Bite Back Box Set 2

by Mark Henwick

  Zane didn’t let me brood on it.

  “Don’t call Felix yet. Cameron needs to see you first. Alone.”

  “What?”

  “It’s urgent.”

  “Damn right it’s urgent. The three of you here without Felix’s invitation or so much as a text message to me.”

  It was bad enough Zane being here. I’d made the case that his deliberately cultivated reputation of violent craziness was a mask to hide a clever and thoughtful alpha. Felix might have accepted it. But the same story on Zane’s boss? Half-head the neighboring packs called Cameron, though none of them had any idea where the nickname had come from. It conjured up visions of a demented werewolf on the brink of going rogue. I’d only ‘met’ Cameron through the wooden panel of a confessional in the Misión El Sagrado Corazón in Santa Fe. Volatile and freaky? Without doubt. Crazy? I didn’t think so, but that message hadn’t gotten through to anyone else.

  “So, you’ll come right away,” Zane said. It wasn’t a question.

  Damn. Damn. Damn.

  I had to. If someone else from the pack stumbled across them, who knew how it would end? If Felix took offense and declared war on the New Mexico packs, I wouldn’t be able to make any deal between Bian and Cameron—in fact, I’d expose her to attack, since Felix and Altau were associated.

  What a frigging mess.

  I had to fix this. Somehow.

  “Yes.” I didn’t bother to hide what I thought of being railroaded like this.

  “You know Sedalia out on 85?”

  Sedalia was one of those places that form out of nothing when one road crosses another, but at least it wasn’t downtown Denver, where a member of the Denver pack might pick up a scent at any moment.

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s a roadhouse bar, just off the highway. Maisey’s Pit Stop. We’re there.”

  The line went dead.

  “Shit!” I yelled and punched my thigh. “Turn around. South. We’ll pick up the 85 at Alameda. Quick.”

  Heaven help me if this went bad. Heaven help us all.

  As Zane had said, Maisey’s was easy to spot from the highway. The name was painted in tall block capitals of faded red paint, and partly obscured by the ‘For Sale’ sign.

  We pulled off into an empty truck-stop lot and parked beside a familiar midnight-blue Dodge. It had belonged to Evans, the Denver werewolf that Felix had thrown out of the pack. Tullah had killed him, the night of the ritual on that cold hillside in the Carson Park. Seems that the Albuquerque pack had inherited his truck.

  Zane and Rita were leaning against the Dodge. There was no one else in sight.

  Rita was all still and watchful. Zane was tense too, despite the casual lean against the truck’s hood. His eyes, mismatched green and brown, took me in, lingered on Yelena.

  He was dressed in sharp tan cargo pants, with a buttoned turquoise shirt under a three-quarter-length flecked coat. A black scarf was looped around his neck.

  His dominance was reeled in tightly.

  Trying to be nice to me?

  I didn’t have time for it.

  “You don’t call, you don’t write—” he started.

  “Cut the bullshit,” I said. “Where’s Cameron?”

  “Inside.” He nodded at Maisey’s. “Alone. This is a private meeting with you.” He looked at Yelena.

  Yelena frowned.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “No. Is not.” Like a magician, her left hand twisted to reveal a compact grenade. Where the hell? She calmly pulled the pin, keeping her grip on the safety lever. “The rest of us, we sit inside car. This grenade’s delay has been reset to zero. Anything happens, I let go, boom. Very messy.”

  Rita’s eyes shaded to cougar. Other than that, she didn’t visibly react.

  Zane licked his lips. I couldn’t read that. Nerves or lust? Maybe he couldn’t help his reaction to dominant, aggressive women. I almost smiled.

  I could see there wasn’t going to be any chance of changing Yelena’s mind, and it would focus their minds.

  “Keep your hands to yourself, Zane,” I said as I turned to go inside. “Wouldn’t want any accidents.”

  Rita snorted as I walked to the bar, pausing in front.

