Wolf Trap

by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom

  “No bite.”

  “Excuse me, Doctor?”

  “Nothing,” Parker replied. “Nothing. Thanks for pointing this out, Reese.”

  Nikki nodded and walked to the door. Pausing, she said, “What’s kind of strange is that this is the second wound like that I’ve seen lately.”

  Parker turned to face her.

  “Last month we treated a guy with a chunk missing from, of all places, his throat. We stitched him up in the E.R. He wouldn’t stay, ran off when we got busy, but he had to be hurting. His wound was as serious as this one.”

  “How much like this one?” Parker managed to ask.

  “Same kind of hole ringed with indentations that looked like teeth marks. The guy had lost a fair amount of blood, but wasn’t the chatty type. We pegged him as the recipient of some new kind of gang violence. Maybe we have a rogue pack on the loose?”

  Pack. The word stuck a chord. But Reese had meant a dog pack, nothing more.

  “Don’t you think?” Nikki pressed, when he failed to respond.

  “It would seem so,” Parker agreed, with a continued sense of foreboding.

  “Well, I’ll be here for another hour. Let me know if there’s anything else you need,” Nikki told him.

  “Any chance you might have some whiskey?”

  She eyed him, then retorted jokingly, “Alcohol of any kind on the premises is against the rules of this hospital. Though the pharmacist is downstairs, and I believe you have a prescription pad.”

  Parker smiled. His first smile in months, and an automatic response. He would have liked tall, well-built, quick-to-make-a-wisecrack Nikki Reese at one time. He should have been interested now. But of course, Woodsen had claimed dibs as soon as she’d arrived. Then there remained Parker’s own loner ways, which he’d just all but broken because of the woman in this bed.

  Beyond those things lay the puzzle of his new life. And the two similar bite wounds.

  Nikki Reese waited by the door. It was obvious to Parker that she had something further to say.

  “I’ll stay with your patient if you’d like to get some coffee,” she told him, leaving Parker with the sense that she had changed course in midstream. Her attractive oval face, however, showed nothing of that.

  “I promised to be here,” he said.

  “Would you like me to bring some coffee to you?”

  “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  “Sorry about the whiskey.”

  “Me, too.”

  Reese smiled again. “Yell if you change your mind.”

  “Don’t you think yelling might be against those rules?”

  “I suppose it is, so I’ll be right outside. You can whisper instead.”

  Parker turned back to the bed as the door closed, intent on the woman in it now that he again had her all to himself. She seemed to be resting more easily, although every once in a while she arched her back, caught in the throes of that bad dream he sincerely hoped was nothing like his.

  “Welcome to my world,” he whispered, reapplying the bandage on her arm, feeling even more unsettled inside. What had caused this wound? That gang might well have had dogs with them that he hadn’t seen. Pit bulls were said to be the beast of choice for gangs in Miami. Animals trained to fight could inflict the most damage.

  Bandage secure, Parker again fingered the scar on his upper arm through the detective’s blue shirt and frowned. He would have smelled dogs in the area, if there had been any. Beyond the jerks he’d fought, there had only been one other presence in that park. One other.

  A rush of cold, like an ill wind, raced up Parker’s neck, as if the pale, half-morphed creature who had helped to scare the fighters off had just breathed on his back.

  Shit, he mouthed, then repeated the oath again. Had that wolf found this woman first and taken a bite out of her? A goddamn, good-size bite? For real? If so, what did that make her?

  Biting, the legends said, caused a person to become a werewolf. Through a bite, infected saliva and blood were transferred, containing the Lycan virus, an ancient pathogen causing the recipient to then become a werewolf with the arrival of the next full moon, as well as each and every full moon thereafter.

  Parker had already discarded that theory as fiction, since there had been no bite for him. Nevertheless, an icy cold spread across his chest as he stared at his patient in an attempt to see right through her skin to what might or might not be forming there. To what she now might harbor in her veins.

