The area was dark and damp, but it was also a lot more roomy than I’d expected.
I reached out to feel the area and wasn’t all that happy with what I was sensing.
Werewolves.
If my radar was right, there were about fifteen of them, including the guy who’d led us down here.
He’d be the first to die.
“Welcome, Mr. Dex,” said Mr. Werewolf as he stepped out into the light. I held my trigger finger back. “I have to say that I didn’t expect you’d actually follow me into a null zone, but I was hoping you would.”
“Where’s Rachel?” was all I cared to say in response.
“Not here,” he answered with a teasing grin. “But she won’t matter to you anyway, unless you get past us, of course.”
I frowned at him. “Call me dumb—”
“Okay,” he said quickly.
“—but is this some kind of game to you?”
“Most certainly,” Werewolf-boy said, nodding. “We call it the challenge game. It helps us to know who is truly at the top of the heap. And you’re the perfect candidate for helping us with this because we all know what you are, Mr. Dex.”
“And what’s that, exactly?”
He tilted his head. “An amalgamite, of course. We also know that you’re one of a kind. This means that we, as werewolves, wish to test our mettle against you.” He then looked over Harvey and Leland. “Your friends can play, too, of course, but they’re not really going to be much trouble. We’ll dispose of them quickly.” He then studied Harvey again. “He may be a bit of a struggle, I’ll admit, but your James Bond lookalike should have informed his next of kin before entering the area.”
I ignored that. “And what if I refuse to participate in your challenge game?”
“Then you’ll die and so will Officer Cress.”
Right, so I had to allow a bunch of werewolves to test themselves against me in order to get to Rachel. I didn’t know if they had any expectations about me dropping Boomy and doing this in a hand-to-hand fashion, but that wasn’t going to happen.
“And so we start with killing everyone in here?” I said, letting my senses flow. “Is that right?”
“If you can, Mr. Dex,” he replied smugly. “If you c—”
That’s all he got out before Boomy ended his thought process.
An instant later, there were wolves jumping at us from all angles.
I’d taken down three of them almost as fast as they appeared, but the rest were coming in quicker than I could manage. At this rate, Boomy would become nothing more than a club.
Harvey had morphed partially into werebear mode, which looked truly ridiculous since his Holmes outfit was still on his person. My guess was that his precious new outfit wasn’t magically protected from shredding. He must have either known this or was worried about it because he should have completed the switchover by now.
I rolled back as a werewolf launched at me, aiming for where I’d been a moment before. A round from Boomy squelched his menacing thoughts, but another wolf was already on my leg, working to tear into my flesh. Fortunately, I was not that easy to rip apart. It still hurt like hell to be bitten, sure, but it wasn’t like the doggy was going to do too much damage. This became even more true as I pressed Boomy against its head, yelled, “Quit biting me, you fucker,” and pulled the trigger.
Harvey roared and threw two wolves with such force that they thudded against a wall and slid down with lifeless eyes. Trails of blood smeared the concrete behind them.
Leland was also holding his own, and he was true to his word.
The man could shoot.
I’d always prided myself on being quite the marksman, but this guy was in a class all by himself. He was firing that PPK as if it were an extension of his person. Honestly, it was mesmerizing to watch, which was a problem because another werewolf slammed into my side and did its best to bite my head off.
If you’ve ever smelled the breath of an aging Chihuahua, take that and multiply it by ten. Then, get that stench all slobbered into your hair and your five-thousand-dollar suit. Finally, let those stinky teeth fight to prick your skin.
Now, how do you think that would make you feel?
It pissed me off.
“Son of a bitch,” I yelled as I pried the nasty jaws from my head. “Gingivitis much?” I said while angrily shoving Boomy into the beast’s mouth and pulling the trigger.
That wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had, seeing that I was covered in its nastiness within seconds.
“Ah!”
I looked back to see that Leland was grappling with one of the wolves, and he wasn’t very good at it, either. In fact, I would go as far as to say that Leland didn’t know how to fight at all. Mostly, he just lay on his back, slamming his fists against the creature’s head as if he were playing the bongos. It was so bad that the werewolf started laughing.
Harvey, on the other hand, had dropped a few more of the doggies, leaving only two left…aside from the one that Leland was basically petting.
“Harvey,” I yelled, pointing at Leland.
My partner leaped across the expanse and grabbed the wolf off the James Bond clone. Then he snapped its neck with a solid roar.
I tagged one of the two remaining wolves in the side of the head with perfectly placed shots from Boomy.
The final wolf had taken off into the shadows, but while I was definitely interested in chasing him and ending his ability to consume oxygen, I couldn’t help but feel we’d just be running into another trap.
No, it was time to regroup, especially since I now had a little more information to go on.
“Aren’t we going to chase him, Chief?” Harvey asked, his voice a little deeper than usual. “He’ll get away.”
“No need,” I said as I tucked Boomy back into his holster. “We know what they want now and that means they’re not going to hurt Rachel until they get it.”
“You?” asked Leland with a nod as he worked to remove the saliva from his hair. His hands were cut up pretty bad. “They want you.”
