by Wen Spencer
He spread his hands helplessly. "I don't remember."
"That's normal," Decker said. "The amnesia that is. The werewolf bite is a magical wound; it opens a gate between you and the source of the werewolf's powers. When you're first opened up to magic, it burns part of you away."
Elise pointed at Decker. "Take him home." She turned and pointed at Joshua. "Make sure you don't hurt Decker or I'll make you sorry."
Joshua was all for bolting from the park. He never wanted to come back. He hated everything about it: the gymnastic rabbits, the badly placed trees, and the rampaging monsters.
* * *
It had been a weird, weird night. Joshua's brain had shut down somewhere around the time that the huntsman showed up. He'd collected his backpack from its hiding place and followed Decker the whole way to the Yawkey subway station before his brain finally engaged again.
"What the hell just happened?" he asked while Decker fed money into the ticket machine. "How did we win?"
"We got lucky." Decker handed him the ticket the machine spat out. "I don't fully understand the pack's magical power, but it's not like most monsters'. The pack is like a tightly woven net; all the members sharing one central power. Most other supernatural beings are a solitary pinprick through which massive power can flow. There's no on or off switch, it's just a flood that wipes out the individual and they become the power. I'm a freak of nature as a vampire; I have an off switch. It gets stuck on when I stress it out, and I become a true vampire if I can't turn it off."
"Like when you almost bit me?"
Decker herded him through the turnstile. "Not my finest moment, but yes. Part of my nature is that I don't need blood to survive; I can tap power from other monsters. If I get too much, though, I overload and can't break free. I could become something that lives to drain all life essence from everything around me. The huntsman should have destroyed any hold I have on myself."
"Which was why you wanted Elise to kill it while you dealt with the hounds."
"Yes. Because you struck the killing blow, the huntsman's power was defused by your connection to the pack's magic." Decker glanced away. "Thank you for protecting Elise."
The train rumbled up to the platform. The doors slid open and Decker stepped on. Joshua realized he hadn't actually thought everything through. His parents always told him not to go anywhere with strangers. They could be dangerous. A vampire definitely qualified as strange and dangerous.
Decker turned and saw that he was still standing outside the subway car. He waved Joshua forward. "Come on. Come on." He said in the sort of voice that one used with a puppy.
Joshua blushed. If he didn't get on, he wouldn't be able to actually finish the conversation. He still didn't know anything useful about being a werewolf and there were monsters chasing after him. He stepped onto the train seconds before the door slid shut.
"Look," Joshua said. "Usually when I'm going to go stay over at someone's place, they have to call their folks and make sure it's alright. This is kind of freaking me out."
"My parents died a long time ago."
Awkward.
"You don't have any place to go, right?" Decker asked. "Or do you have family in town?"
"No. I-I just had the weird dream in the hospital that I should come to Boston." It sounded stupid aloud. At least he assumed the Prince of Boston would be in Boston. Someplace.
Decker nodded but didn't comment on the dream. "And you don't have any money? Nothing to buy food with?"
His running away from home would seem stupid if it wasn't for the whole "monsters chasing you." And to be honest, he hadn't known about that part. It wasn't like he was some little kid that should be under constant watch. "I was going to go to college next fall. I had it all planned. Harvard was my top choice but I needed a scholarship. That was a real long shot. I'd figured that I'd end up at Syracuse like my sister Bethy. She's a senior there. I wanted to have an apartment instead of living in the dorms. I figured I'd just get bullied in the dorms---like usual---only worse."
Decker raised an eyebrow, apparently confused by the change in subject. He thought for a moment, tilted his head, and asked, "Do you know the story of Bluebeard?"
It was Joshua's turn to be confused. "The pirate?"
"That's Blackbeard. Bluebeard is about this woman who gets married to a man who'd been married multiple times but all his wives had mysteriously disappeared. He gives his bride the keys to his castle and tells her that she has full run of the place, as long as she never uses the key to a small room in the basement. Eventually she goes to see what's in it and finds the bodies of his previous wives hung up like butchered pigs."
Joshua squinted at Decker, trying to figure out the point of this story. "You've got dead bodies in your basement?"
