“That one is a werewolf,” he said abruptly, as if he’d just figured it out.
Harris frowned irritably. “I was told that this involved vampires. I have five people who can fly this bird from the US to Europe, excluding me. Four of them are humans, so I brought the werewolf. He doesn’t belong to Hauptman’s pack. I cleared it with Hauptman.” He turned his frown to Adam.
“I was told a pilot and copilot were acceptable,” said Adam coolly. “What race or species they belonged to was not specified.”
The vampire was doing its mind-out-of-body thing again. When he came back, the vampire’s body language changed entirely, and the beast who lived in Adam’s heart suddenly took notice. Adam didn’t know who was looking out of the head minion’s eyes, though he had a good guess. One thing Adam knew was that it certainly wasn’t the vampire he’d just been talking to.
“Are you Charles Cornick?” the vampire asked the man standing just behind Harris.
The werewolf’s jaw dropped. “Oh, hell no, sir,” he said in a shaky voice, his shoulder bumping into Harris’s.
He might as well have screamed “I’m a victim” to the biggest predator in Europe. Adam could see the urge to attack slide into the bodies of all the vampires in the area—including Marsilia and Stefan.
Adam pinched his nose and closed his eyes briefly as the weight of responsibility fell on his shoulders. He had to keep all of these people safe—and they were going to be doing their best to get themselves killed. Some of them because he had asked it of them. The only shining thread in this whole mess was that Mercy had managed to extract herself: Bonarata did not have Mercy.
Harris’s copilot continued to babble, the smell of his panic filling the air. “Have you ever seen Charles? He’s about twenty feet tall, and he’s Native American. Do I look Native American to you?”
“Leave him alone, Bonarata,” said Adam. “He’s not your food. He is . . .” Adam surveyed the trembling wolf without affection, but sighed. “He is under my protection.”
“I thought you said he wasn’t one of yours,” the vampire observed.
“He doesn’t belong to my pack,” Adam said. “But for the purposes of this trip, he put his neck on the line for me. That means he is mine to protect.”
Bonarata’s puppet turned to Adam. “My apologies,” Bonarata said through his puppet’s mouth. “But you pricked my temper, because I am most disappointed. I was sure you’d bring the boogeyman of the werewolves. I’ve been looking forward to meeting him.”
“I did ask,” said Adam coolly. “But the Marrok forbade it. Charles is very good at ending people . . . monsters, let’s say, and the Marrok apparently thinks that bringing him here, where there are so many monsters to be slain, would be a bad idea. Maybe he believes that. Maybe he believes this is my problem, not his—and he doesn’t want to risk losing Charles. Or maybe he is reluctant to deal with the headache of the power vacuum that your death at Charles’s hands would leave in Europe. It would be nearly as large a mess as the death of Jean Chastel, the Beast of Gévaudan, left.”
“Charles didn’t kill the Beast,” said Bonarata. The vampire’s voice wasn’t as certain as it would have been if he knew what he said was a fact.
Adam shrugged. “I wasn’t there when Chastel died.”
Charles had been, though, and rumor persisted in laying the old villain’s death at Charles’s feet—as if Charles’s reputation needed any help from killings he hadn’t performed. Whether it had been at Charles’s hand or not wasn’t the point. Adam was just reminding Bonarata that even powerful old monsters could die.
“Master,” said a soft voice. It belonged to the vampire who had been on the crew that had taken Mercy. “You asked me to remind you when you were close to harming one of your own.”
Bonarata, still possessing his minion, nodded. “Grazie, Ignatio. Hauptman, I look forward to meeting you and yours in person. My people will escort you to my home.” Then the vampire staggered, dropped to his knees, and shivered in a fit very like a grand mal seizure.
Ignatio—and Adam stored his name for future reference—waved, and a couple of the vampires picked up their fallen companion.
Ignatio bowed. “If you would be so kind as to follow me?”
As they moved toward the waiting vehicles just off the runway, Adam walked behind Ignatio and to his right. “Your scent was on my wife’s car seat along with her blood,” he murmured, though everyone in their group would hear him. Quiet, he had found, could be a lot more menacing than loud.
