“So now I’m a goddamn science experiment and a security risk?” Slade pulled away from the doctor’s touch and started to pace the length of the room like a caged tiger.
“Not yet, Donovan, but it’s too soon to tell,” Achilles said soberly. “No one else save for myself, Dr. Chamberlin, Trejan Dionotte and Laird Petrov have been informed of the specifics of your condition.”
His condition? Slade stopped midstep and pointed to the door of the room. “Yeah, but you know as well as I do, the minute any of the other vampires in this clan find out, I’m going to be a second-class citizen around here. I’m a damn half-breed.”
“I’m afraid it’s worse than that. We don’t know if the vampire virus arrested the development of the Were virus in your system or if there’s still a chance given the right trigger that you could spontaneously transition,” Dr. Chamberlin explained.
“You mean I could still turn into a full Were?” Slade pinned his gaze on his commander. A potent mix of anxiety, disgust and dread pinched down hard on his insides. “Will they kick me out of the clan if I transition?”
Achilles’s mouth flattened into a firm line. “We don’t know. This is kind of unprecedented. But the safe money would be on the council removing you as a security risk.”
Freakin’ fabulous. Just what he didn’t need to hear.
“So since you’re full of good news, I don’t suppose you have any idea who my father is?”
Achilles’s brow furrowed and a heavy feeling invaded Slade’s chest, making his limbs feel like lead. “Hit me. This night can’t be any worse than it is already.”
Achilles’s gaze flicked to Dr. Chamberlin’s for a brief moment before connecting back with his. “We think the leader of the Wenatchee Were pack is your father.”
Raina gasped.
Slade’s knees suddenly wouldn’t support him. He wondered who’d cut his legs out from under him. Hell. He’d been wrong. It was worse. Way worse. “Bracken?”
“Yes.”
Damn. Double damn. He was on a roll of bad luck like an interstate highway stretching out before him with no stopping and he was on a turbocharged V-twin cycle from Hell.
“If the Weres find out, I see it going down one of two ways. Either they are going to force you to fight the pack beta for position or they’re going to want to kill you,” Achilles said.
The drab green of the security room walls swam before his eyes, making his stomach uneasy. Everything he’d counted on his entire life was falling apart like a cliff washing out beneath his feet and pitching him into a free fall. He glanced at Raina. Worry creased her brow, but she remained silent. He looked back at his commander and tried to focus on Achilles’s face. “Why?”
Raina put her hand on his back and for a moment things fell back into focus. “When Bracken dies, you’re the logical one in line to lead the pack. But in regular wolf packs the succession of pack leadership is always based on who beats the old alpha or who’s the strongest if he has died. Since Bracken is your father, they’d expect you to fall in line. Their entire pack and its relationship to the tribe is based on ancestor worship. They’d never dream of you challenging and beating your own father. It would threaten everything for them. A half vampire half Were leader. Being a pack, they’d have to follow your command as alpha if you won, but they have no way of knowing if you’d command them to fall under control of the vampires.”
He looked down at her. “Whoa. Back that semi up. Are you telling me I’m some kind of Were leader in training?”
“Worse. You’re royalty.”
Chapter 11
“I was freakin’ born to lead a bunch of furries?” Slade swore and beat his fist into the brick wall of the security room.
Raina jumped back. A reddish cloud of brick dust settled over his dark shirt. The dust dissipated, revealing a large fist-size dent in the wall as if it had been made of soft white bread instead of rock.
She’d known Slade was strong, but she momentarily wondered if all the vampires in this room were just as strong. She’d been trying to stay out of their conversation as much as possible, partly because it wasn’t her business and partly because she didn’t want to get squashed like a bug if one or more of them got good and pissed.
“Get your head back in the game, solider,” Achilles growled. “You going to tell me what happened out there, or do I drag it out of Officer Ravenwing, here?”
Raina took an involuntary step back, then corrected herself. It wouldn’t do to show her fear, but her heart was pounding so hard it had taken up residence at the base of her throat.
Slade glared at Achilles, his expression full of anger and contempt, but his eyes were dark with deeper shadows of fear and uncertainty. “When I woke, we headed for a cabin Officer Ravenwing was familiar with in the area. We were going to talk to the woman who lived there.”
“My Aunt Lee.”
“And?” Achilles prompted.
Slade leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling, breathing out harsh breath. “The cabin had been broken into. Signs of a struggle. Partially dried deer blood on the porch and no old woman. The Were patrol had followed us.”
Raina fixed her gaze on Achilles and he glanced at her. She added to the report. “They surrounded us and Slade jumped both of us to the top of the cabin and he fought them off, killing at least two and wounding the others.”
Slade gripped the back of his neck with his hand. “The leader of the patrol identified himself to Raina as Ty.”
“Identified himself, what the hell are you talking about?” Achilles roared. Raina thought she suddenly smelled a strong odor of pepper as if someone had just ground it in front of her, but it made no sense.
Slade’s gaze flicked to Raina and for a second she felt as if they were a team. A team taking a dressing-down from a commanding officer, but a team nonetheless. Her heart swelled in her chest with a little bit of pride. Given the hit he had just taken with the news of his screwed-up genetics, she knew he needed her support but would never ask for it.
