Wolf Angel, Mark Hobson [best free ebook reader for pc .txt] 📗

Placing it on a small shelf, he and the girl had moved from crib to crib, quietly and gently drawing blood from the tiny infants. Most had slept through with barely a flicker, or at most a little murmur, before resuming the sleep of the innocents, unharmed and unaware.

Finished with this task, Wenzel had removed the stopper from the glass phial and they had emptied the contents of their syringes into the mixture, the potent combination of sweet blood and male seed and menstrual energy creating a powerful unifying force.

And finally, Wenzel and the girl had used salt to lay down the necessary symbols on the stone floor, the markings and letters and pentagrams, copied from the heavy leather-bound file called UNTERNEHMEN WERWOLF that Wenzel had read back at Hulchrath Castle over a year and a half ago. Those strange and otherworldly signs, together with the obscure rituals and the incantations he now spoke, his voice echoing in the dark room beneath the convent.

On the evening of their second day of waiting, they received word that the fishing trawler would be leaving on the morning tide. They were to be ready, with any baggage they required, on the small stone pier at first light.

Later that night Wenzel drove their farmer’s truck further up the coast and left it amidst the sand dunes, then walked back to the boarding house.

They slept a little. Yet the anticipation of what was to be the final leg of his long journey, and the prospect of reaching a safe haven, meant he could not rest for long. So in the early hours the two of them made their way down the grassy slope from the boarding house, each carrying a small suitcase, Wenzel still wearing the knapsack with its priceless items inside.

The MFV Toró was waiting for them. It was a sturdy-looking wooden vessel, normally crewed by three or four men, but for this trip Wenzel had insisted on just the captain. He was being paid handsomely and so was happy to oblige.

Climbing on board, they both immediately went below deck.

A few minutes later the boat set out across the water, heading east into the brightening dawn sky.

The world was to hear no more of Herbert Wenzel.

CHAPTER 14

PRISHA KAPOOR, AND THE FOOT-TRACK SPELL

He had no time to think about Lotte’s whereabouts, for his mobile phone immediately started to jangle and buzz with notifications of updates and messages from work.

General requests for information and answers to a multitude of queries had built up overnight, including questions from the media who had somehow got a hold of his number. These latter he ignored. Pieter scrolled through the others, picking out one or two of the more important ones, and did his best to respond, either by phone call or email. The others could wait until he arrived at HQ.

This took up an hour. He managed to snatch a quick breakfast, and then he dashed down the stairs and out the front door, where his driver was waiting for him. His own car, damaged in the shootout, was in the compound, and he would pick up a temporary replacement from the carpool later.

His first stop was the hospital morgue. He’d received a garbled voicemail message from the Chief Pathologist, Prisha Kapoor, which sounded quite urgent.

Overnight all of the bodies had been ferried over from the temporary morgue to the hospital. When he strode through the automatic doors, Pieter was confronted with the gruesome sight of several rows of corpses lined up on autopsy tables awaiting examination, with still more stored away in the freezer storage units.

Some of the bodies were still bagged up, whereas others were laid out, unclothed and being processed. Prisha and one of her assistants were busy at work. To say they were snowed under was an understatement.

At the moment she was gowned and masked up and using a small circular saw to cut away the top portion of a man’s skull. The high-pitched noise set Pieter’s teeth on edge, and a fine white mist sprayed up as she worked.

He watched from the other side of the room, feeling like a morbid ghoul, fascinated and repulsed in equal measures. Prisha prized away the skull section and placed it to one side, and then reached into the cavity and, with a loud sucking noise, pulled the brain free and plopped it into a set of scales. Her assistant, a pale-faced young man with bug-out eyes, made notes on his iPad.

Prisha glanced up then and noticed him. Saying something to her assistant, she removed her plastic face-shield and waddled over to the wash basins. Snapping off her latex gloves and binning them, she washed her hands and arms, and then joined him.

“I was on my annual leave until this happened,” she told him grumpily, as though blaming him personally. “I’ve been here since midnight.”

“Sorry.”

Prisha looked him up and down sternly, then her features softened a little. “From what I hear, you’re lucky not to be one of my specimens today.”

“Hope you’re not disappointed?”

“You’re a man. By default you’re all a disappointment.”

“But aren’t you gay?”

“Yes,” she fixed him with her stare, “and now you know why.” Spinning on her heels she beckoned over her shoulder. “Follow me.”

She gave him a tour around the room, leading him up and down the rows of cadavers.

“As you would guess, most of the victims from yesterday’s attack died from gunshot wounds or shrapnel wounds resulting in severe trauma and blood loss. There are a few exceptions. Your colleague, Mr Beumers, died from asphyxiation. The overweight man over there,” she pointed at the obese naked form of Levi Kohnstamm, “he suffered a massive coronary, so wasn’t technically murdered. The eyes and tongue were removed post mortem. And the one who jumped from the roof of the science museum, he experienced multiple blunt fractures from impacting the water, and then drowned. He’s bagged up over there.”

Pieter noted the short row of bodies still in their body bags were slightly