The girl pressed her thumb to her forehead, automatic. “Well, Death
is
evil.”
Silver laughed. The sound grabbed at Andrew’s gut for some reason, compelling. “I suppose I thought that at one point too, but mostly he’s full of himself.” She laughed again. “Yes, you are.”
The girl gave Silver an incredulous look. “Who are you talking to?”
“Oh, Death follows me. But don’t worry. I won’t let him near you. It’s me he wants. Dare made it so he can’t have me, but I think he still follows me just to be an ass.”
The girl tittered nervously. “You goth or something? Death betrayed the Lady.”
Andrew sat on the couch as quietly as possible, not wanting to disturb Silver.
“Not because he wanted to. It may not make sense to you now, but when you get older you’ll understand that sometimes things have to be done. Hard things. But everyone will hate the person who finally does them.”
Andrew drew himself up straighter, recognizing the echo of his own words. Silver gave him a tiny smile when their eyes caught, then she looked away again. “But if they do them anyway, that’s the mark of true honor.” She let her breath slip out in a sigh and her words took on a storytelling cadence. “When the world was young, we couldn’t die. Not by sickness or age, or injury. Only fire could destroy us, since fire was where the world began. Fire is how the world rebuilds itself even now. But back then the Lady lived among us, with Death at Her side, Her partner in everything. But the humans and the human gods were jealous. That is how humans exist—they are driven to take everything they see, and destroy it if they can’t take it. The human gods gave them fire, and sent them to take what we have.
“But the Lady didn’t see it. She thought we were safe. Death knew better. He knew that we were complacent, and if we did not learn of mortality, we would never stand against the humans. So he killed the first of us with his own jaws, so we could know death and fear it, and fight against it when the humans came. He had to do it, and it worked.
“And the Lady punished him, for betraying Her, because She had to do it too. Because he had stolen the voices of Her slain people, She stole his voice, so he must forever after borrow those of the souls he takes and returns to her. She took his name. And worst of all, She barred him from Her side until the end of our time. So he loves Her, but he can never feel Her presence again.”
Silver tilted her head up so her tears couldn’t spill free. Andrew’s instincts screamed at him to touch, to pet, to hold, but the girl was right there, and the moment passed. Silver pulled herself together.
“Little heavy for a kid, don’t you think?” he teased awkwardly.
“I’m not a kid,” the girl protested. “But I still think Death is evil.”
Silver smiled, a little tight, but a good effort. “I know, puppy.” The girl bristled further at the diminutive and pushed herself up to finish getting dressed.
Andrew watched Silver, rather than the girl. Her expression was unreadable, but he kept turning her words over in his thoughts. Was he Death, doing what no one else would, or was Silver, barred from the Lady’s presence? He supposed to Silver’s mind he was barred from the Lady too, though he had chosen that when he ceased to believe.
17
Once Andrew had seen the girl to her mother, he returned to the kitchen where Pierce and another couple Were had gathered, cleaning up after lunch. Now he had a sensitive question, he might as well try it on everyone.
Something made everyone’s heads come up before Andrew could speak, however. Unused to sorting traffic on the road from traffic up the driveway for this particular house, Andrew took a moment to realize what had attracted their attention. A car door slammed, and someone’s key scraped in the front door.
“John!” Everyone seemed too frozen to answer. A woman’s heels tapped down the hall. “Look, I’m so sorry, but there’s no one else to take Edmond.”
Pierce cast a frustrated glance at Andrew and stepped forward to intercept the woman. The other Were faded back into the kitchen, smelling of fear and more guilt. What the hell was going on?
John’s footsteps thumped down the stairs in a great hurry and he skidded into the entryway behind her a moment later. The woman stopped short at John’s sudden entrance. She was close enough now that Andrew could match her to the human woman’s scent around the house. She looked to be in her midtwenties, with an aggressively fashionable haircut of the kind Andrew associated with women planning to climb the corporate ladder.
The baby in the sling across her front squalled, but subsided when she cupped her arm underneath to bounce him. He needed his diaper changed. Strange choice of girlfriend. Awfully young, and Andrew wouldn’t have thought that John was the type to put up with a single mother.
