Bite Back 05 - Angel Stakes

by Mark Henwick

  “Do you need to take Tom and a couple of the others to the club?”

  “No. I don’t want to make it any more tense than it will be.”

  Just Yelena, Bian and me.

  They’d turned off their commset at the club, and no one was answering their cells. We needed to go now. At this time of night, traffic would be lighter.

  I was worried it would still take too long.

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  Club Vasana looked deceptively quiet, but the parking lot was full.

  The two Altau security guards that Tom had sent were playing doorman and doorwoman. They’d been dressed in the club’s gray top hat and tails uniform, but their jackets had been left looser than Dominé would usually allow. I saw the slight bulge that told me they were both wearing their shoulder holsters.

  “Ladies, welcome to Club Vasana,” they said, laughing, taking off their top hats and bowing us in through the doors.

  Well, they seemed to be enjoying themselves.

  “I guess no one’s dead, then,” I said.

  “It got pretty tense for a while,” the guy said. “But they all went back to the office and it’s been quiet since.”

  “Dominé kept a lid on it?”

  They looked at each other and laughed again.

  “Y’know, to tell the truth,” the woman said, “it was more Vera.”

  I felt a stir of unease. Vera was good at keeping people calm. I’d seen plenty of evidence of that back in Ops 4-10. And she was a favorite at House Altau—people would talk freely to her in a way that they seldom did to others.

  But she’d arrived in Denver with a serious bullet wound, and Bian’s emergency treatment with its overdose of euphorics had seemingly left her with a tendency to say the oddest things. For instance, she’d told me the Athanate were angels, except the ones that were devils.

  What if she came out with the wrong comment at the wrong moment? What if Rita was on a knife edge?

  We thanked the guards and trotted down to the office, with me leading the way.

  All around us, Club Vasana did what it did best: sex—real or fantasy.

  “Did you see that?” Bian said, but I was too focused on getting to Dominé’s office.

  As we approached, my worst fears seemed justified. I could hear shouting even through the thick barrier of the door.

  Chapter 26

  Haz was leaning over Dominé’s conference table, almost nose to nose with Rita. She was making most of the noise. Rita was making some kind of sign with her hands. Dante was hanging onto Haz’s arm and Yelena was sprawled in a chair crying with laughter.

  What the hell?

  Vera was calling for calm, without success.

  Dominé jumped up, looking guilty.

  “Ah. Amber. I apologize.”

  “What for? What on earth is going on?”

  “This is absolutely my fault. I should never have allowed it.” She gave an embarrassed cough as Haz and Rita finally registered we were there and sat down, red-faced. “We thought while we waited for you, we could pass the time with champagne and charades.”

  Say what? She’d invited a half-crazed were-cougar to play parlor games?

  Dominé read my dumbfounded look, and raised one arched eyebrow. “I didn’t think it would be so…competitive.”

  I registered the glasses on the table, the dark green bottles upended into the ice buckets. Then I tried to imagine Haz, Yelena, and Rita miming movie titles and pop song lyrics. Twilight? Werewolves of London?

  I flopped down in the chair next to Yelena and dissolved in laughter. I could feel some of the tension seeping out of me.

  “Whose idea was this?” I managed to ask.

  Everyone’s head swiveled toward Vera, who gave me one of her bright smiles.

  “Fantastic,” I said, standing, and pulled Rita up into a hug. “Great to see you guys.”

  She was stiff, but she did hug me back and murmured an inaudible greeting.

  I had to practically lift Haz out of her chair to hug her and she didn’t say anything. Whether that was from embarrassment or wariness, I wasn’t sure.

  “I’d like to introduce a friend of mine.” I turned and smiled. “Bian Hwa Trang, House Trang.”

  Yelena raised her eyebrows at the new title.

  Bian stepped forward and offered an Athanate greeting to Rita, kissing her neck. I was surprised. Athanate almost never kissed necks with non-Athanate. But to the right person, it was an honor. Bian had judged it well, and Rita seemed to appreciate it for what it was. She returned the kiss and gently pulled Bian’s collar to one side. Her eyes swept down the leopard skin tattoo over Bian’s neck and shoulders.

