Wolf at the Door

by Christine Warren

  Quinn sat back against the sofa cushions with his arms curled around her and kept silent. He understood this was important to her, and he wanted her to be reassured that everything was all right and her grandmother was safe. He wanted to hear that, too, and his sense of hearing was acute enough that he could listen to both sides of the conversation just fine where he was. He heard the phone ring three times before the other end picked up and a man’s voice answered.

  “Berry residence.”

  Cassidy frowned. “Who is this?”

  “This is the Berry residence. Can I help you?”

  “Yes, you can,” Cassidy snapped. “You can tell me who the hell you are and why you’re answering my grandmother’s phone, and then you can put her on the line before I call the police.”

  The voice on the other end of the phone sighed. “That won’t be necessary, Cassidy. This is Rafael De Santos and the police are already here. I’m afraid your grandmother is missing.”

  Twenty-five

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Cassidy felt her heart stop beating. She knew exactly what Rafael meant, but the words leapt out of her mouth of their own volition, as if by making him repeat himself, she could force him to take it back.

  “I’m very sorry, Cassidy. We thought we would be able to prevent this, but whoever orchestrated it clearly knew what they were doing.”

  “What happened?”

  “Two of my men were stationed right outside the house, but they never saw it coming. The only explanation is that the kidnappers used magic to take my men by surprise. They used a spell to give them the element of surprise, then cracked the guards’ heads open and bound them with silver cuffs.”

  “I don’t give a shit how they did it,” she roared. “My nana is gone, and you were supposed to make sure that didn’t happen! I want you to go and get her back right now!”

  Her scream still echoed through her living room when Quinn tackled her to the sofa, grabbed the phone from her hand, and sat on top of her to keep her in place. “Shit! What the fuck happened? How did Adele disappear out from under your fucking nose?”

  Cassidy cursed loudly and brutally and lay into Quinn with a vengeance, trying to get free of his restraint. She punched and beat and scratched and clawed and made a few good attempts to bite until he pressed the heel of his hand against the middle of her forehead and pinned that to the sofa cushions as well.

  “Yeah, how did you think she’d be taking it, ya gob-shite? She’s a bloody wreck! How long ago did you realize she was missing?”

  His anger and distress came through loud and clear, but it was the question about her grandmother that managed to bore through Cassidy’s red fog of panic and rage. She wanted to know everything Rafael De Santos knew. And then she wanted to find whoever had taken her nana and kill them. And then she might have to get nasty.

  She stopped struggling and lay beneath Quinn, panting and concentrating on Rafael’s end of the conversation.

  “Only an hour ago,” the Felix was saying, “but we think she must have been taken during the night, so they’ve got a good head start on us.”

  Cassidy quickly calculated the time between sunrise and now. They could be hours away. She yipped in frustration and tested Quinn’s hold with a desperate squirm.

  He just rode it out and glared down at her. “And your men didn’t see anything?”

  “No. They didn’t have to. I’ve been trying to tell at least one of you that the kidnappers got sloppy. They brought silver cuffs because they knew the guards at Adele’s house were shifters and wouldn’t be able to break out of them, but they didn’t count on shifter healing rates. One of the guards had healed enough to regain consciousness in time to see the car leaving. He got a make and model and a partial plate.”

  Quinn lifted his hand from Cassidy’s forehead, but it hovered just a few inches away until she gave a terse nod, acknowledging that she wouldn’t try to bite him again. It wasn’t because she didn’t mind being pinned down by a macho idiot. It was because she needed to save her strength to tear out the throats of the stupid bastards who had taken her grandmother.

  “Did you run a trace?”

  “Of course.”

  “And?”

  “Our friend at the FBI says the car is leased out of a dealership in Fairfield, Connecticut. The name on the leasing agreement is D. Yvan Young.”

  Quinn swore. “Then it is the Light of Truth.”

  “We think so.”

  That time, Cassidy took her turn swearing.