  Lycan virus? Absurd.

  All of a sudden he wasn’t too sure.

  Suppose, he reasoned, that werewolves—if there were more of them than the one he’d seen, and that’s what they really were—didn’t all maintain a spark of human intelligence? Suppose werewolves weren’t good guys? Maybe like humans, there were good and bad Weres. With the sort of power and strength he’d gained since his first transition, a strength still in its infancy, one bad werewolf would be terrible news for Miami. More than one wolf gone over to the dark side, and the entire city could be in jeopardy.

  Biter? Hell, he had wanted to bite her. Maybe that was the way werewolves showed their affection—with a good nip or two to the neck.

  Parker searched his Jane Doe’s swaddled face. She was medicated now, but when her senses returned would she imagine he had done this to her? Had she seen him out there in his half-morphed form? Was there a chance she might have heard his awful confession?

  If she had been given an infusion of wolf saliva, would she walk out the door in a day or two, miraculously healed?

  Was the brave little soul in this bed about to become like Parker?

  No. No, she couldn’t be a wolf, he told himself. He had imagined it all. Still, there were so many reasons for him to run. Not only for fear of being accused of this heinous crime, but for the elusive unknown that now seemed only an inch away.

  Mired in bleak thoughts, Parker knew how important it was, now more than ever, that he find what roamed the Landaus’ property and sniffed around its walls. Somewhere out there a pale wolf wandered, one that had been at the scene of the brutal crimes against this woman. In order to find that wolf, Parker would have to leave her.

  How could he remain? How could he guarantee her safety or anyone else’s if that dark side he had been giving in to, piece by piece, might eventually cause him to harm others? Where would this mutation take him as time passed? Hadn’t he been contemplating that very idea?

  Returning to the window, Parker looked out at the city with a deep, almost gut-wrenching eagerness to be out there in it. He wanted to be free from the constraints of walls and sickness and having to deal with being a beast in a doctor’s clothing, tethered to the word human by the most slender of definitions.

  And, Parker concluded, unable to forget the sight of the holes in this poor patient’s flesh, a girl who might soon become so much more than she appeared if his intuition proved to be correct…For the moment, though he wanted to run, he could not. He was, in fact, hobbled by something as delicate as a silken strand of an anonymous woman’s golden hair.

  A woman who perhaps held another key to the secrets he harbored.

  A knock came at about the same time the sun began to rise. From his position near the window, Parker turned.

  “I was told I might find you here.” Detective Wilson stood in the open doorway holding two plastic cups in his hands.

  “You brought coffee?”

  “The coffee is courtesy of the nurse in the hallway. Perez, I think her name is,” Wilson said.

  “Bless her.” He went to meet the detective, feeling like hell warmed over, desperately needing that coffee.

  “You’ve been here all night?” Wilson asked.

  “Yes. How about you?”

  “Out in that infernal park for most of it. I did manage to get home for a quick shower. Man cannot live by caffeine alone.”

  For a detective, and as surprised as Parker was to admit it, Wilson seemed okay. First the loan of the shirt, and now the coffee. He d
idn’t seem as pushy as most of his kind often were. Yet things were not always what they seemed.

  “How is she?” Wilson handed one cup over.

  “She had a rough night, had to be sedated.”

  “She didn’t open her eyes, offer any clue as to her identity?”

  “No, and no.” Mostly the truth. “I’d like to keep her sedated for a while longer, then bring her out of it slowly.”

  See what she is.

  Wilson blew on his coffee, then took a sip.

  “Did you find anything out there?” Parker asked, sipping his from his. The coffee was lukewarm. Wilson had wasted a breath.

  “Lots of footprints, her blood, not much else,” Wilson replied.

  It didn’t take extraordinary brains to know that the good detective withheld information. “And?” Parker prompted.

  “We found a trail of blood on the ground. Drips leading from a certain point in that area. Which means that some of her injuries had happened in another location, before you found her.”

