Jessie
“Tom?” she said tentatively. “What’s wrong?”
She’d wanted nothing to do with answering the phone, lying in bed and thinking of letting voice mail pick up. But then she’d glanced at the bright screen and picked up, angry for letting things get to her, but knowing this was more bad news.
She was right.
“Jessie…” Tom stopped and sighed. The sound of a man close to…to what? Exhaustion? A breakdown?
Just a man at the end of his rope.
“Jessie,” he started again, stronger, before she could respond. “Can I speak to Detective Lupo?”
Her heart sank. “Uh, he’s asleep, Tom. Wiped out. He caught a bug and turned in to try and beat it. Can he call you back?”
The silence seemed dangerous. “Ah. Okay, sure, have him call me the minute he wakes up. Anytime of the night.”
Was that doubt in his voice?
“What’s wrong?” Jessie said again. She swallowed a lump the size of a golf ball.
Arnow blew out air. “We had two more attacks. Killings. These can’t be animals, but they sure look like it. Two more, both council members.”
Roaring in her ears, Jessie said, “Sam?”
“No, Walters and, uh, Calling. And somebody who got in the way. Jessie, these two were attacked in their houses.”
“Christ.”
“Exactly.”
Now what? She didn’t know what to say. Nick was out there in the moonlight, almost captive to it. She sensed Tom Arnow’s need—either for her, or Nick, or both of them to bail him out. But she stayed silent too long.
“Just have Detective Lupo give me a call when he can,” Arnow said. Maybe not believing her story, but too polite to press it.
Polite? Maybe something else.
“I could sure use a hand on this thing,” he added. “Before it blows up on me.”
She sensed his embarrassment.
She made a noise and he took it as an affirmative and a good-bye.
Jessie hung up and looked out the window, where moonlight tinted the panes silver-white.
Arnow
Standing on the sprawling deck of Alfred Calling’s estate home, as the brochures called it, he stared through the shattered glass panes and into the house proper.
His deputies were getting seasoned, he thought. Hardly anyone had upchucked. Well, there was some gagging. He himself had barely fought off the nausea, thankful he’d had no time to eat anything like a real meal all day. The mess was the worst he’d ever seen. Entrails, feces, chunks of human flesh, limbs.
And the heads.
The heads were the worst.
The two heads had been gnawed, noses and ears bitten off, eyes squished out like grapes.
And then they had been posed. No other way to put it. Whoever or whatever had torn through the people—and he only assumed it was two victims, because he wasn’t quite sure—had feasted on the corpses and then taken the time to prop the heads on a soiled cocktail table.
What the fuck was going on in his county?
The mayor was going to go apeshit.
He was still holding the warm phone after calling Jessie Hawkins. Her voice had a tremendously calming effect on him, but he didn’t know why. Caused a bit of a belly shake, too—the good kind. Hell, he knew she was spoken for, but a man could dream.
Man could dream.
It rankled him that he’d weakened and given in to his first wave of insecurity and called the city cop. What was wrong with him? Wasn’t likely to inspire much interest from the good doctor, using her to whine for help from her boyfriend. But, shit, these deaths were getting to him. There were clues, but they didn’t add up. Animal attacks? What animal posed its dead prey? Invaded houses?
Tom Arnow was a very conflicted man. And if he’d blown any long-shot chance he might have had with Jessie Hawkins, then so be it. He couldn’t enjoy her company if he lost his job, anyway.
Morton and Halloran approached almost apologetically.
“Sheriff, this is the most fucked-up crime scene I ever came across,” Morton said.
Halloran said nothing, but he was sallow and his eyes looked stricken.
“Yeah,” Arnow said. “Anything we can actually use?”
“Looks a lot like the others. Hair and saliva we got bagged. Then the rest of it looks like it’s just these folks, chewed up and spit out, like.”
Halloran turned away and walked to the railing. His back was stiff. Moments later, they heard him retching dryly.
So much for that, Arnow thought. “We’re going to go over this whole scene again, you and me. Starting now. Nobody leaves.” He tipped his head toward where Halloran was still gagging. “Him either.”
Morton swallowed and said nothing.
They got back to work.
Lupo
Silvery beams shone through the pines like unearthly flashlights, and the Creature played a game, crossing from beam to beam.
He had brought down a rabbit flushed from its lair and eaten his fill, then chased another rabbit for sport until he bored of it, letting this one flee through his forepaws.
Take only what you need, the human commanded, and the Creature obliged. The synergy between them seemed to increase with every lunar cycle. Or Lupo’s ability increased. Either way, he felt more at home in the Creature’s body than ever, and the Creature’s accep tance of his commands also improved.
Right now, Lupo and Creature were having fun. When he caught the spoor of deer, Lupo coaxed the Creature away—he didn’t need the meal. But Lupo registered the scents that played with the Creature’s nostrils.
Recalling the blond human who followed the reporter, Heather Wilson, he had the Creature seek and follow.
And now here the scent was again, crossing his nose like a signpost.
It swirled under his nose. Familiar yet not. Pungent. A wolf, reeking of maleness. A human thread, reeking of testosterone. Intertwined.
The Creature growled deep within its throat.
