Pack of Strays (The Fangborn Series Book 2) (3 page)

As crazy as he was, he knew his wolves. “Yeah, but … werewolves? There is
no
such thing. What if there’s some … nut job, running around doing this?”

I’d almost said “some
other
nut job,” but caught myself in time.

He grimaced, as if I wasn’t worth answering. “Forensics. Claw and bite marks. Hair.”

I cast about, trying to act like an innocent person. “Wild dogs? Pit bulls—?”

“Don’t go blaming breeds; pit bulls aren’t any worse than any other dog. It’s all in the training.”

He was very open minded about
other
species, I noted crazily.

“And there’s proof.”

This I’d be curious to see.

He pulled out a tablet computer, cued up a video. Held it in front of my face, close enough to see, but not so close that I might be able to suddenly lunge at him. He watched me intently, and it occurred to me that he would have been attractive in a weather-beaten way if it hadn’t been for the hate in his dark eyes.

It was the town that I’d “flown” over, as it had been just a few years before now. I tried not to flinch as I recognized a place I’d seen an instant ago without ever having been there when the town was alive. A
vibrant
and bustling “Anytown, USA,” in my vision, the little town in the video had clearly contracted some since the 1940s. Very early morning: a small plane flew over, spraying a substance that might have been pesticide. A fine mist settled over the town. The image jarred; someone nearby had slammed a car door or trunk. Someone had set up a camera, then left.

He fast-forwarded to that evening. A scene of hell. Doors were hanging open, mutilated bodies littered the street. In a few
instances
, fires had started, barbecues and stoves left unattended because their owners had been dragged away.

Then, a blur. Two creatures—I could only think of them as
monsters
—followed a trail, their heads down, their bodies hunched. They lumbered quickly, a cross between an upright human gait and apelike knuckle walking, and then the scent got stronger. One of them made a noise that was half growl, half roar, and they hastened across a yard. A woman had been hiding in a garden shed.

“No—!” I couldn’t stop myself from saying. I steeled myself against what I knew what was coming, sure as in any horror movie script.

The door was a slight barrier, and they bashed at it until the metal buckled. They seized the edges and pulled it off. The shed shuddered and the woman’s body flopped in the doorway, drenched in blood, her face no longer recognizable as such.

I was used to violence. I knew what it was to tear flesh and what it was to suffer. This was beyond anything I’d ever seen. The Fangborn were quick. They worked to a purpose that served the greater good, unsanctioned as it might be. This was brutal slaughter, to no end.

At first I thought it was possible they were Fangborn, but then half-second glimpses of the creatures showed me: they only
approximately
resembled us half-Changed. None were in full wolf form, and I didn’t see any vampires.

The worst thing was finally recognizing the monsters. I’d seen one something like that near Ephesus—l
oose-hanging skin covered with a dull gray coat of short, rough fur; a stunted muzzle full of terrifying teeth—and had felt compelled to kill it on the spot.

An evil Fang—no, I wouldn’t call them Fangborn. Something
profoundly, evilly, and willfully destructive had found this town and eradicated every living thing in it. This was the opposite of everything the Fangborn claimed to stand for. My stomach roiled at the notion.

“A population of two hundred, give or take,” he said, as if read
ing my mind. “Fewer than twenty survived, and half of those because
they were away at the time. Three more are unlikely to make it.”

“Why didn’t this make the news? Why isn’t everyone in an uproar?” I asked.

“It did make the news, but not as an attack. This was
Princeville
Township. Remember the train derailment, the chlorine spill? The gas-main break that followed? Used to cover it up.”

“How?”

“The government, of course. Maybe they were covering up the fact that their pets got off the leash. I wouldn’t put it past them to have let the beasts out themselves, a test run.”

“For what possible use?” I jerked my chin at the tablet. “That’s … obscene.”

“Super weapon? Super soldiers? Who knows? Obscene’s the
perfect
word. Government
deals
in obscene.”

I opened my mouth to protest but closed it again, thinking of
the asylum, the notes I’d had on Fangborn experiments—
Fangborn
subjects. My own treatment at the hands of the TRG.

An entire town—civilians—extinguished, made a ghost town, haunted by its gory history and violent end. My mind shut down at the idea. My friends had been involved in the TRG; they wouldn’t sit still for this. Not in a million years.

“What about the survivors?” I said. “I mean, there had to be some who got away. What are they saying?”

He scoffed. “From what I hear, not much. Oh, some of them are saying they heard the train and the sound of an explosion. But we both know money, drugs, or threats can make a person say the sun is purple and the moon is pink polka dots.”

He was lost in thought as he put the tablet away.

