Cool Hand (30 page)

“He was trying to gauge my strength by testing himself against you,” Felix said. “Why would he do that, unless if he was thinking about a challenge or encroaching on Denver territory?”

“I don’t think—”

“After all, he’s confined to Albuquerque and its surroundings,” he talked over me. “He’ll be looking over the border and seeing the Denver pack sprawling across all of Colorado. Like every other pack in the area, he’ll be wondering how much hard it would be to take a slice of our territory.”

“But how could he run two territories, with Santa Fe and Cimarron in between?”

Felix didn’t have an answer to that. He changed tack instead.

“How screwed are you with Altau?” he said.

“I don’t know, Felix. I haven’t made the call,” I replied. “If I have something solid to report about Diana, that might buy me a little forgiveness, so I’m holding off until tomorrow.”

He was silent for a moment.

“What about forgiveness from the pack?” I asked quietly.

As strong an alpha as Felix was, the Denver pack was too big and powerful for him to simply command them on matters like this. I’d already been an issue with them, now I’d added to the problems. I hadn’t even convinced Felix I’d done the right things down here. Convincing the pack would be much harder.

He snorted.

“Understand, I’m trying to deal with this the way it is, not how I want it to be. So, I’m not going to try giving you orders I know you won’t obey. And personally, I hope you find Diana and she helps you past your crusis problems.” He sighed. “I value you and Alexander, your Athanate House and the tremendous things your kin can do for us, but from the pack’s immediate point of view, the key fact is that you’ve made a deal with Albuquerque for you and Alexander, one that’s a potentially huge security problem for us.”

I tried to argue, but he overrode me.

“That’s the way they’ll see it, until you can prove otherwise, which is going to be too late,” he said. “The fix is easy. The pack will say that you and Alexander cannot share our territory. I’m pretty sure we could argue a border territory for you. Alamosa down south for instance, or somewhere out in the San Juan.”

Exiled.

Thinking of the similarity to Gold Hill and Ute Mountain made that really hurt.

“What else would fix it? I mean fix it so we could stay in Denver. If I worked out the ritual to help Were change?”

No response. There was background noise on the line. Someone crying. And I heard Martha’s voice, speaking soothingly.

“Felix? Felix! What’s happening?”

Oh, God. Olivia.

He came back on the line.

“It’s started,” he said, his voice bleak. “Olivia’s just had the first of the attacks.”

He was silent for such a long time I thought he’d put the phone down again. Then: “If you have a ritual that works, I’d like to believe it’ll change the pack’s attitude, but that’s not the point really. Time’s run out for Olivia. You’ve got a couple of days, no more.”

By the time Felix and I finished talking, everyone else had been through the bathroom.

They were all sitting there, watching me struggle to overcome my reaction to the news about Olivia.

We’d gotten a family room with two double beds, so close together there was barely room to get between them. We split up naturally, with Savannah and Claude in one, Tullah and me in the other. Claude was already asleep when I came out of the shower. Savannah was sitting on the edge of the bed, nervously watching me. She’d borrowed a pair of shorts and a T from Tullah to sleep in. Her heart rate was inching back up.

I guess I’d given her cause. I’d nearly attacked her, and by the end of my conversation with Felix there wasn’t anyone in the room who doubted how close to the edge I was.

But Savannah’s worry wasn’t for her personal safety. As I moved around the room drying my hair, she shifted slightly so she was shielding Claude from me. I didn’t think she was even aware of it.

I sat on the bed facing her. The gap was so narrow, our knees touched.

Tullah gave me a frown.

No one appreciated how much effort I was putting into
not
biting.

Maybe if I hadn’t been
not
biting when Olivia offered it, she’d have more time now.

Focus on the here and now.

I studied Savannah, which made her drop her eyes.

How do I start building bridges?

“I’m sorry about earlier,” she said suddenly, looking down at where her fingers worried the edge of the blanket. She spoke quietly to avoid disturbing her brother. “I’m not good at talking. Y’know. At expressing myself.”

She’d caught me off guard. I was supposed to be the one apologizing.

“That’s fine. I’m sorry too, for the way I behaved.”

Savannah’s eyes flicked across to Tullah. “You’re having problems with Blood. I understand. I should have thanked you for saving us right away, and not....” she faltered.

“And not challenged me.”

“Yeah. And you’re right. We made choices. I mean, we can’t go back. We’re kin.”

I gave a little hum of sort-of agreement and she was silent for a while.

“Pretty tats.” I reached out to run a finger down the spiraling design on her arm.

I was trying to shift her onto some other topic and let her calm down. People who put that amount of effort into getting themselves inked are usually happy to talk about it. Her tattoos were a blend of Native American totems and Celtic spirals that I thought were lovely.

“They’re beautiful, actually,” I said. “Who came up with the idea?”

“They’re my design,” she said. There was pride in her voice, but instead of calming her, my attention was having the opposite effect.

She swallowed, her heartrate edging up.

“I…I just want to ask, Mistress—”

“Amber,” I interrupted.

She nodded jerkily and went on. “I wanted to ask you to give Claude some time before you….”

She slipped her T off and moved across to sit beside me, putting one trembling hand on my leg.

“Please, feed from me instead. I’m…well, I haven’t…”

“I wasn’t planning to bite him tonight, Van,” I said. “Or you.”

“Oh.”

It wasn’t what Savannah wanted right then, but I slid an arm around her and hugged her slight body to me.

I felt her willing herself to relax.

I sighed. The right thing to do was to send her off into her own bed at once.

Despite everything, my Athanate was enjoying this too much. I wasn’t about to bite her. And this girl had spent half the evening crouched down on Zane’s floor, with a dead body and an unconscious Were for company. Was I worse than that?

