“He can have my shirt,” he said. “But I can’t leave to get clothes; I’m on guard duty.”
I sighed. “He can have my sweatpants.” The T-shirt I was wearing hit me halfway down my thighs.
Shawn and I stripped Adam as quickly as we could, using the shirt to wipe most of the silver off his skin before covering him in my sweats and Shawn’s green T-shirt. Adam was shivering when we finished.
The thermos cup had dumped its sticky contents all over the floor when I dropped it, but both it and the thermos had survived. I had Jesse pour hot coffee down her father as fast as he’d drink it, and, with something to focus on, she steadied. When the coffee was done, she fed him the raw roast from the Ziploc bags without turning a hair.
I was worried because Adam was so passive, not a state I’d ever seen him in before. Samuel had said prolonged exposure to silver increased sensitivity. I thought about Adam’s headache and the seizures and hoped lycanthropy was enough to allow him to heal.
“You know,” said Shawn thoughtfully, “for someone who wants this one to fight the head wolf in a month, Gerry’s not taking very good care of him.”
I was frowning at him when I heard the door open.
“Hey, Morris,” said the stranger as he opened the door, “the boss wants to see you and—” His eyes traveled to Adam and Jesse and he stopped speaking and went for his gun.
If I had been alone, we’d have all been dead. I didn’t even think to pull my weapon, just stared in shock, belatedly realizing that Shawn hadn’t bolted the door when he’d come in. Shawn’s gun popped quietly three times in rapid succession, putting a neat triangle of red over the intruder’s heart, making little more noise than someone opening a can of pop. He was shooting a small-caliber automatic with a silencer.
The wounded man fell slowly to his knees, then forward onto his face. I pulled my SIG at last and took aim.
“No,” Adam said. “Wait.” He looked at his daughter. “You told me you weren’t hurt—is that true?”
Jesse nodded resolutely. “Just bruises.”
“All right, then,” he said. “Mercy, we’re going to try to leave as many alive as possible—dead men tell no tales, and I want to know exactly what’s been going on. We’ll be gone before this man heals enough to be a danger. Leave him be.”
“He’s not dead?” asked Shawn. “The captain says you can kill werewolves with lead.”
Not being in the habit of taking on werewolves, Christiansen’s men hadn’t had silver ammunition, and my supply was limited. Silver bullets are expensive, and I don’t go out hunting werewolves on a regular basis. Only Connor had had a gun that could use any caliber I had anyway. I’d given him a half dozen of my 9mm bullets.
“You have to take out the spinal column if you want to kill a werewolf without silver,” I told him. “And even then . . .” I shrugged. “Silver ammo makes wounds that don’t heal as fast, gives them a chance to bleed out.”
“Damn,” Shawn said, with a last look at the bleeding werewolf he’d shot. He took out a cell phone and dialed in several numbers.
“That’ll let everyone know we’re on the move,” he told me when he’d finished, tucking the small device back into his pants pocket. “We’ve got to get out of here now. With any luck they’ll assume someone’s out on the range and won’t pay attention to my shots. But someone’s going to miss Smitty, and we need to be out of here when they do.” Then he got down to business and organized our retreat.
I put the SIG back in its holster and took out the .44 magnum. I didn’t have a holster for it so I’d just have to carry it. I shoved the extra magazine for the SIG into my bra because I didn’t have any better place to store it.
We dragged the wounded werewolf out of the doorway, then Shawn and Jesse got Adam to his feet. Shawn because he was the strongest of us, Jesse because I knew how to shoot a gun. I went out the door first.
This part of the warehouse was set apart from the main room. The offices had been set into a section half the width of the building, and below me was a bare strip of cement wide enough for two trucks to drive side by side. Leaning over the railing to check beneath the stairway, I could tell that there was no one nearby, but I couldn’t see very well into the rest of the building because of the racks of giant crates.
As soon as the others were out of the room and onto the landing, I ran down ahead of them to the second-floor landing, where I could guard their descent. Shawn’s plan was that we were going to try to get Adam to the cars. One of Gerry’s men drove a classic Chevy truck that Shawn said he could hot-wire faster than he could put a key in the ignition.
I tried to control my breathing so I could listen, but the warehouse was silent except for my comrades coming down the stairs and the ringing in my ears that could have obscured the movements of an army.
There was a garage door right next to the offices, the kind that is double-wide and double-high so a semi can drive through it. Shawn told me it was kept padlocked from the outside, and Gerry had shot the motor that opened it when he’d decided to keep Jesse in one of the offices here where he could control who had access to her. We’d have to make our way back toward the other side of the warehouse and go out a person-sized door, which was the only one unlocked.
As I waited at the bottom of the stairs, trying to see into the warehouse past the impossible maze of crates that could conceal a dozen werewolves with a host of hiding places to spare, I thought about what Shawn had said at last. He was right. If Gerry wanted Adam to kill Bran, he’d need him in a lot better shape. It wouldn’t take Bran more than a few seconds to kill Adam in his present condition.
Gerry wasn’t stupid, Samuel had told me. So maybe that was the result he intended.
It occurred to me that there were an awful lot of things that didn’t make sense if Gerry wasn’t stupid—and Samuel was a pretty good judge of character. David seemed to think that the bloodbath at Adam’s house had served to rid Gerry of some unwanted competition—but it had also drawn the Marrok’s attention. And it would have drawn Bran’s eye, even if I hadn’t taken Adam to him. An attack at an Alpha’s home was important. Then there was that payment to the vampires. I might have found out about it sooner than expected, but if Bran had come sniffing around, I was pretty sure he’d’ve discovered it, too.
If I were trying to get someone to challenge for Marrok, I wouldn’t make my candidate hate me by kidnapping his daughter. If I were going to use underhanded methods to force a challenge I wasn’t certain my candidate would win, I would make sure to cover my tracks so Bran would never find out—and Bran had a deserved reputation for finding out everything.
Gerry had all but painted a billboard that said, “Look at what I’m doing!” and, if he wasn’t stupid, he’d done it on purpose. Why?
“Mercy.” Shawn’s whisper jerked me back to the present. They were down the stairs, and I was blocking their way.
“Sorry,” I said in the same soundless whisper.
I took point, walking a few steps ahead and looking around the crates as we passed. It was slow going. Adam was having problems with the leg he’d damaged in the first attack, and Jesse was too short to be a good crutch when paired with Shawn, who was nearly six feet tall.
I’d heard something, or thought I had, and I stopped. But when the sound didn’t repeat, I decided it was still the ringing in my ears, which was coming and going a little. I hadn’t taken but three steps when power ran through me like a warm, sweet wind.
“The pack’s here,” said Adam.
I’d never felt them like that before, though I suppose I’d never been in a situation where they were all coming together with one purpose. That might have been all it was, or it might have been because I was standing so close to the pack’s Alpha.