Anyway, after five years in the military, he’d gotten out with enough money to go to school. After getting his degree in criminology at San Jose State, he’d landed a spot in the Sacramento PD. Which had led to him looking into an anonymous phone call about a gang fight, which had led him to my doorstep.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
MCCLANNIGAN’S WAS HOPPING. IT ALWAYS WAS ON A SATURDAY. It was one of those places in Sacramento that the young and the beautiful could come to meet and greet. It had also been in business for more than a hundred and sixty years. For well over a hundred of them, our friend Paul had bartended here.
I keep waiting for someone to figure it out. A manager. An accountant. Somebody at some point was going to notice either that his work history with the bar stretched back into the 1800s or that there was a faded sepia-toned photograph of him tending the bar in a starched white collar and bow tie gracing the hall down to the bathroom. So far, however, no one had.
I also wondered if some day someone would notice that Paul was a werewolf. I knew it the second I laid eyes on him, but then again he tripped my sensors at a pretty high rate of vibration, and werewolf is a very definite signature. For a regular person, he’d be hard to detect.
The Sierra pack’s Alpha, Chuck Winterthorpe, wasn’t a fool. He didn’t let werewolves from his pack out to play with the general populace unless they had a high degree of personal control. Paul made playing human look effortless. Every once in a while, in moments of stress, I could see the beast inside him, but I think most people just thought he was a little grumpy.
Right now, however, despite the fact that the bar was packed with guys and girls wearing an overload of perfume and cologne and exuding a thick miasma of pheromones that made my eyes start to tear up, I saw Paul scent the air the second that Ted and I walked into the bar. It was kind of cute how he wrinkled his nose when something made him take notice.
He raised his head and his gaze swiveled to us in a heartbeat. He smiled and waved. Ted waved back and guided me through the crowd to a narrow space at the bar with his hand on my back. More than a few women looked our way as we wove through the throng. I controlled my urge to hiss at them, but just barely. It really wasn’t their fault. Ted was hard not to look at. He, however, seemed entirely oblivious to the attention. I supposed I should be grateful it didn’t go to his head.
“Hey, Paul,” Ted said. They bumped fists.
I shook my head. The two of them had bonded during last summer’s adventures. It didn’t sit well with me. It messed with my ability to compartmentalize when my boyfriend was fist-bumping with my favorite werewolf (which was truly damning with faint praise) and general source of all good supernatural gossip.
Paul set a beer down in front of Ted and mixed a white wine spritzer for me. I looked at the drink and then back at him. “You can’t be serious.”
Paul always micromanages my drinking. He has a tendency to hand me light beers and diet colas, which is insulting enough in its own way, but a white wine spritzer? Seriously? It was something one of my mother’s bridge partners would drink.
“I thought I’d give you something girlier tonight. You look a little girlier than usual.” He grinned at me, and I could see a touch of the wolf in the glint in his eyes.
I did look a little girlier than usual. Norah had refused to come out with us, but she had sent me out dressed as her proxy. Instead of my usual jeans, boots and black turtleneck, I had on a top with a very deep V-neck that flowed from a high waistline down to the top of my low-cut jeans. It was light blue and had something sparkly in it. Oh, and heels instead of my usual boots or sneakers. I was even wearing mascara
and
lipstick. It had earned me a low wolf whistle from Ted when I’d come out into the living room. I didn’t need one from an actual wolf.
Ted leaned on one elbow and looked back and forth between the two of us. “She’s not driving,” he offered.
Paul shook his head. “She still needs to keep her senses sharp.” He bared his teeth at me. It might have looked like a smile to someone else, but I knew better. It was a show of power and a message about who was in control.
