My gun was under the front seat. I almost changed back to let him know, but decided not to. I couldn’t carry it, and I was the only one who would be more dangerous with a gun in my hand tonight.
“Blood and humans and sweat and …” Stefan stood up and shut the back door. “Mercy, you let me talk to Marsilia about this before you return her car.”
I gave him a brief nod and trotted toward Kyle’s house. Ben was on three legs, but he had no trouble keeping up. Stefan brought up the rear.
The guy next door to Kyle had died a while ago and the house was still empty with a FOR SALE sign in the tidy front yard. The gate to the backyard was open, so I led my posse in that way.
There was an eight-foot stone fence between the yards, but someone had left a ladder next to it. Had old Mr. What’s His Name been sneaking into Kyle’s swimming pool before he died, or—and this was more troublesome—had someone been spying on them? In any case, it was not much effort to get over the fence. Even on three good legs, Ben didn’t have to use the ladder; nor did Stefan. As a coyote, I’m outclassed by the werewolves and the vampires in everything except blending in.
Like the empty house, someone kept Kyle’s yard neat and tidy so that we ghosted over grass rather than rustling through the leaves of fall. We kept to the shadows, though I don’t think that anyone would have seen Stefan if he’d walked through the middle of the backyard. He was doing something, some vampire magic, that made him really hard to focus on.
I kept a sharp eye out, but I didn’t see anyone keeping watch. That didn’t mean they weren’t there, but between Stefan’s mojo and the concealing pack magic that Ben and I were pulling around ourselves, only truly bad luck would allow a human to see us anyway.
I could smell it before we hit the house. There was blood on the lawn. I abandoned the shadows to cast out until I found where the dark wet stuff splattered the grass, because it was Warren’s blood I smelled.
Ben sniffed beside me and snarled soundlessly, exposing his fangs as he turned his eyes to the house. From the back, it was as dark as the front, but this near the house, we could both hear the murmuring of voices from inside. They were being quiet, and had we been human, we would not have heard them at all. As it was, I couldn’t hear what they were saying, just a rumble of men’s voices.
They’d taken Warren here, in the backyard. He’d been in human shape—a werewolf’s scent changes when they are in human form, becomes diluted. That they took him in the yard was good. That I smelled only his blood was also good. That meant that all of Kyle and Warren’s friends who’d come over for Thanksgiving probably weren’t in the middle of a firefight. That was good news, and not just for Kyle and Warren’s friends. Once these people began killing innocent humans, there was no way back. Their only survival path would then be to kill everyone who knew about them—including Adam and the whole pack.
As long as the dead were werewolves, it was unlikely that they had to worry much about the consequences as far as the human justice system was concerned. With the fae, the courts had already demonstrated that when put to the test, fear beat out justice.
For us, right now, that was a good thing. As long as we could keep the villains off the defensive, Adam should be okay.
What Stefan had said was true. They were obviously waiting for someone, and Jesse, Ben, and I were the logical targets. I had to assume that they were prepared to deal with Ben and me. Stefan would throw a wrench in their plans, but I didn’t know if it was a big enough wrench.
While I was debating, someone started speaking. The voices were coming from Kyle and Warren’s bedroom on the second floor. I looked up and saw that the blinds weren’t drawn—unusual for Warren, who was quite aware that there were things that could look in your window in the dark.
“They aren’t coming,” someone said. “We can’t afford to wait until daylight. We need to find them. Orders are to get the information.”
“Yessir,” a second man said. “How far can I go?” The second man gave us a total of at least four. I could still hear the rumble of the other two down in Kyle’s living room.
“Get the information,” the first man said, and I heard the bedroom door shut and the footsteps of someone leaving.
“You hear that, Johnny?” There was a sick eagerness in his voice. “He said I could go as far as I want.”
Another man, presumably Johnny—giving me a count of five bad guys—said, softly, “Only until we get the information, Sal. You hear that? Give us what we want, and I’ll stop him. Sal was captured by the Afghanis a while back and didn’t come back quite right. He likes torture. Tell us where they are likely to have gone to ground and everything stops.”
