by Mark Henwick
I was right. It hurt.
When something comes through the windshield like that, it’s got to be a shock. The Were inside didn’t stop and think through the possibilities, or wonder what had just dented his roof. He came out, snarling and spitting, looking up to see which idiot had thrown a cabinet at his car. He didn’t even have his gun in his hand.
And as he came out the door, I came off his roof, knocking him down and landing on him with my knee in his guts.
We were too close for anything subtle. I punched him in the face, breaking his nose, and then I slammed his head against the road until he was half-unconscious.
He was Were, but I had no time to check which pack. No sounds of gunfire from the building yet, but the stopwatch in my head was ticking and I had two vulnerable House kin in there.
It took me a valuable minute to zip tie the driver’s hands behind him. I tore his belt off and used that to lash him to one of the wheel rims. I lost more seconds taking his cell and gun. I wanted to search the car, but I couldn’t leave Yelena with two people to keep safe.
I sprinted to the door.
“One down. You okay?” I spoke into my cell.
Yelena was wearing an earpiece. She couldn’t talk for fear of giving away her position, but she tapped her cell.
One click. Yes.
They’d had too long. Long enough to become alert and suspicious. Long enough to start searching through the building.
There was no time to split them up and take them individually.
“Get ready,” I whispered.
I went through the door, low and quick as an eel.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. The good news was that they were still in the open area in the middle of the building.
“Diversion, now,” I whispered.
The Were heard me and they started to turn around.
A rotting wooden box of metal spare parts came hurtling out of the darkness and crashed to the floor, disintegrating on contact. Random bits of metal jangled out and there was a scream like a tortured banshee from behind the screen of crates.
Both Were lifted and fired a short burst in that direction. Quick, instinctive, halfway trained but just wrong this time around.
I shot the closer one in his legs. Tap, tap, tap. Two out of three hits. Ankle and calf.
As he was falling, I fired at the other Were. Missed. He’d had enough warning to swing around at what he thought was his most immediate threat, and I wasn’t happy to see the ugly barrel of the silencer looming.
A second, smaller box hit him full on the side of his head.
He staggered.
I’d missed with my first, but my second shot hit him in the knee and his trigger finger spasmed, firing his Uzi into the concrete floor, ricochets snapping and buzzing like angry wasps in the gloom. There was more danger from those than direct shots, but then he started to lift his gun again, despite the pain he was in.
Then his wrist got broken as he was flattened. Yelena was fast. She’s crossed twice the distance in the same time it had taken me to get to the closer Were and scoop up his Uzi.
The pair of Were writhed in pain and anger on the dusty floor.
It was peculiar; they were scared all right, but I could feel the anger blotting almost everything else out. As if they hadn’t been trying to kill us, as if it was unfair, as if they couldn’t believe they’d been tricked and taken down by a couple of girls.
I flipped, but it was Yelena that reacted.
Her Athanate fangs came out and she hissed, something halfway between spitting and the shriek of a demented hob-kettle. It seemed to come from deep inside. It was fierce, almost primeval.
And I didn’t know about the two Were, but it scared the hell out of me. In a sorta good way—she was on my side, after all.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
“So you sent them home, tails between their legs, with a message for their Alpha?” Tom Sherman asked. “That sounds like hardly any fun at all.”
“Well, I wrecked their SUV with a filing cabinet. So there’s that,” I replied. That got a grin out of him.
I was back at the house, reporting in to Tom. Like all the other Houses in LA, I had a 24/7 security watch against Basilikos and other nasties. Tom was in command of mine. Despite joking about the Pasadena Were, Tom wasn’t happy I’d gone in with so little backup. He had a point; if I’d been injured, he’d have been the one facing the hard questions from Skylur. I shouldn’t have put him in that position.
“Security’s getting even more stretched,” I said.
Tom looked like he was eating lemons.
“Adding the Empire into our tasks is a helluva hit,” he said. “I guess asking the Were for help might have just gotten a little harder.”
The door opened and Alex came in.
His wolfy hearing had picked up our conversation, just as I’d picked up his wolfy scent coming across the hall.
I stepped into his embrace.
“Not the best opening for a conversation with the Pasadena,” he murmured into my hair.
I rubbed my face against his neck, mainlining his scent and his touch. He was angry. I didn’t think that was directed at me or Tom, but Tom didn’t know what to make of it.
He headed out the door, pausing only to say stiffly: “We’re all being called on to make sacrifices.”
Ouch. That wasn’t like Tom. If he had something to say, he usually said it. I’d have to find out what was twisting his tail later.
I took Alex in to meet Dominé and Dante.
Jen was away on urgent business in New York for a couple of days. Julie and Keith had gone with her. Dominé was on the phone to the club, and Vera was talking to Dante, who immediately jumped up from the sofa. “I was just going to complain you’d oversold me on the hot vamp guys,” she said. “This is more like it.”
She got in close with Alex.
He growled again—one of those chest-deep rumbles that everyone understands.
“Oh.”
Dante backed away quickly. It got quiet.
Alex looked at me, his eyes hooded and the wolf-gold bleeding into them. He turned away and stalked upstairs to the bedrooms.
