"I think she's saying no," Annie translated, her voice hesitant.
"I know what she's saying. And even if I couldn't tell, after a week of dealing with her god-awful stubbornness I could have made a good guess." His voice was grim and he never took his eyes off Sam's. "But in the same week, she should have had time to figure out that I can dig my heels in just as deep. I want to talk, and if I have to go knock on Princess Fiona's door to ask her to summon a moon spell to force her change, I'll do it. So she can shift now, or she can make me make her do it and end up pissing me off."
She bared her teeth at him.
"Never let it be said I left you without a choice, Samantha."
Annie looked from him to Sam and back again. "I have sweats in my desk. I'll go grab them."
Sam extended her glare to include her friend and ruffled her fur, but she made no move to stop Annie. When she set the clothes on the ground in front of Sam, she spared Noah one last killing glance, then smoothly shifted and yanked the sweatshirt over her head.
"Arrogant, hard-nosed, thickheaded son of a bitch," she muttered. When she pulled on the sweatpants, she got creative.
Noah let her run with it. When she was covered and he'd managed to unclench his jaws enough to speak, he asked, "Now who's going to explain to me just what the bloody hell is going on here?"
* * *
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sam folded her arms over her chest. "Annie already told you, I'm here because she called me. I think the more interesting question is why the hell are you here?"
A muscle jumped in the side of his jaw. "I followed you," he bit out.
She suppressed a start of surprise. "What? Since when?"
"I came downstairs at the club to see how much longer you'd be, but instead of finding you directing the troops, I saw you running for the back door like your tail was on fire. I worried something was wrong, so I followed you."
"You couldn't have." She shook her head. "I'd have spotted you. And there's no way you could have kept up with me anyway."
"Not on foot," he agreed, "but I caught a lift on the bumper of an obligingly speeding delivery van."
Her scowl deepened as she took in his clothing and the pistol holstered at his waist. "You came looking for me at the club loaded for bear?"
"Damn it, I just told you I was worried!"
"You said you were worried when you saw me leave. If you followed me immediately, you had to have been dressed like that before you came downstairs. What the hell aren't you telling me, Noah?"
Annie broke in. "Um, not that I want to get in the middle of this—or, you know, within a good fifty feet of it—but don't you think we should be focusing on the people who were trying to break in here? The ones who sacked my lab?"
For the first time, Sam took a good look around her, and she swore. While she'd been busy scent-trailing the bastards through the building, one of them had already gotten inside the lab and done a quick, thorough, and very messy search.
"Are you all right?" She reached out and grasped Annie's arm. "Were you in here when they did this? Did they hurt you?"
Annie shook her head. "I'm fine. I hid in Gordon's office, but the man out here seemed less interested in me than in… whatever he was looking for."
Beside them, Noah snorted. "Let's not be coy, ladies. This isn't exactly a random burglary, and no one breaks into an academic building or a library looking for money and stereo equipment. I think both of you know exactly what he was looking for. The question is, did he find it?"
Sam and Annie exchanged glances. Annie's dropped to her feet.
"Yes."
Sam couldn't stifle the snarl. "I told you the Alpha had to know, and now he doesn't just have a potential mess to clean up; he's got an actual one."
"Sam, I didn't—"
She cut her friend off. "Save it. Right now we need to know who they were and where they went. We can play true confessions once we're back at the club where the Alpha can hear the whole thing. What did they take?"
Annie cast a helpless look around her. "At first glance? I'd say everything."
That earned two muffled curses, one from Sam and one from Noah. "Did you get a look at them?"
"There was just one in here," Annie said. "He had some kind of mask over his face, like a ski mask, and he was dressed—" She broke off and looked at Noah. "He was dressed a lot like you."
Noah didn't bother to answer. His attention seemed focused on the room, his sharp eyes scanning the debris of the search. Restlessly he began to pace along the walls and counters.
"What are you doing?" Sam snapped. As far as she was concerned, that was only the first of a bushelful of questions he had to answer, but at the moment it was the one she settled on.
He ignored it. "What do you smell in here?"
"I don't—"
"Sam, just tell me what you smell."
Grinding her teeth together, she pursed her lips and took a deep breath. Frowned. Then another. "I'm not—" She tried again. "I don't know. There's… something here, but it's not… normal." She looked at Annie. "That guy who did the search. He wasn't a vamp, was he?"
Annie shook her head. "No. I mean, I didn't touch him, and I was concentrating too hard on staying out of sight to pay much attention to whether he smelled or not, but he was definitely throwing off heat, and he didn't move like a vampire. You know what I mean?"
Sam did. Vampires might not be the equal to shifters, but they had their own kind of grace that would be hard to mistake for a human. But the fact that Sam had been able to see the intruder's heat made it even more certain. Not even a vampire who'd just drunk someone dry could have given off enough of the stuff for Annie to have seen it from her hiding place.
Sam's lips firmed. "I didn't think so."
"Now that you mention it, I'm not entirely sure I know what he was." Annie frowned.
"Me either."
"I do."
Both women turned at the sound of the much deeper voice. Noah paused in his examination of the debris scattered over one counter in particular, and even from across the room his expression looked grim. "He was a soldier."
