“Is he serious?” demanded Chloe. “That isn’t how this works.”
I leaned a little to the side in order to get a clear look at her. “Actually, yes, it is,” I said. “I’m assuming you wanted me because you’re looking for information about your condition. There are some negative side effects, after all, and if I were you, I would very much want a trained biologist on my side. And if I am intentionally infected, I will fight you until you either have to kill me or let me go, at which point I will return to America to be cared for by my own family, and any chance you might have had of exploiting what I know will be gone. Bite me, and you lose.”
Chloe stared at me. “I—I don’t even know what to say.”
“Oh, you’ll help us,” said Cooper, dragging my attention back to him. Chloe’s interjection had apparently given him time to recover his train of thought. Pity. I preferred my assholes confused and easily manipulated. “See, what you’re forgetting is that you’re not the only one I can sink my teeth into. So you say you won’t help us if we bite you? I say you’re going to be begging for it after we bite your fiancée.”
“Shouldn’t I be begging you to bite me instead of biting Shelby?” I asked, struggling to keep my tone neutral. I couldn’t let him see how much the question had upset me. If I did, he’d know he was on the right track. “And don’t think I missed how you stopped referring to her as my girlfriend and started calling her my fiancée as soon as you thought you could use her against me.”
“Nah.” Cooper grinned. “I’m going to bite her no matter what you do. But once she’s one of us, you’ll help, just for the chance to keep her alive. Maybe that’ll be my wedding gift to the pair of you—a little nip so you can make healthy pups.” He turned and started to walk away.
“Where are you going?” This wasn’t in the plan. Much as I wanted to be alone—it would make it easier to get out of these damn ropes—I didn’t want him going after Shelby.
“You know where I’m going,” said Cooper. He opened the door leading out of the room. I caught a glimpse of empty, unfurnished hallway. We were in another safe house, then; what little I had seen had the unmistakable hallmarks of the Thirty-Six Society’s absolute lack of design sense. “Shelby will be thrilled to know that you’ve been found. Chloe, Trigby, you’re with me. Blithe, you stay here and keep an eye on our guest.”
Chloe and the previously unnamed male werewolf fell in behind Cooper, following him out of the room. Chloe cast a grin back over her shoulder at me, blowing a quick kiss before she stepped into the hall and slammed the door.
The remaining werewolf—Blithe—smiled apologetically. “Sorry about all this,” she said. “Cooper said there’d be some resistance, and maybe his methods aren’t the nicest, but he really does have our best interests at heart. You’ll see. Once you’ve had a chance to take a couple of deep breaths and think about it, you’ll understand.”
“Cooper just killed a man in front of you,” I said, slowly. “He slit his throat and then shot him in the head. Isn’t that a problem for you?”
“Nah,” said Blithe, shrugging. “Werewolves always have issues, no matter where we’re at. I mean, back in New Zealand, I got accused of harrying sheep. As if I would. No point in bothering the flocks when they belong to the people I know. Tourists are much tastier.”
This time, her smile seemed to contain substantially more teeth, and those teeth seemed substantially sharper.
I stared at her. “It was you,” I said. “You’re the one who brought the infection to Australia.”
“Brought it to New Zealand first,” said Blithe. “I was on vacation in California when I got nipped. Flew home before I shifted the first time. Didn’t I get a shock! Ate the cat. Ate one of the neighbors, too.” She didn’t sound remotely sorry about either. “New Zealand’s a bit small when you’re a big, healthy predator, you know? I needed a place where I could run, where there were other dangerous beasts to keep people from fingering me for everything that went wrong. I’d worked with the Thirty-Sixers before, and I managed to stick it out six months before anyone caught me. It was an accident that I came across Cooper while I was changed. I didn’t mean to bite him, but he frightened me, and I did what came naturally.”
“You should never have come here,” I said.
