I nodded. “Maybe as many as two thousand in the US, five or six hundred in Canada, and about four hundred in Mexico.”
“How do you know so much about werewolves?”
“I was raised by them.” I waited for him to ask me why, but his attention had drifted toward the body. He inhaled deeply and gave an eager shudder.
“Do you know what they wanted with you?” I asked hurriedly.
“They told me they were looking for a cure. Kept putting things in my food—I could smell them, but I was hungry so I ate anyway. Sometimes they’d give me shots—and once when I wouldn’t cooperate they used a dart gun.”
“Outside, when you were talking to them, you said they had others like you?”
He nodded. “They kept me in a cage in a semitrailer. There were four cages in it. At first there were three of us, a girl around my age and a man. The girl was pretty much out of it—she just stared and rocked back and forth. The man couldn’t speak any English. It sounded like Polish to me—but it could have been Russian or something. One of the times I was taking a trip on something they pumped in me, I woke up and I was alone.”
“Drugs don’t work on werewolves,” I told him. “Your metabolism is too high.”
“These did,” he said.
I nodded. “I believe you. But they shouldn’t have. You escaped?”
“I managed to change while they were trying to give me something else. I don’t remember much about it other than running.”
“Was the trailer here in the Tri-Cities?” I asked.
He nodded. “I couldn’t find it again, though. I don’t remember everything that happens when. . .” His voice trailed off.
“When you’re the wolf.” Memory came with experience and control, or so I’d been told.
A strange car approached the garage with the quiet purr common to expensive engines.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, when I stood up.
“Don’t you hear the car?”
He started to shake his head, but then paused. “I—yes. Yes, I do.”
“There are advantages to being a werewolf,” I said. “One of them is being able to hear and smell better than the average Joe.” I stood up. “It’s turning into the parking lot. I’m going to look out and see who it is.”
“Maybe it’s the guy you called. The Alpha.”
I shook my head. “It’s not his car.”
Chapter 3
I slipped through the office and opened the outside door cautiously, but the smell of perfume and herbs hanging in the night air told me we were still all right.
A dark Cadillac was stretched across the pavement just beyond Stefan’s bus. I pushed the door all the way open as the uniformed chauffeur tipped his hat to me, then opened the car’s back door, revealing an elderly woman.
I stuck my head back in the office, and called, “It’s all right, Mac. Just the cleanup crew.”
Keeping the humans ignorant of the magic that lives among them is a specialized and lucrative business, and Adam’s pack kept the best witch in the Pacific Northwest on retainer. Rumors of Elizaveta Arkadyevna Vyshnevetskaya’s origins and how she came to be in the Tri-Cities changed on a weekly basis. I think she and her brood of grandchildren and great-grandchildren encouraged the more outrageous versions. All that I knew for certain was that she had been born in Moscow, Russia, and had lived in the Tri-Cities for at least twenty years.
Elizaveta rose from the depths of the big car with all the drama of a prima ballerina taking her bow. The picture she made was worth all the drama.
She was almost six feet tall and little more than skin and bones, with a long, elegant nose and gray, penetrating eyes. Her style of dress was somewhere between babushka and Baba Yaga. Layers of rich fabrics and textures came down to her calves, all covered with a long wool cape and a worn scarf that wrapped around her head and neck. Her outfit wasn’t authentic, at least not to any period or place that I’ve heard of, but I’ve never seen anyone brave enough to tell her so.
“Elizaveta Arkadyevna, welcome,” I said, walking past the bus to stand by her car.
She scowled at me. “My Adamya calls and tells me you have one of his wolves dead.” Her voice had the crispness of a British aristocrat, so I knew she was angry—her usual accent was thick enough I had to make a real effort to understand her. When she was really angry, she didn’t speak English at all.
“Werewolf, yes,” I agreed. “But I don’t think it is one of Adam’s.” Adamya, I had learned, was an affectionate form of Adam. I don’t think she’d ever called him that to his face. Elizaveta was seldom affectionate to anyone likely to overhear her.
“I have the body in my shop,” I told her. “But there is blood all over here. The werewolf chased me with a torn artery and bled from here over to the storage facility, where he tore up the fence in two places before he bled to death out on the street. The storage facility has cameras, and I used Stefan’s bus”—I pointed to it—“to move the body.”
She said something in Russian to her chauffeur, who I recognized as one of her grandchildren. He bowed and said something back before going around to open the trunk.
“Go,” she told me, and flung her arms in a pushing gesture. “I will take care of the mess out here without your help. You wait with the body. Adam will be here soon. Once he has seen, he will tell me what he would have me do with it. You killed this wolf? With a silver bullet so I should look for casing?”
“With my fangs,” I told her; she knew what I was. “It was sort of an accident—at least his death was.”
She caught my arm when I turned to go into the office. “What were you thinking, Mercedes Thompson? A Little Wolf who attacks the great ones will be dead soon, I think. Luck runs out eventually.”
“He would have killed a boy under my protection,” I told her. “I had no choice.”
She released me and snorted her disapproval, but when she spoke her Russian accent was firmly in place. “There is always choice, Mercy. Always choice. If he attacked a boy, then I suppose it must not have been one of Adamya’s.”
She looked at her chauffeur and barked out something more. Effectively dismissed, I went back to Mac and our dead werewolf.
I found Mac crouched near the body, licking his fingers as if he might have touched the drying blood and was cleaning them off. Not a good sign. Somehow, I was pretty certain that if Mac were fully in control, he wouldn’t be doing that.
“Mac,” I said, strolling past him and over to the far side of the garage, where we’d been sitting.
He growled at me.
“Stop that,” I said sharply, doing my best to keep the fear out of my voice. “Control yourself and come over here. There are some things you should know before Adam gets here.”
I’d been avoiding a dominance contest, because my instincts told me that Mac was a natural leader, a dominant who might very well eventually become an Alpha in his own right—and I was a woman.
Women’s liberation hadn’t made much headway in the world of werewolves. A mated female took her pack position from her mate, but unmated females were always lower than males unless the male was unusually submissive. This little fact had caused me no end of grief, growing up, as I did, in the middle of a werewolf pack. But without someone more dominant than he, Mac wouldn’t be able to take control of his wolf yet. Adam wasn’t there, so it was up to me.
I stared at him in my best imitation of my foster father and raised an eyebrow. “Mac, for Heaven’s sake, leave that poor dead man alone and come over here.”
He came slowly to his feet, menace clinging to him. Then he shook his head and rubbed his face, swaying a little.
“That helped,” he said. “Can you do it again?”