The wolf’s paws pounded against the tough earth, and the animal breathed in the air around him, checking the wind for the scent he was seeking.
Earth. Detritus. Mushrooms growing in the colder dirt since the season had changed.
The lake nearby sent up the smells of fresh fish and eels and green algae. The wolf wanted to jump into that dark abyss of comfort and refreshing bliss, but the deeper woodsy scent called to him. The vibrations called to him as well. There was something in these woods, something that would quench his thirst.
The wolf ran full throttle, not feeling the tearing of muscle or the fire in his legs that a human might have felt when the same force was applied to their fragile tendons and joints.
He was animal.
He was fight or flight.
Mostly flight.
He was beast.
The form he preferred the most.
Nicky scrunched up his snout.
The delicious smell of fresh animal’s blood from the rabbit he carried with his strong canine teeth filled his nostrils, but underneath that heavenly, sweet smell of dirt and the meal to come: Death.
Not animal death. No. Someone was playing in his woods.
He dropped his dinner to the ground with a huff of disgust that quickly morphed into a groan as his muscles and bones shifted. He felt the tension ball in his hindquarters as his shift from wolf to human bowed his back. No beautiful transformation for Nicholas Arviso. His wolf was different. Not bad different. Just different. In fact, he was cocky enough to believe his wolf was more beautiful than the pure ones he’d met. But there was still a reason why his family had hidden in the mountains of New York rather than tie themselves to the Vuković Clan most often found in Eastern Europe, Ireland, and the Western parts of North America.
Nicky felt the chill against his skin, but he was Clan, and no matter his strange shift and the secrets he kept, he was Vuković, and he could take the early Friday morning chill of a Western New York fall. The crisp November air touched a part of his soul that nothing else could, and he breathed it in as a man now, instead of as a beast.
But he was always a beast, and his senses were on high alert as he slowly made his way to the smells of blood and a fresh kill. His steps did not crunch the autumn leaves as they should have. No, Nicky Arviso was a ghost.
While stationed in Kuwait, Afghanistan, Indonesia, and Pakistan, he’d been the green grunt, the heavy artillery, grenade-launching, let’s-blow-shit-up kid, but afterwards...nah.
Fuck, but afterwards, he’d been just Ghost. Invisible. Off course. A mother-fucking persona-non-grata, except when they’d needed something. Except when they liked to bring up his major fuck-up. Except when they used his skills, his special training to get a job done. But he was finished with that now. He’d turned his back on that life when he’d moved to Montville.
He cracked his knuckles on his right hand, touched the scar on his chin, and tightened his jaw. A ritual to get his head in the game, to get his damaged mind back in the moment. He never used his tell around anyone else. But he used it often enough when he was alone.
He rounded the corner past a cluster of maple trees, quietly and succinctly avoiding disturbing any of the natural landscape. But what met him was a sight he wished he could unsee.
Mangled webs of tendons and viscous fluids covered the opening in the forest as though the body – shit, was it even a body anymore? – had quite literally been obliterated. It wasn’t a wild animal even though it had smelled like fur and sweat. It also wasn’t human or Clan.
Other.
“Shit!” Nicky cursed, and his voice echoed through the clearing, vibrating around him in an unnatural way. If he’d been in wolf form, the vibration would have had his fur standing on end. What the fuck?
He moved closer to the clearing, senses on high alert. It smelled like dust, and there was a barely-there scent of rose blossoms, talc, and peat moss. What creature had been here? He’d never scented this mixture from any other creature before, and he’d met everything from Clan members to Nymphs to trolls and even dragons. He shuddered at the thought of Cam Waters’ change. A lot had changed since the man’s disappearance. Too much at times.
When the smells and the sights did not reveal any new information, Nicky let his Vuković senses take over. His innate ability to sense power, even in human form, would be useful. He walked further into the clearing and felt electricity crawl over his skin like small lightning bolts. He jumped back at the abnormal sensation, unable to enter the invisible barrier.
“Oh, come on. Fuck it all!” Nicky said to no one, and again, his voice echoed unnaturally around him, bowing his back in pain. It was as though his body was being repelled by the very nature of the power surrounding the scene of the Other’s death.
