Wolf Hunted

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Dag did not disguise her disgust, and her wall pushed against the amber shell around his body. Sparks flew. She stepped one foot back as if to lean into a push.

  And right then, right as the interloper tilted his head as if listening to someone whisper in his ear, dawn fully crested over the City Admin Complex. Bright, pre-Samhain sunshine flooded the lot.

  The light hit Dag’s wall, which expanded and shifted from her normal icy blues and greens to a bright golden shield.

  Axlam’s wolf rose up as a towering blue-violet canine energy. Hackles stood along its neck. Gleamingly bright teeth and a magical snarl erupted with such force I was sure the mundanes in the building felt the push.

  Arne walked toward the interloper, his own wall in front of him until it merged with and augmented Dag’s. “You will leave our town,” Arne said.

  The interloper pointed at Axlam. “She’s why I’m investing in this pathetic little town! Why I’m bringing you civilization! It’s my gift.”

  Nothing this man said made sense.

  “I don’t know you!” Axlam yelled.

  “I’m here to right the sins of the past!” he screamed.

  Axlam walked toward him, back straight and finger pointing. “Leave us alone.”

  The interloper threw his hands into the air as if asking the gods for help. “Why can’t you accept the gifts I bring?”

  Arne took Dag’s hand. He stepped forward so he directly faced the interloper. Dag twisted so that her body was perpendicular to Arne’s shoulder and the arms of their joined hands were flesh-to-flesh from wrist to elbow. Then Dag moved her free arm so that it, too, was perpendicular to Arne’s free arm.

  A sigil so dense it weighed on the air formed directly in front of them. They shifted the orientation of their hands—and released a blast of magic so strong the Tesla moved.

  But the interloper did not. The blast flowed around him as if his shadow was some sort of shielding spell.

  The interloper laughed, and his toddler-like foot stomping morphed into a neck-throbbing rage as if someone had flipped his nervous system’s switch. He roared at Arne and swung his fist at Dagrun, even though he was more than ten feet away. “You’ll pay for that,” he shrieked.

  Dag tossed a tracer spell.

  The spell sparked and tried to attach, but his magic shell had an oiliness to it and the tracer slid off the pulsing carapace.

  He shook his hands as if he’d been zapped by a battery. Then he bounced on his heels and howled at the sky as his shadow shell clarified and moved from static-filled to high-definition.

  His carapace was filling up—or winding up. Magical energy accumulated and danced along its weird event-horizon edges.

  He smirked like a child about to spring a trap.

  He was going to blow up his magic like a damned flash-bomb.

  I had him around the neck with my hand over his nose and mouth before he could yell or even bite. “Stop,” I said. He’d hurt not only the elves and Axlam, but Ed and the mundanes in the building. He might hurt everyone in town.

  He howled into my palm, but I held on. “I am the jotunn of Alfheim,” I said. “This is my home.”

  I didn’t know why I said jotunn. It seemed important, for some deep unintelligible reason, that I fake-out not just the interloper, but also his magic. That I pull a hand that felt, at the moment, to be much more than a joke.

  The pulsing of his magic stopped. The carapace snapped down onto his body. The “call,” it seemed, had disconnected.

  I let go. He sucked in his breath. “I am going to make all of you pay!” he shrieked, and… vanished. His shadow flickered for a split second, then it too vanished.

  I threw my arms wide, more out of instinct than any real ability to protect myself. “Is he still here?”

  Arne swore. His augmentation of Dag’s wall dissipated as his wife contracted her magic into a bubble around Axlam and Ed. Arne’s organic magic spread out through the entire parking lot, flowing around my truck, the camera crew’s vehicle, his vehicle, and the handful of other cars like a blanket showing all the lumps underneath.

  He was trying to drop a sheet on our ghost.

  “He’s gone,” I said. Quickly, too, since he’d gotten out of the lot before Arne sent out his magic.

  Arne signaled to Dag. “I felt a burst of power.” Then to me, “Did you see it?” He mimicked the headlock.

  “It looked like he was about to explode,” I said.

  Arne swore again. He pointed at the building. “The camera crew is inside?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Arne jogged toward the door.

