“Hello again, Greg.” Annette held out her hand. It was listlessly shaken. Ugh, nothing makes my skin crawl more than a limp handshake. Well. Sea snakes, maybe. I am not a fan of legless reptiles that can kill a hundred men with a few milligrams of venom. “You remember David.”
“Yeah, Greg. You remember me.”
“We thought we’d come by to pay our respects!” Ugh. Tone it down. You are not going on a picnic. Ohhhhh, don’t think about picnics. Don’t think about cold fried chicken and potato salad and ice-cold lemonade and plates of brownies but not frosted brownies because the frosting ends up on the container and not on the brownies which is a goddamned tragedy every time.
The older woman shuffled forward to peer up at them. “I’m sorry, who are you?”
Greg bent down to mutter, “Ma, I told you about these guys. They’re looking into Terry’s death.”
“You’re with the police?” she asked, thin voice trembling.
“No.”
“Oh. Well. Thank you both for coming.” Then, after a once-over: “You look lovely, dear. Very…festive.”
Fucking salmon. “Our condolences,” Annette said. “This must be so difficult. Especially for you, Greg. You lost a client and a brother.”
“Half brother.” Greg flushed to the eyebrows. “Different dads.”
“Still.” Annette gestured to the photos. Brennan was featured prominently in nearly all of them: the Good Son. Lund was shunted off to the side with a frozen grin on his face: the Unfavorite. “It must be hard. Losing a sibling. And a son. Especially when your relationship was so clearly…complex.” See? See what I did there? That pause indicates that I know more than I’m telling! And that I’m only pretending to be polite! HOW DO YOU LIKE IT, MRS. LUND OR IS IT MRS. BRENNAN?
Greg let out a bark of laughter. “Complex. Sure. One way to put it. Fucking retarded, that’s another way.”
“Gregory.”
“Sorry, Ma.”
“You know I hate the f-word.”
“I know, Ma.” To Annette and David: “But he was. Sorry, I guess that’s not PC or whatever.”
“No, it’s not PC or whatever. And—oh.” Don’t gape at him like a moron. Don’t gape at all. But especially not like a moron. Which would be difficult, since things were falling into place with near-audible clicks.
Dev, that first day: He wasn’t a werewolf, he was a monster.
Lund himself: I’m kinda the white sheep of the family. They know my business is the most important thing to me.
Brennan: Lund was more interested in being a tough guy than paying attention.
“You told us Lund was a pain,” Annette said slowly. “When we were at your office, remember?”
“It was an hour and a half ago. So, yeah.”
“You said what happened to him was a real shame.”
“It was a shame,” Mrs. Lund (or Brennan) agreed with a vigorous nod.
“Yeah,” Greg said. “I mean, obviously.”
“But you weren’t talking about the attack, or even his murder,” Annette said. “You meant because he was a sport.”
“A what?”
“Your brother was a squib. A Shifter who couldn’t shift.” And before David could say anything, she added, “And don’t talk to me about the Harry Potter universe and the proprietary use of the word ‘squib.’”
“Nobody is talking about Harry Potter.”
“Because the term ‘squib’ predates those books by centuries as a term for a firearm malfunction.” At their stares, she elaborated. “When there isn’t enough powder? So the bullet gets stuck in the barrel? Also known as a pop-and-no-kick?”
“It’s also someone born to magicians who can’t do magic.” From David. “See? That’s just easier. Everybody gets it right away. You don’t have to explain anything. Or use phrases like ‘pop-and-no-kick.’”
“I just said to leave Harry Potter out of it! J. K. Rowling does not own the rights to the word ‘squib’!”
“J. K. Rowling can have the rights to any word she likes!”
“That’s enough,” Greg said sharply, which was timely because she and David were almost nose-to-nose.
“You’re right, that’s not important now.” She turned away from David’s dangerous irrationality. “So here it is. Your brother—”
“Come with me.”
Greg gripped Annette by the upper arm, and she let out a growl. Just a little one—it was a memorial, after all. But he let go of her like she’d grown hot. “For privacy,” he elaborated, and she summoned a pleasant smile for him, because though he was a creep, they needn’t put on a show for the mourners. If that’s what they were.
Greg led them to an office just off the chapel, shut the door, then turned back to them. “Half brother.”
“Pardon?”
“Terry was my half brother.”
“As well as a Shifter who couldn’t shift. And none of you ever let him forget it. Not even here. So many lovely family pictures all over the chapel! So many of them showing your other selves… It was amazing to see all those wolves.
“But not Terry Lund. He’s a biped in every one. See?” She held up the photo she’d been able to snag before Greg frog-marched them into the office. “See how he tries to smile like you weren’t killing him with your petty species-ist bullshit?”
Wait. Do I actually feel sorry for the late unmourned Lund?
Nope.
“I’ll bet if I shook your family tree, a few SAS members would fall out. Or maybe SAS-adjacent. What good is a Shifter if he’s locked into one shape, right? You thought he was inferior, and you never kept it a secret.”
“I’m an idiot,” David groaned. “It’s how Caro nearly killed him! Here’s this poor cub, malnourished and weak and dehydrated, and she ripped him up. We couldn’t figure it.”
