The Black Wolves of Boston (eARC)

by Wen Spencer

  "Trade?" Seth had so many secrets he couldn't tell police.

  "All we told your lawyer over the phone was that we found a twenty-year-old Dodge in the lake. He shows up five hours later. You're what? Nineteen?" She missed his age by three years. "You've got a lawyer on retainer and are driving a Porsche. You've got to be stinking rich. Why did your lawyer drop everything and push the speed limit to get here from New York City in that short a time? For a freaking twenty-year-old Dodge?"

  Obviously Bishop hadn't told them anything. What should he tell her? There was no guarantee that she would tell him anything useful. She probably was just trying to milk him and had no intention of giving him information.

  But Jack wasn't in Ithaca, nor anywhere close. Seth would have to drive blindly, and Jack had grown weaker over the hours. He had to find Jack soon.

  "It's not the car that is important," Seth cautiously started. "The people that stole it killed my father's first wife. The car is the only lead we've ever had."

  "Oh! Bishop said nothing about a murder."

  Seth spread his hands, trying to look innocent. "I don't know why. Maybe he's trying to keep my family's name out of the news." Seth knew he was setting bridges on fire. He was willing to risk anything to get to Jack. "Her name was Anastasia Tatterskein."

  He needed to start with the half-truths. He'd been taught early never to discuss his father's arranged marriages. "She was born in Moscow. She came to the United States as an exchange student when she was thirteen. My aunt was her host mother. Jack was five when Anastasia arrived. He was ten when she was killed. He's never gotten over her death. He loved her like an older sister."

  After Anastasia's murder, the king had insisted on Seth's father take a new wife immediately. It was why Jack had been so angry at the joining of Seth's parents that he'd gotten himself banned by the Mexican pack.

  "When and where was Anastasia murdered?" Officer Kjeldsen said.

  "Tyringham, Massachusetts on March fifteenth." His father always disappeared on the date to grieve privately while his mother raged about the Ides of March. It had etched the date into Seth's brain. "My family has an isolated mountain lodge outside of Tyringham. The land is totally backed by Beartown State Forest. Anastasia was there with my father. They'd gotten snowed in the night before. He'd gotten up early, shoveled out the driveway and gone to town for groceries. While he was gone, she was shot a dozen times."

  "And there were no suspects? Your father was cleared of the murder?"

  Seth stared at his foot rather than look at her. If he did, he'd frighten her. "We know who killed her. It was a cult that practices black magic; they use human sacrifices in their rituals. They cut up their victims and combine them with silver and myrrh and pieces of wood to create---" he caught himself. Most humans didn't believe in magic any more than they believed in monsters. "--- items that they believe hold magical powers. There were three to seven people." Three was the minimum because his father had killed two and one had gotten away in the Dodge. It was one of the many secrets Seth needed to keep. "They came in multiple vehicles. One of their cars got stuck in the snow. They couldn't get it free, so they took the Viper. After they fled the lodge, they disappeared. My family has never been able to find any clue to their whereabouts."

  His father killed two of the coven that day. A witch at the lodge. A warlock just a mile from the Lee interchange on Mass Pike. His grandfather was still alive; the power to track people through their territory hadn't passed to his father yet. His father had guessed blindly and gone cross-country to get ahead of the warlock.

  Seth got his anger under control. He looked up to meet her eyes. "These are dangerous people. If my cousin followed some kind of lead on them, he could have fallen into a hornet's nest full of trouble."

  "You think your lawyer discovered a lead when he was here?" Officer Kjeldsen said.

  "Yes. Bishop was my family's lawyer when my father married Anastasia. He dealt with her funeral arrangements. He could have seen a clue in something that seemed insignificant to you. Bishop met with Jack and an hour later my cousin drove out of New York City."

  Officer Kjeldsen tapped the desk with her pencil, flipping it on each tap. Tip. Eraser. Tip. Eraser. "Okay. Let's look at what we pulled from the car. It would be useful to know what triggered all this."

