Bite Back 05 - Angel Stakes (16 page)

The patrol’s discard truck no doubt had a long and distinguished career in LA’s ceaseless war on the potholes in its five-hundred-square-mile domain. That was all forgotten as I swore at it. It had one last job to do, and it had decided it also had one last trick to pull.

I couldn’t get it into reverse, and the clock was ticking.

Alex’s team was almost in place.

Tom’s voice on the comm: “Team North, green.”

Elizabetta: “Team East, green.”

Dammit. Dammit.

Another crunch as I pulled at the gearshift. I needed to be rolling. Now.

Alex: “Team South, green.” In place. The main team, including Bian.

Silence on the comm. Everyone waiting for me.

In desperation I stomped again on the clutch, grabbed the gearshift in both hands and rammed it into every forward gear, one after the other. Each time it engaged, I eased off the clutch a fraction, trying to stir up the gears so whatever was catching moved just enough.

Then I hauled it back into reverse with all my weight.

With a sickening grind, the gear caught and the truck lurched backwards.

There was no time left for finesse.

I slammed the pedal down and yelled over the comm: “Rolling!”

Five.

Backward visibility was bad. It was great good luck that no one had parked along this street as I tore down it, the engine screaming protest and the truck weaving drunkenly from side to side, bucking over the potholes. The hazards were flashing and the backup warning screeching.

It was a bit late to discover the truck’s steering differential was shot as well.

Four.

A screech as I swerved and a bang as I clipped a streetlight and lost a side mirror.

Three.

I yanked on the string leading into the back and hoped the grenade arming pins all came out cleanly. There was no way of telling.

Two.

I had to swerve again to line it up.

Don’t hit Tom!

One.

Fingers crossed.

Zero
.

The back of the truck slammed into the north wall of the warehouse. The wall burst inwards. The back of the truck crumpled. The flash bombs and smoke grenades went off.

Alarms screamed.

Tom and his team ripped the sealing boards off the windows and emptied their guns on full automatic up into the ceiling. No silencers.

Elizabetta smashed windows in neighboring buildings.

The whole street was drowned in a cacophony of alarms, lit by flashing lights.

The Were inside had been in a safe, comfortable refuge where all they’d needed to do was hold out until reinforcements arrived. Suddenly, they were under a full-scale assault. The wall was breached. Bombs had gone off, and there was smoke pouring out of this truck that had appeared right in their safe area. Someone was firing at them. Added to that, they were probably half blind and deaf from the flash bombs.

And they were amateurs. They did what sensible amateurs would do: they bugged out.

All but one.

I heaved my way through the rubble, obscured by the billowing clouds from the smoke grenades.

Someone inside fired.

They were shooting at the truck, as if that was going to achieve something. A ricochet went over my head, making that evil
wheep
sound.

Timely reminder. You’re just as dead if you’re killed by chance. I crouched.

We didn’t want to kill any of them, but I didn’t want any of us dead either. And leaving a trigger-happy Were in here when emergency services would be on their way wasn’t a good outcome either.

Luckily I had one last flash bomb.

There was the sound of the patrol vans skidding to a halt outside the south entrance. As they emerged, the Were would be caught, bound and tossed into the vans.

“Team South, four secure.” Alex’s voice, tense and level.

Done.

I had to move on the final one.

“Team South, one more coming up soon. Fire in the hole,” I said, and threw the flash bomb in the direction the shots had come from.

Boom
.

I covered my ears and eyes, so I was in a lot better shape than the hapless holdout.

Tom beat me to him anyway.

He vaulted through the broken window, rolled and came up in one smooth motion, his reloaded gun pointed at the last Were, who had dropped his gun and was stumbling backwards, completely blind and deaf.

He’d recover.

“Pick him up, Tom. Time to go.”

I scooped up the gun he’d dropped, and then we grabbed his arms and sprinted to the south exit.

“Coming out with prisoner,” I yelled. It sounded like I was calling from the bottom of a well. Despite covering up, my ears were still ringing.

Tom repeated it on the comm and then we were outside.

Bian grabbed our prisoner and threw him in the back of the last of the patrol vans, following him inside.

Our van pulled up. Elizabetta was already inside.

“Go, go, go.” I leaped onboard as the driver hit the gas.

And we were gone.

“Hello, boys,” I said cheerfully.

We were at a safe house, half a mile from the scene and on the other side of the river. Everyone was inside, Tom was calling HQ to report, and I was speaking to the LA Were, who were trussed up like turkeys ready for the oven.

The Altau patrol were still glaring at the Were. Being shot at does that to you. The fact that we’d captured them didn’t seem to be enough payback. And the Were knew it, even though they were still suffering from shock. They just about managed a snarl at me between them.

All guys. If I didn’t know, I’d have been hard put to pick them out of an LA crowd as Were. Black pants; bulky, colorful jackets; scarves; plain shirts; work boots.

I sniffed, let their marque take its unique form in my nose, tasted their Call.

“You aren’t Pasadena, so I’m guessing maybe Redondo?”

One of them spat. I ignored that. I watched the eyes. Who looked where. Who looked down.

The eyes told me that the guy who’d stayed behind in the building was their leader. He was out of it for now, lying semi-conscious on the floor. If he was awake, he’d be getting his sight and hearing back about now, but he’d also managed to pick up a bad blow to the head. We’d overdosed him with standard human painkillers and trusted his Were defenses would deal with it.

I’d guessed his number two was a rangy Latino with short, stiff hair and a horseshoe mustache.

Subtle head movements in the pack. Horseshoe stared at each of the others until they lowered their eyes, then looked back at me, his authority confirmed. It was an angry look.

