That was putting it lightly. Before Jim became the Beast Lord, he served as the Pack’s chief of security. I thought I had a high level of paranoia, but Jim took it to stratospheric levels.
“My paranoia is keeping us safe.” Jim brushed his face. Suddenly he seemed tired. “Dali, I just spent eight hours arguing with the Pack Council. Do you think you could postpone yelling at me until later?”
“No!” She sighed. “Yes. Fine.”
I reached into the fridge. We would need more sausage.
• • •
NORMAL PEOPLE SPOKE while they ate. They socialized, carried on a polite conversation, and even told jokes, pausing their food consumption while doing all those things. Shapeshifters ate with single-minded focus, as if eating itself were a very important task and they had to concentrate on it completely. Talking while eating beyond the usual “pass that, please” was considered rude.
It took fully half an hour before they finally leaned back from the table. Jim sighed quietly. He looked haggard. It was unusual for him. Dali reached over and quietly stroked his hand. He took her fingers into his and squeezed.
“So what was the fight about?” Julie asked.
“We’re trying to pass a security reform,” Jim said. “One of the provisions requires Pack members residing at the Keep or at their Clan Houses to sign out before they go into the city. We’ve had a few issues over the last couple of years with finding everyone when an emergency hits.”
“Seems reasonable,” I said. Sailors did it on shore leave, soldiers did it when they left a military base, and there was no reason why Pack members couldn’t do the same.
“It’s his first act as the Beast Lord,” Curran said. “The alphas will dig their heels in to see if he will bend.”
“We were arguing,” Dali said. “And then Desandra said that if the Beast Lord wanted to know where she was at all times, she would be delighted to make it happen.”
I laughed. Dali glared at me.
“That’s what she does,” I said. “When she’s uncomfortable, she starts saying uncomfortable things to knock you off your stride.”
“I wanted to curse her.” Dali jabbed her thumb in Jim’s direction. “He wouldn’t let me.”
Considering that Dali’s curses backfired half of the time, that was probably a very good thing.
“We need the Wolf Alpha to pass the reform,” Jim said.
“I wasn’t going to kill her,” Dali told him. “I was just going to seal her mouth shut.”
“Knowing Desandra, that would kill her,” Curran said.
“I handled it,” Jim said. “I told her that if she required someone to watch her at all times, the Pack would accommodate her wishes and assign a nanny to her. Anyway, what have you been doing?”
I’d been thinking about whether Mahon had had a moment of insanity and murdered his future son-in-law. “Hunting ghouls.”
“Why?”
I told him about the ghoul horde.
He frowned. “Thirty.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a hell of a lot of ghouls. Let me talk to my people. We’ll see what I can find out. Are you going to see Mitchell?”
“I was thinking about it.” The number of people who knew about Mitchell could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and here Jim rattled off his name like it was nothing. Why was I not surprised?
Curran glanced at me. I’d have to explain Mitchell later.
Jim leaned forward, his gaze intent on Curran. “Look, you’ve had your fun. It’s been nine weeks. You can come back now. We’ll say it was an extended vacation. A sabbatical.”
Curran leaned forward as well, matching Jim’s stare. “I’m out.”
Jim dropped his fork on the table and sagged in his chair.
“If you hate it so much, step down,” Curran said.
Frustration twisted Jim’s face. “I can’t. They’ll screw it up.”
Curran laughed.
“That was mean,” Dali said.
“It’s not funny,” Jim growled.
Oh no, it was funny. It was downright hilarious. I grinned at Jim. “I seem to remember a man who brought me a two-inch-thick file just last September, told me that Clan Nimble and Clan Jackal had declared a vendetta on each other and the details were in the file, and then walked away.”
“Oh yeah,” Curran’s eyes shone with gold. “What was it he said?”
“He said that we’d have to handle it because he had ‘real shit to do.’”
“What’s your point?” Jim grimaced.
“Payback’s a bitch,” I told him.
“You can moan all you want,” Curran said. “The fact is you wanted the job. You’re smarter than I am and you’re strong enough to hold the power. You had plans for the Pack and I didn’t always agree. Now you’ve got a chance to do it your way.”
Magic rolled over us in a fast invisible tide. Everyone paused for a moment to adjust.
Jim pulled a simple beige file out of his jacket and put it on the table.
“What’s in the file?” Curran asked.
“Are you sure you want to know?” Jim asked. “Once we do this, there is no going back.”
Curran just looked at him.
Jim opened the folder, took out a stack of papers, and passed them to Curran. Curran read the first page. “What the hell is this?”
“It’s like this,” Jim said. “You own too much crap. You hold at least a twenty-five percent stake in over twenty-two percent of the Pack’s businesses. Only a few of these businesses are established enough to be able to come up with the money to buy you out. A lot of them are new enterprises and each dollar of profit is being put right back into them. If we buy you out now, the way you want us to, the Pack will go bankrupt.”
“That’s bull,” Curran said.
Jim spread his arms. “This is what the accountants are telling me. I understand you might have a cash flow issue, but you wouldn’t have one if you were still the Beast Lord.”
Curran’s face went blank, unreadable like a stone wall. Uh-oh.