He didn’t want the goddamned Clan Council involved in shit. On his land.
The Others policed themselves most of the time using a group of Enforcers that had been formed a couple hundred years earlier, and the Council wasn’t going to fucking care that an Other was dead. No, unless a Clan member was among the dead or involved, the Councilors never really gave a fuck when an Other was killed. Goddamned bureaucrats.
Well, Clan was definitely involved. An exploded body in his own goddamned backyard.
Not to mention, his land bordered Cam’s, which had now been taken over by Alexia and Devon. That meant Alexia – future Clan Councilor for the Vuković and the Skröm – would have to deal with this shit as well.
Because when an Other went rogue or wound up dead in a Clan member’s backyard, they were Council territory.
Fucked. Up. Beyond. All. Fucking. Recognition.
He made mental notes of the scene and left it as it was before running back to his makeshift home. A year after buying the acreage, and he still hadn’t built anything permanent. A yurt was his only protection during the seasons. But he was Vuković. What fucks did he give? The Vuković ran hot, which was linked to their animal natures.
He opened the outer flaps of the yurt and unzipped the inner flaps as well. The fire going inside had burned to cinders while he was away. Stupid to leave a fire going, but even with the Vuković tough skin, he loved the warmth of a good fire, so he often left it burning.
His cell phone was charging on the table in his makeshift kitchen and attached to the plug that was hooked to his solar power box. He grabbed the phone and flipped open the decade-old contraption.
Yeah, he hated technology.
Ex-military. Navajo. Vuković wolf.
Hiding. In the woods. In a Yurt.
He got it.
Cliché.
And he was damned okay with that. Better removed than causing more shit. He’d already caused enough pain. Enough loss. Enough grief. Cam Waters didn’t corner the market on leaving death in his wake. In fact, it seemed the curse of some of the Clan to hold that burden, because just like his neighbors, shit seemed to find him wherever he landed.
He held down the six button for Daniel Rios, and Danny answered on the second ring, the sounds of Trappe’s Bar rolling through the phone. Danny sure did spend a lot of fucking time at that bar. Then again, the waitress and occasional barback, Melina, was damn fine. If Nicky wanted to bond at all, he’d have been on that beautiful Latina like it was no one’s fucking business. Hell, he just might have looked. Once. Or twice.
“What?” Danny’s voice was tense. He’d get like that after spending time at Trappe’s, and Nicky had worried about this when he’d become his partner at Montville PD a year earlier, but Danny was steady. He’d get pissed, and then he’d brush it off and say some asshole thing just to make someone laugh, and it’d all be okay again. He never let the darkness drag him under.
Unlike Danny’s best friend, Cam.
Unlike Nicky himself.
Nicky would never give into the Darkness completely, though. He was Clan. And Nicky kept those darker instincts so deep below the surface that he’d started to feel a little more like a civilian the past year and a half
he’d lived in Montville. And yet, not so close to civilian that he could stand being around humans for too long. They smelled wrong. They focused on unimportant shit. And they were fucking whiners. Yeah, shit, they didn’t have as much time as the Clan and the Others, but they didn’t know that. They also should have had the comprehension to come to the conclusion that life was too short to complain and gossip and fear it all away. Too fucking short. An image of Graham Vuković flashed in his mind and he cringed.
“Body,” Nicky said into the phone. “Need you to come out to Ca—to Alexia’s and Devon’s place.” They didn’t talk about Cam. Ever. No matter that he and Danny had been partners for a year. A year wasn’t long enough to bring up shit like that. No, there was never enough time when a friend, a brother, had been lost – death or not. “Look, it’s a pretty fucked-up mess. I need you out here as soon as you can get here.”
“Ah, shit.” Nicky heard Danny yelling out to the bartender to close up his tab, probably Damon himself or Alexia if she was on. “It’s fucking three a.m. Did you get a call from the captain?”
“Not that kind of case, Rios.”
“Shit. Damn. Fuck,” Danny said succinctly. Pretty much. “Sometimes, I really hate you all. What’s it this time?”
