Bite Back 05 - Angel Stakes (21 page)

She looked pleased at the invitation, and so, instead of heading off home, we went visiting.

Tove Johansen. Twenty-two years old. Born on the family farm outside Clearbrook, up in the Red River basin of Minnesota. Fresh off the flight from Minneapolis four years ago, eager to show LA she had what it took to be an actress.

Year of auditions and waiting tables; empty promises and leaking hopes.

Three years ago made a claim to police that Forsythe had raped her.

Case thrown out.

Working name Celeste.

Five convictions for prostitution and drugs.

Currently living in a squat yellow apartment building just off Sepulveda in Van Nuys, walking distance from rooms by the hour along the boulevard. Despair drifting up from the hot streets like an invisible, poisonous gas.

She hadn’t been expecting visitors.

Once Elizabetta persuaded her to let us in, Tove made some faint effort to clear a place for us to sit. Unappetizing, half-eaten meals went in the sink. Clothes were thrown on the bed. Glittery, eye-catching, tight. Desperate. She threw a coat over them.

Her movements were sluggish, her blue eyes too bright. Her pale hair was matted and dull; her hands fluttered like butterflies.

She was just focused enough to take some cash off Elizabetta.

When she became aware of me looking at the state of the veins in her arms, she put on a shabby sweater and hugged herself.

“Don’t know why you want to talk about it,” she said and shrugged. “Your money, your time. You’ll never get it in print.”

“We aren’t journalists,” Elizabetta said.

“Police?” Her eyes came up to glare at us, genuine anger breaking through to animate her face.

I shook my head.

It was too much effort for her to keep the anger going. She sank down on the bed and waved a hand.

“Ask away.”

Elizabetta glanced at me. She’d told me the basics in the cab as we’d been driven from downtown, with Yelena following on the Kawasaki. I nodded at her to continue. Yelena and I were going to try and see if Tove was telling the truth. I hoped her drug-induced daze wasn’t going to make that impossible.

“Tove,” Yelena began, “you’ve had convictions for drugs, including drugs that might affect your memory. How can we be sure what you claimed is true?”

Tove snorted. “You can’t. That’s the whole fucking problem, isn’t it?”

“Were you on drugs the night he raped you?”

“Only the ones he gave me,” Tove snapped at her. “Before and after.”

She might as well have punched me in the stomach.

Yelena looked at me, worried by my reaction.

I settled it down. It served no purpose to react like that. I had to keep it under control; otherwise I’d distract Yelena. But Tove Johansen hadn’t lied.

“Rohypnol?” Elizabetta asked.

“No. Roofies screw with your head, make it difficult to remember. I knew exactly what he was doing. Him and his friends.”

“You felt weak, barely able to stand, but still aware?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.

Tove nodded.

Elizabetta kept pressing. “The convictions you have—”

“I never touched the stuff,” Tove said angrily, and then slumped back. “Not then. Those first convictions afterwards, the ones when I went to the cops about him. I was set up.” She sighed and rubbed her face tiredly. “I don’t expect you to believe me.”

“I believe you,” I said.

She laughed. A harsh, bitter sound. “Good cop, bad cop? Spare me. Yeah, I have convictions. I have a habit. I do what I do to feed it. Since that’s what the DA told me I was, what other choice did I have?”

“You could go home.”

“Fuck home. You think they don’t know? You think that fucking lawyer of his doesn’t make sure the Clearbrook Gazette knows all the juicy details every time I get busted?”

She turned to grab a cigarette and made herself busy lighting it.

“No jobs. No one wanted me for auditions. Even the fucking restaurants wouldn’t take me.” She gave that laugh again, paused to wipe an eye. “It’s like being famous, except it’s the exact opposite effect.”

I’d had the army. I’d had choices. I’d had friends.

She’d had nothing and no one.

I went over and knelt in front of her.

She looked at me, suspicious and red-eyed and angry.

“Tove, I believe you.”

For a moment, I thought she was going to cry, but no.

“Fucking hooray,” she said, twisting her face so the pretty girl from the plains was hidden.

Without meaning to, I reached with eukori.

