Lone Wolf (Arctic Wolf Book 1) Read online

  LONE WOLF

  A novel by

  J.R. RAIN &

  H.P. MALLORY

  Arctic Wolf #1

  Other Books by J.R. Rain & H.P. Mallory

  LUCY WESTENRA

  Neither Hyde Nor Hair

  Gallant Ghosts and Ghastly Gentlemen

  DUNGEON RAIDER

  Grudges

  Illusions

  POPPY’S POTIONS

  Gypsy Magic

  Faerie Enchantment

  WANDA’S WITCHERY

  Cashmere Curses

  MIDLIFE MERMAID

  The Mermaid Next Door

  CHASING DEMONS

  Hell on Earth

  HERE TO THERE

  Princess of Lost Memories

  ARCTIC WOLF

  Lone Wolf

  Lone Wolf

  Published by Rain Press

  Copyright © 2021 by J.R. Rain & H.P. Mallory

  All rights reserved.

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  **Previously published as Ice Wolf. This edition includes numerous changes.**

  Dedications:

  J.R. wishes to dedicate this novel to John and Chuck.

  H.P. wishes to dedicate this novel to her son, Finn, for making her the happiest mom ever!

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Reading Sample: Princess of Lost Memories

  Reading Sample: Hell on Earth

  About J.R. Rain

  About H.P. Mallory

  Lone Wolf

  Chapter One

  The body had been perfectly preserved in the ice.

  What little there was of the winter sun was low on the horizon, shining at an angle, casting long shadows but giving little or no heat. It was noon, and the sun had reached its zenith. It would be gone in an hour or so.

  Whoever this was, he’d spent the harsh winter buried in snow and ice. Same with the knife sticking out of his chest. The body was that of a male Native American. He was Inuit, no doubt. He was maybe thirty-one, thirty-two. He was also completely naked, although his legs were still partly encased in ice.

  One of my deputies, Miguel, who was wearing latex gloves, squatted next to the dead man, and looked carefully at the knife protruding from his chest.

  “Strange,” he said.

  A bitterly cold wind swept over the freshly-thawed lake. I ignored the wind, or tried to. I might have hunkered down into my police-issue jacket a bit more, but that was it, and no one saw me do it. There’s an unwritten rule in Alaska, at least, out in these parts; you ignored the cold, and you sure as hell didn’t make a fuss over it. Even if you were a woman, and especially if you were the chief of police.

  I squatted down next to him and studied the knife.

  Miguel nodded towards it. “It’s not a normal knife.”

  Antler handle, sloppy glue job.

  The afternoon light reflected dully off the metal shaft. I suspected the knife had been plunged all the way into the man’s chest; however, due to the ravages of time and the brutal winter, his skin had retreated some, revealing more of the unusual blade.

  “It’s homemade,” I said as I continued to study it. “And it’s silver.”

  Miguel nodded.

  We both stood but continued staring down at the body, which was propped up against a tree in a sitting position, as if waiting for teatime.

  “Ijiraq,” he said finally, using the Inuit name for “shape-shifter”—a name I was all too familiar with.

  I knew this was coming. After all, in these parts—these remote parts—the legend of the shifter was prevalent. For three months now, I’d been the chief of police of Hope, Alaska, and during that time, I’d heard the word whispered dozens of times. Some weren’t whisperings. Those who were courageous enough spoke freely of the creatures that many believed stalked their woods, raided their homes, and stole their livestock and, in one case, their children.

  I’d heard the rumors, too, all the way down in Anchorage, where I’d worked homicide for eight years. We’d all heard the stories that trickled out of Hope. And we’d all laughed at them, too. After all, Anchorage was the last outpost of civilization. It was where the Starbucks stopped, and where the real bucks started. Where hipsters’ beards weren’t just ironic, but necessary. Anchorage was the last place where people were born and raised and educated and actually became something.

  But out here, in the wild, beyond our imaginary fortress walls, anything was possible. Or so some claimed. Out here were thousands of acres of untouched wilderness. Out here were beasts of all shapes and sizes. Polar bears, moose and brown bears in unheard-of sizes. Some even claimed the last vestiges of the Ice Age were out here, too, but these stories seemed less probable, though no less prevalent. It wasn’t that unusual to hear stories from hunters returning from the wilderness who’d claimed to see wooly mammoths and mastodons. (I never knew the difference between the two, truth be known.) There were also the Inuit trackers who said they’d seen saber-toothed tigers and dire wolves and lived to tell about it.

  Yes, we’d heard all the rumors and legends. We’d listened to the stories from behind our lattes and within our heated homes. We’d heard the stories and we’d laughed them off. We had to. We were civilized, after all.

  But there were some stories that weren’t quite so easy to dismiss. And those stories revolved around wild men and women who lived off the grid. Way, way, way off the grid. People who governed themselves and lived outside time and space and law, people who were nearly impossible to reach. And if you did reach them, you were in for the fight of your life.

