Wolf's Deal: A Nick Lupo Novella (The Nick Lupo Series) (16 page)

It might have been a
familiar scent, but maybe it was altered, made much more pungent, and
unrecognizable, by fear
.
Pure terror.

The wolf whimpered. Or maybe it was Nick Lupo’s own reaction
he heard. His own fear. The wolf understood terror. The human riding along
didn’t want to create it except in his enemies.

Part of his fear was that he simply couldn’t tell whether
this was the scent he wanted. Only that it was familiar. He cursed the arcane
filtering that kept the wolf and human sides essentially in conflict.

Now the fear stabbed through him like a blade. Even the wolf
flinched.

Jessie, is it you?

 
He didn’t know
how to pray while in the wolf’s brain, or even as a human, really, but he tried
anyway.

CHARLIE BLACK BEAR

Christ, Lupo
had
flinched hadn’t he? Twice? Physically flinched.

The voice on the phone had asked him if he had any silver
jewelry available, at hand. In his office, perhaps? Had told him what to do,
and what to watch for.

Hell, I’m an Indian
, he had thought.
Of
course
I got some silver
stuff
.

But then he’d had a change of mind.

He had decided he wasn’t playing along with them, no way,
whatever they wanted he was staying away from. He figured they were bluffing
about his family. They had to be. They knew him, they had to know he would
chase them down and kill them if they hurt his family. They were playing off
his superstitions, expecting the whole secretive voice on the phone, creepy photograph
from creepy stalker ploy to sell him on their serious intentions. Deadly
intentions.

But they couldn’t be serious. Could they?

Nah, it was like something out of a mediocre movie. Like he
was Michael Douglas or Tom Cruise, getting threatened by some unholy asshole
holding a gun to his family’s head. That kind of thing didn’t happen in real
life, did it?

Still…

He wasn’t sure why he had dug into his desk until he found
the silver bracelet with the turquoise inlay his wife had given him a couple
years ago, but he had and he’d chuckled nervously as he slipped it on. Then
he’d rejoined his crew on the hunt for the Pathfinder that belonged to Lupo’s
friend (
lover?
), and then Lupo had
flinched.
Twice
.

Hell, he was an Indian. He knew what
that
was all about.
Shit
.

Now what?

PREY

The Archer was panting, staring at her with what she took to
be lust.

“What do you want?” she said. Her voice was a frightening croak
and reflected her own fear all too well. She tried to create saliva so she
could ask the question again, but gave up and waited. A tremor rippled through
her extremities and then numbness.

He seemed to be in some kind of a trance. A minute ticked
by, then two.

She spoke again, with better result. “I haven’t done
anything to you.” Trying to humanize herself, maybe. She hadn’t done anything,
had she? She’d never seen him until he pretended to be a cop.
What happened to the real guy?
The cop whose badge he had flashed?
She
shivered in the clammy air. No, she knew what it was.
Fear
.

Definitely it was fear. More like terror.

“You’re just like the others.” His voice was soft, almost
pleasant, like a polite waiter or bartender. “You see me, but you’re
indifferent. I’m just a number to you, a player with cash in his pockets.”

What’s he talking about?

“Like Tanya,”
he continued in that over-sweetened tone. “All she cared about was getting me
to play longer, bet more.”

She knew he
was talking about his – The Archer’s – first victim.

“All dealers
want you to play,” she said. “It’s the business.” There was no point in
pretending she didn’t know what he was talking about. “Is that why you killed
the other dealer?”

He laughed.
“Like I’m going to start explaining myself to you!”
 
His tone was less sweet suddenly.

“Why are you
treating me differently then?” She gambled that they were looking for her by
now. If she could keep him talking… but not instigate his rage. If she
could—

“You’re just
another target to me, don’t you see?”

“Am I?”
You’re pushing it…

“The same,
but different. The others got me noticed. But you, you’ll really get me what I
want. They won’t ignore me any more.”

He was
nearly incoherent. What he said didn’t make sense. She knew he was about to
continue, so she didn’t respond. Anything to keep him talking.

“Tanya was
beautiful, but cold,” he said, his eyes unfocusing as if he were gazing at
Tanya from a distance. “You – you’re even more beautiful. As soon as you
showed up, I knew I was going to take you. I considered that other one, but
there was something about you. You know those cops, they know you. You will
make them all notice and remember.
 
I want you… I want you very much…”

She
trembled, the shivers running through her in waves again. He made it sound like
sexual
want. Like he was about to
assault her. But then she saw that perhaps he wanted to
own
her, like a trophy. Was there a hunting thing there? She was a
trophy? She stared at the hunting tip on the bolt in his crossbow. She didn’t
want to feel that shard of sharpened steel rip into her flesh and organs,
pinning her to the target.

Dear God
, she really
didn’t…

Was she
over-analyzing? Maybe it was too much in her nature, dissecting facts, trying
to fit them together. Maybe it would have been best not to do it, just this
once.

She
considered the double razor-blade-like tip. It would
penetrate
her, in a way that both was and wasn’t sexual. It was
both personal and impersonal, wasn’t it? She wondered what his beef was with
the casino, if he had one, and whether his feelings were hurt because the
dealers were treating him like a number… whether those two things hadn’t
somehow pushed him over the edge to where he was confused about what kind of
revenge he wanted.

