Prowlers: Wild Things (20 page)

With a roll of his eyes, he turned and glared balefully at it.

"Want me to get it?" Amy Pepper asked.

"Would you?" Castillo hated how pleading his voice sounded, but he just wanted to go home.

Detective Pepper picked up his line. She spoke briefly, then clutched the phone against her chest with her brows knitted in consternation. "Some girl named Eden Hirsch. Says you've met through the Dwyers. Said to tell you Jack's in trouble."

Castillo forgot all about the case that was haunting him. He strode over, nodded his thanks to Pepper, and took the phone from her.

"This is Detective Castillo," he said.

He listened to Eden Hirsch's voice, tight with panic, and he dropped his chin to his chest and massaged the bridge of his nose, rubbing at his tired eyes again.

"Jesus," he rasped. "When will this kid stop sticking his head into the lion's mouth?" Castillo got the details from Eden, jotted them down on a pad, then tore off the sheet and folded it once, slipping it into his pocket.

"I'll get back to you tomorrow with an update," he told Eden.

When he hung up, Pepper was watching him.

"So?" she asked.

"Just someone who expects me to play nursemaid."

Pepper smiled, but there were questions there. "Dwyer. That's the brother and sister who own that pub near Quincy Market, right? One of these days, Jace, you're going to have to tell me how you got so involved with them."

"But not tonight," Castillo replied. "Tonight there's sleep."

He waved casually and strode from the room as though he had already forgotten the entire thing. But the moment he stepped off the elevator on the ground floor and started toward the front door, Castillo had his cell phone out and was dialing. He and a handful of his fellow officers were fighting a kind of shadow war, out of the public's eye, against a race of monsters that lived and bred amongst them, a race of killers. But most people, even most cops, had no idea they existed, and Castillo had orders to keep it that way.

Jack and Courtney Dwyer and their friends were part of that war as well, fighting on the side of the angels. Their paths had crossed a number of times, but as deep as he got himself into things, it seemed like the Dwyer kid always managed to get himself out. From the sound of things, though, he'd really stepped in it this time. Castillo had worked with them in the past, but this was the first time Jack and his girlfriend, Molly Hatcher, had really needed to be bailed out.

The problem was, of course, that they were hundreds of miles away.

On the sidewalk in front of the division headquarters he held the cell phone to his ear and strode quickly away from the building. The line crackled with static, but after a few rings, it was answered abruptly.

"What?" a scratchy voice barked. It belonged to Delaney Orton, a captain at the State Police barracks in Buffalo, New York. Once upon a time, they'd worked together, but Orton's wife had wanted to move home to be near her family.

"Del? Jace Castillo."

"I'm sleeping, Jace Castillo," Del rumbled. "Go 'way."

"Wake up, Del. I've got a situation in a town called Hollingsworth, a ways south of Albany on Route 89. I need your help."

"Ever look at a map, Jace? I'm in Buffalo. Buff-a-lo. Look it up."

"It's an animal control problem," Castillo replied, glancing around the street to make sure he was not being overheard.

When Orton spoke again, he sounded very awake.

"Talk to me."

Talk to me.

Those had been Olivia Navarre's words to them, and in the ensuing hours, that had been just about all any of them had done. Jack sat with his back against the concrete, his gaze ticking back and forth between Olivia and Molly. It was still difficult for him to accept this girl as Bill's niece when he had not even known Bill had family until a few months ago. And yet how much more difficult than the many other discoveries he had made since the spring?

Only recently had Jack learned that his friend, this being who was his sister's lover, had never even told them his true name. Bill was a variation on Guillaume. But only in this conversation with Olivia did they come to the startling realization that Cantwell was a completely manufactured surname, that their friend's family name was
Navarre
.

Olivia had also explained to them the significance of the Navarre family to the history of the packs, and the relationship of her grandfather Yves Navarre, to Owen Tanzer's father, Wade. That particular bombshell had left Jack and Molly both wide-eyed and shaking their heads that Bill had conveniently neglected to mention any of that to them in the past.

