Bargains and Betrayals (8 page)

I needed to believe it. “He’ll be smart—stay away?”

He folded, snorting. “No guarantees. Love makes people crazy.”

“Look around. I’ve got plenty of crazy. What I need is
smart
.”

Jessie

But Pietr seemed more capable of delivering crazy. Maybe it was like his brother Max had said: Smart didn’t come easy to a seventeen-year-old guy with a girlfriend.

That night he tapped on my window again. Hadn’t Dad delivered my message? I raced over, ignoring the all-seeing eye of the camera. It meant nothing the way the wind howled. There would be only moments between Pietr’s appearance, the scattering of his scent, and the warning call of the dogs as they barreled after their quarry, my guards on their heels.

Dammit
.

I tore a sheet of paper from my journal and scrawled a note, which I pressed to the glass.

I love you, but run and DON’T come back!

Thank goodness for werewolf night vision. I tugged the paper away.

His mouth moved, carefully, as he enunciated each word.

“You
love
me?”

Oh, holy crap! Smart—I needed
smart
! I tore the paper away and scribbled.

YES! Don’t be stupid—RUN!

I underlined “
DON’T come back!
” and flattened the paper out.

He stood there, puzzling at it. I flipped it around, wondering how soon the dogs would be on him. My writing was barely legible. Trembling I circled the key words.

YES! and DON’T come back!

The dogs began their keening cry. When I finally pulled the paper back down I saw Pietr’s reply—his handprint wanting mine—pushed into the fog left by his breath.

I rested my hand against the print and leaned my forehead on the glass until all sign of his visit had faded away.

CHAPTER FIVE

Alexi

True to her belief she could get us in to see Mother soon, Wanda arranged a meeting time for us and so we found ourselves retracing a path we were beginning to know well.

After promising to hand over the single baby tooth the family had kept, we were allowed entry to the bunker that looked, from all outward appearances, to be a Colonial farmhouse with a rapidly failing border of aromatic herbs.

In. Down. The numbers were the same: the same number of steps. The same number of doors, locks, and cameras, but still I counted them to better burn them into my memory, to make their existence second nature so that when we came to free Mother we would not trip over ourselves or tangle and fall in the dark, victims of our own feet and some misstep.

The only thing that seemed to change was the code they typed into the door at the bottom of the stairs. I’d caught it, memorized it, played it back in my mind, but each time we visited, it was new. If I could determine a pattern, then I could predict the next round of numbers. But it seemed some things were truly random. Perhaps sometimes there was no pattern—no way to anticipate an opponent’s next move.

The concept frustrated me beyond all logic.

I understood that when we came to free her we would need a way past the interior doors, a way I could not yet provide.

We walked through a long fluorescent-lined cement hall of a buried tractor trailer and through the cubicle-filled office area that branched into the underground science lab and the broad room where Mother was kept in a clear-walled environment that offered no privacy and made the rarely occupied office cubicles look inviting.

Behind me—because they still insisted I go first, like some substandard bodyshield—Pietr’s breathing wavered as the final door opened.

Our escorts continued forward, but we paused, noting a difference so subtle many would not have considered it.

They were down a guard.

“Mother?” Pietr asked the figure in the seamless glass cubicle.

She turned, saw him—saw
us
—and let out a little cry of relief, tears shining on her face. My heart hammered in my chest and I felt my brothers bristle beside me, saw how Catherine’s spine straightened, all of us thinking the same thing at once. Something else had changed—something beyond one less guard. Something deeply disturbing.

Mother
never
cried.

We walked to the transparent door, limbs stiff with stress as we exchanged glances. Pietr and I entered first, the warning call of “Red-Red-Red” coming just as the nearly invisible door slid open.

Max and Cat watched the guards, though Max’s wolf senses and all of Cat’s sadly muted human ones were trained on us.

“Mother.” Pietr reached a tentative hand out to stroke her hair.

She leaned into him, resting her head on his chest and the look he gave me spoke more than words could as he tenderly lifted and dropped a long curl of her hair back to join the rest, sweeping down to obscure her face.