There was a painful, suffocating pressure on me. For a moment, I thought it was my eukori failing again, but it wasn’t. It was what Tove lived with because of what Forsythe had done to her.

Lungs laboring, I struggled back to my feet. I’d had enough.

“We’ll…” I stopped.

Do what? Make it right? Get her justice? Give her back the last three years?

She grunted as if I’d proved something, and looked away.

I pressed my PI card into her hand. It was all I could think to do.

“I’ll help if I can.”

She refused to look at me.

We got up and went to the door.

“Farrell,” she said.

I turned back. She was squinting at the card, cigarette smoke twisting around her head.

She was silent for so long, I was about to leave.

“You know that bastard is producing a new show?” she said. “Airing in the spring. Just started shooting.”

“Is that right?” I said.

How would she know?
I hadn’t seen anything online.

She could see the doubt on my face. “I hear things,” she said defensively. “I still got contacts in the business.”

Johns, more likely.

But she was owed a shred of dignity.

“What kind of show?” I asked.

Forsythe did glitz and glamour. Contests and reality. LA life.

“The same crap, only with a new twist,” she said.

I stifled my impatience. “What twist?”

“Some shit about ‘Tomorrow’s Faces’.” When I didn’t respond, she looked me in the eyes for the first time. “Young models. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.”

I felt the bile rise in my throat. I thought about an ad I’d seen on one of his websites.

What would you do to be a model?

Oh, God. No. No.

I swallowed hard. “Call me if you hear anything else.”

She shrugged and turned away.

Outside, we stopped, Elizabetta looking sick. Yelena looked angry.

“That bastard,” I said, my breath still coming hard. I’d avoided thinking about what Forsythe might have been doing since I last saw him. Nothing to do with Diana’s compulsions. I didn’t want to face what I might have been responsible for.

“I wasn’t a one-off,” I said. “My gut tells me he’s been doing this for years. And now he’s starting in with kids.”

“There’s nothing on him here in LA, beyond a couple of these dropped cases,” Elizabetta said. “But maybe he wasn’t so careful back in Denver.”

“That’s a long time ago,” I said. “Statute of limitations.”

“Maybe not,” Elizabetta said. “Jefferson’s files show Forsythe goes back to Denver regularly, a couple of times a month. He keeps a house there. If he’s been taking girls there…”

Then there might be some evidence he’d left behind.

“In the meantime,” Elizabetta said, “I’ll get some details on the new show.”

“You can do that from home,” I said. “Come on.”

We split up again. I persuaded Yelena to go with Elizabetta in the cab. I wanted some time to myself on the motorcycle.

At the house, I found Alex had come in, showered and gone straight back out on patrol with Altau security. He’d be back for the concert tonight. Jen was still in New York. Vera was waiting up for us in the living room—that is to say, she’d fallen asleep on the sofa, though she woke quickly enough when we came in. Dominé and Dante came in from the club right behind us.

I should have taken the USB drive with Jefferson’s files on Forsythe up into the study and gone through it alone. Instead, I sat down with my laptop in the living room and worked my way through it, struggling against sleep.

Dominé, Dante and Vera made breakfast for themselves.

Yelena got Elizabetta into a bed and told me she was sleeping when she came back.

I skimmed on through the files. Through a growing sense of nausea, I was vaguely aware of the others gathering around, reading over my shoulder.

Tanner Forsythe was even worse than I ever imagined.

And it was my fault that he was free to do it. My fault.

Eventually, Yelena slipped onto the sofa beside me. I could feel her eukori slipping under my defenses.

“Stop,” she said. “This is not something you could have prevented.”

“If I’d—”

“What? Gone to the police?” Vera said. “Taken him to court? The word of one drunk young woman against all of them? He’s part of a rich and well-known family who’d have hired the best lawyers. They’d have had private investigators turning your life upside down and proving that you were desperate for money. You wouldn’t have had a chance.”

Of course everyone in my House knew all about it. Even Dominé and Dante, now.

“Fay—” I started.

“Two drunk girls. One of them with a reputation. No better.” Vera took my laptop away.

Yelena pulled me into an embrace, tucking my face against her neck. She was dosing me with pacifics, and I felt so tired.