“She’s a Wolf Whisperer, sir. Able to communicate by some kind of genetic bond with them. Something about her tribal connection.”
Achilles turned on her, advancing at a pace that had her scrambling backward until her back hit a brick wall, scared enough to jump out of her skin. She’d been unprepared for his reaction. “Is this why you came to us, to infiltrate our security, to lead him right into their hands?”
“No!” Raina yelped.
His wife shook his arm. “Achilles! Think. She’s a mortal officer of the law, not a shifter,” she said, her voice edged with warning.
Slade gripped Achilles’s shoulder in a clear signal to back off. “She thought it was a bunch of tribal mumbo jumbo until she actually talked to the things.”
Achilles whipped his head around. “She can talk with them, too?”
“Yeah, better than I can.”
Achilles’s shoulders slackened. “You can talk to them? When were you planning on divulging that bit of information?”
“I didn’t realize that’s what it was. Out on patrol, I could hear them talking in the woods, but I just figured it was some kind of vampire tracking thing, just like the mental telepathy we have. I didn’t realize I was hearing shifters.”
The harsh planes of Achilles’s face visibly relaxed. Raina inched away from the wall. “So what were they saying?”
“They figure since we started the whole coming-out party with the mortals, they have a right to join in.”
The corner of Achilles’s mouth quirked up in a semismile. “Is that their plan? Gain enough numbers, then overwhelm us?”
Slade gave him a slight smile in return. “Sounds like it, sir.”
Achilles let out a bark of laughter and clapped a hand on Slade’s shoulder so hard it made Slade huff out a breath. Both of them looked way too pleased, in Raina’s opinion, cocky even. “Well, that’s the best news I’ve had all night.”
“How’s that?” Dr. Chamberlin asked.
Dr. Chamberlin threw her husband an arch look that told him he was too confident for his own good.
Slade cleared his throat. “There’s one more thing, sir.”
The half smile on Achilles’s face faded. “Why does it sound like something I don’t want to hear?”
“I think I spotted Eris out in the woods running with the Were patrol. It’s just a hunch, but I did hear the Weres mention the word goddess.”
Achilles let loose a string of curses that almost turned Raina’s hair blue. Dr. Chamberlin’s face looked suddenly drawn and tight. Oh, this was bad. Very bad.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Who’s Eris?” Raina asked.
All three vampires turned and stared at her as if she’d just rolled off the tailgate of a turnip truck.
“Eris, daughter of Ares, is the bitch goddess of chaos,” Achilles said through gritted teeth. “And if she’d got a finger in this, you can be sure it won’t turn out well for anybody, especially the mortals.”
Raina stared at the three vampires crowded with her into the confines of the small, slightly musty Cascade Clan security briefing room two stories under the streets of Seattle. Achilles, Dr. Chamberlin and Slade all looked seriously uptight about this Eris character joining the battle shaping up between the Weres and the vampires. Raina found it somewhat amusing that they could get so worked up over some ancient Greek goddess. Personally, she thought they had a lot bigger things to be concerned over.
“Are you talking like ancient Greek mythology, minor goddess, Eris? The one who likes to throw the golden apple of discord around to stir up trouble?” she asked.
“The same,” Achilles said, his face deadly serious. The artificial glow from the myriad of flat-screened computer monitors in the room only made him look more ominous.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You powerful vampires are afraid of a mythical goddess?”
“Not mythical. Which you’d know if you’d ever met her,” Slade said darkly.
Raina shook her head. “Of course I haven’t. She doesn’t exist.”
“That’s why you’re not scared,” Slade said with absolute certainty that sounded to Raina like it came from personal experience. The frenzied look in his eye confirmed it. “I’ve met her. Trust me, you ever run up against her, you’ll know why she’s a threat. DMDs won’t even take her down.”
“DMDs?” Raina asked.
“Dead Man Darts,” supplied Dr. Chamberlin. “Tranquilizer darts filled with dead man’s blood will take out a vampire for hours. It’s a swift-acting poison in their systems, rather like what would happen if you shot them up full of liquid nitrogen. I watched a whole barrage of them pass right through her as if she was a hologram.”
Dr. Chamberlin slipped her safety goggles back in place, then grabbed hold of Achilles’s bicep. “If you’re thinking of sending Slade and Officer Ravenwing back up that mountain in Were territory with Eris on the loose, then I need to get back to my lab and see if I can come up with something that might stabilize his condition further.”
“How long would that take?” Slade asked.
“Forty-eight hours, give or take. I’ve been working on something but I want to finish testing it first.”
Achilles pinned Slade with a no-nonsense look. “You’ve forty-eight hours before I want you to report back for duty.”
Slade stood a little straighter. “What’s the plan?”
“We need more information. We need to know when they plan to strike. Whatever they are going to do is going to be splashy. Being subtle isn’t exactly in their nature.”
“Yes, sir.” Slade saluted Achilles by placing his fist across his chest and bowing his head slightly.
“And Donovan—”
His head popped up. “Sir?”
“Keep an eye on Officer Ravenwing while she’s our guest here at the complex. With her connected to the clan in this operation it’s not safe for her to be without backup.”
