Vice

by Callie Hart

  “Over here!”

  She’s easy to find. She must have been doing a fairly good job of keeping up with me, because she isn’t that far behind. I find her crouched low with a serrated dagger in her hand. Her expression is grim and serious, her gaze locked on something in front of her. I don’t see it for a second. My eyes need a moment to adjust to the camouflage of the forest, but soon I can pick apart all of the greens and blacks and browns, and the wolf appears, hunkered down, teeth bared, eyes glinting wickedly. He’s pure black, so wild looking and beautiful, despite his obvious desire to tear Natalia’s face off. She holds out her hand, gesturing for me to stop, to stay where I am.

  “He won’t strike if there are two of us,” she whispers. “Just wait. Don’t move.”

  I’ve had no experience with wolves before, and I’m betting the woman in front of me has had plenty. I do as she says, waiting to see what the wolf will do, though my hands are twitching by my sides. It feels wrong. It feels like I should be doing something to protect her.

  “Steady, boy,” she murmurs under her breath. “Steady now.”

  The wolf remains totally still; the only part of him that moves is his muzzle, which trembles as he growls. It’s a menacing sound. He means fucking business, and I have no doubt he’ll launch himself at Natalia if she so much as flinches.

  She doesn’t, though. She is even and calm as the wolf watches her with his sharp yellow eyes.

  A series of excited yips echoes through the trees around us, and a cold sweat breaks out on my brow. “He’s not alone, Natalia. I think it’s time to go.”

  She nods very slowly, turning the handle of her serrated knife over in her hand. “If I back down now, he’ll know he’s won,” she says. “I’ve got to see this through.”

  Fuck Harrison. If he hadn’t taken my gun, this situation would be a whole lot different. I might not have even needed to kill the wolf; a shot in the air might have been enough to scare him off. As it stands, the animal is likely to die, and for some reason that seems like an injustice.

  The wolf pounces forward, just a foot, testing the water. Natalia doesn’t back down, though. She remains frozen, knife held out in front of her, ready, and her hand is stable. The woman isn’t even shaking. She’s fucking remarkable. “Get ready to run,” she tells me. “I was wrong. This one already thinks he’s won.”

  “We don’t need to ru—” Sudden, fast movement takes me off guard. I haven’t been watching. I haven’t noticed the wolf to my right, sneaking through the undergrowth toward me. I barely register the blur of color as it springs up out of the shadows, flying toward me, teeth bared and snapping, going for my throat. I don’t get my arm up in time. I’m halfway there, bracing, getting ready to break the thing in half, when a flash of silver cuts through the air, and the wolf cries out, yelping. He hits me in the side with the force of a seventy-pound bowling ball, but he’s not trying to tear at me with his teeth now. He’s bleeding, lying on his side, and Natalia’s knife is sticking out of the side of his ribs.

  Then everything is chaos.

  The black wolf attacks, hurtling toward Natalia, who is now unarmed. Did she…did she just take down a wolf with her knife? Mid-air? I have no time to process. I’m racing toward Natalia, but the black wolf is there first. He fastens his teeth around her forearm, clamping down, drawing blood. She screams, and the sound of her pain sends a frisson of electricity through the darkening forest. A series of howls and yelps follows—the wolves are getting excited. And now, they can undoubtedly smell blood.

  I fall on the black wolf, grabbing hold of its head.

  “Cade! Get it off me!”

  I try to cut off its air supply, to choke it out for want of a better word, but I can tell from the rigid, taut way its body is bowed that it won’t give in that easy. It just won’t. There is no backing down in this animal’s world. There is only success or failure, and when failure means starvation, it makes creatures like this determined. I have to kill it. I have to. My balisong is still in my hand, but stabbing him isn’t the most efficient way of ending this right now. I grab hold of his head, taking hold of his muzzle and his lower jaw, and I twist sharply. A sickening crunching sound fills the air, and I feel the damage I’ve done. The wolf’s neck snaps in my hands, and that’s it. He’s dead. It’s over.

