The Frenzy Way (33 page)

A black man who wore his hair in cornrows jumped up. “You mean guns? We can shoot guns too.” Two of his companions yelled their support, and he sat down.

Gabriel scanned the room. “You want revolution? You want war in the streets? That’s what this rogue wants: to provoke us into direct conflict from which we can never extricate ourselves. And we’re outnumbered a hundred thousand to one. So get these feelings out of your system now.” He waited for the crowd to settle down. “Six murders that we know of, one of them a policewoman. The city’s in a state of panic. We have to find this insurrectionist ourselves and put him down before he causes any more damage.”

Another figure rose, drawing attention to himself. Gabriel showed no surprise.

Joseph
, Angela thought.
Of course.
Joseph Patterson, a pharmacist who lived on the Upper West Side, had been Gabriel’s chief opponent in the contentious election held one year earlier.

“Yes, Joseph?” Gabriel’s voice revealed no irritation at his former rival’s inevitable comments.

“You make a good speech with all your fancy talk, but what’s your plan?”

Gabriel pointed at a map pinned to the wall. “The grid. Every person in this room will pair up with another, and each team will patrol a small section of the city. We’ll concentrate on the Village and work our way out in a growing radius.”

“And when we find him?”

“We destroy him.”

Angela spoke across the room to her brother. “That plan poses danger as well.” Heads turned in her direction, and faces registered surprise. Gabriel and Raphael shot her sharp looks. She did not like challenging her brother, but she had no choice.

“Sister,” Gabriel said, “in this situation, every course of action poses danger.”

“It’s one thing to track this rogue,” Angela said, “but another to reveal ourselves to him. In the course of trying to apprehend him, we may still expose ourselves to mankind. Surely that will place us in even greater danger than we already face.”

Gabriel’s tone grew agitated. “What do you suggest? We can’t just sit around waiting for the police to stop him. We have to take action ourselves.”

“I’ve seen him. I’ve seen the Berserker.”

Palpable silence.

At last Gabriel said, “Who is he, then?”

“I don’t know. A stranger to our pack or someone who walked among us a long time ago. He visited the shop this morning.”

Rising, Raphael spoke for the first time. “You know his scent?”

Angela nodded.

“Then you have to lead us to him!”

The crowd murmured their agreement.

“No,” Angela said.

“Are you
insane
?”

Gabriel held his brother back with one hand, allowing Angela to speak.

“The hunter’s returned,” she said, anticipating the gasps that broke out around her. “He’ll kill the Berserker for us, and then there will be no threat of exposure.”

Raphael looked at Gabriel and shook his head, and Gabriel said, “So that’s your purpose in providing this information: to plead for your lover’s life. How dare you bargain with us, Angela. We can’t allow him to reveal our existence any more than we can allow the Berserker to do so.”

Ignoring the other members of the pack, Angela focused her attention on Gabriel. “It’s been three years, and he hasn’t said anything to anyone.”

“We can’t take that chance.”

“John’s already set his trap. He’ll kill the Berserker, or the Berserker will kill him. If he wins, I want your word that you’ll leave him alone, no matter where he chooses to live.”

Gabriel glanced at Raphael, who shook his head, then measured the faces in the crowd before turning once more to Angela. “If your hunter kills the Berserker, we’ll allow him to live. But he’ll have to leave this city again.”

“Agreed,” said Angela. She had already decided to leave with Stalk.

Eight years earlier

When Julian heard the door crash open below and a multitude of footsteps on the stairs, his first thought was,
police!
He tried to sit up, but the heroin coursing through his veins prevented him from doing so.

After dropping out of college, he had traveled to Rome and London and Tokyo, just like Brooke had wanted, only without her, in search of the extremist Wolves she had suggested existed. He did not wish to rejoin the pack in Boulder or return to New York City. From time to time he wondered about his childhood crush, Angela, and his boyhood friend, her brother Gabriel. But he had no desire to see them or to seek company with the Wolves he knew. Brooke had been right: he was monogamous. Without her, he lost his desire to live and lived for only one thing: to kill. After slaying his mate’s murderer, he had incinerated his love’s body. He left the university a week later, enjoying the fear that had settled in the small town after one of its residents had been torn to pieces by a wild animal. Some citizens speculated that the culprit had been a bear. No one suspected a wolf.

