by S. M. Reine
Deirdre looked down at herself. Her shirt was stained from all the sweating she’d done racing Rylie.
“Go ahead and take a shower,” Rylie said. “I’ll hold your car.”
“We get a car?” Deirdre said. “I feel special.”
Rylie laughed. “Don’t say anything until you see it.”
Deirdre went into the guest cottage, showered briefly, and then packed. She hadn’t expected to find much worth packing—she had only been able to grab a few things from her townhouse before leaving with Gage—so she was surprised to find that someone had visited the cottage overnight.
Several shopping bags were waiting for her on the coffee table. One of them included a brand new backpack that matched Gage’s.
She picked through the presents. There were a lot of nice, rugged clothes in various sizes, all pretty close to Deirdre’s actual size. Someone had been guessing at what she’d wear and done a good job of it. They’d given her everything she would need to last a month without laundry.
Deirdre tossed most of it onto the couch, picking out a few leather items and shoving them into the ratty backpack she’d brought with her.
“Don’t like Summer’s picks?” Gage stood in the doorway, shoulder leaned against the wall, arms folded across his chest. He was a picture of relaxation. Utterly unconcerned about the suicide mission to come. If anything, he almost looked giddy.
“Who’s Summer?” Deirdre asked.
“One of Rylie’s daughters. The one married to the angel. She went shopping for you.”
“How did she know what size I wear?”
“She looked at you,” Gage said. “Summer’s a woman of many talents.”
“I didn’t see this Summer lady anywhere.”
“Another of her talents. She was hanging out in her animal form with the shifter kids yesterday. You wouldn’t have noticed.”
“Well, she has good taste,” Deirdre admitted. “But she’s stupid. Stark’s trying to recruit people who are down and out. The castoff shifters who’ve been loosed into society without support from the pack. They’re not going to be able to afford this crap.” She shook a pair of designer jeans at him, which had been artfully distressed around the knees and thighs.
“Oh? But society’s castoff shifters can afford fine leather biker gear?”
A smile tugged at the corner of Deirdre’s mouth as she tried on the jacket. It smelled delicious and felt like butter. “It’d be a shame to put this to waste. I’ll just have to throw myself down a few rooftops wearing it so it looks aged.”
Gage laughed. He thought she was joking.
Deirdre finished rolling up her clothes and zipped the backpack shut. “I’m ready to go.”
“Not quite yet.” Gage tossed her a box.
Inside was loose silver .380 ammunition—perfect to fit her Ruger. Deirdre gave a low whistle as she counted.
Ten of them. Ten.
It had been hard to get the ones she’d wasted on Burgh, and for good reason. Silver bullets were incredibly illegal. Just joking about being in possession of them was like asking for the Office of Preternatural Affairs to knock on your door.
Now a werewolf was handing her enough bullets to take down ten of their kind.
“Another gift from Summer?” Deirdre asked.
“From Rylie. She said they’re your prize. What does she mean by that?” Gage asked.
Deirdre had meant to shout that she’d beat Rylie from the rooftops, but the enthusiasm had gone out of her. She closed the box’s lid. “What’s a werewolf Alpha doing with silver bullets?”
“They belonged to Abel. They’re pre-Genesis work—plated with pure silver, better than any of the crap you might have gotten off the black market. The alloys that get sold these days are weak. These bullets, on the other hand, were cast back in the day when silver was easier to get.”
Which meant that they were basically priceless.
“Rylie’s putting a lot of trust in me with these,” Deirdre said, adding them to her bag. She would have to load the magazine later using pliers. She couldn’t touch the bullets if she wanted to be able to use her fingertips any time in the next few weeks. They’d burn her skin right off.
“Rylie’s putting all her trust in us,” Gage said.
So Rylie was just as stupid as her daughter.
Nobody in the pack knew Deirdre. Nobody knew who she was, what kind of things she’d done, or where she’d come from. And they were handing her a way to kill a lot of people.
