Salvage: A Shadow Files Novel

by A. J. Scudiere

  “It's entirely possible someone from their organization has infiltrated us. When the family outside of Billings got out, there was evidence that someone had come and searched the place within days, maybe hours.”

  GJ looked up at Walter, their eyes connecting. Everything they heard told them more and more about how well-organized and well-informed this militia was. What had started as three zealots out acting crazy—or maybe just drunk—one night, had turned into a terrifyingly organized attack.

  "We've also had some infighting lately," Will offered, and GJ couldn't help it, she desperately wanted to roll her eyes, because the last thing they needed right now was trouble from the inside.

  However, she kept her voice steady. "What kind of infighting?"

  Walter, too, was leaning forward. Only Christina was staying back, and as GJ watched, the woman's hands, already flat on the table, clenched just a little bit. And she had to wonder what the hell Christina was doing.

  "It goes in cycles." Will said, and GJ wanted to throttle him. But she didn't ask, what goes in cycles? Instead, she smiled and stayed still, and waited.

  "We have a roaming pack of Lobomau. In fact, it's part of the reason our group has gotten smaller. Some of the wolves are more aggressive."

  "Lobo mau?" GJ asked.

  Will shrugged. "An old term—it’s Portuguese. The Lobomau are gangs of roving wolves who go out causing problems."

  Good to know. Werewolves had street gangs.

  "Needless to say," Will offered, "the Lobomau don't like having their information recorded."

  "These aren't Lobomau," GJ said, already incorporating the term. These were humans. Or at least, she’d seen no evidence otherwise.

  "No," Will offered, "but I wouldn't be surprised if one of them gave up some useful information to the hunters. The Lobomau? They’ll turn on you if they get the chance.”

  42

  GJ found herself sitting at a table with Walter, Christina, and Will Little. They all stared at each other for a moment, having been left alone, finally, to figure out what the ever-loving fuck to do about this situation.

  "If this organization gets their hands on your records, that means they can find every single person like you in the U.S., or at least most all of them?" GJ asked. She was pretty sure that's what she'd gathered from Will's earlier comments about the documents. However, she wanted to be sure before she proceeded, and the majority of what she was hearing was blowing her tiny little mind.

  Will nodded. "All of us here in the US, as well as a handful of families in Europe and many in India."

  As GJ watched, Walter startled a little bit. Turning her head ever so slightly, she asked, "What?"

  It was an odd reaction for Walter to have, but Walter looked at her and said, "Donovan's part Indian. His mother grew up in Calcutta."

  Oh, GJ found herself once again startled by Donovan’s heritage and background. How had she missed all this? When she thought about it in light of the new information, realized she had noticed his bone structure indicating Asian descent. She wondered if the backs of his teeth were shoveled and decided that they probably were before she realized she needed to keep her head in the game. And the game was here, at this table.

  "It's not just this organization, these people," Will said. "It's the Lobomau, as well. They've been coming for the documents, too. It’s a big part of the reason we moved them to a central location. The Lobomau actually managed to successfully get some of them from us. Luckily, the family that had them stolen managed to digitize the records first. So the Lobomau have the originals, but we at least retained the records.”

  “That’s good,” GJ chimed.

  “Not really. Not in the end. The Lobomau slaughtered the family that they stole records from. That incident was part of our decision to reconcile all the various documentations we had and put them into a single, safe location."

  From the look on Walter's face, she was thinking the same thing GJ was. It wasn't looking very safe.

  Will sounded very certain in his idea that this was a safe place. She wondered again how to defend against a relentless enemy that had numbers far larger than expected, especially when her own SAC wasn't doing a very good job of sending them backup.

  It was Walter who said, "We can safely assume these guys are coming back as soon as they're capable. We've got their leader, or one of them, in custody. We haven't killed him, so there's a chance they can get him back. If they’ve got any kind of communication or tracking device on him, they may not have to take much risk. GJ bullshitted about us sending our vitals back to the bureau, and that may be the only thing keeping us alive. But as I said, it was complete bullshit. We don't have anything."

  Will Little twisted his head a little to the side and offered up words in a more comfortable tone than GJ was willing to believe. "Actually, we have a lot."

  "We need backup. We need an army," Walter said.

  "It's coming," Will assured them, which left GJ once again wondering what the hell he was talking about. All the family members had been gathered into the three houses. Some of the children had been sent away with Alicia and a couple of other guardians. Word was they were okay, but she didn't know how long that could hold, because she didn't know where they were. That was for safety, but it also made her nervous.

  That was when Will turned and looked over his shoulder. Coming up from the cellar was a wolf. By himself he padded up the steps, nudging the wooden trap door slowly upward.

  She heard him before she saw him, and when she saw him, he looked somewhat familiar. GJ frowned at the brown hair and hazel eyes and the feeling of vague recognition faded into dust as Will turned and said, "Hey, Wade."

  Wade, apparently as a wolf, simply nodded back to his grandfather and trotted into another room, disappearing into the home, right before GJ's eyes.

