9: ELISE
The Wicker house was easy to find; Elise merely had to follow the caravan of vehicles heading down the narrow country road. It seemed as if the New Hartford Police Department had called in favors with every law enforcement officer in the state. The good news was that no Wicker could control this many people. Unfortunately, they’d only need one or two well-placed puppets who could command the rest of the herd.
The road went past the Sauquoit high school, three stories high with ten-foot-high glass windows. It looked surprisingly large and moneyed for such a small town. At some time in the past, the area had been well-to-do. Three or four hundred feet more and the caravan turned onto an even narrower street and stopped just short of a railroad crossing.
The Wicker house sat on a large parcel of land, set back from the street another hundred feet. A winding driveway led back to the two-story farmhouse with a large river rock chimney and a wrap-around porch. It was a modern house pretending to be something old. It was too small to house a large coven; its size confirmed that the property was a temporary base.
Yellow police tape kept the caravan from turning into the driveway. The police cars that she’d been following pulled onto the grassy shoulder, already cut deep with ruts.
A small media circus had gathered, unpacking satellite dishes and cameras. Elise tucked her Jeep between two production trucks. She had wondered why the Wickers were delaying the hunt. The witches obviously wanted a lot of people between them and the werewolf. A set start time maximized the turnout of monster fodder.
Elise wished that she could simply sit and wait for the Wicker to show up. She couldn’t kill the witch in front of so many police officers and expect to be able to walk away. It would get messy. Yes, when push came to shove, her family did lean toward “kill them all and let God sort them out.” It made the Grigoris’ lives much simpler. Heaven was a nice place; good people went there. Bad people got what they deserved.
It would piss off her grandmother, though, and that was to be avoided at all costs.
A cameraman spotted her as she climbed out of her Jeep. He’d been about to lift the camera to his shoulder. His eyes went wide and his pupils dilated. “Wow. Hello gorgeous! Who you are with?”
“I don’t date losers like you.” Insults were now her kneejerk reaction to how men acted around her. Depending on the guy, one or two dozen cutting remarks generally got them angry enough to actually see her. She didn’t like the type of person it was making her. Not that she was the sweetest person in the world to start with, but she was starting to feel like a weird cross between a swan and a spitting cobra.
“I meant your network.” He started to point the camera her way.
“Unless you want to eat that thing, do not point it at me.” She pulled her pistol and aimed it at the lens.
Really, she didn’t like that pulling a weapon was her first reaction. Or that her second reaction was thinking about pistol-whipping him and stuffing him into the equipment locker on his truck. Other women didn’t have to be this hostile—right?
“Okay! Okay! Not filming!” He jerked the camera off his shoulder and back-pedaled, bouncing off vehicles as he went.
She stalked across the road, muttering darkly. “Is it really too much to ask, God, for one person—beyond Decker—who won’t go brain dead every time they look me in the face?”
There was yellow tape where the front door had stood. The frame and part of the wall around it lay in the high-ceilinged foyer. The wolf had caught the warlock in the hallway just beyond it. Blood painted the walls and ceiling for eleven feet from a werewolf tearing the body to pieces. Eleven parts, to be exact, according to the coroner’s report that the U.S. marshal had shared with her.
Elise ducked under the tape and followed the blood trail. At the end of the hallway, the wolf had barreled into a big farm kitchen.
There had been something made of wood and blood sacrifice waiting for the wolf. The end result must have mystified the police. Sticks and leaves and something long dead littered every surface along with swathes of blood from the wounded wolf.
Something glinted among the dead leaves. Elise toed aside the dead foliage. It was a silver bread knife tied to a branch. The small-town police, overwhelmed by violent and bizarre massacres, had missed the silverware. Even if they’d seen it, they wouldn’t realize what it indicated.
The witches had known what was coming for them. They’d prepared.
So the werewolf wasn’t just wounded, it was poisoned. It wouldn’t heal until its wounds were washed clean with Earthblood. That explained why the Wickers knew that it had to be somewhere close by, nearly dead.
“Hey!” A male voice shouted at the end of the hall. “That’s a police line that you just danced under, Missy!”
“Interpol!” she shouted back, following the splattering of blood to the garage entry. Some of the coven had escaped while the construct bought them time. The garage door was smashed open from the inside and there were tire marks on the driveway, racing away from the house.
