Lycan Legacy - 4 - 5 - 6: Princess - Progeny - Paladin: Book 4 - 5 - 6 in the Lycan Legacy Series

by Veronica Singer

  A larger smile. “Is this another example of your feminine wiles?”

  “Manny!” I snapped. “I don’t appreciate your tone.”

  “You’re naked under that.”

  “So?” I furrowed my brow. “Isn’t everybody naked under their clothes?”

  Manny looked down at my bare feet and smirked. “Yeah, but…”

  Mike entered and saved him before he could crack another joke. He carried several bags that smelled deliciously of roast chicken and side dishes. My mouth watered.

  “Manny, you’ve been in this country too long if the sight of bare feet excites you,” he quipped. Then he walked over to the table and opened the bags. “Are you hungry, Luna?”

  “Starved. Those leftover MREs were starting to look good.”

  Grateful for the interruption, I grabbed clean plates and flatware and placed them on the table.

  After finishing one chicken, my irritation at Manny faded. Maybe he had just been surprised to see me there.

  “Manny, I’m sorry I snapped at you. I don’t like being stared at.”

  Mike coughed to interrupt. At my nod, he said, “Luna isn’t like other women. She grew up in a cult that practiced nudity, so sometimes she forgets the effect she has on men.”

  Mike pulled my plate of well-gnawed bones away and slid another whole chicken in front of me. “So if you see her naked, she is not coming on to you.”

  He looked at me a long moment before continuing, “She’s also a lot more ‘touchy-feely’ than most women. It’s how she was raised.”

  “Yeah, she’s as ‘touchy-feely’ as a cactus,” Manny jibed.

  Mike struggled to hold in a grin. “After you get to know her, I mean.”

  Manny licked his fingers, then reached for a napkin. “So, you and Luna aren’t…?”

  “No!” we said in unison.

  Mike continued, “Luna is happily married to a man I consider a brother. I think of her as a sister.” Mike locked gazes with Manny and said, “I suggest you do the same.”

  Manny took a drink of Coke, then laughed loudly. “So I’ve been hired by a touchy-feely, wily, female nudist, who definitely is not a witch and definitely doesn’t work for the CIA, to rescue hostages in Saudi Arabia.” He nodded to himself. “If this was a movie on TV, I’d switch channels.”

  Mike joined his laughter. “Don’t feel bad, Ell Tee. Ever since I met Luna, my life has been a series of unbelievable adventures.”

  Dinner finished, Manny headed upstairs to shower and get ready for tonight while Mike and I cleared the table.

  Keeping my voice low, I said, “Mike, our odds just improved. Silkworm is back.”

  “Who the hell is Silkworm?”

  “You should remember. Mason and I used her to climb that cliff to get to you the first time we met. Mason got her in a trade with Jorōgumo, the spider-goddess.”

  Mike shook his head. “I don’t remember much from that night. That was before Mason fixed my eyes.”

  “Let’s see if she remembers you,” I said.

  I opened my mouth to call her, then stopped. She had responded to mental commands before, so I sent Silkworm, come here please.

  It took a few seconds, but my bag in the living room rustled and Silkworm slithered into the dining room.

  Mike jumped back and scrambled for a weapon. “An albino snake!”

  “No, Mike. This is Silkworm.”

  The knotted ball rose to meet my hand and I continued, “Silkworm, this is Mike.”

  Mike calmed but stayed alert. “I thought you couldn’t bring strange magic to this country. Ariel said it would irritate the local gods.”

  “Silkworm doesn’t register as magic,” I said. “I don’t really know what she is. Just that she saved my life more than once.”

  Mike scoffed. “Okay, you’ve got a sentient clothesline for a pet. What good does that do for us?”

  Silkworm slid closer to Mike and raised her head to waist height, then tilted it in query. Her tail rose to head-height, looped back on itself and formed a knotted hangman’s noose. The noose closed with a snap.

  “Okay, it’s dangerous,” conceded Mike. “It might be useful—”

  He squinted and leaned closer to Silkworm. “She has a soul! Not like a human, but there’s something there.”

  Mike extended his left hand slowly, like you would approach a strange dog to let her sniff.

