Wolf at the Door

by Christine Warren

  Shaking her head, Cassidy decided to put it out of her mind and pulled a dozen free-range eggs out of her refrigerator. She had better things to do than speculate about political whack jobs who called her in the middle of the night to insist the world was about to come to an end if she didn’t cater to their little fantasies. The only fantasies she planned to cater to for the foreseeable future were the very reason she was standing half-naked in her kitchen in the middle of the night prepared to administer massive doses of protein to herself.

  After all, a girl had to keep up her strength.

  Quinn felt as if someone had lined the insides of his eyelids with sandpaper, and perhaps whacked him sharply over the head with a lead pipe for good measure. It left him somewhat cranky. Given that the time was now closing in on four in the morning and he could think of at least a hundred other places he’d rather be—most of them involving a certain redhead and a horizontal surface—he thought himself very restrained for pacing the library at Vircolac rather than resorting to violence.

  But oh, how the violence tempted him.

  Hands fisted in his pockets, he reached a wall, spun on his heel and stalked back in the other direction. Richard had taken the opportunity to stretch out on the sofa and close his eyes, and De Santos successfully ignored Quinn by immersing himself in the documents seized from the Lightheads’ computer. Within five minutes of their arrival at the club, the Felix had printed out the contents of the USB drive and settled himself behind that massive, immaculate desk with a cup of coffee and five colors of highlighter. He’d been making notes and keeping silent for the past forty minutes, and Quinn gave himself ten more of his own before a complete mental breakdown.

  A minute and a half later, he revised his estimate.

  “For the love of all that’s good and right in this world, De Santos, a blind ninety-seven-year-old with gout wouldn’t take so long to read a few pages! Are you translating them into Sanskrit, or do you plan to tell us what the hell you think?”

  De Santos looked up from his pages, his expression no more than mildly irritated. “Has anyone ever mentioned that you can be a real pain in the ass, wolf boy?”

  “Only every day,” Richard called out from the sofa.

  Quinn couldn’t make up his mind over which of them to throttle, so he just glared and brooded while the head of the Council shuffled through the documents. Then the Felix pulled out six sheets and laid them out in a neat row on the desk.

  “This is no small matter, Quinn. I wanted to be very careful not to jump to conclusions.”

  “Just so long as there’s a conclusion in there somewhere.”

  “You tell me.” De Santos tapped the first of the printouts he’d laid out and leaned back in his chair. “I suggest you pay particular attention to the passages marked in yellow.”

  Reining his impatience in hard, Quinn braced his palms on the desk and bent his head to read. He felt Richard’s presence when the Selkie rose and moved to stand behind him, but he didn’t look up. He didn’t even snap about someone reading over his shoulder. He was too busy following the trail of dots that De Santos had connected with his damned yellow highlighter. With each new sentence, he felt the knot in his throat tighten until he almost choked on it. Richard had to be the one to speak.

  “Buggering hell. The dragon! Adele Berry is the Lightheads’ informant?”

  Quinn waged war against the compulsion to howl his outrage to the skies. His tightly clenched jaw told him he managed it, but the close watch De Santos kept on his face said it was a near thing.

  “Most of the entries are signed with the initial D, for David, I assume. The boy has been helpful, but nothing here can be called conclusive,” the Felix warned. “It amounts to more of a collection of implications and innuendos than anything resembling fact. Whoever has been aiding these radicals has done an impeccable job covering his, or her, tracks. The evidence pointing to Adele is limited and subtle, but very definitely present.”

  Speech failed him. Quinn held on to his control with a tenuous grip. Emotion drove the urge to shift until it threatened to overwhelm him. Cassidy. What would she do? How would she cope? Instinct demanded that he protect her, but how could he defend her against the betrayal of her grandmother? He was reduced to impotence, and the helplessness only fueled his rage. His skin began to tingle in the first sign of his change, and he tensed, fighting against it. He couldn’t afford to relax his control, not when his animal impulses whispered at him to tear apart anyone who dared to hurt his mate.

