Capitol Kidnap: Urban Werewolf Book 1 (2 page)

"He's my brother."

"And you've got four other ones. You'll get over it."
 

Naomi forced back a growl. She was too quick to anger this close to the moon. "They're going to force him to transform in public, then shoot him. Then just for the hell of it they're going to hunt us down for being different. Not exactly my idea of it not making any difference. And he's my fucking brother! You vampires are all the same. Me! Me! Me!"

"You talk to your mother? I mean the last thing I want is a pack of werewolves in town. They might just decide to hunt me down despite what you tell them."

"Hey! Richards South! That's our exit."

##

Her brother's boyfriend silently led them deeper into the bike path. He swallowed hard, Naomi could hear the spit in his throat.
 

"Thanks Mike," Naomi said.

"This is the last place I saw him. I didn't stay to see him change. He-he doesn't like that. I felt safe walking back by myself from here."

"Gotcha. We're going to scope it out, see if we can find anything," Naomi said.

"Anything I can do? I mean, it's not like I'd be much help out here, but I could… I don't know do something." His eyes pleaded with her. He didn't want to be alone.

"He'll be all right. I won't let anything bad happen to my baby brother."
 

Mikey said nothing. His eyes watered. Naomi bit her tongue to keep from cursing.
 

"I'd rather you went home. You'd really just be in the way out here," Naomi finally said. Mikey looked broken when she said that.

"What she meant is that you're more help in the apartment," Mindy said. Get things together for us later. Try to think of anything weird that's happened." Mikey turned back towards the apartment he shared with Bryan. Naomi headed deeper into the grass. Bryan hadn't moved things too far from where Naomi had changed just a few years ago. She easily found his cache of clothes with just a little help from her nose. This far from the path, his change would have been well hidden.

"Mindy, could you turn your back for just a minute?"

 
"It's not like you got something I never seen before. And I thought your kind was super comfortable –"

"Fine. Just keep an eye out." Naomi stripped off her clothes and put them into the box with Bryan's. She tamped down the weeds around the box. Naomi hadn't really wanted Mindy to see her vulnerability during the shift, that wasn't exactly something any vampires know about–even one that led a somewhat legit life like Mindy.

Naomi stretched up towards the moon, feeling oddly self-conscious. The shift began. Her face grew, teeth slid around her mouth lengthening, sharpening. Her ears slid higher up her head. Her bones popped as her limbs shifted. She crumpled to the ground as her legs slimmed and shortened–her arms lengthening to match her legs. It looked painful, but it was fluid. Too fluid. This moment she hadn't wanted to share. She was vulnerable. Defenseless. For a few seconds during the transformation she couldn't support herself and could hardly move. They must have got Bryan during this brief moment of utter vulnerability during the shift.

Scents suddenly slammed into focus. She could smell months and months of Bryan using this as his romping ground. She could smell his fear from the night before. The scent of pure terror burned her nostrils. It was sharply unpleasant. She could smell the prey he chased–rabbits last night. The faint coppery scent of their blood hung on the air. How did they sneak up on him? Once shifted his senses should have been too sharp for that. She could hear Mikey back in the apartment, blasting music to pretend he wasn't alone. That he really wanted to be left alone. He'd been terrified. Whoever the mysterious "they" were, he thought they would come for him. Bryan had never even really left out of earshot. Poor kid. Naomi had to keep him safe from Mom. If she found out Bryan had told him, she'd make Mike disappear. She jealously guarded their secret, with good reason apparently.

Naomi followed the scent of Bryan's fear. They must've caught him returning back to change, tired and sated. There were other scents blurred with his, but they followed the bike path so that it was impossible to sort his kidnappers out from the people that had used the bike path during the day. Her kid brother's fear on the other hand was easy to sort out. They must have tied him up so that he couldn't fight back. It must have been dark so that no one would notice them carrying Bryan back.

That meant they had to have known his habits, and seen him change before they kidnapped him. She sneezed.

"What the hell?" Mindy asked. Naomi did her best to smile through her wolf face. A faint scent tickled her nose. She almost recognized it, but it wasn't a normal human smell or a vampire smell either. She went back, took a deep sniff, and sneezed again. It smelled vaguely like cinnamon and roses.