  “Do you have any idea where they might have taken her?”

  Cassidy sat up as much as she could with a two-hundred-pound werewolf on her chest and listened intently.

  Rafael hesitated. “We aren’t positive. The car makes us think Connecticut, especially given the Thurgood situation, but that’s still an awfully big search area.”

  Cassidy snarled. “Then get an awfully big search party together. We need to find her.”

  “Easy, Cassidy, you’re not the only one around this conversation with good hearing,” Rafael said. “I understand your sense of urgency—”

  “Do you? Is it your grandmother who’s been kidnapped?”

  The Felix’s voice remained low and calm, but an unmistakable cord of steel entered it. “No, it isn’t. But I’ve a family of my own, Miss Poe, and I know how I would feel if someone were to try and take one of them from me. The streets would run with blood.”

  She wanted to howl her approval of the imagery.

  “But I also know that I would want those with cooler heads around to keep me from doing anything stupid. If we go rushing out, beating every bush in Connecticut, the Light of Truth will hear us coming from three counties away. They’ll either move her or kill her before we get anywhere close to finding her.”

  Quinn rubbed his hand over Cassidy’s shoulder and felt her flinch at the words. “So what do you suggest? We can’t afford to wait around and hope they have a change of heart.”

  “I don’t propose we do. I’ve already spoken to the two men I sent to Greenwich to look into Alexandra Thurgood’s situation. They think they might have found a contact at the hospital who would be willing to provide us with some information we can use to track the Lightheads. If it leads us to them, it can lead us to Adele.”

  “Well, what the fuck is he waiting for?” Cassidy demanded. “What’s the information?”

  “He refuses to talk over the phone. He wants to meet with someone in person.”

  Her frustration was reaching a boiling point. “Then have your men talk to him in person. How is this a tough call?”

  “I never said it was.” There was that steel again. “Unfortunately, Miss Poe, your grandmother is not the only missing person we have on our hands. Miss Thurgood is no longer at the hospital. My men are a bit preoccupied trying to find her at the moment.”

  Part of Cassidy wanted to shout at him to screw the damned governor’s daughter and tell his men to drop everything and find her nana. But another, admittedly smaller, part of her wondered how she would feel if she were the girl’s mother or sister, and she bit her tongue.

  “Fine. Then I’ll go. Give me the guy’s name and I’ll talk to him myself. I can be in Greenwich in an hour.”

  “Make it two,” Quinn growled, showing her his teeth when she tried to protest. “We both need to get dressed before we go anywhere.”

  “I can go myself.”

  “Over your dead body. I’m driving, and we’re leaving as soon as we’re dressed.”

  “I’ll let you fight that out among yourselves,” Rafael said. “The contact is named Ryan. He’s an orderly at the hospital, and he’s Other.”

  “Vamp? Lupine? What?”

  “Not sure. The men thought changeling, but they didn’t have time to ask a lot of questions.”

  “All right, then. I’ll have my cell phone if anything happens. If it does, I expect a call. We’ll be on the road in twenty minutes.”

  They were
on the road within ten and across the state line in thirty. Cassidy sat in the passenger seat of Quinn’s rented sedan (he’d vetoed the idea of folding his huge frame into her Mini and refused to let her drive in her condition anyway) and watched the miles crawl by on the road between Westchester and Fairfield Counties. She knew from slightly less than subtle glances at the speedometer that Quinn was already pushing the boundaries of felony speeding, but to her, they couldn’t possibly go fast enough. Her heart had stopped beating the moment she’d heard Rafael’s news, and she didn’t think it had started again yet.

  “Are you all right, love?”

  Quinn’s voice rumbled more smoothly than the engine and pulled her attention away from the passing scenery.

  “If they’ve hurt her, I’m going to kill them.”

