by Geonn Cannon
"Not to mention the fact the hunters saw us," Paige said. "They may not know what we look like, but they have a lot of information I'd prefer they didn't. The van..."
"We ditched the van."
Paige said, "Yeah, but you didn't evaporate it. If they find it, it'll lead them to us."
"The van's rental records lead to a shell company that will lead them to a defunct corporation. They'll go around in circles before ending up with nothing. The same with the van itself. It's safely tucked away. Even if someone finds it and connects it to the events of last night, it won't get the police anywhere."
"If they find even a speck of Hannah's blood and test it," Tarun said, "they'll trace her and find out she entered the country with three people who were overnight guests at their lovely precinct last night. I'm just pointing out we may not be as protected as we hope to be."
Milo said, "They might still make the connection from you three to what happened last night. Are you sure you weren't followed here?"
"Positive," Benji said. "We parked for fifteen minutes at a car wash, we stopped to get breakfast from three different fast-food restaurants - which is still out in the car if anyone wants something - and then we drove around like confused tourists for thirty minutes just to make sure we didn't see anyone following us."
"We should still err on the side of caution," Gwen said. "Your personal information was so iron-clad because it was for the most part true. If they decide to look into you again, they'll find you regardless of whether they followed you this morning or not. Hopefully Ariadne will find a way to give us warning when they're on the way, but if she's not able or not privy to the plans, we'll be working blind."
Owen held his hands out. "So where does that leave us?"
"It puts us in a place of power," Gwen said. "You were a pack in London, and now that you're here I'm temporarily your Alpha. Do you have any problem with that?" The group shook their heads. "So we're a pack, and we've struck a blow against the hunters. That means they're going to be coming after us hard. It's only a matter of time before they put together all their evidence and come looking for us."
"How is that good for us?" Owen said.
"We know they're coming eventually. We can be ready when they show up."
#
Lorne was called into his captain's office immediately upon his arrival at work, leaving Ari waiting at his desk with Keighley. She took the opportunity to observe the unknown quantity. He was still even while waiting, seated behind Lorne's desk with his hands folded in his lap. The sole concession he made to comfort was tilting the chair back so he was at a slight incline rather than sitting up straight. It was the perfect position for napping but he kept his eyes open to silently scan the bullpen. Other detectives scurried around on jobs and cases that had nothing to do with the war, oblivious to wolves and hunters. At the moment Ari envied them.
"So what do you know about me?"
She very nearly flinched at the sound of his voice. He hadn't seemed to move before speaking, but afterward he looked a challenge at her.
"You've been watching me for fifteen minutes. Surely you've come to some conclusion."
"You're a hunter."
He sighed and returned his attention to the room at large.
"You don't believe in wasting energy or time. You make every move, no matter how minor, worth the effort it takes to make it. Conservation of energy, sure, but it also manages to make you incredibly easy to overlook. It pulls you into the wallpaper and lets the eye drift right over you. You make yourself invisible so the prey never sees you coming."
He pushed out his bottom lip a little and nodded his head.
"And you have a bad back."
Keighley looked at her, something almost like surprise in his icy blue eyes. "On what do you base that conclusion?"
"The way you were sitting in the car, the way you're sitting now, and the way you stood in the elevator on the way up here. You try to hide that you're doing it, but you rotate your hips every now and then to stretch out your spine."
"Nicely done."
Ari dismissed him with a lifted shoulder. "I'm a private investigator. It's what I do."
"Would you like to know what I've observed about you?"
"Not particularly."
"You strive to make people underestimate you. As a woman, you have to outwit men rather than besting them in a toe-to-toe fight. It's your secret to success. You call your business ‘Bitches' to counter anyone who might be dismissive of a female private investigator. Laughing at yourself before they can laugh at you, as it were. The collar is an interesting choice. You wear it without irony, yet you lack the other accoutrements of the sub-culture that is most-often associated with that accessory. That tells me you wear it for a reason, that it has meaning, but I'm not sure what that meaning is. Everything about you is defensive. Secretive. It makes me wonder what you're hiding from Detective Lorne, and what secrets you're keeping from us all."
Ari covered her discomfort by smiling before she realized she had just done exactly what he'd accused her of. "Well. Thanks. I'll try to work on that." She tapped her finger on the desk and glanced over at the captain's office. "You know, on TV this is the point when Lorne would come out so we wouldn't have to sit awkwardly together in silence."
Keighley leaned back in his chair and resumed scanning the room.
"Right."
It was another ten minutes before Lorne returned. He looked at Keighley, who made no move to get out of his chair, and pulled an empty chair over to sit next to Ari.
She said, "What did the big man have to say?"
"Basically that I should be suspended for everything that happened last night. It was my operation and it went sideways as horribly as possible. Orarian is pissed because we lost their shipment. They might not have known what the wolfsbane was, but they knew we took boxes out of their top-secret lab and those boxes were stolen on our watch. So they're livid. They're threatening to sue if any of their proprietary information is compromised."
"Never mess with a Big Pharma," Ari said.
Keighley said, "What of the accident reports?"