“Yep,” I sighed as I also did my best to scrape the goop from my person.
Honestly, I should either choose a different line of work or I should start dressing like Warren. At least then I wouldn’t give a damn about getting covered in all this crap.
Chapter 15
We walked back out of the null zone and up the stairs that took us back to Craven Street.
I had enough information to go on at this point to make me believe that Rachel wasn’t going to be killed unless I was killed. While I had no intention of dying, I felt better knowing that these wolves all wanted to challenge me. Okay, maybe “felt better” isn’t the right way to to put it. The point was that I understood their perspective. They were always looking to see who was the top-dog in the bunch. If one of them bested me, he or she would be the alpha for some time to come. The dogs were smart about it, too. They knew I’d come to Rachel’s aid, which meant they were all in on this challenge game of theirs. It gave me little choice but to participate.
That made me raise an eyebrow at myself. Sometimes my self-talk was less than helpful.
Sniff.
The word came into my mind out of nowhere. It was another one of Gabe the Vampire’s little treats, just like Time and Flashes had been. Also like those, there was no user manual with this one.
Sniff, it came again.
“What do we do now, Chief?” asked Harvey.
We were just standing at the top of the stairs, staring down toward where The Sherlock Holmes restaurant sat.
“I say we go back to the PPD and gather our wits about us,” suggested Leland as he dabbed a handkerchief against his bloodied lip.
Harvey seemed to agree. “You guys got a vending machine there?”
“Quite a lovely one, in fact,” answered Leland.
I tuned the two of them out as I studied the area. There were flowers and bushes in little pots sitting on small wrought iron balconies along the two rows of flats on eith
er side. To our right, anyway. A more industrial feel ran to our left.
Sniff.
Yes, I was fighting to ignore the command. However, I was starting to get the point that, on some cosmic level, these special abilities spoke to me. It was like they were telling me the best time to use them. How they knew that, I couldn’t say, but seeing that they’d been right every time, except for when I’d slowed the world to watch Dr. Vernon have an orgasm—and it should be noted that I thought it was exactly the right time to use that particular skill—I thought it may be wise to listen.
So as the two goobers continued blathering on about vending machines and their favorite detectives from the past, I rolled my eyes and sniffed.
Nothing happened.
Then I remembered that I had to think the word actively for it to work.
I sighed.
Sniff, I thought in that magical way that seemed to activate any of the skills Gabe provided.
The world suddenly became a haven of smells. Flowers, car fumes, colognes, perfumes, food, birds, buildings, the street, and Harvey. These were the things that stood out most. Especially Harvey. Werebears weren’t exactly known for smelling like roses.
Obviously I would need to focus this Sniff skill or I’d end up gagging.
I was looking for Rachel, so I needed to recall her scent.
As if I were seeing an aromatic photograph of my ex-partner, my nose picked up something. It was as clear as day, making me feel compelled to start running toward the source.
“Where’re you going, Chief?” Harvey called out, but I was too far gone to pay much attention to him. “Wait up!”
I chased the scent all the way down to the Strand, anxiously waited for a break in the traffic, and then bolted for Duncannon. If I had been an actual dog at this point, I’d be roadkill. I now understood why dogs didn’t pay much attention to anything else once they were on a scent trail. It was overwhelming.
To our right was St. Martin-in-the-Fields again. It was as if we’d come full circle.
But the scent wasn’t in the church. It was beside it somewhere.
I kept running, doing all I could not to throw people out of my way in the process. While my nose was going insane with the need to find the source of the smell, my forebrain had to keep my wits about it. If I didn’t, I’d probably cause a lot of injuries.
“Chief,” Harvey said raggedly, “what’s going on?”
I pushed his hand from my shoulder as we approached a statue.
This was where the trail ended. The Edith Cavell monument.
Like a man possessed, I jumped up and started climbing the front of it. It was tough to get a foothold, but I managed, scaring away a number of pigeons in the process.
“Chief?”
I looked down at him and snarled.
“Okay, okay,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender. “No need to bite my head off.”
Obviously having a nose like this made for a powerful animal response. But I didn’t feel bad about it. He could clearly see I was on to something, so why pester the shit out of me?
I pulled myself up until I was face to face with the namesake of the monument.
Sitting atop her head was a brown leather glove.
It was Rachel’s.
In fact, it was one of the gloves that I’d given to her on our first anniversary working together before I was the chief.
I dropped down and held it up to Harvey in an effort to explain why I’d been so focused on my running.
He squinted at it for a second and then took out his magnifying glass to give it a deeper study.
“Looks like a glove,” he said finally.
“Yes,” agreed Leland, “I would most definitely say that’s a glove.”
I just stood there staring back and forth between them.
“Obviously it’s a glove, you idiots,” I said with more heat than was necessary. “The point is that it’s Rachel’s glove.”
“Really?” Harvey pulled up his magnifying glass again.
“Honestly, Harvey,” I said while pulling the glove away, “how do you expect that your magnifying glass is going to help you determine the validity of my statement?”
He lowered the glass with a sad look.
“Sorry, Chief.”