“Poor cub?” Mrs. Brennan (or Mrs. Lund) said sharply.
“I never saw his other self. When I rolled up, I just figure he’d shifted back from the stress of the attack. But he couldn’t shift. And Caro knew it and went for him.”
“That’s it! That’s it exactly!” Annette seized David’s hands. “We figured it out!”
“We need to clutch at straws more often.” David laughed.
“I know!”
“Will you two shut up?”
“Oh. Right.” She cleared her throat. “Once again, our condolences.” She opened her mouth to let out another platitude when the approaching sirens cut her off. “Ohhhhhh, that’s not great.”
Greg grinned, so any thought that it was a police siren unrelated to her present career difficulty faded. “Hear that? I don’t think you’re gonna be able to make our appointment tomorrow, cutie.”
Which is why you suggested it.
She traded wide-eyed looks with David. She couldn’t say it.
She wouldn’t say it.
David said it. “Nadia’s the only one who knows we’re here.”
Fuck.
Chapter 30
“Pat?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“You are.”
“Yuck, you sound like Annette.”
“That’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told.”
Dev smirked. “Wait.”
“Annette sounds like me. It’s not the other way around,” Pat pointed out.
“Right.” Dev slid onto the stool across from Caro, who, after a Funyuns and ginger ale break, had begun writing again. A corner of Pat’s studio—well, it wasn’t really a corner since the building was round—was a mini-kitchen, complete with tiny microwave, stove, and oven, and the marble island they were sitting at had cupboards stuffed with canned food, snacks, and bottles of water. Pat had reassured them that they had sufficient supplies for well over a week, unless Annette dropped by.
&nb
sp; Dev hadn’t thought it was possible, but he was getting sick of Pringles. “So. Um. The thing I wanted to ask about. Your…”
Caro looked up and shook her head. Dev exercised his prerogative as a younger brother and ignored her. “…face,” he continued. “What happened? Did you know Annette back then?”
“It’s how I met Annette.”
“No shit?”
“Zero shit.”
“What happened?”
Caro set her pencil aside and propped her chin on her palm to listen.
Pat stopped pretending to sort his nail polish art wheels. “Clichés happened.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna need more than that. Please, por favor, s’il vous plaît.”
“Angry loner fell in with wrong crowd, blah-blah, stupid decisions followed by something-something, which culminated in more blah-blah, which I should have seen coming but didn’t, and Annette stumbled along just in time to get them off me. Literally. There was a rough chunk of sidewalk and she tripped.”
“Who were they?”
“SAS.”
“The species-ist guys?”
“The inbred morons who got so pissy about Stables calling themselves alpha predators that they decided genocide was a sane alternative. And this would normally be the part where I say ‘Don’t judge me’, except joining them was monumentally stupid and hateful so judge away.”
“Well.” Dev, nonplussed, cast about for a positive. “We all do dumb things when we’re kids.”
“It was six years ago.”
“Oh. When you were…”
“Not a kid.”
A short silence, and then Caro held up her pad:
Were you scared?
“Yes.”
Thought you’d die?
“Counted on it. But I consider myself lucky.”
Because you lived.
“Sorry, I’ll need a question mark on that.”
Because you lived?
“No. Well, that’s what I think now, but back then, I simply didn’t give a shit if they killed me. Death sounded like a vacation.”
Dev was shaking his head. “That’s messed up, Pat. Death is detention. Forever! And you don’t have anything to do and you can’t talk and you can’t leave your seat and the room smells like sweat and dust and there’s nothing good to eat. Forever.”
“Thanks for a fascinating glimpse into that bundle of neurons and synapses you call a brain, and I’m not being sarcastic. And you’re right—I had a fucked-up mind-set back then. But what I mean was that fortune intervened when they decided to kill me behind an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant. If they’d tried it behind a rice-cake manufacturer, I’d be dead.”
Caro snorted, then clapped a hand over her mouth while Dev bit his lip, hard, so he wouldn’t laugh.
Pat grinned. “It’s fine. Even bigotry and felony assault have their lighter side. Never tell Annette I said that. Anyway, she saved me, we got to know each other, I moved in to recover and never left, fin.”
“Is that why you have this silo? It’s your den, like the house is Annette’s?”
“Something like that. I’ve found since the attack that I’m…not agoraphobic, exactly. Agoraphobic-adjacent, I suppose. Apparently a near-death experience averted by a friendly stranger left me with a pile of PTSD. So I work from home, and if I feel the urge to shift, I stay on Annette’s land.”
“What did she do to them? The guys who hurt you?”
“Ate them” was the matter-of-fact reply.
Dev nearly toppled off of his stool. “Ate—you mean killed them.”
“Nope.” At Dev’s stunned expression, he added, “Werebears are opportunistic omnivores. The apex of the apex. Why d’you think there are so few of them? The region can only support so many.”
“But doesn’t that… Is she a cannibal, then?”
“How does a werebear eating a werewolf make her a cannibal? Do you need a dictionary?”
“It’s just… She’s so… I can’t even picture…” Dev shook his head. “I mean, she’s so nice. And she never loses her temper.”
