by A. J. Downey
“Then there’s your answer.”
He tugged lightly on my waistband and I turned, letting him tow me up against his body.
“Curb your attitude with her just a little?” he asked gently.
“Working on it,” I promised.
“Thank you.”
I nodded and let him kiss me, even though it was awkward for me, knowing the door stood open at my back. He let me go and smiled a knowing smile.
“Thank you for that, too.”
“No problem,” I lied and he gave me that rakish grin that set my panties on fire, or maybe that was just my little white lie.
He dressed and we went out to the dining room where several of what had to be the pack were milling around.
I took a deep breath and stopped, pulling my right gun, sighting and firing. The shot landed true, the dude’s head snapping back; a Goth girl next to him screaming and I gritted my teeth. I guess it was time to see if Remus and I were partners for real.
Markus snarled and lunged but Remus shoved me behind him as I pushed it out of my mouth in a bellow I hoped would carry over the din, “He was a Crusader, I mean a Hunter! He was a plant and I can prove it!”
Remus held Markus who was half shifted off of me and I put up my gun, holstering it in a show of good faith. I put up my hands, using one and sweeping my hair away from the back of my right ear, exposing the tattoo behind it.
“Check behind his ear, if it’s not there, try the arch of his foot.”
“Nothing behind the ear,” Craig said and started working on the boots. He pulled off the guy’s sock and there it was.
“How did you know?” the Goth girl asked. “How did you know Eamon was one of…?”
“Because we trained together and occasionally fucked when I was sixteen, until James beat his ass.”
“Who’s James?” Markus demanded, scowling. At least he’d backed the fuck off Remus and was more human than not.
“My brother. Mathias had him killed in revenge for questioning his authority; now I want Mathias seven different kinds of dead for hamstringing my twin and letting y’all use him as a chew toy. It’s a whole different kind of crusade I’ve got going on over here, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that jazz.”
The wolf-kind in the room all stopped and stared, even Remus. I looked at him and he nodded once. It suffused me with an emotion I had no name for. Not pride, not exactly, it was foreign but it felt good so I mentally shrugged it off and looked at all of the people left gathered in the room. There had to be twenty-five of them here.
“We work in teams, Kids. So if he was here, there are more and the Order is too big for me to know them all by looks. Your salt-the-earth protocol is pretty much a sham.” I looked at William and Chloe who were standing at the kitchen island, “What are all of these people doing here anyways?”
“They wanted answers,” Markus growled and I raised my eyebrows.
“I’m starting to see why it was so easy for the Romans to pick you off in the first place.” His brows crushed down even further into a heavy scowl, and I jolted when I realized he seriously didn’t know what I was talking about. Hunters really did know more about their history than they did…
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I muttered, “You don’t even know where you come from? Okay, I’ll give you the ‘too long; don’t read’ version of it. The first were–” I stopped myself and corrected, “Wolf-kind, were druids. The Romans and the Catholic Church were sent to wipe you guys out; it didn’t exactly go according to plan, because whatever nature deity y’all’s ancestors worshiped back then flipped some sort of primal switch and turned you guys into whatever you are to save your furry asses. It’s been the mission of the Crusaders, that’s what we call ourselves, to wipe you out ever since. Okay?”
Silence, Markus looked like he was going to have a fucking heart attack, his eyes met mine and his voice, gruff with emotion, said “Tell us more, tell us all of it,” I shook my head.
“No time, you need to mobilize if you want to survive and we need to hit their central nervous system. Knock out their comm’s and destroy their data storage. That’s only if you want any hope of survival now.”
“I suppose you know where all that is?” Chloe asked.
“Damn right I do,” I answered giving her what could probably be described as a wolfish grin. “There’s more than one facility like the one in Indiana. The center we need to go after is going to be more heavily guarded. They know I’m helping you now, in some capacity or other. This shit is going to be harder, not easier. The only thing we have going for us is the element of surprise.”
I thought about it for a minute and drew breath, “We’re going to have to hit more than one facility at once in a coordinated attack.”
My idea was met with silence and grim looks and I looked at everyone present in turn. This wasn’t going to be easy. Not by a long shot. It was like arming farmers with pitch forks and sending them in against the might of the U.S. Military, which, by the way, had nothing on the Crusade.
People were going to die… but that was the nature of war, now wasn’t it? If these people wanted to survive the genocide Mathias Young was bringing to their door, then they needed to get on board with that. I exchanged a grim look with Remus and he nodded. I guess it was time to impart some grim reality onto these people, as if the body of the Crusader cooling on the floor weren’t reality enough.
Why did I always net myself the shitty jobs?
“Why are you doing this?” The Goth girl asked and I raised an eyebrow at her.
“I told you, Mathias had my twin brother killed. You have no idea what that’s like. Having the other half of your being ripped away. Mathias wanted to make an extra special point, so he sent me and my team in to clean up the mess. I found James like that, after one of you…” I sucked in a shuddering breath, hands twitching. Remus’ hand landed on my shoulder and I jumped. He immediately took it back.
I pursed my lips, “Mathias needs to die and if the other Crusader’s want to get in my way, then I have no problem going through them.”
