The NightShade Forensic Files: Fracture Five (Book 2)

by A. J. Scudiere

  Instead, Eleri dug her fingers into the muscle, pushing on nerves and arteries. A gurgle escaped Gray’s mouth, even as her face and neck pulled back, became human just in time for her head to bounce off the pavement. Eleri switched grip and just used the hand to hold her down.

  Gray got mad—or frightened, or something—and popped her shoulder, using her greater weight to advantage and rolled Eleri off. Now she was the one with her back on the concrete, with Gray’s hands on her shoulders, pinning her to the sidewalk.

  That was stupid. Clearly Gray liked to dog fight, rather than human fight. And, exposed, she didn’t have the option.

  Just as the woman growled again, Eleri brought up her free hand, the one that had reached behind her and now held her gun. She pushed it under Gray’s chin, then smiled at her own advantage.

  Gray grinned back. Her men towering over them again, guarding the fight and their leader. Off to the side, the other man still wrapped his arms around Donovan in a hold that was effectively chaining him.

  The woman didn’t budge from the gun under her chin, but commented slickly, “You need silver bullets for me.”

  Jabbing the gun harder, Eleri countered, “No, I don’t. Bitch.”

  Gray glared, but Eleri kept going. Though her shoulders were pinned, she could move her arm, and she reached into her pocket before the woman could stop her. The woman was growling over her when Eleri flipped open her leather wallet with practiced ease.

  “I’m FBI. And so is he.” She moved her eyes to Donovan. “We know exactly what you are. And now we know where you are.”

  It didn’t work. It only made Gray angrier. “I will kill you!”

  She reared back, twisting her head away from the barrel of the gun, ready to shred Eleri in her nearly defenseless position on the ground.

  Eleri was fucked. She didn’t want to show the gun to the people around them. It was bad enough she was in the middle of a scene like this while she was trying to be covert, dammit! She was pissed as hell, and this breach was going to cost other people their lives even if it didn’t cost Eleri and Donovan.

  Something snapped in her, and she reared up off the pavement, her own primal growl coming at the woman.

  Gray must not have expected it, because she leapt back of her own accord, her face twisted in fear. The two men blocking the women in also abruptly stepped back, as though the sight of Eleri mad was scarier than anything they were. The one effectively caging Donovan dropped suddenly back onto his butt and he scrambled to join the others.

  Donovan rushed to her side, making a line of defense the best he could and growling at them. The two groups faced each other, the dog pack suddenly wary.

  Eleri stepped forward, into Gray’s space, and for some reason, they let her. For a moment, their eyes darted to each other, questioning. She locked her gaze with the leader and heard her own voice, deep with anger and the gravel of her convictions.

  “Run along, puppy.”

  Slowly, they stepped back, then one by one they turned and began walking away, the encounter ended in the same almost-casual fashion in which it had started.

  Shaken, Eleri held herself together long enough to look around. Several passersby watched, but none had stepped forward. Probably a good thing. Not a fight a random hero would want to get involved in. Besides, it had been a disagreement to start with, she’d been caged, but not hit. Then, when moves were thrown, it had probably all been over with faster than anyone else could have jumped in.

  The few people who paid attention waited for her to nod that she was okay. Her gun was no longer in her hand and, reaching back, she felt that she’d automatically reholstered it. Good for her.

  Turning, she made sure Donovan was at her heels, then blended back into the crowd. Cooper Rollins was gone; Aziza was gone.

  Hopefully none of them had seen that clusterfuck.

  Her day was screwed. She now knew there were wolves everywhere. And apparently, they didn’t like her.

  Donovan had been itchy. Inside his skin. He’d been twitchy, frustrated, and needing to get out. He’d known what he needed, he just hadn’t known how to do it.

  While Eleri walked into the kitchen and started on a hard cider, she called Westerfield and asked what the protocol was for writing up such an incident.

  Donovan only twitched more.

