Silver Bullet (12 page)

But the wolf didn’t attack. The beast’s flesh rippled. The fur puddled around on the floor, baring raw, pinkish-brown flesh. Bones popped. The man stood erect as his vertebrae ground against each other, sucking his tail back into his spine. He grimaced as his muzzle compressed, letting human lips and a human nose appear.

The only thing that didn’t change was the eyes. Those huge, glowing, silver moon eyes.

I backed into the corner with Fritz and Malcolm. There was no escaping without having to get too close to the shapeshifting werewolf.

It didn’t look like Fritz was going anywhere anyway. He’d put up a good fight against the basandere but taken a hell of a lot of damage himself. It looked like he might have been missing teeth. Worst of all, blood caked his chest from a wound I couldn’t see. He pumped the shotgun. “Get ready,” Fritz muttered, and Malcolm lifted his fists, prepared to fight again.

The werewolf finished changing. He stood in front of us all naked and human.

He was about as hairy as you’d expect a guy that turned into a wolf to be. His chest, forearms, and shins were carpeted. His skin was several shades darker than mine, but the hair on his head was blond and coarse and curly.

The wolf-turned-man wiped demon blood off of his bottom lip with his thumb. I caught a flash of sharp teeth hiding behind those lips.

“Well,” Malcolm said. “Lovely.” That wasn’t the word I would have used, but okay. “Thanks for your help.”

Sheer contempt radiated from the werewolf. “Don’t thank me. That wasn’t a rescue.” His voice was a surprisingly light, articulate baritone. “You’ve got something I want and I couldn’t find it in the penthouse. What did you do with the ethereal artifact?”

It took me a second to realize what he was talking about. “The white rock?”

His silver gaze turned on me. “Do you have it?”

None of us had it. After picking us up from the mine, the helicopter pilot had immediately taken it back to the OPA office in Los Angeles for study.

I didn’t want to be the one to break the bad news to the werewolf. The wound on my chest throbbed in memory of his claws, and I wasn’t eager for another opportunity to get acquainted with his temper.

“Who are you?” Malcolm asked instead, redirecting the conversation.

The werewolf puffed up his chest. Tossed his head back. “I’m Cain.” He said it like we should have recognized him. I knew who Cain was—as in, am-I-my-brother’s-keeper Cain—but as far as werewolves went, that name was meaningless to me.

“Well, Cain, if you need the ethereal artifact, I’m sure we can come to some kind of agreement,” Fritz croaked, coughing wetly. He set down the shotgun and the BlackBerry appeared in his hand. “Let me make arrangements.”

Cain didn’t seem interested in “arrangements.” The werewolf fisted a hand in the throat of Fritz’s suit. Pulled a fist back to strike him.

I stepped forward. “Whoa there, you don’t have to do that, buddy. We’re not arguing with you. We want to help.”

“I don’t need help and we aren’t going to negotiate,” the werewolf said without releasing Fritz. “This is my demand: You will send me your fragment of the ethereal artifact or I’ll crush all of your bones into dust with my jaws.”

He had a pretty damn compelling argument. And a heck of a way with words.

The werewolf’s nostrils flared. He tossed Fritz aside and advanced on me, sniffing the air around my shoulder. He wasn’t as big as he looked when we were standing face to face. About my height, but not as broad. Built more like a swimmer than a football player.

My spine stiffened, but I didn’t pull back. I watched Fritz scramble away in my peripheral vision. He had dropped his beloved BlackBerry at Cain’s feet, but at least he was safe.

“I wounded you, witch,” Cain said, almost like it surprised him. “I smell myself on you.”

“Uh, yeah. But I didn’t take it personally. No hard feelings.”

“That’s not all I scent. Where did you see Yvette?”

I blinked. “Yvette?”

“You’ve got Yvette’s smells all over your hands. You touched her recently.” He shook his fist at me as he spoke and I got a glimpse of his naked side. The werewolf had a tattoo on his ribcage. It was a bleeding apple about the size of my hand, encircled with emerald green leaves and dripping inky blood down his flank.

The same tattoo I’d seen on the bodies in the mines.

