Hidden Trump (Bite Back 2) (31 page)

I shut up. It was like standing on sand, feeling the sea eat it away beneath me. But
Diana
had suggested I become House Farrell.
Before
Alex infused me.

“He hasn’t told me anything like this,” I said.

“Altau never does,” snarled Larimer. “What he says and what he wants are two different things. He’s only happy when you think you’re doing what you want, but you’re actually doing what he wants. He leaves you guessing. And if you guess wrong, the consequences can be fatal.”

He stepped back in front of me again and glared down. “Here,” he rumbled, “we say what we mean.”

Crap. He was wrong about Altau. Surely, he was seeing layers that weren’t there. And equally, Altau were wrong to leave him festering like this. He wasn’t someone to be treated like that. I wasn’t going to play the two of them off against each other, but in the short term, I needed to keep my neck whole, and that meant going along with it, with both of them.

I ducked my head. Good girl. “I understand.”

He wheeled back into the shadows, doing a circuit. Sensing the reaction of the pack for all I knew. I hoped I felt an easing towards me and hopefully, that meant towards Alex as well.

“You realize,” he said, “that Alexander’s marque is now at odds with the pack?”

“I wasn’t sure,” I replied. “It seemed possible, but I had nothing to check against.”

“Check it now.”

I went back to Alex. Now, concentrating on it, with the pack to compare it with, the difference was obvious. There was a hint of the exotic, sharp fragrance that made David and Pia different from Altau.

“Different,” I said humbly, returning to my place. I couldn’t see where Larimer was.

His voice came from the side. “Neither of you have the pack marque. Neither of you is pack. And how do you expect me to deal with this?”

I cleared my throat. “Like Altau. A separate affiliate?”

“In my territory?” Larimer was suddenly in my face, making my heart jump. But long hours of being intimidated by hardcore instructors in the army let me deal with it inside. I’d even fallen into a parade rest.

“Yes,” I said, focusing my eyes about the level of his collarbone.

His hand lifted my head till I was looking directly into his eyes.

“We’re not like Athanate. We don’t have charters. We don’t do paperwork. We don’t do oaths.” He measured my reaction before going on. “A temporary arrangement, while we investigate you,” he said. “You show up, where I say, when I say, at least weekly. You do exactly what I tell you.”

“I can’t give that last promise.” My voice sounded weak, but there was no point agreeing, only to be told to do something like betray the Altau. “I’ll try and do what you say, just as I’ll try and do what Skylur says.”

He was looking at my throat, and his nostrils flared.

“You should be very glad you didn’t lie to me,” he murmured. Then he twisted and stalked away. “I expect you to comply with the rest.”

There was a long pause. Larimer’s boots clicked on the wooden boards. There was a scrabble of claws and whispers of hay as wolves eased their positions around me.

“If not for Altau’s business, why are you here?” he said, eventually.

“Because we have a problem.”

“‘We’? Oh, I like that, I think. At least more than ‘you.’” He waited, then went on. “Tell me about ‘our’ problem.”

“There’s a rogue werewolf killing humans in Denver.”

The tension soared in the barn again. Larimer swayed back into one of the slanting beams of light. His eyes disappeared into shadow pools.

“We have learned discretion. We do not kill humans. Usually.”

In between all the threats and posturing, I knew he wasn’t stupid. I hadn’t expected the alpha of the Denver pack to be. There was an element of playing to the crowd going on here, and that helped me relax a fraction.

“Show me.” He waved at my backpack, making the correct assumption that I hadn’t just shown up empty-handed to start spouting allegations.

I unfastened the flap and retrieved my first exhibit, some plaster casts of werewolf paw prints.

“I took these up at Bitter Hooks. They’re your pack, I believe.” I knelt and placed them in a row on the ground, in size order, with a ruler next to them.

“Olivia, some light,” Larimer said.

There was a creaking and banging in the rafters as a woman, in human form, threw open a skylight shutter, suddenly flooding the center of the barn with light. I blinked. Mercifully cool air stirred.

Larimer came and stood just behind me, looking over my shoulder. I took a deep breath and tried to ignore him, but I had to admit, he had a presence; I could sense him there.