  Now, the wind somehow found its way inside my clothing, but I ignored it. If someone looked closely enough, they might have seen my shoulders hunch a little as I attempted to ward away the cold, but they wouldn’t see anything more.

  I was the new girl. And not just a girl, either. I was the chief of police. The boss. And the Neanderthals here didn’t know what to make of me. Six machismo officers, all under my command. The small town of Hope had been looking for a new police chief, and I’d been looking for a way out of Anchorage. It was a match made in heaven. At least on paper. In reality, the guys didn’t like me, and some might have even hated me. After all, who was I, an outsider, to come in and tell them how to run their department, their town, their lives? Hell, I was a city slicker, an outsider, and I was a woman, too. All of which added up to animosity.

  All of which I ignored.

  I was convinced that most of them thought I’d be gone by now. Most had it wrong. It was going to take a lot more than butt-hurt cops to scare me away.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this, Miguel?” I asked.

  He moved closer to the blade, and was now inspecting it from just inches away. There was no blood,
but I wasn’t surprised. Undoubtedly, any blood had washed away with the snow melt. At present, the temperature was a little above freezing. Warm enough to melt snow but not warm enough, apparently, to cause decomposition. The dead man before me could have died hours ago, minutes ago. Hell, he looked like he could be alive even now.

  “Yes, Chief,” he said. “I have.”

  I waited.

  Miguel had been the first to call me chief. A few of the others had followed suit, but the name hadn’t stuck. I hadn’t earned it yet, I suspected. At least in their eyes. My years in homicide had done nothing to impress them. Then again, I wasn’t here to impress anyone. I was here to uphold the law. At least, that’s what I’d said during my interview with the mayor. What I hadn’t said was that I was here to start over, to find myself, to heal myself. Mostly, I was here to forget.

  Miguel continued, “It was when I was a boy. I found a man on a boulder, facing the sky. A spear in his chest.”

  “A spear?”

  He nodded. “With a silver tip.”

  “Do you remember anything else?”

  “The elders burned the body.”

  “Who was he?”

  Miguel, who was about thirty, the same age as me, and who sported uncannily round eyes for an Inuit, glanced at me. “My brother.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  Miguel looked back at the man propped up against the tree. “We must burn him, too.”

  “No,” I said. “First, we find out who he is, and then we find out who killed him.”

  Chapter Two

  The beads of rain splashed my face, the sudden coldness shocking at first but then, strangely comforting. People always thought it was odd that I preferred a rainy day over a sunny one. Who knew? Maybe I was odd. I’d been accused of worse…

  I could feel the burn in my legs as I continued jogging and before long, I found myself headed for the woods—woods that were dark, hidden.

  My heartbeat started to increase as unease overcame me, though I wasn’t sure why I was feeling anxious. I ignored the feeling and continued forward. That was when I saw him—the largest animal I’d ever seen in the wild. A wolf.

  He was standing maybe five feet in front of me and was completely black with the most startling gray eyes. I’d never seen eyes this color—that of steel.

  I immediately stopped and my heart rode up into my throat. I took a step back but the wolf made no motion to follow me. Instead, it just stood there, watching. Waiting.

  I won’t hurt you, Elodie.

  It was the creature’s voice in my head. And it was plainly male—the tone deep and gruff.

  I didn’t understand how it was that I was hearing the creature’s thoughts in my own mind, but there it was.

  I need you, Elodie. We all do.

  ***

  My eyes popped open at the same moment that I bolted upright. I was panting and the sweat was already beading along my hairline. It took me a few seconds to catch my breath and convince myself it was just a dream. A recurring one. But my heart continued to thump against my ribs in rapid succession as if it wasn’t convinced.

  I threw off the duvet cover and reached for my fluffy white bunny slippers from underneath my bed. Their proximity was by design, considering I woke up nearly every night the same way. Yet, the dream had changed. Before I’d moved to Hope, Alaska, I woke up every night dreaming about an evening eight years ago when my fiancé, Nick, had been shot and killed, right in front of me. It was the reason I’d become a cop and the reason I’d moved to Alaska from Connecticut. Call it escaping the past or fleeing from reality, call it whatever you wanted.

  Yet, ever since I’d moved to Hope, I hadn’t dreamt of Nick once. Instead, I’d had this dream or a variation of it. And it was always the same: a wolf—black and enormous and I could hear his voice in my head, telling me he needed me.

  I shook my head as I put on the annoyingly fuzzy slippers and then plodded into the living room, the milky-white moonlight guiding my way. The clock on the stove revealed it was 2:00 a.m.

  “One of these days,” I said with a sigh, even though I wasn’t exactly sure what it was that I was trying to tell myself. One of these days, I’d actually sleep through the night? One of these days, I’d stop having this weird dream about a talking wolf with steel gray eyes?