Not happy. I guess not going to be my best friend.

“Long Beach,” he said.

“So that’s three packs I know of. Who are the others?”

Horseshoe chewed the question around. I wasn’t exactly asking him to reveal secrets, but he really didn’t want to answer.

I waited him out.

Finally, he grunted: “The Heights. Whittier down to Chino.”

“Is that all the packs?” I asked.

He nodded.

Four, not the five that Dominé thought.

“You’re alive because we don’t want to fight with the local Were.”

“Should’ve thought of that before you came here.” The speaker was one of the subordinate Were, and he shut up when Horseshoe snarled at him.

“You’ve invaded our territory—” he started.

“Nothing that couldn’t have been settled with a conversation,” I said. “Instead, you started shooting at us.”

Horseshoe’s eyes went to Alex.

“Oh, you were only shooting at my mate. That’s all right then.”

He looked back and I could see his nostrils flare as he sniffed the marque in the room.

He’d get there eventually. Separate out the Altau Athanate and be left with just Alex and me.

Three. Two. One.

He frowned, right on cue. “What the fuck?”

“Yeah. What the fuck are you doing shooting at folk who’re on Athanate business? We’re Athanate as well as Were. You
want
to start a war?”

His eyes widened. “You’re the hybrid…” he said.

He might as well have gone on and called me ‘bitch’. I could sense he wanted to.

Yup. So not going to be friends with him.

To my surprise, he sucked it up, kinda.

“My apologies. Really,” he choked out as Alex snorted. “Why didn’t you contact us?”

But he wasn’t talking to me. He’d fixed on Alex, and he was apologizing to him as if I wasn’t there.

“Couldn’t find your website, let alone your contact information,” Alex said.

The sarcasm bounced off Horseshoe.

Alex was getting irritated, and letting his dominance ooze out.

Maybe that was the way to go. Together we were an alpha pair, and unless there were exceptional alphas in LA I hadn’t heard of, we’d be dominant over the whole bunch of them.

If only it was so quick and easy.

Alex glanced my way and I jerked my head to indicate we should get out of earshot.

In the darkness outside the house we hugged. I closed my eyes and just enjoyed the feeling of his arms for a minute, the scent of my own big, bad wolf.

“I gotta leave these guys to you,” I said finally, and told him about the New Mexico Were turning up at the club and the short version of the meeting with Skylur.

Bian came out.

“Tarez called. Advises us to cut them loose,” she said. “He’s worried that holding them will jeopardize any deal he can make with the local packs.”

“No. Alone, he isn’t going to make a deal in any reasonable timeframe,” Alex said. “Four packs who probably can’t stand each other? What’s he going to offer?”

“Yeah. We need to find out what’ll attract them,” I said. “They seem to prefer Alex to me. That tells us something at least. But first, I’ve gotta go to the club to make sure the New Mexico Were aren’t going to add to our problems.”

“I’d like to meet the New Mexico Were,” Bian said. “They’re going to be my neighbors and associates soon enough, I hope. And, if they are a problem, you need backup.”

“Deal. Alex? You okay to stay and pump these guys gently?”

“Fine,” he said. “What do I do if Tarez shows up and gives orders to release them?”

“I am the syndesmon. Skylur told me to get
all
Were into some kind of shape that we can get them into the new Assembly.” I sighed. Tarez had supported me against Naryn. I felt I could work better with him, but none of the Athanate really understood packs and how they functioned. Not at the gut level Alex or I did.

I squared my shoulders. “I’m going to go ahead on the basis that no one tells us how to handle negotiations with the Were.”

“Okay. What do we need from them?” Alex asked, jerking his thumb to indicate the Were inside.

“A meeting with all the alphas. I’ll take it from there. Of course, anything you can find out about them will be useful.”

“Do you need to take Tom and a couple of the others to the club?”

“No. I don’t want to make it any more tense than it will be.”

Just Yelena, Bian and me.

They’d turned off their commset at the club, and no one was answering their cells. We needed to go now. At this time of night, traffic would be lighter.

I was worried it would still take too long.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

Club Vasana looked deceptively quiet, but the parking lot was full.

The two Altau security guards that Tom had sent were playing doorman and doorwoman. They’d been dressed in the club’s gray top hat and tails uniform, but their jackets had been left looser than Dominé would usually allow. I saw the slight bulge that told me they were both wearing their shoulder holsters.

“Ladies, welcome to Club Vasana,” they said, laughing, taking off their top hats and bowing us in through the doors.

Well, they seemed to be enjoying themselves.

“I guess no one’s dead, then,” I said.

“It got pretty tense for a while,” the guy said. “But they all went back to the office and it’s been quiet since.”

“Dominé kept a lid on it?”

They looked at each other and laughed again.

“Y’know, to tell the truth,” the woman said, “it was more Vera.”

I felt a stir of unease. Vera was good at keeping people calm. I’d seen plenty of evidence of that back in Ops 4-10. And she was a favorite at House Altau—people would talk freely to her in a way that they seldom did to others.

But she’d arrived in Denver with a serious bullet wound, and Bian’s emergency treatment with its overdose of euphorics had seemingly left her with a tendency to say the oddest things. For instance, she’d told me the Athanate were angels, except the ones that were devils.

What if she came out with the wrong comment at the wrong moment? What if Rita was on a knife edge?

We thanked the guards and trotted down to the office, with me leading the way.

All around us, Club Vasana did what it did best: sex—real or fantasy.

“Did you see that?” Bian said, but I was too focused on getting to Dominé’s office.

As we approached, my worst fears seemed justified. I could hear shouting even through the thick barrier of the door.