“You have a chance now. Not just for you. For every one of those girls,” Yelena said. “But it won’t be easy.”

“And you need to rest now,” Vera said. “You’re still recovering.”

“Spent a month recovering,” I mumbled, struggling against sleep.

“No. You spent a month in treatment.”

I tried to argue, but I couldn’t form sentences.

Yelena carried me upstairs to bed like a child, where she and Vera held me between them as I drifted, desperate for sleep and scared of what might be waiting there.

However cold it had been last night, the Santa Ana winds had returned this morning. I could feel the house get warmer. The air was drier, charged with a strange electricity.

But it all felt distant, as if it was happening to someone else.

I reached inside to the unnerving emptiness. No twin sister. No spirit guide. In the way that thoughts blend and twist together near sleep, I wondered whether losing Tara and Hana was a long-delayed punishment for my failure to confront Forsythe. Would I get them back if I made up for it? If I found Fay and helped her, whatever she’d been through, whatever she’d become, would that stand in lieu of all the other girls I hadn’t helped? Girls like Tove?

No. Not my fault. Not my fault.

Weaving between my thoughts, Yelena and Vera held a murmured conversation about things like faith and redemption, the gaps of silence lengthening, until each sentence was like a pebble dropped into a deep, still lake.

“God is good, good is God,” Vera said.

I finally fell asleep trying to untangle that.

I slept the whole day, without dreams.

They’d built a concert stage inside the inner courtyard of the former hospital, turning it into an open air amphitheater.

It was surrounded on three sides by tall white walls, built in a brutal, monolithic style where the empty windows seemed like tiny points breaking the concrete expanse. Stains ran down the sides and the bottom of the walls were a jungle of lurid graffiti.

The wooden stage itself was attached to the main block. It looked as if a shipment of oversized loudspeakers had crashed there. Haphazardly tumbled together, the speakers dwarfed the band themselves. Projectors turned the wall behind the stage into a seven-story pockmarked screen.

The band was in mid-session when we arrived. I had to admit, they had powerful, driving songs and they’d nailed their audience. The courtyard was like a sea in a storm, filled with leaping, waving bodies. Every last one of them a werewolf, so Billie had said.

Every last one of them male
, she might have added, but she knew I was seeing it. Female werewolves were
too precious
to be allowed to come to this
dangerous
situation. Shit. No wonder they ran away.

The Belles had closed ranks, but the crowd was too intent on enjoying themselves to notice female werewolves slinking by behind them.

“They always get some guys slipping their leash and changing,” Billie yelled in my ear as we made our way around the back.

She must have been reading my mind. “They have trouble?”

“A little. Always contained. Always enough of them stay sane and sober to keep their friends under control. And the band’s a big pack who keep good control.”

Our group passed behind a long stall at the back that was serving beer.

Werewolves burned it off quickly, so they were busy.

There didn’t look to be any animosity between packs. Given the declared neutral venue, the music and the beer, their natural instinct to claim territory seemed to have taken the night off.

Every pack had a distinct Call, and putting packs close together like this tended to create a discord, reflecting the tension between packs. But sticking them in the audience of a concert actually worked. I sensed all the Calls, and for want of a better phrase, they were in harmony.

We went to one of the old hospital’s side entrances and there the band’s security got tighter: a group of monstrously large guys were on the door, practicing their resting bitch faces.

The appearance of the Belles acted like some magic vanishing cream, and the scowls disappeared while they high-fived with the girls and hopped from foot to foot like school kids on a break.

An escort of slightly smaller guys arrived and we went on in, getting clapped on the back by the guards as we did. Their aim was way off—Haz, Yelena and I collected more than a couple of claps on the butt too.

Alex growled.

“You upset no one tapped your butt?” I asked. He growled some more.

Billie tried to roll her eyes at the guards’ behavior, but irrespective of what the other LA alphas might think about it, Billie and the Belles were popular with the band’s traveling pack. The Belles soaked it up and returned it with interest.

As we made our way deeper into the building, I wondered what it was like for the band to be werewolves and have no territory; to always be a guest of some other pack. They were more friendly than I imagined most packs would be. We had way more roadies than necessary to guide Billie and the rest of us. Our little group seemed to pick up more of them as we went, slowing everything down. It was like walking through mud until you couldn’t lift your feet.

