Hidden Trump (Bite Back 2) (32 page)

“Alexander is entirely too taken in by the local stories. He thinks your great-grandmother was an Adept involved in the transition of new Were, and we should investigate.”

I shifted my weight. I didn’t really believe it either, but he was dismissing it out of hand. I wanted to be convinced one way or another on evidence. Alex wouldn’t have arranged this if he couldn’t make a good argument for it.

“And you’re having some…issues there.” I skirted the problem word, but I wanted to see his reaction. Larimer himself gave nothing away. But he’d used the reaction from the pack to threaten me, and now it worked against him. I could feel their reaction in the dark corners of the barn. There was a problem. And as I came to that conclusion, the same question I’d asked about Athanate came to the surface. Where were all the werewolves? This couldn’t be the whole pack, surely? My sense of smell had been getting sharper over the last couple of years as I became more Athanate, and I’d never smelled a hint of Were in Denver until I’d met Alex.

Larimer was watching me shrewdly, trying to guess the thoughts going through my head.

“The thing is,” he said, “even if, as the stories say, you were firstborn
and
received the token,
and
it actually worked, you’ve obviously lost the knowledge that goes with it.”

Ask questions and say nothing.

I jumped. Tara spoke to me at the oddest times, but I always listened. Something had just happened here.

“What token?” I said to cover my surprise.

“A fetish.” He waved his hand in exasperation. “Some mumbo-jumbo ritual thing that gets passed down. Who knows, a cup? A carving? Adepts are always into that sort of crap. And they’d love to claim it was their role, to help the Were. That the Were need Adepts.”

“Who would know the rituals? Adepts? You said the knowledge is lost. Do you mean completely?”

He shrugged. “
If
it exists, the Adepts might know.”

“You don’t get along well with them either?”

“I prefer thinking of it,” he bared his teeth in what he might have described as a smile, “as no one gets along well with us.”

Okay.

“So my great-grandmother may have been an Adept.”

Larimer sat forward. “She almost certainly was.” He pointed at my belly. “I can sense there are echoes in there, Ms. Farrell. That doesn’t mean she had any role with the Were. And you want to be very careful with Adepts. They don’t like people who aren’t Adepts experimenting with powers.”

A creak above made me glance up. Olivia was lying on a cross beam like a leopard, staring hungrily at me. She hadn’t been in wolf form when I’d come in and still wasn’t. Maybe she was one of the problems. I hoped that was the cause of the hungry look, not that there was a tasty Athanate trapped in a barn in the middle of nowhere.

Get out. Now.

“Well, I’ve said my piece.” I indicated the casts and photos. “The one police officer who knows that I’m looking at this will hold off a while, but at some stage he’s going to want to talk to me. We need to talk again before then. What the FBI are doing, and what they might make of this, I don’t claim to know.”

Larimer nodded.

I twisted around. “Alex?”

“You will leave him alone for a while,” Larimer said. “It’s what he needs.”

“Forgive me, alpha, but I’ll let him tell me that.”

Larimer growled. “Don’t call me alpha and then refuse my command.”

Alex lay down where he was. He wasn’t coming with me, but something told me he wasn’t going to stay away either.

I went.

Leatherface didn’t look up as I passed. If he had, I might have told him he had the cam on his distributor upside down.

Chapter 29

There were no connections for the octopus to make until I was back in the city limits. That was fine—it gave me time to recover from meeting the pack.

I got Tullah to reserve an interview room for the rest of the day at the Keynes building, and to generate me some fake business cards to be delivered there. Then I primed Arvinder’s Diakon that I would arrange a pickup for Arvinder and confirmed he would be alone. Finally I called Victor.

“Vic, you good?”

“I’m great. What crazy bitch scheme you trying to sell me this time?”

“I’m hurt, big man.”

“Don’t bother.” He chuckled. “I can hear it in your voice. What you want, girl?”

“That security system we used last year, will it still work? Say, in the Keynes building?”

He went quiet. “No guarantee. Never was. Look, I’m not gonna tell you not to, but you sure?”

“I appreciate it, Vic, but I’ve got no time, I gotta do it this way.”

