"We haven't started anything," Rafe assured her.
"No, we were just discussing killing Noah," Tess informed her cheerfully.
"Oh, right." Fiona turned her eyes on the human man, and from the way they narrowed, Sam guessed someone had filled Fiona in on the whole story to date. "Need any help?"
"No one needs to kill Noah," Sam announced, torn between amusement and exasperation. "I'm the only one with a right to, and I'm more than capable of handling it myself if I felt the need. So you can all just back off and drop it, okay?"
Noah squeezed her hand and shook his head. "They've got nearly as much right to be mad at me as you do, sweetheart. I lied to them, too."
"I'm glad to hear you admit it," Graham growled. "But I still don't think a pretty apology is enough reason to let you live."
"Enough, already!" Missy shouted, rolling her eyes. "You know perfectly well that you don't really want to kill Noah. You like him too much for that. You're just pissed that your famous Spidey sense didn't tell you he was up to no good from the very beginning. Everyone here knows that if you'd been in his position, you'd have been hard-pressed to do anything differently than he did. If you thought the pack depended on your actions the way he thought his country did, you'd have done the same damned thing, so spare me the righteous-indignation crap. I don't want to hear it."
Sam had never heard anyone talk to the Alpha that way, not even the Luna. It astounded Sam that he did nothing more drastic than turn his head and glare at his mouthy mate. "Who asked you?"
Noah gave a half laugh. "Listen, I appreciate both the willingness of some of you to defend me and the desire of the rest of you to rip out my spleen, but we have more important things to be arguing about. We took all morning off to rest and regroup. Now we need to get back to business and find Annie's missing data."
Abby frowned and looked around the room. "Where is Annie? She knew we were meeting back here at noon."
"Was she supposed to join us?" Fiona asked. "Tobias and I passed her as we were walking into the club. She was just leaving and she looked like she was in a hurry. I assumed she wasn't needed or she would have been coming, not going."
Sam heard Graham swear and felt Noah's fingers squeezing hers.
"Did she say where she was going?" Noah demanded.
Tobias shook his head. "She didn't say much of anything. She walked right into me, mumbled some kind of apology, and said she had something important she had to go take care of."
"What?"
"We didn't stop to play twenty questions. Fiona and I were late, so we came right upstairs. Annie left through the front door. Maybe she told someone else her plans?"
Noah swore and pushed himself from the sofa. Graham just swore.
"Is she really stupid enough to go off and try to recover that data on her own?" Noah demanded.
"Watch who you're calling stupid, human," Graham snarled. He set Missy firmly to the side and glowered as he rose to his feet. "Sam, where do you think that idiot has gone?"
Ignoring the irony, Sam shook her head. "I don't know. I knew she felt really guilty about all of this, but I had no clue she was going to go off half-cocked and try to fix things all by herself. That's crazy."
"Especially since she doesn't even have all the facts," Noah agreed. "If she'd come down here first, I could have told her that I have a good idea where to start looking for information."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that if the people who took the data are who we think and are working for Hammond, then we should start by checking out their safe house. I told you last night that my team had located it and was keeping it under surveillance. If we want answers, that's where we need to start."
Graham grunted. "I forgot about that, but you're right. We should check it out. But we can't just leave Annie to her own devices. We need to find her."
"I can track her," Sam said, already heading toward the door. "Fiona and Tobe just saw her. She can't be more than ten minutes ahead of me. I'll pick up her trail in the entry hall and I'll have her back here within the hour."
Noah snagged her upper arm. "No way," he said. "I want you with me. You're not the only one in this city with a good nose. Someone else can go after Annie."
"She's my friend," Sam protested. "Do you expect me to just sit here while she wanders into a dangerous situation?"
"Of course not. Like I said, you're coming with me. The most dangerous situation will be where the B-team is, and that's where we're headed. The faster we get the data back, the faster we can make everyone else lose interest in Annie."
Sam didn't like it, but she could see his point. "Fine, then let's go now."
"I'll get a tracker on Annie," Graham said. "And I'll send up a howl. If we have the whole pack out looking for her, she won't get very far."
"I'll send a few trackers back to the lab, too," Tobias offered. "It's a logical place to look for her, and if she's not there, maybe we can pick up something else from the goons who broke in last night. They might not all be hiding out in some safe house."
"I doubt they will be," Noah said. "The house will be more like a base of operations. They won't leave it unguarded, but they won't all be hanging out there all day. You never know. You may stumble onto something. If you do, let the rest of us know immediately."
"Will do." Tobias gave a casual salute and towed his wife toward the door. "You can come. Rule said Sam and Annie smelled something weird about one of the men at the lab. Maybe you've got some voodoo we can use to figure out what the problem was."
Missy looked at her husband. "I'll stay here and help you direct the troops, of course, but I don't like the idea of Sam and Noah walking into a vipers' nest all by themselves."
"Tess and I will tag along," Rafe suggested. "There's more than strength in numbers. We can cover more ground and gather more information with four than with two."
