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WOLF PACT
The shadows made everything look larger, and smell worse. Styrofoam platters and massive rolls of waxed paper were stacked on the counters. Hooks from empty meat racks hung from the ceiling, their crooked silhouettes looking even more ominous in the moonlight. Tacked on the brick walls were charts mapping animal parts. Shoulder. Chuck. Loin. Near the entrance were two large glass counters full of steaks and chops wrapped in cellophane.
Bliss Llewellyn took a deep breath and held it for as long as she could, willing her tense muscles to relax. She had tracked the beast inside the butcher shop, had watched its arched, furry body slink in through the back door. This was it. She’d been in Hunting Valley for three days now, and had combed every inch of it, which wasn’t too hard, really. It was barely a town—the downtown area consisting of one honky-tonk bar and several boarded-up storefronts. It was the kind of place most people left as soon as they had the means; the kind of place for those left behind.
Bliss crept as quietly as she could across the wet stone floor. This was the end of her chase. Everything she had done so far had led to this moment. The beast was lurking somewhere within the darkness, waiting. She would have to be quick. She had seen the carnage it had left in the woods, had followed the trail, and now she was at its end. Tame the hounds, her mother had told her. Bring them back to the fold. She would have to bring it to heel, somehow. Her eyes caught a flicker of light in the distance. In the back of the room she noticed the door to the meat locker was open, revealing a carcass swaying like an inverted pendulum. So that was why her surroundings smelled of blood.
She closed her eyes so she could hear. Concentrate. She pinched her nose. The smell was distracting. When the Visitor had been her only contact to the outside (or was that inside?) world, she found she could listen better if she closed her eyes and withdrew from her other senses. She was human now, with human limitations. She could no longer listen to a conversation conducted fifty feet away; she could no longer lift objects five times her body weight; she could no longer do any of the things she had taken for granted when her blood was blue.
But even if she was only human, she was used to the dark. The Visitor had taught her that. She heard a clock tick, the sound of a hook grinding against a chain, heard the soft click of claws against the concrete—the beast, stirring... and then there, barely perceptible, was the sound of breathing. There was someone else in the room, someone other than the creature. But where? And who?
The horrible clicking grew louder, and Bliss heard a snarl, deep and primeval and vicious, and then the sound of breathing became louder, more desperate—suddenly a scream from beyond the doorway. Bliss leapt from her hiding place and ran toward it.
Clang!
A knife fell to the floor. She swiveled in its direction, then stopped. The knife was a ruse, a distraction. The beast was behind her now; it was trying to steer her away from the door. She could see it watching her from the shadows, its crimson eyes staring at her balefully. Did it think she was stupid? She might not have her vampire abilities anymore, but that didn’t mean she was completely useless. She was still fast. She was still coordinated. She had the speed and skill of an athlete.
The beast snorted and raked its claws across the concrete. It was angry and getting ready to jump. Bliss figured it was now or never. She pushed her way toward the open door, clambering onto a table and spraying a dozen knives across the room. The beast leapt but she was faster, and when she reached the oversized steel door, she grabbed the handle and, using its weight as a pivot, swung around so that she pulled it closed behind her. The freezer slammed shut with a thick, wet sucking sound that made her wonder if this had been a good idea. How much air was in here? No time to worry about that now. She grabbed a knife hanging on the wall and jammed the lock closed.
She could hear the creature throwing its
weight against the bolted door, making the archway shake. It was larger and more dangerous than she had thought. Tame the hounds? She would be lucky if she got out of here alive.
She looked around. There were a dozen or so carcasses hanging from the ceiling. The air was rancid, metallic. She pushed her way through the animal corpses to the back of the freezer, toward the sound of ragged breathing.
On the floor of the meat locker lay a boy, no older than she was, chained to the back wall. Next to him were a cutting board and a band saw. A meat hook swung above his head, crusted with blood and rust. The tiled walls were splattered a deep shade of scarlet. The boy’s skin was blue, his hair caked with filth... there were ugly red marks around his wrists and neck, where he was bound with heavy iron shackles. Dear God, what was going on here? Bliss wondered, her stomach churning....
