Wolfe
Authors: Cari Silverwood
B
EAUTY
AND THE
B
EAST
as it’s never been told.
by
Cari Silverwood
For mature readers only
This is a dark erotic series and is written to be disturbing.
This book contains adult language and sexual situations only suitable for adult readers.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
Wolfe
Words. Pain and words. I could hear but the meaning slipped away.
My body hurt. My head, my eyes, everywhere hurt.
For a while though, there’d been
sun
. Searing, beautiful light.
Words...
“No one can live with –”
“Bullet holes everywhere. Brain shot. Stomach, leg. Who is he?”
“A monster, I heard.”
“That’s a soldier tattoo.”
Monster. I heard that. Knew it was true. Words. I’d not heard words for a long time. Only cries and screams and whimpers.
There’d been blood, bodies, and starvation. Darkness. Loneliness. The animal in me growled and wanted. More females. More food. More blood.
Pain and blackness oozed past, leaving trails of words.
“He should be dead.”
“DNA result is back. He’s American. A soldier.”
“They want him flown out if he stabilizes.”
“If...”
“When... He’s alive. Shouldn’t be, but he is. Won’t see again though. Visual cortex is gone.”
The dark in my eyes fluttered and rocked.
Slowly, the dark took on color.
More days of pain, blurred days. They poked my skin and cut me, wrapped my mind in fluff. There were soundless days when they made me sleep.
Until one day...I could think again.
One day, I opened my eyes and...I saw.
The first word that came from the man leaning over me was, “Fuck.” The word was in English, a language I’d missed hearing.
I opened my mouth to speak and found nothing in my throat but dust, emptiness.
Even as he spoke into something in his hand, I knew I was missing parts of myself. Bad parts, good parts. When I shut my eyes, I could find some of them – a long way away, lost in the swaying, clinging fog. The fog clogged my tongue, my head, my thoughts.
Even my legs wouldn’t work.
Days and days and days.
The window glowed and darkened, shone and went black, rain spotted it. Then the glass dried until the next day of rain.
Days and more days, nights too.
The smell of antiseptic tainted the air, the rattle of wheels, the clatter of dishes and pans and things. I watched my fingers jerk upon the white bedsheet.
“You’ll be fine, Andy,” the male nurse said as he held me in place, where I sat on the edge of the hospital bed. “You’re home, you know? The USA. We’ll get you up and walking. It might take a while, but we’ll get you there, son.”
Son? I grunted my puzzlement. Andy? Was I an Andy? I didn’t think so. No, I was a Wolfe. There was another name too, but that one I’d forgotten. The men above the deep hole I’d lived in had called me Wolfe for so long the other name had drifted away.
“Move your lower leg. That’s it! You’re a damn miracle, Andy. Good man.”
It took me months to figure how to walk. Talking was harder, even if my thinking came good. The fog was there in my head, so maybe that was to blame? I took my pills and kept trying. One day I would run and talk, and all the lost bits in my head would come back.
My first word was a great one: “Wolfe.”
The doctor and nurses whooped and cheered. I didn’t smile. They didn’t understand that was my name even when I smacked my chest and said it.
Dumbasses. Kind dumbasses but still, dumbasses.
I was getting better and I’d figured out one of the missing bits. Females. Not that there weren’t female nurses but when I watched them go past, or change my bedding, or do all the other stuff nurses did, the beast in me barely stirred and never woke.
For the best. Definitely. The fog kept it quiet.
I took my pills and I smiled the day they transferred me to a bigger, more open place. This was somewhere I could see the sun every day. I could be outside, feel my skin warm, see the bees flit past.
I could open my arms and laugh at the sun. I could help rake the pungent soil and plant flowers, and no one cared that I didn’t speak well, or that once upon a time I’d killed everyone the men above had given me. Killed them, maybe done worse. My memories weren’t good, but I didn’t want them anyway.
I was done with that time...
I wanted the beast asleep, forever.
I was Wolfe and I was happy.
Until the day she came.
Kiara.
At first she was like a pretty bird that had landed in my garden. She was so elegant and sure of herself, even in the nurse’s uniform, yet unaware of the admiration of those around her.
I was kneeling in the dirt, gardening, that first day. Her ankles fascinated me, then her stockings as they flowed up her leg, the edge of her dress, the flash of thigh as the cloth moved. The swell of her breasts, the shape of her lips when she smiled.
Nothing new for a female, yet it was for me. She was.
Slowly things changed. Sometimes the days jumped. Half a week would go before I figured out I’d lost time.
Sometimes days crept like burned offerings across my tongue, my mind. When I saw her, beautiful images jarred into being. Visions of her. Objects. Moving scenes. When she was gone, I itched to set them on paper, but the little pens and pencils fell from my fingers.
If I was the sort of man who cried, I would’ve. Instead I cursed, quietly, to myself.
The fog blurred my world. I was lucky to figure out one plus two. I knew about math, about history, about logic, but by the time I settled on one thing, what I’d calculated would’ve slipped away from me.
I could never catch the tail of those thoughts well enough to draw, couldn’t command my fingers enough to focus. A shovel, sure. The difference escaped me. I guess I was just shit at art.
Leonardo da Vinci. I remembered him. He’d painted a woman. He’d have laughed at me.
So when the visions hit, I’d sit down and close my eyes and remember.
Close one eye, that is. My hurt one I could see with now. I had a patch over it. People didn’t need to know. Maybe Kiara had injected me with a bunch of health and that was why I got better.
Most of my visions of her were tame – the angle of her body as she turned, the play of shadows and light on her face, the sound of her laughter, the sound of my heart when she spoke.
In one, all I could hear was her breathing. All I could see were her light brown eyes looking up at mine. That vision was the strangest. It disturbed me. Maybe because my hands would often be beside her neck, with the thumb stroking her skin.
Only, they didn’t seem to be my hands. They had blood on them.
* * * * *
Kim Phuong, Bangkok, Thailand
Kim was walking along the sidewalk in front of his favorite dumpling restaurant in Bangkok when the news was delivered. A man found almost dead in the jungle some months before had been the mythical one they called Monster – the crazy one who had inhabited the missile silo for many years and fed off the carcasses thrown to him by the equally mad Johannes.
So, he’d been real, not some made-up story.
Johannes had also joked that he’d eaten some of the women while they’d been alive, but Johannes had liked to make evil jokes. True or not, it didn’t matter anymore. Or not to Kim.
Over a drunken game of
makruk
, a man had admitted to shooting the monster. Then he’d seen the monster rescued.
Kim’s men knew better than to report a half-researched story. They’d tracked the monster’s path to hospital and then to the USA. He was alive if badly hurt, but where he’d gone in the US no one knew.
Yet.
The facts gave Kim several sleepless nights. What if Johannes had been correct? What if this monster possessed a strange form of mind control, even if it only worked on women? The now-deceased Johannes had promised him such powers.
Kim no longer wished to dabble in brain research. Johannes had been dirty and his honor the lowest of the gutter low. However, this information might be valuable to someone.
This idea gave Kim Phuong several more restless nights, while he decided who it would be best to deliver the information to. Though
he
couldn’t operate in the USA, there were several countries that did and could operate there. China for one. Russia for another.
Money was better than some fruitless chase after magical powers.
Finally, after much prayer, he decided who to bargain with.