She’d seen a therapist twice up at the rez. Nick didn’t know about that, so maybe they were a little even about those new scars of his. But she had friends and connections—hell, she ran the hospital!
Rosa had pegged it, there was no doubt. Post-traumatic stress disorder. It manifested in different ways for different people. In her case, the bloodbath had led her to seek some kind of release, and apparently spending money gambling with little or no control fit the bill. PTSD affected soldiers most often, but civilians who’d survived catastrophic events came down with it too. As a doctor, she’d suspected it, but it was frustrating that she couldn’t make herself stop.
What happened to “Physician, heal thyself?”
Well, she couldn’t.
She moved her hand around gently and felt his muscles react, rippling slightly. He never really relaxed. She knew he was worried about Wolfpaw coming after them again. And that he felt guilty because it was his fault. And she suspected he himself suffered a form of PTSD.
Lately they’d just stopped connecting, but she was sure the problems stemmed from the same roots. She didn’t even consider Heather Wilson the worst of them.
Though if she ever saw that scheming nymphomaniac ever again, she’d…well, she had a stash of silver ammunition. And Nick had that old silver dagger.
Was that even still a real term, nymphomaniac?
What did they say these days? Sex addict?
She smiled into his shoulder. She’d just been a good little sex addict herself, not long before. She felt good and fucked. Fucked good.
She almost giggled.
Her hand moved in small circles, slowly enlarging them until she reached the part of his groin where…
Yes!
He stirred under her touch, and then Nick himself stirred too. She grinned.
He had a bad case to deal with, and lots of worries, and her own weird problems, and he needed his sleep. But right then, she needed what he had given her earlier even more.
He growled playfully and rolled over, taking her by surprise.
“Haven’t you had enough?”
She captured him with her long, slim fingers. “Actually, no.”
Her fluttering strokes grew more insistent. Now he lay sideways and faced her, and she felt him below, prodding her mound and sending electricity through her again.
She ran a long fingernail down the length of his resurrected penis until it shuddered on her, flirting with her lips. She smiled into his eyes. “Well, Mr. Lupo, I presume?”
“Uh huh,” he whispered.
“Meet your rescuer.” Her voice was husky with reawakened desire.
She pushed him gently onto his back and slid off the bed, kneeling in front of him. Her hands first massaged his thighs, then took hold of him.
“Jessie—” he began, but she cut him off.
“Shhh, let’s just concentrate on the now.”
“I have to be up in a couple hours…”
“Mr. Lupo, you seem to be up right now.”
Her lips encircled him, and then she was reminded of what those first times had been like, back when Martin Stewart had been on the hunt for them, and she made him forget about their current problems—and she forgot about her anger, too, she noted—for as long as she could. For as long as he could.
Afterwards, with both of them awake and alert, he mixed them a couple of his Midtown Manhattans, which they sipped sitting in his leather chairs set in front of his window, watching the wind whip tree branches around. Winter seemed to be coming early, and leaves had already started leaving the trees. The hardy mix of tastes in his invented drink warmed her belly, and their silence was a comfortable one after all the intimacy.
Lupo’s feet touched hers on the leather ottoman they shared.
“What if I ask Marcowicz about trauma and whether your gambling is related?”
She pulled her feet away from his.
“Marcowicz! You can’t even stand him.” Suddenly she felt cold again.
“Doesn’t mean he doesn’t know his stuff.”
“You do what you think is right,” she said, making clear she was done talking.
He sighed audibly.
In the morning she awoke refreshed, but then she remembered his little dig. And she heard him tune into the early local news and their report on the “brutal Third Ward murder,” and he said “Shit!” and jumped in the shower.
She rolled over, tears soaking into her pillow.
Sigfried
When he swung open the door to the secret room at the rear of his penthouse in the city, as always Margarethe took his breath away.
She’d entered his lair through the secret underground ramp and used the second private elevator, hidden in the rear of the 20,000 square-foot sky-high abode.
Encased in shiny, black PVC and rows of sharp studs, her full breasts thrust through openings in the plastic and her nipples engorged and lacquered in fire-red, she was the minx of his dreams. Her long, lean legs started from the stiletto heeled knee-high boots and swelled to her muscular thighs, between which the bare mound of her sex glistened with her desire literally dripping down the thin chain that hung from her sparkling labial ring.
Hair a golden honey, a full head of it framed a face highlighted by blood-red lips and blackened eye sockets half hidden behind a leather mask, before cascading down her plastic-corseted back down to exposed buttocks chiseled from flesh-colored marble. Her sleeveless tunic revealed muscular biceps tattooed with SS flashes on the left and an official tilted swastika on the right like an armband.
One spike-gloved hand held a bullwhip coiled like a snake ready to strike.
“Margarethe,” he whispered, his voice raspy with desire and lust. He wanted to taste the bite of that snake. He wanted to—
As soon as he entered and the door closed silently behind him, he saw that she did have someone with her even on such short notice. Probably one of her less talented trainees. Manacled to a tilted, grooved table. She was a slight girl, not well fed, but full-breasted, wrapped in a loose uniform tunic in Wehrmacht gray. Her eyes were only half open and glazed.
