Silver (14 page)

Andrew was no forensic expert to find weapon and injury signatures in the Rorschach patches of dry brown spray on the walls and dripped puddles on the floor. So much blood, splash layered over splash. It all blurred together in his mind.

The kitchen counter finally broke through the numb haze he’d retreated into. He’d seen the blood that remained on the walls after a challenge fight to the death. He’d seen a punishment in a European pack, silver used to bind Were, or placed against their skin for a length of time commensurate with their crime.

He’d never seen so much silver as he saw jumbled on the counter. Knives. Needles, like those used for body piercing. The worst was the jewelry, like a woman’s bracelet, one side of the C-curve stained brown as if it had been used for gouging. Necklaces were tangled in knots or laid out like garrotes. To the side, a crucifix, clean and untouched. Being near so much silver was like standing in front of an open oven with the killing heat on your skin, waiting for the stumble or push. Then you’d sizzle and scream.

Andrew retched, controlling himself before more than a mouthful of liquid reached the floor. The acid smell seemed small next to the fear and horror that had soaked into the walls. No wonder Silver had refused to sit on the kitchen chair in the Roanoke house. “What was it like when you arrived?”

“We found them too late to be able to tell much from the bodies. The adults were all tied—” John stood among the chairs and swept his hand to them. “The kids were a mercy, one strike, no torture. Over at the side of the room.” He took a stride in that direction. “The others were injected, like her.” John held fingers around an invisible hypodermic to his own elbow. “Then tortured. Or maybe the other way around.”

Andrew slammed a flat palm into the counter. A tile cracked and a silver knife wobbled and came to rest pointing at a different angle. “This is beyond territorial sovereignty.
You should have swallowed your Lady-fucking pride and called for help.
” It was hard to get the words past the rage vibrating in his chest. “From anyone. Everyone.”

John flushed with anger of his own, but something about the curse made him hesitate before speaking. It didn’t keep him from speaking at all, unfortunately. “Thought you were familiar with this kind of thing.”

Andrew crossed to John in two strides, and clenched a hand around the other man’s throat. “Not this. And even if I was, all the more reason to stop the poison here before it begins. The Europeans have always delighted in killing each other. No reason for us to follow in their footsteps.” He met the other man’s eyes and shoved the two of them into a full challenge, gazes locked together until someone’s strength won.

John choked, but didn’t fight, putting all his energy into the nonphysical struggle. Andrew hardly registered the effort. Not here. Not like in Spain, where so many were dead because each pack looked only to their own. Not again.

Then John broke, turning his head aside. Andrew opened his hand, and Seattle fell to his knees, coughing. “Why aren’t you alpha of Roanoke, Dare?”

Andrew started opening drawers, collecting dish towels. “Don’t want the job.” He wrapped one around his hand, and laid another several flat, loading the silver onto them piece by piece. When he was finished, he folded it up into a neat package. Maybe the silver could tell them something about the man who’d used it, but Andrew would also be delighted to show it to anyone else who doubted the situation’s seriousness.

“I’m checking the rest of the house.” He left the silver on the counter and stalked down the hall to the bedrooms. They were dusty too, left in a state of life interrupted, covers rumpled and dirty clothes in the hamper.

The house smelled like the ghost of people. Happy people. People and the tang of bleach, then dust and disuse settling in a layer over all. Here and there someone’s scent seemed familiar to Andrew, but he couldn’t pinpoint it under everything else, even to tell male from female. A faint trace of what Silver had used to smell like, maybe. Selene.

“There was nothing outside?” Andrew came back, and asked the question of John’s back as the man looked out the kitchen window. The garden visible beyond was overgrown with weeds. “Nothing else you can remember seeing?”

“No. Things were almost too normal when we got here. The bleach and the blood, but nothing disturbed, other than in the kitchen.”

Andrew grabbed the bundle of silver and turned to the front door, hurrying suddenly. He needed to breathe fresh air. He could trust John’s word about the rest. John’s footsteps followed closely.

“What now?” John asked as he opened the door to his truck. He kept his head down and avoided Andrew’s eyes now, the failed challenge hulking between them like a third party in the conversation.

