Howl at the Moon

by Christine Warren

  "We should talk about who has the information and how we can find them. We have to do it quickly, before they have time to pass it on to anyone else. Everything else can wait. No one's issues are going to just go away. We can afford to move them to the back burner."

  "Sam—," Noah started, and his voice sounded almost aching. He must be regretting that she had found out his secret before he'd completed his mission.

  She ignored him. "Annie can tell you what's missing, and Noah sounds like he knows who took it. I'm sure the rest of you can figure out what to do about it. This isn't the first crisis the pack and the Council have faced and overcome. I'm sure it won't be the last."

  Weariness dragged on her. She wanted nothing more than to find a cool, dark place filled with nothing but silence and curl up there to sleep. Maybe when she woke she'd even have the strength to lick her wounds. For now, the poison in them made that impossible. Sleep. She would just sleep.

  "Don't say that as if you're not going to help with the figuring, Sam," Graham said, his growl less menacing than she had expected, more… concerned. "You're already in up to your neck. You don't get to leave just when the water reaches your chin."

  She shook her head, her gaze on the floor. Not out of respect, but because she lacked the energy to lift it.

  "She needs sleep," Tess said, her tone brooking no arguments. "I'll take her up and tuck her into one of the guest rooms."

  "No. I'll take care of her." Noah stepped forward, and Sam issued an instinctive whimper of protest.

  "Right now, she wouldn't let you take her to a water fountain if she'd been six weeks in the desert." Tess sent him an impatient glare and put one arm around Sam's back, turning her toward the door. Sam let herself be led.

  Noah shook his head and his eyes blazed furiously. "She's mine, and I'm the one who's upset her. I'll be the one to take care of her."

  He reached for her and Sam jerked back, her eyes finally lifting to meet his gaze. She didn't know what he read in her expression, but he lost some of the angry color in his cheeks and the muscle in the side of his jaw worked like an echo of his heartbeat, jumping in time to the pulse of his anger.

  "I don't belong to you," she said clearly, ignoring the small part of her that howled in instinctive protest. A few hours ago, she would have jumped at the chance to be claimed by him. A lot changed in a few hours.

  "You owe it to the Alpha to help get Annie's data back, since you know who took it and had been planning to do it yourself." She straightened her shoulders and held his gaze with hers. "Help the pack. They still have a use for you. I don't."

  * * *

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  For a moment, Noah actually thought he saw his life flashing before his eyes, which was disconcerting enough, but the part that really bothered him was the end. The part where he watched Sam turn and walk beside Tess out of the room, closing the door quietly and firmly behind her.

  He knew that Graham stood to one side, growling something suitably threatening and quite possibly plotting all the ways he could think of to rip a human's head off its body, but Noah didn't have time to worry about that. His eyes and all his attention were focused on Sam, on the door she'd just left by.

  When he'd made his confession, she had turned paler than the sheets he'd laid her on last night. Her eyes looked like huge pools of liquid honey in her blank face, and he didn't imagine she could look more hurt if he'd blackened one of them for her. Instinctively he had reached for her and felt the brutal stab of rejection when she flinched away. He'd expected her to be furious; he could have dealt with furious. It was wounded that was giving him so much trouble. He wanted to fall to his knees and beg her forgiveness, but he didn't have time for that. None of them did. The damned miserable, worthless mission still dictated every course of action. It still hung over his head like a guillotine blade just waiting for the right moment to fall.

  Or maybe it had already fallen and this was just that last moment of clarity before the brain realized the spinal cord had gone missing.

  "Samantha," he said, and his voice sounded gruff and weak in his own ears. Too late, of course. She'd already left the room, not even bothering to look back. He supposed it had been too late for a while now. Ever since he'd gotten his orders and walked into her office without bothering to tell her why he was really there.