  Axlam, and her wolf magic, stared silently westward.

  Ed paced. “How are we supposed to protect Alfheim from that?” he asked.

  Dag formed a sigil around her fingers and touched the inside of my elbow where I’d held the interloper. She then touched my cheek. “No residuals,” she said. “The pre-Samhain sun burned him off.”

  “No,” Axlam said. “Frank scared his magic.”

  “I told him I was the jotunn of Alfheim,” I said. “And his shadow… hung up on him.”

  Dag, too, looked westward.

  “His magic, it’s sent. He’s like you said, Axlam. He’s using magic that’s not his. He’s an avatar.” I rubbed at my hair. “It’s as if he’s walking around inside a receiver.”

  And I’d made him—and his boss—angry.

  “Who’s feeding him?” Dag, like Arne, spread a layer of magic through the parking lot.

  Axlam closed her eyes. Her wolf retreated to her normal shimmer, but didn’t calm. The shimmer continued to carry significant energy.

  I pulled out my phone. “What did that kid say? They’re here for someone’s Rural Initiative?” Like Natural Living Incorporated, the other company might lead to some answers.

  “Ned-and-Dine?” Ed said. He flipped open his notebook.

  I swiped open my phone.

  Damn it, I thought. I’d think about my mystery woman later. I opened my search app.

  “Mednidyne,” Axlam said. “He said Mednidyne Pharmaceuticals.”

  I tapped in the name.

  “The website’s in French.” I tapped at my screen trying to find an English portal.

  Axlam held out her hand for my phone.

  She swiped through a few pages. “Maybe there’s a list of—” She stopped swiping. Stopped moving. Stopped everything and just stared at whatever she’d found on the Mednidyne site.

  Dagrun walked over. “Axlam?” She touched her friend’s arm and looked at the screen. “Can it be?”

  “What did you find?” Ed also looked over Axlam’s shoulder. “That’s him, alright.”

  They must have found a photo.

  “Bastien-Laurent St. Martin,” Ed said. “He’s the CEO?”

  We had a pharmaceutical CEO menacing Alfheim like some second-tier trickster spirit?

  “He’s dead, Axlam,” Dagrun said.

  Ed pointed at the screen. “Wait. This guy’s dead? Great.” He stepped away and paced next to the women.

  Was St. Martin like me? “I’m confused.” I seemed to be confused a lot this week. Was someone else re-building people? He did own a pharmaceutical company. “Did you find something that will help us contain whatever magic he’s using?” Was this all coming back, yet again, to my father?

  Axlam shook her head. “Standing up to him just now was the dumbest thing I have ever done in my entire life.”

  Ed stopped pacing. “No. You did the right thing.”

  “I didn’t have a choice.” Fear crept into her shimmer, and her face. “He was going to hurt you, Ed.”

  Ed looked at me as if annoyed he’d needed to be saved by a werewolf.

  She looked up at the sky. “St. Martin is bad, bad magic.”

  “Axlam?” I took my phone from her hand. And there he was, our interloper, grinning up at me like the entitled idiot he was.

  I minimized the page and put his name into Wikipedia.

&n
bsp; “He’s not going to back off,” Axlam said. Terror flashed across her face. Real, undeniable, traumatic terror as if that one phrase pulled up the absolute worst moment of her life.

  I knew what that terror meant. I’d seen the exact same fear flash across Mark Ellis’s face, and across the faces of other members of the pack.

  This wasn’t about rage. Bastien-Laurent St. Martin had somehow been involved in Axlam’s turning. And that’s also why St. Martin had felt “familiar.”

  “Dagrun,” Ed said. He wanted answers as much as I did.

  Our Queen shook her head as if to tell Ed to wait.

  I scanned down through St. Martin’s bio. He was born in the late eighties into a wealthy family of French doctors, and started Mednidyne less than a decade ago after coming up with some miraculous drug for a disease I’d never heard of. There’d been a story a few years back about a proprietary major medical breakthrough. I didn’t pay a huge amount of attention at the time, but I did remember the hoopla about the discovery, and their young genius of a founder. His past was mostly unremarkable, except…

  “His father was murdered in a refugee camp in Kenya?” I said. The same year Axlam had come to us.

