The Scions Of Fenrir (The Wolf's Heart Journals Book 1) Page 3

  Marie Catribs is a small, extremely popular sandwich shop. They specialize in foodie type fair. Like a braised lamb sandwich that makes my mouth water just at the thought of it. They also have Turkish coffee. Well I guess it’s more accurate to say that they had Turkish coffee.

  A ring of police cruisers had set a perimeter around the building holding the shop. A huge group of looky loos stood outside that perimeter. Grand Rapids is the second largest city in Michigan but despite its size it is actually pretty safe. So, any big police presence was bound to draw a big crowd.

  Anders pulled her car through a break in the cruiser blockade and parked us right in front of Marie Catribs. I checked my watch. It was about 2:30pm. By the smell of the blood I guessed that whatever happened had gone down right around noon. On a Tuesday that would mean that not only had every table been full but there had probably been a line at the door.

  I stepped out of the car and opened the back door to let out Lily. That’s when it hit me. The thick musky scent of wolf. I stopped in my tracks. In so many ways this was totally fucked up. For one thing, only a new wolf attacks in public. And then only if they are caught in the rays of a full moon and have no idea what’s happening. Only older wolves can control the shift and then they can’t do it during the day. Lily hopped out of the car and I could tell that she felt something off as well. Pugs are normally snuffly snorty little clowns. Four legged rotund balls of fun and whimsy. Lily is normally like that but as soon as her little paws hit the ground her wheezing stopped. Her head swiveled back and forth and I could tell she was in business mode. “Stay at my heel girl.” I said. Her sneeze was all the response I needed. Anders came around the car and gave me another strange look as her eyes took in my tiny shadow but she didn’t say anything.

  There was a group of three men standing near the door to the shop. Ian Mercer broke off from the other two men. Ian isn’t a big guy and his monkish bald spot makes him look rather common and anything but intimidating. His off the rack suit fit in a way that made him look a bit rotund. But I knew better. Ian was about as soft as a boulder. Like I said his head was as far from up his own ass as possible. He stayed in good shape because he lived firmly in reality and knew that being strong could mean staying alive. The other two looked intentionally nondescript. Their suits were of decent quality but not nice enough to draw notice. They were also tailored to hide the side arms they carried in shoulder holsters. I could smell the gun oil, cordite and the polymer smell of their synthetic grips. In a very non-literal way they stunk of feds. Interesting that the feds made it here so quick.

  I’ve dealt with the agents of the paranormal side of the F.B.I. before. Normally what I do doesn’t ruffle their feathers too much. As long as I clean things up nice and tidy and avoid making a scene then my actions make their main goal, sweeping nasty things under the rug, easier. So, it’s really more of a non-aggression pact than an actual working relationship.

  “Good to see you Kevin.” Ian said, stepping up to me with his hand out.

  I shook his hand and gave him a searching look. “No, it’s not Ian. If you called for me things are more than likely pretty fucked.”

  Ian chuckled a bit ruefully. “Sadly, that’s very true. But I am glad you’re here.”

  I glanced at the big windows that made up the front wall of Marie Catribs. At first, I had thought that the police had put some sort of blind up over the windows to keep prying eyes from seeing inside. Now I could see that the dark brown of the windows was from a thick coating of blood on the inside. I looked at Ian “How many?” I said

  Ian swallowed slowly “Fifty, as best we can tell.”

  I tried hard to keep my mouth from dropping open. Fifty dead from a werewolf attack was practically unheard of. By my estimation the Atkins brothers were responsible for about thirty deaths but that was spread over years. Lycans, much like their normal animal counter parts, are smart hunters. Sure, the human side can get involved and make them sick fucks but wolves do not fuck up a food source all willy nilly.

  “Ian that’s fucking nuts. I’ve never heard of a wolf killing that many at once.” I said

  Ian looked to Anders and then at the two men he had been talking to earlier. They had walked over and joined us. “So, you think it was a werewolf?” he said

  I’m sure my confusion must have been extremely clear. “Yes of course it was. I can smell it from here.” The two men and Anders looked at each other questioningly. Obviously, they were not fully briefed on my abilities. “Why the hell would you have called me if you didn’t think it was a lycan.”

