by Jessica Snow
“You’ve got a lot on your plate as is,” Robert said, still flabbergasted. “Lord Lockwood, you know I cannot speak for all the Kenai—that’s not my position—but I’m sure that we can appreciate your offer of friendship. I’ll speak with the other elders of the clan and have a place for Magnus tonight.”
“No need,” Kristina said. “Lord Lockwood, I have a two-bedroom house in the zone between Kenai and Aklark housing. Why not have Magnus stay with me?”
Keith nodded, as if he’d just heard the idea, and turned to Robert. “I think that’s a fine idea, as it’ll allow Magnus to stay out of your hair and be closer to the heliport. What do you say, Robert?”
Jorgenson nodded eagerly. “That is more than welcome, Kristina Darksky. By that, it means Magnus is fully welcome in Kenai lands, as Peter’s invitation is still valid. I’ll notify the clan elders, and we can talk about what the Kenai can use. And I offer you my personal thanks.”
“You’re welcome, Robert,” Kristina said. “Magnus, if that’s okay?”
Magnus nodded, his eyes gleaming as he looked over at Kristina. “Of course. Thank you for the invitation. Um, do you have a truck?”
“At my place,” Kristina admitted. “Come on, it’s not that far a walk. We can go there after we help the Waldwycks take off.”
Twenty minutes later, the two helicopters took off, Kristina watching as they circled and flew south. She looked over at Magnus, who looked at her with a gleam in his eye. “So, your house?”
Kristina nodded, smiling a little. “I wasn’t trying to pressure you. We’ll have to share a bathroom.”
Magnus chuckled and shook his head. “Not a problem. How’s the rest of the house?”
“A normal house. You’ll probably find it pretty low-class,” Kristina admitted as they went inside and grabbed their bags, slinging them over their shoulders. They left the heliport, crunching their way through the mixed snow and mud to the main road to town. “Being an outcast, I didn’t exactly get the well-paying jobs among the Aklark, and the regular companies around town are sort of . . . well, not too well-paying either.”
Magnus nodded, looking down the road. The main town wasn’t much, a gas station, a few normal looking office buildings, and that was about it. All in all, Magnus had seen smaller small towns, but not too many. “Just how big is this place, anyway?”
“A little over two thousand, if you include the loggers who are in a camp up on the north side of town,” Kristina said. “That’s the whole reason the heliport exits. It was built by the Kenai and Aklark after people started getting hurt logging. About sixty percent of town is human, fifteen percent your people, and the rest mine. Your people control most of the big money, the professional stuff, while my people do what you’ve seen, lots of working class stuff. The humans are the middle class around here.”
They kept walking, Kristina waving amiably to people she knew, and she was surprised when Magnus reached over, taking her hand. “Magnus?”
“People are giving me the hairy eyeball,” he explained simply. “If I make it clear that I’m with you, it’ll be easier.”
Kristina felt a moment of disappointment, then shrugged. It was what it was, even if part of her wished that he was holding her hand for another reason. “Okay, that makes sense. So when do I get my date?”
Magnus blinked, then laughed. “Well, first, let’s find out what your house is like. You’ve been gone a few weeks, remember?”
They kept walking, and when they reached Kristina’s house, the sun was low in the sky. Kristina opened the door, glad when she wasn’t hit with the smell of rotting food. She’d been worried that Ben had lied to her when it came to taking care of her house. “It’s cold, but it’s home. I’ll get the furnace going.”
Magnus looked around, thinking that while Kristina’s house was small, it wasn’t as bad as she’d made it sound. In fact, in terms of square footage, it was bigger than his apartment in the Lockwood Tower, although the furniture was certainly dated but sturdy. He heard a whoompf sound and turned to see Kristina fiddling with a set of circuit breakers. “Good, he just threw the main breaker, although I hope they cleaned out my fridge.”
