THE WOLF IN WINTER

Also by John Connolly

The Charlie Parker Stories

Every Dead Thing

Dark Hollow

The Killing Kind

The White Road

The Reflecting Eye (Novella in the Nocturnes Collection)

The Black Angel

The Unquiet

The Reapers

The Lovers

The Whisperers

The Burning Soul

The Wrath of Angels

Other Works

Bad Men

The Book of Lost Things

Short Stories

Nocturnes

The Wanderer in Unknown Realms (eBook)

The Samuel Johnson Stories (For Young Adults)

The Gates

Hell’s Bells

The Creeps

The Chronicles of the Invaders (with Jennifer Ridyard)

Conquest

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Bad Dog Books Limited 2014

The right of John Connolly to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

in which it is published and without a similar condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to

real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN 978 1 444 75532 9

Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 444 75533 6

EBook ISBN 978 1 444 75534 3

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For Swati Gamble

Permissions

Gerald Hausman kindly gave permission to quote from his book Meditations with the Navajo (Bear & Company/Inner Traditions, 2001).

“The Divine Wolf” by Adonis, translated by Khaled Mattawa, is cited with the kind permission of the author and the Yale University Press, publisher of Adonis: Selected Poems (2010), in which this poem appears.

I

HUNTING

He fed in fear and reached the silent fields

And howled his heart out, trying in vain to speak.

Ovid,

Metamorphoses

1

The house was studiedly anonymous: not too large or too small, and neither particularly well kept nor in any sense dilapidated. Situated on a small patch of land not far from the outskirts of the city of Newark, Delaware, in the densely populated county of New Castle, the town had taken a hit when the Chrysler Newark assembly plant closed in 2008, along with the nearby Mopar distribution center. However, it was still the home of the University of Delaware, and 20,000 students can spend a lot of money if they put their minds to it.

Newark was an unsurprising choice of location for the man we were hunting. It was close to the borders of three states – Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland – and only two hours from New York City by car. Then again, it was just one of any number of rat’s nests that he had established for himself, acquired over the years by the lawyer who protected him. The only distinguishing feature of this property lay in the degree of power consumption: the utility bills were steeper than for the others we had discovered. This one looked like it was used regularly. It was more than a storehouse for elements of his collection. It was a base of sorts.

He called himself Kushiel, but we knew him as the Collector. He had killed a friend of ours named Jackie Garner at the end of the previous year. The Collector would have called it an eye for an eye in his version of justice, and it was true that Jackie had made an appalling error, one that resulted in the death of a woman close to the Collector. In revenge, the Collector had shot Jackie down without mercy while he was unarmed and on his knees, but he had also made it clear that we were all under his gun now. We might have been hunting the Collector for what he had done to one of ours, but we also knew that it was only a matter of time before he decided we might be less of a threat to him with six feet of earth above our heads. We intended to corner and kill him long before it came to that.

A light burned in one room of the house. The others were all dark. A car stood in the driveway, and its arrival had alerted us to the possibility of the Collector’s presence. We had placed a dual wireless break-beam alert system in the undergrowth halfway up the drive. The system was timerbased, so an alert would only be sent to our phones if the two beams were not broken twice within a ten-minute period. In other words, it allowed for deliveries, but a vehicle that entered the property and remained on it for any length of time would trigger the alarm.

Of course, this assumed that the Collector would not arrive on foot, or by cab, but we figured he had too many enemies to leave his escape routes to chance, and he would keep at least one well-maintained vehicle. A windowless garage stood to the right of the house, but we had not risked breaking into it when we first discovered the existence of the property. Even planting the little wireless infrared transmitters was a calculated gamble, and had only been undertaken after a sweep of the yard revealed no similar alarm system beyond whatever was used to secure the house itself.

‘What do you think?’ said Louis.

His dark skin caught something of the moonlight, making him seem even more a creature of the night than usual. He wore dark cotton trousers cinched at the ankles, and a black waxed cotton Belstaff jacket from which all of the buckles and buttons had been removed and replaced by non-refective equivalents. He looked cool, but then he always looked cool.

‘My legs are cramping up, is what I think,’ said Angel. ‘If we don’t make a move soon, you’ll have to carry me in there on a sedan chair.’

Angel didn’t care about cool. His clothing was functional and unlabeled. He just preferred things that way. His gray hair was hidden beneath a black beanie. Without the cap, he looked his years. He was older than Louis and I, and had grown quieter and more cautious in recent times. Mortality shadowed him like a falcon mantling its wings over dying prey.