“Marley Philips. Welcome to the Great Hall of the MacKenzie.” Sean spoke with a harsh voice that made him seem older than he looked. He was slightly built, though every sparse inch of him was rangily muscled, his narrow frame swathed in a fur cloak over the tartan tunic he wore. “Few humans have ever set foot in here.”
“I’m honored.” I meant it.
“Good. Do you understand why I have asked to see you?”
I nodded, carefully. I could take a guess but did not want to offend my host – word was that Sean had a temper. “I think that, while you respect werewolf strength more than any other Pack Leader, you’re also a practical wolf. Werewolves aren’t the best investigators – they’re too direct to be subtle. I’m making more headway in this business than your men, even though I don’t know anything about it. So I think, maybe, you’re going to tell me what it’s about, and see if I can help you.”
Sean watched me with dark eyes for a moment before nodding. “That covers it. My men,” he threw out a hand towards Talbot, Kessler and Reed, “are supreme fighters and hunters. They are wolves. They took on this job because I commanded it, but such a job is beneath their dignity.” He gave a little shake of his head. “And try as they might, they are shit at it.”
“I wouldn’t say that…” I tried to stand up for the men.
“I would. It’s not their fault. Like I said; they are wolves. None finer. But for the nasty, underhanded, dishonest job of investigation,” he pronounced the word as if he was afraid of catching something, “you need a human. And you seem to be the human for me.”
Did I want a job working for MacKenzie Sean?
“I’m flattered,” I began, “but I don’t…”
“You don’t want to work for a werewolf,” Sean finished the thought. “Or at least, not for a Pack Leader. Not a good look for someone who used to be on the Werewolf Squad. I didn’t think you would. Look,” he leaned forward on his wooden throne, “we’re all on the same side here, all I’m suggesting is we pool our resources. If you can work with my men; great. If you’d rather work alone then you go your way and they go theirs. It doesn’t matter to me who finds Molly, as long as she is found.”
“Molly?” My cop instincts were on the alert. “That’s Lovely’s real name?”
“The name I gave her,” nodded Sean. “She is my daughter.”
That explained the interest of the Pack Leader and why he would put his own wolves on it. If Molly was caught up in something bad then he would want to protect her, which might not be possible if he called the cops. But there was at least one question still begging.
“But Lovely was singing at The Silver Fox two years ago…”
Sean held up a hand. “It’s easiest if I tell it. Molly is one of my middle children.” Pack Leaders commonly have a lot of kids from multiple mates. “She was always willful and headstrong, which I encouraged – up to a point. It’s good for werewolf youngsters, male and female, to find their own path. But the one Molly chose was always bad. Here in MacKenzie territory we believe in the wildness of our natures, we encourage wolves to embrace the darkness and violence of their ancestry. Unfortunately, this does mean that when our pups rebel – as children must – they do so to extremes.
“Molly took up with a young werewolf named Texas. He was a strong and independent male, which I approved of, but there was something about him I didn’t like, and I latterly found out that he was a small-time dealer in wolfbane.” Sean growled viciously beneath his breath. “Bane has ravaged my territory, and to have a male who was selling it hanging around my daughter,” the growl became a sharp snarl of contempt, “I forbade Molly from seeing him.”
“I can’t imagine that went well,” I commented.
Sean gave a wry smile. “I should have known it would drive her away. She ran off with Texas.”
“You tried to find her?”
Sean frowned at me as if I was speaking Greek. “Of course not. She is a werewolf, not some pathetic human. She had chosen her path and that was that. If she dies in a gutter from a bane overdose then that’s nothing to do with me.”
“But?” I wondered, knowing there was more.
Sean hung his head. “Perhaps I am growing weak with age. When the word of this Dog’s death reached me… I knew that she had been involved with the case against him. I let it happen without a word – she made her bed and if it led her to jail or worse then so be it. But that was then, and now…” He shook his head. “Drugs are one thing. Killing is part of werewolf nature. But murder? The clandestine, premediated ‘assassination’ of another? That is not what werewolves do. It makes me wonder into what pit of degradation this Texas has dragged her. And in my weakness, I find that I care about her. I do not know if she can be restored to me, but I would like to know that she is alright.”
That was a lot of information to take in, and I needed time to think on it. But one thing stood out.
“This Texas,” I asked, “definitely not the same person as Dog?”
Sean shook his head. “Texas was young and handsome. The sort of male every teenage female wants to mate with.”
And yet, everyone knew that Lovely was with Dog. When had that happened? And how? And, frankly, why? I needed to speak to this Texas.
“Marley Philips,” Sean addressed me, “will you help me find my daughter?”
I nodded without a thought. “Sure.” I looked around at the three guys behind me. “And I could use some help.”
The time would come when I needed werewolves on my side, and these three had skills that would be essential in the danger I was going into.
Plus; why wouldn’t I want them around?
Chapter 9
After a night’s rest – and most of the morning, too; it had been a long one – we met up again, but there was one important thing to be decided.
“So, who’s in charge?”
