Wolves of Haven: Lone (6 page)

Akia sighed. “I know you do. I’ll
call you later,” she whispered before hanging up.

Damian fought the urge to throw the
phone across his office and growled in frustration. “Stubborn
woman,” he snarled before pulling his hand over his face in
resignation.

Self-sufficient and hardheaded were
admirable traits in a partner, but at the moment it was infuriating
because the stubborn woman never asked for help, ever, and it drove
Damian crazy. He knew that Akia could take care of herself; he’s
seen her take down perps three times heavier and hopped up on PCP
before and not break a sweat. But this was different, this was an
emotional battle that she was facing, alone, and it killed him
inside to just sit there while she was facing the demons of her
past by herself.

Damian didn’t know of her family,
but he suspected that it was much like his: good came with the bad.
For the first year of their relationship Akia would wake up
screaming or crying, and when he tried to console her she’d
scrambled away from him or pulled a weapon on him. There were a few
times that his life literally flashed before his eyes as he
struggled to stay completely still as a blade bit into his throat,
drawing lines of blood. Eventually the episodes became less and
less, and instead of attacking him or trying to run, she’d curl up
in his arms and allowed him to console her. He had asked a couple
of times, but she’d get closed off and argumentative, and he really
didn’t like sleeping alone, so he quickly learned that asking would
only cause her to get closed off and turn her from him thus he
stopped asking.

“The good with the bad,” he mumbled
under his breath and unlocked his cell phone then flipped through
the encrypted files until he found what he wanted.

Giggling made him smile as the
video played.

“I’m serious, Damian. Stop,” Akia
said between bouts of laughter.

“Not until I hear you say it,” he
taunted; he was straddling her on the bed, torturing the stubborn
woman by the worst means possible: tickling.

She glared at him and defiantly
jutted her chin out. “Never,” she hissed.

“Wrong answer,” he tauntingly
sang.

Another bout of hysterical laughter
caused the woman under him to thrash and kick, but she couldn’t
buck him off.

“Damn it! I hate you!” she
yelled.

“Say it,” he said.

Akia rolled her eyes. “You
suck, but you were right.
You talkin’ to
me
was an improvised line by De Niro.
There, you happy?” she sneered, making a face.

Damian chuckled. “Honestly, it
wasn’t nearly as gratifying as I thought it’d be.”

The corners of her lips twitched
before she laughed, smiling wide.

“Beautiful,” both Damian’s murmured
before the video ended. Before he could lock his phone, a pop up
reminder flashed. When he opened the notification his eyes widened.
“Shit,” he hissed, silently berating himself for nearly forgetting,
then started hurrying to finish his paperwork and signing off on
the stack of reports before he addressed his schedule for the
coming week.

“Just put it in drive and… Damn
it,” Akia grumbled, smacking the steering wheel again before
struggling with the lid on her prescription bottle so she could
take a pill. “It shouldn’t be this hard!”

“It usually is.”

She looked over to the passenger
side and smiled. “Hey, Connie,” she whispered then patted the seat,
inviting him to join her, which he obliged, closing the door behind
him. “You’re the only person I know that can sneak up on me like
that.”

Connell smiled wide. “It’s a
talent, Sis. How are you? You look like hell!”

Akia rolled her eyes. “It honestly
amazes me that you’ve practiced medicine as long as you have
because you have no bedside manner in the least.” She made a
mocking face before popping a small pill in her mouth, swallowing
it dry.

He chuckled and pushed his falling
black bangs back from his eyes. “You take offense to, as what
you’ve called more than once, pussy footing around the subject so
it’s safer to be direct.”

She nodded her
agreement.

“Trying to find the nerve to drive
up to the house?” he surmised.

“What’s going on?” she asked,
instead of admitting she was terrified to drive the three hundred
yards to Verulfr Manor. “Varg called and simply said Father needed
me and to come home. I get that the asshole isn’t one for words,
but really?”

Connell chuckled. “According to Kid
he has the personality of burnt toast.”

“Adopting again?” Akia asked since
Kid wasn’t a known name to her.

“Lou and Father tracked him across
the Ukraine,” he explained, his green eyes moving over her
appraisingly. “For being young, he is surprisingly resilient and
shows impressive control. He’s been here for five years. I offered
to visit every six months to check up on him, make sure that he
hasn’t relapsed…the people that had him got Kid strung out on
garbage heroine in order to control him. He’s been clean since he
came home, but you know how Lou worries about relapsing since he
was once afflicted with chasing the green dragon. Sadly, when I
came for a follow up I got stuck here again.”

They were quiet for a moment,
neither knowing where to go after that statement; no one spoke of
the personal demons that each family member had faced or still
dealt with. It was their way of not causing the inflicted to have
to vanquish their demons over and over by reminding those harboring
it of them.

“How are you?” Connell asked at
length, eying the pill bottle she tossed in her purse. “Your follow
up isn’t for another couple of months, but I’m curious how it’s
working since you’ve been quiet.”

She shrugged and looked out the
window. “Apparently it’s regulated, almost like clockwork now, so
that’s good. The combination you came up with is working for now. I
have more control over her, but at the same time I have none. If it
wasn’t for the pills and…my outlet, I don’t know what I’d
do.”

