13 to Life (34 page)

I understood, my stomach knotting, as Taser cables sliced through the crisp night air.

They weren’t here to kill the werewolves. They wanted them alive. Taser tips lodged in Wolf flesh. A
sizzle
and the air lit up—shades of violent electric blue. Desperate to tear the darts out, the Wolves’ teeth flashed away from their attackers to combat the cables carrying the current.

My fingers dug into the tree trunk, lichen crumbling to dust under my nails. I wanted claws. I wanted teeth. I wanted to help somehow. . . .

The blue shockwave knocked them to the ground. Immobilizing Catherine, Pietr, and the other Wolf. They struggled in slow motion, their responses dulled, muscles quaking.

“Again,” Nickolai demanded as he stood and brushed himself off. The
zip
of electricity delivered another blow. I’d never thought Tasers could deliver more than one jolt. But these did. Nickolai grinned. “Again.” And another. Until, finally they lay there, Catherine, Pietr, and Max, quaking, their forms shivering somewhere between man and beast.

Nickolai surveyed the scene. And realized someone was missing.

I heard him yell, “Where is that girl? You and you—Grigori—find her!” I hugged the tree so tightly I became one with its trunk, snuggling into it where the shadows of its knotted and gnarled neighbors wove tightly together in the gloom. Who would have guessed that years of playing flashlight tag with Amy, Sophia, and Annabelle Lee might come in handy against the Russian Mafia?

Dazed, his mafiosos stood, looking at him a moment.

“Get the girl!” he demanded. “She knows too much!”

Dammit.
Why did people keep presuming
that,
and if it was true, why the hell couldn’t my GPA reflect the fact?

Grigori and his companion raced past, just below the branches holding me. Did they expect a victim so terrified she ran blindly, thrashing through the forest? I was the other sort of terrified. My brain wasn’t working fast enough even to make flight possible.

I needed a weapon. The forest floor was littered with sticks and branches big enough to knock a guy’s head off, but that required getting close to someone’s head without getting shot. Nickolai may have wanted the Rusakovas alive, but I was no Rusakova.

I heard a thin and reedy whine and looked away from the bodies in the field, unable to watch them writhe as yet another bolt of electricity shot into them. They had already taken horribly unnatural amounts of current. The fact they still lived shocked me with equal doses of hope and fear.

Nickolai was speaking again. Thank God he was a talker, it might just buy us time. I only hoped time was what we needed. “This was not the delivery I had hoped for, but—”

The whine grew louder and I recognized the sound only when Alexi’s ATV roared onto the meadow and skidded to a halt. I thought for an instant that I heard something else even farther out. But Alexi yanked off his helmet, stepped off the ATV, and immediately had everyone’s attention.

“Ah, Alexi. I was just about to mention your obvious development of cold feet. . . .”

“I never get cold feet.”

“Then what would you call it?” Nickolai snapped. “Did you forget your part in this deal? Did you forget who pays your bills? What side you’re on?”

“
Nyet.
I have forgotten nothing. But I have remembered things you would rather I forget.” Alexi’s look alone could have killed the remaining seven men. I wondered why he hesitated—why didn’t he Change and attack?

“Then you surely remember that you are not like them.” Nickolai stuck a gun to Alexi’s head. “At all.”

Alexi paused in his progress forward. “I’ve never forgotten that.”

“Would you have ever told them, I wonder.” Nickolai smiled cruelly. “That you are not their brother—only their keeper? Like the man who shovels dung out of cages at a zoo?”

Alexi flinched.

I noticed the bodies between the two men tightened, necks craning as they strained to look up at their eldest brother. Their guardian.

Max snarled, lips drawn back, “You bastard! You were going to sell us out?”

Nickolai grinned. “Go ahead, Alexi. Tell them the truth. For once,” he urged. He verged on laughter.

Suddenly I understood how Alexi could lie so convincingly. He’d been practicing for years. And seeing what all his lying led
to . . . I shivered, staring at the mess in the meadow. In the short while I’d known him, Pietr had always been honest. Until I’d made a liar of him, too.

Dammit.
How did anyone untangle a mess of these proportions? How could everything ever go back to normal now? Once trust was gone . . . I bit my lower lip and tried not to think of my dad and the last two phrases he’d said to me. Instead, I focused on the disaster directly in my line of sight.

