* * *
Andrew didn’t mind being used for a pillow—he fondly remembered doggy piles for naps from back when he actually belonged to a pack—but there was something ignominious about being petted in someone’s sleep. Silver was light, no burden at all, but clutched like this, he felt like a child’s stuffed toy. But he’d seen her begin a seizure caused by her inability to shift only to pull herself back from the edge out of that odd concern for him. He’d endured enough humiliation already at Seattle’s hands; he could sacrifice a final shred of dignity to keep her safe in this.
Silver murmured something in her sleep and petted his shoulder again. How long had it been since he’d curled up with someone like this, without sex beforehand? That was the closest he’d gotten to the intimacy of a pack doggy pile in a long time. No question of naps with the Roanoke pack.
So that would mean the last time had been in Spain—no. That wasn’t something he chose to remember.
He growled and wiggled out from under her. Time to be human again. He didn’t want the alpha seeing him in the defenseless, personal moments of shifting. And he didn’t want to give Seattle a power bonus as the only one able to speak.
Silver reached out as if trying to pull him back again, but then subsided. The collar made dressing awkward, and he discovered he’d popped off a button last night in his hurry to undress. When he finished, Andrew scrubbed at his rough jaw. Unwashed, unshaved, and yesterday’s clothes. Damn, he wanted a shower.
“Are you feeling better?” Silver asked, blinking her eyes a few times to clear away sleep. She propped herself up with her good arm to look at him.
Andrew had to smile. That was his line. His concussion was long gone, but Silver didn’t seem to realize the irony of the injured party inquiring after the healthy one’s state. “Are you?”
Silver wrinkled her nose and didn’t answer. She levered herself upright. Andrew motioned her closer and waited this time for her to give him her arm. He alternated watching her face for pain with examining it. She winced once, but otherwise seemed unaffected as he moved it this way and that. No new blood had soaked through the bandages.
“As soon as Seattle comes to his senses, I’ll be going to where it happened,” he said, laying Silver’s arm back against her chest. “I assume they know where, and aren’t just inventing a crime scene whole cloth from some mysterious disappearances.” He paused a beat. “There’s no reason for you to come.”
“No,” Silver said. “I don’t think I should.”
Andrew let out a relieved breath and looked into her eyes. There did seem to be more sense there than before he’d drained some of the silver from her blood.
Footsteps on the stairs, and they both looked up. The night’s sleep had knocked the alpha’s name loose. John. Denied other options by being chained up, Andrew supposed he was down to the stupidest of dominance games, so he pretended that John was too unimportant to bother cutting short his conversation with Silver.
“Do you trust them? I could take you anywhere you wanted to go, if you’d rather not stay here,” Andrew said. Games aside, this was important. He didn’t want Silver stuck here if she wasn’t completely comfortable with it.
“My mother belonged to this pack, before she died. They’ll take care of me. Even if they’re supremely misguided.” Silver didn’t ignore John, turning instead to give him a glare as he came down the stairs.
“And your father? Was he not part of Seattle? Would you want to go to him and his pack instead?”
Silver laughed and turned back. “He roams. I don’t know where he is or even how many children he has. We have no ties.”
Seen from the corner of Andrew’s eye, John’s expression was getting thunderous, so Andrew stood, chain rattling. The tension between the two men instantly tilted a little more equal, and Andrew relaxed a little. That was better. He was no longer the captive chained to the floor. “So?”
John ran a hand through his hair, dislodging a pine needle. Someone had been rolling in the dirt last night. It annoyed Andrew afresh to think of John running free. But some of the alpha’s confidence from the night before had gone. “Sel— Silver seemed to think enough of you I called Roanoke this morning.”
Andrew’s lips quirked. The man’s ears were probably still ringing. Rory tended not to remember in the heat of the moment that he couldn’t reach out through the phone and strangle someone. “And how is Rory?”
“Apparently you were both in Ottawa when it happened. And Ottawa vouches for you, not just Roanoke.”