  “I see.” There was more. Parker waited.

  “We picked up her trail pretty close to that stone wall you asked me about.”

  Fairly sure he kept his face expressionless, though another chill made it down to groin depth, he said over the rim of his cup, “The wall around the Landau place?”

  “That very one.”

  The questions Parker didn’t ask brought on another round of anxiety. Am I going to be a suspect? Is this how it will go down?

  “We found other prints there, besides yours, and in another place farther east, mixed with hers,” Wilson explained. “And we found her shoe. Only one shoe.”

  A black boot.

  “So, you think she’d been chased by that gang?” Parker asked.

  “Seems likely,” Wilson affirmed. “Can you tell me anything more about her condition?”

  “She has some serious injuries. A broken wrist and cracked ribs. The wound in her head has been stitched. Her face was sliced open three or four times by something sharp. My first guess would be a knife.”

  My second guess would be claws, Parker silently added, liking the idea of another wolf out there less and less.

  “She has a chunk missing from her upper arm,” he went on. “Even I can’t explain that one. One of the E.R. nurses thought it resembled a dog bite.”

  He had to tell Wilson most of it, didn’t he? The detective could see her chart anytime he wanted to. This kind of information wasn’t protected from the cops.

  “Has she been tested for rabies?” Wilson asked.

  “I’m sure some blood work would have been done when they found that particular wound. You said she had been pretty close to that wall, Detective? Do the Landaus have guard dogs roaming the property line?”

  “No.” Stated adamantly, as if Wilson knew this for certain.

  “It’s usual for a property that size to be guarded, isn’t it?” Parker pressed.

  Wilson shrugged. “I suppose so. In most cases dogs would be a decent deterrent to trespassers.”

  Parker picked up on that. “Do you think this woman might have been about to become a trespasser?”

  “We won’t know until we talk to her.”

  “But you found evidence she had been near the wall.”

  “Yes. Alongside evidence that you had been there.”

  Parker blinked. Wilson moved closer to the bed, adding, “We found the same boot prints near that wall that were near the girl. The ones belonging to you.”

  “I didn’t do this,” Parker said.

  From across the bed, Wilson met his eyes. “So, why don’t you tell me what you were doing up on that wall?”

  “I didn’t mention anything about being on it.”

  “The deeper prints where you jumped down were fairly easy to see, Doctor.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” Parker said. “Why, I mean. I wanted to see the place. Just curious, I guess.”

  Wilson checked out the unconscious girl again. “What I find curious is that you didn’t see the girl, since you both were there at about the same time.”

  “She wasn’t near me, Detective. I heard her call out, and went to see what was wrong.”

  “You hadn’t been drinking, or…”

  “Or what? Have a split personality, one of which is a psychopath with a penchant for mauling young women, so that the other side of me can put them back together right afterward?”

  Having said that, Parker experienced a familiar stab of uncertainty. In fact, he did have what was in essence a split—not in personality, but in physicality.

  “It would, of course, be pretty silly of you to bring her in here to get her patched up, and then hang around,” Wilson agreed, his attention on one of the machines. “However, stranger things have happened in an attempt to throw us off a scent.”

  Scent. Parker’s tension increased with Wilson’s choice of that word. “You found evidence of the gang?”

  “Yes. Five of them, just like you said, tearing up the ground all over the place. Heavy bastards, by the prints. They also were near the wall, and then beside the tree where you found this girl.”

  What shouldn’t have been relief, but was anyway, flooded through Parker. Maybe Wilson didn’t consider him a suspect. Maybe he wouldn’t be under careful scrutiny—because that would put a damper on his nighttime plans.

  “Are you going to bring her out of this state anytime soon?” the detective asked.

  “She’s had several convulsions.”

  “Will she have them again?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure what caused them in the first place.” Yet.

  “You’ll find out?”

  “I will. If you’d like to force the issue, I’ll wake her now.”