The wolf wanted to kill him, but Adam understood about being a soldier and taking orders. Still . . .
Adam said, “I will remember.”
“Pack remembers,” Honey added.
6
Mercy
So from now on, the timing between my part of the story and Adam’s gets tricky, and you’ll have to pay attention. This chapter begins late afternoon, the day after Adam and his people land in Milan. I’m asleep with my face plastered against the top of a metal table. Being sophisticated like this just comes naturally to me—what can I say?
I WOKE UP. MY CHEEK WAS HALF-GLUED TO THE TABLETOP from drying sweat and (probably) drool. But I didn’t pry it loose because there was a werewolf watching me, and I was still caught up in dreams that had me riding a troll over the Cable Bridge, jousting with the Golem of Prague while the drowned ghosts of a thousand werewolves climbed up the side of the bridge asking for jelly beans.
I needed a moment before I could deal with the real live werewolf. The troll I got, and the golem, of course, but I couldn’t figure out why the wolves wanted jelly beans.
“I know you are awake, Mercedes Hauptman,” growled a soft tenor voice with the seductively thick vowels that the Slavic languages are famous for. Czech was different from the Russian accents that I was more familiar with, throatier and deeper. Not so much less musical as bassier musical.
I sighed, sat up, and rolled my head, then my shoulders to ease my muscles. “Now I’ll never find out why it was jelly beans,” I said.
“Jelly beans?” he asked.
I drew a deep breath. “Just a dream,” I told him, and took a good look at Libor of Prague, the Alpha who had some sort of secret grudge against the Marrok.
He smelled of werewolf, of butter and yeast and wheat and eggs. And a little of the same fruit filling I’d eaten in the pastries he’d fed me earlier. The smell was sweet and rich: like jelly beans.
Libor looked nothing like I imagined him—at least not as I’d imagined him when I was a child. Probably that was a good thing for him.
His hair was medium brown and cut almost brutally short. His face was clean-shaven but, like Adam tended to, he already had a shadow of a beard making itself felt this late in the afternoon.
Libor, the Alpha of Prague, was a big man, not so much tall as massive. There was something more leonine than lupine about him. His features were of average attractiveness. He was neither beautiful nor ugly. It was a strong face and intelligent. He reminded me, superficially, of Bonarata, in that people would look at him and expect brutality and risk missing the intelligence altogether.
But Bonarata had been cold all the way to the bone. Any warmth I’d seen in him was an illusion created by a master manipulator.
Libor, my coyote informed me, was many things, but cold was not one of them. He smiled as I met his eyes and held them. His smile expected me to turn my gaze away and leave him in charge. His problem was that I had just had a few very bad days and was done with being vulnerable and lost. A minute passed. Two.
“You tread upon dangerous ground, Little Wolf,” he said softly.
“My apologies,” I said insincerely, without dropping my eyes. One of the cool things about my coyote is that dominance battles aren’t usually a problem for me. I could stare down just about anyone except for the Marrok himself. Libor wasn’t my Alpha, and I was just not go
ing to give in.
After a moment, my brain kicked in. Staring down a werewolf was dumb. I’d spent my life trying not to be any dumber than I had to be.
After a few more heartbeats, during which time I acknowledged to myself that I was antagonizing someone I hoped to elicit help from, and being dumb with no end in sight, I said, “I’m trying for strong enough to pay attention to but polite enough not to cause a real fight. How am I doing?”
He lost his smile, which was good because it had become sharp around the edges, and he narrowed his eyes until I could feel his power beating at me angrily.
“As I said,” he told me, his voice as casual as his eyes were not, “dangerous. You should probably consider how . . . thrilled? Yes, that is the word. How thrilled I am to have the daughter of Bran’s heart here in my territory. It is something that gives me great pleasure.”
He didn’t look like a man who was pleased. He looked like a starving wolf who’d caught a glimpse of a wounded deer. “Pleased” was such a bland word for that emotion.