The beast couldn’t have done this alone. There was something else going on. Bliss shivered, goose bumps appearing on her skin. Now that she wasn’t a vampire, her body did not control its temperature as well as it used to. But was it fear or the cold that had caused the rows of tiny bumps? For the first time in her journey, Bliss wondered if she was in over her head.
She bent down to touch the boy’s face. It was still warm at least. She placed a tender hand on his bony shoulder. “You are going to be okay,” she told him, and wondered if she was also consoling herself.
“Yes, but you’re not.” His eyes came alive, and before Bliss could blink, the boy had wrapped his fist around her neck and pinned her to the floor, locking his knees against her waist and keeping her arms away from her body. His shackles, Bliss could see now, had not been locked.
“Who are you?” she asked, spitting out the words with difficulty, recoiling from the boy’s grip around her neck. She wondered if she could reach into her jean pocket to stab him with the hidden blade she always kept there.
“I think the correct question is, who are you? You’re in our territory.” His voice was low and musical, friendly.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“We don’t like the likes of you here. You smell like the glom,” he said, and she knew he meant that she was not quite human; that somehow, he could sense her formerly immortal stature, when she had once been an angel of fire.
“You know about the glom?” Bliss asked.
The boy laughed. “We hunt in the glom. We are the Abyssus Praetorium.”
Bliss startled. She’d heard the term before. The Guards of the Abyss. Also known as the Praetorian Guard. An image flashed in her mind. She saw the Visitor—Lucifer—her father—standing inside an elaborate palace, surrounded by magnificent columns of gold. A cast of thousands was gathered around his court. Was this Rome? Or ancient Egypt? She couldn’t tell. Lucifer stood at the top of a marble staircase, looking down at a creature of exquisite beauty. It was a man, but he was taller than a human male, with a certain otherworldly magnificence, wild-eyed and ferocious.
The image did not come from her memory but from Lucifer’s. When she had been captive to his spirit, when he had taken over her soul, fragments of his memories had drifted into her consciousness. Triggered by random events, memories she’d never had would suddenly pop into her mind. So. The Visitor knew these creatures. She closed her eyes to recall the scene once more. She could hear Lucifer speak. The language was unfamiliar, its words harsh and convoluted, but she knew she could speak them as if they were her own.
“Release me!” she cried, just as the boy’s hand tightened on her throat. The room froze and from the other side of the door, the beast howled. Then the boy’s grip eased and he fell away, staring at her in amazement and confusion, as if he could not quite understand why he had let her go.
She was as she shocked as he was, but she didn’t have any time to lose. In one fluid motion, Bliss rolled away and bolted from the room, catching her balance before she slipped in a puddle of blood. She wrenched the knife from the freezer door and ran through the doorway and back out into the shop.
What just happened? She had tracked the creature for weeks, and now suddenly it seemed that she was the one who was being pursued. Had Lucifer sent the creature to lure her here? Was he somehow able to reach her once more? Was the boy working for him? How could Allegra have led her to this hellhole? Was everything she had been told and everything she believed nothing but a lie?
Bliss pushed against the front door, surprised to find it was locked. She had purposefully left it open when she’d entered. Who had locked it? She kicked at the jamb, splitting it in two and throwing glass out onto the street. She flung the door open and skidded out onto the sidewalk. Tiny shards of glass dug into her shoes as she stumbled across the pavement toward her car. She heard the slap of running footsteps behind her, but she didn’t turn. Grabbing the keys out of her pocket, she wrestled the door open, slid into the driver’s seat, and fired the engine. She looked ahead of her, and then behind. She was parked in from both sides, the other cars mere inches away from hers. There was no way she could get out without doing damage to either vehicle, or her own. It was obviously a trap. She’d just have to smash her way out. She floored the gas pedal, and slammed into the car in front of her. It moved, but barely.
She slammed on the gas again, this time throwing the car into reverse, and plowed directly into the car behind her, causing a sickening crunch of metal against metal as the back end of her car crunched like an accordion and her taillights exploded in a shower of plastic and dust. She threw the car back into drive and pancaked the rear bumper of the car in front of her. Her own car popped up on the curb—that was more like it— allowing her to twist her way out from between the two cars that had trapped her in front of the butcher shop.