“All those things can be true, Dev.”
He was still shaking his head. “Uh, no. They really can’t.”
“She loses her temper under a very specific set of circumstances. And when that happens, it’s just better to take a step back. Like, halfway across the country. And then find a bed to hide under. For a year.”
“Didn’t she get in trouble?”
“Nope. Clear case of coming to the rescue and then self-defense. There were three of them, after all.”
“Jeez!”
“It’s not against the law to defend yourself, or to eat a dead werewolf.”
“This is gross and interesting and weird.”
“Yes, it is.”
Caro, meanwhile, had been studying Pat as if she was planning to describe him to a police sketch artist. Her steady regard was…not unpleasant, exactly. Intense. If she was a speaker, it’d be the time for her to say something dramatic.
But she wasn’t a speaker. So she slapped two sketch pads down in front of Pat, who eyed them like he wasn’t sure if they were snakes or snacks. Then she gestured.
Please.
Pat started to read.
Chapter 31
“Oh, that bitch! She’s dead! And not ‘dead to me’ dead, but actually, biologically dead! I’m going to snuff out her life force as I stomp on her face.”
“I was kinda hoping I wasn’t right about that one,” David said, taking a hard left. “Gotta wonder about her motive, though.”
“And I’ve gotta wonder about my abysmal judge of character. Do you know how many alarm clocks the woman has bought me?”
“A hundred?”
“No goddamned wonder Caro won’t speak to anyone. Random case workers and judges are literally out to get her, and I’m floundering in my own ignorance! Case in point: using flounder instead of founder!”
“I think—”
“And I’ll tell you something else, I know I’ve seen Brennan before today. There’s something about the set of his head. Or shoulders. It’s driving me insane.”
“I can tell. You haven’t tried to back-seat drive at all.”
“This is no time for me to stroke your driving pride,” she snapped.
“Sorry.”
They were minutes away from the Minneapolis warehouse district, having fled the funeral home out the back exit to avoid the cops. The family pretending to mourn Lund didn’t hinder them, which was the only nice thing she could say about them.
Annette slumped in her seat and rubbed her temples. “All right, I need to figure this out. So there were syndicate members at the memorial, yes? Had to be. And they know we’ve been trying to expose them.”
“Couple of them must’ve dropped their teeth when we walked in.”
“Right. They’ve been hoping the system—our system—would rubber-stamp all of it with ‘case closed.’ And they’re desperate for Lund to take all the blame. That was the point of killing him in the first place. So they could escape detection and start over. So they can keep getting off. But Lund’s motivation was different from the syndicate’s. They were in it for their fuckstickesque idea of fun.”
“And Lund was in it for revenge.”
“Lund was in it for revenge.” She heard herself say the words, let her brain sift through them. This was what her brain had been trying to grasp in the Target changing room but had been too distracted by a salmon party dress and David’s mock turtleneck to do so. Lund’s campaign to kidnap, brutalize, and eventually dump juvenile Shifters wasn’t about trafficking at all. Because the most important thing in Terry Lund’s world was his work: exotic pets. He’d told them so himself.
“Caro tried to tell us,” she continued. “Well, she told Mama Mac. Remember? Ple
ase also know that I am not a pet. I will hurt anyone who tries to hurt me or mine.”
“Oh Christ.”
“Right. Those photos of abuse… He was breaking Shifter juveniles to be pets. House-breaking them. For syndicate members who wanted their very own pet Shifters. But perhaps also…”
“For Stables. Because what’s more exotic than a werewolf? What could be trendier? It’s the sociopathic version of tropical fish or a potbellied pig.”
Annette felt her gorge think about rising. Knock it off, gorge. “And…and that means that not only are there plenty of Stables in the world who know about us, they’re also happy to subjugate us.” Every time I think this case won’t get worse, it does.
“Which suited Lund fine.”
“More than fine. It’s why he would have thrown himself into providing for the syndicate. Can’t you picture it? Here was the perfect opportunity to show his family he wasn’t worthless. Not that it worked—Brennan was still desperately ashamed of his half brother. And given some of what we overheard at the memorial, he wasn’t the only family member who felt that way. So Lund grew up feeling like he wasn’t one of them. Like he was a genetic joke. Worthless. Stable.”
“He overcompensated,” David added. “Like all these scumbags do. And made his life all about punishing others for what his family did.”
“And because his real motive was so well hidden—even from himself, I think—no one would guess what he was up to. Even people who routinely see abuse. We never thought ‘pet store’ or ‘slavery.’ Hell, we had photographic proof of what he was doing and we still couldn’t connect the dots.”
“The names.” Scout. Lambchop.
Pet names.
“And if any Stables who weren’t in the syndicate saw the photos, they’d think it was animal cruelty at worst.”
Annette thought about how she’d blithely informed Caro “We’ve found out everything.” And how the girl had just looked at her. Because they hadn’t. And for all Caro knew, they never would. So while in Lund’s grip she’d gone mute out of self-preservation. And out of Lund’s grip, she stayed that way. Because there was no one, no one in the world she could trust. Except Dev. But how could a child—even one with Dev’s, um, gifts—help her?
Bears Behaving Badly Page 23
