Dog Warrior

Dog Warrior

by Wen Spencer

To David G. Kosak,

little brother of my heart

CHAPTER ONE

Ludlow Service Area, Massachusetts Turnpike,

Massachusetts

Sunday, September 19, 2004

Atticus smelled the blood first.

He'd parked the Jaguar under the floodlights, and he had just paused, door open, his cup of hot cocoa on the roof, in order to pull off his leather jacket before climbing back into the still-warm car. A blue Honda sedan came cautiously into the rest stop from the dark highway. The bitter cold wind blasted over the Honda and brought him the reek of slaughter .

He tracked the car's movements without looking directly at it. It paused at the decision point of turning into the parking lot or going on to the gas pumps, the right turn signal flashing a yellow warning. There were four people in the car, three men and a woman. The woman was leaning over the front seat, pointing toward the retro-styled McDonald's with the large yellow arches. Atticus turned his back to the Honda as the driver scanned the parking lot.

On the other side of the Jaguar, Ru picked up on his unease. "The Honda?" Ru pretended to ignore the sedan, seemingly focused on the coffee cup in his hands, tracking the car only with his dark eyes.

"Yes." Focusing on his sense of smell, Atticus grew aware of the Jaguar's hot engine, oil spilled on the asphalt nearby, food cooking in the McDonald's, the taint of the ocean a hundred miles away, and massive amounts of old blood. "They've got something dead in the trunk."

"Ah." Ru sipped his steaming coffee. "Things like that are always a bitch to explain."

"Do you see anything weird about it, Ru?"

The car cooperated and turned into the parking lot. The driver carefully used proper signals and slowly pulled into a nice dark corner of the parking lot, tucked behind an RV.

" Nada." Ru shrugged one lean shoulder, his black bangs falling into his eyes. "Maybe I need a closer look." Ru finished his coffee and walked to a trash can across the parking lot.

Atticus leaned into his car to place his hot cocoa into the front cup holder.

The woman all but bolted from the Honda, hunched over, clutching at her stomach, her face set in pain. She concentrated on walking, eyes focused on the ground. The men followed, intent on the woman, worried. All four were in their early twenties, wearing black running suits with jackets zipped over pistols in shoulder holsters. They smelled faintly of gunpowder, smoke, scorched hair, burned flesh, and blood.

The men had ignored Atticus, half-hidden in the Jaguar, but glared at Ru as he casually stuffed his empty cup into the trash can. Ru read the bulges under the jackets and the tense body language and didn't play any mind games with them. He studiously ignored them, walking back to the Jaguar, pulling on his leather gloves.

"A seriously scary foursome." Ru unzipped his jacket slightly, giving him access to his own gun, as the four vanished into the McDonald's. "I say we see what they've got in their trunk." He made a show of sniffing. "I'm sure I can smell blood now."

Atticus scoffed at the claim, while he considered the car parked upwind. More than the blood, there was a weird niggling feeling that something was drastically wrong with the car. It seemed to exude terror. How could a car feel afraid?

Ru rapped on the roof, his lock picks in hand. "They're not going to be in there very long!" he sang.

Atticus glanced toward the McDonald's. "Let's do it."

He shut the Jaguar's door and walked after Ru, keeping watch on the building.

Ru had the trunk open before Atticus even reached the car, murmuring. "Bingo: one body." Ru stripped off his right glove and reached bare fingertips to the body's neck. "Question is, is he really dead or just—Oh, fuck."

Atticus looked then. The trunk light shone on a young Native American face, battered and bloody, vaguely familiar.

I know this person,Atticus thought with a lurch.

"Atty," Ru whispered. "This is you."

"What? Well, there's a resemblance—"

"Atty, I've seen you dead enough times to recognize your body. This is you. Look, there's blood mice."

This was directed at small forms darting for new cover as Ru shifted the body slightly.

They're just normal black mice,Atticus thought at first. He'd long resigned himself to being a freak of nature; the one-in-a-trillion result of the genetics game played with billions of combinations over millions of years. Like the Elephant Man, he'd been oddly malformed, only his monstrosity remained hidden down on the cellular level.

Then he realized that he could feelthe mice—little motes of terror moving through his awareness.

They're why the car feels afraid.He looked again at the dead body with the familiar face. His face—just at an angle he wasn't used to viewing. He's like me?Atticus laid his hand on the boy's cheek. The flesh was cold to touch, but it was his skin, his cells, his DNA. It felt like half his body was dead and being examined by a part still alive. He jerked his hand back.

"We've got to get him out," Ru was saying. "And into the Jaguar."

He's not" like" me, he is me!Numb, Atticus slowly shook his head. "We call nine-one-one."

"Atty, if we call nine-one-one, they'll take him to the morgue and do an autopsy."

Atticus shuddered at the idea of being not completely dead, but entirely helpless. "We don't know if he'll come back to life."

Ru shook his head. "If he's like you, it's going to take him hours to heal up from this kind of damage. But if he can recover, and we let the coroners take him . . ."

"Oh, fuck." That didn't bear even thinking through. "Okay. Get the Jag."

Atticus would guess the boy to be twenty at most, but Atticus had aged strangely, still looking to be in his teens when he was nearly thirty. Even now Atticus could pass for mid-twenty. Hair as crow black as his own, but long enough for a braid down past the shoulder blades. Boots with a crease mark from shifting motorcycle gears across the top of the left foot. Blue jeans incrusted with road dirt and dead blood. A black T-shirt with small bullet holes punched into the chest. Powder burns indicated the boy had been shot at close range. His arms were handcuffed behind his back, where the bullets had shredded part of the design on the leather jacket. Only the words "Dog Warrior" remained.

Who the hell is this? Why did they kill him?

The damage had been done by more than just bullets. Road dirt, abrasions, paint, and shattered bones indicated that the boy had been hit by a car first. Judging by the angle of entry for the bullets, he'd been lying prone when shot. Oddly, his killers had bound his feet and handcuffed him after he'd died. They'd done a thorough job murdering the boy, but if he was like Atticus, it wouldn't be enough to keep him dead.

Pulling on his leather gloves, Atticus took the handcuffs and jacket off the boy, leaving them as evidence on the bloody carpet. Ru pulled the Jaguar in beside the Honda and popped the trunk but left the motor running.

"Good compromise," Ru said of the jacket and handcuffs. "I need to move the bags. Here." He held out a small cage. "Don't forget the mice."

Some of the Dog Warrior's blood had dried on the carpet—totally lifeless. The rest had survived spilling out of the boy's body by changing into mice. They scurried out of Atticus's reach as he shifted the body around, a dozen in all, little bundles of fear and worry.

Come here.He called to them as he would to his own mice. Come on. Hurry.

He didn't expect it to work, but they scurried forward and let him scoop them into the cage.

Ru had shifted their bags into the Jaguar's backseat, tucking in the mouse cage last. "Let's get out of here before someone calls the police on us."

Atticus lifted the body up and out of the trunk. As he settled the boy into the Jaguar, Ru tugged his right glove back on and closed the Honda's trunk tightly.

It took two minutes to steal the body and stow it safely away. Certainly not what Atticus expected they'd be doing when they stopped for a stretch and something warm to drink. It felt weird driving away, knowing what was in their trunk. Atticus supposed that Ru was used to the feeling, all things considered.

Ru was getting "the grin," enjoying the adrenaline high of doing something outlandishly bold without breaking a sweat. "What do we do about his friends in black?"

Atticus handed Ru his cell phone. "Anonymous tip time."

"You don't suppose they are his friends? Certainly I've driven around with you dead in the trunk enough times. We could be leaping to the wrong conclusion."

"No. They murdered him. The mice are too afraid for them to be friends."

"Ah," Ru murmured. "I suppose I always take the handcuffs off you."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome." Ru flashed him a grin, and made the call to weave a mix of truth and fiction.

***

Atticus hated the house. They crossed Massachusetts on I-90 in a nearly straight shot, dropped down, bypassing Boston until they reached Cape Cod, and then followed increasingly narrower roads until they hooked around a sharp curve and the road stopped altogether. The house sat on a windswept hill, surrounded by sand dunes and nothing else; a contemporary designed for views, it had walls of glass and sprawling, multilevel decks to extend the living space.

All the houses they had seen thus far had been dark on the cold autumn weekday evening. This one, however, was bright, throwing slants of light out into a yard mostly of sand. Kyle's Ford Explorer filled the carport. Obviously they were in the right place.

"You've got to be kidding," Atticus said. "This is Lasker's place?"

"It's all about appearances." Ru zipped up his leather jacket. "Got to have flash."

"Maybe while Lasker was alive. Whose bright idea was it to use his house?"

"I think Sumpter's."

Atticus sighed and got out of the Jaguar. The ocean rumbled close by, like a monster hidden by the darkness, scenting the air with salt. Atticus stood in the freezing wind until he accustomed himself to the bombardment of vastly different stimuli. New places tended to overwhelm him.

The Dog Warrior was still dead. While Ru held the front door, Atticus lifted the body out of the trunk and carried it into the house.

The downstairs was basically one open area with only furniture to denote where one "room" ended and the next started. A forest of support columns held up the second floor in the absence of load-bearing walls. To the left a series of French doors gave access to a sprawling deck. To the right, a sleek marble fireplace anchored the house. Perhaps Lasker had used the house merely as flash—bare as a hotel room, it smelled like one too, tainted only with sea spray, ancient wood fires, and propane cooking gas.

Kyle was in the kitchen area, counting money. The L-shaped, granite-topped island was a disarray of computer equipment, weapons, surveillance cameras, and stacks of twenties. Despite it being after midnight, he smelled of fresh soap, and his hair was damp from a recent shower. Somehow, though he was being stylishly dressed in a charcoal turtleneck sweater and gray slacks, Kyle managed to look scruffy. It was more than his perpetual five-o'clock shadow and uncombed hair—there was a way he held his body, something between a slouch and a sulk, that defeated all of Ru's fashion tips.

"You hate the house," Kyle called without looking up from his counting. "It's too isolated, too open, too many windows, too many doors, and not enough cover. Lasker was an idiot. You're going to kill Sumpter next time you see him."

"Yeah, something like that." Atticus paused, considering where to put the dead body.

"I was starting to worry—the Weather Channel shows a big storm coming in." Kyle licked his fingers and continued to count, bobbing his head as he mumbled, "Six hundred, twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, seven hundred."

"We had a delay." Ru carried in the mouse cage and set it on a desk built into the kitchen cabinets.

Kyle paused to frown at the mice. "Atty got hurt?" He turned to look at Atticus and started at the dead body in Atticus's arms. "Holy shit, who the hell is that?"

"Good question." Upstairs, Atticus decided, out of sight, would probably be the best place for the boy. He started up the stairs. "Where's a bathtub?"

"Master bathroom." Kyle followed him. "Top of stairs, to the right, at the end of the hall—but you're not going to put him in there. It's a Jacuzzi!"

"You want him in the shower?" Atticus knew the answer would be no. God forbid they desecrate a shower.

"Oh, gross, no—Shit! I've got security running." Kyle dashed back down the steps.

"Wipe the memory!" Atticus called after him.

The master bedroom looked out over the gray, shifting ocean. The master bath was all black marble and sleek white fixtures. Water still beaded on the glass surround of the dual-person shower. The massive tub sat tucked into a bay window alcove with a foot-wide surround of marble.

The body left a smear of dead blood on the white acrylic when Atticus settled it into the tub. "What a mess."

As Atticus cut off the boy's bullet-tattered shirt, Ru came up with the luggage.

"Here. I brought these up." Ru held out a plastic bag for the black T-shirt. There had been white lettering on the shirt's back, but the exiting bullets had shredded the design; the only thing readable was "Benne" in a thumb-sized font under "Priva" in larger letters. "How is he?"

"Still dead."

As Ru gingerly carried away the bloody shirt, Atticus undressed the body down to underwear. He was always the subject of this exercise—the dead person needing to be nursed back to life. It was a weird, out-of-body experience to be on the caregiving side.

The murderers had stripped the boy of all belongings; at one time, he had carried a wallet, cell phone, keys, change, a Swiss army knife and a pistol—all now missing. Only microscopic traces of them tainted the cotton fabric of his clothes. The bare basics that remained showed that the similarities between Atticus and the Dog Warrior went past genetic makeup and outward appearances. They both preferred the same hiking boots, cotton boxers, blue jeans, soap, deodorant, and shampoo.

From such an identical foundation, how different could they be?

The biker jacket suggested the differences could be huge.

Kyle reappeared at the door with the first-aid kit. "Ru said to bring this up. What are we going to do if he doesn't come back?"

What a fucking mess that would be.But you didn't say that to Kyle. While Ru got off on danger, Kyle liked to feel safe. Kyle had driven straight to the Cape instead of joining Atticus and Ru in Buffalo, just to avoid the mess they were dealing with there. "I'll deal with it."

"We've got the buy going down tomorrow night." Kyle glanced at his watch. "Tonight actually."

"Kyle, I know." Atticus opened up the kit and found the antibiotic cream. While the bullets probably lodged foreign material into the wounds, his body usually expelled such matter while healing. Hopefully—on all counts—the boy was the same. "I'll figure something out if he stays dead, okay. Do we have all the money?"

"Yeah, I was just counting it for a second time." Kyle fidgeted while he watched Atticus apply cream and bandages. "I'm completely jacked in. Phone and cable are up, and I've got security running. We're set for anything—well, almost anything." Not counting miscellaneous dead bodies that might or might not come back from the dead. "I also stocked the fridge, and put fresh linen on the beds."

"Great! Okay, do me a favor." Atticus told him where and how they'd found the dead body. "Find out, if you can without drawing attention to us, who killed him and what happened after we left."

"Do you have an ID on him?" Kyle pointed to the boy in the tub.

"No. He was wearing colors." Atticus described the biker jacket. "The club name was either Dog Warrior or Warriors."

"Bottom rocker?"

The city named at the bottom of the patch identified the chapter that the member belonged to. Club enforcers, who drifted from chapter to chapter, collecting dues, would have "Nomad" printed in place of a chapter name.

"There was none." Now that Kyle mentioned it, Atticus realized how odd it was. Perhaps the jacket hadn't been a true "gang" jacket.

"See what you can pull up on the name."

"Right." Kyle left in his abrupt manner, locked onto something new.

Having covered the gaping bullet holes, Atticus strapped the broken ribs and splinted the shattered arm; apparently when the car had hit the boy, he had taken the brunt of the damage with his left side. Finally done repairing what damage he could, Atticus washed his hands, and caught sight of himself in the mirror. He studied his reflection for a minute and then looked down at the boy, trying to judge whether they were as identical as their genetics as Ru claimed them to be. While he had stopped being carded long ago, he didn't look the thirty-six years that his driver's license reported. If he seemed solidly in his mid-twenties, what age was this boy who looked only in his late teens? The differences between them were slight. Atticus kept his hair in a short, stylish cut instead of the boy's long braid. The boy seemed to have another inch or two to grow before reaching Atticus's height; his youth showed in his chin, the column of his neck, and the depth of his chest. Atticus could remember, though, having this build, this face.

Ru came back with a cocoa blast. "We should get him up if we can, in case Sumpter shows."

One of the bullets had sliced through a major artery, thus the reason for the body shutting down—to keep the heart from pumping out the entire blood supply. Atticus could sense, though, that the wound was healed over. That was promising in and of itself. "Give it a shot."

Ru held the beer stein of warm mash under the Dog Warrior's nose. He gave the stein to Atticus to hold, repositioned the boy's head so the throat was one straight column, and spooned some into the lax mouth. "Come on, come on." After a minute, he shook his head. "No, it's not working." He thumped back onto the tile floor. "This is going to soooosuck if he stays dead."

"He's healing," Atticus said slowly. If Atticus could control the mice, and sense the body healing, maybe he could influence it even more. "Let's get him out of the tub."

"Hold on." With practiced ease, Ru cut off the soiled underwear, wrapped it in plastic, tossed it away, and cleaned the boy. It was embarrassing to know Ru had learned the skill on Atticus. Washing his hands, Ru spread a blanket out on the floor. "Okay."

They lifted the body out of the tub and onto the blanket, tucking the flannel around the cool skin.

Atticus leaned over the Dog Warrior, extending his awareness until the boy's still body seemed like part of his own. He could feel the dormant cells patiently waiting for the return of life. Come on. It's time to be alive. Breathe!The boy's body arched upward as Atticus forced it hard into the first breath. Good boy!He let it go slack and nudged the heart into a beat. Breathe!Again the body bent as the breath rattled into its lungs. Come on. You can do it. Breathe!

Like a motorcycle being kick-started, the Dog Warrior lurched through the forced breath, gave a sudden half cough, and then gagged as his newly awake stomach decided to eject its contents.

Atticus levered the boy up and over the toilet before he choked, and the boy's stomach emptied. He was ice-cold, and the vomit splashing over Atticus's arm held the same dead chill. The kid was shivering hard, his teeth chattering.

But he was alive. There was a heart thumping hard under Atticus's palm, pressed to the kid's chest. The kid took deep, deep breaths, like someone who had stayed underwater to the point of drowning and had now come up for air.

"Well, that worked," Ru said. "Whatever you did."

With a wolflike snarl, the Dog Warrior spun to face Ru. Atticus felt the stranger's anger, fear; and despair as the boy started to growl. It was a feral sound, deep in the boy's chest, inhuman in its resonance and savagery.

"We're not going to hurt you," Atticus said. "We're not the ones that killed you."

Atticus had been expecting human reactions. As he started to speak, the boy jerked around to face him even while scuttling away from both of them with stunning speed. A moment later, the Dog Warrior was backed against the bay windows, the pit of the tub between them. His dark eyes locked on Atticus in a steady, unblinking stare that seemed to see into him, to his core, and through, to encompass all that he was and wasn't.

Belatedly, Atticus realized that—because they were physically identical—the boy hadn't realized Atticus was there until he had spoken.

"It's okay." Atticus tried for a calming tone. "You're safe."

Ru started to move, and the boy's stare flicked to him, his lips going back into a silent snarl. Of course, Ru took it in stride, holding out the stein of warm chocolate mash. "Cocoa blast?"

The Dog Warrior sniffed, nostrils flaring to catch the liquid's scent, as he considered the two of them. "Boy" was the wrong word for him. Dead, he seemed a young and helpless human. Alive—even deathly pale, covered with bandages, arm splinted, and shivering hard as his body fought to climb back to normal core temperature—there was no denying that he was something wild and powerful. Slowly, the Dog Warrior uncoiled from the corner, crept forward, and took the large stein in his one good hand.

He drank greedily, getting a dark brown milk mustache, which he licked off. All the while, he watched them with the all-seeing stare.

"What's your name?" Atticus asked.

"U-U-Ukiah." It was forced out between chattering teeth.

Atticus exchanged a look with Ru; he'd been found as a toddler in Idaho, just over the Blue Mountains from Ukiah, Oregon. "Like the town? Ukiah, Oregon?"

"Y-y-yes."

Atticus waited for him to add a last name, but none was forthcoming.

"W-w-who are you?"

"Atticus. Atticus Steele."

"I'm Hikaru Takahashi, but my friends call me Ru."

Ukiah thrust out the empty stein, the hand trembling, but the eyes locked and steady. "M-m-more. P-p-please."

At least he had manners.

Ru took the stein and murmured, "It's going to be easier to feed him downstairs."

Yes, but the kitchen was full of money and guns. "Go let Kyle know I'm bringing him down."