Everyone stopped in what had once been the main lobby: a bleak, wide expanse, with stairs going up and down from this level. What had been the front door was entirely blocked by banks of gas-powered electricity generators, growling away and stinking the place out.

A Were came up trotting up the stairs and went through a forearm-gripping and shoulder-bumping routine with Billie. He had a sense about him—not the aggressive dominance display of a normal alpha, but something confident, quiet and hard. This had to be the band’s alpha.

“M’name’s Cane,” he said to us, his voice scratchy. “Ya bigman posse all waiting downstairs.”

He turned to us. “Deauville?” he asked Alex, who nodded. “Just you and ya woman.”

When Alex started to argue it, he cut across him. “Them down there: one alpha, one lieutenant, no exceptions. The room is sealed off, so no other dudes is hitching in. You two, you co-alpha, still counts as two.”

Cane looked at Haz. “You the one from Albuquerque? You alone, hey. You can take someone.”

The Belles were more than ready to provide someone, but Haz, for all her jealousy and fang-phobia, was a smarter operator than I’d given her credit for.

She looked around. “Billie, I can’t ask the Belles to do any more. But House Farrell is already associated with the Albuquerque pack.” She pointed to Yelena as her second.

With a glance at me to confirm, Yelena subtly changed position to be nearer Haz, muttering to herself.

Thanks to my lessons on Athanate and the fact that the language contained loan words such as ‘grenade’, I had a good idea of what Yelena thought we should do with a roomful of unpredictable LA alphas.

Cane missed that. His nose flared, seeking out more information about this Athanate that Haz had put her trust in.

Billie would have told him I was the famous hybrid. Yelena’s marque matched mine, down to the mix of Were in it. I could see him wondering if there were two hybrids in front of him.

I didn’t care what he thought. This had worked out better than I expected. With Alex and Yelena beside me, I felt secure.

“I’m taking Vig with me,” Billie said, indicating the Scandinavian blonde.

Cane frowned. “This not your party, Billie.”

I cleared my throat. “Yeah, you’ve got us here. You’ve done what you said—”

“I wouldn’t miss this for a truckload of beer and a tanker of gas.” Billie waved it off.

Cane shrugged and led us underground to where a double door was guarded by another group of his oversized pack.

He stopped in front of them and held his hands up.

“Okay, dudes, cut time. Bail or boom.” He tapped the floor with his foot. “This here’s neutral territory, everything chill. In there,” he jerked a finger over his shoulder at the door, “you on ya own. Only thing we do is clean house after. ”

“Boom,” Alex said.

Cane smiled slightly as he stood aside and the guards opened the doors. We walked through.

The basement was a long room, extending far under the stage and courtyard where the rest of the LA werewolves were partying.

Cables snaked in, running to four powerful stage lights in the corners.

The room had been cleared, in that all the trash had been shoveled to the side. That left the center open, apart from weird, swelling columns which supported the roof and carried mysterious tubes down their sides. It looked like huge concrete trombones had been jammed between floor and ceiling.

Although the sound from the concert was muted down here, you could feel the heavy bass making the whole building tremble. Dust and flakes of paint floated down from the ceiling like a gentle rain, sparkling in the strong side light.

The alphas and their lieutenants were waiting for us, standing in an arc with a couple of yards between each of the packs.

As we walked in, a storm of angry dominance came lashing off them.

If they’d been coordinated, I suspected I wouldn’t have been able to ride it. But four different alphas all trying to dominate wasn’t four times the dominance.

Taking Alex’s cue, I let it roll over me. I didn’t push back. I didn’t bow my head. I didn’t stop walking until Alex halted and we formed an approximate circle with the waiting alphas.

I kept my eyes on them, but from the edge of my sight, I saw Billie didn’t distance herself from us. She was about an arm’s length away from Haz, who stood close on my right.

I could feel Yelena standing behind us like a drawn blade.

Billie and Vig hadn’t bowed their heads at the dominance display either. I had the impression they’d die before they bowed to these guys.

The waiting alphas were all big, and none of them happy about being here.