It itched at her, that trust. Treating her like she was already a beloved member of the pack when she was a total stranger.
“Can we go now?” Deirdre asked. The less time she spent thinking about those bullets, the better.
Gage stepped outside, and she followed him. “Theoretically, yes, we can go.”
“But what?”
“So there’s a little complication with this whole ‘infiltrate Stark’s evil pack’ thing,” Gage said. “Tiny, bitty, insignificant problem.”
“You don’t know where to find him,” Deirdre said.
“And you don’t sound that worried about it.”
She sighed. “Not at all.” She’d come out of the preternatural foster system, after all. She knew hundreds of bitter gaeans who’d be dying to hook up with Stark. And one of them was sure to know where to find him.
The car was waiting for them at the end of the trail. It was the first vehicle that Deirdre had seen in the city. Shifters moved so quickly in their animal forms that confining themselves to a car didn’t make sense. Rylie was standing beside a pre-Genesis Honda Accord, which looked like it had survived a few werewolf attacks.
It shouldn’t have surprised her that the car would be cheap, but it did. They had a private jet. They had government funds and the wealth of the whole pack.
“You’re joking,” Deirdre said.
Rylie handed her the keys. “It’s discreet. Nobody will look twice at you.” She wrapped her arms around Gage and squeezed him so tightly that Deirdre thought she heard bones creak. “You could wait another day if you want. Until after the full moon.”
“If Stark’s going to attack you at your town hall, there’s no time to waste,” Gage said. “I’ll just hit up one of the safe houses on the way. I promise.”
That didn’t seem to set Rylie’s mind at ease at all. “God, Gage, you better come back. Okay? Two weeks.”
“As long as it takes,” he said gently, planting a kiss on her forehead.
“No. Two weeks. Before the next new moon. That was the deal.”
“That was your deal, Alpha,” Gage said. “But I’ll be in touch.”
Rylie sniffled. Wiped her cheeks. “Yeah. You better.”
Deirdre moved to get into the car, but before she could, Rylie hugged her as well. And almost as tightly. Rylie smelled like the trees, the icy runoff that poured off a mountain during spring melt, the warmth of summer sunshine. She smelled like everything good about shifters packed into a woman.
Deirdre didn’t hug her back.
“Thank you both,” Rylie said. “Look out for each other.”
Gage got in. Deirdre did, too.
Rylie was still waiting on the trail when Deirdre turned the corner, leaving her line of sight.
Gage and Deirdre drove for hours. To be precise, Gage drove for hours—Deirdre spent that time making phone calls.
She finally reached someone late in the afternoon.
“Found him,” Deirdre said, leaning against the car as Gage pumped gas. The numbers on the pump ticked higher and higher. At six dollars a gallon, they were going to use half of the money that Rylie had given them just trying to get out of the state. “We’re headed for New York City.”
“How did you do that?” Gage asked. “We’ve been searching for this guy for weeks and have barely gotten any sniffs.”
“You’re obviously too respectable,” Deirdre said.
He hung up the nozzle and they got back into the car. Deirdre had picked up snacks in th
e station while making her call—trail mix for her and jerky for Gage. She hadn’t bothered asking him what he’d want to eat. Werewolves loved jerky. They’d become such a huge part of the market in the last few years that some companies even sold werewolf-branded meat snacks now, which Deirdre and Jolene liked to call “kibble.” The actual brand was called “Natural Beasts,” but “kibble” was funnier.
She managed not to laugh when Gage dug into it, but it did make her longing for Jolene lodge in her stomach like a rock.
Gage texted on his cell phone with one hand while driving with the other.
“Who you talking to?” Deirdre asked, trying to see the screen. “Chatting with Rylie?”
Gage tossed his phone in the cup holder. “Actually, I’m reading Marion and Dana’s status updates.” At Deirdre’s look, he said, “Those were the kids hanging out with Rylie’s human son.”
