Dead Letter Day (37 page)

I turned slowly around to see if I could spot or sense anything, but got nothing but a whole lot of werewolf for my trouble.

“What?” Norah asked.

“No crows,” I said.

“Is that good?”

“Maybe.” What I hoped was that it meant that Inge was truly on her own. Perhaps Frigga and Odin had lost interest in our little drama. It would be like them. Fickle creatures gods. I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw them.

I wondered how far Inge had trusted them.

I HAD ASKED TO TAKE FIRST WATCH OF ERIK AND SVEN. For one thing, I wanted a better look at Chuck’s facilities. A second advantage would be being away from everyone for a few minutes. As much as I loved not being lonely, I still needed a little solo time on a regular basis, a few
minutes here and there where someone wasn’t asking me a question or telling me about something. Believe me, no one down in the depths under Chuck’s house wanted to get chatty with me.

Inge hissed at me for a second when I first walked in and then settled down in her cell, lying on the metal cot and facing the wall. What Chuck had set up in the basement was, for all intents and purposes, a jail cell. Actually, three of them.

They looked exactly like the holding cells you always see on television shows when people get arrested. There was a metal toilet and a metal sink sticking out of the wall and a metal cot, with a mattress on it, also attached to a wall. That was pretty much it.

Oh, the bars were coated with silver. That was different. Not that it made all that much difference for Inge. I wasn’t sure if it made any difference for Erik or Sven. With the injection of werewolf blood, did they take on the vulnerabilities of a werewolf as well as a werewolf’s strength? I knew they definitely were affected by the full moon. That was totally werewolfy. I figured I might as well ask. The worst that could happen would be that they ignored me.

“Hey,” I said, trying to sound conversational. “Do you burn when you touch these bars?”

Erik walked up to within a few inches of the bars and raised his arms. Stripes were seared across them at the exact width of the bars on the cells. “Does that answer your question?” he asked.

“Pretty much,” I answered.

He bared his teeth and growled at me.

“Don’t talk to her.” Inge had gotten off her cot and walked to the bars of her cell. “She’s not our friend,” she told her son.

“I think I figured that out, Mom,” he said sounding like
a total teenager. No wonder they’d been so hard to control. Teenage rebellion crossed with werewolf blood injections? How volatile could Inge have made these boys? I shook my head. She’d done it for the best of reasons and with the purest of motives. She’d wanted to protect them. She’d wanted to make sure her children were safe. She’d managed to do it in a way that was completely wrong for so many people and for so many reasons.

I turned to her. “So how did you get Frigga to weave you that silver net?” I asked.

“She didn’t.” Inge went back to her cot.

“Oh, come on. She had to have at least helped. No way you could have done that on your own. You don’t have enough of the blood in you to make an object of power like that.” I walked over to her cell and leaned against the wall next to it.

Inge stiffened. Something about saying she didn’t have enough of the blood in her had bothered her.

“Did she spin the silver and then you wove it?” I pressed.

She turned away from me, but I knew somehow I’d hit a nerve. But which one? “What did Frigga get from it anyway?” One thing I knew about most gods and goddesses was that they didn’t do anything for free. There was always something in it for them.

“She got us,” Sven said from his cell, glaring at me, eyes glittering behind his silver bars.

“I told you to hush,” Inge said.

Sven retreated away from the bars again, but didn’t stop staring at me, his eyes glowing red in the dim light.

A few cogs clicked into place. I turned to Sven. “Frigga wanted Ulfhednar again, but not only was your mother’s blood too diluted to have much power, yours was even more diluted, wasn’t it?”

No one answered me. They didn’t have to. “She made
the net for you to capture a werewolf so you could try to strengthen their blood. In return, they owed her their lives.” I shook my head. What had gone wrong, then? Why wasn’t Frigga here protecting her new warriors now?

“But they were too volatile, weren’t they? The more werewolf blood you gave them, the less you could control them.” I was starting to get it. “She cut you loose, didn’t she? That’s why you were running away from the battle. You couldn’t count on her protection anymore, could you?”

That was why Huginn and Muninn had disappeared. She didn’t care what I did because she was abandoning her little project and Inge with it. I heard a small sob coming from Inge’s cell and realized how on the mark I’d been.

“Frigga’s not the only one to abandon you, either, is she?” I sank down on the ground so I was closer to eye level with the cot. “Someone in this Pack was working with you, too. Not just Kevin. In fact, Kevin wasn’t really working with you at all, was he? You used him.” I shook my head. He hadn’t been that hard to manipulate either. “Who else was helping you, Inge? Who told you where you could find Paul and when he would be vulnerable and alone?”

There was still no answer from the cell, just the quiet sobbing of a mother whose heart had broken into too many pieces.

As it turned out, she didn’t need to answer. The night split with the sound of a horrible roar of pain. It was coming from the direction of Paul’s room. I left the basement cells at a dead run.

