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

by Lee Dignam

  “Do you really think it’ll be better out there? Somewhere else?”

  “Maybe. There have to be cities not entirely overrun by vampires somewhere.”

  “Think again. Vampires are parasites; where there’s humans in large numbers, we go.”

  “So, then I’ll go to a small town.”

  “You expect me to believe that you’ll settle in a small town? You, of all people?”

  Cyanide frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You like trouble. You can complain all you want, but I know you live for the thrill of the fight, of the hunt.”

  “So?”

  “So, I know you’ll get bored of a small town. Have you ever tried living in one? It’s unbearable even as a human. There’s nothing to do, everyone gets up in your business, everybody knows each other. Those are not the kind of qualities hospitable to a vampire.”

  “You don’t get it.”

  “No, you don’t get it.” Neo was staring at her now, his eyes burning with intensity and glimmering like black pearls in the dimness. He never raised his voice unless he meant business, and whether she was full with human blood or not, it set her body alight every time he did.

  “This thing we’re doing,” he continued, “The women going missing, it’s bigger than you think. I know it is. And if you abandon us now, you aren’t just giving up on hope, you’re condemning people to death.”

  “What… do you mean?” Cyanide asked, daring the question carefully.

  “There’s a girl that went missing a couple of weeks ago who is… important to Daniel.”

  “Important? How?”

  “She’s a blood relative. A living blood relative.”

  “Oh… Christ.”

  “He’s been looking for her, scouring the city, spending every penny he has, tapping every contact he’s ever made to try and find her. Tonight was his best shot at finding her since he started the whole process.”

  “I had no idea… why didn’t he say something?”

  Neo’s voice softened now. “He isn’t that kind of guy and you know it,” he said. “He didn’t want to say anything until there was something to say.”

  “And, but I mean, is he sure she was taken?”

  “Yeah, he is. He’s been keeping tabs on her for years—all of his real, human family. He watches over them, makes sure they have the things they need. His great-granddaughter wasn’t the kind of girl to just get up and leave or disappear. She was taken.”

  “Great-granddaughter…” Cyanide said, letting the word trail off. She couldn’t remember her parents, couldn’t remember anything before the first night she became a vampire—the night Neo found her in an alley, abandoned on a pile of trash like an unloved cat. Her memory was in tatters, she could barely remember how to speak, let alone her own name or that of her living relatives.

  “You need to help him find her,” Neo said.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I’d be a dick if I didn’t. I already feel like a dick for the way I acted toward him back there. He should have just told me.”

  “Does it change anything?”

  “I… don’t know,” she said, letting her eyes fall on the ocean. “I still don’t want to stay here, and I think we’re fighting a losing battle... where would we even start, anyway? Daniel doesn’t have any more leads, and finding a new one could take time.”

  Neo checked the time on his wristwatch, then peered out the driver’s side window. “Dawn will break in about an hour,” he said.

  “Shouldn’t we be heading back?” Cyanide asked.

  “Just wait…”

  Cyanide now stretched her neck over Neo’s shoulder to get a look at where his eyes were pointed. From here, the city dominated the horizon—tall, twinkling skyscrapers reached out to touch the low-hanging clouds painted gold with the lights from the city beneath them. It was a beautiful sight, really; she had to admit as much. Cities called to a primal part of her, the part that craved safety in numbers and protection from the dark. Even now, as a monster, she could feel the call in her chest and wondered what life away from a city would be like.

  Maybe not better, maybe not worse, but definitely different. And after years of struggling through shit and mud, she was ready for different.

  “What are we—?” she started to ask, but then she saw it. A beam of light grew from the mouth of a tunnel she couldn’t possibly have seen in the dark; attached to them, an eighteen-wheeler was trawling slowly up a short stretch of winding road.

  Neo started the car.

  “No way,” Cyanide said, her eyes wide now. “Is that—”

  “The trailer we’re looking for?” Neo asked. “I don’t know, but maybe.”

  “Bullshit. How do you know?”

  Neo said nothing. He put the car in reverse, pulled it back onto the road, and began to close the distance between the Trans Am and the trailer. Less than a minute later, they were following the trailer along a narrow road nestled between tall rocks and the ocean. She had no idea how he knew about this, but that didn’t matter now. All that mattered were the contents of that vehicle.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Neo had killed the lights and was following the trailer at a distance, using the natural rocky terrain to mask his approach. Cyanide’s heart, still enlivened by the human blood in her body, began to pound inside her chest, thrashing like a wild animal inside a cage. She leaned back into her seat to try and calm her nerves, but it didn’t help. There was only one way she would be rid of this anxiety, and that was by ripping those metal doors open and knowing if it was the trailer they were looking for, or just another decoy.

  “Now what, Neo?”

  “Now we’re going to follow the trailer until it enters the city.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Why aren’t we going for it right now?”

  “Because if we attack out here and something goes wrong, we’ll be stuck without shelter when the sun comes up in less than an hour. In the city, we have a chance at finding somewhere dark in a hurry.”

  “Shit. I don’t want to end up in the sewers again.”

  “This won’t be like that.”

