Wild Card (7 page)

The big V8 howled as we overtook another car like it was stopped. Alex tucked the front end expertly into the next corner and then powered us out of it.

“On the positive side,” he said, “he’s got your promise to help track down the rogue. That’s more important than you think.”

“Well, good. But you said we’re both in it.” I looked at him, unhappy at the thought of messing him up with the pack, and struggling with the Athanate side of me that just wanted to say he was mine and to hell with them.

He snorted. “Yeah. Well, I got involved in the fighting at Longmont. He’ll have an issue with that.”

“Hmm. He explicitly told you not to. And your response will be?” My binding him didn’t seem to be at the top of his mind. One knot of worry eased, but only making the others feel worse.

Alex stared at the road for a while without answering. I could feel the wolf stirring unhappily in him. It was my fault, putting him in this position with his pack. I sensed he would fight, if it came to it. At the moment, challenging him on that wasn’t going to help. I’d have to handle this carefully, or do something spectacular in the meeting to distract them. The pack was part of Alex at a deep level. I didn’t want to break that.

“I’m going to claim pack obligation”, he said finally. “Felix has to acknowledge that.”

“But I’m not a pack member yet.”

“You are for me.” He grimaced. “And that’s playing lawyer, which doesn’t go down well in the pack. But it changes the argument from disobeying him to whether or not you’re in. As long as we can obey him in future, and that we’re going to have to do, to be in the pack.”

“There’re all sorts of arguments, Alex. Are you changing to hybrid like me?”

“Hey, we’ve changed our marques. You’re part Were. There’s nothing that tells me I’m part Athanate. I haven’t grown a different set of fangs or wanted to start drinking blood. I don’t feel any different.”

Early times yet
.

“Well, I wonder what Larimer’s take is on that.”

“Felix,” Alex said with emphasis.

“Felix,” I allowed. “How is he going to feel about that?”

“He won’t be too happy. It’s part of the role of an alpha to be suspicious about things like that and Felix is a damn good alpha. The thought I might challenge him because you’re compelling me, and it’s all an Altau plot, that’s just feeding the normal alpha paranoia with nitroglycerine.”

I sighed. It said something that I could actually understand Felix’s paranoia better than I could understand Alex on this. I was reluctant to come straight out and talk about the binding. It felt too intimate. But I was going to have to deal with it, one way or another.

“I can see his point. This is not a complaint, okay? Don’t you think we’ve rushed into this? I mean our relationship. Look, Alex, I can understand it looks odd to others. It must look very suspicious to Larim—to Felix.”

“Not having second thoughts again?”

“No! But what if Felix is right, and I’ve been using some Athanate voodoo on you all along? Without knowing. I mean, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing for Jen in the van and I ended up healing her.” I took a breath and rushed on. “And now we’re bound together, all three of us. I’m not complaining. Hell, it feels great. But I don’t know what it means for us, I don’t even know how I did it, and I…ahh…didn’t have your permission.”

Alex grunted. “Yeah, well it was a shock, all right.” He shifted in his seat and concentrated on slinging us around a sharp corner. “But I’m not complaining either. Look at it this way: I didn’t have your permission to infuse you.”

That was a point. But two wrongs made a right? Two crazy things neither of us intended made it even?

“But what if I’ve compelled you, so you only think it’s okay? What if I’m still compelling you without you realizing it?”

“Same as you’ve done for Kingslund?”

“No!” I rubbed my face. “I don’t know.”

Had I? Had I made Jen fall for me, so I could have her as kin?

“Jeez, you’re getting all messed up in the head, Amber.”

A tentative smile tugged the corners of his mouth.

“I’m serious,” I said. “Neither of us really knows what’s happening. Am I doing something to you? Even, y’know, sex, for example. As an Athanate, I can make you want it, and then I can make you like it. And if I do that, I might as well be Basilikos.”

“That isn’t anything like Basilikos and you didn’t compel me. Werewolves haven’t got powers like the Athanate, but I could tell if you were trying to make me do something. And, sure as hell, I could tell if you tried juicing me with that enviric stuff you Athanate have.”

“Really? You’ve come across it before?”

Alex shrugged and kept his eyes firmly on the road.