I COULD SMELL THE BURNING FLESH FROM THE FIRST floor. The thought of it gagged me, but I couldn’t let it stop me. If someone had attacked Paul again, I wasn’t sure he
would survive. His body had taken too much of a beating to heal itself as it should. Why wasn’t Alex or Ted making whoever it was stop? The screaming was terrible. It didn’t even sound like Paul.

I took the stairs three at a time, trying hard not to think about what would happen if I tripped and fell and landed on my stomach. I rounded the corner to see why it didn’t sound like Paul screaming.

It was because it wasn’t him. Norah and Alex had Sam pinned beneath the silver net that had been used to kidnap Paul.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “You’re burning him!” I tried to grab the edges of the net and pull it off of Sam. I couldn’t bear to see his young open face twisted in agony like that.

“Careful, Melina. I don’t want to let him up until he drops the knife,” Alex shouted to me over Sam’s roars of pain.

That’s when I saw what he had in his hand. The knife was wicked and long with a vicious curve to its blade. It shone in the light.

“Unless I miss my guess, the blade is pure silver,” Alex said, giving the net a shake. “Drop it!” he commanded.

“NO!” Sam shouted and then screamed again as the silver came into contact with new areas on his body.

I walked across the net and stepped on Sam’s wrist. His fingers opened and the blade dropped from them. Without taking my boot off his arm, I reached through the net and plucked the blade out. “Let him up,” I said. “Now.”

I turned. By now, there were at least ten of Chuck’s werewolves gathered around us. I held the blade in front of me and stared at each one in turn. “Don’t even think about it,” I said.

Then I sank down onto the floor next to Sam. “This is some kind of mistake, right? There’s an explanation.”

He stared up at me and under the pain, I saw an expression on his face I’d never seen before. It looked an awful lot like hate. Then he spat at me.

I wiped the spittle off the side of my face. “I trusted you. I thought you were helping me. I thought you were helping Paul.”

Sam laughed. Or I think it was a laugh. It came out more like a rasp. “I know. That’s what made it so effective. You made it easy for me to keep track of you.”

My shoulders slumped forward. Suddenly I was terribly tired. “Why?”

He shook his head. “I can’t believe you even have to ask. Look at where I am in this Pack. They have me working in the kitchen. I cook. I clean. I might as well be a chambermaid. I’m a werewolf, goddamn it.”

“You did it because you didn’t like your chore list? Why didn’t you just ask Chuck for something else to do?”

Chuck stepped forward from the crowd. “It doesn’t work that way, Melina. You earn your way up in the Pack. Sam had a long way to go to earn his way up.”

“I’m young. I’m strong. But there were so many to fight and challenge between me and the top. With Paul gone, the infighting would start. They’d take each other out and get out of my way.” Sam curled onto his side, wincing.

“How did you know about Inge?” I was still confused. It still didn’t make sense to me.

“How could anyone not know about Inge?” He tried to laugh again, but it sounded even worse. “She broadcasts her emotions around like a TV station. You’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb to miss it.”

“But the part with Frigga? How did you know about that?”

“That? That was just dumb luck. I was there in the woods
that night. I saw her. I saw her try to kill herself and saw Frigga stop her. I knew those sons of hers could never be Ulfhednar without some assistance. They’re just kids. There’s nothing that special about them.”

“Did you know what they were doing to Paul this whole time?” I finally asked. That was the part of it that horrified me the most. Maybe it shouldn’t have been. Maybe I should have been more horrified by the fact that he was so willing to manipulate all these beings around him that had pledged to always have his back. Maybe I should have been more horrified at the way he manipulated a woman’s grief over a dead child. I wasn’t, though.

He shrugged. “Pretty much. What did it matter, anyway, though? No one even thought he was missing until you came along. Everyone thought he was off on some personal retreat or something. He would have been dead before anyone realized anything was really wrong if you hadn’t stuck in your nose in where it didn’t belong.”

I stood and looked at the Pack. “You can take him,” I said. I let the knife dangle from my hand at my side. I didn’t let go of it, though.

I WENT BACK DOWN INTO THE BASEMENT, TO THE CELLS, taking one step at a time and not rushing. It was quiet. I thought maybe all three of them might be asleep. I didn’t care.

“They just caught Sam trying to finish off Paul,” I said.

Inge stiffened on her cot.

“Yep. It’s all over now. That’s the last of your allies, isn’t it?”

She didn’t say anything. I don’t know what I expected her to say anyway. I just thought she should know. I stood and headed back to the stairs, then I heard a groan.

I turned. Erik’s face contorted and he doubled over. I rushed to his cell. “What the hell?”

“Erik!” Inge screamed.

“Chuck, something’s wrong!” I yelled, hoping that everything I thought I knew about werewolf hearing was correct and that he would be able to hear me no matter where he was in the house.

Erik’s brother curled into fetal position on his cot and let out a groan, then began to shake.

“Chuck, now!” I yelled, not sure what to do.

Inge had thrown herself against the bars that separated her from her sons. “What is it? What’s wrong?” She thrust her arms through the bars and Erik lunged at her. She barely retreated in time to avoid being slashed with the claws that had suddenly grown out of Erik’s fingertips.