by L. A. Banks
“They want the Druid?” Woods said after a moment, tilting his head. He looked at Bradley with total confusion.
“Who’s they and why me?” Bradley said, hedging.
“You’re not gonna believe this, bro,” Woods said, his eyes following the lights. “Fairies—”
“What?” the group said in unison.
“Honest to God,” Woods said, his eyes wide with wonder, seeming mesmerized by the lights. “They’re pissed off because somebody ate a girl in their gardens. They claim it wasn’t Sasha.” He placed a hand on top of his head. “They refuse to testify for fear of reprisal, but say they were double-crossed and want a dark arts specialist they can trust, someone who can reverse an enchantment spell at the teahouse.”
“You seem . . . distant,” Lei said, giving Dana a sidelong glance as the male body vanished into the bayou thicket with her mother.
Dana stared at Lei for a moment. “Not distant, just tired. I lost two very close friends tonight.”
“Their sacrifice was worth it,” Lei said coolly, beginning to walk back in the direction of the road.
“I hope so,” Dana said, standing in place and not following Lei.
The stillness and the comment behind her made Lei turn around. “I sense hesitation on your part to complete our very worthy cause.”
“You sense confusion,” Dana said carefully. “I don’t understand why you would bribe the Fae into creating an enchantment spell to draw Shogun to me, and then offer those same services to Sasha Trudeau?”
“Ah, you have been walking in my garden and listening to the complaints of meddlesome Fairies, I see.”
“They are disgruntled about your mother feeding in their gardens—that was sacrilege to them. Their complaints were loud enough to overhear.” Dana folded her arms.
“That was a grave mistake, but you have met my mother. She is not to be denied. The gardens were her favorite refuge while here at conferences. My father had the spot made for her, years ago, while they were still . . .” Lei’s voice trailed off, the wistful tone left it, and the familiar hardness returned. “Why both you and Sasha, you ask?” Lei placed a graceful finger to her lips, appearing to contemplate Dana’s question for a moment while staring up at the moon.
“My brother is shrewd,” she finally continued. “If I were to appear openly against Sasha, he would immediately sense duplicity. But if I encouraged his fleeting fantasy, even said his bond with her might strengthen the alliance . . . if something unfortunate happened to her, there would be no obvious blood on my hands.”
“I understand why you asked for aid from the Fae to get him to come to me,” Dana said, lifting her chin. “But I don’t understand why it was necessary for you to make her willing to accept his advances.”
“Jealousy clouds judgment, Dana,” Lei said with a smile, clucking her tongue. She wagged a finger as she spoke, beginning to make a wide circle around the weaker female.
“Take a page from The Art of War. Think. Suppose my brother believes that Sasha truly cares for him and wants him intimately, and the only thing standing in his way is her North American mate. Way down deep in his subconscious, beneath all the honorable rhetoric, is still a man . . . is still a wolf who wants what he wants but cannot readily have—her. That is enough to incline him to war if the slightest opportunity presents itself. The opportunity has presented itself. The Fairies will get over it. Their garden refuge will eventually get cleaned up by the Gnomes.” Lei’s eyes narrowed to a threatening glare. “And you will get over it, Dana. All of this was a necessary step to place you where you’ve always wanted to be—at the top beside Shogun. And then you will owe me. Power often requires sacrifice.”
Geoff stood in the garden staring down at the naked, mauled female at his feet. His Vampire henchmen hissed as he slowly rolled her body over with a dark-charge from the tip of his forefinger.
“Look at this mess,” he said shaking his head. “A beautiful face gone, body torn to shreds, viscera everywhere, organ meat eaten. Completely savage. A positive natural disaster and waste of a gorgeous woman’s body. She could have been elegantly drained of blood and life and then reawakened later as one of us, but I couldn’t even tell you what this woman-child looked like.”
One of Geoff’s henchmen stooped down and closed his eyes, then sent the images he perceived into the minds of the other vampires around him. He looked up at Geoff, complete black overtaking his green irises in the moonlight.
