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    Hound of Winter
    Hound of Winter
    Hound of Winter
    Ebook51 pages50 minutes

    Hound of Winter

    By Jon Nichols

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    About this ebook

    A day can mean everything in the world to one person.
    To someone else...it’s just Tuesday.
    Blaine is a damaged soldier. He has a business transaction with a London escort, an Asian goddess named Alana. Snow is falling and she asks him to spend the night and for a while, Blaine knows pleasure and refuge from pain.
    A few hours later and Alana is gone. Blaine sees her leaving with a boss in the Russian mafia. Thinking that she couldn’t have left him by choice, Blaine goes after her. He’ll kill his way back to her, march through the worst winter Europe has ever seen, anything...just to be back in those arms.

    But Alana may not be the kind of dame Blaine thinks she is. Doesn’t matter. He’s going to find her...and leave bodies in the snowdrifts behind him.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJon Nichols
    Release dateJun 20, 2012
    ISBN9781476330945
    Hound of Winter
    Author

    Jon Nichols

    Science fiction writer and Fortean researcher living in the Chicago area.

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      Book preview

      Hound of Winter - Jon Nichols

      Hound of Winter

      Jon Nichols

      Copyright 2012 by Jon Nichols

      Smashwords Edition

      Hound of Winter

      by

      Jon Nichols

      I am a cliché. So is she.

      Funny thing about clichés. They exist because there’s truth to them.

      They are the things we see everywhere. That’s why they become tedious and trite. That’s why they bore us like tomes of tax laws or bland bowls of oatmeal. But there really are damaged tough guys on the edge. There really are whores with hearts of gold.

      It’s about 11:05 on a Chicago winter’s night. I’m in a bar writing all this down, just so I can get it out (there’s another cliché. I told you they’re everywhere. Might as well’ve started this out with it was a dark and stormy night.) The house band went on about five minutes ago and this paper already smells like a beer. I reach for my glass, but it’s empty. I light up a smoke instead.

      The fake chemical smell of perfume hits my nose. From the corner of my left eye, I see a woman take the stool. She leans against the bar, watching the band play but keeping her body open to me. The bar lights are dim but I notice blonde curls on bare shoulders and a black strapless dress. She reminds of an actress I saw in a porno movie once during deployment.

      I think the woman says something to me. Even if I were listening I wouldn’t have known what she said. The band drowns out everything else as the singer screams through his nasal passages about why we shouldn’t stop believing. I keep writing; just losing myself in this pad of yellow, green-striped paper that reeks of Genuine Draft. A brown-eyed girl drifts into my mind’s eye…and the woman next to me evaporates. There is a gauzy cocoon around my head, one woven of memory and alloyed with dreams.

      Fingers slap the bar. I catch the blonde curls bouncing as she storms away. The bartender, a young kid with his black hair shaved down and the pencil-thin beard of trendiness on his jawline, steps in front of me on the other side of the bar.

      I think she just wanted to talk to you, he says.

      There’s a smile on his face. A sick one, the kind people have when they want to say you’ve done something stupid.

      I’m not throwing away love for a night’s romance, I say.

      My head goes down. My pen meets the pad. I hope he takes the hint. If he doesn’t, things could go south in a hurry. This problem I have, with drinking, and my temper…

      You could’ve…said something, the bartender persists and even adds a laugh.

      I vault up. The barstool falls to the floor behind me. The kid goes white as a ghost.

      He doesn’t know what I am. That laugh and smile…it takes everything I have not to take my beer glass and bust it over the bar, then slice the jagged edge across his throat before he even knows what hit him. He doesn’t know what I can do. Not like those six in Cambodia know. Yeah, that op was a wet one. And this kid could learn all about it. For a few seconds, all I want in the world is to feel his body go lifeless in my hands. Righteous.

      Then I think of her. Her almond angel face drifts into view and everything else just goes away.

      ***

      This whole thing started in Berlin, about a month after Baghdad with the sand still in my head. It might not seem like the proper beginning, but to me it is. So don’t try me.

      I tasted schnitzel in the back of my throat as I ran. I shouldn’t have eaten, not when there could have been a runner. But I was hungry. And I had to leave half the meal behind. A waste.

      Russians. Seems like every job has something to do with them these days. Solntsevskaya Bratva. Russian Mafia. Their fingers are in more pies than anyone knows. The punk I ran after in Berlin, Stripey, was one of them.

      I

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