  Sheer force of will beat the beast back into its cage, but when he raised his head to meet De Santos’s eyes, he knew his own would still be glowing a bright, golden amber. The Felix watched him for a long minute before nodding.

  “Good. Now, if you will allow me to continue, I will show you something else.” Picking up the six sheets he had originally laid out, De Santos replaced them with five more. “The papers I just showed you contain some circumstantial but worrying evidence against Adele. They tell us the one referred to as the ‘Damned Soul’ is one of our most respected and influential members, that he or she possesses frightening powers, and that he or she also possesses great wealth, evidenced by several substantial monetary donations to the cell’s cause. These things could refer to any member of the Council. Then, the diaries of the contact between the cell, someone referred to as ‘R,’ and this Damned Soul say the Other is privy to the most secret workings of our governance, which narrows the field and leaves us with only the members of the Inner Circle. There are fifteen in that group, but again more than one of us match the diary’s description. Adele is mainly implicated by one statement.”

  The Felix picked up one of the three papers and read, “ ‘This monster with whom we cooperate for the higher cause, neither harnesses the powers of evil for works of dark magic’—and I take it to mean they believe all works of magic to be dark—‘nor is forced by the light of the moon to take hideous shape, but believes itself above the lunar pull, unique and superior among all the accursed.’ ”

  Richard raised his brows and spoke over Quinn’s low growl. “That sounds like more than an implication to me.”

  De Santos nodded. “At first glance I would agree, and that troubles me. For someone so careful not to give the humans any hint of his true identity, why reveal so much detail as to allow any first-time reader familiar with the Council to guess it?”

  “She would have had to tell the Lightheads something, otherwise why would they agree to work with her?”

  “I’m sure the informant did have to reveal something, but such an important and unique detail? It doesn’t make sense.” He set down the page of diary entries and pointed to the other documents spread before him. “The passage strikes me as nothing more than a clumsy attempt at misinformation, so I looked more closely at some of the financial documents. They’re difficult to trace because they were routed through offshore accounts, but if you will follow the blue lines, I think you’ll notice an unusual commonality.”

  Quinn just glared at De Santos and curled his lip. He was barely managing to keep his shape. No way could he see through his haze of anger well enough to read anything yet.

  “Well, if you did read the sections I marked, you would notice that the transfer request origins are recorded based on whether the orders were placed electronically or by phone. In each case, the location of the originating computer or telephone is indicated by a numeric area code. Most of them come from Manhattan, which again fails to narrow anything down, but several of the orders were placed in Connecticut.”

  His snarl gradually turning to a scowl, Quinn squinted at the papers. “And what is that supposed to mean to us?”

  “Adele Berry was born and raised in Manhattan, as were her mother and grandmother at the very least. This is a woman who finds the Hamptons wild and uncivilized. I doubt she’d set foot in Brooklyn unless threatened with bodily harm. This woman does not make regular jaunts into Connecticut.”

  Quinn’s haze cleared in a r
ush of hope. “Then it means someone else must be the informant.”

  “I can’t call it proof, but I’m inclined to say yes.”

  “But why point to her if she wasn’t involved?”

  De Santos looked grim. “That is what has me concerned. The most recent entries in the diary mention that the informant’s aid has allowed them to plan a strike against us that would either give them the final proof they need to expose us, or force us to take action against them, thus exposing ourselves.”

  He pulled one final sheet of paper out of the stack and handed this one directly to Quinn. The Lupine scanned the contents and felt his muscles tense all over again.

  “What is it, man?” Richard demanded.

  “It’s a bill from a private investigator.” Quinn’s fingers tightened until the paper crumpled in his hand.

  “For what?”

  “For surveillance on the person and the home of Adele Berry.”

  Twenty

  On Monday afternoon, Cassidy followed the last of her Cultural Anthro 102 students out of the small lecture hall and switched off the lights in relief. Normally, she loved her job, but today she’d rather go home and crawl back into bed next to a certain Lupine who hadn’t let her get much sleep over the past day and a half. There were just two problems with that. One, he wasn’t actually in her bed at the moment, because she’d kicked him out of it yesterday evening; and two, she had a hundred and fifty new papers to grade.

