by Mark Henwick
Denver’s association or alliance with the Oklahoma and Kansas packs might be straightforward, through Felix.
LA looked much harder; four alphas who didn’t work together, and we were already on the point of conflict with a couple of them.
The other Were coalitions and the Confederation? Well, they seemed as remote as the stars in the sky.
But Skylur was right; we needed to get them talking instead of fighting. We needed them in the Assembly. We needed a united front for Emergence.
First steps first. A meeting with the LA Were, to get them to back off a little. Then I needed to be in Denver and Albuquerque, in short order. And somehow, in the midst of all that, I had to deal with Forsythe.
I turned off down the riverside road to the safe house and started to pay more attention to my surroundings. And I got the first stirrings of uneasiness.
I couldn’t pinpoint what it was. I slowed the bike all the way down and swiveled my head to look back the way we’d come. I had that freaky nightmare feeling of things that disappeared as I turned to look for them.
Nothing. Streetlights gleamed on rainy streets, making small pools in the night. Houses sat back from the road behind a narrow sidewalk. Opposite the houses, a wall topped with iron railings ran the length of the street on the river side, the levee a looming shadow in the darkness above it. Across the river, the interstate traffic hushed liked distant surf.
No one moved. No one seemed to be awake.
“Why slow? Fast is fun,” Yelena said.
“Don’t know. Something feels off.”
“You are walking on your grave?”
“I think you’re trying to say someone else is walking on my grave.”
“But you are not in your grave.” She scanned the street as she spoke. “And if you were, how would you know if someone walked on it? Why would it matter?”
“Good questions.”
We were coming up to the safe house.
I was thinking it would be a good idea to ride on past, when I felt something I recognized.
All Were packs have a Call. It’s a subdued thing a lot of the time. I could barely sense the Long Beach werewolves we held prisoner. Alex and I shared a Pack Deauville Call, and there was nothing to sense on that.
But a pack that’s hunting, they will Call.
A couple of big motorcycles, Harleys or similar, emerged from the darkness ahead, turning lazily into the road.
A glance back showed another three had appeared behind us.
And I could feel that peculiar werewolf thrill of sighting prey come snaking down their Call.
Crap.
I skidded to a stop and we jumped off the Kawasaki.
I felt the welcome weight of the HK in the holster, but I didn’t draw. We had to make every effort not to get into a war with the local packs.
The bikes, all of them big cruising Harleys, came to a coordinated stop on either side of us.
All ridden by women wrapped in Mad Max biker leathers.
All werewolves.
Moving purposefully but without haste, they formed a casual semicircle in front of us and stood there.
I’d back Yelena and myself against them hand-to-hand. Hell, I’d back Yelena on her own against them. If they had guns, that might be a problem. It only takes one bullet. But, I’d still back the pair of us.
They noticed our confidence.
“You’re acting damn cool about this.” She was the alpha, a genuine alpha, standing in the middle of the five of them. It was too dark to make out features. Her voice seemed too light for her bulk, rich and smooth as melted chocolate.
“I could say the same about you,” I replied.
“Well, that may be because we’re in our territory and you’re not. Skipping over the part where we outnumber you.”
I frowned and sniffed. It was another marque I didn’t know. “You’re not Long Beach or Pasadena,” I said. “You can’t be Redondo this far over, but I would have thought it’s a helluva stretch to call this the Heights.”
She laughed. “Heights don’t come down here,” she said. “They have way more sense than that.”
“Well, if we’re trespassing, we apologize,” I said. “Funny though, Long Beach didn’t mention another pack. Who are you?”
“We call ourselves Belles.”
I grinned despite myself. Yeah, this district was called Bell. I guess it made a kind of sense. But if Long Beach hadn’t mentioned them at all—were they outcasts?
The leader took a couple of steps forward and sniffed the air.
“You’re not any pack I know, but you got Long Beach in that house behind you. What you all doing here?”
“They’re our guests at the moment. Not that they want to be. They attacked us.” She was listening, so I hurried on. “We’re acting for the local Athanate House, and all we’re trying to do is contact all the alphas in LA for a meeting.”
“That so?”
The alpha took another step—trying to get me to back up.
I wasn’t going to. She was bigger than me, and confident with it, but confidence without ability and training is brittle. She was going to get a shock if she attacked.
That attack looked more likely when I refused to give way. She had tells: her shoulders tensed; her knees bent slightly.
My gut feeling was that she’d come at my face to try and stun me into submission.
Submit? Not going to happen.
My body went all loose and still, alert to every twitch and sound.
Including the sound of the door opening behind me.
Alex.
He made that growl that I felt in the chest rather than heard—a sound full of threat.
That wasn’t the main event. Not even close.
Alex and I were alphas. I’d guess that either one of us was more dominant than the Belle alpha. Our dominance had grown since we’d become paired, and under threat, it was a case of pumping each other up and lighting the fuse.
It wasn’t directed at me, but the wave of dominance from Alex blew through me, snatching the breath from my lungs and crashing over the Belles.
