ds_flashfiction | Happy Halloween!

leave it to the week of ghoulies and ghosties to wake my wolf-boys up again.
What follows is a excerpt of what will eventually be a longer prequel to my Chicago Series. This installment of the series deals with RayK's becoming a werewolf.

1073 words of mostly depressed, contemplative but ultimately hopeful RayK.

Chicago Wolf
by JennyB.
excerpt from a new prequel to the Chicago Series

“You’re free to go, Detective Kowalski. It was a righteous kill.”

All I said was thank you and then I headed out. The shooting team had cleared me and that's all I needed to know. They gave me a card and told me to see a shrink if I needed to, but no shrink was going to understand the real reason I killed Pete Polnicek.

No one was going to understand that I had killed the man who made me a werewolf because he was eating people. I’d get locked up for sure if I told anybody that. Somebody would figure I went off the deep end after Stella gave me my walking papers and that would be that. I’d be out of a job. And that would be the fucking last straw because the job was the only thing that was holding me together.

I walked a lot at night, wishing it was the Full so I could change and run, feeling Her presence get dimmer and dimmer every night. I went by the old shop where I’d met Mere Claire, the beautiful, Creole woman in the gypsy clothes who turned out to be a Goddess. She gave me the bullets coated in wolfsbane and monkshood to kill my sire and told me I could be better than the bastard who’d made me. But now the windows of her shop were dark and the place had been boarded up. Didn’t stop me from going back almost every night for two weeks.

I didn’t know what the fuck to do. My wife had left me because she thought I was seeing another woman once a month. At least that was the grounds she gave besides irreconcilable differences on the divorce papers. My sire had killed half a dozen people in as many months because he’d developed a taste for human meat and I had to kill him because I had sworn to protect the people of the City of Chicago from predators like him when I became a homicide detective. The things in my life that made me who I am had all turned to shit. What the hell was I still here for?

So at the height of the New Moon, Halloween Night as it turned out, I sat in the park where I’d killed Pete, back against a tree, pistol in my hand loaded with the leftover bullets from Mere Claire. I’d never felt this alone in my life. I sat there, taking turns staring down at the gun and up at the black, black sky. I felt so empty that I thought maybe, just maybe a little lead would make me feel full again, or make me stop feeling altogether.

I rubbed the steel that shone blue in the faint light from the stars. Used the sleeve of my jacket to wipe the fingerprints off. At least I wouldn’t be naked when they found me, like Pete was.

“Have faith, Ray Kowalski. The world has a place for you. Continue to live and it will find you.”

Her voice didn’t even startle me. It was almost like I’d been expecting it. I looked up and there She stood, all light cocoa skin and long, curly hair and flowy skirts. I could see the swell of stomach under Her skirts and wondered for a second if a Goddess could be pregnant.

She smiled at me and my chest bloomed with warmth. Gently she took the pistol from my hands and unloaded it, setting the gun on the ground beside me and slipping the rest of the bullets she’d given me back into the folds of her skirts. Then she knelt next to me and waited, the soft smile still on her face. She was beautiful and strong and knew so much. There was so much I wanted to ask her.

“Mere Claire—“

“Faith, Ray. When you feel it falter, remember you are not alone. I am with you.”

She held her hand out and cradled in her palm was a length of silver beads shot through with blue and white every fourth bead or so.

“Silver and moonstone. My metal, my stone. Wear this and I will always be with you. When I am not in the sky, I walk the earth. If you truly need me, I will come, just as I have for you so far.”

I wound the long chain twice around my wrist and closed the clasp. The metal should’ve felt cool, but it glowed warmly against my skin. It felt good there, felt right. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the weight of the silver and stone. When I opened them again, She was gone.

The next Full, I changed and ran alone for the first time in the seven years since Pete sired me. I hunted and filled my belly and then I lifted my voice in praise of Her. Like the song said, you got to have faith. So I would wait for whatever to happen.

About a year after that visit from Mere Claire, I got a call from my Lieu. They wanted someone for an undercover gig and I’d distinguished myself in the last couple of years. They wanted someone to fill in for a guy at the 27th who’d been tapped by the Feds for an out-of-town deal. Seemed this guy had a Canadian partner and said partner had a…a deaf wolf? What the hell?

In the time I’d lived as Wolf, I’d learned to trust my gut, my instincts, above everything else. Something flared in the place inside me where my beast slept when the moon wasn’t Full and I knew the answer I had to give.

“Lieu?”

“Kowalski, do you have good news for me?”

“I think so, sir. I’ll take it.”

“Good. You report to Lieutenant Harding Welsh at the 27th precinct station house at 8am a week from today.” He tossed a file on his desk in my general direction. “Here’s the file on this guy. Good news, you won’t have to learn a new first name, just a last one. Detective First Grade Raymond Vecchio. Now go home and start studying. I already farmed your cases out to the rest of the squad.”

“Thank you, sir.”

I walked out of his office with the file in my hand, the beads of my bracelet warm against my skin and I knew deep down that this assignment would change my life.