Wolf at the Door

by Christine Warren

  She landed on the floor shoulders first and twisted with a grunt to her stomach. From there she managed to push herself up to her knees and look around.

  Quinn lay motionless beside her. The golem must have remembered their last match at the hospital, because he’d given the Lupine an extra blast from the wand before tying him up and then carrying them both up from the cellar. He had dumped them in this room and gone to stand against the wall.

  It looked almost like a ballroom to Cassidy, with a huge expanse of polished wood floor surrounded by intricately carved walls painted a creamy white and broken every few feet on one side by tall, floor-to-ceiling windows. At one end was a set of carved double doors, and at the other a small dais, like a band might play on while couples danced below. Atop the dais sat several chairs filled with several people—or at least people-shaped things—whom Cassidy instantly recognized.

  She almost wished she hadn’t.

  On one end of the abbreviated row lounged the blue-black demon to whom she owed her aching back. Now that she had a clear and right-side-up view of him, she saw the tail he whipped restlessly by his side and heard the muffled rustling of wings when he moved. He stared right back at her, his eyes pools of flame, his mouth a cruel echo of a smile. At his feet she saw the crumpled form of a body clad in a dark robe and wearing a rosary just like Ryan’s. The demon nudged the body and grinned.

  Swallowing a rush of nausea, Cassidy made a point of meeting the creature’s gaze for the space of three heartbeats before she allowed herself to move on to the next figure.

  The next chair held Francis Leonard, sitting calmly and comfortably between the demon and two other people Cassidy had really hoped never to have to see again. The remaining members of the Terrible Trio.

  “I think we’ve managed to surprise you, Miss Poe,” Leonard said, his tone almost teasing as he rose to his feet. He looked for all the world as if he were greeting her at the entrance to a swanky party, rather than, you know, planning to kill her and feed her to a demon in little bloody pieces. “I’m sorry about all this, but I have to say, we could have avoided this whole mess if you had just agreed to be a little more cooperative.”

  She snorted. “I think that ship has pretty much sailed. I tend not to feel all that magnanimous after I’ve been knocked unconscious, kidnapped, imprisoned, paralyzed, tied up, and dumped on a floor like a sack of dirty laundry.”

  “Cassidy, dear—you did say I could call you Cassidy.” His grin was ingratiating and vaguely nauseating at the same time. She kept looking for his expressions to be mirrored in his eyes, but they never were. There didn’t seem to be anything in those eyes, just an absence of morals behind the glassy blue surface. “Cassidy, I want you to know I never wanted to hurt you. None of us did.”

  Leonard rose from his chair and stepped down from the dais, approaching her with a big smile and open arms.

  She jolted to her feet and took an instinctive step backward. “Yeah, well, you’ll understand that I have a hard time believing that when I’m tied up with some kind of demon braid and held against my will in a place I don’t recognize by someone I thought was on my side.”

  “I’m afraid we had little choice. We gave you every opportunity of doing things our way, Cassidy, but you seem to be cursed with the same sort of conceited independence that is your grandmother’s burden to bear.”

  Cassidy froze, her breath stalling in her throat. “If you so much as mussed my nana’s dress, I swear by all that’s holy—”

  Leonard cut her off with a mocking laugh. “Really, Cassidy, you’re hardly in a position to make threats, but I understand the effect stress can have on some people.”

  She bit back another snide comment and glared at him instead. His smarmy “we’re all friends here” attitude both disgusted her and made her really uneasy.

  “I regret the necessity of bringing you here,” he continued, “but neither of you have been willing to listen to reason. You and I both know how foolish this talk of Unveiling is. We should be ruling the humans, not trying to determine ways in which to persuade them to accept us.” His lips curled in a sneer, exposing a length of fang. “The Europeans, like this dog you’re consorting with, would have us begging their pardon and pleading with them not to hurt us. I have not lived hundreds of years to be reduced to such a pitiful state.”

  Leonard’s contempt for Quinn was obvious, but then, Leonard seemed to feel contempt for just about everyone. His expression never altered and his smile never wavered when he drew back a crisply polished wingtip and planted it hard in the middle of Quinn’s rib cage. He was out of his bloodsucking little mind.

