“Joey showed a lot of promise, though,” Kiona added, no longer whispering.
Twice in her life Shara felt what she felt right then. The first time had been after her high school prom, after her date raped her in a cheap hotel. She stole his car, his most prized possession, and did her best to destroy it. During her assault on the car she had gone into a blind rage. It had happened again a few years later when her first three children, mutants fathered by a natural wolf, had been torn apart by the father’s pack. That time, she had been a wolf herself and had let the rage overtake her so much that she lost her humanity for several years.
This time, it was as simple as something snapping within her. One moment she was burning with anger, the next she was moving.
Shara sprang from her chair, her shape shifting as she lunged over the corner of the table and onto Kiona Brokentooth. She was too fast for the Indian woman. They both fell to the floor, rolling out of the chair. Shara hovered in the vulnerable in-between state where she was the strongest. Kiona began to change her shape to match Shara’s strength as activity erupted around them. Shara felt hands pulling at her.
She darted her jaws past Kiona’s pounding fists and snapped them shut on her human throat. She pulled and twisted. The spine crackled and tore. Flesh stretched and ripped. Blood pumped wildly into the air. Then Shara held the severed head in her mouth, tasting the blood, swallowing it, loving the burning sensation as it entered her body.
The hands were still pulling at her. They were calling her name over and over.
Shara dropped Kiona’s head. It rolled a little and came to rest, the dead brown eyes staring at Fenris’s boots. Shara let herself return to her human form. The hands helped her up. She wiped at her mouth while everyone stared at her.
“Well, who’s not to be trusted now?” Fenris remarked coldly.
“Shara, do you realize what you’ve done?” Cerdwyn asked.
Shara looked around at the faces surrounding her. Fenris’s goons were ready to attack her at his word. Kelley and Cerdwyn both looked shocked and angry. Thomas, too, was gaping in disbelief. If anyone looked on with understanding, it was Skandar.
“You can all go to hell,” Shara snarled. She pushed her way past Fenris, daring him to lay his hands on her or order someone to stop her.
No one stopped her. She left the room, found the closest exit and fled the hotel, stopping only at the fountain in front to wash the blood from her face and wet her clothes to hide the bright red of the stains.
Morrigan was calling her, and she would answer.
Fenris
Fenris stood over the body of Kiona and watched as the blood pumping from the ragged stump of neck slowed to a dull leak. Even he had been surprised by the savagery and suddenness of Shara’s attack. And Kiona’s complete lack of defense. After goading Shara as she had, the Indian woman should have expected some form of retaliation. And yet she’d barely been able to so much as begin her transformation.
“Does this alter our agreement?” Cerdwyn asked.
Fenris looked up and found the priestess among those watching him. He shook his head slightly. “It was inevitable that one of them would kill the other. It’s unfortunate it happened here, and we’ll miss Kiona’s ferociousness in the fight. I do wonder about Shara, though. Can she be trusted? Where has she gone?”
He watched as the priestess and her company looked to one another. Finally McGrath spoke up. “I’ll go see if she’s in our room.” He left them. Fenris watched him and wondered about the sickness that was plaguing the man. Werewolves don’t get sick like that, he knew. Unless Thomas McGrath had been poisoned, there was no reason for him to be vomiting like he’d done.
“We should clean this up,” Kelley said.
“Ever efficient Kelley Stone,” Fenris chided again. “How do you propose to do that? We can’t replace this carpet. How are we going to carry a headless body out of here?”
“What do you propose?” Kelley asked.
Fenris sighed. Kiona had been a worthwhile companion, and a fantastic lover, but she was gone now and there was no sense in being sentimental about it. “Leave her. We all check out of our rooms and get the hell out of here before she’s found. If we’re ever asked, we say she stayed behind to put the room back in order and we never saw her again. She was obviously attacked by some large animal. Maybe a Las Vegas show tiger?”
