Inked

by Karen Chance

  He hit a button and the phone in my hands leapt. I dropped it and it went skittering across the tiles, spinning to a stop by the plastic container Sedgewick had placed hopefully at the end of the table. I stared at it, feeling my thoughts scatter and break, fracturing as the floor sank dizzyingly beneath me.

  My chest felt pinched as I sucked in a lungful of air, but it didn’t seem to help. A bone-dead chill settled through me and my knees gave out. “Lia!” someone said, but I barely heard.

  The last thing I remember before darkness washed over me was two tinny, cheerful howls merging with the white-rush-roar in my ears.

  3

  “IT isn’t him. Lia, do you hear me? It isn’t Cyrus!” Someone was holding me, close enough that I could feel the body heat radiating from him. It was hotter than usual for a human, and some part of me found that oddly reassuring.

  “Mr. Arnou,” it was Sedgewick’s voice, sounding clipped and impatient. “It’s merely a faint. She’ll come around in a moment.”

  Sebastian paused to draw a breath. And when he started speaking again, his voice had gone low and smooth and dangerous. “For all your vaunted knowledge of our anatomy, Doctor, it appears there are a few things you do not yet understand about Weres.”

  “And that would be?” Sedgewick had obviously dropped the charm act, because his voice was almost nasty.

  “A Were who has lost a mate can turn feral, knowing nothing, seeing nothing, except revenge. I have witnessed a small female of our kind carve her way through five strong Were guards to reach the one who had taken her mate. And then kill him, before dying herself.” His grip tightened enough to hurt. “I do not wish to see it again.”

  I came around completely with a grunt of pain, to find myself draped across Sebastian’s lap. We were in Sedgewick’s tiny office, sitting on his ugly plaid couch. The doc was behind his overflowing desk while Hargrove hovered in the doorway. “But Lia isn’t a Were,” Sedgewick said testily. “Therefore, whatever questionable—”

  “Colin,” Hargrove began warningly.

  “—methods your people use for revenge don’t concern—”

  “Colin!” Hargrove’s tone snapped like a whip. “With me.”

  Sedgewick started to protest, but Hargrove somehow got him out the door without a major incident. I didn’t see them go because Sebastian had bent over me, his eyes searching mine as if he expected me to go berserk at any moment. I didn’t feel berserk; I felt sick. I really hoped I wasn’t about to yak all over royalty.

  “It isn’t him, Lia,” Sebastian repeated, low and distinct. “It isn’t Cyrus.”

  “Then who?” I croaked, struggling to sit up.

  “Grayshadow,” Sebastian said, his face expressionless. “At least, that was his Were name. In the human world he was known as Alan Thompkins.”

  “But the phone—”

  “It’s Cyrus’s, yes, but the body isn’t.”

  “How could you tell?” I asked thickly.

  “Scent.” His mouth twisted in a wry half-smile. “Those archaic chemoreceptors. And if you noticed, the body was missing part of the right front paw. Grayshadow was missing three fingers on his right hand, a relic of an old duel.”

  I swallowed. “I didn’t really look that close.”

  My head was pounding and my throat felt like a desert. I spied a small fridge sitting at the end of the sofa, wedged in between an overstuffed filing cabinet and the wall. Its sole contents turned out to be a six-pack of mineral water and a beer. The beer was warm. I drank it anyway.

  “If you already knew who he was, why let Sedgewick examine him?” I asked, after a minute.

  “I was hoping he would tell me that the skin was removed after death, and that something else had killed him.”

  “Yeah, because that would be so much better!”

  “Yes. It would.”

  The strain in his voice surprised me. While Cyrus was considered mad, bad and dangerous to know, Sebastian’s reputation matched what I’d seen so far—elegant, composed and levelheaded. Only he wasn’t sounding so much like that now.

  “Don’t you think it’s time you told me what’s going on?” I demanded.

