Hidden Trump (Bite Back 2)

by Mark Henwick

  In between all the threats and posturing, I knew he wasn’t stupid. I hadn’t expected the alpha of the Denver pack to be. There was an element of playing to the crowd going on here, and that helped me relax a fraction.

  “Show me.” He waved at my backpack, making the correct assumption that I hadn’t just shown up empty-handed to start spouting allegations.

  I unfastened the flap and retrieved my first exhibit, some plaster casts of werewolf paw prints.

  “I took these up at Bitter Hooks. They’re your pack, I believe.” I knelt and placed them in a row on the ground, in size order, with a ruler next to them.

  “Olivia, some light,” Larimer said.

  There was a creaking and banging in the rafters as a woman, in human form, threw open a skylight shutter, suddenly flooding the center of the barn with light. I blinked. Mercifully cool air stirred.

  Larimer came and stood just behind me, looking over my shoulder. I took a deep breath and tried to ignore him, but I had to admit, he had a presence; I could sense him there.

  Next, I laid some photographs and sketches down alongside the casts.

  “These are from police reports. Some of them, the older ones, are from non-fatal attacks reported as large dogs.”

  “And the others? The more recent ones?”

  “Murder investigations, where the coroner concluded that unidentified animals had disturbed the body post mortem.”

  There was a silence in the barn; even the panting had stopped. Far away, birds called in the trees. Outside, the wind rustled the grasses and Leatherface dropped a tool onto metal with a curse.

  “Ricky,” called Larimer.

  At the edge of my vision, there was movement, a distortion like looking at a heat mirage. Out of it stepped Ricky, a blond Viking type, unshaven, six feet six at least and completely naked. He didn’t seem concerned. He stood behind my other shoulder. Very close.

  “Big,” he said. His voice was quiet. I had to bite my tongue again. Yes, you could say that.

  “Yeah,” I said, when I had my humor under control. “Way too big for a dog. As big as the biggest of the casts I took.” I cleared my throat. “One or two, I could overlook. I’d take that as coincidence, errors in measurement, whatever. Half a dozen, no way. A dozen makes it a serious problem.”

  “You haven’t got a dozen reports there,” said Ricky.

  I stood up. I’m not body-conscious, but it was difficult to concentrate with the Nordic god looming over my shoulder like that.

  “Those were what the police gave me. There were some where no casts were taken. Anyway, I did some checking, and I found something that isn’t in the main police files, yet.”

  I pulled out the printout and tossed it alongside the rest.

  “Those are from consultants brought in by the police and experts the consultants talked to. Some of them are in Spanish, and I’m a little hazy on the science.” I paused, wiped some of the sweat from my face. “The first was a zoologist brought in by the coroner to check some bite marks on some femurs and cervical vertebrae in a couple of the recent cases. The zoologist pointed out that the femurs had actually been snapped by bites, not by blows. So they brought in a consultant and asked him what kind of dog can do that.”

  Maybe I should have been a lecturer; I had the most attentive audience ever. They knew all about bite force, of course, but I needed to build the logic.

  “Turns out an average dog can’t. Their bite force is around 750 psi. A specialist dog might be higher. An average wolf would be about 1500. The consultant said it had to have been an escaped hyena, because it was over double that.”

  Fresh air whispered past my face, chilling the sweat.

  “The police dropped it at that point. It was costing money and they thought it was going nowhere. They thought the data had problems. But the consultant had gotten curious, and he sent the findings to an expert he’d met at a conference. A professor in Spain, whose area is hyenas.”

  I stepped around the big square patch of sun and tried to pierce the darkness at the corners of the barn.

  “The professor said the data must be wrong too. Either it isn’t a hyena and the force calculations are wrong, he said, or it is a hyena and the teeth patterns are wrong. End of story, except he got drunk that night and wrote another email as a joke. In that one, he speculated that it had to be a wolf from the pattern, and attempted to figure out how big the wolf would have to be to generate that force.”

  Larimer watched me, his face unreadable. Ricky stood listening with a deep frown twisting his pale face, looking down at the casts.