Desperate, I tried to think of some other distraction. My wrist was swelling, and there was no way I’d get it out of the shackle, but maybe I could work on the staple that held it onto the tree. “Why me? What makes you think I’m a werewolf?”

“Because your name was on the list, Zoe Miller. Because you’re Fangborn. And because you took the bait.”

His answers came so fast, my head swam. “But that … I’m not … that’s not my name. I’m … Louise Connor.” I gave him the name of Danny’s dead mother.

Another grimace, and he pulled out a deck of cards. Shuffled a few off the top and a few off the bottom and held them up for me to see. Ordinary playing cards. Then held up the next one, which had the same pattern and color as the backs of the others, but the front had been altered. A picture of a young man I’d never seen before, probably of Asian descent, was pasted into the middle of the seven of spades, with a few lines of text.

He shuffled a few more cards—each of these with an unfamiliar face—until he paused and smiled. The card he held up now, the queen of spades, had the picture from my ID at the TRG.

That meant he knew what I was. Maybe even that I was different from other Fangborn.

I stared a little too long.

He reached down and jabbed me hard in the side. Tased me. I threw my head back against the tree. I half-Changed, then flashed back to human form. The pain in my wrist eased momentarily. When he stopped, it was a vast relief.

“Okay, you’ve seen it already.” I swallowed, tried to catch my breath, which felt like fire. “I’m … I’m a werewolf. Fangborn, we’re called. Just as you say. So that should tell you something.”

“Like what?”

“Like my people don’t do this sort of thing. We only go after the bad guys. We’ve always been dedicated to the protection of humans.”

He spat again. “Tells me you’re a liar is what that does.” He glanced at me. “But you believe it. That’s what’s confusing me. You seemed genuinely shocked for someone so high up in the ranks.”

Rank? “But I’m not even—”

“We’ll try the other way.”

He pulled out the bolt cutters. Looked big enough to take down a wrought-iron fence.

They weren’t for any fence, I knew. My stomach lurched as I sensed the blade slip across my pinkie.

“Please—”

The first bit of pressure was only distressingly snug—just the anvil, none of the bite. Then a blink, more pressure, too much pressure, not even time for me to catch my breath. A rush of wet, of cold air, and then the pain hit—too much pain.

I screamed.

He kicked gently, but his boot hit my wounded hand. The pain shrieked up my arm. I tried to roll away, but the chain kept me close.

He nudged something with his toe and then, setting it up, kicked again. I braced myself against the blow, wondering how anything could hurt so much—and I’d been shot. I wasn’t healing as fast as I could. It never hurt so much before because I’d been Changed, but now the hellebore was suppressing that.

Nightmare Man had kicked my severed fingertip away, then put the blood-streaked bolt cutters back onto his shoulder, like he might a golf club. He knelt beside me.

“Look, the bad news is that I can keep this up all day. I’ve had practice. The really awful thing is that you can keep up all day, too. The fingertip will take a bit longer to grow back because of this—” He pulled out a hypodermic needle, removed the cap with his teeth, and stuck it straight into my thigh.

An instant later, every muscle in my body cramped at once, threatening to break the bones beneath them. Hellebore toxin, one of the few things to have a truly detrimental effect on the Fangborn.

“In the meantime, you have a lot of other fingers and toes, and other things to clip, too. Those little pauses will give you a chance to think about what I’m going to do next and whether you wouldn’t be better off telling me what you know. Got it?”

I couldn’t answer.

Another pressure, a little longer than the last one. Just enough to let me think of what was coming next. Just as he’d promised.

Clip.

I screamed again; words came gushing out like blood. “I don’t know anything! I only found out what I am this spring!”

“I already know that. But you’re one of the few werewolves I’ve met who’s ever seen the inside of the TRG. And I want to know everything you know about that. Now.”

I didn’t give a shit about the TRG anymore, would’ve been happy to tell him everything I knew. But Will and Danny and the Steubens were still with the TRG. I couldn’t let them suffer because of me. I’d die before that.

I dug down, trying to marshal my strength and focus my thoughts. I was so messed up with pain and the hellebore poisoning that when I felt something
shift
inside me, I couldn’t tell if it was good or bad.

The werewolf hunter got bored. The bolt cutters brushed past my other hand on the ground. Fear welled up inside me. The
shift
grew stronger.

“Who was it?” I asked on impulse. My head cleared a little, and I could move without wanting to puke. “Who died here and brought you?”

I put some push into my voice, to lull him. Maybe I could talk him into letting me go, but I wasn’t going to count on my erratic powers against his hatred.