Crap. Angrier than I thought.
Dante was looking at his retreating back and me, working it out. There was nothing wrong with her brain, when she engaged it.
“I thought you…I mean, I heard them telling you about Jen being away. She’s like your kin, isn’t she?”
“She is my kin. So is Alex. And he’s a werewolf, not Athanate.”
“Oh. Okay. My bad.”
Dante’s eyes flicked to and fro again.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was dumb. I didn’t mean to upset things.”
She looked down at the ground, seeming even younger in her embarrassment.
“I’ve come here into your world,” she went on, “and I know I have to understand it, I have to fit in.”
I seemed to collect people like this. I’d rescued Savannah down in New Mexico and we’d had a similar problem, where she seemed socially awkward and what I had tried to do had only made it worse.
I had to take responsibility.
“No, I’m sorry, Dante.” I pulled her into a hug. “I should be giving you information and direction that gets us all to where we’re comfortable with ourselves and each other. No one explained things to you. You didn’t mean anything bad by it and it wasn’t your fault.” I patted her back. “Now, excuse me, I’ve got to go talk to Alex.”
Dante was on the point of making another sassy comment, but she bit her tongue.
I smiled.
I can manage the little crises, I thought. Let’s go see if I can manage the big ones.
Chapter 18
He was in our bedroom, pacing.
“I don’t know who we can trust anymore.”
We. Small word. Important to me. I hugged him. “What the hell brought this on?”
He hugged me back. He was still making wolf noises, deep ins
ide, like he’d been long-term caged. Maybe the distance he seemed to have been keeping from me was all because he wasn’t at home here in LA. Nowhere to shift and run.
I pulled him closer, smothering myself in his wolfy scent. It would have been so easy to do nothing but stand there and inhale him, but I had a mission to find out what was wrong.
Why did I always have a damned mission? I had to sweep aside a prickle of irritation. I had a mission because I was House Farrell. And I was his alpha. At least, while we were on two legs.
“What’s up?” I prompted him again.
“It’s getting to me.” He paused, as if willing himself to speak calmly and clearly for me. “We keep doing what Skylur and Diana say, without question, and there’s no return.”
“How do you mean?”
I ran my hands over his chest. My wolf wanted to join in his growling, and stroking him seemed to be the best way to keep her quiet for the moment.
“You tried talking to Diana today?” he said.
“Well, she’s not available. The Empire—”
“I know. I got a briefing from Bian on the way back in,” he said. “Skylur has plans but she can’t actually tell me anything, and it’s all about what it means to the Athanate.”
“Well, I’m supposed to be a link between the Athanate and the Were now, so I can start working on it.”
“Yeah. I heard. How did that go today?”
That got half a smile from me.
“It’s not just the Athanate politics,” he said. “It’s you and your therapy.”
He pulled free and resumed pacing.
“Right up to today, we’ve all been treating you like a patient in recovery. Then today, you’re expected to handle Ibarre and Huang and binding. And being this syndesmon. What am I supposed to do?”
“I don’t understand.”
“What am I allowed to even talk to you about? You think the rest of the world’s forgotten about you?” he said angrily. “Felix? Your mom? The FBI? Even those crazies down in New Mexico want to talk to you. They’re all being stalled.”
I could see what he meant. Diana’s compulsion that protected me while I was recovering didn’t stop me from remembering the outside world, but it made it all seem less important, less urgent. Yet everything seemed so reasonable. Every time I thought about something too hard, my mind just seemed to slide away from it, as if that was the right thing to do.
I could remember the therapy session where I’d visualized it as climbing out of a pit of ice.
Diana had said everyone was being talked to. But that was three weeks ago. Three weeks.
I shuddered. I hated the thought of not being in control of my own brain.
But confronting the compulsion, acknowledging it, seemed to shift its foundation. My mind didn’t skitter away.
“So how’s it going out there?” I asked.
“Not well. Your mom is worried. Ingram is pissed. Felix and Zane? Same story. Everyone understands you were ‘injured’, as much as we told them, but we’re running out of time.”
While I was still down in New Mexico, Agent Ingram had told me I had a day or two to make good on my promise to speak truthfully to him. Mom had asked me to drop in as soon as I got back.
A month ago.
I could imagine how well my absence was going down.
“Okay.” I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to think dispassionately. “Tell me what’s happening in the Were world.”
“The Confederation has recovered well,” he said, and stopped pacing. “Look, we made the situation better. We—I mean the Denver and Cimarron packs with help from Altau—we faced down the Wind River Pack and we killed or captured hundreds of them. All their southern border packs that the Confederation had taken over took the chance to break free—Cheyenne, Medicine Bow, Rock Springs, Black Hills. And they backed out of a confrontation with Salt Lake. The Confederation is limited to the northern Rockies now.”
“So they’ve pulled back. Good. But you said they’ve recovered.”
“The Bozeman pack used us as the bad guys to scare a whole load of new northern packs into allying with the Confederation against our ‘aggression’. They’ve wrapped up the Montana and Idaho packs and even pushed into Oregon.”
“Our aggression? How did they spin that crap?”