Hmmm.

“Bian?”

He flushed and his knuckles went pale on the steering wheel.

“Oh.”

We drove on a while. Deep down, I’d known it really. She used to be the Were liaison for Altau, so she’d presumably spent some time with the pack. And Alex.

“Am I allowed to be jealous?” I said.

“No!” The corners of his mouth turned back up. “It’s history anyway.”

I laughed, glad to release the tension for a moment. “Okay, not this time.” And I’d draw a discreet veil over Bian’s leopard-stalking of me as well.

“I guess, until we work out what it means for us, we don’t say anything about binding.” Alex hunched a little.

I felt uncomfortable too. “I don’t want to start like that with the pack—lying.”

He dipped his head briefly. “Don’t lie. If Felix asks us, we tell him. In fact, I think it’d be dangerous for any of us to try and lie to each other.”

“Alpha thing?”

“Dominance thing. It’s very difficult to lie to a more dominant wolf and impossible to your alpha.”

But maybe not impossible for the alpha to lie to me. And what about while I wasn’t in the pack? Could I lie to him now? Or not tell the whole truth? I grimaced. Alex was right, I’d need to be very careful.

“Okay, we can’t lie,” I said, trying to form a plan as I spoke. “We can’t help provoking him—we’re a provocation just by existing. We mustn’t back him into a corner. We’ve got to get him into a position where the obvious way forward is a good outcome all around.”

Yeah, I thought. Maneuver a werewolf alpha who’s probably seen this kind of political manipulation for a hundred years before we came along. But I didn’t say it.

“We should be able to get him to agree you’re part of the pack through me,” Alex said. “You realize that means you’ll lose some leeway to act on your own. You can’t defy the alpha. It would make him look weak. We’re not Athanate, we’re werewolves, we need a strong leader to be a strong, healthy pack.”

“Enough,” I muttered.

Again, I had the idea there were things unsaid. I kept quiet while he took another tight turn, but he didn’t continue where he’d left off.

 Instead, he glanced at his watch. “We’ll be at Coykuti in five.”

“The ranch is called Coykuti? Something to do with coyotes?”

He shook his head. “It’s from Arapaho. It means to set free. When Felix first set up, this was where the pack used to run.”

“Now they go to Bitter Hooks. Why the change?”

“Coykuti’s not big enough, even with the whole mountain behind it. People have got places all along the edges now, they’ve cut back on the trees. That’s why it was so easy for Tucker to persuade us to scare off the builders at Bitter Hooks. Kingslund’s Silver Hills resort would have sat bang in the middle of our range.”

“Jen, not Kingslund,” I insisted quietly. I didn’t add,
and Jen’s land, not the pack’s
. Must have been that tact thing I kept hearing about.

We turned again, onto the last snaky road that led to Larimer’s ranch.

“Jen,” Alex muttered eventually.

“She never intended to build it, you know.”

“So you said. And now?”

“Why would she change her mind now?”

He didn’t answer.

I tried to clear my head and calm myself. I needed so much from this meeting. Diana had warned me, but what had she actually said? That if I joined a pack and left, I could go rogue. And if I didn’t have the influence of an alpha while I was in transition, I could go rogue. She’d avoided directly telling me, but the implication was there—for my sanity I should join Alex’s pack.

I didn’t want an alpha. My House was enough pack for me. But the way my wolf and Athanate fed on each other, it felt like I was like juggling flares at a fuel dump. Echoes of the sick fascination of feeding on Julie’s fear still oozed out of dark corners of my mind. Lurking inside me was a weakness that might pull me to the Basilikos side, or drive my wolf rogue.

If Felix refused to allow me to join the pack, would I survive? What if he made a condition; pack or House? Surely he wouldn’t do that.

The trouble was, I didn’t know how Felix would act. I didn’t understand the Were enough. I simply hadn’t had the time to find out. And I was in the same position as I was with the Athanate and the Adepts; a little information was probably more dangerous than none.

Once I understood all the fractured parts,
if
I could get to that situation, I had a hope of fusing it all together.

I’m an optimist like that.

We pulled in through the Coykuti gates and parked by the ranch house, next to a long, black Volvo and a Dodge Ram colored like a fire truck.

