Bad Wolf Chronicles, Books 1-3 Page 25

  Lara

  Hearing her name in his voice withered her. Palsied her grip on the rifle. He turned and spat, a bloodied glob on the floor, but he never took his eyes off hers. “Put it down, Lara. You can't shoot me now.”

  “Shut up!” Gallagher. His voice ringing off the tin walls. He didn't know what Prall was saying to her but it didn't matter.

  “The wolf is gone, Lara.” Prall ignored the man, his eyes on Mendes and Mendes alone. “You can't kill it anymore. You know that.”

  “Stop talking.” Everything was too loud in her ears. Prall's rasp, Gallagher's hollering. The dogs scratching at the door. She brought the stock up and seated it into her shoulder. Whispered to him. “Just close your eyes.”

  Prall twisted and pulled against the restraint. Grunted at her. No, no, no. Blood pooled around him on the cold floor. “I've come too far. I will not be shot down by pigs.”

  Gallagher hissed in her ear. “Do it. Do it now.”

  Prall's head flopped round and rotated upright. Eyes finding Gallagher's for the first time. “You. You're gonna get yours, pig. That little girl of yours? I'm gonna eat her real slow.”

  The S & W came up fast and Gallagher slammed it into Prall's head. Burnished metal against the cross-shaped scar. “Tell me something asshole, do I need silver bullets to kill a piece of shit like you or will any old hollow point do?”

  “John,” she warned him off. “Easy.”

  Spittle flew from his mouth. “Then do it! Kill this piece of shit now!”

  Lara notched the barrel sight onto Prall's eyes. At this range, his head would be blown clean off. “Don't look at me,” she said.

  Her finger inched back slow on the trigger piece.

  The door burst open but it wasn't the dogs. Vogel and Rowe and Bingham hurtling inside. A uniformed officer bringing up the rear. Three guns went up in unison and drew a bead on the two armed people in the room. The ex-detectives, their weapons trained on the slumped figure lashed to a post.

  “Drop the gun, Mendes!” Vogel's bark was sharp and unmistakable.

  “Back off, Lieutenant.” Gallagher barked back.

  “Do it!”

  A standoff. Everyone but the bleeding lump on the floor clutching a weapon. Gallagher chanced a glance at the open door but the dogs were gone.

  Rowe raised an open palm, talking everyone down. “Just put the weapons down, people. Before something stupid happens.”

  What were they going to do, shoot three cops? Lara lowered her aim and Gallagher followed suit. Bingham moved in and took the Mossberg from her.

  Vogel looked down at the man twisting against the rope, recognizing the face from the files. “Is that who I think it is?”

  Ivan Prall grunted through clenched teeth. Vogel spun to Lara, veins bulging his temples. “What the hell were you going to do? Just shoot the man and walk away?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hold on, Lieutenant—“ Gallagher cut in.

  “Shut up!” Vogel kept eye-balling Mendes but she didn't look away.

  Rowe knelt before the restrained man. “This guy's bleeding.”

  Vogel finally blinked, turned away. “Cuff these two.”

  Bingham didn't move, balking at the idea of cuffing another cop. Rowe's response was identical but the Lieutenant's nostrils flared like a bull and both detectives knew they didn't have a choice. The cuffs came out.

  Bingham shrugged apologetically, “I'm sorry, G. You know the routine.”

  A racket from outside. Everyone turned as the dogs burst through the door. Barking and popping their jaws, the pack raced through legs and collided into knees. The pit bull snapped at Bingham's calf and he clubbed it with the shotgun. The uniformed officer kicked out at the animals and pulled his service issue. “What the hell!”

  Rowe fired a warning shot into the path of a rampaging dog. The animal tacked left and came around. The sound only crazed the pack further.

  Lara's face sank and one word tripped from her lips. “Prall.” The Lieutenant's bulk blocked her view and she elbowed him out of the way as the dogs kept darting and feinting, coming back for more.

  The rope lay limp at the base of the wood post. A little blood but no Prall.

  IT IS FINISHED.

