The night folk 01 sable, p.1
The Night Folk 01 Sable, page 1
Contents
Copyright
Sable
Foreword
Also by J. L. Bryan
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
From the Author
Copyright
Copyright 2022 J.L. Bryan
All rights reserved.
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Sable
The Night Folk, Book One
by
J. L. Bryan
Foreword
Thanks for giving this book a try. It's the first I've written outside my Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper series in a few years, so it's definitely excited and scary to put it out there. This one was written much more from the gut than my average book, guided more by emotion and intuition than the writing approach I used for Ellie's haunted-house mysteries. I've always been drawn to werewolf stories, and have written a few since childhood, but this is the first one I've published.
I've enjoyed this dive into their shadowy, moonlit world, full of supernatural danger and powerful emotions. I hope you'll find the world as compelling as I did, when it kept me up late at night this past winter, demanding to be written.
Also by J. L. Bryan
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BOOKS BY J. L. BRYAN
The Night Folk series (NEW!)
Sable
The Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper series
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper
Cold Shadows
The Crawling Darkness
Terminal
House of Whispers
Maze of Souls
Lullaby
The Keeper
The Tower
The Monster Museum
Fire Devil
The Necromancer’s Library
The Trailwalker
Midnight Movie
The Lodge
Cabinet Jack
Fallen Wishes
Urban Fantasy/Horror
The Unseen
Inferno Park
Time Travel/Dystopian
Nomad
The Jenny Pox series (supernatural/horror)
Jenny Pox
Tommy Nightmare
Alexander Death
Jenny Plague-Bringer
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my wife Christina for her support. Thanks to my son Johnny for always doing his homework and his chores.
I appreciate everyone who helped with this book, including beta reader Robert Duperre and Rhiannon Frater (check out their books!). Thanks also to copy editors Brooklyn Ann (check out her books, too!) and Lori Whitwam, and Andrea van der Westhuizen for proofreading. Thanks to my cover artist Claudia from PhatPuppy Art, and her daughter Catie, who does the lettering on the covers.
Thanks also to the book bloggers who have supported my books, including Heather from Bewitched Bookworms; Michelle from Much Loved Books; Shirley from Creative Deeds; Kelly from Reading the Paranormal; Lili from Lili Lost in a Book; Kelsey from Kelsey’s Cluttered Bookshelf; and Ali from My Guilty Obsession.
And thank you for trying this new series!
Dedication
For Christina S.
Chapter One
I had gone days without an anti-lycanthropy injection, so the monster stirred inside me, filling me with hungry energy and sharpening my senses. Keep it under control, Alice, I told myself as I stalked through a grungy traveling fair in the parking lot of a dead shopping mall.
My ears throbbed under a deafening onslaught of recorded calliope music, laughing teenagers, and screaming children. Powerful odors assaulted my nose—onions and doughnuts frying in grease, the sickly reek of petting-zoo goats and dirty straw, the crowd of sweaty fair-goers.
I searched every face in that crowd, hunting for the murderer, my own eyes hidden in shadow under the low brim of a tiger-striped Cincinnati Bengals cap from a local gas station.
I didn't know the killer's scent, but I had a picture of him on my phone. He was tall, with long dirty-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing a tank top to display tattoos of cobras and adders coiled around his muscular arms. He looked rough and strong, somewhere in his late twenties.
The picture had been snapped by a young bartender who'd felt uncomfortable when the guy hit on her friend at the same fair three months earlier in Hammond, Indiana, three hundred miles away. Tonight, the fair had pitched its ragged midway and rusty rides outside Mansfield, Ohio, its colorful lights luring customers off the highway like moths to candle flames.
“He was kinda cute, with these really gorgeous blue eyes, but also kinda off,” the bartender in Indiana had told me. “He gave me that dangerous feeling. But Nina was drawn to that. She wouldn't listen to me. She thought he was irresistible.”
Nina had been the second unfortunate young woman in the past year to be found the victim of a deadly mauling after The Mid-American Goodtime Fair passed through town. A third had been reported missing.
As far as I knew, nobody else was on the killer's trail, connecting the victims in different states. The traveling funfair was almost too small to notice, rustling up and down the highways, striking quick deals to appear in the hollowed-out shopping centers of rundown cities and sleepy towns.
I believed the murderer worked here, preying on victims as it traveled from town to town, and he'd grown sloppy about disposing of the remains.