  “Well by type of wounds on the victims it looks like a wolf attack but the size is all wrong and no one saw it.”

  I let that sink in for a second. “No one saw it?” I said. “This wolf killed fifty people in broad day light and you have no witnesses? And what do you mean the size is all wrong?”

  Ian glanced back at the shop. “Kevin” he said in a somber tone. “I think you should go have a look. There is no way any of us can describe it well enough to do it justice. I just nodded and started toward the door. The two dark suited men behind Ian parted silently for me. As I strode past them I caught sight of ear pieces on each of them. Definitely feds.

  A blast of congealed blood and various death odors stopped me as I opened the door. It was worse than any slaughter house you can think of. The air still held the cortisol stink of fear. I stood in the door way a moment and looked around. Bodies lay everywhere. The walls, windows and floor were covered in a thick sticky layer of blood, Lily gave a low growl. I leaned down and patted her head to calm her or maybe to calm myself. “Stay out here girl” I told my little shadow. She let out a small sneeze and a huffing grunt and sat down next to the door.

  I’ve seen terrible before. I’ve walked into barns that were the butcher shop for a group of hillbilly smoky mountain werewolves. I’ve seen families eaten. I’ve seen a few other types of badies, even a wendigo. Nothing compared to the shear slaughter before me.

  As I scanned the room I started to think that butchery was the wrong word. I slowly began making my way from body to body. I examined the wounds. They were definitely claw wounds but I saw what Ian meant about the size. They were too big. Closer inspection showed me that butchery was definitely the wrong word. A normal wolf attack follows a pattern. Their instincts tell them to bite the throat. Claw attacks will hit the throat if the victim makes a fight of it. But normally claw attacks go for the stomach or the Achilles. Those claw attacks are normally dig four deep furrows in the victim where ever they hit. The bodies of victims are normally broken up pretty bad too. Wolves generally don’t use finesse. They use their overwhelming size and strength in bursts of pure savagery. Lots of broken bones and fractured skulls.

  These wounds were all just two huge furrows and on every victim they precisely hit a major artery. They hit the neck, the wrists or the femoral artery. All with surgical precision. These were wolf claws but huge and this beast only used two. As if he or she was reaching out delicately with two fingers to causally end each victim. The targeted areas also explained all the blood. There were plenty of ways for a wolf to kill without arterial spray painting everything.

  As I examined each victim a few things became extremely clear. This beast had not killed in a rage. It was too precise. It had not struck out in hunger, there was not a single bite mark on any victim. Each strike had been made to cause the most blood spray. The creature wanted this place to be painted in blood. This wasn’t just slaughter it was a message. A statement of superiority. It wanted to show us that we were not safe. And from what I was seeing it had a good point.

  My examination stopped dead at a body I recognized. Her name was Denise. She always wore tank tops to show off her sleeve tattoos. She had the aura of a bad ass rock chick but she was a sweet heart. People generally avoid me. Truthfully, I bring it on myself most of the time. I act surly and I’m not what you would call personable. The same incident that scrubbed the myelin off most of my peripheral
nerves wiped out all my memories. It’s hard to connect with people when you have almost no memory of how to be a person. Denise didn’t let my bad manners and awkwardness stop her from trying to be nice. To her I wasn’t some ghoul who survives off death. I was a quiet customer who always ate alone. She was nice to everyone but I don’t think she ever knew how much it meant to this particular customer. I stood there for a couple minutes staring at the deep wounds in her neck. Her face held no fear. If anything, she looked surprised. She must have been one of the first, lucky her.

  I moved away from Denise, continuing my examination. I gave each body a thorough inspection and a good sniff. As I moved farther from the front door the faces began to show terror and the stink of fear permeated the air. As I neared the back door it was obvious that these patrons had started to flee. I stopped again near the rear of the shop. Bodies were piled up against the door that lead to the rear parking lot. I moved over to the door. I gave it a push. The lock wasn’t engaged but the door wouldn’t open. I wiped away enough blood from the floor to ceiling window next to the door to look at the outside. I could see rents in the metal that looked like giant hands had squeezed the frame and the door together.