Naomi couldn't ask Mindy if she recognized the smell or if she could smell it too. Wolf mouths and vocal cords just don't move the same way as a human's. Naomi sniffed where the scent was the strongest, looked at Mindy, then sniffed again, loudly with her nose to the ground. No reaction, Mindy just scanned the horizon, looking for some kind of threat. Naomi tried wagging her tail. That got Mindy's attention.

"What? Are you high?" Naomi growled in response. Mindy might be strong, but sometimes, Naomi swore, she was as dumb as dirt. "Fine you smell something." Naomi nodded the best she could, sniffed ground, then looked at maybe. "I don't smell anything weird." Mindy sighed. "You done yet? Did you find what you needed?" Naomi growled. She needed a better way to communicate. "Fine not yet. Can't you just find something to be done with this? I'm totally losing out on my tips for tonight. Besides, I don't really trust them to run the joint without me."
 

Naomi growled, then continued following her brother said. She could just barely taste that strange scent, just at the very outside of her perception knowledge she had caught it once. The slightest of tickles in her throat let her know that it was still there. Finally they turned towards the road. They weren't even really in Davis anymore. They finally emerged on a country road.

"I don't think were in Kansas anymore, Toto."
 

Naomi rolled her eyes. The scent ended just past the waist high grass where they had emerged from the path. The kidnapper's car had left deep tire tracks in the dirt, but that wasn't helpful. How did she know what kind of car they had? She sniffed the tire tracks and sneezed again. The same smell, but it was stronger. Spoiled cinnamon and old roses, like mildew. She sniffed at the ground where it was strongest, looked at Mindy and tried to get Mindy need to recognize that she needed to know if the vampire could smell the same thing she could.

"I still don't smell it." Mindy looked at her watch. "Great, there's no hope of getting back to the club tonight. Might as well see what else we can find." Mindy knelt to look at the tire tracks. "You know how they do this in movies? Yeah, I'm not that good. I can't even tell you what brand these tires are." She paused a moment and pressed her hand into the track. "They're deep though. Does that mean like a van or something heavy? Hey, is that a footprint over there?" About three feet away from the tire tracks there was a footprint with a small triangle in front and a round little hole in the back. "She snuck up on your little brother and took him out in heels? What a badass."

Naomi growled. The threat was clear.

"Look, I'm not on her side. I'm just asking what happens when you find her on your own and she just takes you out like she took out your little brother? No offense, but you need to work on some kind of defense against her. She must have used something to get your brother under her control and carry him out here. Either she had a lot of help or her mojo's strong enough to make them walk this far." Mindy turned around. "Let's go back to the car, were not going to be able to get very far here, name the friend who should be able to help us." They walked back down the path. "Maybe my friends will even know a little bit about that smell. Weird that I can't smell it. I mean, my nose is sharp. You think you'll be able to recognize it when you're not, you know a wolf?"

Naomi nodded. She was certain of it. She trotted back towards the main part of the bike path.

##

"Who is this friend of yours?" Naomi grunted as she buttoned her slacks. "How do you know we can trust him."

"Well, I don't, which is why we're not going to tell him anything. At least not really. Good thing for you, he lives out in West Sac – "

"He's not – he's not a vamp, is he?" Naomi glanced back over her shoulder at Mindy as she buttoned her shirt. "I don't need any more of you knowing."

"No, Mac's not like me. He's… Well, I guess he's Irish."

"Irish?" Naomi asked, waiting to hear more. When Mindy didn't answer, she switched questions. "How do you even know he'll be up this late?"

"It's always late when I see him. He's a night owl." They started back towards the car. "Doing that shit makes you hungry, right?"

"Yeah, but there's nothing open this late, is there?"

"It's a college town," Mindy answered.

T
HEY
PULLED
UP
TO
A
patchwork collection of apartments – condos Mindy said, correcting Naomi's train of thought. Red, blue, and green buildings stood neatly in a row. Mindy led them to a green condo. After Mindy flung open the door to his condo, she just stood awkwardly in the doorway. "It's not like I haven't been invited in before," she whispered. "I just won't invade his house without explicit permission every time I visit."