  Sebastian wordlessly pulled a manila folder from under his suit coat and handed it to me. It contained photos, big glossy ones in full color that might have been taken from the exam room down the hall. Only the backgrounds differed. Instead of brushed steel, these bodies lay on red, rocky soil, cracked asphalt and scrub brush. Three bodies, three different places of death, but the same gruesome method.

  “Grayshadow was the fourth—that we know of,” he said, when I looked up. “The first was a week ago. Forest Walker of Maccon. Then White Sun of Arnou and Night Dancer of Tamaska.”

  “And Grayshadow belonged to which clan?”

  “Arnou.”

  “So two out of four were Arnou.” Sebastian nodded. “But why were they all…like that?”

  “Our pelts are prized possessions in many circles. If taken at the moment of transformation, they retain much of the magic needed for the Change.”

  He said it so matter-of-factly, that it took me a second to get it. “Wait. You think someone killed them for their skins?” I stared at him in horror.

  “So it would seem.” His voice was as smooth and untroubled as if that earlier lapse had never happened. But his eyes were clouded when they met mine. “It appears that we have a Hunter.”

  I looked down at the too-colorful photos. My nausea was back, big-time. “But how? Weres change so quickly—”

  “A spell is required to strip the skin from the body before the change can be completed.”

  “You think a mage did this?”

  “They are one of the few predators to which we are vulnerable.”

  My head was spinning, a combination of numb stick, shock and warm beer. It felt like I was simultaneously getting too much information, and not enough. “Okay,” I said slowly, trying to sort out my jumbled thoughts. “Right now, I’m not interested in this Hunter, mage or not. I’m interested in why Cyrus’s phone was found under a dead body, and one that had no clothes to hold it. Was it planted to make us think it was Cyrus? Because any Were would immediately know that it wasn’t.”

  Sebastian’s jaw tightened. “It was, I think, a message to me.”

  “What? Some kind of challenge?”

  “More likely a warning not to interfere in this creature’s affairs.”

  I frowned. “And you would need a warning because?”

  “White Sun was my Second, my right hand. When I learned of his death, I asked Cyrus to check with his contacts in the underworld, to get me a lead on this creature. A name, a location, anything.”

  “And did he?”

  “I didn’t want to discuss this over the telephone,” he said, not answering me. “And as you know, Cyrus and I cannot meet.”

  I nodded. Sebastian had recently been elected wartime chief, which was what bardric actually meant, of the North American Were clans. In order to get the votes of those leaders who were more impressed by brawn than brains (in other words, most of them), he’d asked Cyrus to challenge him for the right to lead their clan—a dispute that could be resolved only by combat.

  As they’d planned, Sebastian won the fight and the election, but losing made Cyrus vargulf— an outcast—in Were society. The brothers intended to reveal the truth after the war was over, allowing Cyrus to reclaim his position. In the meantime, he was using his disreputable reputation to spy on the Were underworld for his brother.

  “So how were you getting information?” I asked, and immediately knew I’d hit pay dirt. Because Sebastian licked his lips. Full-grown Weres, especially High Clan, don’t show nervousness. It’s viewed as a weakness and is drilled out of them early. So that little gesture was the equivalent of a human throwing a hissy fit.

  “I didn’t like the idea of Cyrus chasing this thing alone,” Sebastian finally said. “And I knew he could cover more ground if he had help. I therefore sent Grayshadow to
act as a go-between—”

  “Wait.” I stared at the gory photos and, suddenly, my brain didn’t seem to be working at all. “That man in there…who ended up like that…You’re telling me he was working with Cyrus?”

  “Yes. He was supposed to bring me a report this morning, but he missed the meeting. And shortly thereafter, we received the call from Central.”

  “Then where is Cyrus?”

  Sebastian met my eyes, and I knew the answer before he said it. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? And we’ve just been sitting here for the past twenty minutes?” I leapt up and started for the door, but Sebastian got there first. I tried to push past, but he wasn’t budging. I could have moved him; hell, the way I felt I could have moved the wall. But that was likely to bring security running and I didn’t have time for that.