The fridge and freezer were in fact cleaned out, and Kristina thought about what they needed to restock. While she made her list, Magnus looked at the kitchen thinking it spoke more to her single status. Small table, two chairs, but only one place setting, like she’d done a lot of eating alone. He looked up as Kristina closed her fridge and cabinets, biting her lip. “Well, guess we need to make a run to the store.”
“How about we split up for that?” Magnus asked. “I wanted to make a quick run out to Container Village to get another look, try to figure out what’s going on with this girl Pauline. But I saw the sign on the store window when we walked through town, and there isn’t time for both. They close in . . . looks like a half hour.”
“Okay, I guess,” Kristina said, looking disappointed. “Just . . . well, I was kinda hoping we’d have dinner together.”
“It’s a dinner date,” Magnus said with a chuckle before stepping close to her. “Listen, I know it’s weird, and I know we sort of played around once with the whole bathroom thing. And I’m going to admit, I’ve been attracted to you. Kimberly and Melanie have been sort of telling me to admit it. So I’m looking forward to this.”
Magnus looked Kristina in the eyes for a moment before leaning over and giving her a kiss on the cheek. She blinked in surprise, her eyes widening. “What was that for? We’re not in public.”
He grinned and kissed her cheek again. “We’re not. Now, I’ll be back in a bit.”
He left the house and tapped partially into his Lycan abilities as he started running along the road toward Container Village. He would have preferred to go cross-country, but there was too much snow on the grounds, and it wasn’t until he was a half mile away that he started cutting between the trees. While his full wolf form would have been easier, he wanted to be able to use his hands if he had to.
As he approached Container Village, he reminded himself about the layout. Ben Stormstout had chosen a house for himself in the village, of course somehow arranging for himself to have the biggest and best house, and it was easy to find as he approached. It was one of the buildings that looked the most like it had never been a shipping container.
Magnus circled the house, which stood slightly off on its own from the rest of the village in a nice-sized plot of land of its own, a good quarter-acre of cleared yard before the trees started cropping up again.
“So what’s your deal, Ben?” Magnus asked as he squatted in the tree line, watching the house. The lights were off, but that didn’t mean the house was empty. He was certain of it—someone was inside. “Why do you have a regular human girl in your house a week after your wife died?”
He watched, trying to listen, when suddenly, the back door to the house opened and Pauline Dejardins stepped out. The only light visible was starlight and moonlight, but the glow of the moon off her hair and her pale skin made Pauline easy to spot as she crossed the snow. Somehow, Magnus noted, she didn’t seem to sink into the snow at all. Instead of floundering like even he would in human form, she walked normally, not toward the road but directly toward the woods, back in the direction of town.
Magnus was up in an instant, circling the yard toward the spot where Pauline walked into the woods, but when he got there, he couldn’t find anything. Not a single footprint disturbed the snow, and when he sniffed the air, there was nothing at all. He crisscrossed the area three times, trying to find something, anything. Finally, just as he was about to give up and resume watching Ben’s house, he saw a silvery thread caught on a tree branch, and he looked closer. It was a long blonde hair, caught on a low-hanging pine needle and just barely catching a glint of moonlight. Magnus plucked the hair from the tree and held it, perplexed. He looked carefully, but the only footprints he could see were the heavy combat boot prints of his own feet.
“What the fuck is going on?
” he asked, looking around again. He put the hair in his pocket and headed back toward the road, knowing that he had to talk with both Kristina and with the Waldwycks.
Chapter 13
“No tracks?” Edward asked over the video connection the next morning. “Magnus, are you serious?”
“Dead serious,” Magnus said, shrugging. He was sitting down in Kristina’s living room while he heard her cooking breakfast in the kitchen. They’d talked it over the night before over dinner, ruining what was certainly supposed to have been a much more romantic evening than it had turned out to be. “Edward, I might not be as pure-blooded as Kimberly, but I’m not blind. There wasn’t a footprint anywhere. And I couldn’t see any in your father’s yard either. It was like she floated across the snow.”
Edward hummed, then nodded. “I believe you, Magnus. Okay, let me talk with some people down here about it. In all of your work, did you ever run into a creature that could do that?”