  * * *

  She gave him a long lecture on how she would show him what was found in the car. He couldn't touch it in any way. Chain of evidence required that items be handled by a minimum number of people, all of them authorized. Standard stuff. Bishop had drilled police procedures into Seth. As the Prince of Boston, Seth might need to make bodies disappear. Shit happened; he would be responsible for cleaning it up.

  As she talked, Officer Kjeldsen let slip that the lieutenant in charge had been off sick since Friday morning and she was bucking for a promotion.

  She had Seth wait in an interrogation room while she got the case files out of storage. It was a big cardboard box marked: Cayuga Lake Jane Doe 34.

  Seth realized he hadn't asked the most important question.

  "There was a body in the car---that's why you're so interested in what I know."

  "Yes. A woman. Coroner says she was between eighteen to thirty years old. We found ten different driver's licenses in the car. Ten different names. All with the same woman's photo. They appear to be stolen identities. It's possible that none of them are her real name. We've been attempting to track down next of kin for all the IDs."

  Each photo license was in a separate plastic bag. The driver had been a waifish Latino woman. The only name that seemed remotely Latino was Wonder Woman Alvarado, which didn't sound real at all. The rest ran the gamut from Orli Cohen to Kyung-sook Kim. In half the photos she sneered confidently at the camera, obviously proud of her long glossy dark hair and good looks. In the other pictures, she looked like a frightened prisoner, stripped of makeup and her hair hacked short. His gut was telling him that this was one of the Wickers' puppets, one that they'd controlled over months instead of a few hours as they normally did.

  If the car was in the lake by sheer misfortune, then the driver would have simply vanished for the Wickers as well as for his family. By contacting next of kin, the police most likely reached the coven. They had set up a collision between Jack and the Wickers. The question was where? Why not here?

  "Did any of the next of kin come look at this evidence?"

  "Yes." Officer Kjeldsen studied a sheet of paper. "A woman came in three weeks ago. The lieutenant accessed the files the day she was here. She was a clotheshorse with a red Bentley. She parked in our lot, ignoring all the signs. Jenkins went out to give her a ticket and came back panty whipped. He followed her around like puppy, holding the doors and fetching her coffee."

  Definitely a witch. She could have left one of the policemen on post-hypnotic script to contact her if anyone else looked into the case. It might explain the officer who was out "sick" immediately after Bishop's visit.

  Seth clenched his hands tightly. Of all the things in the world, a witch was the most dangerous to werewolves. They knew all the wolves' weaknesses and they had an unlimited supply of human puppets to throw at wolf packs. At one time, wolves killed any witch that crossed their path, but the treaty with the Grigori changed that. Now only witches that worked blood magic were killed, and only after being screened by the Grigori.

  Larger plastic bags followed the small ones out of the box. They held a rusted gun, two large meat cleavers, the tattered remains of a purse, a plastic drinking cup from Roy Rogers, and a nylon windbreaker with a rusty zipper. Seventeen years in water had destroyed most of the evidence. Why were the police even bothering to follow the case so closely?

  "There was something else in the car," Seth guessed. This was Wickers after all. "Was it a severed limb or something?"

  She eyed him. Her silence alone confirmed it. After a long silent debate with herself, she finally admitted, "A human head in the trunk. Wrapped in a black garbage bag. We've got i
t at the FBI labs for identification."

  So they were treating it as a murder case.

  Officer Kjeldsen pulled out an evidence bag containing a small lump of leather and fur. Seth gasped and snatched it up.

  "Hey! I said don't touch!" Kjeldsen put out her hand for it.

  Seth reluctantly gave her the plastic bag. He'd gotten a close enough look to recognize it.

  She squinted at the contents. "What is this?"

  "It's a hat." His grandmother had made it with yarn, leather and fur. Water had rotted it into a shapeless mass but the wolf ears were still recognizable. In his concern for Jack, he'd forgotten about his half-brother Ilya.

  The Wickers had stolen his father's firstborn. They'd taken Ilya out of his crib and driven off with him. His father had gambled that Ilya was in the warlock's car. He'd been devastated when he discovered that he was wrong.

  Had Ilya died in the lake?

  Seth scanned the items on the table. Purse. Nylon windbreaker. Plastic cup. All the little items belonging to the puppet stayed in the car. Except for the hat, there was nothing else related to an infant. "Did the windows break when the car crashed? Could anything small float out?"

