Bite the Bullet

by L. A. Banks

  A very, very old Vampire stood slowly from his seat at the bench with seemingly great effort. The hall went still. Blue veins crisscrossed his bald scalp beneath paper-thin, death-gray skin, and he took his time adjusting the black velvet robes around his slight frame. With one finger he opened the carved box that sat at the front of the U-bend in the table, then stood back. A heavy onyx-and-marble gavel with strange markings on it flipped out of the enclosure and smashed itself against the wood. The cracking sound that echoed through the hall was like a strike of lightning, and then the enchanted gavel threw its head back and began shouting.

  “Hear ye, hear ye, welcome all to the ten-thousandth, two-hundredth and eighty-eighth year of the United Council of Entities. Vlad Temps is again this year’s presiding elder. Are there any challenges before the crier reads the minutes?”

  Silence echoed in the great hall behind the gavel’s voice. Sasha watched the old Vampire’s face, noting the very subtle smirk it now held. The venom that threaded through her as she watched his arrogant confidence almost foolishly made her stand. It was hard not to wonder how long the Vamps had the UCE on lock with their ruthless power paradigms. She glimpsed their box, and they were strangely the most handsome group of entities she’d laid eyes on . . . genteel even. They were as politically correct as one could be, all nationalities represented, everyone wearing understated, very expensive designer tuxedos and gowns—women dripping hundreds of thousands of dollars in jewels or more, perhaps enough to make Hollywood’s best and most beautiful gag.

  Baron Geoff Montague, who’d been her informant in South Korea just before Shogun had pulled her from his mental clutches, gave her a pleasant nod and a knowing smile. Handsome rat bastard. Sasha’s gaze shot around the room. Others felt like she did, she could tell. But no one was going to put their neck, literally, on the line. Maybe it didn’t matter who presided over the Conference, but something about Vampires consistently winning that coveted role didn’t seem right, especially when they’d just been involved in some very foul and underhanded events.

  Sasha sat back, allowing momentary defeat to claim her. Hunter squeezed her hand tightly and then let it go to grip his armrests. It wasn’t her place to disrupt things. The fact that the thought had even crossed her mind made her want to slap her own face—was she trippin’? Disgust filled many eyes, but clearly no one was going to challenge the old bastard.

  Complete silence answered the gavel’s question. A coal-black mermaid with glistening, opalescent scales, long aqua hair, and emerald eyes was brought down the center aisle in the arms of a tanned, very nude and very buff male nautilus water sprite. Her huge fan tail was the only thing that shielded his pride and his expression was utterly zombified. The siren lifted a large nautilus shell to her lips and drew in a deep breath, closing her eyes until her pale pink lashes dusted her regal cheeks.

  “No!” Hunter stood so quickly he toppled his chair.

  The Titan almost dropped the crier when he snapped out of his daze, seeming bewildered as to what to do. Vampires stood slowly in their boxes and leisurely took off their gloves. Hunter’s retinue was on their feet, but the expressions on their faces were very unsure. Sasha stood too, completely at a loss.

  One thing she did notice was Dragons had moved into place like huge bouncers, and the Fae had sent several archers up the side aisles. They’d drawn like lightning; silver arrows were in quivers. She so badly wanted to ask Hunter, Baby, do you know what you’re doing?

  “Your complaint, sir?” the old Vampire said in a patronizingly patient tone.

  “Due to the duplicitous nature of the species and recent events that could have cost catastrophic losses of the wolf clans, and have—as well as caused human collateral damage, thus outings into the general human knowledge base—the North American Federation of Clans challenges the Vampire Cartel’s leadership at this conference this year.”

  “Due to our duplicitous nature?” a smooth, lilting voice said from the Vampire box. “But, mon ami . . . duplicity . . . well . . . that is part of our culture.”

  Subdued laughter created a low, charming resonance within the Vampire box.

  “Mr. Hunter . . . you are aware that you must have evidence?” The elderly Vampire smiled a tight, toothy smile, but his eyes burned black with rage from the affront. “I suggest you throw down that particular gauntlet when you have proof—or a good attorney.” He looked at the Vampire box. “How many attorneys do we have present tonight—a show of hands?” Half the box responded and then laughed.