But Jack did not blame him. When they had first discovered what Bill was, it would likely have been even more difficult for them to accept his true nature if they'd known that his lineage was so linked to Tanzer's. Still, it made him wonder what else they did not know.

For her part, Olivia had seemed even more surprised to learn about her uncle's current situation than they had been to discover his history. When Molly explained that Bill was in a relationship with Jack's sister, the astonishment and quiet revulsion on her face had been plain, and instructive.

"With a
human
?" Olivia had asked, wrinkling her nose, her features shaded by the straight black hair that framed her face.

Jack tried not to take offense. Though he had known Bill for years and had come to term with his sister's relationship, the same sort of repugnance, though in reverse, had still been his first response.

Olivia knew about her uncle's wish to live amongst humanity, to merge with human civilization. She knew he had played professional football and had confessed that her own interest in writing and performing music would not likely have been nurtured in her if not for the example he had set. But he had his own life, and she hers, and when her mother had died a few years before she had almost entirely lost touch with her uncle. By the standards of the previous six months, Olivia's story seemed almost normal. In the wake of her mother's death, she had done a great deal of soul searching and focused more than ever on her love of music. With her absentee father never available, she had returned to her mother's pack, her distant relatives, for a while. At seventeen she had set herself up in New York City with the help of other Prowlers in the underground and begun to work the music scene with some small success, spent a lot of time busking — playing out in public for tips — in places like Washington Square Park and South Street Seaport. There had been some attention from A&R execs at more than one recording label.

Jasmine had violently interrupted that process.

Now the stories had largely been told and Jack and Molly sat beside one another in the basement, leaning against the wall, with the delicious scents of coffee and bacon and other greasy food wafting down to them and making Jack's mouth water. As the girls talked, he had only been half listening, far more interested in the basement, in the concrete walls and the two doors off the wide, nearly empty room. The rear door, up to a bulkhead in the back of the parking lot — the door they'd been brought in — was steel, and so was the one that led up into the Blueberry Diner.

We need to get out of here
, he thought for the thousandth time. Neither one of them had life-threatening injuries, but he and Molly both had dozens of cuts that ought to be disinfected. A ridiculous thing to think about, considering that at any moment Prowlers might come down and rip their throats out, but nevertheless, his mind went there. Even if Olivia was right and the Prowlers were going to hold onto them until Jasmine arrived to witness their execution, there was no way to know exactly how long that was going to take. At first, the conversation had seemed important and necessary, but as it began to wind down now, he started to think the get-to-know-you session had been a mistake.

"You know what?" he said suddenly, interrupting the two girls. "Maybe we can continue this later? I don't want to be here when Jasmine comes. I have a feeling she won't be interested in keepin' us alive if she has you, Olivia."

The Prowler girl nodded and flipped her hair back away from her face. She stood, and once again Jack was struck by how tall she was. "I'm all for leaving. But I've been down here a while and it isn't like I haven't tried. No offense, but I can't see how a human can get through one of these doors if I can't."

Jack bristled. However progressive Bill was in dealing with humanity, his niece needed a few lessons in inter-species diplomacy. Jack had the idea that in political terms, she might be what Prowlers would consider middle-of-the-road. In other words, she might not eat small children, but wasn't likely to have much objection if her friends wanted to indulge. It was a lesson to him: don't trust the girl just because of who her uncle is. After all, Olivia's father, Dallas, had tried to kill them back in August and they had ended up punching his ticket instead. Not that he was prepared to tell Olivia that.

"I'm not so sure we need to go through the door," he told her.

Olivia frowned, but Molly interrupted before she could respond.

"Wait a second, you two," Molly said, leaning forward. "There's a part of this I need to understand that isn't making any sense to me."

Her eyes fixed on Olivia, and Jack sensed a kind of understanding between them. He realized with no small interest and surprise that while his mind had been wandering, between the lines of their conversation, these two had been forming a sort of alliance. They had connected.