Cam had completed his change and Mindy had died, and nothing since then had been smooth sailing. Not that anyone had expected it to be, but a break would have been nice. Danny had easily assimilated into this other world because although he didn’t share, they all knew he’d seen some shit in his time in the military, but he’d also been exposed to a whole bunch of new shit Nicky thought a lesser person would have balked at. Not Danny Rios, though. No. That Guatemalan was steady as fuck despite his seemingly absentminded, lazy, suave, playboy ways. Nicky hadn’t seen those characteristics; he’d just heard the stories around town. Small towns and all that shit.
“No idea what it is.” And if that didn’t stick in Nicky’s craw. He hated not knowing.
“What the hell do you mean, you don’t know what it is?” Danny’s voice lowered as he spoke, and Nicky could hear him finishing up with his tab and moving out of the bar. “Aren’t you supposed to know all this shit? That’s why I put a good word for you on the force in the first place.” Of course, Danny had always known a little more of the supernatural, and it hadn’t just been his experience with Cam. Nicky wondered how deep into their world Danny had gotten before he’d met all of them.
Nicky didn’t take offense to the tone. That was Danny after he’d been at Trappe’s. It took some time for Danny to recover from that place.
“Damnit,” Danny yelled into the phone. “Shit, Nick, I’m sorry. That was an asshole thing to say.” And there it was.
“I’m over it, Rios.”
“So, you don’t wanna hug it out when I get to whatever shitstorm you’re dragging me in on?” Nicky barked out a laugh. He’d been doing that a little more recently. Laughing.
Nicky’d shrugged off the changes, but even Alexia had commented on it the week before when they’d been training with Ben, Devon, and Matt, a Luna who’d been sent down by James to help build the new Lodge extension a year earlier.
Not Carrie, though, Nicky thought. The Taryn Clan member spent the time the rest of them were training cooking, her new favorite past time, or hiding away. Carrie was… Well, he hadn’t known her before, but the once-nicknamed Tinkerbell spent most of her time in the small cabin they’d all chipped in to build for her on the ten acres of land that still technically belonged to Cam. Alexia still tried to call Carrie Tinkerbell on occasion, but she’d stopped doing it regularly. The smell of pain from that girl wasn’t Disney princess fairy shit.
That smell was one he knew all too well. He’d lived that pain. He’d experienced that pain for himself. But worse still? He’d caused that pain in others.
“Nah, Rios. You’re the touchy-feely type. The Navajo Newb doesn’t do that shit.” Nicky left that there for Danny.
“Are you making a veiled comment about your well-thought-out nickname as a new detective?”
“Well thought out? Dude, that nickname is shit.” He didn’t mention that it was a hell of a lot better than Ghost.
“Hey, that took me like a good hour.”
“Ah, the brainpower of the great Daniel Rios.” Besides Alexia or Ginny, Danny was one of the few people who could give Nicky a good laugh.
“My brainpower is just fine, dickhead.” But Danny wasn’t angry. Trappe’s just had the asshole effect on him.
“Yeah, yeah,” Nicky said.
“So, total FUBAR situation, dickhead?”
“Yeah, asshole.”
“Shit. Coming from you, that’s saying something.” Danny blew out a breath and Nicky did the same. Never a break. His world needed to get their shit together. It was a never-ending cycle of pain and death for the Others and the Clans, unless you were the privileged Pure Clan members who got to hide their heads in the sand and pretend the world was all copacetic, “except for those damn Hybrids, Skröm, and the Others.”
Their words. Not Nicky’s.
Nicky had met fucking evil Clan members who liked to pretend they were good people. Then there was one of his best friends, Ginny. A Pure Skröm. Legends stated she should have been this murderous bitch who sucked every human around her dry. Fuckin’ Ginny was the craziest vamp he’d ever met, but not crazy as in ‘batshit’. Crazy, as in that girl lived in her own world of happiness. Always believing life was full of possibility. How the fuck she’d ended up with that outlook, he had no goddamned clue. She was way too happy for what was normal, especially considering she was easily in her sixties or seventies in human years.
