A Wolf at the Door: A Jesse James Dawson Novel Read online

  Praise for the

  Jesse James Dawson Novels

  A Shot in the Dark

  “An outstanding urban fantasy…[a] super paranormal.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Jesse James Dawson is my kind of hero…[Stewart] has created an urban fantasy with the same touch of darkness I found in Butcher’s Dresden series…. [She] also has a wicked sense of humor, which I find irresistible.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “I love Jesse’s adventures, that of a modern-day samurai mixed with the paranormal and a bit of mystery. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for Jesse next!”

  —News and Sentinel (Parkersburg, WV)

  “Stewart provides nonstop action…well-developed characters and taut pacing.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  A Devil in the Details

  “A clever conceit, with a surprisingly moral center. Lots of fun, deftly witty, and one of the most appealing central characters of recent years.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Simon R. Green

  “If you want your life saved, you call the cops. If you want your soul saved, you call Jesse James Dawson. Humor, action, and a one-way trip straight to Hell, this book delivers it all.”

  —New York Time bestselling author Rob Thurman

  “Dawson is a modern-day warrior who can tie up his ponytail with one hand and use a katana in the other to fend off the forces of evil. Equal parts heroic, dark, and funny…a welcome addition to the urban fantasy genre.”

  —Anton Strout, author of Dead Waters

  “Stewart’s wisecracking hero is smart and thoroughly 3-D. The tight terse style honors but doesn’t copy Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books, and urban fantasy fans looking for something new will happily devour Stewart’s debut.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “For all that the book deals with death, devils, and damnation, it doesn’t dwell in gothic gloom, but flits lightly and entertainingly from emotional lows and highs. A very enjoyable book, with the potential to become a very engaging series.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “A dynamic debut.”

  —Genre Go Round Reviews

  “K. A. Stewart is a sensational writer who will soon work her way up to the level of recognition of Jim Butcher and Simon R. Green, and A Devil in the Details is her first work of pure excellence…. This is a must read for any fan of urban fantasy.”

  —Whatchamacallit Reviews

  “[A Devil in the Details] gives you a hero that will make you smile and it is an enjoyable read.”

  —Smexy Books Romance Reviews

  “A refreshing story with really appealing characters who have such witty humor that you don’t see coming until it smacks you in the face. I’ll definitely be reading the next one in this exciting new series.”

  —The Book Lush

  Jesse James Dawson Novels

  by K. A. Stewart

  A Devil in the Details

  A Shot in the Dark

  A Wolf at the Door

  A WOLF AT

  THE DOOR

  A JESSE JAMES DAWSON NOVEL

  K. A. STEWART

  A ROC BOOK

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2,

  Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

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  Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632,

  New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, August 2012

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Kari Stewart, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-59397-4

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Printed in the United States of America

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  To you, for all that you do

  But more for all that you are.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It’s getting harder and harder to thank everyone who deserves it. So many people help me with these books in ways they never even realize. As always, for Scott and Aislynn. For my beta-slaves, without whom this book would never exist in the form that you see it. For the crew at Badger Blades, and Badger himself for creating The Way. For the Purgatorians, who all know why. Also, for those people who make me laugh when I didn’t even know I needed it. For the authors who make jokes only another author understands. For the agents and the editors who ride the highs and lows with us. And last but most definitely not least, for the readers. You are why I get to do what I love every day.

  Table of Contents

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  1

  Four years ago…

  Once upon a time, this guy stumbled into something big, something way bigger than he could handle, and though he won, he got his ass handed to him in multiple pieces. And while he was recovering from that, this huge white-haired dude with a foreign accent and a black trench coat showed up and said, “Follow the yellow brick road!”

  And that’s how I wound up here. Wherever the hell “here” was. It sure as hell wasn’t Kansas anymore, Toto.

  Okay, I knew I was somewhere in Eastern Europe, one of those countries that changes its name every other week. Somewhere that seemed uniformly gritty, until I was sure I could feel tiny granules grinding between my teeth, strained out of the air I breathed. Given that my guide was Ukrai
nian, we’ll say I was in Ukraine. ’Cause I honestly had no idea. You would think for my first trip out of the United States, I would have chosen somewhere less…frozen.

