THE WOLF IN WINTER
Also by John Connolly
The Charlie Parker Stories
Every Dead Thing
Dark Hollow
The Killing Kind
The White Road
The Reflecting Eye (Novella in the Nocturnes Collection)
The Black Angel
The Unquiet
The Reapers
The Lovers
The Whisperers
The Burning Soul
The Wrath of Angels
Other Works
Bad Men
The Book of Lost Things
Short Stories
Nocturnes
The Wanderer in Unknown Realms (eBook)
The Samuel Johnson Stories (For Young Adults)
The Gates
Hell’s Bells
The Creeps
The Chronicles of the Invaders (with Jennifer Ridyard)
Conquest
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Bad Dog Books Limited 2014
The right of John Connolly to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with
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imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to
real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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For Swati Gamble
Permissions
Gerald Hausman kindly gave permission to quote from his book Meditations with the Navajo (Bear & Company/Inner Traditions, 2001).
“The Divine Wolf” by Adonis, translated by Khaled Mattawa, is cited with the kind permission of the author and the Yale University Press, publisher of Adonis: Selected Poems (2010), in which this poem appears.
I
HUNTING
He fed in fear and reached the silent fields
And howled his heart out, trying in vain to speak.
Ovid,
Metamorphoses
1
The house was studiedly anonymous: not too large or too small, and neither particularly well kept nor in any sense dilapidated. Situated on a small patch of land not far from the outskirts of the city of Newark, Delaware, in the densely populated county of New Castle, the town had taken a hit when the Chrysler Newark assembly plant closed in 2008, along with the nearby Mopar distribution center. However, it was still the home of the University of Delaware, and 20,000 students can spend a lot of money if they put their minds to it.
Newark was an unsurprising choice of location for the man we were hunting. It was close to the borders of three states – Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland – and only two hours from New York City by car. Then again, it was just one of any number of rat’s nests that he had established for himself, acquired over the years by the lawyer who protected him. The only distinguishing feature of this property lay in the degree of power consumption: the utility bills were steeper than for the others we had discovered. This one looked like it was used regularly. It was more than a storehouse for elements of his collection. It was a base of sorts.
He called himself Kushiel, but we knew him as the Collector. He had killed a friend of ours named Jackie Garner at the end of the previous year. The Collector would have called it an eye for an eye in his version of justice, and it was true that Jackie had made an appalling error, one that resulted in the death of a woman close to the Collector. In revenge, the Collector had shot Jackie down without mercy while he was unarmed and on his knees, but he had also made it clear that we were all under his gun now. We might have been hunting the Collector for what he had done to one of ours, but we also knew that it was only a matter of time before he decided we might be less of a threat to him with six feet of earth above our heads. We intended to corner and kill him long before it came to that.
A light burned in one room of the house. The others were all dark. A car stood in the driveway, and its arrival had alerted us to the possibility of the Collector’s presence. We had placed a dual wireless break-beam alert system in the undergrowth halfway up the drive. The system was timerbased, so an alert would only be sent to our phones if the two beams were not broken twice within a ten-minute period. In other words, it allowed for deliveries, but a vehicle that entered the property and remained on it for any length of time would trigger the alarm.
Of course, this assumed that the Collector would not arrive on foot, or by cab, but we figured he had too many enemies to leave his escape routes to chance, and he would keep at least one well-maintained vehicle. A windowless garage stood to the right of the house, but we had not risked breaking into it when we first discovered the existence of the property. Even planting the little wireless infrared transmitters was a calculated gamble, and had only been undertaken after a sweep of the yard revealed no similar alarm system beyond whatever was used to secure the house itself.
‘What do you think?’ said Louis.
His dark skin caught something of the moonlight, making him seem even more a creature of the night than usual. He wore dark cotton trousers cinched at the ankles, and a black waxed cotton Belstaff jacket from which all of the buckles and buttons had been removed and replaced by non-refective equivalents. He looked cool, but then he always looked cool.
‘My legs are cramping up, is what I think,’ said Angel. ‘If we don’t make a move soon, you’ll have to carry me in there on a sedan chair.’
Angel didn’t care about cool. His clothing was functional and unlabeled. He just preferred things that way. His gray hair was hidden beneath a black beanie. Without the cap, he looked his years. He was older than Louis and I, and had grown quieter and more cautious in recent times. Mortality shadowed him like a falcon mantling its wings over dying prey.
We squatted in the grass by the side of the road, Angel to my left and Louis to my right, each of us armed with a suppressed Glock 9mm loaded with subsonic ammunition. We’d lose something in velocity, but if we found the Collector we’d be working at close range. There were properties to the east and west of the house, and the area was quiet. We didn’t want to bring local law enforcement down on our heads by replicating the sound of the Gunfght at the O.K. Corral. All three of us also carried Russian-made anti-fog gas masks. They had cost less than Louis’s boots, but they hadn’t let us down yet.