Bitten

by Kelley Armstrong

  On the other side of the dense hollow, the trees opened up to let in some moonlight. As I picked up speed, bushes crackled to the north, something big breaking through the undergrowth. It wasn't Clay or Nick. Even Nick moved through the woods with more finesse than that. Leaving Clay's trail, I veered north. I'd run about a quarter mile when I felt the vibration of running paws hitting the ground somewhere behind me. That was Clay and Nick. I recognized them without looking, so I didn't slow down. Since I was cutting the trail, though, I wasn't running as fast as they were, and before long, I heard Clay's rhythmic breathing at my heels. We skirted a large outcropping of rock. Branches snapped somewhere behind us. Twisting around, I saw a huge reddish brown shadow burst from behind the rock and run in the opposite direction.

  I dug my claws into the soft ground to stop, then pivoted and raced after Cain. Only one pair of footfalls followed: Nick. Clay was gone, taking another route in hopes of cutting Cain off like he had the stag. Cain followed the trail I'd cut, looping back the way he'd come. After a quarter mile, he swerved to the east. He was heading for the road, hoping to escape. I shot forward and got close enough for his tail hairs to brush my muzzle. Then my paw caught on an indentation in the ground, not a hole or anything large enough to make me trip, just the barest change in elevation that slowed me down enough for Cain to get that extra foot ahead. Nick raced up from behind me. As he started to overtake me, I eased back to conserve my energy. Ahead, the forest opened up as we approached the road. I swung to the left, hoping to gain a few feet by anticipating Cain's route. He didn't turn, though. He kept running, back into the forest.

  Seeing what Cain was doing, I looked ahead and saw a clearer patch of land to the northwest. When Cain didn't head that way, I did. Nick stayed on Cain's tail, not so much trying to catch him as hoping to run him into the ground. My path led to a rocky hill. As I climbed it, I picked up traces of Clay's scent. The terrain got rougher as I ran, slowing me and making me curse my choice of shortcuts. Halfway up the hill, my forepaw slipped on some stones, one of them sharp enough to slice through my foot pads. I grunted, but kept moving. Once I was at the top of the hill, my effort seemed worthwhile. From here I could look down and see the whole terrain. To the east, I caught a flash of gold as Clay weaved through the trees. As a nearly black wolf, Nick wasn't so easy to spot at night, but after a moment, I saw some trees shake below me. I followed the path of the rustling trees and bushes. They were coming this way. I traced the line of their route and moved to the spot where I guessed they'd come out. I was rewarded by the crashing of undergrowth directly in front of me. Seconds later, a massive shape shot through the brush.

  Seeing me in his path, Cain stopped. He growled and dropped his head. His green eyes blazed and his dark blond fur stood on end, adding a couple inches to his size. The extra size was superfluous; Cain didn't need it to look imposing. As a human, he stood over six-five, with the shoulders and sheer bulk of an all-star quarterback. As a wolf, he was literally more than twice my size. I pulled back my lips and snarled, but felt about as threatening as a Pomeranian facing down a pit bull. One part of my brain, soaring on adrenaline, insisted I could take Cain, whatever the size difference. Another part wondered where the hell Nick and Clay were. The loudest part just shouted: Run, you idiot, run!

  As I was thinking this, Cain suddenly turned and ... ran. For a moment, I couldn't move, unable to believe my eyes. Cain was running? From me? No matter how much my ego liked to think he was afraid of me, common sense told me otherwise. So why did he bolt? Again, my wolf instincts wouldn't let my brain ponder the question. As Cain disappeared down the hill, my instincts kicked in and I started after him.

  I'd gone maybe a dozen feet when something landed on my back, knocking my legs from under me. I twisted to see Clay standing over me. I tried scrambling to my feet, but he held me down. Was he crazy? Cain was getting away. I snapped at him, catching his foreleg in my jaws and clamping down, growling. He grabbed me under the throat and pinned me. With each second, I pictured Cain getting farther away. I struggled, but Clay fought back and kept me down. Finally, I knew it was too late. Cain was gone. For a second, Clay hesitated. Then he bounded off, not after Cain, but in the opposite direction. When I was back on my feet, I raced after him. I followed his scent fifty feet to a clearing where I could smell his clothing. This was where we'd first Changed. I poked my muzzle through the undergrowth to see Clay in the midst of his Change, his back arched, his skin throbbing and pulsing, too immersed in the transformation to notice me. I paused, uncertain. Then I found my own clothes and Changed back.