Kelley nodded. “Alright. Cerdwyn, you and Skandar go upstairs and pack our stuff. Tell Thomas and Shara what’s going on. Text me when you’re in the lobby. I’ll stay here and keep the hotel staff out of the room.”
Fenris turned to his remaining party and told them to do the same. “I’ll stay here with Kelley.”
They watched the others leave. Kelley locked the door behind them, then turned to face Fenris. “I suppose you want to kill me.”
He sighed. “Ordinarily, yes, that’s exactly what I’d do. Will you sit down with me?” He waved at the conference table. They left the overturned chairs where they were and sat across from one another further down the table. Fenris studied her face for a long moment, then shook his head. “It angers me that you were able to cuckold me for so long.”
“I know,” she said.
“You never shared my goals? You never were loyal to me?”
She smiled at him a little. “I did the tasks you assigned.”
“And reported everything I did to your priestess.”
Kelley shrugged. “Not the mundane stuff. And you’d be surprised to know how much of your activity she already knew about.”
“Messages from her goddess, I suppose?” he asked.
“I suspect so. I don’t know. I certainly don’t feel or know the things she knows, and I’ve been trying for years.”
Fenris nodded. “There are forces we do not understand working for and against us, and in spite of us.”
He watched as Kelley’s mouth turned up in a real smile. “I never took you for a religious man,” she said.
“One secret I kept from you?” he teased. “Do you think I was born with white hair? Or that my mother named me Fenris?”
“I suppose not,” Kelley said, her voice guarded.
“But you’ve checked. You’ve looked into my past as far as you can. You can admit that to me now.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “There’s almost nothing. Sightings of a white wolf in Europe, especially during the Second World War around Hitler’s hideout.”
“I was more careful than most. My mistake, I suppose, was not killing Ulrik when I found him there in the German forest,” Fenris admitted. “He got away, wounded, but he did get away. That’s when I knew he was a worthy foe. I lived mostly in the forests after my youth. It was safer.”
“I guess,” Kelley agreed.
Fenris leaned forward suddenly and fixed her with a penetrating stare. “We could die within a week. If I die and you live, there is a journal in a safe behind the Wallcousins print in the bedroom of my house in California. The combination is 32, 14, 12. I want you to go there and get it. Do what you will with it.”
“You’re serious about this,” she said. “And you’re telling me? Why not Gary? Or Andrew?”
“Gary Andersen is good enough at what he does. He’s smart and can be ruthless when needed. He’s not the animal Walter Hess was. Damn that man and his appetites.” Fenris paused, a sudden wave of anger washing over him. He sighed. “Anyway, Andersen lacks your judgment. Andrew Langham, well, he knows finances and office management, but I don’t trust him much further than that. He won’t steal from me, and I believe he’d kill for me, but I wouldn’t trust him to do or plan anything major.”
“But you’re trusting me? Someone who has already betrayed you? I don’t understand,” Kelley said.
“Reading the journal may help with that,” he explained. “For now, I will tell you that I died once. It was long, long ago. I was still a boy. The one who gave me the Gift turned on me, gave me to some villagers and blamed me for her own crimes. They starved me. When
I was dead, I talked to a god. When he sent me back, my hair had turned white and there was a man willing to release me if I would give him the Gift.”
Fenris watched Kelley as she looked back at him. “I have to admit, I’m more than just a little curious,” she said.
He smiled at her. “Only if I die in the coming battle,” he said. “You have the combination memorized?”
“Yes,” she said. “I have it.”
“I was sorry to lose you. If things work out here and it proves that your priestess and I can be allies, maybe you’d come back?”
“No,” Kelley said. “I did what I needed to do to maintain my cover, but Fenris, you are a cruel man. It’s one thing to kill someone who actually wronged you, but to kill someone who failed through no fault of his own, and to do it the way you did …” she trailed off. “You called Walter an animal, but he acted that way because you gave him the freedom to do it. You set the example.”
Fenris’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out and looked at the text message. “That’s a fair accusation on your part,” he said, then added, “We’re ready.”
