I looked up again, and this time the world didn’t spin. Darryl and Warren were both kneeling on the floor, near where they’d been fighting when I’d last seen them. I saw the reason for the odd enunciation problem Darryl was having—a nasty cut on his lip was visibly healing.
“I couldn’t lie to Darryl,” explained Warren. “You were in a healing sleep, and I couldn’t wake you up. I couldn’t let any of the pack up there while you were vulnerable.”
Samuel sat beside me and licked my face, whining softly.
“Ish,” I said, thrusting him away. “That’s just gross. Stop it, Samuel. Didn’t Bran teach you any manners at all?”
It was a deliberate distraction, designed to give us all a chance to decide how to handle the situation without more bloodshed.
“Warren was acting under my orders,” said Adam slowly.
“I see,” said Darryl, his face becoming carefully expressionless.
“Not against you.” Adam waved his hand at chest height—don’t feel hurt, the gesture said, it wasn’t personal.
“Then who?”
“We don’t know,” I told him. “There was just something that bothered me.”
“Tell them what happened that night,” Adam said.
So I did.
To my surprise, when I told them that I’d had a bad feeling about calling in the pack, Darryl just nodded, saying, “How did they know where Adam lived? Or when the meeting was over? How did they know he didn’t have an army at his house like some of the Alphas do? Jesse’s not stupid. When she heard the sound of the tranq guns firing, she wouldn’t have screamed—but they knew where she was anyway.”
I thought about that. “There was just the one human they sent up after her—and he went right to her room.”
Darryl made a sweeping gesture. “I’m not saying that there are not explanations other than a betrayal by one of the pack—but you made the right choice.”
It shouldn’t have made me feel good—but I’m as much a sucker for a pat on the back as the next woman.
“Go on, Mercy,” said Adam.
So I continued the explanation as succinctly as possible—which meant I left out any details that weren’t their business, such as my past relationship with Samuel.
The rest of the pack filtered in while I talked, taking up seating on the floor—moving broken furniture out of the way as necessary. It wasn’t the whole pack, but there were ten or fifteen of them.
Auriele sat next to Darryl, her knee just brushing his. She had a nasty bruise on her forehead, and I wondered if she would continue to treat me with the cool courtesy she’d always extended to me—or if she, like the females in Bran’s pack, would consider me an enemy from now on.
Warren, I thought, with Adam’s support, had just cemented his place in the pack—at least with Darryl, whose body language told the rest of the pack that Warren was not in disgrace. Darryl valued loyalty, I thought, suddenly certain it wasn’t Darryl who had betrayed Adam.
Who then? I looked out over the faces, some familiar, some less so; but Adam was a good Alpha, and other than Darryl, there were no wolves dominant enough to be Alphas themselves.
I got to our decision to bring Adam to Warren’s, saying only that we thought it would be a better hiding place than his house or mine, and stopped because Darryl was all but vibrating with his need to ask questions.
“Why did they take Jesse?” he asked, as soon as I quit speaking.
“Warren tells me there haven’t been any ransom calls,” Adam said. He’d begun pacing sometime during my story. I couldn’t see any sign he’d ever been hurt, but I suspect some of that was acting; an Alpha never admits weakness in front of the pack. “I’ve been thinking about it, but I honestly don’t know. One of the wolves who came to my house was someone I once knew—thirty years ago. We were both turned at the same time. His experience was . . . harrowing, because he Changed without help.” I saw several of the wolves wince. “He might bear a grudge because of it, but thirty years is a long time to wait if revenge is the only reason for taking Jesse.”
“Does he belong to a pack?” Mary Jo asked from the back of the room. Mary Jo was a firefighter with the Kennewick FD. She was small, tough-looking, and complained a lot because she had to pretend to be weaker than all the men on her team. I liked her.
Adam shook his head. “David is a lone wolf by choice. He doesn’t like werewolves.”
“You said they had humans with them, and new wolves,” Warren said.
Adam nodded, but I was still thinking about the lone wolf. What was a man who had been a lone wolf for thirty years doing running in a pack of new wolves? Had he Changed them himself? Or were they victims like Mac had been?
Samuel laid his muzzle on my knee, and I petted him absently.
“You said they used silver nitrate, DMSO, and Ketamine,” said Auriele, the chemistry teacher. “Does that mean they have a doctor working for them? Or maybe a drug pusher? Ketamine isn’t as common as meth or crack, but we see it in the high school now and then.”
I straightened up. “A doctor or a vet,” I said. Beside me Samuel stiffened. I looked at him. “A vet would have access to all of those, wouldn’t he, Samuel?”
Samuel growled at me. He didn’t like what I was thinking.
“Where are you going with this?” asked Adam, looking at Samuel, though he was talking to me.
“Dr. Wallace,” I said.
“Carter is in trouble because he can’t accept being a werewolf, Mercy. It is too violent for him, and he’d rather die than be what we are. Are you trying to say that he is involved in a plot where young wolves are held in cages while experiments are performed upon them? Have you ever heard what he has to say about the animal experimentation and the cosmetics industry?”
For a moment I was surprised Adam knew so much about Dr. Wallace. But I knew from the reactions of the people in Aspen Creek that Adam had spent time there. I suppose it only made sense that he would know about Dr. Warren’s troubles. From the murmurs around us, the rest of the pack didn’t, though.
Adam stopped arguing with me to explain to everyone who Dr. Wallace was. It gave me time to think.
“Look,” I said when he’d finished. “All these chemicals for the drug they shot you with are readily available—but who would think to combine them and why? Who would want to be able to tranquilize a werewolf? Dr. Wallace is in danger of losing control—I saw it myself this week. He is worried about his family. He wouldn’t have developed a way to administer drugs to werewolves in order to kidnap Jesse, but he might have developed a tranquilizer for people to use on him—in case he lost all control, and his wolf attacked someone.”
“Maybe,” Adam said slowly. “I’ll call Bran tomorrow and have him ask Dr. Wallace about it. No one can lie to Bran.”
“So what do they stand to gain with Jesse?” Darryl asked. “Money seems ridiculous at this point. It seems that this attack was directed at the Columbia Basin Pack’s Alpha rather than at Adam Hauptman, businessman.”
“Agreed.” Adam frowned at him. “Possibly someone wants control of the pack? There isn’t much I would not do for my daughter.”
Control of the pack or control of Adam, I wondered, and is there a difference between the two?
“Whoever it is and whatever they want, we should know before dawn. We know where they are staying,” I said, reaching into the pocket of my jeans and pulling out the paper the vampires had given me and handing it to Adam.