The Accords Triptych (Book 1): Wolves Without Teeth Read online

  WOLVES WITHOUT TEETH

  By Ian Thomas

  Book 1 of The Accords Triptych

  Text copyright © 2016 Ian Thomas

  All Rights Reserved

  www.ianthomasbooks.com

  Also by Ian Thomas

  THE CUPS TRIPTYCH

  Building a Mystery

  How to be Dead

  The Space Between

  RED RAIN

  THE ACCORDS TRIPTYCH

  Wolves Without Teeth

  Bloodstream

  Heartlines

  To Ben and Lucas

  Acknowledgements

  Okay to clarify the dedication. This book wouldn’t have been made possible without the valued assist of Lucas Sachs and Ben Elias. Two former students who have gone to study at NYU. While not direct inspirations for Mouth or Jason, they’ve helped provide an authenticity of the student experience at NYU. More than that though, these two have been inspirational in following their dreams. As a teacher you hope to inspire young people – or at least get them to think for themselves – but rarely do students inspire the teacher. So this book goes out to these two along with the many, many students who I’ve had to the pleasure to teach. And even some of the more trying ones.

  Thanks always to JT for boundless support, kind words, and gentle humour.

  Thanks to the usual crew of companions, colleagues and miscreants who flesh out these characters into quite real people.

  Chapters

  Prologue

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  XXXVIII

  XXXIX

  XXXX

  Prologue

  “Can I get a name for the order?”

  What was he calling himself now? He’d worn so many names. Rarely his own. After all, a man’s true name was a powerful thing.

  “Henry,” the man replied with a smile. For what he intended, this name would suffice. He wasn’t going to make it easy for them. Oh no, cat and mouse worked so much better when the threat was hiding in plain sight.

  As the young Asian girl scrawled his name quickly on the paper cup he looked around the West Village coffee house. Business had returned to normal. He took a seat at an unoccupied table. Ordinarily not someone who waited, he did occasionally enjoy watching the banalities that passed for modern life. People were mindless fools, he thought, almost laughing at how the six people waiting were glued to their devices. They made it too easy, he thought darkly. How easy would it be for a vampire to kill one of these prols? For a mage to drop a hex bag in their coat pocket? For a siren to feed off any of the young men present? Hell, a werewolf could transform in front of them and they’d barely notice.

  How long had this establishment been closed following the discovery of the dead body? A day? Two? Maybe he should have left it at the front door. Correction – arranged to have it left at the front door. He hadn’t dirtied his hands like that in the years.

  Seems he was going to have to try harder to get their attention.

  Still, this was going to be easy.

  He couldn’t have chosen a better time to return if he’d had an actual hand in Ben’s betrayal. The man knew Matteo wouldn’t recover well from such treason. He hadn’t before.

  One lesson the posturing academics rarely alluded to about history repeating itself was that when it did, it was often more brutal, bloody, and devastating than the first iteration. A scenario he eagerly anticipated.

  When the accords broke chaos would ensue.

  The witches would retreat further into their scattered cloisters. Draw the blinds, lock the doors, quieten their voices once again. They squandered their gifts on blessings and therapies, illusions and parlor tricks, when they had the power to enslave the world. Fools. Small minded fools.

  Wolves too. But then they’d lost their teeth. Where the Pack War was to be a werewolf renaissance – an Age of Enlightenment, an era of rightful dominance – it had been a farce.

  Vampires could never rise. Their inflated sense of self-worth was merely a front for the awareness they were a virus, a rot within the supernatural world.

  Didn’t mean they didn’t have their uses though, he mused darkly.

  Which left the vessel.

  So closely linked to the mortal world, he diminished both realms.

  How could he not?

  A stained mortal, a lesser supernatural – he just didn’t fit anywhere and in trying to, he poisoned them. That much Henry would agree with Ben on. But the young wolf lacked both the imagination and balls to pull off what he’d intended.

  Henry had laughed at aligning with the Cult of the Eighth House. While he admired using those sycophants as worker bees, drones for the larger purpose, it was never going to work. Cults had no respect for the occult. To them it was a tool they used for their ends with little understanding of the cost. Or willingness to pay it. Even dullards knew the occult – the supernatural – demanded a trade-off. A painful cost which shaped them, a hurt eagerly paid for great power, that in turn became an outward affliction. Understanding the benefits of such a cost was invigorating.

  But they were all but disbanded now. Petulant brats licking their wounds.

  No, he didn’t need them. He had more ambition than that. And imagination.

  “Ristretto for Henry?” a blonde co-ed called out. When she saw him, she dropped her head submissively with a smile. “So sorry for the delay. Here’s a voucher for your next visit.”

  “That’s quite alright.” Returning her smile, he took the coffee and headed for the door. “You have a nice day.”

  Once outside, he threw the coffee in a trash can and walked off down the street. This was going to be fun, he thought. Bloody fun.

  I

  The cellphone screen flashed.

