Loving the wolf, p.11
Loving the Wolf, page 11
Even though Mike was the senior member of the Pack among the four of them, he’d willingly let Trevor take lead on this operation since he was the reason they were all out here. So after Owen and Isaac had promised to keep their mouths shut and do exactly what they were told, Trevor convinced himself the two paranormal investigators couldn’t be that much trouble.
Turns out he’d been wrong.
Owen never shut up, repeatedly asking why he couldn’t have a gun like the ones Trevor and his three teammates were carrying. And when he wasn’t talking, he was pointing his flashlight in everybody’s face, damn near blinding them all.
“You make it sound so illegal when you say it that way,” Owen said from his place several spots behind Trevor, flicking his flashlight this way and that, like he was a member of the Scooby Gang looking for a clue. “All we did was attach one of those tiny GPS trackers to the underside of your rental car. You know the ones that helicopter moms clip to their little kid’s backpacks? The things are cheap as hell and connect straight to an app on my phone. We put one on Jenna’s car, too, so it’s not like we were only targeting you or anything.”
Trevor bit his lower lip to keep from growling.
“Tagging a person’s car with your cheap GPS tracker sounds illegal because it is illegal, you dumbass,” Connor said from farther back in the tunnel. “It’s a misdemeanor in California for anyone but the cops or a licensed PI to do it. And you guys are definitely neither of those things.”
“I don’t know if anyone has ever told you this, but you come off sounding like a cop when you talk like that,” Isaac said.
“That’s probably because we are cops,” Mike said from directly behind Isaac. “I assumed the fact that we’re carrying licensed handguns would be a dead giveaway, but I guess not. Then again, it’s not like running around in the sewers looking for supernatural creatures is a normal thing for police to do, so I probably shouldn’t hold that against you.”
There was silence for a long time as Trevor continued leading them through the tunnels, the dirt and musky scent he’d come to associate with the ghouls incredibly easy to follow. Every once in a while, he or one of his pack mates would use a piece of chalk to mark an arrow on the wall. It wasn’t as if they were worried about getting lost down here, but Owen and Isaac were a different matter. If they got separated, hopefully the arrows on the wall would lead them back to the exit.
“Um…I just want to let you know that we never used the trackers on a person before,” Isaac finally said, suddenly sounding guilty. “We originally picked them up in case we ever stumbled across a paranormal creature and needed to follow it back to its lair.”
Trevor had a sudden vision of Isaac jumping on a vampire’s back, trying to clip a GPS tracker on the vamp’s belt, even as the bloodsucker tore the rest of his HOPD crew to shreds. These guys were so far out of their league and didn’t even know it.
“Have you ever actually run into a real supernatural creature?” Hale asked, clearly thinking the same thing Trevor had.
“Oh yeah. Lots of them,” Owen assured them in a tone that suggested it wasn’t a big deal at the exact same time that Isaac said, “Not really.”
Trevor stopped walking to look back at the two members of the nerd herd, the beams of their flashlights reflecting off the walls of the tunnel to reveal some seriously embarrassed faces.
“I mean,” Owen started slowly, “we’ve come close to seeing some supernatural creatures. But they always seem to slip away at the last second. They’re out there, though. I swear it.”
“You don’t have to do much to convince us of that,” Trevor said, moving out of the way of the flashlights so that they illuminated the hole in the tunnel floor that the creature had disappeared into the other day. “In this case at least, you’re right.”
Owen hurried over, leaning forward and running his light around the ragged edges of the hole in the concrete, the beam glinting off the pieces of steel rebar the ghoul had sliced clean through. “Where did that come from?”
Trevor dropped to one knee beside the hole. “This is how the creatures we’re after are able to move around the city without being seen. It appears these things can claw through concrete and steel like it’s tissue paper. I’m guessing that flesh and bone wouldn’t present much of a problem, either.”
Even in the darkness, it was impossible to miss that Isaac and Owen had become extremely nervous all of a sudden. Their hearts were beating faster and they were sweating a little. Something told Trevor that both men were probably wondering if coming down here had been such a good idea.
“Do you think there are more than one of these creatures?” Owen asked, running his fingers along the edge of the hole like he was trying to understand how any creature could claw through concrete and metal like this. Trevor couldn’t blame him. Werewolves had claws, but even they couldn’t do anything like this.
“Yeah,” Mike said from the back of the group, and Trevor could see him lift his nose to subtly test the air. “There are definitely more than one.”
“So…” Isaac said, looking back and forth between the part of the tunnel where Mike was standing and the pitch-black darkness filling the hole in the floor. “Are we going down there to try and follow one of those things?”
“That’s the idea,” Connor said, mouth curving into a smirk. “Of course, you two are welcome to head back up to the surface and wait for us up there where it’s safe.”
Isaac seemed like he was ready to accept the offer, but Owen stood straighter and got an obstinate look on his face, like Connor was challenging his manhood or something lame like that.
“Oh, we’re going down there all right,” Owen said fiercely, taking a step closer to the hole in the floor of the tunnel. “In fact, we’re going to go first.”
Before he could take a step, Trevor reached out and grabbed his shoulder. “You’re not going first and that’s the end of it,” he said firmly, tugging Owen back.