  I made my way back through the shop and took my focus off the people. I looked over the whole shop. I looked at the scene and slowly I noticed something. There was a counter that separated the dining area from the kitchen. At noon all the stools along the counter would have been taken. Everyday there was a wait even for seats at the counter. A body lay on the floor next to all but two stools. The one nearest the front door and the one closest to the back. So, the fucker had help. But if the back door was still twisted shut then wolf number one must have left through the front.

  “Two wolves in broad daylight” I said to myself shaking my head trying to wrap my mind around it. In the seven years, I have been hunting I have seen a lot of powerful lycans. I’ve seen big fuckers and smart wolves who learned how to shift only parts of their bodies. But one rule always held. Wolves don’t shift during the day and they damn well don’t shift in public. I have spent countless hours studying werewolf lore, which is a bitch to find in the states by the way, and I have never heard of wolves operating in the day.

  No lore or theory I had ever read gave a clear origin for the curse of lycanthropy. It is generally agreed that the wolf strain of the curse came first and is the purest. Other types of lycans, werebears, wererats, weretigers etc.., are all thought to be mutations of the original curse brought on by magical practitioners messing with the magic of the original curse or trying to duplicate it. Despite the fact that so many theories abound there is one theme in all of them. The moon and the night. Obviously, the moon affects them. At first lycans cannot change without the light of a full moon. As they gain control they can start to call forth the change under less and less moon light. But only the absolute strongest and oldest can change on a fully moonless night and, like I said, up until that moment it was generally believed that changing during the full light of day was impossible.

  I stood there among the blood and death trying to keep my mind from spinning out. Outside the shop there were a bunch of people waiting for me to walk out the door and give them some answers. I didn’t have any. A wolf killed fifty people in broad day light in the middle of the second largest metropolitan area in Michigan and I had fuck all idea how that shit was even possible. I shook my head and just stared at the blood coated door. “What the fuck am I even doing here?” I said to myself “I’m a hunter not a fucking detective.”

  Like I said, I’m a quiet awkward guy. I don’t have friends. I don’t relate to people very well. The accident or incident, whatever it was, that fucked up my body also scoured my mind of all personal memories. I know facts. I woke up 9 years ago in a hospital bed wracked with mind searing pain and no idea who I was or how the fucking fuck I got there. I remembered book type knowledge. I could read, I could do algebra. I even knew what fucking year it was. But no sense of who I was. Other people have years of stories. They have experience to shape who they are and how they react. I don’t. I have no real ties. My family are all strangers and I have zero friends other than my dog. I have no reason to go out of my way for any of the people standing on the other side of that door. I hunt wolves. I cut out their hearts, I keep the pain away and I get paid. That’s my fucking life. Most people might find that sad or pathetically lonely but I don’t know any other way. I can’t miss what I have never had.

  I ran all those thoughts through my mind and I was pretty much resolved to walk out the door and tell the chief that he was on his own on this one, throw the deuces and walk my ass home when my nose caught a whiff of a scent layered under all the shit, piss, blood and fear. Not to mention the food and coffee smells normally found in restaurants. It was a thick musky odor. It was the scent of the wolf. The older and more powerful a wolf gets the more defined and unique their scent becomes. This scent was strong. It was thicker and more nuanced than anything I had ever smelled before. It spoke of power and age far far beyond any wolf I had ever encountered. It was vast and strong and somehow familiar!

  That spark of familiarity triggered a burst of pain in my head. For a moment, my brain caught fire and my vision blurred.

  I grabbed my head and bent over holding it until the pain cleared. It was so weird. I felt like I should know that smell. Like a word stuck on the tip of your tongue. That smell was somehow connected to the parts of my brain that my memory loss had scrubbed clean. I had never experienced that before. Even when I had met with Melinda and Charles, the two nice older folks who had raised the me that I was before my incident, I had absolutely no twinge of recognition. Which, by the way, absolutely destroyed those nice people.

