Tasers are becoming commonplace among police departments, though I'd never actually seen one in the flesh before. Somewhere on YouTube there is a cameraphone video showing what happened to a student who broke some rule or other in a university library. He was Tasered, then Tasered again because he wouldn't get up when they told him to.
It hurt. It hurt like… I didn't know what. I dropped to the ground and lay there frozen while Corban frisked me. He went through my pockets, dropping my cell phone to the porch. He grabbed my shoulders and knees and tried to jerk lift me.
I'm a lot heavier than I look—muscle will do that—and he was no werewolf, just a desperate man whispering, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
I'd make sure he was sorry, I thought through the haze of pain. "I don't get mad I get even" was more of a credo than a cliché to me.
The people I'd seen Tasered were only knocked out of commission for a few seconds. Even the kid in the library had been able to make noise. I was absolutely helpless, and I didn't know why.
I tried touching the pack or Adam for help. I found where the connection should have been, but the Taser had nothing on the pain when I tried to force contact. My head hurt so badly it felt like my ears should be bleeding.
It was still daylight, so calling Stefan wasn't going to be much help.
The second time, he got me up and took me to his car. His trunk popped with a beep, and he dumped me in it. My head bounced off the floor a couple of times. When I got out of this, Amber was going to be a widow.
Scrabbling fingers pulled my hands together behind my back, and I recognized the signature sound of a zip tie. He used another on my ankles. Prying my mouth open, he stuffed it with a sock that tasted of fabric softener and smelled faintly of Amber, then he wrapped what felt like an Ace bandage around that.
"It's Chad," he told me, eyes wild. "He has Chad."
I caught a glimpse of the fresh bite mark in his neck just before he shut the trunk.
CHAPTER 11
IT MUST HAVE BEEN AT LEAST FIFTEEN MINUTES BEFORE the effects wore off, and I began to function again. The first conclusion I came to was that whatever he'd hit me with had been no normal Taser. No way in Hell. Ill and shaking, I huddled in the vibrating trunk and tried to come up with a plan.
I couldn't shift yet, but before we reached Spokane I'd be able to. And the zip ties weren't tight enough to hold the coyote. The car was newer, and I could see the tab that would release the trunk. So I wasn't trapped.
The realization did a lot to stop my panic. No matter what, I wouldn't have to face Blackwood. I relaxed into the floor of the trunk and tried to figure out why the vampire wanted me badly enough to ruin his lawyer to get me. It might be that he didn't value Corban—but I'd gotten the feeling that their association was of long standing. Was he trying to take over the Tri-Cities as well as Spokane? Take me down and hold me hostage to force the wolves to act against Marsilia?
It had seemed like a possibility… had it been just yesterday? But with the warfare between wolf and vampire at an end in the Tri-Cities, kidnapping me to influence Adam seemed like a stupid move to make just now. And a vampire who was stupid didn't successfully hold a city against all comers. There was a chance, just barely, that he hadn't heard what happened. It was that chance that meant I couldn't dismiss the theory outright. And Marsilia was down three of her most powerful vampires. If he wanted to move against her, now was the time to strike at her. Kidnapping me wasn't a strike—it was, at best, an end run. Especially now that
Marsilia had declared a truce with the wolves. Kidnapping me, I judged, would do nothing except send Adam to Marsilia with an offer of alliance.
See? It was stupid to take me—if his purpose was to take over Marsilia's territory.
Since Blackwood couldn't be that dumb, and I found myself indisputably lying in Corban's trunk, I was inclined to think we had been wrong about Blackwood's intentions.
So what did he want with me?
It could be as simple as pride. He'd claimed me as food—maybe as he claimed anyone who came to Amber's house. Then Stefan came along and took me from him.
The theory had the benefit of conforming to the KISS principle—Keep It Simple, Stupid. It meant that Blackwood didn't have anything to do with Chad's ghost. It supposed that it was sheer dumb bad luck that I had gone blithely into his hunting ground when I went to Amber's to look for a ghost.
Vampires are arrogant and territorial. It was not only possible but probable that having fed from me, he would believe I belonged to him. If he was possessive enough—and his holding the city for himself presupposed that Blackwood was very possessive—it was entirely reasonable that he would send a minion to fetch me.
It was a neat, simple solution, and it didn't depend upon my being anything special. Ego, Bran liked to say, got in the way of truth more often than anything else.
Trouble was, it still didn't quite fit.
Being alone in the trunk with nothing better to do gave me time to analyze the whole thing. From the beginning, Amber's first approach had bothered me. Upon reflection, it struck me as even more wrong.
The Amber with whom I'd had a water fight, who gave dinner parties for her husband's clients, would be neither so thoughtless or gauche as to approach me to help her with a ghost because she'd read about my rape—the rape of a near stranger, really, after all these years—in the newspaper.
I hadn't seen her in a long time. But, in retrospect, there had been an awkwardness in her manner that was unlike either the woman she'd been or the one she'd grown to be. It might have been explained by the odd situation, but I thought it more probable that she'd been sent.
Which left the question, why did Blackwood want me?
What could he have known about me before he required me to travel to Amber's?
The newspapers announced that I was dating a werewolf. Amber knew I saw ghosts. I sucked in a deep breath—she also knew I'd been raised with a foster family in Montana until I was sixteen. It wasn't something I'd kept hidden—just the part about my foster family being werewolves, except that time when I was drunk.
But among the werewolves, the knowledge of the walker, the coyote shapeshifter, who'd been raised by Bran, was well-known. So say that he didn't know anything about me until the newspaper articles. Say Amber looked at the newspaper, and said, "Goodness—I know her. I wonder if she might not be useful helping us deal with our ghost. She said she could see ghosts."
Blackwood said to himself, "Hmm. A girl whose boyfriend is the Alpha of the Tri-Cities. A girl with an affinity for ghosts." And being much older than me, he might have known more about walkers than I did.
So he put two and two together and got, "Hey, I wonder if she might not be that walker who was raised by Bran a few years ago." So he asked Amber if I was from Montana. And she told him I was raised by a foster family there.
Maybe he wanted something from a walker. Here I had an uncomfortable moment remembering Stefan telling me about the Master of Milan, who was addicted to the blood of werewolves. But Stefan had taken blood from me and hadn't seemed to be much affected by it. Anyway, suppose Blackwood wanted a walker and so he sent Amber to find me and persuade me to come to Spokane.
I didn't like it as well as the KISS theory. But that was mostly because it meant that he wouldn't quit hunting me just because I'd escaped from this car. It meant that he'd just keep coming until he got what he wanted—or he was killed.
It fit what I knew. Walkers are rare. If there are other walkers around, I've never met one. So if he figured out what I was, and he wanted one, it would be logical for him to come after me. The question it left me was, What did he want with a walker?
The tingling in my arms and legs had faded and left only a dogged ache behind. It was time to escape… and then I really thought about what Corban had said: "He has Chad."