In the Werewolf's Den (21 page)

"Want to talk about it?” Danielle finally asked.

They'd been walking in silence for fifteen minutes, ducking out of sight when one helicopter swooped overhead, and keeping to the shadows whenever they could.

"Talk about what?"

She resisted the urge to slug him. “Let's see. One of your friends blew himself up and saved your life. Your entire plan to develop a cure for the magic virus has gone out of control, your investments in the zone were largely destroyed in the rioting and your chances of getting the money the network owes you are slim. Oh, and your girlfriend betrayed you to the warders. Other than that, I can't think of a thing."

"You did betray us?” His voice was harsh with accusation. “I was hoping Arenesol was wrong about that."

"Of course I betrayed you. What did you expect me to do? Try to help an illegal impaired breakout?"

"Is that what it was?"

"It seemed that way to me at the time.” She sat down at an abandoned bus stop, the Plexiglas and plastic structure still providing some shelter from the blazing sun and from the constant spying of warder choppers.

She patted the bench next to herself, but Carl ignored her gesture and paced in front of her.

"Does it still seem that way to you? Can you still justify it? All those dead elves."

And Joe had lied to her. She'd believed him when he'd said they would simply overawe the Tiger escape.

Carl's words only rubbed salt in the wounds Joe had left. Still, Danielle wasn't the kind to back off. “What do you want me to do, Carl? Grovel? I made a decision based on the information I had. Believe me, I'm aware of the consequences. I'll have nightmares about it for years. Would I do something different knowing what I know now? Sure. But it isn't as if you took me into your confidence. You treated me like an enemy, so why are you so hurt that I acted like one?"

He spun toward her, opened his mouth, then shut it.

"Can I make a suggestion?” she asked when it became obvious that he wasn't going to say anything.

"I'd love to hear it."

Sarcasm dripped, but she decided to take him literally.

"I can't undo what I did. I wish we'd both done a lot of things differently. But we're humans. At least I'm a human and you're a
Were
. That means that neither of us comes close to perfection. But we need to be honest with each other. If we can't talk about things, can't work them out between us, we're going to end up fighting all the time.” And they'd end up killing each other. She didn't want to say that.

"That makes sense.” His agreement was reluctant, but he did agree.

"All right. I admit that I made a mistake telling the warders about Arenesol's breakout. I didn't plan on a slaughter. We were just supposed to turn them back."

"We?"

She barked a laugh. “See, Carl, it isn't easy to break the habits of a decade of training. And that's how long I've been working to become a warder. Ever since—” she trailed off.

"Ever since what?"

She'd said they needed to be honest. Well, this was her first test. She didn't want to tell him about finding her mother—it was a personal memory. But she owed it to him. If he looked at her and walked away in disgust, it was better now than later. Wasn't it? Actually, she wasn't so sure.

She took a deep breath. “Early in the return of magic, before people really knew what was going on, I snuck out of high school. I was going to the mall with a couple of girlfriends and I stopped by our apartment to change first.

"My mother had lost her job, but she just slept all the time so I didn't have to worry about her. Now, I know that she suffered from depression. At the time, I just thought she was lazy.” Too lazy to care about me.

"I didn't bother checking on her when I got home. I was worrying about how much trouble I'd be in if she caught me, and didn't consider that she might be in trouble too. But I heard something in her bedroom when I was on my way out the door. So I decided to peek in."

Despite the decade that had passed, Danielle shuddered at the return of the memory.

Carl's eyes gleamed with sympathy. “Go on."

"My mother had remarried a couple of years before and my step-father was younger than she. I think I must have had a bit of a crush on him. I don't know what I was expecting when I opened the door, but it definitely wasn't what I got."

Carl nodded, waiting for her to continue.

"My stepfather was on top of my mother. I was embarrassed. I thought I'd walked in on them when they were having sex. Then I saw that his teeth stuck in her throat. There was blood—” she broke off.

