7: ELISE
Elise left Boston after midnight. Massachusetts was a sea of darkness after an hour of suburban sprawl. She climbed up and over the Berkshire Mountains, the wind blowing dead leaves and promises of winter storms. She played rock music loud to drown out the fear that the dark wind blew through her.
Hunting Wickers was a dangerous game of cat and mouse. The witches could turn most normal humans into puppets and hide behind them. A very powerful witch could remotely control their puppets by implanting scripts like post-hypnotic suggestions. It meant that Elise could be fighting puppets in Utica while the Wickers searched Boston for Joshua. She was betting heavily that the Wickers didn’t know that the boy had taken the train. A huntsman wasn’t an urban-friendly tool; it drew too much attention to the Wickers’ activities. They probably cast the spell thinking he was hiding in a tree fort near his house. By now they would have realized something had gone very wrong but without the heart stone, they wouldn’t be able to recast the spell. Probably. It made her uneasy that Joshua didn’t recognize the moon-shaped loop of silver. It had to resonate strongly with his soul; otherwise the spell wouldn’t have worked.
Dawn rose on farmland. Rolling pastures lined the highway with solitary barns standing like islands. She spotted distant woods marking where the land lay too rugged for farming. Prime Wicker country.
Utica sprawled in a broad wooded river valley. The wide streets lay in an orderly grid system. Four- and five-story buildings were scattered randomly through the city, as if someone had gone through and weeded out structures. It seemed that Utica had been a base of power back in the age of the Erie Canal but now was merely a truck stop along the New York State Thruway.
Signs off the highway pointed out the Amtrak train station, Saint Elizabeth Hospital, and the various law enforcement agencies. She stopped at a large gas station with four islands of pumps to stretch, fill up her Jeep, and consider her options.
Joshua was from the town of Sauquoit, six miles south of Utica. The town was so little that she couldn’t find any information on it beyond the fact it did have a post office. Satellite pictures of the area showed that the town was little more than a string of houses lining the country roads with backyards giving way to farmland and woods. News stories had ten dead teenagers at a barn Friday afternoon, a late Friday night discovery of the mauled body of a Reed Wakefield at his home, and the murder of Joshua’s neighbor, Joseph Buckley, sometime Saturday afternoon.
Wakefield most likely was a Wicker; killed by the same werewolf that showed up at the barn. Buckley may have been the sacrifice made to create the huntsman. It was difficult to tell, as the news stories contained fewer and fewer details instead of more. Clarice was right: the Wickers had recovered from the disasters and taken control of the media. By Saturday evening, the news reports dropped all mentions of Buckley, Wakefield and the wolf. The only stories posted Sunday morning defended the decision to issue an amber alert on the seventeen-year-old Joshua and details of the mass funerals that would take place Monday.
Twelve people dead in three separate murders meant that the local police departments would be overloaded. If the Wickers seriously wanted Joshua captured, they would worm their way into the police search for the missing teenager. The New Hartford department had used volunteers to comb the fields around the barn for additional victims. The Wickers probably inserted themselves into the pool of concerned citizens and took control from there. Only one in a million humans was immune to their powers. The sheer number of law agencies involved was the limiting factor; even the most powerful witch could only control a handful of people at the same time.
Elise could guess who was a witch; she needed to be in the same room with the Wicker to be sure. The problem was that any witch could recognize Elise instantly as a Grigori. Any humans in the room with them would become an instant tool for the Wicker. The trick was to catch the witch alone.
Elise considered her options. All the local law enforcement agencies would be keeping tabs on the case. None, though, would be eager to share information with her. Law enforcers tended to be control freaks. The irony being that her family predated everything in the United States. The FBI. The CIA. The Boston City Police were started in 1838, nearly two hundred years after the werewolves and the Grigori arrived to protect the city. Since her family operated internationally, she had official Interpol credentials. The badge raised a few eyebrows in large United States cities and suspicion in small ones.
She eyed her phone. It looked as if her best bet would be the U.S. Marshals.
* * *
The U.S. marshal, Thomas Stewart, was wearing blue jeans and honest-to-God black cowboy boots. His jeans hid all but the unmistakable toe and heel. His navy blue polo shirt had the star within circle symbol of the marshals. Otherwise he looked like any other law enforcement officer with open carry pistol, badge, and handcuffs attached to a thick leather belt.
She had caught him in the parking lot, just getting out of his car. He held a large Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and looked like he desperately needed it. He stared at her face, ignoring her badge. There was grey in his mustache and goatee and his hairline was receding. She guessed that he was old enough to be her father. It was always creepy when they were old.
Elise moved her badge to in front of his eyes. “Interpol,” she repeated.
Stewart blinked several times before refocusing his attention to the billfold with the gold badge and picture ID. “Huh? Interpol? Wh-wh-what?”
She waited impatiently for blood to return to the big head.
A moment later, Stewart managed to ask, “What brings Interpol to Utica?”
“I’m chasing a cult.” As far as modern police were concerned, witches were part of fairy tales. Cultists, though, police believed in. “There’s six dead in the Boston area. We think it’s linked to your murder of Joseph Buckley.”
