Fox Play (10 page)

I didn't like the way he looked at Lara. I imagined they weren't happy to be across the table from three females. And then I asked myself whether that was throwing them off.

Our dinner arrived, all of it in wolf-sized portions. I transferred the amount I wanted onto a bread plate, sliding my big plate in front of me. Lara added a fox portion of her steak to my plate and helped herself to some of the chicken. Jared, Lara and Vivian ate modestly for wolves. Durian and Avery gorged themselves.

"Are you going to eat that?" Jared asked me, gesturing to the chicken.

I glanced at Lara to see if she wanted it. She ignored the exchange, so I told him, "Help yourself. I have a fox sized appetite, as you can see."

Jared took the plate, thanked me, and then slid it down the table to his father. Durian looked at it with disdain and would have shoved it away, but did so in a fashion Avery could grab it if he wanted. Avery wolfed down my remaining chicken.

Inwardly I smiled. Let him gorge himself. What little blood normally made it to fuel his brain would head to his stomach instead, making him even more stupid that he already was.

Conversation throughout the meal was strained. Durian asked about Lara's businesses and the health of the pack. Lara answered with unhelpful answers, directing questions back towards Chicago. Avery spent five minutes bragging about a chain of shopping malls he owned, but I wondered if they weren't falling into a state of disrepair. I started to wonder about the financial status of the Chicago wolves. I thought perhaps Durian and Avery lived off tithe and not their own merits.

"Would it be impertinent for me to ask a question?"

"Not at all," Jared answered before anyone else could. I don't think his father was happy with that response, but he was enough of a father not to contradict him in front of Lara.

"Do your wolves tithe, Durian? If so, what percentage?"

"Of course they tithe!" he said firmly. "They are all lazy, of course, but they tithe thirty percent. A weak leader may demand less, but a strong leader is owed a proper tithe."

Jared looked pained by the response. He wasn't an open book, but he was still a wolf. The Chicago wolves would be far better led by this wolf than their current leader or the presumptive heir.

I wondered if they realized how much they were telling me.

Dinner finally finished and we pushed away from the table. Avery had switched to beer halfway through the meal, and I had to admire his capacity. Jared drank wine with the meal and coffee afterwards. I stuck with lemonade.

"We will play here, but we have a time for a short break," Lara said. "The wait staff can prepare the room." Both contingents retreated to opposite sides of the room. I leaned against Lara and eavesdropped on the other wolves.

"I can't believe these repeated insults," Durian muttered. "Three females, and one not even a wolf."

"You can challenge the alpha here and now," Avery said. "Get this over with."

"Patience," Durian said. "And not so loud. I told you don't get drunk!"

"I'm not drunk," Avery said. "You'll know when I'm drunk. What are we waiting for? Even Jared is bigger than their biggest. We won't even need to shift to take them. Ignore the fox and the old bitch and it's five to three, and two of those three are weak females."

"We are deep in their territory," Jared said. "Sun Tse would suggest, know thine enemy. We do not yet know the enemy. An attack is precipitous."

"That's what you always say," Avery shot back, loudly enough I was sure Lara could hear.

"Keep your voice down!" Durian said, almost as loudly.

"He's a weak coward," Avery said. "I don't know why you are even here, brother."

"He is here to win back the money you will undoubtedly lose," Durian said.

"No one would lose money if we attack now," Avery responded.

"Shut. Up." Durian said. "End of discussion. We stick to the plan."

Avery grumbled after that, but he didn't talk back any further. The wait staff cleaned up the room, and Elisabeth provided Lara with a small package containing poker chips and a dozen fresh decks of playing cards. We sat down and ran into a fresh disagreement.

Who to be banker?

"Let us see your money, gentlemen," Lara said. "The buy in is ten thousand dollars." She pulled out her own envelope and counted out twenty five-hundred-dollar bills in four stacks of five each. She then gave herself her chips, also counting them in front of everyone, and slipped her money into a zippered pouch.

"Who said you're the banker?" Avery asked. "Father should be the banker."