  Sure, they’d been assaulted. Not by anyone related to their case. Still, the idea that there might be a registry of his kind? That did not sit well. So while Eleri unwound with the odd combination of alcohol and paperwork, Donovan did something he’d never done before. He called a friend.

  Wade answered on the first ring. “Thought I’d hear from you soon. Didn’t know if you’d ever had that before.”

  “What was that?” Donovan shook his head as though that might settle the swirling parts. It didn’t. “That was a thing?”

  He could almost hear Wade nodding, adjusting his glasses. While Donovan was as much into science as anyone could be, it had been a haven maybe more than a home. Wade had embraced it all the way. The man loved Minecraft, comic cons, and Star Trek—though only certain portions of the series. But for all his differences, Wade was also Donovan’s only sane source of information. “Around the world there are solo folks like you and me, and then there are some . . . packs, for lack of a better term.”

  “Are they all judgmental assholes?” That had just slipped out. Maybe these were Wade’s people. Maybe Donovan shouldn’t latch on too tightly, too fast to his new friend. He’d done that once in middle school and it had backfired badly. Most of his attachments had.

  “The packs? Yeah, mostly. They’re like gangs, but with teeth instead of guns.” Wade was pacing; Donovan could hear it through the line.

  Inside the house, Eleri’s keyboard clacked softly, making a white noise to his sensitive ears. He didn’t mind the sounds. For a long time, he’d just assumed the other kids could hear what he could. That they could tell what he said from two rooms away, or down the hallway. It had taken a while to shake the paranoia. Today, it had all come flooding back.

  He felt bad for stealing Eleri’s friend. She and Wade went back almost a decade, as far as Donovan knew. But she’d only just recently learned that Wade was something more like him.

  “Are there a lot of these packs?” Was this going to be a likely occurrence? Going undercover as his wolf-self had seemed obvious, relatively easy once they worked out a few logistics. He couldn’t ask questions, but no one worried about what they said in front of him. This new problem—that others would sense him and come after him—it wasn’t anything he’d even considered a possibility.

  That they would come after Eleri was something he wasn’t ready to deal with. She was small and lacking teeth or jaws. Although, today, she’d surprised both Donovan and the others.

  “The packs are more prevalent in big cities and out rural where they’re the only ones.” Wade was explaining. “I think in the cities they seem to be in the poorer areas—forming for the same reasons other gangs do. No money, no prospects, and too much power.”

  Donovan didn’t like that idea.

  Wade continued, “Not a lot of lobomau in the suburbs.”

  “A lot of what?” Donovan wasn’t sure if he’d heard correctly.

  Wade laughed, and Donovan could imagine him in his plaid button down and khakis, somehow far more comfortable with what they were than Donovan had ever been. “Lobomau. Sorry, it’s a Portuguese term, literally ‘bad wolf.’ That’s what I’ve always heard the gangs referred to as: Lobomau.”

  His head swam. There was so much more out there than he’d imagined. He hadn’t even known it went beyond his own family. There was the legend of the werewolf, and his father had embraced it, but never said anything about others. Aidan Heath wasn’t the kind of man you asked questions. He was the kind of man who picked his son up in the middle of the night and said they had to move. New town, sometimes a new name. Donovan didn’t ask. To this day, he’d never gone back and investigated. What
he already knew was enough to make his sleep uneasy.

  In college, he’d come to realize that the legends didn’t have anything to do with his father. He made the logical leap that the legends existed for people to explain odd people like him. But he never bothered to seek any others out, and he wouldn’t have imagined getting assaulted by a full pack on the open streets in Los Angeles.

  “Are you squirrely?” Wade asked. “Do you need to run?”

  “Yes.” It was a relief being asked, not having to ask. It was a relief to know that it must sometimes happen to Wade, that maybe it didn’t make Donovan inferior at the thing he’d thought for so long only he was. “But how? It’s a city.”

  “There’s always a way. We’ll get Eleri to drive us up to Griffith Park. She can stand guard. It’s good to have a normal standing watch.”