  The words buzzed through Ivan Prall's head as he scrambled away from the pigs. From the good book, the last words of a dying man. Those words gnawed and stung like a blowfly eating his brain. He knew it when the buckshot flayed his skin with leaden hail. He knew it lashed to the beam and his heart juiced faster and faster. When his tongue lolled through his teeth just to breathe. When the sight of more pigs gave him the strength to snap the rope.

  He failed. A battle won but the war lost, lost, lost. He killed the lecher Kovacks, cleaved the bastard's heart in two with his teeth and ground his bones to paste with his molars. Spilling the monster's blood was supposed to cauterize the wolf from his own heart.

  It didn't work. He'd miscalculated. He had been lied to. The ‘why’ of it didn't matter anymore. Kovacks was dead and now he was the only monster left. All other options ran dry after that. Heaven was closed off, redemption a cruel lie. Salvation was now a cocktease forever out of reach.

  It is finished.

  Fine.

  The only door left opened onto a lake of fire. The only role now was that of the monster. Like a dirty Halloween costume dismissed by other children and left on the floor for him and him alone.

  Fine.

  He'd become the monster. Show them the gates to Hell. The woman would turn soon. She'll fight it at first but she would join them. She had nowhere else to go but the pack. The man was a different problem. Killing him wouldn't be enough. A violent pig would only welcome a violent death. But there was his kid. He got hard at the thought of eating the little girl.

  So let the change come.

  37

  “SHOOT THESE DOGS!”

  Lieutenant Vogel's last words, the dogs snapping and darting between his officers. He heard Mendes holler something, saw Gallagher go pale, and then everything else was drowned out by a sickening roar from behind the stacked boats. He'd never heard anything like it. It was obscene. Furious.

  The dogs skulked out of the way, heads low and tails down.

  It exploded from the dark, the lobo, as big as it was terrifying. Charging in, knocking them flat like tenpins. The Lieutenant's Glock was halfway from his holster when the wolf hit him, its leviathan maw opening. The jagged teeth bit, jaws clicked and locked and the man was jerked violently back and forth. His scream cut short by the snap of his collarbone.

  Gallagher, gunless, bellowed at Bingham. “Shoot it!”

  Knocked to the wet floor, Rowe watched in horror at the monster shredding his lieutenant. He felt something grip his wrist. Gallagher ripped the gun from his hand but the lobo was gone, dragging Vogel with it. The Lieutenant's fingernails left score marks on the ground.

  Bingham blinked stupidly. Felt the shotgun tugged from his grip. Lara jacked the slide. She hadn't even got to her feet when she heard it coming back.

  It launched in fast and low, spinning Gallagher off his feet and bowling Rowe. Trampling over Bingham, it knocked Lara flat. Its teeth clenched her neck without breaking the skin. Its yellow eye stared into hers, communicating something. Lara pushed it away, punched at it, anything to get it off of her. The wolf didn't budge, its eyes locked on hers. Waiting.

  Lara Mendes felt something crack. Not bone or cartilage, some seal in her heart she'd been keeping shut for so long now. Looking into that yellow eye, the seal cracked and something bubbled to the surface.

  She shut her eyes.

  No.

  IT WAS the uniformed officer who got the first shot. Knocked to his ass by the thing, he ignored the shock freezing his hands and took aim. Fired. It punched a small hole in the hind end. The giant wolf jerked and turned. He fired again but the shot was wild and the thing was on him. Wrenched back and forth until his neck snapped and the screaming stopped.

  Gallagher fired
as the thing loped through the open door. He missed and the thing was gone.

  THE water lapped cold on her ankles. Lara splashed down the sloped concrete slip and pulled the body out of the water. The Lieutenant was gone from the waist down, bobbing obscenely in the water. Lara dragged an elbow up the slip and turned away from the appalling sight. The sound of the water trickling up and down the boat slip was calm and soft. Soothing almost. She'd lived in Portland for eight years and never spent anytime near the water. Why?

  Gallagher's voice bounced off the tin walls until it found her. Calling her name and ruining everything.

  The uniform was dead. Gallagher read the tag on his shirt. Dan Osteder. Detective Rowe was shaken but uninjured. Bingham sat on the floor with his legs tucked under his chin, lips quivering. Gallagher touched his shoulder and Bingham recoiled as if stung. He turned to Rowe and told him to find his phone. Call it in.