Nowhere in his travels did he find others of his kind. He wandered the streets and alleyways of cities and towns, searching for someintangible purpose. When he found none, he descended into a self-pitying mélange of alcohol and drug abuse.
If you can’t eat them, join them.
Here in the city of Patras, Greece, he had decided to kill himself with the needle. The days and weeks became months, and he lived in squalor with a household of human drug addicts in the ruins of a neoclassical mansion that had been abandoned following an earthquake. One half of the mansion, located near the city’s western seafront, admitted sunshine and wind through the gaping holes in its walls. The other half provided cool darkness for its emaciated denizens.

Three shadows entered the living room, where Julian and five others lay strewn across the floor. The room reeked of body odor and human waste. Julian gazed at the men through clouded eyes. They wore dark clothing, not uniforms, and carried rifles.

Not police …

One of the men, sporting a beard, barked orders at the other two.

It’s Greek to me
, thought Julian, who had picked up only bits and pieces of the native language.

The men fanned out, kicking the semiconscious occupants.

Just let them try to do that to me.
He would tear the men’s heads from their shoulders. Then it occurred to him that it might not be possible for him to Change in his current state. He had never attempted Transformation while high on drugs.
We’ll just have to see.

One of the men towered over him, staring straight down at his eyes. The man leaned forward, a look of disgust on his features. Then he shouted to his comrades, who ran over to join him. The three men gazed at Julian, who smiled and muttered something in English that he didn’t even understand himself. They hauled him to his feet. He wanted to fight them—to dismember them!—but his body would not cooperate.

Two of the men supported his weight and dragged him from the room. In the doorway, a shirtless addict with long hair and a beard asked the men a question, and their leader fastened his fangs over the man’s exposed throat. The addict screamed, and Julian laughed asblood sprayed the wall to his left. They carried him down the stairs, and at the halfway mark the addict’s head rolled past them like a bowling ball. Julian laughed again.

Julian awoke lying on the floor of a cargo van that bounced along a road. The two men who had removed him from the drug den sat on the wheel hubs, guarding him. One of the men shook his head in disgust. Their leader sat up front next to the driver. Sunlight flooding through the windshield blinded him.

Then the white turned black again.

Bars on the windows.

Consciousness came and went. So did his visitors. Only the pain remained constant.

Julian screamed. He howled. He wept. He cursed. Finally, he slept.

“How long have I been here?” Julian said when his body had expelled the poison.

“Two weeks,” the leader said in English. “You were a difficult patient.”

“Good.” Julian gulped water. “I’m Elias Michalakis, the leader of this cell.” Julian focused on the man. He had been unable to focus on anything for such a long time. “Julian Fortier.”

“I know who you are. Other cells have reported your presence in their countries.”

Julian fixed his host with a stare. “You mean other ‘packs,’ don’t you?”

“Not packs. Cells. Each cell usually consists of four to six Wolves. Our purpose isn’t social; it’s revolutionary.”

“Tell me more.”

“First, tell me why you did this to yourself.”

Staring out the window at the blue Aegean Sea, he told Elias about Brooke.

“How did it feel to avenge her murder?”

Julian considered this. “Sloppy. I’d never killed a Man before.” He still remembered the German shepherds’ frenzied barking as he’d devoured their master.

“Your efforts to find us were also sloppy. You spoke to several of our members, but you were so indiscreet that they could not trust you. Instead, we monitored your activities from one country to the next.”

“You’re … organized?”

Elias nodded. “We can teach you discretion, to move in the shadows.”

“What else can you teach me?”

“How to kill Men and cover your tracks.”

Julian smiled.

Elias introduced Julian to Arsen, Damon, and Otis, the other members of the cell. They shared a small house in the hills.

“There are few packs left in Europe,” Elias said as the five of them ate dinner on a wooden table. “Most of our species were killed during the Inquisition, and the Brotherhood of Torquemada has continued the genocide. We’ve learned to avoid each other out of self-preservation. Our women raise our pups to continue the species, and we men join cells like this one to fight the war.”

“It’s different in America,” Arsen said. “The Wolves there have assimilated into Man’s culture to such a degree that they have no wish to Change. They’ve grown soft—‘civilized.’ There’s no room for pacifists in war.”

Julian gnawed on a loaf of bread. “Tell me more about this war.”

“It’s a secret war,” Elias said, “between Wolves and the Torquemadans. For the most part, we carry out covert operations. The challenge is to make it appear as though the Men we kill were really killed by their own kind.”