  He hated the way he'd seen her, looking first so shocked as Tess forced her down to the sofa, then almost broken as she'd curled up on it and shrunk back from his touch. She looked like some of the women he'd seen caught in war zones, shocked and traumatized and afraid that every touch could be the one that brought death. He hoped to God she wasn't actually afraid of him. He had never hurt her, and he'd cut his own hands off before he would, but did she know that?

  And even if she did, would she still believe it?

  "Now I believe it is time for some explanations," Rafe said, slipping smoothly into his accustomed role of peacemaker and voice of reason in a world often ruled by instincts. "Tess will see to Samantha, and as she said, you and Annie know as much, if not more, of the situation as she does. That being the case, I think it would be wise for you to share some of that knowledge with the rest of us. I, for one, find myself fascinated to learn of your transformation. I've never seen a man go so quickly from court favorite to most hated man in the room."

  Noah didn't need anyone to remind him of his fall from grace, especially when he knew he probably had a few more feet to go before he hit rock bottom. He felt pretty confident that if Graham Winters had his druthers, the entire length of Noah's intestines would soon be decorating the ornately plastered ceiling. Possibly along with bits of his spleen.

  Missy obviously saw the possibility as well, because she had stopped trying to hold her mate back with a couple of small hands and placed herself bodily between him and the rest of the room. If she hadn't been so incredibly precious to him, Noah didn't think even that would have made much difference to Graham.

  "You can come into my club, into my pack, accept my hospitality, and repay it like this?" the Alpha spit out, as if he'd just been waiting for the green light to let his fury rip. Noah thought he saw a hint of fang peeking between the Lupine's compressed lips. "If my wife and your sister weren't standing right in front of me, I'd rip out your throat and dance on it, you lousy son of a bitch!"

  Noah nodded once, Sam's last words still echoing in his ears. "And I'd deserve it."

  "You think you can pacify me by admitting your guilt?" Graham laughed, but no one could mistake the sound for amusement. "It's going to take a hell of a lot more than that, human, beginning with blood."

  Abby stepped forward, still pale and still looking so shocked and hurt that Noah wanted to crawl under a rock somewhere. Even worse, he knew that her sense of betrayal couldn't even begin to compare with Sam's. He wouldn't have been surprised if Abby echoed the Alpha's sentiments. He wouldn't have blamed her, either.

  "Blood doesn't make anything better," she said, her voice not quite steady. It left jagged little wounds in Noah's hide. Sam's rejection had left them in his heart.

  "And if anyone has learned that over the last few years, we have," Rafe agreed. "There has been enough of it spilled by everyone else in this unofficial little war of ours. Let's not go adding to it. If nothing else, I would prefer not to give the humans who call us monsters the satisfaction."

  Graham opened his mouth to retort, but Missy cut him off with a glare and a hard smack on the shoulder. "Before you, or anyone, say something I'm going to make them regret, we need to look at this calmly."

  "You don't need to play referee, Luna," Annie said, her soft voice still managing to draw everyone's attention. "This is my fault. I'm the one the Alpha is angry with, and I deserve to be punished for my actions. I put the pack in jeopardy. I bear full responsibility for it, and I'm not going to run away from the consequences."

  "That's awfully noble of you," Missy snapped, "but from what I can tell, the Alpha is angry with a whole bunch of people ri
ght now, and frankly, I'm not all that far behind him. Somehow I don't think you're responsible for the army sending Noah here to spy on us, or for his treatment of Sam, so let's not get carried away. It seems to me that this situation has plenty of blame to go around."

  Annie straightened her shoulders and lifted her gaze as far as the Luna's chin, which Noah assumed proved just how determined about this she was. "That may be true, but in the end, it falls back on me. If I hadn't been conducting this particular set of experiments and following this particular line of research, the humans would have had no reason to send anyone to spy on me."

  "That's a big if." Noah tore his gaze from the door through which Sam had disappeared and turned it on Annie. "From what I can tell, they're right about the march of progress. Your work may have given the army a hell of a jump start, but I think they were already working on something similar all on their own."

