“We don’t know,” Jim said.
He leaned against the doorframe like a bleak shadow knitted from anger. I hadn’t heard him approach.
“Regeneration and change of shape are irrevocably linked.” Doolittle drank his tea. “There are things that can be done to induce a change in one of us. We’ve tried them all, trying to break him from the coma. Something is blocking him.”
They were so calm about it. “Why aren’t you surprised?”
Doolittle sighed.
“He isn’t the first,” Jim said.
THE FIRST PICTURE SHOWED A CORPSE OF A MAN. His face was crushed, the skull indented with such tremendous force, his head resembled a shovel. His chest bone had been cut out of his body. His ribs jutted from the wet mush, the pale cage of bone slick with dark blood.
The black-and-white photograph looked absurdly out of place on a red-and-white-plaid tablecloth. Like a hole into some horrific gray world.
Jim drank a bit of his tea. “Doc, this stuff is pure honey.”
“A little sweet never hurt nobody.” Doolittle looked offended and poured more syrup into my glass.
Jim shook his head. “The Midnight Games. Sixteen years ago a championship fight went all to shit. A big dumb sonovabitch of a bear lost his way and went wild. Killed a crowd of civilians.”
I didn’t interrupt. He was talking and I didn’t want to do anything to make him stop.
“A lot of people should’ve stepped up to bring the bear down and didn’t. Curran took ownership of it and got it done. That’s what an alpha does. It was damn clear after that who was in charge.”
Jim leaned forward, his arms on the table. “An alpha’s first law must be solid. It shows what the alpha stands for. No matter what other shit happens, the alpha has got to uphold that law, because once he lets somebody question it, his whole rule comes into doubt. Curran’s first law is ‘Don’t touch the Games.’ ”
“It’s a good law,” Jim continued. “We don’t need to be messing around with a place that’s interested in making us dead in a pretty way. Even the People stay the hell away from it since it’s gone underground.”
He fell silent. Like Curran, Jim mostly hid his emotions, but his eyes betrayed him this time. Dark and troubled, they brimmed with anxiety. He was keeping it in check, but I could sense it. Jim was uneasy. Haunted.
“So what made you mess with the Games, Jim?” I prompted.
“They’re importing shapeshifters. Some are on the level. They brought a mountain cat out from Missouri a few months ago. A decent female. But some are scum. They come in to scope our territory. They’re a threat. That’s a security issue, and that makes it mine.”
Pieces clicked together in my head. “You put a mole into the Games. And you didn’t tell Curran because you didn’t think he would be reasonable about it.” Jim took it upon himself to make a decision only the Beast Lord could’ve made. It wasn’t just a Bad Idea. It was a Sure to Get You Killed in a Hurry Idea.
Jim pushed the photograph toward me. “Garabed. Good, strong cat. Armenian. Found him like this a block from the Northern Office.”
Now I saw it. Jim had a dead shapeshifter and he couldn’t tell Curran about it. Knowing Curran, he would shut down the whole operation at the root. The Beast Lord had to uphold his laws. But now that one of his people was lost, Jim couldn’t let it go. He had to find and punish the guilty. First, to avenge the death, and second, because his crew would abandon him if he didn’t. The first duty of an alpha was to protect his clan, and Jim’s crew was his clan for the time being.
“Garabed showed no signs of shifting shape?” I asked.
“None.”
If I were Jim, I’d put somebody back into the Games. Somebody vicious, smart, and skilled. Somebody hard to take down . . .
“You brought Derek in.”
Jim nodded. “He’s the best covert agent I have. He looks”—words caught in his throat—“looked like a brainless pretty boy. Nobody pays him any mind. But he misses nothing.”
“What happened?”
Jim grimaced. “He went there for a month and came back with this weird-ass story about the Reapers. It’s the name of a team. They came out of nowhere a few weeks ago and landed with a lot of noise. Half of them m-scanned as human, but Derek said they weren’t. Didn’t smell right. He thought they had some sort of beef with us. Not just with the Pack but with our whole kind. Something about us being a meld of humans and animals, and those guys hate both. He told me there was a human girl in the Reaper crew and spun this long story about how she wanted to switch sides and would tell us all about the Reapers and Gar’s murder if we got her out.”
“And you told him no.”
Jim drained a third of his glass. “I told him it was too risky. The Reapers travel together, fifteen, twenty, sometimes thirty per group, always armed.”
“As if they know they’re going in and out of enemy territory.”
Jim nodded.
“And they can’t be tracked by scent? They have to have a base of some sort.”
Jim looked like he’d just bitten a lime. “The problem isn’t tracking. The problem is the location of their base.”
“Where is it?” Why did I have a feeling this wouldn’t be good? With my luck, the next thing to come out of his mouth would be something crazy, like Unicorn Lane . . .
“In Unicorn—”
I held my hand out. “Got it.”
Unicorn Lane gave no quarter. Savage magic roiled there, streaming through the gutted corpses of skyscrapers, too powerful to harness, too dangerous to fight. Ordinary objects became suffused with lethal power. Horrible things that shunned the light hid in Unicorn, feeding on lesser monsters and spinning foul magics of their own. Lunatic cultists with secret power, deranged loups, cast-out Masters of the Dead, when they had nowhere to go, when every friend and every family member turned them away, when the apprehension directive on their profiles became “Shoot on sight” and desperation muddled their minds, only then did they try to enter Unicorn Lane. Most became nourishment for abominations. The rare few who survived went mad, if they weren’t already.
There was a reason why Andorf the Bear who had rampaged at the last legal Games chose Unicorn Lane as his refuge. There was a reason why Curran had set our first meeting on the outskirts of Unicorn, just deep enough to weed out the scared and kill the stupid.
To follow thirty monsters in human skin into Unicorn Lane in the middle of the night was a cruel and unusual way to commit suicide.
“Scouting their base is right out,” Jim said. “But suppose we did somehow spring the girl before they hit Unicorn Lane. We just kidnapped one of their own. Guilty or not, human or not, they would go to war with us after that. We can’t afford another damn war.”
“Not without cause,” Doolittle put in.
“All he had were some funny smells and a girl with a big mouth. I told the kid to stop chasing tail and bring me some proof. He went there one more time, but I could tell the girl made an impression.”
“I’ve seen her,” I told him. “I can’t blame him.”
Jim started. “How?”
“You finish first, then I’ll tell you my side.”
Jim shrugged. “Derek clammed up. I saw reason wasn’t getting through—he would try to rescue her one way or another, and I pulled him out of it. The tickets to the Games are hard to get and go for three grand apiece. I knew he didn’t have three grand lying around, and even if he managed, the type of ticket he could get wouldn’t let him into the lower level. I put a tail on him, told him to chill, and thought that was the end of it.”
Ahh, but Derek had seen Saiman at the Games and recognized him by scent. He knew Saiman in his Durand persona owned part of the House and had “go anywhere” tickets.
“While Derek was cooling off, I put Linna into the Games in his place.” Jim placed a second photograph in front of me. A corpse of a woman lay on the surgical table. The outline of her body was distorted, uneven. I studied the photo and realized she was in pieces. The body had been severed into sections and reassembled bit by bit.