A man came stomping up the hallway toward her. “I don’t care which news agency you’re with, get back across the damn road and wait with the other vultures!”
“Interpol.” She pronounced it slowly and held up her badge. “As in international police. As in the United States Justice Department. As in federal agent. Interpol.”
“What?” He snatched the badge from her. He was a tall beefy man with a bulldoglike face. His nametag stated Chief R. Dietz. His uniform patch identified him as New Hartford Police Department. From what she’d been able to gather, Sauquoit didn’t have its own police. “French police don’t have jurisdiction here.”
Dietz studied her photograph and then glared at her. He could have been gay, but the lack of understanding of complex structures that he should know was a classic symptom of being under a witch’s power.
“I’m a United States federal agent who works on the behalf of the Attorney General and Homeland Security.” It was a greatly simplified version of the command structure in Washington, D.C. It usually required diagrams to explain who had control over what. The bureaucracy usually worked in the Grigoris’ favor since no one was ever sure who to complain to.
He frowned at the badge again. “What the hell does Interpol want with a simple murder case?”
Simple? Elise laughed despite the fact that her heart was racing, making ready for a possible do or die fight. “I’m investigating the trafficking of endangered species.”
“Trafficking? Like drugs?”
Oh, this man was ratcheted tight if he wasn’t following that.
“Illegal importing of animals on the endangered list. It’s possible that this is a critically endangered red wolf, or endangered Ethiopian wolf or a near-threatened maned wolf.”
“What the hell does that mean? Are you a tree hugger here to stop this hunt?”
“No, I’m trying to trace how this animal got here in the first place. Wolves are extinct in this area, so clearly someone brought it here.”
“We’ve looked for kennels and animal sanctuaries…”
“You’ve checked the registered ones. I’m looking for unregistered places with European ties.”
All bullshit but he nodded slowly, grasping what she was implying.
“Were you given ammo?” He held up two magazines for her. “Everyone should take one. It’s loaded for wolf.”
She took the nine-millimeter clip magazine and made a show of loading it into her pistol. He was working off a script. Like post-hypnotic suggestions, he’d keep to the script until the witch showed up to supervise the hunt. Obviously he’d been told to gather up a hunting party and arm them with silver. Short of knocking him unconscious and tying him up, Elise had no way to get him off script. Killing him would also work but that would be bad.
She desperately wanted to search the house for clues on what the Wickers intended to do with Joshua. The Wickers obviously thought he was still in the area. They were standing their ground to find him. As long as they thought he was in the Utica area, he was safe in Boston.
There wasn’t time to search the house. The Wicker could arrive at any moment and the werewolf was someplace, poisoned, and obviously too wounded to move. She had to get to it before the police could close in on it. A single bite would instantly make one of the hunters a feral werewolf. From there, chaos would spiral outward.
* * *
The house’s backyard edged a dense woodlot of sugar maple, shedding brilliant red leaves. Elise stood on the edge of the yard and considered the layer of dead foliage. Strange how leaf-covered ground could seem so threatening.
There were witches, and there witches and then there were witches.
Wickers took the word to a scary level. Just about anything could be lurking in among the leaves or hidden in the woods besides one hurt and very pissed off werewolf. Luckily the media circus was in full swing in the front yard. The house shielded her as she pulled her daggers. Nerves jittering with fear, she walked into the woods.
The dead leaves crunched under foot. Occasionally a hidden twig would snap, making her tighten her grip on her daggers.
It was times like this that she wished her faith was stronger. Oh, she knew there was a God. The proof was written on the face of every member of her family and all the monsters she’d killed since she took up her daggers. What she doubted was that God gave a damn about his creations. Look at what he’d done to Decker; given him a divine gift and then twisted him hard by having him attacked by a vampire. As a man, he’d been persecuted for God’s touch on him. Because of his faith, he couldn’t even kill himself and go on to the afterlife that he believed in, even after he’d become a monster. What kind of creator did that to its creations and could still be called “loving”?
The wind sent the leaves skittering. She pranced sideways, startled.
“Oh God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth!” She blushed and glanced about to see if anyone had witnessed her fear dance. No. Her forefathers, however, were probably snickering at the moment. They had to be a little perverted despite being angels—hence the reason they’d slept around with human women.