Lupo knew he had found someone exactly like him.
The Creature howled an angry challenge.
From far away, miles perhaps, howls answered. More than one.
The Creature howled again, and the response was immediate. A pack of several distinct voices returned the call, raising the hackles along his neck and back.
The challenge was accepted.
The foreign howling crossed the moonlit woods, creeping closer.
Lupo’s breathing quickened.
He was not alone.
And now they were coming.
Tannhauser
Senses alive and singing with the joy of being in the moonlight, belly full, nostrils still coated with the blood of prey, Alpha heard the howling—a fellow werewolf.
He and his pack pulled up to listen. He grinned with his fangs. When the Other stopped howling, Alpha and his followers answered with their own joyous calls to glory. He paused to sniff the cold night air for a scent to follow. When he caught it, he led them toward their foe.
He recalled his grandfather’s experience in the Werwolf Brigade. Displaced in time, he was his own grandfather, running down Allied troops in the Black Forest, tearing into their bellies and feasting on their intestines.
He blinked and was back in the present. His pack watched him with anticipation, their eyes were alight with bloodlust.
Lupo
He spent the next hour evading the pack, which had split up. His nose told him there were several individuals, but he didn’t think he would be able to sniff out the humans based on only these scents. The human thread was just too weak when the person inhabited his wolf form.
Lupo had to learn these things quickly, or the new foes would run him to ground and tear him apart. The Creature was more than a match for a single enemy of any size, but facing down this many was suicide.
The pack sounded fierce and well trained in working together.
Lupo felt the first stirrings of fear. Fear of something other than
his own wolf side.
He spurred on the Creature, leading the other wolves in a chase and hoping to reduce their number the only way the Creature knew how. With teeth and claws.
Arnow
There would be no sleep for him tonight. They had finished at the crime scenes as well as they could. He was proud of his deputies. They were holding up well, considering the horrors they had seen in such a short time. Despite their weak stomachs, they did their jobs.
Hell, he wasn’t sure he was holding up well.
He wondered about his own weakness. He wished he could take back his call to Jessie Hawkins, all that whining about needing that Milwaukee cop, her boyfriend for Christ’s sake, to help with his difficult case.
Jesus, what was he thinking?
That had been a misstep.
But any way he looked at it, he was nowhere. Lots of stuff out to the crime labs, but nothing concrete he could hang an arrest on, or even some suspicion.
He was cruising South 45 from the rez back to town, his eyes never still as he scanned the tree line close to the road. Usually you did that to spot and avoid deer as they crossed the highway. But tonight he wasn’t sure what he was trying to spot—and avoid—at the side of the road.
What the hell was killing people in his county?
Sure, the killings were technically on the rez, and in most counties the sheriff might not have been drawn into it at all. But Vilas County had more or less married the rez when the casino decision passed. The management had been busy hiring and training not just Indians, but also regular county residents, to fill the hundreds of jobs the casino would create. The economy was bad, and people needed jobs. The rez was proving to be a good neighbor. Only those hold-out racists or so-called sport fishermen still pissed about spearfishing treaty rights refused to get with the realities.
Arnow steered around a mound of fur in the middle of his lane. The asphalt was streaked bloody and still slick.
Some nights there seemed to be more roadkill than live animals around here. Those semis headed up to Watersmeet in the U.P. mowed down anything in their path.
He glanced back at the lump of meat and sighed.
But then he slowed down.
There was another mound of fur in his lane, this one with bones sticking through its skin. The blood around it wasn’t pooled, it was splattered.
Jesus.
He slowed to a crawl and edged onto the shoulder, flashers and brights on, aware that he still took up too much space in the lane. People regularly barreled through here in their 4x4 pickups and souped-up muscle cars, completely ignoring posted limits. He could have raked in a ton of cash for the county just setting up speed traps. But that wasn’t his style, and he’d not been instructed to crack down on speeding—only fighting and race baiting.
All too aware of his exposed body on the narrow highway, Arnow stepped out. The ribbon of road behind him was hidden by a long, gentle curve. Oncoming traffic would be nearly invisible until they were almost upon him. Grimly, he walked back to where the roadkill lay, bulky Maglite flashlight in hand. A breeze ruffled the fur on the dead animal, a badger.
The state symbol, he thought. He was from Illinois originally, but he knew badgers were sacred in Wisconsin.
Blood splatters all around the animal indicated a fierce struggle. He shone the light farther down the dark asphalt. More splatters. There was a trail of them, spread out on both sides of an invisible line.
Damned if it didn’t look as though the dead animal had been carried and shaken, maybe still thrashing for its life, until it was dumped. Badgers were ferocious in a fight—this was some predator’s work, not a semi. A large predator.
He touched the fur with the toe of his boot, half expecting the dead badger to rear up and attack. Geez, you’re touchy!
Skin still pliable. If he put his hand on it, he knew it would still be warm. He did it anyway, feeling the stiffness setting in. The nearby blood glittered in his light, barely beginning to dry.
He stood and swirled the light around, seeing nothing between the trees tilted over the road. Grunting, he flipped over the carcass with his boot.
Christ.
He couldn’t keep from grimacing.
