The phone worked, which was nice, because otherwise he’d have had to use one of the Cantrip agents’ phones, and with the taste of the hunt on his tongue, that would have been unwise.
He called Mercy first. He needed to hear her voice to remind him that he was not entirely a killer, not entirely a monster. But her cell rang three times. And then a recorded voice informed him that her line was unavailable. He fought down instinctive panic.
She was smart, she would have destroyed her phone to keep them from tracking her. If she were dead, he would know.
Human form or not, he was still too close to the monster who had ripped a door apart for being a door, and that monster needed to hear his mate. He took a deep breath and thought human thoughts for a few minutes.
Adam called Elizaveta and got one of her grandsons, though he could hear her cranky voice in the background.
“Who is calling at such an hour?”
As soon as her grandson told her, she took the phone from him. “Adamya,” the old witch said. “We have been so worried.”
“I need a cleanup,” he told her abruptly, so weary he leaned against the wall. “This is a landline, can you trace it?”
“Da, this is not a problem. How many bodies?”
He couldn’t remember. Hadn’t kept count. He looked at his hands and realized that they were black with blood.
“That many,” she said into his silence. “We will come and do what is necessary.”
“It has to be done before dawn,” he told her. “They are sending a helicopter at dawn.”
“Then they will find nothing,” she told him.
“We need transport, too,” he said. “For thirty wolves.”
“This we can also do,” she promised him.
“And I need to know where Mercy is,” he said.
“She is at Kyle and Warren’s house,” Elizaveta told him. “I thought you would ask, so I sent one of my grandsons to follow her.”
“Good,” he said. “Come as soon as you can.”
“Yes,” she told him—and hung up.
Elizaveta was nearly seventy; she was powerful, but her body was beginning to fail her. In the last two years, she’d lost both of the people she’d been training to take her place, the people who should have been helping her carry the burden of her work. Both of them were killed in incidents involving his wolves.
She might have taken it wrong, might have blamed his pack, except that she liked Adam. His mother had been Russian; her parents had fled Moscow when she was a child. She had spoken Russian as her first language, and Adam had learned it at her knee. When he’d first spoken to Elizaveta in Russian, she’d recognized the accent of Moscow, her hometown, and it had created a bond that he deliberately used. He was always very careful not to tell her that his mother had left fleeing the tide of revolution that had immolated Russia just after WWI.
He was at least as old as Elizaveta. She didn’t know it, would never know it because Adam understood people. Oh, she knew in abstract, unlike the public, that werewolves could live a good long time, but she’d never made the connection to him. He knew that because if she ever processed what she knew, she would hunt him down and try to make him turn her.
He would kill her before he did that.
The vampires had a taboo about attempting to turn anyone who was not a normal human. It had happened. The local seethe had a witchblood—and a woman who had been brain-damaged while still human.
Adam knew of three werewolves who had been witchborn. They were the three most dangerous and powerful werewolves in the world, and he didn’t think it was an accident. The idea of that much power in a woman so morally … ambivalent was disturbing.
The thought made him laugh. Here he stood dripping blood on Spanish tile, his naked body drenched with the blood of strangers, and he was judging other people’s morality.
He could have let them all live, turned them over to the courts. But the courts had let a serial killer walk because his victims had been fae and werewolf.
Cantrip was a government agency—these people were not serial killers, and if he turned them over to the courts, only Peter’s body and a kill list would stand as witness against them. Additionally, it would come out that they had a drug that worked on the wolves, a vulnerability that Bran had been trying to keep secret—and Adam agreed it was best not to advertise to everyone who might decide it was a good idea to rid the world of werewolves.
Probably the justice system would only slap the wrists of whoever was in command. He might even lose his job—to be hired immediately at ten times his salary by someone who supported his vision. Cantrip would hire another person with the same attitudes. The end result would be that the enemy prospered, and the wolves would lose a few more weapons in their struggle to survive.
But Adam could have done it anyway. Could have captured the enemy without killing anyone. He chose not to. And it wasn’t because he was sure that the courts would not grant them justice; that was just an excuse, really. He clenched his bloody fist, then brought it up to his mouth and licked it.
They had attacked his people, and they had killed the one he most needed to protect. They threatened those under his protection, and for that, they could only die. The world needed to remember that it was a bad idea to attack a werewolf pack.
He picked up the phone again and dialed Hauptman Security.
“Gutstein.” There were the sounds of a busy office behind him. It was very early in the morning, an odd time for busy.
“Jim.” Adam closed his eyes.
“Adam. Sir. Good to hear from you.” Behind him, the office noises ceased—and then someone cheered, followed by a whole lot of noise.
Jim Gutstein covered the speaker of the phone, but his whistle still made Adam jerk the phone away from his ear until it was over. When he put the phone back to his ear, Jim’s voice was still muffled. “Can’t hear a word he’s saying. Shut up until we know what’s going on.”
Silence fell, and Jim said, “Sorry, sir. Brooks told us what he knew, and we’ve been worried.”
It took Adam a half a second to connect “Brooks” to Warren’s Kyle. He still wasn’t at the top of his game. He needed food—and he refused to consider all the meat that was nearby.