  “We’ll lend you one of ours,” someone called out from the Vampire box.

  “You could always try to get pictures of us caught in wrongdoing, however,” another threw in.

  The elderly Vampire sat down chuckling, drawing the other Vampires into satisfied snickers, dismissing Hunter with a wave of his hand. “But now that you mention it, there was a disturbance that could have your species brought up on—”

  “Let’s do this the old-fashioned way,” Hunter growled.

  Even Silver Hawk landed a hand on Hunter’s shoulder, but he shrugged it off.

  “Not fifteen minutes past midnight and you already have a death wish?” The old Vampire stood slowly, his black gaze narrowed. “We try to have these meetings after peak full moon phase so you dogs can at least maintain some of your human composure.”

  “He’s got proof,” Sasha said, not sure when her brain had fled her skull.

  “Oh . . . this should be very interesting,” the presiding elder said as murmurs now filled the great hall. “But I’m sorry, mates are—”

  “I’m not his mate—I’m his enforcer.”

  The older Vampire hissed, causing silence to cloak the hall. “Same clan, therefore not allowed.”

  “You said pictures,” Sasha spat back. “I’ve got ’em. U.S. Military, Special Forces, Paranormal Containment Unit, sir!” Sarcasm had a stranglehold on her and she saluted him like he was a five-star general and stepped forward. If she’d been armed, she would have shot him, just because. “That’s right, even though you undead bastards don’t photograph, the lack of photo image is what nails you. I can prove through military surveillance that ‘nothing’ opened a lab vault with infected Werewolf toxin in it and removed it from our labs.”

  The Fae peacekeeping forces turned their arrows toward the Vampire box now, and she also saw they had vials of liquid that she was sure had to be holy water, locked and loaded and ready to go.

  “But that—”

  “And,” Sasha said, practically leaning over the edge of her box as she cut off the bench president, “I have the synapse tracks of a meeting of the minds with Baron Geoff Montague.” She smiled a wicked smile as his fellow Vampires sneered. “Isn’t that right that you can’t purge a Shadow Wolf memory . . . that you boys are afraid to go in because if you get trapped there by an angry wolf, your psyches can be forever damaged?”

  Sasha paced, watching the Shadow Wolves all begin to snarl. “Uh-huh . . . I thought so. But, see, my momma was from Louisiana—a seer.” She spun on Geoff and blew him a kiss and made her voice dip to a syrupy Southern accent. “Didn’t know that, did ya, suga? But I bet if one of these nice psychic, neutral Fae folk goes into my brain, they’ll be able to read some of the nasty little things you left behind in my pretty little head . . . things I might not have even remembered.”

  “This is an outrage!” Geoff bellowed, flinging his white gloves down and yanking off his bow tie.

  “You wanna do this Old World style?” Hunter growled, and transitioned so quickly into his wolf that he hadn’t drawn a breath.

  “Fliers up!” the old Vampire shouted.

  “Not until the story is told.” A white-coated wolf shed his purple Conference robes in a hard, furious transformation and began stalking down the center of the polished table.

  “Southeast Asia will testify. We saw the results and fought with the Shadows!” Shogun had transformed and was now precariously walking the rim of his group’s box.

&n
bsp; Every Shadow Wolf in the house transformed, creating a ripple effect of howls of support from the Werewolf Federations. Only Sasha and Silver Hawk remained in their human forms. When the elderly Vampire started to raise his finger, a black electric charge crackling at the tip of it, Fae in the rafters shook their heads no and then motioned to the hundreds of already transformed wolves.

  “I have a full medical team at the hospital that saw one of yours breach a human facility to get to me tonight for my Shadow blood and the antitoxin that would be made from my grandson’s blood,” Silver Hawk said. He removed a pouch from his suede jacket and flung it to a peacekeeper to take to the bench. “His ashes are in there. Smell them, and see if he is indeed from your own coven.”