  I hitched the collar of my coat up higher around my chin, but despite the occasional brutality of Midwestern winters, the leather bomber jacket just wasn’t living up to the Ukrainian temperatures. I jammed my hands in my pockets and did my best to keep up with the long strides of the man in front of me.

  His name was Ivan Zelenko. I got that much a few days ago when he showed up on my front porch. Dude had to be at least six four, and his shoulders were broad enough to be two of me. His white hair was cropped in a short military buzz cut, and the lines of many years made his eyes crinkle at the corners.

  Most of the time, I’d have told him to stuff whatever he was selling and get off my lawn, but when I opened the door, he was thoughtfully examining the doorjambs, running a finger down the wood like he was testing for dust.

  Finally, with an approving nod, he said, “This is to being good work. Excellent wardings. You are to being Jesse James Dawson?”

  That one statement brought me up short. Not the knowing my name part, even as creepy as that was. No, it was the recognizing the wards part. Up until that moment, I’d known only one person besides myself capable of sensing the protection spells on my doors, and that was the woman who’d put them there. My wife, Mira. And to tell the truth, up until that point I wasn’t sure she and I weren’t both some level of insane. I mean really. Magic? Demons? If I’d have told anyone else, they’d have put me in a nice white coat with extra-long sleeves and given me a padded room to take my rest in. No sane person believes in demons.

  Except that I’d seen two of them now, and the second one was nearly the end of me. The muscles down my left side were still knitting, the scars that marred me from armpit to hip angry red and throbbing when I overexerted. I’d gone from wiry to emaciated in the ICU, and even a month after my liberation from the hospital, I was struggling to put the weight back on. The huge man on my front step served only to make me feel as wasted and frail as I was afraid I looked.

  So, this Ivan Zelenko knew magic. After proving that he could walk through my doorway unimpeded, I invited him to sit on my couch. He met my wife. He met my daughter. Despite the fact that he nearly filled the room with his sheer size, and booming gravelly voice, he managed to put both the women in my life at ease almost immediately. And then he did a lot of talking in badly fractured English.

  Most of it boiled down to the fact that he knew all about demons, and contracts, and fighting. A champion, he called me. He was one too, or had been in his youth. Unabashedly, he unbuttoned his shirt to show me the scars, some of which looked like the ones I was now carrying, and some of which looked like an alien creature had tried to gnaw out a few vital organs. Nothing natural made marks like that.

  “I watch for men like you. To be letting them know that they are not alone in this fighting. The more we are to be knowing, the better chance we are to be having.”

  “That’s great, man, really, but I don’t intend to be doing this again. This isn’t a lifestyle choice.” The white-haired man smirked before I could even finish my sentence.

  “If you could to be stopping, you would have said no already.” He nodded sagely. “When next someone is to be asking you, you will fight again. I am seeing it in your eyes. A champion.”

  While he may have liked what he saw in my eyes, he was not as impressed with the rest of the examination.

  He asked to see my weapon, and I produced my katana, which seemed satisfactory. He asked to see my armor. I didn’t have any. That got a deep furrow of his white brows. He asked to see my magic and I laughed in his face.

  “I don’t have any magic.”

  The big man looked perplexed. “Apologies, I am not to being so good at the language. The spells on your door…?”

  “That wasn’t me. That was my wife. She’s tried to show me how, but it just doesn’t click. No juice.” It took me a few more minutes of translation difficulties to get the man to understand that I just wasn’t a magic-user. “What’s the big deal? It can’t be that common or everyone would do it. Don’t you have any of these champions without any magic?”

  The answer was a resounding no. Not only was it unheard of, it was also unacceptable, and somehow I found myself on a plane to Ukraine, where Ivan believed I would learn something that would correct all I’d done wrong up to this point.

  I was still alive. Personally, I thought I’d done pretty damn good so far.

  Though we’d started on the outskirts of a small town, our little walk was rapidly leading us across a sparsely wooded area, mostly really old-growth trees. No brush, no saplings, oddly barren compared to the woods I was used to back in Missouri. It had to be almost midnight, local time, but my internal clock was so fried from crossing time zones, I didn’t know if it was Tuesday or raining out. Without the slight dusting of snow on the ground to reflect the distant moonlight, I’d have been walking into trees left and right.

  Ivan’s long strides were outdistancing me, given my still-weakened state.