Next, I laid some photographs and sketches down alongside the casts.

“These are from police reports. Some of them, the older ones, are from non-fatal attacks reported as large dogs.”

“And the others? The more recent ones?”

“Murder investigations, where the coroner concluded that unidentified animals had disturbed the body post mortem.”

There was a silence in the barn; even the panting had stopped. Far away, birds called in the trees. Outside, the wind rustled the grasses and Leatherface dropped a tool onto metal with a curse.

“Ricky,” called Larimer.

At the edge of my vision, there was movement, a distortion like looking at a heat mirage. Out of it stepped Ricky, a blond Viking type, unshaven, six feet six at least and completely naked. He didn’t seem concerned. He stood behind my other shoulder. Very close.

“Big,” he said. His voice was quiet. I had to bite my tongue again. Yes, you could say that.

“Yeah,” I said, when I had my humor under control. “Way too big for a dog. As big as the biggest of the casts I took.” I cleared my throat. “One or two, I could overlook. I’d take that as coincidence, errors in measurement, whatever. Half a dozen, no way. A dozen makes it a serious problem.”

“You haven’t got a dozen reports there,” said Ricky.

I stood up. I’m not body-conscious, but it was difficult to concentrate with the Nordic god looming over my shoulder like that.

“Those were what the police gave me. There were some where no casts were taken. Anyway, I did some checking, and I found something that isn’t in the main police files, yet.”

I pulled out the printout and tossed it alongside the rest.

“Those are from consultants brought in by the police and experts the consultants talked to. Some of them are in Spanish, and I’m a little hazy on the science.” I paused, wiped some of the sweat from my face. “The first was a zoologist brought in by the coroner to check some bite marks on some femurs and cervical vertebrae in a couple of the recent cases. The zoologist pointed out that the femurs had actually been snapped by bites, not by blows. So they brought in a consultant and asked him what kind of dog can do that.”

Maybe I should have been a lecturer; I had the most attentive audience ever. They knew all about bite force, of course, but I needed to build the logic.

“Turns out an average dog can’t. Their bite force is around 750 psi. A specialist dog might be higher. An average wolf would be about 1500. The consultant said it had to have been an escaped hyena, because it was over double that.”

Fresh air whispered past my face, chilling the sweat.

“The police dropped it at that point. It was costing money and they thought it was going nowhere. They thought the data had problems. But the consultant had gotten curious, and he sent the findings to an expert he’d met at a conference. A professor in Spain, whose area is hyenas.”

I stepped around the big square patch of sun and tried to pierce the darkness at the corners of the barn.

“The professor said the data must be wrong too. Either it isn’t a hyena and the force calculations are wrong, he said, or it is a hyena and the teeth patterns are wrong. End of story, except he got drunk that night and wrote another email as a joke. In that one, he speculated that it had to be a wolf from the pattern, and attempted to figure out how big the wolf would have to be to generate that force.”

Larimer watched me, his face unreadable. Ricky stood listening with a deep frown twisting his pale face, looking down at the casts.

“Answer is about double the mass of a normal wolf. Now mass doesn’t increase directly in proportion to height, so he did some arithmetic. Came out with a wolf that stood four feet at the shoulder.”

I looked around. At least half of them would have qualified.

Larimer stirred. “When?” He waved at the casts and reports.

“Oldest attack, a year ago. Newest, last month,” I replied.

“Why have you brought this to us?”

“You’re the resident pack. Are you telling me there are other werewolves in Denver?” I asked.

Larimer really didn’t like that. Neither did Ricky. Of course, Alex had told me there was a problem, but now I knew it officially. The Denver pack were under some kind of attack.

“So, there’s another pack in Denver? Unwelcome?”

Larimer nodded curtly.

“How long?”

There was a snarl from the shadows, but Ricky snarled back and a whine of apology came back. It got quieter, but there was still the subliminal growl shivering through me, and the sound of wolves creeping closer in the dark, crowding me.

“Three months or so,” said Larimer. “They won’t be here for much longer.”

“So nothing to do with these.” I touched the older reports with a toe, trying to ignore the pressure of eyes on me. “Is this the same sort of thing they’re doing?”

