Tarnished (22 page)

“Raul, go home and tell Madrid,” Andrew said, raising his voice to carry, “that we have no need for Europeans here.”

The room exploded, alphas and betas all coming to their feet, anger at Rory congealing in the air. Andrew concentrated on taking deep breaths and holding up his neutral mask.

“He is Madrid, Dare,” Arturo said with a smirk. “He takes the idea of ties with North America seriously enough that he has come himself.”

“Or the idea of a takeover,” Andrew countered over the roar of everyone’s voices, raising the noise to a new pitch. This was bad, very bad. He’d had no idea Raul had challenged since he left Spain. He’d always figured the man was dangerous, but now it seemed he had the position to back it up.

Raul said nothing through it all. He waited impassively for the storm to pass, arms crossed. Dammit, what did it take to shake the man? Was that confidence that the rest of his metaphorical pack was even now circling around to box in the prey? Arturo glanced back and then smirked anew at Andrew. There was something else they were hiding. Andrew knew it.

Maybe somewhere in there, he really had forgotten to breathe, because Andrew’s whole world stopped dead. Only he existed, him and the young woman who walked through the door. She looked about fifteen years old, wearing too much makeup, with her black hair left loose to tumble in waves over her shoulders. He didn’t recognize her at first—maybe he didn’t want to recognize her—but he knew. He knew.

He pulled away from Silver and took a stumbling step forward. At first, she didn’t look at all like her mother. This girl’s face was harder, wilder, sharper. She was much taller than her mother had been, height in her legs, like Andrew’s own mother. But he could see Isabel’s bones in her face, the line from deep brown eyes to the corner of her jaw to the curve of her chin.

“Felicia.” The word came out mangled and husky. Andrew had to try twice to make it audible even to himself over the pounding of his own heart. “Felicia.”

He ran. Arturo and Raul stepped out of the way and part of Andrew screamed that that wasn’t right, after all the effort they’d put into keeping her from him. But that wasn’t loud enough to be heard over his heart either. Felicia. She’d grown into a beautiful young woman, healthy and confident.

He reached her, she looked in his eyes, and she snarled. Short, but with so much contempt in the sound. Andrew tried not to hear it, tried not to have it be true. Contempt? He’d known they’d probably turned her against him. He’d known it, and seeing it in her face was still like a physical blow. All the times he’d imagined her grown, it had been smiling, as she smiled as a child. That smiling toddler was gone forever, as gone as Isabel. At least when he’d lost her, it had been an honest pain that faded as time passed. Straightforward. Having lost the child but not the person—that was a silver knife to the gut, twisted.

“Felicia—” He tried again, but this time she cut him off.

“You.” Her lip lifted in another snarl, but she didn’t give it voice this time. “It’s good to finally meet you again,
Father.
Maybe you can explain to me why you were so cowardly as to stand back and let my mother
die
when you could have saved her. But you couldn’t risk your precious skin, could you?”

Andrew stared at her for several seconds, trying to understand what she’d just said. Let Isabel die? He still had nightmares about the first sight he’d had of the house, pounding down the streets so hard he couldn’t draw in enough air, following the smoke. Every breath had been filled with the smell of that fire, burning too far advanced, he’d known it. But still he ran and found the house with ravenous orange licking from every window, every door, devouring the beams around where the roof had collapsed.

He’d still have gone in. He remembered the moment with crystal clarity, seeing the house and knowing no one could be alive. But werewolves could heal, couldn’t they? He had to go in and try.

Felicia had been sobbing wildly in his arms for the whole run. She hadn’t understood what was going on, but she knew it was more frightening than anything she’d ever encountered before. At that moment, the moment when he’d looked at the house and made that calculation, she screamed with absolute terror. It reached Andrew. He held her against him and breathed in the scent of her hair, the scent of her, and he didn’t go. He stayed as the second floor collapsed down and the firefighters arrived. He held his daughter as she screamed and screamed. His tears were silent.

“There was nothing anyone could have done,” Andrew said. “We got there too late.” He searched her face for some hint she was listening, but found only righteous anger.