The werewolf’s blood trail was easy to follow; the wolf bled heavily as it staggered through the woods. The officers sent to tell Daphne’s “parents” the bad news had been at the house late Friday night; they’d missed the blood splattered on the dead leaves in the darkness. Saturday the police had been distracted with Joshua disappearing and the murder of his neighbor. The Wickers had been busy regrouping, trying to capture Joshua, and sacrificing Joshua’s neighbors for the huntsman. It had been a busy Saturday for everyone involved.
There was no way the hunters would miss the blood trail today.
Elise followed it through the woods, heading downhill. The werewolf needed Earthblood to cleanse his wounds. It was unlikely he’d find any. He’d reached the railroad crossing and realized that it would taint anything that lay beyond. He lay there for some time, bleeding out, before crawling across the gravel and creosote-soaked ties and metal rails to the shallow stream beyond.
Sauquoit Creek ran too polluted for Earthblood, but gave him something to drink, so he was still alive when she found him. She cursed softly at the sight of him. He was a massive black male. Ferals were only slightly bigger than a Rottweiler. Normal pack wolves tended to be slightly larger than Great Danes. This wolf was built more like a black bear. Her family had legends that the Wolf King was like a polar bear crossed with an elephant when he was angry—huge and white—but it was unclear if that was true or not. Most people did not survive witnessing it.
He growled softly without opening his eyes.
“Seth?” Elise kept her distance.
He breathed out a bitter laugh. “Everyone forgets there’s more than one black wolf of Boston still alive.”
“Cabot.” She’d forgotten about him. Jack Cabot was the prince’s cousin. He was the youngest of the Wolf King’s Thanes. If he hadn’t been wounded, she would have been seriously outclassed. Even hurt as badly as he was, he might be able to kill her.
He opened his eyes for a moment, focused on her, and then closed his eyes with a laugh. “I never thought I’d be happy to see a Virtue in person. I knew I’d be in deep shit when it happened, but I thought I’d at least start on my feet.”
“The Wickers are using the local police as puppets. They’ve armed the cops with silver ammo. A hunt for you starts in a matter of minutes.” She scanned the area. There was no way she could carry him any distance. There was no safe hiding place nearby. She would have to get her Jeep. “I need your promise that you’ll not hurt me while I’m trying to save your ass.”
His laugh ended with a whimper of pain. “I want to live. For Seth’s sake, I need to live. I’ve been lying here realizing how messed up he’s going to be if I don’t make it. I’ll promise almost anything.”
“That you won’t hurt me?”
“I will not hurt you unless you do something stupid, like trying to shoot those silver bullets you have at another wolf.”
Close enough. “I’m going to get my Jeep. I’ll be right back.”
“I’ll be here.” He closed his eyes.
* * *
A powerful witch could walk into a car dealership, pick out a car, and have it given to them, all the proper paperwork signed and sealed. The more expensive the car, the more powerful the witch.
There was a red Bentley sitting in the Wicker driveway. Elise took a deep breath as she realized that the witch had walked away with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar car. No wonder the Wickers could keep Dietz on script from miles away. It was possible that such a powerful witch could control all the police at the house.
Elise wanted to kill the witch, but now was not the time. Just as she was nearly immune to a Wicker’s ability, they were immune to hers. The Wicker would see her coming and throw every puppet in the area at Elise. She needed to catch the witch without its meat shield.
Elise drove her Jeep down the railroad, straddling the right rail. The right of way dropped off steeply on either side; she really hoped that no train came while she was driving down the narrow raised bed. A quarter mile up the tracks, she reached Cabot.
“You need to get up.” She opened the passenger door. “I can’t lift you.”
He heaved himself up, growling lowly. It was impressively loud and scary as hell.
She backed away from him. “Do you have to do that?”
“Being angry helps,” he snarled. “We’re strongest when we’re pissed off.”
“As long as you remember that I’m not the one you’re pissed at.”
“I know exactly who I want to kill. I saw her just before that damn thing in the kitchen laid into me. A tall brunette with red fox jacket and big gold earrings. Late thirties, early forties. She just glanced back toward me and said ‘kill it’ and walked out. Walked.” He nearly roared the word and flung himself into the passenger seat of the Jeep. It rocked under his weight. “Like I was nothing.”
In place, he subsided, panting.
“You done?” Elise did not want to get in beside the angry werewolf.