The “we” was because cops liked dealing with organizations, not individuals. There were only a handful of Virtues on the East Coast and even fewer Powers. To outsiders, her family seemed like nothing but loose cannons. She focused on Buckley’s murder because it would be difficult to explain what happened at the barn in terms of “cult activity.”
“Why are you here talking to me instead of…” Stewart glanced at her face and lost the thread.
She blocked his view with her phone playing the video of Joshua’s parents making a passionate plea for anyone knowing his whereabouts to contact a tip line. “We believe the cultists are still in the area attempting to locate the sole survivor of the animal attack. The speed at which the parents called a press conference suggests that they’re being manipulated by the cult without their knowledge. These cultists are very good at moving into an area, working their way quietly into people’s trust and then using it against them.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you’re talking to me.” He tried to look around the phone.
She shifted it to keep the phone blocking his view. “Can you identify all the people in this video?”
“That’s the parents of our missing boy. Sandy and Walter. They’re good people. They own a garage here in town.” Stewart knew the family personally then.
“Not Joshua’s parents,” Elise said. “The people in the background, especially anyone who looks as if they’re trying to stay out of camera range.”
He studied the screen, nodding. Something she was saying was clicking with something he’d already noticed. “You think that these cultists inserted themselves into the investigation?”
“Yes. These cultists are very good at tricking groups of people into thinking they’re trustworthy. Basically X will trust the cultist because of Y; Y will trust them because of X. Their belief loops without any external proof that their trust is well founded. Once the cultists are firmly entrenched, they’re assumed to be a trusted member, even in a close-knit community.”
At that point, it became difficult to determine who was a puppet and who was simply deluded by pretenses.
He cursed. “Everything went batshit crazy on Friday. There haven’t been wolves in this area for nearly a hundred years and then we have two attacks in one day. I was thinking it had to be something like Satanists or something after they found Joe Buckley yesterday. Tied up like that with herbs stuffed in his mouth and his lips sewn shut with thick black thread. Coroner says he was still alive while they were cutting out his heart.”
He’d seen Buckley’s body, either in person or via forensic photographs.
“You’re involved in the case?” Elise asked.
Stewart blushed slightly and studied the tips of his boots. “I—I stuck my nose in when Joshua went missing yesterday. I got all my nieces and nephews into judo. He and his older sister are part of our dojo. They’re good kids. Well, she’s a firecracker. He’s dorky as all hell but he’s got grit in spades. Buckles down, does the work, pitches in to help without being asked, avoids fights even when he could clean the floor with the other kid, always where he’s supposed to be when he’s supposed to be there, or he makes sure people know why he isn’t. A really good kid. And he’s gone. Just gone. New Hartford police are saying he ran away from home; that’s not the kid I know. Something’s happened to him. I want to find him before he ends up like Joe Buckley. This cult thing worming their way into a group—that makes sense because the New Hartford PD suddenly can’t find its ass with both hands. They ‘lost’ all the clothes from the crime scene yesterday. They’re saying that the clothes might have gotten accidently mixed into the trash and ended up in the incinerator. What kind of idiot does that?”
The clothes hadn’t been lost; they’d been used in making the huntsman. The lie was merely to cover that they had been taken. The Wickers definitely had someone on the inside of the New Hartford Police Department. Elise was glad that she hadn’t gone straight to them.
“Who do you know at this press conference?” Elise asked.
He tapped on the screen to pause the video. “Like I said, Sandy and Walt. That’s their daughter, Bethy.”
All three were tall, willowy platinum blondes. Between their butchered last name and fair coloring, she guessed that the family had originally been either Scandinavian or Slavic. Elise couldn’t see any family resemblance to Joshua. He seemed too short and mousey to be genetically related.
Stewart continued to name people clustered around Joshua’s parents.
“Rob Harpur, he’s the guidance counselor at the high school. He and Walt went to school together. Joshua has been working his butt off to get a scholarship to college. William Cosby is our representative; he’s up for re-election. That’s Dahlia Wakefield…”
“Wakefield, as in Reed Wakefield? The man mauled in his house?”
Stewart nodded. “His wife.”
Dahlia was the epitome of a Wicker. She wore a red fox jacket, diamond studded fingernails, and Coach handbag. Wickers had a need to be recognized as powerful and important.
Covens liked to work in groups of three to thirteen people. The members weren’t necessarily related. A group of unrelated people moving into an area would raise flags. The coven would use one family name to draw less attention.
“What can you tell me about Dahlia Wakefield and her family?”
Stewart shrugged. “The first eight hours or so, everyone ran in circles, screaming and shouting. None of the kids had any ID on them. They’d changed into costumes for the haunted house. All of their wallets and purses were locked in one of the cars. The kids were so torn apart we weren’t sure how many there had been. We spent hours scouring the fields around the barn, making sure a kid hadn’t run off wounded and was lying unconscious in the undergrowth.”