***

Kyle hastily packed away the money as Atticus half carried the blanket-wrapped Dog Warrior downstairs; he gave Atticus annoyed looks as he stuffed stacks of twenties into a brushed-steel briefcase. The guns were out of sight, and Kyle's computers showed only log-in screens.

As Ru mixed another cocoa blast using raw eggs, pureed liver, wheat germ, and chocolate sauce, Atticus helped Kyle hide away the money.

"Speaking as someone who has an asshole for a brother," Kyle hissed, "we shouldn't trust him."

Atticus looked to the stranger with his face and feral eyes. Brother?

Amazing how one word could explode so much emotion through him. Atticus couldn't even identify all the fragments. Excitement? Maybe something that might have even been joy, but heavily mixed with anger and fear. Family was something Atticus had dreamed about as a child, along with a Santa Claus who would finally figure out which foster home he lived in and deliver several years' worth of misplaced presents.

The Dog Warrior at least had his keen hearing. "B-brother works."

Yeah, right.Still, Atticus couldn't deny that they were genetically identical. Younger twin brother?"Who are you? Really?"

Ukiah eyed Kyle, apparently unsure if Kyle was in on family secrets.

"These are my best friends," Atticus said. "I don't hide things from them."

Ukiah picked up a bag of fresh pizza dough Ru had set out of the refrigerator in his search for the cocoa blast makings. "O-our mother was from the Cayuse tribe. Her name was Kicking Deer."

The Cayuse were a Native American tribe in northeast Oregon, over the mountains from where Atticus had been found. According to his case files, the Idaho state police checked with the reservation outside of Pendleton and no one had reported a missing infant. He and Ru had double-checked the summer of their junior year in college. Atticus controlled a flash of anger—he couldn't assume that the boy was telling the truth.

Ukiah fumbled open the bag, and shivered while making the dough into a soft, squishy doll. "Kicking Deer was kidnapped and made pregnant by our father, Prime."

"Prime?" Atticus echoed.

"That's the English version of his name. He wasn't human." Ukiah laid the doll onto the granite counter, and hugged the blanket around his shoulders. "Kicking Deer had a baby. His name was Magic Boy."

"Just one baby?" Ru took sausage links out of the microwave and set them in front of the Dog Warrior.

"I don't get it," Kyle said.

"One of us was this Magic Boy?" Atticus hoped there was a point to this story.

They had to wait while the narrator gobbled down the sausages and licked his fingers clean.

"I-if Magic Boy was hurt," Ukiah continued finally, pinching off a small ball of dough, "what he lost became a mouse." He rolled the ball around on the counter. "Which Magic Boy could recover later by merging it back into him."

"We know about blood mice," Atticus said.

"Ah. Good." Ukiah merged the tiny piece back into the doll with trembling fingers. "Got to keep track of them. They're very important."

Atticus fought the urge to ask why. Why can't I remember being a baby when I have a perfect memory? Why do I bleed mice? Why do we come back from being dead?There were so many questions. Would he like the answers? "So I'm this Magic Boy?"

"Well, one day Magic Boy was murdered." Ukiah pulled a cleaver from the knife block beside him. "He was killed with an axe."

Atticus watched with horror as the Dog Warrior hacked the helpless doll apart, reducing it to bits.

"It was quite horrible," Ukiah said sadly, letting the cleaver drop. "All the parts ran in terror. Some went this way." A leg rolled into a ball that went right. "Some went that way." The head rolled to the left. "The pieces scattered away, never to be Magic Boy again."

Ukiah rolled the dismembered torso across the counter to Atticus and then looked at him with the feral stare. "This was you." He leaned back and pointed at the severed leg in front of him. "This was me." His story done, Ukiah ate the scattered pieces of dough.

"That," Kyle whispered, "is profoundly creepy."

Ru moved the cleaver and the knife block out of the Dog Warrior's range.

Atticus stood and walked away. If it weren't for Ru and Kyle, he would have walked far, far away. He settled for prowling the downstairs. This was too much, too soon. This was like the first time he watched his blood turn into mice. This was like the first time he knew for sure that he had died and come back just by the terror on Ru's face when he woke up. This was like the time he blew off the fingers of his right hand and watched them grow back over a week's time. This was one of those huge mind-altering experiences.

He tried to get a handle on it. He and the boy had been one person. The boy was once his leg or his arm. Someone chopped off his leg and it became the boy. He had a brother. One that bled mice, came back from the dead, and aged oddly too. He wasn't alone.

In the kitchen, the conversation continued without him.

"I need to use a phone," Ukiah was saying.

"The phone hasn't been connected yet," Ru lied. "It should be hooked up tomorrow."

"What about cell phones?" Ukiah asked.

"Sorry, I forgot to charge mine," Ru said. "And Atticus doesn't own one."

Atticus glanced back, feeling slightly guilty; as usual, though, Ru was taking all weirdness in stride, calmly putting out food for the boy while fending off requests that could prove awkward.

Undeterred, the boy looked questioningly to Kyle.

"I-I-I forgot mine at home." Kyle made a bad show of patting his pockets.

There was a reason they kept Kyle out of sight.

Sighing, Ukiah wearily laid his head on the counter. Obviously the food was hitting bottom, and his body was focusing on putting it to good use. He'd be dead asleep in minutes, waking up only when his body burned through all the food he just ate. "I need to call . . ." He yawned deeply. "Let everyone know I'm okay."

"I'll plug my phone in after we get you in bed," Ru promised, clearing away dirty dishes. "You can use it when you wake up."

"Hmm." Ukiah didn't move.

"Where should we put him?" Ru asked Kyle. "How many bedrooms are upstairs?"

"There's one downstairs." Kyle made a face over Ukiah's head and pointed urgently downward.

" Downis easier than up," Ru studied the boy for a moment before saying, "He's asleep already. Atty, can you carry him?"

Atticus realized that he had actually felt the boy falling asleep; the fading of a presencemaking him aware of its existence.

"Atty?" Ru said, meaning, Are you okay?

"Sure." Atticus said, meaning, I'm fine.

***

While not apparent from the driveway, the house was built into a slope, so it had a walkout basement. In one corner was a guest bedroom with glass-block windows. Obviously Kyle thought it made a handy prison; after they tucked Ukiah into bed and shut the door, Kyle produced a latch and padlock, which he installed with a cordless screwdriver.

"Okay." Atticus eyed the padlock. "You've found something out?"

"Come upstairs."

Upstairs, Kyle logged back in to his computers. "The Dog Warriors are one of five biker gangs that make up the Pack. They're not like any outlaw motorcycle club I've ever heard of—not that I'm an expert."

"Outlaw" denoted the one percent of biker gangs, like the Hell's Angels, who embraced being outside the law. Kyle knew enough to distinguish between the "one-percenters" and normal, law-abiding motorcycle clubs; it was a bad sign that he labeled the Dog Warriors as such.

"How so?"

"Well, they don't pretend to be a club. They don't have a clubhouse, membership dues, charter rules, officers, or any of that stuff. They don't even seem to have a base city or state—they're complete nomads."

Kyle connected with the Internet and pulled Web pages out of his history log. "This is their leader, Rennie Shaw." Under a banner of blazing red that read, "Wanted by the FBI," and a long listing of crimes starting with, "Murder (eighteen counts)," was a slightly blurred photograph of a man with grizzled hair and vivid blue eyes. "His lieutenant, Bear Shadow." Another "Wanted" page, another blurred photo, this of a Native American with feathers braided into his hair and a necklace of bear claws at his throat. "Shaw's girlfriend, Hellena Gobeyn." A compact, dark-haired woman sat astride a fallen log, cleaning a pistol.

Kyle pulled up one page after another. "There are approximately twenty members of the Dog Warriors. All of them are wanted by the FBI."

This was the fear that been eating at Atticus since taking the jacket off of Ukiah. Still, it felt like he'd swallowed cold gravel. "Ukiah too?"

"No." Kyle hated to abandon his fearful suspicions. "He's not listed with the Dog Warriors. The Demon Curs, another Pack gang, has been active in Oregon for the last few weeks, in and around Pendleton and Ukiah; it's spammed all my searches for your brother. Without a last name, I haven't been able to isolate anything about him."

"Wearing a jacket doesn't automatically make him one of them," Ru reasoned. "If he's not listed with the others, then maybe he got it from a thrift store, or found it and didn't know what it was."

They looked at him.

"I'm farting out my mouth here, aren't I?" Ru said.

"Yes," Atticus and Kyle said.

"We're sitting on a quarter million dollars, enough guns to take out a police department, and a possibleFBI most wanted locked in the basement." Kyle hedged for Ru's sake. "Brother or not, this isn't good."

"Do some more digging," Atticus said. "We need to know who we're dealing with. What about his killers?"

"They're just as scary in a totally different way." Kyle closed up the FBI pages. "I tapped into the state police system. There was a shootout after you left. One of the men was killed, the other three hospitalized. They've identified themselves as Byte, Ascii, Coaxial, and Binary of the Temple of New Reason."

"Ascii and Coaxial? You've got to be kidding."

"No, it's some New Age cult that seems to be on everyone's hit list of 'loonies to arrest on sight.' The members use computer terms for names. The state police notified everyone from ATF down to NSA." Kyle pulled up some files copied from the state police, and scrolled down through them quickly, knowing that Atticus could memorize an entire screen in a glance. "The cult had a public Web site like Heaven's Gate, but took it down. I found an old cache of it. They have lots of weird ideas about the end of the world."

ATF had been notified because the cult was suspected of massing large numbers of automatic and semiautomatic weapons and buying explosives. The NSA were seeking the cult for wiretapping and hacking government computers. The FBI wanted them for kidnapping and murdering several infants in the Pittsburgh area.

"Wait, go back," Atticus said as a phrase leaped out at him. He leaned over Kyle's shoulder to page backward through the reports. He could call it up in his memory, but then Ru and Kyle wouldn't be keyed in to his thoughts. "Here. New York State Police want them in connection with cremated bodies found near Buffalo. Forensics shows that the bodies had been hacked apart with a bladed instrument, probably an axe, and burned, which matches the MO of murder victims found around the Boston area."

"Buffalo and Boston," Ru murmured.

"Do you think that's what they planned to do with your brother?" Kyle asked. "I mean, if they hit him with a car, shot him dead, and then tied him up, maybe they knew that the only way to keep him dead was to burn his body."

Anger flashed through Atticus, surprising him. Certainly no one deserved such brutal treatment, but this was more than general indignation. Why was he enraged? He forced himself to be honest, backtracking to the source of his fury. He found a series of images and impressions that had preceded the anger—like lightning before the thunder.

The boy lying dormant and helpless in the truck, surrounded by the fearful mice.

Ukiah licking the milk mustache from his lips.

His brother in his arms, reduced to helpless and harmless by sleep, so like Atticus that he couldn't tell where his brother ended and he began.

In his mind he knew there was no reason to trust Ukiah. The boy—no, not boy! Atticus forced himself to remember the snarling young man crouched in the bathroom. He couldn't let himself ignore all facts and suspicions; this was a feral, dangerous stranger. For Ru's and Kyle's sakes, he couldn't harbor any feelings toward this person, not now, and perhaps not ever.

Probably picking up on his inner turmoil, Ru checked his wristwatch. "Well, the buy is going down in about twelve hours. What do you think? Call it a night?"

If Atticus didn't go to bed, neither would they. Kyle rarely slept, driven either by insomnia or hyperactivity—Atticus was never sure which. Ru would stay awake, worrying about him—he could be such a mother hen. All things considered, they needed to be sharp in a few hours.

"Let's lock down," Atticus said, "and get some sleep."

***

A storm was blowing in off the ocean. Atticus stood leaning against the glass wall of the master bedroom, watching the darkness rush over the water as clouds obscured the moon. Light eaten by darkness.

I have a brother. He's a Dog Warrior. A bunch of religious loons tried to destroy him utterly.

The door to the master bathroom reflected in the window, a rectangle of light, the quiet sounds of Ru getting ready for bed. The light snapped off, the clouds covered the moon, and he was in darkness.

"It's like seeing into the past." Ru came to stare out the window with him. "I look at him, and I see you back when we first met."

"Is that how I looked to you? Like some wild creature?"

Ru laughed softly. "Okay, so he's like a wolf-man version of you. That stare he has—it's like he looks right down into your soul." Ru breathed out and his breath smoked the glass. "I wonder what happened to him that he's like that."

The wind gusted and roared against the house.

"This has really weirded you out, hasn't it?" Ru asked.

"When I touch him, I can't tell where he ends and I begin. I can feel his emotions. When I walk around the house, it's like I have a compass needle in me, and he's north. I can't smell him over my own scent. When I touch things he's used, I only feel myself on the item. He's so close that's he's invisible."

"Like he's you and you're him."

"Like we're one person, yes." Atticus sighed. "What are we going to do with him? We can't keep him locked in the basement."

"He's not going anywhere soon. We give him a phone to keep him happy, stuff him with food, and let him sleep. It's only for a few days, and then when we're done here, we can deal with him properly."

"If we let him call the Dog Warriors, they might come here."

"He doesn't know where he is. We picked him up a hundred miles from here, and he was in a car with Pennsylvania plates—who knows where those butchers actually killed him?"

"He'll ask."

"You are just so fucking truthful sometimes it hurts." Ru laughed softly. "We lie to him."

"What if he knows this area? He'll recognize it."

"We improvise. It's what we're good at."

"I don't want you hurt," Atticus said.

Ru reached out and brushed his hand down Atticus's side and paused, letting it rest on Atticus's hip. And they stood a moment in quiet prelude—the wordless question waiting for a silent answer. One would think, after all this time, he'd be less hesitant, more comfortable with their relationship, with himself. There was still that point, though, where love and desire didn't completely mesh. So delicate was the act of engaging both, that a single word could derail him. So they learned this silent dance, temporarily reversing their normal roles—Ru taking lead and he nearly passive—until they could bump over some deep-seated block.

Atticus nodded, and Ru stepped close, hands warm on his back, mouth softly coaxing him into the full unity of love and want.

CHAPTER TWO

Hyannis, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Monday, September 20, 2004

Kyle's anxious whisper woke Atticus. He stood at the foot of the bed, jiggling the mattress. "Atticus. Atticus."

"What?" Atticus untangled himself from Ru, who was awake but not stirring. Wise man.

"The power is out." Kyle wore pink bunny slippers and black silk pajamas that he plucked at nervously.

Atticus fumbled for his wristwatch. He'd been asleep only four hours. Outside, the howl of the wind drowned out the roar of the surf. "Fuck."

"I can't run the security systems without power. My laptop has only six hours of power, max. The outside line is dead too."

"Fuck," Atticus repeated, scrubbing at his face. "Remind me to kill Sumpter next time I see him."

"What do I do?"

The heat must be off too—the air was chilly. The temperature had dropped outside, sucking the heat of the house through the great expanse of glass.

"Take the Explorer and find a rental place," Atticus told Kyle. "Pick up a generator. Get fuel for it. There's a fireplace downstairs, right? See if you can pick up some firewood."

That was all that was needed. Kyle nodded, calmed by having a direction pointed out to him. "Okay. It will take me about an hour or two."

Atticus crawled out of bed.

"What are you doing?" Ru grunted, not even opening his eyes.

"Scouting around the house, getting used to the lay of the land."

"I'll come with you." Ru stirred feebly.

"Get more sleep. One of us should be sharp enough to deal. Besides, I want you to stay with my little brother." It felt weird saying that. Little brother.

"Hmmm? Hmm! Oh, yeah. The Dog Warrior. Okay."

***

Atticus took a cold shower, leaving the hot water for Ru. Dressing, he pondered his taste in clothes. He would have thought such outward choices were dictated by upbringing, not something genetic. Somehow it seemed impossible that Ukiah could be so feral and yet wear the exact same boots. Atticus laid out warm clothes for his brother, and then tried to banish him out of his mind; he had bigger things to think about.

Putting on a windbreaker to cut the cold wind, Atticus went outside to explore the area.

Lasker's place sat on a low bluff, flanked by other luxury beach houses, which Atticus cautiously circled. He found them empty: weekend retreats closed up for the week. While fringed by a stand of stunted hemlocks, the hilltop had only sand and dune grass, giving it an impression of barren isolation even though he could pick out sounds of distant traffic, screened by the trees.

The houses shared a narrow beach facing south, looking out over Nantucket Sound. The storm surf pounded the shore; the water rolled deep green until it broke to white, reeking of salt and a billion fishy organisms, alive and dead. Atticus knew Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket lay out across the water, but the fog hazed the sky to a smothering level.

Atticus had never put his hand in a bag full of scorpions. He assumed that he had too much common sense and intelligence to ever attempt doing so. There was also the little matter of someone finding a good enough reason for him to try. Yet here he was, about to do the equivalent—and worse, it wasn't going to be his hand alone dipping into the bag.

We should just leave. How could this ever have sounded like a good idea?

To be truthful, it never had. It had always sounded like a bag of scorpions.

They were chasing after a phantom, a new designer drug with street names like Pixie Dust, Mojo, Liquidlust, Blissfire, and Desire. They'd first heard about Pixie Dust in raves around Baltimore, elusive as an urban legend. The supply was so erratic and the demand was so high—and still growing quickly—that they'd never even seen a sample of the drug. No one knew where Pixie Dust was coming from. As Atticus and Ru set up deals for old favorites inside the Beltway, others tracked the new drug to Upstate New York. Outside of Buffalo, things had gone horribly wrong.

Atticus had worked with Boyes, Scroggins, and German. Despite what Sumpter might think, the men had given new meaning to the word "paranoid;" it was unlikely that they would have been careless. Whoever ambushed them had done a ruthlessly thorough job, killing everyone at the warehouse, buyer and seller alike, and smashing all the security equipment.

He and Ru had driven up to Buffalo to identify the bodies. Early Sunday morning, he'd slipped under the police tape and searched the warehouse with his inhumanly sharp senses, but there had been little to find. Scroggins and German had emptied their guns—both carried a SIG Sauer P229 in forty-caliber Smith & Wesson—but not into the dead drug dealers, who had been killed with shotguns. The lack of bullet holes in the back wall indicated that they'd hit someone—only all the blood splatters matched up with accounted-for dead bodies. Also there'd been a mysterious swath of clean floor, as if something had been dragged across it. During the long drive from Buffalo to Cape Cod, he'd reviewed his perfect memory, recalling every inch of the floor and walls in minute detail, and found nothing he'd overlooked.

Both sides had reasons to keep the meeting secret, so who would have ambushed the buy and walked away unscathed? Atticus would have suspected the man who had acted as the go-between—Jay Lasker—but he had dropped dead suddenly after setting up a second meeting. With Lasker had gone all the details about the Pixie Dust and the people selling it.

So here Atticus and his team were: at a dead man's house, meeting with people who had no names, seeking a drug they'd never seen. Unfamiliar with the area, they didn't know the secret ways, the ancient history, and things long ago buried but not forgotten. And now his brother was thrown into the mix.

One thing was clear: If things went badly, there wouldn't be any place to run to, no one to turn to, no place to hide.

***

When he got back to the house, Ru was up. Still damp from his shower, he padded around the kitchen, trying to figure out what to cook for breakfast with the power out.

"I'm going to wake up Ukiah," Atticus told him. "That way we can feed him and put him back to bed, out of the way for most of the day."

"Sounds like a plan."

