“You told Armstrong that you think this was aimed at the werewolves.”
“Don’t you?” I asked.
Asil shook his head. “It doesn’t matter what I think. Let’s look at the world through their eyes a moment. If Adam did exactly as they asked him to, what would be the result?”
“They kill the pack anyway—can’t have witnesses. They’d kill Adam, so he doesn’t kill them. The senator’s dead or wounded by werewolves. The people who think the only good werewolf is a dead werewolf would have more power.” I ticked them off on my fingers, then said, “Kyle and I, Adam and I, and just I have gone through this a hundred times.”
“Okay,” Asil said. “The rogue Cantrip agents like the last part, the one that lets them go hunting werewolves. Maybe they like the dead senator part, too. Campbell has been standing between them and their kill-’em-all hunting license for a long time. But who is after Adam or the pack? You think they are the ones this is aimed at—so who benefits?”
“Shouldn’t we do this part downstairs?” I asked, my throat tight. I didn’t want to go over and over how much danger Adam and the pack were in—I knew. “We were discussing this with Armstrong.”
Asil shook his head. “What happens if Adam and the pack are gone?”
I bared my teeth at him. “I go out for revenge—I don’t do peanut butter much anymore. But if they aren’t afraid of the pack, they aren’t going to be afraid of me. Bran is scarier—but they probably don’t know about Bran.”
“Maybe they do,” said Asil. “Maybe they’re after Bran.”
“They knew about Gerry Wallace’s silver/DMSO/ketamine cocktail,” I conceded. “They knew every wolf in the pack. Maybe they do know about Bran.”
“Mercy?” Kyle called up from the floor below. “Are you through telling the werewolf all the things we mere mortals shouldn’t know, yet? I’m making breakfast, and the sun’s coming up.”
“What were you planning on doing next before Agent Armstrong and I arrived?” asked Asil.
“I was going to go to get Adam’s people, the ones who work for his company, to see if they can figure out where the money is coming from. See if they can tell if it is government money or private. I was going to the vampires to see if they knew anything about where someone might be holding a pack of werewolves—they run this town’s supernaturals like the mob ran Chicago back in the day.” There was something else. Something I was supposed to be remembering. “Damn it,” I said, diving for my dirty, bloody jeans. “Tad. Damn it.”
I pulled out Gabriel’s sister’s phone and saw that I’d missed calls—and had twenty new text messages. There were fifteen calls exactly one half hour apart from a number I didn’t know. I didn’t bother to read the text messages, just dialed the strange number. Tad answered.
“So,” he said grumpily without waiting for me to say anything. “I take it you’re dead? Because, otherwise, there is no excuse for guilting me into sitting outside in winter watching the most boring family on earth for more than a whole day. They started sending out the kids with cocoa yesterday about two in the afternoon. Dinner was homemade burritos with Spanish rice and refried beans—and almost good enough to forgive you for making me think you might be dead.”
“How did they know you were there?” I asked.
“I knocked on the door to use the bathroom. Figured it was safer than leaving them to be slaughtered by enemy government agents while I went out to find the nearest gas station.” There was a pause. “You all right?”
“No,” I told him honestly, closing my eyes. “Not at all. Adam’s still gone. They had a few men here at Kyle’s—”
“That’s Warren’s boyfriend, right?”
“Right. Anyway Ben, I, and Stefan—mostly Stefan—got Kyle out of their clutches but spent the day at the police department answering questions.”
“Good for Stefan.”
I rubbed my eyes and thought. “I think the best thing to do might be to grab Gabriel and Jesse and bring them back here. There are police keeping an eye out on Kyle’s house, and Adam’s team is running security.” I looked at Asil, and asked—“Are you planning on staying here with us?”
He nodded. “Until Adam is found, yes.”
“Okay, did you hear that, Tad? I have one of Bran’s wolves here to help out, too.”
