The wolfs curse reapers.., p.1
The Wolf's Curse (Reapers Reborn Chronicles Book 1), page 1
The Wolf's Curse
Reapers Reborn Chronicles
Book 1
Alex Gates
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Alex Gates
The Wolf’s Curse
Reaper Reborn Chronicles: Book 1
Copyright © 2023 by Alex C. Gates
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover Design: J Caleb Design
Created with Vellum
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
MAKE A DIFFERENCE
TRY IT OUT: SHADOW BORN
TRY IT OUT: VOODOO BLUES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT ALEX GATES
BOOKS BY ALEX GATES
Chapter One
Valley Springs, California. Sunday, August 11, 1:01 AM
A rare summer rain fell in sheets, blanketing my windshield and soaking the night, deepening the darkness. The windshield wipers left long, wet streaks across the windshield. My truck’s headlights offered little help. They reflected off the downpour, further disorienting me as I drove through the winding foothills.
Rain is a good omen, especially summer rain, my late-grandma’s voice rang through my head. It signifies rebirth, new chapters. Cleansing.
Well, Mama Wiley (that’s what she went by, although her name was Marilynn Peake, so I’m not sure where Wiley came from) had superstitions a mile high. I mean, crystals and incense and rabbit feet and clovers, which don’t dip into her mannerisms, like knocking on wood or avoiding ladders or tossing salt over her shoulder. Whenever she mentioned omens to me, be them about rain or itchy hands or pointing at a rainbow, I struggled to take her seriously.
As I leaned forward, hugging the steering wheel, squinting into the liquid darkness, I questioned my Mama Wiley’s claims that rain, especially rain in summer, brought good omens. If I had to forecast an outcome, I would predict my untimely, violent death from sliding off the road and wrapping around a tree.
I’m not a praying man. I’m of the mindset that God helps those who help themselves, which makes prayer a redundancy. Yet, that night, I prayed a deer or an escaped horse didn’t wander into the road.
As with most prayers, God answered with a twisted sense of humor.
“Hey!” Alice said, bolting upright in the passenger seat and pointing out the side window. “Stop!”
Alice Newhall had the tanned and leathery skin of spending untold hours in the sun. She wore her gardening clothes: Denim overalls patched across the knees and stained with mud and grass, and a yellow long-sleeved shirt rolled to her elbows. Her dyed-dark hair rested in a loose braid, the sloppiness of it emphasizing her natural beauty. Tiny, tight wrinkles spread outward from the corners of her light-brown eyes and her off-red lips. Alice had lived before Botox and fillers became trendy, and her ageless appearance enhanced her beauty beyond anything a simple beauty procedure could accomplish.
And yes, you read that right—Alice had lived, past tense. She had died nearly twenty years ago.
In death, despite keeping the mud and grass stains, the leathery skin, and the wrinkles, Alice shed the discolored bruises and bright-pink welts she hid poorly with makeup during her life.
When I first saw Alice after her death (I was about ten), I asked if she chose how she looked, what she wore, and the color of her hair. Let’s back up a little. When I first saw Alice after her death, I ran back in the house and changed my pants. I peaked through my bedroom window, which overlooked the fence separating our house from the Newhall’s. Once I gathered a little courage, I chanced the backyard again, opting to speak with a spirit of the dead for the first time in my life.
My ten-year-old brain wasn’t sophisticated, wasn’t much on par with the ten-year-olds in my class. I preferred getting in fights than listening to my teacher. As I returned to the ghost of Alice—who stood on the other side of the fence in her backyard (there was a broken picket on one of the panels, and when she lived, Alice often snuck me treats as I told her about my days), I asked, “Do you choose how you look? I mean, do you pick your clothes and the color of your hair?” I can’t tell you why I asked that, but her appearance was what stuck with me, and it’s what I commented on, for whatever reason.
“I don’t know,” she said. For a few seconds, she closed her eyes, as if meditating. “Do I look different now?”
“No.”
“I guess I can't choose my appearance then. I imagined myself as a young girl, one close to your age, in a lovely sundress.”
“What about… your bruises?”
Through the broken picket (“I’ll fix when I can,” my dad always said; he never fixed it) I would watch Alice, back when she lived, as she gardened. From the outfit her spirit wore—always wore, even twenty years later—the lack of makeup, the rushed braid, Alice appeared exactly as I remembered her, except she lacked the assortment of bruises that had riddled her arms, her face, and her neck.
Alice, after my question, raised her arms and inspected the unbruised, immaterial skin. “I don’t know.”
Twenty years later, neither of us had learned how the rules of the dead worked.