  She made a little noise in her throat and stepped back, looking Bian in the eye.

  Both of them were testing the air, weighing the presence of the other.

  Rita’s green eyes had shaded toward cougar.

  Yelena sat forward, not laughing at all now. A stone-cold sober Rita was unpredictable. Drunk on champagne, who knew what she might do?

  As it turned out, nothing. I had the suspicion that Rita’s and Bian’s testing of each other was far from finished, but for now, Rita sat back down while Bian turned to the other Albuquerque Were.

  Haz wasn’t going to allow an Athanate anywhere near her neck. She stuck her hand out like a barrier.

  Bian shook it. “Welcome to LA,” she said. She kept hold of Haz’s hand a moment longer than necessary.

  Haz and Rita couldn’t have been more dissimilar. Haz was fang-phobic. Rita had had an Athanate lover at some stage before House Romero’s betrayal. Haz was dressed in shabby biker-chick leathers and boots, her jacket open to display a T-shirt with a picture of a flaming skull overlaid on a Harley. Her blue-black hair was held back by a scarlet bandana. Rita wore elegant, skin-tight trousers and a blue shirt with a tailored jacket hitched over her chair. Her tawny hair had that artless just-out-of-bed look that hairdressers charge a fortune to replicate.

  “So, you were saving up the serious talk for me.” I pulled up a chair and sat down at the table.

  “I think it’d be a good idea if I make coffee, if I may,” Vera said to Dominé. “Everyone?”

  We all nodded.

  “I’ll help,” Dante said. “There’s a machine in the kitchen, but it’s all the way on the other side and you might take a wrong turn. Who knows what you might see.”

  Vera laughed and they left together. It felt good to see my House like that.

  Dominé cleared her throat and looked around the table.

  “Although I wasn’t warned beforehand, this visit from Albuquerque was anticipated,” Dominé said. “You know the purpose—to make connections with the local pack.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Why don’t you explain about the packs—”

  “Hold it. Explain why you’ve taken her into your House first,” Haz interrupted.

  All the humor of the charades game was gone.

  I stared her down. “No association existed between you and Dominé, if that’s what you’re hinting at. You sold the club protection in Albuquerque, and part of the deal was that she would introduce you to the pack in LA. As it turns out, LA isn’t run like Albuquerque, and now she’s part of the Athanate.”

  “She accepted an obligation from us,” Rita said.

  “And House Farrell will honor it. But just as a matter of interest, why are you looking to make contact in LA?”

  Rita and Haz exchanged glances.

  “I am your associate,” I pointed out.

  Their alpha, Zane, had demanded an association between Pack Deauville and the Albuquerque pack. He wanted to be able to visit Denver. Meet with Altau.

  Well, that cut both ways; associated packs were supposed to talk freely. The Albuquerque pack owed me some answers.

  They didn’t try and deny it.

  Rita spoke for them: “We’re forming alliances against the Confederation…and any other group large enough to threaten us individually. We’re most of the way
there with the packs in Arizona.” She shrugged. “LA seemed a logical next step.”

  “Not Oklahoma? Texas?”

  Haz frowned at me as if I should know. “You’re allied with Cimarron. There’s no way around a pack that size for us to get into Oklahoma or Kansas.”

  By ‘you’, she had to mean the Denver pack, rather than Alex and me.

  “And Texas?”

  “We’re in western Texas,” Rita admitted.

  “And if you think we’re crazy…” Haz muttered, but stopped at a look from Rita.

  “You have a name for this group?” Yelena asked.

  Rita shrugged. “League of Southern Packs.”

  Vera and Dante came back with a tray of coffee mugs. They came through the door with smiles, but caught the renewed tension and just handed the mugs out silently.

  I nodded at Dominé. “Go ahead.”

  “Hela! The packs are very confusing in Los Angeles,” she said to the Albuquerque Were. “There are four or five packs in the county. They cooperate, of necessity, but they do not like each other.” She sipped her coffee. “Down in this part, we’re in the territory of the pack Redondo. There’s a Long Beach pack, and the biggest of all in LA is the Pasadena pack. I don’t know the others.”