  “Answer is about double the mass of a normal wolf. Now mass doesn’t increase directly in proportion to height, so he did some arithmetic. Came out with a wolf that stood four feet at the shoulder.”

  I looked around. At least half of them would have qualified.

  Larimer stirred. “When?” He waved at the casts and reports.

  “Oldest attack, a year ago. Newest, last month,” I replied.

  “Why have you brought this to us?”

  “You’re the resident pack. Are you telling me there are other werewolves in Denver?” I asked.

  Larimer really didn’t like that. Neither did Ricky. Of course, Alex had told me there was a problem, but now I knew it officially. The Denver pack were under some kind of attack.

  “So, there’s another pack in Denver? Unwelcome?”

  Larimer nodded curtly.

  “How long?”

  There was a snarl from the shadows, but Ricky snarled back and a whine of apology came back. It got quieter, but there was still the subliminal growl shivering through me, and the sound of wolves creeping closer in the dark, crowding me.

  “Three months or so,” said Larimer. “They won’t be here for much longer.”

  “So nothing to do with these.” I touched the older reports with a toe, trying to ignore the pressure of eyes on me. “Is this the same sort of thing they’re doing?”

  Larimer grunted noncommittally.

  “There’s something else,” he said, and waited. “You haven’t finished, have you?”

  “Yes. I don’t know what it means, but these files are being copied to the FBI. Whatever is going on needs to stop and it needs to stop soon. None of us want the FBI poking around in Denver.”

  There was a shocked silence that Larimer pretended to shrug off.

  “Ahhh. So that’s it. The Athanate don’t want the FBI here.”

  “You can make up whatever damned reason you like, Larimer,” I snapped. “I haven’t had time to talk to Altau about this. I brought it to you because it’s your concern.”

  He backed off a yard or two, becoming a pale floating shape in the darkness again. I could feel him watching me still.

  A half-dozen other Were changed with the eye-hurting distortion, and came forward to look at the reports. A couple of women as well as the men. I gave them space. None of them looked at me as if I was doing them a favor, but at least none were actively hostile.

  Ricky and one of his friends were frowning at my casts, but Larimer was still intent on me. He strolled back into the light. The look on his face was more wary and evaluating now, rather than outright intimidating.

  “Is there more I can do to help with this?” I asked him.

  “We don’t need help from Athanate,” snarled Ricky’s friend, looking up from the casts. I just smiled at him and he was smart enough to understand how stupid he’d just been. He didn’t like that. He flushed with anger and growled, a sound too tight and light with his human throat, but full of threat.

  An answering growl came from behind me, deeper, vibrating through my chest. Alex.

  Everyone froze.

  Ricky’s hand clamped on his friend’s arm and his human face made a good impression of a wolf’s bared fangs, but too late. The group around him seemed to swirl, coalescing into the pack against the outsider. I twisted the backpack in my hand. I could have the HK out in a tenth of a second. And after the magazine e
mptied I could use it as a club while they tore me to pieces.

  Ricky hurled a couple aside, but it was Larimer who ended it, lashing out at the forming group, breaking the dynamic and snarling at the aggressors. He was sweating freshly for all that he tried to look unconcerned at the challenges.

  The pack fell quiet. Alex didn’t. Larimer’s eyes weighed me, weighed Alex. He saw the way I held the backpack, and I didn’t doubt his nose had told him what was in there. He looked past me at Alex.

  “My apologies, Alexander,” he said formally. “I have mistrusted you on the evidence of something I did not understand. But this is not a matter for challenges.” He glared around him.

  The noise from Alex lowered without quite ceasing to be a growl. Larimer cautiously came closer to me.

  “And my apologies to you too, Ms. Farrell. You appear to be sincere, and if you’ve caused problems for us, they are less than what you’ve brought to our attention.” His mouth twisted as his eyes flicked to the backpack. “Your willingness to come here freely, and your willingness to die alongside Alexander speaks well of you. Perhaps some good will come of this.”