I nodded. I saw. The hair that had been so recently auburn and copper was shot full of silver. I slid my hand down her slim arm and subtly pinched for a pulse. Too fast.

Everything was moving way too fast.

My eyes locked with Pietr’s and he suddenly realized what I knew—what I’d read was inevitable. When the end came, it came suddenly.

Mother may have been dying since she first started to change—to evolve into an oborot at age thirteen—but now she was sliding down the slope toward sudden death.

And no matter how powerful in life an oborot was—no matter how fierce in their wolf form—they were helpless as any human when death came hungering to their door.

We stayed there with her for the allotted time. I tried to absorb her every word, reminding myself this might be the last chance.… But every time I fought harder for focus, her words retreated further into a fog and I lost every thought except the one that made me angriest: We had to find a way to free her—there had to be a bargain that could be struck—and that I had no idea how to do it or what it would take.

Max and Cat switched places with us, and standing outside mother’s unyielding environment, I glared at Pietr and wished Grandfather had somehow endowed the oboroten with telepathy so we could take advantage of one less guard and, even unarmed as we were, somehow break Mother out.

In a very few minutes the thought became an obsession of dizzying power.

So it was only logical, in an extremely illogical way, that when the door to the cubicle next hissed open to release Max and Cat and Mother was so near the opening—

I took a chance.

Grabbing Mother so suddenly, I yanked her free of the cubicle, stunned by how light she was in my grasp.

Max and Pietr only stared at me a moment—a single heartbeat between fascination and horror—before they pulled free of their clothes and shook into their wolfskins.

Cat tried to look threatening as we began to move to the door as a unit, the wolves snarling and snapping at the guards, lunging so they forced their guns’ muzzles up as the agents tried to gain control without harming the assets they still needed intact—my werewolf siblings.

Mother stumbled, tucked against me, and I took her negligible weight, my back nearly at the exit when I felt a draft and realized the door had slid open before I was ready.

Safeties clicked off three guns behind me and their snouts bit into my head. I froze, steeling myself against the possibility that this was the last thing I’d ever do.

And probably by far the finest.

If I could throw my body at my killers and let go of Mother at the right moment, they might all still make it out.…

“Let go,” I urged Mother, her fingers claws in my arms.

“
Nyet
,” she replied, eyes flaring with red and filling with moisture as, searching my face, she discovered my intent. “
Nyet
, Alexi!” With a brutal shove she threw herself back from me, past her other sons, ruffling the crests of their furs as she landed at the feet of her guards.

And gave herself up.

The wolves whined, Catherine crying out at her choice. Their shapes shuddering, Max and Pietr regressed to their human forms, crouched, damp with sweat and stunned to the marrow.

“You will not die forrr me,” she roared, the words growing guttural. “I am dead alrrready, do you not see?” Shaking out her long mane of hair she stood and tugged at the silver filling so much of it now. “My clock rrruns down too quickly.”

Her voice a hoarse whisper, its intensity never lessened. “Hear me clearly. If they will not release me—if they intend me to die here, so be it. I will not have you sacrifice yourself for me. I will not have my family made into martyrs.” She inhaled sharply and bent over, fighting for control.

“Heart-Rate-Is-Elevated,” the computerized monitor called.

Mother growled her response.

A pop sounded and her hands twitched, shifting as they rested on her slender legs just above her knees. Hair shot up from one in a dramatic display of the wolf’s growing power.

Mother shook, pushing back the change.

When she straightened to address us again, her eyes were bright with unshed tears. Taking a deep breath she said, “I will not watch my children die as my husband did.”

Turning her back to us, she led her guards to her cell and waited obediently for the door to open and let her in once more. A guard picked up Pietr and Max’s shed clothing and threw it at my brothers, grinning at our failure.

Behind me, the agents withdrew their guns and stepped aside to let us out.

“This was both unexpected and disappointing.”
Wanda
.

The agents flanked us, fingers by their trigger guards.