  That was Wade, she told herself. Then she mentally repeated it several more times, trying to wrap her head around it. If she had to deal with one more bout of cognitive dissonance tonight, her brain was going to explode inside her skull, and explosions in contained spaces were very, very bad.

  Then she turned back to the table, her warped mind processing things slowly. "Army? Backup?" she asked.

  Wade had been out there. The wolf howls. It was dumb to go out. But Wade hadn’t gone out. This was the first time she’d seen him here. She looked then at Will. Maybe the wolves hadn’t simply gone out hunting themselves. Maybe there were wolves coming in. "How many?"

  "I don't know," he said. "We'll ask Wade when he can talk. He should have rounded up a handful before he came."

  It was mere moments later that Wade turned up in an outfit of khaki pants and a t-shirt. It was a little off for standard Wade, but probably the most Wade-like thing he was able to find in the closet. Even in the short time that GJ had been around him, she didn't think she'd ever seen him wear anything other than khakis and a white t-shirt with a plaid shirt buttoned down over it.

  He barely said hello and then walked to the other side of the house. It was Will who said, "Glasses," and GJ remembered Wade wore them. He wouldn't have carried them in—not in that form. Will saw her confusion and answered her question before she asked. "For everyone who has glasses, we keep a spare prescription in each of the houses."

  Of course they did, she thought. Sure, if she shape-shifted and ran through the woods looking like a wolf, she'd want her prescription available wherever she wound up. She was wondering if he had poor eyesight as a wolf when he came back into the room still wiping the glasses off as if it was part of the habit before settling them on his nose.

  Without a word, and without waiting for an invitation, he pulled out the last seat and joined the group at the table. Walter held out her hand and Wade leaned out to clasp hers across the short distance. That was probably as close to a hug as Walter got for anyone who maybe wasn't Donovan, GJ thought.

  "Did Westerfield send you?" GJ asked. She was hoping her boss had finally sent them the backup they so desperately neede
d.

  "Somewhat," Wade said. "I told him I was leaving and he let me go. There aren't enough agents to cover this. This requires Nightshade agents, or my family members."

  GJ tried to think it through as she was interrupted by Will.

  "How many?"

  "Twenty-five," said Wade.

  43

  Walter finally felt better. Numbers were important. She was finally starting to feel more comfortable considering family members as troops. She appreciated the skills she kept seeing, both for her own safety and the work of the group, and for their skill in running a mission. "So, you left the hotel this morning, and you rounded up other family members nearby and came in?"

  Wade said, "I left early yesterday. I've been traveling, gathering people. We came in as close as we could. We changed, and we snuck in through the back paths. They're changing now, getting situated between the houses. Some have visited here before, but some haven't. Others are still out in the woods holding spots that we know are well fortified."

  "How are they with arms?" Walter asked, realizing that when she said it, she meant weaponry, and when others said it, they might be thinking about the thing that she had a prosthetic version of. She might have also inadvertently asked how well these wolves handled guns…

  Wade didn't question her. "They're good. I brought the fighters. We've made sure that the remaining family was safe and off their land, because, honestly, I'm concerned. If we bring the strongest to gather here, the vulnerable ones left behind can be attacked."

  "Good thinking," Walter told him. It was what she would've done. Then again, maybe it was just what Wade would have done. He'd been in this a lot longer than she. They tried to sketch out a plan, and though Walter worked at finding out, Will refused to tell anyone where the documents were kept. But Walter pushed back. "How can we protect them if we don't where they are?"

  "How can you protect them if someone can torture you and you tell them where they are? We've managed to keep these safe for thousands of years. Give me a shot at this, honey."

  Well, fuck. Walter wasn’t ready to concede that they actually had kept the documents safe. By Will’s own words some had been stolen. Worse, some of their people had been murdered trying to protect them. In addition to that, Walter did not like being referred to as honey, and it had been a long time since someone had had the balls to do it. She did think she had to admire him for trying. Even so, on the outside, she glared, letting him know that word would not be acceptable again. Though they’d probably outnumbered their attackers from the beginning, it had been a difficult fight. Some of their numbers had been children; many had been untrained. As far as fighters went, they were underscored. Now, however, their forces were bigger than the ones coming.

  She was about to say so to the table when GJ voiced exactly the point Walter wanted to make. "We have a greater number now than they had when they came last time, but we have that because of reinforcements we just brought in. What if they do it, too?"

  Walter nodded, and looked to Wade. "Did anyone see you coming in? I think the big question is: do they know that we have reinforcements?”

  "I can't imagine they did see us," Wade said. "We know this land, and so many of us went out. I sent signals. Will sent a handful of scouts out to find the incoming, so we could lead them in along the paths we know that are silent, dark, and as stealthy as possible. I didn't encounter anyone, and I didn't hear any gunfire. I have a hard time imagining that anyone out there in the woods wouldn't have fired on us if they'd seen us."

  Walter thought it was pretty plausible, unless one lone person was sitting there in the dark, watching. In that case, firing on a pack of wolves could easily go badly then. They might get a couple, but in the end, the pack would turn and the shooter would likely be dead, so she wasn't quite as confident of Wade's assessment of their stealth.