“Dana Broussard was here,” the lead security lieutenant said. “She helped with the feeding of the demon one . . . so did Shogun’s sister. Max Hunter and Sasha Trudeau had no hand in this murder. But it may be a sign that all wolf packs in the region are out of control, boss.” He smiled a gleaming porcelain-white smile that made the others around him join him with toothy grins.
“The Fairies won’t tell, even if it’s happened in their own backyard,” another handsome security lieutenant said. He flipped his blond mane over his shoulder with an aristocratic toss of his head. “It’s like they’ve adopted the foolish human thug don’t-snitch policy. All the better. You’re on the tribunal, so it is whatever you say it is—as a lead investigator.”
“I don’t think we’ll have any issues with Dugan,” a tall, athletic brunette said, slapping five with the first henchmen as he stood. “Not after he relaxed his B and B security to let us in . . . ah, a man’s soul for the price of silver. A piece of the casino action will do it every time.”
The Vampires standing around Geoff laughed in low, wicked unison, slowly becoming vapor.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve had an open wolf hunt. Should we alert the Cartel? Your call, boss,” the group leader murmured on the night air.
“Not yet,” Geoff said, choosing his words with care as he straightened his French cuffs beneath his suit before dematerializing. “One must be strategic to avoid outright war. I need more information and we need plausible deniability, as always.”
Footfalls pounded the front steps and porch. Wolf calls ripped through the night sky. Sasha and Silver Hawk crossed the room just as the front door burst open. Bear Shadow and Crow Shadow panted hard, sending puffs of breath in white clouds into the frigid mountain air. She could see Doc running down the path leading to the house. Sentries littered the porch and parted for the doctor.
“He’s escaped,” Bear Shadow said, seeming confused that Sasha and Silver Hawk were meeting calmly. “Went right into a shadow like one of us.”
Crow Shadow looked at Sasha and then at Silver Hawk, lowering his pump shotgun. “How can this be when they said he had the dread disease? His containment cell was covered in pure silver. But we scented female demon-wolf . . . we thought . . .”
Silver Hawk raised a hand. “She did no harm and was with me. Ten pack brothers who guarded my cabin know this—Sasha is not the she-demon scent on the wind.”
CHAPTER 12
“If he got past the bars and went into a shadow,” Sasha said, clasping Silver Hawk’s arm with repressed hope, “that could mean his Shadow blood is rejecting the contagion.” She gazed around the table of the closed session with the pack’s senior leadership to lock eyes with Bear Shadow and Crow Shadow before looking to Doc to corroborate her theory.
“If what you’re saying is so,” Doc said, glancing around the pine table, his eyes holding Silver Hawk’s then Sasha’s, “Hunter came from two genetically strong parents. That’s why I need to get to the lab. If his father’s gene set isn’t imprinted, even though he was a strong alpha Werewolf clansman, and if his father was more impervious to the contagion that the average Werewolf, Hunter might stand a chance. His mother’s Shadow heritage definitely gives him the advantage—which is why it’s so odd that he didn’t shake the virus. Before, when he was infected in battle, it was harder for him to recover—due to his father’s genetics, as we now know. But he did recover. His body has to be strengthening its autoimmune system against the contagion.”
“I want you to take a look at Sh
ogun’s blood,” Sasha said, her gaze boring into Doc’s. “On the vision quest it was clear. Shogun’s mother got infected—which means that on his matrilineal side, there’s the imprinting weakness. His father Turned much more slowly after a deliberate attack by her to infect him; he even retained some of his original inner wolf long enough to try to help Hunter’s mother. To me that means Hunter’s mother was pure Shadow—and had the immunity. A strong gene set. Hunter’s father, although Werewolf, also had a very strong immunity. Over the past week, Hunter was inadvertently dosing himself with contagion, but he’s still got Shadow Wolf capabilities.”
“It could be working like snakebite anti-venom—a little toxin helping the body to build up its own natural defenses against it.” Doc peered around the table. “Or it could be a time bomb inside him, waiting to explode.”
“He’s fighting it,” Sasha said quickly. “He has to be.”
“He’s bigger, Sasha. His wolf is insane,” Bear Shadow said quietly. “Stronger than I’ve ever seen him.”
