by Mark Henwick
Julie cleared her throat behind me.
“We can’t take weapons into the club, but I think we should put some in the car,” she said.
“Good idea.”
The others went off to get changed, which left me with Pia.
“You’re taking the lead on mentoring Scott?” she asked.
“I think I have to,” I said and she nodded.
“Yes. My experience is limited...”
“But?” I prompted.
“When I was in House Altau, we used to interact a lot more with the Denver pack.”
“I remember Felix saying something about that,” I said.
“Okay. We never had a hybrid, obviously, but we did have new wolves team up with new Athanate, so I got to see how the new wolves act.”
Bian and Diana had both said something to me about that as well. Athanate in crusis had an urgent need to bite, all while being subjected to the torrent of heightened senses and unpredictable emotional swings. It was dangerous. Kin had to be trained on how to handle that.
It was similar with new werewolves; violence was part of what made them werewolves. They had to learn to control their violence.
And although Scott had started off with turning wolf, I had to assume he’d have Athanate fangs as well soon. He’d have the problems from both sides.
House Altau and the Denver pack used to have some kind of scheme where both new Were and new Athanate were able to let off steam together.
I was a little slow this evening, but I finally saw where Pia was heading.
“Have I got this straight?” I said. “All those newbies used to get together and screw each other’s brains out?”
“Yes,” Pia said. “It seemed effective. Just something I thought I should remind you about.”
“Yeah. Good call,” I said, keeping a blank face over my totally freaked-out mind. I was Athanate, but clearly not quite Athanate enough.
As I pulled on my jacket—actually one of Alex’s—my cell pinged.
Jen.
“Hi,” she said, making it bright and cheerful. “Just wanted to hear your voice. We’re on the ground at Cincinnati. Got some time while they refuel us.”
“Hi, Boss.” Yelena’s voice cut in. “All good?”
I snorted and gave them a rundown of what had happened at Haven and afterwards.
“So now you need to go out to get Tove and David back?” Jen asked.
“I need to get David. Whether Tove comes back is up to her.”
“You need to find Tullah and then let her and Kaothos face down the Adepts,” Yelena said. “Don’t need risks like tonight. Julie or Keith go with you?”
What she really wanted to say was that I shouldn’t go out at all.
“Both of them,” I said. “It’ll be fine, but there’s bound to be something you want to share from the wisdom of the Carpathians on this?”
She thought for a moment.
“Yes, Ukrainian proverb, very famous. Woman who licks knives, one day will cut tongue.”
Chapter 20
I managed to drive us down to the club without cutting my tongue.
Yelena had a point, I guessed. I was taking too many risks. But every point of decision had worse outcomes than the one I’d chosen.
Which was not to say the decision this evening was safe or easy.
We parked on Lincoln and walked.
The club worked hard on soundproofing, but with our wolfy hearing, the rush of synthesizers over the heavy heartbeat of the music seemed to reach out to us as we approached.
Scott reacted. Ideally, he should have been somewhere quiet and familiar with me and Alex and Amanda, in soothing surroundings, getting used to his wolf. It was just too bad that nothing in Denver was familiar, he’d barely met me, and he’d yet to meet Alex at all.
So, instead of that quiet time, I was taking him into a bright and noisy venue where he was going to be surrounded by a herd of excited prey. Already, mingling with the crowd at the entrance, his heart rate and respiration jumped up a notch.
I couldn’t leave him behind. I couldn’t leave him in anyone else’s care. All I could do was take his hand as we walked in, and the physical contact seemed to help.
“Chill,” I said. “We shouldn’t be here long. In and out.”
He didn’t reply, but he seemed okay while we touched.
It was the calm before the storm.
I’d been there before, but none of the others had. As we descended into the basement, the reason for the club’s nickname became apparent to them. The theme color was blue, ranging from light swimming pool blue to deep space violet. There were ‘windows’ on every wall, made to look like stained glass and backlit. There were strobe spotlights on the ceiling and a swirling layer of water-vapor mist above the dancers that made it feel like everyone was dancing in a fog.
Electric Breath were already up and running. They were two goth girls who took turns sharing the DJ work with leading the dancing, and their routine was working well tonight.
And just as we reached the dancefloor, my nose finally worked through all the haze of adrenaline, sweat, drugs, alcohol and perfumes.
There were werewolves in the club.
And they weren’t Denver pack.
Scott smelled them a second after I did and I had to grab hold of his arm to keep him in place.
Julie reacted by slipping in front of me, and Keith covered our backs. Kane did something that I felt as the skin-prickling sensation of magic stirring, without knowing what it was. None of them knew what was going on, or what had triggered the response from me and Scott.
“Easy!” I shouted above the music. “Calm down.”
Wolf territory didn’t apply so strictly at the moment. Wolves from all over the US could be here in Colorado to visit Felix and Cameron out on the ranch at Coykuti. They could be here to meet me for another ritual. There were lots of reasons there might be wolves in the club.
I knew it and it still felt wrong.
Scott didn’t know the background; he was stuck at the my-territory, not-my-pack stage. His new instincts hadn’t yet worked out that if he attacked them, they’d kill him. Easily.