“Why do you keep calling them Crusaders?” William asked.
“Because that’s what we are,” I swept my hair aside so he could see the red Templar cross tattoo behind my ear again, “The order has different splinter cells in each country. Our splinter cell is a descendant from the Knights Templar. The rest of the world at large thinks the Catholic Church tried to wipe us out for being corrupted; which is where they get their little Friday the Thirteenth legend. The truth is, wolf-kind actually managed to mobilize for once and you guys nearly succeeded in taking us down. We crawled out of the ashes though, and socked it right back to you.”
“Holy shit, this is a lot to process,” Chloe said and placed her hands flat against the countertop leaning into them.
“Sorry, Princess. It was a bitch and a half keeping it from you, but Mathias had an entire team dedicated to keeping you oblivious. All your nanny’s, the butler, even plants in your school.”
William gathered his wife to his chest and she leaned back into his support.
“How do we know where all these facilities are?” he asked.
“Ever see a Red Cross?” I asked and the wolf-kind all looked at one another startled.
“As in the American Red Cross?” Markus asked.
“That would be the one.”
“Fucking-A,” Craig muttered.
Wow these guys were clueless. I exchanged a look with Remus and he finally spoke up, “We can’t talk about this here. We need to find neutral ground, but we need to ferret out any of their operatives first.”
“Agreed,” William nodded, “Time for plan C.”
“What’s plan C?” someone asked.
“Good question,” Markus said and a lot of frightened looks were traded.
It was going to be a long day.
Chapter 23
Remus
“Seriously, why is the old cow coming with us on this? We need peopl
e that can move and we don’t need to be held up because she broke a hip,” Ava muttered, crossly as she glared out the back window of the FJ Cruiser.
“Sharon is a lot tougher than she seems. She might have been around the block a few times, but she’s still wolf-kind,” Markus growled from behind me.
“Doesn’t make any sense. Aren’t there any more like you and Remus back home?” she asked Craig where he sat in the seat behind her. He didn’t say anything so I assume he shrugged or shook his head. Ava let out a frustrated sigh and turned back around in her seat. “That’s just great. I wouldn’t mind a little more muscle on this field trip yah know. They’re going to realize we found their facilities eventually.”
“And if we play our cards right, we’ll be inside causing trouble before they do,” I reminded her. “Now just settle down. We’ll be there in ten minutes.” She glared at me but huffed and crossed her arms.
A glance in the rearview mirror showed that both Craig and Markus were staring at Ava. Not with the wary distrust from the day before though. I hesitated to think it, but Markus actually looked in awe of her.
After her bombshell about our origins, and how we had Hunters that’d been turned wolf-kind planted in our own damn pack, we’d had to figure out how to ferret them out without tipping them off. In the end, it had been relatively simple, if slightly distasteful to some of us.
There were seventy-three members of the Pacific North-West Pack on the peninsula at the time. So we called them, five at a time to come to William’s house. As each one arrived, Chloe would lead them into the downstairs workshop where we had moved all the tables to give us space and five of us stood around in Hybrid form. We told them to show us the bottoms of their feet and behind their ears or we would look for ourselves. Those that argued with us on it, we found out were more often than not, marked as a hunter.
We’d found three by the time the last batch had arrived. Two were in that last batch and it had gotten a little hairy in subduing them. The whole thing had been time consuming, but it worked and it had all been Ava’s idea. That wasn’t what had the boys in the back looking at her in such a different light though.
No, what really did it was how she went about getting the information that we’d needed to bring us to our present point. When securing a member of wolf-kind, extra efforts were needed. We had shackles, designed and made expressly to confine our kind. Extremely heavy and thick, the inside coated with silver. Even I would have been hard pressed to break free quickly and none of the plants had anywhere near my level of strength.
They’d been sitting on the floor against the back wall to William’s shop, their buddy’s body lying beside them, while most of us had been trying to figure out how to go about getting information out of them. While we’d been working on that, Ava had suddenly heaved herself a deep sigh, and fed up with the pack’s arguing back and forth on the matter, had pushed away from the wall.
She marched right over to the first man in the line, pulled her pistol and chambered a non-silver round, pressed the barrel to the guy’s left knee and pulled the trigger. With no one around for easily a mile in any direction, she’d let him howl in pain while the rest of us clapped our hands over our ears to try to blot out the mind numbing shriek.
“Now,” she’d said, leaning down to the guy’s eye level as his knee slowly started to heal. She pressed the gun to his left knee and gave him the most evil smile I had ever seen before and said in the sweetest tone of voice, “Are you going to give us any useful information, or am I going to have to ventilate all of your joints for you, one after another?”
The guy she’d shot had just glared at her but the only woman of the five of them immediately started spilling her guts. Mathias had moved from Indiana, a piece of information that had royally pissed me off at first. Luckily it turned out he’d moved closer to where we were. He was rumored to be traveling to another Red Cross facility, this one located near Denver, Colorado. We had two days before any of them were supposed to check in with their handlers so if we wanted to attack, it would have to be fast.
Worked for most of us.