My phone buzzed with a text from Sorcha, who'd sent me on this mission. Update?
Still looking, I replied. It's crowded. Getting dark. He should be out hunting soon.
I took the opportunity to double-check the killer's picture on my phone. He was kissing the second girl who'd been killed—Nina Patrick, a nineteen-year-old high school dropout who worked part-time in a convenience store and lived with an opioid-addict aunt. The police hadn't seemed to put much effort into finding the girl, like she wasn't even worth looking for. When her mangled, gnawed, mostly eaten remains eventually turned up in the woods, their lazily composed theory was she'd died of a drug overdose or too much alcohol, and her body eaten by coyotes or bears, though her bartender friend told me Nina didn't do drugs.
The killer had a talent for sniffing out marginal, isolated victims whose disappearance wouldn't draw a lot of public resources or attention. I had spoken to victims' relatives and other known associates, always lying about who I was in order to gain their trust.
I put away my phone and continued down the midway, past a palm reader's tent and a funnel cake stand that made my stomach growl, toward the carousel and tilt-a-whirl.
A pack of laughing kids crossed my path. One girl of ten or eleven waved a huge pink ball of cotton candy, squealing with sugar-induced delirium.
I tried to imagine what it would have been like, a childhood spent in pursuit of innocent fun, with little to fear.
Then I spotted the killer.
He stood on the carousel, looming over a freckled teenage girl riding a worn-down unicorn whose gold and pink paint had mostly flaked off. She had dyed-black hair and dark makeup and clothes to match, including a black shirt polka-dotted with skulls. She wore two plastic bracelets, one indicating she'd paid for unlimited rides, the other that she was too young to buy beer.
The carousel revolved, whisking the killer and his next victim out of sight.
I moved closer to the waist-high barricade of temporary aluminum fencing, then raised my phone and smiled like a young mom snapping pictures.
When they came around again, the killer was whispering close to the girl's cheek while his finger explored a rip in her shirt. She giggled, blushing, tilting out of her unicorn saddle toward him as if drawn by some magnetic animal energy. The sight made me ill.
They crept by slowly, barely moving. The carousel had reached its final go-round.
As they passed close to me, a gray-haired lady beside me raised her phone and shouted, “Aubrielle! Over here! Smile for Grandma!”
An elementary-age girl riding a lion looked over, smirked, and raised her middle finger.
“Aubrielle!” the elderly lady bellowed in outrage.
The killer looked over too, and I didn't avert my gaze fast enough. His bright, almost glowing lapis-blue eyes locked on to mine like he knew I'd been watching him.
I aimed my phone at some kids behind him—just a young mom Instagramming her child's day at the fair, that's me—but I felt exposed, no longer invisible. It took an eternity for him to rotate out of sight again.
I hoped he hadn't smelled me on that slow final pass. While I'd slathered my body with neutralizing deodorant, laying it on thick like mosquito repellent at summer camp, that provided no guarantee. He might already know what I was, that I was like him.
When the carousel stopped, the killer and his prey were on the far side, near the ride's exit. I threaded through the crowd as quickly as I could without drawing attention to myself.
The merry-go-round's passengers disembarked in a swarm, thickening the crowd ahead of me. I lost sight of the killer and the girl for a long, panicky minute.
Finally, I spotted them again. Good thing he was tall, with a ponytail down to the middle of his back, making him easier to identify.
I tracked them at a distance, using other, larger people for cover. Being shorter than average has plenty of disadvantages, but does make it easy to hide in a crowd.
I clutched my straw purse, roughly the size of a beach bag. Luckily for me, the fair didn't check for weapons.
A couple of particularly attractive guys around my age strolled past, flowing with the crowd in the opposite direction, and one took his time looking me over, taking in my baggy gray shirt and jeans. Apparently, my disguise needed more work in the bland and average department. The last thing I wanted was to catch anyone's eye.
I smelled the guy who'd checked me out as he passed close, and there was a lot to like in his scent. It was one I could have gotten up close to and rolled around in if I was free to do what I felt, which I was not.
The Order had very strict rules for me, and it was probably for the best.
Still, I could almost imagine the salty taste of his warm skin, the thick meat below, the iron-rich red blood fresh from the heart—
Down, monster, I whispered to the hungry thing moving inside me. He's not the prey.
But he could have been. I'd deliberately lowered my dosage over the past week and hadn't had an injection at all in three days, letting the thing inside me come close to waking up as the moon waxed closer to full.