"Our town," Lara said. "Our rules. But perhaps you would prefer if we asked the restaurant manager to bank for us."

"One of your wolves, one we haven't even met?" said Durian. "I don't think so."

It went back and forth and then Jared said, "Let the fox be the banker. It's not like she would be brave enough to cheat us or fast enough to escape us."

Durian really wanted to hold the money, but he realized I was the second best choice for exactly the reasons Jared recommended. And of course, Lara and Vivian would trust me.

So Lara slid the poker chips to me. I counted her money for myself, investigating the bills to assure myself they were not counterfeit, then counted out her chips. That made it impossible for anyone to complain when I did it for everyone else.

When it was time to count my money, I handed the stack to Jared. "If you would, please."

"Where does a fox find this much money?" Durian asked with a sneer. "Perhaps you earned it on your back."

Lara tensed, but I simply smiled. "No," I said. "Most of it I earned at the poker table. Any time I spend on my back is done for the pure joy of it."

Once I had collected everyone's buy in money and distributed poker chips, I wondered what to do with the pouch of cash. I finally took the expedient of sitting on it. Jared smiled, amused. I adjusted until I was comfortable, and we began.

I spend the first hour losing slowly while learning to read the Chicago wolves. I made sure to offer three sets of tells, one set very obvious, one subtle, and one nearly impossible to detect. I hoped I didn't have any I didn't know about. I realized Vivian was offering two intentional sets but also had some subtle tells I didn't think were intentional. Lara was more obvious and easy for me to read.

Of the Chicago wolves, Jared was doing the same thing I was. By the end of an hour, I still wasn't sure I wasn't reading exactly what he wanted me to read. But it took only five hands to have Avery figured out and only a few more after that to know Durian. They both lived off bluff and swagger, and fleecing them would have been easy.

Lara hadn't explained why I was supposed to lose. I realized that was perhaps an important piece of information.

It took a while, but I eventually learned that Jared never raised his brother or father, and if either of them were bidding heavily, he folded, even when I thought he perhaps had a better hand. The only time he took a pot was if both his father and brother had folded or bidding was light enough he had stayed in. I could use that.

By the end of the first hour, I was down twenty percent of my stake, but I was starting to take money from everyone at the table. We played for another half hour, and after a particularly large pot that I won, Lara called for a break.

Avery was steaming. He had tried a particularly poor bluff and lost to the fox.

Each contingent retreated to opposite sides of the table. Vivian begged off for a bathroom break. Avery did as well, but returned promptly afterwards.

And Lara had words for me.

"We told you that you needed to lose," she said. "We need them complacent."

"You never told me why," I said. "And if you aren't going to tell me why, you may want to consider trusting my judgment."

"We're trying to defuse the situation," Lara said. "Letting them win a poker game will help."

"I see. I think we should continue this conversation when Vivian is back and include Elisabeth."

"I think you should do what you are told," Lara said.

"I think you should tell me why you are so upset with me."

She looked down at me. "I am not upset with you, little fox." We leaned together silently.

Avery returned and shot me a look that told me everything. Lara saw it and bristled, but I simply leaned against her more and lifted my lips for a kiss. Durian's body language told me what he thought of two women kissing; it wasn't pretty.

"I want the fox," Avery told his father when he returned. "I haven't been on a fox hunt in years."

"You will need to wait a few more weeks. Stop being such a hothead! I will challenge their female alpha on our territory, not theirs."

"Since when are you afraid of a female?" Avery asked.

Durian almost cuffed him but then saw us watching dispassionately. And now I had their entire plan.

"Lara," I said very quietly. "We are going to lose enough that we are under no obligation to accept a rematch based in Chicago, and under no circumstances are you to accept any invitations to their territory. Do I make myself clear?"

She growled at my tone.

"Trust me or don't trust me," I added. "I will explain later."

"Trust," she said finally.

"Thank you."

Vivian returned, and we resumed the game.