Decker covered his eyes and shook his head, laughing silently. "I am the dead body in the basement! And people are like that. You try to tell them to stay out of one room and no matter how many times they promise not to, sooner or later, they just have to find out what you're hiding. It never ends well. As recently as fifty years ago, it got villagers with torches showing up, trying to kill you, blaming you for everything from a recent murder to low sex appeal."
"Okay." Joshua still didn't see the point.
"I've been trying to live alone and it's not working. I need someone. A housekeeper."
"Like Alice?"
"Alice?" Decker echoed, mystified.
"On The Brady Bunch. Alice was the housekeeper. Always in a maid's dress."
"I was thinking more like Mr. French."
"Who?"
Decker sighed. "Obviously before your time."
Joshua doubted that the vampire actually needed a housekeeper. He wasn't sure why Decker was even making the suggestion. "Look, I wouldn't look good in a maid's outfit."
"I don't know. A little black corset dress with a white apron?" Decker drew indecent lines where the outfit would start and end. "Stockings and garter belts? A white ruffled headband and a black ribbon choker?"
"In. Your. Dreams."
Decker snickered. "Okay, what I really need is a guard dog. Someone that can move around in the daylight. Chase off intruders. Bring in the daily paper."
"I'm not a dog."
"You're better than a dog, because you talk and clean up after yourself and drive a car."
Joshua burned with embarrassment. "I don't have a driver's license. I don't even have a learner's permit because my parents have never been able to figure out what they did with my birth certificate." He needed it to get a social security number too. He didn't remember his folks being so weird about the paperwork with his older sister. As always, it sounded so lame that he added on their other excuses. "They couldn't afford the additional insurance while my sister is in college. And my folks have an old Dodge half-ton pickup with a manual transmission and I---I'm having trouble with the clutch." Because he couldn't reach the freaking pedals, but he didn't want to mention that.
"Ah, the all-important clutch." Decker somehow made that sound dirty. "You can learn to drive, something that's beyond the average Rottweiler." He took a deep breath and confessed. "I need someone I can trust. Someone that knows I'm a vampire and won't be trying to kill me or sell my story to newspapers. Someone who has a hope of surviving if I lose hold of the monster inside me. Someone who amuses me."
Joshua studied the vampire. In the flickering lights of the subway, he looked like a normal college student. If Elise was his closest friend, then the man was very much alone. And wasn't everything Decker said true for Joshua? He needed someone that knew he was a werewolf. Someone that had a hope of dealing with the wolf when it finally manifested. Someone who found him amusing, not frightening?
"Okay, but no maid outfit."
Decker grinned but made no promises.
The subway slowed and pulled into a station.
Decker stood up. "Come, this is us."
2: Elise
Elise stopped at the Natick Service Plaza on the Mass Pike. She
had a quarter tank of gas, but it was two hundred and sixty miles to Joshua's home in Sauquoit, New York. Ignoring the signs on the gas pump, she called in her report.
Clarice answered with a sleepy, "Central. Ow!"
"Are you okay?" Elise asked.
Clarice had bright copper hair and the porcelain skin that went with it, which meant she bruised spectacularly. She was also a klutz. "No biggie. I just kicked my desk." She yawned deeply. "Report?"
"It's Elise. The huntsman is dead and I've secured its target."
"Oh good." There was a clicking of keys as Clarice entered the information into the logs. "And the Wickers that made it?"
"I'm looking for them now. I think they're in the Utica area of Central New York. Is anyone else there? There was a wolf attack at a barn on Friday night. It was related to this."
"The Wolf King is on the warpath in Belgrade." Clarice must have put Elise on the speakerphone. Her voice floated away from the pickup, and was joined by the sounds of coffee making. "He popped up on our radar when he and half his Thane went through customs. All hell let loose there. We're not sure what's going on."
"I said Upstate New York."
"Yes, I know." Another faint "ow" as she burned herself on the coffee she'd just made. "Whatever is happening in Belgrade has all the wolves rattled. After I heard about the attack in Sauquoit, I called Albany and Syracuse to see if it was one of their wolves or a true feral. The Baron of Syracuse said we should mind our own business. I took it to mean that the wolf wasn't a feral, otherwise it would be our business."
