by Mark Henwick
I guess I’d given her cause. I’d nearly attacked her, and by the end of my conversation with Felix there wasn’t anyone in the room who doubted how close to the edge I was.
But Savannah’s worry wasn’t for her personal safety. As I moved around the room drying my hair, she shifted slightly so she was shielding Claude from me. I didn’t think she was even aware of it.
I sat on the bed facing her. The gap was so narrow, our knees touched.
Tullah gave me a frown.
No one appreciated how much effort I was putting into not biting.
Maybe if I hadn’t been not biting when Olivia offered it, she’d have more time now.
Focus on the here and now.
I studied Savannah, which made her drop her eyes.
How do I start building bridges?
“I’m sorry about earlier,” she said suddenly, looking down at where her fingers worried the edge of the blanket. She spoke quietly to avoid disturbing her brother. “I’m not good at talking. Y’know. At expressing myself.”
She’d caught me off guard. I was supposed to be the one apologizing.
“That’s fine. I’m sorry too, for the way I behaved.”
Savannah’s eyes flicked across to Tullah. “You’re having problems with Blood. I understand. I should have thanked you for saving us right away, and not....” she faltered.
“And not challenged me.”
“Yeah. And you’re right. We made choices. I mean, we can’t go back. We’re kin.”
I gave a little hum of sort-of agreement and she was silent for a while.
“Pretty tats.” I reached out to run a finger down the spiraling design on her arm.
I was trying to shift her onto some other topic and let her calm down. People who put that amount of effort into getting themselves inked are usually happy to talk about it. Her tattoos were a blend of Native American totems and Celtic spirals that I thought were lovely.
“They’re beautiful, actually,” I said. “Who came up with the idea?”
“They’re my design,” she said. There was pride in her voice, but instead of calming her, my attention was having the opposite effect.
She swallowed, her heartrate edging up.
“I…I just want to ask, Mistress—”
“Amber,” I interrupted.
She nodded jerkily and went on. “I wanted to ask you to give Claude some time before you….”
She slipped her T off and moved across to sit beside me, putting one trembling hand on my leg.
“Please, feed from me instead. I’m…well, I haven’t…”
“I wasn’t planning to bite him tonight, Van,” I said. “Or you.”
“Oh.”
It wasn’t what Savannah wanted right then, but I slid an arm around her and hugged her slight body to me.
I felt her willing herself to relax.
I sighed. The right thing to do was to send her off into her own bed at once.
Despite everything, my Athanate was enjoying this too much. I wasn’t about to bite her. And this girl had spent half the evening crouched down on Zane’s floor, with a dead body and an unconscious Were for company. Was I worse than that?
Amber. Tullah’s voice inside my head. See yourself as she sees you.
My eyes went blurry and I felt dizzy. Kaothos was messing with my head.
She sent me a glimpse of myself from Savannah’s perspective.
Frowning. Strong. Overwhelming. Strange. Scary.
I blinked and eased up on the hug.
She saw me like that. How did I see her?
Savannah was a contradiction. On the surface there were the tattoos, the punky hair and the awkward speech. Nothing extreme, but not mainstream either. She was also Athanate kin and that was hardly ‘normal’. But beneath that level was a woman, barely more than a girl really, who craved normal. I’d seen inside her house in Albuquerque. Apart from the hiding space, the place defined normalcy. For Albuquerque at any rate. She’d been the one who’d created that feeling.
And she was the same girl who’d beat up on herself for not being able to do more for Larry’s other kin. Who’d risked her life without hesitation to rescue her brother.
The sort of person I hoped would be at home in House Farrell.
But also the person who, if I was reading the signals right, wasn’t at all comfortable with the idea of me biting her. Or anything else I might do to her. It made me wonder about her arrangements with Larry.
And again, she’d put all those fears aside when she’d thought I might be wanting to bite Claude. Bite me instead…
Overactive hero complex. Who does that remind me of? Tara snarked.
Shut up, smartass.
I planted a kiss on the top of Savannah’s head and willed my body to put out some of the pacific pheromones instead of the Athanate sex appeal that I’d been pumping out at the Calle.
“Go on, into bed,” I said to her, and pulled her T back over her head. “Careful not to wake Claude.”
I swiveled and slipped into the sheets as Tullah got in the other side.
“Thank you, Amber,” Savannah whispered.
“What kind of work do you do, Van?” Tullah asked to lighten the atmosphere a touch.
“I’m a biologist. I was working towards getting a research position.” She sighed. “I guess that’s gone now.”
“You’ll find something new,” I said. “What about Claude?”
“School.” Her voice was getting fainter. A couple of questions later she slipped off.
Tullah took my arm and wedged it under her pillow.
“I’m not going to go sleepwalking,” I complained. “Or sleep biting.”
“Course you aren’t,” she replied. “Not now, anyway.”
“Am I really that bad?” I murmured, thinking of the image that Savannah had had of me.
“Sometimes,” Tullah said, yawning. “You’re kinda wobbling. One minute, it’s you, and the next it’s the monster.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. David’s email come through okay?”
