The Dead Wolves: An Ashwood Novel (Cursed and Damned Book 1)

by Lee Dignam

  Too easy, it said, not right.

  Was she making a mistake? Was she running into a trap? These people looked organized, and the men wearing the suits were also carrying guns—she could see the bulges in their underarms. If there was one thing she had come to learn about Ashwood, it was that evil people always got what they wanted, and the people who would dare stand in the way were likely to expire.

  Hesitation weaseled its way deeper into her belly, but the image of those women huddled in the back of that trailer—scared, and cold, and dirty—turned her conviction to steel. She crossed the road, coming now in full view of the men. One of the suits tapped the other on the shoulder, and both guys stared over toward Cyanide. She didn’t return their gaze, only walked with her hands in her jacket pockets, her eyes low to the ground while still keeping them in her periphery.

  “Hey,” one of the men said, “You lost, pretty lady?”

  Cyanide ignored him and kept walking.

  “It’s a little late to be out, don’t you think? Need a ride somewhere?”

  One of the suits broke off from the pack to intercept her while the others mobilized, like jackals sensing a quick, easy meal. The way he was walking, he would cross her path in front while the others circled around behind, boxing her in. If she were any other woman, the chances of her joining the others in the back of that truck would have just leapt past one hundred percent. She would become another statistic on a crime report no one would ever take action upon; just another number to add to the tally of women gone missing in the city in the last couple of months.

  But she wasn’t just another woman; they were jackals, but out here, she was a lioness.

  Cyanide stopped and turned her eyes up to the man crossing in front of her. “You got the time, mister?” she asked.

  The suit checked his watch—it was shiny, and fancy. “Two in the morning,” he said, “Where you headed?”

  “Nowhere. Just out looking for a good time. You got a smoke?”

  He waved at the guy with the overalls, and he came up with the pack of smokes. From where she was now standing, she counted another man, the truck driver. She could see his hand lazily draped out of the side door, a cigarette burning in his fingers, tresses of smoke rising and dancing from the burning tip. She could hear his heart beat from here, just like she could hear the hearts of the other three men, pumping faster and harder now as they circled around Cyanide. They were all human.

  The man in the overalls—the name tag embroidered into his clothes identified him as Peter—handed a cigarette over. Peter smelled like a garage—all motor oil, sweat, and grease. The other two, the ones in the suits, looked like they were each worth a million dollars. Faint clouds of expensive cologne clung to them. They were cleanly shaven, and wore their hair the same way—neat, trim, and parted to the right.

  Cyanide took the cigarette, held it between her lips, and allowed Peter to light it. But just as soon as the tongue of flame jumped to life in his hands, Peter jerked away and dropped the lighter, sending it clattering to the floor.

  “What the fuck?” he asked, almost jittering.

  The man in the suit closest to Cyanide turned his eyes on Peter. “You fucking moron,” he said, “Can’t light a cigarette?”

  But Peter was too stunned to speak. In that instant—as the flame had illuminated Cyanide’s sparkling gray eyes, her cheeks as white as milk, her lips full and red—he had seen past the surface. He had gazed into the eyes of death itself, and realized he had been standing too close to it. With a look, she had rendered him almost entirely useless, and now she had her chance.

  The suit was distracted. With one quick move, she had closed her hand around his chin, pulled his head up, and plunged her fangs deep into his neck. Hot blood burst into her mouth, like the juice from the first bite into a grape, and she drank deeply from him while Peter watched, unable to do much besides blubber and mumble.

  “Oh shit!” the other suit yelled. He reached for his gun and drew it. Cyanide turned and put her victim between herself and the three bullets the gun spat out. His body convulsed with each hit, sending bubbles of blood spurting out of his mouth.

  Cyanide ran with him into the arms of the man holding the gun, sending them both to the ground beneath her and immediately switched to clamping her teeth down on the neck of the healthier man. She could feel her body warming now, her dead heart starting to beat as his blood made its way through her cold, black veins and brought her organs back to life.

