“Everyone is alive,” I told him. “I can tell that much. What happened?”
“Taken,” he said, then, “Federal agents.”
Chills went down my spine. I had a degree in history. When the government moves against a segment of its own population, it is bad. Nazi bad. Genocide bad. We needed the feds to protect the werewolves from the zealots in the general population. If the government had turned against us, the wolves would have to defend themselves. There was no good ending to that story.
“Federal agents from which agency?” I asked. “Homeland Security? Cantrip? FBI?”
He shook his head. He looked up at me and stared for a moment as if eye contact would let him sort himself out. He started to speak a couple of times.
“They took everyone who was there?”
“Everyone,” he said. He put his head against me again. “Everyone there.”
It had been Thanksgiving. I exchanged a bleak look with Jesse. A lot of the pack was at the house.
“Honey and Peter and Paul and Darryl and Auriele.” He stopped naming wolves for a moment to take a breath. “Mary Jo. Warren.”
“Mary Jo wasn’t there,” I said. “Neither was Warren.” Warren and his boyfriend had put on a Thanksgiving dinner for their friends who didn’t have families to go home to. Being gay meant they had a number of friends with no welcoming families. Mary Jo, a firefighter, had been on duty.
“Smelled them,” growled Ben. Then he paused, his body tightening. “Said … they said, not Adam said. They said … ‘Come quietly no one gets hurt, Mr. Hauptman.’ Adam, he said, ‘I smell blood on your hands. Warren and Mary Jo. What have you done to my people?’ They said, ‘Federal agents,’ again. Said, ‘Here’s our ID.’”
He took in a big breath. “Adam said, he said, ‘ID is good. But you are not federal agents.’ Liars. Adam said they lied.”
I couldn’t tell if I was holding Ben or he was holding me.
“How did they find Mary Jo?” I asked. Mary Jo worried that she would lose her job if they knew what she was. If they knew about Mary Jo, knew about the tranquilizer, then someone knew too many of our secrets. It was a rhetorical question, I didn’t expect Ben to know the answer.
“Cell phones,” he told me. “Bran sent a text.”
“I got it,” I said. “I thought it meant that the phones weren’t safe to use.”
He shook his head. “Meant that someone was tracing our phones. GPS tracking. Charles has spiders.” Charles was the son of the Marrok, who ruled the werewolves. Among his wide array of talents were killing people, making money, and a scarily thorough understanding of technology—but not arachnids. Not that I knew of, anyway.
“Spiders?” I asked.
He huffed a laugh. “Spiders. Bits of code out looking. Watching out for things like that. Spyware in the phone-company logs. Think he might have someone on the inside. Warning came too late, though.”
“How did you escape?” I asked.
“I was upstairs.” His voice was getting closer to his usual enunciation, and he sounded more coherent. “Getting toilet paper for the fu—for the downstairs bathroom.” He made a noise, a half sob. I hugged him more tightly.
“Go ahead and swear,” I told him. “I promise not to tell Adam.”
He snorted. “Bad habit.” I couldn’t tell if he was talking about his swearing or me promising not to tell Adam.
“You’re right,” I said, because he was. “So you heard them and ran for Gabriel?”
“I heard,” he told me. “I waited. Whole pack was down there. Then Adam said, ‘In all Mercy, Benjamin Speedway.’ Adam said that ‘Benjamin Speedway’ like he was swearing, but I knew. I’m Benjamin. Mercy is you. Speed meant go. He was ordering me to run, to find you. Disguised the order to give me a moment of grace before they figured it out. There were people out the back, and they saw me jump out the window. Hit me with the damned dart, and I ran for the river. Doubled back and found Gabriel. Made him drive. But you weren’t here. You were supposed to be here.”
If it hadn’t been for the wreck, Jesse and I would have finished our shopping and headed home. Presumably into the arms of whoever had Adam. Luck. It made me take a deep breath, and I got a good whiff of what I’d been smelling all along.
“Blood.” I leaned back, trying to get some space between us. “Ben, where are you bleeding?”
2
“Do we need lights?” asked Jesse.
