Bitten

Ambush

On the way to Bear Valley, Clay drove, Nick took the backseat, and I sat up front where the safety restraints were better. As I'd feared, the Camaro wasn't eager to restart. When it hesitated, Clay rammed the gas pedal to the floor, revved the engine into the red zone, then slammed the gearshift into reverse, ignoring the clanking sounds coming from under the hood. Forced into a battle of wills, the car surrendered and meekly let him drive the shit out of it all the way to Bear Valley.

"No, take the next exit," I said as Clay started turning off the first road to Bear Valley. "Head for the east end. To the hotel."

"Hotel?"

"There's no sense chasing our tails all over Bear Valley if the mutts haven't even left their hotel room. If they are gone, maybe I can track them from there."

Clay's hands tightened on the steering wheel. I knew he was certain the mutts had gone after Jeremy and checking the hotel only meant precious minutes lost. Still, it made sense. Instead of answering me, he veered back onto the highway, darting in front of a fully loaded logging truck. I closed my eyes for the rest of the ride.

When we got to the motor lodge, Clay whipped the car into the handicapped spot beside the lobby and was flying out of his seat before the engine died. I grabbed the car keys from the ignition and went after him. This time, he made no effort to fool the desk clerk. Luckily, there wasn't anyone behind the desk. Clay ran up the stairs two at a time. At LeBlanc's room, he snapped the freshly repaired lock and barreled through the door without waiting to see if anyone was on the other side. I was mounting the last steps when he came out.

"Gone," he said, pushing past me back down the stairs. About halfway down, he realized I was still going up and turned around. "I said, they're gone."

"This isn't the only room," I said. "Marsten wouldn't be caught dead camping out on anyone's floor."

Clay growled something, but I was already heading down the hall, pausing at each door and trying to pick up Cain's or Marsten's scent. Clay came back up the stairs and strode down the hall toward me.

"We don't have time-"

"Then go," I said. "Just go."

He didn't. Three rooms past LeBlanc's, I stopped.

"Cain," I said, reaching for the door handle.

"Got it. Keep moving and find Marsten's."

Marsten had the next room down. While Clay was still checking Cain's room, I broke open Marsten's door and walked inside. Except for the Italian leather suitcase in the corner, the room looked uninhabited. The bed was made, the tables were spotless, and the towels were all neatly hung on the rack. Definitely Karl Marsten's room. If he had to stoop to taking a room in the Big Bear Motor Lodge, he wouldn't spend any more time there than necessary. I was about to leave the room when I caught another familiar scent.

"Jeremy," Clay said from behind me as he stepped into the room.

"He's gone," I said. "He must have been here checking things out."

Clay nodded and brushed past me on his way out the door. We went back to the car. Next, Clay cruised the parking lots looking for the Mercedes or the Acura. Actually, "cruise" is misleading; I should say he ripped into the lots, circled around sharp enough to induce whiplash, and tore out again. In the parking lot behind Drake's Family Wear, we found Marsten's Acura.

I was only guessing that the Acura belonged to Marsten, but it was a pretty safe bet. LeBlanc may have had a steady income while he was living in Chicago, but by the looks of his hotel room, he wasn't shelling out the big bucks on luxury cars these days. Marsten, on the other hand, was very successful at his career… if you call thievery a career. Stealing was the number one occupation among mutts. Their lifestyle didn't encourage them to stay in one town long enough to settle into a job. Even if they were inclined to lay down roots, it wouldn't last. The Pack routinely rousted mutts who seemed to be settling into a non-nomadic lifestyle. Making a home for oneself meant claiming territory and only the Pack could claim territory. So most mutts wandered from city to city, stealing enough to stay alive. Some did better than that. Marsten specialized in jewels, namely jewels from the necks and bedrooms of lonely middle-aged dowagers. He had money and he considered himself a cut above other werewolves. It didn't matter to the Pack that he could speak five languages and didn't touch wine younger than he was. A mutt was a mutt.

Clay slowed down behind the Acura, then hit the gas, and swung from the parking lot.

