2
Blood. Andrew smelled blood, werewolf blood, sharp as a shout on the wind. Fresh blood. He pounded into a run, sacrificing discretion for speed. The smell came from a triangle of protected wetland surrounded by a chain-link fence. The cut metal ends glistened red where someone had squeezed between links and post, hard to see but immediately obvious even to Andrew’s human nose.
He strode to the fence and hid his hands with his body in case of observers, then bent the links back far enough to squeeze through. The land sloped too much for Andrew to see the water below, but he could smell it as a tang of freshness that meant it was running. The Were’s silver-tainted scent was clear on top, mingling with the blood and pain again. She must have hurt herself badly.
But that made no sense. Her werewolf strength should have let her bend the fence back as easily as his had. Why expose herself to scratches when she had to know she was being followed? He could smell fresh blood still, up ahead. A healthy werewolf would have healed mere scratches by now.
He followed the path worn down to the stream, past beer bottles and crumpled chip bags. He kept his hand out to stop the hanging blackberry tendrils menacing him at face level from scoring any hits.
He saw a flash of white as the Were straightened from a crouch. She was scrawny, her scuffed and dirty jeans caught on her hipbones. By human standards, she looked around twenty-five, but werewolves aged slower as well as lived longer, so she was more likely in her thirties to forties. One sleeve of her plain gray, zippered sweatshirt hung free, the arm a lump held against her chest. The sweatshirt’s bagginess hid anything else about her figure. Blood still seeped from cuts on her hand and cheek.
Up close, the stink of silver was muddier, not like a carried object but mixed in with everything else. The scent of her pain reminded him powerfully of injured humans he’d smelled. A hint of infection, under the blood. But werewolf wounds didn’t last long enough to get infected. Under the poison lurked the more normal stink of someone who hadn’t bathed in far too long.
After her scent, the strangest thing was her hair. Even dirty, the locks straggling to below her ears were recognizable as white. Werewolves didn’t go white before their first century, if ever.
“You’re in Roanoke territory,” he said, voice low so as not to carry to any humans on the relatively still air, but still plenty loud for a werewolf. “Who are you?” The Were just stared at him. Did she not understand English? He repeated it in Spanish, since he’d been fluent once upon a time, though she didn’t have the look of any of the Spanish packs. Her face showed no more response.
The woman dropped to a crouching stance, one hand on the ground, as if ready to run on four legs. She stared intently at his face for a moment, and then stared just as intently at a point in the air beside his feet. Andrew knew it was empty, but he instinctively checked again to be sure. Nothing.
“I lost my name. The Lady has turned Her back on me, and my wild self is gone. I walk only with Death.” The woman’s voice was soft and breathy, probably with pain, but it didn’t waver. Her eyes swung back to a point somewhere in the matted grass covering the small stream, empty but for a snagged plastic bag.
Something about the reverence with which she invoked the Lady made Andrew’s arm jerk reflexively, ready to bow his head and press his thumb to his forehead. Childhood training ran deep, but he caught himself. Bullshit, like all religions. “What pack do you belong to?”
Blankness again, like she hadn’t understood and used English a second before. Either she was playing a deep game, or she was brain-damaged. Andrew didn’t see how any werewolf could be, but it was hard to argue with the evidence before him. She smelled so wrong—silver and blood and infection—his instincts screamed at him not to touch her. No European or other troublemaker would be able to fake that, or her apparent insanity. He needed to find her help.
“Why don’t you come with me?” he said, keeping his words simple, like speaking to a child. For every step forward he took, she took a matching one back. He was no good at this. As Roanoke’s enforcer, it was his job to drag people back to their punishments, not to coax them.
She bolted past him. Andrew grabbed at her, but she still had a werewolf’s speed. She dodged and escaped through the hole he’d made in the fence. She took off down the street, running flat out, head down.
Andrew growled under his breath and followed, jogging more than running. He didn’t want anyone passing to see a grown man chasing a scrawny and pathetic-looking girl. He could outrun her if it came down to it, but he’d rather try letting her slow down naturally. She smelled too hurt to keep up the pace for long.