“I’ll get the big kit in the shop,” Gabriel said, and ran for it. Night was dark to him, but he knew his way around, and the first-aid kit was on the wall just inside. He wouldn’t be as fast as me, but I was attached to a werewolf at the moment.
I knew what Adam would say about turning on the lights when we were possibly hiding from some unknown group capable of taking on a pack of werewolves and coming out on top. But my night vision wasn’t up to first aid in the dark.
“Flashlight,” I said. “Under the counter. Also get the box cutter next to it in case I have to slice his clothes.” I put my hands on either side of Ben’s face and tried to make him look at me. “Ben. Ben.”
“Yes?” It came out clear and crisp-upper-crust-British, as Ben, with his excellent four-letter-laced vocabulary seldom did. But he didn’t let me pull his face up so I could see it.
“Where are you hit?”
“Tranq. Arse.” That one wasn’t as clear, but I could understand him and assumed the last word was a location and not an epithet, though with Ben it was a risky call.
“No. Not the tranq.” A tranquillizer dart wouldn’t have left him bleeding this much later. “Someone shot you, Ben. Where?”
Jesse aimed the flashlight. “Leg,” she said. “Just above his right knee.”
He wouldn’t let me go, so Jesse sliced through the fabric of Ben’s khakis with the box cutter. Gabriel took the flashlight and got a good look at the wound.
“In and out,” he said, sounding calm, though his face paled and took on a greenish tinge.
It hadn’t healed, so either whoever had shot him was using silver bullets—or the silver in the tranquilizer mixture was slowing his healing. Whichever way, we needed to get the bleeding stopped.
“Telfa pad,” I told Jesse. “It’s important not to use anything that might stick on the wounds.” Ben’s skin could grow over it if he started to heal as fast as he should be healing. “Then gauze, then vet wrap. We’ll pack up, go to Samuel’s, and hope that he’s home.”
Samuel Cornick, who was both a doctor and a werewolf, would know best what to do for Ben. He wasn’t answering his phone, either, so he’d probably gotten the message from Bran. He also wasn’t pack. There was a good chance that he’d been overlooked when they, whoever “they” were, had gathered up the rest of the wolves. I hoped desperately that he’d been overlooked.
I needed to get Ben to Samuel, then I needed to get help—which hopefully would also be accomplished at Samuel’s. I needed to find Adam, the pack, check on the other wolves who hadn’t been at Thanksgiving—and make sure that no one else had been taken or hurt, like Warren’s boyfriend or Mary Jo’s fellow firefighters.
If our enemies had known to find Mary Jo and Warren, then they knew more than they should about who was a werewolf and who was not. If they were humans—and Ben would have told me if he’d noticed that they were anything else—and they were willing to kidnap damn near thirty wolves, then they were either crazy, planning on killing everyone all at once, or at least armed and very, very dangerous. And they might be feds, despite Ben’s recollection of Adam accusing them of lying.
“Can you stand?” I asked Ben, when Jesse had finished making a pretty good job of the bandage.
He grunted.
“We’ve got to get out of here. If they knew enough to get Warren and Mary Jo, we’ve got to assume they know about this place.”
“Danger,” he said, sounding bad again. “In danger. You.” That thought seemed to inspire him because with a sound that was more wolfish than human, he stood up, t
hen sort of sagged until he was draped over me.
“It’s not the leg,” he said, overenunciating a little. “It’s the drug. Weak. Weak. Weak.” He was tensing up, his eyes bright gold with the wolf’s drive to protect itself. No predator likes to be weakened and vulnerable.
“It’s all right,” I told him firmly, because it was important that he believe me. If he didn’t, he’d get aggressive, and we would have even more trouble. “You are among friends. Gabriel, grab the keys to the Mercedes parked in the garage and help me get Ben to the car.”
Marsilia’s dark blue Mercedes, an S 65 AMG, was parked inside my garage lest anyone walk by the parking lot and decide to key the paint or toss a rock. It was three months old, here to get its first oil change, and I could have bought a second shop for less than its sticker price.
“The AMG?” Gabriel said, though he retrieved the keys as he spoke. “You’re going to let Ben bleed all over a Mercedes AMG?”