"We aren't tracking them?" Nick asked, leaning over the seat.

"I don't care where they are. I care where Jeremy is."

We found Antonio's Mercedes a couple blocks away in the paper-mill parking lot. This trail was easy for me to follow, the scents being so familiar that I could let my brain process on autopilot while I concentrated on looking ahead for clues.

The trail looped past the local newspaper office, The Donut Hole, the warehouse where the rave had been held, and a country-and-western bar just off the main street. I could follow Jeremy's logic as we passed each point: the paper for late-breaking news, the coffee shop for gossip, and the warehouse for any overlooked clues. The tavern was a bit trickier, until I picked up the acrid scent of stale urine where Cain had pissed on the rear wall, presumably after a round of drinking the night before. From there, the trail headed back toward the paper mill where Antonio's car was parked.

"They're heading back," Nick said. "I bet we just missed them." We went about five steps when a cat hissed at us from a pile of garbage. Nick hissed back. The cat's eyes narrowed, tail shooting up into an affronted exclamation mark.

"Leave the kitty alone," I said. "He's too skinny to be more than a mouthful and a stringy one at that."

As I turned, I saw something sticking out from under the bags of garbage. At first it looked like a row of four pale pebbles peeking out from between two bags. The sight was so out of place that I stepped toward it, ignoring the reek of garbage that overpowered everything else. As I drew closer, I realized what I was really seeing: fingertips.

"Shit," I muttered. "Look at this. Either those mutts are getting careless with their kills or they're leaving them lying around on purpose."

"Twenty bucks on the latter," Clay said.

He stepped forward and nudged the top bag back for a better view. The fingertips were attached to a hand, which was attached to an arm. As Clay heaved the bag up, the lower bag slid out and the body tumbled to the ground. It rolled onto its back. The man's head lolled to the side at an impossible angle, neck broken. Unruly red hair glittered even in the dark.

"Peter," I whispered.

"No," Clay said. "Jeremy. No!"

Clay shot off into the darkness, running footsteps echoing down the alley. Nick's eyes widened and met mine. Then something behind them clicked as he remembered that Jeremy hadn't been the only one with Peter. He raced after Clay. I paused to hide Peter's body, then ran after them, my heart pounding so hard I couldn't breathe, gasping and choking for air as I ran. Twenty feet away, I saw a pool of thick red glimmering under the sick light of a half-dead light. From it, trails of blood tentacled out, then converged in a single thread leading into the distance. I followed the trail. Ahead, Nick's white shirt bobbed against the blackness. I could hear Clay's footfalls, but couldn't see him. The blood trad wove around two corners. As I wheeled around the second, I saw Clay and Nick just ahead, both stopping and circling back. They'd run past the trail, which ended in a puddle of blood just past the corner.

I bent, put a finger to the blood, then lifted it to my nose.

"Is it?" Clay asked.

"Jeremy's," I whispered.

"And there's plenty more here if you'd like a closer look," a deep voice said.

Clay's head shot up. We looked around, then saw a loading dock to our right. Clay hopped onto the three-foot-high ledge and disappeared into the darkness of the opening. Nick and I followed. At the back of the loading dock, Jeremy sat in the corner, propping his right leg on a broken crate as Antonio tore strips from his shirt. As we approached, Jeremy lifted his left arm to push his bangs back from his face, then winced and used his right hand instead, letting the left fall awkwardly to his side. "Are you okay?" I asked.

"Peter's dead," Jeremy said. "We were ambushed."

"We were heading back to the car," Antonio said as he added another layer of bindings to Jeremy's leg. "I took off to find a bathroom. Five minutes. I must have barely turned the corner and-" He kept his eyes on his task, but self-reproach leached from every word. "Less than five minutes. While I'm taking a damned piss-break-"

"They were waiting for an opportunity," Jeremy said. "Any of us could have turned our back for a moment and they would have attacked the other two."

Antonio glanced over his shoulder as he worked. "The new one, the mutt that killed Logan, attacked Jeremy with a knife."