"Your mother—"

"By the time the police got there my mother was dead. I must have screamed because my stepfather looked up. He—” Danielle swallowed. “He smiled at me."

She gasped a sobbing breath. The memory was vivid now. She could almost see that gory vampire face sneering, lust inflaming his eyes, his teeth dripping with her mother's life-blood.

"That was only a few days after the beginning of the return,” she told him. “I got away, called 9-1-1. And I watched when the police came. They didn't have silver bullets back then, of course. Let alone wooden stakes. He killed three cops before they brought him under control. He just took their bullets and laughed.

Carl stopped pacing and sat next to her, taking her suddenly cold hand between his warm ones. “It must have been terrible."

Terrible was only the beginning. They hadn't understood the return of magic then. She'd been locked in isolation for months while doctors waited to see if she had the infection. There had been plenty of orphans. Children whose parents had gone magic and vanished, children whose parents had been killed by the magical, and children whose parents the government whisked away in one of their crackdowns.

Danielle had been lucky. Joe Smealy had been one of the first cops on the scene. He'd taken Danielle under his wing and made sure she didn't get lost in the bureaucratic shuffle—or condemned as a latent. He'd worked to send Danielle to a government school for the dispossessed. Once there, he'd made sure she was tested as a candidate for the new warder organization.

Joe had done what he could, but Danielle couldn't forget her mother. She'd sworn she would avenge her, would live to protect others from the cruelty that had taken her mother.

And now she was breaking that promise, throwing her lot in with the magical. She hoped it wasn't just her hormones controlling her life.

"So it must have terrified you when I changed to
Were
that first time we made love."

She nodded, her throat suddenly too thick to continue talking. Carl's change had brought up all of the fears she'd spent a decade suppressing. But it was more than that. Even then, a part of her had recognized her own action as a betrayal of the man and system that had adopted her, protected her when her own family had abandoned her.

Carl, wisely, said nothing. Instead, he handed her a chilled water bottle.

She drank until it was gone.

"Anyway,” she handed back the empty bottle, “that's the sad story of my life."

"It is sad,” Carl told her. “It must have been especially hard because of your conflicted feelings about your mother."

So much for Carl's good sense in keeping his mouth shut. “I spent months listening to a psychologist going on about Freud and Oedipus,” Danielle told him. “I don't need it from you."

"In that case, what do you say we get a move on it? Mike and Snori are likely to get worried."

They met up with Snori and Mike right on time. The vampire and troll were trying too hard to look inconspicuous. Since the center of the zone was filled with people who were hiding from someone or something, they fit right in.

Snori waved them over to an outdoor table where he'd already ordered Turkish style coffee for them. Carl sipped at his politely. Danielle just looked at hers, then pushed it away. She couldn't stand the stuff.

"Any problems?” Carl asked.

Mike shook his head. “Smooth sailing."

"Except we ran into a couple of rioters who must have gotten lost on their way out of the zone,” Snori added, his words barely comprehensible underneath the laughter he couldn't suppress. “We, uh, helped them along to the border."

"After taking away all their loot,” Mike added.

Danielle shook her head. He could understand their action. But it was too much like Carl's attack on the guard post. Randomly striking back could be emotionally satisfying, but it didn't make a bit of difference to the reality the magical faced. Even if the looted goods were returned to their original owners, something Danielle suspected would never happen, they would simply be looted again the next time rioters descended on the zone.

They needed a fundamental change in the way they responded to the attacks. And getting that would require an alteration in the structure of the zone. As long as half the zone leaders were goons like Arenesol, and the other half were co-opted or paid by the warders, things would never get better.

Of course, first they had to survive.

"Any word on a warder attack?” Carl demanded.

Snori shook his head. “Still a lot of chatter on the encrypted warder bands. Does our pet warder have any information?"

Intellectually Danielle had known she was changing sides. But there was still an emotional charge realizing that she wasn't just being asked to ignore orders. Carl and his mob needed her to spy for them as she'd spied against them.

