Chapter 4
Jack and Nikki had work to do, but there were some cots set up in the basement. They offered to let me catch up on sleep for a few hours until it was time for them to go back to their headquarters. I gratefully accepted.
After taking an age to get back on my feet and an exceedingly painful millennia to limp down the stairs, I collapsed into one of the cots in the storage area and slept for a while.
Nikki woke me with a rough shake some time later. All that kept me from punching her was the protesting ache in my muscles. Even so, I felt better, not quite so sore, and followed the two hunters to a black SUV parked a couple blocks away from the shop. The sun was still out, but the end of the workday was approaching and the streets were quickly becoming packed with traffic. I dozed again on the ride, the sounds of a low, droning announcer on the radio lulling me into a groggy stupor.
By the time we reached Jack’s hideout, a spacious house in the exclusive community that made up City Island, I was too hungry to sleep and desperately hoping they would let me raid the fridge once we got inside.
“I need to make some calls,” Jack said as he pulled into the garage next to another car, a beaten up Jeep that looked out of place next to the sleek lines of the Suburban. “Nikki will show you to a room and find you some clothes. After you shower, you remember where the kitchen is? Come down and we’ll discuss who it is you’re looking for over dinner.”
I followed Nikki up the stairs (God, not more of those!) to a guest room that was warm, furnished, and showed signs of prior habitation. Somebody had left a stack of magazines touting the joys of hunting, big guns, and barely clothed biker babes on an end table next to a window with a fabulous view of the bay.
“Sorry,” Nikki said, not sounding sorry at all. “Bo must have left these up here. Make yourself at home. I’ll see if I have anything in my closet that would fit you, but there should be some men’s sweats in the drawers that you can wear until we can get you some of your own clothes. Towels are in the cabinet across from the sink. See you in a few.”
She shut the door behind her without bothering to wait for me to respond. From the looks of things, the upcoming month spent in close quarters with Nikki was going to be full of sunshine and rainbows.
With a great deal of groaning and pain, I shed my jacket, my weapons, and the body armor that clung in a way reminiscent of leather to bare skin. Once I managed the contortionist acts necessary to get the clingy material off, I gingerly settled the pile of dirty clothing on the dresser and tucked the weapons, extra ammo, and Amber Kiss perfume into an empty dresser drawer.
The shower was one of the most heavenly experiences of my life. The pipes rattled a bit, and the water took an age to get hot, but it was a
real
shower. The warmth of the water sucked the aches right out of my muscles, and I used the crappy bar soap to scour the filth that had collected from my hands and face. I didn’t stop scrubbing until the water spiraling down the drain was clear instead of a dingy gray.
By the time I finished, I was feeling relatively human again. With my hair lying in a damp tail down my back and the grossly oversized sweats rolled up over my wrists and ankles, I plodded downstairs to join Jack and Nikki again. The scent of steaks and veggies wafting out of the kitchen made me feel a little less awkward about wandering around a strange house in someone else’s borrowed clothes.
I wasn’t expecting the grumpy siblings to have invited company, and paused with a hand on the door as a few voices drifted out into the hall.
“... and I don’t see how you can assume the leech didn’t plant her. You have an obsession with this woman, an unhealthy one, and I guarantee you she’ll bring trouble to our door just like she did last time.”
I didn’t recognize the voice, which was male and edged with aggression. Another unfamiliar voice chimed in.
“I agree. We cannot trust that she is what she says. Why don’t we kill her now and get it out of the way?”
I backed up a step, pressing a hand to my mouth. Jack spoke up next, and I wasn’t quite certain if I was thankful that it was in my defense.
“We don’t know for sure that she’s been infected, and we have literally dozens of better uses we can put her to while she’s still alive. I never said we should trust her, only that we should go along with her little scheme for now, because it might present a better opportunity for us later.”
A yelp was forced out of me as someone shoved me through the swinging door, sending me stumbling into the room to meet the startled, distrustful eyes of half a dozen hunters. Nikki strolled in behind me, dusting her hands off, and I shot her a dirty look she soon returned in kind.
Then I had to face the hunters.
“Uh,” I said.
Jack kicked out a chair beside him at the table, his eyes narrowed and jaw clenched. I shuffled over to it with as much dignity as I could muster, mumbling something that I hoped passed for a greeting so I wouldn’t have to meet their probing gazes. Nobody said a thing as I gingerly lowered myself into the chair, or as I cast surreptitious, longing looks at the piles of steaks, veggies, and other trimmings placed around the table. No one had filled their plates yet, so I didn’t dare reach for anything, and I wondered what the heck they were waiting for.