Raina bristled. She wasn’t staying here to just wait around. She needed to report in to the station. “I have backup. My whole depart—”
Achilles cut her off with a dark look. “With all due respect, they aren’t vampires, Officer. They won’t know how to fend off a Were attack should one show up unexpectedly.”
“I think I’d notice a huge wolf headed my way.”
“And what about an ordinary man in a business suit? Or a kid in jeans and a hoodie? How about a young mother in a park? Would you suspect them, too?” he countered.
Her brow furrowed with confusion at his question.
“Because that’s precisely what a shifter would look like just before they attacked you, and you’d never even suspect them. Donovan has a nose for this. You don’t. Do us all a favor and stick together and stay vigilant. I want you both able to report back here in forty-eight hours.”
Raina nodded, but Slade noticed the rebellious look sparking in the brown depths of her eyes. He was going to have to stick closer to her than a pair of leather riding chaps if he wanted to make sure she didn’t get into anything she couldn’t handle. She might be a trained police officer, but he knew damn well that there was no training available to mortals on handling the kind of storm they’d wandered into.
Achilles and Dr. Chamberlin took each other’s hand and vanished into a spin of dark particles.
Raina shook her head. “I don’t know if I’m ever going to get used to you vampires doing the genie, smoke-and-mirror thing.”
Slade could tell it wasn’t the transporting that agitated her—she was badly shaken by what Achilles had said. He put a hand on her shoulder and gave her a light and easy smile, trying to reassure her and find a way to take her mind off Achilles’s accurate but unsettling warning. “You actually did really well on your first transport. Want to see something else cool?” He fluxed, turning invisible.
She jumped back slightly, then spun around, looking for him. “Slade? This isn’t funny. Where are you?”
He phased through the wall of the security room, the shift in his particles passing through the solid structure of the wall feeling a lot like walking through thick-set gelatin. Fluxing back into his visible form, he opened the door from the other side on a shocked Raina.
“How’d you do that?”
“Fluxed. Told you it was cool.”
Raina walked through the door he held open for her and joined him as they headed back in the direction of the main complex. “Now you’re just showing off,” she said without heat. He was glad she’d gotten her spunk back.
“There’s a lot more to being a vampire than you’re aware of. Same goes for the Weres. What you’ve seen is just the surface. I know you don’t like being kept here, but it really is for your own safety.”
Raina swept a loose strand of her dark hair that had escaped her severe bun, confining it behind her ear. “So what do we do now? Shouldn’t you get that broken arm looked at?”
“No point. It’s practically healed. We’re going to sit down, put our heads together and come up with a plan.” They walked in companionable silence through the maze of hallways leading back to the atrium. He was grateful she was not the kind of woman who needed to run her mouth just to fill in a stretch of quiet. It gave him time to think.
A Were-vampire turf war was one thing. A turf war handcrafted by the goddess of chaos was quite another.
Slade had seen for himself the kind of confusion, desperation and fear she loved to cause. She didn’t care who was hurt or in turmoil as long as someone was. She lived on aggression, torment and disruption—literally inhaling it. Just thinking of the last time he’d come up against the goddess when he’d been backup for Achilles on a raid of a genetics lab creating a deadly vampire vaccine made his skin turn ice-cold.
“The only way we’re going to get anywhere with
this is if we figure out what they want,” Slade muttered, more to himself than to Raina.
“They want to be recognized by humans.”
Slade grunted. “That’s what they say, babe. That’s not what they mean.” There were three things Slade knew for sure. One was that Weres needed a strong leader. He seriously doubted it was some older alpha pushing them to expand the territory. Two, whatever happened, he was a half-breed, part Were, part vampire. That meant at some point the vampires might not want him in their clan, but the Weres weren’t going to welcome him, either. And three, the Weres weren’t going to stop with just making themselves known to mortals. They wanted power, and coming out was just the beginning.
“So what’s your plan, hotshot?” Raina asked, breaking the silence.
“We’re going to capture one of them and bring him back here.”
Raina pulled up short, forcing him to stop. “To the clan complex?”
Slade nodded slowly, the plan beginning to gel in his brain. “We bring him back and Achilles and I get him to talk.”
“Then it has to be the right wolf. Not just any Were will do. You get one that’s too far down the hierarchy in the pack and they won’t know anything.”
“Exactly.”
“So who do you have in mind?”
“Ty.”
Raina crossed her arms, making the epaulets on the shoulders of her uniform buckle a bit. “You can’t be serious.”
“Why not? If they trust him to lead a patrol that large, he’ll know what’s going on.”
“He hates you.”
Slade’s lips twitched with amusement. “They all do, babe. Vampire, remember?”
Raina pressed her fingers to her temples, rubbing them in small circles. “This is the craziest plan I’ve ever heard of.” He noticed the dark smudges forming beneath her eyes. It was nearly three in the morning. She had to be beat. He needed to get her to a place where she could sleep.
“Little C4, a few charges, some wire, we can knock down the side of a mountain, let alone a Were.”
“Is that your solution? If you can’t fix it, blow it up?”
The Half-Breed Vampire Page 11