“Yup. Sycamore Ranch, not far from here. Something about the ownership flagged it, and he also found that Jaworski is from the Polish for sycamore.”
“Hmm. Okay, we look tomorrow.” I switched the lights out, but I wasn’t finished.
“So,” I said, dragging the sound out. “I have some questions for you.”
Tullah was suddenly nervous. With my behavior over the last day, I guessed I couldn’t blame her.
“You know when you turned up in the Hill Bitch and kidnapped me, Felix had just gotten a call. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
Tullah cleared her throat. “I can tell you it was Alex and Jen. All I know is they had some plan that would divert him.”
Interesting.
What the hell had they cooked up? Felix had said something about my kin doing ‘tremendous’ things for him. I should have questioned him about it.
Were my kin really working together? And what did it mean for them—a temporary truce? I’d have to ask them at the next opportunity.
“Okay. One more little puzzle,” I said. “When I woke up after the kidnapping, we were in Colorado Springs, in a park.”
Tullah nodded. She seemed to be finding the pattern of the blanket fascinating, tracing it with her fingers in the dark.
“In the middle of a park. A couple of minutes’ walk from the car.”
“Uh. Yeah.”
“So how did I get there? Did you carry me?”
No way they carried me. I’m five-ten and one-forty plus.
“No.” She ran her hand across the blanket one last time and then looked at me. “We did a zombie on you.”
“A what?”
“It’s sort of…” She paused. “Look, zombies don’t exist like the stories. You can’t take a body and just give it some instructions and then let it go running off to kill people and eat their brains or whatever.”
“But…”
&nbs
p; “Well, you can pilot somebody. It’s not really very useful in most situations. You can’t just jack in and control something as complex as a human body. Gross motor function only, and not much of that—”
“So, I’m getting a picture here…stumbling, slobbering, swaying…”
Tullah blushed. “No, we walked on either side. You probably just looked as if you were feeling sick. The kids in the park didn’t even notice.”
“So much better.” I had to work to sound grumpy.
“We should have a quick lesson on using the energy,” she changed the subject hurriedly, “and then you need some rest.”
“Yeah. Tell me, first, are we being dumb? Why don’t we break the lock on you and just rely on the lizard and your workings to achieve what we need?”
She snorted softly and turned the lights off.
“Kaothos and I aren’t that strong yet, whatever she says. And her signature in the energy is distinctive. We couldn’t be sure we’d be strong enough for whatever we wanted to do, and from what we saw with the Denver community, we’d have every Adept in the land united against us.”
“Okay.”
“Your signature, on the other hand, is hidden,” Tullah said thoughtfully. “You seem to have this ability to channel other workings, but without Hana it’s almost as if…”
“As if I can’t use the energy at all.”
“No.” She scratched her head. “I’m not really a shamanic Adept; I mean, I know the basic training, but I’m trained more in the standard stuff. If I didn’t know you and someone asked me, I’d say you have a little latent ability and nothing more. But Chatima knew you had much more ability—enough that she gave you the necklace. Anyway…tonight’s Adept exercises…”
We were both tired. Tullah kept going, but it wasn’t long before I was sliding toward sleep and the nightmares began to stir.
Then Kaothos came out and claimed me again.
Chapter 38
SATURDAY
Sycamore Ranch lay about halfway down the side of the hill, in a small, steep-sided canyon formed around a lazy creek. The main compound was four pink-roofed buildings in a square around a shady courtyard. A couple of SUVs were parked neatly in front. To the right of the ranch house, there were wooden barns and outbuildings.
A hundred yards beyond the ranch, the small arroyo meandered down the bottom of the valley. There was flowing water in it now, but the ground told me that this place got dry.
Regardless of that, between me and the ranch there was an orchard, laid out on terraces stepping down the hill; I could see lemon and cherry, fig, orange and lime. I was peering through the leaves of a creosote bush, so any citrus smell or anything else that might have drifted up was masked by the acrid resin. There was a white-painted water tower about two hundred yards to my left on the ridge line. I guessed that served the orchard.
There were no corrals, no sign of herd animals and no obvious farm machinery. It was no working business; apart from the fruit trees, this was just a house.
A cool wind blew and the sun shone.
Peaceful. Still.
Except for the vultures. The early arrivals were fighting over a body in the courtyard.
We’d approached the ranch by a dirt road that dog-legged this hill. I’d had Tullah stop when I spotted the vultures circling lazily, and I’d climbed up to check before we drove around the hill.
Tullah slipped in beside me, keeping behind the bush. It was easy to forget sometimes that she was still learning.
Savannah and Claude were waiting in the Hill Bitch. That wasn’t good, exposing them like that, but we’d run out of options.
What had happened?
Was Diana in the ranch?
I lifted the binoculars and began slow sweeps of the buildings, looking for anything out of place, any hint of someone waiting. I wanted to run down there. I wanted to scream. The thought of getting so close, beating all the odds of finding Diana, and then being too late was like ice in my heart.
