Smoke Bitten

by Patricia Briggs

  New languages would be especially easy for Sherwood to acquire. He wouldn’t need a large vocabulary because he didn’t talk a lot.

  “George couldn’t get off work,” Adam told the room. George was a police officer with the Pasco PD—it got him out of a lot of meetings. “He’ll be here tonight and I’ll update him.”

  Warren glanced at a couple of wolves and they got up, freeing the seats next to Aiden—who rolled his eyes at us.

  “I don’t need a protection detail,” said Aiden, pulling his blanket closer around himself. “I don’t think there’s anyone here who wants to kill me.” He didn’t speak particularly loudly, but everyone in the room heard him just fine.

  Jesse rolled her eyes back at him. She was better at it. “Just me,” she said in syrupy tones. She continued with sisterly affection as she sat down, “Stupidhead—we have to sit next to you. How else am I going to pass notes back and forth? And why are you wrapped in a blanket?”

  “Shh,” said Aiden. “I’ll tell you later.”

  Adam had leaned back against the table, legs crossed at the ankles and arms folded. “Anytime you are ready,” he said with faux patience.

  “Sure, Dad,” Jesse told him, as Warren and I took our seats and the rest of the pack quieted down. “Go right ahead.”

  He grinned at her cheeky response, showing a dimple. Properly, I suppose, he should have enforced discipline. But our pack was very stable at the moment, forced there by the gigantic task of keeping the peace in our territory.

  Since I’d made us responsible for the safety of the citizens of the Tri-Cities area, and the fae had taken it a step further and signed a treaty that established the Tri-Cities as a neutral place, we’d been kept hopping, what with minor actors coming in to test our mettle and major offenses like the latest one with the zombies. We were too busy to stoop to squabbles—as a result, our pack was a tightly knit bunch.

  I glanced at Auriele and amended my thought. As long as Christy quit sticking her fingers into our business, we were a tightly knit bunch. Today there was a thread of tension in the room that hadn’t been there a few weeks ago—or that I hadn’t noticed a few weeks ago.

  Adam took a breath and looked around the room. “I didn’t ask you all here on a whim,” he said. “Yesterday brought us some problems.”

  He explained yesterday in a concise and cogent manner—beginning with Underhill’s addition to the landscaping of the backyard, through Anna’s and Dennis’s deaths, and ending with the final act of the jackrabbit hunt that left us with the realization that we had an unknown but magically capable foe, probably an escapee from Underhill.

  I noted that he left out my vampire stalker. I wasn’t sure why. I hoped that he wasn’t trying to spare me any attacks by Auriele, who had become very quick to point her finger at me since Christy had resunk her claws into the pack. I didn’t need him to protect me from Auriele; she didn’t worry me. Made me sad, yes; worried, no.

  Of course, he’d left out the werewolves, too, so maybe he was just working his way down the list of our new and newly active opponents, one at a time.

  “Aiden has some insight as to what we might be facing,” Adam said. “Since our adversary and the door to Underhill appeared on the same evening, we are making a guarded assumption that one has to do with the other. Aiden?”

  Aiden stood up and gave the same précis he’d given Adam and me last night.

  Darryl stood up when Aiden finished. Adam nodded.

  “What makes you certain that Mercy’s jackrabbit and your . . . smoke demon are the same creature?” Darryl asked. “I’m not doubting you. Just asking for clarification.”

  “Her wound smoked,” Aiden said. “I don’t know of any other creature that leaves smoking wounds with only a bite. Not in Underhill, at least.”

  Darryl sat down and Honey stood up.

  “Are you certain it is something that escaped from Underhill?” Honey asked. “There are a lot of magically gifted others who are not werewolf, vampire, or fae. Could one of them have been attracted by all of the notice being paid to us? Maybe its appearance at the same time as the new door is just a coincidence.”

  Downstairs, the doorbell rang.

  Jesse said, “Since I’m only here for curiosity’s sake, I’ll go get it.”