My mouth was suddenly dry. If this guy wasn’t happy about the ethereal artifact going missing, he
definitely
wasn’t going to be happy to hear about his dead friends.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

His hand shot out and clamped on my throat. He lifted me right off my goddamn feet like I was a chicken getting hauled to the chopping block.

Malcolm and Fritz were exchanging glances, as if trying to silently decide how to handle the situation, but I knew there was nothing they could do. I’d already seen how useful it was to shoot werewolves.

I struggled to speak. “Look, Cain—”

“We have Yvette!”

The words came from behind the werewolf. He turned without dropping me, and I struggled to breathe through the pressure, kicking uselessly at the roof.

Suzy was standing in the doorway, shotgun aimed.

“Say that again,” Cain growled.

“We’ve got Yvette and the ethereal artifact,” Suzy said, fearless in the face of the werewolf. “Drop Cèsar or you’ll never see either again.”

What the hell was she talking about? I tried to catch her eye, but she was ignoring me.

The werewolf sniffed the air. He must have been able to detect the smell of Yvette around Suzy, too, because he finally released me. I stumbled, gasping as air flooded my lungs.

“Bring both to me tomorrow at midnight,” Cain said. “You’ll find me on Sapphire Beach. If you don’t come, or if you don’t have Yvette
and
the artifact, then I will kill every last one of you.” There was something very matter-of-fact about the way he said that, like he was confident that killing us would be about as difficult as popping down to the corner store for aspirin.

“Fine,” Suzy said.

Cain stepped away from me, backing toward the edge of the roof.

He was leaving. I started to relax.

“I’ll need insurance, of course,” the werewolf said.

Then he broke into a run—too fast for me to realize what he was doing, much less stop him.

He wrapped both of his arms around Fritz’s body. And then both of them plunged off the side of the condo’s roof.

MALCOLM AND BELLAMY SEARCHED the sidewalk below the Dat-So-La-Lee Condominiums for purée of werewolf and OPA director.

Unsurprisingly, they didn’t find either.

I felt weird retrieving Fritz’s BlackBerry from where he had dropped it on the roof. I’d never seen him without it, so it seemed like a deeply personal possession. Like picking up someone else’s dirty underwear.

“Didn’t Fritz tell us not to touch his cell phone?” Suzy asked, meeting me at the stairs leading back to the penthouse. “Something about drastic consequences and hellfire?”

“I bet he was an only child,” I said.

“Is,” she said. I lifted my eyebrows at her in questioning. “He ‘is’ an only child, not ‘was.’ Being dragged off a rooftop by a werewolf doesn’t mean he’s instantly dead.”

I had a hard time imagining any other outcome to the situation.

We returned to the penthouse to find that it had been ransacked—probably by Cain while we were distracted by fighting David Nicholas’s guys. Nothing was missing, as far as I could tell, but our fancy furniture had been shredded and the floor had been scored deeply by werewolf claws.

I was still numb from watching Cain drag Fritz over the side of the roof, but not so numb that I couldn’t realize that we needed help. More help than one kopis and aspis dyad. Maybe whole squads of trained werewolf- and nightmare-hunter type help.

So I waited until Suzy retreated into her bedroom, then called Fritz’s boss.

Drastic consequences and hellfire? I’d like to see Fritz try to kill me for making a call on his phone while he was being held captive by Cain.

I’d never met any of Fritz’s superiors before. I wasn’t high enough in the OPA food chain to know that we had a database of witches, so I definitely wasn’t high enough to talk to upper-upper management, either. But his boss’s name was one of the only contacts in his cell phone: Vice President Lucrezia de Angelis.

Imagine my surprise when the woman that answered the phone had a thick Italian accent and didn’t seem to care about Fritz’s disappearance so much as the fact that I’d breached the levels of bureaucracy.

“Are you a moron?” Lucrezia asked.

I was pretty sure that it wasn’t in my best interests to answer that question.

“I apologize for calling you, but this is urgent,” I said in my very best I-am-a-good-employee voice.

“You have another supervisor that could have contacted me, don’t you?”

I was totally thrown by the question. “Actually…” Since Fritz had reassigned Suzy and me to a new team handling special investigations, I was pretty sure that the former layers of middle management had become irrelevant. But I also wasn’t sure that Fritz’s superiors knew anything about that. “Sorry?”

