by Lia Silver
He gave her the paper, then caught her hand in both of his. “Laura, I can’t tell you how much this means to me. And…I’m glad I’ll get to see you again.”
She forced herself to smile. “If you’re all right now, I’ll take off. The sooner I go, the sooner I’ll be back with someone who can give you some answers.”
Roy stepped away from the car, squaring his shoulders. “I can walk back. It’s not far.”
“See you tomorrow night, probably.” Laura turned away before he could see the tears welling up in her eyes, and scrambled into the car.
Looking through the rear view mirror, she watched him walk away until he disappeared around a curve in the road. Seven hours to San Diego, a night’s sleep, and seven hours back, hopefully with DJ, but if not, with someone from his family. And then she’d have made all the excuses to stick with Roy that she could possibly make without getting into outright conning and lying.
One more day, and she’d see him again.
One more day, and she’d say good-bye to him for the very last time.
Chapter Thirteen: Laura
The Lair
Laura drove down the mountain road, wary of icy patches. The passenger seat, still shoved all the way back, kept drawing her attention with its absence of a passenger.
Sometimes she could almost see Roy sitting in it, pale and sweating, his stubborn determination pushing him onward until his body gave out.
Sometimes she imagined him as he must have been before he’d been changed, at ease except for having to cram his long legs into her little car. Maybe they’d trade lines from his favorite movie (Die Hard) or hers (Ocean’s Eleven), while he leaned back and rested one hand on her thigh.
They’d be a road trip they’d taken together for fun, or maybe to visit DJ and his family. Roy had told her that after his mother had died, he’d always spent Christmas with DJ’s family, along with other Marines from the base who didn’t have a family or couldn’t spend it with theirs. The Torres family had a huge house with an even bigger backyard where they used to slaughter and roast a pig, in defiance of multiple city zoning regulations.
“Supposedly the pork tastes better if the hog is exercised first, so they’d have us chase it around the yard a while,” Roy had said. “And then, when we were all tired, Mr. Torres would say, ‘Okay, that’s enough exercise, go ahead and catch it now.’ That’s when all the guys who hadn’t done that before would find out that chasing a pig is easy, but catching it is harder than you’d think.”
“Didn’t the neighbors complain?” Laura had asked.
“The backyard had a wall around it. And now I know why,” he’d said with a laugh. “I used to think fifteen Marines chasing a hog was the liveliest it got at the Torres place, but I can only imagine what holidays are like when they don’t have outsiders around. I used to think DJ was the wild one in his family—his brother Dominic is a lawyer and his sister Five—Danielle—is this high-powered movie director. But if I understood him right, they’re all werewolves, down to the toddler cousins and the grandma.”
“The Torres family wolf pack,” Laura had remarked.
She hadn’t meant anything by it, but Roy had flinched as if he’d been struck, then launched into a story about the time that DJ had accidentally overdosed on NoDoz and no one noticed the difference until he started hallucinating.
She crossed her fingers that she’d find DJ safe and sound in San Diego. If she didn’t, she had no doubt that Roy would do anything to rescue his buddy, no matter how dangerous or even suicidal. Laura hoped they hadn’t managed to cross wires to the extent that DJ thought Roy was still imprisoned somewhere, and was off trying to rescue him.
Laura couldn’t help envying them their relationship. Not just Roy and DJ, but Roy and DJ and Alec and Marco, and Roy and the soldiers in his platoon. The way he talked about being with them, it sounded halfway between a camping trip with your brothers and a sleep-over with your very best friends, with life-and-death stakes to bind you that much closer together.
Not that Laura had ever experienced a sleep-over. Or best friends. Friends, sure. Sort of. She was certainly friendly with her co-workers. They ate lunch together and chatted. She knew about their hobbies and health problems and significant others. But real friends, true friends, friends you could confide in and lean on, friends for whom you’d do anything, friends you’d trust with your life…
Laura had learned very young that there was no point making close friends when you’d eventually leave town at a moment’s notice and never see them again—probably never even say good-bye. When she got older, that went double: how could she confide in anyone when she couldn’t tell them the truth?