I got out and looked up, over the house’s maroon roof, to the slopes behind. The dark wave of pines seemed to be reaching down the mountain and stopped no more than fifty yards from the back door of the house. A narrow dirt track wound upwards through the woods and disappeared. I could feel the coolness from the shadows beneath the trees, and an eerie silence hung over everything. I shivered. This whole place had the same sense of watchful waiting as Bitter Hooks.

The ranch itself was old-style; timber and stone, long and low, with signs that bits had been added or changed as the need had arisen. The roof tiles were fired clay. I suspected they’d been made here, from the earth beneath our feet. I had to say it looked good, it looked like it was part of the mountain.

Where we’d stopped, in front of the house, the screen of cottonwood and maple all but obscured the road we’d come in on. And beyond the work yard to our left, the rickety, ancient barn where I’d last met with the pack stood in the meadow.

“Not the barn, this time?” I asked.

“Only for big pack meets,” Alex said. “This is more of a closed session by the sound of it.”

“Like a trial,” I muttered, as we stepped up on the wraparound porch, the boards creaking loudly under our feet.

Chapter 8

I’d half expected Larimer to have a special room for an audience, like Skylur in his underground lair, but we met casually in his living room. We were ushered in by a woman who didn’t speak and left immediately. I sensed more of the pack in and around the house, but they stayed out of sight.

The living room was a huge, sprawling space, with enormous leather sofas and chairs scattered around a set of coffee tables, all handmade from railroad ties. A working loom and spinning wheel sat in one corner, half obscured by a rank of spikey-leaved Madagascan dragon trees in pots. An old saloon mirror dominated one wall, across from an eight foot long painting of plains buffalo which stretched over the fireplace. There were water jugs and glasses on the tables. Bowls of fruit and nuts. Almost a welcome.

We sat opposite Felix. To our right sat Ricky, the big blond Viking I remembered from my visit to the barn, though he was wearing clothes today. He was big enough, he made the oversized chair look normal.

To our left was a small man, very neat and formally dressed in a suit and tie, with a goatee and dark brown hair brushed straight back. He sat with his legs crossed, looking lost in his chair compared to Ricky and Felix. I recognized him as one of Alex’s friends from the charity ball. He smiled briefly back at me and returned to jotting on a pad in his lap.

“Finally,” said Felix, by way of starting. “We don’t have much time.”

Alex glared at him and the small guy stirred on his seat. Felix relented and introduced me, pointing at the others. “You’ve met Ricky. And this is Dr. Noble.”

“We almost met,” I said to Noble. “You helped me escape the charity ball.”

“I tripped the doorman,” he replied, pursing his lips. “That’s hardly help. But I’m pleased to meet you at last.”

I laughed.

Felix got up and started to pace like an animal in a cage.

That felt uncomfortable, but not as much as seeing the effect it was having on the others. Ricky and Alex tracked his movement as if mesmerized. Even Noble’s scribbling in his notebook went on hold for a minute.

Felix stopped abruptly and turned to face me.

“We had an agreement, didn’t we?” he said.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Tell me what it was.”

I’d kinda expected this. It was the standard disciplinary setup, getting me to admit I knew exactly what I was meant to be doing first and then going through where I’d failed. Like screwing Alex in his office and not making any progress on tracking the rogue down.

“There’s a temporary arrangement in place, which I guess means I’m a sort of honorary werewolf and honorary member of the pack. While that’s the case, I’m on call for you. I’m supposed to leave Alex alone and work on tracking down the rogue.”

“Succinctly put. What about my instructions for Alexander himself?”

“No contact. And that he wasn’t supposed to get involved in fighting between Athanate.”

Failed again. Both counts. I’d visited him at his office and Alex had helped storm the factory at Longmont where Jen had been held.

I could explain each step and give reasons for it but I didn’t want to go down that route. That felt like admitting this was like a trial, and besides, I wasn’t sure Felix would listen anyway. I kept quiet and waited.

Felix was looking at me. To see if I was going to justify our actions?

I thought I’d made the right decision to shut up for the moment.

“I’ve set a precedent for your status and given clear requirements for your behavior which you have not followed. You visited him at his work.”