  Alex went quiet behind me and the pressure in the barn collapsed like an old tire.

  “Honestly,” I said to Larimer. “I thought relations were better than this.” I cleared my throat. “New Athanate and Were, you know…”

  “Oh, that was fine. It worked well.”

  “Worked? As in used to work? It’s stopped?”

  Larimer raised a brow at me, surprised I didn’t know. “It has.”

  “Why?”

  “Ask the Altau, Farrell,” Ricky said. “They haven’t told us anything.” He’d dragged his friend forward to stand between him and Larimer. The boy stuttered an apology and fled when I shrugged it off. I guess it’s difficult for a guy to stand stark naked in front of a clothed woman and apologize for being an ass, Were or not.

  “It’s not for me to say, Larimer, but I’m sure you and Altau can sort this out next week.”

  He snorted. “Yes, next week, not this week, not with Denver stinking of Athanate.”

  I ignored that. “My offer stands, if there’s anything I can do. And my gut feeling says that Altau will be on your side if there’s a problem.”

  “That would be a first.” Larimer snorted.

  “There’s something else that Alex wanted me here for.” I didn’t want to introduce the topic since the alpha seemed so twitchy about protocol, but Alex could hardly do it. “Maybe…” I was going to suggest Alex joined us on two legs, but one glance from the alpha shut me up.

  “It’s better for the pack if he stays wolf for the moment,” he said without explanation. “Anyway, I know what it’s about.” He returned to his canvas seat and sat back down with a sigh.

  “Alexander is entirely too taken in by the local stories. He thinks your great-grandmother was an Adept involved in the transition of new Were, and we should investigate.”

  I shifted my weight. I didn’t really believe it either, but he was dismissing it out of hand. I wanted to be convinced one way or another on evidence. Alex wouldn’t have arranged this if he couldn’t make a good argument for it.

  “And you’re having some…issues there.” I skirted the problem word, but I wanted to see his reaction. Larimer himself gave nothing away. But he’d used the reaction from the pack to threaten me, and now it worked against him. I could feel their reaction in the dark corners of the barn. There was a problem. And as I came to that conclusion, the same question I’d asked about Athanate came to the surface. Where were all the werewolves? This couldn’t be the whole pack, surely? My sense of smell had been getting sharper over the last couple of years as I became more Athanate, and I’d never smelled a hint of Were in Denver until I’d met Alex.

  Larimer was watching me shrewdly, trying to guess the thoughts going through my head.

  “The thing is,” he said, “even if, as the stories say, you were firstborn and received the token, and it actually worked, you’ve obviously lost the knowledge that goes with it.”

  Ask questions and say nothing.

  I jumped. Tara spoke to me at the oddest times, but I always listened. Something had just happened here.

  “What token?” I said to cover my surprise.

  “A fetish.” He waved his hand in exasperation. “Some mumbo-jumbo ritual thing that gets passed down. Who knows, a cup? A carving? Adepts are always into that sort of crap. And they’d love to claim it was their role, to help the Were. That the Were need Adepts.”

  “Who would know the rituals? Adepts? You said the knowledge is lost. Do you mean completely?”

  He shrugged. “If it exists, the Adepts might know.”

  “You don’t get along well with them either?”

  “I prefer thinking of it,” he bared his teeth in what he might have described as a smile, “as no one gets along well with us.”

  Okay.

  “So my great-grandmother may have been an Adept.”

  Larimer sat forward. “She almost certainly was.” He pointed at my belly. “I can sense there are echoes in there, Ms. Farrell. That doesn’t mean she had any role with the Were. And you want to be very careful with Adepts. They don’t like people who aren’t Adepts experimenting with powers.”

  A creak above made me glance up. Olivia was lying on a cross beam like a leopard, staring hungrily at me. She hadn’t been in wolf form when I’d come in and still wasn’t. Maybe she was one of the problems. I hoped that was the cause of the hungry look, not that there was a tasty Athanate trapped in a barn in the middle of nowhere.

  Get out. Now.