“Don’t test me.”
“I’m not testing you. I’m telling you, this is how it is. The contract you’re holding outlines our proposal. Instead of a monetary payout, we offer you a business in trade for fifty percent of your collective stake now, and then, once the other businesses begin to be profitable, you can either continue to own them and collect your share of profits or sell off your stake as you see fit.”
“This would make sense,” Curran said, “if I had no eyes to read it or no brain to understand it. Did Raphael write this?”
“He might have looked it over,” Jim said.
Raphael was the alpha of Clan Bouda. He was too handsome for his own good, mated to my best friend, Andrea Nash, and a complete shark when it came to all things business. If Raphael wrote the contract, it was a good deal for the Pack and a bad deal for us.
We weren’t desperate for money, but a large chunk of our ready cash had gone into buying and furnishing this house. I never asked Curran how much money he had, because even though he referred to it as our money, he had earned the bulk of it before he ever met me. But I got the impression that we weren’t too far from the bottom of our reserve.
Now that we both had time to devote to Cutting Edge, the business was picking up and it would start putting food on our table within a year. Trouble was, we faced a lot of stiff competition. In the hierarchy of clearing paranormal hazmat, Cutting Edge scraped the bottom of the barrel, with the Guild being our major competition. We had to underbid the mercs, and while the Guild was having serious issues, competing with them was difficult. It didn’t help that the Pack had bankrolled Cutting Edge’s startup costs and both Curran and I wanted to get that loan taken care of.
“What are you offering?” I asked.
“The
Mercenary Guild,” Jim said.
“What?” I must’ve misheard.
“The Mercenary Guild,” Jim repeated.
“That’s stupid,” I told him. “I have the business sense of a walnut and even I know it’s stupid.”
Ever since its founder died, the Mercenary Guild had been run by an assembly consisting of veteran mercs, admin staff, and the Pack representative. The rule by committee wasn’t working. I knew this, because I was that Pack representative. I’d worked for the Guild since I was eighteen. Mercs didn’t have a long life expectancy, but I was hard to kill and I had passed the eight-year mark, which made me a veteran. I had street cred, but even with my reputation, my veteran status, and the power of the Pack behind me, I got through to the Guild only half of the time. As long as I was there, keeping the peace, some stuff got done, but when I hadn’t been there, from what I’d heard, the infighting got so bad, the Guild was on the brink of bankruptcy. Jim knew all this. He used to be a merc, too, and he had spies all over the city.
“First, the mercs and admins are too busy being at each other’s throats,” I said. “Second, the Pack doesn’t own enough of the Guild to make it worthwhile for us.”
“We do,” Jim said. “The mercs have been selling off their shares and I’ve been using the shapeshifter mercs to buy them.”
He must have thought I was born yesterday. “They’ve been selling off their shares because the Guild has hurtled over the cliff and is nose-diving into the ground. Rats abandon a sinking ship, you know that.”
Jim dismissed it with a brisk gesture. “That’s beside the point. Kate, the Pack now controls thirty-six percent of the Guild. We’ll transfer these shares to you, which will make you two the largest single shareholders.”
“This is a bad idea,” I said.
“We’re not taking it,” Curran said.
“Bottom line, I’m the Beast Lord,” Jim said. “I’m telling you, that’s our offer.”
“Your offer stinks,” I told him.
“Our offer is more than fair.”
“You can’t compel me to agree,” Curran said. “The Pack law is crystal clear: as a retired alpha, I have autonomy.”
“No, I can’t. But I can control what we offer you and this is what I am offering. You’re my friend, but the Pack is my job now. So you want me to go back to these people in whose businesses you invested and tell them that you don’t give a crap about their livelihood?” Jim said. “Just trying to be clear.”
“I own ten percent of Raphael’s reclamation business,” Curran growled. “His annual earnings are in the millions.”
The light dawned on me. “That’s why Raphael wrote the contract. He doesn’t want to pay.”
“He wrote the contract because I asked him,” Jim snarled.
Curran looked at him. An imperceptible shift occurred in the way he held himself. Nothing obvious. A slight hardening of shoulders, a straighter spine, a muted promise in the eyes, but suddenly everyone knew the conversation was over. This was how he used to silence the Pack Council.
“We thank the Pack for their generous offer,” Curran said. “The answer is no. Julie needs to get to school and we need to get to work. Thank you for your visit. You’re welcome in our home anytime.”
Jim rose. “Think about it.”
Dali looked at Julie. “Do you need a ride?”
“I’ll take it!” Julie jumped off her chair.
Dali drove like a maniac. “Do not kill my kid.”
Dali snorted. “I didn’t kill her when I taught her how to drive, did I?”
Curran rose and went to the other room. Jim and I traded glances. He reached for the folder.
I miss making it work . . .
“Leave it, please,” I said.
CHAPTER
4
THE GUILD OCCUPIED an abandoned hotel on the edge of Buckhead. Once a futuristic-looking tower, it had succumbed to the magic waves like the rest of the business district. High-rises fell in two ways: either they slowly deteriorated until they collapsed in a heap of dust and debris, or they toppled. The Guild’s base was a toppler: the tower had broken off about seven stories up as if cut by a blade. The renovations and repairs shaved off another two floors, and now the Guild had five floors, only four of which were functional, the price of living through a slow-motion apocalypse.
