by Chanel Smith
He bumped into several sleepy pack members stumbling down the steps to the cellar, all demanding to know what was happening.
“For right now, get to the tunnels and go to the swamp shack. Once all of us are there, we’ll take the Jeeps and then I’ll explain. For now, move it and fast before they figure out what we’re up to.” He paused, then added reluctantly, “It’s that damn European pack. It’s not humans we’re facing, so the danger is ten-fold. Now move out.”
The other Weres came instantly awake and took off at a dead run for the well-hidden door behind the washing machines in the cellar.
Only six pack members arrived at the shack in the swamp. Charissa and Erigny were missing, to Raya’s shock and misery. The very two Weres who’d brought him into the Were world and they’d been taken, no doubt about it.
What would happen to them?
Chapter Fifteen
The Swap
As both Jeeps bumped over the rough track leading to a small swamp trail, Raya’s phone rang. A muffled voice informed him that the RRP indeed had his two bitches, and would accept only one thing to retrieve them: him, himself. It was to be a swap or he could retrieve Charissa and Erigny’s corpses.
He was given a location (a tiny Creole restaurant deep in the swamp, at 3:00 AM the next night) and told that if he didn’t arrive alone, he’d find only two bodies.
Raya agreed and hung up. Surely Itchiko would have an idea: his own mind was overwhelmed by grief. He remembered the red glow he’d seen not long before, always a warning that he was going to lose a pack member.
One of those two wouldn’t make it out alive.
Raya’s pack had a distinct advantage, due to one of Itchiko’s weirder ideas. Each member had shifted, been taken to a vet and chipped like the family dog. Tracking the two missing members would be cake.
Finding them alive would be another story.
Once they’d arrived at the safe house set up so long before, Itchiko opened his laptop and located the two missing Weres. There was a small group of shacks and warehouses at the edge of Lake Pontchartrain where the swamp began: Charissa and Erigny were there. As his pack and the electronic sniffer drew closer, the kidnapped members’ location would narrow and become more specific.
Raya didn’t like the numbers. From what he’d heard, 12 RRP members at least were in town. His own pack now numbered half that. How on earth could they effect an rescue under such conditions?
It was Itchiko, of course, who came up with the solution at 6:00PM: none too soon for Raya’s liking. The Rats were holding his wolves at an ancient warehouse, surrounded on all sides by flat swamp. Impossible to sneak up on, especially with the understanding that all werewolves loathed water. True as it was, the Rats could never guess the agony Itchiko had put Raya and every member of his pack through: learning to swim first, snorkel, and deep sea dive at the end.
Such talents would come in handy today along with a small group of highly-trusted humans, all of whom together made up for one wolf as Itchiko figured it. Raya didn’t care. Sometimes numbers didn’t matter: strategy did.
He hoped this was one of those times.
Chapter Sixteen
Preparing for Attack
Pack Lupeinescu wasn’t without their own smoke bombs. Nothing so simple as knock-out drugs, of course: Itchiko was far too refined for such. No, the black wolf had worked paw in paw with a distant pack who had a chemist member. Itchiko had a few surprises for RRP, one of which he’d had specially made just on the off chance that wolf would ever go against wolf: an unheard-of event until now, but even such events should be prepared for. Today was proof that however unlikely an event seemed, one should be protected should it occur.
Raya had even protested when Itchiko had told him of the product some seven years ago. Itchiko had said then that “not all wolves run on the same paws,” and Raya had been forced to give in however reluctantly.
Now of course he blessed Itchiko, who gave a snarky grin and advised him to check his weapons.
Shortly they were less than two hundred yards from the Rat-held warehouse: six utterly miserable wolves in human form wearing diving gear. Well, five as Itchiko was nowhere in sight. He’d be coming up on the warehouse from behind, with Raya’s humans to make a distraction.
VROOM!
And there it was, right on target. Three Wave Runners shot by the warehouse, turned, came straight back. They were making a third run when a fourth seemed to leap out of the warehouse and give chase... but just as that last Wave Runner appeared, Raya heard what he’d been waiting for. A distant explosion.
Now, if only that product worked as Itchiko had insisted it would. Developed specifically for wolf constitutions, the drug was a combination of powerful sexual hormones and pheromones. A werewolf is a highly sexual creature. When females were in heat, males were blind to the thoughts of anything else. Females in heat were even worse than the males.
Itchiko’s drug had been devastatingly simple: it simply set female wolves in premature heat. In human form, a wolf would instantly shift. Females would enter directly into strong estrus and every male wolf within hundreds of yards would respond.
One more reason for the diving gear was that the Weres would have oxygen face masks they now wore and would continue wearing for the duration of the attack, although the drug itself would dissipate in an hour. The effects would last five-seven days, though, the usual length of wolf heat: any wolf near a group of wolves with females in heat couldn’t help but join in the festivities.
Distant howls went up from the warehouse and Raya turned, nodded at his pack.
It was time.
Chapter Seventeen
And They All Fall Down
Raya’s attack wasn’t as simple as he’d thought, as of course human elements were involved and unaffected by the drug. The pack made short work of them, although one member took a shot to the leg and had to instantly shift to heal.
