Lost Library: An Urban Fantasy Romance (8 page)

Interestingly, Lizzie
—who didn’t usually think much about dating—hadn’t been able to stop thinking about whether John might be in a relationship, or possibly even married. She’d noticed he wore no ring. Many guys didn’t wear rings—or any jewelry, for that matter. But maybe it was a werewolf thing. It made her a little bit sad to think he might be with someone else. Putting those thoughts aside for the moment, Lizzie turned the conversation back to her invitation.

“I’m sure John has his own agenda for inviting me. But
I’m not sure I can pass it up. Being around magic and people who know about magic, even if it’s different from mine… I’d love the opportunity to go. And what’s the point of being one of the few people in on the big werewolf conspiracy, when I don’t actually know anything about werewolves? So annoying.” Lizzie grinned. “Wouldn’t you like to have my problems?”

Kenna
laughed. “I do have your problems. Why else am I standing in front of a café on a Thursday afternoon when I’m supposed to be at work? By the way, you owe my boss some flowers. You know how much she hates for me to step away from the office. She swears the whole place grinds to a halt when I’m gone.”

Her
boss wasn’t entirely wrong. Kenna’s position as a legal secretary for a local boutique firm paid her bills and made her happy. She was very good at her job and much appreciated by her boss, one of the firm’s managing partners.

Lizzie
replied, “On a more serious note, as much as I would like to be led by my curiosity, common sense says not to wander off with a man I’ve known for such a short time. Would you know how to do a background check on him? I know you work with investigators sometimes. He hasn’t been very forthcoming on personal details, but I think it’s more his personality than actual secrecy. I’ve got his business card and car registration—or I will if you’ll go out in the parking lot and write down his license plate number,” Lizzie said with a mischievous smile.

Kenna
nodded her head. “Of course. I’ll touch base with one of my contacts and have a time frame for you shortly.”

“The red
Chevy pickup,” Lizzie added.

“
And I’d be glad to snoop around his car a bit. That’s what he gets for being so closed-mouthed.” Kenna smirked. “Serves him right.”

Kenna
stopped and looked carefully at Lizzie. “I’m assuming your gut feeling about this guy is good, or you wouldn’t even be considering this trip?”

“I like him,” Lizzie said. And that was
apparently enough for Kenna. For now.

Settling int
o her seat in the café, Lizzie removed the tea bag from her cup. “Do you have a super-secret lair where you all meet? Because I’m very confused how,”—she lowered her voice—“werewolves can be real and no one knows about you. And before you ask, I’m a huge Batman fan. I will be very disappointed if there is no lair.”

Lizzie took a drink of her
over-steeped, too-strong tea.
Darn it.
She got a little distracted by an invitation to rub shoulders with the inhabitants of a non-existent culture, and she ruined a perfectly good beverage. Maybe her perspective was a little skewed these days, but worrying about the little things kept her from completely losing her sanity.

John leaned back in his chair a little, his
full lips tipping up slightly at the corners. “Cute. Sorry to disappoint, but there’s no super-secret location, and no lair. Our headquarters is a house. You’d be our guest at a local bed and breakfast, if you decide to come. It’s not far, just a little northeast of here. Austin is actually pretty centrally located within our territory.

“
If you agree, I’ll be trapped in a car with you, so you can grill me at length and I can’t get away.” He grinned a bit at that, so Lizzie refrained from taking offense. He really had lightened up. She
had
asked a lot of questions. “And I’ll get you a rental car when you arrive, so you’ll be free to check out the local sights…or leave whenever you like.”

Lizzie skirted the question of visiting the pack, but asked him what he could tell her about them now.

He straightened in his chair, so that he was sitting completely upright again. Less at ease, John asked, “What exactly do you want to know?”

“Well, start with how
Record Keepers fit in with the pack, I guess.”

“The
Texas Pack….” He stopped at her raised eyebrows. “How about I start with some basics of pack structure. Then, Record Keepers.”

At her eager nod, he continued.

“
Lycan—that’s what we call ourselves—form family and social groups, called packs. A Lycan pack is a group delineated by geography, shared history, culture, and tradition. The Texas Pack’s territory roughly follows the borders of the state. Although, there are many similarities between packs, each has its own governance and laws which are particular to their pack. For example, most packs still have a pack leader. Practically speaking, the role serves different functions within different packs, but it exists in every pack I’m familiar with.”

As he spoke, he got more comfortable. Lizzie hated to interrupt for fear she would stem the flow of information. When he paused and didn’t continue, she asked “
And Record Keepers? And the book?”

“
Hmm. You’ve already pointed out our secret is well-maintained. One of the ways we remain hidden, is to prohibit unsecured written records of our society. This prohibition crosses pack lines.”

Lizzie let out an, “Oh!” When he smiled mildly at her, she continued. “That makes sense. You use the
magical record books because it shields werewolves—sorry, Lycan—from exposure and still allows you to benefit from the advantages of keeping a written history. Did you rely on an oral tradition before the books?”

He looked amused and
raised his eyebrows.

“Make fun. I took an anthropology class ages ago. I might have had aspirations of an
Indiana Jones-type life…until I realized how boring most of the classes were. But some of it apparently stuck.” She wanted to stick her tongue out at him. But that would be juvenile. Right? She refrained.

“
Yes, that’s my understanding. I’ve no idea if one pack discovered the method and shared it—a thought I find unlikely, even though it would be mutually beneficial. Or if several different packs simultaneously discovered the method. In any event, the use of record books became common at some point in Lycan history.”