Magnus shook his head. “No. But I’m not an expert on other supernatural beings, Edward. I dealt with business matters, not spooks and ghosts.”
“I doubt she’s a ghost,” Edward said, sighing. “Either way, as soon as I have information, I’ll forward it. Do you need backup?”
“Backup on what?” Magnus said, shrugging. “So far, we’ve got a lot of suspicions and a weird chick who apparently doesn’t leave footprints. You want to have a throwdown up here about that?”
“Okay . . . but if you need me, send the 911. I’ll have my phone on me all the time, and we’ve got the Blackhawk fueled and ready up on the roof. We’ll be there ASAP if we need to.”
“Thank you, Edward. You worry about the family first,” Magnus said. “We’ll get this taken care of.”
Once the call was finished, Magnus was surprised when Kristina brought in a big bowl of eggs, ground meat, potatoes, and vegetables mixed and tossed together. “Whoa.”
“Not too fancy, but it’ll keep your belly full,” Kristina said with a slightly shy smile. “You sound like you’ve got a busy day ahead of you. What’s your plan?”
“I’m going to need your help,” Magnus said, sighing. “I’ve got to go over to the Kenai and coordinate with their clan elders to try and figure out who is the strongest over there and start getting things done. Sure, they can run their businesses, stuff like that, but Lycans . . . well, if you put enough Lycans in a small enough area with no Alpha to keep things straight, things can get very ugly.”
“How ugly?” Kristina asked. “Civil war?”
“To put it mildly. Last time it happened in American history, it was out west, thank God, back in the pioneer days. A town called Trader’s Gulch in northern California, near the Sierra Nevadas. We’ve got the diaries of the last of the townspeople in the Lockwood vaults, and the Alpha Female of the clan that had gone out there was a blood relation of the Lockwoods.”
“What happened?” Kristina asked nervously.
“Basically, a mining accident,” Magnus said. “The Alpha Male had sent his wife back to Lockwood territory in order to bring out another group of Lycans who wanted a fresh chance in a new territory. Eighty percent of the town was Lycan, mixed clans who had agreed to form a new clan, and it had grown well, as you’d expect. No worries about Indian attacks and no worries about finding game. Then . . . well, one of their side businesses was a silver mine. This was after the gold rush, but there was plenty of metal in the hills. An earthquake hit while the Alpha and three of the strongest members of the clan were in the mine, and in an instant, the Trader’s Gulch Lycans had found themselves leaderless. Now, this was back in the days when even sending a letter meant taking weeks to reach the other clans. By the time Clan Lockwood heard about the mine collapse, it was all over.”
“They turned on each other?” Kristina asked, and Magnus nodded.
“They’d agreed to form a new clan from those who’d felt they were chafing under the other clans’ systems. Ones and twos, mostly, all fifty-five of them. No group bigger than the Lockwood Lycans who formed the core, but even they weren’t close blood relations. Suspicions grew, small mistakes were treated as blood insult, and by the time the Alpha Female returned, thankfully without the other settlers she’d planned to bring, it was over. Fifty-five Lycans, and every human in town dead, and some of them in not too pleasant ways.”
“Isolated group . . . and the Aklark aren’t doing well either,” Kristina said. “Jesus, it’ll be a massacre.”
“Yes, it will,” Magnus said. “So I’m going to deal with the Kenai first. The Aklark might not be very well-run right now, but at least Ben Stormstout is somewhat in charge still, even if he’s not doing a damn good job of it. So while I take care of the Kenai, I need you to try and do what you can to gather information on Pauline and to tell me what the Aklark really need. Right now, I trust Ben about as far as I can throw him.”
They finished breakfast, and Kristina left her house, heading into town. Her friend Melissa worked in town as a legal assistant, and she knew a lot of the comings and goings around town as she was one of the Aklark who worked with nearly everyone.