  Only it isn’t, because then there are another two wolves creeping forward out of the forest, and then another two, and then another three. More and more of them appear, materializing out of the darkness, and every single one of them looks ready to kill.

  Natalia holds her arm to her chest, cradling it. She’s covered in blood, and her face is a strange, ashy color. “They won’t stop now,” she whispers. “We have to get out of here.”

  I help her to her feet, moving slowly, trying not to startle the approaching pack. “We can’t outrun them,” I tell her.

  She shakes her head. “This is their world. They can see in the dark. And they’re way better at running through the forest than we are.”

  “Then what do we do?” There is always a way out of every sticky situation. Always. I can’t see the way out of this one right now, though, and it’s beginning to freak me out. I may be able to fend off a bunch of the wolves and save myself, but can I save Natalia at the same time? Can I make sure that both of us come out of this unscathed? For the first time, I wish I had been selfish enough to ask Jamie to be here. If he were at my side, this would be a fucking cakewalk. He could have handled the majority of these fuckers while I made sure Natalia was all right. Wishful thinking, though. I told him not to come. I told him to stay in New Mexico with the club, and it’s too late to be changing my mind now.

  Moving slowly, I bend down, retrieving Natalia’s serrated blade from the dead wolf on the ground to my left, and I toss it to her. “Go for their necks. Their eyes,” I tell her. “Stay calm and we’ll walk away from this.”

  She swallows, nodding, and I can see that she’s scared.

  The wolves creep forward, darting ahead one at a time, testing us, trying to find the best spot to attack. There are nine of them now. Nine wolves against the two of us. The way they move is silent and menacing, and death hangs in the air.

  “Cade,” Natalia says. The terror is plain in her voice. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. I’m sorry. You were supposed to leave. You were supposed to get out.”

  “It’s okay. It’s going to be all right.” I can’t even convince myself of that, though. The wolves draw closer. Their teeth are clearly visible even though the light is failing, and I know how they will feel, ripping and tearing into our flesh. It will hurt. It will be agony, and it will be all my fault.

  Closer, they come.

  Closer.

  One lunges on my left, snapping and snarling, and I slash out with my blade, growling back at it. The wolf falls back, but it’s only a matter of time before it strikes again. And the next time—

  A loud, thunderous siren blasts through the forest, the depth and breadth of it making the ground beneath my feet shake. I jump, ready to slash and cut with my knife, but something miraculous happens. I’ve never heard anything so loud before. The siren shakes the leaves on the trees. My teeth rattle inside my head, the sound is so powerful. I try to shout over it, to ask Natalia what the fuck is going on, but it’s futile; my words are swept away in the ear-splitting din.

  The wolves have frozen. They’re no longer advancing towards us; they stand, glued to the spot, ear swivelling like crazy as they listen to the sound. Nearly all of them have a paw raised in the air. They seem conflicted. One skitters forward, and another gnashes its teeth, chasing it back.

  The sound stops dead, just as unexpectedly as it started, and the wolves scatter, turning tail and bolting away from us, headed down the hill.

  I can’t fucking believe it.

  My ears are ringing. I can barely hear anything over the loud, insistent buzzing inside my head, but I have the wherewithal to turn to Natalia and speak. “What the fuck? What just happened? Wha
t the hell was that sound?”

  Natalia slumps to her knees, her chest hitching up and down as she begins to fall apart. Wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, she inhales, obviously trying to pull herself together.

  “My father,” she gasps. “He’s calling them to him. They know.”

  “They know what?”

  She looks up at me, and I see the pain in her eyes. “That it’s feeding time.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  NIGHTMARES AND VICES

  Apparently a bound, helpless prey is much preferable to a pack of wolves than one who fights back. And the wolves on Orellana mountainside know when their dinner bell has been rung. As we run through the forest, back toward the house, Natalia explains her father’s method of attracting the wolves so they know a ready meal is being served on the front lawns of the estate.

  The alarm means live, fresh meat. And it means hurry.

  “Someone must have…tried…to run,” Natalia pants. “Someone must have…tried to escape.”