“Your outlet, that’s a person
right, and not an impressive collection of sex toys?” he mused,
cocking an eyebrow.

Akia’s mouth fell open before she
softly smacked him, so he smacked her back. “That’s disturbing, and
I’m not even going to address it with a response.”

He roared with laughter, and she
chuckled. “I missed this, Sis. I know you had your reasons for
going, and I understand part of the reason why you stayed, but you
should have vacationed on the Island every so often instead of
meeting up with me in seedy hotel rooms.”

She nodded. “Only a couple times
was it a seedy hotel room, Smart Ass, but we can discuss resolving
that later. At the moment tell me what’s going on.”

Connell buckled the seatbelt and
motioned for her to get back on the road; she complied without
question. “Nearly two cycles ago, a body was found on the beach,”
he explained as Akia drove back towards town. “Drowning with an
animal attack finisher was listed as the official cause of death by
the medical examiner.”

“By you,” she clarified.

“I moonlight as many things, Sis,
you know that,” he amusingly reminded her. “The wounds were
consistent with a large animal, bear according to the official
report.”

She snorted.

“Yes, I know,” he dramatically
sighed for show, and she rolled her eyes over his antics, “I used
to be much more creative. But don’t worry, with the second body the
cause of death was listed as death by a Wendigo!”

Akia gave him a look. “Second body…
Wendigo?! You’re an idiot,” she groaned, and he roared with
laughter. “I honestly don’t know why they’ve permitted you to keep
an adult job. You are a child in the body of sixty-five year
old-”

“That doesn’t look a day over
thirty,” Connell amusingly interjected.

“Yet another discussion that I will
not contribute to,” she said. “Two bodies-”

“A few,” he corrected. “All washed
up on shore…presumably washed up. In my non-professional opinion,
they were staged, but what does the medical examiner
know?”

“Not much if you’ve never been
trained to process crime scenes or collect evidence…that’s why I’m
here, isn’t it?” she asked. “To help Father figure out what is
going on in order to keep attention off of the family?”

Connell hissed out a breath. “Yeah,
not exactly. Father is in custody on suspicion of murder,” he
mumbled the latter quickly under his breath.

Akia slammed on the breaks and
turned to look at him; her nostrils flared, eyes narrowed and
darkened, and a menacing growl rolled from the base of her
throat.

“Calm down, Sis,” he lovingly
scolded. “Control your temper otherwise Eve will have her fun. Is
that what you want?”

He was right, and she knew it, and
if Eve did make an unwanted appearance, it would be bad for
everyone.

Akia took a couple of deep breaths
to calm herself.

“Better?” he asked.

“Marginally,” she hissed. “Why is
Father being detained for this?”

Again, he hissed out a breath; he
didn’t want to be the one to tell her, but he drew the short straw.
“Father is the one that found each body, as if they were left
purposely for him to find.”

Again, Akia growled and her hands
tightened on the steering wheel.

“Calm down, Sis. One of us needs to
keep a level head, and since the locals don’t know you, don’t know
that you’re part of the family, I think Varg was hoping that you’d
be able to sway the local authorities into releasing Father on
house arrest or something until we can figure out what or who is
doing this and why.”

“Any suspects not noted in the
police files?” she asked, pulling back onto the road, and went into
police mode.

“None. Can’t pick anything up, at
least I couldn’t,” he admitted. “The first was reported right away,
for obvious reasons, so the others didn’t get a chance to see the
body. The second, third and fourth bodies were absent of anything
useful. There was something there, but most likely the tide washed
away anything that might have been traceable or I was imagining
things.”

Akia nodded, processing what
he said. “Water submersion is a means to remove trace evidence, so
I can’t fault
you
for finding it odd that multiple victims, all apparently
attacked by a wild animal, would randomly wash up on shore. But
there are no bears in the area, or Wendigos, Smart
Ass.”

He smiled wide.

“On the flipside of that forensic
countermeasure,” she continued, “the water shouldn’t have been able
to scrub the body, in a sense, of traces that would only be
detectable to the family. Seff has a suspect list
drafted?”

Again, a hissed breath came from
between Connell’s teeth. “None. We didn’t pick up anything on any
of the bodies or the dumpsites, or even the woods around the manor,
at least not anything that was familiar. Once you smell it you
never forget it, you know that, but none of us recognized what
wasn’t there.”

“I hate it when you speak in
riddles.”

“I know,” he said with a
chuckle.

“Was it the same with each victim?”
Akia asked, going down the checklist in her head.

Connell shrugged. “Honestly, it was
hard to tell. There was something masking it, an agent that I
couldn’t identify. It was natural, not a chemical, but the results
back from the crime lab were useless. The mass spectrometer…it was
a report longer than your arm, but it didn’t make any damn sense to
anyone, myself included. I have Lou looking into it, but he’s
getting more and more distracted lately. I fear it might be early
onset Alzheimer’s.”

She made a face. “Lou just needs to
get laid. The last time he got laid was in the eighties before his
last wife died. Did you neglect to notice that the anniversary of
her death is coming up? Get him drunk and find him an older lady
that understands French and likes animalistic, slightly romantic in
a deranged way, sex, and he’ll be fine.”