Claire raised the femur and charged the raised platform. Scarlotte merely smiled sardonically and Renard dumped the chair backwards, trying to get away from the shifter with the rabid snarl on her face.
Claire hit the platform with one foot as she went for Renard. He had won the lottery on that score because he was marginally closer to her than Scarlotte. To Claire’s wolf, Renard presented the larger person, or the biggest threat, and was necessary to deal with first. Again, if she, herself, had been thinking she would have gone for Scarlotte first.
The femur pulled back for the strike, she would bash the horse were’s head in, so he’d never be able to look down his long nose at another were again. They’d thought the bone monster was enough protection for them, and it was easy to disregard a girl barely out of school, one who was known to be slower than her sister. However, neither she nor her wolf minded teaching them a lesson about reality versus assumption. She might be slower than Ula, but she wasn’t useless.
Claire’s body in the air, femur clutched tightly in her manacled hands, she swung the bone toward Renard’s face, which had gone rigid with fear.
The air in Claire’s lungs whooshed away as something caught her around the middle and snatched her backwards. The ball joint of the femur had been an inch away from Renard’s skull, and the bone went flying out of her hands as she was pulled away.
Claire found a breath of air and shrieked her rage, twisting and clawing with her hands. Through her mounting fury, she smelled the dry reptilian scent of the snake. He’d wrenched her away from the platform and tossed her across the room. She slid on her side, zooming past the bone monster still struggling to reach for her. Its skeletal claws scraped against the stone floor as it pulled itself around. Those red-rimmed black marbles burned with frenzy.
Claire had come to a stop against the far wall, underneath a row of witchy blue lights. She snarled and launched herself to her feet just as the snake reached her. For a weighted instant as he stared at her, his mouth moved in a single, silent word. “Sorry,” he’d said before slamming his fist against her face.
Chapter 7
The wolf is not always a wolf. – Italian Proverb
In a state of rising consciousness, Claire touched her jaw before she could decide whether she should do that very thing. It was dislocated, and it hurt a lot. As she bit down on her tongue and pushed the bone back into place, it made an odd popping noise.
“Good,” the snake said. “You’re awake.”
“Fuck you and your cold-blooded relatives,” Claire muttered. The words sounded funny because the jaw wasn’t working correctly yet. She opened her mouth wide and nearly winced when her mandible ground against another bone. She pushed again with her finger, trying to re-adjust the bone alignment. She heard it make another grating popping noise, and then it was where it needed to be.
“We’re not really cold-blooded,” the snake said. He clicked his tongue. “I wonder if we are when we’re in snake form. I’ve never thought to check.”
“You should have let me kill them,” she murmured.
“You might have damaged Renard,” the snake said. Should she think of him as Serpent instead? No, she couldn’t let go of the snake part. He was snake to her, no matter what. “But you wouldn’t have gotten Scarlotte. I’ve never seen anyone get the best of her.”
“My sister could,” Claire said. “She’s that fast and she’s sneaky.”
“You’re not exactly slow.”
“Slower than my sister.”
“A little sibling rivalry, hmm? One day, I look forward to meeting Ula, daughter of the Bloodletter.”
“You’re awfully friendly now,” Claire said and opened her eyes. Slowly she took in the scene. One part of her expected to be in a traditional torture chamber with the iron maiden, a ducking stool, and a rack. Instead, she found herself lying in her cell. She recognized the marks on the walls as her own. The snake sat in the middle of the open doorway, blocking the exit.
“Scarlotte wasn’t happy about having to put her ‘thing’ back together,” he remarked, “but it’s keeping her busy now. Most weres try to levitate away from it instead of attempting to tear a limb from it. I’ll have to remember that if I have to go up against it.”
“Nice femur,” she said. “Makes a damn fine club. Must have come off a giant. And I didn’t ‘attempt’ anything. That thing was crawling for the interim.”
“How’s that jaw?”
“Hurts,” she mumbled. “It’s healing. Won’t hurt in a few hours.”