Even with people she had no intention of conning, like her co-workers at the bank, knowing that she couldn’t be honest about her past put a barrier between them, like the bullet-proof glass she sat behind. Or perhaps she’d missed the window for learning how to be intimate with people.
She felt close to Roy, but he must have sensed that she was nothing but a clever con artist all the way down to her soul, a fake person with fake feelings, incapable of true intimacy.
Laura angrily swiped at the tears that had once again started to well up. She couldn’t cry and drive. These were dangerous roads.
She came around yet another hairpin curve, and stomped on the brakes. A huge, leafy tree branch had fallen across the entire width of the narrow road. Laura got out of the car, hoping it wouldn’t too heavy for her to be able to drag out of the way. She bet Roy would have been able to pick up it one-handed and toss it like a twig.
Trying to push away thoughts of Roy, Laura looked for the best place to grab hold.
“Freeze.”
Hearing that voice again plunged her into terror. She didn’t have to make a decision to freeze; she was frozen already, flung back to the bank. She was kneeling beside the man she’d killed. His blood was running over her hands.
Red blood soaking into white carpet…
Gregor stepped out from behind a redwood, gun in hand. “Just a precaution. I would hate to have to hurt you.”
Laura wasn’t half so afraid of the gun as she was afraid of him. He’d killed Mike. He’d forced her into complicity with his killing of a completely innocent bystander.
Red blood soaking into white carpet…
“Walk this way.” He took her elbow as if he was escorting her to a dance.
Laura felt as if she was trapped in a nightmare. Everything seemed unreal. She couldn’t feel her feet touching the ground. It was as if she wasn’t in her body at all.
They turned the corner, and she saw a car parked on the shoulder, with two people standing nearby and one at the driver’s wheel. She couldn’t see anything of the driver but the back of his head. Of the people standing, one was a young Latino man wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a Spiderman T-shirt, and the other was an athletic-looking woman in her thirties with clipped white-blonde hair. The woman held a gun.
Laura’s thoughts moved slowly, as if they were swimming upstream. She couldn’t do more than observe what was happening, and feel a distant alarm at her own state of shock.
Red blood soaking into white carpet…
The driver got out of car. He was a burly man with a boxer’s often-broken nose—the same man who’d tried to kidnap her. The same werewolf.
Roy lying at her feet, his blood soaking into the snow…
Roy had taught her how to bring herself back to reality.
Laura pressed her toes into the ground, trying to make herself feel the earth under her feet. Hard. Bumpy. There’s a pebble under my left foot.
She let her left hand brush against her thigh. Smooth cloth. Straight raised seam. Warm flesh underneath.
Laura felt a little steadier, as if she was inhabiting her body rather than drifting several feet above it.
Three things that are black: the road. The Spiderman guy’s hair. The car tires.
Three things that are white: the clouds. A scrap of paper by the
side of the road. Gregor’s shirt.
Laura took a deep breath, observing the slight chill of the air as it filled her lungs, identifying the scent of pine and moist earth and rotting leaves.
“Miguel, take her car and follow us,” Gregor ordered
As the younger man turned to go, Laura saw that his right cheek was badly scarred, as if his face had been caught and chewed up in some machine.
Or maybe it had been literally chewed.
“Get in the car, Laura,” said Gregor.
Laura obediently walked to the car, but her mind was working again. It was as if she’d turned a remote control on herself and hit “play.”
The werewolf was Gregor’s minion. He hadn’t been after Roy at all—he’d been after her, on Gregor’s orders. And if that was true, then maybe Gregor was also…
“Oh, Laura…” Gregor said, with a smile that showed a lot of teeth.