“You know what this means, of course,” she stated crisply, but in her eyes I read something soft, like pity. “Mother’s now under restricted access. You’ll have to earn your way back into our good graces—and into her environment. And”—she measured the weight of her words, trying to lighten the impact with her tone. But no change in volume or pitch could stop the inevitable pain of hearing—“that will take time.”

Dazed, we were led away from the bunker’s bottom section, where Mother lived and might very well die, and up the stairs.

Still stunned, I would not have noticed him if it were not for Pietr’s sudden lunge toward a dimly lit room.

“Whoaaa—easy, fella,” an agent said, pressing the end of his gun into Pietr’s gut and pushing him back into our midst.

Blind with rage at whomever lurked in the shadows, Pietr roared and Max grabbed him, wrapping his arms tight around Pietr’s chest to haul him away as the agent and the person he guarded joined us in the narrow hall.

I’d never met the boy, but I knew him immediately from the descriptions Cat, Max, and Pietr had shared.

He stood nearly the same height as Pietr, but where Pietr had dark, unruly hair that often hid one eye, Derek’s hair was golden blond pushed back from classic American features. A square and powerful jaw framed Pietr’s crisp cheekbones, where Derek’s jaw was mildly blunted and somehow less threatening. Where Pietr had an edge and wildness to him, Derek had refinement and polish. An artist could have compared the two and viewers would have still argued who was more handsome.

But after what had happened between Derek, Pietr, and Jessie there could be no doubt of who was more dangerous. And it only made his boy-next-door charms more ironic.

“Youuu,” Pietr seethed, pulling against Max so he was inches from Derek’s smiling face. And less from the gun barrel of Derek’s smiling guard.

“Hello, Pietr. How’s Jess?” His eyes unfocused and he looked somewhere beyond us. “Yep. Still hot.” He blinked, his vision returning to where we all stood. He grinned at Pietr.

Pietr went wild and Max’s arms were suddenly filled with a snarling, snapping werewolf clawing toward his antagonist. To Pietr’s credit, his sudden loss of control made Derek jump back. The smile fell off his face and from the dim room behind him someone reached forward and took his arm.

“Don’t be stupid,” a dark-haired woman with fine features advised Derek. Slender and well dressed, she didn’t carry herself like an agent. Catching a glimpse of her tailored outfit and high heels I doubted she was a normal feature in the bunker. “Come away now. We have a session.”

Tight-lipped, he spared us one more look, then raised his chin arrogantly and followed her back into the dim room.

Snapping and thrashing in his wolfskin, Pietr struggled in Max’s grip, his brilliant red eyes never leaving his ex-rival. I doubted he’d even seen the woman ghost in and away.

With a grunt, Max dragged himself and his more than human burden toward the door.

My mind racing, I ushered Cat out ahead of me, scooping up the remnants of Pietr’s jeans with my shoe.

Household expenses would again be on the rise, it seemed.

By the time we’d gotten out the front door, Pietr had changed back and slipped into his shredded pants, holding them together at his waist with a clenched fist. He didn’t say a word, just sat in the car, staring grimly ahead.

Max dug into the glove compartment and handed him a belt to twist through his tattered waistband.

We drove home in silence, each of us surely thinking of how we’d alone been responsible for our joint failure.

Pietr was brooding.

I was allowed no such luxury. Now was a time for action, not sorrowful introspection. If only I knew what action to take.…

Pietr was the first out of the car, throwing his door open with so much force its hinges groaned and Max shouted. We shadowed him up the stairs, onto the porch, and inside the house.

There, hidden from the potential curiosity of nosy neighbors, Pietr let loose.

He tore through the house, filled with a white-hot anger, kicking door jambs, punching walls, and cursing.
Bilingually
. Cat followed, a banshee wailing for him to stop—to
think
 … I reached for my cigarettes and trailed them like a ghost.

What could I say or do? My grandfather’s science was what had brought us all to the realization that Mother was dying. And we couldn’t free her—couldn’t save her.

When Pietr cleared the small, marble-topped table at the sitting room’s edge, sending the pieces of the family’s
matryoshka
flying, Max took him to the ground.