***

Atticus unlocked the door to the basement bedroom and opened it, half expecting to find either an empty room or a snarling, angry stranger. Ukiah, though, still lay in the bed as they had left him, apparently so deeply asleep he'd not moved all night. In sleep, his brother was just a young man, badly battered but healing.

He should wake the boy, and yet he stood at the door, watching Ukiah. All the possibilities of the world existed in his sleeping brother. A family. A friend. A belonging complete beyond any he had ever hoped for. A bitter enemy. A cold mirror reflecting back how inhuman he truly was. Once he was awake, time would flow, a single path taken, a course he probably couldn't control. A part of him hardened over the years by the real world foresaw that the crudest road most likely would be taken.

Atticus stood watching his brother, hoarding this moment before things went wrong. If he stored it away, no matter what, he would have this one moment of peace.

"We're almost out of eggs," Ru called from the kitchen. "So we're going to have pancakes."

Time started again.

"Okay," Atticus called back. "I'll have him up in a minute."

Ukiah was sluggish to get roused and up the stairs. Atticus could feel his brother's bone-deep weariness as his body slaved to knit bones, repair organs, and deal with the massive blood loss that the mice represented.

At the top of the steps, though, Ukiah suddenly veered off toward the back door. The blanket around Ukiah's shoulders slipped to the floor as he opened the door and stepped out onto the deck. Hunching against the stiff cold wind sweeping off the ocean, the boy started for the railing, faltered, and came to a halt. Atticus felt disorientation flooding into his brother, sweeping away both dismay and sense of self.

He's never seen the ocean before!

Picking up the blanket, Atticus went out to rescue him. The feral look was gone, replaced by more human confusion and distress. Naked, the boy was shivering but too overwhelmed to move.

"Come on." Atticus wrapped the blanket around his brother's shoulders and pulled him back inside the house, shutting the door on the roar and the salt-laden spray.

"I could hear it roaring all night." Ukiah whimpered like a lost puppy, his gaze still trapped by the endless gray of ocean. "I could feel it pounding against the land, but I couldn't figure out what it was."

"It's the Atlantic Ocean."

Ukiah tore his gaze away, dismay creeping back in. "Where am I?"

If he'd never seen the sea before, he didn't know the New England coastline.

"Gloucester, Massachusetts," Atticus said. They had decided on the town in case—like Atticus—Ukiah had maps stored in his perfect memory. Gloucester faced water to its south, and had islands across its bay. Not a perfect match for Nantucket Sound, but Gloucester gave them a hundred-mile margin for error. They kept within the state to account for the proliferation of Massachusetts license plates if they had to move him any distance.

"How did I end up here?"

"Ru and I drove in from Buffalo last night. We stopped at the Ludlow service area on the Mass Turnpike and found you locked in the trunk of a car." Atticus described the car, only to get a blank look and a slow shake of the head. "We were hoping you could tell us about it."

"Last thing I remember," Ukiah said slowly, "I was with Rennie in a parking garage."

Through years of experience, Atticus was able to treat the comment as just a data point and file it away to be reacted to later.

Ukiah eyed the cage of black mice on the kitchen's desk. "Are those my mice or yours?"

"Yours." It came out naturally, yet Atticus still found the concept of someone else that bled mice stunning. "All twelve. We've fed them."

On Ukiah's face, desire to remember everything forgotten warred with knowledge of his limits. He was too weak to take back the mice and he knew it.

"Eat and then sleep some more." Ru added water to the pancake mix and then started to stir. "You can deal with them later."

Ukiah grunted acknowledgment of this truth, eyeing the batter hungrily.

"Here." Atticus patted the stack of clothes he'd laid out for his brother. "Let's get you dressed first."

After two awkward minutes of Atticus trying to help Ukiah into the boxers, Ru took pity. "Why don't you cook, and I'll get him dressed?"

So they switched, Atticus lighting the gas burner on the range, while Ru helped Ukiah put on the boxers.

Atticus had always been too hurt to appreciate Ru's bedside manner—he hadn't noticed how Ru could get another man in and out of underwear with such clinical impassiveness. Sweatpants and a pair of tube socks followed boxers.

"Sweater?" Ru asked after watching how carefully Ukiah moved his newly mended arm.

"No, please!" Ukiah winced at the thought.

"Then that will have to do for a while." Ru resettled the blanket around Ukiah's shoulders.

Ukiah fingered the sweater where it lay on the counter, then checked its Lands' End label. "I have this sweater too. Same green color." He inspected his borrowed sweatpants, and then—tugging the front of his sweatpants open—he eyed his boxers.

"Can I take a look-see?" Ru asked.

"What?" Ukiah snapped shut his sweatpants.

Ru looked puzzled and then suddenly grinned. "Your ribs! Can I see them?"

"Oh!" Ukiah opened up his blanket wrap. "There shouldn't be much to look at."

Ru ran light fingers over Ukiah's chest. "It just blows me away how you two heal. Just apply food and sleep. It ends up being like making bread. Cover the mess up with a blanket and keep it warm, and poof, it transforms itself while you aren't looking."

Ukiah struggled not to laugh. "My ribs still hurt like hell."

"Yes, but they look fine. Here, let me see your arm. Yes, that's healing nicely."

"I've got some use of it back." Ukiah demonstrated. "But the slightest pressure will break it again."

Ru produced a sling and tucked Ukiah's arm into it. "Try not to use it, then."

"Check." Ukiah fiddled to make the sling comfortable.

So the feral Dog Warrior did have a civilized side, once he healed up.

Atticus lifted the first of the pancakes off the griddle and drowned them in syrup for Ukiah. The next batch Atticus split with Ru, but the rest, a monster's share, went to his brother.

After wolfing it all down and licking his plate clean, Ukiah looked longingly at the empty bowl. "Is there anything else?"

"Oh, what pleading puppy eyes." Ru stood and tousled Ukiah's hair, ending the move with a pat on the head. "I had a dog that would beg at the table with that same woebegone look."

Ukiah grinned in response to the affectionate teasing. "Bowwow."

"I could never say no." Ru studied the contents of the dark refrigerator. "How about a steak?"

"Oh, yes! Please," Ukiah said. Whoever raised Atticus's brother had at least taught him manners, despite all the feral appearances. "The power's out?"

"Yes," Atticus said, and then, sensing the coming question, added, "The phone is still dead."

"I did manage to charge up my phone before the electricity went out." Ru slid his phone across the counter. "You can make a call while I get this started. Try to keep it short—it's the only working phone we have."

Ukiah took it and wobbled off across the open downstairs to the farthest corner for privacy.

Ru wore a slight puzzled look on his face as he did a quick wash on a skillet.

"What?" Atticus asked.

"Just thinking on differences."

"Like what?"

"It was weeks before you'd let me touch you that casually." Ru dried the skillet. "You hated it anytime I'd breach your personal space. You still don't like strangers touching you." With a glance toward the roiling surf, Ru added, "And I've never seen you space out like he just did with the ocean."

"I was over the worst of it by the time we met," Atticus said. "I would lose it like that every time they'd move me to a new foster home. It always made a wonderful first impression on foster parents."

The quiet conversation across the room had a familiar cadence—a peppering of questions with lots of silences that indicated listening. Atticus had made many such calls— What happened while I was dead?

Ukiah came back, silent and sullen. The feral look was back in his eyes. What triggered the sudden change? He put the phone down beside him on the counter, not offering to return it.

"How do you like your steak? Bloody?" Ru guessed, probably because it was how Atticus liked his steak.

"Yes."

"Then this is done." Ru gave Ukiah a sincere smile, one of the ones that went soul deep, the kind he usually gave only to people he loved.

The feral look gave way before Ru's smile. "Thank you."

Still, he ate with wolflike ferocity.

It was good Ukiah would be sleeping soon, Atticus decided. He found that the boy absorbed all his attention. Surely some of it was that Ukiah was new and unknown—Atticus's own personal ocean to be lost in. He could ill afford the distraction.

Ukiah lifted his head and went still.

"What is it?" Ru asked.

"Harleys. Ten of them."

Atticus listened and heard them now, a rumble of multiple motorcycle engines growing closer. He couldn't tell the make or the exact number, although he could pick out six or seven distinct engines.

The Dog Warriors! Did he call them!

Ukiah glanced at him. "No, they're not Pack."

Atticus frowned. "How do you know?"

"Pack knows Pack."

"What does that mean?"

"Shut your eyes," Ukiah commanded.

Atticus hesitated. He knew how fast he could move—even wounded, Ukiah could probably strike as quickly. He checked to see if Ru was in position and ready before closing his eyes.

"Keep your eyes shut." Ukiah's voice came out of the darkness. "Focus on me."

He could feel Ukiah's presence beside him like an electric ghost. His brother moved, a rustle of blanket, and Atticus sensed that Ukiah had stretched out a hand to nearly touch him, fingers splayed close but not pressing against the fabric of his shirt. Atticus reached without opening his eyes and found Ukiah's hand with his own. Traces of steak. Road dirt. His own saliva. His own flesh. His own blood.

This is right. This is good.

"Looks like we have company," Ru remarked dryly, breaking the spell.

Atticus dropped his brother's hand and stood. The motorcycles had rounded the sharp bend in the road and come into view.

Ukiah grunted. "Iron Horses."

"You know them?" Atticus asked.

"I know of them," Ukiah said. "They're Pack wanna-bes; the biggest one is John Daggit. He's the New England chapter president. Rebar is his sergeant at arms." Which meant Rebar would be the club enforcer. "Smithy and Draconis are both local members, but Animal is a nomad. I don't know the rest. They could be prospects or maybe another club."

The motorcycles roared up to the driveway of the house, sat a moment, scanning the land, gunning their engines, and then silenced ominously.

Who were they? Friends of Lasker? The killers from Buffalo? Or, despite what Ukiah claimed, part of the Pack?

The house felt like a trap, but at least it offered some protection. The treeless sand dunes were entirely too exposed. Atticus went to the door, opened it, and stood waiting for the bikers to come to him.

Atticus had originally thought that "biggest one" meant "the most desirous wannabe" but apparently Ukiah had just meant "huge all over," and the monster of a man on the lead bike was John Daggit.

"You Steele?" Daggit dismounted to swagger toward the house. He topped Atticus by another head with huge, beefy hands. His stock of gray-salted brown hair was shaggy, framing a face that might have been handsome except for the dark inset of his eyes, which made him look not totally sane.

"What do you want?" Atticus kept the door blocked even though Daggit loomed over him. Obviously the big man was used to his size intimidating people.

"Look, asshole . . ." Daggit put out a hand to brush him aside. Atticus caught the hand and used it to bring the big man down to his knees, eliminating the leverage that Daggit's size might have given him.

"What do you want?" Atticus repeated calmly, pushing the hold almost to the point of breaking the arm.

"I'm a friend of Jay Lasker's." Daggit hissed in pain. "If you're Steele, then I've got business with you."

Perfect. The sellers—twelve hours early. Atticus released Daggit, stepping back to let him up.

"Yeah, I'm Atticus Steele."

Daggit got up, wincing at his arm. "I'm John Daggit."

Great. Well, things were so amazingly screwed, but they had no choice but to act as if it were business as usual. "Come in."

"I figured the deal would be off once Lasker died." Daggit ducked into the house, six of his men following. They stank of unwashed hair, old sweat, hot oil, engine exhaust, cigarette smoke, and spilled beer. Atticus scanned them discreetly for weapons. Something crystalline glittered on their hands, clothes, and faces. Pixie Dust? "All I got off him was a name and time."

Which was more than Atticus had gotten. By all signs, Sumpter had focused on the logistics of arranging the buy without getting the intel on the seller, trusting that Lasker would cover those details later. Why was it that the idiots were never the ones that dropped dead?

"Everything is still go." To force introductions and get names attached to the other men, Atticus waved toward Ru. "My partner, Hikaru Takahashi." Then, because he didn't want to get Ukiah more involved than he had to, Atticus made a dismissive noise and added, "And my little brother."

"This is Animal. He's a nomad for the Iron Horses." Daggit named the others—confirming Ukiah's guesses—apparently working from level of importance instead of by whom was standing closest to him. Animal was a wiry man with flamboyant red hair and beard and a slightly manic smile. "Rebar here is my right-hand man." The club enforcer was a bald man whose leather jacket and thick waist disguised a strongly built body. Daggit rattled off the names of the others as if they were of no consequence. "Draconis. Smithy. Quasimodo. Mutt and Jeff."

Draconis was a tall, lanky man with dark hair and beard. Smithy was short, pudgy, and sweating nervously. Quasimodo was as ugly as his namesake. Mutt and Jeff were brothers or cousins; both had the same broad face and sparse, sandy hair.

Atticus committed faces to memory as he kept between the bikers and Ru. He could hear a faint ongoing chiming sound but he couldn't tell the source. As he moved around the room, it stayed elusively faint and directionless. "You're here earlier than we expected. We said dusk, not first thing in the morning."

"Are we screwing up some kind of schedule?" Daggit sneered.

"We were thinking about heading out." Ru reached out and flicked the nearest light switch on and off. "The power is off here. The stove is gas, so we were able to make breakfast, but there's no coffee."

"Yeah, well, it's off for most of the Cape." Daggit meandered through the living room, pausing to open up a drawer and look into it. "A substation got taken out last night in the storm. You'll have to go pretty far out for that coffee."

"Ah." Ru drifted out of the tight corner of the kitchen. "Do you have what we're looking for?"

On the team, Ru was the voice, Atticus was the muscle, and Kyle was the backup—only Kyle was still off getting the generator, and Ukiah, a complete unknown, had been added into the equation. Who knew what direction the Dog Warrior would jump in a situation like this? His brother sat still, seemingly chewing his steak, but Atticus could feel his attention focused on the bikers as they moved around the room.

"Maybe." Daggit had to duck to walk into the kitchen. There was a slight coving to delineate it from the open living room that Atticus hadn't noticed before.

"Nah." Animal's red hair made a nimbus around his head as he shook it. "We just drove all the way out here for our health."

"Do you have it or not?" Atticus snapped, irritated over how fucked-up the situation was. They didn't even know what form the drug came in—pill, brick, dust? They'd have to dance around the word "drug" until they knew.

"Perhaps." Daggit opened the refrigerator, scanned the inside, and helped himself to one of the beers.

Atticus wished that for once a deal could go down without all the coy double talk. He supposed it would make life too simple. "We're not buying 'perhaps' here. Do you have the shit or not?"

Ru gave Atticus a look that said, What am I missing?

Daggit had found Ukiah's mice and crouched to stare into the plastic cage. The black mice lined up to stare back.

"What's up with the mice? They look like Pack . . ." Daggit reached out a hand for the cage, but froze when Ukiah growled.

"Don't touch my mice, Daggit," Ukiah said through clenched teeth.

Daggit grunted, abandoning the mice to study the Dog Warrior. "What do we have here? You don't look like you've got bite behind that growl."

On the other side of the room, providing cover for Ru, Atticus was in the wrong place to stop Daggit as he made a grab for Ukiah.

"Don't touch me!" Ukiah snarled, jerking back out of reach with surprising speed, but at a cost. Atticus felt the pain that flashed through his brother as one of the fragile knits splintered. "You've got Invisible Red on you!"

"I have what?" Daggit glanced at his hand, puzzled.

"Blissfire. Drugs."

Daggit twisted open his beer, frowning at Ukiah. "How do you know that?"

"I can smell it." Ukiah growled, hunching against the pain. "It's all over your skin and clothes."

"No, you can't." Daggit shook his head, took a sip, and explained: "It doesn't have a smell or a color. You can't see it."

"You can't," Ukiah said. "Pack can."

Daggit cocked his head. "Who are you?"

"I'm the Pack's Cub," Ukiah said.

"Aaaaah." Daggit's interest sharpened. "So you're the Cub. Man of mystery. We've heard that you existed but not much more; the Pack won't say squat about you. What are you doing here?"

"I'm eating breakfast." Ukiah tore another mouthful of meat off of the steak and made a show of chewing.

Well, that killed any doubt that Ukiah was one of the Dog Warriors.

Daggit flicked his gaze to Atticus and back. "I didn't know that Pack took brothers."

"We're a special case," Ukiah growled.

Daggit worked his jaw as if it were connected to a massive gear that needed to be turned in order for him to think. "This doesn't feel right. You"—he waggled a finger at Ukiah—"I can buy without a doubt. You've got that wolf feel. Him." Daggit pointed to Atticus. "He's Pack. But this one"—the massive finger settled in Ru's direction—"he's all wrong."

"He's not Pack," Ukiah said before either Ru or Atticus could claim otherwise .

"So who is he?" Daggit asked. "What's he doing here with two Pack dogs?"

"That's Pack business," Ukiah growled softly.

Atticus wondered why Daggit and Ukiah included him as part of the outlaw club. Pack knows Pack.Did that mean that the rest of the members were somehow like him? But how would Daggit know, since he wasn't Pack?

"You come to our turf and set up a buy," Daggit was saying, and Atticus struggled to keep his attention on the leader of the Iron Horses. "You make it our business."

Daggit got only "the look" as an answer from Ukiah.

The biker jerked his head in the direction of the mouse cage. "Show me that you're really Pack."

"No," Ukiah grunted around a mouthful of steak.

"Shit has gone down, and there are Iron Horses dead," Daggit said. "I'm not going to jump through hoops until I know that I can trust the people I'm dealing with."

"Fine. Don't deal," Ukiah said.

Daggit pulled out his pistol and put it to Ukiah's head. "I said show me!"

Triggered by Daggit, the other six bikers pulled guns and leveled them at Atticus and Ru.

"Just take it easy." Atticus kept his hands carefully clear from his gun but shifted sideways, screening Ru.

Ukiah stilled, eyeing Daggit, then glanced to Atticus protecting Ru. "Okay." He broke the silence. "You, Rebar, Animal, Draconis, and Smithy—I know can be trusted. The other three—I've never heard of them; they don't get to see. Get them out."

Daggit lowered his gun. "You heard him. Out."

Licking his fingers, Ukiah stood up, shrugging off the blanket. Half-naked, his borrowed sweatpants threatening to slide down off his slim hips, his torso a patchwork of bruises and bandages, dwarfed by Daggit, Ukiah suddenly seemed battered and vulnerable. A fear for his brother took root in Atticus, yet there was nothing he could do but watch as Ukiah limped around the island to the desk, Daggit looming over him. The mice sensed Ukiah's intent and fought for his attention, all wanting back, to be a part of him again. He opened the lid and plucked one out. A second slipped out. "Nah, nah, back in," Ukiah said gently. "I'll get you later."

The unwanted mouse scurried back into the cage.

The mouse in Ukiah's hand shivered with anticipation, a tiny spark of joy.

Ukiah covered it lightly, screening the true process. The spark faded, lost in the larger presence of his brother. After a moment, Ukiah opened up his hands, showing they were empty. "There. I won't do any more tricks for you."

"Looks like someone had you playing dead." Animal smirked, indicating the bandages.

Ukiah snarled silently in response, like the defiance of a wounded dog.

"Are we still dealing here?" Ru struggled to pull the conversation back on track.

"We're dealing," Daggit said. "How much do you want?"

"A hundred grand, to start," Ru said.

With a large buy, they'd learn better how close the bikers were to the source of the drug; the rest of the quarter million would be held in reserve for follow-up buys.

"A nice even number," Daggit said, without indication that it would be a problem to fill. Then what Lasker reported was true—the bikers had ties to the manufacturer.

"Do you have it?" Ru pressed for an answer.