Werewolves have a strictly hierarchical structure by which their packs are organized and sub-organized. As soon as I saw the three guys together in the interrogation room earlier, it had been clear to me that Talbot was the one who called the shots, but now I was involved. One of the good things about wolves is that gender is seldom a major factor. The Arctic Pack had a female Pack Leader and that was not so unusual. Wolves believed in the equality of survival; if you could tough it out and beat all comers then you could be in charge. The females who rose through the pack might, therefore, have to be tougher than their male counterparts, but they had a right to be there.
That said, I didn’t want to be in charge of three werewolves.
That said, I didn’t want to take orders from one, either.
“We work for separate bosses. You guys are reporting back to Sean, I’m working for me,” I explained. “So, we’re not really working together, we’re working nearby. That means no one is in charge.”
The werewolves looked at each other. You know that look a dog gets when you pretend to throw a ball and, to them, the ball has just vanished? That was how they looked on being presented with the concept of ‘no one in charge’.
“So,” said Talbot, who was still technically in charge of everyone but me, “we go along to this warehouse and see what we can find?”
“Sounds good.”
Sean had had no address for Texas, but knew that his ‘business’ had been run out of a warehouse on the outskirts of MacKenzie territory. This location was important, as it meant the bane dealers could skip across the border at the first sign of trouble. If a band of armed wolves loyal to the MacKenzie crossed into Kenai territory, that was an act of war – a risk that Sean could not take.
Still, I couldn’t help wondering why Sean had never moved against the operation. He had muttered something about it being very small scale, not worth bothering with, but I fancied that he was again protecting his daughter, something he was ashamed to be caught doing. For a Pack Leader, defending a disobedient child was a sign of weakness.
Whether or not the operation – such as it was – was still i
n the same place, no one knew, but it was a good start, and practically the only lead we had on the elusive Texas. As we drove out towards the outskirts, I fulfilled my end of this resource-pooling bargain we had and told the guys about the matchbook.
“Her b.day?” asked Kessler, perplexed.
“That’s what it said.”
“Like one of those French bathroom things that squirts water up your…”
“No. B, D, A, Y – b.day, as in birthday.”
“Her birthday,” Talbot mused. “M and M base.”
“Headquarters for something?” suggested Reed. “Maybe Dog found out where Texas is running his drug operation.”
“M and M could be a new drug,” agreed Kessler. “Like the sweets. Dealers are always trying to hook kids into a habit. If Texas had a new type of bane that was made to look like sweets for kids.”
“Makes sense,” nodded Reed. “There was a period after the B, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I replied.
“Could stand for bane. Potentially. Her bane day. The day he sells to… who? Molly?” He sighed. “Even if it’s right, it still doesn’t tell us much.”
“I bet we’re not far off what it means though,” said Kessler.
“Her b.day. M and M base,” Talbot repeated to himself, apparently not listening to his friends.
I had to admit that what Kessler and Reed had worked out between them made sense, but it also made a lot of assumptions. And was it the sort of thing you wrote down? You wrote down stuff you had to remember and might forget; names, numbers, addresses, that type of thing. Someone’s birthday you might write down. I made a mental note to check Molly’s birthday.
The explanation my new comrades had come up with just struck me as a bit too simple – a wolfish explanation. But then again, the note had been written by a wolf, and a pretty simple one, at that. Maybe I was the one who was wrong for trying to come up with something more complex when it had been written by Dog, a man for whom 'complex’ was an eight-letter word beginning with ‘k’.
“Does my head in,” murmured Kessler.
“What?” I asked, rejoining the conversation.
“The fact that we dragged you into an interrogation room to get ‘Her B.Day. M and M base’ out of you. I’m glad we failed. That would have been a major disappointment.”
“May yet prove important.” I didn’t know how, but every cop instinct in me said this was important.
It would be unfair to say that MacKenzie territory was all the slums of the city, there were some very nice areas – mostly populated by humans, it had to be said - and others that could have been nice if wolves cared more about that sort of thing, but there were other regions that were barely more than wasteland. It was via the largely abandoned old industrial district that the MacKenzie had first claimed their portion of the city, under Sean’s grandmother, MacKenzie Innes, a formidable woman who cast a long shadow over her descendants. From this powerbase they had spread out, claiming their territory street by street, fighting back other wolves where they found them and throwing them out of houses. Perhaps a lot of their territory was ground no other pack wanted, but it was theirs. Perhaps it was that happy connection to the past that had encouraged subsequent generations to leave the empty warehouses and factories of the industrial district as it was. Or perhaps it was a lack of money and inclination.
Pulling up in the outskirts as evening fell, the four of us got out of Talbot’s car and made our way past abandoned machines and burned out shells of buildings, following a map drawn by MacKenzie Sean ‘as far as I can remember it’. I observed the guys as we walked. They might not be skilled at tailing someone on the city streets but this was a hunt, and that was something with which they were far more comfortable. Though they did not speak, or communicate with each other in any other way that I could see, they seemed in complete synchronicity, as if each knew where the others were and what they were doing at any point. They spread out across the derelict landscape, their eyes constantly alert to danger, their bodies tensed and ready for action.
“That’s it.” I spoke quietly as we approached the ruined warehouse, knowing how good wolf hearing was. “Let’s take a look around the back.”