  He fought her, feebly, waving his arms and trying to grab fistfuls of her hair, but his eyes rolled back into his skull and the fight ebbed out of his arms until there was nothing left. When she was done, she pulled her fangs away from his neck, licked her flush, red lips… and found herself staring into the business end of a shotgun.

  At the other end, a name tag with a smiley face on it read Bernie.

  “Fucking vamp bitch,” Bernie said.

  When he pulled the trigger, she saw the explosion begin to burst out of the tube almost in slow motion. With a quick roll to the right, she put herself out of harm’s way before even a single pellet could touch her. The suit on the ground, though, got it full in the chest. A cloud of blood sprayed up into the air as the tiny metal shards tore into his skin, killing him instantly.

  Using the momentum from her supernatural speed, Cyanide grabbed the shotgun and yanked it out of his hands with ease. Bernie’s eyes widened as she drove the butt of the gun into his nose with a loud crack, and he went down hard, clutching his broken, bloody nose. When Cyanide turned around, the other two men were also sprawled on the sidewalk; the trailer was secure.

  With her heart now thumping hard inside her chest, she approached the doors and pulled the lock free with her bare hands, but the truck was empty and dark. There wasn’t a soul inside.

  “No,” she said, “No, no, where are the girls?”

  She hopped inside and quickly moved into the depths of the trailer, hoping to find something, anything, but it was as quiet as death in there. She allowed her sense of smell a second to adjust, to filter out the stink of the exhaust and metal, and hone in on human smells—sweat, tears, anything that would hint at the presence of women here at some point tonight.

  Nothing.

  “Fuck!” she yelled, sending her voice echoing throughout the trailer. There were never any women here.

  She rushed out of the trailer, circled around it, and clasped the driver’s collar. His mouth and chin were covered in blood, but despite the damage to his nose, he had a smirk on his face like a man with a secret; one she didn’t think he would part with easily.

  “Where are they?” she asked, growling into his face.

  The driver laughed. “Fuck you,” he said, spitting a glob of blood into her face.

  Headlights flooded the street, and Neo’s red Trans Am appeared, gleaming beneath the streetlights. He brought it to a halt behind the trailer and stepped out into the night. A quick glance at the open doors and Cyanide’s face, and he knew, too, that the women weren’t here.

  “Hold him down,” Neo said.

  Cyanide nodded, stood upright, and pressed her boot against the driver’s chest.

  “This was a ruse?” Neo asked.

  Cyanide nodded. “What happened to the car?”

  “I lost it.”

  “So, the girls…”

  “They’re somewhere else.”

  She turned her head down and stared at the driver. “He got a shot off with his gun. Someone may have heard it. We should probably get out of here.”

  “You go and wait in the car. I’m gonna get some answers from this guy.”

  “You won’t get him to talk.”

  “I don’t need him to.”

  Neo walked past her without as much as a second glance. It occurred to her now that she had started to shake, to tremble at the thought that they had gone through all this, spent weeks trying to find this drop point, and for what? An empty trailer. Her thoughts went to those women, scared an
d alone, trapped in some dark place with no one to help them.

  It didn’t matter what she did; bad guys always got what they wanted.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A single, weak light bulb hung in the center of a damp room with bare, concrete floors and walls. The light struggled to illuminate the farthest corners of the small, square room, but served its purpose where it stood, throwing its light on the table in the center. On it were a number of papers, dossiers, and a large map of Ashwood. One plastic layer draped over the map highlighted its jagged sewer system with a series of black lines, another plastic layer showed the many paths its metro underground travelled, with different colors to represent each line.

  The underground wasn’t exactly how the members of the Dead Wolves organization preferred to travel, but when you were part of a group charged with upholding Crimson’s legacy, sworn to fight against the Count and his bullshit, it was important to know Ashwood’s underbelly intimately—just in case you needed to get out of a tight spot in a hurry. These were uncertain times, and uncertain times called for unconventional methods to be adopted.