  “Hello, Silkworm. Nice to meet you.”

  Silkworm nodded gravely, then turned to me, like a cat turning away from an unwelcome house guest.

  “She says you’re on probation,” I said.

  “She talks? I didn’t hear anything.”

  “No, she doesn’t make sounds. I just know her moods.”

  The shower sounds stopped. Manny would be back downstairs soon.

  “Silkworm, please go back to your bag. You might freak Manny out,” I said.

  Mike nodded agreement. “She freaks me out and I’m used to this stuff.”

  Silkworm nodded and wriggled back to my bag in the living room.

  Manny came down a minute later, drying his shaggy gray hair with a towel.

  “Good, you cleared the table. We can set up our demo.”

  In a few minutes, more than a dozen blocks of C-4 were laid out on the table.

  Manny smiled proudly and gestured at the explosives.

  “See, boss? Aren’t you glad you hired me? With these, we can break into any compound in the country.”

  I took a long sniff and sighed. There was no easy way to say this.

  “Manny, you got scammed. Half of those are fakes.”

  15

  “Fake? Are you crazy? I tested these,” Manny said. His face tightened and grew red. “I’m the demolitions expert. What do you know about C-4?”

  “I know what C-4 smells like, and this stuff smells wrong.”

  “It smells like the real thing to me,” said Manny, then, in disbelief, “Where the hell where you that you were close enough to smell C-4?”

  “At the mine, Manny. I told you I owned a mine.”

  “That ‘gold mine’ comment wasn’t a joke? This is unbelievable.” Then he laughed. “If I’d believed you, I would have asked for twice as much money. You can afford it.”

  “No, Manny, I can’t,” I said. “The gold was a byproduct of what we were really digging for, and the mine’s played out. It’s barely making enough to cover overhead. That BITCHCoin was the last of our available resources.”

  I stared into his eyes, alpha to warrior, and growled. “I don’t lie to people I work with, Manny. I didn’t lie about the mine and I’m not lying about the C-4.”

  Mike raised both palms in a calming gesture. “Luna, maybe you’re smelling the difference between the commercial grade C-4 we use in the mine and this military grade C-4.”

  “Mike, you know how good my nose is. I know the smell of both the civilian and military types.”

  He scrunched up his nose in thought. “Where’d you smell the military stuff?”

  “I got a good whiff of military grade C-4 when I killed the ensign to break out of that prison in Alaska.”

  Mike nodded. “Yeah, that’s right. I’d forgotten about that.”

  At Manny’s shocked look, I added, “I didn’t want to kill him. But he had a deadman switch. He would have killed a lot of innocent people.”

  Manny made a ‘time-out’ gesture and pulled out a chair. “I need a minute to process this.” He took ten deep breaths, in a pattern strangely like my meditation routine.

  Then his eyes blinked open and he smiled. “So, you’re also an explosives expert with a bloodhound’s nose?”

  “No, Manny. I have a sharp nose, but I’m not an explosives expert. That’s why we need you.” I gestured to the C-4. “If I tried anything with this stuff, I’d blow up the entire subdivision.”

  Mollified by my admission, Manny stood and said, “Do you mind if I repeat the tests?”

  “Be my guest. How do you test these?”
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  Manny went to the laundry room and returned with a small kit that contained glass vials. “This is a fresh test kit. Put a sample in, screw the top on, break the seal, the chemicals react with the material and change color. Bright purple is real C-4.

  “The three random samples I took at the seller’s all tested good. Now you’re telling me some of them are bad. We’ll just check every one.”

  Manny took a sample from each block, ran the tests, and got purple with each.

  “See? I told you they were good.” He smiled triumphantly.

  “Do it again, Manny,” I instructed, “but take the sample from the center of the block.”

  “What? Why?”

  “The fakes are coated with real C-4 around an inert substance. These were made to fool those test kits.”

  Manny dug a stainless-steel probe deep into the clay-like substance, dredging up a small sample for his test kit.

  His face fell when the chemicals stubbornly refused to turn purple. He tried several times, but the best he got from the suspect blocks was a faint mauve.