  Cyanide pulled her eyes away from the trailer and looked at Neo. “How do you know? How did you even know this trailer would be out here?”

  “I didn’t; I only had a hunch.”

  “A hunch? Why couldn’t you have had that hunch earlier?”

  “Look, I need you to just trust me.” He turned his eyes on her. “Do you trust me?”

  She swallowed her apprehension and nodded. “I do.”

  Neo nodded, turned his eyes back onto the road, and gripped the steering wheel more tightly, the leather driving gloves squeaking against the wheel itself. After another couple of minutes driving on the small side road, the trailer veered off onto one of the main veins of traffic, and Neo followed. But here there were no rocks, no bends in the road, and nowhere to hide. Being exposed like this tore Cyanide’s gut to ribbons and made her heart start leaping inside her chest.

  Then the trailer began to speed up.

  Without saying a word, he flicked the Trans Am’s headlights on and shifted the car into higher gear, pressing down on the gas to close the gap between the car and the trailer. Cyanide watched the eighteen-wheeler getting bigger and bigger, then turned her eyes to Neo, who was already looking at her. He nodded, and she started to climb out the window.

  The wind grabbed her hair and pulled it back. The air out here smelled of exhaust, asphalt, and burnt rubber, and as she climbed onto the hood of the moving car, she thought she could hear swearing coming from the front of the trailer—voices caught by the draft and delivered to her ears.

  Neo brought the car as close as he could to the back of the eighteen-wheeler. Cyanide lifted herself to her knees first, then planted one boot on the hood, readying herself to make the jump, but the trailer’s driver had another idea and hit the brakes. Neo swerved, tires screeching, and Cyanide reached fo
r the sides of the car to stop herself from being whipped into the road.

  It took him an instant to regain control of the car, but when he did, they had started to overshoot the trailer itself and had pulled up alongside the cab. Cyanide turned her head up and, for the second time tonight, found herself looking at the business end of a gun thrown over the driver’s arm. She narrowed her eyes, grabbed hold of the Trans Am’s side with both hands, and used the momentum to launch herself at the cab.

  The gun spat a bullet and Cyanide’s torso swallowed it, but she didn’t miss her mark. Reaching out with her hands, she grabbed hold of the side of the cab and shimmied through the gap between it and the trailer. She pulled herself up and looked through the back window just as the gun went off a second time. Only, this time, they weren’t firing at her—they were firing at Neo’s car. Both the driver and his passenger had their guns trained out the window.

  She pulled herself up above the cab and threw her eyes along the length of the eighteen-wheeler. She thought of running along the length of the trailer and opening the door, but with the trailer still moving, where would the girls go, assuming they were in there?

  “Goddammit,” Cyanide said, and put her fist through the back window, causing it to shatter into a hundred pieces.

  The man in the passenger seat turned his gun on her and fired off a blast, but she was too quick for him. She threw her head to the left and avoided being hit. While he reloaded, she reached into the cab, grabbed the gun and broke his nose with it. Hot blood shot out of his face in all directions, covering the seat and the ceiling. The man screamed and grabbed his nose to try and stop the bleeding. By the time the driver turned his head to see what was going on, Cyanide had slipped around the side of the cab and opened the door. She grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him out, letting him fall to the road, bouncing and rolling to a chorus of tires screeching from the few cars around and behind the semi.

  She then slipped into the driver’s seat, held onto the wheel, and brought the vehicle under control. The man next to her was still screaming. He threw a punch, but Cyanide grabbed his hand, twisted it, and broke his arm. An instant later, he passed out, and the screaming stopped. Neo and his Trans Am pulled up alongside the trailer now and pointed straight ahead. He maneuvered the car into position in front of the semi and sped up.

  Cyanide called him and pressed her phone to her ear.

  “You ever driven one of these before?” Neo asked.

  “Nope,” Cyanide said.

  “Alright. Just keep it slow and we’ll be fine.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  The trailer proved to be a stubborn mule on the road, but Cyanide was more than up to the task—provided she didn’t have to shift gears or take any sharp turns. Luckily, Neo didn’t speed off too far ahead, and Cyanide was able to keep pace and navigate Ashwood’s industrial district, though her heart continued to thump viciously inside of her chest throughout the entire trip. One wrong move and the whole thing could have toppled over, and if there were any girls in the back, they would be no longer.

  Neo led Cyanide into an area of warehouses, factories, and towering cranes. The whole place smelled of grease and soot. Many of the buildings here seemed to have been abandoned decades ago, especially the warehouses. Some factories, too, had their windows boarded up and were surrounded by perimeter fences with ominous DO NOT TRESPASS; BEWARE OF DOGS signs slapped on them.

  When he finally brought the Trans Am to a halt, it was to the side of a warehouse with its large, main door thrown wide open. There were three people standing outside, one of whom Cyanide recognized immediately as Daniel. She slowed the trailer down gradually, then guided the vehicle through the large doors and into the mostly empty warehouse. When she ran out of space to maneuver, she killed the engine, and let her head rest.

  “Good job,” Neo said over the phone, and he hung up.