Noah had known it even before he'd gotten inside, but that didn't make him any happier to have his assumptions confirmed beyond a doubt. The man who'd sacked the lab was definitely a soldier and definitely trained in dealing with Others, or he wouldn't have made it in and out without alerting Sam and Noah to his presence.
Realizing he'd been screwed by his own superiors did nothing to improve Noah's already grim mood.
He cut off the women's questions with a harsh gesture. "Sam is right. We need to get back to the club and get this all hashed out. Whatever you were doing in here, Doc, someone else found it damned interesting. I doubt he's going to wait long to share it, which means that you need to explain it to me, Sam, the Alpha, and the rest of your pack, and somehow I don't think you're going to want to go through that twice. Come on. Let's go."
He nearly fainted when no one argued, but that would have taken away his advantage. Shepherding them out of the lab, he watched while Annie reset the locks and didn't comment. It might be silly to lock up when everything worth locking had already been taken, but he understood the impulse; she needed to take control back, and locking up at least make her feel like she was doing something. And he supposed there might be some equipment in there that hadn't interested the B-team but might prove a little too tempting for a real thief.
Outside, Noah paused and glanced down at Sam's feet. "You can't walk all the way back to the club without shoes. I don't suppose you keep those spare, too?"
Annie shook her head. "Just the sweats. But it wouldn't matter anyway. I'm a size smaller than Sam."
"I'll be fine," Sam protested.
"Don't worry about it. I'll drive us." Annie pulled out a set of keys. "I drove up to Boston, and I haven't turned in the rental yet. I'm parked in the deck next door."
Well, that certainly made everything simpler.
Noah bundled Sam
into the back, using the excuse of his longer legs to claim the passenger seat. In reality, he needed any advantage he could get to reclaim some sense of control. The operation had exploded the way he'd been afraid it would, and now the only question was how to deal with the fallout.
He hadn't forgotten Sam's way too perceptive question about his clothes, and he seriously doubted that she had. When they got back to the club and the whole sordid story came out, she'd have a hell of a lot more questions for him, he was sure. He didn't look forward to answering any of them.
He would have to tell her the truth. Tell all of them, and he didn't look forward to that, either. He couldn't think of a single way to make it sound any better. Nothing could change the fact that they'd welcomed him into their community and he'd made a place for himself under false pretenses. He'd taken advantage of them, all of them, and he wouldn't blame them for wanting to kick his ass.
Wanting, hell, they'd do it. The best he could hope for was that they'd stop with the kicking and not follow it through to the end. Any one of them was more than capable of killing him with their bare hands, Sam included, and he wasn't even sure he could marshal the desire to fight back. As far as he was concerned, he deserved everything he got.
At least he could try to explain that things had changed. He'd been betrayed the same as them, and he'd be happy to demonstrate that he intended to make sure whoever was behind it found out what a very bad idea that had been. The challenge would be getting that out before one of them got to his jugular.
He looked at Annie. "Do you have a cell phone?"
"Yes."
"Let me borrow it."
She frowned, but she didn't ask him any questions, just fished the phone from her lab coat pocket and handed it to him. If only her friend could be so accommodating.
"What are you doing?" Sam demanded from the backseat.
Noah ignored her and punched the buttons with his thumb. He felt a slight sense of relief when Missy answered instead of her husband. In as few words as possible, Noah let her know that the three of them were headed in and that they had news that Graham at least should hear and probably the head of the Council of Others, too. Once again, a woman in Noah's life proved unexpectedly agreeable and assured him without questions that she would take care of it. They would all meet at the club in twenty minutes.
"Why did you do that?" Sam asked when he'd disconnected and handed the phone back to Annie. "You should have let me or Annie call. This is our problem."
He ignored her and pulled Carter's cell from a pocket in his vest. Punching in the preprogrammed number, he waited for the answer. "Clean up on aisle five," he said as soon as he heard Carter's greeting. "I haven't seen it, but I expect a pretty big spill."
"If you didn't see the jar break, who dropped it?"
"Somebody else."
"Is that somebody with an innie or an outie?"
"None of your business," he snapped. "Just send someone with a mop. And make sure the floor is left sparkling."
"What about the back room?" Carter wanted to know if they should handle the lab, too.
"Don't worry about it. It's just a little disorganized. Nothing for you to worry about."
"Ten-four. Anything else?"
He glanced back at Sam's narrowed eyes. "No. But if I don't check in sometime in the next twenty-four hours, you can have my DVD collection."
He clicked off and tucked the phone away.
"And what the hell was that about?" Sam demanded. The words exploded from her as if the strain of holding them back had been the hammer on her trigger. "If you had that in your pocket, why did you need Annie's phone? Noah, I want to know what's going on."
Instead of looking at her, he looked out the window and gauged their location. "In a minute. We're almost there."
He felt her hand grasp her arm and turned. Her eyes met his and she looked less furious than he'd assumed she'd be and more worried. "And when we get inside, you'll tell me whatever it is you're holding back?"
Grimly he looked out the windshield and nodded. "Ready or not."