Stoned, Sigfried realized. She might be ready…
Her mouth was gagged with a short, black leather shaft tucked far back into her mouth like a horse’s bit.
His eyes roved over the luscious offering, then met Margarethe’s piercing blue eyes. With a raised eyebrow, she held out the bullwhip and he took it. It sent a shiver up his arm and down his back.
He unleashed the bullwhip, and its plaited leather length undulated lazily like a narrow snake, tongue flicking wickedly.
Crack!
A line of blood appeared on the girl’s abdomen, the skin parted by the leather tip as if with the flick of a scalpel.
Crack!
Another bloody rip appeared between the girl’s breasts. This time she reacted, whimpering around the gag as the pain finally registered.
He dropped the bullwhip. Foreplay could only last so long.
Margarethe’s gloved hand reached out, encircled Sigfried’s erection, and gently tugged him closer to where the bound girl writhed in a sudden effort to free herself. The sharp razor pain of the whip’s tip was stripping off the high of whatever drugs the lovely Mistress Margarethe had administered. When Sigfried was close enough, Margarethe’s other hand swung a hospital table around and brought it within range.
Sigfried’s cock twitched in Margarethe’s grip as he perused the silver instruments lined upon the red velour tray. Her fingers traveled lightly and cupped his balls, and he felt himself harden as his hand hovered indecisively over the selection and returned to grasp a long-handled scalpel with triangular blade.
“Ah, the number eleven,” Margarethe leaned in and whispered in his ear, her fingers tracing the veins on his cock with gentle pressure. “A very good choice.”
Sigfried’s breath came in short gasps, the stimuli gaining power over him. Margarethe knew his triggers. She knew his needs and his wants. She made sure his ey
es roved over her Nazi tattoos, her dripping red lips, and the bloody slits on the girl’s torso, then she applied just enough pressure to his groin and felt his excitement spike.
She knelt slowly beside him and took him into her mouth as he began to cut, the girl’s white skin a canvas for his inspiration. Thus thoroughly stimulated, Sigfried indulged in his art.
By the time he came, the girl was unrecognizable, and what was left of her bled out and down the table’s grooves, into the drain.
Chapter Six
Mordred
Seven years ago…
Occasionally, he sat in the chair they provided and did not roll around like a freak. Those were the times he could almost hear them scratching their heads, scribbling notes on their computers and pads. To be sure, they also scribbled when he flopped around. But he felt that somehow they were more mystified when his reactions didn’t fit their preconceptions.
He raised his head, painfully, and stared into the glass partition. He saw himself and marveled at how much of a stranger’s face it was.
His arm throbbed where they had stabbed him yet again with their needle. The throb started with a regular beat, but the tempo increased. He looked down and watched as his blue vein swelled in time to the throb. It pulsed and itched to the point where he needed to scratch the skin stretched like parchment over the blue snake. His hands shuddered in jagged little motions, and he felt his nails lengthen and enlarge into sharp claws.
Suddenly he screamed a full-mouthed scream.
The throb in his veins had become a stabbing-burning-lancing of white-hot fire.
The echo of his scream bouncing from the metal walls hurt his ears, but there was so much pain from inside the veins that snaked through his entire body that he couldn’t even feel it.
The liquid burning dug through every limb like a scalpel, scraping bone and muscle like a rusty file.
But his hands were trapped by aluminum bands not even his immense strength could snap, so the claws that craved to scratch the flaming fire infesting his veins could only flutter uselessly. The bands dug into his skin and added to the pain.
His screaming went on and on, until his throat was raw. And then he passed out, his head slumping down onto his chest with a suddenness that seemed final. As if he had expired.
Behind the viewing glass, Dr. Schlosser turned to his team of assistants.
“Note that once the pain has spread throughout his body, it subsides to the level at which he is able to withstand it.”
“Could it be he’s just so fatigued by the continuous pain that his passing out is a form of escape?” The assistant was fairly new, still wide-eyed at what he had seen and learned in this sublevel laboratory. His expertise in veterinary medicine and physiology had gotten him on the team, but his ruthlessly dangerous and subversive experiments since then kept him there.
“That’s what we thought until a couple years ago, Dr. Gavin,” Schlosser said, ignoring the slumped figure in the other room. “But we have fairly good evidence that the tolerance therapy works. We took an approach several generations ago that has led us to this day, a day in which a genetically manipulated werewolf has become much more tolerant of the one substance that would otherwise kill it.”
Schlosser turned to the bank of video monitors, recently updated along with the archival system so that decades’ worth of videotape now resided on hard drives. He keyed up a distorted video that slowly coalesced to show his test subject writhing in pain.
Of course, there were always those damnable daggers. He would come to understand them, in time. Right now, he could celebrate his unqualified success.
Celebrations were held in his playroom.
He was looking forward to it.
He was in the narrow streets of Falluja again, ducking gunfire from hidden AK-47s, knowing they’d targeted him even more because he was a contractor and not one of the “flags,” what the Wolfpaw people called American soldiers.
Then he was inside the dingy, barely stocked store, a family of terrified ragheads standing against the back wall. He turned his MP5K’s stubby muzzle to cover them while his fellow squad members fanned out behind him, and he heard them smashing the store’s wares.
