Way of the Wolf: Shifter Legacies 1

by Mark E. Cooper

  “Tw... tw... twice?” she stuttered.

  “For honouring my word and giving him the reward he sought, and then allowing you to meet him this way. It won’t happen again. I will ensure he is elsewhere during your visits. Will you still have dinner with me?”

  She opened her eyes and looked beyond him at the empty corridor. There was no sign of Terry. “It wasn’t him. I mean he surprised me, but it was your reaction that scared me half to death.”

  Stephen’s face fell. “Ah.”

  She felt his self-disgust clearly. “What did he try to do to me?”

  “He tried to glamour you.”

  “But all it did was make me feel dizzy. Was he trying to do that, why?”

  “No, you misunderstand me. He’s too new; his power is weak. He tried to take control of your mind and make you his toy.”

  Marie paled.

  “It’s all right. I have impressed upon him the consequences of repeating his error.”

  She could guess what Terry’s punishment would be if he angered Stephen that way again. She nodded, only then realising she was still kneeling on the carpet, and Stephen was crouching at eye level to talk to her. She gave him her hand.

  “Help me up?”

  Stephen’s relief was obvious. He pulled her up, and steadied her. “Dinner?” he asked hopefully.

  Why was he so interested in her, why so intent upon dinner? It wasn’t as if he could eat. All he could do was watch her. It was flattering that he wanted to do that, but she was no child to believe an immortal saw merit in her. She was nothing special. The more she thought about it, the clearer it became that the only thing special about her was her father.

  * * *

  Part II

  11 ~ Tea and Cookies

  “I don’t know, man. It just seems a little…”

  “What?” Slick Willie said as he drove. “You ain’t pulling out on me are you?”

  “It just seems a little off you know? I mean, she’s just an old lady, right? How much we gonna get from someone like that?”

  “If you don’t want to come in with me, Lenny, just say it straight. Are you pulling out? I can drop you right here.”

  “No man, I’m with you,” Lenny said hastily.

  Right here was a particularly nasty neighbourhood; not a good place to be alone and he knew that. Willie smiled into the dark. He didn’t need Lenny for this little job. Hell, he didn’t need anyone’s help to relieve an old biddy of her savings, but she was expecting him to bring his brother with him this time. The stupid bitch thought he was her friend. She thought him a nice boy for helping her carry packages up to her apartment and gave him tea and cookies like he was a damn kid. She had some nice stuff. Some of the china dolls she had collected must be worth a few bucks, and the picture frames were silver. He didn’t know much, but he knew quality stuff when he saw it. Sal the shark would take them off his hands no problem at all.

  Willie parked the car outside the old biddy’s building and locked the door. He wanted the car to be still here when he came back. With luck it would be, though it wasn’t his. He’d stolen it just an hour ago especially for this job.

  He led Lenny into the lobby. The building used to be a good hotel back in the day. The floors, though worn, still had a look of elegance. They were clean and the marble tiles shone dully. The entire building was like that. It had once been something special but had declined slowly into just another apartment building with a history. Unlike some, the owner of this one had taken care not to let age turn it into a derelict. Yes, its splendour had faded with age, but its quality was still obvious. If he ever had the money, he would buy something just like it for himself.

  They walked by the desk being held down by the so-called building supervisor. Willie nodded to Frank, but the old sot didn’t even notice. Just as well. They didn’t need the old fart getting involved and maybe getting hurt. Not that he was averse to hurting him if he had to, but it would be a hassle he didn’t need. He wanted money not a fight.

  The elevator dropped them on the fifth floor and Willie led Lenny to the old lady’s door, but something wasn’t right. The door was slightly ajar. His sense of danger was highly tuned and it kicked into high gear on seeing the door unlocked. Lenny, the dope, wouldn’t sense danger if a guy stuck a stunner in his ear—he pushed the door open and grinned as if it meant their luck was in. Willie hesitated to follow as Lenny entered, but this was his job. He had to follow through. He pushed into the darkened apartment then on into the sitting room. He fumbled for the light switch, but couldn’t find it. He stepped further into the room and his footsteps rustled. He looked down to find himself standing on a plastic drop cloth. The kind you used when painting the ceiling or something. Was the old biddy having some work done, was she even here?