Amber.
Tullah’s voice inside my head.
See yourself as she sees you
.

My eyes went blurry and I felt dizzy. Kaothos was messing with my head.

She sent me a glimpse of myself from Savannah’s perspective.

Frowning. Strong. Overwhelming. Strange. Scary.

I blinked and eased up on the hug.

She saw me like that. How did I see her?

Savannah was a contradiction. On the surface there were the tattoos, the punky hair and the awkward speech. Nothing extreme, but not mainstream either. She was also Athanate kin and that was hardly ‘normal’. But beneath that level was a woman, barely more than a girl really, who craved normal. I’d seen inside her house in Albuquerque. Apart from the hiding space, the place defined normalcy. For Albuquerque at any rate. She’d been the one who’d created that feeling.

And she was the same girl who’d beat up on herself for not being able to do more for Larry’s other kin. Who’d risked her life without hesitation to rescue her brother.

The sort of person I hoped would be at home in House Farrell.

But also the person who, if I was reading the signals right, wasn’t at all comfortable with the idea of me biting her. Or anything else I might do to her. It made me wonder about her arrangements with Larry.

And again, she’d put all those fears aside when she’d thought I might be wanting to bite Claude.
Bite me instead
…

Overactive hero complex. Who does that remind me of?
Tara snarked.

Shut up, smartass.

I planted a kiss on the top of Savannah’s head and willed my body to put out some of the pacific pheromones instead of the Athanate sex appeal that I’d been pumping out at the Calle.

“Go on, into bed,” I said to her, and pulled her T back over her head. “Careful not to wake Claude.”

I swiveled and slipped into the sheets as Tullah got in the other side.

“Thank you, Amber,” Savannah whispered.

“What kind of work do you do, Van?” Tullah asked to lighten the atmosphere a touch.

“I’m a biologist. I was working towards getting a research position.” She sighed. “I guess that’s gone now.”

“You’ll find something new,” I said. “What about Claude?”

“School.” Her voice was getting fainter. A couple of questions later she slipped off.

Tullah took my arm and wedged it under her pillow.

“I’m not going to go sleepwalking,” I complained. “Or sleep biting.”

“Course you aren’t,” she replied. “Not now, anyway.”

“Am I really that bad?” I murmured, thinking of the image that Savannah had had of me.

“Sometimes,” Tullah said, yawning. “You’re kinda wobbling. One minute, it’s you, and the next it’s the monster.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence. David’s email come through okay?”

“Yup. Sycamore Ranch, not far from here. Something about the ownership flagged it, and he also found that Jaworski is from the Polish for sycamore.”

“Hmm. Okay, we look tomorrow.” I switched the lights out, but I wasn’t finished.

“So,” I said, dragging the sound out. “I have some questions for you.”

Tullah was suddenly nervous. With my behavior over the last day, I guessed I couldn’t blame her.

“You know when you turned up in the Hill Bitch and kidnapped me, Felix had just gotten a call. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

Tullah cleared her throat. “I can tell you it was Alex and Jen. All I know is they had some plan that would divert him.”

Interesting.

What the hell had they cooked up? Felix had said something about my kin doing ‘tremendous’ things for him. I should have questioned him about it.

Were my kin really working together? And what did it mean for them—a temporary truce? I’d have to ask them at the next opportunity.

“Okay. One more little puzzle,” I said. “When I woke up after the kidnapping, we were in Colorado Springs, in a park.”

Tullah nodded. She seemed to be finding the pattern of the blanket fascinating, tracing it with her fingers in the dark.

“In the
middle
of a park. A couple of minutes’ walk from the car.”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“So how did I get there? Did you carry me?”

No way they carried me. I’m five-ten and one-forty plus.

“No.” She ran her hand across the blanket one last time and then looked at me. “We did a zombie on you.”

“A
what
?”

“It’s sort of…” She paused. “Look, zombies don’t exist like the stories. You can’t take a body and just give it some instructions and then let it go running off to kill people and eat their brains or whatever.”

“But…”

“Well, you can pilot somebody. It’s not really very useful in most situations. You can’t just jack in and control something as complex as a human body. Gross motor function only, and not much of that—”

“So, I’m getting a picture here…stumbling, slobbering, swaying…”

Tullah blushed. “No, we walked on either side. You probably just looked as if you were feeling sick. The kids in the park didn’t even notice.”

“So much better.” I had to work to sound grumpy.

“We should have a quick lesson on using the energy,” she changed the subject hurriedly, “and then you need some rest.”

“Yeah. Tell me, first, are we being dumb? Why don’t we break the lock on you and just rely on the lizard and your workings to achieve what we need?”

She snorted softly and turned the lights off.

“Kaothos and I aren’t that strong yet, whatever she says. And her signature in the energy is distinctive. We couldn’t be sure we’d be strong enough for whatever we wanted to do, and from what we saw with the Denver community, we’d have every Adept in the land united against us.”

“Okay.”

“Your signature, on the other hand, is hidden,” Tullah said thoughtfully. “You seem to have this ability to channel other workings, but without Hana it’s almost as if…”

“As if I can’t use the energy at all.”

“No.” She scratched her head. “I’m not really a shamanic Adept; I mean, I know the basic training, but I’m trained more in the standard stuff. If I didn’t know you and someone asked me, I’d say you have a little latent ability and nothing more. But Chatima knew you had much more ability—enough that she gave you the necklace. Anyway…tonight’s Adept exercises…”

We were both tired. Tullah kept going, but it wasn’t long before I was sliding toward sleep and the nightmares began to stir.

Then Kaothos came out and claimed me again.