Paul was all about power and control because a werewolf in a pack was all about them. The Pack taught discipline, respect and restraint, all things werewolves need if they’re going to be around’Danes, as we call those people who think they inhabit a world without magic or mythical creatures. You wouldn’t want a werewolf without a pack around other Arcanes for that matter either. Without the qualities that the Pack taught and enforced, a werewolf would most likely go rogue, which would be like letting a feral dog loose in a crowded theater and then setting it on fire. Lots of blood. Lots of tears. Probably a dead werewolf and lots of dead people. It wasn’t a scenario that anyone would want to see happen. And talk about a public relations nightmare! Werewolves aren’t supposed to exist, after all. Then again, neither are vampires or goblins or Messengers like me.
Still, the idea of the Pack got under my skin a little. The idea of handing over my freewill and offering unquestioning obedience bugged me. I get the heebie-jeebies at Disneyland when I feel like I’m being manipulated into having fun. Try to explain this to my mother, who paid perfectly good money just to have me cringe away from the pretty princesses as if they had STDs. She’s still irritated with me and that was fifteen years ago.
I considered growling at Paul to give him as good as I was getting, but thought better of it since I was planning on asking him for information the second I could do it without Ted hearing.
So we chitchatted at the bar. Or, to be honest, Ted and Paul chitchatted while I pretended to listen and looked for an excuse to send Ted off somewhere on an errand so I could talk to Paul alone. Luckily, he decided to head to the little cop’s room. The second he did, I leaned over the bar to get Paul’s attention.
“Easy there, girl,” he said. “Your ta-tas are spilling out on my bar.”
I reached down and readjusted my top. That would never have happened if I’d been wearing a turtleneck, not unless my boobs acquired a life of their own and crawled out on their own accord. Which I suppose was possible. I’d heard of weirder things than someone’s boobs becoming possessed. My point is, it would have taken more than just a little gravity to have them spilling out on the bar. “I need to ask you a question.”
There were reasons I often went to Paul for information. First of all, as a werewolf, he covered a pretty large range of territory. Paul’s wolf form was larger than your average wolf and he could and did travel long distances over rough ground just for the sheer joy of it. Second, he was tapped into whatever the Pack was tapped into, and that was pretty much everything. Chuck didn’t get to be six or seven hundred years old without learning to appreciate the value of a good intelligence network. He was probably one of the best-informed leaders of any of the supernatural groups in the area. The vampires were generally only interested in information that pertained to them directly. As the two most sentient groups, they were always my first choices for information and the Pack was definitely superior to the Seethe in that regard.
Third, the dude was a bartender at an absurdly popular nightspot. He was crazy observant, because hunters have to be, and trust me, if you don’t think a werewolf is a hunter, you’ve never seen one take down prey, human or otherwise. A guy can learn a lot by being observant in a place like McClannigan’s. He can notice trends and hear about all kinds of funny little things before they hit the awareness of the general populace.
“Shoot,” he said. “What do you need to know?”
“Are you hearing about anything weird down around Elmville?”
Paul frowned. “Where the hell is Elmville?”
“A little east of Manteca.”
He snorted. “Beyond freakin’ Egypt, then.”
I nodded.
Paul polished a glass, a thoughtful look on his face, then he shook his head. “Not that I can think of. Why? What’s up?”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure. Recipients of two deliveries I’ve made up there have turned up dead under strange circumstances. It made me a little nervous. I thought I’d check into it.”
Paul’s polishing slowed. “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘once bitten, twice shy,’ little one?”
It seemed like a funny phrase for a werewolf to mention. In their case, it was more like ‘once bitten, never shy again.’ Seriously. Shapeshifters will get naked in front of anyone at almost any time. They have no modesty whatsoever. “Of course I have. What are you trying to say?”
He set the glass down very carefully and leaned across the bar. I could feel his warm breath on my bare neck. Yet another reason to wear turtlenecks. “You’re a Messenger. Your job is to deliver the messages. It is not your job to stick your pretty little nose into whatever happens after that. I would think you would have figured that out by now.”
His teeth, although still very human-sized and -shaped, were way closer to my jugular vein than I was completely comfortable with. I stayed still as a statue even though every survival instinct in my dinosaur brain was screaming for me to run. Run from a natural predator and you’re likely to get chased. It’s hard as hell to stay still sometimes, but it’s often your best avenue to survival. “Are you threatening me?”