  Annie frowned and opened her mouth as if to demand an explanation, but then she froze. Her eyes widened, and when she spoke, her voice was hushed and revelatory. "Oh, my gosh, you're right. They've been working themselves, and I think they may have gotten almost as far as I have. At least one of the men who raided the lab tonight wasn't quite human."

  The room went silent at that, as if everyone in it had stiffened and gone perfectly still. No fabric rustled, and no one coughed or sneezed or even breathed as they digested that information. Noah clenched his teeth and struggled against the urge to head straight out the front of the club so he could find Hammond and strangle the bastard with his bare hands.

  "Or at least, not completely human," Annie continued. "I didn't know what it meant until just now, but I smelled something off as soon as I got to the building. I could tell there were three of them. One of them smoked, so I'm not surprised I noticed him, and another smelled really scary, like hostility was billowing off of him. That's the smell that freaked me out enough to call Sam." She shook her head. "But the third one just smelled… off. Half the time I couldn't smell him at all."

  "But if someone had already figured out a way to combine human and Lupine DNA, shouldn't you have been smelling both those scents? That seems to make more sense than the idea that the two scents would cancel each other out." Missy looked confused.

  Annie nodded. "Yes, or at the very least, one of the DNA sequences would take over and you'd smell either human or Lupine. Not smelling anything is just weird. I really didn't smell anything when the guy was in the lab. At the time I thought it was because I was too freaked out from realizing they were coming for the lab, but if Noah is right, an altered human would make almost as much sense. And it would explain a lot."

  "I still don't get why they focused on Annie, or even how they knew about her work." Missy frowned.

  "It wouldn't have been tough if they knew what they were looking for," Annie admitted, looking uncomfortable. "All genetic experiments have to be registered with the government to be certain they aren't breaking existing laws over cloning and stuff like that. It all gets compiled into a huge national registry that's secure but accessible to people who work in the field or who work for any of the regulatory agencies involved in policing the research. Someone who was looking to find out about any experiments along the lines of what they were interested in could just search the database and they'd hit on my lab. And my name. And if they dug a little deeper, they'd be able to make a good guess about what stage in the work I was at."

  "Betrayed by bureaucracy," Rule snorted.

  "All right, so now we know Annie's story," Graham said, turning his attention to Noah and making no attempt to look less than murderous. "Let's hear yours."

  Noah had no choice and felt almost relieved by that knowledge. He didn't look forward to the reaction of the Others, but it would feel damned good to get the lies off his chest. He'd never been good at the deception, and he'd sure as hell never found peace with it. Not having anything to hide would be a blessing. It was how he preferred to live his life, and he made a vow to himself that he'd never live any other way. He just wished he'd been smart enough not to attempt to live the lies in the first place.

  "My team came off a mission three months ago," he said, determined to get this all out as quickly and thoroughly as possible. "We'd been assigned to an anti-terrorism team dealing with a suspected cell in Canada run by a vampire from a sect that never wanted to be Unveiled. He kind of liked it when everyone was afraid of him and viewed him as a killer rather than a regular guy with photosensitivity and an iron deficiency. He wanted to put the cat back into the bag by killing the entire membership of the International Committee on Interspecies Relations and declaring war on humanity. My team took care of it."

  He set his jaw and wished all his missions went as smoothly as that one. The team hadn't even broken a sweat. In fact, things had been so easy, he'd managed to get down to New York three or four times for quick visits with Abby. At least, that's what he'd said they were for. In reality, he'd been mooning around hoping to catch glimpses of Sam.

  "When we shipped home, we immediately switched on for a ten-week training and resupply rotation. As that was winding up, I received orders to meet with my CO's CO for a one-man deployment." He shifted his stance and clasped his hands together behind his back. He kept his eyes straight ahead. He had no desire to watch Graham flay him with a glance, and he couldn't bear to see Abby looking at him with disappointment. "It was unusual, but orders are orders, so I went. Down to the Pentagon."

  Rafe and Rule quirked identical eyebrows, while Graham's scowl morphed into a frown.