Silence.
“So where would they go?” someone asked, and there was the sound of flesh on flesh.
Someone made a noise, and the hair on the back of my neck rose as my lips pulled back from my teeth. Kyle. They were hitting Kyle.
“Staying quiet isn’t helping, son,” said the soft voice. “I don’t want to do this. Boss don’t want to hold your lover any longer than we have to. Takes a lot of people to hold a werewolf pack—and some of them are going to get dead. If we can get Hauptman’s daughter and wife, we can let the rest of you the fuck go.”
I wonder if Kyle heard the lie.
“Fuck you,” he said.
Maybe he had. A divorce attorney, I expect, would have a lot of practice telling when someone was lying.
They hit him again. Beside me, Ben was vibrating.
Stefan said, sounding hungry, “Mercy, there are only two of them in that room.”
I shifted back to human so we could talk.
Ben nudged my knee, hard.
“I know,” I told him. “Can we take them without alerting the others?” I shivered. The Tri-Cities wasn’t Montana, but it was still too cold to stand around naked in November. Or maybe I was shivering with my coyote’s desire to go kill someone.
The first man said something ugly, and Kyle made a noise.
Yep. It was the go-kill-someone shiver.
“We can,” Stefan said. “And if not—I can kill them all.”
That didn’t sound like a bad plan, standing out here listening to them hurt Kyle. I knew it would be stupid to leave bodies, but his pain was putting paid to my good sense.
“Throw me up,” I told him, and turned back into a coyote.
I looked at Stefan, and when he met my eyes, I jerked my chin to the balcony that came off the bedroom. He frowned at me doubtfully. I rose up on my hind legs and bounced once. Then lifted my muzzle toward the balcony again.
His eyebrows rose, but he picked me up and threw me. I cleared the railing but had to twist hard, so I landed in the middle of a planter instead of on top of the lawn furniture that might squeak under me.
Ben jumped to the top of the railing, and Stefan followed. Stefan hopped off and landed on the balcony with bent knees and no sound. Ben’s ears flattened at me, so I moved off the planter and let the heavier werewolf use it as a stair so that he didn’t have to land so heavily. Hard to land quietly on a hard surface with werewolf-sized claws.
4
The brocade drapes were an inheritance from the people who had built the house. Kyle loved the fabric but complained a lot about the way they left six inches between the bottom of the curtains and the floor.
I dropped to my knees and peered through the bottom of the sliding glass door that Kyle planned to replace with french doors next summer along with the drapes.
Kyle and Warren’s bedroom was decorated in a minimalist and very civilized style. The blood on the carpet looked like the single contrasting note one of those designers on TV liked to recommend.
There was so little furniture that the villains had had to bring up a chair from the dining room so they had something to use to stage their interrogation. They’d tied Kyle to the sturdy chair naked. His feet were free, but it didn’t matter because they were also bare. Unless you are a werewolf or maybe Bruce Lee, bare feet can�
�t do much damage unless you have more of a strike opportunity than being tied to a chair presents.
From the looks of him this wasn’t the first round of abuse he’d taken. I kept my growl to myself, though I could do nothing about the snarl that wrinkled my nose. Kyle’s face was bruised, the aristocratic nose sat at an angle, and dried blood covered his chin and upper chest. A cut above one eye had bled, too, and that eye was swollen shut and purple. There were red marks on his cheekbone and stomach that were fresher, having not had time to bruise.
The two men in the room were dressed all in black, and they wore the same body armor the men who held Adam had worn. The taller man was bald, his skin tanned by a life spent outdoors. I put his age between twenty-five and thirty. The other man was heavier built and not so tan, his hair the shade of rust and cut tightly against his scalp.
The bald man’s body language was relaxed, and that made the worry he projected in his voice even more of a lie than the words.