The snake breathed a heavy sigh. “Whew,” he said with obvious relief, “I wouldn’t want to have to tell—”
Claire rolled onto her side. She had been lying on her back on the plastic mat and had her head turned to one side. She had an amazing view of a half-empty water bottle and the plastic bucket that served as her toilet. She turned her head back toward the snake. “Tell who what?”
“Never mind that,” he said quickly. “We’ve got to get you to another location. Since Scarlotte knows about this one, she’ll be down to torture you about her bone monster. She doesn’t mind a little collateral damage to her creature, but outright vandalism pisses her off. Once they’re done trying to find the drakken, she’ll come to see if she can break you.”
“What the hell are you trying to say?”
“Pay attention. We need to move you to protect you,” the snake elucidated.
“Then why did you bring me back here at all?”
“Weres were watching me,” the snake said. “Her weres. I had time to free the drakken as a distraction, but I don’t have time to get you out of the catacombs. I can’t openly revolt, or they would know that…”
Claire’s eyes narrowed. “Why would you…”
The snake came to his feet in an elegant movement. One instant he was sedentary, the next he crouched in the doorway apparently waiting for Claire to attack him.
“Taq?” she called. There wasn’t an answer.
The snake grimaced. The expression revealed everything even to the typically clueless Claire.
“Son of a…” Claire climbed to her feet and said a few more choice swear words. “He’s one of you. He’s one of the Council’s weres, isn’t he?”
The snake didn’t say anything.
Don’t trust anyone. Don’t trust anyone! DON’T TRUST ANYONE!!! The wolf inside Claire howled with dismay. That jerk and his stupid Inuit stories! That absolute asshat!
Finally the snake said, “I’ve got just the place for you. It’s safe until Sh— I mean, Taq, comes back, and he’ll make sure you’re protected then.”
“Why would you do this?” Claire said through gritted teeth, which only exacerbated the pain in her jaw.
“The Council’s weres aren’t all bad,” the snake said quickly. “I can’t explain it all to you. There are a hundred other weres who would sell us out for the Council’s favor, and I don’t know all of them. So come with me and we’ll…”
Closing her eyes for a moment, Claire leaned on the wall, desperately trying to think of options. She didn’t have any options, and the snake didn’t have to tell her anything. She would have to cautiously trust him. When he didn’t say anything else, she opened her eyes and saw another were carefully holding her forearm around the snake’s throat, and choking him. He tried to change, but the abrupt lack of oxygen had obviously turned his brain into mush. His hands turned blackish-green and scales rolled across his flesh. A highly agitated rattle sounded and echoed down the hallway. One of his hands pried at the forearm.
After ten seconds, the snake’s eyes rolled up in his head, and his body relaxed. The were released her forearm and let him fall onto the floor. The snake grunted and lay as still as a rock.
Claire stared. The other were wasn’t particularly large, not an inch over five feet and was, in fact, some inches shorter than she was. Her hair was as black as Claire’s, but her eyes were a gleaming green, a fiery green that seemed to undulate in place. The epicanthic fold revealed her
Asian descent. The butter brown of her flesh was smudged with dirt, and her clothing was a ragged t-shirt that hung to her knees.
“But he helped you,” Claire said, assuming that this were was none other than the escaped drakken. She certainly didn’t smell like other weres, and she didn’t even smell like the snake. It was part reptile, part mammal, part bird. The wolf inside Claire didn’t know whether to fight or flee. Is there any kind of were they don’t have around here? the wolf asked.
“And when they find him, they’ll think he didn’t help me,” the other were said. She spoke Japanese accented English.
“What about the cameras?”
“The snake took them out when he freed me. He short-circuited the feeds.”
“You’re the one they call Tatsu?”
“Hai.”
Don’t trust anyone, her inner beast advised.
“Where are we going?”
“Out. Away. The snake freed me, but there are so many of the Council’s weres here,” she said quickly, looking anxious. “I’ve stomped around enough of the tunnels for them to be confused by the crossed scent paths, but I need someone to help fight.”