  When I stormed from the clearing, Clay was already there.

  "Where's Nick?" Clay said before I could say anything. "Goddamn it! He's got the keys. Wasn't he right behind you?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  Clay strode into the bushes, looking around. "Don't you get it? He was distracting us, keeping us busy."

  "Nick?"

  "Cain." Clay was out of sight now, only his voice echoing from the forest. "We were asleep and he didn't attack us. We chased him and he didn't fight or try to escape. He just kept us going in circles. Nicholas!"

  "But why--"

  "Jeremy. They've gone after Jeremy. Goddamn it! They've probably been watching the house and we didn't even--There you are!"

  "Hold on," Nick's voice emerged from the darkness. "Can I have a second to do up my pants?"

  Clay crashed from the bush, dragging Nick by one arm. "To the car. Both of you. Move!"

  We moved.

  CHAPTER 16

  AMBUSH

  On the way to Bear Valley, Clay drove, Nick took the backseat, and I sat up front where the safety restraints were better. As I'd feared, the Camaro wasn't eager to restart. When it hesitated, Clay rammed the gas pedal to the floor, revved the engine into the red zone, then slammed the gearshift into reverse, ignoring the clanking sounds coming from under the hood. Forced into a battle of wills, the car surrendered and meekly let him drive the shit out of it all the way to Bear Valley.

  "No, take the next exit," I said as Clay started turning off the first road to Bear Valley. "Head for the east end. To the hotel."

  "Hotel?"

  "There's no sense chasing our tails all over Bear Valley if the mutts haven't even left their hotel room. If they are gone, maybe I can track them from there."

  Clay's hands tightened on the steering wheel. I knew he was certain the mutts had gone after Jeremy and checking the hotel only meant precious minutes lost. Still, it made sense. Instead of answering me, he veered back onto the highway, darting in front of a fully loaded logging truck. I closed my eyes for the rest of the ride.

  When we got to the motor lodge, Clay whipped the car into the handicapped spot beside the lobby and was flying out of his seat before the engine died. I grabbed the car keys from the ignition and went after him. This time, he made no effort to fool the desk clerk. Luckily, there wasn't anyone behind the desk. Clay ran up the stairs two at a time. At LeBlanc's room, he snapped the freshly repaired lock and barreled through the door without waiting to see if anyone was on the other side. I was mounting the last steps when he came out.

  "Gone," he said, pushing past me back down the stairs. About halfway down, he realized I was still going up and turned around. "I said, they're gone."

  "This isn't the only room," I said. "Marsten wouldn't be caught dead camping out on anyone's floor."

  Clay growled something, but I was already heading down the hall, pausing at each door and trying to pick up Cain's or Marsten's scent. Clay came back up the stairs and strode down the hall toward me.

  "We don't have time--"

  "Then go," I said. "Just go."

  He didn't. Three rooms past LeBlanc's, I stopped.

  "Cain," I said, reaching for the door handle.

  "Got it. Keep moving and find Marsten's."

  Marsten had the next room down. While Clay was still checking Cain's room, I broke open Marsten's door and walked inside. Except for th
e Italian leather suitcase in the corner, the room looked uninhabited. The bed was made, the tables were spotless, and the towels were all neatly hung on the rack. Definitely Karl Marsten's room. If he had to stoop to taking a room in the Big Bear Motor Lodge, he wouldn't spend any more time there than necessary. I was about to leave the room when I caught another familiar scent.

  "Jeremy," Clay said from behind me as he stepped into the room.

  "He's gone," I said. "He must have been here checking things out."

  Clay nodded and brushed past me on his way out the door. We went back to the car. Next, Clay cruised the parking lots looking for the Mercedes or the Acura. Actually, "cruise" is misleading; I should say he ripped into the lots, circled around sharp enough to induce whiplash, and tore out again. In the parking lot behind Drake's Family Wear, we found Marsten's Acura.