Larimer grunted noncommittally.

“There’s something else,” he said, and waited. “You haven’t finished, have you?”

“Yes. I don’t know what it means, but these files are being copied to the FBI. Whatever is going on needs to stop and it needs to stop soon. None of us want the FBI poking around in Denver.”

There was a shocked silence that Larimer pretended to shrug off.

“Ahhh. So that’s it. The Athanate don’t want the FBI here.”

“You can make up whatever damned reason you like, Larimer,” I snapped. “I haven’t had time to talk to Altau about this. I brought it to you because it’s your concern.”

He backed off a yard or two, becoming a pale floating shape in the darkness again. I could feel him watching me still.

A half-dozen other Were changed with the eye-hurting distortion, and came forward to look at the reports. A couple of women as well as the men. I gave them space. None of them looked at me as if I was doing them a favor, but at least none were actively hostile.

Ricky and one of his friends were frowning at my casts, but Larimer was still intent on me. He strolled back into the light. The look on his face was more wary and evaluating now, rather than outright intimidating.

“Is there more I can do to help with this?” I asked him.

“We don’t need help from Athanate,” snarled Ricky’s friend, looking up from the casts. I just smiled at him and he was smart enough to understand how stupid he’d just been. He didn’t like that. He flushed with anger and growled, a sound too tight and light with his human throat, but full of threat.

An answering growl came from behind me, deeper, vibrating through my chest. Alex.

Everyone froze.

Ricky’s hand clamped on his friend’s arm and his human face made a good impression of a wolf’s bared fangs, but too late. The group around him seemed to swirl, coalescing into the pack against the outsider. I twisted the backpack in my hand. I could have the HK out in a tenth of a second. And after the magazine emptied I could use it as a club while they tore me to pieces.

Ricky hurled a couple aside, but it was Larimer who ended it, lashing out at the forming group, breaking the dynamic and snarling at the aggressors. He was sweating freshly for all that he tried to look unconcerned at the challenges.

The pack fell quiet. Alex didn’t. Larimer’s eyes weighed me, weighed Alex. He saw the way I held the backpack, and I didn’t doubt his nose had told him what was in there. He looked past me at Alex.

“My apologies, Alexander,” he said formally. “I have mistrusted you on the evidence of something I did not understand. But this is not a matter for challenges.” He glared around him.

The noise from Alex lowered without quite ceasing to be a growl. Larimer cautiously came closer to me.

“And my apologies to you too, Ms. Farrell. You appear to be sincere, and if you’ve caused problems for us, they are less than what you’ve brought to our attention.” His mouth twisted as his eyes flicked to the backpack. “Your willingness to come here freely, and your willingness to die alongside Alexander speaks well of you. Perhaps some good will come of this.”

Alex went quiet behind me and the pressure in the barn collapsed like an old tire.

“Honestly,” I said to Larimer. “I thought relations were better than this.” I cleared my throat. “New Athanate and Were, you know…”

“Oh, that was fine. It worked well.”

“Worked? As in used to work? It’s stopped?”

Larimer raised a brow at me, surprised I didn’t know. “It has.”

“Why?”

“Ask the Altau, Farrell,” Ricky said. “They haven’t told us anything.” He’d dragged his friend forward to stand between him and Larimer. The boy stuttered an apology and fled when I shrugged it off. I guess it’s difficult for a guy to stand stark naked in front of a clothed woman and apologize for being an ass, Were or not.

“It’s not for me to say, Larimer, but I’m sure you and Altau can sort this out next week.”

He snorted. “Yes, next week, not this week, not with Denver stinking of Athanate.”

I ignored that. “My offer stands, if there’s anything I can do. And my gut feeling says that Altau will be on your side if there’s a problem.”

“That would be a first.” Larimer snorted.

“There’s something else that Alex wanted me here for.” I didn’t want to introduce the topic since the alpha seemed so twitchy about protocol, but Alex could hardly do it. “Maybe…” I was going to suggest Alex joined us on two legs, but one glance from the alpha shut me up.

“It’s better for the pack if he stays wolf for the moment,” he said without explanation. “Anyway, I know what it’s about.” He returned to his canvas seat and sat back down with a sigh.