"And there"s plenty more here if you"d like a closer look," a deep voice said.
Clay"s head shot up. We looked around, then saw a loading dock to our right. Clay hopped onto the three-foot-high ledge and disappeared into the darkness of the opening. Nick and I followed. At the back of the loading dock, Jeremy sat in the corner, propping his right leg on a broken crate as Antonio tore strips from his shirt. As we approached, Jeremy lifted his left arm to push his bangs back from his face, then winced and used his right hand instead, letting the left fall awkwardly to his side. "Are you okay?" I asked.
"Peter"s dead," Jeremy said. "We were ambushed."
"We were heading back to the car," Antonio said as he added another layer of bindings to Jeremy"s leg. "I took off to find a bathroom. Five minutes. I must have barely turned the corner and-" He kept his eyes on his task, but self-reproach leached from every word. "Less than five minutes. While I"m taking a d.a.m.ned p.i.s.s-break-"
"They were waiting for an opportunity," Jeremy said. "Any of us could have turned our back for a moment and they would have attacked the other two."
Antonio glanced over his shoulder as he worked. "The new one, the mutt that killed Logan, attacked Jeremy with a knife."
"A knife?" Clay glanced at Jeremy for affirmation, as disbelieving as if Antonio had said Jeremy was attacked with an antique Howitzer. "A knife?"
Jeremy nodded.
Antonio continued, "They jumped Peter and Jeremy. No one had time to react. When I showed up they took off. I"d have gone after them, but Jeremy was bleeding pretty badly."
"Not that I would have let you go after them anyway," Jeremy said. "We don"t have time to rehash events now. We need to get things cleaned up and go."
He started getting to his feet. Clay hopped over a crate and helped him up.
"We left Peter at the scene," Jeremy said.
"I know," I said. "We found him."
"In the garbage," Antonio said, wiping a hand over his face. "That wasn"t right. I"m sorry, but Jeremy was bleeding and I-"
"You needed to find a quick hiding spot," Jeremy finished. "No one"s blaming you for that. We"ll get him now and take him home."
Clay helped Jeremy down from the dock. I moved up on his left side to take his other arm, then remembered it was injured and settled for walking beside him, ready to catch him if his leg gave out. I gave Nick my car keys and he ran ahead to back up the Camaro to the end of the alley. When we got to the garbage heap, Antonio uncovered Peter and cleaned him off.
"Marsten"s going to pay for this," Clay said, looking at Peter"s body, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. "He"s really going to pay,"
"Marsten didn"t kill Peter. Daniel did."
"Dan-" Clay choked on the rest of the name. "Ah, s.h.i.t."
I rode back to Stonehaven in Antonio"s Mercedes, sitting in the backseat with Jeremy, in case the bleeding worsened. Antonio drove in silence. Jeremy stared out the window while holding the bindings tight on his leg. I tried to concentrate on something other than watching my car through the windshield and thinking about Peter"s body in my trunk. Instead, I thought about the mutts.
So it was Daniel after all. That meant trouble. Big trouble. More than Marsten or Cain, Daniel knew how the Pack operated, how everyone in it operated. He"d been Pack, having grown up with Nick and Clay . . . or, more accurately, he grew up around them, "with them" sounding as if the three had been buddies, a definite misconception. Now, before Clay"s arrival, Nick and Daniel had been semi-playmates, thrown together by their closeness in age, like two cousins who play with each other at family reunions because there"s no one else to hang around with. Then came Clay. I was a bit fuzzy on the details, but I"d been told that Clay and Daniel loathed each other from the beginning. The precipitating event seemed to have occurred when Daniel eavesdropped on Nick and Clay"s conversation and raced off to regale the Pack with the story of Clay"s expulsion from kindergarten, which had something to do with dissecting the cla.s.sroom guinea pig to see how it worked, but like I said, I was fuzzy on the details-when I asked Clay about it, all he"d say was "it was already dead," which was apparently supposed to explain everything. Whatever the story, it embarra.s.sed Jeremy, who"d been fudging the details when explaining to the others why Clay"s school career had lasted only a month. By upsetting Jeremy, Daniel had earned Clay"s eternal rancor.
In the years to follow the relationship between the two only grew more acrimonious as Daniel and Clay fought for supreme position among the younger generation. Or, I should say, Daniel fought for it. Clay simply a.s.sumed it was his and squashed Daniel"s aspirations with the lazy contempt of someone batting away a mosquito. When the three were in their early twenties, Jeremy became Alpha. I may have given the impression that this was a bloodless ascension. It wasn"t. Seven members of the Pack backed Jeremy and four didn"t, including Daniel and his brother Stephen. The dissension crescendoed when Stephen tried to a.s.sa.s.sinate Jeremy. Clay killed him. Daniel insisted his brother had been innocent and that Clay had murdered him to quell opposition to Jeremy"s leadership. When Jeremy was confirmed Alpha, Daniel decided there wasn"t a place for him in the new Pack.