  “Wait.” Adam held up a hand.

  I gave voice to his thought. “It’s five thirty in the morning and someone is ringing the doorbell?”

  “Warren,” Adam said. “Would you go down with Mercy and see who it is?”

  By traditional accounting, Warren was third in the pack, after Adam and Darryl. As Adam’s mate, I shared his rank—because women didn’t get their own rank—traditionally speaking, anyway.

  Our pack had started to . . . broaden our reality a bit. Pack members could still easily rattle off the ranking of wolves according to tradition—but they treated Honey as if she were ranked in the pack just below Warren, instead of the bottom-of-the-pack ranking where an unmated female would normally be accounted.

  Honey blamed me for this—and she might have been right. Sometimes she chafed at it, but more and more she owned that rank. Auriele, as Darryl’s wife, outranked everyone except for Adam, me, and Darryl in that order. But the pack had started treating her as if she were right behind Honey. And it felt like a promotion—even though technically she had dropped in rank.

  Adam told me that he was just holding his breath and hoping that it continued. Werewolves are volatile creatures. It is hard for the human to hold the wolf in check—and when it didn’t work . . . Well, there was only one thing to be done with an out-of-control werewolf. And now that the wolves were outed to the human world, there were no second chances.

  Anything that could be done to strengthen the ties that bound the pack together also helped everyone manage better. Adam maintained that by actually paying attention to the real order of dominance, our pack members were better adjusted and not nearly so likely to go off on another member of the pack because their wolf was confused about who was actually dominant.

  To that end we all pretended that we didn’t see what was really going on, and only occasionally did it pop up in conversations. We weren’t ignoring it—but we were pretending that nothing had changed.

  The Marrok’s son Charles, who treated his own wolf spirit as if it were another sentient being who shared his skin, once told me that wolves were straightforward creatures on the whole, and that most of the mess that was werewolf culture had been brought about by the human halves of the werewolves. I was beginning to see what he meant.

  We also pretended—Adam, Darryl, Warren, and I—that Warren was not more dominant than Darryl. Warren was gay—and a lot of our werewolves had grown up in eras in which that was something not tolerated. The survival rate for gay or lesbian werewolves was far lower than for straight werewolves—which wasn’t anything to brag about, either. Warren was the only gay werewolf I knew. The bigoted members of our pack had been bludgeoned (literally and figuratively) into first tolerating Warren and then appreciating him. But none of us was sure if that would hold should Warren become Adam’s second—who would be counted upon to lead the pack should something happen to Adam.

  All of that meant that Adam had just picked out the most dangerous werewolf in the pack besides himself to escort me downstairs. Maybe it was only because Warren had been sitting next to me, but I doubted it.

  The doorbell rang again as Warren held the door for me and followed me down, as if I outranked him.

  * * *

  • • •

  I stopped in the bedroom to grab my carry gun and tucked it, loaded and ready to go, in the back of my jeans. Warren didn’t say anything about it, just patted his lower back—he was carrying, too.

  As we got to the bottom step, doors slammed and a car took off.

  “Honda V6,” I told Warren.

  J-series, if it matt
ered. But that didn’t tell him any more than it told me. There were a lot of Hondas with a V6 J-series, and there were different versions of the J-series. Hondas weren’t my manufacturer, so I couldn’t tell one version from another without having two different versions in front of me.

  “Probably not a rental car,” said Warren.

  Okay, so it told us something. Rental cars tended to be the stripped-down versions and the V6 was mostly an upgrade.

  We were both speaking very quietly as we closed in on the door. Warren kept his eyes on the windows where people could look in. It was darker in the house than it was outside now, so it would be hard for someone to see us, but not impossible.

  “Adam needs to get opaque curtains and use them,” said Warren.

  “Then we can’t see out,” I told him, not paying as much attention to what I said as to the front door.

  “I know he has cameras,” Warren answered. “He doesn’t need windows.”

  He bent down and cautiously looked through the peephole and shook his head.