"A knife?" Clay glanced at Jeremy for affirmation, as disbelieving as if Antonio had said Jeremy was attacked with an antique Howitzer. "A knife?"

Jeremy nodded.

Antonio continued, "They jumped Peter and Jeremy. No one had time to react. When I showed up they took off. I'd have gone after them, but Jeremy was bleeding pretty badly."

"Not that I would have let you go after them anyway," Jeremy said. "We don't have time to rehash events now. We need to get things cleaned up and go."

He started getting to his feet. Clay hopped over a crate and helped him up.

"We left Peter at the scene," Jeremy said.

"I know," I said. "We found him."

"In the garbage," Antonio said, wiping a hand over his face. "That wasn't right. I'm sorry, but Jeremy was bleeding and I-"

"You needed to find a quick hiding spot," Jeremy finished. "No one's blaming you for that. We'll get him now and take him home."

Clay helped Jeremy down from the dock. I moved up on his left side to take his other arm, then remembered it was injured and settled for walking beside him, ready to catch him if his leg gave out. I gave Nick my car keys and he ran ahead to back up the Camaro to the end of the alley. When we got to the garbage heap, Antonio uncovered Peter and cleaned him off.

"Marsten's going to pay for this," Clay said, looking at Peter's body, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. "He's really going to pay,"

"Marsten didn't kill Peter. Daniel did."

"Dan-" Clay choked on the rest of the name. "Ah, shit."

I rode back to Stonehaven in Antonio's Mercedes, sitting in the backseat with Jeremy, in case the bleeding worsened. Antonio drove in silence. Jeremy stared out the window while holding the bindings tight on his leg. I tried to concentrate on something other than watching my car through the windshield and thinking about Peter's body in my trunk. Instead, I thought about the mutts.

So it was Daniel after all. That meant trouble. Big trouble. More than Marsten or Cain, Daniel knew how the Pack operated, how everyone in it operated. He'd been Pack, having grown up with Nick and Clay… or, more accurately, he grew up around them, "with them" sounding as if the three had been buddies, a definite misconception. Now, before Clay's arrival, Nick and Daniel had been semi-playmates, thrown together by their closeness in age, like two cousins who play with each other at family reunions because there's no one else to hang around with. Then came Clay. I was a bit fuzzy on the details, but I'd been told that Clay and Daniel loathed each other from the beginning. The precipitating event seemed to have occurred when Daniel eavesdropped on Nick and Clay's conversation and raced off to regale the Pack with the story of Clay's expulsion from kindergarten, which had something to do with dissecting the classroom guinea pig to see how it worked, but like I said, I was fuzzy on the details-when I asked Clay about it, all he'd say was "it was already dead," which was apparently supposed to explain everything. Whatever the story, it embarrassed Jeremy, who'd been fudging the details when explaining to the others why Clay's school career had lasted only a month. By upsetting Jeremy, Daniel had earned Clay's eternal rancor.

In the years to follow the relationship between the two only grew more acrimonious as Daniel and Clay fought for supreme position among the younger generation. Or, I should say, Daniel fought for it. Clay simply assumed it was his and squashed Daniel's aspirations with the lazy contempt of someone batting away a mosquito. When the three were in their early twenties, Jeremy became Alpha. I may have given the impression that this was a bloodless ascension. It wasn't. Seven members of the Pack backed Jeremy and four didn't, including Daniel and his brother Stephen. The dissension crescendoed when Stephen tried to assassinate Jeremy. Clay killed him. Daniel insisted his brother had been innocent and that Clay had murdered him to quell opposition to Jeremy's leadership. When Jeremy was confirmed Alpha, Daniel decided there wasn't a place for him in the new Pack.

