Bite Back Box Set 2

by Mark Henwick

  Timely reminder. You’re just as dead if you’re killed by chance. I crouched.

  We didn’t want to kill any of them, but I didn’t want any of us dead either. And leaving a trigger-happy Were in here when emergency services would be on their way wasn’t a good outcome either.

  Luckily I had one last flash bomb.

  There was the sound of the patrol vans skidding to a halt outside the south entrance. As they emerged, the Were would be caught, bound and tossed into the vans.

  “Team South, four secure.” Alex’s voice, tense and level.

  Done.

  I had to move on the final one.

  “Team South, one more coming up soon. Fire in the hole,” I said, and threw the flash bomb in the direction the shots had come from.

  Boom.

  I covered my ears and eyes, so I was in a lot better shape than the hapless holdout.

  Tom beat me to him anyway.

  He vaulted through the broken window, rolled and came up in one smooth motion, his reloaded gun pointed at the last Were, who had dropped his gun and was stumbling backwards, completely blind and deaf.

  He’d recover.

  “Pick him up, Tom. Time to go.”

  I scooped up the gun he’d dropped, and then we grabbed his arms and sprinted to the south exit.

  “Coming out with prisoner,” I yelled. It sounded like I was calling from the bottom of a well. Despite covering up, my ears were still ringing.

  Tom repeated it on the comm and then we were outside.

  Bian grabbed our prisoner and threw him in the back of the last of the patrol vans, following him inside.

  Our van pulled up. Elizabetta was already inside.

  “Go, go, go.” I leaped onboard as the driver hit the gas.

  And we were gone.

  Chapter 25

  “Hello, boys,” I said cheerfully.

  We were at a safe house, half a mile from the scene and on the other side of the river. Everyone was inside, Tom was calling HQ to report, and I was speaking to the LA Were, who were trussed up like turkeys ready for the oven.

  The Altau patrol were still glaring at the Were. Being shot at does that to you. The fact that we’d captured them didn’t seem to be enough payback. And the Were knew it, even though they were still suffering from shock. They just about managed a snarl at me between them.

  All guys. If I didn’t know, I’d have been hard put to pick them out of an LA crowd as Were. Black pants; bulky, colorful jackets; scarves; plain shirts; work boots.

  I sniffed, let their marque take its unique form in my nose, tasted their Call.

  “You aren’t Pasadena, so I’m guessing maybe Redondo?”

  One of them spat. I ignored that. I watched the eyes. Who looked where. Who looked down.

  The eyes told me that the guy who’d stayed behind in the building was their leader. He was out of it for now, lying semi-conscious on the floor. If he was awake, he’d be getting his sight and hearing back about now, but he’d also managed to pick up a bad blow to the head. We’d overdosed him with standard human painkillers and trusted his Were defenses would deal with it.

  I’d guessed his number two was a rangy Latino with short, stiff hair and a horseshoe mustache.

  Subtle head movements in the pack. Horseshoe stared at each of the others until they lowered their eyes, then looked back at me, his authority confirmed. It was an angry look.

  Not happy. I guess not going to be my best friend.

  “Long Beach,” he said.

  “So that’s three packs I know of. Who are the others?”

  Horseshoe chewed the question around. I wasn’t exactly asking him to reveal secrets, but he really didn’t want to answer.

  I waited him out.

  Finally, he grunted: “The Heights. Whittier down to Chino.”

  “Is that all the packs?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  Four, not the five that Dominé thought.

  “You’re alive because we don’t want to fight with the local Were.”

  “Should’ve thought of that before you came here.” The speaker was one of the subordinate Were, and he shut up when Horseshoe snarled at him.

  “You’ve invaded our territory—” he started.

  “Nothing that couldn’t have been settled with a conversation,” I said. “Instead, you started shooting at us.”

  Horseshoe’s eyes went to Alex.

  “Oh, you were only shooting at my mate. That’s all right then.”

  He looked back and I could see his nostrils flare as he sniffed the marque in the room.