  Manny’s face darkened. “I’m going to kill that cheating bastard.”

  “It’s a shame when you can’t trust your black-market arms dealer,” I agreed. “But we don’t have time to go back and get revenge on this thief.”

  Manny gave me a surprised look, then laughed in resignation. “Okay, you’re right. We need to concentrate on the mission. More than half of these bricks are good, so we still have more than enough for the plan. Hell, if things go smoothly, we might not even need the demo.” He shook his head. “I thought the deal was too good to be true.”

  I bit back a comment that if I had been there, he wouldn’t have been ripped off. Nobody likes to hear ‘I told you so.’

  “We’ll leave a strongly-worded Yelp review after this is over,” I said dryly.

  Mike and Manny laughed and got to work on the demo. They spent about an hour doing things I didn’t understand with the plastic explosives, shaping them into various forms and packing the forms into separate bags.

  Finally, the table was cleared, and our backpacks were filled with explosive goodies. We sat over another cup of magic coffee and looked over the printouts of the compound we were going to invade.

  “This place is huge,” said Manny. “It’s surrounded by a double-layer perimeter wall twelve feet high, with razor wire on top. There are five guard towers embedded in the inner wall, spaced out around the perimeter.”

  “A pentagram,” said Mike. He looked at me with a raised eyebrow. I gave him the ‘I’ve got this covered’ hand signal. I could walk through almost any magical barrier on this world. Once inside, I could open it to allow everyone else to enter.

  Manny missed the byplay. “Yeah, it’s a pentagram. Maybe they’re superstitious. Won’t do anything against C-4.”

  He pointed to the space between the walls, which was cleared. “This is wide enough for a vehicle to race around to any intrusion point.”

  “Will they have guard dogs between the walls?” asked Mike. He looked at me. “You can handle dogs, right?”

  “Unless they’re specially trained, the repellent and ultrasonics I have will make them run away.”

  “Repellent? Ultrasonics?” asked Manny. “I didn’t see any equipment like that.”

  I gave Manny my ‘need-to-know’ look and said, “Dogs won’t be a problem.”

  Mike moved in with a smoother lie. “We have access to stuff that SEAL teams would cream their jeans to have. Just the existence of this equipment is compartmentalized information.”

  Manny nodded acceptance. The security aspect was making it easy to hide magic.

  “Anyway,” said Manny, “I don’t think they’ll have dogs. Saudis consider dogs unclean animals and almost never use them. We’ll just worry about guards in vehicles.”

  “So that’s why I haven’t sme—seen any dogs here,” I said.

  Mike and I shared a look. If they considered dogs unclean animals, what would they think of werewolves?

  Manny turned his attention back to the charts. “They’ll have sensors, infra-red and night-vision cameras, as well as roaming guards.

  “Since a helo drop is out of the question, there’s no way to surprise the guards. I think we should do a ‘shock and awe’ entrance.” Manny pointed to a section of wall closest to the main building. “Satchel charges here to enter, then a second charge on the inner wall. Once inside, we double-time to the building, open any doors we need with breaching charges, find the hostages, bag ‘em, tag ‘em, and cart them out.”

  “‘Bag ‘em, tag ‘em?’” I asked.

  “SOP for hostage rescue,” said Mike. “Hostages do crazy things: run away in fear, run back to their captors, grab weapons and try to become heroes. Those are all bad for everybody. Since neither of our targets have been through SERE training, they won’t know what to expect during a hostage rescue.”

  I nodded. It made sense. Alisha hadn’t been trained, and Logan’s wolf side might strike out at anyone nearby when he was released. If I were there, I could control him. But if I didn’t make it that far…

  Manny stood and looked around. “Is everybody good with the plan?”

  I took a deep breath and Manny gave me an impatient look. I tried to be diplomatic.

  “It sounds like a good plan, Manny. But there’s something you didn’t know. I have the means to avoid the sensors.”

  Manny scoffed. “Avoid the sensors? What do you have, a Harry Potter invisibility cloak?”

  “No, I have ways to block them. The invisibility suit is too small to fit any of us, so we didn’t bring it.”