“You stalk teenage girls on the internet?”
“Yes, please try to make me sound as perverse as humanly possible. It’s not like they’re practically family and I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye before leaving today.”
“Holy defensive reaction, Batman,” Deirdre said. “I was just teasing.”
Gage pulled out onto the road. His shoulders were taut. “Sorry. I know. It’s almost the moon. I get like this.”
She’d forgotten what day it was. Deirdre had spent so much time away from other shifters that she’d completely lost track of the cycles of the moon.
“We’ll have to toss our phones before hooking up with Stark anyway,” she said. “We can’t have him looking through our contacts and realizing that you’ve texted Rylie’s kids and their friends. It’s a major security issue.”
Gage grunted his reluctant agreement. “Well, the phones don’t have to go yet. We won’t make it to NYC before moonrise. We’ve got at least another six hours of driving and I’m bushed.” He sighed. “I need a shelter.”
“We could just pull over. Rylie’s influence can reach you from the sanctuary,” Deirdre said, spilling a handful of cashews into her mouth.
“No, I really need a shelter,” he said. “Trust me.”
If that was his preference, then Deirdre wasn’t going to argue with him. She’d prefer sleeping in an actual bed anyway, and she didn’t want to pay for a hotel. The shelters were government subsidized, which meant free places to sleep on the moons, even if Deirdre couldn’t shift.
“There’s a shelter up that way.” Deirdre pointed at the big yellow sign on the side of the road.
Gage’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. His smiles and charm were gone.
“Got a problem with that one?” she asked. “Ex-girlfriend runs it or something?”
“I don’t have any ex-girlfriends,” Gage said.
Deirdre snorted. “Okay, so pull off over there. We should get checked in before it fills up.”
If she hadn’t known what she was looking at, the shelter would have passed for an unusually secure parking lot in the middle of the city. But she knew that there was a reinforced bunker underground, accessible only by the booth at the rear of the lot. All the shelters were the same.
Each of them only had a few rooms, since almost all shifters had let themselves get called to Rylie’s pack, and she gentled their transformations. Most everyone Deirdre knew just slept through the full and new moons.
The people who used the shelters were the ones who didn’t want to or couldn’t fit into Rylie’s pack. They didn’t want to adhere to her rules. Or they’d committed too many crimes and gotten kicked out.
Those were the kinds of shifters who were dangerous on the moons. They were the man-eaters, the moon-sick.
And Gage.
“You’re looking kind of green.” Deirdre bumped the car door shut with her hip and headed toward the booth.
Gage swallowed the last of the kibble. “I’ve never stayed at a shelter before.”
“What? Really? Not at all?” Deirdre frowned. “Then why do you want to stay at this one?”
“I promised I would. That’s all.”
It was still early in the day, but the check-in booth was already staffed, and there was a short line of shifters waiting to get checked in. The witch behind the window wore so many enchanted pentacles on her rings and necklaces that she could have stuck out the night through a tornado if she needed to.
Deirdre and Gage only had to wait a few seconds to get their turn at the window.
“Good afternoon,” the witch said cheerfully, pushing the sign in sheet through the slot. “One room or two?”
“Two,” Deirdre said.
She wrote her name on the page and put “wolf” as her animal—easier than trying to explain the truth. Gage wrote his information and returned the page to the witch before Deirdre could peek at what he’d written.
“It’s good you got here when you did. Seems like we’re having a lot of busy nights as of late.” The witch typed their information into the computer, fingers flying over the keyboard. “You would never guess how many shifters I had to turn away last week. There’s talk of building an overflow shelter.”
Gage scowled. So many loose shifters could only mean increasing numbers rejecting Rylie.
“Probably a good idea,” Deirdre said. “I bet it’s only going to get worse with all the moon sickness.”
“You want to sign the petition to have the overflow shelter rushed?” the witch asked. “I have a copy back here with me.”
