Free Stories 2014

by Baen Books

  I considered, then rejected, the theory that it was one of the true Elders, like Carruthers, for two reasons. First and most importantly, the agreement to leave my town alone had been made in the name of Virigar, their King, and none of those Elders would be insane enough to break that agreement. Second, I seriously doubted any defense that Hansen could have had ready to go would stop one of those monsters.

  And if they'd been using Angela's trick of being, well, the sort of person you wanted to meet discreetly, Hansen would never have known, nor had any chance to act.

  On the other hand... "Outward Outreach" meant what it said. It wanted to "reach out" ... FAR out. To the nonhuman residents of the world. I had stressed multiple times to Hansen that Werewolves were NOT one of the groups he wanted to try to play with, and that by even starting this thing he was in danger. He had seemed to understand, especially after Angela's trial and conviction. But maybe he'd decided to take a chance that killed him.

  Well, I've put it off as long as I can. I took another deep breath and stepped through the door. As I remembered, this led to a reception area, with Hansen Guildermere's office past that reception desk.

  I shuddered as I finally got a good look into that office.

  Splashes of crimson and red-brown sprayed high and wide all around the formerly white and aqua-painted room, radiating out from and pointing towards the grotesque figure sprawled in a huge office chair. My stomach tried to protest. Preparation doesn't help so much when you recognize the victim.

  Hansen Guildermere was almost spread-eagled in his cushioned chair, but his face was nearly bisected by a single cut that was paralleled by three others lower down, sectioning him neatly into four pieces that barely retained enough connection to keep from falling apart, not counting the severed remains of one arm that had been in the way; the stench wasn't just from blood, but from the contents of his lower abdomen, too. Part of the desk had been carved away by what must have been the same stroke.

  Contorted on the floor in front of the desk in a twisted pose that showed all too clearly how agonizing its death must have been was the Werewolf. The size of a grizzly bear, the monster would have topped eight feet if it had been standing, and even in death radiated menace from its coarse, shaggy-haired form with the glittering diamond teeth and claws.

  "So, are we dealing with a Wolf that can get past the CryWolf sensors?" Jeri asked quietly. She'd come up from behind without my even noting her presence.

  "I hope to God not. Either he somehow got in another way, or — for whatever reason — Hansen had the alarms off and the thing got close enough to kill him before he realized it. There was security footage, right?"

  "Yeah, we're getting that now. We'll send it over to your offices tomorrow to the attention of your new office manager... um, Wendy, was it?"

  "Wanda. Wanda Beers, and don't make any jokes about her name unless you can figure out one she won't have heard a thousand times before."

  "You are the one I'd worry about making cheap jokes, Jason."

  "Point. Anyway, yes, send it to Wanda. She's not just office manager, she's got the technical know-how to get things started. I'm also finally getting some other field people trained for ... the unusual stuff. I'll introduce you when they get past the basics."

  "Good." She clapped me on the shoulder. "Glad to see that you're finally getting things under control over there. James suggested Wanda, right?"

  "He did, and a good call that was."

  She looked down at the massive furry corpse, covered with a shimmering dusting of silver. "Honestly, though, this looks pretty straightforward, aside from the mystery of the alarms. Wolf comes at man, man's last act is to hit the button, everyone dies."

  "He had a special button for that?" I reconsidered my thoughts. "Of course he did. Now that I think of it, he was asking questions about proper defenses and communications. He's got a little control panel there, hasn't he?"

  "Not all that little. Take a look, just don't touch."

  "I never do."

  Sure enough, there was a fairly impressive set of controls inset under the desk, where Hansen could reach them easily yet have them completely out of sight of other people. Most of this was taken up with pretty mundane controls — lighting, environmental, presentations (open up the screen, activate and control a presentation, etc.), and so on — but there were a few clearly meant for dealing with situations your normal community outreach person never had to consider. The silver dispenser was clearly labeled, well separated from all others, bright red, and twice as big as any other button.

  I examined the actual dispenser setup. "Thought so. Top of the line from Shadowgard, under cooperative license from me. Pressurized liquid with silver suspension, high-pressure delivery, clean and fast. Obviously worked as intended."