While this quickened my senses and enhanced my speed and strength, the danger was that my inner demon had a mind of its own. If I let things run too far, I could lose my slippery self-control. If I let it control me, I'd be no better than the monsters I hunted, those who delighted in killing.
I wasn't like them. I didn't enjoy stalking and killing. I only did it because it was necessary.
I repeated this to myself often, so it had to be true.
Ahead, the killer and his prey reached the funhouse, his arm around her hips. The girl showed her unlimited-rides bracelet to the middle-aged woman in a Def Leppard shirt out front, who looked the girl up and down, then nodded.
The killer didn't have an armband or a ticket, but the lady let him through anyway, supporting my belief that he worked at the fair. He and the girl entered the funhouse through a giant rotating barrel-o'-fun at the front.
I dug a ticket out of my pocket and began to follow them, but the ticket lady rose from her orange plastic chair and flipped switches inside a steel fuse box. The funhouse lights snuffed out behind her, and its recorded carnival music fell silent.
“Excuse me?” I smiled, holding out my ticket. “I was about to go in there.”
“Fine by me,” she said, but she stepped out of the gate and locked it like maybe it wasn't all that fine by her. “Give your ticket to Shirley if she ever shows up for her shift. I'm tired of missing dinner break for her. I want a chili dog.” She yawned and started toward a concession stand.
I chased after her. “But aren't there still people inside the funhouse?”
She glared at me, her eyes lapis blue like the murderer I was tracking; maybe she was a relative. Maybe even a packmate, if there was a whole pack here, which was one of the things I'd been sent to determine. She brushed a graying blonde chunk of hair out of her tough, bulldog-like face.
“The funhouse is for kids, anyway,” the lady said. “You should try the tilt-a-whirl, something like that. For adults, you know? Kinda strange for adults to hang around the kids' areas alone, if you ask me.”
Then she turned and walked away briskly, and I had the impression she might bite my face off if I said anything more.
The funhouse's only exit was a steep yellow spiral slide down from the second floor, at the end of an outdoor bridge that bounced up and down as people crossed it. Three elementary-age kids whooshed down at high speed, laughing, but there was no sign of the killer or the girl.
She was alone in there with him, and the older lady had closed down the funhouse to keep it that way. There would be no potential witnesses left inside.
I considered jumping the gate, but surely carnival workers up and down the midway watched for people doing that.
Instead, I walked around the side of the funhouse, turning sideways to fit down the narrow gap between its outer wall and the Haunted Shack beside it, where recorded screams and howls played over loudspeakers.
Along the way, I sent another text: Heading into funhouse. I kept it vague, because if I caught the killer in the act, there was a good chance I'd get violent. I wasn't supposed to do that. My very specific assignment was to observe and report, not to get involved. Going off-mission would get me in huge trouble.
Keeping to the shadows, I approached the backlot area, full of tents, pickups, RVs, and heavy rigs that hauled the bigger rides and attractions. I expected someone to barge out and demand to know why I was creeping around back there, but nobody did. The fair had hit prime time, so the carnival workers were probably busy running their booths and attractions, hustling for their daily bread.
I climbed rickety wooden stairs to an employee entrance in the back of the funhouse, opened the steel fire door, and slipped inside.
Chapter Two
A twisting mirror maze took up much of the first floor, and it slowed me down pretty severely. With the lights out, all I could see was shadowy phantoms of myself passing in the gloom, like lost souls wandering through purgatory.
I picked my way through the darkened maze, listening carefully, trying not to make any noise. Now that the killer was alone with his prey, he was probably starting to change, and his hearing would be even better than mine. I winced each time I bumped into a clear plastic wall, mistaking a dead end for a way forward.
From my purse, I drew out a subcompact 9mm pistol and a silencer longer than the gun itself. While it wouldn't actually make the gunshot silent, maybe it would muffle it enough under the fair's cacophony of music, machinery, and screams.
The traditional weapon of my order, since early medieval times, has been a crossbow with silver-tipped bolts, but that wasn't so easy to smuggle around, and was far more likely to raise eyebrows than a small handgun here in America.
The maze ended at steep stairs to the second floor. I started up them cautiously, but they slid from side to side under my feet, making me stumble. The trick stairs rattled loudly, shattering the quiet inside the funhouse.
Snarling with frustration at the obnoxious clatter that had announced my approach, I jumped over the last few stairs and landed softly in a low crouch at the top.
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