Lorne said, "They have witness reports and we're working to gather as much security camera footage as we can so we can piece things together. That first accident at the intersection of Fifth has to be involved. I wanted to talk to the three guys who took blame for what happened, but they had already been released."
"Their names?" Keighley said.
"Owen Kiernan, Benjamin Wood, and Tarun Conrad. They came into the country a few weeks ago. We're looking into it."
Keighley said, "You should have kept them."
"We had nothing to hold them on. They were issued a citation, but they weren't under the influence. The arresting officer even tried to connect it with what happened to us, but it all dead-ended. We had to let them go."
"The police had to let them go. You should have had hunters in place to detain them before they left the building. We are beyond legalities right now. What about the van?"
"We're still looking. We don't have a license plate, and the description of a black passenger van isn't really narrowing things down very far."
Keighley stood up and subtly stretched his back. "Then perhaps you should get to work. Every moment wasted is another moment the wolves may have destroyed the wolfsbane."
Lorne slipped past him and took his seat while Keighley stepped out from behind the desk. He scanned the room again before his eyes settled on Ari. "Get to work, you two. Let me know if you require any help with your search. I won't be far."
"Yeah, I bet you won't." She watched him walk away and looked at Lorne. "Just curious. What happens if we don't track down the wolfsbane?"
"Then Keighley tells Huxley that I screwed up beyond repair, and Huxley decides what to do with me." He rubbed his sleeve above the slight rise created by the bandage. "Let's just say being a hunter doesn't offer a very attractive retirement plan."
Ari sighed and picked up the files Lo
rne had put on the desk before he went to be verbally assaulted by his boss. "Right. So let's see if we can find ourselves a specific black van in all of Seattle."
Chapter Nine
From the camera posted outside Bank of America: The van (driven by Chase) appears at the lower left-hand side of the screen and progresses north at the posted speed limit. In a flash of headlights from a passing car, Ariadne Willow's face is visible through the windshield. At the center of the screen, another van (driven by an unknown woman) appears from the bottom sector of the screen. It impacts the hunter van in the rear quadrant, lifting the passenger-side wheels off the ground as it is pushed out of its lane. The side doors of the wolf van slide open. Two women climb out with guns drawn, masks over their face. Seconds later, a pair of wolves emerge and race past them.
Ari watched the confrontation again, then held her breath as Dale appeared. She ducked down, grabbed the wolf that had gone down in a spray of blood, and hauled her up into the van. Lorne had fired again while Dale was exposed, and Ari felt a surge of anger. If he'd accidentally hit her, if he'd even winged her arm, Ari knew she would have gone feral without the help of wolfsbane. Then there was the question of who had been shot. It wasn't Milo, and neither of the masked women - whoever the hell they were - had her mother's height or build. That meant one of the two unidentified wolves was Gwyneth Willow, and there was a fifty-fifty chance her mother had been the wolf that Dale rescued.
Her mother might very well be dead.
Of course it could also have been another stranger, one of Milo's friends, but would Dale have gone into the line of fire for a stranger? Or would she have taken the risk because she knew how much it would mean to Ari? The more she thought about it, the more likely it seemed. She expected to have conflicting feelings about that, but in truth all she felt was sadness. She didn't want her mother to be dead, didn't want to be an orphan. She had gone half her life without even laying eyes on the woman, but the thought of losing her this way...
"Are you okay?"
She nearly jumped. She had forgotten Keighley was sitting at the next desk, and his voice had seemed to come from right next to her head. She blinked rapidly and gestured at the screen. "Too long sitting here staring at a screen. This is why I have a secretary."
"Hm."
She stamped down her emotions about what might have been and started the next video.
From the camera at Starbucks: The hunter van progresses from left to right. In the slowest possible speed, the wolf van is visible accelerating toward the intersection from Lenora Street. Gwen's face is visible through the windshield, but the image is blurry enough that no amount of zooming or enhancing will be able to identify her. Ari is only sure because she's so familiar with her mother's face. In this angle, the hunter's van blocks the view of the assault.
She leaned forward and rubbed her eyes with the video paused. She was stunned at how many angles they had of the same scene, impressed and violated at the same time. It seemed impossible that none of her many transformations or half-naked traipses across city parks hadn't ended up all over YouTube. She was watching the tapes on a police-owned laptop, exhausting her eyes and boring her silly so the real cops could spend their time on actual police work. She moved the mouse and clicked on the next icon, the footage from the car dealership.
Lorne came back from retrieving his warrant for rental records from Enterprise. "Hey. Find anything?"
She remembered her anger at the video version of him, but fought past it. "There are two sides to every story, and eighty-nine thousand angles to the same damn street corner."
"Welcome to the glorious day of a police officer. Paperwork and squinting at blurry images on a computer screen. Just be grateful you don't have to sit in a room with a VCR trying to find pertinent info between wiggly lines because some shop owner decided to reuse the same tapes over and over again for the past decade. I'd have loved for digital files back in those days."
"I'll kill someone for you if you watch this footage for me."
He smiled and waved his paper like a white flag. "Sorry. Gotta call and check out every black van that got rented last night. You're finally getting that fancy consultant paycheck on this job, better start earning your keep."