“Oh, shit,” one of them breathed, her knees buckling.
But their alpha refused to take a backward step. By force of will, she locked her legs and kept her head up.
A van appeared down the street and sped up when they caught sight of us. I hoped it was Bian. Not because I wanted to win a fight, however much my wolf was spoiling for it, but because I wanted the Belle alpha to realize there was no point in trying to fight.
This pack hadn’t even been mentioned by Long Beach. I was curious, and not least because they were all women.
The van screeched to a halt and Bian, Rita and Haz leaped out.
“Odds have changed,” I said, my voice rusty, “but really, honestly, all we want to do is talk to the local alphas.”
The Belle alpha still hadn’t moved. Her pack had recovered a little, folding back into a defensive circle.
I walked forward, despite Alex’s snarl. I held my hands open and away from my body, away from the comfort of the HK and Yelena at my shoulder.
We locked eyes and the alpha tried to stare me down. She had way more juice than the Long Beach Were, but it wasn’t enough. After all my staring matches with Zane and Felix, she was a dewy-eyed cub.
“My name is Amber Farrell,” I said. “House Farrell, sub-House of Altau. And co-alpha with Alex, behind me, of Pack Deauville of Denver. I ask your permission to be in your territory while we talk.”
“It’s the frigging hybrid herself,” hissed one of her pack.
The alpha held her hand up to silence them.
We stood, still as carven chess pieces, while the night wind coiled around us.
“Maybe,” the alpha said finally. She squinted at Rita and Haz, her nose flaring. “Who else am I hosting?”
“The Albuquerque pack,” Rita said.
“That so? And you ain’t even wolf, woman. Shit, you all got stories I gotta hear.”<
br />
She backed up a pace, tension flowing out of her. Her pack loosened up behind her, not without a couple of sighs of relief, quickly stifled.
“Name’s Billie,” she said, and put out a hand. “Welcome to Bell.”
I shook it.
Her hair was cropped tight to her head, eyes deep beneath a broad forehead, strong cheekbones and a wide mouth. The distant streetlight gleamed dully on dark skin. I couldn’t make out much else in the darkness.
“Come inside,” I said.
“We will,” Billie replied, “if your hunk stops glaring at me like that. It’s not how a girl wants to be looked at.”
Alex snorted and put it all away.
I gave him a quick squeeze as we filed past. And inside, I soon found out why he wasn’t in the best of tempers.
He’d made a deal with Horseshoe, the temporary leader of the Long Beach prisoners. Altau security had blindfolded the rest of them and delivered them back to the Long Beach area in exchange for Horseshoe cooperating with us. Except as soon as he’d gotten a call from his pack alpha that the rest were safe, Horseshoe had clammed up.
Quite a trick, managing to be so irritating and noble at the same time. It wasn’t as if we had any intention of interfering with the local packs.
Horseshoe registered the Belle alpha and his face went dark with anger.
He jumped up, only to be sent crashing back to the floor by Alex.
“You can’t talk—” he started.
“Right. We can’t talk to her because she doesn’t exist, asshole,” I said. “Four packs, you said.”
“They’re not a pack,” he shouted. “She’s not a real alpha.”
“No? Looks the part to me,” I said. “Talks the talk and walks the walk.”
Oh.
A pulse on the Call. My comment had gotten me big bonus points from the Belles. We had ourselves a genuine sore point here.
Billie was ignoring the Long Beach Were and looking at what Alex had been doing when we arrived. He’d pinned a huge street map to the wall and marked it up.
The pack names had been written in approximately the right places. Alongside, we had contact info for Pasadena from the cellphones I’d taken. Alex had gotten another number when the Long Beach alpha had spoken to Horseshoe.
Dominé had given us a cell number for Redondo. There was nothing for the Heights, and clearly, nothing for the Belles.
Billie stood in front of the map, unzipping her leather jacket slowly.
She snorted and seemed to come to a decision. She held out a hand. It was a square, strong hand, the edges of her nails dark with oil. A woman who got her hands dirty, literally.
Alex gave her the marker pens.
She picked a color for each pack and started drawing boundaries.
“Approximate, you get it?” She snorted again. “LA is a frigging mess.”
“Why?” I asked.
She looked over her shoulder at me. “Too few of us. Too big. Too many people. Too many gangs. Too many tourist areas. The place is too frigging…complex.”
“What about the police?” Elizabetta asked.
“Which police? There are forty-five departments. That’s not counting the airport police or the harbor patrol. To answer generally, no, they don’t bother with us. They have too much on their hands already.”
She paused in her drawing to glare around the room. “We’d like to keep it that way. Keep under their radar. You know, not driving trucks loaded with explosives into the sides of buildings, that sort of thing.”
Oops.
She took the pink marker and drew out the area from Bell, across the Los Angeles River, up to the rail yards in Commerce and Vernon. She labeled it ‘Belle’ with a smiley face and wrote a cell number beneath.
She picked a new color, yellow, and drew boundaries around the airports, downtown and other areas. “Highways, stations, airports, tourist areas,” she said, waving the yellow pen at the map, “all common ground for the four packs.”
