Moon Called (5 page)

Mac nodded. “That sounds right. He came down the stairs with the first guy and another man. None of them would talk to me or answer any of my questions.” He swallowed and gave me an anxious glance. “This shit just sounds so weird, you know? Unbelievable.”

“You're talking to someone who can turn into a coyote,” I told him gently. “Just tell me what you think happened.”

“All right.” He nodded slowly. “All right. I was still weak and confused, but it sounded like Leo was arguing money with the third guy. It sounded to me like he sold me for twelve thousand dollars.”

“Leo sold you for twelve thousand dollars,” I said, as much to myself as to Mac. My voice might have been matter-of-fact, but only because Mac was right: it
was
unbelievable. Not that I thought he was lying. “He had one of his wolves attack you and your girlfriend and when you survived, he sold you to someone else as a newly turned werewolf.”

“I think so,” said Mac.

“You called your family this afternoon?” I asked. I smiled at his wary look. “I have pretty good hearing.”

“My brother. His cell phone.” He swallowed. “It's broken. No caller ID. I had to let them know I was alive. I guess the police think I killed Meg.”

“You told him that you were after her killer,” I said.

He gave an unhappy laugh. “Like I could find him.”

He could. It was all a matter of learning to use his new
senses, but I wasn't going to tell him that, not yet. If Mac did find his attacker, chances were Mac would die. A new werewolf just doesn't stand a chance against the older ones.

I patted his knee. “Don't worry. As soon as we get word to the right people—and Adam is the right people—Leo's a walking dead man. The Marrok won't allow an Alpha who is creating progeny and selling them for money.”

“The Marrok?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Like I told you, except for the occasional rogue, werewolves are organized into packs under an Alpha wolf.”

It used to be that was as organized as werewolves got. But the only thing it takes to be Alpha is power, not intelligence or even common sense. In the Middle Ages, after the Black Plague, the werewolf population was almost wiped out along with real wolves because some of the Alphas were indiscreet. It was decided then that there would be a leader over all the werewolves.

“In the US, all the packs follow the Marrok, a title taken from the name of one of King Arthur's knights who was a werewolf. The Marrok and his pack have oversight of all the werewolves in North America.”

“There are more of us?” he asked.

I nodded. “Maybe as many as two thousand in the US, five or six hundred in Canada, and about four hundred in Mexico.”

“How do you know so much about werewolves?”

“I was raised by them.” I waited for him to ask me why, but his attention had drifted toward the body. He inhaled deeply and gave an eager shudder.

“Do you know what they wanted with you?” I asked hurriedly.

“They told me they were looking for a cure. Kept putting things in my food—I could smell them, but I was hungry so I ate anyway. Sometimes they'd give me shots—and once when I wouldn't cooperate they used a dart gun.”

“Outside, when you were talking to them, you said they had others like you?”

He nodded. “They kept me in a cage in a semitrailer. There were four cages in it. At first there were three of us, a girl around my age and a man. The girl was pretty much out of it—she just stared and rocked back and forth. The man couldn't speak any English. It sounded like Polish to me—but it could have been Russian or something. One of the times I was taking a trip on something they pumped in me, I woke up and I was alone.”

“Drugs don't work on werewolves,” I told him. “Your metabolism is too high.”

“These did,” he said.

I nodded. “I believe you. But they shouldn't have. You escaped?”

“I managed to change while they were trying to give me something else. I don't remember much about it other than running.”

“Was the trailer here in the Tri-Cities?” I asked.

He nodded. “I couldn't find it again, though. I don't remember everything that happens when. . .” His voice trailed off.

“When you're the wolf.” Memory came with experience and control, or so I'd been told.

A strange car approached the garage with the quiet purr common to expensive engines.

“What's wrong?” he asked, when I stood up.

“Don't you hear the car?”

He started to shake his head, but then paused. “I—yes. Yes, I do.”

“There are advantages to being a werewolf,” I said. “One of them is being able to hear and smell better than the average Joe.” I stood up. “It's turning into the parking lot. I'm going to look out and see who it is.”

“Maybe it's the guy you called. The Alpha.”

I shook my head. “It's not his car.”

I slipped through the office and opened the outside door cautiously, but the smell of perfume and herbs hanging in the night air told me we were still all right.

A dark Cadillac was stretched across the pavement just beyond Stefan's bus. I pushed the door all the way open as the uniformed chauffeur tipped his hat to me, then opened the car's back door, revealing an elderly woman.

I stuck my head back in the office, and called, “It's all right, Mac. Just the cleanup crew.”

Keeping the humans ignorant of the magic that lives among them is a specialized and lucrative business, and Adam's pack kept the best witch in the Pacific Northwest on retainer. Rumors of Elizaveta Arkadyevna Vyshnevetskaya's origins and how she came to be in the Tri-Cities changed on a weekly basis. I think she and her brood of grandchildren and great-grandchildren encouraged the more outrageous versions. All that I knew for certain was
that she had been born in Moscow, Russia, and had lived in the Tri-Cities for at least twenty years.

