by Geonn Cannon
Marin Cardoso was sitting up on the bed, straightening when she saw the unfamiliar face peeking in. Ari remembered the angle of the online video and looked toward where the camera had to be.
“There was a light,” Marin said. “But that went out a few seconds ago.”
“Good girl, Dale.”
Ari came into the room and went to the shackle holding Marin to the bed. She crouched, grateful the keyring only had two keys on it. Marin twisted to watch her work.
“Who are you?”
“Just for tonight, we’re the big bad wolves.” She got the cuff open and helped Marin pull her hand free. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Mm-hmm...”
Marin was breathing quickly, on the verge of hyperventilating. Ari put her hands on Marin’s shoulders and forced eye contact.
“Listen to me. My name is Ariadne Willow. I’m canidae. I’m a private detective. Your sister hired me to find you.”
“Eva?” Marin’s voice was small. “I’ve been trying not to worry about... sh-she’s okay?”
Ari nodded. “She’s safe. Your whole pack is safe. Let’s get you back to them.”
Marin gripped Ari’s hand. Ari pulled her up off the bed and put an arm around her waist. In the hallway, Gwen had just finished zip-tying the arms and legs of the unconscious guards.
“This is my mother. She’s going to get you out of here.”
Gwen said, “The hell I am. I’m seeing this through.”
Ari glared at her. “Mom...”
“I’m not letting you go up there alone.”
“She won’t be alone.”
Gwen turned to see Dale had joined them. She looked frantic, eyes a little too wide and hair wild, but she was breathing normally.
“You okay?” Ari said.
Dale nodded. “Lot of violence. But good violence, against the right people.” She looked down at the bloodied guards lying between them and then pointedly looked away. She looked at Gwen. “You’ve done your part, okay? You need to get her out of here, go be with Milo.”
Gwen still hesitated, but one look at Marin changed her mind. “Come on, sweetheart, let’s get you somewhere safe.”
Marin looked at Ari for confirmation before she accepted the swap. Gwen looked at Ari, monologues of warnings and promises passing between them as she led Marin away to safety. Dale stepped over the guards and cupped Ari’s face.
“You’re bruising.”
“It’s fine.”
Dale pressed her lips into a disappointed line, eyes hard. Ari brushed her thumb over Dale’s cheek. “Massages and long baths after this.”
“Promise?”
“Swear.” Ari looked past Dale toward the stairs. “Hayden retreated up. Roemer and some mystery person were up there this whole time. We could be walking into a trap.”
“We’re definitely walking into a trap.” Dale took Ari’s hand. “Nothing is stopping us from just going downstairs and getting the hell out of here.”
Ari squeezed Dale’s fingers. “Wanna run?”
“What kind of wolf would that make me? Besides, I think it’s time we finally shut Hayden up once and for all.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Dale looked at the discarded weapons from the guards. “No hero speeches. Right?”
Ari looked at the guns. After a moment of hesitation, she stooped to pick them up. She handed one to Dale, kept the other for herself, and took a second to get used to its weight.
“Ready?”
Dale nodded. “Always. As long as you’re at my side.”
Ari leaned in and kissed her. Dale cupped the back of Ari’s head, then dropped her hand down to brush her fingers over the leather of Ari’s collar.
“Whatever happens,” Ari said.
“No matter what.” She rested her forehead against Ari’s and then stepped back. “Shall we?”
Ari nodded, then led the way to the stairs and started up.
Chapter Twenty
The top of the stairs had no landing, leading directly into an open space. Ari stopped low enough that she couldn’t be seen, but that meant she couldn’t get a look at the layout for herself. She listened and heard whispered voices.
“Yo, Hayden. I can’t see, are you waving a white flag? I’d really like to accept your surrender here, save us both a lot of time.”
“Why don’t you come on up, Ms. Willow?” a male voice Ari didn’t recognize called out. “I assume Miss Frye is with you? She can come, too.”