  “Just finding that out got a reaction,” I interrupted. “The Pasadena pack decided Dominé was a security risk and sent a hit squad yesterday.”

  Rita sat forward, a growl escaping her. “What happened?”

  I guessed part of the problem with this new arrangement was that Rita did regard Dominé as somehow part of the Albuquerque pack, and she felt the need to defend her.

  Mine, my Athanate said. Aloud: “We sent them back, hurt but alive, with a message that Club Vasana is part of House Altau.”

  Haz nodded. “The right thing to do. His wolves will heal, but deaths would have forced Pasadena to attack again.”

  “That obligation…” Rita prompted.

  “Alex is trying to set up a meeting with all the alphas right now.” I shrugged. “I don’t see why you can’t come along.”

  “Well, I can,” Bian said. “It sounds like it’s going to be tense enough as it is.”

  She was probably right.

  Haz and Rita looked pissed.

  “However…” Bian pushed her empty mug away and leaned her elbows on the table.

  She had everyone’s attention.

  “If your pack is an associate of Altau, say through an agreement reached with the Altau sub-House in Albuquerque…”

  Rita’s lips pulled back in a snarl. “There’s no way we’re associated with House Romero. Or Amaral.”

  “They’re gone,” Bian said. “The new Athanate House in Albuquerque is House Trang.”

  “Since—”

  “Since today,” I said. Both Rita and Haz looked at Bian with a new level of concentration, but I sensed they wouldn’t be pushed into anything, and Zane wasn’t here anyway. “Let’s hold that for the moment. Take the pressure off and say this is just a preparatory meeting with all interested parties, including Were and Athanate.”

  Rita pondered it and nodded. “I’ll need to call Zane and update him,” she said.

  “Fine. You may want to come back with me and meet some of the Long Beach pack we captured earlier. Alex is pumping them for information to set up the meeting now, and it’ll be useful to see how they react to you.”

  Haz and Rita both agreed, and Dante took them to the next-door office to make their call. I hoped Zane didn’t mind being woken at this hour.

  Dominé congratulated Bian on her appointment. “And you must use Club Vasana as a base in Albuquerque until you’ve found your way around,” she said.

  I smirked. Bian wouldn’t let it distract her from her task, but it would be interesting if they decided to hold one of their Blood Orchid nights at the club—their name for a vampire-themed party. It made me laugh to think of her dancing her way through the horde of fake vampires, everyone else flashing their fake fangs at each other.

  Time was pressing on and we started to move as soon as Rita and Haz finished their call to Zane.

  Dominé and Dante would stay at the club until it closed just before the rest of LA woke to breakfast. The Altau guards on the door would escort them back to the house in Hollywood Hills, where we’d meet them when we were finished with the Long Beach Were.

  In short order, the rest of us met down in front of the black box truck that Rita and Haz had arrived in.

  “It is good to see you, Amber,” Rita said. “Things always happen when you’re around.”

  “Thanks. I think.”

  “But I can’t claim to miss you as much as Zane does.” Rita was laughing at Haz, who was scowling. “Yeah,” she went on. “He even sent you some presents.”

  She opened a door and reached underneath the passenger seat. She picked up a box and pulled out a small, heavy bundle, which looked as if it was wrapped in bulky, stiff cloth.

  I could smell gun oil. Zane was giving me a gun as a present?

  Rita held it in one hand and used the other to flick the folds of cloth back. Except it wasn’t a cloth, it was my battered old stockman’s coat. And inside…

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “Christmas came early.”

  She was holding my old Heckler Koch Mk23 in its shoulder holster. The one I’d lost when I’d been captured by Vega Martine’s ninja nuns at the convent outside Taos. I’d thought it was gone forever.

  I took the familiar weight on my hand, uncertain what to say. It had even been cleaned and oiled.

  “We found it when we went there to clean up. Couldn’t leave it behind.”

  I looked up. “Anything else at the convent? Wind River Were? Bodies? Prisoners?”