“Okay. You there?”

“I got a meeting room there. And I need a guy collected and delivered to me, clean of trackers and followers. It’ll be a last minute confirmation. And one of your micro cameras.”

We haggled on the costs, but his prices were good for the quality I needed, and most of it I was going to pass right on to Skylur. It wasn’t my idea to meet Arvinder. The rest of it, I’d take on rather than pass it on to Niall. Not good business sense, but something I had to do.

I deleted another message on my cell about turning up at Haven, this one from Jason.

And that done, it left me with no way to avoid thinking of what had happened at the wolf meeting.

The shocks and threats, well, I kind of got them; I understood in my gut how the pack worked, how it responded to outsiders and handled insiders. I could have done without the threats, but I knew it was necessary for the wolf side to do these things. Maybe it was exaggerated, but it was only society with big teeth. I shook my head at that thought–when had I become such a werewolf expert?

At least Alex and I had half an understanding with them. I got that it was a problem that needed to be resolved, not parked, and there was a time limit on it.

Strangely, that wasn’t concerning me half so much as the trigger that upset Tara.

There was something about a gift passed down to the eldest, an elusive tickle of a memory. Eldest. My hands gripped the steering wheel as a thought emerged. I hadn’t been firstborn. Tara had been.

I remembered; there was something in my mother’s souvenir box that hadn’t been given to me. My father saying it wasn’t his to give, because he hadn’t been eldest either. Something that was waiting to be passed on to the firstborn of the next generation. A chill went through me as I visualized Alex’s chart of the Farrells.

It couldn’t be.

I dug his file out of my backpack. One hand on the wheel, I flicked it open. Papers spilled from it onto the floor.

Damn. I pulled over and gathered the sheets up, picking out the chart.

I was right. It wasn’t just that children had died.
All
the eldest had been stillborn or died as infants, even among the cousins. And the gift in the box passed unclaimed.

I shuddered and put the thoughts aside. It was ridiculous. I was not going to start believing in multi-generational curses or magically deadly gifts. It was only three generations. It was a coincidence. I’d just ask Mom what was in the box when she got back from vacation. Just for interest.

And how did Mom know all those Arapaho children’s stories? Speaks-to-Wolves was Dad’s grandmother, not Mom’s. Like many things that I’d learned as a child, I’d never questioned it. And when the time came to think about it, it grew deeply uncomfortable.

By the time I’d reached the Keynes building, I’d passed by Manassah and I was dressed in the upscale suit that Jen had bought me. It pissed me off that what she’d bought me was so damn useful. And necessary. I’d try and be angry at her again this evening, maybe.

I got in the elevator and looked at myself in the full-length mirror. Turned, checked my butt. Straightened the skirt a touch.

Gods, Amber, you cleaned up okay. Should’ve put some makeup on as well. Nice suit. I’ll forgive you, Jen.

Victor was already there, setting up the system, letting it sink its electronic fangs into the building. He waved at me briefly, did a double take and then grinned at my outfit. I glared, daring him to make a comment. He wisely went back to frowning at the screen.

I made the coffee and rustled up some doughnuts. While I waited, I found Tullah’s fake business cards had arrived and I had a neat pocket in my new jacket for them.

“Nearly there,” he muttered through a mouthful of doughnut, and clicked his way through a couple more screens of settings. He shook his head.

“Too easy, this security system,” he said. “Remember last time?”

“Yeah, we had a fight to get in.”

“Done.” He brushed his hands together. “This is just sitting here in passive mode, demonstratin’ its capabilities, understand. You gonna be on your own with that thing, girl, so whatever you do, don’t hit that button there or it goes active. You understand?”

I nodded. That button. Yup.

“Now, your ‘colleague’ you want delivered. He okay to ride on a motorcycle?”

“Yeah, he’s fit and healthy.” A motorcycle would be a good way to do it. Arvinder could decline if he didn’t like the idea, and I could stand back and say I’d done everything I could within reason. And I’d still hit Skylur up for the check.

“Good. I’ll have a couple of outriders as sweepers behind. It likely to get hot?”