I tried to figure out how to answer him.
Death threats—and he had just issued one, if obliquely—are to be gotten through as lightly as possible. I’d noticed that if I paid too much attention to them, matters tended to proceed from bad to worse.
I was tired, and I’d hesitated too long to deny that Bran had treated me like a daughter, before he’d abandoned me and the pack for political reasons. Our pack was the only pack in North America not affiliated with the Marrok. We stuck out like a big sore thumb, and someday soon, someone was going to give in to curiosity and see what happened when they hit us—as they would not dare do to one of the packs under the Marrok.
I took a breath. Had I misread Bonarata? Had that been what he was doing? Did his kidnapping of me have nothing to do with Marsilia at all?
But Bonarata was in Italy, and I was sitting across the table from a werewolf I needed to pay attention to instead of playing my I-wonder-why-the-big-bad-vampire-took-me game.
I had missed my chance to claim that Bran didn’t care about me. Likely, Libor wouldn’t have believed my disclaimer anyway because I only mostly believed it. Bran hadn’t abandoned us because he didn’t love me anymore; he’d abandoned us because he had a Greater Cause, the survival of the werewolves, that he loved more.
So. Death threat.
It was likely that Libor didn’t intend to kill me unless I pushed him into it. First, Charles had sent me here. Though Charles maintained that he wasn’t good with people—which was true enough—it didn’t keep him from reading people pretty well. Second, and even more telling, I wasn’t already dead. Alpha werewolves don’t tend to be the kind of people who dither.
I realized I was watching my fingers tap on the table. At some time during my thinking process, I’d dropped my eyes to the table. It hadn’t been because I’d been intimidated, or at least I didn’t think so. But if I was going to get into a staring contest with a dominant wolf, I probably should have been paying more attention.
“I had heard that you and Bran weren’t on speaking terms,” I said. “So . . . you’d have killed me already, but you don’t want me to die before I satisfy your curiosity?” I hazarded lightly. Not afraid of the Big Bad Wolf—no, sir, not me. “You want to know what I’m doing, alone, in your territory and why I mentioned the Lord of Night?” I shrugged. “Otherwise, I’d probably be dead instead of fed good food and left to sleep in safety.”
He leaned back comfortably in his chair (it creaked alarmingly) and said nothing.
“I am here because of Bonarata,” I said blandly. “He kidnapped me about a mile from my home in the US. Apparently he was under the impression that I was the most powerful supernatural entity in the territory of his discarded mistress and One True Love. I think he’d forgotten all about her until recent events put the Tri-Cities of Washington—state of—USA into national and international news. Reminded of his love, he chose to go after her by kidnapping me.” That was my current favorite theory. Or maybe it was a hit directed at Bran—or the pack. But I’d go with my first instinct. So I nodded as if he’d said something, and continued, “I know. It struck me as stupid, too. But I’m not an ageless vampire, so I’ll cut him some slack.”
“Are you?” Libor asked.
“Am I what?”
“The most powerful supernatural entity in the Tri-whatsit city?”
“I change into a coyote,” I countered. “That’s my superpower. What do you think?”
He’d been sarcastic with his question, but at my answer, he straightened ever so slightly and looked . . . intrigued.
“I had forgotten that about you,” he said slowly. “And I do not think that you have answered my question. Which I find very interesting. Are you the most powerful supernatural creature in your territory?”
I shrugged uncomfortably because I couldn’t lie to him. “Maybe,” I said. “Possibly. But not because of what I am. More because of who I know. I was raised in the Marrok’s pack. I’m mated to Adam Hauptman, who is Alpha of our pack, and not least among Alphas in the other packs. I have a friend who is fae—and he is someone even the Gray Lords don’t mess with.” They were looking for more pieces of one of the Gray Lords who had ticked Zee off. My informant (Tad) was pretty sure that they would find them all. Eventually.
“I have a friend in the human police department and another in the local vampire seethe.” I shrugged again. “Anyway, Bonarata was disappointed because he’d expected someone . . .” I tried to decide how to explain it.