Then she
reminded herself that it didn’t matter. She could analyze to the end of time,
but she didn’t have till then. Perhaps she was out of time. He was building
himself up – sexually? – to where he would rape her with a metal
stand-in for his own penis. That’s what it was, but how could she avert this
result while keeping him busy?

He tipped up
the crossbow like an erection and her muscles tightened, waiting for the
tearing, shredding, lancing impact.

She thought
her bowels might loosen, and she didn’t care.

THE ARCHER

Enough talking!

This woman
was beautiful and he wanted her. He had a boner bigger than any of the other
people he’d killed had ever given him. But she was a
talker
. She was trying to get into his head. He’d been mesmerized
by her lips as they formed words. Even after zapping her and tossing her in the
van, head covered in sack, hair now askew, she still looked exquisite and he
ached for her. That hair was a dark halo on the multi-colored rings of the
archery target behind her. He would paint those concentric circles with her
blood.

This was
like Tanya, but ten times
better
. A
hundred times. He felt as if he would truly
own
her.

His rage at
the treatment he’d been subject to would be sated when The Archer took another
life.

He raised
the crossbow. He’d cranked it, so it was cocked and ready, a bolt in place. The
bolt’s tip swelled in his vision and his head swam for a second, swam with the
motion of the act. He felt the sexuality of it in his loins.

This
was
better than taking them from the van
window. It was more personal.

He
considered stepping closer, maybe even touching the sharpened tip to her
exquisite skin. He wasn’t sure why, but the thought made him harder, and wet.
Leaky. His breathing turned to panting. The bolt would nail her to the target,
maybe even pierce her through and through. He swallowed a lump in his throat.

His finger
brushed the trigger as his feet started to take him closer.

The woman’s
eyes widened.

She knows what’s coming. She’s waiting for it
.

He was awash
in lust; it flowed like liquid fire in his veins.

He stepped
closer.

The woman
turned her head and closed her eyes.

Look at me!

He knew she
wouldn’t, averting his gaze, until he touched her with his heat. Trying to make
it less personal for him. It wouldn’t work.

He was only
a few feet away now.

The savage
growl took his attention away from his lusts and he stumbled, the crossbow
wavering as he turned to see what—

Some huge animal had come from nowhere, left the
ground, and was now in mid-lunge toward him, jaws open and teeth already
snapping, its eyes spinning in a strange kaleidoscope spiral as they fixed him
with a rage-filled stare
.

“Arghsk—”

It was all
he could manage, nothing more than a strangled sound.

They
collided. He had no time to sidestep the hurtling animal. The massive jaws
snapped shut on his arm, ripping and tearing through his clothes, and the
crossbow clattered to the broken concrete floor.

He screamed
incoherently as the pain of the animal’s mauling reached his brain. The Archer
tried to pull his arm away, out of the monster’s jaws, but he couldn’t. Instead
bright gouts of his blood sprayed into his face, into his open mouth, into his
eyes, and when the arm was finally freed from those savage jaws, half of it was
gone, sawn off like a piece of lumber in a table saw.

In shock,
The Archer fell back and dropped to his knees, his ears filled with the
growling and in the distance the screaming of the woman who had been his
target. Crazed now, he scrabbled to find the rest of his arm or the crossbow or
both, but he no longer knew what he was doing, and all he did was paint the
concrete floor crimson Jackson Pollock-style.

The wolf
leaped in at him again, forepaws crushing The Archer’s chest as it drove him to
the floor onto his back, snout and maw spraying spittle and bloody bits of arm
and shredded clothing.

The Archer’s
eyes fixed those of the monster who was devouring his flesh. His voice was
gone, his lungs collapsed, and yet they faced each other with equal rage. The
wolf broke the stare first, its teeth suddenly ripping through The Archer’s
throat, sawing and chewing skin, muscle, and tendon…

The Archer’s
brain was unable to process what had happened, but the monster feeding off him
had driven him over the edge of whatever sanity he might have had left and his
thoughts were reduced to a mere mesh of fleeting images and impressions tinged
with red.

And the
woman was screaming, the sound fading in and out as his eardrums seemed to
rupture at the same time, adding one more level of pain to all that which was
already coursing through The Archer’s body…

And he
thought he still wanted to kill her. He still wanted to make his statement. He
started to spasm. But he wasn’t done yet, no he wasn’t.

PREY

She screamed
as she watched the coyote or wolf or dog, or whatever it was, killing her
attacker. She was trying to scare the monstrous animal away. Somehow she’d gone
from fearing for her own life to fearing for the life of the pitiful being
who’d been dubbed The Archer by people who stood to make money from his
insanity. And she knew who they were. For
she
had dubbed him The Archer and given him his reason for being.

She shouted
at the creature, but it ignored her and continued mauling the ordinary-looking
Archer. It was a wolf – it had to be a wolf, for it was much too large
and black to be a normal dog or coyote.

“Stop!” she
shouted at the top of her lungs despite the dry mouth, then realized that it
might well begin mauling
her
, if she
attracted its attention.

Indeed, the
wolf paused and she could see that its fur stood up stiffly on its back,
bristled like a steel wool brush that seemed sharp enough to draw blood if she
happened to stroke it in the wrong direction.

“
Go away!
Stop!
” She made sounds that weren’t words then, shouting like a
rodeo clown trying to distract a bull away from a stricken rider.

The wolf
seemed to hear her and during the pause in its mauling of the screeching,
spasming Archer, it backed away from its grim task, lowering its huge slavering
maw as it stared at her, eyes still rolling in their wilding state.