He meant firearms. I shook my head. “Still put them in Kevlar though.”

He brought out a sketchpad and a street map and we spent fifteen minutes making sure we had a good plan for the pickup and the right route to get Arvinder here without anyone else knowing. Halfway along, they’d shake him down for trackers. I wondered if Arvinder was going to feel that a chat with me was worth it after all that.

Victor handed over the rest of the equipment and left, sparing a worried glance at the system.

I came up against the first minor problem with my plan. The octopus couldn’t find any unsecured internet connections in the building.

I locked the meeting room, made the managers aware that I was just stepping out for a short time, and walked out with my laptop under my arm and the antenna sticking out of my pocket.

A block away and the octopus made a couple of connections. I clipped on my headset and made the first call, a test call to Niall. I told him to disconnect his phone after we finished and not reconnect until late afternoon.

He chuckled. “This sounds fun,” he said. “But I suspect I really don’t want to know. And before I forget, Cassie said she’ll be coming home in a couple of weeks. Will you be around?”

“I’ll do my best.” I always did, but I wasn’t entirely sure that was going to be enough this time around. I could just as easily be locked away. “Tell her I have problems with my cell, but a text message usually gets through, eventually.”

I reminded him again about disconnecting and we ended the call. Tests over.

I called Underwood.

“Mr. Underwood? Thank you for taking my call. I’m calling on behalf of the insurers of your sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Quinn.”

“Oh, yes.” Underwood sounded surprised. “How can I help?”

“You’re aware they had a burglary recently?” I rushed on. “Because of the rarity of some of the items, I’m required by our new procedures to confirm a few things. I’m only a block away, can I stop in and take just five minutes of your time, please? Or would it be possible for you to take time to meet my boss later?”

“I don’t see quite how…”

Being involved was the last thing he wanted, but I’d got the drop on him and he couldn’t come up with an excuse quickly enough.

“It’s simply that you are about the only other person likely to have seen some of the items recently. Only five minutes.” Five minutes would be easy, and then he could put it out of his mind.

“Oh, all right.”

“Thank you so much. I’ll be there soon.”

I ended the call and headed back to the Keynes building.

Underwood’s small office suite was pleasant, even luxurious. His secretary guarded the door and her domain included a table where she was preparing a promotional campaign for an event at one of his galleries. There was no one else in the suite. I’d learned that from listening to Jen last night. Underwood didn’t need this office. He would be better and more inexpensively accommodated in one of his galleries, but he liked the impression a separate business office made.

While he made me wait, I found out his secretary, Mrs. Ellis, commuted to work by car. Good. I was going to use that later.

When he came out to meet me, the man himself was skinny and bug-eyed, with lank, gray hair brushed straight back. He frowned a lot and fidgeted, touching lapels, cleaning his glasses, joggling his tie in a constant cycle.

His office was lined with mahogany display cabinets. I showed interest and got the two-minute tour of his private collection. By the end of the tour, he and I were being filmed by a tiny bug I’d planted, hidden against the side of one of the cabinets. It was to cover one of the weak points in my plan. I needed confirmation that the medal was here and, just as important, where it was. I couldn’t come in and tear cabinets up or blow safes apart.

Underwood settled down behind the gleaming shield of his bare desk and offered me a drink. I turned it down.

“Well, Ms.…” he glanced surreptitiously down at my fake card, “Johnson, how can I help?”

I handed over a picture of the medal. “This is the item we’re particularly concerned with, Mr. Underwood. Can you confirm you recognize it and are you aware of what it is?”

He placed the photo carefully on his desk and bent his head over it.

“Oh, indeed, I am. This is their Congressional Medal of Honor, earned by Captain Quinn in the First World War. This was stolen?” He looked up at me over the rims of his glasses. Mistake. He was trying to overdo the innocence.

“You didn’t know?” I asked.

“No. I knew they’d been burgled, but that was all.”

Liar.

“That’s strange, isn’t it?” I did wrinkly-forehead puzzlement on steroids. “Surely, this is the most valuable piece. I’d have thought they’d have said.”