The man didn’t sound entirely convinced, so Andrew said what he already knew John was thinking. “Unless I hopped a plane. But I do fail to see how I could be gone for something like twenty hours round trip and still have time to do”—Andrew glanced at Silver—“whatever was done. Which, I might remind you, I still have no idea about. I’d be touched if you’d share.” John bristled at the tone, but his eyes went to Silver too.
“I’m hungry,” Silver announced. She pointed to Andrew. “And he is too, even though he’s too proud to say. C’mon, Death.” The last was directed at the air beside her. She headed to the stairs.
The men stood in silence without her for a while. John finally came forward, taking a key from his pocket. “Don’t try anything.”
“That would be stupid.” But tempting, Andrew had to admit. They could see how the alpha liked being chained up. He lifted his chin and stayed perfectly still as John fitted the key into the padlock. He rubbed at his neck once the collar fell away. John offered Andrew’s phone silently and Andrew slotted it into its holster.
“You want something to eat too?” The offer was so grudging, Andrew was surprised it didn’t stick in the man’s throat on the way out.
Silver had been correct, in both respects. Andrew wasn’t going to admit he needed anything from this man. “We can wait for her to finish.” Andrew nodded upstairs. It was clear enough Silver meant them to talk now when she wasn’t around to be hurt by the memories.
Now he was free, he took a look around. Besides the couch and shelves he’d noticed the night before, an amorphous mass of blankets and pillows, thoroughly coated with hair, took up the other corner. If not for Andrew’s presence, the pack would undoubtedly have slept down here in wolf form last night. Andrew eyed the couch, but stayed standing.
John made no move to sit down either. He leaned on his hands on the couch back. “The Bellingham pack splintered off five or six years ago, when my uncle was still alpha. Selene’s brother was the pack’s alpha, she was the beta, and they took about a dozen other young were. We kept in pretty close contact, until four months ago when they went quiet. We waited a little and then went up to investigate.” John paused, struggling with the words. “They were all at the alpha’s house. It was—like a horror movie. All of them tied up with silver, and then one by one—” A growl rose in his throat. “We found all the bodies but Selene’s, but her trail petered out—we assumed she’d died somewhere else, after escaping.”
“Selene was the only one missing?” Andrew wished he dared ask if any of the Seattle pack had been coincidentally not around at the time. Someone the Bellingham pack trusted would have had an easier time getting the jump on them, but now was not the time to risk Seattle’s anger that way. He could find out later on his own.
“Yes.” John shoved himself away from the couch, and started pacing. “You think we haven’t investigated this? We combed the woods for trails for weeks. We found gallons of scattered bleach, a few small brush fires. No scent trail left. The house was more bleach and blood. A lot of blood, none of it a stranger’s.” John slammed his hand into the wall. The paneling cracked, but the concrete beneath didn’t care. Bruises appeared across his knuckles and slid through the colors of healing before fading out.
“Why didn’t you tell Roanoke?” Andrew flexed his hand against his opposite palm. Hitting things would be a lovely idea, but he was running low on resources to heal another injury if he didn’t eat soon.
John snarled. “What business is this of Roanoke’s?”
“What business is this of any of us? What if he’d gone to Portland next? They had no idea when I talked to them that they might even be in danger. Or Billings? Or Sacramento?” Andrew didn’t give a damn what the Western packs wanted to do with themselves, but he hadn’t realized any had gotten to this level of isolationism.
“He was our problem. If we’d caught him—”
“But you didn’t.” Andrew put a whipcrack into his words, one alpha-powerful Were to another. “You didn’t even fucking find Silver. A smart man knows when to call in
help
.”
“Meaning you?” John’s lips twisted into a sneer.
“Me. Or the next pack over. Or Roanoke, because whatever else you say about us, we can get a network of people looking within hours, without fucking around with people who don’t feel like answering our calls.”
John made a grudging noise, wanting to agree without losing face. Andrew reluctantly allowed him that and changed the subject. “Silver said she’d stay here while you take me up to see the scene.”
“Yeah.” John turned to go, leading the way up to the main floor. “We brought your car. So you can get your stuff and change.” He sniffed pointedly.
Andrew suppressed a snarl. Obviously, it was his own fault he’d been chained up all night without access to a shower. “But these clothes were just getting properly broken in.”