  She clenched her jaw against the urge to cry out when she heard Quinn groan and saw him shift position on the hard floor. She almost wished he’d stay unconscious. At least then she wouldn’t have to worry about him getting into any more trouble.

  “The only thing I can imagine right now,” she said, drawing the vampire’s attention away from the prostrate Lupine, “is that if I’ve taken to consorting with this dog, you might want to consider that I’d probably feel more cooperative if you refrained from kicking him right under my nose.”

  Leonard’s smile widened. “Oh, but you come from a long line of politicians, Cassidy. And in politics, I believe this is what they call leverage.”

  She watched helplessly as he reached down and grabbed Quinn by the hair, lifting his head clear up off the floor and shaking him like a puppy.

  “Of course, if you require more persuasion, Cassidy, it could be arranged.” Madame Touleine’s bayou drawl echoed from her place on the dais. Cassidy followed her gesture toward a small door at that end of the room, which opened to admit the golem, once again carrying a burden. This one looked small and fragile and was covered in purple silk.

  Nana.

  Ignoring her bindings, her captors, and the distance between them, Cassidy surged forward, intent only on getting to her grandmother, on protecting her from these monsters.

  She didn’t get three steps before she felt some invisible force tighten around her throat and push her to her knees.

  “Tsk, tsk,” Madame scolded, holding aloft by the throat a small doll with yellow-green beads for the eyes and rust-colored yarn for most of the hair. Cassidy saw a few strands of much finer, glossier hair stitched carefully to the doll’s head and felt her stomach clench. The buttons on that chair in Leonard’s parlor. Looking back, she remembered the tug of a few strands of caught hair pulling out, but she’d been too worked up at the time to think clearly and gather them before she left. How monumentally stupid!

  Madame smiled and loosed her grip around the doll’s neck, allowing Cassidy to breathe. “Do try not to do anything rash, Cassidy. I would hate to see you disappoint me when I have so far thought very highly of you.”

  Great. Just what Cassidy had always wanted. To be a mad old voudun’s pet.

  She straightened her spine and backed up a couple of steps. “Fine, I’ll stay where I am. But if you want me to do anything for you, you’re going to have to give me my grandmother.”

  “Just hear us out,” Leonard urged, still smiling. God, she wanted to wipe that expression from his face. “We think you’ll understand our point of view. What we want isn’t unreasonable.”

  “If you want to rule the world and enslave the humans, I think there might be one or two folks around who would argue.”

  The smile didn’t go anywhere, but it did turn brittle. “Our dominion over the humans is inevitable. They are a dead end on the evolutionary trail, and we will triumph in the final act. But we aren’t saying it must be today, or even tomorrow. We aren’t like the humans. We can afford to be patient.”

  “You possess something that has become very important to us, Cassidy,” Ngala inserted smoothly. He shifted in his chair, scars writhing in the light, and this time Cassidy could see it wasn’t an optical illusion. His scars didn’t look like they were moving. They really were. “Something, it seems, that your family has always had. Influen
ce.”

  “Influence?” If she sounded half as incredulous as she felt, it would be saying something. “What kind of influence do you think I have? I’m an untenured assistant college professor in an underfunded and unglamorous university department. You’ve got to be kidding if you think I can do anything for you that you can’t do for yourselves.”

  Leonard shook his head, his smile stretching from politic to beatific in an oily, disturbing shift. “Dear, dear Cassidy. You suffer from the blindness that plagues so many of our folk. You take for granted the resources at your disposal because your access to them has been so easy. You don’t see the power lurking at your fingertips.”

  Okay, the dude was seriously beginning to creep her out. She wanted Quinn to wake up and take over. She wanted herself to wake up and realize this was not actually happening and she’d just gotten hold of some bad couscous or something.

  Yeah, well, you’ve always wanted to be five-seven, too. How’s that working out for you?

  She forced down the fear and the unease and met the lunatic’s gaze. “So what exactly do you think I can do for you, Mr. Leonard? Administer a pop quiz on the characteristics of cultures that use matrilineal lines of descent? Grade some papers? Supervise a dissertation? What?”