  Neo stepped into the light with Cyanide behind him. Daniel was waiting on the other side of the table, pouring over a number of papers and files.

  “Dammit,” he said, slapping the dossier shut and dropping it on the table. “How did this happen?”

  “Your intel was wrong,” Neo said.

  “It wasn’t wrong. It couldn’t have been. My sources were airtight.”

  “So, where are the girls?”

  Daniel scanned the table in silence. Despite the natural darkness, this man seemed to shine as if possessed of his own, inner luminosity. But it wasn’t light that was coming through; he was just stunningly handsome. More so even than Neo, Cyanide thought, and Daniel wasn’t exactly her type, with his suits and his clean shave. Yet, there was a kind of magnetic quality to Daniel even she had a hard time escaping.

  “Somewhere here,” Daniel said, “In one of these files, is the name of someone who either fed me the wrong intel, or told them we would be coming.”

  Cyanide picked one of the dossiers up and opened it. “Hank Matheson,” she said, reading the file belonging to a bald man with a number of prison tattoos on his face—tear drops, spider webs, skulls. “Ex-convict, sentenced to three life terms for a triple homicide. Says here he’s an informant on the south side. How the hell is he out of prison if he was charged with three life terms?”

  “I have connections,” Daniel said.

  “Okay, but why do you have him in your employ? He doesn’t exactly seem trustworthy.”

  “Neither do you.”

  Her eyebrows raised, surprised by his bluntness, but she didn’t reply.

  “The people he killed were working for a drug baron who had been selling fake heroin in the city,” Daniel continued, “One of the victims was the baron himself. A lot of people died because of what he’d been doing. Hank did the deed and took the fall so the police would close the case and stop poking around. Something may have led them back to me—to our kind—and neither of us wanted that.”

  Cyanide closed the file and let it rest on the table again. “So, you trust this guy?”

  “I do,” Daniel said, “I trust all of the people in these files, which is why I can’t understand where we went wrong. I can’t find the damn leak.”

  “Maybe you’re looking too closely,” Neo said, his voice not rising far above a whisper. This was the way Neo spoke—little, and quietly.

  “Too closely?” Daniel asked, “What do you mean?”

  Neo picked another file up, but Cyanide got the impression he wasn’t truly reading what was on it. “Someone here has been bought out.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “These people aren’t martyrs; they’re slaves to money, and slaves only want more money. Someone knew who to buy.”

  Daniel considered Neo from across the table, narrowing his eyes. “Say you’re right,” Daniel said, “Which one is it? Were we fed bad intel, or did they know we were coming?”

  “The latter,” Cyanide said. “One of them called me a vamp bitch. I fed off one of them, but a human who didn’t know about us wouldn’t have stood and fought, they would have run. These guys knew what to expect tonight.”

  “Dammit,” Daniel said, resting his hands on the table. “Now I’ve just got to figure out which one.”

  But there were easily ten files on the table; that meant ten people, ten potential Judases. Needless to say, if he had to go vetting each and every one of them, their entire operation would be slowed down to a halt. Meanwhile, those women were still out there somewhere, probably already going to wherever it was they were being taken. Cyanide shook her head and folded her arms in front of her chest.

  “So, they’re gone,” Cyanide said. “That’s it.”

  “They aren’t gone,” Daniel said, “They’re out there somewhere, and they still need our help.”

  “But we have no leads, no options, no choices, no trail to follow. How are we supposed to find one trailer full of women in a whole city with nowhere to look? It’s a needle in a haystack.”

  “Maybe, but we need to find that needle. Women are going missing every single day, and we know they end up as property.”

  “That isn’t exactly new news.”

  “You don’t get it. Maybe the idea of human trafficking isn’t new, but it’s the number of women who are being snatched up by the people running this operation that set alarm bells ringing in my ears. As many as two or three a night.”

  “A night? How can you know that?”

  “I have sources.”

  “What, like the guy who sold us out to the people behind this?”