“Susan, not now—” Pierce started herding her toward the door. The scent of panic bloomed from John’s direction when he noticed Andrew watching the whole scene. He strode forward like he wanted to block Andrew’s view with his shoulders. Andrew just sidestepped.
“I’m just dropping him off. I’ll only be here a minute, I promise.” Susan pushed right past the beta. Dominant. That made more sense for John. She unbuckled the sling and dropped a hefty diaper bag covered with tulips at John’s feet. “Please, just for a few hours.” She put the baby into John’s unresisting arms.
Andrew rubbed at his jaw. That’s how it was, then. John must be the child’s father. Was this what John had been hiding? But this was too simple. People would give John shit, sure, but everyone had some human blood somewhere in their family tree. It was like how everyone had a relative among the true wolves if one looked far enough. These things happened, especially when you lived in a world where one had to practically live and breathe human. He presumed this explained yesterday’s late arrival. John must have been arguing with her over whatever excuse he was using to keep her away while Andrew was here.
“Hi.” Andrew put on a pleasant smile and stepped around John. Might as well introduce himself to the woman. John had no reason to hide her now his secret was out. Andrew didn’t want that additional guilt confusing what he needed to find out.
Silver slipped in behind him. Less worried about manners, she stared at Susan with frank interest.
Susan rocked back on her heels like the hand Andrew extended to shake was some kind of threat. “Oh. Uh. Hi.” She glanced to John and her baby, and then to the door and escape. Andrew suppressed a frown. He was keeping his dominance as damped as he always did for humans. Was he getting that sloppy, that he was scaring her?
“You smell of fear. Which, as Death says, is odd.” Silver prowled over to stand between Susan and the door. “What’s to fear? Those of our kind are hardly frightening unless you know.”
“Know what?” Susan’s hands started shaking, and her fear flared to choking levels. “John said the friend coming to stay was kind of a hard-ass, that’s all.” She threw Andrew an apologetic smile.
Andrew would have growled at Silver for scaring the woman for no reason, but Susan didn’t quite smell of fear of the unknown. She smelled of guilt and fear of being found out. Her and the entire pack. The stink of panic had gathered thickly enough to cloud the hall.
Could she know about the Were? The conclusion seemed obvious, but Andrew couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that anyone would be so stupid as to tell a human anything, sleeping with her or not.
“I doubt that’s what he really said.” Silver dropped to all fours, or at least three, with her bad arm tucked into her pocket. Susan flinched from the movement, a movement that, if anything, should have been less threatening in human terms.
There was no mistaking Susan’s flare of fear, either. The human woman knew about them. How could John have told her? How could he?
“No!” John tried to hand his child back to his mother, but quivering tension made her slow to respond. Silver straightened and slipped between them and gathered the baby up, cradling him in her good arm. The moment the baby was elsewhere, Andrew shook off his shocked paralysis and closed the distance to John.
“Have you lost your mind?” Andrew had the satisfaction of seeing John flinch as he spat the words, a few inches from his face. “How could you possibly—”
John put a restraining hand on his arm, and Andrew jerked it off. “Outside. Do this outside.” John repeated the motion, and Andrew repeated throwing it off.
“Why? Since she knows already—” Andrew glanced to Susan, and when he looked back, he saw such fear in John’s eyes it disgusted him. Disgusted him with himself. He hated that his reputation was so bad people would actually think he’d threaten the life of John’s child, or even the human he loved.
Andrew stomped for the front door without saying another word. John’s garbled explanations to his girlfriend followed Andrew out to the front step where he waited, door open, for the other man to follow.
“—that’s why I said you couldn’t ever come to the house. He smelled it on you. It doesn’t matter how much self-control you have, you can’t hide that—”
Silver made an exasperated sound, and Andrew smiled slightly, imagining the matching expression. “He’s not going to kill you. Either of you.” Susan’s wordless response didn’t sound particularly soothed. “However stupid you were.” That, too, sounded aimed at both members of the couple.
“John,” Andrew snapped, putting an alpha’s command into the word. The moment he heard John’s steps coming toward him he started around the side of the house. He found the patch of shadows he wanted under the eaves alongside the garage. They’d still have to keep their voices down, but they would have more privacy from neighbors there than in the backyard.