“I don’t have a car,” Tad told me. “I hiked over. You’ll have to come get them yourself.”
“No worries. I’ll be over in about fifteen minutes.” I opened my mouth to ask if he would consider helping us further but closed it again because he’d been standing guard all day.
“If Kyle has an extra bed in his mansion,” Tad said, “I’ll catch a few winks of sleep there, and I’ll help you until this is finished.” He paused, too. “I’m sorry I’ve been a jerk. Life hasn’t been a bed of roses lately, but I don’t have to take it out on you.”
“Sure you do,” I told him. “Who else would listen to it? I’ll be over as soon as I can.”
I clicked the phone off.
“I’ll come with you,” Asil said. “They know where you are—which makes you the shiniest target.”
“Fine,” I said. “If we leave Ben here, there will be room in Marsilia’s car.”
Asil looked at me. “Your vampire friend is Marsilia? Mistress of the Tri-Cities’ seethe?”
I snorted. “Don’t be silly. Marsilia hates me and would love to see me rot in Hell. I stole her car so that the bad guys couldn’t find me—and because I wrecked my car. Ben’s already bled all over her Mercedes, though, so a few more miles on the odometer won’t make her any madder.” I caught sight of Ben. He was watching me intently and told me as clearly as he could without words that he didn’t intend to be left behind.
“You need to change back,” I told him. “You’ve been shot and dragged all over the place, and you’ve been wolf for nearly two days. Time to change back and rest up. All I’m doing is picking up Jesse and Gabriel and coming back here. Bran sent Asil over to be useful, so he will be and, unless I’m much mistaken, we’ll also have an escort of Adam’s finest trained professionals to make sure I make it back safely.”
“I’ll keep her safe,” Asil told Ben solemnly.
“Besides,” I said, “I’d like to leave Kyle with some real backup in case something happens.”
It was the truth—and that one worked. Ben liked Kyle—and Ben didn’t like very many people.
6
ADAM
Fear was a familiar friend. Adam sometimes thought that he’d been afraid since he’d stepped on the bus that took him to basic training all those years ago. And the older he got, the more he had to fear. Right now, he was afraid for Mercy, who didn’t have the sense to be afraid for herself.
When he’d been a boy, he’d thought that if you were just strong enough, tough enough there wouldn’t be anything to be afraid of—except for God, of course. His parents had been small farmers, patriots, and devout Baptist God-fearing Christians and raised him to be the same. But their best efforts had met the world, and, mostly, the world had won.
He’d left the farm first, and Vietnam had done its best to scour him of his patriotism. It hadn’t succeeded entirely, though he reserved the right to think most elected officials could do with a little jail time to mend their ways. Vietnam had also taught him that the tougher and smarter you got, the more afraid you learned to be. It had also taught him that there were monsters in the world—and he had become one of them.
Then he’d come back home and found out that war didn’t cause fear—love did. He loved Mercy with a fierceness that still surprised him.
Adam took a deep breath, and it didn’t hurt. Silver didn’t burn in his joints and dull his senses anymore. He tested his body, just to be sure. Someone watching would only see that he continued to sit with his back to the wall of the cold stone room where the pack had been imprisoned. He tightened and released muscle groups that responded with their usual quickness and force.
He didn’t underst
and what Mercy had done. No, that wasn’t quite true—she’d taken the silver poisoning his body into herself. He understood that was how the pack bonds worked for her, that she saw things in symbols and pictures while he smelled things. Samuel had once told him that he and Bran both heard music. What he didn’t understand was how she’d used the pack bonds and magic to do the impossible.
And what really scared him was that he was fairly certain that Mercy hadn’t known what she was doing, either. She could have killed herself. Silver wasn’t poisonous to her. However, if someone had injected an average Joe human with the amount of silver that had been in his body, it wouldn’t have been good for the human, either. He wasn’t a doctor, but he was pretty sure it would have been fatal.