Unfortunately for all, that wasn"t the end of the story. Even if they were no longer Pack brothers, Daniel and Clay had had plenty of run-ins since that time. After I came along, things got even worse. Daniel decided he absolutely had to have me, if only because I "belonged" to his archrival. When Daniel first approached me, I even thought he was a decent guy. I believed his stories about being mistreated and maligned by Clay-at the time I was quite happy to believe anything bad about Clay. One day I was in San Diego with Antonio delivering a warning to another mutt and, knowing Daniel had been living there a few months, I slipped away from Antonio to say h.e.l.lo to Daniel. When I got to his apartment, I caught him trying to hide a woman in the closet. It wouldn"t have been so bad if the woman was still alive. Apparently, she had been, right up until I rang the doorbell, upon which Daniel snapped her neck and tried to stuff her into a closet so I wouldn"t find him with someone. After that, I"d put a lot more credence in Clay"s warnings about Daniel.
The woman in the closet wasn"t the first of Daniel"s kills. When he"d left the Pack, he"d abandoned its teachings and become a man-killer. Like all successful-and long-lived-man-killing mutts, Daniel learned the trick to killing humans, the same trick a wolf uses when confronted with a large herd of prey: cull from the edges. If you stick with the marginalized-the drug users, the teenage runaways, the prost.i.tutes, the homeless-you stand a good chance of getting away with it. Why? Because n.o.body gives a d.a.m.n. Oh sure, they say they do, the police and the politicians and everyone who"s supposed to uphold justice, but they really don"t. People can vanish and, so long as they stay gone, n.o.body will care. I"m not talking about third-world dictatorships or even American metropolises infamous for their crime rates. Vancouver had over twenty prost.i.tutes disappear from a single neighborhood before authorities began to suspect a problem. Trust me, if these women had been students at the University of British Columbia, people would have perked up a whole lot quicker. That"s where Thomas LeBlanc went wrong, picking the daughters and wives of middle-cla.s.s families as his prey. If he"d stuck to hookers and runaways, he"d still be doing a booming business in Chicago. In all my arguments with Jeremy over the unfairness of the Pack"s hierarchical system, I"d upheld the human democratic model for comparison, where everyone was supposedly equally important. It was bulls.h.i.t, of course. Even though the Pack had a strict hierarchy, it would never let even the death of its omega member go unavenged.
Back at the house, Jeremy asked me to help dress his wounds. Maybe he a.s.sumed I"d be a gentler, more tolerable nurse than the men. Right. Jeremy may not have known much about women, but he"d learned enough about this particular one never to mistake me for Betty Crocker, Martha Stewart, or Florence Nightingale. More likely he thought that, given the choice between nursing and gravedigging, I"d be much happier donning a cute little white hat and dress. My last graveside episode wasn"t one I cared to repeat any sooner than necessary. At least if I was looking after Jeremy, I could block out what was going on in the back field.
Normally, Jeremy would be the one doing the nursing. He was the Pack doctor. No, that wasn"t a time-honored role pa.s.sed down through generations of werewolves. It was something Jeremy took on when, as a child, Clay jumped five stories down a department-store elevator shaft (don"t ask) and fractured his arm in several places. Not wanting to risk Clay"s future mobility on a makeshift splint, Jeremy took him to a doctor. Although he was careful, citing religious reasons for not wanting blood work and other routine lab tests done, the doctor did them anyway. The results might have gone ignored, having little to do with a broken arm, but a bored lab technician on the night shift spotted something peculiar in the workups and called Jeremy at two a.m. Werewolf blood is screwed up. Don"t ask me for the exact details-I barely pa.s.sed tenth-grade biology. All I know is that we aren"t supposed to let anyone draw and a.n.a.lyze our blood. Whatever the technician saw in Clay"s workup made him think Clay had some life-threatening condition and he ordered Jeremy to bring Clay to the hospital immediately. The upshot of the whole mess was that both the technician and Clay"s file were missing when the day shift arrived. After that, Jeremy bought and studied a shelf full of medical books. A few years ago I made the mistake of giving him a copy of the St. John Ambulance Official Wilderness First Aid Guide. St. John Ambulance Official Wilderness First Aid Guide. He"d liked it so much he had me buy copies for all of us so we could keep them in our glove boxes and fix our own emergency amputations. Call me a wimp, but if I ever lose a limb and there"s no one around, I"m a goner, even if the guide does have wonderful instructions (complete with helpful ill.u.s.trations) for tying off the injury with a stick and a plastic garbage bag. He"d liked it so much he had me buy copies for all of us so we could keep them in our glove boxes and fix our own emergency amputations. Call me a wimp, but if I ever lose a limb and there"s no one around, I"m a goner, even if the guide does have wonderful instructions (complete with helpful ill.u.s.trations) for tying off the injury with a stick and a plastic garbage bag.