“Yeah? Where should I have gone?” Blithe spread her hands in a beseeching gesture. “Look at it from my perspective: I didn’t ask to get bitten. I didn’t volunteer to be changed. Why should I have to give up my life because of a stupid accident? And look, I did my best to minimize the damage. I kept an eye on Cooper until I was sure he was going to change, and then I made sure he went through the first few transformations when he was somewhere nice and isolated, with no one around for him to hurt. He never had the opportunity to become a danger, you can be sure of that.”
“You were the second werewolf in the meadow, weren’t you?” I shook my head, using the motion to distract from the fact that I was working my hands harder now, picking and pulling at the rope that held them. I was starting to get some give in the knots. If I was going to be tied up and held captive, these were the sort of people I wanted doing it: people who had no idea how to take prisoners. “You’re the one who bit me.”
Blithe shrugged. “Cooper explained what you were here to do. I couldn’t let you get a good look at me—it was hard to say whether you’d be able to spot me in my human form, I keep my eyebrows plucked and most people haven’t noticed my hands—but I could help with recruitment. We figured you’d trust him after that. We didn’t count on you being able to mix up your witch’s brew after you’d been wounded, and we definitely didn’t figure on you killing poor Donny. Lead works, if you use enough of it.”
I looked at her blankly. “Your hands?”
She held them up, backs toward me, fingers pressed together. Her index and pointer fingers were the same length. “Some of the old stories are truer than I ever thought. I figured you might catch it if you looked.”
“We usually kill werewolves before they have a chance to undergo any permanent physiological transformations,” I said. Assuming I made it home alive and with my fingers intact, I was going to have a lot of updates to make to the field guide. We’d never realized that werewolves changed like that.
“Oh, then you’ll love this.” She stuck a finger in her eye. I cringed, waiting for gore—and only relaxed a bit as she withdrew her finger, now with a contact lens resting on the tip, and blinked one suddenly lupine, amber eye at me. Her grin was delighted. “You’re a lot more squeamish than I thought you’d be.”
“How is your color vision?” I couldn’t resist. Maybe I should have . . . but it’s not every day that a genuine scientific curiosity decides to try selling me on the idea of becoming part of its pack. Everything Blithe told me was going straight into the guide. Hopefully.
“Not so good,” she admitted. “It’s been getting worse since my irises started changing. I figure there’s something structural happening in there. I used to need glasses, though, and now my vision is better than twenty-twenty. I can see for miles, and you’ll be able to do the same. No more specs for you, brainy boy. Won’t that be a nice change?”
“You know, I like my glasses,” I said. The first knot let go. “I’ve been wearing them for most of my life, and I’m used to them at this point. Besides, they can be useful. They’ve kept me from getting blood, cobra venom, all sorts of things into my eyes. They even helped keep me from being turned to stone once.”
“Too bad.” Blithe smiled toothily. “I know you think this is a bad thing. I know you feel like we’re forcing you. But it’s for the best, you’ll see. We’re a family, a pack. We’re better than what you’ll be losing.”
“Did Mick feel like that?” I kept working at the second knot. It felt like I was going to dislocate my thumb. I was willing to do that, if I had to, but things would be easier if I didn’t. It’s hard to shoot people when
your thumb doesn’t feel like working anymore.
Not that I was actually sure I still had a gun, and it wasn’t like I could ask Blithe if they’d taken it off of me: asking would be a good way to get frisked, assuming I hadn’t been already.
Blithe’s lip curled upward in a sneer. “Mick was a fool,” she said. “He didn’t appreciate the pack. He didn’t appreciate what he’d become. He only went along with it because he thought it would make him stronger, and he thought it would help get him into Chloe’s pants. I suppose that’s been a bit of a shock for him on both counts, hmm? Not only did he not get laid, he got weaker. He wasn’t meant to be an alpha.”
“Am I?”
Blithe’s sneer became more pronounced before she abandoned it in favor of laughing out loud. “Heavens, no. You don’t have the right combination of viciousness and wanting to be an alpha. Cooper did. I did. We’re going to lead this pack forever, and you’re going to work for us willingly once you’ve been bitten and the instinct kicks in.”