“He’s already bleeding all over a Mercedes,” Jesse said dryly. Then she turned to me. “Wait a minute. The AMG? That AMG? Mercedes Athena Thompson Hauptman, what are you thinking of? You can’t let Ben bleed all over Marsilia’s Mercedes.”
“Marsilia the vampire queen?” Gabriel choked. “Mercy, that’s just stupid. Take my car.”
“She’s not a queen, she’s the Mistress of the seethe,” I corrected him. “That car seats four and doesn’t scream VW mechanic on the run with wounded werewolf.” What I didn’t say, because I didn’t want to panic anyone, was that because the vampires were a lot like the CIA crossed with the Mob, the Mercedes also had bulletproof glass. More importantly, if we were really dealing with an attack by a government agency, this car was clean of tracking devices. Between me and Wulfe—the magic-using vampire who served Marsilia—all the tracking gadgets that were routinely attached to new cars all the way down to the RFID tags on the tires had been disabled.
And right now I had bigger things to worry about than offending Marsilia, scary though she was.
Get Ben to Samuel, who could treat what was wrong with him.
Take Jesse and Gabriel to someplace safe.
Find whoever had taken my mate and get him back.
Adam’s pain was a roar in my heart, and I was going to make everyone who hurt him pay and pay.
It was like triage. Decision one—preserve those who were safe. Decision two—retrieve the rest. Decision three—make the ones who took them regret it.
On that thought, I ran back into the office. At Adam’s request, I’d taken to keeping my 9mm Sig in the safe. Being married to the local pack Alpha gained me some notoriety, and it made Adam feel better knowing I was armed. I shoved two spare (loaded) magazines into my purse and grabbed the extra box of silver ammunition. If I’d had a nuclear bomb, I’d have grabbed it, too—but I would make do with what I had.
Jesse had settled in the back with Ben. Smart girl. Ben knew Gabriel well enough under normal circumstances, but Jesse smelled like Adam. Ben couldn’t sit in the front with me because the combination of drug and wound made him too volatile, and he was too strong for me to wrestle with while I was driving. Jesse had also found an old blanket to cover the seat.
I backed the Mercedes out of the garage and waited for Gabriel to close the door and get in.
“Your eyes are gold, Mercy,” said Gabriel as he slid into the front seat. “I didn’t know they did that.”
Neither had I.
Samuel lived about twenty minutes from my garage, but it felt like hours. The temptation to put my foot down on the accelerator was strong. Marsilia’s car topped out at 250 mph—I had also, at her request, taken care of the electronic governor that limited the car to more human-reflex-safe speeds. But there were a lot of cops out even at this rarefied and still-dark hour because the shopping crowds were starting to increase again. I needed to avoid getting pulled over as long as I had a man with a gunshot wound in the back seat.
At sixty miles per hour, we purred slowly along the side of the river to Samuel’s house in Richland.
Before I’d married Adam, Samuel had been my roommate. He still came by to visit a lot. A wolf, especially a lone wolf, needed the presence of others. Though Adam was Alpha and Samuel was very dominant, they had a cautious friendship.
Samuel had a condo in Richland right next to the river, where land prices were at a premium. He could care less what his home looked like—he had lived with me in my elderly fourteen-by-seventy trailer for two years, more or less, without much complaint—but he loves the water. What he paid for that condo could have bought a huge house anywhere else in town.
The complex was less than ten years old, built of stone and stucco and groomed to within an inch of its life. I parked the Mercedes in front of Samuel’s garage, left my comrades in the car, and knocked at the door.
No one answered. I put my forehead against the cold surface of the fiberglass door and listened, but I could hear nothing.
“Please, please, Samuel. I need you.” I knocked again.
When the door finally opened, it wasn’t Samuel but Ariana, Samuel’s mate. She wore a sweatshirt and fuzzy midnight blue pajama bottoms decorated with white kittens playing with pink balls of yarn.
Fae have glamour—that’s what makes them fae. They can take any living shape they like, and mostly they like forms that blend in. I’d first met Ariana in the guise of someone’s well-to-do grandmother. I’ve also seen what I think is her true face and form, which is spectacular and beautiful.