“Because we’re allied with Altau and Skylur went ahead with your suggestion. Every House in North America has been in contact with the packs in their area, offering alliances. Bozeman was able to twist the whole thing around into an attempt by Athanate to control Were.”
They weren’t pushovers in the Confederation, and this was a war. There were three controlling packs in the Confederation. We’d damaged Wind River, hell, Julie had killed their alpha, but that left Bozeman and Bighorn. We’d just won the first battle and redrawn some lines on the map.
“How’s Felix taking it?” I said.
“The Athanate stuff he took well to start with, until he found he couldn’t get access to you.” Alex scrubbed his face with his hands. He looked tired. Like he’d been carrying this alone too long. “Look, the key is the news of the ritual: it’s gone nuclear. Felix has started to get calls from packs all over the world, let alone the US. He’s had to stall them, and that’s not going down well. That’s the only reason he hasn’t come marching into LA to demand you back—he’s trying to keep where we are a secret.”
“Oh, shit,” I said, as I saw where this was going.
“Yeah. One or another of those Pasadena wolves you beat up will have enough brain cells to use his nose and draw a conclusion. There’s only one hybrid. It’s already out. Everyone who wants a piece of you will know you’re in LA by this time tomorrow.”
Confronting the Pasadena Were had been a huge mistake. Even if I hadn’t been told what the situation was, I should have worked it out for myself.
Alex knew me well enough to read my thoughts. He stopped pacing and grabbed me. “It’s Diana’s fault, Amber. Not yours. If she’d agreed that you could be told what was going on, you wouldn’t have risked ambushing the Pasadena Were. If she’d even told Tom, he could have said something. Best of intentions, but it went wrong. Not your fault.”
“Okay, okay.” I couldn’t blame myself for everything. “So…about the halfies. I guess there are some more now?”
“Some? Every pack has the damn problem. They all want to send someone for you to work your magic on.” He looked unhappy. “It’s gone political. Felix wants to restrict it to packs that are allied with him. Skylur wants to include any pack that’s allied with Altau—claims it’s the same thing.”
“No,” I said.
Alex managed a half-laugh and wrapped his arms back around me, rocking us from side to side. “That’s my crazy woman,” he said. “You want it to be open to everyone, don’t you? Even the Confederation?”
I hit him in the ribs. Only I am allowed to call myself crazy.
Yeah, crazy.
I took a deep breath and pushed all the outside worries down. “Don’t tell me any more tonight,” I said.
He looked puzzled, and I was worried at myself. Was this some aftereffect of the compulsion? My decision felt so reasonable, just as you’d expect from a subtle compulsion.
No. I would go crazy thinking like that.
“There’s too much going on,” I said, burying my face against his neck, “and to make any sensible decisions, we need more information.”
He wasn’t getting it. I could feel it in the tension that was building in him. My Athanate was all for working this through. His Were was howling for action.
“Listen to me, wolf. I’ll get through to Diana tomorrow and get rid of any more compulsions. She can’t say I’m not strong enough if I’m expected to do the list I’ve been given. Then I can start fixing things. Felix. Ingram. Mom. Tomorrow.” I went back to nuzzling against Alex’s neck, trying to convince him without words and arguments to drop it for now, trying to talk to his wolf in ways his wolf would understand.
&nbs
p; Trying to change the conversation to one that just the two of us needed to have, with no input from outside. One that could go badly wrong. “You’re unhappy, and it’s not just the problems with the Athanate and Felix, is it?” I said quietly.
He pulled away abruptly. “It’s not important.”
Well, I’d made him stop thinking about other problems. Now to nail this one.
I stalked after him. “It’s very important. I need my kin happy.”
He gave me a sideways look, full of wild wolf.
“Both kin,” I said. “Happy with me and happy with each other.”
His wolf was so close to the surface his lips drew back on his teeth. It was frustrating. I wanted the wolf but not the snarl.
“I’m right, aren’t I? You and Jen still have a problem with each other?”
He didn’t need to answer. I could see it. All I needed was to understand it.
He wasn’t an insecure person—Alex had swagger to spare—so it wasn’t that he thought he was going to lose me to Jen. Similarly, I doubted he cared that I bit her more than I bit him; my Athanate need for human Blood was greater than my hybrid need for Were Blood. We didn’t understand it, but we lived with it.
It wasn’t sex. We hadn’t, and he’d be well aware I hadn’t made love to Jen either during the weeks of therapy. Reliving those events hadn’t left much room for desire, not in me and not in Jen. Not in him. Alex was bound to both of us, and he cared. Whatever he showed to the world, he had unflinchingly shared the horror of what had happened.
Was that it? I shivered at the thought that some of the stain from my strongbox had been passed to him, as if horror and insanity were contagious.
“You care for her,” I said. “I saw it when we uncovered the memories from Longmont. That doesn’t go away because she puts you down over some business decision you can’t agree on.”
He growled. I’d cornered him, physically at least. He’d have to jump over the bed to get away from me and that would just be plain undignified.
It turned out to be the right way to get through to him.
“You know what hurts worst,” he said, and there was the smallest gleam of humor in his eyes. “She’s usually right.”