“I can fight,” Claire said. She could have eyes in the back of her head, too, for a while, if need be. She’d do just about anything to escape this netherworld. A burning rage ate a hole in her gut. She had trusted Taq, and he was nothing but another were who wanted her for another undisclosed reason. She couldn’t afford to trust the wrong person again.
Tatsu studied Claire. “They whisper about you,” Tatsu said. “The weres here. They say you are the Bloodletter’s daughter. They say the Bloodletter is coming for you. Having the Bloodletter’s daughter at my side would be advantageous.”
Claire studied the other were in turn. The torn t-shirt didn’t detract from her exquisiteness. She was a petite beauty, the kind that Claire would always be jealous about. She didn’t look like she would be able to fight her way out of a paper bag, but she had just choked the snake into unconsciousness with an arm movement that had seemed effortless.
“I haven’t a clue what my father is doing,” Claire said honestly. “I know he’s coming. I don’t know when, and I don’t care to wait and see if he’s in time.”
“Good,” Tatsu said. “Let’s get out of this place. I like a dark place but this…this is too dark.”
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, the wolf told Claire, until the enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
* * *
Claire followed Tatsu. They climbed from the pit she’d been kept in. There was only one exit from that. It was there that Claire scented Taq again. He’d been all through the corridors and the passages above her dungeon. It was such a unique scent, and it coiled inside her, twisting through every vein, working its way through her bloodstream, making her want to scream with frustration.
A cat shifter came out of the darkness to Claire’s left, aiming a billy club for the back of Tatsu’s head. He disregarded Claire completely. The wolf inside her reacted and swung with her left arm. She followed with her body, and the shifter hit the wall with all of the force of Claire’s weight. He fell to the stone floor without regaining consciousness. It turned out some of her father’s many teachings had held true.
Tatsu aimed a kick at the shifter’s head. “Thank you,” she said. “They’ve been told I’m very dangerous.”
She doesn’t look dangerous, the wolf said. She looks much smaller than you are.
“Why don’t you change?” Claire asked and aimed another kick at the unconscious shifter’s head, wishing it was Taq’s head. Just to be certain.
Tatsu smiled, and it was a cold, grim smile. “The drakken is much larger than these little tunnels.”
They could hear yelling in the distance.
“They’re desperate to keep you,” Claire said. “They think you’ll head to fire, that you might burn down half of Paris.”
“Fire does not come from above,” Tatsu said. She crouched in the tunnel and touched the floor, her hand flat against the rocks. “I feel the fire below us. We must go down. They’ll be expecting us to head upward. We might slip past them.” She rose to her feet and spun around. One leg snapped out, and Claire ducked as it passed over her head. It missed Claire’s head but it didn’t miss the shifter behind her. His body slumped against the wall, then fell next to the first one.
Claire spared a quick glance. “We need to run, Tatsu.” She pulled her clothing from her body. She began her change. The words were thick in her metamorphosing jaw. “I can sniff us a way downward.”
Tatsu nodded and waited, looking around them. “Come, daughter of the Bloodletter. The rat witch will be on us soon, and she’ll bring that cursed bone-constructed thing with her. I can’t fight her black magicks in this place.”
Claire’s wolf shape shook its head and took an accounting of the situation. Claire could speak to the wolf just as the wolf could speak to her, although they were both, and sometimes they were separate. The wolf wanted only to think about the way to fresh air and a forest in which to run, while Claire wanted not to think about the fact that some bear had deceived her. Not up, Claire told herself. Down. Down into the deep tunnels of the Earth. Let the drakken find her source of energy. Let her help us.
The wolf didn’t like that much, but the distant sounds of approaching weres prodded them into acceding.
The wolf led the way and the drakken followed.
* * *
Tatsu bent over and caught her breath. “I can sense the heat, Bloodletter’s daughter.” Her green eyes waxed with knowledge. “They won’t be able to stop us before we slip away.”