  "All the glass is intact. The victim didn't have her seatbelt on when the airbags deployed. Coroner says it looks like she'd been knocked unconscious and then drowned."

  Bishop had helped clean up the dead Wickers before the police were notified of Anastasia's murder. He had been a frequent visitor to Boston when Seth was growing up. Bishop would have recognized the baby hat; Seth and all his baby brothers had worn one. Bishop would have realized that Ilya could have been in the Dodge Viper when it was driven away from the lodge.

  It was possible that Ilya's body simply hadn't survived being submerged for seventeen years. Something, though, made Bishop send Jack someplace north. Someplace not within Seth's territory but between here and Tyringham.

  "She stopped someplace," Seth said with certainty. The answer was on the table in front of him. He just had to look.

  "Probably," Kjeldsen said. "It's like two hundred miles to Massachusetts state line. She would have needed to stop for gas someplace." She pointed at the Roy Roger's cup. "There's only a handful Roy Roger's in the state and all of them are on the Thruway."

  Seth scanned the other bags. The smallest evidence bags held scraps of paper inside a gallon-sized Ziploc storage bag. He leaned close to study them. One was receipt from an auto repair place in Utica. The other was a deposit envelope from First Niagara Bank. He typed Utica into his phone GPS system. The town was just off the New York Thruway. "What was in the deposit envelope?"

  "A cashier's check made out to one of the IDs. This one. Wonder Woman. It was drawn on the account of a New Hartford law firm that closed doors fifteen years ago. Both partners are dead. We're trying to track down any clerical staff that worked there. The check is for twenty thousand dollars."

  New Hartford was a small town bordering Utica.

  "What's the date on it?" Seth asked.

  She checked. "Oh shit. March fifteenth."

  Ides of March.

  A puppet flees Massachusetts with a baby, most likely without a script in place to control her actions. She went via the Thruway until the Viper broke down near Utica. Facing possible kidnapping and murder charges, she had to be in a panic. Obviously via the auto repair place, she got the Viper running. In New Hartford, lawyers gave her twenty thousand dollars. In Ithaca she died without the baby in the car. The logical explanation was that she sold the baby in Utica.

  "I know where my cousin is." It would take Seth two hours to get there.

  7: Elise

  Elise left Boston after midnight. Massachusetts was a sea of darkness after an hour of suburban sprawl. She climbed up and over the Berkshire Mountains, the wind blowing dead leaves and promises of winter storms. She played rock music loud to drown out the fear that the dark wind blew through her.

  Hunting Wickers was a dangerous game of cat and mouse. The witches could turn most normal humans into puppets and hide behind them. A very powerful witch could remotely control their puppets by implanting scripts like post-hypnotic suggestions. It meant that Elise could be fighting puppets in Utica while the Wickers searched Boston for Joshua. She was betting heavily that the Wickers didn't know that the boy had taken the train. A huntsman wasn't an urban-friendly tool; it drew too much attention to the Wickers' activities. They probably cast the spell thinking he was hiding in a tree fort near his house. By now they would have realized something had gone very wrong but without the heart stone, they wouldn't be able to recast the spell. Probably. It made her uneasy that Joshua didn't recognize the moon-shaped loop of silver. It had to resonate strongly with his soul; otherwise the spell wouldn't have worked.

  Dawn rose on farmland. Rolling pastures lined the highway with solitary barns standing like islands. She spotted distant woods marking where the land lay too rugged for farming. Prime Wicker country.

  Utica sprawled in a broad wooded river valley. The wide streets lay in an orderly grid system. Four-and five-story buildings were scattered randomly through the city, as if someone had gone through and weeded out structures. It seemed that Utica had been a base of power back in the age of the Erie Canal but now was merely a truck stop along the New York State Thruway.

  Signs off the highway pointed out the Amtrak train station, Saint Elizabeth Hospital, and the various law enforcement agencies. She stopped at a large gas station with four islands of pumps to stretch, fill up her Jeep, and consider her options.