"Leg first?" I asked Jeremy as he took his box of medical supplies from the bathroom closet.
"Arm. I"ll get the bone in place. You splint it."
That didn"t sound too bad. Jeremy sat on the toilet seat and I crouched beside him as we worked. It was a clean break, not an open fracture, so there wasn"t any of that nasty pulling the bone back under the skin stuff required. The break was just below his elbow. After he got it realigned, I placed the padded splint under his arm. Then I got the bandage roll out. Following Jeremy"s instructions, I bound it first below his elbow, then above his wrist. Then I fashioned a sling to keep his arm elevated. It took a while, but it was fairly easy . . . compared to what he wanted me to do next.
"You"ll need to st.i.tch up my leg," he said.
"St.i.tch . . . ?"
"I can"t do it with one hand." He stood and leaned against the vanity, undoing his jeans with his good hand, then struggling to get them off. "I could use some help with this, too, if it"s not too much to ask."
"Sure," I said. "Undressing men, I"m good at. Sewing people up, though, is questionable. Maybe the cut isn"t that bad."
I unwound the blood-soaked strips of Antonio"s shirt from Jeremy"s thigh. The skin and muscle parted like the Red Sea, an even more apt a.n.a.logy considering the gush of blood that streamed out. I had no problem seeing Jeremy with his pants off, but this internal view was more than I wanted to see of anyone.
"Grab the facecloth," he said, sitting quickly and shoving a towel against the gash.
I wet the cloth, cleaned the wound, then applied antiseptic. I didn"t work as fast as I should have, and by the time I was finishing, blood was gushing over my fingers.
"Get the tape," Jeremy said. "No, not that tape. The other-right."
Using the tape and some fancy maneuvering, we got the blood flow stopped before Jeremy pa.s.sed out. He took something that looked remarkably like a needle and thread from the kit and handed it to me.
"Stop backing away, Elena. It"s not going to bite. Take the needle and start. Don"t think about it. Just try to make a reasonably straight line."
"Sounds easy, but you never saw my home economics projects."
"No, but I"ve had the privilege of experiencing your haircuts. As I said, try try to make a straight line." to make a straight line."
"I always cut your hair straight."
"If I hold my head on a certain angle, it"s perfectly straight."
"Watch it. I"ve got a needle."
"And maybe if I get you mad enough, you"ll actually jab me with it and get to work before I bleed out."
I took the hint. Despite what Jeremy said, it was not like sewing fabric nor could I pretend that it was. Cloth doesn"t bleed. I concentrated on doing a good job, knowing that if I didn"t, I"d be razzed about Jeremy"s crooked scar for the rest of my life. It was nearly done when I felt a rush of anger that some mutt had dared do this to Jeremy, which made me think about how it had happened, which made me remember that Peter was dead. First Logan. Now Peter. Of all the Pack, they deserved it least. Jeremy never sent them to roust or kill any mutts, not even to deliver warnings. Their deaths weren"t about revenge. They weren"t about taking out the Pack"s strongest fighters. Logan and Peter had been killed to make us sit up and take notice. Nothing more. My hands started to clench. The old serpent of rage started moving through me. I stopped, inhaled, and started again, but couldn"t steady my fingers.
"So we"re up against three experienced mutts," Jeremy said, breaking into my thoughts.
I swallowed back the clot in my throat and played along with the distraction. "Plus at least one new one."
"I haven"t forgotten, though I"m more concerned about the experienced ones. Yes, they"re good-my arm and leg prove that-but they"re not on the same playing field as Daniel."
I broke off the thread. "That"s because you know Daniel. And even if you don"t know Marsten and Cain equally well, you know what to expect from them because they"re like you. They think like you, they react like you, they kill like you. These new ones don"t. Werewolves don"t strangle people. That"s how LeBlanc killed Logan and he succeeded because it"s the last thing Logan would have expected. Then he pulled a knife on you. You"d expect that as much as a samurai would expect a kick in the b.a.l.l.s. That"s why LeBlanc is still alive. He threw you off balance. If-"
"We"ve dug the grave," Antonio said, coming into the bathroom. "I"m sorry. Did I interrupt something?"