“But what about
Record Keepers? They aren’t Lycan, right? So how did the two get together?”

“
Originally, I’m not sure. Now, I know some packs actively recruit Record Keepers. Even enticing Keepers away from another pack with promises of greater prestige or better pay. It’s not always a paid position, but it can be.”

Lizzie tapped her fingers on the table.
Waited. Squirmed in her seat. Waited some more. Rubbed her nose. And she
thought
he had been downright talkative for a moment. Her fidgets went unheeded, and he remained silent.

She couldn’t stand it. She prompted him, “So what else do you know?”

Lizzie could see him trying not to laugh at her. His mouth tugged upwards slightly at the corners, and his eyes were starting to crinkle around the edges.

“Go ahead. You can laugh. I know I’m acting like a kid in a candy store. But
really—magic? Werewolves? Can you blame me?”

He let out a single short snort,
then in all seriousness said, “I do know Record Keepers have magic that can be used to access the record book and record new information. I know they’re always women. I also know the books are passed down from one generation to the next. I’m not sure if that’s for the practical purpose of keeping the information together, or if maybe the art of creating the books has been lost over time.”

During their conversation, a few customers had come and gone
, but their corner was isolated and they’d been undisturbed. It was now approaching 5:30 and the after-work crowd was making its way into the shop.

John looked at the
increasing crowd, then turned to her and said, “Well, what’s the decision? Interested in meeting the family?”

Lizzie had received a text from
Kenna around four o’clock giving her an update on the background check. Her investigator would need at least three days to pull together more than a cursory report. And Lizzie needed to tie up a few loose ends work-wise before she could leave town.

Lowering her voice, Lizzie baldly stated
, “I’m having a background check run on you. I wanted to give you a heads up, in case…well, in case it might mess with your super-secret conspiracy of wolfy silence. I’d like to go. To learn more about Lycan and Record Keepers. But I can’t abandon all common sense, either.

John didn’t blink.

“You appeared on my doorstep only a few days ago, completely out of the blue,” she began cautiously. “But—if the check comes back clear, you provide me with an address for the B&B where I would be staying, and you give me a week to clear my desk at work—I’m in.”

“Fair enough.
It’s a deal.” He stretched out his hand, and they shook on it. They agreed to keep in touch to discuss the details over the next several days. As Lizzie left the shop to catch a cab home, her mind skipped back to the firm, but not overpowering handshake. On the short ride home, the feel of John’s large, warm hand wrapped around her smaller fingers, replayed in her mind. And her stomach fluttered just a little bit. Okay. Maybe a lot.

Three days later, Lizzie smacked herself in the head for being so cautious.
Metaphorically. She would have
actually
smacked herself, but she was tied up, gagged, and stuffed in the trunk of a sedan. If she had only left when John invited her, instead of delaying...

A nice man—or werewolf, who was she to quibble over small details at this point—invites her home to meet his family. And what
did she do? She ran a background check on him and passed along her travel details to a trustworthy friend. And what did that relatively sensible action get her? Nabbed by three big German-speaking guys wearing European shoes.

At this point
, Lizzie started to think her gag was just a little bit too tight and maybe she wasn’t breathing through her nose as well as she might. She must have been oxygen deprived, because what fully-oxygenated woman would dwell on European versus American men’s footwear while tied up in the trunk of a car?

O
h my god—her dogs. Her parents.
She absolutely had to get home before someone told her parents she had been kidnapped.
Normal people did not get kidnapped!
That was a much more sensible reaction to kidnapping. Now Lizzie’s thoughts turned to torture, starving dogs, and traumatized parents. In retrospect, European footwear had been a much better choice.

Two
hours earlier, she’d been in the parking lot of the local pharmacy, going through her mental list one more time. She contemplated work, packing, arrangements for the dogs—all of the little things she needed to finish before leaving town. Only four more days, and she’d be meeting John’s pack. Kenna’s investigator, Jack something or other, had produced a thorough report within three days. Included were no red flags and a significantly better credit and cleaner traffic record than Lizzie herself had. There was nothing in the report to concern her. Not that she had expected anything else. Lizzie was usually a pretty good judge of people. A little glass-half-full, but not usually far off.

She decided there was n
o need for a runny nose just because there was change, drama, and magic in the air. So she’d made a stop at the pharmacy after picking up extra dog food. One pack of allergy meds, a new toothbrush, and a few small travel containers later, and Lizzie was feeling much better equipped for the trip.

Returning to her mental list, she ran through the items that were left.
Kenna’s mom had agreed to take the dogs, but she still needed to pack their…

“
Ow! I’m sorry. Excuse me,” Lizzie said as she tried to regain her balance.

A man
had come from nowhere and bumped into her, making her stumble and almost fall to the ground. Darn her need to apologize for something not her fault, Lizzie thought.  A thought followed immediately by a rough hand on her arm, which continued to pull her in the direction of her stumble.

As she looked up, Lizzie quickly saw
that she was now behind a large dark car, in a large dark parking lot, and no longer visible from the street. A second man appeared and grabbed her other arm, and then both men pulled her closer to the dark car. A third man grabbed her feet, and she was suddenly horizontal to the ground and neatly lifted into the trunk of the car.

Only then, after the trunk had closed with her inside, did Lizzie think to yell
, “No! Fire! Help!”

At first she had been surprised
. Then confused. By the time she realized something was wrong, she had already been bundled into the car. It had all happened in less than ten seconds. Apparently long enough for Lizzie to notice her abductors’ European shoes, but not long enough to scream her head off.