"Not on us," Daggit said.

Atticus and Ru glanced at each other and came to a silent agreement on how to proceed.

"What is this bullshit?" Ru said. "Time is money. Are we supposed to sit around with our thumbs up our butts without so much as a sample?"

"A sample we can provide." Daggit reached into his back pocket and slipped out a thumb-sized self-sealing plastic bag. "This is a nickel bag." He held it up to glitter in the weak sun.

"It's empty," Ru said.

Atticus shook his head. "There's something in it."

"It's invisible." Daggit tented open the bag. "Well, except to Pack. It has no smell. No taste. You can barely feel it."

Daggit stepped forward, offering to pour it out into Ru's palm. Ru raised his hand to accept it, but Ukiah moved—fluid motion at fast-forward speed—to suddenly be standing beside them, Ru's hand trapped in his own. A growl so low it was nearly subsonic came from his brother.

" If you love Ru, don't let him touch it," Ukiah said, and it wasn't until Atticus started to ask why that he realized that Ukiah hadn't opened his mouth, moved his lips, or spoken aloud. " If one of you must handle it, it should be you— and then don't touch him."

"Hey, don't pull any freaky Pack shit," Daggit snapped. "Talk with your mouths. You want a sample or not?"

"It's okay." Animal seemed reluctant to annoy either Atticus or Ukiah. "This is good shit. It's not going to hurt him."

"Don't be a wuss." Rebar made a noise of disgust. "This is the safest shit to hit the street. It makes Ecstasy look like heroin."

Intervening between Daggit and Ru seemed to have sucked the last of Ukiah's energy out of him—he started to sag. Ru moved to support Ukiah, either as an excuse to occupy his hands or simply to keep him from falling over—Atticus couldn't tell which.

Atticus put out his hand to receive the drug. Daggit shrugged and spilled out the contents into Atticus's palm. The bikers were right—except for an impression of being slightly greasy, even he could barely feel it. He expected something fairly simple like cocaine, but its molecular structure was vastly complex and strange. For a moment it lay on his skin, and then he felt it seep into his flesh and enter his bloodstream like liquid fire. A dozen heartbeats and the drug surged through his entire body, unfolding into a jangling erotic buzz. He became aroused, suddenly aware of the warmth of Ru's body beside him, his heated scent. The chiming went from nearly imperceptible to so loud it threatened to drown out the conversation around him.

Ukiah leaned against Ru, head against his shoulder, arm about his waist. Ru held his brother lightly in return. It was a disturbingly intimate pose.

"Well?" Ru eyed him worriedly. "Atty?"

"It's real." Atticus gasped.

"So, you want to deal?" Daggit asked.

"Okay," Ru said slowly, still watching Atticus. "Let's try this again, but with money and the real shit."

"No go." Daggit made a motion that took in the house and the ocean. "Not out here. Not after what happened in Buffalo. We pick the place."

"Where?" Atticus snapped.

"There's a town closer to Boston, called Hull. We'll be at Hawg Heaven on Nantasket Avenue. Meet us there at seven."

"Fine," Atticus said, anxious to be done. His thoughts kept straying to Ru—and Ukiah was about to drop over completely.

Daggit followed his gaze and smirked. "Well, you three have fun. We'll see you tonight."

Eternity passed before the Iron Horses roared off on their Harleys.

"Why shouldn't Ru handle it?" Atticus snapped as Ru muscled his brother to the couch.

"It's death." Ukiah sagged back onto the cushions.

"They said that it's harmless," Atticus said. "They all use it."

"They're wrong." Ukiah slid sideways so he half lay on the couch, eyes closed, his feet still on the ground as if he were too weary to move them. "They're all dead men."

"How do you know?"

"It's Invisible Red. It's . . . it's . . ." Ukiah mumbled and then made a raspberry. "It's too hard to think. I just know."

"Will it hurt Atty?" Ru swung Ukiah's feet up onto the couch so he was fully lying on it.

"No," Ukiah said. "Not that little, no."

"It has affected me," Atticus said from across the room, keeping his distance from Ukiah and especially Ru.

Ukiah breathed deeply as if asleep for a minute, and then mumbled. "You're a . . . a breeder . . . it will make you want to have sex . . . but it won't hurt you . . . you're a breeder . . . it was made to make you breed." And then he was truly sound asleep.

***

Atticus took a cold shower, scrubbing the last traces of the drug from his skin, but could do nothing to remove what raced through his blood, filling him with artificial desire.

Ru waited outside the shower, towel in hand and a worried look on his face. "Are you okay?"

"I'm just horny." Atticus accepted the towel.

"When are you not?" Ru teased lightly, but his smile didn't reach his eyes; he was worried.

"I'm fine."

"Lasker dropped dead after using it only a couple of times. The autopsy said he died of an aneurysm."

"I come back from the dead." Atticus scrubbed his short hair dry.

"We don't know if you come back if you're poisoned." Ru picked up another towel and wrapped it around Atticus's waist.

It was the barest brush of Ru's fingertips over his hip, the warmth of his touch gliding across skin, that undid Atticus. It was like a large wild animal awoke in him and shoved him aside to use his body for its own pleasure. It pushed Ru roughly against the wall, bruising his mouth with Atticus's lips, tugging impatiently at his clothing with Atticus's hands. Tasting blood, he tried to stop, but his body continued, leaving him mentally crying No, damn it, no! Only after the first, frantic, rough union did he manage to wrestle control back.

"Oh, shit, Ru, I'm sorry."

"Oh, don't you dare think I'm not enjoying this." Ru pulled him back, and he was lost again, but this time he didn't care.

***

Kyle returned with a generator and had it set up before the drug wore off. Atticus caught him up to speed, explaining the Iron Horses, the drug, Ukiah's identification and caution of it, and the buy scheduled later in the day.

Kyle had only one question. "What are we going to do with your brother duringthe buy?"

Atticus jerked to a full halt as every quick answer he thought of fell flat. Take Ukiah with them? They couldn't put him in with Kyle—they needed Kyle to act as backup, not babysitter. Nor could Atticus and Ru take Ukiah with them in the Jaguar—the last thing they needed in the middle of a buy was someone who could read Atticus's thoughts. Even if Ukiah's telepathic ability wasn't that profound, his presence would be like trying to do surgery while someone jiggled his elbow.

Yet leaving Ukiah locked in the basement seemed dangerous. There was a risk that he'd leave or call out or be found—none of which would be good.

Ru guessed the reason for his silence. "We could lock him back in the Jaguar's trunk."

"Don't tempt me," Atticus snapped. "But, he could easily wake up and cause a problem."

"Well," Kyle said, "we could kill him."

"Kyle!"

"He'd get better."

"No, Kyle."

"Well, I could rig some remote alarms. We'd at least know if any of the doors were opened."

"Even with the phones down?"

"Oh, yeah, I'd link them to a hub that could page my PDA if anything got triggered."

"We're going to be over an hour away," Ru said. "We might know something went down, but we're not going to be able to do anything about it."

"We can't take him with us." Atticus wasn't going to endanger Ru and Kyle to keep Ukiah safe. "Can you search on 'Cub'? That's his street name."

Kyle shook his head after several minutes of searching. "No, nothing is coming up under that name. Did you get a last name out of him?"

"No, the Iron Horses showed up before we had a chance to ask. He did make a call on Ru's phone."

"Ah, tricky." Kyle typed on his keyboard to cue up the recorded conversation.

The number had a 412 area code. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It rang seven times before being picked up, and a sleepy male voice grunted into the phone. "Hmm?"

"It's me," Ukiah said with all confidence his voice would be recognized. And it was.

"Ukiah! Oh, thank God."

"I've got a broken arm, broken ribs. I've been shot about five times. I've got a dozen mice on my hands . . . and I'm at the ocean. What the hell happened?"

Who had Ukiah called? Rennie Shaw?

"The cult nailed you yesterday evening. The police called early this morning; they found your jacket on the Mass Pike but there was no sign of you. We've been worried sick that the cult torched your body. Are you still with them, or are you safe someplace?"

"I think I'm safe. I got yanked out of the trunk, dead, by . . ." There was some mysterious grunting on the other end of the line. "Max?"

No, not Shaw.Atticus leaned over Kyle's shoulder, substituted "Max" for "Cub" and hit return.

"Oh, I'm just trying to get my PDA," the mysterious Max said. "It's—damn it—I hate hospitals. There! Give me the number you're at."

Ukiah read off Ru's number. "Is everyone else okay?"

A woman's voice, distant but growing closer said, "Hi, I'm Deb, your physical therapist. I need to clear you on crutches before you can be discharged."

"Ummm, I'll talk to you later about that. My physical therapist is here." Obviously this Max didn't want to discuss murder and mayhem in front of hospital personnel.

"Max, was anyone hurt?"

"Don't worry, kid. They took you down in Ohio with the Dogs."

"If you want to be released today," Deb said impatiently, "you're going to have to get off the phone."

"Hang tight, kid. And be careful. You're too vulnerable right now to believe anything that anyone tells you. These loons specialize at getting people to trust them. If you were"—a pause as the word "dead" was caught before being said aloud—"if you've got that many mice, your 'rescue' might not be what it seems. I'll call you back as soon as I'm done here."

"Okay."

The line went dead.

Well, that explained why Ukiah had come back from the phone call sullen. The conversation only raised more questions. The search for Pack members with the name of Max had come back empty. So who was this? What was his relationship with Ukiah? Why was he in the hospital? If the "Dogs" were the Dog Warriors, why had the cult attacked them? When did religious groups start wars with biker gangs?

"The number was a private room at Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh," Kyle complained. "I'll have to hack their database to find out who was in the room."

Ru read the call log off the computer screen. "This Max has called back a dozen times since Ukiah called him." He kept his phone on silent mode; it must have vibrated unnoticed. "If we leave Ukiah here, he might disappear back to Pittsburgh, or wherever he came from."

"We can't take him with us," Atticus repeated.

Ru glanced at his watch. "He'll probably wake up soon after we leave."

"If we get him to take back all his mice, he'll be asleep the rest of the day."

"You think he'll be safe?" Ru asked.

"The only ones who know he's here are the Iron Horses—and they seemed fairly respectful. He should be safe here. We can't take him with us."

By the looks on Ru's and Kyle's faces, the one he was trying hardest to convince was himself.

CHAPTER THREE

Hawg Heaven, Hull, Massachusetts

Monday, September 20, 2004

The town of Hull sat on a narrow dogleg of land that jutted out into the Atlantic Ocean. On the way to it, they passed signs for "World's End," which seemed appropriate as they drove down Nantasket Avenue, water flanking either side of the road. To their left, the water was nearly pond still, fringed with trees dressed in fall colors. On their right ran an empty parking lot, a sandy beach, and the ocean. Seasonal businesses were closed up, and no one was out on the rainy cold afternoon.

They scouted the area in the drizzling rain before dusk started to set in, not that there was much to be learned. The bar sat on a lump of land in the middle of the narrow peninsula, between the mainland and the bulk of the town on the bulbous tip. Nantasket Avenue split around the bar and its parking lot, with traffic going out to the land's end running in front of the bar, and the lanes heading for the mainland lying behind it. Motorcycles already sat in the bar's parking lot, so they had no chance to scout the inside before the buy.

When it came time, they parked the Jaguar where Kyle could keep watch on both it and the bar and yet stay out of direct sight. They had the money in a backpack on the theory it would draw less notice than a briefcase. Atticus slung it onto his back, made sure it didn't interfere with drawing his pistol, and then led the way into the bar.

Steppenwolf leaked out around the door, wailing about heavy metal thunder. Atticus opened the door and the music flooded out on a wave of warm air, thick with cigarette smoke, beer, and hot grease. Obviously the bar was the refuge of men who had nothing better to do than sit around and abuse themselves with diluted poisons. Atticus stepped in far enough to give Ru room to enter, and paused, letting all the little details sink in. Once the bar became known, his senses would work on automatic, acting like a "spider sense," alerting him to danger as long as he didn't get too deep into focus on something.

"Born to be Wild" beat against his skin. The banks of smoke came from Winston, Old Gold, and Marlboro cigarettes. Off to the right was the clack of billiards, the table screened by bodies. The beer on tap was Samuel Adams and the whiskey of choice seemed to be Jack Daniel's. Unlike other bars he'd been in, this one was heavy with cured leather and blue jeans embedded with the exhaust and engine oil of motorcycles. After the bars and raves of the Beltway, the men were shaggier, dirtier, and more heavily armed. He picked out knives—and in lesser numbers pistols—hidden in boots, in pockets, and under clothing.

It was a WASP blue-collar bar. He and Ru had dressed down in blue jeans and T-shirts and leather jackets, but everything from the shape of their eyes to the color of their skin set them apart.

One of Daggit's Iron Horse peons, Draconis, leaned against the bar, looking up when they came through the door. Recognizing them, he ground out his cigarette, picked up his beer, and sauntered across to greet them.

"Daggit is waiting for you in the back room." Draconis gave a jerk of his head to indicate a doorway behind him. After getting a nod from Atticus—interestingly Ru didn't rate attention—Draconis led the way down a long narrow hall past restrooms reeking of urine to a back room.

The walls muted the music, the bass thumping like the heartbeat of a giant beast.

Five of the Iron Horses sat around a poker table; a single shaded light hung down, throwing harsh shadows on their faces. Crushed cigarette packs, overflowing ashtrays, guns, and crumpled bills littered the table.

Animal was dealing out cards, making them flash across the table in easy, well-practiced throws. He had a pile of bills in front of him, while the others wore surly looks. "Seven-card stud, black deuces and red fours are wild."

A groan went up from the players.

"If you're going to do wild cards, j-just make it one or the other," Rebar cried as the first card landed in front of him. His complaint came too late; his first showing card was a two of diamonds. "Crap. This isn't poker; it's a kid's game."

"They're here," Draconis announced.

Daggit's showing cards were a five of clubs and a nine of hearts. He glanced at his hole cards, frowned, and shoved them back toward Animal without revealing them. "Game's over. Everybody clear out."

"Ahh, I had two queens," one complained, flipping over his hole cards.

"I had three kings," another said, showing a king of hearts, the two of hearts, and the four of spades.

Animal laughed, flashing his gold tooth. " Blackdeuces, redfours."

"But last time—"

"Was last time, and this time is this time." Animal tucked away the bills in a wallet already fat with hundred-dollar bills.

The sheared lambs fled, leaving the wolves behind to deal a different type of game.

Atticus gave the opening bid, playing the heavy. "Could you've picked a place more public? We'll do this deal, but next time we pick the place."

"This is how I do business. My turf. My rules." Daggit took out a revolver and laid it on the table and then produced bullets with dramatic flair. They were self-loaded shells with silvery tips. "I know about Pack and I'm ready for you."

Only confused by the odd display, Atticus glanced to Ru. There was laughter dancing in his partner's eyes.

"Silver bullets?" Ru guessed.

"Damn right!" Daggit loaded the bullets into the revolver. "The only way to deal with werewolves."

"Werewolves?" The word slipped out before Atticus could stop himself.

"Do you think we're stupid?" Daggit ticked factoids off with his fingers. "The Pack. Dog Warriors. Demon Curs. Hell Hounds. Growling like a rabid dog anytime you're pissed off. Howling at the full moon? Jesus, you might as well have it tattooed on your arm: werewolf."

Howling?Atticus had never felt the urge to howl.

"They can't do tattoos, dickhead." Animal snickered. "Their bodies reject the ink and heal over. They don't fucking scar."

That's true,Atticus thought.

"They could use silver ink." Daggit used one of the bullets to imitate the rapid jab of the tattoo needle, complete with a soft tat tat tatsound effect.

"Silver only works as a bullet inthe heart," Animal said. "If it just goes throughthe heart, you're screwed. You're going to get your face torn off by a pissed-off Pack dog."

"Whatever." Daggit waved it off. "Where's the Cub?"

"He's sleeping." Ru gave a safe answer.

"Someone fucked him over good." Animal tapped out a cigarette and lit it. "Who is this walking dead man?"

"The Cub doesn't remember what happened," Ru told them; they'd decided against mentioning Ukiah's real name to the bikers. Annoying as it might be, they were safest dealing under the Pack's cover.

"He lost that mouse, eh?" Daggit ignored Ru's presence and addressed Atticus instead. "Or hasn't he taken the mice back yet?"

"That's why he's sleeping. He took them all back." Actually, they had released the mice into bed with Ukiah. Nature would take its course, keeping his brother asleep longer than any drug would. Still, it was startling that the bikers knew things Atticus thought were secret. Was what they were telling him about werewolves true?

"Someone's going to get their ass kicked, then." Animal gave a breathy laugh, eyes going wide with anticipation of such an event.

"You're Pack too, aren't you?" Daggit finished loading his revolver and gave the cylinder a spin. "You have that look."

Atticus glanced towards Ru—he didn't like talking during these things. Normally he stood in the corner, looking menacing while Ru closed the deal. Because of his Pack connection, though, the Iron Horses seemed to want to talk only to him. Ru glanced upward in an abbreviated roll of his eyes, meaning that they had little choice but to reverse their roles. "I didn't know we had a look."

"You're lean and mean." Daggit patted his paunch. "You never see a beer gut on Pack. Six-pack abs. It's all part of the magic."

"Like voodoo," Animal intoned. "The werewolf curse."

"It's one of the reasons that these dipshits are all drooling over the idea of being Pack." Daggit shook his head as if not understanding it. "Ask any one of them if they were willing to run the risk to be Pack, and they'd sign up for a mauling in a second."

"Not you?" Atticus asked.

"Hell, no." Daggit borrowed Animal's cigarettes and tapped one out for himself. "Any retard can do the numbers. A couple dozen can take the walk in the woods with the Pack, maybe one will come back out changed,one of them."

"A Get," Animal said with reverence.

Daggit shot Animal a disgusted look, and then continued. "These dipshits see one of their brothers go all toned without lifting a weight, able to throw a bike around with one hand, and take any amount of shit and get back up, and think, 'That's so cool; I want that too.' They can smell the power, without thinking it all through."

"Hell, I'd do it. Like that!" Animal snapped his fingers.

"Yeah." Daggit lit his cigarette, took a deep drag, and blew out a column of smoke. "And if you do come back, there's a stranger looking out through your eyes."

"Look." Animal pulled out his wallet and thumbed through it to pull out a photo. "Look at this."

Daggit took the photo and studied it a moment. "So?"

Atticus intercepted it before Daggit could hand it back. Unlike the blurry photograph on the FBI Web site, this was a clean shot of Rennie Shaw and a young Animal with a Mohawk haircut. The nomad faced the camera while the Dog Warrior was focused on something else. On the back was written, Mike" Animal" Ross, Rennie Shaw, 1984 Gather.

"I was seventeen in that picture. Look at Shaw. The fuck hasn't aged a day. He still looks like he's in his mid-twenties. They live forever, Daggit. Shaw was in the fucking Civil War, man."

"Come on; that's all bullshit. Urban legend."

"And the chicks," Animal went on, undeterred. "Prime babes. Not an ounce of fat on them, and that sexy wild-thing look. They only spread for Pack dogs."

If the conversation had sunk down to sex, then they weren't going to get more useful information—if you wanted to call the werewolf theory useful—out of the bikers.

"Let's do this." Atticus unslung the backpack and thumped it down on the table. "Show us the goods."