  I recognized Cameron’s dominance leaking from the building.

  Prickly, but not as angry as last time we’d met. Tense, maybe.

  His scent marque tickled my nose. It’d been half hidden when we’d met in the church—an aromatic candle had been burning at the time. Without that masking it, his marque made me think of rain on creosote bushes: clean and sharp.

  A wind came snaking in off the wide prairie, cold and dry, with that electric feel like a storm was building. It carried fine sand that scoured the double doors in front of me. They had been painted red to match the Maisey’s sign. And like the sign, the red had faded; the hard edges were eroded. I pushed and the doors screeched open on dry hinges.

  It wasn’t completely dark inside but I stood for a second anyway, to let my eyes adjust.

  What light there was came in through slits in the boarded windows, etching bright lines across the abandoned bar. The wind outside pushed sand in through the same gaps and it whispered down the walls.

  The center of the bar was empty except for one old table and a couple of chairs dragged out into the middle of the rough wooden floor.

  Alone, Zane had said, but I guessed there was one more guard for me to make my way past or kick out, before I sat down with Cameron.

  She—I was pretty sure it was she—sat hunched inside her coat, one of those bulky wool coats I couldn’t tell whether it was a jacket or a sweater, with bright and dark Navajo patterns. The colors made me think of mountains in the desert, caught in the evening light. She wore matte black skinny pants tucked into lace-up buckskin boots.

  Her hair gleamed in the dark, an outrageous style—a huge wave of glossy black ringlets rising tall from her head and then falling like a spray of flowers down to her right shoulder.

  There was a scratch of a lighter as she lit an old brass miner’s lamp on the table. The smell of the lamp oil mingled with the scent of the Santa Fe pack.

  The light revealed a proud African face, turned side-on to me, frowning as she adjusted the lamp’s wick feed with long fingers. Her nails were painted gold. There were gold rings on her second fingers, and fine gold chains looped from the rings to wind around her wrists. Gold body paint wove intricate patterns on the backs of her hands and traced a thin Celtic pattern like deer horns along the line of her jaw, rising up the sides of her cheeks to border her eyes with wild rose thorns.

  All wonderfully decorative, but I was here to talk to Cameron, not his mate.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  She turned and looked at me. On the left side of her head, up to a couple of inches or so above the ear, the hair had been trimmed down to a buzz cut.

  Shit. Half-head.

  A joke about her freaking hairstyle. And the joke’s on me.

  “Hello, Amber,” she said, her voice barely louder than the hiss of sand against the window slats.

  Chapter 40

  “Cameron.” I sat opposite her. “I’m disappointed. No dark confessionals in old churches. No buzzy voices and burning incense. No drama.”

  I was lying about the last part.

  “They all served a purpose.” Her real voice was all late-night radio, warm and smooth as chocolate.

  “And that purpose is finished?”

  She nodded, a tiny movement.

  Her face wasn’t the usual western African structure of strong, broad planes. She was angles and edges, Eastern African, maybe Somali or Ethiopian heritage. The eyes were dark-rimmed, quick and bright, the nose sharp, the mouth full, but hinting at impatience.

  A stunning blend of rich Nile black and clever Egyptian haughtiness.

  She could have told me one of her ancestors had been a pharaoh, and I would have believed it without any problem.

  And scary. Lots of that. Wh
ether or not my brain believed she was as crazy as the stories made out, some part of my gut had her pegged as unstable.

  “Well, I don’t understand,” I said. “What was the purpose, exactly? Why did you put such an effort into disguise last time?”

  “Because I’m not crazy.”

  That was avoiding the question, but I had to laugh.

  The whole New Mexico setup was designed to keep other werewolves away. The reputation of the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Were was that they were near-rogue, slathering brutes. Even Felix, only four hundred miles away, had believed the myths they built up around themselves. No one came and messed with the New Mexico packs if they could avoid it.

  All the disguise and deception was working to that end.

  Why?