“You brought me. You and your kind—”

“No.” My voice was calmer, stronger.
I
was calmer. “No, to this … state. The hate welling up inside you, crippling you.”

“Doesn’t need to be anyone but me and my sense of what’s right and wrong in this world.”

“It has to be something else,” I prodded. “I mean, I can see that scar up your arm, for starters. What happened there?” I gave him a push:
Keep talking.

“This?” He pulled up his sleeve. An old scar puckered white against weathered skin. “This is nothing, this is me getting sloppy one day. And this …” He raised his shirt, and I could see angry red gouges where something had bitten him—correction: some
one
. One of my Family had bitten him. “This isn’t anything, either. And I made sure she who did it will never do it again.”

I swallowed; an image suddenly too vivid appeared, unwanted. A Fangborn wolfself in her death throes tried one last time to rip out his guts and failed, kicking and scratching, latching on to his arm. He shot her until she fell away.

My heart sank. I didn’t seem to have any influence over him, but the blood I’d tasted before I passed out had given me a view of some of his strongest memories. How was I seeing this?

The field and the tree and my Nightmare Man vanished.
Another
vision.

I saw Sean. Sitting in an archaeology lab. I never saw Sean, only heard him whispering inside my head.

Not a vision,
I thought.
I must be dying
.

“No time for dramatics, Zoe,” Sean said.

“What? How—?”

“I’ll explain later.” He handed me a thick file folder and gave me a shove. “Now go!”

The lab dematerialized. I was back chained to the tree. Somehow, the contents of the file had filled my head.

I could work with that. There were two memories that stuck out for me. I mentally shuffled them round and round, like the last two cards a kid holds when playing “Go, Fish.” I took a deep breath and then went for it.

“Now or never,” Sean said from somewhere inside me. “Make it good, Zoe.”

Chapter Three

Make it good?
Jesus, Sean, is that all you have for me?

My life depended on the information I now had, so I had to make the most of it. I made my body go rigid, which hurt like hell, my muscles cramping and full of poison. I strained against the chain. My wrist was on fire and my fingers … best not to think too closely about them. I rolled my eyes back, eyelids fluttering, and dropped my chin to my chest, trying to confuse or distract the Nightmare Man.

“Aw, fuck.” I snapped my head back up, then my words raced, monotone—not of my doing.
“There’s a man, two men, they look like you, but with white hair, white as wood ash, and they’ve got stacks of money on the table, and they’re in the cabin by the mill brook. One’s counting, and the other is cleaning the leg of a third, there’s so much blood, but the bullet’s broken the bone on the third man, and he’s begging to be taken to a hospital, a doctor, a vet even, anyone who might be able to make the pain stop, stop, stop!”

I could hear Nightmare Man edging closer, my eyes closed, and smelled the leaves as he stepped on them. He wasn’t saying a word. I had to keep going. But it got easier as I went along, and I felt better, the more I did it. His memories tumbled out of me like they were my own. Which was … ghastly.

“… and the two white-haired men, who look just like you, they share another look, and that look doesn’t say anything good for that other man, and the one who’s cleaning his leg wound—the younger of the two men—nods and steps away, saying he’ll get a friend on the phone, except there is no friend, and there is no phone, but there is all that cash, and as soon as the younger man steps away, the older man swings the shotgun up and around, and it’s a deer slug in the head of the man who was crying, only he’s not crying anymore because his leg doesn’t hurt anymore.”

I was aware enough of the outside world to know that he was closer to me now. But not close enough. I wished I could stop; reliving someone else’s worst memory was no fun.

But it was intoxicating.

I continued in that same rapid monotone.
“It was the best thing, they both agreed, to put the poor son of a bitch out of his misery, and he was going to slow them down anyway, and they owed it to his widow to make sure they could get away to give her a share of the money, and if the share they gave her wasn’t as large as the man’s would have been, well, there was just her now, and not him and her.”

He was almost close enough. Fascinated, drawn in like a mouse about to be taken by a cobra. As I recounted the defining, worst moment of Nightmare Man’s life, part of me waited, outside this all, for the chance.

“Thing was, it wasn’t just the two of them, there was a little boy, and he was the one who got it worst of all, even though there wasn’t a scratch on him—not yet, anyway—because the problem was, they might have ditched the law, but they didn’t shake the others who were following them, the others who didn’t have badges but had a mission and fangs and the compulsion to right wrongs. Those others were up the path when they heard the shot, and they busted into the cabin, one of them like a wolf, one of them like a walking snake, and suddenly there were teeth and claws and knives and the other barrel from that shotgun, and before they could do anything, the little boy ran out of the house, just like his daddy and his grandpa told him to. And he was crying so hard, he tripped and went sprawling over a tree, and got his leg pierced with a root, but he pulled himself off that. The blood was terrible, the pain worse, but rather than be taken by them, he pulled himself off, up and off that root, and he got in the car and drove and drove and drove, even though his feet were barely able to reach the pedals and blood soaked the seat and floor.”