The greatest problem was truly unexpected although it shouldn’t have been. Charissa and Erigny, the members they’d come to rescue, refused to go. Not only refused, but were both deeply involved in a typical werewolf orgy.
Call it by any other name—Itchiko should have foreseen this too, Raya cursed as he gently tried to coax the two bitches, both in full estrus, to shift human and leave. Even as he spoke, he know his entreaty fell on deaf ears, or deaf crotches in reality. Neither bitch even looked up as one was mounted from behind by an enormous male, while Charissa’s blue eyes gleamed as she shifted human and took another male’s cock deeply into her throat as Raya spoke. Useless—any attempt at all would be useless.
Reluctantly Raya approved of the hypodermic needle that Itchiko held up, both brows raised. The shot contained a powerful depressant in a dose that would knock an elephant out. Hopefully it was powerful enough to put a werewolf bitch in full heat to sleep as only unconscious wolves would leave the scene Raya now surveyed—wolves fucking everywhere, shifting to human and back again but never losing deep contact. Raya’s own instincts and deepest urges were to join that scene immediately, yet he knew logically that he had to interrupt it. Second only to joining the frenzy, Raya wished to destroy the wolves who held and threatened his two valuable bitches. Again, the Lupein Codec forbade it.
Not that the codec had deterred the other pack in the slightest.
With reluctance, he finally gave Itchiko the nod. Two darts were shot, and the first hit home in Charisa’s shoulder. Erigny, however, had been in the process of deep-throating another male, who had just finished in her mouth. Just as the tranquilizer dart was inches from her shoulder, Erigny had shifted and leaped in front of an eager male. The dart sailed harmlessly over her head. All had not been lost: Itchiko simply reloaded and waited until he had another clear shot.
Just those few crucial moments had caused what followed, Raya knew. They’d given the other pack long enough to wonder why no calls were being answered, and send a couple of wolves to investigate.
The two new wolves had
opened the door on what must have seemed a bizarre scene, with one of the captured Pack bitches being taken from behind whilst the other was passed out on the floor. The two new Weres weren’t stupid: they’d called for backup and raced into the thick of the orgy, intent on recapturing the pack bitch who was being royally nailed at the moment. As both of the new wolves pulled guns, Erigny had noted that from the depths of her sex-crazed consciousness.
Had she been aware of the inevitable reaction when she’d yelled in the old language, “Rise at once, Charissa love! This is a setup!” in an attempt to save her pack sister and, more importantly to Charissa, a beloved lover who had been with her for nearly four hundred and fifty years.
They’d never know, Raya thought bitterly. One of the new wolves had instantly whirled and shot in one smooth movement: Erigny’s life had been extinguished just that fast.
Raya doubled over in anguish as that Pack thread had abruptly been sundered, and where that sense of Erigny had lived in him for so long there was now a resounding deafness emanating from a black void which her bright presence had filled.
Raya wasn’t alone in that knowledge...
Pack Lupeinescu was warned in the same way, the Uber Wolf having ensured it. The pack was aware of both the danger and the horrific loss of one of their own. A howl went up, a howl of despair, the Death Howl. It took massive efforts on the parts of both Raya and Itchiko not to join the pack and give voice to their anguish, but such would mean their own demise.
No. No one needed to know of their presence.
There was nothing to do now but race in and extricate Charissa, but two new wolves were involved and the situation had become complicated.
More Weres were en route, of that Raya was certain. He and Itchiko had to do whatever it was right the hell now or give up on Charissa as well.
At that thought, fury raced up the Alpha’s spine and his head finally cleared enough for him to formulate a rapid, extremely dangerous plan. He communicated it to Itchika via a number of hand-gestures, and got a doubtful head shake in return.
There was no time to explain: roaring engines were approaching. He raced over to the few pack members who’d accompanied them, gave them a couple of objects from his back pack and whispered orders. Three Weres went racing off, and then it was a matter of waiting. Waiting when the approaching vehicles grew closer by the second, and the window of their escape grew smaller.
It seemed ages but had only been minutes when the first explosion came, followed by a human’s voice bellowing “Terrorist attack! They’re hitting our houses! Get your families the hell out now!”
It was as if a branch had been poked into a beehive. People from every house anywhere near that warehouse poured outside, screaming and shrieking in fear. Like country people everywhere, they were armed to the teeth and soon gun shots began to ring out as well.
The entire situation disintegrated to sheer chaos in an instant. The approaching vehicles were stopped at gunpoint and screened by frantic citizens, all of whom had guns.
The two new wolves were in a quandary: keep an eye on the captives or help those who had just arrived and were now taking gunfire? Werewolf culture kicked in, and the two raced to protect their packmates.
Raya and Itchiko waited a few moments, then ran inside the house and picked up the unconscious Charissa and Erigny’s poor corpse.
They were out and gone in an instant, but the scene was burned into their minds forever.
The mission hadn’t been a success, but neither could it be called a failure: not when one pack member had been successfully saved. A partial success, but the loss did what nothing else could have. Within a matter of hours after Pack Lupeinescu returned, for the first time ever war was declared. War which meant wolf against wolf: pack against pack.
