Page 4 of White Wolf

As she sat with her hands clenched in her sweat-damp sheets, working to slow her heartrate, she ran her tongue along her teeth and swore she could still taste blood. Pulled in a deep breath and thought she caught a whiff of frost. Her skin prickled; felt windburned and frozen.

“It was just a dream,” she whispered to herself, curling her hands into fists in the bedclothes. She tried to ground herself in the moment, in the reality of her surroundings.

Her bedroom was more like a broom closet, too narrow to walk all the way around the bed, but she liked the exposed brick along the wall, the way red neon from Imperial Palace splashed across it. She let her eyes wander across the worn-smooth floorboards, her rope rug, discarded flip-flops, the partially-open closet door where the sleeve of a jacket peeked out through the crack. The window was open, the humid breeze lifting the curtains, bringing in the hiss of tires on wet pavement, the honking of horns, the rattle and chatter andnoiseof New York City. The rain pattered softly against the fire escape, the kind that made for perfect sleeping weather. Thunder rumbled in the distance, a hint of a stronger weather system moving in.

She took a deep breath, and then another, until she no longer smelled frost and blood. Jesus. She sat forward and braced her elbows on her thighs, lifted her hair off her damp neck in the vain hope that the summer night air would cool it.

The nightmares had started about three weeks before, and though they differed, some things remained constant: the snow, the blood, the wolves. The crushing sense of fear, and pain, and grief. Each night it was worse – though her heart slowed and her sweat dried, the emotional hangover lasted for hours, usually preventing her from falling back to sleep.

The part she didn’t understand was this: she’d been born and raised in New York. She’d seen snow, sure, especially that Christmas at her uncle’s house in Buffalo when she was ten. But she’d never seen snow like in her dreams. Had certainly never seen a wolf…nor touched its fur and known how soft it was right up against its skin.

She’d never met a man with eyes that blue who could howl like an animal.

In her line of work, nightmares were a given. But it wasn’t the job that stalked her dreams. No, it was something that wasn’t even real, and yet was far more frightening than the real-life monsters she helped to catch and put away.

She heard a car accident unfold on the street outside: squeal of brakes, skid of tires, then the crunch. A moment later she heard angry shouting from two separate voices and figured no one was hurt. She ought to walk to the window and peek out, make sure she didn’t need to call it in. But the sense of obligation was fleeting, her legs too shaky to hold her weight right now.

Fuck.

She fumbled across her tangled covers until she found her phone. Two-fifteen a.m. Still plenty of time to catch more sleep…if she could.

She didn’t lie back down, though. Instead, she flipped the covers back and eased out of bed, wincing as her knees tried to buckle. There was an odd throbbing pain low in her back and racing down her legs, the pain from the dream manifesting itself in reality somehow. Psychosomatic, she guessed.

She stepped over to her dresser and pulled open the top drawer. Shifted her underwear to the side to get to what she wanted: the bell. It was small and bronze, tarnished and beat up. It looked like nothing, like something someone pushed aside at a yard sale to get to something better beneath; if her dad hadn’t told her it was a family heirloom, she would have tossed it long ago. But she had so few links to her ancestry in the Old Country, no photos, no keepsakes. So the bell lived in her underwear drawer, and she pulled it out sometimes, like now, holding it up by its flimsy silver chain.

She couldn’t read the Cyrillic engraving on the inside, worn almost completely away at this point, but Dad had told her it meant “Our Friend.”

It tinkled softly as she lifted it, a musical little chime. Just like the bell she’d heard ringing in her dream. “Keep it close,” Dad had said, smiling at her, “and it will ring when dark forces are near.”

He’d always been a weird one, her old man.

An entirely different kind of ringing started up behind her, startling her. The bell slipped from her fingers and fell back into the drawer, jangling.

It was just her phone, and she cursed herself for being so jumpy. Stupid dreams.

She grabbed the iPhone off her bed and thumbed the lock screen. “This is Detective Baskin.”

~*~

The scene was four blocks from her apartment, so Trina walked, shielded from the rain by the kind of big black umbrella that people always cursed: too wide, dripping rainwater, its metal spines threatening to poke out eyes. When she was a beat cop, she’d had a clear plastic poncho she’d tugged on over her uniform, one that always seemed to leak in the join of hood and shoulder, until her blue polyester was glued to her skin and she was shivering and miserable. She didn’t pay any attention to some of the dirty looks her giant umbrella drew: she’d earned this thing, and she was going to use it. Same went for the black trench she’d pulled on over jeans, tank top, and green Hunter boots. Middle of the night phone calls were worth it if it meant she didn’t have to wear that damn uniform and poncho anymore.

Not like she’d been sleeping anyway.

It was a night ripe for fictitious interpretation. The rain-slick streets, the colored neon reflected in puddles, the steaming subway grates – all of it straight off the pages of a comic book. Pedestrians were staggering home from bars, talking, laughing, shoving one another good-naturedly. The day’s heat had been broken by the rain and the dark, and the night was alive, exuberant and too excited to be contained by wet pavement and concrete. Trina breathed in the warm damp air and let herself be drawn toward the revolving red and blue lights down at the end of the block. Down where someone’s night had gone very, very wrong.

Two patrol cars were parked at slants at the end of an alley between a dry cleaner and a club that was one in a long line of revolving too-dark clubs that had occupied the ground floor building space. Crime scene tape was strung up between the cars and beyond, tied off on a street sign andWall Street Journalmachine respectively. A small crowd was starting to gather, onlookers stretching up on their tiptoes to see. A few had phones aimed toward the action and the uniforms were waving them away, telling them to move along.

Trina spotted a familiar dark blue unmarked parked across the street and ducked under the tape, managing to keep her umbrella aloft. “What’ve we got, Eugene?”

The nearest uniform jerked a thumb toward the alley. “It’s a strange one. Your boy’s over there with Thompkins. ME and CSI are on the way.”

Trina nodded. “Thanks.” And walked over toward the dumpster where another uniform and her partner stood over their DB.

The side door of the club – they were calling it Angelo’s these days – was propped open with a brick, blue light beaming out into the alley. Trina caught a glimpse of a pale face: male, mouth partially-open, eyes wide and sightless.

“Hey,” she said, drawing up beside the others, umbrella cocked back so it didn’t whack anyone in the head.

Lanny, the big idiot, of course didn’t have a hood, his short dark hair glittering with raindrops as he turned to look at her. “They wake you up?” he asked. He was chewing gum; she could see it cracking between his back teeth, could smell the mint on his breath…and the bourbon.

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