We spent the rest of the evening with money moving around the table, carefully orchestrated by me. I decided perhaps Lara and Vivian were willing to lose their entire stake, but it was too much for me. My goal was to keep half of my money by the time the evening ended. I could win back my losses if I could get the pack council to agree to a night or two. That thought made me smile.

Lara and Vivian were both practically shoving money at Durian and Avery. I kept taking some of it back and finding ways to give back to the Lara and Vivian, trying to drag this out until our two AM cutoff. I didn't want the game to be down to just me and the three from Chicago. As bad as they were, they could play conservatively and still clean me out.

Shortly after midnight, I had just handed a large amount of my money to Vivian, shoring up her supplies, and was down to two thousand dollars. I wasn't worried. I could get that back from Avery any time I wanted.

And then I blew it. Hey, it happens.

I had a good hand, an unlikely straight. I thought Jared had two pair. All his tells were saying the same thing, and I'd had a hard time finding any hidden tells. I had built the pot up a little, which drained my resources lower than I liked, and it was down to just Jared and me when Jared asked me, "How much do you have left over there?"

I counted. "Twelve hundred and... fifty."

Jared counted out twelve hundred and fifty dollars in chips and set them into the pot. "That makes you all in or fold." He said it kindly.

He was holding a full house, and I was cleaned out.

I was gracious about it. It happens. Lara and Vivian didn't last much longer. It was Jared who really cleaned them out, but he made it look like his father had done it. The game was finished by one AM.

I was happy it was over but unhappy about the cash I'd spent months winning. I cashed out their chips. Jared leaned to me and said quietly, "Well played. You would have cleaned us out if you hadn't been keeping your alpha and council member alive."

"If they dropped before I had taken out at least one of you, it wouldn't matter. And I don't think either your brother or father would respond well when losing to a fox."

"No, I don't believe they would. Maybe you and I can play sometime in a more appropriate setting."

I looked at him. He had just offered friendship. "I think I would like that. Perhaps for smaller stakes."

He smiled. "Yes, that would be good."

In the meantime, Durian was trying to lure Lara into committing to a trip to Chicago. She kept putting him off. He couldn't say, "You have to let us win our money back," but all Lara said was, "We'll check our schedules and see what we can arrange."

Durian and his group left while we waited behind. And then we followed.

In the limousine, Lara said, "I'm sorry. You shouldn't have had to carry us. I couldn't believe we couldn't do better. Durian and Avery are so easy to read."

"Yes, but it was Jared who orchestrated that." Then I lay down across Lara's lap. "I don't think they'll do anything untoward tonight."

"I agree," Vivian said. "They are mollified now."

"No, they are not," I replied, but they didn't hear me, and I drifted to sleep.

Reporting In

Lara woke me when we arrived at the compound.

"Does the spy report tonight or tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow to the council," Vivian said.

Lara climbed out first, and I put my hand on Vivian's knee. "Vivian, it's bad."

"I know," she said. "But we have time." Then she climbed out and I followed her.

Lara checked in with Elisabeth, sending me to our room. I waited for her, and when she arrived a half hour later, I think she was surprised to see I was sitting on the couch, fretting. I was nearly in tears.

"I'm sorry," I told her the minute she walked in. She closed the door and hurried to me, but I held my hand out. "I need to confess something to you, and I'm so afraid you are going to be angry."

"All right," she said warily.

"I've kept something from you," I said.

She sat down on the sofa. "Something important?"

"I've let you believe something that isn't true," I said. "I've done so very deliberately."

"Keep going," she said slowly.

"That day when we replaced my monitoring station. You wanted to know how I knew where those wolves were. And I wouldn't tell you."

Her face grew relieved. "Oh, that. I know about that. You haven't explained how you do it, but there are a lot of things in this world we can't explain. I just thought you had some special sense wolves don't have. But you haven't lied about it."

"Sort of I did," I said. "Tell me, how much better is your wolf nose than your human nose?"

"Quite a bit. Three or four times better."

"And your human nose, how much better is it than my fox nose?"