  “Mrs Marchant? Its Willie and Len… you invited us for tea. Are you there?” He peered into the darkness and his eyes slowly adjusted. The shadow sitting upon the settee didn’t respond. “Mrs Marchant?”

  “Ellen is sleeping,” a voice out of the darkness hissed.

  Willie gasped and spun to his left. A pair of eyes were revealed by a ray of light leaking into the room through the part drawn drapes. The voice was definitely that of a man, but the eyes reflected the light oddly. They almost seemed to burn red.

  Lenny fumbled in his jacket pocket for his boomer. Willie cursed himself for a fool, but before he could pull his own weapon, Lenny collapsed bonelessly to the floor, hit from behind. Before Willie could react, powerful arms encircled him. With one hand trapped in his jacket pocket and the other down by his side, he could do nothing but curse and struggle.

  “Thank you, Frank,” the voice said again.

  “You want me to take care of him for you, Mister Lochlin? I can’t leave the desk too long.”

  “No, we can’t have the lobby unattended at night. Hold him for just a moment.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Willie shook with fear. “Let me go man. I won’t say nothing about Lenny. You can have him; you can do what you want to him. He’s nothing to me. I swear I’ll go and you’ll never see me again. I swear it!”

  “I’ll not be seeing you again in any case,” Lochlin said as he stepped closer. “You really shouldn’t have come here. Ellen likes you, and that means I had to do something I would rather not have done. I broke a promise to myself and violated her trust because of you. You have no idea how angry that makes me.”

  “But he will,” Frank said.

  “Oh yes, yes indeed,” Lochlin said and came forward in a rush, fangs already out and his eyes blazing red with his fury.

  Willie began screaming.

  * * *

  12 ~ Slick Willie

  It was a cool but bright morning in the city. The sidewalks were busy with shoppers and people hurrying to work, but traffic had yet to reach its peak. Chris smiled her approval and drove fast.

  She beat a tattoo on the steering wheel and sang along happily to a song she’d heard that morning on the radio. “Hmmm, Hmmm…”

  Her partner of four years, John Warner, was quiet but that was okay. They had been together long enough to be comfortable with each other’s silences—

  “Why don’t you put a sock in it?” John growled irritably.

  —and bad moods, she grinned and drove faster. She swerved around a car pulling out of a side turning, and with tyres squealing, she floored it. The car surged ahead.

  “And slow down for the goddess’ sake!” John yelled clutching the oh-shit handle on his side of the roof. “They can’t get away, Chris, they’re already dead. Remember?”

  “Yeah, but it’s so much fun. I love this job!” she said and laughed at his growls. When John drove, he almost always put the car on autopilot, but she rarely did. She was a control freak and knew that about herself. It was one of her best qualities. “I have a need for speed!”

  John grinned for a moment but then got serious. “Yeah, but you’re going to get that pretty butt of yours in a sling if Stokes hears.�
��

  She sighed and slowed down. Stokes was her captain and he didn’t like her idea of fun. She got along with most people in her department, she even got along with Cappy most days, but he could be a pain about certain things. Things like speeding to a scene, or damaging public property, or pressuring a suspect. He was the perfect captain, always ready to protect his people against outsiders, but at the same time, he would be reaming her over the methods she used to take down the bad guys.

  “I’ll be good.”

  John looked at her sideways. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” she said and grinned. “Scout’s honour!”

  John sighed. “What’s with all the uniforms?” he said nodding at the street up ahead. The street was jammed with people. Cops and newsies didn’t mix well usually, but here they were, one big happy family.

  Chris manoeuvred as far as she could into the chaos of cars and vans before parking. Hundreds of onlookers were trying to see the poor devils that had been stupid enough to walk through an alley in Monster Central without a stunner in each fist. They climbed out of the car and looked around.