Pack Lupeinescu went into military mode as they’d trained so often to do, and that major change in their lives was the only thing that kept them from grieving as a pack should—with constant howls for a period of three days.
Grief could wait, there was a war to win.
Chapter Eighteen
Corporation Decides on Drastic Step
Raya was lucky in that he’d infiltrated a human into the Cavello Corporation almost immediately after the initial news had seeped out. It hadn’t been difficult at all. Cavello was housed in a six story building just outside Newark, and had its own restaurant in the basement. A quick dose of Ipecac and their vaunted head chef had puked everywhere.
Itchiko’s computer wizardry had hooked into the agency Cavello used for chefs and other such professionals. When the call came, Itchiko himself had recommended the highly-vaunted French chef Francois LeBlanc, who had just flown in from Paris where he’d been head chef for that well known hotel, the Georges V. Luckily the Cavello responsible for hiring had bought Raya’s hastily conjured up story and had leaped as foreseen, and the human had been in place ever since.
Francois had placed listening devices throughout the building, the officer’s cars and homes. A team of humans had been tasked to sort through every day’s recordings and had set up an instant alert on the upshot of today’s senior Cavello meeting.
Seems the Gambini family wasn’t happy with the glaring spotlight on their model city, even if no one had yet discovered that the GarTres chemicals mixing with the plastics in a simple water bottle had caused the calamity. They would: it was only a matter of time.
Cavello had been advised that action must be taken immediately or the Gambinis would see to it that the entire board would be replaced, and the original board members wouldn’t be alive enough to care. Or alive at all.
Hence the senior-level meeting. Such solutions as eradicating all the canines within two hundred miles of the city and/or wiping out the entire city’s population, canine and human alike—were discussed and discarded. Either measure would bring far more scrutiny down upon the city and ultimately Cavello itself.
Then one of the youngest members of the Cavello board made a suggestion that at first gave even the hardest members pause: let an Act of God destroy the ‘goddamn town’. Who could blame an Act of God? A tornado, an earthquake. Such things weren’t out of reach anymore, the young man said. He’d seen isolated reports come out of China, Japan and various European countries. Weather control was no longer a fantasy, but it did come at a price. One hell of a high price.
Chapter Nineteen
Winds of Destruction
The meeting had ended on an up note for Cavello when the head of the board, a European woman, had made a brief phone call to her home town in Germany. The grin on her face after the call made her news that much more terrifying to Raya and Itchiko as they listened in growing disbelief and mounting dread.
The woman gleefully announced that Germany herself had made a massive break-through concerning weather control. The discovery stemmed from research during World War II, she said, during which Hitler had demanded his scientists formulate a way to cause storms to hit just prior to a bombing run on London. The storm would hide the incoming German bombers from any watching eyes until it was too late.
Once the old WWII papers had finally been made available to the public, it was a reporter who’d been the first to spot the old papers and realize what he’d found: the resulting story had exploded internationally, titled “Weather on Demand? Push Button Hurricanes!” The story had described the original research made by Hitler’s finest scientists, then projected possible outcomes of the research exactly as the scientists at the time had done. Both hurricanes and tornadoes would be possible after a bit more research and testing, the scientists had proclaimed at the end of the report. The reporter took it one step further he coined the phrase, ‘T.O.D.’ and that was what had completely swept the media.
German scientists had taken that original rough research and, by dint of recent discoveries in nano-technology, pushed the original plans forward in the very direction suggested by those long-ago scientists: the generation of tornados and other events such as hurricanes.
Now the research was as complete as possible whilst the testing facilities were still under construction. No one was aware of that, though: just that one could now create a tornado on demand as scientists had discovered not only how to seed clouds and induce storms, but were able to produce specific types of storms including hurricanes and tornados. Unfortunately the lead scientist had died weeks earlier, during a test of his own procedure when an enormous tree uprooted and smashed the shelter where he and other scientists were observing and noting the weather conditions.
Now the Germans could seed both clouds and the earth below them, causing the development of a tornado which would touch down on the seeded ground. They could even ‘dial in’ the desired strength as measured by the Fujita-Pearson Tornado Scale. F2? F3? A dreaded F5 ‘killer tornado’? The Cavello board decreed unanimously to use the F5 tornado, as by definition it lifts houses off foundations, automobile-sized objects fly one hundred meters plus through the air, and even trees are debarked.
A modified plane would quietly launch and ... “hang on to your ass with one hand and solid concrete with the other,” a Cavello board member advised. “Concrete is the only thing that mostly will survive an F5, and sometimes not even.”
Hearing that, Raya went white and even Itchiko lost color. What could they possibly do to combat a tornado that would destroy a city of millions?
Then Itchiko slowly grinned. “Got it. Remember? ‘Itchiko, why buy THIS?’ ‘Itchiko, all this money no one will ever use...’ ‘Not another of your damn toys, Itchiko!’” he quoted Raya as he led him to the weapons wing. Finally he unlocked a door and ushered the pack leader in. With a flourish he pointed at a nearby table. “Might not be so high tech anymore, but it will solve this problem.”