I frowned, thinking. Cooper hadn’t mentioned Blithe; hadn’t introduced her to me, hadn’t brought her forward as his co-leader. Hadn’t done anything but allow her to stay behind and try to sell me on the exciting werewolf lifestyle. There had been three wolves with him when he came to see us in the swamp. Mick couldn’t have been among them—none of them had been particularly larger than the rest, and more, he’d been in the line, within Charlotte’s line of sight, the whole time. Someone like Chloe or Blithe could move through the crowd without making a fuss, but Mick? He had been a mountain. When mountains move, people notice.
“If you’re his co-leader, why didn’t he tell you to bite me?” The second knot gave way. One more to go. I began working faster, trying to keep the motion from traveling into my arms and betraying what I was doing.
Blithe’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
“I’m just saying, Cooper never told me he was sharing leadership with anyone. He seemed pretty sure that this whole pack belonged to him. He came up with the current plan all by himself. Leave me human, infect my girlfriend, make me beg to be one of you—that was all him. How come he didn’t tell you to convince me?”
“He didn’t have to,” she said. She was starting to sound uncertain. Good. “He knew that when he left me here to keep an eye on you, I’d start working on bringing you around. I’m not some pup who needs constant guidance.”
“Or maybe he didn’t think you’d disobey him, because he doesn’t think you’re an alpha.” The third knot was beginning to slip. Not much—not enough—but there was give in the rope now. I kept working, praying she wouldn’t smell the blood from my increasingly raw fingertips.
While I would never be glad that one of my mice was dead, I did find myself thankful Mick had crossed a line and justified Cooper killing him—even if the justification was only in Cooper’s mind. Mick had bled enough as he died that my little scrapes shouldn’t attract any attention. I hoped.
“Shut up,” said Blithe.
“I thought you wanted me to talk to you,” I said. “So we could discuss what it’s like to be a werewolf. Wasn’t that the plan? I’m interested in your insights, since you’re the one who decided to bite a man who was smarter than you were. Did you secretly know that you weren’t an alpha? That would be a good way to go about replacing yourself. You wouldn’t even have to admit what you were doing. You’d just need to stand back and follow orders while the pack slipped away from you and toward him. I applaud you, really. I couldn’t have done it better myself.”
“Shut up.” This time Blithe chased the word with a snarl. There was a wild look in her single amber eye; the blue contact covering her other iris kept it from portraying quite so much of her turmoil. It was almost a snapshot of the werewolf condition. She was human and animal at the same time. Again, I wondered whether I had any right to do what I was about to do. If she had been willing to keep her teeth away from people, to go into quarantine and live out her life without hurting anyone, could I really have called her a monster?
But those weren’t the choices she’d made. She’d bitten Cooper, knowing what might happen, and she’d helped him with his whole delusional plan to create a pack from the bodies of the Thirty-Six Society. She was a person, yes. She was also an enemy.
“Make me,” I suggested.
She lunged, snarling—
—and stopped, looking in confusion at the throwing knife that was sticking out of her abdomen, just below the rib cage. It was a good shot, if I did say so myself. That’s not an easy mark to hit, especially when your target is in motion.
“You little bastard,” she said wonderingly. “I knew we should have searched you. I knew it. But Cooper said you’d be more cooperative if you felt we’d been respectful.” She raised her head and growled, ropes of froth beginning to form at the corners of her mouth. “I’m done being respectful.”
“Good,” I said. “So am I.”
Her one amber eye made a perfect target, distinct as it was from the rest of her face. Knife-throwing was never my focus—not the way it was for Verity, who practically specialized in the things, or Antimony, who regularly carried knives belonging to our great-grandmother, and considered them more accurate than bullets in many situations. But it was a family tradition, and I knew how to handle a blade with sufficient skill as to not be an embarrassment. I aimed. I threw.