  This called for coffee.

  Decision made, she hefted her pack higher on her shoulder and left the campus building for her favorite coffee shop three blocks over. It was owned by a gnome whom most humans mistook for a particularly grumpy midget. Cassidy knew the key to not getting kicked out of his shop was to come often and praise lavishly. Gnomes melted at the slightest compliment.

  The café was typically quiet when she stepped inside, a rush of warm, coffee-scented air greeting her. She nodded and waved to the hostess and wove her way between the tightly packed tables to her favorite booth near the back window. It didn’t overlook much, just a small patio that served as extra seating in the summer, but Cassidy was a creature of habit. And besides, she liked watching the squirrels. They ran away like speed demons every time they saw her coming.

  She settled in and, armed with a self-serve pot of café au lait and a red felt-tip pen, dove into her freshman classes’ impressions on the meaning and boundaries of culture. Thank goodness freshmen eventually turned into seniors and their papers started to make sense.

  Her pen flew over the pages, and within an hour, she’d made a reasonable, if unimpressive, dent in the stack. The dent she’d made in the coffee was considerably larger. In fact, it necessitated flagging down a waiter for a new pot.

  She stretched the kinks out of her back and looked around for a server. Instead a tall, pale blond woman slipped into the other side of her booth and stared at her with ice-blue eyes.

  Cassidy pursed her lips. “What can I do for you, Grendl?”

  “Gretel.”

  “Whatever.”

  The other woman didn’t blink at Cassidy’s old dig. Either she’d never read Beowulf, or she’d gotten used to being called a monster.

  The Nordic ice queen and professional gofer to the Other stars had never been one of Cassidy’s favorite people. She had the looks of a supermodel—all painfully slender limbs, sharp cheekbones, and oversized lips—and the morals of pond scum. Cassidy didn’t know all that much about her personally beyond that she had been the lover/distraction technique for a series of the city’s more wealthy and less ethical Other men. Frankly, she really didn’t care to learn more. There was just something about the lack of a soul in a human being that set her teeth on edge. Go figure, but she had always thought if vampires, shifters, sorcerers, witches, and Fae could have souls, a human being ought to be able to manage one.

  “What do you want?” Cassidy asked after a brief, mutual dislike-filled silence.

  “A meeting.”

  “It seems like half the city is just foaming at the bit to have an audience with me these days.” She couldn’t quite manage to contain the sarcasm.

  Gretel shrugged, sending the curtain of her long, nearly white blond hair shifting like water. “I can’t see why, but I suppose it’s none of my business.”

  Cassidy folded her arms over her chest and slouched back in the booth. “So what is your business? Still whoring for that sorcerer on the Upper West Side?”

  “I have a new employer,” the blonde said mildly, refusing to take the bait. “Someone who has been very anxious to meet with you. In fact, he’s already attempted to contact you twice. And he’s rather unhappy at having been put off.”

  Cassidy lifted an eyebrow. The person who had called her at home and at Adele’s house was Gretel’s boss? “And who are you working for now, Grendl? Could it be . . . Satan?”

  Gretel looked blank. Maybe she’d never watched Dana Carvey on Saturday Night Live. Yet another reason not to trust her.

  “I work for Mr. Leonard now.”

  Cassidy swore silently. She wasn’t sure she was comfortable with Francis Leonard seeking her out for anything. She wasn’t terribly fond of the old bloodsucker. Plus, she didn’t trust him any further than she could kill him.

  As amoral as his employee, Leonard held a seat on the Council’s Inner Circle, but Cassidy had never been quite certain why. From what her grandmother said of him, the vampire lacked just about everything the position required, from insight to diplomacy, but he did have money. A lot of it. And even though he wasn’t a particularly old vampire, a few decades over three hundred by the best estimates, he’d spent nearly all that time in New York. If Francis Leonard possessed any talent, it was for making beneficial alliances and weaseling out of them at the most opportune moments.