Trevor looked at each of his pack mates in turn before turning his gaze on Owen and Isaac. “I shouldn’t have to repeat this, but I will anyway. We’re going down in that hole for one reason, and one reason only—recon. We need to know how extensive these tunnels are and how difficult it will be to navigate them. If we can figure out where these creatures live, we’ll consider that gravy at this point. We’re going to avoid contact, no matter what. We simply don’t know enough about what we’re up against to risk a confrontation.”
Owen opened his mouth, no doubt to demand they should go running in with guns blazing as if they were in a Hollywood action movie. Fortunately, the man censored himself at the last moment.
“Are you sure we can’t have weapons?” he asked instead, peeking down in the hole in the floor again.
“No!” Trevor and his pack mates said in unison.
Jumping into the hole, Trevor immediately began moving forward on his hands and knees. The bottom of this new stretch of tunnel was rougher than the man-made sewer above, with ridges of stones and chunks of rubble that dug into his jean-covered knees and the palms of his hands as he crawled. In some places, the tunnel narrowed, scraping his shoulders and back, while in others, it was big enough to almost walk upright.
As he continued crawling through the tunnel, he listened for the sound of movement ahead of him. He’d hoped that his nose would clue him in to the presence of any ghouls, but the tunnel they were in reeked of dirt and that musky scent he associated with the creatures, so right now, they could be anywhere.
Sound carried funny through the tunnel, too, and he wondered if creaking in the rock around him was one of those famous California earthquakes or merely a heavy truck passing by on the street overhead.
Unfortunately, hearing anything became difficult soon enough, as Owen began a monologue into his phone about being in the belly of the beast and how he was risking his life to uncover the truth of the Skid Row Screamer.
Trevor couldn’t help but shake his head. Man, the guy was such a total doofus.
Desperate for a distraction from Owen’s nonstop talking, Trevor found his mind wandering. His thoughts naturally found their way to Jenna. A big part of that was how amazing it had been to wake up with her in his arms this morning, but the other part was how thrilled he’d been when she’d decided not to come with them on this morning’s recon mission. Even if her reasoning had more to do with her fear of going underground and her ongoing spat with Connor. Still, Trevor would have been freaking out if she was down here with them. The mere thought made his heart thump hard and his claws threaten to come out. He never ever wanted to consider Jenna being in danger. Just another sign of how far he was falling for her.
Trevor reached a Y intersection in the tunnel with two passages snaking off into the darkness. He stopped in the open space before the branches, making room for everyone else to gather around in the tight space. Owen and Isaac nervously swept their flashlights all over the place.
“I was hoping this tunnel would lead straight into the center of the creatures’ territory, but apparently, we’re not going to get that lucky,” Trevor said. “So we have a decision to make—stay together and pick one tunnel to follow, or split up.”
“We should split up,” Connor said firmly before anyone could get another word in. “Mike and I will go left and the rest of you can go right. We can cover more ground that way.”
Trevor wasn’t surprised Connor wanted to split up or that he refused to be teamed up with him. It had been hard enough getting him to come down into the tunnels in the first place, and Trevor suspected most of that was because his friend couldn’t stand the sight of him right now. Then again, maybe he was giving himself too much credit. Maybe the reason Connor hadn’t wanted to come was because he believed that if he never saw a ghoul with his own eyes, then he wouldn’t have to face the fact that he’d done everything Jenna had accused him of—namely abandoning her and Hannah.
“I don’t think splitting up is the best idea,” Isaac pointed out. “That’s what happens in every sci-fi and horror movie right before people start getting eaten.”
Trevor couldn’t necessarily disagree with that logic. Splitting up usually did bring scary things out of the woodwork. But in this case, there wasn’t much they could do about it. If they stayed together in one large group, the chances of finding anything down here weren’t good. For all they knew, they could end up wandering around down here for days. They didn’t have that much time to waste, especially because Jenna would almost certainly come looking for him if he was gone too long, and that was flat-out unacceptable.
In the end, Connor did go left with Mike, but they took Isaac with them. Trevor, Hale, and Owen went right. It seemed a concession that everyone could live with.
“We go as far as we can for an hour,” Trevor said. “Then, regardless of what either of our teams discover, we turn around and rendezvous back here. No exceptions. If one team comes back here and the other hasn’t shown within five minutes, that means something is wrong, and the first team goes into rescue mode at that point.”
Trevor hoped that never became necessary, but it needed to be said. They had to have a plan in case everything went sideways. Mike and Hale nodded as if that made complete sense while Owen and Isaac looked more nervous than before. Like they finally figured out that this was all real. Connor didn’t look as if he cared one way or another.
The tunnel Trevor and his small team moved through began descending at a steady slant, becoming wider and wider the farther they went. Within a few hundred feet, they were all able to stand up and walk, even if he and Hale still had to lean over to keep from hitting their heads on the ceiling.
“Why does a creature that’s barely three feet tall need to dig a tunnel that’s six feet high?” Hale asked softly as he made another chalk mark on the rough wall. “That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
“Wait a minute,” Owen said, turning to shine his light in Hale’s direction. “You’ve seen one of the Screamers, too? When?”