He took deep cleansing breaths before murmuring, “Yes. Done. Get me out of this place. Please.”
* * *
The nearest Earthblood spring was in Ferris Lake Wild Forest, over an hour away. Cabot lay silent the entire way. Much as she wanted to ask him questions, she didn’t want him angry again while she was trapped inside the car with him.
The spring was deep within the park. The Earthblood spilled out a granite outcrop to gather in a grotto. Despite the overcast sky, the “water” shimmered with the telltale gleam of the pooled magical liquid.
She waited until after he’d half fallen out of the Jeep and crawled into the grotto’s pool. Red clouds formed and drifted away as the Earthblood cleansed his wounds.
“I was expecting Samuels to come and laugh at me,” Cabot whispered. “We did rock-paper-scissors and I picked what sounded easier.”
“A Wicker deep in the country? Easy? Amateurs.” She pulled out her phone and found the photo of the dead wolf. “Is this Samuels?”
Cabot breathed out and closed his eyes. “Yes.” He was silent for a minute before speaking again. “I suppose I did get the easy job then. The witch he was going after?”
“Dead.”
“And the others?”
“What others?”
“The seniors were doing some kind of haunted house to fund their prom. Eleven kids had gotten out early for it. Samuels would not have gone down without a fight. What about the other kids? Was there collateral damage?”
She showed him the collateral damage.
“Jesus.” He breathed and closed his eyes against it. “We royally screwed this up.”
“You were after Wickers. What did you expect?”
“We weren’t! Not originally! The first we knew that there were Wickers in the area was when we walked into the school. That damn smell: myrrh and fresh bruised greens and something dead long enough it started to rot. We decided to split up. I’d follow the witch’s trail back to her lair. Samuels would go on to the haunted house.”
“Why were you at the school?”
“Wolf King’s business.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit.”
Cabot snarled, showing teeth.
She slapped him hard on the snout. “There’s dead scattered all across the tri-state area and you’ll be out of it for days yet. I need to know what I’m dealing with here.”
He swore, rubbing his snout with a huge paw. “I don’t know! Alexander said merely that a youngling was a senior at the school and that we were to find him and bring him back. Only there’s no pack in this area; the closest is Albany. Their younglings go to a private school the pack owns. If a youngling goes past thirteen without being changed, it’s usually because they chose not to become a wolf. Those kids go to a boarding school on the West Coast. Alexander didn’t give us a name; he just said that we’d know him when we found him. There was a youngling; we tracked his scent through the school. He was in among the bunch of seniors heading to the haunted house.”
She hadn’t realized that younglings smelled different from normal humans, since they weren’t werewolves until they were bitten. She’d always assumed that younglings were humans. If the Thanes could pick the youngling out of a crowd, then the boy wasn’t completely “human.”
It meant that Samuels had gone to the barn without knowing which of the kids was the missing youngling. Was Joshua actually the child that the Wolf King sent the Thanes to find? Cabot couldn’t tell her.
He rose to his feet and shook, spraying her with Earthblood.
“Hey!” Elise backed away from the grotto.
“Sorry.” He stretched and changed. He was a flowing dark gleam as if his entire being became glowing liquid. It started black and shifted to a dappled green and then stabilized to bare skin and honey brown hair.
Cabot made a tall, muscular man. Seriously ripped. His shoulder-length hair was surprisingly honey-colored, a blond nearly dark enough to be brown. His thick eyebrows, beard and chest hair were darker still. His eyes were a golden color. Fringed with the black lashes, they almost seemed to gleam.
The men of her family were just as angelic in their looks as the women. They were elegantly beautiful to the point of being androgynous. (Their gaydar was utterly useless as even straight males hit on them.)
Cabot’s face was pure strength, drawn in rugged lines. Every part of it alone suggested brute force. The solid square jaw, the high cheekbones, and prominent brow ridge could have been ugly, but together they created a raw animalistic handsomeness that was impossible to deny.
Elise realized she was staring and turned around, blushing. “You could warn me you were suddenly going to be naked.”
“Sorry.” He gave a slight laugh, as if he was too weak for anything more. “I’m not thinking clearly. I assumed you had some clothes I could put on. The police are looking for a wolf, not a man.”