Nikki brought a couple of bottles of red wine to the table, popping the corks and pouring. At this point, I was too hungry to care about the awkward silence; I just wanted the wait to be over so I could dig into those heavenly-looking steaks. Once everyone had a full glass, she took a seat, and then we all started filling our plates.
“Shiarra,” Jack said, startling me so badly I almost dropped the salad bowl on my lap, “I believe you remember Dr. Morrow and Bo, yes? If you haven’t been introduced, I’d like you to meet Jason, Patrick, Adam, and Keith.”
The other hunters gave me sparse nods as Jack said their names. Patrick, Adam, and Jason were watching me with mixtures of speculation and dislike. They looked vaguely familiar, and they all had the bodies of men who pumped iron and probably hid tattoos of things like barbed wire cuffs and flying hearts with “Mom” banners on them under their long-sleeved shirts. Keith, a skinny kid who reminded me of Arnold the mage, gave me a disinterested once-over before digging into his steak.
Dr. Morrow and Bo seemed to be the only people who didn’t loathe me on sight. Dr. Morrow had treated me a few times when I’d been in scrapes before. I hadn’t known until I was suffering from severe blood loss after a vampire bite that he was working for the White Hats.
A group of them, including Bo, had saved me from the clutches of a vampire bent on revenge. Why Max Carlyle had thought Royce cared enough about me to think that I would be useful as bait was still beyond me. Though I was grateful to the White Hats for saving me, I’d never considered becoming a member of their crazy organization. Bo had badly injured his leg in some fight or another (maybe in the process of saving me from Max?), and we’d spent some time together in the infirmary. Judging by the wink he gave me, he didn’t begrudge my walking out on the White Hats to go back to Royce’s side the way Jack and Nikki did.
“Still waiting for that movie night, chica,” Bo said, giving me a flash of white teeth against dark skin. “Got any plans after dinner?”
“Sure, I owe you one,” I replied, returning his smile in kind.
Patrick kicked Bo under the table, not so subtly that I missed it. Bo shot him a look before returning his attention to his meal. Jack sipped at his wine, not touching the small portions of food Nikki had put on his plate, earning a frown from her.
It was probably the most awkward dinner I’ve ever attended, even counting the time Chaz and Arnold came to my parents’ house for my younger brother’s birthday. Every time Bo would try to strike up a conversation with me, someone else would cut him off. Dr. Morrow was as disinterested as could be in anything but his food. Jack, Nikki, Patrick, Jason, and Adam seemed as if they couldn’t care less whether I lived or died.
Keith surprised me by being the first to show interest. He finished his second helping before anybody else, and swirled the wine in his glass while he stared at me from across the table. He had to lean slightly to one side to peer around a vase of flowers Nikki must have put there as a centerpiece.
“So, you’re looking for somebody, right? Is that why you’re here?”
I glanced up, fork halfway to my mouth, uncertain if he really was talking to me. Everyone else but Bo feigned disinterest in the conversation.
“To hunt, right? Some Weres?”
“Yeah. Yes, I guess Jack must have told you. I had a run-in with the Sunstrikers. There are a few of them I need to find.”
“Good,” Keith said. He was surprisingly eager, leaning forward and setting his glass aside. “I’m the resident computer nerd, so it’ll be my job to track them down. You have their full names? Addresses, places of work, anything like that?”
Though I knew my face was burning red, both from embarrassment and anger, I didn’t hesitate. “Yes. The pack leader was my boyfriend. I can give you everything you need.”
That earned another round of awkward silence. So, Jack hadn’t told them everything. I was quick to cut into the quiet before they could start jumping to the wrong conclusions.
“I know where to find him. Plus, I’m a private investigator, so I can probably help you search. I’m not after the whole pack, just a few specific people.”
“Oh,” Keith said, his eyes aglow with excitement. “Oh, this is good. This is very good. Lady, forget your after-dinner movie. I’m going to need to pick your brain.”
“Hey,” Bo protested. “That’s not fair.”
Jack pushed his chair back, leaving his food untouched. “Fair? Who said anything about fair? We’ve got a month before we might have a new shifter on our hands, gentlemen. We move fast on this, or not at all.”
Though his words turned my blood cold and killed what was left of my appetite, I nodded and firmed my resolve. With Keith’s skills, and my knowledge of Chaz’s haunts and my talent for skip tracing, it shouldn’t take long at all to find the Sunstrikers.
I hoped.
Chapter 5
(Days left to full moon: 19)
“Stop that.”
For the umpteenth time, I did my best to put a cap on my nervous fidgeting, but even Patrick’s growled command couldn’t scare me into being still for long. Soon the grip of one of my stakes was squeaking again as my fingers tightened on the leather.