Kelley’s phone rang, then, and she answered it, spoke a few words, then put it on the table. “You’re still coming with us?”
“Definitely,” he answered.
“Then let’s go.”
Fenris had to step over the body of Kiona Brokentooth. He did so with barely a glance, and walked out the door first, telling Kelley it was safe. She locked the conference room door and they left the dead woman behind.
Joey
“Where does this boat go?” Jenny asked.
Joey watched her for a minute before answering. The Oklahoma wind whipped her long blonde hair all around her head like an angry yellow cloud. Her skin was so smooth and clear that for a moment he wanted to reach up and touch her face. What would it be like to be with her? Would she be like Kiona? He smiled.
“The Web page says it goes through the downtown area. We can get off in an area called Bricktown. I guess there are shops and stuff there, and restaurants. And ferry boats on a canal. We could ride one of those, if you want.”
“Sure,” she answered, trying to control her wild hair. “It beats sitting around in that hotel room all the time.”
They stood on the deck of a long, low ferry cutting gently through the Oklahoma River. It was the first boat to leave the dock that day and it wasn’t very crowded. Joey watched her fight her hair for another moment, then asked if she wanted to go inside and sit down. She did.
Inside the passenger area, they were able to look out through tinted windows and watch the urban landscape slip by.
“I guess your mom and dad grew up around here?” Jenny asked.
“In Oklahoma, but not here,” Joey said.
“Oh.” They were quiet a moment, then she asked, “Are you disappointed you’re not, you know, the one? The Alpha?”
Joey thought about it. He had been thinking about it. It had been a while since he’d felt sure he was the Alpha, even before that dream it seemed like everyone had shared the other night. If he was the Alpha, why was his dad and Kiona able to hide him for so long? Why hadn’t anyone ever come close to finding them? Why hadn’t they trained him to be the leader the way Ulrik had been doing?
Now there was all this fuss about his mom’s other kid. A girl.
I’m the oldest, the first werewolf born naturally, and I’m male. Shouldn’t that make me the Alpha?
He picked at a scratch on the tabletop and wondered if that’s really even what he wanted. What would it mean to be the Alpha, really? Would he tell his father what to do? His mom? Someone like Ulrik? That seemed ridiculous. He could never be the kind of leader Ulrik had been.
Then, when the dream came, and the internal ache and pull that it left, Joey knew he was not the Alpha.
He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he answered truthfully. “All my life I was told I was the Alpha, that I would bring the Pack together and do great things. But I never what kind of great things I was supposed to do. Dad and Kiona kept me hidden away in the swamp, almost never taking me to town because they were afraid there would be somebody waiting to catch or kill me.”
He paused and watched as the boat slipped under a major roadway. “Now, all that is gone. It’s kind of, I don’t know, liberating. I mean, here we are, unsupervised. That never would have happened before. I don’t think I’ve been alone in eight or nine years.”
“You’re not alone now,” she said, and smiled at him.
“No,” he admitted, and felt himself reddening.
“I shouldn’t tell you this, but your dad asked me to watch out for you,” Jenny said. “He told me you hadn’t been alone in a long time and that you might act, I think he used the word ‘peculiar’ in public.”
“Really? He said that?” Joey felt himself getting a little angry. “I don’t know why he’s always in my business.”
“You may not be the Alpha, but you’re still his son,” Jenny countered. “And by your own admission, you haven’t had much experience outside the swamp.”
“I suppose,” he conceded.
She laughed. “The truth is, I haven’t, either. Fenris kept me locked up on his ranch most of the time. I only got to go to the city with Kelley, and he wouldn’t let me go very often.”
“What was it like living with him?”
“Oh, there were good days and bad. I know Kelley shielded me from the worst of it,” she said. “You don’t want to be around Fenris when he’s mad.”
“Why would he call himself Fenris? That’s so obvious,” Joey said. “He might as well have named himself Big Bad Wolf.”