He could feel her, so she wasn’t dead, but the link felt … off—and that really scared him. He had to control the urge to run, to bull through anything that stood between them so he could protect her. But he wouldn’t waste her efforts, he would wait until the proper time, then he would go hunting.
Something changed in the room, and Adam pulled his head into the here and now. He listened. The almost constant soft clink-clink was the sound of his bound wolves moving restlessly, even drugged into almost unconsciousness because the pain of the silver in their bodies and in the chains that held them made it impossible for them to lie still. He could smell them, smell silver and sickness in spite of all that he could do for them.
Judging from their condition, the sacrifice he’d intended would not have helped the pack enough. Jones was afraid, and he’d pumped them all too full of silver. Adam, though, was now free of the effects of all those darts. He could do more for the pack, but he didn’t want Mercy to deplete herself keeping him healthy. So he would wait until it was necessary.
Perhaps the soldier who moved like water through the densely populated room would give him other opportunities. The human stepped over Warren’s still body and crouched, finally, in front of Adam. He settled in close, because Adam could feel the disturbance the man’s breath made in the air.
“Alpha,” said the man who’d reprimanded Mr. Jones after he’d shot Peter, the one who seemed to be in charge of the military or pseudo-military rank and file.
Adam opened his eyes. The other man was crouched so his head was level with Adam’s, close enough to see the whites of his eyes. He was wearing the familiar black armor, and his face was blackened and mottled with a fresh application of greasepaint.
Warren was lying just behind him, and Adam saw the gleam of his eyes in the darkness. Darryl slid closer, his chains silent as the big man moved. Adam made a move with the hand away from his enemy observer, and Warren, then Darryl subsided.
Adam was in no danger. Free of the silver and drugs, Adam could have crushed his throat before the man took his next breath. It was tempting. Very.
But this one wasn’t the man who’d killed Peter, so Adam waited to see why he was here. Killing was easy. It could be done at any time.
“We are going,” the other man said in a conversational voice. “Leaving our employment here.”
Adam lifted his head and met the other man’s gaze. After a brief count, his opponent turned his head.
“You aren’t as foggy as my employers think, secret knock ’em out darts that work on werewolves or not,” said the enemy soldier. “They don’t affect you the way they are supposed to, I saw that right off, even if Jones chooses not to. So you might have picked up that I had some men waiting at Kyle Brooks’s house with orders to capture your wife, your daughter, and Ben Shaw because our intelligence said that was where they would probably go. Early this morning, the police broke up the party—” He quit speaking for a moment and stared at Adam’s face. “And how do you know that?” He shook his head and spoke to himself. “Freaking supernatural bullshit. I told them we should stay out of it, but the money was too good, and we always like to keep the government happy with us. Keeps us employed.”
He sat there in front of Adam and thought some more. Patience, Adam counseled himself, there was more information here, and it would be easier if the man chose to tell him about it himself.
“So we ended up with one of ours dead and three in custody—and your wife is talking to the police about how someone kidnapped your pack and wants you to go kill the good Senator Campbell. I thought maybe one of my boys talked out of turn—which they wouldn’t. But maybe she knew about it the same way you know what went down this morning, huh?”
He waited a moment, but both he and Adam knew that Adam wasn’t going to respond.
“Now my outfit is pretty big news, and we make good money. With no civilians dead, it didn’t take our lawyers long to get the rest out—and once out, they’re all the way out. Too many eyes on them to make them useful for this operation. No worries, we have the resources to replace them with operatives with clean slates and redeploy the hot ones somewhere less worrisome—out of the country until certain people forget the ones who work for a paycheck and keep after the people who pay the money, you know what I mean?”
Adam didn’t say anything, just waited for the man to get to the point.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said slowly, as if he had all the time in the world. Maybe he did. “I asked to be in on this. You are demon spawn, you werewolves and the fae and the witches. All of you need to die, and someday I hope to be one of the people called upon to rid your scourge from the earth.”