Claire yipped. Tatsu was more intense than any were Claire had ever met, with the exception of her father. However, Tatsu had been held by the Council in the same manner as they’d held Claire, and Claire didn’t want to change back into her human form to ask Tatsu why this was so. Tatsu could have killed the snake or the other weres they had run into, but she had withheld her strength and left them unconscious or unable to follow. The last rat were they’d encountered had four broken limbs, and he was going to need traction to set them straight. But he wasn’t dead and for that he was lucky.
Tatsu suddenly straightened and looked ahead of them. Claire glanced forward and saw nothing but a bone-decorated wall blocking them. They would have go back and find another route. That was a problem because Claire could hear a group of weres moving in that direction. It shouldn’t have been a problem because the trail of scents she had been following was strong. It shouldn’t have led to a dead end. Weres had come to this very place for some reason. A very specific reason.
Tatsu said something in Japanese and then added in English, “The Earth’s heat beckons to me.”
Claire looked at the drakken and then at the wall. Multiple scents in a path meant someone had come this way. Some of the scents came and went. Other scents only came once. She stepped closer to the wall and stopped. It stank of magicks. It smelled like the rat witch and what she emitted when she conjured blackness. Claire whined, but the drakken paid her no mind.
Tatsu took another step closer to the wall. She held up her hands and said, “I am drakken,” she said, “and you will allow me to pass.” Claire didn’t like the abrupt surge of magicks that followed the statement and bumped Tatsu’s leg with her shoulder.
Consequently, when the wall opened and swallowed Tatsu, Claire was sucked in, as well.
* * *
Shade rubbed his forehead. He had a headache. Actually he had multiple headaches. The trip to the states had been uneventful. They’d changed to the helos at Riverton. The airport there was small, and the humans gave them and their militarized armament and transportation a wide berth. Fortunately, the airport was well outside of the town, and the witnesses were limited to a few Airport Ground Operations crew. If the Council’s team was lucky, the humans would chalk up the sighting to the mythical men in black or something equally innocuous, like unknown NSA action.
The helos ma
de the trip to the facility near Yellowstone Park in record time. Regardless, the clans from Colorado and New York had beaten them to the locale. The facility had been rescued. The humans were rounded up in the cafeteria, and the weres were systematically searching for the kidnapped weres they couldn’t find.
Shade caught sight of Ula Bennett once, and his heart was wrenched in his chest. He wanted to tell her about Claire. He wanted to tell her about her father, but it was something he couldn’t do. Scarlotte had neglected to instruct Shade on what to do with the kidnapped weres, and specifically Ula, so he was purposely going to turn his head. Let her run back to Manitoba and the safety of her clan.
But the humans of the facility were Shade’s responsibility. That and the cleanup. He set Yves on the task of planting the explosives. He arranged for transport of the prisoners he needed to keep, which meant a few of the scientists that Whitfield Dyson had working for him and Whitfield Dyson himself. The Colorado Clan wanted to argue about who got to kill Dyson, but the Council trumped their claim, and their Alpha was out in the woods chasing after his mate, so he couldn’t weigh in. To give Shade more of a headache, the weredove, Xandra, had claimed that a few of the humans helped them.
Shade wasn’t a cruel were, but if the dove knew what he knew about what would happen to the humans when they reached Paris, she wouldn’t have insisted on Shade’s intervention. The doctor, Anton, and a few others, would be tried before the Council. It wasn’t going to be as just and fair as trials were portrayed on American television shows.
For the rest of the humans, Shade used a witch. She was on the Council’s payroll, and she systematically wiped their memories. They were going to remember the think-tank and the explosion and the deaths of the billionaire, the state senator, and his brother. It was a disastrous accident. The former military base had filled with noxious gases emitting from the geologically unsound region. Something had ignited them and kaboom. Wow. Nothing left. Couldn’t even find ashes. A fifteen second line on CNN Headline News. Very tragic.
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