  As she watched, though, another long and pointed face nudged up the door to the cellar. Ears perked up as the lithe body wriggled out from under the door. Walter wondered why no one was helping them through, and then she decided it was none of her business. She was the interloper. The FBI wasn't sending backup. She, GJ, and Christina were the ones who didn't belong, and maybe these people knew exactly what they were doing. Even as she thought it, Wade reached out to her right hand and gave it a quick squeeze. "It's good that you're here," he said. "We need some tactical experience."

  Walter then asked the question that she needed to know, but had dreaded asking. She didn't want to see the looks on their faces. "What is it that we are protecting?" They all looked at her like she was nuts, as though the answer was obvious, and she wanted to point out that it wasn't.

  "We're protecting the people."

  "Do we have any people who need more protection than others?"

  "The women and children," Will said immediately. Wade was nodding.

  Unsure if she could talk about the documents now that the crowd had been added to, she took what she could get. “Women and children” was a pretty standard answer, and she'd partly expected it, but she wouldn't have been surprised if one of these people here—one of these family members—didn't turn out to be some kind of Egyptian deity, and maybe needed more protection than the others. So she was glad that the initial answer had been simple, but it wasn’t enough. "What about the property?"

  "What do you mean?" Will asked.

  "How valuable is the property to you? Can we light it up? Can we burn the house to the ground to make them think that we're gone?"

  That made the old man sit back and run his fingers through what was left of the hair on his head. It still looked pretty good, but was thinning just a little, and she had to wonder how it would look in wolf form. She didn't ask, though.

  "We have to save the property," he said. "This is our home. This is where we live. I mean, obviously, if it comes down to people or property, then ..."

  "But that's the problem," Walter protested. She’d been in this situation before, and she knew people under-predicted the damage. "It almost definitely will. I can't say it will come down to all the property, or one life. It could be chairs, it could be walls, it could be all the buildings. It could be that your well is poisoned. I don’t know,” she shrugged. “I can't tell you what those ratios will be. But you have to go into this willing to give up a lot—probably even things that you love—to save the people. Too many people wind up trapped or dead trying to save property because they don't believe their lives are truly in danger, or they don't understand how far their enemy is willing to go.

  “I want to know ahead of time what we can and can’t do. If I see an opportunity, and I can—I don't know—start a fire and save a handful of lives, should I just do it? Or do I wait until the very last moment, because the property itself is valuable and worth saving? Is there anything in here that is worth more than the human lives?” Then she quit trying to hide it and just blurted it out. “Like, say, these documents you're talking about?"

  44

  GJ felt her head snap up as Walter started asking her questions. What was here that was more valuable than human life? GJ would've said nothing. It was a snap response, and something they'd specifically been trained for at the FBI.

  But Walter understood war. However, as GJ thought about it, she recognized the value of the question. It didn't matter what she thought was most valuable. It mattered what these people thought was the most valuable. That would be the way they made their snap judgments when they were fighting. Their snap judgements, their sacrifices, even their statistical maneuvers would be based on the thing that they most wanted to protect—and if it wasn't themselves, that changed everything.

  The answer came back from Will. "We have to protect the documentation. We have to protect enough of us to keep going, and we must keep the documents. If they find it, they can see that we know of every wolf in the US and on many other continents. It won’t matter if we survive here if they get their hands on our genealogy."

  That was the issue, GJ thought. Too many points
to protect, too many things and too many different places. If they were thinking about it, they would likely protect their women. Childbearing was much harder and more time-consuming than child siring. They were protecting their genetic pool. Though it sounded from the way Will Little said it that no individual was more important than the documents.

  That idea—protecting a statistical outcome—was probably the hardest thing of all. Again, GJ found herself looking to Walter. She raised her eyebrows, as if to say, You're the expert. What do we do? Then again, Wade was here, too.

  He was not only an FBI agent with seniority to either of them. This was his family and his home compound. He probably knew the area like the back of his hand. Actually, she could say for certain that he did. He had managed to sneak in here without getting shot or even detected.

  Just then, in the background, she heard another series of howls. They went up, one after another, until an entire chorus echoed between the hills. In half a second after that, she heard gunshots as well. They couldn't be too far away. She understood from her training what a gunshot sounded like—up close, at a hundred meters, at a mile. She was starting to be able to place them. Walter was likely much better at that than she was, but now was not the time to ask.

  One of the howls cut abruptly, and everyone at the table jerked to their feet. It was Will Little who held his hands out to everyone, asking them to wait. To not act yet.

  "They'll signal us. That’s not the signal, so we have to wait. Those should be incoming. One of my guys is there to meet them and help guide them in. But until he gives the signal that they're under fire and they need help, we don't move."

  The howls went up again in the distance, and GJ listened closely. Though she heard absolutely nothing different, several faces around the table visibly relaxed. She could only assume that they were hearing something she wasn't, some sort of signaling. Even as she thought it, Wade nodded.