“Well, thank you all for coming,” Billie drawled.

“Get on with it,” the guy in the middle snapped.

Billie smiled, unfazed. “In order, then. This here’s Haseya from the Albuquerque pack. She’s here to tell you they’re building up associations in the south and they want to talk to you. Next to her, Amber and Alex, co-alphas of Pack Deauville out of Colorado. They also want to talk association, but they’re talking on behalf of House Altau as much as themselves.”

“And you? The Belles are looking to join with these packs and Athanate?” The guy asking was on my right, the nearest of the LA alphas.

“We intend to
associate
,” Billie said, and the satisfaction in her voice made the alphas blink. She used her words carefully. Only a pack with an acknowledged alpha could associate with another. An unled group of werewolves, say one that lost an alpha and had no one to step up, they could only join a pack.

Billie turned her face slightly to us, not actually looking away from the others. “That’s Redondo asking the question. LA style is to call an alpha by the pack name.” Her mouth twisted. “But you all keep calling me Billie.”

She pointed to the remaining alphas around the circle. “Long Beach, Pasadena, Heights.”

There were no bikers on their side. The first three, Redondo, Long Beach and Pasadena, were big bruisers—guys who supplemented the musculature that being a wolf gave them with hard gym time. They were all casually dressed, close enough that it looked like a uniform: big-buckled belts on blue jeans, shit-stomping work boots, dark, tight vests. Their only individuality was in their jackets, all light and bright.

The last one, Heights—well, I wouldn’t have made him as a werewolf unless I got close enough to sense his marque. His clothes were completely different. He wore trendy black jeans and gray sneakers. His long-sleeved yellow shirt was left untucked under a linen blazer. A tweed fedora shaded dark blue eyes and wavy black hair. From what I could separate out, his marque was like his clothes—sharp.

I labeled him ‘unknown’. And maybe ‘dangerous’.

The others: on the surface, I didn’t think we’d have problems with Redondo. Predictably enough, Long Beach and Pasadena weren’t
ever
going to be my friends. This was looking more like pushing water uphill with every passing minute.

I knew that the slightest mistake I made, they’d leap on it.

Hopefully, Alex and Haz could do all the talking. Stop me from putting my foot in it. And in fact, they were all looking toward Alex. That was fine by me. I wasn’t here to gain their acknowledgment.

But it was Haz who got us started, and that made twice in the evening I realized I’d underestimated her. The biker gear and snarly voice, the jealousy and phobias, they all disguised a woman who thought and spoke clearly when she needed to.

Her alpha, Zane, had sent her specifically to do the talking, and that reinforced my opinion that he was smarter than he made out too.

Great idea. Send someone less outrageous and threatening to start talks with the LA alphas.

How wrong could I be?

“We’re looking for a preliminary agreement today,” Haz said clearly. “Just enough to allow us to continue talking. So, first off, we’d need the right for a couple of us, no more than that, to visit here for more detailed discussion. Your choice of place and time, of course.”

She paused. Redondo and Long Beach were looking at her. Pasadena was looking at Alex. None of them looked happy. Heights was looking at the other three LA alphas, his face unreadable.

“The purpose behind our discussion would be nothing to do with acquiring territory, but defending it. Details would be developed together over time, but at the lowest level of association, it’s our proposal that we should pledge support for each of the other packs in our association against any attempted—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Pasadena said.

It was a deliberate provocation. Even in the same pack, one Were saying that to another was likely to end up in a fight, unless the difference in dominance was huge.

I could feel Haz struggle with the urge to go to her wolf. As a human and a representative of her pack, she had to weigh things that the wolf didn’t care about.

But his attention wasn’t on her.

With a little shiver, I saw he was fixated on Alex, staring at him eye to eye.

In wolf form, Alex would eat him alive. Possibly literally. A formal challenge between alphas would mean they’d go to their wolves and Alex would win. This wasn’t a formal challenge.

Pasadena might also be smarter than he looked. The kind of challenge he was trying to provoke was resolved in human form, for the simple, practical reason that if one Were tried to strip off, or went to wolf without stripping first, then for a fatal second or two, they’d be vulnerable.