“I don’t like letting him free to do as he wants, Mr. Brooks. It isn’t good for him or you. He might do some serious damage. Things that can’t be repaired. I can stop him if you just let us know where you think she might go. We’ll get out of your hair, and you never have to see us again.”
Kyle spat out blood. “You must be fae. I never heard so much truth built into a lie. Did your mother have wings and pointed ears?” he asked, his voice as cool as it was in the courtroom.
Hadn’t Kyle ever heard that you weren’t supposed to antagonize your kidnappers? Especially when they were beating on you?
At least he had their attention fully on him.
Taking advantage of their preoccupation, I changed back to human and reached up to the catch on the glass door, which was, luckily for us, unlocked. Hopefully, the heavy drapes would disguise the cold outside air now wafting into the room as I carefully, quietly slid the door open. It was good for us and for Kyle that he had not had time to replace either the door or the drapes.
As soon as I had it opened, Stefan dropped to his knees to get a good look through the gap between the floor and the drapes, and I shifted back to coyote. My four-footed shape might not be as impressive as one of the wolves, but it was more lethal than my human shape. I squeezed next to Stefan and looked again.
The bald man’s face had lost its pleasantness, though he’d taken his time to answer Kyle’s taunt. “Your mouth is dangerous to you, Mr. Brooks. I’d suggest you use it to give us the information we want, or you might not be able to use it at all.”
“You’re a dead man,” Kyle said. “Warren doesn’t take kindly to people who hurt me.”
We had to get in there—and now the only obstacle was the curtain. If we could be quiet enough, the men downstairs would not hear us.
“Your Warren is our prisoner,” said the bald man, back to his Mr. Nice Guy persona. “He can do nothing to help you.”
Kyle smiled. “You just keep telling yourselves that.”
The younger man bounced a couple of times on his feet and feigned a strike. Kyle pulled his head out of the line of fire and the man hit him in the shoulder with a spinning back kick that launched Kyle’s chair over onto its side. If he’d hit him in the head with that foot, Kyle would have been dead.
On the floor, Kyle’s face was aimed right at me. He blinked twice and shook his head. “Get the hell out of here.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Brooks, but we can’t do that,” said the bald man with mock sorrow, unaware that Kyle hadn’t been talking to him. The other man put a foot on the chair and rocked it a little.
Stefan had stood up so there was room for Ben to put his head on the ground next to me and look below the curtain, too. When he saw Kyle, the werewolf went still.
Ben was not the largest werewolf in the pack—though he was big enough. But he was among the most dangerous. He was fast—and he wasn’t bothered by the thought of killing someone, even when he was as human as he ever got. He had been abused, severely abused when he was a child. People, outside the pack and Adam’s family, just weren’t real to him. We were working on that, Adam and I, but I discovered right then that Ben considered Kyle one of the pack.
Better to aim my weapon than to let it go off half-cocked. I bumped him, and when I had his attention, I pulled my nose out from under the curtain. Then I looked up at the top of the curtain and back to him. Shapeshifting makes all of us pretty good at charades.
Ben stood up and kept going until he stood balanced on his good hind leg with a front paw on the side of the house next to the sliding door. I backed out of the way—and realized that Ben and I were alone on the balcony. Stefan had disappeared.
I nodded sharply, and Ben’s free front paw slammed the curtain, rod and all, onto the ground, where it would not interfere with us. I’d gathered myself to leap, but what I saw made me pause because there was no one to attack.
Stefan was already in the room, lowering the bald man to the ground with gentle care. The first man, the man who’d hurt Kyle, was dead, his eyes starting to fog over and his body draped over Kyle. Stefan had incapacitated both men without either making a sound. Pretty efficient, the coyote in me thought, and the rest of me was very, very glad that Stefan was on my side.
Despite my earlier stand, even knowing it could come back and bite us, I couldn’t deny that I was happy that Stefan had killed Kyle’s assailant.
I changed back to human and hauled the dead man off Kyle while Ben aimed himself at the bindings on Kyle’s wrists that held the rest of him into the chair. Stefan touched Ben’s nose and moved it out of the way.