“Screamers?” Hale said curiously, looking back and forth between Owen and Trevor.
“That’s what the locals call these things, no doubt thanks to Owen, I’m sure,” Trevor said, turning to focus his attention on the passage ahead of them. “And no, Owen, Hale has never seen one of them. But he has seen the life-size sculptures that Jenna did. They’re perfect in every detail.”
“Jenna sculpted life-size models of these things?” Owen said, his voice rising a little. “And she never bothered to show them to me or my crew? Why not?”
“You might want to keep your voice down,” Trevor said calmly, glancing over his shoulder at him. “Unless you want to come face-to-face with the creatures much sooner than you want.”
Owen looked ready to argue for a moment but then finally nodded and lowered his voice. “I just don’t understand why she didn’t show us right from the beginning.”
“Maybe it was because you seemed to make a joke out of everything when she took you to the alley where her sister got kidnapped,” Trevor said, biting back a growl at the memory of Jenna telling him that story. “She thought you were nothing but a bunch of jerks with no intention of ever actually helping her, so why would she bother to show you anything?”
Owen had the grace to look ashamed at that.
They continued moving along the tunnel in silence for a while. Trevor kept an eye on his watch as they passed several smaller passages to the left and right of their pathway. Without comment, they all decided to stay with the main tunnel. It seemed clear it was obviously heading somewhere important.
“Have you noticed these holes in the walls?” Owen said a little while later, stopping to shine his light into one that was about twenty inches in diameter and positioned about waist height. “You think they’re air holes or something like that? If they are, they don’t smell very fresh at all.” He made a face. “Actually, they smell like a skunk.”
Trevor and Hale both leaned in close. Considering the fact that they were at least three or four hundred feet underground, the hole could be home to skunks, he supposed. But from the strong musky scent coming out of the small opening, it was obvious that one or more ghouls regularly moved through it.
“They might dig these for air movement,” Trevor said. “But I also think they use them to travel through as well.”
“We’d better be careful then,” Hale murmured, sticking his head completely in the hole to look around. “If the creatures realize we’re here, these holes will let them surround us damn quick.”
“Which is a good reason to make sure they never realize we’re here,” Trevor pointed out before turning to keep leading the way through the tunnel.
Another dozen side passages later, the tunnel leveled out, opening onto what could only be described as a main concourse, over seven feet in height and wide enough to drive a small car through it. Trevor looked around, expecting to see Mike and his team waiting for them, but there was no sign of them. He couldn’t even get a whiff of their scents. Then again, who knew how expansive these tunnels were? Mike and the others could be miles away by now along that other passage they’d taken. Hell, they could be back on the surface already for all anyone knew.
Trevor was trying to figure out if he should go left or right when he smelled smoke. A second later, he noticed a flicking orange glow softly highlighting the tunnel to the left. There was obviously some kind of fire or torch burning down there. Without thinking twice, he spun around to motion for Owen to turn off his flashlight.
The paranormal investigator fumbled with the light so much he almost dropped the damn thing, but he ended up getting it together enough to flip the switch before splashing the beam all over the tunnel.
“What is it?” Owen whispered loudly. “I can’t see a thing.”
Trevor grabbed his shoulder and turned him in the direction he’d seen the fire, leaning in close to the man’s ear. “Keep looking in that direction until your eyes adjust to the darkness.”
Not twenty seconds later, he felt Owen tense.
“Crap, is that a fire?” Owen asked softly. “These frigging creatures know how to use fire? How the hell is that possible? They’re monsters.”
Trevor wanted to point out that there was probably something prejudicial about that but decided not to bother. Something told him that Owen wouldn’t get anything he tried to tell him. It was better to save himself a wasted effort.
“I know it’s dark as hell in here for you,” Trevor said instead. “If you want to keep going, I’ll have to guide you with a hand on your shoulder. That’s probably going to be tough for you, so if you want to stay right here, that’s not a problem. Hale and I will go check out whatever is up ahead, then come back and get you.”
“No. I want to keep going,” Owen said, barely hesitating before giving his answer in a voice a lot stronger than it probably had any right to be given the situation.
At a nod from Trevor, Hale drew his handgun and moved across the tunnel, reaching the far wall, then motioned back for them to follow. Trevor started forward, holding his weapon with one hand and keeping the other on Owen’s shoulder to steer him in the right direction. Owen moved with slow, careful steps, feeling out in front of him with his toes, obviously afraid of falling flat on his face.
Once they reached the wall, Trevor turned Owen to the left, then slowly started edging them closer to the soft glow of the fire ahead of them. Hale crept silently as a wraith across the stone floor toward the next curve in the tunnel. Trevor could tell the moment his pack mate was able to see around it because Hale froze before dropping to one knee, motioning Trevor and Owen toward him. When he got there, Trevor slowly poked his head around the round corner, stunned at what he saw.
The tunnel ahead opened into a broad cavern that was easily fifty feet across and twenty feet tall, with three small fires burning in pits in the center of the space. Earthenware pots hung over the pits, smoke curling up and around them before heading for vent holes in the ceiling.