  Joshua was from the town of Sauquoit, six miles south of Utica. The town was so little that she couldn't find any information on it beyond the fact it did have a post office. Satellite pictures of the area showed that the town was little more than a string of houses lining the country roads with backyards giving way to farmland and woods. News stories had ten dead teenagers at a barn Friday afternoon, a late Friday night discovery of the mauled body of a Reed Wakefield at his home, and the murder of Joshua's neighbor, Joseph Buckley, sometime Saturday afternoon.

  Wakefield most likely was a Wicker; killed by the same werewolf that showed up at the barn. Buckley may have been the sacrifice made to create the huntsman. It was difficult to tell, as the news stories contained fewer and fewer details instead of more. Clarice was right: the Wickers had recovered from the disasters and taken control of the media. By Saturday evening, the news reports dropped all mentions of Buckley, Wakefield and the wolf. The only stories posted Sunday morning defended the decision to issue an amber alert on the seventeen-year-old Joshua and details of the mass funerals that would take place Monday.

  Twelve people dead in three separate murders meant that the local police departments would be overloaded. If the Wickers seriously wanted Joshua captured, they would worm their way into the police search for the missing teenager. The New Hartford department had used volunteers to comb the fields around the barn for additional victims. The Wickers probably inserted themselves into the pool of concerned citizens and took control from there. Only one in a million humans was immune to their powers. The sheer number of law agencies involved was the limiting factor; even the most powerful witch could only control a handful of people at the same time.

  Elise could guess who was a witch; she needed to be in the same room with the Wicker to be sure. The problem was that any witch could recognize Elise instantly as a Grigori. Any humans in the room with them would become an instant tool for the Wicker. The trick was to catch the witch alone.

  Elise considered her options. All the local law enforcement agencies would be keeping tabs on the case. None, though, would be eager to share information with her. Law enforcers tended to be control freaks. The irony being that her family predated everything in the United States. The FBI. The CIA. The Boston City Police were started in 1838, nearly two hundred years after the werewolves and the Grigori arrived to protect the city. Since her family operated internationally, she had official Interpol credentials. The badge raised a
few eyebrows in large United States cities and suspicion in small ones.

  She eyed her phone. It looked as if her best bet would be the U.S. Marshals.

  * * *

  The U.S. marshal, Thomas Stewart, was wearing blue jeans and honest-to-God black cowboy boots. His jeans hid all but the unmistakable toe and heel. His navy blue polo shirt had the star within circle symbol of the marshals. Otherwise he looked like any other law enforcement officer with open carry pistol, badge, and handcuffs attached to a thick leather belt.

  She had caught him in the parking lot, just getting out of his car. He held a large Dunkin Donut's coffee and looked like he desperately needed it. He stared at her face, ignoring her badge. There was grey in his mustache and goatee and his hairline was receding. She guessed that he was old enough to be her father. It was always creepy when they were old.

  Elise moved her badge to in front of his eyes. "Interpol," she repeated.

  Stewart blinked several times before refocusing his attention to the billfold with the gold badge and picture ID. "Huh? Interpol? Wh-wh-what?"

  She waited impatiently for blood to return to the big head.

  A moment later, Stewart managed to ask, "What brings Interpol to Utica?"

  "I'm chasing a cult." As far as modern police were concerned, witches were part of fairy tales. Cultists, though, police believed in. "There's six dead in the Boston area. We think it's linked to your murder of Joseph Buckley."

  The "we" was because cops liked dealing with organizations, not individuals. There were only a handful of Virtues on the East Coast and even fewer Powers. To outsiders, her family seemed like nothing but loose cannons. She focused on Buckley's murder because it would be difficult to explain what happened at the barn in terms of "cult activity."

  "Why are you here talking to me instead of..." Stewart glanced at her face and lost the thread.

  She blocked his view with her phone playing the video of Joshua's parents making a passionate plea for anyone knowing his whereabouts to contact a tip line. "We believe the cultists are still in the area attempting to locate the sole survivor of the animal attack. The speed at which the parents called a press conference suggests that they're being manipulated by the cult without their knowledge. These cultists are very good at moving into an area, working their way quietly into people's trust and then using it against them."