But a little closed canyon, one road in and out, no one around for miles. It was shouting ‘trap’ at me.
That cold feeling spread to my spine and lifted hairs on my arms. I swung the glasses up to have a look at the water tower.
It was too perfectly placed. It had line of sight on the road as it curved around the hill, it overlooked the whole hilltop, the orchard, the house, the stream and the hill on the opposite side of the stream. A perfect place for a sniper.
In the shadows beneath the cylindrical body of the water tank, there was a second platform, almost invisible until you really looked. Just enough space for a couple of people to lie down and maintain a great 360 degree lookout.
It had been built for the purpose, and I was right; it would have been a great place to post a sniper. All of us would have been dead, but it was empty today.
Okay. Missed it on the first pass. Not at your best. Put it behind you.
I couldn’t make any more mistakes like that.
So why might someone spring a trap without posting a guy with a rifle in the water tower?
What if they hadn’t had time? They were still in the ranch?
I turned my attention back to the valley below.
The courtyard door to the main house was open, shifting with the breeze.
There was something wrong about the scene, something beyond the ugly contrast of peacefulness and death, unused sniper posts and open doors, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
“Anything you can do to tell me if there’s anyone alive down there?”
Tullah shook her head. “What about your bracelet?”
“Nothing at the moment, but I always worry about how it works.”
She smiled.
“I’m going down,” I said finally. “I need you to watch from here. Keep an eye on the road as well.” I handed her the binoculars and checked my cell. One bar of signal.
Damn.
Amateur hour. We needed tactical headsets, and full assault gear. And while I was at it, a squad of Ops 4-10 and one of those silent recon drones. I had a shotgun and a cellphone.
Suck it up.
I made sure Tullah knew which cell I was using.
“Call me if anything changes,” I said.
“Be careful.” She was worried, but she took the glasses without arguing and copied my slow sweep over the ranch and the outbuildings.
I hefted the shotgun and slunk over the ridge, staying low and moving quickly. The orchard beckoned; it would give me some good cover as I approached the house.
It was where I would have set a trap. Then again, I’d have had a sniper in the water tower.
Unless, maybe, I wanted to lure someone down into the ranch and capture them.
I slithered down into the cover of the trees and checked all around me.
There was nothing there, other than relief from the smell of creosote bushes.
I slipped through the trees and down the hill. My view of the ranch was obscured, and I had to trust Tullah to see what I couldn’t, ahead of me.
Crouched at the lower edge of the orchard, I still had another twenty yards to the corner of the first building. And now the smell of the orchard and the creosote plants on the hillside couldn’t mask the insidious smell of death.
It wouldn’t have been there yet for a human, but I was relying on my wolf senses.
I tried to block out the death and focus on the rest.
The marque was House Romero; we’d found Oscar Jaworski’s House. But it was just the scent. The marque’s other component, the feeling of a presence, simply wasn’t there.
Didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone else here.
Pressure was growing on me to act.
I sprinted across to the closest part of the building and trotted down the side, glancing in windows as I went past.
Stopped. About halfway down I could make out one body in a room. Two in the next. Still silent. And still no other scents or marques.
I went on. Down at the end, I tried a doo
r. It was unlocked.
Booby-trapped? Someone waiting?
Got to keep moving.
Pressing myself against the wall, I pushed the door open.
Nothing. No explosions, no reactions, no movement at all apart from the vultures.
This was starting to stretch my nerves like violin strings. I’d have almost welcomed an attack.
Stupid thought.
I went in and began to work my way through, room by room, sprinting down corridors where I had no cover, whipping myself around corners and into rooms.
The buildings all connected, all the way around the courtyard. The bedrooms were luxurious, the living rooms wide and airy, storerooms neat. The kitchen could have catered for a small army. The dining room would have seated thirty.
The only sound came from my footsteps and my pounding heart.
I could barely breathe. Any second I knew I’d find Diana.
Room after room.
Five bedrooms had bodies in the beds. Some of them had been shot while sleeping. Others had leaped up when someone came in. There was no difference in the end result. Athanate and kin, male and female, dead and tangled in bedclothes.
Whoever had done this had struck last night, probably in the early hours of this morning, in almost complete silence.
This was Jaworski’s secret retreat. Why no bodies outside, apart from the one in the courtyard? Had he felt so secure, he’d posted no guards? Or had they betrayed him?
Either way, he’d made a huge miscalculation and it had cost him everything.
He was there, the only one I recognized, in the huge living room—surrounded by bodies, dried blood splatter, the smell of death and violence. And flies.
There was no one alive in the ranch.
And no Diana.
There was no cellphone signal either.
I needed the exercise to clear the images out from behind my eyes and the smell from my nose. I ran up the hill back to Tullah, picking out the rocky parts where I got good traction.
“No one alive down there,” I panted when I reached the top. “I want Claude on that platform underneath the water tower, watching the road. If he sees anything, he runs as fast as he can down to the ranch. You and Savannah come around in the car. I need both of you.”