  “Lia!” Sebastian grabbed me by the upper arms, tightly enough to remind me of just how much brute strength that polished linen was hiding. “Listen to me! The only report from Cyrus I received said his quarry was hiding somewhere in Tartarus. But there are four hundred miles of tunnels. We could search for weeks and never find them!”

  “So what are you saying? We just sit here and hope for the best?” Because that so wasn’t happening.

  “No, we must go after him.”

  That stopped me. “We? As in…”

  “You and I.”

  “But you’re bardric. You can’t put yourself—”

  The skin along his jaw stretched white over the bone. “What I cannot do is let my brother die at the hand of a monster!”

  “Then send someone else!”

  “And who would you suggest? Cyrus is vargulf—dead, as far as the clan is concerned! I cannot send a team in after him without admitting the deception. And if I do that, the Council will be within their rights to call for a new election, one which almost certainly would go against me.”

  “And your position is worth more than Cyrus’s life?”

  Those blue eyes flashed, and for the first time, he looked more like a predator than a diplomat. “My most likely replacement is Whirlwind of Rand. He hates our alliance with the humans. One of his first actions in office would almost certainly be to undo it!”

  I stopped struggling for a moment. The Corps was supposed to be a police force, not an army, but lately we’d had to be both. One of the few saving graces had been the Weres, who were as vicious in combat as legend said. They’d saved our asses more than once, however much the Corps might not want to admit it. I honestly didn’t know what we’d do without them.

  “Grayshadow was my Third,” Sebastian told me more quietly. “And the only one, other than White Sun, who knew the truth about Cyrus. Now that they’re both dead, I do not know who I can trust, and I cannot risk making a mistake when the repercussions could be disastrous.”

  I was trying for calm, trying hard, but it wasn’t working that great. “But how are we supposed to find him without help? The only witness is dead!” And if I didn’t find Cyrus soon, he might be, too. I suddenly couldn’t seem to get enough air in the claustrophobic little room.

  “You will lead me to him.”

  “If I knew where he was, don’t you think I’d have told you?” There was a weird, teakettle sound. The air around us had gone into motion, sending Sedgewick’s piles of clutter flapping against the ceiling like trapped birds.

  “Lia!” Sebastian’s fingers bit into my arms, bruising hard. “Sedgewick was wrong! Our abilities are not defined by the limitations of anatomy. We are magical beings, and when we make connections, they are magical also. In some cases, mated pairs among our people have been known to share images of what one is seeing, or to experience something of what the other is feeling—”

  “For Weres, perhaps. I’m not one!”

  That won me a hard glance. “We both know that isn’t true.”

  “My mother was Were; I am human,” I repeated, angry that he couldn’t seem to understand. “Considering how often I have to say that, maybe I ought to get a tattoo!”

  “Tattoos are only skin deep. What you are runs through to the bone.”

  “What my mother was. Lobizon tried to turn me, but they failed. You know that!”

  The leaders of my mother’s clan had pressured her for years to have me undergo the Change, but she had always hedged, telling them it was my decision. And her rank was high enough that they had been unable to force the issue as long as she lived. But barely two days after she died, they sent a group to attack me, intending to take the choice out of my hands. Sebastian had saved me by adopting me into Arnou, which as the clan of the current bardric, outranked Lobizon. As long as I remained under his protection, they couldn’t touch me.

  Sebastian didn’t say anything for a long moment. “How certain are you that we are not being overheard?” he finally asked.

  “Pretty sure. The Corps usually spies on other people.”

  “Be certain.”

  I threw a silence shield around us. “Okay.”

  Sebastian slanted a sharp look at me. “I could not allow someone into my clan, not even for Cyrus’s sake, without knowing the truth. You carry Neuri. Why bother to deny it?”

  It hit like a quick punch to the gut, leaving me breathless. No one ever said that word aloud, not even me. It was the elephant in the room, the thing that even my mother had tiptoed around in case uttering it somehow made it more real. I’d been fifteen before I learned the name for the problem that would define my life: Neuri Syndrome.