Elizaveta rose from the depths of the big car with all the drama of a prima ballerina taking her bow. The picture she made was worth all the drama.

She was almost six feet tall and little more than skin and bones, with a long, elegant nose and gray, penetrating eyes. Her style of dress was somewhere between babushka and Baba Yaga. Layers of rich fabrics and textures came down to her calves, all covered with a long wool cape and a worn scarf that wrapped around her head and neck. Her outfit wasn't authentic, at least not to any period or place that I've heard of, but I've never seen anyone brave enough to tell her so.

“Elizaveta Arkadyevna, welcome,” I said, walking past the bus to stand by her car.

She scowled at me. “My Adamya calls and tells me you have one of his wolves dead.” Her voice had the crispness of a British aristocrat, so I knew she was angry—her usual accent was thick enough I had to make a real effort to understand her. When she was really angry, she didn't speak English at all.

“Werewolf, yes,” I agreed. “But I don't think it is one of Adam's.” Adamya, I had learned, was an affectionate form of Adam. I don't think she'd ever called him that to his face. Elizaveta was seldom affectionate to anyone likely to overhear her.

“I have the body in my shop,” I told her. “But there is blood all over here. The werewolf chased me with a torn artery and bled from here over to the storage facility, where he tore up the fence in two places before he bled to death out on the street. The storage facility has cameras, and I used Stefan's bus”—I pointed to it—“to move the body.”

She said something in Russian to her chauffeur, who I recognized as one of her grandchildren. He bowed and said something back before going around to open the trunk.

“Go,” she told me, and flung her arms in a pushing gesture. “I will take care of the mess out here without your help. You wait with the body. Adam will be here soon. Once he has seen, he will tell me what he would have me do with it. You killed this wolf? With a silver bullet so I should look for casing?”

“With my fangs,” I told her; she knew what I was. “It was sort of an accident—at least his death was.”

She caught my arm when I turned to go into the office. “What were you thinking, Mercedes Thompson? A Little Wolf who attacks the great ones will be dead soon, I think. Luck runs out eventually.”

“He would have killed a boy under my protection,” I told her. “I had no choice.”

She released me and snorted her disapproval, but when she spoke her Russian accent was firmly in place. “There is always choice, Mercy. Always choice. If he attacked a boy, then I suppose it must not have been one of Adamya's.”

She looked at her chauffeur and barked out something more. Effectively dismissed, I went back to Mac and our dead werewolf.

I found Mac crouched near the body, licking his fingers as if he might have touched the drying blood and was cleaning them off. Not a good sign. Somehow, I was pretty certain that if Mac were fully in control, he wouldn't be doing that.

“Mac,” I said, strolling past him and over to the far side of the garage, where we'd been sitting.

He growled at me.

“Stop that,” I said sharply, doing my best to keep the fear out of my voice. “Control yourself and come over here. There are some things you should know before Adam gets here.”

I'd been avoiding a dominance contest, because my instincts told me that Mac was a natural leader, a dominant who might very well eventually become an Alpha in his own right—and I was a woman.

Women's liberation hadn't made much headway in the
world of werewolves. A mated female took her pack position from her mate, but unmated females were always lower than males unless the male was unusually submissive. This little fact had caused me no end of grief, growing up, as I did, in the middle of a werewolf pack. But without someone more dominant than he, Mac wouldn't be able to take control of his wolf yet. Adam wasn't there, so it was up to me.

I stared at him in my best imitation of my foster father and raised an eyebrow. “Mac, for Heaven's sake, leave that poor dead man alone and come over here.”

He came slowly to his feet, menace clinging to him. Then he shook his head and rubbed his face, swaying a little.

“That helped,” he said. “Can you do it again?”

I tried my best. “Mac. Get over here right now.”

He staggered a little drunkenly over to me and sat at my feet.

“When Adam comes,” I told him firmly, “whatever you do, don't look him in the eyes for longer than a second or two. Some of this should be instinct, I hope. It isn't necessary to cower—remember that you've done no wrong at all. Let me talk. What we want is for Adam to take you home with him.”

“I'm fine on my own,” Mac objected, sounding almost like himself, but he kept his head turned toward the body.

“No, you're not,” I said firmly. “If there wasn't a pack, you might survive. But if you run into one of Adam's wolves without being made known to the pack, they'll probably kill you. Also, the full moon is coming soon. Adam can help you get control of your beast before then.”

“I can control the monster?” asked Mac, stilling.

“Absolutely,” I told him. “And it's not a monster—any more than a killer whale is a monster. Werewolves are hot-tempered and aggressive, but they aren't evil.” I thought about the one who had sold him and corrected myself. “At least not any more evil than any other person.”

“I don't even remember what the beast does,” Mac said. “How can I control it?”

“It's harder the first few times,” I told him. “A good Alpha can get you through that. Once you have control, then you can go back to your old life if you want. You have to be a little careful; even in human form you're going to have to deal with having a shorter temper and a lot more strength than you're used to. Adam can teach you.”

“I can't ever go back,” he whispered.

“Get control first,” I told him. “There are people who can help you with the rest. Don't give up.”

