"I do have backup, you know," Sasha said. "If she comes with Vampires, it would be within the human military"s right to make a retaliatory strike . . . They lost four marines, and by human standards also lost four students and four civilian adults."
"They"ll have to be thoroughly briefed, then, Sasha," Hunter said carefully. "Not just for their safety, but for ours. If they freak out in a firelight when they see multiple ent.i.ties or freeze at the trigger... I don"t know. We really need to weigh that option."
"Okay, you make a valid point... but let"s keep it on the table as a backup option. I have to brief Colonel Madison, anyway. J don"t want anybody, human or supernatural, getting hurt who doesn"t have to."
"All right," Hunter said, his tone still noncommittal. "As a plan B."
"When you send Lady Jung Suk to the Light, you will lose your evidence trail," Garth said, his tone measured and cautious.
"I don"t care," Shogun said. "It is the right thing to do, and we know the truth of what happened before."
"Again, I stand with my brother in this," Hunter said.
"And I," Sasha said.
"And I," Bear Shadow chimed in with both Crow Shadow and Silver Hawk.
"Your honor is moving," Sir Rodney said, "but the alliance will crumble. They will still win, even if your honor is indisputable."
"They cannot stand up under the pen strike of the high court," Sasha said. "When we answer the charges and the book of truths opens to our testimony, our blood will not sizzle and burn, but will take to the book."
"Let us hope that you are correct," Sir Rodney said, seeming unsure. "It is a delicate game we play, with chess pieces not well placed on the board."
"Don"t worry," Sasha said, holding his gaze. "Some things are just right."
"But there is also another predator that we must flush out of hiding," Hunter said, sending his gaze around the table. "That one may prove harder to track and trap than Lady Jung Suk. The possession demon that is feeding on humans and making it look as though it was wolf attacks."
"I have an idea," Sasha said. "But for this one I really am going to need Colonel Madison"s help."
As insane as it was, Colonel Madison had her standing in front of a small cla.s.sroom on the base, speaking to special forces guys. It was both an honor and one of the crazier things she"d decided to do in her life. But while Fisher and Woods were on a military flight to join her at the base, the two hours to give a small unit a heads-up that could possibly save their lives was the very least she could do.
"When Lieutenant Woods and Lieutenant Fisher arrive, they will be your point," Sasha said, holding a dry-erase marker. "They know the difference between a friendly supernatural and a deadly one. If you kill a friendly in a firefight, you significantly degrade your cover, understood? One friendly wolf can cover about ten human men, so the loss of onea"especially if there"s another Were on your a.s.sa"makes you dog meat. Literally."
Sasha turned to the whiteboard and began sketching a loose diagram of the Bayou House area and incoming gravel roads.
"I don"t have to tell you, we lost four good Marines out there, four civilians, and it might have been the kill site for two or three missing studentsa"two of whom were later found half eaten. Your task for this mission is to remain in a backup position only. There will be super-naturals deep in that bayou sc.r.a.pping it out at velocities you cannot fathom. But they do fatigue and could get overrun by hostile forces. If you hear the howl, you come a-knockin" and let your weapon start a-rockin". We clear?"
"The howl, sir?" one confused lieutenant asked, glancing around the cla.s.sroom.
When others smirked at him, Sasha set down her dry-erase marker calmly. "It was a good question, Lieutenant Campbell. Under other circ.u.mstances, you wouldn"t be able to trust the howl, because it could be coming from a demon-infected Were . . . that"s why I"m bringing in Woods and Fisher. They have superior hearing, know the calls, and know all our voices." She threw her head back and howled, and then smiled as the stunned group of Marines simply stared at her. "Kinda cool, ain"t it? Yeah ... well, wolves can hear that for miles."
Another hand raised, and she motioned with her chin for the soldier to ask his question.
"Uh, Captain .. . you said to shoot by the color of the glow of their eyes. Red or shiny black for Vampires, and never go for the golda"your wolf company ... but there"s a hostile out there who might have green glowers ... I mean, these are actual eye colors we"re supposed to be looking for?"
"Yes, Lieutenant," Sasha said, looking at Colonel Madison for a moment. "Sir, it"s going to be necessary for me to show these gentlemen what you saw, in order that they don"t get jumpy and either freeze in a firefight or just frag one of us."
"That is exactly why I had everyone disarm before coming in to cla.s.s," Colonel Madison said calmly, folding his arms. "Carry on .. . this is gonna be good."
Sasha chuckled. "All right, Lieutenant Peterson, this is what you are looking for." She closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and summoned a little of her inner wolf to the lore.