She started panting within a minute and slowed to a jog as shadows from the maples lining the sidewalk slid up and over her hair in rhythm. The rushing sound of traffic on a main road oozed up with its choking exhaust to blanket them both.
Andrew’s breath caught as the woman didn’t turn aside on the last residential cross street as he had expected, but kept going right for the traffic. “No!” he called after her. “Wait, that’s a good girl. It’s all right.”
That made her pause, at least. A concrete wall shielded the houses along the road from the noise, and the woman caught its end to hold her up as she snarled silently at him. “I won’t let you hold me here. The monster will find me while you’re still deciding whether to listen to me.”
Andrew didn’t know what monster she meant, but who knew what she thought she saw, acting as she was. He strode forward and she jerked away from the wall, toward the cars. He couldn’t reach her before she reached the road, so he stopped again. Stalemate. “It’s all right—”
The woman’s expression grew harder. “Stop insulting my intelligence. It’s not all right. Death says I’m supposed to trust you, but Lady knows why.” She took a backward step toward the road. “Just let me go. I’m no threat to you. The monster chases me, and I run. Death follows to take
me,
not you or your pack.” She cocked her head, listening to something that couldn’t be heard. “But you have no fear of him, he says.” She snorted, and spoke to the air. “That’s a dubious recommendation, at best.”
Andrew let silence fall as he chose his words carefully. Something told him these would be the last words he’d have time for before she was gone, crushed by one of the SUVs barreling past. If religious metaphors were so important to her delusions, he’d use them too. “Fair enough, but I’d recommend you run somewhere else.” He nodded to the street behind her. “Death hunts those lands.”
The woman twisted her head over her shoulder to frown at the cars. “I can swim,” she objected, but her stance changed, no longer braced to run in that direction.
Andrew didn’t allow himself a sigh of relief yet, but he held out his hand to the woman. “Come on. If the monster comes, he can deal with the wrath of Roanoke’s enforcer, and by extension, Roanoke’s alpha.”
The woman ignored the hand, but she did join him. “I would not dismiss the monster so easily if I were you.”
Andrew put a hand behind her back, not quite touching, to guide her back to the car. “So what’s your name?”
The twist of the woman’s lips made her abruptly look much older. “I told you, I lost my name. Death calls me Silver.”
Andrew choked. She didn’t seem like she was trying to shock him, but if it was a joke, it was in poor taste. Who in their right mind would name themselves after a torture method? Though he supposed that was the operative phrase here—the woman clearly wasn’t in her right mind. “But what do you call yourself?”
The woman smiled without humor. “Who am I to argue with Death?”
* * *
The man was some kind of warrior, Silver decided. He was the first she’d seen since she started walking in the Lady’s realm who seemed quite real, besides Death and the monster. He didn’t shine with Her light from within like one of Her champions, but Silver didn’t mind. She would have hated to be reminded of the Lady’s true favor forever denied her. It was bad enough that the Lady’s light caressed his skin from above.
The warrior’s wild self was scarred, rough patches scattered in the steely gray fur. Silver watched the wild self pace beside the man and saw the play of muscles catch and hold in places, where more scar tissue lay hidden below the surface. His tame self did not show the injuries, as was the way of tame selves, but had the same confidence. His short hair was dark, and his features and muscles had a fineness to them that suggested his power came from training, not sheer strength. No brute, he. No wonder Death approved.
Death exchanged sniffs with the warrior’s wild self, two old alphas too confident to bother with the ritual of challenge. The warrior’s wild self had more muscle, but Death had no injuries and moved with the quickness of night swallowing the sky when a cloud passed over the Lady’s light.
“He brings you voices?” Silver asked Death. “Is that why you like him?” Death returned to stalk her rather than answer. Silver braced herself for his howl to come, but she could never brace enough for the burning, hissing pain that consumed her. The snakes paralyzed her muscles, forcing her to fight to break free before she could even writhe with the pain.
“Is he going to cut my voice loose for you?” she asked, when she had the breath for words again. “Is that why you wanted me to go with him?”
