Fox Revenge (Madison Wolves #5) (29 page)

"Yes," Angel said. "They were happy to see you marrying Lara. Weren't they?"

"Don't do this, Angel."

"This is the price," Elisabeth said. "It's a small price given that you're asking the people in the room to die for you."

"I'm not!"

"You are," she said. "Pay the price." She tapped the next photo. "What is this?"

"Lara and I dancing," I said. It was
taken from behind me, and Lara couldn't have looked happier.

"She looks happy," Scarlett said. "Tell us why."

"You know why."

"Tell us, Michaela. Why does she look happy?"

"We had just gotten married."

"Keep going," she said.

"We were dancing. We had never danced together before. I didn't know how. I just moved where she wanted me. It was fun."

Elisabeth made me explain every photo. Then she pulled out more
photos and accepted shorter answers for each of them. Me dancing with Ron Berg. Me with Elisabeth, and she looked insanely happy, too.

"Why am I so happy?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"Because I was dancing with you," she said. "I was dancing with my new sister-in-law, and the only person on the planet I love more than her is this woman." She showed me another photo of Lara in her tuxedo.

Angel and Scarlett worked together to pin all the photos on the wall.

Serena slid a plate of food to me and a glass of lemonade. I took them quietly and began to work my way through the food.

Greg sent a bunch of pictures in my direction. "These are the protective forces around the house. There appear to be eight or ten enforcers. We don't get many glimpses of them. They don't patrol the grounds; that would be obvious. But sometimes we see one of them on the deck, and a few times we have gotten lucky with a shot like this." The next photo was taken through the patio door from quite some ways away. In the background stood a wolf.

"What is he holding?" I asked.

"An assault rifle," Greg said. "We don't know the model." Then he showed me several others. "But this is a Glock sub-machine gun." He rattled off the statistics. "We presume the rounds are armor-piercing, but of course, we don't know. They could be straight silver rounds, which are easy to stop with body armor, but of course, will explode a wolf head just fine."

"They're armed like this in a human residential neighborhood and no one cares?"

"Apparently," he said. "We don't know how they're getting away with it."

I paged through the photos. "How do we deal with this?"

"In open ground, that sniper rifle you learned to shoot would be great. But of course, you wouldn't get more than one or two before the rest took cover in the house. After that, well. We have an assault plan we'll show you later."

I nodded. Elisabeth's folder was empty, but then Scarlett gave her another one. It was thicker than the last one. She slipped the first photo to me. It was Bree Callahan. She added photos of Robert and Virginia Callahan.

"Why am I giving you these?" she asked.

"You're reminding me of the help you gave me last year."

"What else?"

"I don't know."

"There are other Bree Callahans in the world," Elisabeth said. "Other girls you're going to help in the future. Maybe this girl." She added a picture of Kaylee. "Or this one." Sophia. "This one." Ava. Then Scarlett and Angel and Chloe and all the other girls in the pack, some of whom I didn't even know.

Then she paused and gave me another photo. It was a female wolf I didn't know. It looked
like an older photo.

"Who is this?" I asked.

"My mother," she said. "She died during a raid to try to kill an alpha." Then Elisabeth added a picture of Emily from the Iowa pack, carrying me to Lara. Sarah was there as well. She lined up the photos of her mother with the two women from the Iowa pack. "Some day, some little girl can remember her mother died in an assault, just like Lara and I remember."

"This isn't fair!" I screamed at her.

"No," she said. "It's not. It is, however, fact. And the price. Look at those photos. Are you ready to help kill those two women? I believe they were kind to you, were they not? Do you believe they'll survive an assault on the house?"

"They might not be there," I said.

"They are," Greg said. He had surveillance photos. "This one is from two days ago."

The photos all got pinned to the wall.

Greg spoke. "Assault plans are basically of three types: some sort of bomb, a full frontal assault, or a sniper or several snipers. Let's talk about a bomb."

"Wait," I said. "What about catching them away from the house."

"Good idea," he said. "The two you want almost never leave. Brody has not so much as stepped out onto the deck the entire time we've been watching. Johnny goes onto the deck for a few minutes now and then, but he is extremely elusive. If I were planning this operation, I would not try to plan on taking advantage of an exceedingly rare exit from the house."

"All right," I said.

Elisabeth pulled out photos. They were from Bayfield. Kayaking. Dinner at the Rittenhouse. The sheds I had built, including a few when we were building them. One of Lara looking at something, and her expression could best be described as "amazed".

"What do you think she is looking at?" Elisabeth asked.

"Me," I said. "She's looking at me, isn't she?"

"Yes, she is looking at you. She is watching you build these sheds. I looked through your house afterwards, and I found your name just like you said I would. I found it everywhere. Those sheds were nothing for you, were they?"

"No. The rafters were tricky. The rest was easy. When I built the garage, I bought prefab rafters."

Elisabeth had more photos from in and around Bayfield. Someone had gotten a photo of me pushing Lara off the sailboat. I stared at it. "Where did you get this?"

"Ava took it," Scarlett said. "All the kids have a copy."

"I didn't know."

"You were so angry," Elisabeth said. "With reason. Lara makes mistakes sometimes, doesn't she?"

"Big ones."

"You almost died that day," Elisabeth said.

Scarlett and Angel both took in deep breaths.
They hadn't known. They had watched me go for a swim, but they hadn't known Lara had to save me.