"Mindy?" A stocky red haired man wearing an apron over red sweatpants appeared from the kitchen. "Girl? What are you doing here?"

"My friend Naomi needs some protection. Mind if we come in?"
 

"I'd like to see you try if I did mind." Mac's smile did not match his words.

"She's not like me. And you invited me before. I just know enough to keep myself outside in case you're up to some crazy shit."
 

"Glad to know have some respect. Come on in ladies make yourselves at home. Would you like some cookies?" he asked Naomi. He leaned in close. "I know they'd just be wasted on her."

"Thanks. What kind?"

"I got some snickerdoodles just about ready to go in the oven. They'll be done in about ten minutes."

"Sure. Thanks."

"No pranks," Mindy said. Mac winked at Naomi.

"Sit, sit." He grinned and gestured to the new black leather couch. "So what kind of protection are you needing?"

"I don't know. I've never…" Naomi shrugged.
 

"Someone kidnapped her brother and she's afraid they'll come after her next," Mindy said as she flopped onto the couch. "Since you know she's running around with me, she's obviously not the kind of girl that likes to have the cops involved in her business."

"Of course not. Though somedays I think it would be easier if we could."

"Then they'd be the ones doing the kidnapping." Naomi shuddered at the thought. Her great grandfather had ended up that way. "Lock us up in the lab."

"Perhaps." You could see him changing gears

"Girl, what's your name? And don't lie to me. I don't like that sort of thing." She answered him. "A good name. Now this brother of yours, how was he taken?"

"I don't know much." Naomi didn't want to tell everyone they were wolves, so she had to choose her words carefully. "He goes to UC Davis, and he was on the bike path close to his apartment. I went out there with Mindy. We saw footprint on the ground, a woman's high-heeled shoe where they first caught him. The car was far away, but it didn't look like there'd been a fight and my brother's a strong boy. He would've fought back against the kidnappers."

"You're sure he was kidnapped?" Mac asked.

"The whole place stank of his fear."

"And she got a phone call threatening to kill him."

"They called you?" Mac's eyes widened in surprise. "Why?"
 

"I don't know. They said they would kill him Monday at nine and then hung up."

"They said more." She nodded. It hadn't really been a question.

"Even called me on his cell phone, but he didn't fight back, and they took him far from where they started."
 

Mac nodded and waited for more.
 

"I suspect she charmed him," Mindy said.
 

"Mindy, this is not your problem. I will deal with the girl's problems by talking to the girl."

"I smelled a strange smell. It made me sneeze. Not much makes me sneeze It was like cinnamon and roses, with just a hint of decay."

"Cinnamon and roses. What are you to perceive magic that way?" He shook his head. "Don't answer that. Some things don't need answering. I suspect what you are is why they took your brother. Don't worry. If she's right, then it's real magic. It's the sort of thing a changeling child might know, or perhaps someone who study sorcery from an old book. Not the sort of thing that those who fancy themselves witches learn in shops these days."

"How do I protect myself against it?"

"It would help to know what you are." Naomi shook her head. She had enough problems with Bry being kidnapped. "Well, part of the battle is simply knowing that you aren't purely human. And it makes it easier for you to resist if you expect it coming." The timer dinged in the kitchen. "Ooh, cookies are done. I'll be the right back." Naomi glanced around the apartment. No TV. The decor had a modernist feel–all blacks and whites. The condo, despite Mac's friendly demeanor, felt lonely with only prints of medieval castles on the walls.

"What is he?" She whispered to Mindy, but Mindy shook her head. Mac was already coming back from the kitchen. He set the plate of cookies on the coffee table and sat across from them. "Mindy, don't even touch these. They're for me and Naomi." He winked at her. "Sometimes she forgets and tries to blend, but it just wastes my cookies and I don't like that." He scooted towards the edge of his chair as he propped a cookie into his mouth. "Now then, as for wards, these should help. All of my guests usually get something to help protect them from the darkness in the world." He picked up a small basket from the site his chair. "Just put the plate down anywhere when you're done." He rummage through the basket, saying some things aside. "Do you have any allergies I should be aware of? Some things that protect against dark magic are also hindrances for those of us who are entirely human. Like me for instance, iron's just no fun."