Tarnished (34 page)

“Actions,”
Felicia murmured, and then drew in a jagged breath. Her fingers touched Andrew’s wrist and he froze. Hope surged into life, painful in its jaggedness. Had she chosen him over Raul after all? Had what he’d said gotten through?

She placed her hand full on his arm, the first they’d touched since she was three years old, Andrew realized. “I’m sorry.” Then her fingers fumbled at the small lock and a key clunked. She hissed with discomfort at the nearness of the silver and Andrew’s wrists dropped free.

A thousand phrases crowded on Andrew—thank yous, scoldings for her actions before, pleas for her to continue to help him. He squashed them all. The surge of hope had left a realization in its wake. He couldn’t let himself be manipulated like that, cast down by Raul and swooping high at the slightest crumb of encouragement only to be inevitably cast down again. Felicia would choose what she would choose. He had to let her go and live his life as if she could take care of herself, if he was to lead anyone.

“Thank you,” he said, without quite looking at her. She nodded, not quite looking at him, either, as she slipped to the door. She let herself out quietly and closed it behind her. She would keep the others from seeing him, but not stay and help, apparently.

Andrew retrieved the key, bent, and freed his feet. He shrugged off the mess the whip had made of his shirt, then pushed himself up and strode for the door. At least, he tried to stride. His head swam. While sitting down, he hadn’t realized just how little energy he had left. He slowed down, stopped. He couldn’t fight five at once, even if he had Silver’s help, even completely healthy.

Andrew checked the building’s walls, but even with his new range of movement, he couldn’t find any good options. The windows were small and high, and the large sliding door in front of the pickup was locked with a heavy-duty padlock, leaving only the small door that would take him out directly into the jaws of Raul and the other Spaniards.

Fine, then. He’d have to even the odds another way. He stooped and picked up one of the abandoned chains.

He kicked the metal wall near where he’d been chained and then positioned himself right beside the door. The dull thud should hopefully sound like he’d dragged himself and the wheeled contraption somewhere he shouldn’t. Sure enough, a moment later the door opened and he looped the chain over Arturo’s neck and snapped it taut. How did he like the feel of his own teeth turned back on him? The Spaniard’s silent, choking struggles filled Andrew with a dimly familiar tide of savage satisfaction. If Arturo died, he’d die paying for what he’d done. There was a heady rightness to that.

Arturo threw himself back, smashing Andrew against the metal wall. Again, and again. Andrew nearly lost his grip as his head clanged off the metal and his vision grayed out for a moment. If he lost consciousness, Arturo would kill him for sure. At least he would have died fighting.

But Arturo was steadily losing strength. Andrew gritted his teeth and hung on even though he couldn’t see properly. Arturo must have been having the same problem because he staggered and seemed to lose his sense of direction, but he still slammed Andrew against the metal again. The wall gave beneath Andrew’s back—not the wall, the door. The door swung open and the two of them tumbled onto the concrete path beyond. Andrew rolled them so he was on top and used the angle to pull the chain even tighter. Slowly, Arturo stilled, unconscious.

“Planning to tear out his throat when you’re done?” Death padded up to Arturo’s head. He used a voice Andrew hadn’t heard for a decade, the voice of Barcelona’s beta, the voice of the first man he’d ever killed. Killed in a berserker rage for revenge, an action that wrenched his life onto a different path.

Andrew let the chain drop. He could snap Arturo’s neck now, so easy. He even took a grip on the man’s hair as he panted raggedly and his vision came back. So much pain Arturo had caused Andrew and those he loved.

But Andrew liked the path he was on now. He didn’t need to walk old ground again. He let Arturo’s head down. Death would have no voices tonight.

Death snorted. “He and his packmates used their voices mostly to repeat the thoughts of others. They’re of no special value to me anyway.”

“I see you have the situation well in hand.” Benjamin’s voice, close by.

Andrew jerked his head up, finally seeing what he and Arturo had fallen outside into. Every adult Were from the Convocation seemed to be there. As he watched, they finished spreading themselves into a semicircle, trapping Raul and his three remaining pack members against the outbuilding. Susan was also in the center, shaking, but standing tall between Raul and Silver. Raul had his empty hands up, his expression at its blandest and least threatening. A beta pushed out through the crowd, holding Raul’s knife out at a slight distance, as if it was offal being taken for disposal.