“Bar area.” I had to shout again.
The bar was a split level on one side, above the dance floor, and steps to it were right ahead of us.
I managed to get them there without letting go of Scott and without anyone noticing how oddly we were behaving.
If they weren’t completely zoned out with the music, the dancing wolves would have noticed us by now, but I hoped they’d register us as part of the Denver pack and not necessarily a threat.
All assuming, of course, that they were here legitimately.
At the bar, it was less frantic than the dance floor. I explained to the rest of them. I sent Keith and Julie to get us drinks. I used Kane to help me frogmarch Scott to the far corner where we got lucky and took over a table as a group left.
Scott understood all the words I’d used, but he was a long way from controlling himself. He was being overwhelmed, so I sat next to him, held his hand, held his eyes and kept speaking to him.
“Just a couple of werewolves. It’s not like we’re in danger, or we’re surrounded by other packs. It’s safe. This is our territory. They’re visitors.”
Over and over, until finally some of that berserk wolf-gold faded from his pupils. He wasn’t relaxed, but at least he wasn’t on the point of exploding anymore.
By the time I’d achieved that, only Kane was sitting with me.
I looked over at him. “Julie? Keith?”
“Down to the dancefloor. They’ll get Tove and David to come up.”
“Good.”
They’d bought us bottles of my favorite Blue Moon beer. Kane pushed mine over, and after a quick check with me, slid one across to Scott.
I took a long pull. Not a very elegant way of drinking, but it tasted so good and I needed it.
“A couple of werewolves came up to the bar area and looked across a
t us,” Kane said. “Then they left.”
I didn’t like that.
It wasn’t as if werewolves were like the Mafia; I hadn’t expected them to come over and pay their respects. But to come up, look, and go away... not good. For no reason I could state, it didn’t feel right.
There wasn’t time to think any more deeply about it. The rest of the party returned to the bar area, escorting Tove. David, Julie and Keith retreated to the bar. Kane joined them.
Scott made to get up too, but I shook my head. I wanted him right here, sitting down and holding my hand, not tearing someone’s face off because they’d stepped on his toe.
Tove slumped down in the seat, her head down, a sheen of sweat on her skin and sparkles of water in her hair from the mist over the dance floor.
Twenty-two years old. Four years out of Minnesota, the first three years in LA waiting tables and hitting the Hollywood auditions. Then Forsyth happened. By the time we met, Tove was working in Van Nuys, charging a hundred bucks a time and calling herself Celeste.
Something resonated, and even if I couldn’t help every woman whose life Tanner had blighted, I could help Tove. Or that’s what I thought at the time. I wasn’t so sure now.
In the deep blue lighting, we all probably looked unhealthy. She certainly did. Pasty skin. Circles under the eyes. Her vital signs were about as erratic as Scott’s were.
Yelena had warned me Tove was a mess when she’d flown her back. The girl had pulled herself together for Christmas Day, but now the withdrawal symptoms had their claws deep in her.
We could partly fix that, Pia told me. Athanate bio-agents could remove the physical symptoms.
The trouble was, they wouldn’t necessarily have any effect on the mental symptoms. And I would need her to consent to being bitten while not under compulsion from the aftereffects of drugs in her system: my rules for my House, so I’d have to stick to them.
How to get through to her?
She was going to be agitated and irritable and—
“So what’s it gonna be?” she asked, her voice waspish and her eyes finally coming up to meet mine. ‘We were just worried for you, Tove’, or ‘you have no right to do this, and don’t you appreciate what we’re doing’?”
For a moment I was too shocked to react, and Scott exploded onto his feet.
His face was distorted with anger. He was a breath away from turning wolf right there.
“Scott!” I grabbed his arm again and pulled him back.
Tove’s mouth was slack and her eyes wide with fear. Even without changing, Scott was reeking of violence.
The others came over from the bar in a hurry, as much to shield us from other eyes as to give Tove and me a little privacy for our chat.
I had to leave her to the others for a minute while I locked eyes with Scott again. I touched him with eukori, but he was such a tornado of emotion it didn’t seem to register with him.
“Back down, Scott,” I said. “Back down. What would Amanda think of how you’re behaving?”
He didn’t like being asked that, not one bit, but it got through all that mindless instinct and connected with his brain.
He sat back, burning with frustration, all that churning emotion and nowhere to ground it, but just—just—under control.
Which allowed me to turn my attention back to Tove.
Do I really want this?
Now?
I don’t back down from challenges.
Under that stubbornness was another thought—if I can’t get through to Tove, will that mean I’ll fail with Kath as well?
Tove had flipped from angry and aggressive to withdrawn and scared. She started to cry.
I pushed her bottle of beer closer to her.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I took another pull of my beer to give myself time to calm down. I’d have preferred a screaming argument with her. With the noise level in the club, no one would have noticed.
“Why?” I asked eventually. “Why are you sorry?”
“Because, everything I do or say, I fuck things up.”
Maybe she wanted me to say something comforting like it’s not your fault.
I shrugged. “Tell me about it.”