The rest of the pack wasn’t in evidence when Andrew left the bathroom, washed and dressed. He couldn’t even count them by scent, as the house had been aggressively treated with scent-disguising cleaning products sometime in the last few days. Probably just before he’d been brought back here. The products made his sinuses ache. Clearly, John didn’t want him smelling the pack’s metaphorical dirty laundry, which made Andrew even more determined to find it. He still hadn’t figured out what had caused the pack’s behavior toward Portland. He lingered in the hall outside the bathroom as long as he could, and finally caught a whiff of a human woman. Worn in, not ephemeral, so she’d been around quite a lot.
Someone’s fuck buddy, he suspected. He could understand the appeal in an abstract sense—he’d had his one-night stands—but he’d never seen the point of starting a relationship guaranteed to end sooner rather than later.
Dishes were piled high in the sink when he entered the kitchen. A couple days’ newspapers lay scattered over the kitchen table under the coffee cups. The pretty boy—Pierce—slathered cream cheese on another bagel for Silver as ham slices sizzled in the frying pan. She already had a plate piled high enough to feed three werewolves on the bar counter before her, and she gave Pierce an exasperated look as he set the bagel down next to the mountain of food. Pierce didn’t seem to notice. He glanced at Andrew and pointedly rubbed his nose, which was a little bit crooked now, spoiling the pretty line. Served him right. Andrew ignored Pierce and kept conversation with John to a minimum out of consideration for Silver.
“Leave her with Yuri if you’re going to work,” John directed Pierce when he and Andrew had finished bolting their own ham. “We’re heading north.”
They took John’s truck, a workhorse of a Ford. They maintained silence for most of the drive. John seemed to think that a lot would be self-evident once they got to the scene. That, or he was too squeamish to talk about it. Watching the man’s set face in profile, Andrew doubted it was the latter.
It was a comparatively short drive. Just a little over an hour until John turned off the main freeway onto a small state highway. Tight hilly curves flanked the road, though the land had more denuded logged patches than on the way to the pack’s hunting grounds. This was the humans’ world, if it so happened he had forgotten.
“Why’d they split off?” Andrew asked at length, staring out the window. “This is awfully close to you.”
John snorted, eyes tight on the road. “Their mother only accepted my uncle’s authority as alpha because she liked him personally. Selene, Ares—either of them could have run a pack on their own easily enough. They could work with each other, but not with my uncle, or me. Too many strong wills.”
Andrew choked. “Ares? You’re kidding me.”
John managed a noise almost like a laugh. “I think Selene’s grandmother wanted to name them after the Colonists. Very traditional. Selene’s mother went too far the other way.”
Andrew smiled, remembering Ginnie and her obsession with Virginia Dare. Silence settled around them again.
When they arrived, the house was nothing much to look at. One story, set back in the trees on a fairly large property, a child’s bike leaning against the picnic table in the front yard. John checked the mailbox and cleared some advertising flyers that had been stuffed half under the door.
“We only cleaned up the outside,” he explained. “And gave the pack the proper rites. Took some fast talking, convincing their employers and the school that they’d moved back East suddenly to take care of ailing relatives. Haven’t decided what to do about the house. Power’s cut off, but nothing else to make the authorities come sniffing around yet.”
“Well, she’s never going to live here again, is she? You could help Silver sell it once we catch the guy.”
John didn’t pause to unlock the door, just yanked it open and shattered the wood frame. “You’ll see,” he snarled. “You’re welcome to try to clean it up if you want.” He gestured Andrew inside with a bow, tension twanging across every visible muscle.
The front room was dusty, filled with the detritus of young adults living together, though there were a few toys, small plastic people scattered around their house. A big TV, a video-game guitar on the couch.
The smell of dried blood came from the kitchen. Seven mismatched chairs stood inside, some from the kitchen set and some from other rooms. There wouldn’t have been room for them, but the kitchen table was on its side against the wall, three legs broken away.
One chair was in pride of place, the other standing ones watching it. Several more were tipped over. They all had silver chains wrapped around their arms or back slats. Those who had removed the bodies hadn’t done more than get the silver out of their way.