Deirdre glanced at the sky. It looked like it was about to start raining. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“I’ll hold you to that! Here are your keys. Have a good night.” The witch buzzed them into the booth.
Deirdre headed downstairs. She hadn’t spent the night in a shelter in months—not since she’d moved in with Jolene—but the sensation of close quarters and unmoving air was unforgettable.
They tried to decorate the shelters like they were spartan hotels, with clean paint and fresh carpet and doors that were designed to minimize the fact they were all made of silver and steel. Yet there was no ignoring the fact that there were no windows. No emergency exits. And only one big floor with two dozen rooms.
“Rooms nineteen and twenty,” she said, stopping in front of her door. She unlocked the other one for Gage.
All of the rooms in the shelters were the same. The beds were made up in cheap linens that could be replaced when shredded. The desks were metal and bolted to the floor. The bathroom doors were adorned with signs asking people to contain their changes in the bedroom.
Everything was painted and warmly lit to make it as hospitable as possible, but it still felt like a prison cell.
Deirdre ran her hands along the paint. It was bumpy from all the shifters who had tried to claw their way out on previous moons, but the actual gouges had been painted over.
Gage dropped his bag on the bed.
“Cozy,” he said.
“The underside of the bed is a lockbox if you want to stick your stuff in there,” Deirdre said. “Or you can just leave your bag in the bathroom.” She pressed the lock on the door handle and jiggled it. “See how I can’t unlock this now? You have to get at a switch under the desk to open the door. Keeps you from accidentally opening the bathroom with your paws.”
“What about the hall door?”
“They lock automatically an hour before moonrise and unlock at sunrise.”
“Nice,” Gage said. “Real nice.”
“Some shelters will drop off water bottles and some kind of protein in the morning, too. In case you wake up hungry.” She hung back by the door, wondering how long she had to pretend to be nice to him. “Yeah. Uh, what are the moons like at the sanctuary? What do you guys do with shifters when they’re having a bad night?”
“Everyone roams loose. It’s more like a buddy system. Older shifters take care of the younger ones.”
Deirdre nodded. “Sounds pretty good.”
She was eyeing the bed. It was hard, with an entirely unforgiving matt
ress, but it was looking pretty good after her night racing around with Rylie.
“Thanks,” Gage said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Thank the gods.
“See you,” Deirdre said.
She locked herself in her room and stretched out in bed. The sheets were even worse than the last shelter she’d stayed at with one of her friends. They were scratchy, more sandpaper than cotton. The faint smell of bleach lingered in the air around her room.
But any horizontal surface was good enough for the moment.
Deirdre was asleep in moments.
Deirdre woke again so abruptly that it felt like she hadn’t slept at all, but her watch said that it was already ten o’clock at night.
And her walls were shaking.
She flopped back against the flat pillow, flinging an arm over her face.
“Damn it,” she muttered.
Someone in the shelter was having a rough change. The studs in the walls were reinforced with silver, but that didn’t stop her from feeling it when people slammed their bodies all over the place. And it wasn’t nearly soundproofed enough.
She’d slept through a lot of bad nights, though. Deirdre shut her eyes and tried to pass out again.
But whoever was banging around in their room was worse than bad. They sounded like they were trying to tear their way out. Her bed shook with the force of it.
Deirdre got up, went to her bathroom, splashed some water on her face. The thumping was even worse in there.
She pressed her hand to the wall between her room and Gage’s.
A body smashed into the other side. Her mirror rattled.
Yeah, that was Gage all right.
Deirdre hesitated, then pressed her ear to the tile, trying to hear the sounds his animal made underneath all the thudding. It stood to reason he was a wolf—they still outnumbered every other kind of shifter. But she didn’t hear any of those familiar growls.
To be fair, she couldn’t hear much of anything under all the slamming.
Deirdre went back into the bedroom, pacing the floor as she waited for Gage to stop changing. It shouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes. Even moon-sick shifters got through it pretty fast.