  “You’d do that?” Wilson said.

  “If it was for her benefit.”

  The detective smiled, but it was in no way a happy expression. “Can you show me the wound on her arm?” he asked.

  “That, I can do.” Parker set his coffee cup down on the table by the bed. Carefully, almost loath to touch her again in case some part of him might slip from his control in front of the detective, he removed the gauze from her upper arm, exposing the wound.

  Detective Wilson made an indecipherable sound that Parker took for disgust. “Is it infected?” Wilson asked.

  “Yes, but it’s been cleaned out, and she’s on antibiotics.”

  “Are those the teeth marks around it?”

  “That’s what they look like.”

  “Are you sure they belong to a dog?”

  “No.” Parker had let that bit of truth escape, and attempted to cover it by diligently reapplying the gauze.

  Wilson was not to be deterred. “Do you think they’re human teeth marks?”

  “I would certainly hate to entertain the idea,” he replied. “I’ve seen The Silence of the Lambs.”

  “I’d like to take impressions,” Wilson said. “I’ll get someone in here to do that, if it’s okay.”

  “Fine. Did you find any evidence of—”

  “No. Turns out she wasn’t harmed in any way other than the obvious, as far as her clothes and the other tests went.”

  Parker’s heart actually pounded with relief. “Well, it’s time for me to get cleaned up and get to work. Is there anything else you need me for?”

  “You’ll bring her out of this today?”

  “When she’s stable.”

  “Then I’ll be back.”

  “Would you like me to call you?”

  “No need. I’ll be around, Doctor,” Wilson said—rather ominously, Parker thought, considering his own need for privacy.

  Chapter 8

  Parker was beyond exhausted. Flat-out dead tired, and in the grip of the kind of fatigue that frequently accompanies stress, prolonged turmoil and sleeplessness. A state all too familiar to E.R. surgeons, as well to a night-loving werewolf.

  “Not much time for a reprieve,” he muttered, tossing his keys on a
table by his apartment’s front door.

  The long shower he took felt like heaven and seemed to wash away his sins. Parker let the hot water scald his skin to a ruddy red for what felt like an hour, despite the rising temperature outside.

  Afterward, with a towel wrapped around his waist and beads of moisture clinging to his torso, he flicked on the ceiling fan to air dry. He shook his wet hair back from his face, lathered and shaved, wiped the vapor off the mirror, and only then dared to study himself. Thankfully, the person in that mirror looked just like him.

  “Always a comfort, eh?”

  He paused to run a hand over his scarred upper arm, and used the mirror for a better look. It sure looked like a ring of teeth marks, and freakishly similar in shape to his patient’s wound. Odd as that similarity was, however, the question that dominated Parker’s thoughts was who or what had caused hers.

  The particles of morning light streaming through the bathroom window seemed to make details about the pale wolf he’d seen in the park more elusive. Daylight always brought with it a fresh take on darker things, for a while—after which the questions would begin their unending loop all over again, starting with Had she really been bitten?

  Parker had ordered enough sedative to keep a woman twice her size dreaming. No way did he want her to waken when he wasn’t there. And this break, quick as it would be, had been necessary. He’d looked like hell.

  Donning clean clothes had never felt better. Parker skipped the pile of new jeans in favor of a faded, worn pair. His skin had grown increasingly sensitive in the months since his first transition. He could handle the worn jeans, but preferred the soft scrubs he would wear at work. The jeans were a last holdout in his leisure time; he had never been much of a tan slacks, button-down shirt kind of guy.

  He remembered to replace his bandages with fresh ones, covering scrapes and bruises, most of which had already disappeared. He hoped actual injuries wouldn’t be a necessary part of this investigation for Wilson and the other officers on the case. The lack of even a single scratch on his body, if he were to be a suspect, would be impossible to explain.

  He covered the bandages with a fresh-from-the-drycleaner’s white, long-sleeved shirt, and tugged the collar into place.