He looked at the bindings for a moment. Yellow nylon rope wrapped Kyle’s wrists and wove in and out of the sturdy wooden chair. “There is no way the police are going to believe you broke out of that.”
And that was the first sign I had that Stefan really had taken what I’d told him to heart. We were going to call the police—and Kyle, very human Kyle, was going to rescue himself.
Stefan put a hand on the seat of the chair and the other on the back. “Brace yourself,” he warned Kyle, then pulled the chair apart. The ropes fell away like magic.
Everyone but Kyle froze, listening for any sign that someone else had heard us.
“Sweats,” Kyle whispered to me, rolling off the chair like it hurt. “Top drawer of the bigger chest of drawers. You can steal a pair, too.” He looked at the chair pieces, and murmured, “The bedroom is supposed to be soundproofed. Doesn’t work on Warren, but maybe we’ll luck out with less gifted listeners.”
The first drawer I found had underwear, so he must have meant the other top drawer. They were sorted and army neat, matching bottoms and tops folded together. I grabbed the top two sets.
No one came boiling up the stairs, so either they hadn’t heard the chair go—or they thought it was part of the interrogation.
Stefan helped Kyle up and steadied him when he was a little wobbly on his feet. I handed over a pair of bottoms. Stefan continued to hold him upright while Kyle pulled the sweats on with great concentration. Once Kyle had the pants on and both feet on the floor to steady himself, Stefan took the rope and started to tie up the bald man.
“How often do the people downstairs come up?” Stefan said.
“The only time anyone has come up here was a few minutes ago,” Kyle told him. “Could be back in a minute, or next week.”
I handed Kyle a sweatshirt. He shook his head, and said, “That’s the wrong top for these.”
“Fashion princess.” I rolled my eyes and gave him the other top, noticing only as it unfolded that it proclaimed, “I’m prettier than your girlfriend,” in purple glittery script. I recognized it because I’d given it to him for his birthday.
“I have news for you, Kyle, it’ll be a while before you are prettier than anyone’s girlfriend. Bruises are not your best color. Are you sure you don’t want the other top?”
He glanced at me and gave me a crooked smile. “You look worse than I do. These goons get to you, too?”
We were all keeping our voices as quiet as possible.
“Car accident.” I pulled on the sweatpants. They were tight, but Warren’s would have been tighter and left me with a foot of material to trip on.
“They have Warren,” Kyle said, his eyes, briefly, looking as terrified as I was.
“I know,” I told him. The top that matched the sweatpants I wore was a spiffy teal. “They have the rest of the pack, too.”
“So I gathered.” Kyle indicated with a tip of his head that his information had come from the bald man. “Are we on the side of the angels?” Kyle pulled on his top, though not without wincing.
Stefan looked up from the bald man, and said, “The first one I killed because I don’t let people who hurt those I care about live. He is dead in such a way that a human could have killed him. Since Mercy has been so concerned with the body count, the second man is merely out—and I made certain he did not see me. If you choose to call in the police, there is nothing that can be used against us—werewolf or vampire.”
“So our halos are nice and bright,” I told Kyle. I looked at Stefan. “Is calling the police smart? Won’t we be putting pressure on the bad guys to get rid of their hostages?”
“No.” Stefan turned his gaze on me. “If this is a government operation, having the local police involved will force them out into the open, and they cannot afford the bodies any more than the werewolves can. If it is something spearheaded by renegade agents—which is what it sounds like—involving the police will alert the agency involved and bring us new allies. That’s how we’ll do this, Mercy. If we can, we trap them in their actions until the only move they have left is what we want them to do.”
He took a breath—which he doesn’t have to do unless he wants to talk, though he usually does if only out of consideration for we breathers who get distressed if the people we’re around don’t breathe for a few minutes. “You were right, Mercy. I was thinking like a vampire before. These people want to separate the werewolves from the protection of society. So we’ll get society on our side instead. It helps that Kyle is human.”
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