  “No one alive but the prisoners, and not all of them, either.” Her voice took on a snarl. “The women from Ute Mountain.”

  Who’d been kept as sex slaves by the Gold Hill pack when they destroyed the Ute Mountain pack.

  I’d done what I could to stop that when I’d been captured. But as a pack, Ute Mountain was just as bad as Gold Hill. All the Were in them, including the women, had been outcast.

  “What did you do with the survivors?” I asked, not sure I wanted the answer.

  “We didn’t kill them,” she said. “They’re on a ranch. Under observation. If they aren’t rogue, we’ll offer them a place in the pack.”

  And if not, they’d end up dead. I couldn’t really ask for more from the Albuquerque pack.

  While Rita had been talking to me, Haz had put a ramp up against the back of the van and she was wheeling a motorcycle out from the back.

  It was the Kawasaki street legal trail bike that Tullah and I had borrowed from Drake in Santa Fe.

  Haz kicked the side stand down, not at all happy about Zane’s gifts.

  Much as I enjoyed riding the Kawasaki, I wasn’t exactly happy either.

  “That’s not my motorcycle,” I said.

  “It is now,” Rita said. “Zane bought it from Drake.”

  “What? Seriously?”

  “Yup.”

  “What does Zane want? Apart from what he was trying to get last time?”

  As in, a way into my pants.

  Rita’s grin widened and Haz’s scowl deepened.

  “You’ll have to take it up with him,” Rita said.

  “What about the Hill Bitch?” Tullah and I had left my monster pickup with Drake at his works for him to make it ‘less distinctive’; which meant repairing the thousands of dents and repainting it.

  She shrugged. “Your witchy friend Tullah picked it up. I think she drove it back to Denver.”

  Despite my initial reluctance, having the Kawasaki was a bonus. It took too long to get anywhere in LA by car. The bike should be much better.

  And it wasn’t going to buy Zane’s way into my pants, if that really was his intention.

  “We should be going,” I said. “I’ll take the bike.”

  “I need to stay with you,” Yelena said imm
ediately.

  “I’ll ride with you in your truck, if that’s okay?” Bian raised her eyebrows at Rita.

  It’d be smart if she got off to a good start with the Albuquerque Were.

  Haz was shaking her head, but Rita just waved at Bian to climb in.

  That left Vera, and the Altau patrol van we’d arrived in.

  I was worried about that, but Yelena had beaten me to it.

  “You okay driving this?” Yelena asked Vera, nodding at the van.

  “Of course. Really, Yelena, you worry so.”

  “Only about you. It’s—”

  “It’s been ages. I am healed. Thanks to you and Bian.”

  “And Naryn.”

  “Well, we’ll just skip that.”

  Yelena laughed, gave Vera a quick hug and kissed her.

  Oh, my God. I needed to reprogram my mental image of Vera.

  The sprightly Colonel’s wife in her late fifties had gone, replaced by a woman whose face and body looked more like she was in her early forties. Her gray hair showed dark roots. She was vigorous and alert. And looking younger every day.

  She was Yelena’s kin, and all that implied.

  I needed to get Colonel Laine back and overcome his phobia of being bitten.

  Another line on the to-do list.

  I checked that I had a full tank, and started the bike. Yelena slipped onto the back behind me.

  “Hold tight,” I said, and dropped the clutch.

  Chapter 27

  Getting across town on the motorcycle was much, much better than by car, even at this time of night and with the roads slick with a light rain.

  It would have been more fun if I’d been wearing a heavier jacket. As it was, I was freaking freezing by the time we’d crossed town, well ahead of the others.

  I shivered and then put the cold out of my mind. The task of getting the Were into individual associations with their local Athanate House and a group association with the new Assembly looked more and more like making a stable pyramid out of ball bearings.

  Albuquerque might be easy. At least Zane was the only alpha in town, and Bian would be more than able to…distract him. That should give me a good introduction to this league Rita was talking about. It would be run by Cameron, since he was in command of all the New Mexico Were. I’d need to meet with him soon, preferably not testing dominance levels and snarling through the walls of a confessional like last time.