Arturo murmured something to Raul. Andrew caught enough of the end to realize that it was a translation of his words.
“You were the first on the scene, Dare,”
Raul replied in Spanish. He smoothed and flipped Andrew’s name with Spanish vowels. Andrew understood, his former fluency seeping to the surface, but emotion blocked out his ability to find words to answer.

Arturo joined in, a beat late, first with a translation of Raul for the audience, then words of his own. “How do we know you’re not lying, to try to save your honor?” Andrew would have laughed, if his grip on control hadn’t been so tenuous. Raul should have known better than to rely on Arturo for his little act. The man couldn’t hide his true emotions to save his life. Arturo knew he was lying.

Andrew imagined shouting at them both, shouting that they’d raised his daughter on lies, even though he’d known that before. That had been different. Having her right in front of him, hearing the lies from her own mouth, was different. He imagined backhanding the smug look right off Arturo’s face.

In the new, his wolf form should have felt miles away, but it seemed close enough to touch now. So easy, to shift and tear Raul into bleeding shreds. Not kill him. Just teach him to regret what he’d done.

But he couldn’t. This was about more than him and Raul and Felicia. Whatever Rory’s plan was in inviting these snakes into the Convocation, Andrew needed to thwart it. “Been losing your memory, Raul? Last time I saw you, you understood English perfectly well.” The words came out flat, but better that than snarled.

Raul spread his hands, the picture of reasonability and confusion, exactly as if he hadn’t understood. It came to Andrew in a flash: who knew what pieces of information people might drop around him if they thought he couldn’t understand. Lady damn him, Andrew refused to let him play his games, play them on Andrew’s people, but he couldn’t attack Raul to prevent it.

“Fuck you,”
Andrew said in Spanish. He remembered that much. But he needed to keep
control,
and it was slipping away from him each moment Raul stood watching him impassively as Felicia’s snarl echoed in his ears. Raul needed to feel
pain.

Silver’s fingers closed on his wrist. “Andrew Dare,” she said. “Everyone is watching. Your daughter is watching.”

Andrew swallowed. She was right. He couldn’t throw away the challenge he’d worked so hard for, and he couldn’t become the fireside-tale monster they’d made of him to her. If he couldn’t keep control, he had to leave. He turned and fled, seeing nothing but the big double door out to the porchlight-stained darkness outside.

23

Silver let Dare go. She wanted to follow so badly, but she could hardly see the world at the moment. She couldn’t move through what she couldn’t see. She had needed that name, needed her mate’s name to truly reach him. But that name was tangled up in the memories it hurt to remember, the memories it drove her mad to remember. Pull on the name and the rest dragged behind. She pulled, she let go, and hid. The rest didn’t overwhelm her, but they did hurt.

“Patience,” Death said, in her mother’s voice, dimly remembered from when she was a cub. “He could not hold to show his strength. Make a virtue of a necessity, and hold yourself.”

So she held until the world seeped back in, and then she put her hand on the shoulder of the young man who had tried to warn them and let him lead her back to her cousin. She sat and let the words around her—accusations, speculations, insults, support—slide over her skin and away like harmless rain.

With Dare’s world at a greater distance, she saw wild selves in greater focus, so she concentrated on reading their enemies’ secrets in theirs. The alpha’s wild self held too still and was light in patches to suit a forest’s shadows. In a pack hunt, Silver suspected he would claim the kill by darting out for the last bite when the others had already chased it far and worn it down. The beta’s dove-gray wild self kept too much behind the tame’s legs for Silver to believe anything the tame’s stance said about his confidence.

Dare’s daughter’s wild self pressed against the tame’s legs, but bared its teeth defiantly. It was dark, darker than most other wild selves in the room, black with hints of russet underfur. It seemed fitting to Silver, considering how the course of the girl’s life had been changed in flames, that her fur should look so burnt. She seemed to lose some of her confidence as the passion of her anger at Dare waned with his departure. She backed to her uncle’s side and he slung a comforting arm around her shoulders.

The voice of Dare’s old, wise ally cut through the voices when the rain of words had lost its initial force and settled into a pattern that seemed likely to hold for hours unless interrupted. “Perhaps we should officially adjourn for the night, so we may eat dinner and think developments over in peace.”