Unfortunately for all, that wasn't the end of the story. Even if they were no longer Pack brothers, Daniel and Clay had had plenty of run-ins since that time. After I came along, things got even worse. Daniel decided he absolutely had to have me, if only because I "belonged" to his archrival. When Daniel first approached me, I even thought he was a decent guy. I believed his stories about being mistreated and maligned by Clay-at the time I was quite happy to believe anything bad about Clay. One day I was in San Diego with Antonio delivering a warning to another mutt and, knowing Daniel had been living there a few months, I slipped away from Antonio to say hello to Daniel. When I got to his apartment, I caught him trying to hide a woman in the closet. It wouldn't have been so bad if the woman was still alive. Apparently, she had been, right up until I rang the doorbell, upon which Daniel snapped her neck and tried to stuff her into a closet so I wouldn't find him with someone. After that, I'd put a lot more credence in Clay's warnings about Daniel.

The woman in the closet wasn't the first of Daniel's kills. When he'd left the Pack, he'd abandoned its teachings and become a man-killer. Like all successful-and long-lived-man-killing mutts, Daniel learned the trick to killing humans, the same trick a wolf uses when confronted with a large herd of prey: cull from the edges. If you stick with the marginalized-the drug users, the teenage runaways, the prostitutes, the homeless-you stand a good chance of getting away with it. Why? Because nobody gives a damn. Oh sure, they say they do, the police and the politicians and everyone who's supposed to uphold justice, but they really don't. People can vanish and, so long as they stay gone, nobody will care. I'm not talking about third-world dictatorships or even American metropolises infamous for their crime rates. Vancouver had over twenty prostitutes disappear from a single neighborhood before authorities began to suspect a problem. Trust me, if these women had been students at the University of British Columbia, people would have perked up a whole lot quicker. That's where Thomas LeBlanc went wrong, picking the daughters and wives of middle-class families as his prey. If he'd stuck to hookers and runaways, he'd still be doing a booming business in Chicago. In all my arguments with Jeremy over the unfairness of the Pack's hierarchical system, I'd upheld the human democratic model for comparison, where everyone was supposedly equally important. It was bullshit, of course. Even though the Pack had a strict hierarchy, it would never let even the death of its omega member go unavenged.

Back at the house, Jeremy asked me to help dress his wounds. Maybe he assumed I'd be a gentler, more tolerable nurse than the men. Right. Jeremy may not have known much about women, but he'd learned enough about this particular one never to mistake me for Betty Crocker, Martha Stewart, or Florence Nightingale. More likely he thought that, given the choice between nursing and gravedigging, I'd be much happier donning a cute little white hat and dress. My last graveside episode wasn't one I cared to repeat any sooner than necessary. At least if I was looking after Jeremy, I could block out what was going on in the back field.

Normally, Jeremy would be the one doing the nursing. He was the Pack doctor. No, that wasn't a time-honored role passed down through generations of werewolves. It was something Jeremy took on when, as a child, Clay jumped five stories down a department-store elevator shaft (don't ask) and fractured his arm in several places. Not wanting to risk Clay's future mobility on a makeshift splint, Jeremy took him to a doctor. Although he was careful, citing religious reasons for not wanting blood work and other routine lab tests done, the doctor did them anyway. The results might have gone ignored, having little to do with a broken arm, but a bored lab technician on the night shift spotted something peculiar in the workups and called Jeremy at two a.m. Werewolf blood is screwed up. Don't ask me for the exact details-I barely passed tenth-grade biology. All I know is that we aren't supposed to let anyone draw and analyze our blood. Whatever the technician saw in Clay's workup made him think Clay had some life-threatening condition and he ordered Jeremy to bring Clay to the hospital immediately. The upshot of the whole mess was that both the technician and Clay's file were missing when the day shift arrived. After that, Jeremy bought and studied a shelf full of medical books. A few years ago I made the mistake of giving him a copy of the St. John Ambulance Official Wilderness First Aid Guide. He'd liked it so much he had me buy copies for all of us so we could keep them in our glove boxes and fix our own emergency amputations. Call me a wimp, but if I ever lose a limb and there's no one around, I'm a goner, even if the guide does have wonderful instructions (complete with helpful illustrations) for tying off the injury with a stick and a plastic garbage bag.

"Leg first?" I asked Jeremy as he took his box of medical supplies from the bathroom closet.