  Hayley calling…

  “Hey, what’re you doing up?” Rebecca asked, checking the song clock. Three minutes. Doable, she thought.

  “Shit mom, totally thought I called Bex.”

  “Shut up, it is me. Just surprised you’re up is all.” Usually when Rebecca was leaving for the graveyard shift at WNYU Hayley was headed to bed. If not already there.

  “No work tomorrow, thought I’d misbehave and binge some TV.”

  “You get we have to be at the airport ‘bout the same time you start work?”

  “Yeah of course, but I’ll be with people I actually like. Totally worth the late night.”

  “I’ve seen you on no slee… you know what, never mind. What’s up?” Not the best time for a lecture Rebecca thought, dropping the matter.

  She’d learned to do that a lot lately.

  Let things go.

  Seemed her go-to behavior was focus on what she could control rather than what she couldn’t. Not that control was important to her…it just helped. With the day-to-day things, the getting up, the moving forward, the leaving the house wearing clothes.

  Having a sense of normal helped with the…n
ot-so-normal.

  Like how her almost-boyfriend was ‘stained’ by a failed demonic possession and his best friends were the Lord Commander of werewolves, or something like that, and a wiccan bad-ass.

  Put ‘normal’ into a whole new perspective. Reclaiming a sense of order, balance – yes, even control – made Rebecca feel she had a handle on things. However tenuous. Hence the letting go. Life wasn’t going to fit an ordered pattern or neat sequence of events. Or something she was gonna divulge to her parents.

  And werewolves, witches, and vampires aside, this was still the most normal she’d felt in over a year.

  “Okay so I was researching this whole supernatural thing.” Apparently, Rebecca wasn’t the only one dealing.

  “Thought you were watching TV?”

  “Duh, where else am I gonna learn stuff about this shit? Books?”

  “You were saying?” She knew Hayley was goading her but along with letting things go came another mantra – or cliché, depending on the day – of picking her battles.

  “Well I’m not sure where we got up to on the whole normal is overrated or underrated thing.” Ever the eternal verbalizers, the pair had been tossing the topic around lately. A lot. That’ll happen when the veil had been pulled back. “And I’m going with overrated.”

  “Go on.” Maybe frequent was incorrect. Constant was more appropriate.

  Originally, reframing normal had plagued Rebecca Miller first. For the better part of a year, she had wanted her life to return to normal. And in a single day she had moved even further from that goal than she could imagine. What the crappy movies and media sold people as normal – stable career, healthy relationship, home big enough to swing a cat in – was just that much further out of reach.

  The career had been short-lived.

  The only time ‘healthy’ could have been applied to recent relationships was regarding either Massimo’s physique or Travis’ sex drive. Facts that said more about them than her.

  Which left her shoebox of an apartment in the East Village.

  Giving voice to her musings showed Hayley was very much concerned with the same debate. What was normal? And was it overrated or underrated? Initially, Rebecca had come at it from the angle of being underrated. Hayley, that normal was overrated. However, being smart and worldly women they convinced each other of their original stance. Confusion reigned.

  “Okay so I was watching Charmed. Rowan should really be insulted you compared her life to that show. Kinda with Ben on that one.”

  “And what did Charmed enlighten you on?”

  “Oh nothing. I got bored and moved on to Roswell.”

  “You get those’re aliens right?”

  “Of course. Anyway so it was the pilot and Liz gets shot and it’s a big deal and there’s some hokey line about dying and coming to life and I threw a pillow at the screen.”

  “This going somewhere?” Rebecca asked, conscious of the clock ticking down and Mouth’s silence in the next booth.

  “Oh yeah, so I’m like – you and me. We’ve done normal. And it kinda sucks. And the people we knew sucked and we lived in that suck for a long time and that was our normal and it was overrated.”

  “So you’re saying that this whole supernatural thing, this abnormal, the witches, wolves, and demonic cult is better than normal?”

  “Kinda. Well it’s better than the normal we had. But no, I mean where we were heading, our little group – even including Mouth – our place, our people, our jobs —”

  “You hate your job.”

  “Sure. Yeah, absolutely. But that’s the only sucky part. The rest is pretty not-so-sucky.”

  “What about McLachlan, Rowan and all that stuff.”

  “Well that’s not normal. But it’s not-so-sucky either. Except for the vampires, I imagine they suck a lot.” Rebecca groaned at the pun. When the song clock changed she guessed Mouth had worked his own non-supernatural magic to give her some time. “Hey, this is the closest I get to a pep talk. You should be impressed.”

  “Oh I am. Always knew you had range.”

  “I felt pretty solid about it. Am I wrong?”

  “No, just a different approach is all.

  “Because a normal approach is overrated. See I work on many different levels.”

  “Heard from Eddie tonight?”

  She paused. “We texted. It’s not a thing, we’re friends. Everyone went through something pretty major. He’s not dealing so well is all.”