  I was only guessing that the Acura belonged to Marsten, but it was a pretty safe bet. LeBlanc may have had a steady income while he was living in Chicago, but by the looks of his hotel room, he wasn't shelling out the big bucks on luxury cars these days. Marsten, on the other hand, was very successful at his career ... if you call thievery a career. Stealing was the number one occupation among mutts. Their lifestyle didn't encourage them to stay in one town long enough to settle into a job. Even if they were inclined to lay down roots, it wouldn't last. The Pack routinely rousted mutts who seemed to be settling into a non-nomadic lifestyle. Making a home for oneself meant claiming territory and only the Pack could claim territory. So most mutts wandered from city to city, stealing enough to stay alive. Some did better than that. Marsten specialized in jewels, namely jewels from the necks and bedrooms of lonely middle-aged dowagers. He had money and he considered himself a cut above other werewolves. It didn't matter to the Pack that he could speak five languages and didn't touch wine younger than he was. A mutt was a mutt.

  Clay slowed down behind the Acura, then hit the gas and swung from the parking lot.

  "We aren't tracking them?" Nick asked, leaning over the seat.

  "I don't care where they are. I care where Jeremy is."

  We found Antonio's Mercedes a couple blocks away in the paper-mill parking lot. This trail was easy for me to follow, the scents being so familiar that I could let my brain process on autopilot while I concentrated on looking ahead for clues.

  The trail looped past the local newspaper office, The Donut Hole, the warehouse where the rave had been held, and a country-and-western bar just off the main street. I could follow Jeremy's logic as we passed each point: the paper for late-breaking news, the coffee shop for gossip, and the warehouse for any overlooked clues. The tavern was a bit trickier, until I picked up the acrid scent of stale urine where Cain had pissed on the rear wall, presumably after a round of drinking the night before. From there, the trail headed back toward the paper mill where Antonio's car was parked.

  "They're heading back," Nick said. "I bet we just missed them."

  We went about five steps when a cat hissed at us from a pile of garbage. Nick hissed back. The cat's eyes narrowed, tail shooting up into an affronted exclamation mark.

  "Leave the kitty alone," I said. "He's too skinny to be more than a mouthful and a stringy one at that."

  As I turned, I saw something sticking out from under the bags of garbage. At first it looked like a row of four pale pebbles peeking out from between two bags. The sight was so out of place that I stepped toward it, ignoring the reek of garbage that overpowered everything else. As I drew closer, I realized what I was really seeing: fingertips.

  "Shit," I muttered. "Look at this. Either those mutts are getting careless with their kills or they're leaving them lying around on purpose."

  "Twenty bucks on the latter," Clay said.

  He stepped forward and nudged the top bag back for a better view. The fingertips were attached to a hand, which was attached to an arm. As Clay heaved the bag up, the lower bag slid out and the body tumbled to the ground. It rolled onto its back. The man's head lolled to the side at an impossible angle, neck broken. Unruly red hair glittered even in the dark.

  "Peter," I whispered.

  "No," Clay said. "Jeremy. No!"

  Clay shot off into the darkness, running footsteps echoing down the alley. Nick's eyes widened and met mine. Then something behind them clicked as he remembered that Jeremy hadn't been the only one with Peter. He raced after Clay. I paused to hide Peter's body, then ran after them, my heart pounding so hard I couldn't breathe, gasping and choking for air as I ran. Twenty feet away, I saw a pool of thick red glimmering under the sick light of a half-dead light. From it, trails of blood tentacled out, then converged in a single thread leading into the distance. I followed the trail. Ahead, Nick's white shirt bobbed against the blackness. I could hear Clay's footfalls, but couldn't see him. The blood trail wove around two corners. As I wheeled around the second, I saw Clay and Nick just ahead, both stopping and circling back. They'd run past the trail, which ended in a puddle of blood just past the corner.

  I bent, put a finger to the blood, then lifted it to my nose.

  "Is it?" Clay asked.

  "Jeremy's," I whispered.

  "And there's plenty more here if you'd like a closer look," a deep voice said.

  Clay's head shot up. We looked around, then saw a loading dock to our right. Clay hopped onto the three-foot-high ledge and disappeared into the darkness of the opening. Nick and I followed. At the back of the loading dock, Jeremy sat in the corner, propping his right leg on a broken crate as Antonio tore strips from his shirt. As we approached, Jeremy lifted his left arm to push his bangs back from his face, then winced and used his right hand instead, letting the left fall awkwardly to his side.

  "Are you okay?" I asked.