"What did the Marquis of Albany say?"
"That the Thane are looking into it. I got the impression that he'd talked with the Castle, been told something that was obviously incomplete, put clues together, but didn't totally trust the answer he'd come up with. He chose to be rude instead of giving us false information. Why?"
Clarice manned the phones at Central because she had a rare magical gift of insight. She could sense patterns from the barest of clues. Also, no one really wanted her playing with knives.
"A wolf tangled with a Wicker's puppets and ended up dead." Elise ticked off what she'd pieced together from the clues. "The sole survivor had been bitten but didn't go feral."
"Bitten? Fudge, I missed that." There was a long pause. "Oh geez, yeah, this has Wicker fingerprints all over it. The news media suddenly detoured off all the weird stuff on the case. You need to go down the whole way to the social media of the victims' family members to get the nitty-gritty. The reporters are churning out buckets of crap, but it's all been whitewashed. You're looking at a big coven. There's no way only one or two witches are running this show. And you're right, the wolf must have been a Thane; I've talked to the two nearest Alphas. Good call."
A big coven. Elise whispered a curse.
"Oh geez. Nonononono!" Clarice cried.
"What?"
"I spilled my coffee! Grandmother is going to kill me."
"You spilled it in your laptop?"
"I'm not allowed laptops anymore. Grandmother said I was going to personally bankrupt the family, which is totally mean of her. I make a ton of money day trading in my spare time. She got me a wireless keyboard and wall mounted my monitor. I'm not allowed to touch the desktop tower. This is the third keyboard this week. Maybe if I can---" Clarice gave a startled squeak and the phone went dead.
Elise tried calling back three times before giving up. Clarice must have killed the phone too. It meant Elise was on her own.
3: Seth
Seth Tatterskein never knew that werewolves were so good at hiding.
In the three years that Seth had lived at the Wolf King's Castle, there was always at least one burly Thane guarding the front door. They were in Manhattan, facing Central Park and tucked between museums. It meant that anyone might innocently walk through the impressive bronze doors, from Japanese tourists mistaking the Castle for a museum to the desperate homeless. Then there was a weird off chance that someone who actually knew that it was the Wolf King's Castle was crazy enough to want to try to take on the king and his Thane. For all those reasons, the entrance was normally kept locked and guarded.
The door had been unlocked and there wasn't anyone standing guard.
Seth stopped in the marbled foyer, dropping his luggage around him. "Hello? Hello?"
Had something happened while he was in the air? He had assumed that his phone calls, as he hopped from one airport to another, had gone unanswered because no one wanted to tell him that his cousin Jack Cabot was dead.
Thirty hours earlier, thousands of miles away, he'd felt something thrust through Jack with a searing blow that would kill a human. More blows followed as someone or something stabbed Jack again and again. And there was nothing Seth could do other than howl in fear and rage.
It was like all the times Seth had felt strangers die in Boston while he was stuck in New York City. Only worse: this was Jack. His big brother, best friend, fierce protector, loyal follower and only living relative all rolled into one. And now Jack was possibly dead.
Seth closed his eyes and focused on the tenuous connection he had with Jack. Somewhere far away, Jack clung to life. Seth growled in frustration. If Jack had been attacked in Boston, Seth would be able to pinpoint his location, know if anyone was with him and figure out if Jack was safe or not. Jack was somewhere west of New York City, not east. Seth needed someone else to fill in the holes as to what was being done to save his cousin.
Seth opened his eyes and scanned the empty entrance hall. If Jack was still alive, why was everyone avoiding Seth? He sniffed, testing the air for blood and gun smoke. He picked up Eric Hoffman's scent. Lowest dominance of the Thane, Hoffman often pulled door duty. Hoffman had been standing at the doorway until a few minutes ago. He probably watched through the spyhole as Seth paid the taxi driver. Hoffman unlocked the door and vanished.
"Hello?" Seth slammed shut the front door. It boomed loudly and echoed. "Hoffman?"