Andrew pushed to his feet. How much had they all seen? The tense silence told him they’d seen plenty.

If they were silent, he might as well take what advantage he could from it. Andrew held out his arms so the shadows of bruises where he’d struggled against the bonds and the fading welts from the whips were obvious. Everyone would know that if those hadn’t healed, his energy had gone to much worse injuries. “This is what Europeans do!”

The continued silence left nothing to hide the panting harshness in Andrew’s voice. He’d wanted the rhetoric to ring, but he’d have to make do. “When they don’t get their way, they try to take it by force. Madrid told me that if I didn’t follow his orders, he’d take my eye with silver.” Andrew drew a line over his eye with a fingertip, waited for the gasps to die down.

“That’s the European way. In North America, we want nothing of the European way, do we?”

“No!” Someone growled, and others joined in. Hands seized Raul and the others. Andrew looked for Felicia at the edges of the crowd, but people bunched in too close. He yanked his attention back to Raul.

Silver strode to Andrew, naked relief peeking through her controlled expression. Her hand on his back made him want to collapse and curl up with her for days. But no rest for an alpha.

She glared at the assembled Were. “It took you all long enough to realize how you were being manipulated. I thought you weren’t coming.”

Andrew looked down at Silver. What had he missed? His confusion must have been obvious because Silver stepped away to sweep her good arm to the crowd. “Roanoke was kind enough to blame himself for what happened and step down from leading the expedition to deal with the Europeans. A new leader had then to be discussed, apparently at length.” Silver’s tone was so acid, Andrew caught several alphas flinching. He searched the crowd, but couldn’t find a sign of Rory. No surprise he didn’t want to be around to reap the consequences of his trick.

“Until the human showed them for the cowards they are,” Benjamin said, on a low rumble of laughter. Susan lifted her chin higher, proud. And no wonder. She’d gotten them moving? Andrew needed to hear that story.

But Susan shouldn’t have had to do anything in the first place. Disgust welled up until Andrew couldn’t control the snarl that escaped. “So Rory played every single one of you, and you let him? Just ran, nose down to the trail he’d laid right into the hunters’ arms?”

No one answered, but the words were tumbling out of Andrew, so he probably wouldn’t have heard them anyway. “This! This is why we need to be united. I don’t care under whom, as long as he or she is competent, but we can’t live apart, letting threats pick us off one by one. The Lady granted us our wolf sides, and wolves hunt in packs. Together, we survive. Alone, we die. Look at how easy we are for the Europeans to fracture! One comment and we’re completely useless. We cannot keep on this way!”

Andrew’s words might have been rough, but the silence that followed them rang. He wasn’t even quite sure what he’d done, except that all his pent-up frustration with the Western packs’ willful stupidity and politics had bubbled up at once. He’d spoken without thinking. What was he supposed to do now?

“Well said, Roanoke.” Benjamin went to one knee. Andrew drew in a ragged breath. As always, Boston was wiser than he. Perhaps he and Silver could depose Rory without a challenge if enough of the Roanoke sub-alphas supported them now, especially since Rory was still nowhere to be seen.

“You wish the Butcher of Barcelona for your Roanoke? A man so emotional he followed his daughter right into our trap?” Raul didn’t smirk, didn’t allow satisfaction into his voice, but Andrew heard it all the same. The man was so calm, you’d never have known his enemies had him surrounded.

“Oh, but you cured me of that, Madrid.” Andrew strove for the same calm in his voice. “I carried a three-year-old’s voice in my memory. That girl is gone. My daughter is Spanish now, you showed me that. I would protect her, the same as I would protect any of my pack, but I will not be controlled by anyone using her.”

“And he does not lead alone.” Silver shook her hair back and lifted her chin high, gaze straight ahead in an implicit offer to anyone who wanted to meet it and test her dominance. “What wounds one does not wound the other. This is the value of a pair.”

“And he is a Butcher no more. You all saw. He chose not to kill.” Benjamin brought his other knee down, spread his right palm flat on the ground, and leaned forward until his head nearly touched the ground too. Andrew wanted to wince. That was overplaying it a bit. He hadn’t earned that degree of respect. Silver smelled similarly embarrassed by the gesture, but she slid her arm over his back again, a united front.

