The second man was older, in his fifties, but in decent shape. He had the good haircut of a bureaucrat planning on rising in the ranks of his profession. His hair was dyed, but it was a good dye job, leaving him with just a touch of gray.
Adam didnt remember seeing himbut hed be the first to admit that he hadnt been at his best since his kidnapping. This one woke up before Adam killed him, but he didnt have a chance to cry out.
He continued down the hall. The next two who died were also easy kills.
He came to a room empty of people, but he opened the door anyway. He should have just kept going, but when he glimpsed a photo of Mercy, he shouldered the door further open and went in. One wall was filled with photos of his pack and their families, including Mercy and Jesse. Each labeled with a name so that people could come in and study the wall, get so they would recognize their targets.
It was a kill list.
Every single one of the pack was on itand their immediate families, human and wolf alike, young and old. Sylvia Sandoval was there and so were her girls.
They were planning on killing the children.
Adams next three kills werent so clean after that, nor so silent. He let the fourth one scream because he was sleeping with a smile on his face.
They were planning on killing children, and this one was smiling.
When Adam got through with him, the mans corpse reeked of terror and pain. Adam needed to control himself better; he couldnt afford to lose control of the wolf because he might never regain it. He had a job that no one else could do to his satisfaction, a duty. The thought settled him; he knew about duty, both man and wolf.
The next bedroom was empty, though it smelled of a woman. He memorized the scent because if shed taken flight, hed have to hunt her through the dead vineyard. Part of him, the human part, knew he would have to give that hunt to someone less
eager than he was. Warren. Darryl, Adams second, was still too much a gentleman to kill a woman without suffering for it. Warren was more practical.
The modern doorknobs designed for handicapped access were so much easier for a wolf to open than the traditional round ones were. The whole ground floor was designed especially for handicapped access, so he made no sound as he opened the next room to discover that there would be no need for him to hunt anyone yet. Hed found the woman from next door, and she and Mr. Jones had evidently found themselves too involved in each other to notice his last victims cries.
Hed promised Jones to Honey.
It was harder than it should have been to leave them alone, but he closed the door as quietly as he could. There were three more people to killhe could hear them. He was getting hungry.
He broke the next mans neck with a swat of his pawlike a grizzly. It was quick and clean. The second one was a woman, crouched behind her cot, which shed knocked over to provide cover. He had a momentary thought that someone had been watching too much TV, because a cot is no kind of protection at alland then the woman pulled out one of the dart guns and started firing.
The first dart hit badly and bounced off his shoulder. Warned, he dodged the second two and jumped the cot to crush her skull between his jaws. He shook her once to break her neck and make sure of the kill, then dropped the body. He didnt enjoy killing women.
He stopped where he was, the corpse on the ground halfway between his front paws, and fought off the urge to eat her. Woman or not, his wolf was hungry, and dead, she was just meat. He didnt have time for itand the strength of the urge meant the wolf was gaining the upper hand. When he was certain he had himself under control he headed off to hunt down the next one.
That one had barricaded himself in one of the rooms Adam had visited earlier. The door was ironbound and thick, meant to look like the old colonial Spanish doors. It stopped the bullets that the man shot into the door as soon as Adam touched the doorknobit must not have been a large-caliber handgun.
But the gunfire did one thing. Mr. Jones opened his door, a gun in his hand. Adam dropped his head and roared at him. It was a sound the lesser wolves could not make, more like a lion than a wolf. The woman behind Jones screamed and screamed. Jones shot twice before Adam hit him, but he hadnt stopped to aim, hadnt been able to control his fear. One bullet skimmed Adams side, but the other missed him altogetherhitting a moving target isnt easy.
Adam deliberately bumped Jones with his shoulder and knocked him off his feet. The womans screams intensified, and he pinned his ears at her. His father had taught him only a cowardly man would hurt a woman. But this woman had agreed to kill people because they were associated with his pack, to kill the children.
Still, Adam killed her quickly and as painlessly as he could. And when the silence of her death filled the room, his fathers admonitions rang in his ears.
Jones made an incoherent noise and scrabbled with his gun, trying to get his shaking hands to work. Adam left the womans body and grabbed the gun out of the humans hands and crushed it. He dropped it, now unusable, to the floor.
His jaws ached to finish Jones
but hed promised Peters killer to Honey, even if she hadnt been in a state to know it. Revenge was a dangerous thing, but a quick clean act sometimes allowed the victim closure. So he left Jones for Honey and went to deal with the only other Cantrip agent hed left alive.
The door was solid wood and locked against him. Adam hit it with his shoulder and cracked the wood, breaking it free of its hinges. It hurt, and he stopped to tear it to bits. Only when the door lay in broken shards did he come back to himself.
The man was on the floor, blood pouring from a bullet woundeither Joness gun had been a bigger caliber and gone through the door, or it had gone through the wall. His gun lay on the floor beside him, and his hand couldnt get a grip on it.
Tiger, tiger burning bright, he stuttered, looking at Adam as he choked on his own blood.In the forest
in the forest. He drew in a breath, looked Adam in the eye, and said again, quite clearly,Forest. His body convulsed once more, then he lay still.
Did He who made the lamb make thee? Adam responded silently with the appropriate line. It was a question that he held dearly: Had God made werewolves? How could He have done so and still be benevolent?
Adam stared at the man until a stray sound reminded him that, William Blakes poetry aside, all of the Cantrip agents werent dead yet.
He called out to his pack, summoning them to the last of the hunt. They came, stumbling and slow, and mostly in wolf form now. The change would help them fight off the effects of the drugs. Warren, Darryl, and a couple of others held on to their humanity. They stopped when they saw him waiting at the top of the stairs.
Warrens nostrils flared, and Darryl ran a hand over his mouth. Adam looked at Honey, and the golden wolf swayed a little. He caught her eye, then glanced behind him to send her hunting.
Only when her impassioned snarl behind him signaled that shed found what hed sent her after, did he step aside and motion the rest of the pack on by. When the last of them had passed him, he started his change back to human. There had been a landline in the planning office. His change was faster than usualwhether due to Mercys meddling or the killing field hed made of the ground floor of the winery, he didnt care to speculate.
The phone worked, which was nice, because otherwise hed have had to use one of the Cantrip agents phones, and with the taste of the hunt on his tongue, that would have been unwise.
He called Mercy first. He needed to hear her voice to remind him that he was not entirely a killer, not entirely a monster. But her cell rang three times. And then a recorded voice informed him that her line was unavailable. He fought down instinctive panic.