It struck Andrew that the man was glad to drop the responsibility on someone else’s shoulders. Andrew slammed the door behind himself harder than necessary. Coward. “We spread the word. He won’t be able to take anyone else off guard that way.” He gave John a grin with too many teeth. “You get to canvass the Western packs, see who knows of lones who have gone missing over the last few years, ones who could have been other victims. I doubt this came from nowhere, and they’ll be more likely to talk to you than to me.”

John turned the key and the truck roared to life. “You have a certain charisma of your own.” The delivery was desert-dry, but a seriousness lurked under it that Andrew couldn’t understand. Anyone could throw authority around. Andrew was no different.

13

Death began to use a new voice while the warrior was gone. It was no one Silver knew, nor anyone she felt she’d once known and forgotten. It wasn’t the man’s voice from centuries ago that Death used most often as his own.

It was a woman’s voice. “So what do you think? Will he run like you did,
mi loba pequeña
?” Her accent was musical.

“She’s not one of my voices,” Silver said, ignoring the question and the words she didn’t understand. The set to Death’s ears, pricked forward to follow her, was jaunty to match the new voice.

“Sí.”
Death laughed the woman’s laugh. “I am one of his. Will you do me a favor? Ask him if he remembers me.”

Silver threw a pinecone at Death’s head. He ducked, avoiding it easily, though he looked insulted. “The warrior has no need for me to taunt him on your behalf, Death. Haunt him with his loved ones’ voices yourself.”

Death laughed, back to the deeper tones of the man’s voice he used the most. “So you protect him now? He doesn’t need your protection, Silver.”

“And I don’t need his. But he offered, and I accepted. That’s what living people do.” She threw another pinecone at his flank, missing by an even greater margin now that he was expecting it. “Why are you still here, anyway? The snakes are dead. You cannot rouse them. Your easy kill has escaped. Go and chase another.”

Death settled back onto his haunches, going nowhere. “He’s back. You should go answer his questions.”

The warrior’s steps crunched on the blanket of dry needles, then, heavier than necessary so that she did not react to sounds of attempted stealth. Silver stood and ran a hand through her unruly hair, tucking it behind her ears.

She could see written all over his face the memories it took all her strength not to remember—or was it that it took more strength than she had
to
remember? But not pity. It helped her keep her chin up and not run and hide from the memories, that she saw only understanding. The alpha of her mother’s pack pitied her. It was choking.

“So,” she said. “Were you impressed?”

The alpha’s face creased with discomfort, and his blocky wild self paced beside him, a few steps and then back. “Sel—”

Silver’s growl cut him off. It was bad enough the man held a key to unlock her memories, but he stabbed it carelessly into her gut with every other sentence.

The warrior regarded her steadily. “I can’t think of anyone else I’ve ever known who could have survived that. Even myself.”

Death prowled behind the warrior’s legs, shouldering the man’s unresisting wild self aside. “He’s right.” The woman’s voice again, making the words strange and singsong. Death prowled back the other direction. “I think he likes you.”

Silver stared at Death. She knew the others didn’t like it when she acknowledged how close Death was—she could hardly blame them—but his words made no sense. The warrior didn’t think of her that way, did he? “What?” But Death just smirked, and settled down, black legs long out in front. “I’m sorry,” she said, bringing her eyes back up to the warrior. “Death is trying to provoke me with words now he can no longer reach me any other way.”

*   *   *

Andrew knew he’d been around Silver for too long when he guessed where her eyes would go to find Death before she even spoke to him. Something about her body language telegraphed the presence of someone she considered to be there.

“But if I’m going to track your monster, I’m still going to need something, Silver. Anything. What was his name? Where did he come from?”

She gave him a look tinged with dry humor. “I’ve lost my own name. What makes you think I can remember his?” She shivered and the sense of a frightened creature hiding its bleeding to discourage the predators came back into her body. Andrew clenched his hands together until the knuckles popped and began to ache. Was finding this man sooner worth destroying the only survivor?