Good for them
, he thought. But it gave him no feeling of warmth or comfort toward Olivia. No matter how striking her outward appearance, he knew there was a monster underneath.

Jack and Olivia gazed at Molly expectantly.

"Well," Molly continued, "if Jasmine didn't know Bill — our Bill — was the same person as Guillaume Navarre, why did she take you in the first place? You've been her prisoner for months and you're still alive. I don't get any of that."

Olivia nodded, her heavy-lidded gaze moving back and forth between Jack and Molly. "I see your point. It was a hell of a game she was playing, dangerous to her and to her plans. See, at first she came to me to recruit me."

When she grinned, Olivia's teeth looked cruel and sharp.

"Jasmine has grand plans, I'll give her that. Tanzer must have been a charismatic son of a bitch to convince her so completely of his dream. She's shrewd and cunning, but even the smartest cur can be blinded by zealotry."

Cur
, Jack thought, and shivered. Months ago, with Artie's death, he had discovered the existence of an entirely new world existing beneath what he had known. But since he had stepped into the Lotus Club a few days earlier, he had begun a descent into that world that chilled him. It was a world with its own politics, customs, and jargon, none of it very pleasant.

"Your music," Molly said softly, knees pulled up under her chin. "She knew you were a musician, how much that meant to you, and she still thought you'd go along with her?"

Olivia chuckled. "Amazing, huh? I understand the predatory impulse, believe me. Maybe that's an area we shouldn't get into. But, hell, who'd want to live in a world without people like B.B. King and Bonnie Raitt and August Wilson in it? Jasmine was a fool to think I'd join her."

Jack raised an eyebrow. "Maybe not."

"I'm sorry?" Olivia replied edgily.

"You're a Navarre. Think what that would have meant for her, long term. It was a risk she was willing to take. When you didn't go along with her, she snatched you up but she didn't dare kill you yet. She'd keep you around in case she needed you. Once she figured out that Bill and Guillaume Navarre were one and the same, she planned to use you against him. He's down in Manhattan looking for you even as we speak."

There was more to this thought process, but it involved the death of her father, and Jack wasn't ready to have that conversation with Olivia yet.

"That makes sense," Olivia said then, understanding dawning upon her features. "She had me down in the city for a long time. Then they must have heard he was in town, because all of a sudden, in the middle of the night, they moved me up here."

"It's probably the nearest large concentration of Prowlers outside the city," Molly reasoned. "The better to hide you. Not to mention what brought
us
here in the first place."

"Right," Jack said. "Now can we get the hell out of here?"

Olivia only stared at him as though he were mad, but Molly smiled sweetly and slipped her hand into his.

"What've you got in mind?"

It was Jack's turn to smile and he flattered himself by thinking that this particular grin might be just as dangerous looking as Olivia's. "Well, they want to keep us alive until Jasmine gets here, but they probably wouldn't bother to stop Olivia from killing us." His gaze ticked toward Olivia and his smile disappeared. "On the other hand, if they thought we might kill you, the granddaughter of Yves Navarre, they'd have to step in, wouldn't they?"

The Prowler girl actually snorted in derisive laughter. "You two? Kill me?"

Molly let her legs slide down and she leaned back against the concrete again. Her expression was deadly earnest. "We killed Owen Tanzer, Olivia. We destroyed the sanctuary in Vermont. As far as they're concerned, we're capable of just about anything."

A wistful look crossed Olivia's face. "The sanctuary. That's a shame, it truly is. The fight goes on." Then she nodded. "All right, then. Let's try it your way. But if they come down, you better make it look good. If you're supposed to be trying to kill me, they have to buy it completely."

Jack nodded. "No problem."

CHAPTER TEN

Jack tried to imagine what was going on upstairs in the Blueberry Diner. It was late enough at night that there was little chance of a random tourist happening through, but the odds were high that at least some of those upstairs were actual human truckers just in for a sandwich and a cup of coffee to break up the monotony of the road. It was Jack's hope that what he was about to do would not get any of them killed.