  “Mr. Zelenko? Excuse me?” On he marched, and my chest burned as my newly healed ribs struggled to flex with my breath. “Hey!” Then he stopped, turning to look at me. “You’re gonna have to slow down. I’m not fully functional back here, remember?”

  That earned me a soft snort, and he set off again, not slowing one damn bit. Well…screw him. I’d take my sweet time. I ducked my head down into my coat, and concentrated on keeping Ivan’s tracks in my view, listening for the soft crunch of his footsteps on the light snow.

  I obviously wasn’t listening well enough, because I nearly walked into his broad back when he came to an abrupt stop. I leaned on a tree—oak maybe?—and tried to catch my breath.

  “Here. You will to be needing these.” He passed me a pair of binoculars so heavy I almost dropped them. He pointed with one gloved hand. “There.”

  Before us, the tree line ended abruptly, the stumps of recently hewn trees dotting a hillside. Under the snow, I could even see the drag marks where the logs had been moved, loaded into some waiting vehicle, I assumed. A logging site. “Really nice stumps you got here.” What the hell was I supposed to be looking for, exactly?

  “To be looking farther up the hill. To be watching.” He raised his own binoculars to his eyes, illustrating.

  With a sigh, I did the same.

  My view of the night suddenly flared in bright greens, outlining everything on that empty hillside in sharp detail. “Oh, cool…night vision!” The teenage boy inside me was thrilled to bits with my new toy.

  “Near the top of the ridge. What are you to be seeing?”

  Obediently, I looked. “There…Is that a woman up there?” Dialing in a bit on the binoculars, I could see that it was indeed a woman, standing alone near the top of the naked hill.

  “Her name is Svetlana.”

  Young. That was my first thought. If she was my age, I’d eat one of my gloves. Y’know, when I got somewhere warmer. Her hair color was impossible to determine, with the greenish night vision, but I could settle on “dark.” It was pulled back into a severe tail. She was dressed in what looked to be white ski gear: a parka, boots, her hood hanging down her back. Her gloves were slim, not bulky like most snow garb, but still white. And was that…“A sword?”

  “A shashka. A saber once used by the Cossacks.”

  It was impossible to see details on the weapon at this distance, but I could tell it had a slight curve, like my katana. It lacked a guard, though, and it was hard to tell where the hilt ended and the scabbard began. If it hadn’t been belted on like it was, I might have assumed it was simply a walking stick.

  If the woman knew we were there, watching her, she never once looked down the hill at us. Instead, she stood on one of the wider tree stumps, doing what looked like warm-up stretches. Still being as stiff and sore as I was after my injuries, I kind of envied her flexibility. Her stretchi
ng done, she bounced on her toes a little, rolling her head on her shoulders. Obviously, she was waiting for something, and it wasn’t us.

  “What exactly are we looking for, here?”

  “Quiet. It is to be starting now.”

  Okay, I don’t like being shushed like a hyper kid, but before I could object, something stirred on that hillside. I squinted through the binoculars, trying to make out just what was going on.

  For a moment, I thought that some small animals had come scampering out of the decimated tree stumps, capering across the ground around the woman’s feet. But it must not have been cute little bunny rabbits and squirrels, because she stepped back up on the tree stump, keeping her boots clear of the darting shadows. They weren’t very big, maybe the size of a football at the most, but she definitely didn’t want them touching her.

  In no time at all, there were dozens of them, probably more, just little balls of shadow flitting and flickering over the ground. I lost sight for just a moment when a full body shudder caught me out of nowhere, and I realized how really freakin’ cold I’d become. Beneath the warmest clothes I had, my skin was crawling with goose bumps, and my stomach cramped painfully.

  Putting the glasses back up to my eyes, I saw that the little shadows had gained some purpose, clambering over each other, stacking like interlocking blocks. Taller and taller it built, until it loomed over the woman like a thin, teetering tower. Each little segment had a pair of legs now, jointed insectile legs, and they waved and flexed, looking for purchase.

  “A centipede…” Crap, that’s what it looked like. A humongous centipede, scuttling over the ground as it came together piece by piece. And it wasn’t finished by any means. The darting shadows kept appearing, kept adding on, and the bug-thing kept getting longer, stretching out along the ground to support the length it had raised up in the air. We still hadn’t got to the head yet, and I was suddenly very certain that I didn’t want to see what that would look like. “We have to help her.”