"Nothing that can"t be finished later," Jeremy said, getting to his feet and testing the st.i.tches. When they didn"t burst apart or gush blood, he nodded. "Perfect. I"ll get dressed and we"ll go out."
Conviction
I went to Peter"s burial site with Jeremy. It wasn"t something I particularly wanted to do, with my last graveside breakdown less than thirty-six hours old. Nor did Jeremy need my help making sure the grave was well concealed. He did, however, need my help in another way, though he"d never have admitted it or asked for it. With his leg freshly st.i.tched, he was in no shape for walking without a supporting arm. So I helped him out to the backyard, though to an onlooker it would have appeared that Jeremy was the one helping me. That wasn"t unintentional. The Pack Alpha could not show weakness, even if he was fresh from a fight for his life. Not that any of us would ever seize an opportunity to challenge Jeremy for leadership. Yet because the Pack placed its Alpha in total control, the idea that he might not be up to the task, even temporarily, would throw the whole Pack off balance.
Although Jeremy had to be in tremendous pain, he never showed it. He accepted my arm going to and from the grave site, but never put more than the minimum amount of weight on it. Only when we were heading back to the house did he pause for a second, presumably to catch his breath, though he pretended to be checking a crumbling stone in the garden wall.
"I guess we should grab some sleep now," I said, feigning a yawn. "I know I could use it."
"Go on," Jeremy said. "You"ve had a rough couple of days. I want to discuss what we found in BearValley before we were ambushed, but I can fill you in tomorrow."
"Everyone"s probably exhausted. We can meet in the morning, can"t we? I wouldn"t want to miss anything."
"I"d like to get through it tonight. If you want to be there, claim the couch and you can doze while we talk."
Okay, forget subtlety. Full-frontal-a.s.sault time. "You "You need to sleep. Your leg has to be killing you, not to mention your arm. No one"s going to think anything"s wrong if you delay the meeting until tomorrow." need to sleep. Your leg has to be killing you, not to mention your arm. No one"s going to think anything"s wrong if you delay the meeting until tomorrow."
"I can handle it. Don"t grind your teeth like that, Elena; I"m not qualified to do dental work. If you want to help, you can round up the others and get them into the study, if they"re not already there."
"If you"d like me to really help, I can knock you unconscious until morning."
He gave me a wry half smile that said my suggestion sounded more tempting than he cared to admit. "How about a compromise? You can help by rounding up the others and fixing me a drink, preferably a double."
Before the ambush, Jeremy"s information gathering had confirmed what Clay and I knew, that we had three mutts in BearValley. He"d also learned a few additional bits of information. Marsten had actually been the first of the three to arrive, before Cain and LeBlanc. He"d checked into the Big Bear three days ago, meaning he"d been in town before Brandon"s death. After a few twenties loosened the desk clerk"s powers of recall, he"d remembered a young man matching Brandon"s description visiting Marsten at the hotel several times. Any doubt that Brandon had been involved with the others was now gone. I wondered if Marsten had been at the rave that night, enjoying a whiskey and soda as he watched Brandon and me, his scent and form hidden away in a dark, smoky corner. Yes, I was sure he"d been there. He"d seen Brandon start his Change, realized what was about to happen and slipped out before the chaos erupted, abandoning his protege to his fate. Mutts may have been able to form relationships with each other, but they lasted only so long as proved advantageous to both parties. Once Marsten saw Brandon was in trouble, his only thought would be to get the h.e.l.l out of there before he got sucked into the mess.
Cain and LeBlanc had checked into the Big Bear the night Brandon died. Presumably they"d either followed Logan from Los Angeles or met him at the airport. Waylaying him in BearValley would have been next to impossible. While we"d been chasing Brandon, Logan had already been dead, probably in the back of some rented car on his way to BearValley. Somewhere along the way, they must have found out from Marsten that Clay and I were in town and the prank of staging Logan"s body near our car was born. I guessed that was LeBlanc"s idea. Cain didn"t have the wits to think of it and Marsten would consider such crude humor beneath him.
It wasn"t quite seven when the doorbell rang. We all looked up, startled by the sound. The doorbell at Stonehaven rarely rang, the house being too remote for salesmen and Jehovah"s Witnesses. Deliveries went to a post office box in BearValley. Even the Pack didn"t ring the bell-except for Peter. I think we all remembered this as it rang. No one moved until the second buzz, then Jeremy got to his feet and left the room. I followed. From the dining room window we could see a police cruiser parked in the driveway.
"We don"t need this," I said. "We really don"t need this."
