Frostbitten

QUESTION

"THE BROTHER," CLAY said. "Interrogate, then hold him hostage."

"Where?"

Clay shrugged. "I don't care. Hogtie him and leave him out here. Or kill him and pretend we've still got him, hope big brother takes the bait."

I shook my head. "He's family; he won't talk, and if Tesler decides he doesn't particularly want his baby brother back, we're screwed."

"You're the boss."

"You disagree?"

He leaned out to look at the two men. "I don't think it's a sure bet either way." When Clay came after me, the other two mutts had chased him only as far as the edge of the building, like dogs making a token effort to frighten a trespasser off the property while really hoping he doesn't turn around. Then they'd stayed there, waiting for Tesler. Unfortunately, he didn't return. We snuck up close to them just as he called his brother, apparently telling them to meet up some place in the city.

"Follow?" Clay said.

I shook my head. "They'll catch on before we get to the rendezvous point, and we can't pull anything downtown in broad daylight. I say grab one and get some answers." I peeked around the building corner and sized the two up. "We've got the leader's little brother and a flunky."

"We'll try the flunky, then."

CULLING ONE FROM a herd of two can be tough, presuming the other one wants to object to his Pack mate being taken. This one didn't. As soon as he saw we'd honed in on his companion, he took off to find his brother.

Then Clay held Dan while I found and secured the interrogation room-a storage unit for a business that rented boats and fishing equipment, seasonal rentals that were now out of season.

Clay brought the mutt in. When we put him into a chair, he started to fight in earnest until Clay clocked him, dazing him enough to get the bindings on.

"This scenario seem familiar?" Clay said as he booted the rolling chair into the middle of the room. "Remind you of what you did in a cabin up near here? To an old friend of mine?"

Dan's mouth opened, ready to spew some variation on "it wasn't me-I was just following orders." But before he got the first word out, he snapped his mouth shut and switched to a new tactic-babbling in his mother tongue.

"You can skip the 'I don't speak the language' shit," Clay said. "It's only gonna piss me off, and it won't help you one bit. You know Roman Novikov, Alpha of the Russian Pack? He's offered to translate, make sure your civil rights aren't violated before I break your kneecaps."

"It's not Russian," I said.

Clay glanced at me.

"He's not speaking Russian. We can get Jeremy or Roman to confirm that, but I'm pretty sure of it."

To a unilingual ear like Clay's or Reese's, I'm sure it sounded like Russian-it did even to a bilingual one like mine. But my mother used to sing to me in Russian and taught me some words in language games, like the ones Jeremy and I play with the twins. So while I couldn't remember more than a half-dozen words, I knew Russian when I heard it-and this wasn't.

I told Clay it could be Polish or Ukrainian. Neither Jeremy nor Karl nor any of our other multilingual sources could help with those.

"That's that, then," I said. "If he can't answer our questions, he's of no use to us."

"Kill him?"

Dan's head jerked up fast enough to tell us his grasp of English was adequate.

"Should have grabbed the brother," Clay said. "Held him as a hostage. Think we can still catch up with him?"

"He's long gone. But we can use this one to send a message."

Clay nodded. "Have to make it a good one, though. Scare the shit out of them. Snapping his neck won't do."

I took out my hotel key card and lifted it, just out of the mutt's view. "How about this?"

"Shit." Clay rubbed his chin. "The last time we used that… "

"Messy, I know. But we need messy. The only problem is the screaming."

The mutt jerked around, moving the chair enough to see what horrific instrument of torture I held. When he did-and realized he'd outed himself-he let loose a stream of Anglo-Saxon profanity.

"Huh," Clay said. "Seems he knows some English after all. Let's see if we can expand his vocabulary."

He slammed his fist into Dan's jaw. The mutt gasped and snarled, then started to swear.

"Nope," Clay said. "Same words. Let's try-"

He grabbed an oar from the wall and swung it against Dan's kneecaps. Wood and bone crackled. Dan bit off a scream, his eyes rolling. Then he lifted those eyes to Clay.

"What you want to know?" he said in perfectly serviceable English.

WE MIGHT HAVE removed the language barrier, but that didn't mean we were getting anything useful from him. We started with the most important issue: why had they killed Dennis? And the corollary questions: did they know about Joey and if so why were they leaving him alone? We weren't worried about tipping Dan off about Joey-it wasn't as if this mutt would ever see his buddies again to tell them. But Dan insisted he had no idea what we were talking about. Other werewolves in Anchorage? Never met them. His scent found at the site of a murdered former Pack member? Huh, we must be mistaken. Maybe our sense of smell wasn't as good as we thought.

On to Reese, then. Nope, he didn't cut the finger off any young werewolf in a museum. Hated museums. No, he hadn't witnessed any finger-cutting either. As for why his scent was there, he had no idea. Maybe another werewolf in Anchorage had a similar scent. Maybe that was the one we'd smelled in Dennis's cabin, too. All werewolves did kind of smell alike, you know.

What about the invasion of our room and the "deposit" he'd left ill our bed? Nope, not him. Tesler admitted they'd been there? Ah, that might explain things, then. Tesler was crazy. He wouldn't put it past the guy to kill the old man for kicks, cut off that kid's fingers and jerk off in my underwear.