Animal reached under the table to pull out a black leather duffel bag. He unzipped it and lifted out resealable plastic bags, the contents shifting like invisible sand. Empty, the inside of the duffel bag glittered faintly from a dusting of the drug, meaning that the plastic bags were probably coated too. Atticus warned Ru off with a look and reluctantly examined the bags. The chiming in his ears had started the moment Animal opened the bag, releasing tainted air. As Atticus handled the bags, the chiming grew louder.

Ru unloaded the backpack, stacking up the bills. He gave Atticus one worried look and then kept his focus on the bikers. The bikers, in turn, thumbed through the stacks of twenties, examining the bills to see if they were real, and even checking for sequential numbers.

Animal produced a scale and they weighed out the bags. Normally Atticus would open the bags and check the contents—his system shrugged off most drugs—but there was no way he was going to do that now, not if he wanted to stay in control. As the drug burned through him, all his senses took on a sharpness,making irritating little cuts into his patience. It was like wading through sawgrass. He packed the plastic bags hurriedly into the backpack, trying to handle them as little as possible.

"We're going to want more," Ru said. "Double this. How soon can you get it?"

"More?" Animal looked to Daggit, who shrugged. "You'll have to give us a couple days."

"This is Monday. By Thursday?" Ru asked.

"Saturday," Daggit said.

"If the Pack are werewolves," Ru, seemingly causal, asked, "does it mean that pixies literally make this shit? Do you hold them upside down and shake hard?"

The bikers laughed, showing teeth yellow from cigarettes, filled with silver.

"Just about," Animal said. "The Temple are all fucking fairies."

Temple of New Reason? The religious cult that murdered Ukiah was their source? Suddenly Ukiah's hate of the drug became clear. The police reports, detailing out bodies being hacked apart with an axe and cremated, flashed into Atticus's all too perfect memory. He felt sudden dread; the bikers knew where Ukiah slept alone at the isolated beach house. "Did you talk to them after you left us?"

"That's none of your business," Daggit sneered. "The middleman stands in the middle, you don't go around him. Pack or not, you're not cutting us out."

Atticus lashed out, grabbed Daggit by the hair, and slammed his head face-first into the table. Everything littering the table leapt up, as if startled by the violence. The smell of blood blossomed into the room. "What did you tell them about us?"

Daggit tried to rise but Atticus kept him pinned, grinding his bleeding nose into the cigarette ashes. Daggit flailed for his pistol, and Atticus caught the hand by the wrist and jerked it up behind Daggit's back.

Ru snatched up the pistol and aimed it at Animal, who was starting to rise. "Easy, easy. Atty?"

It was more the awareness of Ru's exhale, the air warmed by his body and carrying his scent, than Ru's words that made Atticus realize it was the drug pushing him to act.

"What did you tell them?" Atticus managed a calmer tone.

"Fuck off!" Daggit cried. "I'm not telling you nothing about them."

"I didn't ask about them," Atticus said. "I want to know what you said about us! Now tell me, or I'll rip your arm off."

"Nothing! Not a goddamn thing."

Atticus could tell by the slight jump in the pulse under his fingertips that Daggit was lying. Clearly, though, he would have to pretend to believe him or beat the information out of him. He was already putting the whole setup at risk for what—a stranger he just met yesterday? A man who might be the coldest bastard on the planet?

Letting go of Daggit, he stepped back out of Daggit's reach as the big man surged to his feet. The room suddenly seemed claustrophobic, taken up by the angry biker, the seated Animal, and the table blocking the exit. There was some part of him, that punk kid he used to be, that wanted Daggit to come at him so he had an excuse to beat the snot out of him. An older, wiser self, nearly swamped under the drug's influence, knew that would be a bad thing. Guns were already in the mix, and Ru could easily be hurt.

"Daggit, he's Pack," Animal drawled, seemingly undisturbed by the violence or the gun that Ru held. "That's a losing hand. Just fold."

Daggit froze, hands clenched into massive fists, panting out breath tainted with beer, blood, and years of cigarette smoking. He glared at Atticus like he meant murder. Atticus stared back, ready and waiting to see how things played out. They stood statue-still for a minute, like samurai testing each other's will. Finally, Daggit wiped his bloody upper lip with the back of his hand and looked away.

Ru took it as a sign that danger was past. He thumbed the revolver's cylinder out and rejected the silver-tipped bullets; they rained onto the tabletop. "You don't want us to know about them. We don't want them to know about us. It seems fairly simple—mum's the word, all the way around."

Daggit grunted.

"We lost three men at Buffalo," Ru reminded Daggit as an explanation of Atticus's reaction. "You lost three too."

"Four." Daggit spat out blood and wiped his thumb over his lip. "No one's heard from Toback since; whoever hit the place took him."

"You sure he wasn't in on the hit?" Ru asked.

Daggit glanced to Animal and shook his head. "I don't know him that well. He's part of the Buffalo chapter."

"Big, stupid, and loyal as a dog," Animal said. "That was David Toback."

So the nomad Animal was the link between Buffalo and Boston.

"Did you tell the Temple about the Buffalo deal before it went down?" Atticus asked.

Animal thought a moment this time before shaking his head. "No. Core got really creepy in the spring, moving out to Buffalo and talking about the end of the world. Let's just say I don't drink around them—just in case they're in the middle of doing a Jonestown thing."

When members of the People's Temple staged a cult suicide with cyanide-laced grape Kool-Aid, not everyone had drunk willingly. It wasn't a good sign that the outlaw bikers—with their loose grip on normal—considered the Temple of New Reason unstable.

"So they're based in Buffalo now?" Atticus asked.

Animal eyed him warily and then shrugged. "They moved again. To Pennsylvania or Ohio. No forwarding address."

Ohio was where they killed Ukiah.

"When we do this again on Saturday, we're not doing it here," Atticus said firmly. "Do you know the Boston Harbor Hotel?"

"It's hard to miss," Animal said.

"Use the guest phone and ask for Steele. We'll meet you there Saturday, at eight o'clock."

Atticus slung the backpack over his shoulder, and they beat a hasty retreat then, the drugs weighing heavy on Atticus's back because of his hyperawareness of it.

Kyle started up the Explorer when they walked out of the bar and sat idling, waiting for them to reach the Jaguar.

"We'll need to bag this and wash my hands." Atticus hated the delay, but he wanted it off him before they got into closed confines of the Jag.

While Atticus kept watch, Ru got out a large plastic bag and tented it open for Atticus, so he could slide the backpack in without touching the bag itself. Luckily they always kept bottles of water in the car. Ru emptied two over Atticus' hands before Atticus sensed that the drug had been washed away. Decontaminated, they got into the Jag and headed for the interstate. A few minutes later, the Explorer's lights appeared in the rearview mirror.

"No one's following you," Kyle said over the radio, after Ru turned off their wires. "What the hell happened in there? It sounded like Atticus jumped someone."

"I did," Atticus snapped. Ru wisely said nothing.

"Sumpter called. He wanted to know when we're dropping the drugs to him."

"We can do it tomorrow morning," Atticus said. "I want to get back to the house."

"They managed to reconstruct some of the records from Buffalo," Kyle said. "He's got a DVD for us."

They'd stopped at a red light, giving Atticus time to shuffle through his options. Sending Kyle to see Sumpter was a no-go; oil and water mixed better. Nor did Atticus like the idea of sending Kyle back to the house alone. If Ukiah was awake and not as harmless as he seemed, Kyle—or Ru, for that matter—would be no match for the Dog Warrior. Ru could take the drugs to Sumpter, but there was a slim chance that they had a tail that Kyle hadn't spotted. Besides, Sumpter was an officious prick and would probably throw a fit if Atticus, as team leader, didn't show. Normally Atticus couldn't care less, but he wanted the DVD—which Sumpter might refuse to hand over to just Ru.

Atticus took comfort that Daggit probably wouldn't endanger his status as middleman. Whatever the biker leader said to the cult, it probably hadn't included specifics on how to find them. Atticus sighed. "Fine. We'll make the drop."

***

Ukiah slept deep and heavy as the dead, reabsorbed memories unfolding as dreams.

The Dog Warriors hunted like wolves. They ran silent and intent through the autumn night, the moon full and the wind wild, covering the sound of their passing. Ukiah could feel the Pack as they slipped through moonlight and shadows. Grim as their mission was, they were pleased he hunted with them. He made them feel complete: wolves showing their young how to hunt.

Fields of shorn hay. Pastures of sleeping cattle. Rich, freshly plowed earth, ready for the winter wheat. They searched for their prey, the Temple of New Reason; more specifically, for the deadly alien machines— the Ae— that the cult had stolen out of storage. Their informant, ex-cultist Socket, could give them only general directions; she'd been given exact change for getting the U-Haul truck through the tollbooths of the Pennsylvania and Ohio turnpikes, and knew that the trip would take roughly two hours. The cultists had mentioned a chain of convenience stores in Ohio by name, telling her one was close to their destination. She wasn't of the" inner circle," so the cult told her nothing more about where they were going, or the plan once they got there.

With perfect memory and a century of roaming the countryside, the Dog Warriors were able to narrow the possibilities to a twenty-mile radius. They checked the hiding places the Pack knew and found them empty. So now the Dog Warriors searched on foot, with nothing between them and clues that the land might hold, using no motors that would alert their prey.

In a low fold in the land, they found the burned remains of a bonfire, built from old telephone poles, heavy with creosote. The fire would have burned hot and long. Ukiah crouched there, smoky ghosts of the bonfire filling his senses as he shifted fingers through the fine ash, finding bits of bone.

The man had been short, dark haired and dark eyed, Italian in heritage, born of a human mother and father, middle-aged, perhaps a parent himself—and long dead before the cult killed his body. The bone fragment showed that he'd been infected by the Ontongard and replaced, cell by cell, until he was fully alien in stolen human form. The cremated man had been Hex's Get long enough that all of the bone had not only been replaced but improved upon, a creature of inhuman speed and strength, healing faster than Ukiah could; the Get should have been nearly indestructible.

Rennie came out of the darkness, silent in his passage.

Ukiah handed the bone to him." We're close."

The tall, lean leader of the Dog Warriors examined the fragment, reading Hex's familiar stamp on what once was human." They're good at this game."

Rennie meant the Temple of New Reason, who had discovered the alien Ontongard and deemed them demons. Not that they were far from wrong— the Ontongard certainly fit the description of evil personified. The first Ontongard, Hex, had extended himself into hundreds by infecting humans over the centuries; a hundred thousand more humans had died when their immune systems resisted the virulent infection.

" The Temple is successful only because the Gets never see them coming," Ukiah said. In the way that Pack knew Pack, the Ontongard could sense the Pack. The cult, though, could lose itself in the sea of humanity and strike without warning. Unfortunately, the Pack was as blind as the Ontongard to the cult, and thus just as vulnerable.

Seeing themselves as holy warriors, the cult believed the ends justified the means of saving the world. Ironically, with the stolen Ae, they could accidentally destroy all life on the planet.

A train whistle echoed out over the land, drawing Rennie's attention to the east." We're losing the dark." Rennie tossed the bone aside and took off at a run.

The dream skipped, plunging into darkness and resurfacing . . .

Ukiah's cell phone vibrated, and he paused to answer. An unfamiliar phone number showed on the display." Hello?"

" Is this Joe?" a female voice asked.

" No. You've got a wrong number."

" Is this. . ." She read off a number, but the last two digits were transposed from his.

" No. You messed up dialing the number."

" I'm sorry; I just got this new phone. Sorry."

The line went dead. Storm clouds cloaked the moon; the night grew darker. The lone headlight of a train crossed his path, a quarter mile ahead . . .

. . . the freight cars flashed by, the rails ringing up and down the sonic range. He was the only one on this side of the track. The diesel engine roared on, too far ahead for him to catch. Somewhere a mile or more in the opposite direction, the end of the train had yet to come into sight.

"Go on," he thought to Rennie, who had paused in his hunting to check on Ukiah."I'll catch up in a few minutes."

Rennie's memories played back over the countryside they'd just searched, reconsidering it for hidden dangers, finding none."Come when you can."

Ukiah ran alongside the train, looking for something that went over the tracks, or under . . .

. . . Ukiah's cell phone vibrated. Who now? He took out his phone. The same number as last time showed on the display. He thought about answering and growling at the clueless woman, but he settled for turning off the phone completely . . .

. . . He paused on the berm of the highway, squinting as the headlights of an oncoming truck hit his night-sensitive eyes. He fumbled out his flashlight, knowing that he'd be night-blind for several minutes after the truck passed—a hazard of having eyes that shifted to night vision. At the fringe of his awareness, he sensed sudden intensity from the others— they'd found something. He went still, focusing on them. The Dog Warriors gathered around a farmhouse, windows dark, hunched under towering oaks. The wind brought the smell of C4 and the taste of red.

Movement warned him too late, and he snapped out of the focus as the truck suddenly veered toward him.

It hit him on the left side, smashed him to the hard road, and rolled over him. Caught between the truck and the road, he tumbled. His flashlight flipped alongside him, showing frightening glimpses of the trailer's undercarriage. Strut, axle, gears flashed by. Somehow the big wheels missed him but his flashlight went under the last set and was crunched flat.

It lasted only seconds but it seemed like forever. Finally it was over. Ukiah lay sprawled facedown on the pavement, dazed and broken. The truck shuddered to a stop, its engine dropping to the low rumble of an idle. The air was heavy with the smell of smoking rubber.

"Cub?" Rennie's thoughts pushed through the pain."What happened?"

Good question. Ukiah tried to lever himself up and discovered with an explosion of new pain that his left arm was shattered.

"Cub?"

"A . . . a . . . a truck. A truck hit me."

Cars were stopping on the highway; people were getting out. For a moment it seemed like a normal accident. Then Ukiah recognized one of the cars: Goodman's dark blue Honda. The cult had taken the car after dismembering their rogue kidnapper.

"Rennie! Rennie!" He could only think of the bonfire victim, chopped up and burned to ash. He fought to stay conscious, to try to crawl away. They were certain to do worse than kill him.

Ice swung down out of the truck's cab and headed toward him, in long, determined strides." He's probably not alone. We have to act quickly. Kill him."

" But if we're right about him—" a female cultist started to protest.

" Then he'll only be dead a little while." Ice handed her a pistol." And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. . ."

Ukiah bolted awake. Even with his eyes open, though, he could see the muzzle flash suddenly brilliant in the rain-cloaked night, feel the bullets hit him with a force that nearly matched that of the truck.

He looked around the room, trying to fill his vision with something else. He was safe. He was with his brother. He was safe.

Then he realized he was alone in the house, his panting the only sound except the rumble of the surf and the wind buffeting the walls of glass.

Atticus left?

Implications of the dream dawned on him. He had his memories back. Atticus must have put the mice in bed with him. That skunk!

Wondering what time it was, he checked the waistband of his boxer shorts. Yes, Ru's phone was still where he'd slipped it during the Iron Horses' arrival. Eleven-thirty—Atticus and Ru had done their drug deal, and probably were on their way back. The call log indicated eight missed phone calls.

Working through the phone's unfamiliar menu system, he discovered that most of the calls were from Max, but the latest was from Indigo. The display showed that the battery was low and the phone was picking up only a weak signal from the carrier.

He left Indigo's number showing and hit the talk button.

"Special Agent Zheng," Indigo answered.

"It's me. I just woke up."

"Good, you're still with the phone," Indigo said cryptically.

"The battery is low, so it might cut out at any point," he told her.

"Are you safe?"

"Yeah."

"Hang up then. Save the power."

Trusting her, he did.

Ukiah sat up and took inventory of his newly healed arm, bending and flexing the fingers, wrist, and elbow. The knitted bones were still weak, but he could use it if he was careful. Under the bandages, the bullet wounds had healed to scabs. It would be another couple of days before the skin was unmarked, but he was strong enough to leave.

The door, though, was locked.

They certainly didn't want him leaving.

He rested his head on the door. Was he strong enough to break the dead bolt?

Outside, a vehicle pulled up to the house. Was Atticus back? His sleeping memories marked the departure of a Ford Explorer and the snarl of a sports car. This engine didn't sound like either. Someone else had found him.

***

The Jaguar's navigation system said that they had an exit coming up on the right. A proliferation of signs, though, stated that the road was closed and suggested they use unfamiliar roads.

"Figures," Atticus muttered. "Our luck is running true lately. All bad."

The navigation system also seemed decidedly annoyed by the detour, insisting that they take the exit as they flashed past the barricaded roadway. Beyond the heavy fortifications, the pavement came to an abrupt halt at a vast pit, seemingly a mile square—a forest of cranes and a jumble of structures, none of them linked, that refused to take any logical form.

"What the hell are they building there?"

Ru made a noise to indicate he was clueless.

"It's probably the Big Dig," Kyle said over the radio.

"The what?"

"The largest urban construction project in the history of the modern world. Forty-two miles of underground highway in a path over two hundred feet wide."

"Oh, yeah. I guess I've heard of it," Atticus said. "Mostly that it's overbudget and way behind schedule."

"Well, they're basically building the Panama Canal through the heart of Boston."

"I heard that in some places they'll have, like, four tunnels stacked on top of themselves," Ru said.

"Four? What the hell for?"

"One for cars, one for buses, the subway system, and the last . . ." Ru searched his memory. "Oh, yeah, the subway station itself."

The detour sent them off on a newly constructed road that the navigation system didn't acknowledge existed, and minutes later they were lost in a maze of small one-way side streets. Atticus cursed softly under his breath as the navigation system struggled to plot a new course. Hopefully finding their way back to the beach house wouldn't be as complicated and time-consuming; he wanted to see for himself that Ukiah was safe.

***

The Iron Horses had described the Boston Harbor Hotel as "hard to miss," and they were right. The street in front of the hotel was an obstacle course as the old elevated freeway was being dismantled. The hotel itself, though, was surprisingly beautiful: crowned like a princess with an elegant rotunda and a four-story archway through the heart of the building to a harborside courtyard and yacht-lined wharf.

They parked in the hotel's underground parking lot and rode the elevator up to the lobby. There it stopped and Kyle stepped off.

Atticus stuck his hand out to catch the doors before they could close. "What are you doing?"

"There's a business center here. I'm going to connect to the Internet and do some searches on the cult."

"You can do that after we talk to Sumpter."

Kyle fidgeted in place. "I don't want to talk to Sumpter."

"I don't want to talk to him either," Ru said.

Atticus gave Ru a hard look. "Neither do I, but we have to."

"You two talk to him. I don't need to be there. I'm just backup."

"Yeah, we're a team," Atticus said. "Come on."

Kyle shook his head, getting his mulish look. "No."

Atticus sighed. "Fine, fine, we'll talk to him. We're going to make this quick, twenty minutes tops."

"I'm just downloading stuff to my laptop for later." Kyle patted his shoulder bag.

"Ten minutes." Atticus let the door shut.

"I don't blame him," Ru murmured as the elevator started up again.

"Sumpter is an asshole," Atticus agreed.

He and Ru rode the elevator to the top floor and found Sumpter's room.

"Yes?" Sumpter called from within the room when Atticus rapped on the door.

"It's Steele and Takahashi."

Footsteps neared the door, there was a pause to use the spyhole, and then the door opened. The wave of air brought out the reek of Sumpter's cologne, Old Spice put on heavy.

"Come in!" Sumpter murmured. He glanced beyond them. "Where's Rainman?"

"Who?" Ru chose to misunderstand him.

"Johnston," Sumpter said.

"Kyle isn't autistic," Atticus stated as calmly as he could.