Ari and Dale glanced at each other. Ari went first, gun raised as the room came into view. It was almost entirely empty except for what looked like an office set for a very cheap community theater play. Hayden was standing in front of the desk, and Roemer stood behind it. Neither of them were armed, and Ari thought Hayden looked extremely smug for someone whose entire little army had just been neutralized. She looked for hunters lying in wait, but the only other person in the room was an older woman seated in one of the chairs in front of the desk.
“Hi, Hayden,” Dale said from behind Ari. “Just in case it’s not clear, consider this my resignation from your little hunting club.”
“Of course,” Hayden said. He didn’t look particularly annoyed, or even surprised. In fact, to Ari’s discomfort, he looked amused.
Ari eyed the woman in the chair. “Care to introduce us to your friend?”
“Oh, Ariadne, I’m hurt you don’t remember.”
The voice was familiar. When the woman unfolded herself from the seat and turned to face them fully, Ariadne couldn’t even feign indifference. The woman was older, her face carrying more lines and her hair whiter, but there was no mistaking her. Ari’s hands went cold and she backed up a step. Dale put a hand on Ari’s shoulder.
“Ari, I thought she died.”
“She did,” Ari said, her voice barely above a whisper. “She died in prison. Cancer.”
Katherine Gavin smiled. “Oh, that wasn’t a prison. That was a hospital with a few extra guards posted outside. And I was a rich woman with cancer and a bullet wound.” She looked at Dale. “I owe you for that last one, Ms. Frye, and I always pay my debts.”
Ari stepped in front of Dale. Katherine Gavin, once one of the richest women in Seattle, a recluse who hired Ari to follow her daughter, then tried to frame her for her murder. Dale had shot her when she was fighting Ari, and all her crimes had been revealed. Ari distinctly remembered seeing online that she’d died while she was in prison, weakened from cancer treatments and her fragile state shattered by the gunshot wound.
But this was definitely her, unmistakably alive and well, smiling like she’d just won a very long game of chess.
“With the kind of money I have,” Katherine said, “it was easy to make my guards look the other way. And money is also very persuasive to doctors with student loan debts. A few thousand dollars here and there, I was officially dead. I hadn’t shown my face in public for years before I hired you, so it was easy to slip back into the shadows. I found a little island off the coast, settled in, and spent the next few years trying to figure out what the fuck you were. Miss Frye helped with that as well. Right before she shot me, she gave me a word. Canidae. Werewolves.”
Ari swallowed hard. “You’ve been funding Hayden’s work.”
“He’d already done so much of the research. Saved me a lot of time, and he was a useful tool. The same with Mr. Roemer. It’s always nice to have professionals on the payroll. I just sat back and waited for their updates to come rolling in. It wasn’t long until we were ready to put our plan into action: the complete extinction of the canidae breed.”
“I don’t know if you noticed, but you’re short an army,” Ari said. “All the people you sent out tonight have been taken into custody. The ones who were downstairs are dealt with.”
“Maybe not exactly as we planned it,” Hayden said, “but I can’t say we’re disappointed with the results. This whole thing was building to you, Ariadne Willow, standing alone. The troublemaker, the wolf who made the hun
ters give up wolf manoth. Alone and surrounded.”
Dale said, “Uh, not alone...”
“Oh right,” Hayden said. “Miss Frye. I apologize.” He faced her fully and put his hands behind his back, rocked on the balls of his feet, and in the most smug, self-assured voice, said a single word.
“Feather.”
Ari stared at him, then looked at Dale. Dale looked at Ari and shrugged.
“Was he talking to you?” Ari whispered.
“I don’t think so. Why would he say ‘feather’ to me?”
“And why’d he say it in that weird way?” Ari deepened her voice and mocked him. “Feather.” She faced Hayden. “What’s that, intimidation?”
Hayden finally looked concerned. “No, I... I was...” He cleared his throat, snapped his fingers at Dale, and said it again. “Feather.”
Dale snapped her fingers back at him. “Okay, dude, feather to you, too.”