  "You see any problems, other than the question of how he got in?"

  I frowned.

  As I hesitated, I could see Jeri's expression darken. "There aren't any problems... are there?"

  Finally, with a sigh, I shrugged. "I wish I could say no, Jeri, but this whole setup stinks. I can't put my finger on all of the details, but I tell you, there's something I'm missing here. Maybe the security tapes will tell me something.

  "But you know the real problem as well as I do: this shouldn't have happened, and the fact that it did? That's got me worried. And if I'm worried — you should be worried."

  Chapter 3. Images of Fear

  I shook my head and closed the book. "Argh."

  Syl, who was reading her own book next to me in our king-sized bed, looked up. "Problem?"

  "Can't concentrate." I felt foggy-headed and couldn't even put my finger on what was bothering me, but I hadn't even been able to focus on what the book was about. "Sometimes I wish I could just forget about all the stuff I know, not have to deal with it."

  "Well," she said, turning towards me, "I think there's a way you'll never have to deal with it again."

  Syl's eyes glowed a monstrous yellow as her form began to expand, shaggy black-brown hair forming, the face shifting to a predator's with a mouth of crystal teeth...

  I sat up in bed with a scream still echoing in my ears; Syl catapulted out of bed, not even fully awake but still grabbing for her gun in its nearby safe. Then she looked up in the moonlight, and her face softened.

  "Nightmare?"

  I nodded, not able to speak yet. I reached out and took her hand, and stared into her eyes, assuring myself there wasn't a trace of yellow. I was tempted to find my CryWolf glasses... but I knew better. If that dream ever became reality, that would be Virigar himself, and my gadgets would be useless.

  She embraced me and we sat there quietly for a few minutes, which my breathing slowed and I stopped shaking. Finally, she said, "Virigar?"

  "Yeah. Like always." I hadn't had nightmares much until I started getting involved in the bizarre, and even after I watched Elias Klein fry I only had a couple. But the King of Wolves... he provided prime nightmare material, and every time I thought the dreams were going away, something came along to trigger them again.

  I got up, turned on the lights, found my glass of water and drained it. "Has to have been the Werewolf body I was looking at earlier. That close up... they still give me the creeps even dead."

  She looked at me sympathetically, black hair tumbling over tanned shoulders, framing her face in night. "And that's the first of what may be several weeks, if I remember the other times right."

  "Maybe it's just a one-time nightmare." I didn't find my tone very convincing.

  Neither did Syl. She stood up, a decisive look on her face. "Well, we're going to put a stop to this. After all, this is the kind of thing he wants you to go through. It's one of his victories."

  "You have a spell or something for bad dreams?"

  She shook her head. "That's not a good idea, Jason. Messing with the way someone thinks, even in their dreams, that's a really delicate operation. Verne can do it, but he's got half a million years of experience behind him �
�� and I really don't think he'd approve of using that power just to stop nightmares.

  "No, we're going to beat these nightmares with mundanity. I'm going to teach you lucid dreaming, and eventually you'll take control of the dreams instead of letting them control you."

  I remembered the last time the nightmares had come — after Virigar had appeared in a private jet at thirty thousand feet, to both congratulate and terrorize me after the trial of Angela McIntyre AKA Tanmorrai. I'd ended up running without sleep four nights out of five. "Can you teach that? I never know I'm dreaming."

  "Most people can learn," she said confidently. "I've been doing it most of my life, and I've taught other people. I'm sure you can learn, at least enough to know you're in a dream and shift it out of nightmare."

  I nodded. "Okay. But we'll start on that tomorrow."

  "Are you sure?"

  I thought for a moment; I could feel the terror still receding, being replaced by an exhausted calm. "Yeah. I'll be able to sleep now. Not sure why, but I'm sure."

  She gave me a concerned look, but then nodded. "Yes, I guess you will."

  I was glad to hear her confirm it, but I was still puzzled by why. It was as I was actually drifting off to sleep that I understood.