  Lara retrieved the Mossberg from where it lay and waited for Gallagher.

  Rowe clutched a throbbing elbow and barked at her. “Where the hell you think you're going? Put the shooter down and take a seat.”

  “We have to go.”

  “You're under arrest.”

  “Sorry.” She turned to the door, Gallagher following.

  “You bitch.”

  Bingham, speaking through chattering teeth. “This is your fault. You get the Lieutenant killed, the kid. And you just walk away. You make me sick.” He spat on the floor to underscore his point.

  It stung and Gallagher saw it in her face. He pushed her out the door and when Bingham cursed them again, he squared her shoulders to stop her from looking back.

  EVERYTHING was quiet outside the boathouse. The low rumble of the river and the creaking of insects. No wolf, no dogs.

  “It's gone,” she said.

  He tromped forward and saw the river. Looked south to a grassy slope and then north, a stand of cottonwoods. “We'll find it.”

  “It could be anywhere by now.”

  “Can't be moving that fast.” He walked back to her. “Not with the buckshot you unloaded on him. The kid clipped it too.”

  She dropped to her knees, let the rifle slip to the grass. “How?”

  He watched her chin sink and he bristled. Hating it. Hating her for giving in.”Get up.”

  Her shoulders sank further and then she didn't move at all.

  He dove at her, grabbed her collar and yanked her eye-to-eye. “Didn't you hear him? He said he'd go after Amy. GET UP!”

  She knocked his hands away, a sharp guttural sound erupting from inside her. That weird strength was back, that unnatural light sparking her iris. What he wanted.

  “You can find him,” he said.

  “Stop.”

  He pushed. “You said you can smell him. Hear the dogs at a distance. You can track him down.”

  She hated him, anger like tinder to the flame in her eyes. “Like what, a dog?”

  “Like a hunter.”

  “No.”

  “You have to. You're the only one who can find him now.”

  “Do you know what you're asking? The more you give into it, the deeper it takes hold of you. Don't you understand that?” He was about to speak but she cut him off. “I can't.”

  “Then he wins.”

  She backed away, shaking her head at what he was asking from her. He let out a long breath and spoke. “If there was another option, I'd be all over it. But this is the one we're stuck with.”

  She hated him for that. Her guts already roiling and the fever coming back, it was all she could do to keep it down. To hang on. How could he ask that of her? If she gave an inch now, the thing inside would take a mile. More.

  Her hand braced against a small boat, the hull stained green with river algae. She felt dizzy and sick. She looked up and saw more than just frustration in his eyes. There was contempt. Not pity, not compassion. Just bitter contempt. She wanted to slap it from his face. She wanted to hurt him.

  “To hell with you then,” he said. “I'll do it myself.”

  He turned his back on her and stomped for the cottonwoods. The gun white-knuckled in his fist. He bellowed out the bastard's name, screaming it into the void because he didn't know what else to do.

  Prall.

  Prall.

  Prall.

  Lara shut her eyes to keep the earth from spinning under her feet. “Shut up.” Gallagher's screams rippled around her, spiking her vertigo. “Shut up!”

  She opened her eyes and saw Gallagher out in the cottonwood trees. He'd stopped screaming, stopped hollering to all points of the compass. Head down, broken. Out of options.

  Then the wolf broke from the void and dragged Gallagher into the darkness.

  38

  THE TREES BLURRED PAST, EVERYTHING spinning. He was raked roughshod over the ground at terrible speed. Bounced hard, dragged over knotweed, shredding his shirt until his back was scraped raw. His leg clamped in the maw of a monster.

  Its pelage smoothed flat in the wind, muscles pumping through the dark fur. Somewhere in the distance behind him, Gallagher could hear the pounding of more paws as the pack thundered after them.

  The gun was still locked in his fist. He brought it to bear in both hands but the monster changed direction, twisting and rolling him crazily. Canarygrass cut his face. His back splitting under the drag. He swung the sight back onto the mass of rippling muscle and fired.

  The jaws let go. He cartwheeled through the muck, tumbling and rolling. His fingers sunk into the dirt, anchoring to a stop. Disoriented. Lost. The pack thundered up on him and he struggled to aim through his double vision. The dogs skirted round and kept running, ghosts without barks, chasing the lead. As quick as they came, they were gone.