  She said it quietly, without any flash or exaggeration, and she meant every word. It frightened her a little. She’d never been a violent person, but she knew that if anything had happened to Nana, she was about to become one. She’d felt dislike, but she’d never hated anyone before this. Maybe this was how those misguided humans felt about her and her kind.

  The sunlight spilling through the windshield bathed Quinn’s profile with yellow light. It seemed to illuminate him from the inside, as if revealing the wolf beneath the skin of the man.

  He kept his eyes on the road and his hands steady on the wheel, but he spoke with utter conviction. “If they’ve hurt her, I’ll hold your coat before I take a turn of my own.”

  And that’s when it happened.

  Cassidy stared across the car at this man, watching the light play over his hardened expression, and felt the earth shift under her feet.

  She loved him.

  The intellectual part of her mind gave a mild “huh” of surprise to note that the shifting hadn’t happened during one of their bouts of mind-numbing sex—which she would happily have rated in terms of the Richter scale—or in the sweet, tender times after. It hadn’t happened the way she thought it would, with a dramatic flash and roar. It hadn’t even happened in the sweet, quiet moments when he took such good care of her or treated her so tenderly.

  No, it had happened when she had really looked at this man and seen the truth. The truth that this Y-chromosome-driven whirlwind who had entered her life in a rush and a tumble clearly intended to stay in it just the same way. He would kill for her or die for her, would kill or die for the ones she loved. And that was it. Game, set, and match. He had won, and she had been thoroughly routed.

  Her mind just clicked off and that was it. Just like that, all her fears ceased to matter. Not that they went away, but they became utterly powerless over her. It didn’t matter anymore that she had sworn never to become involved with a diplomat. It didn’t matter that this man would always have a higher calling to which he had to answer. It didn’t matter that she might spend the rest of her life being dragged from assignment to assignment along with him and a passel of pups. It didn’t even matter that they might end up like her parents, killed by the very people they were trying to help. If she died, she didn’t think she would mind so much as long as this man was by her side.

  Shit. Her heart wasn’t kidding around about this.

  She was on her way to find out whether her grandmother, the woman who had raised her since childhood and one of the only constants in her life, was alive or dead. This was not the time to fall in love with a large, pushy, furry, sexy, exasperating man from half a world and about three species away. There shouldn’t be room in her heart or mind for anything but Nana, but the heart, she could see, was an incredibly elastic organ.

  It, she discovered in that long, silent moment as she stared across at him, had already made him room. It had stretched and shifted and cleared away old baggage and cobwebs and laid out a welcome mat for its newest resident.

  God, how was she supposed to break that to her grandmother?

  Quinn steered the car along the exit ramp, his gaze darting between her face and the road ahead. “Cassie love, are you still with me? Cassidy?”

  She tore her attention from his face and looked back out the car windows. She needed a second to get a grip on this. On anything that still made sense. She couldn’t afford to be picky just then.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m fine. Just worried.”

  Quinn slowed the car nearly to a stop and made the turn onto a narrow, tree-lined road. “I know you are. But I promise we’ll find her, sweetheart. It will be okay.”

  “You didn’t say that about Ysabel Mirenow.”

  He was silent for a couple of minutes, which didn’t do much to reassure Cassidy. She needed reassuring right about then.

  “No,” he finally said. “I didn’t. But I knew why they had taken Ysabel. She was a pawn. That was all she could be for them. She wasn’t Other, just connected to one. There was only so much they could accomplish by taking her, and none of it depended on whether or not they kept her alive. That’s not true with Adele.”

  She turned to look at him, almost afraid to let what he was saying make sense. “Why else would they have taken her?”

  “For the reasons I was going to tell you about before we got sidetracked. Adele is an incredibly important figure in the Other community. She’s too valuable to discard so easily.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Your grandmother isn’t just any Other. She’s nearly the community in and of herself. I know that much even on such short acquaintance. If I were them, I’d be looking for a way to use her that had nothing to do with killing her.”

  “Like?”