We were waiting in a van parked outside of some skeezy-looking place called The Tease in northern Jersey. Nikki was in the bar wearing clothes that made her look like she might be one of the featured strippers taking a night off. How she expected to fight a werewolf in those heels and with that much skin showing was beyond me, but I had problems of my own.
Sitting in the van doing nothing was torture. The belt kept yammering about its violent urges and sending surges of adrenaline through me. If not for my worry about hitting innocent—okay, maybe not innocent, but
human
—bystanders,
I
might have charged in with guns blazing.
Keith hadn’t been paying me much mind. His attention was focused on the panels in the back, and on listening in on Nikki’s conversations through headphones that must have led a former life in a sound studio. Their equipment had drawn my interest for a while. Any P.I. worth their salt would have been drooling over the high-resolution video feeds, listening devices, and GPS tracking systems. Judging by the quality, I had to guess that some of the stuff was military grade.
If the belt hadn’t been a constant earache—and if I weren’t feeling so paranoid about whether or not I’d survive to return to my job as a private investigator once the month was out—I would’ve been far more interested. As it was, the van was too overcrowded and I was too irritated to do more than fidget.
We hadn’t had any luck until yesterday digging up any information on where the Weres had gone to ground. Visiting Chaz’s, Dillon’s, and a few other Sunstrikers’ homes a few times a day hadn’t yielded anything of use, other than noting cops staking them out, too. Somehow the Weres had known, and found, places to hide where even I couldn’t find them.
Finding out about Vic had been a stroke of luck. I’d been so frazzled by Chaz’s disappearing act that I hadn’t thought to search for one of the lower ranking Weres to interrogate until after two fruitless days of hunting for my ex. Jack didn’t want to waste time and had used his network of contacts to find one of the thirty or so werewolves high enough in the pack who might know where Chaz and Dillon and the rest of the dominant wolves were hiding. Even then, it took some time to dig up the info.
Somehow, through whatever connections the White Hats had and some legwork on Keith’s part, they’d tracked Vic Thomasian to this crappy neighborhood just a few miles southeast of the Newark airport. Nikki was supposed to lure him out. The stink of a nearby wharf and the surrounding industrial buildings only added to the charm of the sagging brick shithole. The place was cradled between two abandoned warehouses, centered in a cramped parking lot that had long since had the lights burned or shot out. The only illumination came from above the entrance in the form of a flickering neon sign depicting a dancing naked woman, and one other sign advertising Budweiser dimly seen through a dirty window.
The Were was in there, somewhere. His car, a rust bucket that might once have been a blue Geo, was parked at the far end of the lot. According to whomever it was Jack had contacted, Vic spent a good portion of his paycheck here on his nights off. So far, Nikki hadn’t had any luck. Unless you counted nearly breaking the hand of the guy who tried to feel her up. It raised my respect of her a notch. She’d since settled at the bar, facing out so the tiny video camera hidden in the big gem in her necklace would pick up whatever was going on in the room. As much as it might have engrossed the boys in the van, I wasn’t interested in the floor show.
“There he is.”
I glanced up at Keith’s announcement. He was pointing at a figure on the screen who was coming out of a back room toward the bar. The Sunstriker pack tattoo—a stylized sun pierced by a spear—was visible on his upper arm. Vic’s stringy black hair looked greasier in the video than it had in the picture we’d found on the Internet. He slicked it back when he spotted Nikki, giving her a toothy smile. She must have returned it, because he took it as invitation enough to make a beeline to the empty seat beside her.
After Keith adjusted some dials and flipped a switch, obnoxious boom-boom music flooded out of some speakers, and Keith hung the headphones around his neck while we listened in on Nikki’s conversation.
“Looking for a job, pretty girl? Or a good time?”
Nikki handled his proposition with more aplomb than I would have managed. “A little of both, baby. You think you can handle this?”
I missed whatever they said next. Between Keith and Bo’s laughing so hard, Jason’s making some kind of lewd comment, and Jack’s shouting from the driver’s seat for everybody to can it, it was impossible to hear anything. Everything simmered down once Nikki got up from her bar stool and took Vic’s arm. They were headed for the exit.
Showtime.
Bo, Patrick, Jason, and Adam reached for their weapons. Mine were already on me, and it took effort to keep from surging to my feet and shoving my way past the men to the rear of the van. Jack eased his door open, not wanting to startle the target. We kept an eye on the video feed to make sure Nikki was leading Vic to the darker side of the building where we were hoping to pin him and force him to tell us where Chaz and the other Sunstrikers were hiding.
Everything was going according to plan. She tugged him away when he was making as if to go to his car, gesturing to the alley. Judging by the sudden leer and eagerness on his face, she must have given him one hell of a suggestive look. He practically shoved her toward the shadows.