“I don’t know. He’s Swedish. They worshipped the Norse gods for a while, I think.”
“I think so,” Joey agreed. “Still, it’s a bizarre name to take for himself.”
“I guess,” she said. “When do you think we’ll be going? You know, north, wherever this feeling is telling us to go?”
“As soon as Mom gets home, probably. What if Fenris comes back with her? Won’t that be weird for you?”
“Yeah,” she said, and dropped her face for a moment, thinking. She had long, delicate eyelashes. “But, if Kelley is okay with it, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
“He killed my grandparents,” Joey said. “I never knew them, though.”
Jenny nodded and looked up. She reached over and put her hand on his. It was warm and soft. “I know. I heard them planning that. Kelley told me there was nothing we could do about it.”
“What do you think about the others?” Joey asked. “Cheryl and everyone?”
“I like Cheryl a lot. She’s a lot like Kelley, just shorter and with that East Coast accent. Janice is okay. She doesn’t talk much, but it seems like she’s always watching everyone. Have you noticed that? I was reading yesterday and drinking some tea and after I took a drink she jumped up and refilled my glass. It was kind of weird.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” Joey said. He almost admitted it was because he’d been so focused on Jenny, but caught himself. How about Merin? Or Alex?”
“Alex Draper I’ve known for a long time,” Jenny said. “He’s a total tool. I’m surprised he was smart enough to run away when he knew his time was up with Fenris. Merin is really cool. I could talk to him forever.”
“Why?” Joey tried to ignore the quick stab of jealousy.
“He’s old,” she gushed. “I mean, not like an Old One, of course, but he’s really old. He’s seen a ton of cool stuff.”
Her brown eyes were lit up like they had torches behind them and she was even more beautiful to Joey now that she was so animated. He didn’t want her to stop talking.
“Like what?” he asked.
“He fought in the Civil War, for one thing,” she answered. “He was in the Pennsylvania militia, or whatever. I don’t remember what he called it. But he told me about some of the battles. He’s been to every continent. He told me about this time when was in Brazil and the – ”
Joey’s phone went off suddenly. He grimaced as Jenny stopped talking. He pulled the phone from his pocket and put it to his ear. “Hello?”
“Joey?”
“Yeah.”
“Hi, it’s Kelley. Is everything okay there?”
“Yeah. Me and Jenny are on a boat ride. What’s up?” He covered the phone and mouthed, “It’s Kelley” to his companion.
“We’re getting ready to leave Nevada,” Kelley said. “There’s been an incident. Have you heard from your mom?”
“No,” Joey answered. “Why? What happened? Is she okay?”
“She’s fine. I think she’s fine. She, well, I’m not going to lie to you, Joey. She killed Kiona Brokentooth, then ran off and we can’t find her. She won’t take our calls.”
“She …” It didn’t really register at first. “She killed Kiona?”
“Yes. Listen, Joey, I need you to do me a favor. Call your mom’s cell phone. If she’ll answer for anybody, it’ll be you. Will you do that for me?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Alright, listen, if she answers, you have to talk her into meeting you and the others. I’ve already talked to your dad and you’ll be leaving Oklahoma today. Because of the weapons involved, you can’t take the plane, so you’re driving that Hummer. If you get to talk to her, try to make her agree to meet you in Duluth, Minnesota. Can you do that?”
“I can try,” he said. The phone beeped in his hand. “I have another call coming in.”
“That’ll be your dad telling you to come back to the hotel. Call your mom. Let me know how it goes. Kiss Jenny for me.” Then she was gone.
Red-faced, Joey took the other call, and it was just what Kelley had predicted. “We’ll catch the next boat back to the hotel,” he promised.
“What’s going on?” Jenny asked when he pocketed his phone. He explained it to her and she nodded. “Is that bad? I never knew Kiona, only heard about her.”
“I … I knew her pretty well, I guess,” Joey admitted.
“Well, yeah, you lived with her for so long.”
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