Receiving no answer, Silver ignored Death in turn and curled over her arm to sing the snakes a lullaby.
Sleep, sleep, don’t hiss, don’t bite.
They ignored her and her mind gnawed at the problem of this warrior, keeping her from her own sleep. He seemed kind, kind enough she had no wish for the monster to catch him too. He probably thought he could defend himself, but the monster had weapons he couldn’t counter. She should leave to protect him, but she was tired, so tired, of running.
3
Andrew led Silver back to the car without fuss, but she started making soft, distressed sounds when he guided her into the passenger seat. He cursed the compact’s limited head room that prevented him from examining her. He couldn’t see any injury he might have disturbed. She babbled something about voices, and then convulsed when he pulled the seat belt across her. He let it go and watched helplessly as her back arched with an apparent seizure.
They’d have to chance the ticket for an unbuckled belt. When Silver finally relaxed and curled into a little ball, he straightened from leaning over the open door and returned to the driver’s side.
Andrew had planned to drive at least half the distance between New Hampshire and the Roanoke pack house outside of D.C. in Manassas before stopping, but that didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore. Traffic on the Beltway would probably still be bad whether he hit D.C. later the next day or not. Unlike other packs, Roanoke was named after the original colony, not their city of residence, but Andrew often wished they did live in the backwater for easier access.
Andrew turned off at the first chain hotel he found, and checked them into a ground-floor room at the back. Silver was still dozing, babbling to herself again, when he returned to coax her in through a side door.
The room stank of cleaning products layered over strange humans, but that was true of any hotel. He got her onto the closest bed, where her clothing looked even more dingy against the overly cheerful shades of the bedspread. When she was settled, he reached for her sweatshirt’s zipper to examine her arm, but she lashed out. Andrew avoided the blow, but he suspected her whole strength had been behind it. He retreated to the other side of the room to allow her to relax again.
When she subsided into a doze, Andrew flopped down on the room’s armchair and got out his phone. Time to figure out what to do with this poor mystery woman. He paused with his address book open. Technically, he should go over the local alpha’s head. He was under Roanoke’s authority, and this was strange enough Roanoke should get involved. But it was the Boston alpha’s territory, so it would be at least polite to inform him of what had happened.
Besides, Boston was Andrew’s favorite of the sub-alphas united in the Roanoke pack. They’d clashed since Andrew had taken the job of enforcer, but Boston was gentlemanly even when working against Roanoke’s orders. More than once, Andrew had privately agreed with the older man.
But then, Benjamin was over a century old. While werewolves could see two centuries if they were lucky, few from earlier generations had made it that far, not in an era when wolf slaughter was practically institutionalized. Benjamin’s age gave him the politeness of another era and a wisdom it was hard for younger men to match.
“Ah.” Benjamin’s voice was warm and satisfied when he answered, like he’d seen a good friend’s name on the caller ID. “Dare. Did you manage to find our lone?”
“Yes, but she’s a lot more than I bargained for.” Andrew scrubbed a hand along his jaw. “She smells like silver, sure, but she’s been hurt. I’m starting to wonder if she’s the victim of a European, rather than one herself. She’s definitely crazy.”
Andrew wished he could smell Benjamin’s reaction in the pause. The silence didn’t tell him anything. Finally Boston asked, “Anyone you knew in your time there? Someone they might use as a message?”
Andrew growled. He supposed when Benjamin had taken him in and helped him through the worst of his darkness after he’d returned from Spain, he’d earned the right to bring up the subject. “I did think about it, when I thought she was a European herself, but I can’t see why they’d come after me after all this time. I haven’t tried to contact my daughter lately.” Andrew had to clench his free hand to keep his voice steady.
“I’m sorry.” Benjamin blew out a breath. “It had to be asked, Dare. Are you taking the poor lone to Roanoke, then?”
“Unless you have some other suggestion.” Andrew almost wished Benjamin did. Rory was a decent alpha, but he sometimes had trouble with bigger-picture stuff. Europeans were good at subtle backstabbing and manipulation, difficult to catch unless you watched the big picture.
“I trust your judgment.”