She had the beer bottle in her hand and began picking at the label like a scab. Tears slowed. David brought her paper napkins from the bar and she blew her nose.
“I’m afraid to talk. I’m afraid to be quiet. I don’t know what you want from me. And you do want something.” She looked angrily at me, daring me to deny it. “No one gives me something for nothing. I learned that real quick.”
“What do you think we want from you?” I said.
She looked around at us, and then she lowered her head again. “You’re some kind of sex cult, aren’t you?”
I had to laugh, even if it made her flinch.
She went back to angry and defiant.
“I know you’re private investigators and company execs and all sorts of shit, but I have eyes, you know, I can see. All that touching and kissing and stuff. No one sleeps alone.”
I was still laughing. It wasn’t that funny and it wasn’t helping the situation, but I couldn’t help it.
How screwed up could this situation get?
“It isn’t really a sex cult, but you’re right, in a way,” I said and took another drink from my beer before continuing. “So... think of it as a cult, if you like. Think of it as we want to recruit you.”
She looked genuinely puzzled.
She wasn’t faking it. I touched on her emotions with eukori and it seemed she didn’t understand, but mainly that she was afraid. Her life was miserable, but she’d come to terms with it. Misery had become familiar; she was too scared to let it go. It was as if she’d convinced herself that her misery was what made the pain tolerable.
“Why would you want me?” she said.
I didn’t answer right away, because in truth, at that moment, I didn’t really want her in my House. There was too much going on, and she was trouble.
And yet, I could still see, under the hard shell of scars, the fresh-faced Minnesota teen who’d run up the steps into the airplane, full of hope and dreams that she’d make her name in Hollywood and show all the people back in her sleepy home town that there really was a whole world out there and a way to grab it.
All she’d shown was sometimes it grabbed you right back.
I didn’t owe her personally. But Very Special Agent Ingram of the FBI had put it well in his lazy Texan drawl: Sometimes I have to ignore the big picture and make it about one person. A representative for the whole. A place holder to take the place of all the others I can’t really help with my justice.
I sighed in frustration.
I couldn’t say that to Tove. She wouldn’t understand it.
However I dodged it, I did owe her, in lieu of all the girls that Forsythe had gone on to rape after he’d raped me and I kept quiet. All the girls I couldn’t do anything about. All the wrong I couldn’t right.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to make her accept anything. It was the same argument that Jen and Pia had made about Kath, and they were right: she’d had enough forced on her.
We weren’t getting anywhere, and I needed to get Scott out of this environment.
Time for plan B. At the possible cost of breaking my word, I had to shock her into making the first positive move. Or not.
“Look.” I pulled out a wad of cash I’d picked up before leaving the house. “Trust is difficult, Tove, and I need that before we can do anything. I need you to make a choice. So, this money is yours. Free. You can do what you want with it. It’s enough to pay for the airfare back up north. You could go home. You think your family doesn’t want any more to do with you, but I can guarantee you’re wrong. It doesn’t mean that it’ll be easy going back, but I believe you’re strong enough, deep down. You know you are.”
I took a deep breath. “Or you could blow it on enough drugs to kill yourself. I hope you don’t do that, but if it
’s what you really want, there’s nothing I can do to stop you, nothing anyone can do. If that’s what you want.”
She started crying again.
“Or...” I put the money into her hands, closed her fingers over it and then wrapped mine around them. “Or, you could decide you’re going to fix things here in Denver, with our help. That’s the hardest path of all, but it’s the one that will work. The trouble is, I can’t prove a thing to you until you trust me, and ask me to help. And mean it.”
I was backing her into a corner, which made me a mean bitch, but it had to be done.
I’d gotten through to her; I could tell.
At that moment, Kane’s head snapped up and swiveled to look down toward the entrance steps on the other side of the dance floor.
The hairs stood up on the back of my neck.
Adepts. Strong ones.
Chapter 21
I leaped to my feet and looked down into the steaming pit of the dancefloor.
All I could see were shapes moving in the water-vapor mist, lit by the flickering strobes. Then, like the winter breath of buffalos, the fog swelled and rolled at the stairway to the bar. Out of that came three people, climbing the steps.
I knew the one in front. Ken Weaver, the leader of the Denver Adept community. Not the type to hang out in clubs. No, this wasn’t a social visit.
“Shit.”
Nothing I could do about Scott.
“Julie, Keith, take Tove outside.”
“Boss—”
“Do it. Then get back here.”
They grabbed a startled Tove and marched her out.
My heart was in my throat as Weaver passed them at the entrance to the bar area.
He looked aside at them, disdain clear on his face, but he didn’t make to stop them.
One problem less.
“Scott. I don’t think they’ll try anything here. Keep it together,” I said.
Scott growled, but I could live with that, as long as he didn’t lunge across the table.
On my other side, Kane prepared something; it felt like insects skittering across my flesh. A defensive working of some kind?
Would Weaver use magic?
I didn’t think they’d try anything here, in full view of the people in the bar. But what if they’d prepared a working to snatch us away into the spirit world? Could Kane stop them?