  Well shit. Perfect timing for us, but not so great for the poor bastard who got caught trying to leave Fernando’s perpetual sex party. He said he had more players arriving today. He told me to leave the house because of it. Whatever happened after those sick fucks arrived must have been really bad for someone to risk this. And the risk didn’t pay off.

  “There’s no point in hurrying back,” Natalia says. “It’s already too late. If my father sounds that alarm, it means he already has someone chained and ready for the wolves. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “Like fuck there isn’t.”

  “Cade, don’t be crazy. His men will all be there. They have rifles. They know how to shoot. If you even try to stop it…” There is a hopelessness in her eyes. Something tells me she’s already seen what happens when someone tries to stop her father feeding his wolves, and it didn’t work out well. I can’t help that, though. I have to try. I sure as fuck can’t stand by and watch as one of the people Fernando kidnapped is torn limb from limb. It could have been Laura once upon a time, and the thought of that makes me sick to my stomach.

  Soon, we’re almost upon the house. I can hear loud shouts and jeers from the front lawn, as well as a good amount of snarling. I’m about to burst through the trees, out onto the lawn, when Natalia grabs me by the arm and pulls me back.

  “No, please. Don’t. Let’s go around the back. Everyone will see us.”

  I could give two shits about everybody seeing me at this point. But she looks like she’s about to have a heart attack, and I just can’t put her through anymore. I let her lead me to the right, then, skirting around the side of the building. I can see people through the trees—so much movement. People running? People fighting? I can’t make out much. Natalia leads the way. She guides me on an unseen path that she seems to know well, and then we’re standing at a doorway, a side entrance to the house, and she’s punching a code into a keypad that’s affixed to the wall.

  “Why are we going inside? We have to fucking stop this.”

  “And we will. Just trust me. Please.” She’s so desperate for me to do what she’s asking of me that I go against everything that makes any sense to me. I do it. I follow her inside the house. The heavy steel door slams closed behind us, and I feel like I’ve just made a terrible, terrible decision. The house is deserted. Not a soul in sight. Our footsteps echo like gunshots as we race down the marble floored hallway, and my heart sounds like a crazed metronome, marking out a frenzied tattoo in my chest.

  Natalia runs through the corridors of the lower ground floor, and with every step we take the sound of the commotion outside grows louder. She’s true to her word; she leads me to a wall of French doors that I haven’t seen before, in a wing of the house that seems more relaxed than the austere white marble and obscenely large vases of the foyer. She rushes to the middle set of French doors and yanks them open, running out onto a deserted terrace, three or four feet higher than the lawn. There must be a hundred or so people gathered out there on the lawn. The air smells green, fresh, like recently cut grass, mixed in with something more sinister. Something metallic, like copper.

  It takes me a moment to figure out what I’m looking at.

  I see Harrison first. His arms are wrapped around himself, but not in a defensive way. He’s cackling, his face a mask of mirth, and he looks like he’s clutching at his stomach because he’s laughing too hard. His body rocks forward, revealing a line of men with guns, standing off to one side, just as Natalia predicted. Just like a few days ago, when William’s body was fed to the wolves, Fernando’s permanent guests are huddled together on the lawn, every last one of them dressed in white robes. I scan the crowd, looking for Plato, but he’s nowhere to be seen. I’m immediately worried. Why isn’t he there with the other Servicio? Seems like an ill omen. There’s no way Fernando would have allowed him to miss this spectacle, which can mean only one thing: he is the person who tried to escape. I don’t know the man well enough to decide if this is the case or not, but it’s a possibility. A bolt of guilt fires through me. The guy saved me. He risked his own life to try and save mine. And no good deed goes unpunished, as my father always likes to say.

  “There are so many men,” Natalia says, pointing out into the darkness. “I’ve never seen so many players here at once. My father…he would normally have told me if we were expecting so many.”