And I noticed how Pietr, Max, and Catherine, now merely human, slowly moved, slowly adjusted their positions, all the while letting their fingers subtly work at the taser darts. Barely flinching, they worked them loose from their damaged flesh and held them so the wires never went slack. So no one noticed.

“Tell them, Sasha. Tell them you are the grandson of the scientist who helped
create
their species. The man who dashed their hopes of normalcy and built them to self-destruct early. What is their lifespan now? I imagine it’s further compressed by their parents being full-bloods. It must be quite the countdown. Tick-tock, tick-tock,” he said with a sneer. “Do they hear it start ticking when they turn thirteen, I wonder? Quite the life sentence!” Now he did laugh, letting the noise bounce across the meadow.

“Sasha,” he addressed Alexi coldly with the nickname. “You must tell them!” He laughed again. “Tell them that when the USSR revoked his funding and put the children he’d created into state-run orphanages he disappeared, only watching from a distance. He was sure he was right—sure the transformation would take. . . . But they didn’t turn until later, did they?”

Nickolai shook his head. “He left them at the mercy of strangers. And such a pity, really. So many lost in those first years. He couldn’t track them all. So he married, right, Sasha?” Nickolai leered at Alexi.

Alexi denied nothing.

My stomach seized. I was going to be sick.

“If he couldn’t track and find all of his own creations, perhaps he could persuade—or create—others to assist him. But his wife was no fool. She only gave him one child—that blasted and meddlesome girl—your mother. You’re nothing but the son of a Coney Island con woman.”

Alexi went rigid at the mention.

I blinked. Things were starting to reorder themselves in my head. My brain tried to make sense of the insanity before me.

“So we became
werewolf
hunters!” Nickolai chortled. “Bring them back, train them up, reclaim the real Mother Russia with the dog soldiers the USSR threw away.” He nudged the muzzle of his pistol into Alexi’s temple. Pietr flinched at his feet.

“We were all thrown to the wolves, weren’t we? These men”—he motioned to the remaining mafia members—“started as good, honest men. We returned from serving our military—a proud tradition—and what was there for us? Nothing. But the O.P.S.—it welcomes all hard workers. It has a vision, including reclaiming all discarded souls—even werewolves.”

“Aaah!” I yelped feeling rough hands close on my ankles, dragging me from the safety of the tree branches. I hit the ground, hard, the fall jarring every bit of bone in me.

The pain, stunning as it was, made me acutely aware of the men now glaring down at me, smirks twisting their lips and raising their eyebrows. They grabbed my arms, wrenching me to my feet. I pulled against them, shoulders popping at the effort. I flailed. I kicked. I struggled as valiantly as I could. It was like I’d done nothing. “Aaarrgh,” I growled, and threw myself against one—using all of my strength.

“Ah—it sounds as if the girl will be joining us shortly. Perhaps there will be more compliance now. So, Sasha, let us have
what you’ve been receiving payment for all along and you won’t die here in the dirt like the simple man you are.”

My captors never reacted to anything I tried. I hadn’t even managed a pale imitation of Catherine’s efforts. In disgust I went limp between them, trying at least to summon the annoyance of dead weight.

Without hesitation they began to drag me across the meadow.

A huge vehicle crashed through the brush at the meadow’s northern edge, brambles across its bumper as it barreled into the middle of everything. It careened to one side suddenly, ramming into a mafioso with a
crunch
as the impact sent him flying.

My captors reacted to
that
. They dropped me to grab their guns.

“What have you done now, Sasha?” Nickolai demanded, his hand tightening on the pistol’s grip.

I scrambled away as the doors of the SUV snapped open and Wanda and Officer Kent—
Holy crap, what a strange, small world,
I thought—jumped out, guns firing.

Pietr rolled, wrenching the taser out of a man’s hands and sweeping Nickolai’s feet out from under him as he pulled the trigger. The shot went wide and Pietr was a Wolf again, Catherine and Max following suit.

“Get down, you bastards!” Wanda shouted.

“Shit! It’s Farthington all over again. They’re like
her,
aren’t they?” Kent yelled.

“Talk less—shoot more!” Wanda commanded.

The Mafia turned their attention, and their bullets, on the—cops? What the hell were they? I needed a chart to keep things straight.