  The nightmare had been as much a warning of my subconscious as it was the triggered fear. I knew there was something wrong, and if I screwed this case up, the King of Wolves would feel that my time had come.

  But at the same time, I also knew I was trying to solve this case, and that meant that — at least for a while — I had nothing to fear from Virigar.

  With that understanding, I let myself drift off, and found no nightmares waiting.

  Chapter 4: Almost Answers

  "What the heck?"

  Jeri was up from the chair where she'd been drinking coffee and filling out forms she'd brought with her to my office, where we were both going over the video from Outward Outreach. "What?"

  "I was fast-forwarding through the recordings and suddenly Hansen just appeared in the chair — nothing on the hallway cams."

  "Oh." She chuckled. "Go back and watch. He had a back door."

  Sure enough, a section of wall I thought was fancy paneling opened up and Hansen came through it, placed a briefcase on his huge desk, and sat down.

  "Makes sense. Outward Outreach sometimes had uncomfortable publicity, so he had a way of coming and going that wasn't obvious." Hansen pulled something out of his case and inserted it into a computer slot underneath the desk. "What was that?"

  "Presentation. He had a whole presentation made for this guy, who was going by the name of Cheney Lugosi."

  I snorted. "The Wolves sometimes have low senses of humor. I'll have to look at that presentation, but I doubt it has any bearing on it, unless he was showing him some particular slide that somehow ticked him off."

  I fast-forwarded until I saw a flicker of movement in the hallway. "There's our not-man."

  "Cheney Lugosi" had chosen a very unprepossessing form — probably deliberately to undermine any fears on the part of Hansen or anyone else he might encounter. He wasn't much over five feet tall and skinny; his forlorn, somewhat beaky face gave me a twinge, because it reminded me somehow of Elias Klein, or maybe of a small Ichabod Crane.

  The shimmering network of light visible in the CryWolf sensor layer, however, showed that this was indeed a Great Werewolf.

  "Shame there's no sound," Jeri said as the disguised werewolf entered Hansen's office and exchanged silent greetings with the activist.

  "Hansen mentioned to me that he wanted to control when actual speech was being recorded, so that's a separate system."

  "I know; unfortunately he hadn't turned that one on — we checked."

  Still, even without sound, everything seemed fairly clear; Hansen offered his newcomer coffee or tea, Cheney accepted a cup of coffee, and Hansen returned to his own seat.

  "See that?" I asked Jeri.

  "He was cautious with the silverware. And he sniffed the coffee first."

  "Yeah. He's tense as hell." That made sense. Technically he was not violating the agreement I had with the other Wolves, at least so far — he wasn't hurting anyone in Morgantown — but he must know he was trampling on the spirit of the agreement. Plus if he was meeting with a human for a genuine attempt at peacemaking, he was potentially putting himself at odds with Virigar himself.

  The two talked for a few moments, Hansen showing some signs of nervousness at first but quickly easing into his more natural and winning smiles. Then Hansen looked down.

  As quickly as that, everything changed. A screen started to lower from the ceiling and at the exact same moment Cheney Lugosi's face contorted and his form shifted, lunging in that moment across the desk. Hansen's head whipped up and he made a pathetic attempt to escape, shoving the rolling office chair backwards a few inches before the huge talons ripped through the desk, his upflung arm, part of the chair, and chopped him into pieces; even as that happened, though, the werewolf pulled back, parts of the black-brown fur smoking, and collapsed in agonized convulsions which lasted a few seconds before all living movement in the room ceased.

  But in a macabre twist, not all movement ceased. The screen quietly finished extending and the first slide shone out: "Werewolf-Human Relations: Building a Bridge."

  "Well," Jeri said, "that looks pretty straightforward. Hansen was either watching him or not in good strike range before; when he looked down to turn on the projector setup, Cheney took his chance."

  I frowned. "Maybe. But really, you've seen these things enough, Jeri, and you saw how fast that transformation was. There isn't anywhere in that office Hansen wasn't in strike range if Cheney wanted him dead. That looked to me like something triggered the strike."