  She’s right. There must be fifty or sixty guys, all dressed in black, talking quietly amongst themselves to one side. They’re all young. They’re all handsome. And they all have a faint tarnished look to them that the Versace, Tommy Hilfiger, Dolce and Gabbana just can’t hide. Worse, they’re all Caucasian. They all look like they’re American, as far as looks can tell you such a thing, and I feel sick to my stomach. My countrymen. The people that I fought to defend. God, they make me ashamed.

  It doesn’t bode well that Natalia didn’t know there were going to be so many. I have no idea why Fernando would be keeping his daughter in the dark, holding her at arm’s length, but damn. Does it mean he knows that she’s been talking to me? Telling me things?

  At the very far end of the huge, sprawling lawn, I catch sight of the man. Fernando looks like he’s eight feet tall. He seems to be glowing with pride as he looks down on a confusion of color and fur, just ten feet away from him. I can’t see what’s happening at first. Then, I make out the still form of a body in the center of the pack of wolves. Still, at first, I should say, and then jerking, twitching, dancing almost, as the wolves rip and tear and claw and bite.

  They’re feeding.

  They’re frenzied.

  Their muzzles are covered in blood and gore.

  And they are nearly done with their meal.

  Natalia covers her mouth with one hand, supressing a horrified sob. “We’re too late. Oh god, we’re too late.”

  Even if we’d arrived twenty minutes ago, we would have been too late. “Who is it? Do you know who it is?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “I can’t see.” It’s no real surprise that she can’t; her eyes are filled with tears. She buckles at the knees, sinking to the floor. I try to catch her, but she wrestles free from my grip, crawling forward on all fours, watching the nightmare unfold before us through the gaps in the marble balustrade.

  I’m at a loss. I arrived fired up to help. To stop this somehow, and now that it’s too late, the adrenalin that has been coursing through my body for the past half an hour has no purpose to serve. My muscles are jumping, demanding me into action, and yet there is no course to take. Nothing that will help, now that the lifeless body out there on the lawn has been reduced to sinew and bone. I haven’t felt this useless in a very, very long time.

  “Persephone!” The cry rings out through the night, and it’s the blood curdling cry of someone who’s just had their heart ripped out. Natalia stops crying. She gets to her feet, and then we’re both scanning the crowd again, looking for the person who screamed out the name.

  It comes again, loud a
nd clear.

  “PERSEPHONE!”

  With the large crowd of Fernando’s players taking up much of the room on the lawn, we didn’t notice him before now: Plato, on his hands and knees in the dirt, naked, hands bound behind his back. His face and his torso are streaked with dirt, and a river of blood is running down his back, over his buttocks and down his muscles legs.

  “Oh god, is that—”

  “Plato,” I finish. “Yes. And the body out there is obviously Persephone.”

  “Oh god. Oh god…” Natalia screws her eyes shut tight. She looks like she’s never seen this before. She must have, though. From the way she’s spoken, she must have seen this over and over again, and yet she seemed sickened to her core. Perhaps that’s the difference between men and women. I have seen so much violence and death in my life. The things I experienced while at war haunt my dreams. There seems to be a big difference between a normal person seeing something like this and when I see it now, though.

  I know it’s wrong. I know it’s fucked-up. My soul rails against it as firmly and as strongly as it possibly can. And yet I have hurt more than this. I have witnessed such depraved, evil, dark things that I can no longer pinpoint the worst of the worst.

  Across the manicured lawns, the wolves are still at work. I have no idea how long they will take over their kill, but they don’t seem to be done yet. They’re getting lazy, full, but they’re still bickering amongst themselves, arguing over their food. Plato screams, his howl of agony plaintive and misery-filled. Harrison, who was still laughing until a moment ago, looks furious. He scowls, his attention turning to Plato. With quick, decisive steps, he heads across the lawn.

  “Oh no. Oh god, no,” Natalia wails. I don’t need to ask why she seems so distraught. I can already see the intent in Harrison’s eyes and I know he means no good. He reaches Plato quickly, drawing his gun from his belt at his waist. I’m moving then. I don’t even know what I’m doing until I realize I’m vaulting over the balustrade, down onto the lawn, and there’s suddenly grass beneath my feet.