  He hesitated, glancing over at her cautiously. “Like magical control, maybe. Or possession.”

  Cassidy went still and swallowed against a raw wave of fear. “Great. Well, thanks for making me feel better.”

  “So my distraction technique might need work,” he said, pulling the car to a stop and shifting into park. “But I got us here with no injuries and no full-blown panic attacks. I think it was damned well done of me.”

  He climbed out of the car and walked around to open the passenger door for her. She was still off balance enough that she let him do it without protest. She finally got her feet back underneath her as they trudged up the path from the parking lot to the front doors of the huge brick building.

  Inside, Quinn bypassed the information desk and led the way to one of the waiting areas inside the lobby. He stopped beside a low coffee table and picked up the heavy ivory hospital phone. Digging a scrap of paper from his pocket, he punched in a number and waited for an answer.

  “Yes?”

  “We’re here and we’d like to talk to you,” Quinn said. “Can you get us up?”

  “I think so. I got a couple of guest badges out of the research director’s desk. She’s in a budget meeting all day.”

  “We won’t be here long. We just want to ask you a few questions, then we’ll get out of your hair. We’re in the lobby.”

  “I’ll come down for you. Give me five minutes.”

  Twenty-six

  The lab tech who greeted them in the lobby and escorted them out from under the watchful eyes of Genghis Receptionist looked about eighteen, tops. He stood eye to eye with Cassidy, which made him about five-three (five-six in heels), and he had the smooth, baby-fine skin of a preteen. He also had an unruly mop of straight black hair and the most gorgeous, faintly almond-shaped eyes Cassidy had ever seen, and a shy, flirtatious smile.

  Quinn greeted the poor kid with a snarl and they followed him to the elevator. The young man didn’t look all that happy about being in an enclosed space with a sulky, possessive Lupine, because he stared at the floor numbers as if they were his last link to sanity all the way up to level six.

  By the time the chime dinged and the doors slid open, the clouds of testosterone had grown toxic.

  “Thanks for agreeing to help us,” Cassidy said, stepping out of the car and following the young man down an antiseptic white corridor. De Santos had called him Ryan, and the name badge th
at hung from a cotton cord around his neck read R. MARKS. “We don’t have a lot of time to waste.”

  “It’s not like I could refuse with the New York Council and the whole White Paw Clan breathing down my neck,” he said, turning a corner and picking up speed. “The old break room is this way. No one uses it anymore since the microwave died.”

  Maybe Rafael had been right about the informant not being Lupine. That comment about the White Paws didn’t quite sound charitable. Curious, Cassidy sniffed the air around the young man and detected . . . something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Not Lupine. Not vampire. Not Racine. Not Felix. Not even Fae. In fact, she went through the catalog of every Other she’d ever met and couldn’t manage to come up with anything that this guy smelled quite like. One more good whiff, though, and she could swear he didn’t smell human.

  “I know the Council claims authority over parts of the tristate area,” she said, fishing, “but I didn’t know the White Paw Clan normally walked around telling non-Lupines what to do.”

  Ryan shot her a wide-eyed look without slowing his pace. “They’re the Council’s representative for the whole state. And since the new Alpha came, the ties to the city are even closer.”

  “But—”

  “The break room is through here,” the orderly said, pausing to push through a set of wide, swinging doors. “Like I said, most of the staff uses the new one in the middle of the wing, so it’s pretty quiet back here.”

  He stopped in front of a wooden door with a small, reinforced-glass window in the top. The room was dark and the hall was quiet except for the jingling of metal as the kid searched for the right key.

  “This isn’t the sort of conversation I want anyone to overhear. People can get touchy about stuff they consider weird, and you do not want to see our psych ward.”

  His voice became muffled as he stepped farther into the room and fumbled along the wall as if searching for a light switch. Cassidy moved to follow him. She had only taken a step or two when she felt Quinn grab her shoulder and yank backward.

  “Cassie! Wait!”