We parked in a big open-air parking lot to the right and got out. About two dozen vehicles waited for us. According to George, Eduardo drove a huge black Tahoe that looked like a tank. Not something you’d easily miss. George drove an FJ Cruiser. Neither was in the parking lot.
Curran and I walked down the parking lane. Curran took short quick breaths, sampling the scents. We would need Derek to really follow a trail. Curran’s sense of smell was many times better than mine, but he was a predatory cat. He hunted mostly by sight, while Derek, my onetime boy wonder, was a wolf. He could track a moth through pitch darkness by scent alone.
I had called over to Cutting Edge and left a message on the answering machine for Derek asking him to stay put in case we needed him. Curran had saved him when Derek’s family went loup, and the young werewolf was completely devoted to him.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said.
“Should I be worried?” Curran asked.
“I would’ve thought Derek would separate with us. I understand why Barabas didn’t—he loves practicing law—but Derek has been working for Cutting Edge since the start.”
“It’s not really a topic I can bring up,” Curran said. “It’s a personal decision for each individual involved. There can’t be any pressure one way or the other. Jim can’t offer them incentives to stay and I can’t use their emotional loyalty to pressure them into leaving.”
It made sense, I suppose.
We combed the parking lot, predictably didn’t find the Tahoe, and headed for the Guild building.
The heavy iron gates stood wide open. Nobody met us in the lobby. I checked the sign-in ledger resting on the metal table. Eduardo had signed in on Monday, February 28. There was no sign-in for Tuesday, March 1.
“He didn’t make it to the Guild yesterday,” I said.
Curran inhaled the air and grimaced.
“What?”
“It smells like a garbage dump. I get hints of his scent, but they’re old. I’d say at least fifty hours or so.”
Fifty hours was consistent with our time line. If Eduardo called George at seven thirty on Monday, he probably got down to the Guild an hour or two later.
Curran and I passed through a large wooden door and entered the inner hall. The hotel was built as a hollow tower with an open atrium at its center. Terraced balconies, one for each floor, lined the inner walls, allowing access to individual rooms.
In its other life, the hotel had been beautiful, all light stone, expensive wood, and elevators with transparent walls. It was way before my time, but I’d seen some old pictures that showed the lobby as an oasis of greenery, complete with a koi stream where fat orange-and-white fish drifted gently beneath the lily pads. A trendy coffee shop had occupied one corner, next to it a raised area had been set out for happy-hour patrons, and an upscale restaurant had offered lobster and steak. All of that was gone now. The coffee shop, koi, and greenery had vanished without a trace. The restaurant had evolved into a mess hall, offering cheap but decent food to hungry mercs coming off long jobs, and the raised area that was once the happy-hour hangout housed the Clerk’s desk and a big job board behind him.
Usually the board was organized to within an inch of its life. The Clerk would write the open jobs on index cards, mark them with different colors according to priority, and pin them neatly to the corkboard. Today the board was a mess. Random pieces of paper covered it, stuck this way and that, some on top of the others. A couple had coffee stains. One looked a hell of a lot like a used dinner napkin whose owner must’ve
indulged in gravy. What the hell . . . ?
About twenty mercs lounged here and there, some at the tables. I scanned the crowd. Not many veterans. The Guild attracted all sorts of people. Some worked hard and some hung out at the Guild bullshitting or waiting for just the right job to fall into their lap. Most of these guys were of the second variety. A few looked drunk. Most weren’t too clean. As we walked through, a woman on the right hocked a loogie and spat on the floor. Charming.
These people hung out at the Guild every day. Some probably slept here. One of them had either stolen a car from a worried woman looking for her boyfriend or knew who had. They would tell me who did it.
The sour stench of rotten food floated in the air. Mud streaks stained the floor. The trash can in the corner was overflowing. The staircase that led up to the three remaining floors had a lovely patina of grime.
“Daniels!”
I turned. A tan dark-haired man in his forties waved at me from a nearby table. Lago Vista. I walked over and took a seat. Curran sat next to me. Lago had been a mercenary all his life one way or another, but he’d joined the Guild about three years ago, when he moved to Atlanta from Lago Vista, Texas. He liked it when people called him Lago. It wasn’t really his name, but he never talked about the things he’d left behind, so I didn’t ask. He and I had worked together on a couple of jobs. He wasn’t as fast as he used to be, but he had a lot of experience and he knew what to do with it. He did his job, he did it well, and he didn’t get me or anybody else killed. That made him a decent merc in my book. If you needed a second for a gig, you could do a lot worse than Lago. If you could put up with his come-ons, that is. Lago was an aging jock. He liked one-night stands, and he viewed himself as a smooth operator.
“Haven’t seen you around.” Lago lifted a coffeepot. “Need some fuel?”
The coffee in the glass carafe was solid black and looked viscous. “Is that last night’s batch?”
Lago shrugged.
Last night’s batch that had probably baked for about twelve hours. No thanks. “Where is the Clerk?”