiated through her body, she started morphing. She couldn’t tell whether the decision had been conscious or involuntary, but it no longer mattered at this point. She needed to fight back, and her wolf would be a much more fearsome opponent for the angry ursidae.

  The bear was relentless. It was as if he were trying to kill her slowly as opposed to just getting on with his lunch. His claws sliced into her flesh with a metronome’s regularity while his teeth chewed at her neck at the junction with her shoulder. She could feel the loss of blood slowing down her morphing. She was also worried about the way the bear had her pinned down. Would her wolf be able to wiggle her way out of the massive paws?

  She felt woozy and didn’t realize at first that the bear had stopped mauling her and was now moving away. From the corner of her eye she saw a dark form jumping in and out of her field of vision. But it was too small to be the bear. Her wounds were starting to close, but the throbbing pain was still just as intense. At least she’d completed her morphing.

  When she finally regained enough strength to get back on her paws, she immediately recognized the wolf being chased by the bear.

  Daka was no match for the grizzly, however. He’d be fine as long as he stayed out of reach. But the bear was smart, often anticipating Daka’s sudden change of direction.

  The wolf suddenly pounced to the right after a feint on the left, but not fast enough. The bear’s swat caught him on the back, the claws drawing crimson furrows on the wolf’s fur.

  The impact made Daka lose his balance, sending him tumbling to the ground. Olivia had expected the bear to push his advantage further, but instead he turned around and charged towards Olivia.

  Enough was enough. Olivia didn’t want to hurt the bear, but Daka’s life was now at stake. She was done playing nice. The bear must have sensed her changing mood for he stopped a few feet away, observing her. The bear’s gaze sank deep into the werewolf’s human eyes, as if he were searching her soul. This felt utterly unnatural to Olivia. It definitely wasn’t normal bear behavior. Could this be a werebear? In which case she was in serious trouble. Had Daka not been around, she’d have made a run for it, but this was no longer an option.

  The grizzly got on his back legs, towering over Olivia’s wolf in an aggressive stance. Should she pounce for the throat? Her wolf was just shy of 200 pounds. She wasn’t dwarfed by the grizzly, but he still had a hundred pounds on her. And despite her supernatural strength, she suspected the bear was still a lot stronger than she was.

  Before she had a chance to make up her mind, Daka’s wolf sank his teeth deep into the bear’s behind before retreating in a flash, avoiding the bear’s retaliatory swat by mere inches. Olivia picked up on the cue and attacked the bear who was now facing Daka. Their harassment tactic worked like a charm and after a minute of the two wolves taking turns attacking and retreating from opposite directions, the bear took off, disgusted.

  “What the hell was up with that bear?” asked Olivia as soon as she’d regained her human shape.

  “I’d say he didn’t like you very much.”

  “This was no normal grizzly, Daka. The way he looked at me… there was hatred in his eyes.”

  “I agree. This was definitely not a normal grizzly.”

  “Do you think that was a werebear?” Olivia asked, although Michael had told her repeatedly that he was the last one of his kind.

  “Definitely not. A werebear would have torn us to pieces. This was a skinwalk
er.”

  Olivia couldn’t wrap her head around that one and didn’t even want to try right now. “I never thought I’d hear myself say these words but I’m sure glad you didn’t trust me and followed at a distance.”

  Daka stepped closer to Olivia and gently took her head in his hands. He kissed her softly, tentatively. Their lips parted, and they stared at each other for a moment, still close enough to feel the other’s breath. It was Olivia who initiated the second kiss: a much more passionate one.

  Chapter 56

  The streets of West Yellowstone were far from busy this early in the season, which suited Michael just fine. He and Sheila were walking hand in hand along a nearly deserted sidewalk. The leisurely stroll had a serious purpose, however: dinner. Michael had decided to take Sheila out for a night on the town to cheer her up. West Yellowstone being the closest thing to a town within a fifty-mile radius of Michael’s cabin, that’s where they’d ended.

  With its wooden boardwalks and storefronts, the town had an old Far West feel that never failed to charm the tourists stopping by for a bite or coffee on their way to Yellowstone. If the smile on Sheila’s lips was any indication, the journalist wasn’t immune to the small town’s quirky magic either.

  “It’s getting chilly,” said Sheila, wrapping herself inside Michael’s right arm. Although still bright in the Montana sky, the sun had lost some of its heating power this late in the afternoon.

  Michael had to significantly slow his pace to allow for their steps to be synchronized, but he didn’t mind it in the least. He’d missed Sheila and was grateful for her full recovery. He hadn’t mentioned anything to her about the awkward moment he’d had with Helen Fletcher and pondered whether he should. Nothing had happened between Helen and him and yet he couldn’t help feeling guilty. She’d caught him by surprise, and before he knew it, she’d been kneeling on the floor in front of him massaging ointment into his legs in something that felt like more than a therapeutic massage. He’d rushed out of her house confused but aroused too. Helen Fletcher was unquestioningly attractive. And Michael’s bear didn’t trouble himself much with things like monogamy or loyalty to a partner. Fortunately, his human half did. Now he simply needed to make sure the human part of his brain stayed in charge when he was around Helen. Good thing the woman spent her days wearing a shapeless uniform covering what most men would have considered perfect curves.