Her tone had become bitter.
“Not for you?”
Billie directed a lethal look at Horseshoe. “Not for the Belles,” she confirmed. “We stay here, mostly.” She shrugged. “Not much they can do about us using the common areas, but it’s not official.”
“Where do you run?” Alex asked.
He meant change and run as wolves.
“Out of town. That’s all I’m saying with him here.” She indicted Horseshoe with a jerk of her head.
She drew a green marker boundary for the Heights pack and started writing in the missing alpha names and numbers for all the packs.
When Horseshoe tried to object, Alex dragged him out. There was the sound of more zip ties and duct tape being applied. Then quiet.
Good.
While Billie finished up on the map, I took the time to look over our new allies.
All they had in common was they were women wearing leather. And they were werewolves, obviously.
A couple of blondes—one who could have been Scandinavian, the other a compact SoCal surfer babe. One Latina and two tall African-Americans, including Billie.
The rest of them seemed more interested in Haz than me, crowding her like wolves do, and bombarding her with questions: simple stuff about the Albuquerque pack—where they went for runs, how they handled working in the human world, and so on.
Haz was more their kind of person. With her biker leathers and bandana, she fit right in. Aside from being a bit twitchy at the crowding. And when they asked her if she was mated.
The smack of the marker pens getting thrown on the table got their attention back.
“And the reason we may want to be besties with this woman…” she said to her pack and pointed at me.
The Belles shuffled away from Haz and looked obediently at Billie, whose face betrayed a hunger that was unsettling.
“…is all this talk about some spell to help a halfy change.”
Map of the Los Angeles packs
Chapter 28
I held up my hands to ward them off.
“Whoa. Ease off. It’s a sort of ritual. It worked once, with someone I know, someone I have a connection with. I’m not even sure I can do it again.”
That dampened the enthusiasm, but not by much.
It was the truth.
My head was a different mess than the way it had been. What if my eukori was the key? It was on the fritz. Would Yelena’s trick with overlaying hers work?
My sister and my spirit guide, Tara and Hana, were silent in my head. Or gone. What if they were somehow part of it?
And the necklace—the necklace that lay hot and heavy on my breastbone had patterns of energy woven into it by Chatima, the shaman Adept.
I ran my fingers over it now, but they felt numb. Was I still sensing the pattern that had said I will master my way, or was I just remembering the sensation of it?
And if it turned out I couldn’t feel it, could I still do the ritual? Was sensing the patterns in the necklace essential? Or sensing the energy at all? It had to be significant that I couldn’t feel the energy flowing through me. Not since that one, excruciating pulse of energy when Kaothos and I broke the lock that the Taos Adepts had put on Diana.
“Well, one thing I’m sure of,” Billie said, unaware of the turmoil in my mind. “Every new werewolf turned in LA in the last four, five years has died.”
That was a slap in the face.
Much, much worse than Denver.
“Can you hold a ritual here, in LA?” one of the others asked.
So they have halfies who need me.
“It has to be somewhere out of the way,” Alex said. He was picking up on my worry and tried to help put them off.
“You could all visit Albuquerque,” Rita said, easing in closer. “Associates should be first anyway. We have halfies—”
Suddenly Billie was right in front of me. “What does it take to be an associate—”
“Stop!” I shouted.
It got quiet.
“It’s complicated. It’s not just whether I’m able to do it again. We—as in Pack Deauville—we have to answer to the Denver pack.” I shifted uncomfortably. “And Altau.”
And I’m the syndesmon.
Forget about whether it would work or not for the moment. If I didn’t hold an open ritual for all Were, how could I claim to represent them?
Felix and Skylur wanted me to use the ritual as a way to lure packs to our side. Zane and Cameron would probably take the same line. But what about the Confederation? What about the LA Were? What about the packs in the rest of the country?
As syndesmon, I’ve got to get them into the new Assembly. All of them.
Which means they all have to trust me.
My gut, my damned, guaranteed-to-get-me-in-trouble gut, didn’t want to exclude any halfy, and my brain was coming up with a justification that it would be impossible talking to the Confederation if we used access to the ritual as a carrot or stick.
Sorry Skylur. Sorry Felix.
I blinked. They were all looking at me expectantly.
“I’ll do the ritual for every Were that needs it,” I said. “But.” I waited till they calmed down again. “But I don’t even know if it was a fluke last time. Okay?”
“Is this tied into why you want to talk to the alphas in LA?” Billie asked.
“Not directly. That’s Athanate business. All Altau Houses, all over America, have been told to form associations with their local packs. In LA specifically, we want permission for Alex and me to be here. And we’d like some help tracking the Basilikos who’re trying to kill people.”
While they took that on board, I needed to get more information about the LA packs.
Something subtle would be the best way.
Instead, the demon that lives in my throat got hold of my voice. “So anyway, Billie, should we be talking to you if you’re not a real alpha?”
Billie saw the joke, but her pack didn’t like any implication she wasn’t an alpha.
