The Wolf in Winter

Chapter I

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 Chrysler’s 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 twenty thousand 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 as if 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 who

was 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 timer-based, so an alert would be sent to our

phones only if the two beams weren’t 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 that 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 been undertaken only 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

of 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 the buckles and

buttons had been removed and replaced with non-reflective 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.”