  "Peter's dead," Jeremy said. "We were ambushed."

  "We were heading back to the car," Antonio said as he added another layer of bindings to Jeremy's leg. "I took off to find a bathroom. Five minutes. I must have barely turned the corner and--" He kept his eyes on his task, but self-reproach leached from every word. "Less than five minutes. While I'm taking a damned piss-break--"

  "They were waiting for an opportunity," Jeremy said. "Any of us could have turned our back for a moment and they would have attacked the other two."

  Antonio glanced over his shoulder as he worked. "The new one, the mutt that killed Logan, attacked Jeremy with a knife."

  "A knife?" Clay glanced at Jeremy for affirmation, as disbelieving as if Antonio had said Jeremy was attacked with an antique Howitzer. "A knife?"

  Jeremy nodded.

  Antonio continued, "They jumped Peter and Jeremy. No one had time to react. When I showed up they took off. I'd have gone after them, but Jeremy was bleeding pretty badly."

  "Not that I would have let you go after them anyway," Jeremy said. "We don't have time to rehash events now. We need to get things cleaned up and go."

  He started getting to his feet. Clay hopped over a crate and helped him up.

  "We left Peter at the scene," Jeremy said.

  "I know," I said. "We found him."

  "In the garbage," Antonio said, wiping a hand over his face. "That wasn't right. I'm sorry, but Jeremy was bleeding and I--"

  "You needed to find a quick hiding spot," Jeremy finished. "No one's blaming you for that. We'll get him now and take him home."

  Clay helped Jeremy down from the dock. I moved up on his left side to take his other arm, then remembered it was injured and settled for walking beside him, ready to catch him if his leg gave out. I gave Nick my car keys and he ran ahead to back up the Camaro to the end of the alley. When we got to the garbage heap, Antonio uncovered Peter and cleaned him off.

  "Marsten's going to pay for this," Clay said, looking at Peter's body, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. "He's really going to pay."

  "Marsten didn't kill Peter. Daniel did."

  "Dan--" Clay choked on the rest of the name. "Ah, shit."

  I rode back to Stonehaven in Antonio's Mercedes, sitting in t
he backseat with Jeremy, in case the bleeding worsened. Antonio drove in silence. Jeremy stared out the window while holding the bindings tight on his leg. I tried to concentrate on something other than watching my car through the windshield and thinking about Peter's body in my trunk. Instead, I thought about the mutts.

  So it was Daniel after all. That meant trouble. Big trouble. More than Marsten or Cain, Daniel knew how the Pack operated, how everyone in it operated. He'd been Pack, having grown up with Nick and Clay ... or, more accurately, he grew up around them, "with them" sounding as if the three had been buddies, a definite misconception. Now, before Clay's arrival, Nick and Daniel had been semi-playmates, thrown together by their closeness in age, like two cousins who play with each other at family reunions because there's no one else to hang around with. Then came Clay. I was a bit fuzzy on the details, but I'd been told that Clay and Daniel loathed each other from the beginning. The precipitating event seemed to have occurred when Daniel eavesdropped on Nick and Clay's conversation and raced off to regale the Pack with the story of Clay's expulsion from kindergarten, which had something to do with dissecting the classroom guinea pig to see how it worked, but like I said, I was fuzzy on the details--when I asked Clay about it, all he'd say was "it was already dead," which was apparently supposed to explain everything. Whatever the story, it embarrassed Jeremy, who'd been fudging the details when explaining to the others why Clay's school career had lasted only a month. By upsetting Jeremy, Daniel had earned Clay's eternal rancor.

  In the years to follow, the relationship between the two only grew more acrimonious as Daniel and Clay fought for supreme position among the younger generation. Or, I should say, Daniel fought for it. Clay simply assumed it was his and squashed Daniel's aspirations with the lazy contempt of someone batting away a mosquito. When the three were in their early twenties, Jeremy became Alpha. I may have given the impression that this was a bloodless ascension. It wasn't. Seven members of the Pack backed Jeremy and four didn't, including Daniel and his brother Stephen. The dissension crescendoed when Stephen tried to assassinate Jeremy. Clay killed him. Daniel insisted his brother had been innocent and that Clay had murdered him to quell opposition to Jeremy's leadership. When Jeremy was confirmed Alpha, Daniel decided there wasn't a place for him in the new Pack.