  “It’s a real zoo down here,” she said looking at all the reporters clamouring for a look-see at the city’s latest morbid offering. “They make me want to hit something.”

  “You told Cappy you’d cut down on that sort of thing,” John warned.

  She shrugged checking that her badge was in place on her belt. Her police issue stunner in its holster rode the opposite hip, while her backup pressed into the small of her back; it was reassuring but illegal as hell. “I did and I am, but I haven’t hit anything for over a week now. It’s getting to me.”

  The uniforms were holding the line against the media, but unfortunately keeping the reporters back from the alley didn’t stop them from reporting their bullshit. Their remote cameras, rotors buzzing like dentist drills were in the air over the scene recording everything in its gory detail. She heard the same old recycled and generic news spewing from the reporter’s lips as she swept by. Channel 5 was doing its worst to trash the department as usual. How many times had she heard the like? Hundreds. Of course, they had no choice as yet. Later the stories would flesh out with names of the victims, and speculation on how, why, and when the murders had occurred as the department slowly released details. It was always the same.

  She ignored the shouted questions just as she ignored the cameras overhead, hovering on their blurring rotors. Why ask her what was going on anyway, she thought grumpily. Couldn’t they see that she had just arrived? Of course they could, the cameras were capturing video of her arrival right now and feeding it to the editors in the vans. No doubt, she would catch sight of herself on screen later.

  John put on the headset they shared—it was his turn—but he didn’t activate it. “What about the coffee machine you killed the other day?”

  “That doesn’t count, it had it coming trying to stiff me like that,” she said absently as she flashed her badge at the uniforms guarding the entrance to the alley. She ducked under the tape with John at her side and made her way to where the action was. The severed head was the first thing that caught her attention. She crouched down to examine it better. John indicated he was going to have a look at the other corpse, turning on the headset to record the scene as he walked.

  “I’ll stay with this one,” she said to his back.

  The head had a face she remembered. Four years ago, she had been in uniform assigned to twelfth precinct, which included 104th street and the scum who owned it.

  “Well, well, well. Fancy meeting you here, Willie,” Chris said conversationally to the head. “How’s it going?”

  Someone coughed nearby covering laughter. She looked up to see a faintly sick looking young man in uniform, but behind him was another face she knew.

  “I think ol’ Slick Willie slipped on the sidewalk de-tec-tive,” Sergeant Jacob Baines drawled.

  Slick Willie was, or had been anyway, Willie Danvers’ nickname on the streets. Back in the day, she had known him as a small-time thief—picking pockets was his main gig, but even then he had diversified from time to time. She wondered what he had been into lately, and whether it was big enough to lose his head over.

  She stood to confront the sergeant. “Well shit, Baines, why didn’t I think of that? Oh yeah! Now I remember, his head came off!”

  Baines grinned. “I heard he was shaving at the time.”

  She laughed and continued their game. “Yeah? Witnesses?”

  “Give me a minute and I’ll find you a couple of dozen.”

  She laughed again. He probably could too. Willie was scum, and like all scum, he had plenty of people who hated his guts. Or rather, he used to have. Now he was less than scum. He was dead scum.

  She stepped over the head and shook hands with her old sergeant. “How are you Jacob?” she asked looking up at him where he towered over her and his huge gut.

  “I’m doing real good,” he wheezed and shook her hand.

  He was an enormous mountain of a man. He had been her trainer and inspiration at one time—her obsidian giant; not literally a giant. He was human enough and swore there were no giants in his ancestry. She still wasn’t sure about that.

  “Glad to hear that, Jacob. Who is your friend?”

  “Let me introduce a new soldier in our fight against the bad guys. Patrolman Kevin Goodchilde, this is one of my old apprentices, Detective Chris Humber.”

  “Nice to meet you ma’am,” the patrolman said and shook her hand.

  Chris liked him straight away, the way you couldn’t help liking a puppy. “Same here,” she said and turned her attention back to Baines. “Who’s the other stiff?”