And Adam smelled the fear on him for the first time, fear and eagerness for blood. Adam was sympathetic; he was afraid for his people, for Mercy—and hungry for blood, too.
“But I didn’t get where I am by working against the rules,” the mercenary said. “Rules keep people alive and keep the money flowing. Rules say that the people who hire us don’t get to kill us when we’ve served our part or because we know things they don’t want to get out. We don’t talk—and we police our own if someone thinks about singing inconveniently.” He met Adam’s eyes briefly again. “You know about rules, you wolves. I’ve heard that.”
The mercenary paused, waiting for a response that didn’t come. When it was clear his invitation to talk had been turned down, he continued. “So these guys had a flight out of here for the morning, but Slick—one of the ones who got away—he went over to the hotel where everyone should be and surprised a government cleanup crew and the bodies of my men who should have been alive. He managed to get away and contact me. All casualties, no survivors but Slick. He’s taking a roundabout way to a rendezvous, and I’m taking my boys out. The word to eliminate the men who were arrested didn’t come from our company—no one who works for our company is that stupid. We’re leaving; and then we’ll deal with the betrayal.”
Adam asked, “Why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t like your kind,” said the mercenary. He looked around and spat on the dirt floor. “But that’s personal. Someone screws us over? That’s business. They killed my boys because they didn’t want them to talk. Don’t know what we know that is so valuable, but I’m telling you what I know in hopes that it torpedoes their plans.” He paused. “Those men took my orders, and that makes their deaths personal.”
“I understand,” said Adam.
The other man frowned at him. “I’d heard that about you, that you wore the uniform.”
“Ranger,” said Adam.
The man examined him, taken aback.
“Doesn’t mean I’m not a monster,” Adam continued. “But I do understand how a soldier works. You follow orders, and in return, you expect the men above you to have your back while you risk your life. When they don’t …” Adam shrugged. “Something needs to be done.”
The other man nodded, took a deep breath. “That’s right. Okay. Folks pay us—we work for them all the way. We don’t take better money, we don’t talk. But our employers broke the rules. If they’re afraid of something getting out—well, maybe I think that might be a start on teaching them not to betray the soldiers who work for them. The folks giving us the orders�
�they’re regular government—Cantrip Agency. You know, the ones who are running around screaming that the fae and werewolves and all the rest are dangerous and need to be exterminated when their job was supposed to be learning about the supernatural world and acting as intermediaries between you and the government. The rhetoric they’re spouting is that they want the power to go wolf hunting before some other agency gets it. They’re tired of having to call the cavalry because they can’t have their own army.”
The mercenary frowned at Adam. “But you probably guessed that.”
“Most of the competent people end up elsewhere,” agreed Adam. “FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, National Security Administration, Secret Service, or one of a few other agencies. Cantrip has been a dumping ground for the screwups for years, and this has the same sort of FUBAR painted all over it that I’ve seen whenever desks try to run real operations.”
The other man grinned at him. “What you said. I’m going to repeat that to my superiors.”
“Okay,” Adam said. “But where is the money coming from? I know what Cantrip’s budget is; they don’t have enough of a black-ops slush fund to work this. Maybe if they all gave up their salaries, they’d be able to hire something like your operation without alerting someone. You guys are more likely to be out protecting some drug lord in South America or fighting the war when the Geneva Convention is too restrictive for the home troops.”
The other man put a finger along his nose and pointed it at Adam. “I could like you if you weren’t a hell spawn, you know? No. Cantrip doesn’t have that kind of money, though they would if a werewolf killed the Billionaire Senator, right? If his party didn’t see to it, his very rich and very, very powerful family would. Word is that the head of this operation is cooperating with some money man, a rich son of a bitch anonymous puppet master who seems to have it in for you, Hauptman. He funded this operation, and the only stipulation was that it was your pack that got elected for assassination duty. Don’t know who he is, but people are afraid of him.”
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