  Noah just plowed ahead. "I didn't like it, and you can believe that or not, but it's the truth. The only covert operations I've been trained to do are the kind that take place at night behind enemy lines and leave bodies, not bookshelves, behind. I'm a soldier, not a spy."

  "Then why didn't they send a spy?"

  "You'd have to ask them. All I can guess is that they don't have them ready. The army had a heads-up on the Others, but I have no way of knowing if the intelligence community did. From the flack my team has gotten since the Unveiling, I'm guessing they didn't. So maybe they wanted to send someone in who knew better what he'd be dealing with."

  Graham growled, "Good. At least you knew we'd kill you when we found out."

  Missy laid a hand on his arm and hissed something at him, and the werewolf subsided. But he still didn't look happy.

  "Yeah, I knew." Noah didn't see any point in pretending they all felt civilized over this. "Just like I knew from the beginning that this whole idea sucked, but I had my orders and I earned them out. I tried, anyway, but this whole thing stank from the very beginning."

  Rafe's gaze sharpened. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean it started off in FUBAR and went downhill from there," Noah snapped. He wanted to be pacing, to work off some of this tension and this angry energy, but he knew the minute he lifted his feet they'd take him up the stairs to Sam's bedside. He didn't think either of them was ready for that. "It was a lousy operation, and I was a lousy choice of operative. I blow things up; subtlety has never appeared on my resume. But I've dedicated the last fifteen years of my life to the service. I wasn't going to throw all that away by refusing to do my job. So I came here and you all made my life a living hell."

  "We bent over backward to help you!" Graham barked.

  "That was the fucking problem!" Noah glared right back at him. He didn't care how infrequently that happened to an Alpha Lupine. "If you'd been suspicious bastards, breaking my balls and poking your noses into everything, at least I could have told myself there was a good reason I'd been sent here, but you didn't. Every single goddamned one of you was sweet as frickin' pie. It's been driving me crazy!"

  "You want us to apologize for not being on your level of bastard?"

  "Yes! Fu—no," Noah shouted, then snapped his mouth shut and grabbed hard at his self-control. "It would make my life easier, but I know perfectly well that's not your job. It made me damned uncomfortable, though. I had a hard time reconci
ling what I knew about you with what I was hearing from the general."

  "The general?" Rafe asked.

  "General Elijah Hammond. He's the one I met at the Pentagon, and he's been the one pulling the strings this whole time."

  The Felix nodded. "All right. Go on."

  Right. 'Cause Noah was really enjoying this. He hadn't realized that baring his soul would be accomplished by tearing bloody strips off his hide one layer at a time.

  "I followed my orders," he bit out. "I dug up whatever information I could and tried to find out about this research I was told we needed to get our hands on. I found Annie, followed Sam to her lab tonight, and found out about the break-in. And now we're here. End of story."

  "Not by a long shot." Graham shook off his mate's hand and stepped forward. His fists were clenched, but he'd stopped vibrating with rage, at least. "Where does Sam come into all this? When did you concoct your plan to wheedle the information you needed out of her?"

  Noah felt himself go cold with renewed anger. "Never. Sam wasn't a part of it, not for one minute, and I suggest you stop insulting her by implying that the only reason I'm interested in her is as a means to an end. As far as I'm concerned, Sam is the end. I wanted her for her. If anything, she was a complication, not a source of information. Do you think it was easy for me to know I was getting in over my head with her while this whole goddamned mission was giving me an ulcer?"

  "I've got no idea what was easy or hard for you, human. The only ideas I ever had with your name on them turned out to be wrong, so I'm not taking any chances."

  "If Noah says he was serious about his relationship with Sam, then he was," Abby said, her voice growing a little stronger than it had been a few minutes ago. "What reason does he have to lie about it now? He's told us the truth about everything else."

  "Has he? Maybe he just thinks that if he doesn't want to have his balls ripped off he'd better tell me what I want to hear," Graham said, and the threat was low and smooth.