Instantly the front row of the cla.s.s was out of their seats, having knocked into the rows behind them. Soldiers scrambled. She heard "Oh, s.h.i.t" so many times that she almost laughed out loud.
"Now do you understand why it is vital that you get used to seeing this? I am a friendly. I"m your instructor. I"ll be the one to save your a.s.s from something really horrible that will eat you alive and make you wish you were never born." She turned to the colonel. "Sir, can you turn off the lights and have one of the men pull the shades. You think this is scary with the lights on, wait till you see it in the dark."
"Uh, Sashaa"I mean, Captain ... we don"t have an EMT squad at the ready . . . one of these men will have a heart attack. Do you think this is wise?"
"I do, sira"because there"ll be no ambulance out there in the bayou, that"s for sure."
"Agreed," he said and nodded to a very nervous soldier who stood by the window seeming as though he was ready to leap out of it.
"Colonel, sir!" a squad commander from the back yelled. "This, this stuff really exists? All this stuff she was telling us about and what we were taught about in the unit. .. it"s, it"s not hypothetical, sir?"
"She can show you better than I can tell you," Colonel Madison said with his hand on the light switch as the shades lowered. "I lost four good men out there in the bayou because I thought this was some sort of joke . . . that the researchers were talking about the potential of supernatural activity, and my job was just to go out there and debunk it. Not so. Whatever you"ve heard in the general media press conferences is to keep the civilian public from ma.s.s panic." He hit the light.
An audible gasp cut through the room.
"This is what a wolf"s eyes look like under the moonlight. This room is only partially darkened, just like a forest would bea"you still have some visibility coming in from the sides of the shades, just like moon-light comes through the tree line. But if my eyes were red, that is not a good thing."
She walked back and forth in the front of the room. "If I have four protruding teetha"upper and lower caninesa"you can bet I"m a wolf or a Were from the big-cat family. If I only have two fangs, unnatural eye-teeth, I"d be a Vamp. Wave your hand in the back of the room if you can see light glinting off my teeth in a flash."
"Holy Christ!" a man shouted in the far back as half the room retreated again.
"Thank you, Lieutenant. I"ll take that as an affirmative."
Sasha blew out a long breath. "Now, gentlemen. I"m about to show you something that may put you down on the ground or make you need to hit the barracks to change your fatigues." She turned to Colonel Madison. "With your permission, sir, only for training purposes." He nodded slowly, but then stepped back, not seeming sure himself about her altered state. And then she shape-shifted.
It was a beautiful transformation, if she did say so herself. . . elegantly done with finesse. No angry lunging to strike terror in the hearts of men. She just strode across the room a few paces and transformed into her wolf, leaving her clothing to float down into a pool of fabric on the floor. Then she did give them a little theater, preening and taking a stance like a championship show dog before she threw back her head and howled. It felt so good to finally let the people she worked with see who she was and what she wasa"the fact that two guys pa.s.sed out and one was hyperventilating while the rest were up on chairs in the back of the cla.s.s was not her fault. This somehow felt even better than when she first let her small unit know what she was; this was a milestone in awareness, if not acceptance.
Loping over to her pile of clothes, Sasha picked up everything in her jaws except her boots, then went into the shadow of the front desk, shifted back to her human to dress quickly in the shadow lands, came back into the cla.s.sroom through the door, and hit the lights.
"Okay, gentlemen. So now you"ve seen your first shape-shift. I"m a smaller version of what you"ll see in combat. The males are about one and a half times my body weighta"and there"s a pure black three-hundred-pounder on our side. This is why it"s important for you to be acclimated before you have a weapon in your hand and before a supernatural is lunging at you full-force. You have got to be able to make a split-second decision, know if it"s friend or foe, and cover yourself," she said calmly. "Get those men up off the floor in the back and any soldier who needs to go clean up, no problem."
CHAPTER 20.
"You did what?" Doc exclaimed into the speakerphone as the rest of the team at NORAD burst out laughing.
"OMG, Trudeau," Winters said from the back-ground.
"How many Marines. .h.i.t the floor?" Bradley asked in his typical sarcastic tone.
"In all seriousness, Sasha, did anybody need medical attention?" Clarissa asked as the only calm voice in the group.
"No," Colonel Madison said, entering the conversation. He didn"t seem the least bit amused, and his gruff reply made the team on the other end of the line clear their throats. "It is not something anyone sees every day, so the fact that some of the men were a little .. . wary, cannot be held against them."
"Certainly not, Colonel," Sasha said, forcing contrition into her voice. "What they witnessed might just save their lives."
"Duly noted," Doc said.
Sasha could just imagine him giving the group the eye along with hand signals to save the laughs for when the colonel got off the line.