  “Well, I’ve said my piece.” I indicated the casts and photos. “The one police officer who knows that I’m looking at this will hold off a while, but at some stage he’s going to want to talk to me. We need to talk again before then. What the FBI are doing, and what they might make of this, I don’t claim to know.”

  Larimer nodded.

  I twisted around. “Alex?”

  “You will leave him alone for a while,” Larimer said. “It’s what he needs.”

  “Forgive me, alpha, but I’ll let him tell me that.”

  Larimer growled. “Don’t call me alpha and then refuse my command.”

  Alex lay down where he was. He wasn’t coming with me, but something told me he wasn’t going to stay away either.

  I went.

  Leatherface didn’t look up as I passed. If he had, I might have told him he had the cam on his distributor upside down.

  Chapter 29

  There were no connections for the octopus to make until I was back in the city limits. That was fine—it gave me time to recover from meeting the pack.

  I got Tullah to reserve an interview room for the rest of the day at the Keynes building, and to generate me some fake business cards to be delivered there. Then I primed Arvinder’s Diakon that I would arrange a pickup for Arvinder and confirmed he would be alone. Finally I called Victor.

  “Vic, you good?”

  “I’m great. What crazy bitch scheme you trying to sell me this time?”

  “I’m hurt, big man.”

  “Don’t bother.” He chuckled. “I can hear it in your voice. What you want, girl?”

  “That security system we used last year, will it still work? Say, in the Keynes building?”

  He went quiet. “No guarantee. Never was. Look, I’m not gonna tell you not to, but you sure?”

  “I appreciate it, Vic, but I’ve got no time, I gotta do it this way.”

  “Okay. You there?”

  “I got a meeting room there. And I need a guy collected and delivered to me, clean of trackers and followers. It’ll be a last minute confirmation. And one of your micro cameras.”

  We haggled on the costs, but his prices were good for the quality I needed, and most of it I was going to pass right on to Skylur. It wasn’t my idea to meet Arvinder. The rest of it, I’d take on rather than pass it on to Niall. Not good business sense, but something I ha
d to do.

  I deleted another message on my cell about turning up at Haven, this one from Jason.

  And that done, it left me with no way to avoid thinking of what had happened at the wolf meeting.

  The shocks and threats, well, I kind of got them; I understood in my gut how the pack worked, how it responded to outsiders and handled insiders. I could have done without the threats, but I knew it was necessary for the wolf side to do these things. Maybe it was exaggerated, but it was only society with big teeth. I shook my head at that thought–when had I become such a werewolf expert?

  At least Alex and I had half an understanding with them. I got that it was a problem that needed to be resolved, not parked, and there was a time limit on it.

  Strangely, that wasn’t concerning me half so much as the trigger that upset Tara.

  There was something about a gift passed down to the eldest, an elusive tickle of a memory. Eldest. My hands gripped the steering wheel as a thought emerged. I hadn’t been firstborn. Tara had been.

  I remembered; there was something in my mother’s souvenir box that hadn’t been given to me. My father saying it wasn’t his to give, because he hadn’t been eldest either. Something that was waiting to be passed on to the firstborn of the next generation. A chill went through me as I visualized Alex’s chart of the Farrells.

  It couldn’t be.

  I dug his file out of my backpack. One hand on the wheel, I flicked it open. Papers spilled from it onto the floor.

  Damn. I pulled over and gathered the sheets up, picking out the chart.

  I was right. It wasn’t just that children had died. All the eldest had been stillborn or died as infants, even among the cousins. And the gift in the box passed unclaimed.

  I shuddered and put the thoughts aside. It was ridiculous. I was not going to start believing in multi-generational curses or magically deadly gifts. It was only three generations. It was a coincidence. I’d just ask Mom what was in the box when she got back from vacation. Just for interest.

  And how did Mom know all those Arapaho children’s stories? Speaks-to-Wolves was Dad’s grandmother, not Mom’s. Like many things that I’d learned as a child, I’d never questioned it. And when the time came to think about it, it grew deeply uncomfortable.