Tarnished (2 page)

“Sacramento said you’d be cowardly enough I’d have to encourage you a little.” The young man pushed away from the car and sauntered close.

Andrew stood his ground as he thought furiously. He’d stayed well out of Sacramento’s reach since he’d had to execute the man’s son for his crimes. There was being a coward and then there was avoiding fights with vengeful, grieving parents. “I especially have nothing I wish to talk with Sacramento about. He aired his grievance in front of the Convocation and they ruled in my favor.” Not that he expected Sacramento’s thug to care about that, but one had to follow the formalities.

In answer, the young man smirked and cracked his knuckles. Andrew resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Why settle for the language of intimidation of humans in movies when Were methods worked so much better? Andrew caught his gaze, pushing the shared look past the sort of dominance assessment everyone did when they met a stranger, and into a full struggle. As he’d suspected, the young man chickened out and broke the gaze to throw a punch before he could lose.

He hauled back so far Andrew saw it coming a mile away and stepped out of reach. He did the same with the next punch. “How’d you find me?”

The blond man ignored the question and seemed to figure out what Andrew was doing. This time he charged before he drew back, bringing him into range fast enough that Andrew had to back up to avoid it. Time to take him out quickly, before his greater strength allowed him to catch Andrew in a hold he couldn’t break.

Andrew used the warning the man’s next draw back gave him to step forward, blocking the blow with one arm as he drove the other elbow into the man’s throat. While the man was still stunned, gasping, he followed up with a knee to the groin that doubled the man over in agony.

Andrew stepped back again, crossing his arms to add a little intimidation for good measure. “How’d you find me?”

“We knew you couldn’t hide at the edge of Seattle territory forever. Set up a net around the city for when you finally came back in,” the man wheezed out. “My alpha
is
going to talk to you, one way or another.” Despite his pain, he managed a certain sort of glee, like Andrew should be cowering in his den now he knew Sacramento was coming for him.

Andrew bared his teeth in a snarl. That was what he was afraid of. He didn’t have time for the distraction of dealing with Sacramento’s hissy fits. “I don’t know what Nate’s told you, but his son was in Roanoke territory when he decided to continue his little game of raping human women. I executed him lawfully.” Once, he’d have pretended it was his alpha’s decision, but no more.

The blond man growled with discomfort when Andrew used Sacramento’s name rather than his title, as Andrew had intended, but shook it off after a second. “Humans.” He sneered and pulled himself up straight using the car. Andrew braced himself for another attack, but the man just snarled at him. The bruise on his throat modulated from blue to yellow as it healed with a werewolf’s speed.

“Oh, and you have no human blood anywhere among your ancestors?” Silver made a show of draping herself over Andrew’s shoulder, but he felt her hand spread over his back, probably checking his muscles for the telltale shake of exhaustion. Dammit, he was healed. She worried too much. “You’d allow someone like your grandmother to be raped, someone like your great-aunt to be violated?”

Andrew shook his head at Silver, meaning both that he was fine, and that she shouldn’t waste her time trying to reason with the man. She made a noise of acknowledgment and stepped back out of the way as the man launched himself at Andrew one more time. She snorted with dark amusement.

Andrew’s heart sped with a moment of worry that the man might have learned his lesson, but he still telegraphed his punches. Like many Were, the blond man had never bothered to learn any of the nuances of fighting in human and treated it like a fight in wolf: a lot of lunges with as much power as possible behind them.

Andrew ducked the punch and kicked out the man’s knee. He heard the squishy pop sound he’d been hoping for and the man went down clutching the joint. That was something else unique to werewolf fighting. If the man didn’t stop immediately to pop the joint into its proper place, it would heal dislocated and have to be reset with even more pain later. The man gritted his teeth, yanked, and gasped.

“If Sacramento wants to talk to me, he can call and get permission to enter Seattle’s territory like a civilized Were,” Andrew told him, looming ready to kick again and start the process over. “Understand?” He didn’t step back until the man nodded.

The man growled something incomprehensible as he got to his feet. He snatched up his bag and stomped off into the trees.