  “One Leonard Joseph Lambe. That’s Lambe with an E. He went by Lenny, not Leo, sometimes Whitey... the hair I guess.”

  Lenny had white hair then. Chris pursed her lips. “Never heard of him.”

  “Nah, he’s new on the block. Well after your time.”

  “Let’s go have a look.”

  Baines escorted her over just like old times. John was having a word with a guy wearing a vest and leather trousers and not much else; a witness maybe, though if he were, Baines would surely have said right off. John saw her coming but continued his questioning.

  The second headless corpse was lying on the ground near a fire escape. Two decapitations in one day had to be some kind of record for the department, but then again, maybe not. This was Monster Central after all, and most non-humans used other weapons than boomers and stunners. Claws and teeth were usually preferred, but swords and other edged weapons were popular too especially with vamps. She frowned at the open door of the fire escape. If memory served it led into a club called Zero Gee; an apt name for a place where most of the customers spent their time flying high. Zero Gee sold more chemicals than Colombia.

  “Someone chase him?”

  “Not that we can tell,” Baines said. “Take a look at his neck.”

  She crouched to have a closer look and frowned at what she saw. Something had taken a big bite out of him before taking his head off. Possibly a vamp, but they couldn’t eat meat and didn’t usually worry at a wound like this when feeding. They were fussy eaters, most of them; very finicky, and there was meat missing from the neck. This was looking more like a shifter attack, but they rarely used weapons. They preferred the homegrown variety—their own claws and teeth.

  “An animal attack?” she said looking up with a grin.

  Baines rolled his eyes. “Yeah, good one... not.”

  “You’re thinking wolf. They are the most common shifter type.”

  Baines shrugged. “Maybe, but what about Willie? No way did a shifter do that. The wound is too clean, a big knife not teeth. We have someone who says he saw Willie pushed out of this door by another guy. Then a minute or two later, Lenny here goes to take a look and wham—he’s dead too. Considering your other case… the certain high profile case that no one is supposed to talk about,” he stressed. “I figured you’d be intereste
d.”

  Interested? Hell yes she was, but she couldn’t see a connection between this scene and the Ghost. The Ghost was a serial killer with a bent for ripping the throats out of women with his teeth, not men. That kind of attack automatically shouted vampire to many people, her included, but Willie’s head had been removed with some kind of weapon—a big knife like a bowie, maybe even an honest to goddess sword. As Baines just said, the cut was too neat for it to be anything else. The coroner would have to confirm. Whitey apparently did have his throat torn out, but the wound didn’t match the others she had seen in the Ghost case.

  “Anyone know who this mysterious fire escape user is?”

  “The witness says no,” Jacob said, hooking a thumb at the man talking to John. “He knows all right. He just ain’t saying.”

  “No murder weapon and no witness to the killing,” she said, thinking aloud. Without either one she had nothing to go on. “We can ask around, maybe come back tonight when Zero Gee fills up again, and see if anyone remembers seeing Willie last night. Other than that, I don’t think I can do much until we have the autopsy report.”

  Jacob nodded. Chris noted a knife lying nearby and untouched. She bent to examine it but kept her hands well away from it. It was clean of blood and was obviously not the murder weapon. A butterfly knife like this one couldn’t take someone’s head, not without a lot of sawing.

  “I’ll track down the third guy and see what he has to say, but without the murder weapon…” she shrugged, leaving the obvious unsaid. The case would go cold quickly and end in the archives with so many other unsolved cases.

  Jacob nodded unhappily and led his apprentice patrolman away. Chris watched him go remembering tagging along behind Baines as Goodchilde was doing. She had learned a lot from him.

  She left the knife where it was for the CSI guys and their robotic probes to investigate, and went back to Lenny. She frowned at the wound. What type of animal could do that with a single munch? Could a wolf really do that much damage with a single neat bite? She needed to look into bite radius and pressure. There were reference texts for that sort of thing. A cat shifter of some kind might be a better fit. Lion? She had never heard of one in this state, but there was a first time for everything in this crazy town. Other cities had them, tigers too; she knew that.