“Where are the insurgents?” he shouted at the cringing locals. “The terrorists? Where are they?”
The family members shrugged, feigning a lack of understanding. The always did that when they didn’t like the questions. But he knew they understood his words well enough. Almost everybody in this country spoke some English.
“Where are you hiding them?” he shouted.
But they stared back, unresponsive and full of insolence.
He set down his submachine gun on the dirt floor, stripped off his flak jacket, and unbuttoned his desert cammies. The idiots stared at him as if he’d grown a second head.
Just wait!
Naked in front of them, his penis standing at attention, he repeated his questions. But the family was terrified now, mostly by this foreigner’s bizarre behavior. Perhaps they wondered if all foreigners were crazy. Insane.
He visualized himself changing, and then he felt the familiar tingle that traversed his veins from head to toe and made him feel as if were bursting. His erection might as well have been made of granite.
When the change took him over, the people’s screams excited him all the more.
He waded into them, claws and fangs slashing.
Blood flowed from severed heads, arm and leg stumps, and slit bellies. He was a blur of savagery, no longer caring about what they said, the answers to his questions, or even his mission. The beast ignored their pleas, their screams, their crying. All that mattered was their deaths. He had become an avenging angel, an executioner, driven by an instinctive need to maim, torture and kill.
And then he fed, eating his fill from each of his victims. He sampled from one, then another and another, and finally he left his mark on the territory and left his wolf form behind. He stood, naked, sated, and examined his handiwork.
Mordred retrieved his clothing and dressed, blinking under the harsh lighting. What he had seen earlier as a dingy Falluja mud-brick hovel of a store became something else altogether. The racks of surviving bottles and cans coalesced under his returning vision. Instead of a dirt floor, beneath his feet was a tiled pattern of black and white, now marred by broken glass, spilled liquor, and the bloody remains of everyone who had fallen prey to the beast.
He shook his head to clear it and wondered about the flashback. For the duration of his raging attack, he had been back in Iraq. It wasn’t the first time. Perhaps he needed to tell Sigfried about these flashbacks. They were occurring too often lately.
He destroyed the tapes from the security system. Then he flicked on the rest of the lights.
On his way out, he flipped the CLOSED sign around to COME IN, WE’RE OPEN.
Chapter Seven
Berlin Underground, 1944
The telephone trilled insistently inside the communications office of the bunker deep below the sidewalks of the Reichstrasse. At the switchboard desk, ready to make the connection, sat a buxom blonde Aryan in a smoke-gray uniform. Her manicured fingers manipulated the wires expertly. In less than a year, her job would be done by gray-haired men in rumpled, stained uniforms devoid of rank insignia, the last remaining few of the Führer’s last guard detail. But now, for a fleeting moment at least, business as usual seemed to be occurring in the busy underground headquarters of the SS Special Units Division.
Obergruppenführer Helmut vonStumpfahren plucked the receiver from its cradle when the blonde’s connection came through and buzzed his office phone. He looked to be in his forties—a hardy, handsome man with leonine salt and pepper hair and a serpentine burn scar on his left cheek.
“Ja,” he barked into the receiver. “I was awaiting your call.”
Recently promoted to full general, vonStumpfahren was the commanding officer of the top secret Werwolf Division of the SS, a unit known to exist only by a half dozen of
ficers from Heinrich Himmler’s staff, and, of course, by the nearly five thousand recruits who had secretly trained in the Bavarian Alps for the glorious last defense of the Fatherland. He had been added to the staff of the Führer’s command bunker to coordinate the division’s deployment in the face of the predicted enemy advance on the capital. The pincers from Italy and Normandy were closing in, and his job would be to pull the trigger on the various outlying units’ assignments in other quadrants of the Fatherland and its annexed territories.
Those quadrants and territories shrank by the day, if one but checked the situation room maps, but no one wished to point out the obvious to the Führer.
Not when he was just as likely to order one’s summary execution for the treason of speaking the truth. But the General’s belief in his various projects included the conviction that all was not lost. Not if the Werwolf Division was deployed correctly. All would not be lost.
Not for him, anyway.
Currently the pressure of the Führer’s expectations and confidence weighed on him greatly. He fingered the “Spezial-SS” flashes on his collar, the lightning bolts woven through a silver wolf’s head—only a handful of officers knew its meaning, but everyone knew he was one of few who had the ear of both Himmler and the Führer himself. He also wore the black uniform and Totenkopf—death’s head—sleeve diamond insignia, the result of which was the abject fear of anyone he approached, for they would gather from the unusual symbols that his rank was special. And therefore to be greatly feared.
Now vonStumpfahren listened as the caller outlined the readiness of some of those units. He tapped his fingers on the desk impatiently, waiting for the long list to end. “What about the Götterdämmerung Projekt? How is the readiness?”
The voice at the other end whined that he was not directly aware of the situation, offering profuse excuses for the lack of detail.
“Damn you,” vonStumpfahren whispered, “how dare you waste my time without the information I require?”
There was a moment’s silence, then the excuses began again. The general hung up, cutting off the obsequious voice.
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