We had, though, come up with, through experience, five things about our unique situation.
One. No one could see or hear Alice Newhall besides me.
Two. Alice Newhall couldn’t interact with the material world (the name we came up with for Earth). She couldn’t slide a leaf of paper across a desk, let alone throw a chair across the kitchen, as depicted in horror movies.
Three. She couldn’t enter houses—except for her past home, the one where she had died.
Four. She would remain on Earth as a spirit until she liberated a woman from her abuser, as Alice never escaped her husband.
Five. She couldn’t possess someone without their explicit consent.
In regards to the fourth point, that was pure conjecture, and it blended into the fifth point. Whenever Alice witnessed abuse or believed abuse had occurred, she attempted to take over another person’s body to exact vengeance. Through human possession, she believed, Alice could interact with the material world.
Once, and only once, I had allowed Alice, as an experiment, to possess my body.
She slashed into my mind like an icy, foreign presence. I panicked and immediately banished her. Without my consent, her spirit had no other option but to vacate.
Back to the dark, stormy night, to Alice yelling at me. “Pull over!”
I slowed the truck but didn’t stop. “Why?” Though I questioned her, with twenty years of always having her with me, I had learned to trust her senses and advice. As a spirit, she noticed things my flawed senses couldn’t pick up on.
“I saw someone,” she said.
I pulled over to the shoulder and clicked on my hazards. When I glanced into the rearview mirror, I only saw inky darkness dimly illuminated by my red brake lights and orange blinking hazards. “I don’t see a thing.”
“Back up.”
“I’m not backing up on this road in this storm. That’s a guaranteed way for me to join you in death.”
“Then turn around.”
I glanced forward and checked the rearview mirror, searching for oncoming traffic. Convinced no other driver was foolish enough to risk their lives in the summer storm at one in the morning, I turned the truck and rolled along the road in the opposite direction I had come from.
“There!” Alice pointed through the driver’s side window, across the road.
Sure enough, a young woman limped along the muddy ditch. The edges of my headlights illuminated her, basking her in a wet light. She didn’t wear shoes, socks, or pants, despite the weather—only an oversized, torn white T-shirt that barely covered her thighs. The rain plastered her blonde hair across her pale face.
I pulled to the shoulder and grimaced.
Alice stared at me with narrowed, angry eyes. “Dory, she’s hurt, and we both know why.”
“We don’t know why,” I said, desperately running through scenarios that didn’t involve someone beating her and tossing her to the curb like trash.
Maybe she had crashed her car in the storm, and now she hiked along the road to find someone to help her. The devil’s advocate chimed in, ripping m
“It’s time,” Alice said, and we both knew what she meant.
I chewed on my cheeks. “No.”
“Dory!”
Alice had one mission in her continued, unnatural existence, and she needed my body to impose her wrathful will… or so we theorized.
She and her husband hadn’t had children before her death. Though he wanted a boy to carry the Newhall name, she feared her husband’s temper; she feared he would unleash his unbridled violence on their babies.
One night, police sirens and lights and constant radio chatter kept the neighborhood up well into the dawn.
My parents sat me down the next morning and told me what happened. Alice’s husband murdered her before taking his life.
A few weeks later, when I asked Alice’s spirit why he had done it, she said he found her birth control.
As I grew and matured, I gained a deeper knowledge of her situation. His physical abuse was the tip of the iceberg. He had terrorized her mind, emotions, and confidence; he controlled her every breath. Alice never had friends, a job, hobbies outside of her home—she never had independence or autonomy. He forced her, over time, to sever all ties from her family. During their marriage, for over thirty years, she hadn’t driven a car, because he didn’t want her driving. He disallowed her from having an email address or a phone she could freely use.
Her husband had turned their home into a prison, and Alice never stepped outside except to toil in her backyard garden and give treats to the neighbor kid.
“Dory, let me take over,” Alice said.
Ignoring her, I hopped out of the truck. The rain fell in torrents, soaking me within seconds. I waded through puddles as I approached the woman. Luckily, it was August, the dead of summer, and the night hadn’t dropped below seventy degrees.
The woman’s bare skin showed beneath the transparent fabric of the ripped white shirt. She hugged her arms over her chest for whatever modesty she could muster.
As I neared, I discerned further dreaded details. A red sheen stained her white shirt. Her narrowed, slitted eyes weren’t from squinting into the wet darkness to enhance her sight, but from nearly swelling shut.
I stopped three feet from her, studying her bruised face, stealing glances at her blood-drenched, ripped shirt.