“And he’s on the run,” Crow Shadow said, rubbing his hands down his face in frustration. “We tracked him to a demon door, too, then nothing. He’s gone behind the dark doors without his amulet, where none of us can follow him.”
The room fell quiet for endless seconds.
“He thinks it’s all over . . . he went after Shogun’s mother on a suicide mission to protect our pack and to avenge his mother,” Sasha whispered, horrified.
Silver Hawk shook his head. “He went on a mission to protect you.”
“Muttering Fairies, disgruntled Gnomes, and double-dealing Elves,” Woods said quietly in the truck’s cabin, glancing at Fisher as he drove. “What’s next?”
“I don’t know, dude, but from the one camera that wasn’t destroyed, I got it all downloaded on digital and erased before the local boys saw this sick shit and had flippin’ heart attacks,” Winters said, his hands rapidly moving across the laptop balanced on his thighs. “Talk about breaking the supernatural news to the general public . . . sheesh! Werewolves busting into the lab, Fairy lights. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to enhance the audio enough to actually hear what they said, but your relay to us is good enough of a translator, Woodsey. For now, I’m shipping these files to a secure hub up at base. Got the rest on flash drive,” he added with a wink. “Never can have enough backup.”
At every turn, his search for Sasha had ended in frustration. Shogun scented the bayou air. Female Werewolf was clear and present, familiar in an eerie way, but not Sasha. Probably a security lieutenant. A growl filled his throat as pain entered his heart and shattered it. He had to stop her, but didn’t want to see her like this. His lieutenants’ snarls pushed him forward. He was a clan leader. He had to do what he had to do, much as he hated it.
Following the infected female trail mixed with the distinct odor of dead human blood and remains, he tried to jettison the horrifying image of Sasha’s infected wolf feeding off that kill. Until he saw the carnage, he wanted to remember what Sasha’s human form looked like. Forcing himself, he thought of her soft, milk-in-tea complexion . . . her dark swath of thick, shoulder-length hair . . . her piercing gray eyes and full, lush mouth. Her graceful hands and sensuous curves. An athletic body that was lean but also soft . . . female . . . woman. She owned a touch that could make a man betray his honor; her kiss stole reason and supplanted it with dangerous dreams. Her wolf was equally as majestic. Vital, with a silvery, glistening coat washed blue-white under the moon when she changed.
The mental vision carved at Shogun’s soul as his wolf bounded over logs and through the overgrown marsh on the hunt. That someone, something, gave her the contagion . . . a careless male . . . ate at his insides until he had to stop and howl.
Her son was hunting her? Noooo . . . Paranoia lifted the she-demon’s head from her human feast in the bayou. She moved deeper into the swamp. Shogun could never see her like this.
Hunter barreled through the demon-door opening, barely escaping the dangerous caverns with his life. The scent of a Werewolf militia fused with infected she-wolf immediately stung his senses, and was obviously enough to keep what was chasing him in the darkness at bay.
Death. Human death floated on the thick bayou air. The she-demon had added a male militia to her previously all-female hunting party. He suddenly lifted his head and snarled. Lei’s scent was there, as was Dana’s . . . but that Shogun was there and had obviously double-crossed him, too, meant war.
“Would you like to see me add gasoline to a bayou flame, darlings?” Geoff crooned from the vapors, slowly materializing out of the mist with the three beauties whom he’d been dining with earlier.
They gathered in close, whispering with excitement and watching a plastic bag containing rumpled pants in his hands. He then snapped and showed them a red plastic biohazard hospital bag. Confusion marred their serene gazes. Geoff threw his head back and laughed at their lack of understanding, snatching the sound from the air and transforming it into the hoot of an owl. It was his private and very fulfilling joke. Dana was a fool. The Cartel dealt in absolutes. Sharing rule with werewolves? Never. There was no such thing as compromise.
“We’ll have our open wolf hunt yet, darlings,” he said in a confident murmur. “Watch as both leaders become infected from their own lusts.”
He moved through the bayou, a blur of black shadow painted on moonlight-swept foliage, and then was gone. But a scent that nearly stopped his heart brought him to a skidding halt. Hunter went back to the pile of leaves and pawed at it, his body trembling from rage and fear of what he might uncover. When it wasn’t the body he feared most, he slumped a bit and sniffed harder.