  She hugged herself. “He was attacking kids,” she said. “He’d already killed at least twenty-seven when he went after my sister.”

  Ed’s mouth rounded.

  “I couldn’t let him take her. I couldn’t.” Axlam looked up at the sky. “He still managed to turn me before I stopped him forever.”

  Chapter 18

  Bastien-Laurent St. Martin was the mundane son of the werewolf who had turned Axlam Geroux—a pathetic son who had found himself some sort of revenge magic.

  In my two hundred years in Alfheim, I’d learned the stories of only a handful of wolves, and mostly in the vague, scene-setting terms given by Gerard and Remy when they left to pick up a new wolf. Things like “ambushed in Texas,” or “the plane went down and a rogue wolf found the survivors,” or with Axlam, “there was a werewolf operating in the refugee camp.” That’s all I knew, all anyone other than the people who went to gather her knew, and that was fine.

  I would never ask. I would never pry. I had the pain of my own creation and I knew damned well that some things cannot be tossed around like a tale told at a party.

  Axlam said nothing else, only stared at Dag’s hand on her own. We all stayed silent. We all understood that such things were too personal—and traumatic—for most wolves to discuss.

  She’d been young at the time—a teenager—and with her younger sister, who now lived in Minneapolis. She’d taken down an older, presumably stronger, werewolf in a Kenyan refugee camp before the Alfheim alphas and their accompanying elves showed up to help.

  We were dealing with a vengeful mundane who might or might not understand that he was being used—and who, it appeared, was fixated on Axlam.

  St. Martin probably didn’t care if he understood what he wielded—or what wielded him.

  “He thinks he’s doing the right thing,” Axlam said. “He thinks…” She inhaled and looked up at the sky, then closed her eyes and shook her head.

  I knew what she was thinking. I’d met many mundane men like St. Martin. We all had. He even reminded me of my younger self—angry at my father, unable to regulate my emotions, targeting others who were easy to target because learning how to deal with those in power took effort and the last thing an angry young man who thinks he’s entitled to revenge wants to do is to think things through.

  Except I’d never hurt anyone. My father did that for me, then laid the blame at my feet.

  From the look on Ed’s face, he was thinking the exact same thing I was. “He’ll get reckless,” he said. “They always do when they get mad.”

  “That concealed camera,” Axlam said, “it was along our run route.” She motioned to the Admin Building. “He’s going to come at us while we run.” She sniffed. “While we’re under a Samhain moon, when our wolves are strongest. When we are most likely to allow the rage of the wolf to surface.”

  “The pack will be safe,” Dag said, in a way that suggested she found the whole idea of the elves not doing their job under the Samhain moon to be a great personal affront.

  Ed ignored her tone and peered into the Tesla. “He said he was going to make us pay.” He shined a flashlight into the interior. “That’s a terroristic threat from an escalating person of interest.” He stood up and faced Dagrun. “Crazy will do that, when it realizes it’s visible. You have to move the run.”

  St. Martin had called us uncivilized. Axlam thought for sure he’d use the wolves’ least civilized time against them.

  But how? The obvious answer was to throw in a mundane as a werewolf snack.

  Maybe the cameras had been a distraction. Maybe his appearances had been a distraction. “Any missing persons reports?” I asked Ed.

  He knew exactly what I was asking. He looked at Axlam. “You cannot run here tonight, do you understand? What if he takes a trick-or-treater just before the moon crests the horizon? If he’s going to toss a kidnapping into this just to see if one of the newbies will break, you cannot be here.”

  Dagrun walked toward Ed. “The pack has to run their established route. We can’t chance a loss of stability with the blizzard and the Samhain moon. If we move north into federal lands, someone will get caught out there and we’ll come home with frozen corpses.”

  Ed looked Dag in the eye. “If you stay here, we might very well have gnawed-on corpses.”

  “We will run as planned,” she said.