He must have been part of the search teams since he used “we” in the tone that meant he’d been stomping through the fields personally. “Half the kids in the county were out at one haunted house or another. When the news got out about the attack, every parent who couldn’t get hold of their kid showed up at the hospital, freaked out of their mind. It was a circus; only this time the lion act had gotten out and eaten part of the audience. It was well past midnight before anyone got out to the Wakefield house to break the news about their daughter, Daphne. The officer found the front door broken down and Reed Wakefield torn apart in the foyer.”
“Had they been living there long?”
“No. They’d just moved in a few days before Halloween. Everything about them seems a bit off but there hasn’t been time to find anything out. It’s been thirty-six hours since the 911 call about the barn was made and twenty hours since Joshua disappeared and his neighbor was found dead. Three different crime scenes and twelve people dead and one boy missing. There was no sign of a struggle and Joshua wouldn’t go without a fight. He might have just wandered off. The first few hours at the hospital, he had no idea what his name was or where he lived. But I think he remembered something from the attack and—and—”
He scrubbed at his hair, looking close to exhaustion. “I don’t know. I’ve been racking my brains trying to figure it out. I’ve even went back to the barn a couple of times, thinking he might have gone there. Some of the older kids are keeping a vigil at the dojo, although that’s a real long shot. It’s ten miles from his house to downtown Utica and when he was released from the hospital yesterday, he barely remembered where he lived.”
The Wickers had to be walking on eggshells. They had a newborn werewolf roaming loose; one trained to fight. They couldn’t be sure what the dead werewolf had told Joshua before he was killed. Their only hope was to take Joshua unaware and cage him before he could react. And they had to act before his pack arrived in force.
Which should have been Friday night. Maybe they were already here.
“Did anyone run the license plate of the mystery BMW?” Elise asked.
Stewart snorted with disgust. “I did after those idiots at New Hartford PD ran in circles all day yesterday. It’s leased by a company in New York City. King Properties. It sounds like a real estate firm. I managed to get through to someone this morning. They said that it must have been stolen. Their records show it’s supposed to be in a garage on…” He paused to consult his note. “Central Park West.”
Elise pressed her mouth tight on a curse. She was glad that he was still looking down; she couldn’t keep the dismay off her face. The company existed solely to manage the Wolf King’s extensive motor pool and far-flung properties. It meant that the dead werewolf was definitely a Thane carrying out the king’s orders.
What did the Wickers do to piss off the Wolf King? Before they killed his Thane? What pulled both the Wickers and the Thane to a barn in the middle of nowhere? Was the Thane there for the Wicker, or was the Wicker there for something the Thane was after? Joshua? How random was it that he was the only one to survive? The boy seemed to think he simply got lucky but this was a Thane, not some random pack wolf. Thane killed anything they set out to kill, as the Wickers found out.
“We’re still trying to find the men that were in the car,” Stewart said. “There’s been no sign of them.”
“Them?” Elise seized on the most important word in his statement.
“Rob Harpur says that there were two men at the high school Friday afternoon. Big guys in business suits. They felt like mafia to Rob. They came in the BMW and walked around the halls, obviously looking for someone. Rob spotted them at Joshua’s locker and tried to get them to leave. He went to call the police. The idiot drama teacher chased them out of the costume room and told them where the kids were.”
The two “men” both had to be werewolves because wolves rarely associated with anyone outside their pack. They were probably both Thanes as most wolves didn’t bother to dress up. Alexander liked formal wear for his heralds/enforcers. It was as close to a military uniform the wolves could get and remain hidden in plain sight.
Two Thanes and only one was accounted for? What happened to the second one? It put a different light on the two separate attacks.
“Are they sure that Reed was killed by the same wolf?” Elise asked.
“Actually, no.” Stewart glanced at his watch. “I’m surprised that it didn’t make the news. For some reason, New Hartford thinks there’s a second wolf. They’re passing around special ammo and doing a blanket search, starting at Wakefield’s house in about an hour.”
“Special ammo?” Hollow points would only mean pissed off werewolves and dead law officers.
Stewart took a pistol magazine out of one of the leather pouches on his belt. “I don’t get this ‘special ammo.’ Looks like crap to me. I’m sure the hell not going to use it. Nothing about this case makes a whole lot of sense.”
The magazine was loaded with silver bullets. The police would stand a chance if they actually used the ammunition. But if they were like Stewart, they’d use their own trusted ammo. At that point, it became Russian roulette for the werewolves. There was no way to get this many silver bullets in thirty hours. The Wickers expected a war with the werewolves and came prepared.
“Wait. The Wakefield house?” Dead Wicker. Silver bullets. Wolf hunt. The witches must have had some kind of magical construct that wounded the Thane. There would be no other reason for the wolf to still be in the area. “Was there a lot of foliage inside the house? Branches and leaves and vines?”
“A shitload of it.”
A newborn and a wounded Thane running around loose, both immune to the witches’ powers. No wonder the Wickers were working slowly and cautiously. One misstep and they’d be missing limbs.
And lucky her had to find the wounded werewolf before the police department—or the town was going to be mourning a lot of dead cops on top of dead teenagers.