"Yes," I said. "The water was much colder than I realized."

"Lara saved you."

"Yes. If she hadn't, I would have died. But to be fair, she pulled me in after her."

"After you pushed," Elisabeth said. "And when she grabbed you, you basically jumped in with her, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"But Lara had made a big mistake. Did you forgive her?"

"Yes." I looked at Angel and Scarlett. "I'm glad I did. She talked me into something that has become very important to me." I got extra touches for that.

Then Elisabeth added a particularly ugly photo. It was taken at the mall where I had been kidnapped. There were three dead wolf bodies and a lot of blood.

"We sniffed a lot," Serena said. "Trying to find out if any of the blood was yours."

"None of it was," I said.

"We figured that out.
I was amazed you had done this."

"I'm not," said Greg. "Michaela, you're amazing."

"But this was the result of a mistake, wasn't it, Michaela?"

"Yes," I said in a small voice.

She returned to the picture of Lara just about to land in the water. "You forgave Lara."

"Yes."

She tapped the other photo. "I wonder whether you can forgive yourself."

I stared at both photos for a while. Then I turned the ugly one upside down. "Please don't pin that one up. I'll look at all your pictures, but please don't pin that one up."

"All right," Elisabeth said. She pulled out one more photo. "What's this?"

"The airplane landing at the local airport."

"I took that," Angel said. "That's your most recent landing."

"This represents another point of forgiveness," Elisabeth said. "Everyone in the pack forgives you for this. Can you forgive yourself?"

They pinned up the pictures. Elisabeth took the photo of the dead wolves and put it back in her folder on the bottom of the other pictures still there.

"All right," Greg said. "We were discussing bombs. There are four basic ways we can blow the house up. We can drop a bomb from an airplane."

"You can do that?" I asked.

He smiled. "It would be expensive but can be amazingly effective. It has a nice advantage of being insanely safe for our side."

"I like safe."

"The next choice," he said, "is some sort of ground launched military weapon such as mortar rounds, rocket-propelled grenades, and the like. These might be good choices on a more isolated target, but there are excessive difficulties for this location. I do not recommend it."

I nodded.

"The third choice would to somehow plant a bomb. This involves access to the house. The only way I think we can do this is if we had inside help. I do not believe we will find that sort of help, but you could certainly try."

"All right."

"The last is a car bomb. We could either outfit a van as a bomb and run it right into the house or we could plant a bomb to the bottom of their car sometime."

"Those don't sound bad."

"They aren't. Now, there are really only three problems with using a bomb of any nature. First, you don't know you're going to get your target. If I drop a military weapon from an airplane, I can destroy the house. The other choices could leave spots of the house that are relatively
undamaged."

"We could miss."

"Exactly. Next, bombs are messy. We are likely to do damage to surrounding structures. I presume you do not want a plan that kills innocent humans walking in the street." He showed me a picture of kids playing in the yard next door.

"Fuck."

"That sums that up," Greg said. "Furthermore, bombs tend to really, really get the human authorities in a frenzy. We do not want that kind of attention."

"No bombs."

"I won't help you with a bomb in a residential neighborhood," Greg said. "And you are not the woman I think you are if you would pick this route."

"No bombs," I said again.

The photo of the kids playing next door went up on the wall.

Elisabeth pulled out a photo of a very young wolf in fur.

"Who is this?" I asked.

"Lara the first day she shifted."

"She looks different."

"Puppy fur," Elisabeth said. Then she added more photos. "This is me on my first shift."

"That one is me!" said Angel. "Wasn't I cute?"

"This is Scarlett."

They showed me photo after photo.

"I don't recognize this one," Elisabeth said.

"Let me see it," Serena said. Elisabeth slipped the photo across to her. Serena looked at it. "Elisabeth, that's your mother."

Elisabeth took the photo back and then hugged it for a while. Then she handed it to Scarlett. "Put this one next to the kids playing, please." Scarlett pinned it up.

Then Elisabeth pulled out a photo of very young wolves in fur. She handed it to me.

"These aren't werewolves, are they?"

"No," she said. "Natural wolves, maybe three weeks old or so. Lara would really, really like to see your babies looking like that, and you are the only person who can give her that."

"You bitch," I said quietly.

"Pay the price, Michaela. Look at the pictures."

I sighed and looked through all the pictures. I stared at the one of Lara the most, but I caressed some of the others as well. Then Elisabeth thrust the one of the natural wolf pups at me.

Finally, Scarlett and Angel pinned them all up.

"The next type of assault," Greg said, "Is a military full frontal assault. We don't know the exact layout of the house interior, but we've made a model with a rough idea."

"I made the model," Scarlett said. She seemed pleased with herself. "Greg, when this is all over, could we use a very, very tiny bomb and blow it up? I never want to see it again, knowing what it represents."

"I'll leave Karen with something just perfect for it," Wendy said. "We have a little C4 with us."

"Oh goodie!" Karen said. "I love C4. Blasting caps, too?"

Wendy grinned at her. "Of course. What good is C4 without blasting caps?"

Scarlett retrieved the model, which was on a table to the side of the room. She set it on the table. It was open on top so you could look in. Then she showed how you could lift off each layer so you could see the upstairs, main floor, and basement.

"As you can see, it matches the photos on the outside. We've had to guess on the inside," Greg said. "We have several plans for a full frontal assault. Several of them are with the available pack forces. The rest involve my people."