Andrew waited a few minutes to see if the man would return, though he doubted it. He got the keys from Silver, unlocked the car, and took his time about pulling on the rest of his clothes. Silver hitched her ass on the trunk, giving a distracting angle and length to her legs, and watched him. “Word gets around, it seems.”

“I’ve been out here for—” Andrew frowned, counting. “Lady, seven months, I think it comes to. I’m sure every one of the Western packs knows that the infamous Butcher of Barcelona is off his leash and prowling the West by now. I just didn’t realize that good old Nate’s grudge was so strong he’d trespass to get to me.”

Silver cocked her head, listening in the direction of an empty patch of ground. Andrew was so used to it by this point he didn’t even bother reacting. If Silver’s hallucination of Death conveyed something important, she’d mention it. If she didn’t, Andrew didn’t care what Death thought. He did avoid looking too closely at the spot, though. Ever since Andrew had hallucinated Death himself in the midst of excruciating pain, he caught imagined glimpses of the wolf-shaped patch of darkness at the edge of his vision every so often.

“You’re not going to get off this easy, though,” Silver said. She came to stand in front of him, meeting his eyes. With her, the match of dominance was almost a caress, rather than a struggle.

“I know.” Andrew frowned off into the trees. “But the Convocation’s in two weeks, and once I’ve challenged Rory we’ll either be out of reach beyond the Mississippi, or we’ll have to join the Alaska pack or something. Run around in the ice and the snow with those nutjobs.”

Silver’s muscles tensed and her expression chilled. “They spend nearly all of their time in wolf. I can’t.”

Andrew winced. He hadn’t even thought about that before he made the stupid joke. Dammit. “I’ll just have to win then, won’t I?” He tried for a weak laugh. That was what
he
was trying not to think about: he had no wish to join the Alaska pack either, but if Rory beat him, he’d have few choices.

Silver laughed suddenly too, her timing suggesting Death had said something. “Oh, enough gloom,” she said, and yanked Andrew’s head down for a deep kiss. He grabbed her ass to pull her closer to him and she wiggled away, laughing brightly. She ran a few steps into the trees and turned back to grin at him.

Andrew checked the wind to make sure Sacramento’s thug was well gone, then grinned right back and followed. Now this was the kind of chase he could get into. John could wait a little for his call about a trespasser on his territory.

2

Susan gave her son a last gentle push on the park swing and then stepped back to let his father have a turn. Edmond laughed and slapped his little hands on the top edge of the swing’s basket. John let the baby’s momentum wind down before pushing again.

Susan leaned the side of her forehead against the metal bar of the swing set. The sun warmed the back of her dark peacoat, left over from work clothes though she’d shucked the bank-appropriate blouse and slacks the moment she got home. The metal was cool in contrast, part of the mixture of chill and warmth she loved about spring. Though spring also meant mud, of course. No matter the quantities of wood chips dumped on this playground, little feet always dragged bare streaks down to mud under the swings.

“You going to see that romantic comedy this evening? Whatever it’s called, I forget.” John wobbled the swing side to side with a grin, and Edmond shrieked with delight. They both had the same smile, which drew one from Susan. She suspected that Edmond would someday grow into his father’s rugged looks. John reminded her of an old-time cowboy, if one had survived into the twenty-first century, and got a job at a software firm. He was a little clean-cut for a cowboy today, though, brown hair combed into order for once. Not for work, since he’d had Edmond today while he telecommuted, so it must be for whatever thing he had tonight.

“I might hang around my apartment. Much as I hate to waste an evening off.” Susan slid into the next swing over. That one was the style for older children, wide and bendy enough to allow an adult’s hips. She pushed herself only a few inches back before falling forward, conscious of not stressing the structure. However hard it was to wrap her head around the idea of the father of her child being a werewolf, his pack made good babysitters. Usually, that balanced out the hassle of John wanting her to keep her own place rather than move in with them. “Besides, why would I want to go alone when I could subject you to the sap later?”

John stepped sideways and gave her a sudden shove. Susan shrieked in surprise herself and tried not to fall off, laughing. John caught her against him on the way back and kissed the side of her head. “Cruel.”