  He’d get there eventually. Separate out the Altau Athanate and be left with just Alex and me.

  Three. Two. One.

  He frowned, right on cue. “What the fuck?”

  “Yeah. What the fuck are you doing shooting at folk who’re on Athanate business? We’re Athanate as well as Were. You want to start a war?”

  His eyes widened. “You’re the hybrid…” he said.

  He might as well have gone on and called me ‘bitch’. I could sense he wanted to.

  Yup. So not going to be friends with him.

  To my surprise, he sucked it up, kinda.

  “My apologies. Really,” he choked out as Alex snorted. “Why didn’t you contact us?”

  But he wasn’t talking to me. He’d fixed on Alex, and he was apologizing to him as if I wasn’t there.

  “Couldn’t find your website, let alone your contact information,” Alex said.

  The sarcasm bounced off Horseshoe.

  Alex was getting irritated, and letting his dominance ooze out.

  Maybe that was the way to go. Together we were an alpha pair, and unless there were exceptional alphas in LA I hadn’t heard of, we’d be dominant over the whole bunch of them.

  If only it was so quick and easy.

  Alex glanced my way and I jerked my head to indicate we should get out of earshot.

  In the darkness outside the house we hugged. I closed my eyes and just enjoyed the feeling of his arms for a minute, the scent of my own big, bad wolf.

  “I gotta leave these guys to you,” I said finally, and told him about the New Mexico Were turning up at the club and the short version of the meeting with Skylur.

  Bian came out.

  “Tarez called. Advises us to cut them loose,” she said. “He’s worried that holding them will jeopardize any deal he can make with the local packs.”

  “No. Alone, he isn’t going to make a deal in any reasonable timeframe,” Alex said. “Four packs who probably can’t stand each other? What’s he going to offer?”

  “Yeah. We need to find out what’ll attract them,” I said. “They seem to prefer Alex to me. That tells us something at least. But first, I’ve gotta go to the club to make sure the New Mexico Were aren’t going to add to our problems.”

  “I’d like to meet the New Mexico Were,” Bian said. “They’re going to be my neighbors and associates soon enough, I hope. And, if they are a problem, you need backup.”

  “Deal. Alex? You okay to stay and pump these guys gently?”

  “Fine,” he said. “What do I do if Tarez shows up and gives orders to release them?”

  “I am the syndesmon. Skylur told me to get all Were into some kind of shape that we can get them into the new Assembly.” I sighed. Tarez had supported me against Naryn. I felt I could work better with him, but none of the Athanate really understood packs and how they functioned. Not at the gut level Alex or I did.

  I squared my shoulders. “I’m going to go ahead on the basis that no one tells us how to handle negotiations with the Were.”

  “Okay. What do we need from them?” Alex asked, jerking his thumb to indicate the Were inside.

  “A meeting with all the alphas. I’ll take it from there. Of course, anything you can find out about them will be useful.”

  “Do you need to take Tom and a couple of the others to the club?”

  “No. I don’t want to make it any more ten
se than it will be.”

  Just Yelena, Bian and me.

  They’d turned off their commset at the club, and no one was answering their cells. We needed to go now. At this time of night, traffic would be lighter.

  I was worried it would still take too long.

  ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

  Club Vasana looked deceptively quiet, but the parking lot was full.

  The two Altau security guards that Tom had sent were playing doorman and doorwoman. They’d been dressed in the club’s gray top hat and tails uniform, but their jackets had been left looser than Dominé would usually allow. I saw the slight bulge that told me they were both wearing their shoulder holsters.

  “Ladies, welcome to Club Vasana,” they said, laughing, taking off their top hats and bowing us in through the doors.

  Well, they seemed to be enjoying themselves.

  “I guess no one’s dead, then,” I said.

  “It got pretty tense for a while,” the guy said. “But they all went back to the office and it’s been quiet since.”

  “Dominé kept a lid on it?”

  They looked at each other and laughed again.

  “Y’know, to tell the truth,” the woman said, “it was more Vera.”