  “It’s really quite simple, Cassidy, and the truly beautiful part of all this is that you won’t have to do anything opposed to your own conscience.” He smiled again. “All we want you to do is to tell the truth. Tell the Council that you have assessed the situation involving the Light of Truth, and you can confirm that they are indeed active in the New York area. Then you recommend the only responsible course of action. That the Council should move immediately to exterminate them.”

  Whoa. Reality check.

  “You want me to do what?”

  “I believe you heard me,” he said smoothly. “You must see that it is the only sensible thing to do. And it is a step we have already begun to take.” The vampire gestured to the body at the foot of the demon. “This David was a sheep, a minor follower as easily recruited as the Ryan boy was corrupted. His kind don’t worry us. We need more than them, Cassidy. We need to dig this cancer out at the root. And you have the power to help us.”

  Cassidy’s heart clenched in sorrow for the young man and whatever family would miss him, but she had her own to worry about, both old and new. Her gaze flickered from Adele to Quinn. His body remained limp, his jaw slack, but she thought she saw a glimmer of old gold beneath the veil of inky eyelashes.

  Yanking her gaze from his prone form, she shifted her position, taking a couple of steps forward under the guise of listening to the vampire speak. In reality, she was doing what she could to put herself between the figures on the stage and the werewolf on the floor. Plus, it was two steps closer to Adele, who still lay limp in the arms of the silent golem.

  “Discuss away,” she said, hoping she hadn’t hallucinated that Quinn was regaining consciousness. “I think I can give you a few minutes before my next pressing engagement.”

  Leonard settled back in his chair atop the dais like a pretender taking the throne. He leaned back and crossed his legs, smiling indulgently down at Cassidy.

  “You may not believe this, Cassidy,” he said, tapping his fingers against the arm of his chair. “But I admire your family a great deal. Or most of it. I never could understand that nasty little tradition of taking human mates. The only thing that made sense to me was that at least they would be easy to control.”

  She struggled to keep her distaste for him and his opinions from reflecting in her face. “We do what we have to.”

  “As we all do.” He sighed and shook his head with false gravity. “Surely you can see that this is the only way. These human fanatics must be destroyed, Cassidy. If they are permitted to live, they will only spread. They are becoming too bold, kidnapping Kasminikov’s mistress, stalking your grandmother.”

  Cassidy must have looked startled, because Leonard paused and smiled.

  “Oh, yes, we know about that,” Madame interjected, not waiting for Leonard to speak himself. “It’s what gave us our little idea, after all.”

  “Yes,” Leonard hastened to continue, “but the important point here is that the humans are growing too bold. They are too close to gathering solid evidence of our existence that they can bring to the masses. We cannot allow that to happen. We must stop them now while we have the chance.”

  Cassidy heard a faint rustling coming from behind her, from Quinn, and raised her voice to cover it, to buy time. “What makes you think we can ever stop them? Fanatics have been preaching about monsters since the dawn of humanity. If we stop the Light of Truth, another sect will just take its place.”

  “Ah, but what truly defines a monster, my dear? Am I a monster? Are you? Are Mr. Ngala and Madame Touleine?” He gestured to the demon. “Is my other friend here a monster? Who gets to decide?”

  Cassidy bared her teeth in what might have passed for a smile, but wasn’t. “I’m probably not the best judge of that. I tend to get the impulse to call anyone who lifts me up by my tail and then beats the shit out of me a monster. It’s this little quirk I have.”

  “If I had beaten the shit out of you,” the demon rumbled, sounding amused, “you would still be unconscious. At the very least.”

  “You sweet-talker,” she snapped. “I didn’t quite catch your name before. What did you say it was?”

  The demon laughed, and if possible the sound was even more grating than its speaking voice. “I didn’t say, little girl. That would be telling. But you can call me Amon.”

  “I believe you should be listening to Mr. Leonard’s request, Miss Poe.” Ngala’s low, melodic voice came from the dais and drew Cassidy’s gaze. “It could prove to be quite important to your future.”