Jeremy shrugged off his arm sling and tucked it into the hall stand, then grabbed Clay"s sweatshirt from the hooks. I helped him into it. The bulky shirt hid his splint and his pants covered his leg bandages. His clothes were clean and unwrinkled, since he"d changed only a few hours ago. That was more than I could say for the rest of us. One glance in the hall mirror told me that I looked like h.e.l.l, clothes covered in dirt and blood, face blotchy, hair knotted from lying on the sofa.
"Get the others upstairs to dress," Jeremy said. "Tell Clay, Antonio, and Nick to stay up there. You can join me on the back porch."
"It"s going to look suspicious if you usher them around the house for a second time."
"I know."
"Invite them in and offer them coffee. There"s nothing here for them to see."
"I know."
"I"ll meet you in the study, then?"
Jeremy hesitated. Knowing he should invite the police into the house was one thing, doing it was another. The only humans who came into Stonehaven were repairmen, and even that was done only when necessary. There was nothing at Stonehaven that would make anyone suspicious, no body parts in the freezer or pentagrams etched into the hardwood. The scariest thing in Stonehaven was my bedroom and I had no intention of inviting any cop up there, no matter how cute he looked in uniform.
"The living room," he said as the doorbell rang a third time. "We"ll be in the living room."
"I"ll make coffee," I said, and left before he could change his mind.
When I got back to the living room, there were two police officers with Jeremy. The older one was the town police chief, a burly, balding man named Morgan. I"d seen him around town, though he hadn"t been with the search party the day before. With Morgan"s arrival, things were obviously heating up, though in a town as small as BearValley, having the police chief show up at your house was a cause for concern but not panic. The other officer was young and bland-faced, the kind of guy you could see twenty times before you remembered him. According to his badge, his name was O"Neil. Neither the face nor the name triggered any recollection from yesterday, but he"d likely been there. The look he gave me indicated he remembered me, though he seemed disappointed to find me fully dressed. At least I came bearing coffee. Jeremy and Morgan were discussing some local native land claim. Jeremy leaned back in a chair, feet on the ottoman, broken arm resting so casually against his leg no one would guess it was splinted. His face was relaxed, eyes alert and interested, as if he had policemen in his home every day and not only knew about the land claim, but was deeply concerned over it, mirroring the police chief"s opinions with the ease of a consummate con artist. The younger officer, O"Neil, was unabashedly gawking around the room, taking in all the details to relate later to curious friends.
Conversation stopped when I entered. I set up the tray on an end table and started pouring coffee like a perfect hostess.
"Oh, I don"t drink tea," Morgan said, eyeing the silver coffeepot as if it might bite.
"It"s coffee," Jeremy said with a self-effacing smile. "You"ll have to excuse us. We don"t have many guests, so Elena has to use the teapot."
O"Neil leaned forward to take his coffee from me. "Elena. That"s a pretty name."
"It"s Russian, isn"t it?" Morgan said, eyes narrowing.
"Could be," I said, smiling brightly. "Cream and sugar?"
"Three sugars. I didn"t see your husband around. Is he sleeping in?"
I spilled scalding coffee on my hand and bit back a yelp. So Clay"s marital fabrication had worked its way up the rumor chain to the police chief. Wonderful, just wonderful. Common sense told me I should play along. After all, BearValley wasn"t the kind of place that tolerated a woman romping naked in the woods with a man other than her husband. Actually, they probably didn"t tolerate naked-forest-romping much at all, but that wasn"t the point.The point was that this "placating the locals" was going too far. It was one thing to let them into our house, to tolerate their gawking, and to let them think we couldn"t tell a teapot from a coffeepot, but to officially confirm the rumor that I was married to Clay? Branding me forever in BearValley as Clay"s wife? Uh-uh. A girl"s got to have limits.
"Yes, he"s sleeping in," Jeremy said before I could speak. "Elena"s always up early to get his breakfast ready."
I shot him a glare to say he"d pay for that. He pretended not to notice, but I could see the glimmer of laughter in his eyes. I dumped five sugars in his coffee. He"d have to drink it. After all, it would be impolite not to partake of social beverages with his visitors.
"Like I said," Morgan began. "I apologize for coming to see you folks so early in the morning, but I thought you"d want to know. Mike Braxton wasn"t killed on your property. Coroner"s one hundred percent certain on that. Somebody killed him elsewhere and dumped him on your land."
"Somebody?" Jeremy said. "Do you mean a person, not an animal?"
"Well, I"d still say it was an animal, but one of the human variety. Doesn"t make a h.e.l.l of a lot of sense to us. The other two were definitely animal kills, but the coroner says Mike"s throat was slashed with a knife, not teeth."
"What about the paw prints?" I hated to ask, but we had to know what the police were thinking.