Blithe stopped, the menace leaking out of her face like it was a punctured balloon. “Ah,” she said, reaching up to touch the knife’s hilt with one shaking hand. Vitreous humor was beginning to leak down her cheek like thick, terrible tears.
“Silver-tipped throwing knives,” I said, pulling my other hand from behind my back and beginning to cut the ropes holding me to the chair. “Always carry them when going into werewolf territory. Unless you’re trying to commit a very painful form of suicide.”
“Ah,” said Blithe again. She started trying to close her fingers around the knife, and found that she couldn’t: the silver on the blade was already interfering with her motor functions.
“Cooper was right: people are generally happier when they feel like they’ve been treated with respect. But the way to do that would have been to not do this in the first place. Nothing about this situation is respectful.” Pins and needles flooded my feet when I cut the ropes away. My circulation was going to take a while to return to normal. Bastards. I forced myself to stand anyway, testing my balance. “I truly am sorry this happened to you. I’m sure you were a lovely person before you got bitten.”
“Ah,” she said, dropping her hand. She looked at me beseechingly, or as beseechingly as it was possible for someone to look when they had a knife protruding from one eye.
“I understand,” I said.
The third knife caught her in the hollow of the throat, severing her airway and coating the wound with silver at the same time. Whatever regenerative properties she possessed—it was unclear exactly how much healing werewolves were capable of, but all the legends agreed it was there, and it was always best to trust the folklore when fighting something you couldn’t risk studying in depth—they wouldn’t be able to work around the silver.
The sound she made when she hit the floor was small and somehow sad, like she had been intended for a grander ending. I walked across the room to where she lay sprawled, and knelt, rolling her onto her back. Her single remaining eye stared sightlessly at the ceiling. I checked her pulse, and found it absent. I still used one of my remaining knives to slit her throat, and waited for a count of one hundred before I reclaimed the others. It was always better to be safe than sorry, especially under circumstances like this one.
I wiped my knives clean on a patch of carpet that no one had yet had the chance to bleed on. Then I straightened, checking the rest of my weapons. They were all present, save for the pistol that had been at my belt. I guess Cooper’s ideas about “respect” didn’t extend to leaving me with silver bu
llets. That was all right. I’m a Price. I was raised knowing how to improvise.
With three throwing knives ready in my left hand, I walked to the door, and pulled it open.
Seventeen
“Empathy is a beautiful thing. It’s also a luxury. When your back is against the wall, remember that survival comes before sympathy, and if you can only save one person, you have to save yourself.”
—Alexander Healy
Stepping into the hall in an unknown location that is probably still in Queensland, Australia, but might as well be on the moon
COOPER WAS EITHER ARROGANT or stupid, or put too much faith in Blithe—or possibly and most likely, some combination of the three. The hall was empty, stretching out in either direction like an invitation to freedom. I stopped in the doorway, tucking my chin against my chest and closing my eyes as I listened to the house, trying to decide which way was going to lead me to the outside world. Voices drifted from the left, distant and distorted, but audible enough to make me think they belonged to living people, rather than to an unattended television set. I raised my head, opened my eyes, and started walking.
The nice thing about being in a house with an unknown number of people is that while it’s still best to be reasonably stealthy, there’s no need to muffle every step like some sort of ninja in a video game. Most small sounds will be dismissed as either a sign of the foundation settling, or the result of someone else moving around. There’s a downside, of course—I could come around a corner and find myself nose to snout with one of my werewolf captors—but the positives outweighed the negatives, at least in my situation.
The impression that this was a Thirty-Six Society safe house intensified as I walked along the hall. The walls were bare, save for a few small, geometric paintings in cheap black frames, and the carpet, while a cheerful shade of lemony yellow, was clearly designed to be easily cleaned, more practical than plush. I would have laid odds on it having been Scotchgarded against bloodstains. Whoever did their interior decorating wasn’t creative, but they were practical enough to make up for any lapses.