Cool Hand (36 page)

“Yes, Boss,” she said easily, completely unfazed by having me in her face.

“Hmm.” I let my eukori reach for her. As before, she put up no resistance—there wasn’t the feeling that I got with Bian, whose eukori seemed to have depths that were blocked off.

I gave her hair a tiny pull and we were even closer.

She was relaxed. Maybe a little puzzled, but open to me.

“When I was in the army,” I said, “I had an instructor called Ben-Haim. He was the guy who taught me most about clandestine operations. He had a phrase:
a spy can lie without breathing, but she cannot breathe without lying
.”

Yelena didn’t flinch.

“He was right,” she said. “When I was a spy, if I’d stopped lying, I would quickly have stopped breathing too. But I have not lied to you, Mistress. I am not a spy anymore.”

From the feel of her eukori, she was telling the truth. Or Carpathian spies could lie with their eukori.

“No one, not even Vega Martine,” she murmured, “can lie with their eukori open like this.”

Truth or not? A classic unverifiable statement.

But I believed her.

“Then tell me—why did you appeal to me for asylum?”

“I have not lied to you,” she said slowly, her accent coming back. “I did not lie to Nick. You gave Larry sanctuary, I knew that, and I was tired of the lying, tired of the fear.”

“Fear of being found out?”

She shook her head. “Every day, what I was pretending to be, it was…seeping in, yes, like a stain in my head. I was afraid that one day I would not be able to see the stain.”

That was so close to the way I felt about Basilikos, my paranoia twitched. Standard subversion tactic. Was she trying to gain my sympathy?

But her eukori settled down, welcoming me in.

“I have nothing to hide from you,” she said.

My jaw throbbed and I had to close my eyes to concentrate.

Our eukori twisted together.

I’d had it nearly right when she’d climbed through that window behind me in Denver. I’d thought of her as a dark, poisonous orchid. That didn’t feel right any more. Dark, yes, but powerful rather than poisonous. No sweet-faced singer in the choir, this one. Sharp. Deadly. Violence wound up like a spring. A thing of beauty and a lethal weapon.

Fine, so long as I kept control. So long as she was
mine
.

My Athanate purred with pleasure.

And this close, my nose was full of her marque—
my
marque. Not my marque without the wolf overtones, that David and Pia had—my complete marque.

“Nothing to hide?” I said. “Not even this trick with the marque?”

From what I understood about the Athanate marque, she shouldn’t have developed my marque unless we’d exchanged Blood. But Carpathians didn’t play by exactly the same rules.

“This marque is not a lie, Mistress,” she said. “This Carpathian secret is something that can be used to lie, but my marque is telling you the truth. I want to be House Farrell; my marque becomes yours without exchange of Blood.”

“And there are more secrets?”

“None that is as dangerous as this one. Mistress, all other Athanate fear this. You must be very certain of your safety when you reveal what you can do.”

“
I
can do?”

“What you will be able to do,” she said with quiet certainty.

One last little probe.

“This
desire
to be House Farrell; you really mean it?”

She nodded.

“So when did you decide you wanted so much to be part of my House?”

“Truthfully, it was as soon as you confirmed the oath, after Bian had told you it was the wrong oath, that you had made a mistake.”

“Just that?”

She nodded again. “I have learned more about you over the last days: from Pia; from David; from Jen. Nothing that makes me change my mind.”

Her eukori began to simmer again. There was more there, much more, when we had time.

I pulled her head down and kissed her forehead.

“I’m glad,” I murmured. “Go. Fly safely.”

I walked away to join Tullah, as satisfied as I could be with my House.

“This is the place? You’re sure?”

“Yup. This is where he said.”

We’d made record time from the airfield. Tullah had asked Victor Gayle for any contacts he had in the area, and this was the one he’d come up with. A guy called Drake, on the outskirts of Santa Fe.

He’d described him as a friend from the service. Victor had been a helicopter pilot in the Cavalry. I was kinda expecting to be directed to another airfield to meet some aircraft mechanic.

Nope. We were south of I-25, with Santa Fe visible to the north across the highway. We were driving through a cluster of hardscrabble buildings and houses. A railroad wound lazily past. The only thing I could say in its favor was that it was poor enough that the Hill Bitch didn’t look out of place.

“There.” Tullah pointed, and I turned onto a dirt track.

At the end was a shed made of corrugated metal, with a sign hanging askew in front.

We pulled up in front and got out. At the top of the sign was a stylized eagle, poster red faded to pastel pink on a soft yellow background. Below it said:
Drake Auto Salvage – KEEP OUT
. There was a little skull and crossbones like an exclamation mark at the end.

“Lovely,” I snarked.