Sam felt Noah's hesitation, but within seconds he was nodding. He knew enough about the werejaguar and his witchy wife to know they wouldn't slow him down and could very well prove to be useful. "Fine."
"What about us?" Abby asked, clutching Rule's hand tightly enough to turn her knuckles white. He didn't even seem to feel it. "I can't just sit here and worry while everyone else is gone. It'll drive me demented."
"There's no need for you to put yourself in danger," Noah said, and Sam heard the tenderness in his voice. "The rest of us can handle it."
"And I can handle taking care of my wife," Rule told him. "The two of us will find another way to be useful. No one has suggested cutting off the head of this particular beast. If your general is orchestrating all of this, he should be dealt with as well."
Noah's protest was instant and emphatic. "No way. I don't want Abby within ten city blocks of that man. Besides, there's no reason to suppose he's even in Manhattan. He can orchestrate a war from D.C., so he can certainly manage one operation."
"Yes, but I believe this one might be of particular concern to the general. You did mention he had paid your progress an unusual amount of attention since your mission began."
"I don't care. It's bad enough I know I can't keep Sam out of the middle of it. There's no reason Abby needs to get involved, too."
Sam grabbed his hand. "I'm glad you realize the part about me, but you need to give both your sister and her husband a little credit. You know perfectly well she's a smart, tough, capable woman who can look after herself. And more than that, you know Rule would never let her face any real danger. So give that protective streak of yours a rest. She really would go crazy with nothing to do."
"Absolutely," Abby agreed, shooting Sam a grateful glance. "And no one is saying we're going to go knock on his door and make a citizen's arrest, but if we can find out where he is, we can keep an eye on him and give you a heads-up if it's necessary."
Abby rubbed her hands together almost gleefully. If anyone could find out if the general was in town, Sam realized, it was Abby Baker. She worked as a professional researcher for a local t
elevision station and the things she could dig up in five minutes of computer time made Sam's head spin.
"Thanks," she said, and smiled at her lover's sister, a woman who'd been a friend for a while now and now felt more like family.
"Good," Missy said. "I'm glad everything is settled. Now let's get moving. We've got some work to do."
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The safe house looked no different from a dozen other row houses on the same block. Its red sandstone exterior looked warm and almost inviting in the late afternoon sun, and the green-painted stoop was neat and nondescript. No one lurked around outside, and with the shades drawn over the windows it was impossible to tell if anyone lingered inside, either. Noah had to assume they did. He knew he wouldn't leave his base unattended in the middle of a city after the incident at the lab the other night. Someone obviously knew the B-team was in the city, so if Noah had been its leader, he'd have left a guard posted at the base 24-7.
He glanced down at Sam, saw concentration furrowing her brow. He didn't know what else to call it, even though it was currently covered with fur, so he stuck to "brow." Or maybe he should use "forehead."
She had insisted on accompanying him in wolf form since her sense of smell was so much better this way. To make them less conspicuous, she'd produced a collar and leash with a breakaway catch in case she got tangled up in something or needed to make a fast escape. When she'd handed it to him, it had been accompanied by a warning glance so fierce he hadn't even tried to crack a joke, and he'd been very careful to keep the leash slack between them the whole time. Tess and Rafe hadn't seemed to find anything all that odd about the arrangement. Tess had just accepted the backpack full of clothes Sam had handed her in case she needed to shift back to human, and shrugged into the straps. Then the four of them had set out for the safe house, Tess and Rafe looking like nothing more than a couple of lovers out for a stroll a couple of blocks ahead of Noah and his dog.
To him, Sam looked exactly like a wolf, with her dense gray-brown fur, pointy ears, and huge golden eyes, but he'd discovered as they made their way along the street that no one else had given her a second glance. Maybe it was the leash and collar, but people seemed to dismiss her as nothing more than an oversized mutt. Maybe some kind of Siberian husky cross. He pitied them for their ignorance and hoped none of them ever did anything to deserve meeting a Lupine in a bad mood.
Sam seemed to sense his gaze on her, because she looked up and gave him a canine nod. There was someone in the house all right.
"How many?" he asked softly.
Her head jerked once, then went still.
Just one.
Noah looked around casually and spotted Tess and Rafe on the other side of the street, leaning against a wall a few houses up. They looked as if they were absorbed in each other, but Noah knew they were both waiting for a signal from him.
He glanced back at Sam.
"Is he in the front of the house?"
She nodded again.
"Armed?" Noah had to assume he was, but it didn't hurt to ask.
Another nod.
Noah gave one of his own, along with a stifled curse. "Okay. Looks like you're circling around back."
This was the part of the plan Noah hated. He'd argued like the devil against it, but he'd lost; and worse, he'd known the others were right. The safe house was in a residential neighborhood in the middle of a residential block. There weren't any convenient alleys to slither down, no easy access to the back of the building. And it was the middle of the day. If he or any of the others had tried to break into the house, front or back, someone would have noticed. But no one would notice a stray dog slinking through the neighboring yards and up to the safe house's back door.