He wasn’t the only one having trouble thinking. Did she have clothes he could wear? He wasn’t fitting into her spare clothes. She remembered that she had a fresh pair of coveralls for Decker. (He had a thing about not ruining his fine tailored clothes and monsters tended to spawn in the sewers.)
“Yeah, I think I might.” She headed toward her Jeep. “You’ll have to go commando.”
“I’ll live.” He was trembling when he reached her side.
“Sit.” She shoved a towel at him. “Put this on until you’re bandaged.”
He wrapped it around his lean hips and perched on the narrow back bumper of her Jeep. He had dozens of wounds on his muscled torso. The shallow ones were already angry scabs but the deeper punctures were seeping blood. “You know my name. What is yours?”
“Elise.”
Various types of magic had a smell. The scent of his change clung to him. It was a soft, woody smell like sandalwood, mixed with a rich sun-warmed grass. He leaned against the frame of her Jeep, eyes closed, as she bandaged the deepest of his wounds. His skin was surprisingly soft, like a newborn’s, only it covered hard muscle. She tried to remember what Joshua had felt like when she’d checked his pulse.
She realized he’d opened his eyes and was watching her. “What?”
“I know our people aren’t always on the friendliest of terms. You could have left me to die. I owe you.”
“Yes, you do.” Elise snapped her mouth shut after her kneejerk reaction had spoken for her. He hadn’t done anything remotely like the mouth breathers. If anything, she was the one quietly lusting…
She blushed hot at the realization. Oh, you hypocrite! She ducked her head and tried to focus on bandaging him. Unfortunately it meant focusing on his body. How their legs had to tangle together for her to get close enough to apply the bandages. The heat of his body. His scent.
Questioning him would be safer than working in silence because without anything to think on, she found herself wondering if he tasted as good as he smelled. “So you don’t have any idea what the Wickers are planning?”
“I think they’re after our youngling. After I tore their construct apart, I noticed that the house was practically empty except for a handful of textbooks and some enrollment papers from the local high school. The house was a staging area.”
“Did the Wolf King tell you the name of the youngling?” Were they looking for Joshua or was the boy merely more collateral damage?
He gave her a long measuring stare. “Why are you interested in our youngling?”
“The Wickers are standing their ground after tangling with two Thanes. I want to know why.”
He closed his eyes. “I didn’t get around to exchanging names with the Wickers. They might not realize who the hell came tearing through their kitchen.”
“They know the car at the barn belongs to the Wolf King. Only an idiot couldn’t put the two and two together.”
He fell silent. He breathed so deeply that she wondered if he’d fallen asleep.
She busied herself with putting away her first aid kit. “You need to put on clothes and get into the passenger side before you can pass out.”
His edge of his mouth lifted in a ghost of a smile. “I know what I need to do but I’m not sure that I can.”
“Do you need help?”
A tired laugh. “Unfortunately, yes.”
The next ten minutes proved to be the most conflicted of her life. Putting pants on a man turned out to be as sexy as taking them off. Nor could she just stop there as Cabot’s wounds and the coveralls’ design made it necessary for her to put both arms around him and pull the back up so he could get his hands into the sleeves. She wanted it to be an innocent act done without awareness of the heat of his body or how their hips pressed together. That she couldn’t keep either out of her mind made her angry with herself; she was reacting just like the mouth breathers.
He slumped against her, head on her shoulder, breath warm against her neck. “I know that I’m weak as a baby. I’ll recover after a night’s sleep. Hopefully. I need to go back. If the Wickers were after the youngling and are standing their ground, then the kid is still in the wind. I need to find him and get him to safety.”
He wanted her to take him back. Until he got back on his feet, he also needed her protection.
At least, she was fairly sure that was what he was saying. Wolves were usually fairly straightforward creatures. Not like some monsters that twisted words around until yes was no and the sun was the moon.
“You’re suggesting an alliance?” she asked to be sure.
“Yes. I need your help. You’re going after them, aren’t you? We can work together.”
It was ironic that she’d had an hour to think on the drive to the Earthblood and she hadn’t considered the ramifications of saving him. He wasn’t a human law officer who could be turned into a weapon against her. Nor he was the clueless puppy ignorant of all things related to Wickers, Grigori and werewolves. This was a Thane. The only danger that he posed was to her libido. There was no good reason not to agree on an alliance.
“Yes, I’m going after them. We can work together.”
Oh, God help her.