“Kind of you to like it, Missy. You lost?” The guy had come around the side of the building. He wasn’t far off fifty, dressed in old coveralls with an Arizona D-backs baseball cap pressed down on scraggly brown hair. He’d opened the top half of the coveralls and tied the arms around his waist, revealing skin so tanned and sweaty it looked like old polished wood. His pale-eyed squint passed over us to the truck and back.

“Victor said to come look you up,” Tullah said.

The man blinked. “You Amber and Tullah? Why didn’t you say, huh? Pull the heap around the other side.”

I patted the Hill Bitch’s hood as I walked back. Only I was allowed to make comments like that about her.

“Way Vic was spouting, I was ’specting a couple of hulking Amazons, with big hairy arms like a desert cactus,” Drake said when I’d parked. “Y’all look sorta normal.”

Tullah batted her eyelids at him, and I bit my lip. Nice to be called normal sometimes.

He got out some folding chairs and patted the dust off them before offering us beers. We sat in the shade of his shed and sipped ice-cold Santa Fe Pale Ale. However dilapidated Drake’s shed looked from the road, his fridge worked well, and the equipment in his shop had the sheen of long use and good maintenance.

“Now y’all looks like you teach Sunday school, for sure,” Drake said to Tullah after a couple of minutes of stories about Victor that I was
so
going to remember. “But I’m guessing if’n Vic sends me someone, they’ll be up agin it. What can I do, huh?”

Tullah was handling it fine, so I took another swallow and made a mental note to get some of these beers to take home.

“Well, it’s the heap,” Tullah said, cocking her head at the Hill Bitch. “Kinda stands out, and we need to get past some folks without raising a ripple.”

“Quiet like,” he grunted, nodding and looking at my truck.

I’d parked her alongside his tow truck. My truck looked meaner than his truck. The golf ball dimple dents that covered every inch of her were the proud reminders of every hill she’d made her bitch, but they were…distinctive.

“And if you’ve got a working wreck of an old car we could rent for the day? Just need to get into town and back. Without raising that ripple.”

“Maybe,” he grunted again, eyeing us both. Then he launched into another story about Vic while we finished our beers. Tullah glanced at her watch. We weren’t late. Yet.

Afterwards he looked the Hill Bitch over. We took everything out—our clothes, bags of fertilizer, shotgun—and stored everything we weren’t wearing in a lockup cage in the corner of his shed.

When we’d finished that, we found him wheeling a street-legal off-road bike out into the front yard. It was a mean Kawasaki 650 in a sort of military color scheme: matte black for the engine, forks and swing arm, and a deep, matte green for the tank, exhaust cover and seat.

Yum.

“Now, this is what I put aside when Vic called, but I’m wondering if you ladies are all up to it.”

There were a couple of full-face helmets dangling off the bars and I put one on. Very handy for hiding my face. Tullah tried the other on for size.

“I’ve ridden before,” I said casually, with the visor tipped up.

“Recently?”

I shrugged. “Don’t they say you never forget?”

“That’s bicycles,” he said. The little creases at the corners of his eyes deepened.

“Huh.” I pulled out half my poker winnings and slapped the bills in his hand. “Whatever you can do for my little truck in a day. And her name’s Hill Bitch, not Heap.”

“Huh?”

I pressed the starter.

“You be holdin’ on real tight, Tullah, babe,” I drawled.

I felt her grip my waist. The engine snarled with an angry crackle that promised fun.

Drake started to say something. Too late.

I whipped the throttle, dropped the clutch and got the front wheel to leap off the ground. Tullah squealed and gripped harder. I balanced it down the short dirt track all the way back to the tarmac. There I slapped it back down, leaned over on one leg and cracked the throttle again. The back tire smoked and screamed as we swung around in a lazy circle.

Drake was doubled over laughing. I heard something that might have been a rebel yell, but I didn’t wait to find out. When we were lined up the right way, I flicked the Kawasaki back up and we shot off to Santa Fe with the back tire still screaming.

Up to it? Yeah.

It remained to find out whether I was up to it with the alpha of the Santa Fe pack.

Half-head. Great name. Just great.

I walked down the narrow streets of Santa Fe old town, squeezed between tan adobe walls on either side.

“Keep going straight,” said the voice in my ear.

Thirty minutes ago, I’d followed Zane’s instructions, leaving Tullah to lie low with the motorbike while I waited alone at the gallery in the park. A Were had come up and given me a tiny comms headset.

This was my second time around the old town, following the directions from the headset.

Walk. Turn left. Stand still.

I knew it was just to check that I had no one with me, but they were jumpy, and it was catching. I could feel it in their Call, like a wooden hinge squealing.

Into the camera shop.