Rookie or not, there was something known as common sense.
“I thought the use of the glass was a wise one,” Leland said, patting my partner on the shoulder. “There’s never enough detailed study one can do when seeking out answers, you know.”
I scoffed. “You two should partner up.”
“At least he wouldn’t yell at me as much,” Harvey more mumbled than said.
He was right, though. I was being kind of hard on him.
Wait—no, I wasn’t!
I was all about having fun, sharing laughs, and being zany, but there’s a time and place for actual work, too. Now, I knew that Harvey thought he was working while studying Rachel’s glove with his Sherlock Holmes fan kit, but the fact was that it wouldn’t help. He should know that. This wasn’t some cosplay convention we were at. This was real.
Still…
“I just need you to think, Harvey,” I said in as calm a voice as I could manage at the moment. “May I see the glass, please?”
He tentatively handed it over.
“Now, I ask you if using this ancient piece of sleuthing technology would really help when studying this glove?” I held up the glove and looked through the glass at it as if to prove a point. That’s when I noticed a tiny stream of text that read, ‘The Chandos’ on it. “I’ll be damned.”
“What is it, Chief?” asked Harvey.
“What is The Chandos?” I said to Leland, ignoring Harvey’s question.
“It’s a pub,” our James Bond clone replied while pointing behind me.
I spun around and noted that the place was right on the corner. It had a wooden outside with columns framing the entryway, and it read “29 St. Martin’s Lane” in the center.
“Huh,” I said, casually handing the magnifying glass back to Harvey.
“So it came in useful, eh, Chief?” he said accusingly.
My shoulders dropped. “I suppose it did.”
“Uh huh.”
Chapter 16
It was your standard pub with lots of deep, dark wood that was shined and polished. There were mirrors lining the wall behind a fully stocked bar, and a number of seating areas where people could spend their nights drinking away their sorrows. Right now, though, all the patrons seemed to be having a pleasant time.
“It says they have a menu…” started Harvey, but he stopped when I gave him a dull look. “Sorry, Chief. Just hungry.”
“They’ve got nice fish and chips,” Leland noted.
I looked over them both. Seriously, they belonged together. I couldn’t even imagine how Rachel had managed to put up with Leland over these last couple of months. She probably arranged to have herself kidnapped in order to get away from the guy.
“Fine,” I said, throwing up my hands, “you two have a seat and get some food. I’m going to keep using this nose of mine to find more information.”
“You sure, Chief?”
“Oh, I’m sure.” I then cleared my throat at the realization that I’d said that quite pompously. “If anything happens, I’ll use the connector to reach you.”
Harvey was all smiles now.
“We’ll be here if you need us.” Then his smile turned to a serious look. “Do you want to bring my magnifying glass? Just in case?”
I didn’t, but damn if it hadn’t been useful back at the statue. It took everything I had not to roll my eyes as I swiped the glass from his hand and slipped it into my suit pocket.
“I’ll be back shortly.”
Without waiting, I moved smoothly through the tables and people until I spotted a null zone. Actually, it was a guess because everyone was giving it a wide berth as they walked by it. A deeper look showed that I was correct.
Behind it
was a blank wall. There had to be something to it, though, because one didn’t just go around putting null zones in a building without there being some purpose to it. I grumbled and took out the magnifying glass and started going over every inch of the thing until I spotted two sets of contact points. One on each side. It was a door. My guess was that there was no knob because we were in a pub. Translation: If a drunkard happened by, they may not be as impacted by a null zone, and so they might just twist the knob and walk on in.
I tucked the glass away.
Another win for Mr. Holmes, and Harvey.
The door opened after I pressed the contacts at the same time.
Also at that moment, I felt the Sniff sense dissipate. But I no longer needed it to know I was on the right track. This was apparent because of the item sitting on a small table in the middle of the moderately-sized room I’d entered.
It was Rachel’s badge.
I picked it up and looked it over.
Instead of the “Las Vegas Paranormal Police Department,” this one just read “P.P.D.” along the top and a redundant “Paranormal Police Department” around the rest of it. All of the PPD stations had been going to the generalized form instead of employing the locale. My precinct hadn’t been forced down that path yet because we were too small and we rarely got new recruits. In fact, Harvey was the first since the last rookie had joined the Vegas PPD…which had been me.
“Welcome to your doom, Mr. Dex,” said the powerful voice of a woman who had stepped out of the shadows. It was an American accent, too. “Your capabilities are quite impressive, I must say.”
She was built like someone who spent a fair amount of time in the gym, compact and muscular with a hint of femininity that threatened to turn my frown upside down. Though she was a little shorter than I considered practical for playing a domineering role, her demeanor radiated strength and confidence.
In a nutshell, she was my kind of woman.
“When you welcome me to my doom,” I said, slowly placing Rachel’s badge back on the table, “do you mean that in a nefarious way or a naughty one?”
“Is there a difference?”
“Only in that naughty ends in our mutual pleasure while nefarious ends in only one of us feeling sated.”
London Growl: An Ian Dex Supernatural Novel, #4 (Las Vegas Paranormal Police Department) Page 6