  “Maybe it’s a Girl Scout,” I told him. “They’re short.”

  “There, you’ve done it,” said Warren, reaching for the door. “Now I want a Thin Mint and it’s the wrong time of the year.”

  He opened the door quickly, stepping away and to the side, but there was no attack. Instead, there was a body on the porch. It took me an instant that felt heart-stoppingly long to realize the body was breathing.

  Warren leaned his head down, took a good scent, and then leaped across the porch and started running down the road as fast as he could—which was impressively fast, even in human form.

  I was pretty sure that we were too late for catching the people who’d driven off, unless they had parked and come back to see what we did—which was possible. I checked out the man on our porch. I smelled unfamiliar werewolves, but I didn’t smell any blood. He appeared undamaged except for the part about him being unconscious.

  Good. Because I liked him.

  “Mary Jo,” I called out. “You want to come down. It’s Renny.”

  The gift our werewolf invaders had left for us was Deputy Alexander Renton of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office. He was in uniform, so presumably they’d abducted him while he was on patrol.

  Wolves in human form boiled down the stairs and out to the porch. Darryl and Auriele did the same sniff-and-go that Warren had done. Mary Jo dropped to her knees beside him.

  “Damn it, Renny,” she muttered to the unconscious man as she peeled back his eyelids to check his eyes. “I told you it wasn’t a good idea for us to start dating again.”

  She checked his pulse, then looked up at Adam. “I think he’s fine. His heart rate is normal, his color’s good. They hit him with a tranq of some sort, I think. His department is going to be in the middle of a mad hunt for him. We should call them.” That last was a request for permission.

  “Do it,” said Adam. Narrow-eyed, he looked out at our surroundings—pausing at a small boat on the far side of the river, maybe a quarter of a mile away. “That boat has binoculars pointed at us,” he said in a conversational tone.

  Virtually as one, the pack glanced at him to see where he was looking, then followed his gaze out to the river. They were intent enough that the pack magic rose among us and we, the pack, understood that there was no chance of getting to the boat before they fled, because Adam knew that. We also rejected using the handguns that some of us were carrying because it was too far for a clean shot, and besides, we weren’t sure Adam wanted them dead.

  The boat’s engine got louder as the boat swung around and took its passengers upriver and out of our sight. The pack hunting magic subsided.

  “We could intercept,” suggested Ben, who did some boating with friends from work. “That small engine is good for being quiet, but pushing even that little boat upriver will be slow going.”

  Adam shook his head. “I don’t want them yet,” he said.

  “I take it,” said Honey, brushing her honey-colored hair out of her eyes, “that the wolves who did this were another of the interesting discoveries you made last night?”

  “Because by Saint Peter’s peter,” said Ben, “an arse-licking boogeyman wasn’t enough. We needed a bishop-beating bunch of mangy invading werewolves, too.”

  Luke laughed and in a fake British accent said, “Fecking right, Ben, my lad. But it would be take a real gobshite to try to invade us right this moment.”

  “Agreed,” said Honey, while I was still trying to figure out what a gobshite was. “They should wait a few more months until attrition has winnowed our numbers down sufficiently.”

  A silence followed her words, broken only by Mary Jo’s quiet voice as she talked to the sheriff’s department.

  It was true. Since we weren’t connected with the rest of the packs (for various political and doubtless correct reasons) in the Americas, when our wolves left, there were no replacements. We’d lost eight wolves since we’d broken with the Marrok. One of us had died, and the other seven had moved for the usual reasons—better jobs, family necessity, and the war-ready tension our pack had to operate under right now. Adam could have made them stay, but he refused to do that. Our pack, which used to have between thirty and forty people in it, was down to twenty-six.

  Our wolves had given up on the chase and were jogging back to the house.

  “They want to talk to you,” said Mary Jo, handing her phone over to Adam. “I’ll take him inside.”

  “Put him in the spare bedroom,” I told her as Adam explained that he understood that the sheriff’s office was not happy with one of their people being taken. “The sheets on the bed are clean.”