"Well, there's something wrong with the dweeb."

Atticus stepped close to Sumpter. "Don't . . . insult . . . my . . . backup."

"Did you make the deal?" Sumpter ignored him, heading back into the hotel room. It was a large suite, with windows overlooking Boston Harbor. The door they came through opened to a living room with a sofa, desk, easy chair, and coffee table. A door into a second room revealed a king-size bed, slightly rumpled.

"Yes." Atticus examined the plastic bag containing the backpack a second time, looking for the drug's telltale glitter. He'd checked it downstairs in the garage while writing his name on the tape sealing it shut, but he was feeling paranoid. "We've got some information on the drug. It's a lot more dangerous than we've been led to believe. It's possible that it's lethal with one dose."

"And it's transparent—nearly invisible," Ru said.

"Invisible?" Sumpter frowned, eyes narrowing. "Are you sure you weren't gypped?"

"This is the real stuff." Atticus held out the bag. "It should be handled only while wearing plastic gloves."

"Check." Sumpter took the bag and added his name to the seal.

"We set up another buy on Saturday, but we changed the location to here."

"Here?" Sumpter asked.

"Lasker's beach house is too exposed. Also the sellers won't deal out there."

"You've made contact with them; that's all that matters." Sumpter disappeared into the bedroom with the bag. The closet door slid open, and a moment later slid closed. He returned with a DVD in hand. "The case and circuitry of the digital video recorder's hard drive were trashed, but the platters were salvageable. A few hours in a clean room and the boys in the lab managed to recover most of the drive. They burned about ten days of data onto this DVD for us." He loaded the DVD into the laptop set up on the desk. "I've scanned through the disk, and it looks like the last few minutes is the only thing worthwhile."

The Buffalo team had used a standard eight-camera system, recording the last minutes of their lives. One camera focused on the desolate parking lot in a mostly abandoned industrial park, carefully set to pick up license plates and faces of people sitting inside the cars. Four others covered different angles of the staged "office" area, well lit and painted a sharp white for better contrast. The last three cameras had been scattered through the shadowy warehouse with motion sensors and silent alarm systems attached.

Sumpter started the video with the team waiting for the buyers as caught by camera four.

The kid, Jason German, juggled while telling a joke; he arced four small cloth sacks through a continuous graceful loop. Tracy Scroggins sat on a battered desk, still and patient, quirking his mouth into a smile at Jason's nervous antics. Walt Boyes, the backup, wasn't visible, most likely stationed at the monitors in the concealed room, judging by how the camera zoomed in and out on the kid. The time stamp ticked off the seconds until they died.

". . . and she says, 'Whatever you gave me, Doctor, didn't work.'" Jason was midjoke as the video started. "'While my farts are still perfectly silent, they now smell awful. Thank goodness that no one can tell it's me farting, because they could peel the paint off walls!' 'Good,' shouts the doctor, 'now that we cleared up your sinuses, we can start to work on your hearing!'"

There was an odd noise from off camera.

"I think you just killed Walt," Scroggins said. "You okay back there, Walt?" A muffled laugh was the only answer. "You've heard that one before, haven't you?"

"It's funnier this time," Walt Boyes called from his concealed room.

"I don't know whether to be complimented or insulted." Jason sent one of the balls looping over his shoulder and deftly caught it.

"Heads up!" Boyes announced the buyers' arrival.

Jason caught the cloth bags he'd been juggling and put them aside, saying, "It's about time."

Tracy nervously checked the draw on his pistol.

The door opened. Four men entered dripping slightly from rain, just as the Iron Horses had claimed. Atticus had seen the bodies of the other three bikers, so he focused on the missing man. He was a big black man with a sleepy look to him. He leaned against the back wall, tucked between two support columns. Nothing about him suggested that he knew what was coming. While Jason and the lead biker exchanged presale banter about the heavy rain outside, Toback literally picked his nose out of boredom.

"Who gives a fuck about the rain?" Scroggins gave the banter a shove toward real business. "Are we going to do this, or talk ourselves to death?"

"Tracy! Jason! Incoming!" Boyes shouted. "Incoming!"

Sumpter reached down and slowed the playback, murmuring, "This goes too fast to see otherwise."

The door flew open and a man walked in, shotgun at his shoulder. He fired as he walked, shooting the bikers even as they turned. Others filed in after him, six in all, faces set and emotionless as they fired. The bullets slammed the bikers' bodies around like puppets with their strings randomly jerked. In the slowed replay, the blood splattered gruesomely. Scroggins and German had flung themselves behind the steel desk. The camera showed only the tops of their heads as they returned fire, pinned behind the desk. Two of the shooters went down, but the other four rounded the sides of the desk and fired point-blank. The police would find later that Scroggins had tried to shield German with his own body.

The time stamp had ticked through twelve seconds.

But the shooters had missed Toback, who had cowered between the support columns. While they started to reload, he charged, a long steel pipe in hand. The foursome glanced up, and one, handing his gun to another, stepped forward to engage Toback hand-to-hand.

The shooter ducked the steel pipe casually, and then caught hold of it. There was a momentary contest of strength that the big man should have won, but the shooter wrestled the pipe away and struck Toback down with it.

The other three stepped forward, guns now loaded, and aimed down at the prone biker. They checked, apparently reconsidered killing Toback, and turned away. They turned toward Boyes's hole instead, leveled their guns, and opened fire. They systematically shifted their fire, visibly working left to right. Atticus recalled the line of bullet holes, how they ran with machine precision across the back wall; he thought that only one marksman had made them. He watched now, stunned with the knowledge that three men had acted in unison. How were they coordinating their shots? He realized then that so far they hadn't uttered a single word.

Behind them, the impossible happened. The two dead shooters scrambled to their feet. One picked up the bags containing the money and the drugs. The other stooped down to grab Toback by the ankles and dragged him outside, leaving the swath of clean floor that would later puzzle Atticus. The shooters' clothes showed bloody bullet holes and gaping wounds, entrances and exits indicating paths through vital organs, but they seemed unhampered and unperturbed by the massive damage done to them.

Walt Boyes started to scream, a wordless howl of anger and pain, like a wounded animal. The guns thundered, and the screaming stopped, and then the video ended.

Sumpter took the DVD out, put it in a jewel case, and held it out to Atticus. "That was the best angle to view the shooters. You'll want to study all the angles."

Atticus took it numbly. Two images chased through his mind: the shooters standing up, ignoring their wounds, and Ukiah coming back to life. His brother had known about the drug, known the bikers, and they found him on I-90, a straight shot from Buffalo. It was the cultists who manufactured the drug and killed Ukiah. Who were the bad guys here? Was it the cult who hit his brother with a car and then shot him? Or was it the Pack, who might have staged the shooting in Buffalo? He was going to get answers from his brother, even if he had to beat them out of him.

***

Ru talked them out of Sumpter's room. There was an older couple waiting for the elevator, so they rode in silence, watching the floor numbers count downward. They found Kyle in the business center, downloading information to his laptop.

"That was not twenty minutes," he grumbled, typing furiously on the keyboard.

"Change of plans," Atticus said. "You and Ru are staying here."

"What?" Ru gave him an angry look.

Kyle glanced up to eye them standing over him and then bowed his head back over his keyboard. "So the video was that bad? I, for one, would rather not see it, but I know I'm going to have to digitally enhance it until my eyes bleed."

"There's no reason for all three of us to go," Atticus stated, answering Ru and ignoring Kyle because he was completely right.

"And we'll be safer here?" Ru added, as if he were finishing Atticus's statement.

Yes.He knew what Ru would say to that, so he didn't say it aloud, not that it mattered. Ru knew him well enough to guess what he was thinking.

"I'm going with you," Ru said.

"I'm just going to pick up Ukiah and come back," Atticus said.

"Don't get stupid because of what happened to the Buffalo team," Ru said.

"The Jag only seats two comfortably," Atticus said.

"We can take the Explorer," Ru countered.

"It needs gas," Kyle interjected the information quietly into conversation.

"I'll be fine alone," Atticus said.

"We don't even know if there are rooms available here." Ru waved his hand to indicate the hotel.

"Two rooms." Kyle paused in his typing. "Should I reserve them?"

Atticus glanced at the screen and saw that Kyle had the reservation form for the Boston Harbor Hotel up, the request for two rooms already filled out, his hand hovering over the enter key. "Do it."

Kyle tapped downward. "You two fight it out." He shut down his computer and unhooked it with swift efficiency. "I'm checking in."

Ru sat back on the desk as Kyle escaped. "I'm coming with you. This is different this time. These people know what you are. They know what it takes to really kill you. The playing field is level here, and I'm not going to let you go without backup."

Atticus sighed, recognizing the pattern. He was being overly cautious, and Ru was asserting his right to put everything on the line. If Ru didn't want danger—and the accompanying adrenaline rush—he'd have been a lawyer like his father had wanted him to be. "Fine."

***

Atticus decided to take the Jag, as it was faster. Ukiah would have to suffer in the cramped space pretending to be a backseat—if the Dog Warrior was even still at the beach house. It was possible that he had woken up, found them gone, and left. Atticus funneled his anger and fears into the car, and they roared down the highway at speeds that made it more low-altitude flying than driving.

They were nearly to the house when the car phone rang.

Ru answered it, putting the call on speaker. "What is it, Kyle?"

"It's the house security," Kyle said. "The front door has been triggered."

Atticus glanced at the GPS system showing their location. They were still twenty miles from the house, nearly fifteen minutes at the speed they were going.

"The door down to the basement just tripped," Kyle said.

Atticus swore. If it were Ukiah leaving, the doors would have opened in the opposite order.

"The bedroom door is open," Kyle reported. "Should I call 911?"

"Shit!" Atticus considered all the messy entanglements that calling the police would involve. It would jeopardize their whole operation.

"Atticus?" Kyle asked after a minute's silence.

Chances were that Ukiah could survive any attack until they got there. They owed him nothing. But if it was a normal human Atticus had just put in harm's way, wouldn't he do something?

"Call the Hyannis police."

There was a pause. "And tell them what? That we have a man that was shot five times locked in a dead man's basement?"

Atticus glanced at the GPS system again. "No. Forget it." He and Ru would be there before they could talk Kyle through a safe report.

***

The house was dark, no sign of any vehicles.

Atticus slammed the Jag to a stop and leapt out, pulling his gun.

The doorjamb of the front door was broken and the door hung open. He went in, gun leveled, splinters of wood under his shoes. The house was silent and still.

He knew he should go slowly, but he found himself moving quickly and quietly for the basement stairs. Let him be there! Let him be in the bed. Dead is fine, just be there!

The bedroom door had been smashed open. He crept to it, afraid of what he would find.

The room was empty, the bed innocent of blood.

What had happened? Who had broken into the house and taken him?

I shouldn't have left him alone. I should have found a way to keep him safe . . .

For the first time in his life, his senses failed to give him warning of an attack.

Atticus stood staring into the room, sick with fear for his brother, and someone slammed into him. In that hard collision of bodies, he lost his pistol. They smashed through the sliding glass door and tumbled out onto the sand. They rolled across the sand, the stranger growling a deep rumble.

Ukiah? But no, Ukiah would have felt identical to him, and there was an "otherness" to this man. Atticus twisted and wrenched himself out of his attacker's hold and scrambled backward.

Rennie Shaw stood grinning, teeth and eyes gleaming in the moonlight, his breath misting in the cold. Shaw topped Atticus by several inches—taller than Atticus expected from Animal's photo. Lean and fit as the Iron Horses described, the Dog Warrior wore biking leathers with savage style. With dark hair grizzled with silver, he smelled like a wolf and radiated the same prickly awareness that Ukiah had against Atticus's senses.

Pack knows Pack.

"So you are like two peas in a pod," Shaw murmured in a deep, carrying voice. "The question is, at the heart of it all, are you the same man that your brother is?"

"Where's Ukiah? Is he safe?"

"It's a little late to worry about that, boy."

What did that mean? Did the Dog Warriors have Ukiah, or had someone else come and taken him? If his brother was safe with the bikers, why had Shaw attacked Atticus?

"I want to scratch your surface a little." Shaw sneered. "See what's underneath."

Shaw lunged at him with inhuman speed, and his punch felt like being hit by a high-powered bullet. Atticus countered with two punches, both of which Shaw dodged as though the fight were choreographed, allowing Atticus to come so close to hitting that he could feel the heat of Shaw's skin.

"Come on, boy, you're thinking too much." Shaw struck him again, knocking him down the sand dune. Atticus tried to duck the next blow, but Shaw, grinning, landed it anyhow.

Shaw battered him down the hill and to the water's edge. Atticus fought with silent desperation, but his kicks and punches kept failing to land on their target. Shaw was as elusive as a shadow, always a fraction of an inch out of reach.

" If you're going to fight someone who can read your thoughts," Shaw said into his mind, " you have to fight without thinking."

Atticus went still with shock. He'd been gathering information on the Dog Warriors, watching the evidence mount up that they were much like him, but he'd somehow denied the deep truth. He wasn't one of a kind—he was part of a race that he knew nothing about. The vast shifting of his universe stunned him to his core.

With a scoffing laugh, Shaw tackled him into the surf. The water sucked them out, away from the shore, and then tumbled them back to the land.

A score of men and women lined the shore, waiting for them. Even standing still, they were sleek, dark, and dangerous in the way of poisonous snakes. The moonlight gleamed in their eyes, and the scent of wolves overrode that of humans. Over the roar of the surf, he could hear their growling, their hostility pressing against him, as irritating as his own anger.

His brother stood on the shore, flanked by Dog Warriors, wholly one of them.

CHAPTER FOUR

Hyannis, Massachusetts

Monday, September 20, 2004

Ukiah had only heard the car arrive, but he felt the Pack's arrival as they swept in behind it and broke down doors to get to him. Rennie reached him first, cuffing him lightly in rough affection. Then awareness moved through the Pack and they made way for an outsider among them. He recognized Indigo by her scent as she picked her way through the dark house to him. When he folded her into his arms, he found that she wore a plain black leather jacket, all signs of her being FBI hidden away. She clung to him hard and parted reluctantly.

She peered at the splintered door frame, smashed into the room and hanging drunkenly on a wedge of drywall. "Direct as usual, Shaw."

"It's faster to break them down than try to pick the locks," Rennie rumbled, anger pushing him to nearly growling. He didn't like that Ukiah had been locked up, or the silent reports from the Dogs upstairs on what they were discovering.

Ukiah realized then what their combined presence—Indigo and the Dog Warriors—meant. She'd brought them as backup. "You're working together?"

"We weren't sure what we'd be walking into," Rennie said, but meant, what Indigo would be walking into alone.

Ukiah flashed over his conversation with Max that morning. No, what he'd told his partner hadn't been too reassuring. He hadn't explained being rescued by his brother; to be truthful, though, he wasn't completely sure how safe he'd been with Atticus. "How did you find me?"

"We used the GPS on the cell phone you're using," Indigo explained. "Who is Hikaru Takahashi?"

"He's my brother's lover."

"What?" she cried as the Pack went still around him.

"I have an older brother. His name is Atticus Steele. He's the one who rescued me out of the trunk."

"Why did he lock you in the basement?" Her voice held the suspicious anger echoed by the Dog Warriors.

" And why is the upstairs dusted with Invisible Red?" Rennie added.

"I think . . . I think he's a drug dealer."

Into the following silence, Indigo's phone rang. She answered it with a brusque, "Special Agent Zheng." She listened to the thin voice coming through the cell phone, her brow gathering into annoyance. "Okay, I'll be there shortly.

"The two male cultists wounded in the shoot-out just died," Indigo told them. "I need to go deal with that. Here." She handed Ukiah his wallet and then a hotel room key card. "I'm at the Residence Inn in Framingham; I've got it stocked with food."

The cult had left his photo ID and Evans City Library card, but taken his cash and credit cards. One of Max's ATM/Visa cards, however, had been tucked into his wallet.

"My gun . . . and cell phone?"

"The cult kept your gun," she said. "We've reported it stolen. We found only pieces of your cell phone, but that's probably just as well—the cult used your cell phone to track you."

He flashed to the undercarriage of the rental truck, the flashlight lying flattened beside him on the road, and shuddered with recalled pain. "Keep yourself safe."

"Let me remind you that I haven't been shot or killed once this year," she said, without adding that he had. In fact, he'd lost count of how many times. She reached up, pulled him down to her, and kissed him, full of fearful passion. "Don't," she whispered huskily afterward, their foreheads still lightly touching, "do that again."

"I won't," he promised, even though he had no clue how to prevent it from happening again. He'd promise her anything to make her happy.

"Good." She released him then.

As Ukiah walked Indigo to her car, Rennie gave silent orders to Murray and Stein, who gave her an unrequested—and perhaps unwanted—protective shadow.

"I'll see you at the hotel."

He nodded rather than lie, then watched her drive away, trying to keep down feelings that he was betraying her. The phone call had distracted her from Atticus. Also she probably thought the drugs his brother was dealing with were of the more mundane type, not Invisible Red. Like one creature, the Pack's mind stayed firmly on Atticus, with a growing determination that he'd be tested in accordance to Pack law, and if found wanting, destroyed. Ukiah didn't want to get her involved, forcing her into impossible choices.

"Atticus is coming back soon," he told Rennie as her taillights vanished. "He left to buy Invisible Red off of the Iron Horses."

"After that massive dose of Invisible Red the cult gave you three days ago, your resistance to it is still low. We'll have to make sure you don't get exposed to any more."

Ukiah winced, memories of his rape while under the influence of the drug cuttingly sharp. "I can hang back until you've got the drug off him. But I want to be there when you test him."

"And if he doesn't pass?"

What will you do if we have to destroy him?was what Rennie was asking.

"I think he'll pass," Ukiah said. "He was part of Magic Boy. He seems even more human than I am. He loves Ru."

"But if he doesn't pass?"

Ukiah shied away from the question and instead tried to find more evidence that his brother was worthy of living. He suspected that, if nothing else, Atticus was a far more complicated person than he was. Atticus seemed to think in multiple layers, and while the surface level had been damning, there had been occasional glimpses at something deeper and truer beneath. Unfortunately, Atticus seemed mostly annoyed at Ukiah, as if he disdained his existence.

"Cub?"

"I know he's flawed, but if he's worse than I think . . ." He didn't want to say it. It was a cold and heartless thing to think of destroying his own flesh and blood, but if Atticus was hiding a heart as barren of emotions as the Ontongard's, then Ukiah couldn't allow himself to be trapped by the word "brother." "We'll do whatever is needed."

Rennie nodded, keeping his thoughts to himself.

Atticus arrived a short time later, broadcasting his concern for Ukiah. In typical Pack fashion, Rennie made sure Atticus had no Invisible Red on him prior to their reunion by knocking him into the ocean. It was a bitter thing to feel Atticus's concern for him wash away with the salt water.

His brother stood now in the surf, face closed and emotions so tightly controlled that there was no clue what he was feeling. How did Atticus learn that, isolated as he was from his own kind? Was it that he merely didn't allow himself to feel?

"What do you want?" Atticus shouted over the surf.

"It's Pack law, Atticus." Ukiah wanted Atticus to understand more than he had when the Pack tested him. "You need to be tested, to see if you're human—or monster."

"Tested?"

"We need to know what kind of person you truly are."

"Go to hell."