Despite the rain soaking me to the bone, fury burned through my veins, igniting me into a red-hot blaze. It shocked me that the raindrops didn’t sizzle and steam when they touched my skin. I kept my voice low and calm, though I felt anything but. “You can climb in the truck, and I’ll take you somewhere safe.”
Her hesitancy and distrust showed brightly through her battered face.
I had to break down the wall of inherent fear. “I’m Doryan. You can call me Ryan.” I forced a disarming smile across my face, hoping it didn’t twist my expression into something like a serial killer. “Or Dory. That’s what my mom calls me.”
The woman appeared shellshocked, and she spoke like it, too. Her voice was a dried-out leaf—brittle, flaky, and without substance. “Dory is a girl’s name.”
It was a strange comment, or so I thought, but it was also a strange meeting.
I chuckled, though the dull laugh lacked any humor. “It’s a girl’s name, which is why I usually go by Ryan.” The rainwater streamed over my face, lathering my too-long hair across my forehead, sopping my thick beard. It, unfortunately, stank like a wet dog. That’s what a long day of working in the sun, sweating and absorbing dust, will do to a beard. “Let’s get out of the rain.”
The woman tightened her arms across her chest, most likely weighing her chances with the storm against accepting my help. Based on how I looked and smelled, I don’t blame her hesitancy. I must have looked like a crazed maniac to her. I didn’t know how to convince her to trust me, to trust I wouldn’t hurt her.
“My truck looks beat up,” I said, “but it’s dry in there. It stinks like a men’s locker room, though.”
“I don’t have anywhere to go,” she said.
I glanced upward before refocusing my attention on her bruised, swollen face. I balled my hands into fists, fighting to temper the scorching rage burning through my body. “I’ll take you to the police station.”
“No!” The word exploded off her tongue like a gunshot. One hand leaped from her chest to her mouth, covering her lips with surprise. “I’m sorry, but you can’t go to the cops.”
I raised both hands in a gesture of surrender. “No cops. Let’s get in the truck, though. We’ll figure it out from there.”
The woman looked beyond me, past my headlights, into the thick darkness of whatever awaited ahead. Whatever or whomever she ran from must have terrified her more than a stranger reaching out a helping hand.
The woman nodded once, a drop of her sharp-pointed chin.
I led her to the passenger door and opened it. She climbed into the cab. Alice had crawled into the backseat and sat in the middle and leaned forward so her elbows rested on the center console. I hurried around the hood and hoisted myself behind the steering wheel. We said nothing as the yellow cabin light faded into darkness.
When I could only see her silhouette sitting beside me, I glanced back at Alice. She couldn’t read my thoughts, but I knew she understood what passed through my mind. Before I allowed Alice control, though, I had to know one thing from the lost woman.
“Do you have children with him?”
I didn’t think she would answer, but she did.
The dark outline of her head shook back and forth.
“You know what will happen, right?” Alice asked me.
I nodded, not wanting to respond verbally and have the battered woman think me unhinged, crazy, and speaking to spirits.
“You’re giving me permission to possess your body?” Alice asked.
I closed my eyes and considered the consequences. Alice would find the man responsible for the abuse, and she would kill him with my hands. I would consent to her possession with that knowledge, which meant I would play a pivotal and conspiratorial role in a murder.
What if it liberated the unnamed woman beside me? Did other avenues of freedom exist for her?
Maybe, but Alice had shared her experience with me. Her husband had held her captive as his property. If she had escaped from him, he would have hunted her down—or more likely, Alice would’ve stumbled her way back to him, unable to survive the world on her own, without his providence, or so she believed because he had brainwashed her to believe that.
Still, a method had to exist outside of murder.
I glanced at the woman sitting beside me, thinking of Alice the night her husband murdered her.
I made my decision, and I would bear the consequences of my choices… but only after the man responsible for the woman’s condition bore the consequences of his actions.
I nodded my head in confirmation to Alice.
An instant iciness spread through me as the spirit leaped from the backseat and into my body. She didn’t so much as possess and take over me as her emotions, thoughts, and intent poured through my entire being. We became one—I saw her memories, felt her fear, basked in her joy.
I remained in control, though. At any moment, I could have banished her from my body. Yet, I had allowed her permission, so I relinquished myself completely to Alice, allowing her spirit to sit solely in the driver’s seat.
With my eyes, Alice stared at the woman’s silhouette in the passenger seat. “Where is he?”
I pulled the truck onto a gravel driveway. A double-wide trailer home sat on the property. I didn’t bother to cut the truck’s headlights. They poured across the trailer, drenching it in a white-blue high beam glow. When I parked, I kept the truck pointed at the double-wide. I wanted the man inside to know I had come for him.