  Gus, my overweight and overloud roommate, plunged off the couch from where he’d been napping and assaulted me with what sounded like an overture of bleating sheep. It was the sound he made when he was hungry and he was always hungry.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I muttered as he weaved his white, portly body in between my ankles, nearly tripping me in the process.

  He sat down next to his kitty bowl and then looked up at me with an impatient expression pasted across his flat face. I flipped on the light switch and suddenly felt like my eyes were being burned out of my head as they fought to acclimate themselves to the fluorescence overhead. Once I was able to see through the narrow slits of my squinting eyes, I pulled open the pantry door. Gus’ rows of Fancy Feast cans took prime position up front and center, outnumbering my human food five to one.

  “Dr. Ivers is going to be upset with me,” I reprimanded the uninterested Persian cat. “You know we’re supposed to be watching your weight.”

  Even if Gus could have understood me, he probably would have responded with something along the lines of, “I’m hungry, so Dr. Ivers can shove it.” As it was, he just licked his chops as I opened the can. I leaned down to spoon out the nasty stuff, but Gus dove for it before I had the chance to empty all of it into his bowl. The guy was serious about his victuals.

  I plopped the can into the recycle bin and then stood back as I studied Gus with my arms crossed against my chest. He made a funny sort of humming sound as he vacuumed the food in his bowl. For myself, I couldn’t even remember if I’d eaten dinner the night before.

  “Maybe if I shaved you, you’d look thinner and we’d be able to pull one over on the good doctor,” I said, legitimately concerned about the scolding I was sure to get from Dr. Ivers.

  Gus finished his chicken pâté in record time and made a beeline again for the living room. He flopped onto the sofa, curled into a big, white ball and promptly went back to sleep.

  “Not even a thank you, ungrateful cat,” I grumbled as I turned off the solar flares overhead and made my way back into my living room. “And what does it say about me that the most conversation I’ve had all week is with you?” I sighed and wondered whether this self-imposed loneliness was going to wreak long-term havoc on me.

  I stood in front of the sliding glass doors that overlooked the harsh Alaskan winter, debating whether or not to make a new pot of coffee or just heat up the leftovers from yesterday. The moonlight reflected against the blanket of white that covered what was, in the summer, a meadow. Beyond the blanketed meadow was the open wilderness, delineated by the pine tree line. In my small community of Pine Hill, everyone kept their animals indoors. Not just in winter, either. In summer, too. If you didn’t, you’d never see them again. Courtesy of the wolves.

  I shivered in spite of myself as I remembered the eyes of the body of the man whom Miguel and I had found preserved in the icy tundra. I’d seen a lot of dead bodies in my time, but there was something about this one that stuck with me. It was the expression in his eyes that was echoed in the curve of his lips. Surprise.

  Surprise? I thought to myself as I shook my head and frowned. How obvious could I be? Of course, he was surprised! No one expects to receive a silver dagger straight through the chest! The first thing anyone would feel is the shock of it. Jeez, Elodie.

  I exhaled a pent-up breath as I recognized the truth in my thoughts. This case was going to be a big one. As it stood, it was the biggest case I’d come across in my three months here in Hope. That meant I needed to step up my game. Thinking a corpse looked surprised wasn’t going to win me any sleuth awards. If I were going to put this case to bed, first, I had to make sure I put myself to bed. It was true—I was
n’t getting enough sleep. I could read as much in the dark circles underneath my eyes. If my aristocratic mother were to see me now, she’d probably have an aneurysm right on the spot. That reminded me, I still hadn’t called her back.

  I glanced at my cell phone on the coffee table in front of the snoring cat and noticed the green light was blinking—I had a voicemail. I was sure it was from my mom. During off-duty hours, she was the only one who called me. I didn’t bother listening to it because her messages were always the same…

  Why wasn’t I meeting any eligible men when I was living in a place where men outnumbered women nine to one? Was I over Nick’s death yet? If not, I really should be. I was now thirty and my biological clock was ticking, so why wasn’t I considering my future more seriously? Why had I become a police officer anyway? Didn’t I remember that, once upon a time, I’d been prom queen and, therefore, could have been the enviable wife to any of the guys on the football team? Didn’t I remember that underneath my amorphous uniform, I still had a figure most women would die for? Wasn’t I aware that in looking just like my mother did at my age, I was beautiful?

  “No wonder you’re the only one in my life, Gus,” I said as I glanced over at the now-twitching cat. “You don’t talk back.”

  Chapter Three

  The thing about naked dead guys was that they didn’t carry identification.

  “I’ve submitted the fingerprints to the IAFIS,” said Dr. Paul Moody, referring to the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System maintained by the FBI. “If he’s in there, we’ll know in a few hours.”

  We stood in Dr. Moody’s office, located in what passed for our “downtown”—it comprised six buildings, three of which were restaurants. Moody was our only doctor. He was also the region’s only qualified coroner. As such, it was his job to identify bodies and determine causes of death. According to him, this case wasn’t exactly a rush job, since our John Doe had been on ice all winter, literally.