On Rennie's silent signal, the Dogs swept in. Atticus was a better fighter than Ukiah; it took four of the Dogs to drag him out of the water, struggling in their grip. Once they got him to the land, the fight went out of Atticus, and he knelt in the sand where they forced him to, panting, eyeing Ukiah darkly.

In that moment, Ukiah would have given almost anything to change history. If only he'd found Atticus at some other time, gotten to know his secret heart without this violence.

Rennie's lieutenant, the Cheyenne warrior Bear Shadow, came down the sand dune, pulling Ru along by the arm. Ru's face was carefully neutral; the man guarded his inner thoughts as closely as Atticus did. Ukiah noticed that Ru rubbed his right hand, as if Bear had disarmed him with force.

" I don't want him hurt," Ukiah silently told Bear.

" He'll witness everything." Bear meant that he could testify against Ukiah, if the Pack killed Atticus.

" I don't care." Ukiah took Ru's arm and pulled him out of Bear's hold. " Either Atticus loves him, or, if Atticus is a heartless monster, then it was Ru who decided to rescue me out of the trunk."

" Ah." Bear nodded slowly. " He won't be hurt then."

Ukiah kept hold of Ru's arm, just in case the Pack forgot.

Hellena stepped forward, caught hold of Atticus's head, and held him still, cocking his head back to look up at her.

"Take a deep breath." She locked eyes with Atticus.

"Fuck you," Atticus hissed, trying to twist out of her hold.

Hellena pushed her will onto his body. "Breathe!"

And against his will, Atticus took a deep breath.

"Again." Together, the two took a breath and released it.

Synced with his body, Hellena pushed into his memories. Atticus grunted with pain as his body resisted another's control. Ukiah and the Dog Warriors reached out mentally, bonding with Hellena as she forced a union of minds. Instantly, they were all one. They were Atticus.

. . . the knifepoint of pain cut straight into him. He wouldn't give them the satisfaction of screaming. He tried to shut his eyes, but couldn't. He couldn't even look away. The knifepoint reached bottom and twisted and . . .

. . . the game room had a vinyl floor that mimicked red and terra-cotta bricks in a random pattern, embedded with memories of the ages. He had been stacking colored blocks. He'd play with similar blocks later, in other houses with other families: green quarter blocks, square blue half blocks, rectangular red full blocks, and lemon yellow wedges. That week he had learned to stack one on top of another to build towers. Mama could stack them ten high, but his chubby, graceless hands could manage only three. He'd grasped that his hands were supposed to be larger, more like Mama's, and the night before had pushed his growth as far as his dinner would allow. To Mama's great height, the change seemed marginal, but Daddy called him a big boy before they left him with Jilly and the blocks. Still, this new size was awkward and he struggled to adjust, building and rebuilding his towers.

Focused on the blocks, he hadn't noticed dusk setting in, or the first knock at the door, or the stream of people gathering in the remote living room. The porch grew dark except for the glow of the muted TV. Night filled the kitchen and dining room beyond. Only a slant of light from the far living room's doorway cut the still darkness.

Finally, he realized that he was alone. Where was Jilly? Thinking back, he realized now that she left him to answer the door and hadn't returned. Strangers were in the living room, the taint of their scent finally filtering through the house to him.

He abandoned the blocks and ventured into the darkness.

All the lights in the living room were on, and people towered there, ignoring the furniture, talking excitedly. He paused in the doorway, still in the dark, looking into the harsh light at the confusion.

" The Caddy swerved around a pickup pulling out of the ice-cream stand and went head-on into them. They never knew what hit them. . ."

A stillness moved through the worn as the strangers realized he watched from the doorway.

" Oh, oh!" Jilly sobbed, tears pouring down her face." What's going to happen to Johnnie Doe?"

Ukiah's life had been simple—decades of running with wolves followed by eight years of living as a child with his mothers. When the Dog Warriors tested him, Hellena had flipped through his memories rapid-fire, quickly finding proof of his humanity.

Atticus's memories, though, started when he was still a toddler, confused by a world where no one was like him, being shuffled through foster homes. Hellena abandoned this early memory and chose another, moving much slower, trying to get a sense of who Atticus really was, as life had shaped him.

. . . He lived in the land of the giants. These people so different from him towered over him and shuffled him from place to place without seeming to realize he wasn't one of them. He was lost in the bombard of new. His newly shorn scalp reported that he had only a quarter-inch of hair now, the rest buzzed off during the haze of a barbershop visit. His shoulders and neck itched from the uncomfortable reminders in the form of dead hair, lifeless parts of him pressed against his skin. Mixed in were ghost traces of everyone shorn by the cutters since their last thorough wash. In a hot car, vinyl seats covered in old tears of unwanted children, ghosts of strangers lay on his shoulders and whispered genetic secrets. The car stopped, the back door opened, hands undid his seat belt, and he was pulled from the vehicle.

Only later, late at night in the new bed in the new house of the new family, would he be able to pick out what the giants said in their thunderous voices.

" This is Johnnie Doe." The social worker herded him firmly into a house.

" They said he was two years old. He looks more like three to me."

" It's just a guess. He was found abandoned in a restroom. They thought he was only eight months old, but now they think he might have been over a year old."

A face loomed close." He seems very . . . confused. Is he retarded?"

" No. They say he seems to have some kind of sensory problem; he doesn't process well. It will be a few days before he comes out of his shell. They say he's quite sweet, once he warms up. He's been through so much for one so little, first abandoned and then the couple that wanted to adopt him were killed. . ."

The Pack grieved for lost opportunity. If they had only been able to find Atticus, things would have been different. Regret moved through the Dogs as they watched Atticus flounder through life, moved from one foster home to another in rapid succession. The joyful toddler grew into a troubled second grader.

". . . tell me about your picture."

He eyed Dr. Holland. He'd been lost in his own drawing and remembering. Normally he had access to only crayons to draw, and they were useless at capturing the details he remembered. Dr. Holland's colored pencils did a better job, but still his ability fell far short of reality. He had been focused, trying to capture real trees on paper." It's just a picture." He'd learned not to talk about the time in the woods, but Dr. Holland was a nice giant.

" Is this a little boy?"

" Yes."

" Is he you?"

" No, but he's just like me."

" Ah. And what's this? A dog?"

" No. That's me."

" Why are you a dog?"

" I don't know. Something bad happened and I ran away. I wanted to go back, but this part of me became a little boy and we couldn't go back together, so I stayed with him, protecting him, trying to get him to come back, but he'd forgotten almost everything but being scared."

" I see." Dr. Holland nodded as if he did understand." Where is he now?"

" I don't know. I forgot where I left him. I know I've forgotten a lot of things since then, so much drained away before I realized what was happening, so I think about this so I won't forget."

" I see." Dr. Holland nodded again." Did you like being a dog?"

" No."

" Why were you a dog?"

He lifted his shoulders up into a shrug." I don't know."

" Why did you stop being a dog?"

He shrugged again." I don't know. I've forgotten."

" Why did you draw this picture?"

He looked at Dr. Holland. The giants never ceased to confound him." You told me to."

" I see," Dr. Holland said.

Perhaps Dr. Holland said that when he didn't see at all.

" Why did you hit all those boys?"

" They were teasing Bobby Hyzen. He can't help the way he is. He would change if he could. But he can't."

" Why did you draw this picture instead of one of Bobby Hyzen?"

" Because I wish I could find him again, the boy just like me."

The end-of-school tone sounded, alerting everyone that buses were arriving.

" Can you sign it for me?" Dr. Holland pointed to the lower left-hand corner.

He put his new name down.

" Clark?"

" I don't want to be John Doe anymore." His last set of foster parents explained the meaning of his name.

" Why Clark?"

He didn't want to tell Dr. Holland that it was because it was Superman's secret identity. Not because he was afraid Dr. Holland would laugh, but because he'd write it down and someone else might find out. He was discovering many of the mistakes he thought he left behind at the last foster home and the last school somehow showed up to haunt him. It would be best not to say . . .

A jump forward in time, an angry sixth grader in another office, fingering a broken nose that was rapidly healing.

". . . what's this about you wanting to be called Parker? What kind of name is that?" vice principal Henry asked.

He'd decided that Clark was a stupid name. Aliens that looked exactly like humans? Only one man on the whole planet smart enough to know it was going to explode but too stupid to send a guardian out with his baby? And that whole kryptonite thing was stupid— how could that much stuff get to Earth?— and a little unnerving. Did he have his own personal kryptonite? Besides, the new Superman movies made his choice way too obvious.

He chose Parker over Peter because he'd seen how Peter Johnson suffered once kids realized all the nicknames for penis. Just like Spider-Man, he had inhuman abilities— but what had been his radioactive spider?

" I don't want to be John Doe," he told the vice principal." I don't like the name; it's like a big sign that says I don't know who I am."

" You can't change your name until you're of legal age."

Ah, yes, the magical age of eighteen, when he was free of so many annoyances." Anthony Cercone Junior goes by Tony, and everyone calls James Walton J.J."

" That's what their families call them. We all need to stay on the same page, John."

" I can have my foster parents call me Parker."

" What about your social worker, and your case files, and the state? Your foster parents are being paid to take care of a John, not a Parker."

He'd come to recognize insurmountable obstinacy. Luckily, he only had to deal with it until the next set of foster parents and the next school.

Flashes of junior high school followed, an endless flow of fighting in the halls, in streets, and on playing fields. Hockey was an excuse to legally hit the other kids. Wrestling. Basketball. Football. Atticus's natural skills got him onto sports teams. His aggression got him thrown off. An angry teenager, he refused to see that his actions dictated much of how the system treated him. One too many fights landed him in juvenile hall, and the fights became a necessity for survival.

When Hellena tested Ukiah, he had been aware only of his thoughts. Now he could see how she directed the search, suggesting a topic and then pulling up the strongest response. What had brought up the funeral of his adopted sister's pet rabbit? He would have to ask Hellena, if things went well. He sensed regret growing in the Pack, though, as they saw a near future where his brother's murder would taint their relationship with Ukiah.

There were areas where Atticus resisted invasion, somehow turning aside Hellena's probes. What he let her search through were fights in dark alleys, crowded barrooms, and even illegal fighting rings for bare-fisted fighters.

"Ru," Ukiah murmured to Hellena. "Have him remember Ru."

. . . Was there anything louder, drunker, randier than a party of college boys? Atticus couldn't decide if coming tonight had been a mistake. With the recent gay bashings, he didn't like his roommate walking alone, but Atticus was the only straight person at the party. And apparently there was some confusion over that. On the theory that a moving target was harder to hit on, he drifted through the party. Perversely, he felt like Goldilocks, critiquing each area: too loud, too crowded, too drunk, way too intimate.

Where the hell was Ru? Atticus felt a prick of jealousy that probably someone else was with his roommate. Ru had been moody and withdrawn since winter break and the whole mess with the stabbing.

At the time Ru had been surprisingly calm and efficient. He said the mice were cute. Instead of being upset about Atticus not being human and able to come back from the dead, Ru seemed to focus on the fact that he was the first person Atticus ever told his secret to. He invited Atticus home during the break, and introduced him to his parents and three little sisters. What had happened? Even with Atticus's perfect memory, he couldn't pinpoint the sentence or the gesture where it all went wrong. And it hurt like hell. Ru was the best friend he'd ever had, and it really felt like he was losing him.

No one was in the backyard. While there was afire going in a brick grill, it was dark and cold: a perfect spot to sulk. Ru found him there a short time later.

" Hey!" Ru breathed out a haze of wine, snuggling against Atticus's back." What are you doing out here?"

" Sulking." Atticus immediately wished he'd said something else. For a moment, things had been right, with Ru playfully affectionate. He liked the closeness they had, despite what it was doing to his image.

Ru, though, pulled away." Whatever for?"

" The mice weirded you out— didn't they?"

" Why would you say that?"

" Because . . . Nothing, just forget about it."

" You sorry you told me?" Ru asked warily, putting more distance between them.

" No. It's just things seem broke between us. And it sucks."

" Yeah, it sucks."

So they fell into silence except the crackling of the fire.

" Yeah," Atticus whispered finally," I'm sorry I told you. I hate this."

" Atty, this has nothing to do with the mice."

He looked at Ru, dubious.

" This is about you and my sisters," Ru explained, or rather, didn't.

" What?"

" All the girls you dated last term were complete babes, but my sisters . . . I couldn't deal with that."

" Ru, what the hell are you talking about?"

Ru gave him a look of pure agony." You'll hate me."

" What, you've taken up killing babies and torturing puppies when I wasn't looking?"

Ru laughed, and then sobered, falling back to the hurt look.

Atticus didn't know what to say. He never knew what to say. He tried to bridge the gap between them; he went to Ru, awkwardly embraced him, and asked quietly," Tell me what's wrong. Until I know, I can't do anything to fix things."

Ru's heart started to hammer, and he let out a trembling sigh, as if he were going to start crying." Oh, Atty, sometimes you're just so clueless."

Just as Atticus was going to ask him what he meant, Ru reached up to undo Atticus's top three buttons, leaned his head down, and dropped a kiss in the hollow of Atticus's neck. His kisses moved upward, strange for their maleness.

It all clicked for Atticus. Ru was in love with him, and Atticus was straight. Things had been fine as long as Atticus was unattainable, but then they'd gone to Ru's home and Atticus had flirted with Ru's sisters. With Ru's long hair, and his sisters' relatively flat chests, the only difference between the siblings was an X chromosome and some southerly plumbing. He felt stupid not to have realized it before.

Shaking now, Ru whispered," I love you."

Ru, who knew that he wasn't human, who had seen the mice form and be reabsorbed, who watched him die and come back to life, loved him. A jolt of something as pure and blinding as joy flashed through Atticus, stunning him.

Ru kissed him, then, firm male lips against his.

Atticus was fairly sure he was straight-straight; as totally aware of being driven by pheromones and animal instincts as he was mystified that he could not be human and still so desperately want to mate with a human female. In his blackest moods, he felt similar to a randy little dog that humped visitors' legs, driven over the boundaries of his species by lust. But he had no species of his own; he was a solitary creature, a freak of nature.

And Ru loved him just the same.

Ru kissed him again, tasting of tears, and then, realizing that Atticus wasn't responding, tried to pull away. Atticus tightened his hold, sensing that if he let Ru go now, it would tear a larger rift between them. The slight pressure was enough to check Ru. As they stood in the cold darkness, neither wanting to let go, it started to snow. Huge white flakes drifted down silently around them.

Could he maybe not be as straight as he always thought? Certainly he'd never tried . . . that. Never had the desire to. But if he really were entirely straight, why'd he never rebuff Ru? Why would the thought of Ru loving him hit him with lightning-intense happiness? And if asked—just minutes ago—for a word to describe how he felt about Ru, wouldn't he have used the word" love" ?

Ru traced the line of Atticus's jaw with his fingertips, snowflakes in his long black hair.

What was the depth and width of his love? For Ru, couldn't he bend a little?

Wetting his lips, Atticus tilted his head to Ru and kissed him. Strangely, while his senses told him that this was just another set of lips, with an X chromosome instead of a Y, there was something different—some electricity that had nothing to do with taste or smell or touch. Was this love?

So while the snow sprinkled them with cold kisses, they tested the possibilities, Atticus unsure and hesitant, Ru eager and growing bolder.

After having Ru as a roommate for months, his body was imprinted on all his senses, and yet it was like Atticus was discovering him for the first time. His musky scent. His soft skin over hard muscle. His silky black hair.

Ru fumbled with Atticus's belt, undid his pants, and slipped a hand down the flat of Atticus's stomach and into his boxers.

Do I really want this? Can I do this?

There was no denying that what Ru was doing felt good— he grew erect in Ru's hand. Encouraged, Ru slid down his body, freed Atticus from his underwear, and, with a slight groan of want, took Atticus into his mouth.

Am I really ready for this? Atticus didn't know, but his body did as it took up the rhythm of sex.

Ru looked up at him, and in that moment of union it seemed like Atticus could see straight to his soul and knew— Atticus loved him.

Relief and puzzlement went through the Pack. How did Atticus get to college? How did he go from the angry teenager to this protective and sensitive man? And how did he end up selling drugs? How long had he been dealing in Invisible Red? Atticus resisted Helena's probes until she used her personal knowledge of the Iron Horses—and what Ukiah had told the Pack earlier—to dig out memories of tonight's buy. She glossed over the biker's theories about the Pack and focused inon the information on the cult.

" We lost three men at Buffalo," Ru said." You lost three too."

" Four," Daggit said." No one's heard from Toback since; whoever hit the place took him."

There was a weird echo in the memory; Atticus hadn't known the name when Daggit said it, but he'd put a face to the name since then, so the reference had new meaning to him. Hellena pushed into the echo, and Atticus's memory jumped to a hotel suite overlooking the Boston Harbor. Atticus stood with a man, watching a massacre on a computer screen.

Why would drug dealers record a drug buy?

Hellena went digging for an answer. Atticus resisted, trying to divert to other thoughts. They played cat and mouse for a moment, and then Hellena caught hold of a memory and dragged it forward with a cry of dismay from Atticus.

Atticus was starting to hate hospitals. He stopped, found the right room, and glanced in. The now familiar scene of a young man strapped to machines doing the living for him, a family desolate with grief. Hopefully this time he could get some useful information.

He rapped on the door, catching the attention of the father." I'm sorry to bother you, but I need to ask you a few questions." He took out his ID and held it out to them." I'm Agent Atticus Steele with the DEA."

" I don't understand," the father said.

" We believe your son took a new designer drug. It has several names. Pixie Dust. Liquidlust."

" Our son would never do hard drugs."

" The word on the street is that this drug is harmless, safer to take than Ecstasy, but we've seen a growing number of deaths in young men like Paul here who frequent the rave and dance club scenes. We think this new drug is the cause."

Atticus thrashed in Hellena's hold, desperately trying to escape her power. He tried to turn his thoughts from the memory, but Hellena kept firm, pushing on to see what he was hiding now.

. . . footsteps sounded behind Atticus. He knew the length of the stride, the scent . . .

"No." Atticus groaned. "No."

. . . the father's eyes shifted to the newcomer. Without turning, Atticus indicated the man behind him . . .

"No!"

" This is my partner, Agent Hikaru Takahashi."

With a roar of anger and fear, Atticus yanked himself out of Helena's control and surged to his feet. The Pack melted backward, having seen enough to convince them, their relief obvious. Ukiah felt his brother's fear for his partner and stepped back, clearing a path to Ru.

Atticus and Ru communicated in some secret language, a look, a touch of left hands, and relief swept through Atticus. Ukiah sensed that Atticus ached to hug Ru tight, as if all his body wanted part of the reassuring contact, but his brother ruthlessly shoved the desire away to focus on the surrounding Dog Warriors. The two DEA agents put their backs to each other and faced the Dogs. Despite the rush of terror for Ru's safety, part of Atticus filled with calm; Ukiah realized that as Atticus protected Ru, his partner guarded Atticus's heart.

But was there anyone else in his brother's life? Atticus had seemed to view Kyle as an odd mix of friend and child; someone protected with affection and yet kept at a slight distance. Ukiah supposed that was the nature of children, that the act of protecting them built a shell around them, keeping them from your own dark thoughts of disappointment and despair. And in Atticus's memories, there had been no one else. What a desolation of a heart. For Ukiah, in the wilderness, there had been only the rough affection of the wolves. How much harder it had to have been for Atticus, surrounded with examples of what he lacked. From Jo finding Ukiah in the woods, onward to the Pack and Indigo, he'd been blessed with those who loved him.