“Dare—” John’s voice was practically whining now. He dragged a hand through his hair, spiking it up.
“Look.” Andrew brushed away a spider silk strand he’d picked up on his sleeve. The scent of decomposing grass clippings from the bin next door stung his nose. “Was this human woman the one who knew about the Bellingham pack, the person everyone was protecting?” He paused for John’s jerky nod. “Do you swear on the Lady no one else but Portland knew about Silver’s pack’s existence?” For that, he caught John’s gaze, to hit him with dominance as he answered, and read the truth in his eyes.
“Yes,” John said, voice steady for that at least. Truth, so far as Andrew could tell.
“Fine. If she can swear she didn’t tell anyone, I didn’t hear anything about her, understand? I don’t want to—” Andrew was so frustrated he couldn’t figure out what he’d intended with his gesture, so he aborted it halfway. “Deal with this. Any of this. I think you’re a moron who should have been castrated if he was going to let his dick do his thinking for him to this degree, but I can’t scare the knowledge out of her, can I? So it can wait until I’ve dealt with the killer, and then you can have your pack back and all these stupid problems with it, and welcome.”
John stared at him in silence for several moments. “Oh,” he said at length. “Who’d have thought.” Andrew speared him with an annoyed glance, and he continued. “That you’re that style of alpha.”
Andrew snorted. “What, temporary? Sure. Makes life much easier.” He set his fist against the garage wall’s siding, careful to hold back any force. “We none of us bask in unobscured moonlight. I married a European, of all things. No one was exactly happy about that at the time, as I recall. But that ended badly, and you know this is going to also.”
“Susan’s intelligent. She would never—”
“She’s a young human. ‘I won’t tell anyone’ actually means ‘—except my closest friend I trust not to tell anyone else.’ You see how it starts?” Andrew got up into John’s face again. “Or imagine if she was tortured. She can take a lot less than a werewolf could, should the killer decide to dig for a little information.”
John barked a harsh laugh. “It’s not like Selene could take much either. And yet you’ve hardly cut ties to her, have you?”
“Silver.” The correction slipped out before Andrew even thought about it. “I’m protecting her from the danger she was already in when I met her. You’re putting Susan into it.”
The garage door machinery in the next house rumbled a warning of prying eyes arriving soon. The two men eyed each other for a moment before heading back to the front door.
Susan sipped a cup of coffee at the kitchen counter as they came in. She looked a little less severe with her jacket hung over the chair back, but maintained a self-possessed air.
Silver sat on a step stool rather than a kitchen chair, the baby in her lap now to save her arm from getting too tired. She made little yipping and growling noises as well as faces, entertaining him with canine baby talk. Susan looked twitchy, showing the usual human discomfort with the Were habit of passing a child around the pack like it belonged to everyone.
Seeing John, Susan picked up a second mug of coffee that had been waiting ready, and came over to offer it to him. “I’m so sorry—I thought I’d just be here for two minutes, and what I know or don’t know wouldn’t even come up—”
“It was going to come up eventually anyway,” Andrew said before John could answer. “Better me than someone else.”
Silver balanced the child’s weight so she could prop him up for Andrew to look him in the face. He stared at Andrew blankly, lips a little poked out. “You can see his wild shape in his eyes!” Her face shone with excitement. “Even though he doesn’t have a real one yet. Maybe that’s where mine hid.” She continued holding up the baby, like Andrew was supposed to look into his eyes and see—whatever was so important to Silver.
He ruffled the baby’s hair instead, and the boy transferred his blankly intense gaze from the opposite wall to Andrew. Andrew’s heart squeezed. He missed his daughter like a physical pain sometimes. Silver’s arm looked like it was tiring from the strain, so Andrew got a good grip, took the baby from her, and swooped him around to the side. The baby made a sound like he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to laugh or not. John flinched, and Andrew handed the boy to him unharmed.
“What the hell is she talking about?” Susan looked from Silver to John and back.
Andrew hadn’t realized how Silver had gone from being incomprehensible to sounding almost normal to him until he saw Susan’s completely baffled expression. “Silver sees our Goddess a lot. I think she’s talking about how your son can’t shift yet.”