Where was everyone? Why hadn't anyone answered his phone calls? Seth had spent nearly fourteen hours trying to reach someone at the Castle before leaving his grandfather's funeral early. (His Uncle Efrain, the new Earl of Guadalajara, hadn't wanted Seth to fly internationally as an unattended minor, but one of the few benefits of being the Prince of Boston was that only the Wolf King could stop Seth from doing what he wanted.) It took another fourteen hours to work his way to Mexico City and then Atlanta and finally Newark. One of the Thanes should have met Seth at the airport with one of the Wolf King's limousines.
Hoffman had been at the door. Where was he now? Where were all the other Thanes? The Wolf King had thirty-one of them living at the Castle.
The lounge was empty; normally at this time of night two or three of the Thanes would be relaxing in the leather armchairs. The billiards room was dark and silent, as was the music room and the theater. Seth checked the library, the ballroom, the formal dining room and the throne room. No one. Nor was there any sign or scent of bloodshed or invaders.
"Where is everyone?" Seth shouted. His voice echoed through the empty castle.
Seth realized then that Hoffman had to be hiding from him and that the Thane was doing a damn good job. Seth looped back through the entrance hall, opening doors and staring intently into the dark rooms. Listening. Sniffing.
Who knew that werewolves were so good at hiding?
Seth hadn't played hide and seek since his little brothers were killed along with the rest of his family. Searching for Hoffman made him remember how helpless he'd felt the day they died. The Thane had pinned Seth to the throne room's floor as his family was torn to shreds in Boston. He could do nothing but scream and beg. When his father died, his power roared into Seth like a supernova. Becoming the Prince of Boston burned out everything that made him Seth; for a few confusing weeks, he was spared the memory of ever having little brothers.
When he started to remember, Jack had been there, keeping him from breaking into a thousand pieces.
"What happe
ned to my cousin?" Seth roared. The coat closet, tucked in a dark corner of the entrance hall, was the only possible hiding place left. He ripped the door off and flung it away from him. The force embedded it into the far wall.
The walk-in closet was cedar-lined and filled with rarely used winter coats. Werewolves only needed outerwear to stay dry, not warm. A light brown tail was sticking out between two camel-hair wool coats. It'd been wagging when he ripped open the door. At the boom of the door hitting the far wall, the tail slung down to tuck between the back legs of a large werewolf.
"Hoffman!" Seth shouted.
"I don't know!" Hoffman wailed, slinking deeper into the coats. "I don't know, Seth! Your highness! Please don't hurt me!"
"I'm not going to hurt you!" Seth growled. "Get the hell out here and tell me what you do know."
Hoffman had twelve years, three inches and fifty pounds on Seth, but was lowest dominance of the Thanes. The man overcompensated with muscle T-shirts to show off his tribal tattoos. The ink showed through his camel-colored fur as bold black markings, making him look like some kind of weird zebra.
"Cabot forgot his phone in the kitchen again," Hoffman whined. "You know how he's always setting it down and forgetting it. When you called, Isaiah picked it up, guessed Cabot's password, and listened to the message you left."
Seth cursed. Jack always used the same two passwords: December twenty-eighth and March seventh. They were Seth's and his half-brother's birthday. "Why didn't Isaiah call me? Why didn't anyone answer the Castle's landline?"
"Isaiah said, until we found out what happened to Cabot, we shouldn't talk to you. It would upset you more if you knew that we didn't know where Cabot was, let alone what happened to him."
Utter bullshit! Isaiah was the Wolf King's son, a twenty-nine-year-old going on five. Isaiah didn't care how upset Seth got. In fact, Isaiah routinely chose the path that annoyed Seth the most.
"It's been a full day!" Seth shouted. "Haven't you found anything out?"
"We thought Cabot was in Mexico with you!"
Jack had been an angry ten-year-old when Seth's parents were joined in an arranged marriage. Apparently he had choice things to say about the ancestry of the Guadalajara pack. When Efrain called the Castle to let the king know that Seth's grandfather was dying, his uncle made it clear that Jack wasn't welcome in Mexico. The Wolf King's lawyer, Bishop, had flown with Seth in a private jet down to Guadalajara. Shortly after they arrived, however, Bishop had taken off with said airplane on some other business for the king.