"But we need your help with a theory," Sasha said, frowning. She pushed back from the colonel"s desk and began to pace. It helped her think better. "I have no idea if this will worka"and it"s all predicated on us having any success whatsoever on the mission we intend to embark upon tonight. But as I told you, we"ve got two known predators hunting humans. We"ve made an ID on one of them, but the other is still at large ... we have no clue as to where it could be."
She looked at Colonel Madison and ruffled the hair up off the nape of her neck, thinking out loud. "It left him alive, but for some reason didn"t attach to him as a carrier. It jumped on me, though, and I had to go get it cleaned off while I was in the lab . .. It also attacked Silver Hawk when he tried to engage it while on a vision quest, and he pa.s.sed it to Hunter temporarily."
"Are they clean now?" Colonel Madison asked quickly.
"You took the question right out of my mouth, sir," Doc said into the speaker.
"Affirmative," Sasha said, stopping by the window. "I don"t feel anything untoward here at the base, either. . . which makes me think it probably pa.s.sed over that guya"the reporter who was also a sole survivor, like the colonel."
"Russell Conway," Winters said, the sound of his keyboard clicking away in the background. "But he"s not just some hotshot local-yokel reportera"he"s also an anti-paranormal hothead."
"A what, Winters? Speak in plain English," Sasha said, coming to the colonel"s desk to lean closer to the speakerphone.
"This guy has a long blog in the obscure rant communities onlinea"you know, the same folks that obsess over Big Foot sightings. Anyway, Russell Conway goes by Wolfkiller100 when he posts . . . and I was able to find some old articles in the South Dakota Sentinel, since he often talks about the beauty of that North Country. There was a whole front-page story about a woman and a little girl being savaged by a grizzly bear thirty years ago, leaving a young teenage boy orphaned. The article said that the boy claimed the only thing that saved him was some sort of silver-and-turquoise Native American talisman that he"d begged for and that his mother brought him at the camping lodge gift shop earlier that day. The kid also claimed it wasn"t a bear, but a wolfa"but authorities said a wolf couldn"t have done that level of damage to a human body unless it was a pack."
"Are you serious?" Sasha sat down slowly. "How do you find this stuff out, Winters?"
"I told you, my kung fu is strong, Captain. But Russell Conway"s recent TV success made it a lot easier for me to dig into his background on the Web. I wanted to personally know who this guy was that had the stones to put together a team to go out in the bayou, and after we saw what jumped out of the cooler, I definitely thought we needed to know if we had a sole survivor carrying this contagion out to the general public."
"d.a.m.n ... I must have been slipping," Sasha said, rubbing both palms down her face. "Good looking out."
"You were infected, Captain," Clarissa said. "Is there any wonder one thing got by you? That"s why you have us, your team, as backup."
"Do we need to bring this guy in?" Colonel Madison said, becoming nervous. This time he stood and was the one who began to pace.
"I don"t think so," Bradley said. "More than likely, just like you were clean after your tragic incident at the Bayou House, Conway was as well. All Winters"s research shows is that this man had an agenda when he came down here. He undoubtedly experienced an attack of some sort by a supernatural as a kid, and the local authorities suppressed it as a grizzly attack. Sounds like this guy has been trying to get vindicated all his life... sorta like the alien abduction people. He"s harmlessa"and G.o.d bless him; he got his fifteen minutes of fame at a very high price."
"Yeah ... and now, unfortunately," Sasha said, "in order to lure the demon to a trap, we"re going to have to take that short-lived win away from the poor man."
"How so?" Colonel Madison said, turning to look at Sasha directly.
"I don"t even know if it"ll work," she replied with a weary sigh. "But the way we"re going to bait Lady Jung Suk out of hiding is by taunting her."
"It"s risky," Bradley warned, "but a good offensive move. Demons hate a challenge to their existence .. . so, a press conference saying that the U.S. military cannot authenticate the images in Russell Conway"s video would make it angry."
"I"ll go to Conway and personally apologize to him," Sasha said. "It"s not fair to make that poor man think he"s crazy when the colonel gets up on a podium and states that the Bayou House deaths are under investigation as possibly being a ferocious pack of feral dogs that have taken up residence in the bayou, post-Hurricane Katrina." She looked at the colonel. "At some point, and I suspect in the near future, the government is going to have to take a position on this secrecy thing . ..too many civilians know, too many are getting hurt, and too many of our people in uniform have been deployed and are losing their lives trying to fight this stuff without the proper training."