  “They won’t all be compromised.”

  “Like hell they won’t. What you’re trying to do, end this whole thing, it’s impossible. There are always going to be assholes looking to exploit the vulnerable, and there isn’t a damn thing you or I can do to stop it.”

  “Not with that attitude we won’t.”

  “Daniel, we have been looking for these girls for weeks, and we’re no closer to finding her than we were at the beginning.”

  The room fell silent all of a sudden, like the calm after a storm—or the calm before a storm. Cyanide wasn’t sure which would come after her outburst. She was only aware that she’d made one, and had derailed the entire conversation in doing so. But she was right, wasn’t she? Daniel had told her he had spent weeks collecting the intel they used tonight, and for what?

  “We can’t help you,” Cyanide said, risking a cautious step into the silence. “This isn’t what the Dead Wolves are about.”

  “And what are they about?” Daniel asked, “Because I thought we were freedom fighters.”

  “Freedom for vampires, Daniel. This is something else entirely. You’re asking us to try and help you put a stop to human trafficking.” Cyanide turned searching eyes toward Neo, silently asking for help—for backup—but finding none. He was stoic in his silence, unmovable and unemotional, like a statue.

  Daniel’s jaw clenched tightly. She could see the disappointment in his eyes, the pain, but this hurt her, too. She hated the thought, the image, of what might be going on right now just as much as he did, only she knew how to separate reality from fantasy. It didn’t seem to her that Daniel could draw a line between the two; he was stuck in the fantasy.

  “I’m not giving up on her,” Daniel said, “And I won’t let you try and convince me to give up. Don’t you see what’s happening here? Can’t you see the bigger picture?”

  “What’s happening here?” Cyanide asked.

  “These women aren’t being sold to humans—they’re being sold to vampires. That’s why the trailer came out of a Court safe-house. These women will be sold to the highest bidder and become blood dolls, slaves, or worse.”

  “And you expect us to, what, save all of them?”

  “What are we if we don’t try?”

  “I’m a realist. You hire
d us to do a job, and we’ve done it.”

  “Guess you’ll want to get paid,” he said, after a pause, and with a hint of disdain in his voice.

  Cyanide nodded, though it took her a moment to do so. She had considered leaving without asking for the money—it was bad manners to kick a man while he was down—but the truth was she needed it. Badly. Not getting paid wasn’t an option for her, and since she had just risked her neck for him, she wasn’t about to leave without it.

  “Tell you what,” Daniel said, drawing himself up and tugging on his suit jacket. “You want to get out of here, don’t you? If you stay in my employ for another couple of days, I’ll pay you enough to get you out of Ashwood. Wherever you want to go, I’ll make sure you get there safely.”

  Neo turned his head to the side, glancing at Cyanide, curiosity now clearly visible in his eyes. But he didn’t speak.

  “You can’t guarantee that,” Cyanide said, narrowing her eyes.

  “I have money. Plenty of it. Enough for you to disappear if you wanted to.”

  Cyanide became aware of Neo’s eyes on her in the same way one knows they’re being watched by a shadow. The urge to turn toward him, pushed on by the hot blood running through her veins, became almost too difficult to resist, but she resisted anyway. She hadn’t told Neo of her plan to leave Ashwood, to get the fuck out of this God-forsaken place, but the cat was out of the bag now.

  “Just like that?” she asked, “You can just do that?”

  Daniel nodded. “All you have to do is give me more time. I need your help, Cyanide.”

  “Look, I… I don’t…”

  “Don’t answer yet,” Daniel said. He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a money roll, which he tossed over to Cyanide. “Your cut for tonight.”

  Cyanide stared at the money in her hands like it was covered in blood, then stuffed it into her jeans where she wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. “Thanks,” she said, “But if I don’t answer you, then I don’t work for you anymore.”

  “I know.”

  “So, I’m just going to go home,” she said, staring over at Daniel like she needed permission to leave, “And that’s the end of tonight.”