Alexi lay on the ground—dead or unconscious, I couldn’t
tell. He wasn’t alone. Near him there were several bodies and across him lay a Wolf that gleamed silver in the starlight.

Oh, God
—I was running before I could think anything but
Pietr
—

“Shit!”
Wanda took me to the ground, covering me with her body as she dragged me toward the scant protection provided by the SUV. “Is everyone in Junction here?” she muttered, firing a shot that took down a Mafia member. “If you don’t have a gun—
and you’d better not—
hug the hubcaps and hope for the best,” she said, targeting another man.

“Pietr—” I insisted.

“Will be fine,” she retorted. “They can take a hell of a beating and be one hundred percent in a day.”

As she aimed for another Mafia member, Kent dropped, hit, on the other side of the SUV.

“Crap. I always have to do
everything,
” Wanda griped. “Stay here.” She slid under the SUV and tugged Kent to safety underneath it.

I saw her check him, roll him over, and quickly search him. He was still breathing, punctuating each careful breath with a curse that threatened to set the air on fire. Just on the far side of the SUV his gun twinkled, half-covered in leaf litter.

The Mafia was dropping all around us, some dispatched by Cat and Max, some taken out by Wanda. Separated from me during the firefight, Grigori was steadily advancing on Wanda like something out of a black-and-white horror flick.

I scrambled under the SUV, heading for the gun—as did Wanda. She rolled out just in front of me and, her gun on Grigori, reached behind her for Kent’s. It was just out of reach of her grasping hand. And I knew, as she must have, that she needed it. We’d both been counting. Wanda was nearly out of bullets. And nearly out of time.

Grigori fired a shot and Wanda gasped, rocked backward by the impact. Blood spread from her shoulder and she smacked her hands together, steadying her pistol with a two-handed grip. She pulled the trigger.

Grigori took a half step back, touching a spot on his arm where blood seeped up and stained his sleeve. She’d grazed him. He grinned. And adjusted his aim.

I grabbed Kent’s gun, pulling it free of the rattling leaves that dotted the meadow. The sights glimmered for a single second, Grigori’s eyes widening in realization. His index finger twitched as the muzzle of Kent’s gun flashed, hot and dangerous as any fire.

Grigori dropped, eyes rolling back. He coughed, blood dribbling out of his mouth and then he was still. Dead.

I dropped the gun. I had killed a man.

“You little bitch—” I swung around in time to see Nickolai raise his gun and snare me in his sights. No time to cry out—I closed my eyes—and nothing. What? My eyes popped open. Nickolai staggered, his legs tangling, pistol dropping . . .

. . . as his head landed on the ground with a
thump.
About two yards away from his limp body.

Pietr, the Wolf, balanced precariously on his hind legs, claws covered in gore, the soft fur of his chest spattered with the same blood that streaked his muzzle. He looked at me, eyes wide and wild, and then he dropped down to all fours.

I began to breathe again. Just before I vomited into the leaf litter.

“Come on,” Wanda urged. She winced. Blindly, I turned and helped her to her feet. “Get Kent . . .”

The meadow was eerily quiet, except for the occasional gust of wind rustling leaves and the ragged breathing of the werewolves and cops. Together Wanda and I dragged Kent out from
under the SUV and awkwardly pushed and pulled him into the back of the vehicle.

Catherine and Max were dressed and beside Pietr, who crouched near Alexi, his eyes closed. As human as they seemed now, I noticed something feral about them for the first time. Something about their eyes and in the lines of their faces seemed to promise the beast within was never far from the surface.

Werewolves!
my mind howled, faced with the facts.

Pietr’s eyes snapped open, and he struggled to find words. “Jess—”

I stayed still. Watching. Stunned.

Catherine looked at me, worry filling her eyes. “She’s still here.” She turned back to him. “Put on some clothes first,” she said, shoving his pants at him.

They all turned as Alexi groaned and slowly stood. Cat jumped in front of him and smacked him so hard his head rocked on his neck.

“Catherine!” Pietr growled, but Alexi put one hand up as he rubbed his jaw with the other.

“It’s okay.” He looked at her, shamed. “I deserve worse.” He put his hands out in front of him, looking at Wanda, expecting to be handcuffed.