Sasha’s female essence was trapped in green sweatpants that had been shoved into a red hospital hazmat bag. Shogun’s male sex scent was trapped in clear plastic-wrapped khakis. Hunter backed away from the pile of clothing, not breathing for a moment. He circled the discovery and then loped away at a much slower pace for a moment. When . . . how . . . why? That she’d done something like this was beyond comprehension.
Then dark thoughts besieged his mind. What if they’d moved on her, the Werewolves as a clan . . . forcing her to accept the loss of her mate, coercing her into making a snap decision so that the power bases remained intact with the wolf Federations. What if all this had been part of a huge setup? He refused to believe Sasha had just left his bed without cause. No. They’d been working on her for the week he’d been sick. Memories of the night they last fought chiseled at his reason. The scent of his rival imploded it.
In a flat-out run, trees were blurred lines, moonlight a streak. Five huge male sentries turned in unison bearing saliva-dripping fangs as he broke through the bramble. Their lead alpha was airborne before they could even crouch. He met Shogun in the air in a feral lock of claws and teeth.
The fight was so vicious and moved so quickly that the others could only circle, barking and snapping. There was no way to enter the fray without possibly injuring their own pack leader as thick, muscle-laden wolf bodies slammed against ancient trees, felling them with the sheer force of momentum. Underbrush was uprooted, mud and bayou bottom slung against onlookers along with spent saliva and blood.
Werewolf howls went out for more reinforcements. Local Shadow Wolf packs sent rally calls for war. New Orleans at night awakened. Fae archers tossed back drinks hard and pulled away from the bars. Clarissa, Bradley, and Winters leaned forward confused as Woods slowed the truck, tilted his head with Fisher, and made a U-turn. Those supernaturals with more delicate sensibilities, like the Fairies, Pixies, and Elves, shut themselves away. Gnomes closed their doors; Mythics hid. Vampires smiled and began taking odds using Phantoms as go-betweens as they festively moved out into the night. The Order of the Dragon bouncers mounted Harleys and peeled away from curbs. Sasha stood stock-still hundreds of miles away from ground zero.
“We have to go through the shadow lands,” she announced in disbelief. “Our clans just went to war.”
&nb
sp; She leapt into the first shadow that would have her, Bear Shadow and Crow Shadow on her flank with four agile lieutenants. The others were quickly following with Silver Shadow—who also wore an amulet—and Doc, who had to make the perilous journey wolf-escorted and protected in his human form. Were it not for his hidden Shadow heritage, the density change would have been too abrupt and could have sent him into shock, killing him. Even Fisher and Woods could never travel that way, given their natural timber wolf mix . . . the shadow lands demanded that only their kind could enter. Sasha prayed as she ran through the mist-filled pathways that Doc would be all right.
Her internal homing was to her familiars’ panicked vibrations. It dropped her out in the bayou, so close to the battle she could smell it before she heard it.
The crash that missed her and her men was surreal. Hurtling wolf bodies locked in mortal combat twisted and leapt as a single thousand-pound animal, then fell, splintering fallen logs and anything beneath them. Gators quickly fled banks to get out of the battle’s way, but positioned themselves to be rewarded by its spoils. Before she and her pack could gain their bearings, what seemed like an endless stream of huge Werewolves sailed over rocks and ground cover coming straight at them.
Lei was on Sasha so quickly she’d knocked the wind out of her, but Sasha pivoted just in time to keep her throat from being ripped out. All around her Werewolves and Shadow Wolves were paired in mortal combat. But a hail of silver-tipped arrows sent the combatants seeking cover in growls and yelps.
In the distance the thunder of motorcycle engines rumbled—then just as quickly as that stopped, the bayou lit with what seemed like flame-throwing blasts. The Order of the Dragon had arrived. Wolf eyes glowing with hatred filled the shadows between trees. Two badly wounded alpha leaders still circled each other snarling as they shape-shifted into their human forms. Arrows pierced their shoulders, calves, and thighs, slowing them, making them drag in huge inhalations and release them with trembling growls.