  Ed pointed a finger at the elf. “My job is to keep this town safe,” he said. “It’s the job you hired me to do. If the wolves run anywhere near town, there will be blood.”

  Dag’s magic twitched. “We will not allow a mishap.”

  “Mishap?” Ed spread his arms, palms up, as if he couldn’t believe Dag’s words. “Someone dying is not a mishap.”

  “Ed…” Dag said.

  “He said he was going to make us pay. That makes my family vulnerable. It makes all the mundanes in this town vulnerable. But there’s nothing I can do, is there? You all put your spells and your magicks above everything—and everyone—else. How’s that been working for you? Dracula got in.”

  “We took care of it,” Dag said.

  “Frank almost died!” Ed inhaled sharply and immediately centered himself. “When that vampire broke the wall between the Lands of the Living and the Dead—the moment he poked holes in structures that have supported this town for centuries—the dam cracked. I cannot fathom how you, Dagrun Tyrsdottir, the Queen of all the pointy ears around here, can justify ignoring the obvious.”

  For the first time in my two hundred years in Alfheim, I saw Dagrun fall silent.

  “He wants me.”

  We all looked at Axlam.

  “St. Martin. He’s here for me. You said he’s owned those farms for years. That’s what the camera was for. To determine our protocols. Maybe for blackmail.”

  Ed shot Dagrun an angry look.

  “He’s been collecting information for years, Ed.” Axlam said. “Years. It won’t make a difference if we leave. He knows all our run territories. Who runs with us, their power level, who’s new to the pack. Everything.”

  “He picked Samhain because he knows it’s a magical night when you have no choice but to follow protocol,” Ed said. “He showed up and made scenes so that we knew he knew. It’s a terror tactic. He wants public revenge. He can’t make the town’s magicals afraid if we’re surprised.”

  Axlam turned to Dag. “We need elves and pack at the schools. Make sure, when the kids leave, that an adult elf or wolf is with them, and that they go directly home, pack an overnight bag, and go directly to our house.” She waved her hand. “Just to be sure.”

  Dag nodded.

  Axlam turned to Ed. “That includes your family. They stay inside our wards until we get this under control.” Then back to Dag. “Send someone to get Isabella and the little ones now. Make
sure they stay with her at all times.”

  Dag pulled out her phone. “I’ll send Sif.”

  “Ed, call a curfew. Blame the coming storm. Make sure everyone in town stays inside tonight and tomorrow night.” Axlam rubbed at her cheek. “He seems… lazy. I’m not sure that’s the correct word. Not so much lazy as unoriginal. My hope is that fortifying the routine will stop him from spreading his public revenge to the public.”

  Ed did not look convinced.

  “He wants me, Ed.”

  I understood reckless men with anger issues. Men who lashed out like children, but weren’t children. They were physically strong, or financially powerful. And too many of them took their revenge in fatal ways.

  For the first time since Axlam had come to Alfheim, she looked small. “He’s going to try to kill me first. If that doesn’t work, he’s going to try to kill my family and everyone else.” She looked around. “So we make everyone else as safe as possible no matter how erratic he is.”

  She was right. The wolves were always right. And we had to find a way to stop him.

  “We will find him,” Dag said. “He will cause no more harm.”

  Ed still didn’t look convinced, but he nodded and tapped the comm on his shoulder. “I need a crew outside to go over an abandoned Tesla.” He waved away Dag and Axlam.

  Dag touched Axlam’s shoulder. A look of comprehension passed between them, then they both walked toward the Admin Building.

  We needed a way to listen in on St. Martin’s connection to his master’s magic, or to track him, or to call him out in an isolated way, so the elves could put him in a cage.

  None of which was going to happen before the storm hit. I looked out at the haze on the northwestern horizon—the blizzard was sitting over the Montana-Canada border, and the forecast had it moving this way at a speed no one had seen from a winter storm in a century of recordkeeping.

  We had twenty-four hours before forty-mile-an-hour gusts full of ice and snow came scouring into Alfheim.

  Behind me, in the Admin Building, Arne, Dag, and Axlam had the reporter and his crew under control. Dag would send out a few powerful elves to check the run’s route.