"Yeah, yeah..." She rubbed the bridge of her nose, widened her eyes, and went back to the well for the next repetition. This time the hunter van seemed to be coming straight toward the camera. She took a deep breath and rested her chin on her hand as she watched everything happen again. Van One, Van Two, Impact, Masked Women, Wolves, Dale, Escape. Ari paused on the escape and backed up the footage. One of the wolves came around the front of the van: her mother. She jumped into the back of the van. Ari progressed the footage forward a frame at a time.
Her mother left the back of the hunter van. She cut a wide circle around the front of the wolf van, back to the driver's side. Lorne's bullet hit the other wolf.
Ari pushed away from the desk and stood up so quickly that even Keighley seemed unsettled. "I need something to drink. Anyone else need something?"
Lorne said, "I'll take a--"
Ari turned around before he could finish speaking and walked out of the bullpen. The break room was a small windowless closet just across the hall. She went inside and, after a quick scan to make sure she was alone, sagged against the door and covered her face with both hands. She didn't sob, her eyes didn't even become wet, but the emotion churning through her needed an outlet and she refused to do it in front of Lorne or Keighley. She was trembling, and her face burned red as she repeated the fact over in her head until she accepted it was true.
Her mother was alive. Dale was alive. She hadn't realized how little she believed those facts until she was presented with the hard evidence. Being unable to reach either of them on the phone had sown seeds of doubt in her mind that had now been eradicated. They were both alive, and when she found them she would tear them apart for not answering their goddamn phones.
Someone tried to open the door and she pushed back against it. "Just a sec."
"Willow?" Lorne said. "Everything okay?"
"Everything's fine."
"Good, because we just got more security footage. Whole Foods is on a side street, so we may be able to see where the wolves went after they blindsided us."
"I'll be right out."
He walked away and she pushed her hair behind her ears, took a calming breath, and fanned the heat out of her face before she went back out to resume her duties.
#
Milo's house was essentially a fortress waiting to happen. It backed up next to a wooded park where she could run and roam to her heart's content, but those woods also provided access to any hunter that wanted to sneak up on the house from the rear. Gwen sent Milo, Owen and Benji to set up some early-warning security so they would know if anyone approached the house from that direction. The front lawn was small and stepped, with the street two levels below the front porch. Paige and Tarun were stationed at upstairs bedrooms on opposite ends of the house, one facing east and the other west.
Dale and Gwen, meanwhile, set to securing the downstairs. They blocked doors and covered windows so there would only be one point of ingress or egress, both easily defendable if it came down to that. Gwen carried a sheaf of plywood from the garage into the living room and propped it up against the wall next to the piano. Dale was almost finished covering the picture window and nodded her thanks before she took another nail out of her mouth.
Gwen watched her for a moment before she spoke. "They were right, you know. This isn't your war, Dale. I know you consider Ariadne family, and I think that's very sweet. It's a romantic notion. But odds are that this is going to be a bloody business sooner or later. We nearly lost Hannah, and we may not be so lucky next time."
"You would have lost Hannah if I hadn't been there," she said, speaking from the corner of her mouth so she wouldn't drop the nails she was holding. "I grabbed her, and I told you where to find a doctor. You're going to be fighting an army with
, what, five people? I'm not going to leave you down another soldier."
"Dale..." Gwen's voice was softer than she'd ever heard it, so she turned to face her. Gwen was looking down at the carpet. "I've taken so much from my daughter. My decision when she was a baby changed her entire life. My admission of that action threw her out into the world before she was ready. The decisions I've made have destroyed my daughter's life, regardless of the success she's been able to salvage from the ruins. If I let you remain here when the violence begins and I'm unable to protect you..." Her voice trailed off and she looked up at Dale. "I can't be responsible for Ari losing you."
"This is where I belong. Here, or by Ari's side. Since that doesn't seem to be an option, then I'm staying here. I'm not going home and watching TV until someone calls to tell me how everything went down. So just... you know... save it."
The back door opened and Milo came in. "We've got the forest pretty well covered. We'll need someone to keep an eye on the backyard to see if the floodlights come on."
"Dale will do that," Gwen said.
"I..." She caught Gwen's look and stopped herself. "I guess that's something I could do."
"Thank you, Dale."
Milo looked between them but decided not to investigate. "Uh, yeah. Okay. We got a call from Mia while we were out there. Hannah wants to be here."
Gwen said, "Out of the question."
"Yeah, you can be the one to tell her that. She says that she's lying on her back, but she can still hold a gun or look out a window to let us know if someone's coming. It would free up Paige or Tarun to be more useful elsewhere. Plus if Mia was here, that would be one more body. And a cop to boot. Look, she's going to be flat on her back anyway. Might as well give her a view that will be useful to us."
Gwen thought it over for another moment. "Fine. If Dr. Frost says she can be moved safely, then we'll bring her over. Before nightfall. I don't want anyone on the road if the hunters make their move."
"I'll have Owen and Paige pick her up on their way back from lunch. Everyone okay with a bag of burgers?"