  Cameron sat, clearly wanting me to puzzle it all out rather than have to tell me.

  What did I know about them?

  The New Mexico packs did things that no other packs seemed to do. They accepted other Were into their ranks without discrimination. Rita was a were-cougar and she was a lieutenant in the Albuquerque pack. I knew of no other pack that did that, though maybe the Las Vegas pack would, when Lynch returned home. Even Felix, who was broadminded for an old alpha, hadn’t wanted to. I wasn’t even sure where he’d gotten to in his decisions about having a lieutenant, Ursula, who was either a skinwalker or simply able to manifest as a bear and a wolf.

  And the New Mexico packs associated, and were looking to expand that association. An association—not a casual alliance, but something deeper, deep enough that Zane, the Albuquerque alpha, was happy to come to Denver and present himself as a lieutenant of Cameron’s.

  Who was a woman. A female alpha.

  The only other one I knew of was Billie in LA, and she wasn’t accepted even by her neighbors.

  The New Mexico packs were radically different. And they were trying to form an association to counter the Confederation.

  “If it got out that you weren’t crazy…” I said, and Cameron’s head dipped fractionally in encouragement. “If that got out, let alone the news that you’re a woman—”

  “I’d be ass-deep in challenges before the sun went down. The challengers would be fighting each other for the opportunity to try me. The Confederation, meanwhile, would be laughing.”

  I sat back and thought it through. For all the hints of an impatient personality, Cameron stayed calm and watchful, content to let me figure it out.

  Would she really get challenges just for being different? Or just for being a woman alpha?

  I didn’t know enough alphas. I didn’t know enough about what happened in a challenge. The LA Were didn’t challenge Billie. The Belles made it clear they weren’t interested in being acquired, and their territory wasn’t anything to fight over. But New Mexico? The state was huge, and prime werewolf country. If even relatively sane alphas like Stillman in the Cimarron pack thought they stood a chance to acquire the whole state of New Mexico with the defeat of one little female alpha…

  And whether they succeeded or not, New Mexico would be thrown into turmoil. There’d be no opportunity for any more expansion while it went on.

  If Cameron won…

  I looked her over. There was nothing to gauge from her body, half-hidden as it was in her coat, but she carried herself with a huge confidence. And dominance played a big part in how fearsome a wolf an alpha could turn into. Even if I hadn’t known she was alpha over a huge territory and several packs, I’d have guessed her to be a significantly dangerous wolf.

  So… If she won, then would the packs of the defeated alphas come over to her? A woman? Or would they revolt and just be easy pickings for the Confederation?

  “Or it might start small,” she said. “I’d win against the first couple. I might even take over their packs. But then everyone would know about it. With every pack I took over, the prize would only become bigger. There’s nothing to stop a dozen of them turning up and challenging me, one after the other. And even if I kept winning, there’d be no way we could assimilate that many packs.”

  “So you have to expand slowly. You get Zane, or one of your other male alphas from your sub-packs, to front up,” I said. “You associate, you change the way new associate packs think, and only when you think they’ll accept it do they learn that there’s a female alpha on top.”

  She nodded again.

  “But you can’t do that now,” I went on. “You can’t afford the time. The Confederation is pressing. And at the same time you need to hurry up, you’re finding even more extreme bigots as alphas, like in LA.”

  “And San Francisco. And San Diego, San Jose, Russian River, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Reno and Flagstaff. Packs from Houston all the way down the coast to Miami, and that’s just the ones we know about.” Dark anger flared in her eyes before she went on. “The entire Confederation is the same, of course, all the way up into Canada. But…it’s not only the Confederation that’s raising the urgency.”

  I narrowed my eyes and wished I hadn’t been so out of the flow for the last month.

  What’s changing?

  The New Assembly. Political structures forming in the packs. And…

  My stomach lurched.

  Felix.

  Just across the border from her, a new super-pack was forming around the Denver pack. And worse, it was mainly because of me. The werewolf underground would be spreading the news that Felix wanted the ritual only for allies.