  Manny laughed, then halted when I didn’t join in. “You’re serious? You have an invisibility suit and you left it behind? Why didn’t you bring magic suits for all of us?”

  “I told you: It was too small. We took it from a foreign agent, and we haven’t been able to duplicate it.”

  Mike jumped in. “That’s not the point. We shouldn’t be talking about what we don’t have. We need to concentrate on what we do have.” He stared at Manny and said, “Ell Tee, you did not hear that part about the suit, understood?”

  “Understood,” Manny said. “But one of these days we’re going to sit down and have a drink and a long talk.”

  Mike looked at me and I nodded. It wasn’t right to keep so many secrets from Manny.

  “Manny, when this is over,” Mike said, “I promise we’ll all get together and tell you everything.”

  The fact that they were both talking about ‘when’ and not ‘if’ was a comfort.

  “Anyway, we won’t need to blow the wall to get in,” I continued, returning to the planning.

  “Kinda hard to walk through a twelve-foot-high wall without blowing it,” Manny said.

  Mike looked at me and raised an eyebrow in query. I shook my head. The short-range portal trick that had gotten us out of the genie’s bottle would get us through one wall, but not two. I wanted to save the portal trick for an emergency.

  “We can scale the wall,” said Mike. “It’s no worse than that time in Fallujah.”

  “Yeah, we can scale the wall,” said Manny. He looked at me. “How about you? Are we going to have to drag your wily ass over the wall?”

  No, Manny, I can jump over a twelve-foot wall, I thought. Diplomacy, Luna. “I brought my climbing gear and gloves.”

  Manny seemed skeptical. I continued, “I’ll haul your geriatric ass over the wall if I have to.” Okay, maybe not so diplomatic.

  “And the razor wire?”

  “I can handle the razor wire.” At Manny’s disbelieving look, I added, “I have hydraulic-powered ceramic-jawed cutters that can cut through almost anything.” I guess you could describe werewolf claws that way.

  Mike stared at the charts. “So, if we can evade the sensors, guards, and any dogs, we can get to the main building. The door won’t be easy. We might have to use a breaching charge—”

  He stopped at my head shake.


  “I can pick the lock and get through any sensors on the door,” I said.

  With an exasperated sigh, Manny asked, “If you can do all this, why do you need us?”

  “Because I can’t watch my back all the time; because I can’t handle explosives or shoot; and because I can’t haul the hostages away without help.”

  Manny’s face darkened and he stared at the chart for several moments. I worried that he would reject my help and pull out of the mission.

  He finally looked up, his blank face hiding all emotion. “You’re sure you can do all this?”

  “Between Mike and me, we have it covered,” I said. Mike nodded emphatically.

  Manny smiled. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll scale the walls covertly. But we’ll leave remote charges to blow the walls for our escape and to create a distraction. We’ll get inside, leave some more remote-control charges as we go, grab the hostages, then try to sneak out.

  “If we run into trouble on exit, we’ll set off the distraction charges and get away in the confusion. If we get separated, we’ll meet at the US Embassy compound. Once the hostages are safe inside, we’ll decide the next step.”

  “Sounds like a good plan,” said Mike.

  Manny sucked air in through his teeth. “But it doesn’t look like we’ll be ready to go tonight. Tomorrow night or the night af—”

  “No,” I interrupted. I closed my eyes momentarily and felt for Logan through our pack link. Despite my transfer of energy, his life force was ebbing. “Logan won’t last another day. His vital signs are too weak.”

  “Listen, Luna, I know you’re worried about the guy and want him out as soon as possible. But you can’t know how he is. In hostage situations, the captors don’t want the hostages to die, so they at least give them food and water.”

  “I know how he is,” I said. “Just like I know he doesn’t have much time left.”

  Mike stepped in with a rational explanation. “Logan has a bio-link that gives us a read on his location and his state of health. If Luna says he’s close to dying, he really doesn’t have much time.”

  Manny shook his head stubbornly. “I’m the expert and I say we’re not ready to go. Flying off half-cocked will be a disaster.” He pointed a finger at me. “You hired me for this job. Now take my advice and wait. Even if you’re right about this Logan guy, saving one hostage is better than saving none.”