Here it comes.
* * *
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Instincts made up a large part of Sam's world; they always had. She'd grown up listening to them, trusting them, considering them one of the most powerful tools she possessed in relating to the world around her and all its challenge and chaos. But they were telling her something now that she absolutely did not want to hear.
She climbed the stairs to the club's second floor behind Annie and with Noah by her elbow. She could feel his presence like a touch, and she knew he was unhappy. Actually, she knew he felt furious and shocked and betrayed and anxious and determined and… sorry. She could read it in the set of his jaw and the tension in his muscles; but more than that, she could smell it on him. It muddied his scent and made her own anxiety levels soar. Something was very wrong, and he was keeping it from her. She didn't like that.
Not at all.
She thought her expression might rival his for grimness as they filed into the second-floor library at Vircolac, otherwise known as the War Room. In the last few years it had acquired its reputation as being the place where everyone gathered when something significant was about to happen. It had seen negotiations, fights, rants, and pleadings, Fae royalty and demon police officers. If there was a crisis brewing in the Other world, someone was bound to find out about it in this room and concoct a suitable strategy to deal with it. With any luck, the room's history would rub off tonight.
Noah held the door for her and Annie, then followed them in and shut it behind them. Graham and Missy were already there, Missy in her pajamas and Graham half out of the suit he'd worn to the party earlier. He still had on his trousers and shirt, but his feet were bare and his buttons were mostly undone, leaving his shirt hanging open. He stood beside Missy's chair with his hand on her shoulder and raised an eyebrow at the group's entrance.
"Who died?" he quipped.
"No one you know," Noah answered.
Sam frowned. "No one at all, as far as I know. Unless Noah hasn't even told me everything."
She almost hoped he hadn't, that a body was exactly what he'd been hiding from her.
He just frowned. "We'd better wait for the others."
"Tess and Rafael are right behind us."
The door opened to admit Abby and Rule, who had spoken in his deep, smoky voice. He looked as calm and forbidding as usual, while she wore a distinct expression of worry. She hurried over to her brother and gave him a thorough once-over.
"Are you all right? Are you hurt? What's going on?" she demanded.
He gave her a quick one-armed hug. "I'm fine. We're just waiting for everyone to get here so we don't have to go through a story twice."
"And to torture me," Annie mumbled, just loud enough for Sam to hear.
She squeezed her friend's hand reassuringly.
"This is starting to sound ominous," Graham said, perching on the arm of Missy's chair. "Am I going to like what I'm about to hear?"
Sam noticed that Noah ignored the question. He turned to watch the door and gave a grunt when Tess breezed through in her usual inimitable style.
"This had better be good," Tess grumped. "I had an urgent appointment with a book and some bubble bath that you just made me break." She glanced pointedly at Noah. "Well?"
"Why doesn't everybody sit down?" Missy, peacemaker that she was, waved at the furniture. "I can send Richards for drinks, if anyone wants anything."
"I don't think it's going to be that kind of an announcement," Sam said, but she watched as everyone else settled onto sofas and chairs. And laps. Abby perched in Rule's, and Tess sat so close to Rafe on one end of the sofa that she might as well have been on him. Noah, Sam noticed, didn't sit at all. He placed his back to the fireplace and stood with his arms crossed over his chest.
She hesitated, unsure where she should put herself. Part of her wanted to be with Noah, to stand at his side and acknowledge the fragile relationsh
ip they'd spent the last week forging, but another part was afraid. He didn't seem to be asking for anything from her, least of all for her to cuddle with him in a public place. He'd been building up a wall ever since she'd run into him at the lab, and it knocked her off-balance. Her instincts told her that she belonged to him now, belonged with him, but he might as well have been holding up a "BACK OFF" sign. In the past, she would have sat near Missy and Graham, but that didn't feel right anymore, either.
Confused and disliking the feeling, Sam perched on the very edge of a chair on the far side of the fireplace opposite Missy and Graham with Noah standing between them. She didn't like it at all.
"All right," Graham said, fixing his attention on Noah. "We're here, and we're sitting. What's going on?"
She watched Noah turn and look right at Annie, who paled but remained standing still and alone in the middle of the carpet. "The first part isn't my story to tell," he said.
"It's mine." Annie's voice quavered, but she cleared her throat and started again. "I'm the one with something to tell you. Something I should have told you quite a while ago. I offer my apologies, Alpha."
Her eyes dropped to the floor near Graham's feet as she spoke to show her respect for him and his position.
His brow furrowed in a light crease, but he nodded. "Just tell me your story, Annie, including why it is you waited, if it's something I really ought to know."
"At first, I didn't really get what it would mean," she began. "I mean, I knew it was big, but I was thinking in terms of science, not in terms of what people can do with science if they take it over for their own purposes. If I'd thought about that earlier, I would have told you right away. But I didn't. And by the time I did, the damage was already done, and I kept thinking that if I just waited a little longer, I'd have a way to fix everything, or something would happen and it wouldn't matter anymore."
"Hon, you're not really making much sense," Missy said gently. "You're going to have to explain it to us. What are you talking about?"
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