He turned away to allow her space. She’d set up in the basement while he was away—he couldn’t help but eye the ring on the wall every few seconds, judging John’s position relative to it and him. But she seemed to feel more secure down here, returning to a cup formed in borrowed blankets on the couch where she had been curled up earlier.

John tilted his head to the stairs, probably suggesting a conference upstairs now they’d failed to get anything more from Silver. Andrew nodded and took a step to follow Seattle when his phone rang.

“It’s Rory,” Andrew told John and waited with his cell in his hand until the other man got the hint and left him to the basement’s comparative privacy. John’s footsteps retreated far enough that there seemed a reasonable chance he wasn’t listening in.

“What the hell are you doing out there, Dare?” Rory didn’t even bother with a greeting. “I get Seattle crawling up my fucking ass about something you were supposed to have done months ago—”

“I thought you liked my exaggerated reputation. You can’t complain when I become the easiest target for anything that happens anywhere in the country.” Andrew made his voice sharp, to cut through Rory’s bluster. He wasn’t in the mood tonight to allow the other man to wear himself out naturally.

“So what in the Lady’s name is going on?”

Andrew glanced at Silver, but it was hard to tell if she was listening, or off in her own world again. He supposed he’d have to risk it. “A few months ago, Silver’s monster somehow got to a splinter of the Seattle pack that had set up in Bellingham. He restrained the whole pack and tortured them with silver. Inventively.” Andrew gave the last word a brutal twist, and was rewarded with a wordless exclamation from Rory. “Then he injected all of them too.”

“After.” Silver’s voice wavered. “He hurt them after. He was angry they weren’t strong enough. Weren’t strong enough for the fire he poured in their veins and they died. One by one, and after each he—” She was on the floor, curled around her injured arm, and now her lips parted like she was trying to scream without a voice.

“Dammit,” Andrew hissed under his breath, going to his knees beside her. He kept the phone to his ear with one hand, and used the other to awkwardly maneuver her against his chest in the same tightly pressed position he’d used on her before.

“I don’t understand. I’m not strong like they were,” Silver murmured against his chest, and then fell silent, just trembling.

“I need you back here, Dare. If someone like that is on the loose.” Rory’s voice was controlled, but Andrew suspected he smelled of fear. What a coward.

“I’ll keep you and the pack safer by catching the pussy. The way I catch him is I follow his trail out here rather than try to protect everyone in Roanoke at once out there. Your faith in my abilities is flattering, but that’s far beyond one Were.” Andrew suppressed as much of the bite he wanted to put into his words as he could.

“You have a trail to follow there, then?”

Andrew drew in a slow breath to stall. He could lie over the phone without Rory smelling it, but the man was still his alpha, however cowardly. “At least there’s the chance of picking it up again. There would be no chance of that back there.”

“And by that you mean you don’t have anything. No. Leave the girl there or put her out of her misery and come back here.” The order was phrased too directly for Andrew to wiggle out of it. If he disobeyed it, that was it, he’d be out of Roanoke.

Andrew swallowed his rage, trying to think. “Roanoke. Don’t force this choice on me.” There was no way he could go back. Rory was even more guilty of burying his nose in the sand than Andrew had just accused John of being. To a certain degree, individual packs could afford to look only to their own safety, but Rory’s territory was half the human country. He had a greater responsibility to show the Western packs you couldn’t stand idly by while a threat worked its way through fellow Were just because it hadn’t reached you yet.

“I won’t say it twice,” Rory snapped, his fear lending fuel to the rage in his voice.

And if Andrew went lone over this, what then? Roanoke hadn’t been a real pack for him, but it had been better than the crushing loneliness of living completely packless. He’d tried that. The eastern half of North America would be closed to him, and he doubted the Western packs would allow him on their territories. Not when the “Butcher of Barcelona” was no longer controlled by an alpha. But he saw no other choice.

“You’d have been strong in my place,” Silver murmured, and pushed away. It took a moment for Andrew to make the connection to her previous words. She must have tuned out the conversation in between, though she seemed to have picked up on his anger. She granted him the space to move by curling back up on her blankets.