  “Because it’s not normal.”

  “But it’s not bad.”

  “So your argument isn’t that normal is overrated, but that different is underrated.”

  “Exactly. Difference is good. We’re in very different places to where we thought we’d be. Granted there’s a little suck involved but I’m appreciating other things so much better than I ever did.”

  “So when there’s no suck, you’re numb even to the good things?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I like that. Nice thinking. Now get some sleep.”

  “We’ll see, I may or may not have discovered Vikings.”

  “Sleep.”

  “Rollo.”

  And the line went dead.

  Working through her notes for the next voice break, Rebecca couldn’t help but think Hayley’s ramblings summed up her feelings perfectly. They’d tried normal. That hadn’t worked so well. This was different. And it wasn’t entirely terrible.

  Even with a demon-stained almost-boyfriend.

  For the record, McLachlan hadn’t progressed to lover just yet. A second date was still in the offing. Despite all the time they spent together.

  Sadly, it wasn’t time spent alone.

  Be it Mouth, Hayley, Rowan, Eddie, or Dylan – someone was always on hand. And intimacy hardly an option. Not that sex was a massive concern for her. It’d be nice…just they’d found little time to properly connect following the ordeal with the cult. Or ‘The Ordeal’ as they had started calling it, thankfully dropping the air quotes after an hour or so. Capitalizing the event was necessary. Especially given that less than twenty-four hours after learning McLachlan had been the victim of demonic possession at the age of nine, it happened again. As understatements went, talking about The Ordeal seemed important.

  Unsure of whether a demon-stained boyfriend – a premature label confined to her private thoughts – fitted with ‘normal’ or railed against it, Rebecca wasn’t sure she cared. McLachlan was a good man. Granted, there was the demon stain but hey, at least he didn’t glitter. That she knew of. Maybe that would be a sex thing, she thought with a smirk as a MS MR song ended.

  “Good morning, New York, it’s eight minutes after two and currently a crisp fifty-three degrees outside,” she purred into the microphone. “This is the Witching Hour and I’m looking for suggestions for best smile in the city. Remember we need a photo for the Facebook page. So send them through to Rebecca at W-N-Y-U. Now here’s three in a row.”

  As Odeza began to play Rebecca tabbed through applications to her email and was relieved to see her inbox start to fill.

  Amid the chaos of great first dates, supernatural revelations, and reframing normal, she’d hosted the worst radio show in her five-month employment. Worse than the first show where there had been actual dead air. While their show occupied the graveyard shift for their small audience Rebecca was worried the sub-par show had broken goodwill with the listeners.

  Maybe not, she thought, working through the numerous emails.

  “Okay so which is correct?” Mouth burst into the main studio, eyes focused on his cellphone. “The funeral of Jason’s gay dead lover or Jason’s dead gay lover?”

  Not looking up from her own screen, Rebecca replied sharply, “well, one implies John was a zombie and one doesn’t.”

  “Interesting,” he said no clearer as to which word order was correct. “I guess given that things really do go bump in the night, zombies could actually be a thing.”

  “Haven’t quite had that conversation as
yet.” Rebecca turned from the screen to regard Mouth closely. He was sprawled on the studio couch, still focused on his phone. “Sounds more your territory than mine. Why do you ask?”

  “Well we know about werewolves, witches, vampires, and demons, seems zombies aren’t exactly a stretch?”

  “No,” she bristled, her tone hoping to draw him away from the screen. “About John.” Though she had barely met the guy or his brother, Rebecca had taken their deaths hard. When anyone brought them up, even Mouth’s indelicate reference, she preferred to remind people the two men had names – John and Boyd Carter. A small act but an important one.

  “Film project,” Mouth replied.

  “Excuse me?!” Her tone suddenly more than cautious.

  “What? Shit, sorry.” Mouth pulled himself off the couch, phone forgotten, his eyes flicking instinctively to the song clock. Without looking, Rebecca knew the second song had at least a minute-thirty left. “No, I’ve been asked to work with a junior on their film project. They want to meet later today and, well, we have the funeral.”

  “Funerals,” Rebecca corrected. “Doesn’t explain why you need to divulge all the details. Unless you’re doing it for effect.”

  As he paused she realized she’d been right. Was she shocked? Any interaction with Mouth came with some element of drama. Whether he skirted the boundaries of appropriateness or laid siege to them outright, his hyper-awareness could be challenging. This, however, seemed almost cheap for him.

  “You’re right. Guess I was just trying to get Jason some sympathy is all.”

  A lie.

  Nothing impeachable, Rebecca decided, knowing Mouth was not one for pretense. Was this how he handled turmoil? Having only known him a short while she’d expected him to roll with it, enjoy the challenge, comment on it acerbically, and recover easily. That’s just who he was.

  As upheavals went – and Rebecca knew a thing or two about them – few rivaled the left-fieldness of learning the supernatural was real and no longer relegated to genre films or penny dreadfuls.