Susan leaned her head back into his warm solidity. His muscles moved as his phone rang and he reached down to slide it from the holster on his belt and answer it. On seeing who it was, John pulled back so quickly Susan almost fell backward. She twisted to frown at him as he answered with a curt greeting.

“You ran into who?” John listened for a moment. “Lady.”

Edmond started to fuss so Susan stood and pulled him out of the swing. The diaper bag was at John’s feet, but when Susan stepped over to collect it, he startled back and strode out of earshot. Susan glared after him, juggling the weight of Edmond on her hip and the bag on her opposite shoulder. She assumed the call was about werewolf stuff. Had to be. She’d noticed lately that John avoided touching her when anyone from that other world of his could see. This reaction to a phone call was a little much, though.

John strode back a moment later. “We’d better get home. My guests just came over the pass.”

Susan pushed the diaper bag at him. “Which means they’re not going to be here for another forty-five minutes at least. What’s wrong?”

“He hasn’t even arrived, and Dare has already collected trouble to bring with him.” John sighed, scrubbed at his face, and accepted the bag. “Lady. It’s never his
fault,
but…”

“I’ve known people like that.” Susan smiled, but John didn’t laugh at the humor. It seemed he’d stepped fully into what she thought of as his alpha persona before they even got back to the house. Or maybe this was the real John, and the relaxed, playful guy he was when they were alone was the persona, but Susan somehow doubted it. She mentally cursed the phone call for making him switch over sooner.

John slid the bag onto his shoulder. He started to step away, but he reconsidered a second later and pressed a hand to the small of her back as he kissed her hair. “We’d better get back. I have some stuff to take care of before they get here.”

Susan sat on her curiosity and didn’t ask what that stuff was. She knew he wouldn’t answer, and it was easier to not have that stubborn silence become reality. She’d decided he was worth it, alpha persona and all, so there was no point picking at it, however much she was dying to know.

*   *   *

As they neared Seattle’s den, the land opened up for Silver to look ahead of them, the view no longer blocked by the nearest mountainside. A river curled, branched, and branched again through the tallest of trees, not wide but very deep and churning, always fighting on its way to the sea. By now, she was familiar enough with what the poison had done to her mind to look harder. Not river, not trees, but something else with a heavy weight of meaning she could sense but couldn’t touch. With time to spare in their journey, Silver pushed and struggled to touch that weight.

Paths. It came to her like blinking away tears so the world sharpened and ceased refracting at the edges. She was seeing paths, much traveled by humans, not rivers. Refraction remained, an uncertain sense she was still missing something, but Silver relaxed and let it slide away again. She trusted Dare to navigate for them both.

As they drew up at the den, Silver’s other worries tightened around her. Death must have sensed this, because he returned just as her hand started to feel empty, loose by her side. She buried her fingers in the warm fur of his ruff. She always caught herself expecting that it would be chill, chill as the sky of a night in the new without the Lady’s light or warmth. Death was as black as that sky, without even the points of stars to fill him, but warm anyway.

“You’re practically shaking like a doe,” Death said with her mother’s voice, exasperated. Silver lifted her hand in surprise, and found it steady. Death was just being a cat. She smacked at Death’s ears, but he danced out of the way. “Why do you fear your mother’s pack, your birth pack?” He returned to his favorite male voice, presumably that of a Were dead generations ago. Death had no voice of his own.

Silver looked ahead, but Dare had enough distance that he could pretend he didn’t hear her talking to Death, and she could pretend she didn’t notice him pretending. “I don’t fear them. I’m not looking forward to dealing with them, that’s all.” Silver clenched her hand. They’d undoubtedly be as pitying as they had been on other visits, when Dare’s pack nature had gotten to be too much and he’d made some excuse to see other Were. Pity, pity the poor cripple. Scarred by the silver, unable to use her arm, unable to shift. Barred from the Lady forever. Pity her.

“You’re as pack by personality as he is,” Death said, not looking back as he paced ahead over the dozens of paw prints leading to the den’s entrance. Silver hurried to catch up. “You want to claim you’re not lonely, just the two of you, no other wolves?”