“You can’t know that,” he whispered. His face was pale and sweating. “This is a trick. They weren’t there to see me fall—”

Left leg.

I rolled up on my left hip and opened my eyes. I drove my foot into his left knee, the one that had never been quite right
after
he’d impaled himself on the root, so terrified in his flight that he’d pulled himself off. I felt the splinters being left in his leg, the weakness in his ankle as the boy hobbled away, crying.

Nightmare Man screamed and, clutching his knee, fell forward. I kept kicking, aiming at his face. He grabbed blindly at my leg, but that just kept him in place while I kicked him with the other foot.

He finally stopped moving. I tried Changing again; still no luck. I’d been out too long after the electrocution, and hellebore had gotten deep into my system.

With a lot of difficulty and swearing, I got the bolt cutters. But with my hands cuffed, I couldn’t get the the cutters open enough to work them. It seemed so obvious, but physics and biology were working against me.

With the Nightmare Man lying next to me, I had to figure out a way to get the key out of his shirt pocket and undo the cuffs. If I scooched around all the way to the left, I could just grasp his shirt collar. I pulled as hard as I could, trying to keep my damaged pinkie and ring finger out of the way. His shirt untucked, but he didn’t move. Straining, my fingertips aching, I pulled harder and was rewarded with a solid handful of shirt. Praying the shirt didn’t come apart before I could reach him, I hauled away and succeeded in moving him closer to me. The stitches pulled and ripped, but the shirt held. It was a painstaking process, gaining no more than a centimeter or two at a time, and I suspect if I hadn’t been
Fangborn
, I wouldn’t have been as lucky as I was. With one more good pull, the body was close enough that I could reach him.

I was bloody, sweaty, and covered in dirt and duff. Even if I could manage to get the key, how would I ever manage to use it behind my back?

I kept pulling. The Taser fell out of his pocket.

When he’d tased me, I’d half-Changed, ever so briefly.

If I tased myself, could I take advantage of that brief moment, when my hand was clawed, longer, and thinner, to yank it free?

The idea was odious. It was also practical.

I worked around until I could get the Taser. I thumbed the stud.

Somewhere in the middle of the electrical storm, I felt my
fingers
shift into claws. I yanked my hand up and out.

Then fell over, gasping, in human form.

Eventually, I could see straight and struggled to get up. I took the cuff off my other hand and then put them on him. I kicked him a few times, as much as my wobbly legs would let me. I wanted to kill him, but was so woozy, in so much pain … my fingertips had stopped bleeding, but the tissue was thinly scarred, not yet regenerated. However, I badly needed the information he had about the Fangborn.

I took my phone out of his pocket. Just that action made my fingertip begin bleeding anew. I stared at it, wondering what to do. I was so hungry I couldn’t think straight. Maybe there was water or food in his camper.

I careened over the rough surface of the fire road, leaned against the camper. Very carefully, a handkerchief protectively wrapped around my hand, I pulled open the door. There I found a cooler. The cheese might have been going a little melty, but a stale roast beef sandwich never tasted so good. I ate both of them,
washing
them down with a warm, fizzy Coke. The sugar and
caffeine
did wonders for me; my fingertips now itched and were sore because the bones were knitting up and the skin closing around them. The food also cleared my head, because I suddenly saw what else was in the back of the camper.

A drawer pulled partially out from under the bunk held an arsenal: I counted two rifles, another shotgun, several pistols, and a few things I had no clue about, but which looked pretty nasty.

There was a tiny fridge, and I liberated a couple more sandwiches from that. I left the beer, with some regrets. Camping gear, some clothes. The faint smell of hellebore kept me from opening another cooler. I didn’t want a setback with more exposure to the hateful stuff, now that I was on the mend.

On one end of the bunk was a stack of paper files held in place with a notebook computer.

I looked through the files: names, photographs, and information. A memory stick jutted out of the side; I ejected it and stuck it in my pocket. A stack of business cards: Jacob Buell. My
Nightmare
Man had a name. The pictures in the files matched those playing cards I had in my pocket, but contained more data.

Most of them were strays.

It was everything I needed to be a werewolf hunter.

Check that.

I could be a werewolf-hunter.