  It occurs sometimes when the mother is Were and the father is not, which is why female Weres rarely marry outside the clan. It’s a variation on lycanthropy, but doesn’t permit its carriers to change. It also prevents them from ever getting the full-blown disease—and therein lay the problem.

  Weres have a low birthrate—the disease often proves deadly to children younger than five or six, killing many in the womb—and therefore periodic “recruitment” is necessary. The clans feared that carriers of Neuri might pass their resistance on to their children, who might disseminate it to their kids and so on. Married to Weres, they would weaken the clan by infecting the bloodlines. Married to humans, they might ensure that, one day, there would be no one left to turn.

  Of course, that argument had made a lot more sense in the medieval world when people tended to live in small villages and rarely traveled. The local gene pool had been limited, and contamination from Neuri had been a real threat. With the much larger, more mobile population of the modern world, the danger was miniscule. But I hadn’t noticed anyone changing the old kill-on-sight rule.

  My mother had fought her clan elders not to give me a choice, as she’d claimed, but because the disease I’d been born with had already made it for me.

  “I haven’t denied anything,” I told Sebastian angrily, when I got my breath back. “I just don’t see any reason to broadcast my status as metaphysical leper to every Were I come across. That’s a good way to get dead, or have you forgotten?”

  “I am not the one who has forgotten something! Carriers of Neuri are Were.”

  “No! We aren’t! We’re prey, that’s why there’s so goddamned few of—”

  I stopped because something rippled over my skin, something that raised the hair on my arms, on the back of my neck, and sent chills down my spine. Something liquid and dark and compelling. I stared up into eyes that were no longer blue, but brilliant, inhuman chartreuse. I tried to turn away, but hard fingers bit into my arms.

  “Not Were, Lia?” he murmured. “Then you don’t taste the wind in the back of your throat? Don’t see the night light up for you, with every branch, every blade of grass crystal clear and vibrating with life? Don’t hear the earth under your feet, whispering to you, revealing its secrets?”

  I was running, light as the wind ruffling the tops of the trees. It was almost dark, but I could see every stone, every bit of life scurrying, slithering or darting, quick and startled, out of my path. Every tiny tremor in the earth that bore
my weight, every scent on the breeze that flowed around me, carried stories of friends and enemies, of water and food, of mile after mile of fascinating, vivid ground to be explored.

  The forest came to life with sleek, dark shadows. They ran close enough that I could feel the heavy, nonhuman heat of them, smell the rich, heady scent of Clan, see the slide of fur over heavily muscled bodies. Their eyes filled with the lambency of living jewels as they howled, sending an unearthly chorus floating out over the valley below us. It tightened my skin, pulled at my heart, set my breath to racing until it tore out of me in a cry of pure delight.

  Then Sebastian let me go.

  The lights came on and the sounds of the busy medical facility rushed back—gurneys rolling over tile, nurses gossiping, the fridge humming. And the world went flat, like it had lost a vital dimension. The colors were just colors, washed out and lifeless, and although Sebastian’s arms were around me, I felt them less than I had the whisper of that scent on the wind. He sat, regarding me with a faint smile, even as part of me grasped for something rare and precious that was no longer there. And mourned its loss.

  I’d seen my mother return from night runs, panting and out of breath, her eyes glowing, her cheeks flushed, more alive than she ever was between four walls. And I’d never understood until now. She’d never shown me what she saw, what she experienced. Maybe because she’d known how cruel it would be when I realized I could never reach that place myself.

  The part of me that was wolf was trapped by my disease. It lived crippled and caged inside a prison of a body that couldn’t flow, couldn’t reform, couldn’t let loose the magic of its other self. I’d never even seen my wolf, and I never would.

  Until today, I’d been at peace with that.

  “That foolish doctor,” Sebastian was saying. “Pitying us for our ‘primitive’ anatomy, when we are privy to an entire world he will never know!”

  “You’re privy!” I gasped, so angry I could barely see. “You did that!”

  “Yes, but I could not have formed a memory bond with a human. Carriers of Neuri are Weres, Lia,” he repeated. “They simply do not change.”