But we hadn't mentioned that the dead werewolf was old. Or where we found the second deposit. No, we must have. How else would he know?

Dan wasn't too bright, but he was tenacious. Though he was quick to turn on his leader, there was no way he was admitting to having done anything himself. Still, as if to prove his usefulness, he did volunteer to give us full dossiers on the Teslers if we'd put him into protective custody like Reese. When we didn't say anything in response, he seemed to take that as agreement.

As Roman had suspected, the Tesler brothers-Travis and Eddie-spent most of their lives in Ukraine. That's where their father was from, before he immigrated to the United States and tried to make a life as a farmer. When that failed, he'd gone back home, taking his young sons with him, and years later they'd met this mutt-Danya Podrova.

The story Podrova gave came close enough to Roman's that we knew he was at least attempting to tell the truth. The Teslers ran a small gang that had moved around Eastern Europe, staying off the Russian Pack's territory. Of course, in Podrova's version, the Russians were a bunch of bullies who'd kept them on the run, when all they wanted to do was settle down and ply their trade. And the nature of that trade? Gun-running, he readily admitted; he even offered to help the American Pack set up its own enterprise.

"Very good money," he said. "Lots of places, they need guns. Pay a lot of money."

So the Tesler gang had jumped around Eastern Europe, picking up new members as it went. Then they'd run into a spot of trouble because of Travis Tesler's habit.

"He likes the girls. He likes the ones who do not always like him, if you understand."

Oh, I understood.

Podrova downplayed Tesler's problems with the law. They'd been planning to move anyway, he explained. Eddie had been researching Anchorage, thinking it might be a stable base of operations. A port city in the wild country, far enough from the American Pack that no one would pay them much attention.

Right now, it was just Podrova and the brothers, setting up in Anchorage. Two others were off on business, establishing trade routes in the Lower 48. And, as Roman suspected, more had been left behind, waiting for the brothers to get established here. Part of those efforts, it seemed, was clearing out all other werewolves.

That explained why they'd killed Dennis, but not why he'd been tortured. And what about Joey? Considering how quick these mutts were to pounce on Reese and now on us, it seemed unlikely that they'd been here for over a month and didn't know they still had another werewolf in town.

But here Podrova retreated into silence. He didn't know Dennis. And those men murdered in the woods? He didn't know them either. Wolves got them, he'd heard. As for the girls? Well, yes, Tester did have a bad habit, but he didn't do that anymore, not after the trouble he caused back home.

So, Dennis had been killed by werewolves, three humans had been slaughtered by wolves and three girls were missing-all since this mini-pack had come into town. But they had nothing to do with any of it.

Clay took me aside.

"I need you to stand guard," he said.

"I know what you have to do, Clay."

"Yeah, but you don't need to see it."

"I think I do, if I'm going to be Alpha. Jeremy plays his part. He takes the lead and asks the questions."

"Maybe, but after all these years, I don't require supervision. I know what you want from him. I'll get it. If I have questions, I'll come out and ask."

"I need to see-"

"But I don't need you to see it."

I met his gaze and understood. It wasn't just about me. Alpha or not, I was still Clay's lover, and this wasn't a side of himself he cared to show me. As Beta and Alpha, Clay and I would never be like Clay and Jeremy. We shouldn't try. If we were going to make this work, I had to remember that.

So I stood guard. What Clay was doing took time-and right now it was time I didn't really want to spend by myself, lost in my thoughts, thinking about Travis Tesler and what he'd tried to do to me.

For twenty years I'd been the only female werewolf in a world of men who viewed women not as mothers and sisters and girlfriends and wives, but as receptacles for satisfying two basic drives: sex and reproduction. Some saw me and yearned for what they couldn't have-a partner, a mate, a woman who would understand and accept them and share their lives completely. Others felt a very different yearning-the drive to take revenge on Clay for enforcing Pack law or to step up on the hierarchy ladder by hurting the man one rung from the top.

After all those years, all those encounters, attempted rape should be par for the course. I should have dealt with it again and again, until I finally expunged the demons of my childhood and those old wounds scarred over, tough and impenetrable. But they hadn't.

There had been a few halfhearted attempts-mutts who weren't rapists, by nature, but thought it would be an easy way to hurt Clay. Property trespass more than sexual assault. It hadn't taken much of a fight to dissuade them, and I'd never felt seriously threatened.

For the rest, they'd dreamed of sex not rape, of sweaty hand-to-hand combat, bites turning to bruising kisses, punches to rough gropes and eager caresses. Mutual passionate sex-their egos would never accept anything less. They wanted to show me that they'd be a better mate than Clay-a better lover, a better partner, certainly a saner one. When seduction failed, most backed off, leaving the delusional few who were convinced it was only a matter of time before I came around.

For twenty years, I'd shattered illusions. Illusions of revenge. Illusions of love. Illusions of sex. But not illusions of rape. These men had never felt inferior to a woman-a mere human-so they'd never felt the need to prove their superiority. Now I'd met a mutt who did and he was still out there, thwarted and waiting for his chance to try again.

I had only to think about it and somewhere inside me, I was twelve years old again, shivering under the covers, praying he wouldn't come tonight and knowing if he did, there was nothing I could do.