Silver groped for his name, any name besides Dare’s, as others filed out before her. The alpha who had replaced the one her cousin’s human killed paused and gave her a thin-lipped smile of sympathy as she passed. In the stress of the moment, her wild self walked shoulder to shoulder with that of her beta. So not beta, but mate? Or perhaps both? That was a very difficult balance of dominance to hold. Silver chose to think about that rather than anything else, until her cousin tugged her up.

Once they were outside, on the path to the temporary den, Silver let herself run. Each jarring step traveled as pain up her shoulder, but the sensation grounded her. The night air was sharp with the chill, the way it had been sharp with sunlight before.

Inside, she found Dare curled up as much as a tame self could, on the ground beside the bed. The salt smell of tears draped him, though she couldn’t see his face. There was hardly room for her in the small space he’d tucked himself, clinging to the false security of a tight den. But Silver joined him anyway, and he moved to let her in.

“Her whole world. Made of lies,” he said after a long silence.

“I know.” Silver looked at Death. She’d lost her names for the moment, and now she couldn’t find the right words. Did the Lady herself have the right words for this situation? It hurt worse than her shoulder to see the agony those cats were putting him through. Death sat tall and said nothing.

“Did you see the way she looked—” His voice broke. “The way she looked at me?”

“I did.” Silver chased words through her thoughts like one might chase a winter rabbit with the last of one’s starving strength. They eluded her. So she stayed with Dare, and let her presence do what little it could.

*   *   *

Andrew lost track of time until Silver joined him. It felt like an hour, but if he was honest with himself, it had probably been about twenty minutes. His thoughts spiraled down, repeating themselves as they worked deeper into despair. What now? What little hope he’d had for reuniting with Felicia, crushed. And crushed by
her.
If he fought, he’d be fighting her, and he’d lose either way. He couldn’t stand it.

But having Silver there reminded him the world held things other than him and his daughter, and it was only about fifteen more minutes before he drew in a shuddering breath and pushed to his feet.

They’d lied to his daughter? Fine. Their mistake was letting him see her. He’d tell her his side of the story over and over, whether she believed him or not.

He helped Silver up and finally noticed the way her eyes couldn’t seem to focus on anything but him. Worse than usual. She’d called him Andrew, he remembered in a flash of clarity. The only other time she’d called him by his first name had been when she’d briefly allowed back her memories from before the silver-poisoning. Selene, she’d been. He doubted he could ever understand the depth of the effort it had taken her to do that, and now she’d done it for him again.

“Selene?” he asked, and cupped her cheek. “I’m so sorry.”

The muscles pulled under his hand as she gave him a minimalist smile. “Not precisely. I didn’t need all of her, just a name.” She turned away, the “and I don’t want to talk about it any more than that” as clear as if she’d spoken. “I think the others want to talk to you, if you’re up to it.”

Now that Andrew paid attention, the sounds and smells of a small army and food in the living room were clear. These cabins were terrible for holding overlapping scents, so he hadn’t noticed the newcomers among the traces remaining from earlier in the day. Andrew considered staying in his room, but only for a moment. Hiding wouldn’t help anything, even though his control seemed to shred into even finer pieces each time he tried to gather it. Madrid wouldn’t be out there, he reminded himself. It smelled like just the Seattle contingent and Benjamin.

“You’re hungry,” Silver declared, and towed him out by the hand. “Everyone else is having dinner, after all.”

Andrew might have laughed in other circumstances. That had always been his mother’s solution to emotional upheaval in the pack. Silver had proved several times before that it worked, much better than he thought it should. A plate piled high with lukewarm burgers sat on the kitchen table, presumably stolen from the catered dinner at the hall. Everyone in the room had one in hand already. Susan had apparently made it back all right and been told the story, because she nodded to Andrew in awkward sympathy and took Edmond and her burger to her bedroom.

Laurence stood by the door. He must have been invited by someone, but Andrew could guess why whoever it had been had taken the initiative. Laurence held his shoulders hunched as if expecting an attack. Andrew knew Rory had been taking his frustrations out on his beta, but the fact that the man was unconsciously on guard for it even now was an even worse sign. The moment he saw Andrew notice him, he launched into an apology.