The door slammed shut. The engine roared, and I started to move. A hard bump from a pothole, and a grind of gears. It took me a minute to figure out what was happening, and by that time it was too late. I fell over, the bumps of the rutted farm road taxing the aging suspension of the truck.

Someone—I had to assume it was Buell—was driving back to civilization, with me stowed away.

He must have had a spare key for the cuffs, I thought.

Oh, shit. Adam. Where was he?

I pulled out my phone and tried to get a bead on where I was. I might be able to escape on my own, but chances might be better if I had some reinforcements.

“Zoe!” Relief was mingled with anxiety in his voice. “It’s been over two hours! Where are you?”

“I’m in the back of a pickup heading for”—I checked my route again—“the center of town. I’m trying desperately not to get kidnapped again. Where are you?”

“What? Waiting at the parking lot, near where you left me. Kidnapped—?”

I glanced out the window through the growing dark and tried to remember if this road led to the center of town, where I’d left Adam, or near the highway. “I’m going to try and jump out of here in about five minutes. I’ll try to let you know where I am, but I have to get out first. I don’t know if he knows I’m back here yet, but I’m not letting him get me to the highway.”

“Shit, Zoe. What does the camper look like?”

I described it. I was about to hang up when the gods smiled on me. Looking out the filthy window, I recognized the lights at the center of town. “Okay, remember that coffee shop where we ate this morning? I’m near there. There’s an intersection, just ahead. If you could get there—”

“On my way.”

I sagged with relief, knowing he’d be as good as his word. I carefully put my phone away and looked around the camper one more time. My bag was there, so I stuffed the notebook computer and some of the papers into it, made sure I had that deck of cards, and got ready. Watching my phone, I waited until we were a block ahead of the stop sign, and then I reached for the latch on the door.

Locked.

Buell must have done it when I was reading the notes, or it was out of habit, or else it had jammed. Or he’d heard me. I threw myself against it again and again, and it felt as if my shoulder was being turned into putty with each blow. There was no way I was going to be stuck in here and leave him to—

We squealed to a stop. A screech of metal, and the door flexed.

I heard a car door slam. Had it been the cab? More doors
slamming
.

A symphony of horns followed. Someone out there had seen the door buckling, maybe. I threw myself against the door, desperate to escape. If it was Buell, then maybe I had a chance of knocking him over and escaping before he could do anything in front of an audience—

A familiar scent—I looked up, not daring to believe, and renewed my attack on the door.

A lurch sent me flying away. My right-hand pinkie smacked into the side of the camper. Sharp, bright pain.

We were pulling off the main road.

I hit the redial on my phone. “Adam! We’re moving. I don’t know where he’s heading!”

“It’s okay! I see you now! Hang on!”

We were going so fast now, I wasn’t sure I’d have the guts to throw myself out of the back of the camper, but I kept on bashing and kicking. Every part of me ached from the new self-inflicted abuse.

And it paid off. The door opened. The camper turned, but I held on. We were pulling into a church parking lot, a bright orange glow from the streetlights. A glance told me: It was empty, but still close to the highway. We’d be visible. That worked for and against all of us. I wanted to get away, but I didn’t want innocent people caught up in this mess.

I flung myself out. It hurt like hell, but every second I was away from Buell and that hellebore, I was recovering.

The notebook computer and some other things fell out of my backpack. I had to leave them; I had no time.

I stumbled about, trying to get my bearings. I froze, believing I was hallucinating when I saw—

Light brown hair plagued by cowlicks, a whisker under
six fe
et. Clearly still running, still working out, because he was trying to pull Jacob Buell apart. Will MacFarlane had found me. My Will.

I was still weak, still dizzy, and disoriented. The effort of escaping had undone a lot of my healing, but my need drove me on. If I could only get to Will—

Across the parking lot. More cars, more squealing brakes, more slamming doors and shouting. At first I thought it was passersby coming to my aid, and then I recognized the uniformity of the vehicles—blacked out, black vans—and the identical headsets the men wore.

Buell had friends. They paused, assessing the situation, speaking into their headsets. Then they moved toward the struggling pair.

“Will!” I screamed. It sounded feeble, faint, out of a bad dream. “Will!”

He turned, shocked to see it was me, and barely got his arm up in time to block Buell’s punch.

More cars. Dark, late-model sedans. I recognized some of the occupants—the TRG. Much as I hated the sight of them, Will needed backup now.

I couldn’t risk Changing, but I could help. I
would
help. I grabbed the first of Buell’s rescuers and shoved him to the ground.
I mig
ht be a small woman, I might be young, but I still had
Fangborn
strength and physics on my side. I could shove with the best of them.