I could almost feel the three pairs of eyes on me. Werewolves go in through the front, and they go in hard.
“We don’t know what’s in there,” I remonstrated with Talbot.
“One way to find out.”
“Talbot…”
“You said; we’re not working together. You go around the back if you want. But we’re going in here. Now.”
He about-faced and kicked the door open, striding in like he owned the place. As he did it, I couldn’t help admiring and envying him. To have that sort of confidence in yourself and your ability. I could use that.
Kessler and Reed followed, spreading out as they went in, covering the wide empty space in the warehouse. I went in after them, feeling a little meek and stupid now. I had wanted them to creep around the back to sneak into an empty building. The interior of the warehouse was barely lit by high windows, smeared with grease and grime, admitting the failing light of the evening. There were scraps of boxes, broken glass, empty beer cans, a shopping cart and the various detritus of empty building everywhere.
“Doesn’t look like anyone’s been here for a while,” commented Reed.
“Someone has.” I might be a terrible coward when it came to kicking down doors, but I could spot tell-tale signs of life better than a werewolf. “The door hinge has been oiled.”
Talbot nodded. “Someone who wanted to come in quietly.”
Kessler had gone further in, peering into the gloom. “What’s that smell?”
Reed pulled a face. “I don’t know how you can pick any single smell out.”
“Abandoned places like this usually get used by the homeless,” Talbot explained to me. “All you can smell after they’ve been here is urine, stale beer and staler sweat.”
“There’s something else,” muttered Kessler. “Just in the background. I can’t quite…”
He was cut off by the sound of a trapdoor opening and slamming against the floor. A figure popped up, bringing a rifle to his shoulder.
“Get down!” yelled Talbot, dragging me to the floor and covering my body with his own.
Gunshots echoed around the empty space and were joined moments later by a loud snarl. As Talbot sprang off of me and pulled me back to my feet, I saw Kessler, now in wolf form, leaping onto the trapdoor and pulling out the man with the gun, who shifted himself. The two rolled on the floor, clawing and biting.
“Help him!” I yelled.
But Kessler could take care of himself. Which was good, because suddenly, one man with a rifle was the least of our worries. More trapdoors had opened in the floor, more people rushing out, all of them armed and making for us. Talbot and Reed shifted and sprang into action. Neither of them carried guns because… well, because werewolves weren’t supposed to, and yet here was a room full of armed wolves. They weren’t using the guns well – more like this was their first time, but the number of them made that matter less.
My weapon had been confiscated when I was captured earlier that day but I had gotten it back before leaving and I leveled it at a wolf, who was taking aim for Talbot. The wolf fell, showing that there was at least one person in the room who knew how to handle her piece. I picked my targets carefully – I didn’t have many bullets and silver bullets don’t come cheap – and kept on the move after a few shots impacted into the wall by my head, making the elderly plaster crack and split.
Thankfully, you can give a werewolf a gun, but you can’t make him want to use it, and as soon as the guys started engaging with them hand to hand then the wolves dropped their weapons and rushed to join the fight. There was no question who the better fighters were, Talbot, Kessler and Reed seemed to be everywhere at once, moving like demons as they fought back the horde, but they were vastly outnumbered.
Talbot snarled a command at his friends, the
n dived across the floor, dodging a slashing blow from one of his attackers. As he rolled, he shifted into human.
“Head for the door,” he yelled at me as he rolled, shifting back into wolf with seamless speed.
I did as I was told. A werewolf blocked my way and I kicked it hard between the legs. It lashed out at me and I ducked, grabbing a broken piece of wood from the floor as I did so and whipping it across the wolf’s face hard enough to snap the wood in two. Grabbing the stunned animal by the throat, I ran it back into the wall and smacked its head into the plaster. The beast collapsed at my feet.
I made it to the door. “Come on!”
As Talbot delivered another growled command – unintelligible to me, I’ve never met a human who’s been able to decipher wolfish – Reed peeled off from the fight and dashed back across the room, shifting back into human as he went. A wolf tried to take him down but Reed was too quick, dodging aside before delivering a spinning kick into the werewolf’s snout.
Reaching the door, he grabbed me and dragged me through.
“What about…”
“Come on.”
“But…”
“They’re just behind us.”
I don’t leave people behind - I didn’t do it as a cop and I wasn’t about to start now. But as I tried to get back to the door to help Talbot and Kessler, who were clearly giving us time to escape, Reed swept me off my feet and plonked me over his shoulder.
“Sorry about this. You can tell me how sexist it is later.”
I know how to fight wolves – I’ve kicked werewolf ass in my time – but when a werewolf as strong as Reed had a hold of you, there was nothing to do about it. From my undignified vantage point, I could see back to the warehouse. A wolf skidded out into the darkness and took off after us. It didn’t make it more than a few steps as Kessler bounded out after it, taking it down and tossing it into the wall of the warehouse like a rag doll.
To my relief, Talbot was not far behind, and the two wolves hurried off in the opposite direction to Reed and I, splitting the attentions of our pursuers.
Her Guardian Harem: Paranormal Reverse Harem Romance Page 7