The air shimmered, and a lean brown wolf stood where Gregor had been. It was the same wolf that had tried to ambush Laura on her way to the cabin.
I’m ahead of you, Laura thought, wrapping herself in cold control. The thoughts chipped themselves out in her mind like ice. I already figured that out. You don’t shock me.
With another ripple in the air, Gregor again stood before her. “Remember me?”
“How could I forget?” said Laura, as lightly as if they were old friends meeting by chance.
Gregor smiled again. “That’s the spirit. That bank robbery was a disaster, but it was worth it for meeting you. Halfway through our little chat in the office, I knew you were the one.”
“The one?”
“The one for me,” Gregor replied. “The alpha female for my pack. My mate.”
Laura gave brief but serious consideration to punching him in the face and making a run for it. Then she looked from his gun to the woman’s gun to the minion’s gun, and decided against it.
If she didn’t come back by tomorrow night, Roy would know something was wrong and go looking for her. If she left some sign, he’d find it. She blew on her hands as if they were cold, then stuck them in her pockets, hoping to find something she could drop.
Her pockets were empty. And she was almost at the car.
Then Laura recalled Roy, when he’d had that breakdown on top of the hill, muttering that he could retrace his path by scent. She didn’t need to do anything special to leave him a sign—she was the sign. All she had to do was wait for twenty-four hours or so, and he’d come rescue her.
Laura got into the back seat of the car, relief warring with fear. A lot could happen in twenty-four hours.
Gregor got in the passenger seat, the minion took the wheel, and the blonde woman slid in next to Laura. The minion and the woman had similar body language, wary and alert, ready to spring into action. Roy had the same attitude. Laura wondered if they were also former military, or maybe former police.
As the car pulled out, Gregor turned to address Laura. “Allow me to introduce my pack. The driver is Donnie, and your seatmate is Nicolette. Nicolette is an Army veteran, formerly with counterintelligence. Donnie…”
“I’m a hit man,” said Donnie. He didn’t say it jokingly or as if he was bragging, but as a fact. Laura didn’t have the slightest doubt that it was true.
“I was going to say ‘enforcer,’ but yes,” said Gregor. “I hope you two can put your first meeting behind you. I’m sure being his alpha female will help.”
“The last time we met, I shot you,” Laura pointed out. “Is that really what you’re looking for in a mate?”
“A charming display of spunk,” Gregor said pleasantly. “Yes, actually, it is. I want a strong personality to help me keep the rest of the pack in line.”
Since Gregor seemed to enjoy it when Laura talked back, she ran with it. “And you’re not afraid I’ll kill you in your sleep?”
He shook his head, smiling. “No, and I’m happy to tell you why. First of all, I think a lot of what you said at the bank was true. You do like danger and excitement and living on the edge. I think you’ll love being a werewolf, and you’ll come to be grateful to me for giving you a life you’ll enjoy much more than the boring one you left behind. And on the off chance you don’t, well… Nicolette, explain to Laura why you’re working for me despite your high moral principles.”
The split-second glare Nicolette turned on Gregor at “high moral principles” also reminded Laura of Roy, when she’d told him DJ was missing in action. Laura would never have the nerve to taunt someone who could look that murderous…
…which meant that Gregor had one hell of a hold over her. And he thought he’d get the same hold over Laura.
“I don’t have any choice,” Nicolette replied, no hint of her previous fury showing in her voice. “The person who bites you becomes your sire. You can’t leave your sire.”
“Tell Laura what happens when you try,” Gregor urged her.
“The pack is your life,” Nicolette said, her voice calm and even. “The pack keeps you sane. And the sire rules the pack and controls the pack sense. If you’re cut off from the pack sense, the loneliness gets worse and worse. Everything hurts. You can’t sleep. You can’t eat. Your powers spin out of control. You go back or you commit suicide.”
That explains a lot, Laura thought.
Hope bloomed in her heart as she realized that if Roy’s problems were caused by being separated from his sire, then finding DJ would fix everything for him.