  A smile swept across Cyanide’s face, but her stomach turned inside out almost immediately, causing the smile to fade. The women. She opened the cab door and jumped down. The warehouse was huge and dimly lit. There were boxes piled up along the walls, and what looked like rooms down one side; rooms with no windows in them.

  She moved quickly toward the back of the trailer where she found Neo and Daniel, as well as two humans, waiting. One of the humans had a set of industrial wire cutters in his hands. He brought it up to the padlock on the trailer door, then clipped the padlock in half, sending it clattering to the ground. Daniel hesitated, then reached for the door and opened it.

  A heady aroma of sweat, tears, and even some blood came wafting out of that dark compartment. Like animals afraid of the light, the women in the back sank even deeper into the shadows, shying away from the people at the door. Maybe they thought Daniel was a buyer, and that the people around him were going to do despicable things to them.

  “Oh, Jesus…” Cyanide said, her hand rising to her mouth. “We found them.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  One by one, Daniel’s team of people brought the women out of the trailer. Medical stations had been set up inside the warehouse, as had cleaning stations and areas with clothes for the women to wear. This had been the place the women would have been brought to earlier had the trailer not been a decoy. The fact that people were still here, with only half an hour before dawn, was a testament to Daniel’s resolve to see this through.

  In truth, Cyanide’s own self-preservation instincts were getting in the way of the elation she could feel building in her chest at having found the women. If she didn’t leave now, she wouldn’t make it back to her apartment before sunrise. And then what? The warehouse looked day-proof, but all it took was a single, stray beam of sunlight to touch her skin and poof, she would go up in flames like paper in a bonfire.

  She walked up beside Neo and counted the women as they came out. Thirty-three, in total. Thirty-three women had been shoved into the back of that trailer for countless hours, with nowhere to sit and nothing to eat. Many of them were filthy, covered in grime and dirt. Most of them had their hair cut short, and what hair there was seemed matted and dull. Some, it hurt to see, had bruises on their cheeks and arms.

  But at least they were here now and out of danger.

  “I almost can’t watch,” Cyanide said.

  “We have to,” Neo said, “This is what we’ve been fighting to stop. If we look away, we’re no better than the people who did this.”

  Daniel came up to the duo of vampires with his hands in his pockets. He turned his eyes up, but shook his head. “She isn’t here,” he said. “Wherever she is, she wasn’t in the truck.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cyanide said. “Neo told me…”

  Daniel nodded. “I know. But we’ll be able to help these women, at least, so that’s something.”

  “Yeah… I guess you’re right. Where are they going now?”

  “Safe houses. They’ll get checked out by the doc, they’ll be given new clothes, a chance to clean up, then we’ll take them somewhere safe and leave them with the promise of delivering a brand of justice cops can’t deliver. Some of them aren’t American, so getting them back to their homelands will be tricky since they were smuggled into the country.”

  “And… your girl?”

  “I’ll just have to keep looking,” he said, shrugging.

  Cyanide nodded. “Maybe one of these women knows something about her.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping,” Daniel said, “But that’s for me to figure out. You’ve done enough.” He turned and faced the line of rooms built against the longest wall. “You can spend the day here if you want. It’s perfectly safe. The doors and walls are reinforced, each room can be locked from the inside, and the warehouse is under watch every hour of the day and night.”

  She turned her eyes toward the rooms and, somewhere deep inside herself, a voice of protest spoke up. Not safe, it said, not home. The voice had a point. This wasn’t her house. She wasn’t familiar with the area and didn’t exactly like the ide
a her place of rest would be watched at all hours of the day. She was sure Daniel had meant to sound reassuring, but the animal part of her that didn’t trust other vampires hadn’t heard it that way.

  Still, she nodded. “Thanks,” Cyanide said, “I appreciate it. Not like I would make it to my place before sun up anyway.”

  Daniel turned his head to Neo, cocked it to the side, and narrowed his eyes. “How did you know?” he asked, finally voicing the question Cyanide had been sitting on for a while.

  “I had a hunch,” he said, echoing what he had said in the car.

  “A hunch?” Daniel asked, pressing the issue, “That was a good fucking hunch. I need you to be straight with me.”

  “I didn’t know the truck would be there, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m asking. How did you know where to wait, and at what time?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Just tell us,” Cyanide said.

  He hesitated, then looked at Daniel. “Remember when I told you what I had learned from the guys operating the decoy trailer?”

  Daniel nodded. “Did you leave something out?”

  “Not exactly. I just pieced some of the things they said together and arrived at the hunch that led me to the overlook.”

  “What was the hunch?”

  “That the court is involved in this.”

  “The court?” Cyanide asked, “How do you know that?”

  “Because I used to be one of the court’s top internal affairs agents,” Neo said. Before anyone else could speak, he put one gloved hand up and continued. “The court has safe spots around the city, spots like this one. Places where vampires can operate the court’s after-hours enterprises away from prying eyes. I knew where all of these safe spots were. When I left the Count’s employ, I thought they would have changed their systems, moved things around, but I decided to go and check the only one I thought big enough to hold a trailer of women waiting to be smuggled into the city. Turns out my hunch was right.”