  I felt a stir of unease. Vera was good at keeping people calm. I’d seen plenty of evidence of that back in Ops 4-10. And she was a favorite at House Altau—people would talk freely to her in a way that they seldom did to others.

  But she’d arrived in Denver with a serious bullet wound, and Bian’s emergency treatment with its overdose of euphorics had seemingly left her with a tendency to say the oddest things. For instance, she’d told me the Athanate were angels, except the ones that were devils.

  What if she came out with the wrong comment at the wrong moment? What if Rita was on a knife edge?

  We thanked the guards and trotted down to the office, with me leading the way.

  All around us, Club Vasana did what it did best: sex—real or fantasy.

  “Did you see that?” Bian said, but I was too focused on getting to Dominé’s office.

  As we approached, my worst fears seemed justified. I could hear shouting even through the thick barrier of the door.

  Chapter 26

  Haz was leaning over Dominé’s conference table, almost nose to nose with Rita. She was making most of the noise. Rita was making some kind of sign with her hands. Dante was hanging onto Haz’s arm and Yelena was sprawled in a chair crying with laughter.

  What the hell?

  Vera was calling for calm, without success.

  Dominé jumped up, looking guilty.

  “Ah. Amber. I apologize.”

  “What for? What on earth is going on?”

  “This is absolutely my fault. I should never have allowed it.” She gave an embarrassed cough as Haz and Rita finally registered we were there and sat down, red-faced. “We thought while we waited for you, we could pass the time with champagne and charades.”

  Say what? She’d invited a half-crazed were-cougar to play parlor games?

  Dominé read my dumbfounded look, and raised one arched eyebrow. “I didn’t think it would be so…competitive.”

  I registered the glasses on the table, the dark green bottles upended into the ice buckets. Then I tried to imagine Haz, Yelena, and Rita miming movie titles and pop song lyrics. Twilight? Werewolves of London?

  I flopped down in the chair next to Yelena and dissolved in laughter. I could feel some of the tension seeping out of me.

  “Whose idea was this?” I managed to ask.

  Everyone’s head swiveled toward Vera, who gave me one of her bright smiles.

  “Fantastic,” I said, standing, and pulled Rita up into a hug. “Great to see you guys.”

  She was stiff, but she did hug me back and murmured an inaudible greeting.

  I had to practically lift Haz out of her chair to hug her and she didn’t say anything. Whether that was from embarrassment or wariness, I wasn’t sure.

  “I’d like to introduce a friend of mine.” I turned and smiled. “Bian Hwa Trang, House Trang.”

  Yelena raised her eyebrows at the new title.

  Bian stepped forward and offered an Athanate greeting to Rita, kissing her neck. I was surprised. Athanate almost never kissed necks with non-Athanate. But to the right person, it was an honor. Bian had judged it well, and Rita seemed to appreciate it for what it was. She returned the kiss and gently pulled Bian’s collar to one side. Her eyes swept down the leopard skin tattoo over Bian’s neck and shoulders.

  She made a little noise in her throat and stepped back, looking Bian in the eye.

  Both of them were testing the air, weighing the presence of the other.

  Rita’s green eyes had shaded toward cougar.

  Yelena sat forward, not laughing at all now. A stone-cold sober Rita was unpredictable. Drunk on champagne, who knew what she might do?

  As it turned out, nothing. I had the suspicion that Rita’s and Bian’s testing of each other was far from finished, but for now, Rita sat back down while Bian turned to the other Albuquerque Were.

  Haz wasn’t going to allow an Athanate anywhere near her neck. She stuck her hand out like a barrier.

  Bian shook it. “Welcome to LA,” she said. She kept hold of Haz’s hand a moment longer than necessary.

  Haz and Rita couldn’t have been more dissimilar. Haz was fang-phobic. Rita had had an Athanate lover at some stage before House Romero’s betrayal. Haz was dressed in shabby biker-chick leathers and boots, her jacket open to display a T-shirt with a picture of a flaming skull overlaid on a Harley. Her blue-black hair was held back by a scarlet bandana. Rita wore elegant, skin-tight trousers and a blue shirt with a tailored jacket hitched over her chair. Her tawny hair had that artless just-out-of-bed look that hairdressers charge a fortune to replicate.