Roemer’s face was red. “Mr. Hayden...”
“No, wait. It’s...” He rubbed his temple.
Katherine also looked enraged, but only glared at Ariadne.
“Feather!” Hayden snapped.
Ari said, “Why do you keep saying that?”
“Because she’s supposed to turn on you!” Hayden growled. “The essays! The essays have a, a failsafe. A trigger word. If a hunter becomes confused or addled, the word ‘feather’ brings them back to their senses. It’s the entire reason I had her read the essays in front of me!”
“She was supposed to be the nuke,” Roemer said. “She’s supposed to be putting a bullet in the bitch’s head right now.”
Ari leaned closer to Dale. “You’re not going to do that, are you?”
“Nah.”
“Cool.” Ari leveled the gun at Hayden. “This has been real swell, Isaac, but I think we’re done with playing games with you. So we’re going to give you the chance to do the right thing. Surrender, turn yourself in for kidnapping, torture, attempted murder, all that fun stuff, and I won’t pull this trigger.”
“You honestly expect me to believe you’ll shoot me in cold blood?”
Ari shrugged. “Depends on what you call ‘cold blood.’ Gwen is my mother. Milo is her partner. Val is a woman I care for very much. And Marin... well, I don’t know Marin, but she wants to work in an aquarium and I think that makes her a cool person. So I’m not too concerned about the morality of putting an end to all of this. But I feel like I should at least give you the option of going out on your own terms.”
Katherine stepped closer. “And these are your terms, Ms. Willow? A canidae using a firearm? That hardly seems like a wolf tactic.”
“Last time I went up against you, I used the wolf. But it was Mrs. Frye-Willow, in the foyer, with a fucking firearm that finally put you down. So I think I’ll stick with this.”
The hair on the back of Ari’s neck stood up, aware before she knew what she was aware of, and a smile crept across her face.
“But if you want wolves, I’d hate for you to be disappointed.”
She didn’t have to turn around. She could smell them as they reached the top of the stairs. Gwen was out in front, the growl in her throat low but with enough bass to fill the empty room. Milo was behind her, then Marin, then Eva and members of the Cardoso pack. The wolves spread out in formation behind Ari, none of them poised to attack but clearly ready if the moment came.
Dale whispered, “Hey, Isaac. Try saying ‘feather’ again.”
Ari smirked. She could smell the rage of every wolf in the room, felt the fire from each one of them. She could hear sirens in the distance, which meant Lucy had finally had enough and called in the reinforcements. Katherine Gavin, Isaac Hayden, and Gabriel Roemer stood in front of her, defenseless, and she remembered what she’d told Dale about her plans to end this night bloody. She could even envision the way Roemer’s head would snap back when she put a bullet in it.
She lowered her weapon. “It wouldn’t help,” she said. “Talking you out of doing something else when the heat dies down, killing you all here, it doesn’t matter. Other hunters are out there. I kill the three of you, I make martyrs for the next guy, and the next one, and the next one. I’m not going to do that. You’re going to pay for what you did to my friends and family. But I’m not going to be your executioner.”
Dale lightly brushed the back of Ari’s hand with hers. “There’s my puppy,” she whispered.
Ari lowered the gun to her side, not daring to drop it and potentially arm the people she’d just spared. “This is over. You’re going to be arrested, you may get to plead insanity for the whole werewolf claim, but the internet is going to forget this by the weekend. Everything you’ve done, all the mental torture you’ve put these women through, it was for nothing.”
Dale said, “We should get all these wolves out of here before we have to explain them to the cops.”
“Right,” Ari said. “You can all have a seat. I’m sure the police will be with you shortly.”
She turned and put her hand in the small of Dale’s back to guide her to the stairs. The wolves reluctantly filed out, a few of them making disappointed chuffing sounds as they left.
Ari heard the footsteps pounding on the floor a second before she heard Katherine growl, “It won’t be for nothing...”