The underside of the badger had been cracked open like an egg and hollowed out. No organs or entrails remained, as if it’d been sucked clean. None lay nearby. The flesh was torn, though. No tools, no metal had done this. Ragged tears.
Teeth.
The dark woods all around threatened to swallow him alive. He thumbed his radio and visualized the patrol schedule.
“Jerry, you there?” Being informal with his deputies was one of the perks of a job away from a red-tape-bound big-city force. “Jerry, come in.”
After a crackle or two, Faber clicked in. “Boss, I’m just past Phelps, cruising south on 17. Need somethin’?”
“Uh, good. Swing around onto 45 and come at me. Got some weird roadkill here I want you to see.” He gave his location and waited.
“Roadkill? What’s so strange about that?”
“You can tell me when you get here.”
“Copy.”
Arnow chuckled to himself nervous ly. You could hear the doubt in Faber’s voice, even over the radio. Since when was roadkill any kind of news? Logging trucks flattened critters out here all the time.
But this one hadn’t been flattened.
Crouching, he studied the ground around the carcass. No footprints or tracks of any kind. The splattering seemed to indicate the badger had been flung to where it now rested.
Wind rustled the white pine branches all around him. But was that wind? The lower branches rustled, but not the higher. The pines suddenly seemed eerily still.
Except for the rustling that slowly came even with him.
Blood drained from Arnow’s head and he felt the lightheadedness that always came before a bust or a confrontation.
The undergrowth rustled once more, roughly, then was still.
Hair stood up on Arnow’s neck.
He drew his Glock and racked the slide.
Schwartz
The moon rolled in his eyes and filled him with the power that made him feel invulnerable.
He followed Alpha for a while, fixing their prey in his head like a target in the crosshairs. But he saw Tef break off and start a flanking motion, and he wanted to do the same, feeling the pull of the moon breaking him away from Alpha. The pack was not as together as Alpha wanted. Lately, it seemed as though the old man’s hold on them was slipping, with Tef going off for hours to do his own thing. Schwartz had smelled woman on him again. Wherever he went, Tef seemed to find himself some cooze, somebody to boink until he felt hungry enough to take her apart piece by piece. Schwartz envied the kid’s good looks, almost frozen in time as they were and helpful in getting him human ass he could sniff and lick to his heart’s content.
Schwartz ran through the pines with abandon, pulling away from Alpha and Tef, feeling as if he was the only wolf caressed by the moon’s silky hands. He heard them crashing through the woods, glorying in the sounds that would frighten their prey. But then he got stealthy, figuring the enemy wolf would do the same. Sometimes Alpha and Tef thought they owned the world, but Schwartz knew their confidence was more arrogance than intelligence. Their prey could hear and sense three opponents stalking him, but why would he keep making noise when it was more likely he’d slip between them and force them to overrun him, then disappear behind them?
Only Schwartz understood that their prey considered himself the hunter, not the hunted. He was sure of it.
He grinned widely in the moonlight. By slinking behind the others, he’d set himself up to catch their prey when he made his slick move to flank them from behind.
Alpha would have to recognize his superior intellect in outsmarting their opponent, whoever he was.
Schwartz wanted to feel the Other’s flesh between his jaws, taste his blood on his tongue.
He knew they were retracing their steps from earlier tha
t night, where the moon had led them in their search for sport and easy food.
Appetizers.
They’d left the carcasses on the road like signposts, and now he could sense he was drawing even with the spot they’d painted with the badger blood.
He pulled up short. The others were too far ahead, too moon-wed, too blood-wild to notice that a human stood out on the highway, right where they’d left their mark.
Schwartz doubled back and sniffed the night air. It was the cop, the sheriff, the guy they’d toyed with before. He smelled the cop’s fear, the stink of his adrenaline souring as he sensed Schwartz’s presence. He grinned again and stalked closer, seeing the cop through the trunks. He was crouched over the badger Tef had flung down the road. Schwartz crawled on his belly through the pines, rustling the undergrowth.
Suddenly the cop stood and drew his gun.
Schwartz’s saliva pooled in his snout, the thought of the cop’s flesh and bone mangled in his jaws making him hungry again. The scent of prey filled his senses until he could think of nothing else.
A growl behind him brought him up short and made his bladder loosen.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Arnow
Whatever the hell was crashing through the brush was toying with him.
Arnow knew it, because there was silence—absolute silence—for a minute or two and then the sounds of something bullying its way through the close underbrush resumed, farther away. Whatever it was, it was trying to psyche him out.
He kept his back to the car, its flashers still on and reflecting crazily in the ground fog that had suddenly sprung up and started swirling over the road. He hoped some semi carrying a load of logs didn’t come speeding through the fog and flatten him and his car like the roadkill at his feet.
Jesus, it was a clear night just a few minutes ago.
The fog seemed to suck into itself any light it touched. His car’s fl ashers were so cocooned he could barely see them, and he was only yards away. The silence was eerie, and he imagined that even oncoming cars would be silent until they were thrust upon him inside the cocoon. White tendrils eddied like soapsuds over the roadway, down the shoulder, and through the first rank of pines, disappearing into the black-edged darkness beyond.
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