“Meet me at Alexia and Devon’s place,” Nicky said as he threw on some sweats. Like most who transformed, he’d much rather walk around naked.
“You gonna have clothes on, or am I gonna get the full monty again, Navajo Newb?”
“As much as I know you’d like to see it, I’m throwing on some of that pansy-ass human shit right now.”
“Clothes are pansy-ass human shit?” Danny let out a long laugh on the other line, and Nicky quirked a smile. Yeah, Danny was good for him, but he was such an asshole sometimes.
“Fuck you, Rios.” The sweats had tiny fibers on them, and right after being a wolf, which was every day, he found it took some time ignoring the little stitches that touched his sensitive skin. Stick him with a claw, and he’d barely flinch, but hell if clothes didn’t make him feel, sure as he had a dick, out of place. “It clings to my skin all strange. I don’t know how you can stand having it rubbing you raw all the time.”
“That’s what she said.” Nicky shook his head at Danny’s attempted joke and then realized Danny couldn’t see him.
“Just get your ass out to Alexia and Devon’s so we can check out the scene,” he repeated. And then he added, a slight smirk on his face, “and wear something you don’t mind burning afterward, Rios.”
Nicky’s smirk turned into an all out grin when he heard Danny’s groan. “I’ve learned with you guys to always keep extra clothes in the Mustang,” Danny said, sighing into the phone. “I’ll be there in an hour, dickhead.”
“Hell, yeah, you will, asshole,” Nicky said and hung up his phone.
As he was putting his cellphone down, though, he noticed three missed messages. Two from his mom and one from his dad. Yeah, his parents were getting worried. They’d been worried for over ten years now, but he couldn’t help that. Having a kid in the military was a point of pride for his parents, but it was also fucking scary. Never knowing when your kid was going to come home, or if. Never knowing if they’d be entirely whole when they did return.
Because some didn’t come back from the trenches. And his parents hadn’t had just one child join up. No, Kai and Isabella had both served as well. All three of their children, and one had not made it back. Nicky touched the scar on his jaw in agitation, trying to rub away the memory of that day. But a man couldn’t scrub those things away. A man could hide in th
e woods, sure as fuck he could. And his parents knew he needed the escape. But he couldn’t afford to share the truth: that the damage his parents saw went so much deeper than even they imagined.
The demons. The pain. They’d heard it when he had the nightmares and he’d been staying at their place in Dunham, sure, but that had ended quick. There came a time when parents couldn’t protect their children, and Nicky’s parents couldn’t protect him.
Fuck. Of all those goddamned demons in his head, most were just memories. And shit, but a man could not fight a memory.
Eire Donovan stood, like most 3:00 am mornings, in a dark back alley. Being an Enforcer for the Others, she was used to the stench of trash and piss and mice droppings clogging her nostrils no matter which area of Syracuse she ended up in. She was also used to a good lecturing from her partner, Gimp. But right now, she really wanted to give Kieran “Gimp” Gimble a good lesson in manners, despite that he was probably the only friend she had. Friend. Shit. Partner really.
He’d been her partner since almost day one. She’d escaped her grandmother and the Veil, and one of her older brothers had said, “Hey, I know someone who’s got a case, and I think you can handle it.” And she had.
For a couple years. And then Gimp had followed her on a case, and he’d been her contact ever since. She’d had other partners, other individuals she’d worked cases with, but she’d chewed them up and spit them out.
But not Gimp. He was tough.
Gimp stuck to her like glue, and that loyalty was the only reason she had kept him by her side. Not that she gave a fuck right then, especially since the Trow drove her up the fucking wall 99.9% of the time. Like tonight. He just couldn’t let it go. Fucking bastard. She swore to whatever god was listening that she would do better at keeping her darker urges at bay if this asshole just left her the fuck alone. Just this once.
“Gimp, I really don’t have time for this shit right now.” Her voice was strong, brokering no argument. Course, that’s the way her voice always was. Cold. Hard. Strong. Honed to razor-like precision and perfection. She was the queen of Sword and Stone, and she was bloody fucking proud of her calm.
Rage Against the Devil (Wild Beasts Series Book 2) Page 2