Paul took one more sniff of my neck and stood back up. “I don’t have to. I’m just reminding you of how the world—our world—works.”
“That’d be peachy if I only lived in one world. I’ve got my feet pretty firmly planted in both,” I reminded him.
He spread his arms wide, taking in the bar. “And I don’t?”
As if I had the choices he had. He didn’t have to work here. He chose to. “It’s not the same and you know it.”
“All the more reason for you to keep your nose clean in both worlds and the best way to do that is to not stick it where it doesn’t belong.”
I leaned across the bar and asked what was really bothering me. “What if what I took to those boys got them killed?”
Paul shrugged his thick shoulders. “What if it did?”
His nonchalance left me thunderstruck. “Then I’m somehow responsible.”
“You’re no more responsible than the Western Union is when they deliver bad news in a telegram. Let this go, Melina. No good will come of you meddling in whatever it is. It could just be a coincidence, anyway.”
I gave him a baleful look. “Do you really believe that?”
“Nope,” he said and grinned. “I thought it might make you feel better, though, and then you might be willing to drop it.”
I saw Ted shouldering his way back through the crowd. Time to wrap this conversation up. “I will take it under advisement.”
“You do that, Melina.” His eyes softened. When the wolf left him completely, they were like dark pools of chocolate, and the wolf was completely gone now. “It would pain me if something happened to you.”
I knew what it meant for Paul to say that to someone who was not Pack. I was left momentarily and uncharacteristically speechless. I set my hand on top of his on the bar. He covered it with his other hand, large and warm and rough. He moved away as Ted returned to the bar.
“Another beer?”
Ted shook his head. “She may not be driving, but I am.”
Fabulous. Caught between a wolf and a Boy Scout. I almost wished there was a rock nearby.
“You ready to go?” I asked.
He nodded and we both slipped off our bar stools.
“Hey,” Paul said, stopping me before I turned to go. “Say hello to Alex for me if you see him. He hasn’t been around lately.”
Another surprise. “Alex has been hanging out here?” During our problems with the
kiang shi
, Alex and Paul had developed a somewhat improbable friendship as well. Improbable because vampires and werewolves generally don’t care for each other. I’ve yet to decide whether it’s because they’re too similar or too different. Both tend to be dominant, controlling and passionate, but where a werewolf is all hot-blooded animal instinct, a vampire is all cold-blooded charm and manipulation.
Paul looked around the room. “This is as good a hunting ground as any.”
True that. The room was filled with beautiful young people out on the prowl. The pheromones were so thick in the air, a person could choke on them. It would be a sweet perfume for Alex. I’d seen him turn on the charm. He hunted with seduction, not brute strength.
“I’ll tell him you’ve been looking for him when I see him,” I said.
“You do that. Tell him I said that all work and no play makes for a very hungry vampire and you know where that can lead.”
Actually, I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t think it was to any place particularly good.
3
AS WE GOT IN BED, TED ASKED, “SO DID YOU FIND OUT WHAT you needed to know from Paul?”
I froze in the act of reaching for the alarm clock. “What do you mean?” Playing stupid is one of my first fallback positions. It works with insulting frequency.
He shrugged and kissed the top of my head. “It’s why we went to McClannigan’s, isn’t it? Because you needed to ask Paul something?” He settled back on the pillows.
I finished setting the alarm. I could dissemble, pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I didn’t want to insult him. “What gave me away?”
He pulled me over on top of him and kissed me. “Pretty much everything. You’re a good liar, but I’ve spent some time watching you.”
“Oh, you have, have you?” I kissed him back, letting my lips linger on his for a delicious moment.
“Mmm-hmm. I have. Plus, I spent a reasonable portion of my life needing to look for underlying motivations in people’s reactions.” He slid his hands up under the oversized T-shirt I wore, and I felt a trail of goose bumps rise under the trail of his touch.
I trailed my fingers down his chest. “I like it when you use big words.”