"Arm. I'll get the bone in place. You splint it."

That didn't sound too bad. Jeremy sat on the toilet seat and I crouched beside him as we worked. It was a clean break, not an open fracture, so there wasn't any of that nasty pulling the bone back under the skin stuff required. The break was just below his elbow. After he got it realigned, I placed the padded splint under his arm. Then I got the bandage roll out. Following Jeremy's instructions, I bound it first below his elbow, then above his wrist. Then I fashioned a sling to keep his arm elevated. It took a while, but it was fairly easy… compared to what he wanted me to do next.

"You'll need to stitch up my leg," he said.

"Stitch…?"

"I can't do it with one hand." He stood and leaned against the vanity, undoing his jeans with his good hand, then struggling to get them off. "I could use some help with this, too, if it's not too much to ask."

"Sure," I said. "Undressing men, I'm good at. Sewing people up, though, is questionable. Maybe the cut isn't that bad."

I unwound the blood-soaked strips of Antonio's shirt from Jeremy's thigh. The skin and muscle parted like the Red Sea, an even more apt analogy considering the gush of blood that streamed out. I had no problem seeing Jeremy with his pants off, but this internal view was more than I wanted to see of anyone.

"Grab the facecloth," he said, sitting quickly and shoving a towel against the gash.

I wet the cloth, cleaned the wound, then applied antiseptic. I didn't work as fast as I should have, and by the time I was finishing, blood was gushing over my fingers.

"Get the tape," Jeremy said. "No, not that tape. The other-right."

Using the tape and some fancy maneuvering, we got the blood flow stopped before Jeremy passed out. He took something that looked remarkably like a needle and thread from the kit and handed it to me.

"Stop backing away, Elena. It's not going to bite. Take the needle and start. Don't think about it. Just try to make a reasonably straight line."

"Sounds easy, but you never saw my home economics projects."

"No, but I've had the privilege of experiencing your haircuts. As I said, try to make a straight line."

"I always cut your hair straight."

"If I hold my head on a certain angle, it's perfectly straight."

"Watch it. I've got a needle."

"And maybe if I get you mad enough, you'll actually jab me with it and get to work before I bleed out."

I took the hint. Despite what Jeremy said, it was not like sewing fabric nor could I pretend that it was. Cloth doesn't bleed. I concentrated on doing a good job, knowing that if I didn't, I'd be razzed about Jeremy's crooked scar for the rest of my life. It was nearly done when I felt a rush of anger that some mutt had dared do this to Jeremy, which made me think about how it had happened, which made me remember that Peter was dead. First Logan. Now Peter. Of all the Pack, they deserved it least. Jeremy never sent them to roust or kill any mutts, not even to deliver warnings. Their deaths weren't about revenge. They weren't about taking out the Pack's strongest fighters. Logan and Peter had been killed to make us sit up and take notice. Nothing more. My hands started to clench. The old serpent of rage started moving through me. I stopped, inhaled, and started again, but couldn't steady my fingers.

"So we're up against three experienced mutts," Jeremy said, breaking into my thoughts.

I swallowed back the clot in my throat and played along with the distraction. "Plus at least one new one."

"I haven't forgotten, though I'm more concerned about the experienced ones. Yes, they're good-my arm and leg prove that-but they're not on the same playing field as Daniel."

I broke off the thread. "That's because you know Daniel. And even if you don't know Marsten and Cain equally well, you know what to expect from them because they're like you. They think like you, they react like you, they kill like you. These new ones don't. Werewolves don't strangle people. That's how LeBlanc killed Logan and he succeeded because it's the last thing Logan would have expected. Then he pulled a knife on you. You'd expect that as much as a samurai would expect a kick in the balls. That's why LeBlanc is still alive. He threw you off balance. If-"

"We've dug the grave," Antonio said, coming into the bathroom. "I'm sorry. Did I interrupt something?"

"Nothing that can't be finished later," Jeremy said, getting to his feet and testing the stitches. When they didn't burst apart or gush blood, he nodded. "Perfect. I'll get dressed and we'll go out."