  “That’s right,” Sasha yelled. “We know for a fact that Vampires aided and abetted rogue Shadow Wolves, but they also poisoned Shadow Wolf food sources. Everywhere we turned, there was Vampire tracer at the sites, and the one thing that is inarguable—we’re the best trackers on the planet. We know what we scented, and it was undead.”

  “You kidnapped our Crow Shadow,” Silver Hawk said. “Seers of the Fae can go into his mind and give them a clear picture that cannot be altered. His silver aura requires that his mind hold the truth. Test him for a lie.” Silver Hawk looked around. “Scent the air, wolf packs and clan brothers, and then unite. Do you smell a lie on us, or them?”

  Angry barks and howls filled the hall. Hunter leaped onto the opposite end of the bench. Fae archers pounded each other’s fists. Dragons shot fire-warning blasts to keep the wolves from instantly going to war, but they were only warning blasts. Gargoyles bickered and shook their heads, and disgruntled Fairies and Pixies began pluming gray sprinkles of rage. The phantom mist grew dark and moaned. Yeti bellowed from behind hidden screens and Unicorns kicked the benches over.

  The gavel slammed the table as even elders at the bench paced, arguing among themselves.

  “You are the liar,” Vlad Temps shouted at Sasha. “We do not have to take indignities from a half-human aura-deformed bitch! You don’t even have the protective silver band in your aura that would guard the truth—and you call yourself a she-Shadow to challenge my people? To challenge me? What moonlight madness is this coming from the North American Shadow Federation clan leader? Tell me it is not that you are so smitten that as a clan leader you cannot see how you’ve been led astray by the human military—an organization that views our kind as lab experiments.”

  Vlad Temps spit a greenish slime on the bench that sizzled with hundreds of years of hatred. The pandemonium in the hall went still. All eyes fell on Sasha. Hunter loped back to her side and transformed to argue for her, but she held up her hand.

  She shook her head and chuckled, walking out of the box into the center aisle. “Just like a lowlife Vampire in the end. Twisting words, changing the facts as a diversion. Fact. I was made in a test tube. Fact. My DNA is Shadow Wolf, a heritage of which I am proud. Yes, fact, the military jerked with my conception, but I know who I am.” She swept her arms out and threw her head back and howled. “When you have nothing to hide, no one can make you cringe from your truth!”

  “She was made, not conceived. Made, not born,” a low Shadow Wolf voice rumbled through the crowd.

  “The prophecy, man . . .” another voice rumbled through the Werewolf ranks.

  “Bringing brothers together, isn’t that how it goes?” someone else said from the back.

  “My wife works ER with the humans,” Ethan shouted from the Fae boxes. “We are neutral, have always been that. But what we have seen at the hands of the demon-infected and the Vampires who colluded with them has been a travesty!”

  And uproar of Fae voices in a rare, unified bloc rang out. The members of the Order of the Dragon began chanting, “Oust, oust, oust, oust!”

  “I am Fae, a healer nurse at Tulane,” Margaret said and then held her husband Ethan’s arm. “We are peaceful people; we have children, and have always been terrorized by what could happen, Vampire retaliation. But to see what I saw in that hospital . . . to see how humans, too, could be hurt if this virus got out—and I saw the honor of the Shadows, the lieutenant . . . the Werewolves, all pulling together, human and supernatural forces to stop a scourge. If I do not speak up, we’ll all never be safe. Take my testimony!”

  “Order of the Dragon will back you up. If anything happens . . . to the nurse and the bar owner, we’ll start opening up graves to daylight,” a big, burly Dragon said and then sent a flaming nostril snort toward the Vampire box.

  “The gavel has been passed to the Shadow and Werewolf clan elders to co-serve for the current year!” the gavel shrieked. “With a bloodless coup, will this meeting, please, people, now come to order?”

  Hunter shifted and leaped onto the Vampire box rim with a snarl and began stalking toward Geoff. Shogun pinned the Vampire diplomats in from the other side. Within seconds they had all vaporized and shot to the exit as a unit, snarling. Their elder stood erect and smoothed down his robes, his eyes now raging blackness as he levitated two inches off the floor before walking on plumes of smoke to vacate his seat at the bench.