"I haven't checked in today.” She held out a hand. “Can I borrow a cell phone? I seem to have lost mine in the confusion."

She phoned in and checked her messages, then reported back. “As soon as I finish Carl off, I'm supposed to report back to the Warder Regional office,” she said. “They've identified Carl as involved in last night's attack and aren't happy that I didn't terminate you before you had the chance."

"That was quick I.D.,” Carl said.

He was right. There had to be thousands of
Were
in the Dallas zone. Danielle knew they'd made progress on pattern-matching algorithms, but how would they recognize Carl when he was in wolf-form?

"Unless we had an informant."

Carl looked from Mike to Snori to Danielle.

She met his gaze coolly. She couldn't expect that making love would automatically eliminate his distrust. The Warder Academy even had a class on how to use sex to infiltrate and destroy. Fortunately it hadn't been a lab class.

"We were the only ones who knew,” Snori said. “And every one of us risked their lives to save you."

Carl smashed a fist into the table. “You're right. I'm sorry. I'm paranoid after what happened, but it isn't your fault."

"And there's a general call for all warders to be out of the zone by eight tomorrow evening,” Danielle added. “I haven't gotten anything personal, though."

"They're suspicious of you,” Mike concluded.

Carl looked worried. “Well, you're here with us. As long as you stay in the zone, you don't have to worry about what they're thinking."

She could stay in the safety of Carl's arms, protected by the
Were
and his friends. It was tempting, but not too tempting. If the warders attacked, the zone would provide no safety.

"You want me to just sit here waiting for them to take the initiative? I don't think so. I've got to go back. I already told them that I terminated you last night after the raid. As long as you lay low they would have no reason not to believe me."

"But—"

She shook her head firmly. Her thoughts had crystallized into decision. “I know it's crazy, but I'm throwing my lot in with you and the impair—magical, Carl. Whole hog and no holding back. I saw the truth about the warders last night, and I didn't like it.

"I told you why I joined the warders. Because I thought they would protect those too weak to protect themselves. Well, I found out that they're more of the problem than the solution. If they attack now, we lose. We've got to play for time and I'm the only card you have in this game."

"We can get—"

"
We
can't, Carl.
I
can. We'll clean out the zone, make it a place where children can live safely. But we need time. Time to get ready for the warder attack. Time to break the links between informants and warders. The longer I can keep up the pretense of being one of them, the more warning we'll get when they come after us. I'm our secret weapon. We've got to use me."

Carl looked doubtful. “We don't know that you are a secret any more. You carried me away from the bomb blast. Someone could have seen you. I was in
Were
form and they still recognized me. And you aren't exactly low profile."

Danielle shrugged. “So?"

"You feel guilty over informing on the Tiger breakout. Well, putting herself at risk won't bring back a single elf."

He was right. She did feel guilty. But that didn't mean she didn't have to do it. “I'm not saying it isn't a risk. I'm saying that it is a risk we have to take. If they're planning a major raid, I'll be able to warn you and maybe delay it. If they aren't, I may still be able to disrupt the informant chains."

"Absolutely not,” Carl announced. “You're going to stay right here in the center of the zone where it's safe. There's no way I'm going to risk you."

She was halfway across the table before he'd even began to react. Coffee exploded everywhere as she grasped him around his neck.

"Listen here, werewolf,” she hissed. “I'm not some fairytale princess waiting to be rescued. If you have a valid reason for me to stay, tell me. Otherwise, back off."

The warder regional office buzzed with activity.

Danielle had been searched, disarmed down to her silver leash, and finally admitted into an underground bunker rather than the high-rise office where Joe had been stationed weeks earlier.

Armed warders tromped through the building as if expecting an attack momentarily.

She'd been waiting for over two hours before the Joe finally rushed into his office.

He rubbed his forehead, slumped in his chair, and stared at the wall for a few endless seconds before silently gesturing for her to have a seat.