  What would that have looked like to Cameron?

  She hadn’t come all the way to Denver today without a purpose. She was here because of the threat that Felix posed, whether he intended to or not.

  Even if she and Felix never contested anything, having two alliances against the Confederation would split their effort and weaken the defense.

  And Felix would be thinking exactly the same way—that Cameron was a threat.

  “You and Felix threaten each other,” I said. “You’ve got to talk. It’s not deliberate, it’s just misunderstanding.”

  She tilted her head, eyes glittering in the lamplight.

  If I was reading her right, that meant I’d only gotten part of the truth. And she wasn’t going to tell me outright. This was some kind of test.

  Why had she called me to Santa Fe when I was down in New Mexico?

  She’d wanted to question me about Felix’s intentions. She’d made me agree to a limited association with Pack Deauville so she could visit Denver.

  Yes, but my gut told me there was more. She’d wanted to see me. She’d wanted to test me against her own dominance.

  Was that so she had an idea of how dominant Felix might be?

  What had testing me told her?

  She was dominant, but not that powerful—

  I looked up and she was still watching me, waiting to see whether I’d reached that point.

  Her eyes seemed to expand. Her dominance flowed out. Not colored by anger, as it had been last time.

  Strong!

  I’d forgotten how strong she was.

  The room receded. My lungs struggled to get oxygen.

  She didn’t move and yet she seemed to loom.

  Shit, but she’s strong!

  She’d been impressed when we’d fought our dominance duel in Santa Fe, but either she hadn’t been trying so hard, or she’d grown in the last month.

  My heart rate surged and a feeling of weakness shocked my muscles.

  I pushed back. It was like getting in a shoving contest with the Hill Bitch.

  And as that realization came to me, it simply stopped.

  I was panting. Cameron had a sheen of sweat on her brow. For all her effort to look as if it was nothing, I’d gotten through to her. In fact, her heartrate was up, her breathing was deeper and her eyes had a fixed look.

  I took what consolation I could from that. I wasn’t top bitch. I’d have to live with it.

  “No,” she said, struggling to keep her voice level. “In case you were thinking it, I wasn’t testing myself against you, h
ere or in Santa Fe, for some cunning plan to find out whether I could take on Felix.”

  “Why then?”

  She shrugged elegantly. “I needed to be sure the direction I was thinking of taking was worthwhile for me. That your alpha was worthwhile. Better than precipitating things and getting into a pissing match directly with him.”

  So she had been measuring Felix by testing her dominance against me, but not to take him on? Why then?

  “What direction is that?”

  She laughed and hedged. “I need you to do something for me. Something that will put Felix off balance a little. Something that will give me an advantage.”

  “Why would I do that? He’s my senior alpha. And I’m a Denver Were; I submit to Felix because it’s the best thing for all of Colorado, let alone Denver. I won’t go against that. And that means I won’t go against Felix.”

  “That so?” She smiled: quick, wolf-sharp, a smile full of teeth. “Not for anything?”

  I glared at her.

  “Say you help me,” she said. “If my plan works, in return, I’ll agree to association with House Trang, and with Altau too, if you want it.” She waved her hand. “Done, just like that.”

  Just like that.

  Her eyes were fever-bright, watching my reaction.

  “I won’t work against the Denver pack,” I said. Surely, she was just testing my loyalty? The reward she was dangling in front of me—all of Skylur’s impossible demands about New Mexico delivered without even needing to go down there—that was all kinds of tempting for my Athanate side, but it was nothing to my Were side.

  “Good,” she said. “Because what I’m going to ask you to do will directly benefit the Denver pack, all its allies and sub-packs, more than anything you could achieve on your own.”

  Arrogant, much?

  And…

  Do I look that stupid?

  She’d just said she wanted an advantage over Felix. How could she claim that would be a benefit for Denver?

  Trick him into an association, maybe?