  “We withdraw our attendance this year,” he said in a hissing murmur. “Perhaps once clearer heads prevail and you have better evidence, we will grace you with our return. Until then, adieu.”

  Sasha called out to the Vampires’ disappearing forms, her voice loud and clear and strident with unspent fury. “We don’t need your presence here, if you’re going to behave like demons! Your goal has always been to make the wolf clans fight each other so that you wouldn’t have a large enough voting bloc—and you almost succeeded. You’ve kept the Fae and other supernaturals afraid of your power that has tentacles everywhere, strangling the life from the smallest and the weakest. But the truth will always out. Tonight is the way of the wolf!”

  Sasha threw her head back and howled and a cacophony of voices joined in with hers—even from those who, technically, weren’t wolves.

  Three weeks later . . .

  “It’s not so bad having to hang out in the Big Easy until the next full moon, just to be sure nothing untoward surfaces while Doc works on more antitoxin.”

  “New Orleans is growing on me,” Hunter said with a deep chuckle. “Wonder why that is?”

  “Wonder how we got stuck right smack in the middle of Vamp country, loving it?” She smiled and kissed him. “But we do need to watch our backs.”

  “So what else is new?” he said with a nonplussed sigh. “The Vampires are always gonna be pissy with us, we needed to do a lot of damage control, and frankly the Shadow packs need to be still for a while to heal from the significant losses. I‘m tired of being on the move.”

  “I hear you,” she murmured. “I might even try to do some digging and look up family . . . who knows? It’s good that Doc is here with the team—I know they are loving New Orleans food and nightlife. This ain’t NORAD by a long shot.”

  She rolled over and laid her head on Hunter’s bare chest, listening to his heartbeat and hoping he would just let time heal him, too. “You know, sometimes you just have to be still and listen to the trees.”

  “You sound like Silver Hawk,” Hunter said with a weary sigh, stroking her exposed back. “He needs time to get stronger physically before we move him away from the doctors that have learned his body . . . so I suppose it’s all good. I just know we need to rebuild the packs, reorganize the territories, bury the dead in righteous ceremonies . . . make sure the contagion is over. Nothing can ever threaten our people like this again.”

  She nodded, agreeing without words with all that he’d said, but she also knew it was a matter of timing. The main thing that he’d failed to mention was his capacity to shift had yet to be tested on a consistent basis. He’d done it under duress at the Conference, but after that hadn’t been as successful . . . his wolf came very, very slowly these days. She knew that was at the core of all things. In Hunter’s mind, how could he lead if he couldn’t become the alpha wolf on demand
? She didn’t know the answer for him, but knew that it lay partly in his gaining the confidence to try again, and again, until he worked the metaphysical muscle back to its original stamina.

  But, how could she even begin to ask him to attempt something that could be so painful, if she was even afraid for him? There was so much adrenaline and hype happening at the Conference; sure, he’d flipped in and out as smoothly as before. But it could have been disastrous, and every attempted shape-shift since had been almost like his joints had become arthritically brittle until he just stopped trying.

  “You know,” Sasha said quietly after a while, talking to Hunter’s massive chest before looking up into his sad gaze. “We lost a lot, but we gained a lot.”

  “Now you really sound like my grandfather.” He tried to smile but she saw the strain in it.

  “We found out who was core to the family. Those we saved. We found out who was not. Those we lost. We found out what poison delivery systems the Vamps and rogue Shadows used. We gained some human allies in this state and even bigger allies at the UCE—avoiding a Werewolf–Shadow Wolf civil war. We routed out some nasty Vamps, pulled off a bloodless Conference coup, and got rid of a region full of infected wolves. We saved Silver Hawk . . . Crow Shadow . . . and, frankly, you. So, we’ll rebuild. Not bad for a day’s work.”

  He smiled at her and stroked her hair. “Like the commercial says, ‘Marines get more done before five A.M. than most people do all day,’ huh?”

  “Yep.” She kissed him. “But I’m PCU—we do our thing at night.”

  He nodded and took her mouth slowly and then pulled back from the kiss. “If I had to be stuck in one form or another, I’m glad it’s this one.” His voice was a low rumble that reverberated through her chest.