Ariana’s current facade was neither beautiful nor ugly, more of a pleasant average. Pale gold hair, more often found in children than adults before the advent of hair dye, framed her face and set off her soft gray eyes. Her apparent age of somewhere between twenty-five and thirty was a match for Samuel’s apparent age. There were traces of her fae-self in her face, just as my old mentor Zee’s fae countenance shared similarities with the human one that I was more accustomed to seeing.
Thing was, she shouldn’t have been there. She was fae. She should have been at the reservation with all the others. I’d called to check on Ariana as soon as I’d found out that the fae had retreated and had gotten Samuel. He’d told me—in what I now saw was a suspiciously relaxed manner—that Ariana was safe and would return when she could. Apparently, that was a lot sooner than any of the rest of the fae.
“Ariana,” I said, “I thought …”
“That I had retreated to the reservation with my kin?” she asked. “My mate is here. I am no follower, and my allegiance is no longer to the Gray Lords, if it ever was. They chose to allow me to stay here under the condition I do nothing to draw attention to myself.” She grinned mischievously at me. “They required us to bring any artifacts or magical items we hold. I brought the Silver Borne with me—they were surprisingly eager to let me leave with it.”
The Silver Borne was an artifact that she’d created long before Christopher Columbus was a glint in his father’s eye. It ate the magic of any fae that went near it. Too powerful to be left where humans could get it—and too damaging to be brought to the reservation.
Her face lost its humor. “But I am chatting, and you are hurt. Come in out of the cold.”
“Not my blood,” I told her. “Is Samuel here? I have a warning and a patient for him. Otherwise, we should probably go.”
“He’s not here,” Ariana said. “His father called him away a few days ago. He said it was something to do with a meeting about ‘disturbances in the Force.’”
I gave her a look, and she grinned, again. “I swear to you that was what he told me. Bring in your wounded, though. I have a fair amount of barbering experience, and Samuel keeps a very well-stocked first-aid kit.”
I hesitated, and the expression on her face changed. Ariana was ancient—older than Bran, I think—but she had this softness about her, a vulnerability that allowed her to be rather easily hurt.
“I’m not doubting you,” I told her. “But my wounded is a wolf. He is in human form for the moment, but he
is clinging to it by his fingertips.”
Ariana had a deep-seated and totally justified terror of canids, which she’d only overcome with people she knew well—meaning Samuel. Most of the rest of us did our best not to be too wolf- or coyote-like around her.
She took a breath. “I knew the patient was likely one of your werewolves. Who else would it be? Bring him in.”
I gathered my people from the car, human and otherwise. I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do. I’d seen Ariana in the grip of panic once, and that was scary enough I didn’t want to do it again. I’d warned her, and she thought she could handle it. Fair enough.
Jesse shoved, and Gabriel and I pulled to get Ben out of the car. As soon as Ben was up, Gabriel slipped under his shoulder and took most of his weight. I glanced around, but all the windows surrounding us were dark. If anyone was watching, I couldn’t tell.
Jesse got the door. Gabriel paused in the entryway because, though the walls were painted bright colors, the carpet was white, and Ben was still bleeding.
Ariana rolled her eyes at us. “Bring him in, children; I assure you that I am more than capable of pulling a little blood from fabric and carpet.”
Reassured, I waved Gabriel and Ben forward. The condo was one of those open floor plans, where kitchen, dining room, and living room shared the same space. Gabriel supported Ben through the entry hall, past the kitchen area, and into the living room, where we laid him down on the dark brown leather couch. He looked worse, if that were possible, than he had in my office. As if, now that someone else was in charge, he’d quit struggling to stay alert.
Ariana looked at all of us and frowned. “Tell me what happened.”
So I did, telling the story from my point of view until we hit the garage, then dropping back to Ben’s tale. When I’d finished, she put her hand against Ben’s forehead.
He muttered something crude, and her eyebrows raised.
“Not fair to hold him responsible for something he says in this state,” said Jesse defensively.
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