  Donovan snorted. Eleri was hardly what he would call ‘normal.’

  “I’ll check.” Donovan put his hand over the mic on the phone, as though that made a difference. Just another thing he did in the guise of ‘normalcy.’

  Donovan made his plans and Eleri popped up, wearing jeans and a jacket, the hood pulled up, her hands shoved in her pockets, the outline of the Bureau issue firearm plain as day along her back.

  Wade showed up about half an hour later and the itch still had a good control on Donovan. He couldn’t explain it or reach it; it was just a desire to change, the need to run, to stretch. And doing so in this form was helpful, but not really what would help. In the end, they wound their way up the hill, Donovan getting closer and closer to wanting to crawl out of his own skin as they approached the observatory. At least there were trees here. Not his South Carolina national forest, not his miles of space, but something. Dirt, shrubs, animals.

  They parked, stationed Eleri at the edge of the woods, and thanked her for waiting. The two men wandered a short distance into the trees, each heading a separate direction, Wade seeming to understand that Donovan was not, and probably never would be, a pack animal.

  Donovan yelled back, “El, if you hide our clothes, I’m going to . . . well, you won’t like it.”

  He heard Eleri shuffling around at the edge of the woods. She’d done this for him before—let him run. Last time it had been with a purpose, he’d even been wearing a GPS. This time, he cocked his neck, popping muscles with practiced ease.

  His shoulder blades flexed upward, the muscles there were morphing his ribcage, slightly altering its shape. He rolled his hips, repositioning the femurs in their sockets and stretched his limbs out, letting them pull back into their new form. That was all just contortion. Some people could fold their legs behind their necks, he could fold into a wolf. But the flood of hormones that came with it was unique to his group—or maybe just to him.

  It felt like relief. Like cold, low level adrenaline. It made his hair stand on end, and when that happened, it ruffed up like fur.

  Taking a deep breath in through his now expanded nasal chamber, he could smell oxygen from the trees. The sharp grade of sulfur products in the air. Faint overlays of the people who tread here earlier in the day, and Wade, off to his left, giving off his own burn of adrenaline.

  Donovan padded over to see his friend. His mouth was now locked with his mandible and maxilla pushing his face out, speech no longer possible.

  Wade looked at him for a moment through dark hazel wolf eyes, then turned, running headlong into the woods. Stretching for the first time in too long, Donovan followed, running until his breath was heaving, and odd muscles burned with new use. They explored the edges of the area, never venturing too far out of the trees.

  In some places, the woods provided cover right up to the backs of houses at the edge of the suburban sprawl. It others, the ground ran dry, leaving wide gaps between them and the human population. In some directions the space went on nearly forever, trees growing farther between, gullies waiting to be crossed. And everywhere, the low tang of coyotes.

  It was a few hours later that the two returned to their original spots. Despite the time, Donovan found his clothes untouched. Suddenly thinking of Eleri, waiting on them, standing guard with nothing to do, just so he could burn off the itch, he changed quickly. Shaking out his pants, he pulled them on, then popped into his shirt. He was sliding now-dirty feet into his shoes when he emerged to find Eleri standing against a tree at the edge of the woods, her arms crossed, her thoughts clearly far away.

  She turned, shaking away whatever she’d been musing as they emerged from the tree line. For a moment, her eyes caught the light, and he saw it again. She’d seemed far away.

  “Did we leave you too long? What were you thinking about?”

  “That encounter today, the whole thing just made me mad.” Again, the light caught her eyes and Donovan stilled, wondering if Wade saw what he did.

  Standing there, at the edge of the woods, his need for freedom finally sated for a while, he broached another concerning topic.

  “Eleri, what did you do when that woman had you pinned?”

  Frowning suddenly, she turned to him, clearly confused. “I kicked her ass. What do you mean?”

  He shook his head. “No, you were good, but she had the advantage, then you got in her face and they all backed off. What did you do?”