  He got to his knees but no further. Too seasick to stand, his calf crushed from the wolf's maw. Eyes whipping round, no idea where he was. How far had the thing dragged him? How far away was Mendes?

  He waited out the vertigo until he could stand without keeling over. His leg hurt like a son of a bitch but he could walk. He had to. The moon frosted the groundcover with quicksilver but gave no clue which way to go.

  A noise, sharp and close. Behind him somewhere. And again, now to his left. Pads trampling twigs, no attempts to be silent. The noise arced round him from aft to stern. The damn thing was circling him out there in the dark, keeping out of the silver trace of moonlight. Round and round it stalked, a monstrous satellite in his orbit.

  Fine. That meant it wasn't tracking down Amy. His daughter's name caught in his throat. He wouldn't get to say goodbye. He stood no chance against this thing, this wolf, werewolf, whatever. He reconciled that but Amy… Their last words were angry, he'd yelled at her. Christ, why had he been such a prick? He still had his phone. Did he have time to call her? Just tell her he loved her and hang up? What if that thing sprang at him before he could hang up? She would hear him die over the line.

  John Gallagher mumbled something. Prayer or plea, hard to tell. He pivoted around on his good leg, tracking the noise with the barrel of the gun. With any luck, any whim of God Almighty he could put a bullet in its brain before it killed him.

  Amen.

  MENDES ran breakneck through the trees, bounding over mossy deadfall and ducking low under the hanging pines. No flashlight but never stumbling in the pitch, her feet hitting solid purchase every time. Something had clicked inside her, locking into place. Reason, logic, intellect; all of it pushed aside and pure instinct took over.

  She couldn't see in the dark but somehow sensed what was in front of her, feeling her way through like some mad Braille. She could read Gallagher out there in the darkness, read the wolf and the dogs. Where and how far away. She followed their precise path, every turn and change in direction.

  When she realized what she was doing, she fell. Reason pushed back, smothering instinct. She was tracking Gallagher by scent, faint as it was. Smell and sound were the Braille she was reading. Instincts other than her own had taken over. Her heart knocked crazily, pu
shing something more than adrenaline through her system. The other, the feral embryo coiled up in her heart sluiced through veins and into the marrow of her bones.

  And now she couldn't move. The same deadening paralysis she suffered in the hospital struck her down faster than venom, ossifying every ligament. Her jaw locked, a rictus of horror flashfrozen to her face. Like before, her mind was trapped inside a shell of stone. Cruelly aware, alert.

  A voice carried downwind and bounced off the trees until it hooked in her ears. Gallagher's voice, screaming and cursing and worst of all, calling for help. Calling her name. Calling for a partner who would never come.

  His voice was chased away by the drum of paws pounding over the forest floor. Snapping twigs, snagging burs. The dogs charging in fast. She couldn't move, couldn't scream, couldn't swing the Mossberg up to blast the filthy bastards to pulp. They would be on her in a heartbeat with their teeth and jaws.

  They broke the underbrush and she braced for the impact but no teeth came. The pack jostled around her, stepping on her hands and nosing her face. Snouts prodding and poking her, nostrils blowing hot in her ear but they held back their teeth. Were they toying with her? Were these killers capable of that?

  Their tang was overwhelming. A stench of wet fur and musk and rancid meat breath. But all of that was surface tissue, a wrinkled skin over boiled milk. Underneath the musk, she could pick out their moods as easily as reading words. No malice or aggression, no hatred nor enmity. There was confusion at first, then curiosity. Acceptance and finally camaraderie. One of their own. A raw fledging pack member.

  One, two, three heartbeats before the full horror of it bansheed over her mind. Her heart stopped and skipped like a needle on vinyl, violently changing tempos. Her core temperature spiked and wet fire roiled up her bloodstream and cooked her brains inside her skull.

  The tiny fetal wolf incubating in her heart unfolded its wet limbs and stretched to its full length. Like lashes to the back, her heartbeat pounded out thirty-nine ticks and it was finished. Lara Estela Mendes ceased to exist.