That was our cue. Bo was the first out the door, and I was the last. I wasn’t expecting it when Patrick grabbed me by the throat and yanked me back against the side of the van. The man had
huge
hands. He leaned right into me, his nose nearly touching mine, as he opened his mouth to speak.
I socked him in the solar plexus, and he staggered back with a groan, releasing me to clutch his stomach. With the belt’s help, that little tap would have been nearly as painful as being punched by a shifted Were. Jogging to catch up with the others, I didn’t look back. Jason and Adam paused when I passed, looking over their shoulders.
Moving to Jack’s side, I reached for one of my handguns, now loaded with silver bullets courtesy of the Highly Illegal White Hat Weapons Emporium. They didn’t trust me to be on the front line yet. Jack was supposed to move in to hit Vic with a stun gun as soon as he was distracted. Bo, Patrick, and Adam were going to wrap him in silver-plated chains. Jason and I were backup, meant to shoot to wound the Were if things got too hairy or he broke out of the chains. We needed to question, not kill, Vic Thomasian.
Once Patrick stalked over to us, he wouldn’t look at me. I returned the favor, though he did growl something at me under his breath.
“Same to you, buddy,” I muttered.
Jack shook his head, then gestured for us to follow. He whipped around the corner and dashed forward. I couldn’t see Vic around the linebacker shoulders of Bo, Patrick, and Adam, but judging by the sounds of things, he wasn’t going down easy.
“What the fuck?” Vic’s voice. Followed by a meaty thump. There was no telltale crackle of the stun gun going off. Had Jack dropped it? “Shit! Ow!”
I still couldn’t see clearly around the men, but they weren’t using the chains effectively. The Were was using his fists, pummeling them, shoving them off, hissing every time one of the chains brushed and burned his bare skin. The smell of cooked meat and charred hair was contributing to the already considerable stink of the area.
Vic was a good fighter for a beta wolf. He’d gone deadly silent save for small sounds of pain from the silver, backhanding Nikki out of the way when she shoved a butterfly knife between his ribs. Even wounded, he was a formidable opponent. The guys were getting their asses kicked.
With a heave, Vic threw Jack into Bo with inhuman strength, sending the two men sprawling. Nikki hadn’t gotten back to her feet, and Adam and Patrick weren’t doing so hot, either. Adam tried to get the chain he was holding around Vic’s throat while he was distracted, but the Were tore it out of his hands and flung it aside, leaving Adam weaponless. They were too close for me or Jason to get off a shot without potentially hurting one of the hunters.
Patrick managed to get the silver around one of Vic’s wrists, which brought the Were to his knees with a harsh cry of pain. Before Patrick or Adam could grab his other wrist, the Were used Patrick’s grip to jerk him off his feet and slam him bodily into Adam. Stunned, the two men collapsed as Vic leapt to his feet—straight at Jason.
The hunter kept his cool. I’ll give him that. Before he was tackled, he got off a single shot that clipped Vic’s shoulder and chipped the dirty brick wall. The bullet ricocheted and whined off to disappear somewhere in the dark. Tucking my own gun away, I sprinted forward as Vic tackled Jason to the ground, fighting for the gun with the hand that wasn’t wrapped in silver chain.
I kicked the Were in his wounded side where Nikki’s knife still protruded. He voiced a coughing snarl and rolled away, getting to his feet in a fluid movement that I might have admired if I hadn’t been so busy trying to take his ass down.
Though I was intending to shoot out one of his knees, the belt overrode my plan and sent me rocketing after the fleeing Were instead.
“What the hell!”
‘Go, get it, get it, now,’
it demanded.
‘Faster, move, just
move!’
Though I stumbled, trying to wrest control of my body back from the belt, I couldn’t stop running. “Stop it! Don’t do this!”
‘Shut up and let me drive,’
it demanded.
I had no control over my movements. We left the other hunters far behind, the Were running in smooth strides that would have prevented a normal human from ever keeping up. The stench of Dumpsters and cheap beer was soon left behind, replaced by the salt stink of the wharf and the heavily panic-laced musk of Were.
He was fleeing. Running. From me.
He couldn’t get away. I wouldn’t let him.
Something inside me clicked into place, and with a hunger I had never before experienced eating at my insides, I gave in to the chase. Every step brought me nearer to closing the distance between us.
We ran between buildings. People. Cars. I didn’t get any of it except as blurred impressions as I passed. My entire focus was on the beast running from me. I could almost see it. The fur and the fangs and the madness under that human skinsuit. The monster hiding below the surface. The thing I had to rid this world of, because there was nothing more important than making sure there was one less moon-chaser on the prowl tonight.