  Cassidy suppressed a shiver. What was it with these guys? Were they charter members of the Creepy Voice Society, or what? “I’m listening. But I still don’t get why you think the Council would be particularly inclined to listen to me.”

  “We were surprised by it, as well. Your grandmother is, of course, a force to be reckoned with in our community, but we felt fairly confident she would be on our side. You, however, were a bit of an unknown, as was the reason behind the fact that De Santos chose to consult with you on this issue.”

  Leonard couldn’t even say Rafael’s name without spitting it. He probably wouldn’t appreciate it if she pointed out that it made him sound almost like a were-cat himself.

  “Gee, all that praise will go to my head. I don’t know if you were listening at the Council meeting that night, but I’m emerging as one of the most respected scholars in the field of the interaction between cultures and fringe groups. It says so right in my faculty bio. You can look it up online.”

  “You must view this from our perspective,” Madame said. “Folk such as we become unaccustomed to asking the opinions of anyone, let alone girls who were unknown to us a few days ago.”

  Cassidy turned her gaze on the voudun and let it harden. “And I’m unaccustomed to doing favors for people who kidnap my relatives and hold me prisoner.”

  “We had hoped you would be reasonable, Miss Poe.” Ngala stood and crossed his arms over his chest. She could see his medicine wand cradled in the crook of one elbow.

  “I don’t think I am being unreasonable. You hurt my grandmother, you hurt my friend, and you hurt me. Am I supposed to brush it aside and pretend it didn’t happen and do you some big favor? I don’t think so.” Especially since Adele still hadn’t stirred in the arms of the golem. “Why would I help you hurt people? It doesn’t matter if they’re homicidal lunatics who probably deserve it, they’re still conscious beings and I won’t be responsible for their deaths.”

  Cassidy risked a glance down at the floor to Quinn’s prone form and felt a swell of relief when one eye winked open and closed just fast enough for her to see. She used all her self-control to keep the reaction from her face.

  “If you are unwilling to cause the deaths of t
he humans,” Leonard said flatly, “you will be causing the deaths of those considerably closer to your heart.”

  As he said it, the golem stepped forward and tightened his hands on Adele in menace.

  Cassidy leaped forward one more time, only to be stopped once again by Madame’s magic around her throat.

  “Ah-ah,” the woman scolded. “Do not be foolish, ’tite. Is what we ask really so unreasonable?”

  The pressure at her throat eased and Cassidy fixed the bayou bitch with a hostile glare. “Gee, I don’t know. Is it unreasonable to kill off an entire group of people based on the principle that if we don’t, they might make things inconvenient for us? Why don’t you go to hell and ask some Nazis?”

  This time Madame didn’t strangle the little doll. She took a pin from the sleeve of her dress and jabbed it into a cloth-covered leg. Cassidy screamed in pain and dropped to her knees.

  She was going to kill that bitch in another minute.

  “I can see you’re going to require a bit more persuasion. I wish you hadn’t made this necessary.” Leonard’s face froze into a mask of cold hatred as he beckoned the golem forward. “Give the old woman to me and kill the werewolf. Make sure it hurts.”

  Quinn’s eyes popped open at that, and his voice rang out clear and strong in the bare room. “I was hoping she wouldn’t make it necessary, either, but you know women. Can’t tell them a bloody thing they won’t argue with.”

  Before she could look down to see what the lunatic Lupine might have planned, she felt his hands close around her ankles, yank her to the floor, and send her skidding across the polished wood toward the other side of the room. She scrambled for purchase on the slick surface, her skin making a ragged squeaking noise as it scraped and slid along.

  But the noise didn’t drown out the sound of his voice growling, “Tell the cavalry I said they’d better have an excuse for their piss-poor efforts at punctuality.”

  Then he stood in a rush, loosened coils of demon rope sliding off him like water, and stretched. She saw his bones shift, his skin ripple, and the light bend around him, and then all of a sudden the man was gone and a seven-foot-tall werewolf was leaping straight for Francis Leonard’s pale, maniacal throat.