  “So, you were saving up the serious talk for me.” I pulled up a chair and sat down at the table.

  “I think it’d be a good idea if I make coffee, if I may,” Vera said to Dominé. “Everyone?”

  We all nodded.

  “I’ll help,” Dante said. “There’s a machine in the kitchen, but it’s all the way on the other side and you might take a wrong turn. Who knows what you might see.”

  Vera laughed and they left together. It felt good to see my House like that.

  Dominé cleared her throat and looked around the table.

  “Although I wasn’t warned beforehand, this visit from Albuquerque was anticipated,” Dominé said. “You know the purpose—to make connections with the local pack.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Why don’t you explain about the packs—”

  “Hold it. Explain why you’ve taken her into your House first,” Haz interrupted.

  All the humor of the charades game was gone.

  I stared her down. “No association existed between you and Dominé, if that’s what you’re hinting at. You sold the club protection in Albuquerque, and part of the deal was that she would introduce you to the pack in LA. As it turns out, LA isn’t run like Albuquerque, and now she’s part of the Athanate.”

  “She accepted an obligation from us,” Rita said.

  “And House Farrell will honor it. But just as a matter of interest, why are you looking to make contact in LA?”

  Rita and Haz exchanged glances.

  “I am your associate,” I pointed out.

  Their alpha, Zane, had demanded an association between Pack Deauville and the Albuquerque pack. He wanted to be able to visit Denver. Meet with Altau.

  Well, that cut both ways; associated packs were supposed to talk freely. The Albuquerque pack owed me some answers.

  They didn’t try and deny it.

  Rita spoke for them: “We’re forming alliances against the Confederation…and any other group large enough to threaten us individually. We’re most of the way there with the packs in Arizona.” She shrugged. “LA seemed a logical next step.”

  “Not Oklahoma? Texas?”

  H
az frowned at me as if I should know. “You’re allied with Cimarron. There’s no way around a pack that size for us to get into Oklahoma or Kansas.”

  By ‘you’, she had to mean the Denver pack, rather than Alex and me.

  “And Texas?”

  “We’re in western Texas,” Rita admitted.

  “And if you think we’re crazy…” Haz muttered, but stopped at a look from Rita.

  “You have a name for this group?” Yelena asked.

  Rita shrugged. “League of Southern Packs.”

  Vera and Dante came back with a tray of coffee mugs. They came through the door with smiles, but caught the renewed tension and just handed the mugs out silently.

  I nodded at Dominé. “Go ahead.”

  “Hela! The packs are very confusing in Los Angeles,” she said to the Albuquerque Were. “There are four or five packs in the county. They cooperate, of necessity, but they do not like each other.” She sipped her coffee. “Down in this part, we’re in the territory of the pack Redondo. There’s a Long Beach pack, and the biggest of all in LA is the Pasadena pack. I don’t know the others.”

  “Just finding that out got a reaction,” I interrupted. “The Pasadena pack decided Dominé was a security risk and sent a hit squad yesterday.”

  Rita sat forward, a growl escaping her. “What happened?”

  I guessed part of the problem with this new arrangement was that Rita did regard Dominé as somehow part of the Albuquerque pack, and she felt the need to defend her.

  Mine, my Athanate said. Aloud: “We sent them back, hurt but alive, with a message that Club Vasana is part of House Altau.”

  Haz nodded. “The right thing to do. His wolves will heal, but deaths would have forced Pasadena to attack again.”

  “That obligation…” Rita prompted.

  “Alex is trying to set up a meeting with all the alphas right now.” I shrugged. “I don’t see why you can’t come along.”

  “Well, I can,” Bian said. “It sounds like it’s going to be tense enough as it is.”

  She was probably right.

  Haz and Rita looked pissed.

  “However…” Bian pushed her empty mug away and leaned her elbows on the table.