“And shorthanded,” said a whiny voice over Jim’s line.
“Tell Evan—” Adam started, grateful for the routine that helped keep him human.
“There goes that promotion, Evan,” said Jim. It was an old joke, and everyone laughed. In the noise, Jim said, “Are you okay, sir?”
“Never better,” Adam said wryly, “considering the scope of the SNAFU. However, I have this situation under control. I need you to find out who is in charge of security for Senator Campbell and tell him that a group from Cantrip, at least one person in the military, and a money man in the private sector have it in for the senator and tried to arrange an assassination.”
“The word is that they already know,” Jim told him. “Mercy was pretty clear to the police.”
“I’d rather know that they have that information for certain. You tell them that the people behind the attempt tried to blackmail me into doing it—and though that situation is under control, it is not certain that the senator is safe. I have taken a bite out of the Cantrip faction.” He smiled—with teeth. “The military gentleman was probably aimed more at us than him—and that might be true of the money man as well, but they are still in play. They had alternate plans if they couldn’t force me to act.” The kill list hadn’t been the only thing in their Ops room. Mostly just notes and scraps of paper, but he was good at connecting the dots. “Someone in their security team is prepared to assassinate him should I fail. I failed, and, hopefully, the money is gone, but I don’t know if he or she has any way to know that.”
“I’ll find out who the senator’s security detail is and tell them. I know someone who can talk to the senator directly. That will make the feds send someone official to talk to you.”
“Tell them I w
on’t talk officially.” Jim had been with him nearly fifteen years. “There are bodies I won’t claim, Jim, or lie about. My official story is that I woke up and the place they were holding us was on fire, so we escaped. Officially, I don’t know anything except that they seemed to want me to assassinate the senator.”
“Is it on fire?”
“Not yet,” said Adam. The witch could do a lot with a body, but she wouldn’t be able to erase the marks his claws had made in the tile or the doors he’d splintered. Fix the bodies and burn the house.
The blood was drying on his skin, and it itched. The smell was making his hunger worse. Time to finish this talk.
“Good,” Jim said. “I want you to know that we are behind you, you and your wolves. We’ve got your back. And right now I’ve got all sorts of our most expensive equipment keeping watch on Kyle Brooks’s house, and we have people following Mercy. We haven’t been able to locate Jesse. Brooks told us Jesse was safe.”
“Yes. Good. I’ll stop in tomorrow, and we’ll call a meeting to discuss how we should proceed.”
“Do you want us to tell your wife that you’re okay?” Jim asked.
Adam looked down at the dark stains on his hands. “No. I’ll tell her when we’re really out of here.”
“All right. We’ll keep her safe.”
The pack had left the last kill finally and crowded into the previously adequately sized room as he hung up the phone.
Honey, nearly as blood-splattered as he was because her fur held on to it better than his skin did, came forward with her head and tail low. The closer she came, the faster she moved. When she reached him, she dropped to the ground and leaned against him hard enough that if he had not been braced for it, he would have staggered.
No, he thought as he bent down to rest his hand on the top of her head, and looking over his battered pack, he did not regret killing these people.
“Tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forests of the night,” he told them in a burst of exhaustion-driven fancifulness. “What immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”
Warren leaned against the doorway, and said, “We’re not tigers, we’re werewolves, boss. God didn’t make us, nohow. Just ask the dead guys where we come from.” Despite the drawl and deliberately poor grammar, the exhaustion and pain turning his skin haggard, his eyes were sharp.
Darryl made a noise that might have been a growl if Adam hadn’t heard his second’s real growls. Darryl reached over and gave Warren’s hair a rough caress, an unusual sign of affection from the pack’s second.
“Dead guys don’t get an opinion,” Darryl told everyone. “We’re the good guys. That we’re scary doesn’t mean we’re the villains.”
7
Dominant werewolves are control freaks and do not enjoy being passengers in cars. Asil was no exception. He put on his seat belt, closed his eyes, and sat tense and unhappy as I drove toward Kennewick.
We’d had a brief discussion about who would be driving, and he clearly felt my argument that I knew where I was going and he didn’t was insufficient. He reluctantly agreed, however, that since Marsilia would hold me responsible for anything (more) that happened to her car, it was only fair that I drove. We couldn’t take his rental because they came lo-jacked to the max, and I didn’t want to lead anyone to Sylvia’s home if I could help it.
“Don’t worry,” I told Asil cheerfully. “I already wrecked one car this week. I have no intention of wrecking another. Really.”
He glowered at me—which was impressive since he didn’t open his eyes.
The morning sky was dark and overcast, which actually doesn’t happen all that often here. It wasn’t much lighter than it had been last night. Rain started to splatter the windshield as I pulled onto the highway back to Kennewick. The car informed me that it was thirty-four degrees F outside.
About once a winter, we get a spate of freezing rain that is unholy scary to drive in. Rain turns to ice as it hits the road, and that turns the highways into frictionless surfaces that look no different than wet pavement—until suddenly steering and brakes quit working. I’ve seen semitrucks stopped at red lights start sliding without any impetus other than the weight of their load pushing eighteen wheels sideways across the road. Freezing rain makes auto-body men happy campers as they count the wrecks using all of their fingers and toes.