  She picked him up in a fireman’s carry. He was quite a bit taller and more massive than she was, so it looked a little odd.

  “I’ll get the doors,” volunteered Ben.

  It took Adam about ten minutes to negotiate a path forward with Renny’s sheriff that didn’t involve the sheriff’s department taking the town apart to look for the perpetrators. The chill effect of Honey’s words kept the rest of the pack quiet. Adam and I had talked about our declining numbers, but apparently it was a new thought for most of the pack. Or maybe hearing it said out loud made it harder to ignore.

  Auriele, Darryl, and Warren were jogging up to the porch by the time Adam disconnected.

  “Let’s go back upstairs,” Adam said. “I have some information for you about the wolves who dropped Deputy Renton on our porch.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Once everyone was seated again—including Mary Jo and Ben, who’d returned from settling Renny, who appeared to be sleeping comfortably—Adam ran down the details of the wolf kill the night before.

  “I identified two of the werewolves from last night, and I made some calls,” Adam said. “I have a pretty good idea who the leader of this pack is.”

  He let that sink in a moment, then continued, “And we can put some other names in the probable category. I don’t think it’s a big group; more than likely there are only six of them. Warren, could you get the lights?”

  Warren reached over his shoulder and flipped the light switch. Adam pulled down the shades and turned on the projector.

  A somewhat grainy photograph of the top quarter of a man appeared on the screen. He had a narrow, aquiline face, a long nose, and big dark eyes.

  “Harolford,” said Elliot as soon the photo came up. He didn’t sound happy. The big man growled. “Bastard. Nasty opponent in a one-on-one fight—wiped the floor with me.” Elliot looked at Adam. “That was before I came here—and I’m a better fighter now. But I don’t have any appetite to go at it again with him. He’s a good strategist—thinks a few steps ahead. I don’t like him. At all. But he isn’t stupid.”

  Adam looked around the room. “I haven’t met him,” Adam said. “Does anyone else know anything about him?�
��

  “Maybe,” said Auriele. “I don’t know him, but if that is Sven Harolford—”

  “It is,” said Adam.

  “Then I’ve had two women—werewolves both—who told me never to be alone with him,” she said. Then she smiled, a dark and hungry smile. “Which makes me want very much to do exactly that.”

  There was a short silence.

  “Don’t remember him,” said Sherwood. “But my wolf is pretty unhappy about him. I’d be okay with killing him.”

  When no one else said anything, Adam pulled up another face. No one knew that one.

  “He has been going by the name Lincoln Stuart, though he is old and that is not his original name.”

  “Was he the guy who was second to . . .” Mary Jo snapped her fingers impatiently. “A pack in Nebraska, but I can’t think of the Alpha’s name.”

  “I know who you mean,” Adam said. “And no, you’re thinking about Lincoln Thorson. He’s still second in the Lincoln, Nebraska, pack—which is why everyone remembers him. This isn’t that Lincoln.”

  He brought up another photo; this one was the kind of photo taken on vacations. An Asian man and woman were standing in front of what I was pretty sure was the Grand Canyon. The shot looked as though it had been taken thirty years ago. The man was smiling at the woman, who was pointing up at him with both of her index fingers in a “look what I caught” pose that was completed by her over-the-moon smile.

  “Chen Li Qiang.” Carlos was not a big man, nor did he look like the badass he was. He worked for Adam, and his specialty, I knew, was de-escalating FUBAR situations. “Damn it, Adam,” Carlos said with feeling. “Damn it. Li Qiang, he’s a friend. I served with him in Korea.”

  “His name is Chinese,” said Darryl. “And he looks Chinese.”

  “He is,” said Carlos. “But he’s lived in the States since he came over to work on the railroad and ran into a werewolf. He worked as a translator for the USMC because his Korean is almost as good as his Cantonese and Mandarin.” Carlos rubbed his hands together and shook his head. “That girl in the photo was his wife. She died about five years ago—I went to the funeral.”