“More powerful,” Libor supplied.
I shook my head. “Whose power wasn’t all in the people she knows. Intrinsic power.” I waved a hand vaguely down myself. “Stronger, at least. Anyway, he decided to engineer my failed escape during which I would conveniently die, and he could blame it on me—and humiliate my mate for failing to take care of me. Instead, I really did escape, hopped on a bus, and ended up here. Penniless. Friendless. And passportless.”
“Pathetic, in fact,” he said dryly.
I widened my eyes and nodded, answering the humor in his eyes with my own sincerity. “On the way here, I got pickpocketed. They stole half of my money. I have about two hundred koruna left.” That I had stolen first. Borrowed, really, since I intended to pay it back with interest, but borrowed without consent was, strictly speaking, theft.
“I’m about as pathetic as it gets,” I told him honestly.
He folded his arms. “Peanut butter,” he said.
“Excuse me?” I tried to sound blank. That stupid story had made it all the way here? Jeepers creepers. If I’d known how long I’d have to live with that, I’d have figured out some other way to get back at Bran.
“You,” he said, “are Bran’s little coyote girl who made him sit in peanut butter because he made your mama cry.” Foster mother, actually, but I wasn’t about to correct him. Not until I knew him better, or it was over something more important.
He gave me a wolfish smile. “You wrapped his new and very expensive car around a tree. People still talk about the chocolate Easter bunny incident with awe. And still Bran did not kill you. You escaped from the Lord of Night, Master of Milan. And you want me to think you pathetic?”
He leaned forward. “I know a little more about you, Ms. Hauptman, than that old vampire did. I do not think you would find it so easy to get away from me.”
“But you haven’t taken me prisoner,” I reminded him, and carefully didn’t say “yet.” “So I don’t have any reason to run away. Charles told me that I should throw myself on your mercy—and ask you to help me stay alive and out of Bonarata’s clutches until Adam can get to me here.”
“Charles said that,” he said neutrally.
“Well.” I tried to stick to the absolute truth. “It was through a third party, and our communication was necessarily brief—but I can read between the lines. I would rather you come w
ith me to storm the seethe of the Master of Milan so that we could extract my husband and the small number of people he took with him to broker my release, which brokering is now unnecessary.”
“No,” he said.
I gave him a look. “Do I look stupid to you? Tired. Pathetic. Yes. Stupid—not usually. I’m not going to ask you to face down any vampire in his den for me, let alone the Lord of Night. I request, respectfully, sanctuary for three days. Charles seemed to think it would allow you to count coup on Bran if you protected me when he couldn’t.”
“You are the mate of another Alpha,” he said, his eyes half-lidded with menace. “Intruding on my territory without prior arrangements. I could have you killed for that alone.”
I’d kind of thought we were past the death threats. But apparently I was wrong.
“Yes,” I agreed. “But it wasn’t on purpose—and killing me would make you look like a real jerk.”
He laughed. “You think I mind looking like a real jerk”—he tasted those two words as if they were something he hadn’t said before—“do you?” But his whole body had relaxed. Once they laugh, they are mine. Mostly.
“If you were going to kill me,” I said, “you’d have done it already.”
“You,” he said evenly. “You are a threat to my people. If I grant you sanctuary and you die, the Marrok will come here and kill my people while I watch. If Bonarata comes after you, he will do his best to kill my people, and he will never let it drop.”
“Libor,” said a small voice chidingly, “you are being mean to the nice lady. Stop it.”
I looked. I couldn’t help it. I hadn’t heard anyone come in, hadn’t smelled anyone approach, and as wound up as I felt, I should have.
I’d expected a child, but instead there was a woman with bright blue eyes and curly hair several shades lighter than Libor’s, a medium brown. She was wearing a folk costume, a more authentic version of what the man at the counter had been wearing: a simple white blouse with a string neck covered partially by a laced-up, heavily embroidered bodice. She wore a multitude of lightweight, bright-colored skirts of various lengths. Her face was cheerful and rounded, like her body.