Then came the arguing over who was going to be a part of the attack team hitting the facility in Colorado. Ava had given us the location of several other Red Cross facilities that were being used to hide Hunter activities. Apparently not every facility was an active Hunter front at all times. They tended to move around with only a small few being permanent installations.
We were sending teams to three different locations, the other two teams were made up of volunteers from amongst the local members of the pack and they had been given detailed instructions by Ava on what they were to do.
Attacking Mathias was a job I wanted, no matter what anyone said, and Ava was right there with me. There was no chance in hell that William was going to pass up the opportunity to go after the old bastard and if William was going, then Chloe wouldn’t be left behind; no matter what anyone did or said. With both Alphas going, Markus was a sure thing; no fucking way was the Pack’s Arbiter going to get left behind. As for Craig? He was just the kind of musclebound idiot that we needed on our team when things got rough. He had former military experience and a decent tactical head on his shoulders when his temper didn’t get in the way. I wasn’t terribly familiar with him myself, but Markus had vouched for him, so that was good enough for the Alphas.
Bringing Sharon along had been seen by Chloe as a chance to let the former Beta regain some of herself. Sharon had once been captured by Hunters, and was apparently subjected to some crazy experiments herself, but she had refused to ever speak of them no matter how many times Declan had asked her in the past. Of course, we’d always figured it as torture, not experimentation; now we knew different. Chloe had figured that the chance to really strike back at the hunters would be good for the old bitch. I wasn’t sure I agreed, but nobody could talk her out of it, and when William caved to her demand the rest of them followed suit.
As the Alphas willed it.
I turned onto Sherman St, and parked the truck across the street and down the block from the entrance into the Red Cross.
“Ok, look chuckleheads,” Ava said, turning once again in her seat. She paused for a moment and glanced at me. “Can they hear me?” she asked and pointed out the back window at William’s grey sedan parked behind us. He tapped the horn once a moment later and I grinned at her.
“That answer your question?”
“Yeah, yeah, you guys are great eavesdroppers, don’t act all smug. The upstairs is usually staffed with normal volunteers and employees. As it’s after business hours, we won’t need to worry about that. Keep in mind that the American Red Cross may be a front for the Hunters, but it also really is a legitimate enterprise at the same time. They do a lot of good for people that need it, so if we can avoid causing any damage upstairs it would be greatly appreciated.”
We all nodded silently and William tapped the horn once again. Ava stared at him through the window for a moment before she just sighed and shook her head. “Seriously never going to get used to that,” she muttered and William tapped the horn again, causing me to grin like an idiot as she growled and glared at him through the window. I didn’t look back at him but I’m pretty sure he had an ear to ear shit eating grin on his face.
“You know, your brother’s a really immature character,” she added, turning to look at me and I grinned again, nodding.
“I’ve been telling him that for forty years now. He just doesn’t seem to want to grow up. I think he’s got a bit of a Peter Pan complex or something.”
“That is our Alpha that you’re insulting,” Markus growled and I had an instinctive moment where I found myself wanting to apologize to the Arbiter when he spoke up again. “Just because he wants to act like a twelve year old doesn’t mean we don’t afford him some respect.” Craig burst out laughing and my mouth dropped open. I don’t think I’d honestly ever heard Markus make a joke about the Alpha before. Of course, the previous Alpha had been my father,
so I guess it’s doubtful that he would have made any kind of jokes where I could have heard him, anyway. Declan had never had much of a sense of humor.
“Yeah well, tell him to keep it up with the horn, might as well just let them know we’re here. You don’t think that won’t be investigated?” We all sobered up quickly at the thought, the silence stretching.
Ava sighed, “Alright, kids,” she said, finally. “Enough with the fun and games. It’s important to keep things light but time to focus. I’m not used to working with you people.” Craig started to open his mouth but she held up a hand to stall him. “And by ‘you people’, I don’t mean wolf-kind, though that’s true enough as it is. I mean you.” She pointed at Craig. “And you.” Markus. “And them,” she finished, pointing through the window at William’s car.
“I’m used to working with my team. People that I’ve known for a long time and fought and trained with. I know what they’re going to do under different circumstances. I know how they’ll react and I know what they’re capable of.” She frowned. “Or I thought I did, at least. Right now the only person in there I think I can count on is my man Mason. He’s in the communications hub and he’ll help keep the alarm muted for as long as possible.”
“I still can’t imagine how you managed that one.” Markus muttered. It’d been bugging me for a while too. Before we’d started out she had borrowed Chloe’s phone and made a call, but she’d walked far enough away that none of us had been able to hear her.
“And you’ll just have to learn to live with that, Sweetheart.” She shot him a smug little grin. “Girl’s gotta have some secrets. Anyway, when we get in there just follow my lead, and please, try not to get yourselves killed.”
We all nodded and as one piled out of the truck. Craig handed Ava her canvas armory and we quickly made our way across the street, stopping against the side of the building.
“That wasn’t funny,” William muttered to me as we made our way around the corner of the building.
“Are you kidding?” I shot back in a quiet undertone. “It was fuckin’ hilarious. Only thing funnier is looking at the bunch of us right now. Good thing it’s three in the morning, if there were any people out on the street right now, someone would’ve already called the cops.