  Jeri grimaced. I couldn't blame her; the desire to just shove all the blame onto the Wolf and close the case was strong, and perfectly justifiable; we knew that no Werewolf we'd ever encountered gave a damn about any people other than their own. But she knew as well as I did why I'd fought to defend Angela McIntyre from an undeserved charge of murder. "Yeah, it does. But... look how nervous he is. He's really on edge. So his host does something he doesn't expect and suddenly things start moving..."

  I rewound and watched again. "Yeah, that timing fits. Fits real well. I would've thought that a Great Wolf would be more controlled than that, though. Still, they aren't as a group terribly bright, and he might have been a young one. Probably was. Still..." There was an obvious question that the video left hanging, and unfortunately the angle didn't let me see exactly what Hansen was doing under the desk.

  "Yeah. That."

  "Have you checked that panel out?"

  "Yep. In perfect condition, works exactly as it was designed. I had people pull the control module itself and test it in the lab."

  "Okay. Then my guess is that Hansen got lucky; since his hands were already on the panel when it all went south, he pushed the panic button as he shoved away from the desk."

  "Fits."

  The two of us sat there looking at the monitor in silence for a few minutes.

  Finally Jeri cursed and stood up. "You're not buying this, are you?"

  "Are you?"

  She grimaced. "I want to. I really do. It fits. I think I could make it stick in court. It'd wrap the whole case up neatly." She paused. "And it stinks to high heaven."

  "Yeah." A glimmering of an idea was starting to materialize in my mind. "And that means that we're back to the classics: motive, means, and opportunity."

  Jeri nodded. "And there's one doozy of a motive."

  "Let me guess: Hansen Guildermere left everything he had to Outward Outreach, cutting out his family and friends."

  "I'm not sure if that shows you're too cynical or too idealistic for this business, but... almost dead-on. There were some minor bequests, but the vast majority of his estate went to Outward Outreach and established a pretty impartial board of directors; it'd be hard to ride it as a gravy train."

  "Are we tal
king about enough to kill over?"

  "Wood, I've seen people killed over pocket change. But in the way you mean? Hell yes. Hansen Guildermere was worth about seven hundred and fifty million dollars."

  Chapter 5. Family and Friends

  "I knew something like this would happen," Vernon Guildermere said heavily. "I just knew it."

  Vernon's sister Meredith nodded. "We tried to tell him this was a crazy idea, Mr. Wood. We all did."

  We were all seated in one of the conference rooms at Morgantown police headquarters; Jeri and her people had done their own questioning earlier, but had let everyone involved know that I was directly attached to the investigation. I studied the four people in the room with me: Vernon, Meredith, Adam Brown (the CFO for Outward Outreach), and Felicia Santos, Guildermere's executive assistant who had been rather obviously personally involved with Hansen Guildermere as well as professionally.

  "All," I repeated. "Does that mean all four of you, or some other 'all'?"

  "I didn't try to tell him he was crazy," Felicia said, black eyes swollen from earlier tears; even her well-applied makeup couldn't entirely hide the signs. "Hansen wanted to bring us together, not keep us separate and afraid. That's not crazy."

  Vernon's blade-sharp face winced. "Okay. Sorry, Fel; not crazy, but... risky. And he insisted on everything being done his way. Meeting that... thing by himself? That really does push toward crazy, to me."

  "But you all helped him with Outward Outreach in various ways, right?"

  Adam spoke up; he had a smooth, warm voice which seemed more suited to someone heading up a political party than the guy in charge of money matters. "As Vernon says, he insisted on doing things his way. As his friends, relatives, and, in the case of Felicia and myself, colleagues, we had little choice. Better to work with him than against him."

  "How were Outward Outreach's finances?"

  Adam gave a wry smile. "From a business standpoint? Hideous. From an operating standpoint? Just fine. Understand, Hansen didn't expect Outward Outreach to make money. It was incorporated as a nonprofit institution, and while one can make money under such an incorporation, under certain circumstances, it was never Hansen's expectation that Outward Outreach would do so, or even that it would reach break-even status in his lifetime. He had found a mission and intended to dedicate himself to that mission, and making money was not a part of that dedication."