“You're not like me.”

“Nope,” I agreed. “I'm a walker: it's different from what you are. I was born this way.”

“I've never heard of a walker. Is that some sort of fae?”

“Close enough,” I said. “I don't get a lot of the neat things that you werewolves have. No super strength. No super healing. No pack.”

“No chance you might eat your friends,” he suggested. I couldn't tell if he was trying to be funny, or if he was serious.

“There are some benefits,” I agreed.

“How did you find out so much about werewolves?”

I opened my mouth to give him the short version, but decided the whole story might better serve to distract him from the dead body.

“My mother was a rodeo groupie,” I began, sitting down beside him. “She liked cowboys, any cowboy. She liked a Blackfoot bull-rider named Joe Old Coyote from Browning, Montana, enough to get pregnant with me. She told me that he claimed to come from a long line of medicine men, but at the time she thought he was just trying to impress her. He died in a car accident three days after she met him.”

“She was seventeen, and her parents tried to talk her into an abortion, but she would have none of it. Then they tried to get her to put me up for adoption, but she was determined to raise me herself—until I was three months old, and she found a coyote pup in my crib.”

“What did she do?”

“She tried to find my father's family,” I told him. “She went to Browning and found several families there with
that last name, but they claimed they'd never heard of Joe. He was certainly Native American.” I made a gesture to encompass my appearance. I don't look pureblood; my features are too Anglo. But my skin looks tanned even in November, and my straight hair is as dark as my eyes. “But otherwise I don't know much about him.”

“Old Coyote,” said Mac speculatively.

I smiled at him. “Makes you think this shifting thing must have run in the family, doesn't it?”

“So how was it that you were raised by werewolves?”

“My great-grandfather's uncle was a werewolf,” I said. “It was supposed to be a family secret, but it's hard to keep secrets from my mother. She just smiles at people, and they tell her their life stories. Anyway, she found his phone number and called him.”

“Wow,” said Mac. “I never met any of my great-grandparents.”

“Me either,” I said, then smiled. “Just an uncle of theirs who was a werewolf. One of the benefits of being a werewolf is a long life.” If you can control the wolf—but Adam could explain that part better than me.

His gaze was drawn back to our dead friend.

“Yes, well.” I sighed. “Stupidity will still get you killed. My great-grandfather's uncle was smart enough to outlive his generation, but all those years didn't keep him from getting gutted by a moose he was out hunting one night.”

“Anyway,” I continued, “he came to visit and knew as soon as he saw me what I was. That was before the fae came out and people were still trying to pretend that science had ruled out the possibility of magic. He convinced my mother that I'd be safer out in the hinterlands of Montana being raised by the Marrok's pack—they have their own town in the mountains where strangers seldom bother them. I was fostered with a family there who didn't have any children.”

“Your mother just gave you up?”

“My mother came out every summer, and they didn't make it easy on her either. Not overfond of humans, the Marrok, excepting their own spouses and children.”

“I thought the Marrok was the wolf who rules North America,” said Mac.

“Packs sometimes take their public name from their leader,” I told him. “So the Marrok's pack call themselves the Marrok. More often they find some geographical feature in their territory. Adam's wolves are the Columbia Basin Pack. The only other pack in Washington is the Emerald Pack in Seattle.”

Mac had another question, but I held up my hand for him to be quiet. I'd heard Adam's car pull up.

“Remember what I said about the Alpha,” I told Mac and stood up. “He's a good man and you need him. Just sit there, keep your eyes down, let me talk, and everything will be all right.”

The heavy garage door of bay one groaned, then rang like a giant cymbal as it was forced all the way open faster than it usually moved.

Adam Hauptman stood in the open doorway, stillness cloaking his body and for an instant, I saw him with just my eyes, as a human might. He was worth looking at.

For all his German last name, his face and coloring were Slavic: dusky skin, dark hair—though not as dark as mine—wide cheekbones, and a narrow but sensual mouth. He wasn't tall or bulky, and a human might wonder why all eyes turned to him when he walked into a room. Then they'd see his face and assume, wrongly, that it was the attraction. Adam was an Alpha, and if he'd been ugly he would have held the attention of anyone who happened to be nearby, wolf or human—but the masculine beauty he carried so unself-consciously didn't hurt.

Under more usual circumstances his eyes were a rich chocolate brown, but they had lightened with his anger until they were almost yellow. I heard Mac gasp when the full effect of Adam's anger hit him, so I was prepared and let the wave of power wash off me like seawater on glass.

Maybe I should have explained matters better when I had him on the phone, but where's the fun in that?

“What happened?” he asked, his voice softer than the first snowfall in winter.

“It's complicated,” I said, holding his gaze for two full seconds before I turned my head and gestured toward the body. “The dead one is there. If he belongs to you, he is new—and you haven't been doing your job. He was as deaf and blind as a human. I was able to take him by surprise, then he was too ignorant to realize that the wound wouldn't close as fast as usual if it was given by a preternatural creature. He let himself bleed out because he was too caught up in the chase to—”