Ari turned, pushing Dale out of the way as Katherine tackled her. They rolled, Ari more concerned with the other woman’s age and fragility than she was about being actually hurt. She stopped the roll when she was on top, but Katherine punched her in the chest and knocked the wind out of her. Ari coughed and fell to one side. Katherine got onto her knees and tried to shove her back, but Ari wrapped both arms around Katherine’s waist and tossed her. Katherine hit the ground, skidded, and then went over the edge of an open elevator shaft that Ari hadn’t seen.
“Shit,” Ari said.
Katherine had grabbed hold of a broken plank that had been blocking the opening, but the wood was already splintering. Her other hand was flat on the floor and sliding with alarming speed. Their eyes locked. Ari saw a look of pure hatred pass over Katherine’s face as she let go and vanished into the darkness. A few seconds later, they heard a violent, final crash of a soft body on old wood and stone.
“Jesus,” Hayden whispered.
A hand lowered into Ari’s line of sight and she followed the arm up to Dale. She accepted the hand, got to her feet, and looked back at the men.
“We’ll be watching at the bottom of the stairs until the cops get here,” she said. “But feel free to try taking the express route like your benefactor. I won’t kill you, but I’m sure as hell not going to save you, either. You can both take a flying leap off the roof for all I care.”
She put an arm around Dale’s shoulders and walked with her out of the room.
***
The gravel parking lot was full of police cars, lights shining brighter than the stadium lights down the street. Marin and Val had been taken somewhere safe to give their statements while a squadron of officers went through the building to gather up the hunters. Milo and Gwen had vanished after leaving the top floor office, and Ari didn’t see any reason to tell anyone they’d ever been there in the first place. They’d been through enough.
The police wanted to speak to them separately, just to get a full idea of what had happened, so Dale had been taken away to be the first one questioned. Ari had been taken to a loading dock and told to “stay put,” which gave her a front-row view of everyone being officially taken into custody. She let her eyes slip out of focus and mentally monitored the adrenaline seeping from her muscles. She’d gone from electrically wired to groggy in just a handful of minutes, and she feared a crash was coming.
Dale came out of the command center and crossed the gravel to Ari. She had a plastic-wrapped sandwich and a bottle of Gatorade, which she handed over before she hopped up to sit next to her.
“Figured you might be crashing.”
Ari looked at the offering like it was gold. “Thanks, Dale.”
“Mm-hmm. They’re going to come get your statement soon, but I convinced them to let you eat something first. It’s been a long night.”
Dale let her feet swing, hands folded between her knees, watching the commotion as Ari devoured the sandwich. She shared the Gatorade.
“So. Feather?”
“There was something about a feather in one of the essays,” Dale said, brow furrowed. “I think it means a hound has picked up a scent of its prey.”
Ari watched Dale’s profile. “Nothing? Not even a tickle?”
Dale turned and met Ari’s gaze. “Not even a twinge. Not even for half a second, puppy.” She smiled and leaned in, bumping her forehead against Ari’s. “I think I’m actually free of it. God what a relief. I was so worried.”
“I wasn’t,” Ari said.
“You walked into a room with me at your back, holding a gun,” Dale said. “I got the feeling you were pretty confident in my loyalty.”
Ari chuckled. “I was worried about how worried you were. So I’m glad you can let go of that anxiety.” She kissed the corner of Dale’s mouth. “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” She brushed a crumb away from Ari’s bottom lip. “There was something else in the essays. Something that’s come up before. Something that really is still bugging me.”
“Something I can help you with?”
Dale shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s something that can be helped.” She looked away. “Canidae live a lot longer than humans. A couple of the essays say that a hundred years is pretty much the baseline. I’ll be lucky if I make it that long. It’s just something I have to live with.”
“Maybe,” Ari said. “But you forget that I’m not a full-blooded canidae. Keighley was a hunter and, like it or not, I have his genes. He’s the reason I wouldn’t have been able to transform if Mom hadn’t taken drastic measures. Maybe a shorter life span is another one of the deficiencies I got from him.”