Each of Roanoke’s sub-alphas went to their knees, some slower than others. Charleston glared before he dipped his head, which Andrew marked, but others went further, as Benjamin had done. Andrew started to breathe again when no one shouted in challenge or objection.

“Lady! You’re each as crazy as the other, but Lady knows we seem to have need of that.” Michelle sank to her knee and Andrew lost the calm he’d gained. He’d never dreamed one of the Western packs would bow to Roanoke by choice, not in the deepest heat of his rhetoric about a united pack.

Sacramento knelt next. She jerked her beta down beside her, hard enough the woman cried out when her knees hit the ground. “Owe you both one,” she murmured. The angle of her head partially hid her smile, but that made the visible corner of her lips seem even more sharply amused. “C’mon, boys. The women are showing you up.”

Slowly, Denver knelt. Salt Lake followed, then Billings. Andrew’s light-headedness pounded with each beat of his heart as one by one the remaining Western alphas and their betas and everyone knelt until no one was left standing but the Spaniards and those holding them.

Silver’s hand spasmed where it was tucked into the waistband of his jeans. Andrew could guess her worry, very similar to his own. Somehow, outside of all expectation, they had this power. Now what did they do with it?

At least the problem in front of them was obvious enough. First things first. “Bring him.” Andrew snapped his fingers to Raul and pointed to the ground in front of himself and Silver. When the man stood before him, Laurence and a beta holding either elbow, Andrew pressed a flat palm toward the ground, an intentional parody of a human gesture for a dog to sit.

Raul started to snarl and struggle, but the two Were forced him to his knees after a few moments of effort. Andrew didn’t have the emotional energy left to enjoy the sight. “Someone take a picture. I think there might be a few interested to know that Madrid lost to us uncouth barbarians out here in North America. Barcelona, perhaps. I’ll get you the number.”

Several phones came out, and repeated flashes of light caught Raul’s profile as his eyes widened with fear. Andrew had just enough energy to rejoice in
that
. Barcelona would be
delighted
to hear that his major rival for territory looked so weak. Andrew didn’t know if Raul would lose his pack once they saw the picture too, but he’d have the fight of his life on his hands. Couldn’t happen to a better man.

“Take them to the Phoenix airport.” Andrew jerked his thumb vaguely south and Raul’s guards let him shove to his feet. “Guard them until they’re on the first direct flight overseas, I don’t care where. They can manage transfers on someone else’s territory.”

People pushed to their feet, coalescing into a tough barrier between Raul and any thoughts he might have of making a run for it. Someone jerked a groggy Arturo to his feet and herded him in with the others. Together, they all headed back toward the ranch. Silver’s breathing was ragged as she walked with him. Her shoulder must be in agony from the jarring of her path over uneven ground. Their success didn’t seem real to him, as much a hallucination as Death. He and Silver were Roanoke—of all of North America?

Arturo twisted to look back and was roughly jerked back on his path.
“What about the girl?”
he demanded of Raul, voice rough from a still-healing throat, apparently trusting to the language barrier to keep the comment somewhat private.
“You plan to leave her behind? Throw her to the North Americans to appease them?”
The other Spaniards looked from Arturo to Raul and back again, restive.

“I intend nothing of the sort,”
Raul snapped, lacking some of his usual cool. He raised his voice to play to the crowd. “You can’t keep your daughter here against her will, Dare. That would be dishonorable.” He used his accent to twist the last word mockingly.

Andrew stopped and searched the clearing around the buildings and the trees beyond one more time. There, in the shadow of the outbuilding. A darted movement. Felicia, but running away. If she’d been close enough to hear what was happening and she was running, that choice was clear enough. Part of him demanded that he go and find her, comfort her, but that was a very small part now. Other people needed him first. She wouldn’t die of a little delay.

“She’ll have exactly the choice you never intended to give her,” Andrew said. He raised his voice, not for the other alphas, but to carry to Felicia. “If she wants to stay, she’s welcome to join any pack she likes or go roaming. If she wants to go, she can approach anyone. They’ll get her on a plane back to Spain and I’ll pay them for the ticket.”