“You’re not authorized to access this phone. You are not authorized to contact me. What have you looked at? Have you read emails, text messages, accessed databases…?”

I didn’t want to apologize again and sound like a broken record. I wasn’t even sure what I was apologizing for. I couldn’t think of any other way to handle Fritz’s disappearance. “I only called you.”

“Do you understand what this means?”

I was pretty sure I didn’t understand anything at this point. “No, ma’am.” Good time to pull out the honorifics, I think.

“Director Friederling is responsible for the information that can be accessed through his phone, which means he is now responsible for anything that you may know. It will be his duty to control you.”

“I don’t need to be controlled, ma’am,” I said. “I wouldn’t say anything even if I had seen it, which I definitely haven’t.”

I was pretty sure her moment of silence radiated skepticism.

“Tell me why you’ve called.”

I gave her an overview of our confrontation with David Nicholas and Cain. She already knew about the earlier raid on Craven’s. She also knew who Suzy and I were, so apparently Fritz was very chatty on his long phone meetings. Made it easy to catch her up on the case, though.

I wondered—not for the first time—how much the OPA knew about what Fritz was doing here. How much, if any, of our current operation was secret on this mission.

It would have been impossible to ask without spilling the beans, so I didn’t.

“What’s your plan after this?” Lucrezia asked, surprising me again.

I was supposed to have a plan now? “We’re going to recover Fritz. Director Friederling, that is.” At least, I
hoped
that we were going to recover Fritz, and not the scraps of Fritz that survived being a werewolf chew toy.

“Yes. You
will
recover Director Friederling,” she said, “and you’ll do it promptly. If he is not available to be responsible for your breach in security, then those loose ends will need to be tied up.”

“Loose ends?”

“You,” she said softly.

I sat down on one of the bar stools. Hard.

Was Fritz’s boss
threatening
me?

This call had gone from “awkward” to “shit-your-pants terrifying” in three seconds flat.

She went on. “The clock is ticking, Agent Hawke. We have procedures. You need to have Director Friederling contact me within thirty-six hours of his disappearance, which I will mark as occurring at five o’clock in the afternoon Pacific Standard Time. After that, we’ll be forced to assume that he’s been killed by the werewolf and can no longer be responsible for you. Do you understand?”

In thirty-six hours, she would arrange to have me killed.

“I think I understand,” I said, and I managed to keep calm when I said it.

“Excellent. Keep me apprised of progress via email. The BlackBerry is yours for the time being.” Did she actually sound amused by that?

And she hung up on me.

I stared at Fritz’s BlackBerry. Her name flashed on the screen and then disappeared.

Setting it down very carefully, I backed away like the thing might give me herpes. Unfortunately, what it had given me was actually much worse.

“Oh
shit
,” I whispered.

Malcolm entered the room. He was in full Union combat gear again, helmet and all. “What’s that you said?”

“Nothing.” Just freaking out over my boss’s boss’s death threats. No big deal. I watched Malcolm as he grabbed a few small flash bombs off the table and began loading his pockets. “Hey Malcolm?”

“Mmm?”

“Do you trust the Union?” I asked. “Or the OPA? The whole organization?”

The question seemed to puzzle him. “Trust them with what?”

“I mean—are we safe?” That didn’t seem to make sense either. I struggled to organize my thoughts. “Would the OPA kill us?”

“Sure,” Malcolm said.

Guess the response shouldn’t have shocked me at that point, but it did. I worked for a secret government organization. It was kind of shady, yeah, but it was still a
government
organization. They were still part of the law. There were definitely laws about not killing employees.

Probably more than a few labor regulations about that, too.

Malcolm seemed to realize the gravity of my question, and he drummed his fingers on the butt of the AK-47 thoughtfully.

“I come from the Union side of things. I went through basic training. I’ve seen Union HQ. I enlisted with my eyes wide open to every shitty thing the Union’s doing worldwide, and I get
why
they do it. You want to know if you can trust your bosses? You can’t.” He gave a helpless shrug. “We’re not here for the pension. We’re here to save the world from powers a lot bigger than us. Evil powers. Gods and monsters that can crush us with a glance. The only way you stay ahead in a place like this is to do evil right on back.”

“I signed the NDA,” I said, choking down a bitter mix of denial and fear. “I’ve done everything they asked.”