Grimly Noah leaned down to unhook the leash from Sam's collar. He cupped her muzzle in his hand and forced her to look at him. "If you get hurt, I'm going to kill you," he warned solemnly, trying not to wince at the humor and excitement in her eyes.
She had warned him that adrenaline affected her differently in this form. The anticipation of the chase was stronger and tended to drown out even common sense sometimes. He knew all that, but that didn't mean he liked it.
Muttering something dire, he bent his head and pressed a kiss to the fur between her ears. "Be careful," he growled, and she turned to swipe her tongue over his cheek before she bounded off for the end of the block.
She had fifteen minutes before he charged in like the First Cavalry Division. He'd be counting every last one.
Sam felt every second of her allotted fifteen minutes ticking away. She wanted to rush, and she did for the first few minutes, but once she got onto the property behind the safe house she forced herself to slow down and take her time. It galled, but no matter how her animal instincts wanted her to go straight for the throat, her human mind knew that would be a bad idea. The neighbors who caught glimpses of her might be willing to write her off as a stray dog prowling through the city, but the man inside the house would know better. He'd have training and would know that the last thing he wanted to find would be a wolf at his door.
Belly low to the ground, she prowled along the perimeter of the property where the weeds had been allowed to grow into bushes. The foliage helped conceal her, and she crouched among the fronds and branches for a moment, her eyes surveying the back of the house. The bright sun contrasted with the darkness inside the house, making the windows little more than rectangular black cutouts. Someone would have to walk up close to them before Sam could see, and right now she couldn't see anything.
Cautiously she crept forward. Noah had warned her about the security the B-team might have put in place, so she watched her steps. They wouldn't use booby traps, nothing that might pose a risk to a neighbor or a kid taking a shortcut, but that didn't mean they wouldn't have tried to protect themselves against a sneak attack. Sam kept her nose peeled and could detect faint traces of men in the yard, but nothing very strong. She didn't think they spent a lot of time out here, definitely not enough to have rigged up any elaborate early-warning systems.
The scents got stronger as she approached the back door. She could smell the acrid smoke stench of Camel man, the one who had played lookout on the roof of the lab building, and had a clear picture of him standing by the back door puffing away. She investigated the ground where his scent was strongest, but there were no butts littering the ground there. Apparently, even at his own base he was careful about his bad habits.
She sniffed along the base of the house, paying close attention to the basement windows, but the B-team wasn't composed entirely of idiots. She could see the little white sensors on the sill and knew an alarm would sound if someone tried to open the window. They hadn't made this easy for her.
Wishing she could wear a watch in this form, Sam sank to her haunches and estimated almost half of her fifteen minutes had passed. She had to find a way inside soon or admit defeat and head back to the street before Noah came barging in after her, guns blazing. He'd do it, too, she was certain. If he thought she was in danger, he wouldn't hesitate to cause the biggest and most ill-advised ruckus this side of a Britney Spears concert.
Sam stared at the back door and considered her options. She had a good feeling that the back door wouldn't be wired while someone was in the house. If at least one of them smoked, they would have gotten used to leaving it unalarmed for the sake of convenience. And men usually felt they didn't need alarms to protect them, only to protect their things when they were away from home. So she could probably get the back door open without making herself known, because she also felt pretty confident about her earlier assessment that the man inside the house was near the front, not in the back. If she shifted forms, she could open the door, slip inside, and shift back before anyone knew she was there.
Probably.
She didn't like the idea, and she was damned certain that if Noah had heard it, he wouldn't have liked it, either. In fact, he probably would have pitched a wild fit and chained her
to something solid until she came to her senses. The problem was that as bad as the idea might be, she really didn't think she had many options.
Five minutes left.
Biting the bullet, Sam slunk up to the back door, threw herself into the shift, and slipped through as soon as she had the thumbs to do it. Immediately she shifted back and took a moment and a couple of deep breaths to allow the dizziness of the lightning-speed transformation to fade.
She had entered the kitchen, and the half-round table and three chairs against the back wall offered her a small measure of concealment while she surveyed the situation. She could smell the sharp tang of gun oil and the sour odor of metal mixed with the smells of men and food. The place was a far cry from immaculate, but it wasn't messy. Everything was in its place, even if it could have stood a thorough dusting and definitely an airing out. Over the other smells she scented blood, and curiosity drove her into the doorway.
She could hear the low murmur of a television set and, when she concentrated, the steady, even breathing of a man, both coming from the front room. Taking special care not to make a sound, she ghosted down the tiny excuse for a hall and peeked around the corner and into a dim living room. The drawn shades cut off the late afternoon sunshine, and the television provided the only artificial illumination. The man stretched out in a recliner chair with his eyes closed and his hand clasped protectively over a black remote control hadn't bothered to light a lamp. Or maybe, she thought, noting with satisfaction the sling around his neck and the bandages wrapped around his right wrist, he hadn't been able to. The lamp was on his wounded right side.
Mr. Anger Management himself, and from the looks of it, he was sound asleep. That must have been why she hadn't recognized his scent as being the one inside the house. While he was unconscious, his anger would be in hibernation mode. A testosterone lull.
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