The colonel nodded. "I will definitely take that under advis.e.m.e.nt and pa.s.s it up the chain of command. After what I"ve witnessed with my own eyes, as well as how I saw those men react in the cla.s.sroom, I know you"re right, Captain. I just don"t have the authority to do so . . . but what I don"t know, I can"t be responsible for."
"Thank you, sir," Sasha said and then looked at the speakerphone again.
"Bradley . . . you said your research into possession demons shows that they have a primary host, and will stay with that host body, causing it to do horrendous things until they use up the life force in it or the body is somehow destroyed."
"Yes, that is how that particular ent.i.ty functions," Bradley said.
"That"s why you"re the man," Sasha said. She gave the colonel a quick nod. "Dude is the best dark arts spec out there. He and Clarissa with second sight make one h.e.l.luva team, sir."
"Thank you, Captain," Bradley said. "That"s why it probably tried you, Silver Hawk, and Hunter... If it could get into a strong wolf body versus some other carriera"probably a local humana"then why not. I"m sure that"s why it"s not jumping around from human body to human body, and since wolves have souls, unlike Vampires, you"re the strongest choice in the area. Hopefully the human who"s currently hosting it will see the colonel"s news conference tomorrow morning, which might p.i.s.s the demon off."
"That"s the very loosely constructed plan I had," Sasha said, letting out another frustrated breath. "Looking for this thing is like looking for a needle in a haystack. We don"t even know what human it"s compromised."
"I don"t mind going on a fishing expedition," Colonel Madison said. "Not after what I"ve seen. It beats sitting around and waiting for more people to lose their lives. Don"t worry, at that news conference, I"ll make that thing we"re hunting mad as all get-out. I"ll say in no uncertain terms, we"re going back to the scene of the crime with a military camera crew, and some meat as bait, in an operation to prove to the public once and for all that there"s nothing out there."
Sasha nodded. "Sounds like a plan, sir. The best we"ve got now, anyway .. . and maybe, just maybe, we can get it to show itself again. This time we"ll be ready for it."
Back-to-back missions were not something she relished, but if they wanted to strike while the iron was hot, that"s what they had to do. They had to go after Lady Jung Suk first, because of the moon cycle of the Weres, as well as to have any chance of saving Amy Chen. The thing that worried her most was, if they couldn"t get Lady Jung Suk separated, they"d have to make an on-the-spot decision to kill the girl to get to the disembodied Were Leopard. No one wanted to talk about that, bit it was implied in the eyes of everyone involved. She was just glad that the military wouldn"t be on this first mission. It was too complicated an extraction, too delicate a maneuver. One wrong move and a young girl could die, or soldiers could lose their throats in a Were Leopard"s jaws.
Secreted away in the stone wizard"s den beneath the palace, Sasha felt like she"d definitely tumbled into the Land of Oz. It was way freakier than the setup Sir Rodney had upstairs, where things were what they appeared to be, even if they had a little Fae topspin on them to make them more enjoyable. But sheesh, this was truly ridiculous.
His top magic advisors actually had apothecary jars labeled EYE of newt with eyeb.a.l.l.s of the tiny lizard that followed you around the room. Enchanted broom-sticks perpetually kept the floors clean while cauldrons bubbled and sputtered in a walk-in fireplace.
Garth didn"t have to tell anybody twice to keep their hands in their pockets and their mouths shut. He and his fellow Gnomes had been busily concocting the vision miasma during the hours she"d been gone; it hovered over a wide circle drawn on the floor and covered with cryptic sigils at the back of the room.
"We have added all of the seeing elements." Garth put a jar of chameleon eyes down on the table. "They blend in," he said with a droll little smile as Sasha studied the eyeb.a.l.l.s that blinked and curiously studied her back. "But this," he added, holding up a small gla.s.s vial, "will ensure we get her attention."
"It is a sample from the site of the Vampire messenger demon kill," a shorter, squatter advisor said.
"A what?" Hunter c.o.c.ked his head to the side.
"The plump human that the messenger demons killed."
"The kid DeWitt?" Sasha said, stunned. "The Vampires sent a messenger demon after him?"
"Of course," Garth said, seeming puzzled that she didn"t know.
"They wanted to send him a message to keep his mouth shut. Messenger demons are pretty effective for that," Sir Rodney said. "They leave a cold, green slime."
"Yuck ... like algae," Sasha said, wrinkling her nose.
Bear, Crow, and Silver Hawk just shook their heads.
"Well, we at least have evidence now that the Vampires tried to keep a witness from testifying," Silver Hawk said.
"They"ll most likely claim that it had nothing to do with that," Sir Rodney said. "They"ll say it was rightful retaliation for the daylight exposure of Ariel Beau-champ"s mausoleum."