But at thirty-four degrees, we were safe enough, so I didn’t have to worry about the rain.
“After you retrieve Adam’s daughter, you really still intend to contact the vampires?” Asil asked when we were nearly at our destination.
“Can’t do that until it gets dark,” I told him, then took a good look at the sky. “Nighttime dark, not daybreak dark. I don’t know what new delights this day will bring; however, if we all make it to this evening, then, yes, I do. Marsilia owes the pack. Much as she’d like to see me roast on a good hot fire for a long time, that’s personal. Business is more important. Business means that she doesn’t want to get on the bad side of the werewolves, especially right now. She’s down four of her five most powerful vampires. Two of them betrayed her to a vampire trying to take over her seethe and were kicked out. Stefan left the seethe about the same time. The one powerful vampire left to her is mostly crazy as far as I can tell. She can’t afford to offend us.”
“What if the pack isn’t a factor?” asked Asil, soft-voiced. “What if they’re all dead? Does she hate you enough to go after them? She cut her teeth in Italy during the Renaissance; a little sleight of hand is not beyond her now.”
“She knows about Bran, knows I was raised in his pack and that he is fond of me. If it turns out that she was involved, he’d wipe her seethe from the face of the earth, and she knows it. No.” I thought about it. “No, it isn’t her. There are too many downsides and no profit in it for her. She actually likes Adam, I think, and he’s pretty easy for her to deal with. Straightforward. Another Alpha might not be so accommodating.”
Though without Adam, would there be a pack here in the Tri-Cities? He’d been brought in to deal with a lone wolf who had decided to build a pack, then started killing humans. Adam had stayed because the backbone of his business was security contracts with government contractors, and the Tri-Cities was full of them.
That wouldn’t benefit Marsilia either, though, because weakened as she was, she counted on Adam to keep the nastier unallied supernatural creatures under control and keep others from settling here at all.
“Ah,” Asil said, as I pulled into the apartment complex. He opened his eyes as we slowed. “Disappointing. I had hoped the responsible party would be the vampires. I could kill vampires, I think, without losing control. If it is humans who are our enemies, I shall have to find another means of stopping them.” He showed his teeth. “Age catches up with us all, and I enjoy the kill too much to be allowed it. If we are to be allies in truth, Mercedes, you should know my weaknesses before they become an issue.”
Most of the werewolves who belong to the Marrok’s pack are there because they can’t function in a normal pack. Asil, it seemed, wasn’t an exception.
“Okay,” I said after discarding several versions of comments that mostly boiled down to “please, please don’t kill anyone, then.”
I drove past Sylvia’s apartment, still thinking about the likelihood that Asil would be put in a position of killing someone. There were no empty spaces to park anywhere. I guess most people were still home at seven thirty in the morning on a Saturday with rain coming down in sheets more common on the other side of the state. Go figure.
I finally found a place next to the Dumpsters a few apartment blocks down. The little Corolla that had followed us from Kyle’s house, presumably full of Hauptman Security personnel, had to keep going. I gave them a little wave as they went by.
I opened my door and got out—and something hit me in the back.
The weight dropped me flat on my face on the pavement. The suddenness of it held me still more than any hurt—though pain came right on t
he heels of the realization that someone had landed on me. I’d hit the ground limp, raising my head just a little to protect my face—years of karate benefiting me yet again. It set my knee and cheekbone off again. “Don’t fight me,” said the woman perched on my lower back. “I don’t want to hurt you.” She put something narrow and hard around my right wrist and reached for my left, braced for me to pull at the trapped hand.
Instead, I rolled sideways toward the hand she’d already gotten, one knee under me to add additional force. The move knocked her against Marsilia’s new car with a thump that wasn’t hard enough to do real damage. At least not to her. Even as the sound of her head on the oh-so-sleek side of the car chimed my if-I-live-through-this-I’m-dead meter and raised it a few notches, I changed. The odd little cuff that had been tight on my wrist dropped off my coyote paw, and I slid out from under the woman completely.
I also acquired an additional opponent—clothes. I slid out of Kyle’s sweatpants when I slid out from under the woman. I leaped with my back feet and rolled in midair, pulling my head and front paws out of the sweatshirt and left it behind. My panties clung to my left foot and my tail, but the real trouble was my stupid bra.
I landed, took two more running leaps, and tumbled head over teakettle when my bra fouled my front legs—which meant that her first shot slid along my fur instead of wherever she’d meant the bullet to go.
I focused on her as I rolled on the ground maybe fifteen feet out, fighting the too-stretchy-to-break straps. Leaping away had been the wrong thing if she was shooting. At least if I was rolling around tangled in clothes on top of her, she couldn’t aim.
I had a blink of time to see her rise to a shooter’s crouch, a dark-skinned woman with white hair in a waist-length braid and a young face. She would have looked more at home in an anime convention than holding a big gun made bigger by the silencer on the barrel. “I didn’t want to do it this way.” She took aim at my wiggling body. “Dead doesn’t pay as much.”
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