  “Well that pretty much seals the deal” I said to myself. I had essentially made my mind up to just peace the fuck out on the shit show that I was pretty sure this whole thing would turn into and this just doubled down on that decision. Most people think that I would be interested in learning about who I was before. They think that upon waking up I would have had a need to search out my past and relearn what it meant to be Kevin Lucas. I, however, had no fucking need to do that. In fact, I have gotten far away from anything involving the old me. I would have changed my name but old me was pretty frugal and had enough saved and invested that a name change would have been a big pain in the ass.

  I know nothing of who the old Kevin was other than that he had two very nice parents. A couple of sweet hearts who seemed willing to give all their time and effort to the burned out, agony riddled asshole I was when I first woke up. It was actually their love and understanding that made me run from that whole deal. I am not the son they knew and I doubt I could ever become him. I had no drive to constantly see the disappointment on their faces as I constantly reminded them that their son was gone. And frankly fuck that guy anyway. The doctors never found a good medical reason for my condition. They found that a big part of my brain seemed damaged and that a vast amount of the myelin was gone from my nerves, that’s what causes all the pain, but they don’t know how and they had never seen it before. When you take the strangeness of my condition, couple that with the strange amount of supernatural facts I found out I had in my head, I took a leap and guessed that old Kevin had been into some shit that got him erased and left me holding the agonizing bill. So, like I said, fuck that guy.

  I shook the remaining pain from my head and stepped toward the door of the shop. My path was clear. Walk the fuck home. Pack my shit and find a new town. Whatever left that scent in the shop was something I wanted nothing to do with. Life sucks enough in general without throwing myself into a meat grinder.

  I opened the shop door and saw Ian, Anders, and the two feds near the curb. It looked like they had been talking but had fallen into the awkward silence of people who had no fucking clue what to do about the shit storm brewing around them. Lake drive was blocked off behind them and just across the median where Cherry St Y-ed off of Lake I saw an even bigger group of looky
loos hanging out near the police barricades. All eight eyes turned expectantly toward me. Well four eyes and two sets of obviously government issues sun glasses, seriously did these guys have no clue how to blend in?

  In my head, I was already saying ‘Well Ian I have no clue what you’re dealing with here but I know I want fuck all to do with it.” Then I heard Lily start to growl. Lily has two very distinct growls. One is cute and harmless sounding. It’s the growl of a toy dog who thinks it’s a big fella. It’s the one she uses when she sits in the window and surveys the neighborhood. The second growl is far lower pitched and menacing than you would think a dog her size was capable of making. That growl raises the hair on the back of your neck and you can feel it vibrate in your bones. She was currently making growl number two.

  I turned to look at her. She had risen from her seat near the door and was now standing rigid with her little tail in a tight curl. Her broad little chest was puffed out and her eyes were locked forward scanning the crowd of looky loos. Pugs are generally known as the clowns of the dog world. Silly little creatures that prance about. Loving little balls of cute. For most pugs, that is a good summation. However, this was not always the case. The breed is very old. They used to adorn the laps of Chinese royalty. From the outside, they were seen as adorable affectations meant to keep those of royal blood amused. In fact, they were bred to keep those of royal blood alive.

  Ancient china was rife with intrigue and plots. Assassins were quite common and many of those assassins were shapeshifters of one sort or another. Skinwalkers, lycan, mimics, huli jing and rakshasa, to name a few. There were overt ways to guard against these threats but somewhere along the way royal mystics came up with an unobtrusive and rather elegant solution. They bred fu dogs, traditional mystic canine protectors, with other smaller breeds until they had the pug. A cute little dog that could perch on a throne and sniff out threats and occasionally, if the blood is strong enough, do quite a bit more. The fu dog blood is too diluted in most pugs these days for them to act in their original role. But if a person is so inclined they can still find pugs with strong fu blood and the right mystic can coax that old magic back out.