“How long can you stay away?” Laura asked, allowing her real anxiety to show through. “Do you have to be permanently joined at the hip?”
“Not at all,” said Gregor, in an annoyingly soothing tone. “A week’s separation is fine. Two weeks, and you’ll feel the strain. Nicolette held out for six weeks before she came limping back with her tail between her legs, but she set the record. No one else managed it for more than a month.”
Roy thought he’d been bitten about two months ago. If Gregor wasn’t conning her, Laura was impressed with how well Roy was holding up, all things considered.
Gregor smiled that toothy smile that made Laura want to punch him in the mouth. “Born wolves—born to werewolf parents—don’t need as much direct contact with their pack. They like it. But they don’t need it. Made wolves—the ones who were bitten—have to stick with their sire or die in agony. But on the bright side, made wolf powers tend to be much more interesting and impressive than born wolf powers.”
“They’re bigger and better wolves?” Laura asked.
“No, their other powers. Nicolette, tell Laura about yours, and what happened to it when you ran away from your sire.”
Nicolette resignedly addressed Laura. “I can tell when people are lying. After I’d been gone a while, I started sensing all the lies—not just deliberate ones, but lies people tell themselves. Then not just lies, but things they think are true but aren’t. Then I couldn’t hear anything anyone was saying, because everything that wasn’t true had gotten so loud. Wherever I went, it was like a radio blasting, ‘She doesn’t love me,’ and ‘She really loves me,’ and ‘I’m doing it for his own good,’ and ‘I’ll get to it in a minute.’ I couldn’t hear myself think.”
“That sounds horrible,” Laura said.
Nicolette’s gaze drifted past her, distant and shell-shocked. “And then I started hearing all the lies I tell myself. That’s when I went back.”
Laura knew Gregor had set up this entire conversation to convince her not to run, but it still shook her.
But if contact with one’s sire was so vitally important for made wolves, what in the world had DJ thought would happen to Roy without him? A Marine on active duty in a war zone couldn’t take off to stay with his wounded buddy. Even if Roy hadn’t been captured and locked up, DJ surely would have known his wounds were liable to keep him in a hospital for longer than a month.
Nicolette seemed to be telling the truth about her own experience, but she was the hostage of a small-time super-villain with every motivation to keep
her in line. Laura was certain that Gregor was playing some kind of con game. For Roy’s sake—and for her own—she had to figure out what.
Laura spoke up. “So I can bail on you and your pack most of the time, so long as I check in every two weeks for my fix?”
Gregor shook his head. “I might forgive someone who runs away once, if they’re very useful to me or if I want to demonstrate what a torture it is to be cut off from the pack sense. But if they do it a second time, I kick them out of the pack.”
Donnie spoke up. “You don’t want that.”
“I guess not,” Laura said uneasily.
Donnie turned on to an unmarked dirt road that wound through the forest.
Second dirt road after Hillyard, Laura thought.
She hoped Roy could track a specific car’s tires by scent, but she didn’t know for sure that he could. Nor did she know when Gregor planned to bite her. They were already halfway down the mountain, and Roy wouldn’t even realize she was missing till the following night.
And that was all assuming that Roy would realize that she was in trouble rather than thinking she’d ditched him. He knew she was a lying con artist; would he think she’d decided not to get involved with all his dangerous problems, lied to get him off her back, and skipped town? Even apart from the fact that it would torpedo her rescue, the thought of him believing that of her, and of how much it would hurt him, made her feel sick.
“Let me demonstrate Nicolette’s talent for you, Laura,” Gregor said. “So you don’t waste your time lying to me, which we all know you can do so beautifully. Feel free to lie or tell the truth to the demo questions, so you can see for yourself.”
“Okay,” Laura said warily.
“First demo question. Which of your parents are you closer to?” Gregor asked.
“My mother,” replied Laura.
“Lie,” said Nicolette.