Pulling up in front of Melissa’s office, she checked herself in the mirror of her truck, refusing to acknowledge that she’d gone to a few extra lengths that day to try and look pretty. It wasn’t much. Kristina had never been one for high fashion, but she was wearing her best jeans, the ones she thought made her butt look best, and she’d put on a shading of makeup, just enough to bring out her eyes and to make her lips look not quite so thin, in her opinion.
She got out of her truck and walked in, seeing Melissa typing away on her computer. “Hey, Mel, how’s it going?”
Melissa looked up, a surprised smile on her face. “Well, I’d heard you stuck around a little while longer. What’s up?”
“Oh, after hearing about Peter, the Waldwycks wanted to make sure everything was okay up here,” Kristina said, giving half the truth. “And since Magnus is still the new boy in town . . .”
“You get to escort him around,” Melissa finished. “Sweet deal. They pay well to play babysitter to him?”
Kristina stopped, thinking. Last night, she’d paid with a credit card that Kimberly Waldwyck had given her, and she hadn’t thought twice about it. “Honestly, I don’t know. Haven’t asked.”
Melissa laughed, shaking her head. “That’s you, Kris. Never worried about the money, instead worried about the adventure and taking care of things. What can I help you with?”
Kristina leaned in closer, lowering her voice. “Pauline. What’s the grapevine saying about her?”
Melissa paled slightly, looking around the nearly empty office before grabbing her handbag. “Come on, I’ll buy the coffee.”
They left the office after Melissa checked in with her boss, the two of them walking down the sidewalk toward the one coffee shop in town besides the diner, an all-human place called the Java Hut. As they walked, Melissa talked. “From what I know, she came to town about two months ago, arriving on what most people figure was that trucker convoy that was headed toward the Hudson Bay. She got herself a job over at town hall, nothing big, clerking for the town.”
“No big deal, but why’d you look nervous when I asked about her?” Kristina asked. “Something to do with her and Ben Stormstout?”
Melissa nodded a little. “Ben went into the town office to take care of the taxes for the diner and Container Village, and since then, things have gone to hell for the Aklark. But that’s not what worried me.”
“What is it?” Kristina asked, stopping still a little ways from Java Hut. “Melissa, the things that I’ve heard about her—”
“Are better not talked about,” Melissa says fearfully. “What I can tell you is that both Jason and Peter Alces both started asking questions about Pauline, and of course, Mrs. Stormstout. All three of them are dead.”
“Jesus,” Kristina whispered. “What are you saying, Melissa?”
Melissa shook her head, looking up and down the street. “I’m s
aying nothing. You know what I know now. Pauline arrives, a bunch of powerful men in the Aklark and the Kenai start getting sick, and three people are dead, all three of whom were asking questions about her or were getting between her and Ben. Don’t ask me how, because I don’t want to know. I do know one thing, though.”
“What’s that?” Kristina asked nervously.
“If things don’t get better soon . . . I think I might be getting in my car and heading south, to hell with my job,” Melissa said. “This land might have belonged to our people for a hundred generations, and I know we don’t quite stick to the old ways, but I’ve never thought about that before. But this keeps up . . . well, maybe good land can be desecrated. Know what I mean?”
Kristina looked around at her town, nodding. “Yeah . . . I think I do.”
Magnus left the Kenai meeting hall, which was officially the Elk Club, frustrated. In addition to having to sit through a meeting that sounded more like it was being conducted in the sick ward of a retirement home than a Lycan meeting hall, things were just as bad as he’d feared.
Yes, the Kenai were a more unified clan than some. They’d kept their blood relatively pure over the generations, with a lot of couples coming together from a Kenai and an outside member. But the base of the Kenai were the five bloodline families that formed the core of the clan, and now, family rivalries were starting to rear their ugly heads.
He sighed, shaking his head. He knew what they needed, and he’d tried to act as the mediator, to be the one member in the hall who had no side to pick other than to try and make sure things stayed civil. It had been hard enough to do that, and in his pocket, he carried a list of things that he had to promise to request that were both ridiculous and expensive. Honestly, how the hell did getting a new X-ray machine have anything to do with the basics of survival until the Kenai could pick a new leader?