"We're not going to hurt you," Ukiah said.

"I don't believe you." Atticus stood panting, one arm still out flung to shield Ru. "You set us up, you little bastard. I can't believe I was fucking worried about you."

"We only wanted to be sure you're a decent man." Ukiah didn't need to check for a vote; he sensed the lack of dissension among the Dogs. "You passed."

Atticus clenched down on a curse, but still it struck like stones against their minds. " Fuck you. Fuck you all."

" Atticus." Ukiah stepped close, attempting to merge back to one mind, to explain. " We don't care that you're DEA. You're family. We test everyone. They even tested—"

"Get out of my mind!" Atticus hit him with the force of a truck, smashing him off his feet.

Without thinking Ukiah put out a newly healed arm to catch himself as he fell. The many fragile knits shattered in an explosion of pain. As the Dogs closed back in with a snarl of anger, Ukiah fought to stay conscious. " No! Don't hurt them!"

"I said stay out of my head!" Atticus roared. "We're not family! I'm not one of you, and you don't have any right to do this fucking mind rape! You have no right to go in, mess with my head, and pass judgment on me!"

"We're brothers," Ukiah whispered.

"We're nothing but an accident with an axe. I don't know you. I don't wantto know you." Atticus caught Ru's elbow and hurried him toward the waiting Jaguar, radiating his anxiousness to get his all too human partner away from the Dog Warriors. "Stay out of my head, stay out of my life, and stay out of my investigation, or so help me God, you'll find out how little I value our family tie."

CHAPTER FIVE

Boston Harbor Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Why, Atticus wondered, did life continually try to confound him?

The sudden addition of an outlaw brother had been bad enough, but an entire species of criminals? Hypocritical ones at that—judge if he was a good man? Unlikely. What had they really been after?

The answer came while they were at a truck stop off of Route 3, where Atticus changed into dry clothes while Ru filled the Jaguar with gas. Atticus had just gotten back in the car when the Jag's phone rang.

Atticus pressed the talk button. "What is it, Kyle?"

"The Dog Warriors just raided Sumpter's room. They've taken the drop."

"Damn it! Are you okay?"

"Yeah, they didn't come down to our rooms."

Because they knew from Atticus's memories that Sumpter had the drugs.

"What about Sumpter?"

"He's pissed."

Which meant he was at least alive.

"We're on our way back."

"I tried both of your phones and you didn't answer."

His phone had been killed by the dip in the ocean. Ru's phone had gone missing sometime during the day. "We're fine. I'll explain later. We'll be there in twenty minutes."

***

The door to Sumpter's hotel room was smashed open in a manner that was entirely too familiar. The room had been thoroughly searched; all the dresser drawers were pulled out and couches overturned. The computer, Atticus noted, was gone from the desk. On the floor was the plastic evidence bag that had held the drugs; his signature was still readable on the tamper-proof tape. They found Sumpter in the bathroom, nose bloodied, checking the tightness of his teeth.

"Steele, you asshole." Sumpter grimaced at his reflection as he found a loose molar. "You were followed here after the buy."

"Yeah, something like that." Atticus scanned the room. "What did they take?"

"Everything, even my sheets and blankets."

That puzzled Atticus until he remembered that the FBI reports stated that the Dog Warriors were known to camp outdoors and Ukiah was without a sleeping bag. He felt a moment of remorse, remembering the flashes of pain as bones splintered; it had been like he did the damage to himself. Angrily, he pushed the sense of guilt aside. Yes, he hurt his brother, but look what the Dog Warriors had done after raping his mind.

"They took my copy of the surveillance DVD." Sumpter wet down a hand towel and dabbed at the blood on his face, wincing in pain. "It's only reasonable to assume that they did it to cover up their involvement in the Buffalo shooting."

Bitter as Atticus was at the Dog Warriors, that didn't seem right. The images on the DVD had been fairly clear; none of the shooters had been the Dog Warriors at the beach. Ukiah and the Dogs had been full of feral grace, something that the shooters lacked. "I think it would be wrong to jump to that conclusion."

"Why else would they be involved in this?" Sumpter snapped.

Because Atticus stole his dead brother out of a trunk. It was annoying that his sense of right and wrong had gotten him into this mess. "According to the Iron Horses, the source of the drug seems to be the Temple of New Reason. I think the cult—"

"You're going the wrong direction." Sumpter threw the bloody towel into the sink. "The Iron Horses set us up here. Obviously, they're working with the Pack. They've got the money and now the Dog Warriors have the drugs."

"That's possible." Atticus could easily believe that. It would explain how the Dog Warriors found the beach house when Ukiah himself was clueless as to his location. "But I don't think they're our shooters."

Sumpter harrumphed, taking one last look at himself in the mirror, frowning at the bloody mess of his shirt. "Where the hell were you, anyhow?" He turned and saw the matching bruises on Atticus's face. "What the hell happened to you?"

Atticus's encounter with the Dog Warriors had left him battered enough that a change of clothes and the healing done during the drive couldn't disguise it. "The Dog Warriors jumped me at the beach house."

"You?" Sumpter studied Ru, who was unscathed beyond a bruised hand. "Where were you during this?"

Ru's face went to neutral, but Atticus recognized the signs of guilt and hurt carefully hidden away.

"He was smart enough not to pick a fight with them," Atticus said.

"He's your partner," Sumpter said.

And the pain etched deeper into Ru's face.

"Give it a rest," Atticus snapped.

"Just because you don't fill out the forms, doesn't mean I don't keep track of the number of times you've been hurt," Sumpter said. "I can read between the lines on your reports. He always slacks off and lets you take the brunt of the danger. He's going to get you killed."

Atticus turned and walked out of the hotel room. It was the only way he could keep from hitting Sumpter.

"Where are you going, Steele?"

"I need a drink!"

He was thankful the elevator appeared moments after he slammed down on the button. Ru huddled in the corner, trying to keep his hurt to himself.

"He's not right," Atticus said to the numbers counting down. "He doesn't know jack shit about me."

"I screwed up big-time at the house. I've gotten too lax. I count on you being able to take anything the perps deal out."

"You didn't do anything wrong," Atticus said. "I rushed in like an idiot, and there were just too many of them. We lost it the moment I got out of the car. Hell, when I left the hotel." He reached out and tried to smooth away the worry line on Ru's brow. "You didn't let me go alone, and that's all you could have done, and that's all that matters." Ru gave him a sad smile as the elevator stopped on their floor and the door opened. "Let's get Kyle and go down to the bar."

***

Normally, Atticus didn't drink. It never solved anything, and his body rejected the poison violently, but he did it when he was depressed. Tonight he intended to get smashed.

The hotel bar had wood floors of cherry with narrow strips of maple and deep red walls. It was cool and elegant, not at all comforting.

"It was just like Daggit said, werewolves," Atticus said after they'd filled Kyle in. "I could smell them. I could feel it." He rubbed his fingers together. He'd scrubbed the evidence away but his perfect memory held the recall of the genetic pattern, so like his, but with a thread of wolf DNA running through it. "Part human, part wolves."

"Yeah, but you're not," Ru said.

He shot Ru a look and went to buy himself another bottle of whiskey. The problem with trying to get drunk was that it was expensive; his body rid itself of the alcohol nearly as fast as he drank it. He carried the bottle back to their table.

"You're not a werewolf," Ru continued as if he hadn't left.

"But everything fits. The whole healing thing. The heightened senses."

"You don't turn into a wolf."

Atticus poured himself a shot of whiskey, ignoring him, trying not to think of the memories he saved from before he was found—those of running on four legs. If he looked hard enough, he could find that thread of wolf in himself. "I can remember . . . something."

Kyle was ignoring them in favor of his PDA, a sure sign that the conversation was bothering him greatly.

Atticus drank the whiskey, letting it burn its way down and blur the edges of his razor-sharp—wolfish—senses. "And I can remember Ukiah. At least I think it was him. I've always felt like there was . . . someone . . . out there. Someone I lost."

"What was the whole stand-around-and-stare-at-you thing, anyhow?" Ru asked.

"They went through my memories. It was like a television, and they kept changing the channels. I couldn't stop them."

"Then they know . . . ?"

"Yeah, they know. They know everything important." He felt like he had been raped. There wasn't a dark secret in his soul that they didn't uncover and fumble through.

"What do we do next?" Ru asked.

Atticus glared at him. He knew what Ru was doing. "We get drunk."

"And tomorrow?"

"We'll think about it when we get up."

"One thing's for certain." Kyle broke his silence. "The Dog Warriors are going to be after the Temple of New Reason."

They looked at him in stunned surprise.

"Well, the cultists killed your brother, and they're the ones with the drugs that the Dog Warriors want, so of course they're going to go after the cult."

"Damn," Atticus swore. "Ukiah knows that the stuff came from the Iron Horses. They'll hit them next."

"The Iron Horses will probably roll over for them," Ru said. "They idolize the Dog Warriors."

"I don't know," Atticus said. "There's a lot of money involved. It's not like they're going to turn over the cash cow."

It would be safest to assume that the Dog Warriors had already blown their cover with the Iron Horses. It was stunning that the Pack had left the two agents alive. During their "test" he couldn't even see; it was like the Dog Warriors had focused his eyes inward. Atticus had been helpless—a new and uncomfortable feeling for him. Not one he wanted to repeat. They'd have to get ahead of the Dog Warriors and stay there—but how?

"What did you find out about the cult?" Atticus asked Kyle.

Kyle made a noise of disgust. "Trying to find out anything was like wading through a flood of sewage."

"What happened to the cultist picked up at the rest stop?"

"They've identified the one killed in the shoot-out: John Fender of New Hampshire. He joined the cult two years ago. Apparently the Pennsylvania State Police pulled over a cult member," Kyle frowned at his PDA. "Dmitriy Yevgenyevitch Zlotnikov was arrested earlier this month while driving Pender's car. Zlotnikov died in a holding tank without explaining where Fender was. Fender's parents listed him as missing after Zlotnikov died, and provided dental records. There's a flag on Zlotnikov's records indicating that his hobbies included high explosives, and abandoned cult property might be booby-trapped."

Atticus grunted.

"I'm not sure who to pity in this war," Ru said, "the cult or the Dog Warriors."

"What about the two wounded cultists?" Atticus asked.

Kyle shook his head. "They're now two dead cultists. They both went into grand mal seizures and died this evening. Still no ID on them beyond the cult names of Coaxial and Binary."

The seizures were just one of the side effects of the Pixie Dust poisoning. The vast array of deadly symptoms had made it difficult to first determine that the deaths of so many young men were linked. Oddly, not a single woman had fallen victim to the drug.

"So that leaves the female cultist."

"So far the police have no ID on her beyond her cult name of Ascii," Kyle said. "She's been transferred to Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Framingham."

"So we can get to her tomorrow," Ru said.

"Most likely," Atticus said. "What else did you find out?"

"Well, the Temple of New Reason was founded by a William Harris, who called himself Core. Harris and Zlotnikov were both originally from Butler, Pennsylvania. Homeland has been tracking the cult for about a year; during that time, they've been in Boston, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,Core was killed early Saturday morning when the boat he was driving at high speeds hit a barge. FBI reports are weirdly muddled about what happened, but apparently the cult planned to do some kind of human sacrifice on an island and there was a shootout, an explosion, an extensive fire, two boating accidents, a drowning, and then some kind of vandalism of the crime scene afterward."

"Everything but cotton candy and fireworks," Ru muttered.

"That was just Saturday morning. Friday there were two other bombings linked to the cult." Kyle checked his PDA again. "An Iron Mountain storage facility and a mansion in Butler where the cult had been living."

"Any forwarding address?" Ru asked.

Kyle shook his head. "The FBI thinks that Harris's second in command, a man they know only by the name of Ice, has taken the cult into hiding. The Pittsburgh police have a cult member who has turned state's evidence; she says that Ice and several of the surviving cult members are from the Boston area."

"Ukiah was in Pittsburgh," Atticus realized. "He called the Pittsburgh hospital and the car that we found him in had Pennsylvania plates."

"Oh, yeah, your brother's name is smeared all through this." Kyle waved the PDA.

But they didn't know his name—did they? "What is his name?"

"Ukiah Oregon."

" Like the town?" Atticus had asked." Ukiah, Oregon?"

Atticus groaned. Ukiah had told him his name—he just hadn't realized it. "Did you run a priors on him?"

"There was a missing person's report filed on Sunday by a Samuel Anne Killington of Pendleton, Oregon—I'm not sure what herconnection to him is—but other than that, he's clean."

Atticus sagged back in his chair. Clean. What the hell was he supposed to make of that? A Dog Warrior who wasn't wanted?

"According to the report," Kyle continued, "Ukiah had been in Ohio when he disappeared. There was another explosion in that area—a farmhouse leveled Sunday night—and another bonfire site found on the land yesterday morning. The owners of the farm are missing, presumed murdered. Dental records on the human remains found at the bonfire site are being checked."

Okay, the cultists were vicious little bastards, all the way around.

Ru made notes on his PDA and eyed them now. "So it looks like Ice fled Pittsburgh for Ohio, and Ukiah followed. The cult and the Pack fight, Ukiah is killed, and the cult heads back to home turf."

"Looks like." Kyle nodded his consensus.

Atticus frowned. "We'll skip over 'how does the cult know he'll come back from the dead.' After talking to the Iron Horses, it's obvious that my healing abilities are not as secret as wethought they were. But why did the cult take Ukiah with them?"

"Maybe they were going to ransom him," Kyle said.

"Maybe they planned to hold him hostage against the Pack," Ru guessed. "The Pack certainly seem like they'll plow through anything to get him back."

That would be more gratifying if it hadn't been himthat they had plowed through. This led Atticus back, however, to the need to stay ahead of the Dog Warriors.

"There's two things here," Atticus said. "First is that the cult might be our shooters. We need to run through the DVD, pull out mug shots of our perps, and compare them to known cult members. Just to be thorough, we can check against the Pack too, but I didn't see a match."

"Check," Kyle said.

"The second is seeing what the state police, the FBI, and any other organizations have on the cult in the Boston area. They might have returned to an old haunt."

Ru nodded and made a note.

"My finding my brother doesn't change anything. This drug is a poison killing everyone coming in contact with it. We've got to shut it down fast."

CHAPTER SIX

Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Framingham

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Framingham proved to be a sprawling industrial town with a heavy Brazilian population. Leaving Kyle to dig through databases, Atticus and Ru used the Jag's GPS system to thread through the heart of the town to the women's prison.

Like the state of Massachusetts itself, MCI Framingham was small and orderly. Screened from the road by a stand of cattails, the prison was a modern redbrick facility with pale gold bricks highlighting the windows. Exercise yards winged the buildings, and a triple row of concertina wire shimmered bright silver in the weak sun. Storm clouds scudded across the sky, cloaking it with gray.

There was a bite of winter to the brittle morning. Atticus's breath frosted as he locked the Jag, and he remembered with a flash of remorse that Ukiah had spent the night out in the cold with a shattered arm. It seemed like his brother was never far from his mind. It had taken ruthless determination last night to ignore all the answers on Ukiah they might find in Kyle's data flood and focus instead on the cult activities in the Boston area.

As he and Ru stopped to sign in, they found David Brukman signing out. They had worked with the ATF agent a number of times; drugs and guns were a common mix, with one often used to buy the other.

Atticus nodded to Brukman, letting Ru do the shaking of hands and the friendly greeting, while he occupied his hands with signing in. If he could, he avoided pressing flesh with people.

"What are you doing here?" Ru effortlessly made small talk.

"I was transferred up to Boston last year." Brukman took back his gun from the guards. "Pittsburgh FBI field office notified us Monday that a gun-happy religious cult just moved back into the area and they bombed the hell out of Pittsburgh when they left."

"Temple of New Reason," Atticus guessed.

"You here for Ascii too?" Securing his gun, Brukman knew them well enough not to push for a handshake from Atticus. "We heard you took a hit in Buffalo but no details. Who went down? Anyone I know?"

Ru glanced to Atticus. The DEA was sitting on the information to protect Atticus's team. If the ATF was after the Temple of New Reason, though, they might be caught in the crossfire between the cult and the Pack.

"It was Scroggins' team," Atticus said quietly. "All three dead."

"Shit." Brukman's gaze hardened. "The Temple were the shooters?"

"We don't know yet." Ru dropped his voice to a whisper. "Scroggins' team was set up to buy a drug that we've since traced back to the cult. They're using bikers as go-betweens."

Brukman nodded, glancing about to see if anyone was listening.

"The shooters are heavily armed and ruthless," Atticus warned. "No ID on them yet, but we just found out that the Pack is going to war against the Temple."

Brukman surprised Atticus by admitting, "The Pittsburgh FBI field office gave us the heads-up on that. I don't know what the hell the Temple was thinking, except maybe they didn't know anything about the Pack. You don't fuck with them."

Atticus laughed at the truth of this, but Brukman misunderstood.

"Don't try anything with them, Steele. I know your team is good, but the Pack has spotted every undercover agent we've ever tried to get close to them and we've lost a lot of good people to them—one way or another."

"What do you mean?" Ru asked.

"Usually they disappear without a trace." Brukman shook his head, seeming confounded. "But sometimes—and this never makes sense, no matter how many tunes I say it—they join the Pack."

". . . a couple dozen can take the walk in the woods with the Pack, maybe one will come back out changed, one of them. . ."

Had the Pack somehow transformed the ATF agents? Made them inhuman? Made them . . . werewolves?

"What do you have on the Temple?" Ru changed the subject away from the Pack.

"Not much," Brukman admitted. "We were just starting to investigate them earlier this year when they dropped off the face of the planet. Homeland tracked them to Buffalo but they moved again; FBI says that the Temple grabbed a Homeland agent and maimed him." Brukman made a snicknoise while chopping down on his left wrist. "They've reattached the hand but—you know—it's never the same."

Perhaps the cult didn't understand Ukiah's nature if they routinely kidnapped and brutalized people.

"Any idea where the cult is now that they're back in this area?" Ru got a shake of Brukman's head. "What did you find out from Ascii?"

Brukman shook his head with a look of disgust. "So far she's clammed up tight to everyone; no one has been able to get her to say anything past her name and some Temple of New Reason rhetoric."

"Who all has talked to her?"

"Me, the state police, and an agent from the Pittsburgh FBI field office. Special Agent Zheng. Oh, there's a real number for you. Very cool. Very collected. You get the impression ice wouldn't melt in her mouth."

"Ouch."

Brukman glanced over Atticus's shoulder and jerked his chin up to indicate someone walking up behind him. "Speak of the devil."

Atticus turned to follow the gaze.

Agent Zheng wore FBI black with stylish perfection. She came only to his shoulder, but there was nothing fragile about her; under the black silk of her expensive pantsuit, she had a trim, athletic body. Her hair was perfectly straight, glossy black of Asian stock, but her eyes were gray and only vaguely Asian in shape. She looked at him with a gaze that gave nothing away about what she was thinking.

"Agent Steele," Agent Zheng greeted him. "They told me I could find you here."

They must have given her a very good description of him, though he supposed there weren't a lot of Native American federal agents in New England.

"Agent Zheng," he said to prove that she didn't have one up on him.

"The DEA wants a go at Ascii." Bitch though she might be, Brukman seemed eager to please the FBI agent.

"I heard." Agent Zheng kept her gray gaze on Atticus. "I need to speak to you about that. Can we talk privately?"

"In regard to?" Atticus wondered how she had heard when they had told no one.