  “My, my,” she finally said, keeping her voice bland. “Isn’t that an interesting career move?”

  “He offered me a most advantageous position.”

  Cassidy could guess what sort of position the megalomaniac vampire had offered, and she figured it was the kind that aired in a thousand adult movie booths across the nation every day. Only, you know, with more bloodsucking. “Let me guess. You provide the meals and he provides the . . . wait. What does Leonard provide his human servants, other than chronic anemia?”

  “I am very satisfied with the arrangement.”

  Cassidy knew enough about the relationship between a vampire and his or her human servant. Usually it was based on trust, mutual benefit, and even a certain amount of friendship. She’d known lots of vamps over the years who used humans as their eyes and ears during the day and to provide blood in emergencies. In exchange, those vamps usually offered protection and increased longevity, with a bit of extra power and some financial aid thrown in. But that was the average vampire. Francis Leonard wasn’t average. He was, in fact, an extraordinarily nasty being who never did anyone a favor if he could get the same result through manipulation, intimidation, or brute force. Cassidy liked him even less than Gretel.

  Still, the blonde was right. It wasn’t any of her business.

  “Fine,” she said, smiling at the waiter who dropped off a fresh pot of coffee. The expression faded fast once she turned back to her visitor. “So then why don’t we cut to the chase, and you can tell me why Leonard is so anxious to get to know me after all these years. I didn’t know he cared.”

  Gretel ignored the sarcasm. “About you? He doesn’t. But he is keenly interested in the affairs of the Council.”

  “Don’t tell me he’s still pouting about De Santos being appointed head instead of him? I mean, talk about sore losers.”

  Something shifted behind the other woman’s hollow eyes. “We, of course, respect the head of the Council. However, we do not feel that such respect requires our withdrawal from important matters of debate. The voices of all Council members are valued and should be heard.”

  Cassidy was betting Gretel had spent hours rehearsing that little response
. “No doubt. But that still doesn’t shed a whole lot of light on the reason why your boss has been stalking me for the last two days.”

  The blonde’s hands remained folded neatly on the table in front of her. “ ‘Stalking’ is a bit harsh, don’t you think?”

  “Not really. He’s attempted to contact me at my home, at my grandmother’s home, and now at a public café I’m known to frequent. He’s left numerous messages, and he’s sent a human servant to harass me when I didn’t respond quickly enough to his demands for a meeting. In my book, that’s stalking. The only thing he hasn’t done is left a dead cat in my mailbox.”

  “That could be arranged.”

  “No, thanks.”

  She shrugged. “None of the methods to which you protest so strongly would have been necessary had you simply agreed to a meeting as Mr. Leonard requested.”

  Cassidy’s eyebrow shot up. “I never disagreed to the meeting. I just told him that the times he wanted to meet were inconvenient for me. It’s not my fault he’s a spoiled little vamp who refuses to wait for a mutually agreeable time.”

  “You haven’t offered any alternative meeting arrangements.”

  “Well, he hasn’t given me the chance. I said I’d call him today, and I will. I haven’t exactly had a ton of spare time on my hands.”

  Gretel made a point of looking around the café and down at the cell phone that rested on the table beside Cassidy’s coffee cup. “I do not see any restraints on you at the moment. And you clearly have access to modern methods of communication.”

  Okay, that snotty tone of voice was not winning the vamp’s lackey any points. “I happen to be working right now. I’m a professor. I teach classes, then I mark papers. When I finish my job, then I have time for extraneous nonsense like playing phone tag with self-important bloodsuckers. Besides,” she said, scowling, “shouldn’t your boss be asleep right about now?”

  “Yes. He is.”

  “Well, then get off my case!” Cassidy thought her tone made her exasperation clear, but if there was any confusion, she was prepared to take action. Like tearing out someone’s stupid blond hair. “If the guy can’t even form a sentence till sundown, why the hell are you harassing me?”