  She laughed. “I got mad as hell. Showed her I wasn’t going to back down. She understood that, I guess.”

  Donovan took a deep breath and looked to Wade. Their friend had a look on his face that told Donovan maybe Wade had seen the glint in her eyes, too. Like a lingering remnant from the fight.

  “Eleri, I don’t know how to tell you this, but . . .” Donovan let the words trail off. He really didn’t know how to tell her. “You scared them off, because when you got good and pissed, well your eyes . . .”

  “My eyes?” She looked at him oddly. She really had no idea what she’d done.

  He tried again. “El, your eyes went bright . . . black.”

  18

  Eleri was grateful they were men now and she wasn’t stuck with two dogs, the only conversation one sided. There were words swimming in her head, needing clarification. But not quite yet. She started her conversation more casually. “Did you have a good run?”

  Donovan looked lighter, more tired, but less stressed. It wouldn’t last long. She’d just been standing here, waiting, daydreaming, and the words had just come to her. Since they could have come from no other place, no other connections, she had to assume that they had something to do with Cooper Rollins.

  Eleri sat in the back seat and waited quietly as they wound their way through streets that were miraculously clear. Despite the dead of night, there was still traffic. People walked the sidewalks, though they were few and far between. Some slept in the nooks of business doors, others worked the corners, the warm night letting them all stay out.

  As they crossed Vine, she finally spoke up. “What’s Fracture Five?”

  “What?” Apparently Wade’s mouth and feet worked concurrently, because he hit the brakes despite the fact there was no real reason to stop.

  Eleri threw her hands up to keep from slamming into the back of Donovan’s seat. It was only okay because Donovan was doing the same thing to the dash.

  With the car completely stopped in the middle of the street, Wade turned and looked into the back at her. “I’m a consultant. I’m not supposed to be involved in this shit any more. Is that what this is?”

  As the lone other vehicle on the street honked at them, she wondered if he was going to put them out of the car. Eleri eyed the neighborhood. Relatively clean during the day, it looked less than stellar at one in the morning. Looking back at him, she repeated, “What’s Fracture Five?”

  Wade started driving. He muttered under his breath, but he didn’t answer. He bitched about answering Westerfield’s call. He let roll a soft string of swear words, starting with the usual and getting downright creative as he went.

  Donovan looked over his shoulder at her, then back at the road as though checking that the
y were still headed in the right direction. By the time Wade pulled his car into the driveway of their tiny rental house and turned the engine off, he still hadn’t answered them.

  Eleri was starting to climb out, but finally Wade stopped her. “Five Fractures?”

  She shook her head and switched the words back. “Fracture Five.”

  They sat in the car for a moment, Wade trying to figure out what to say, Eleri and Donovan waiting.

  “I got out of Terrorism for a reason.” Wade’s words seemed resigned. Like cops, they often referred to their units by an incomplete but understood name. Eleri hadn’t known he was ever in the Terrorism division. And she hadn’t been entirely confident that’s what this case was about.

  Up until now, they had been questioning terrorist activity. They had illegal arms deals, but no one to pin it on. They had American soldiers involved. And people of three nationalities. But Wade seemed convinced now that it was, in fact, terrorism.

  “A fracture is a way of keeping the top level coordinators from being found out if a low level terrorist is caught. That’s why it’s so hard to pin these guys down. The fracture is whatever they put in place to keep the lackeys from having names they can hand over.” Wade sighed. “It means if they’re captured, they can’t talk about anything but their own assignment. Even if they wanted to. It’s that in each cell, someone communicates with the higher ups, but even they often don’t know who they’re talking to.”

  She absorbed that, her brain turning it over. She also absorbed all the things she had learned about Wade since rejoining the FBI. She’d always thought he was just a senior agent who knew his physics well enough to pinpoint a shooter or unravel an accident in under two minutes. But despite the fact that the man had hidden wells she’d never even known about, she had to stay on task.