Page 24 of Forbidden Wolf

“What’s going on, Levi?” Radar set his equipment to the side to watch me.

“What if the enemy is aquatic? Then the flooding would make sense.” He didn’t need to tell me that the area we sat in was black on his screen. The hairs at the back of my neck standing to attention told me there was an enemy close by.

“Vampires are aquatic now?” His eyes widened as he stared down from the tree.

“There were dead lycans and vamps back there. Both of them killed in exactly the same way.” I sighed heavily and leaned back. “What if this new deadly breed of vampire isn’t a vampire at all, but something else entirely?”

Radar’s brow creased. “That would mean we’re both fighting the same enemy and each other at the same time.”

“Yeah, it would.”

Lycans were at war with vampires because they were supposed to be evil bloodsuckers who fed from innocent humans and left them dead or turned them into new vamps. In ten years, I’d never seen any evidence of these claims. The one vamp I’d known was kind and gentle. She lifted caterpillars off paths, for fucks sake.

“What can we do?”

“Get that intel to our people. Tell them to avoid the black areas and keep moving. They seem to be following our movement or body heat.” If that was true, we were screwed because we were miles from nowhere.

“There are mountains in that direction with less of this mud to wade through.” Radar pointed toward the east. “If we can send our team in that direction there are fewer black areas to avoid.”

“Do it. Send them toward the mountains. Tell them to watch their step to avoid activating anything under the mud.”

We needed to ensure no one knew what we were talking about. If whatever was out there had outsmarted us this long, we needed to make it believe we were still clueless about its presence.

“We’re currently in a huge black area,” Radar said in a low voice.

“Let’s hope it’s attracted to movement and with us up here it’ll lose interest.”

Radar nodded, his fingers skimming over the many devices he carried in his backpack that he began to sort through and pull out. He twisted wires together, his face tight and brow furrowed. He lowered a probe on a long wire toward the water surrounding the base of the tree. Before bringing it back up and lengthening the wire.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“It’s the same principle as the probes I made to study Nessie. I’m trying to determine if there is any significant movement under the water. It’s not refined enough to calculate size, shape, or speed. But if there is something in there, then it should detect the movement of it.”

I crossed my fingers the same way I had as a child, sending a silent prayer up to whoever was listening that my theory was wrong. I would fucking hate to be right at this moment.

Radar chatted in the background, talking to himself as he pieced his devices together. He slowly lowered the probe into the mud and jumped. “Fuck me, there’s something in there.”

Both of us peered down into the black liquid in an attempt to see something. Everything remained still. The monitor screen flared again.

“Whatever is down there is big, but I have no idea how big in comparison to the surroundings,” Radar said.

“Can you guess?”

“Nope. All I know is that it needs to be at least the size of a ten-year-old child to register. So, between that and Nessie.”

“You are fucking obsessed with that monster,” I muttered.

“She’s the greatest mystery in the world. Imagine what she’d look like swimming through that Loch.”

I rolled my eyes at him as he lapsed into talking about his favourite pastime.

We waited while he monitored whatever was down there. My toes were so cold they were numb, but the area around us changed to pale grey on the monitor. We slipped into the water and made our way directly toward the mountain. Every so often, Radar would submerge another probe that was connected to his computer back at base.

The water lowered as the ground became a hill.

A sudden pain radiated down my side, the sensation like someone had stabbed me repeatedly. My legs buckled and I fell onto my knees.

“Levi? What’s happening?” Radar asked, his hand gripping my arm.

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