It had a ‘closed’ sign on the door. I walked in and an anxious Were patted me down, then followed it with an electronic scanner. Nothing. I’d left my cellphones with Tullah.

“What’s in the shoulder holster?”

“Heckler Koch, Mark 23.”

“You copy that?” The Were spoke into a mike and listened to the reply.

“Go out and turn left,” he said to me.

After the rush to make the meet, walking around the town gave me time to think about what I was doing.

I had a reason I wanted to see the alpha of Santa Fe—he was the only way I’d find out where Diana was.

But why did the alpha want to see me?

And why such an elaborate procedure?

Zane had said I would be safe. How much did I trust him?

Trust no one
, whispered Ben-Haim.

I didn’t want to, but I had no options. I shivered.

I reached a wider part of the street I was walking along. The walls fell back and were replaced by a gray stone building on the left and a restaurant on the right. There were empty tables in the sun, and parasols advertising beer cast long, deep shadows across them.

A waiter watched me from the gloom inside the restaurant’s door. Spicy cooking smells drifted out.

“Across to the right,” the voice said at the junction.

It was an old mission church, a simple box-shaped construction, even the bell tower. The walls were adobe orange, supported on the sides by angled stone buttresses. The adobe had softened in the weather until there were no sharp edges. A white cross was thrust up into the blue sky from the flat top of the tower.

Misión El Sagrado Corazón. Sacred Heart Mission, said the sign.

The door was old and heavy, layered with a pattern to look like a castle gate. It creaked as it opened and a priest stepped out.
Not
a Were, my nose told me, but someone who was around them a lot.

Interesting.

“Good afternoon, my child,” he said.

He had a long face, saved from looking gloomy only by the sense of peace he projected. His pale green eyes were sharp.

“There will be no weapons in the house of God. I will keep your gun safe for you.”

It was a neat trick to have your enemies disarm themselves voluntarily.

Paranoid? Not me.

And an alpha werewolf who was probably going to be six-six, two-fifty, incredibly strong, quick
and
crazy wasn’t a weapon?

But I wouldn’t be able to find Diana without the alpha’s help.

I slipped the HK out of the holster, checked the safety and handed it over.

“Thank you,” he said. He was holding a cloth over his hand. He took the gun and wrapped it up without touching the metal, then motioned me inside.

He locked the door behind me, leaving me alone and unarmed, while he was outside, with my gun. With my fingerprints all over it.

Not paranoid at all.

I stood still until my eyes adjusted.

There were lamps set in the wall, but they were off and I couldn’t see any way of switching them on. The main light was from the sun spearing through the high, thin windows and turning strips of the church into molten bars that hurt to look at. A few votive candles flickered on a rack in front of the altar.

My nose flared. Wood wax and candles; old, dry sweat and soft, heady incense. And finally a hint of Were, like the Albuquerque marque, but mingled with something I couldn’t place.

I could see no one. Above my head was the wooden floor for the bell tower, with plenty of space for someone to be waiting up there. In front of me were pews, an organ, a pulpit and the altar itself.

I took a few more steps down the aisle. The floor was stone and I didn’t try and muffle the sound of my boot heels.

Why was Half-head playing hide and seek?

Was all this security really necessary to meet the most powerful Were in New Mexico?

And where were we going to have a chat? Sitting in the pews?

“Wait inside the confessional,” the voice in my ear said. “Close the door behind you.”

Huh?

Then I saw it. What I’d thought was an organ was, in fact, an old confessional. Like the church, it oozed age. When it had been made, it had been simply a wooden cabinet with two doors. In parts, I could still see the rough cut of the original timber posts. Over the years it had been carefully and lovingly modified: ornamental panels of woven wood in the doors, a plaque inlaid with white crossed keys, a cross on the top. Climbing lizards had been carved all the way up the corner posts. The wood was dark with time and worn smooth with the passage of hands.

In front of it on a stand, a single, intensely aromatic candle burned. Closer, the scent was cloying, making me want to sneeze.

I guessed the alpha wanted me to sit in here, unable to see when he came in or how many he had with him. Standard tactics to unnerve me before he hauled me out for whatever interrogation he wanted.

I huffed and went in the door marked
Poenitentes
. It was cold and dark.

“Just wait. Do
not
open the door until you are told.”

The connection cut.

I pulled the earpiece out and stuffed it in my pocket.

It was silent in the church. No noise reached in from the outside. Which meant that noises inside wouldn’t get out either. I was isolated from the rest of Santa Fe.

I shivered again.

And I knew exactly when the alpha came in.

His aura of dominance pushed at me. I half expected to hear pews being shoved aside.

Even half-masked by the church’s smells, the wolf scent thickened, making my stomach knot.

I heard footsteps outside the confessional: strangely light and measured. A sense, not just of dominance—more a radiation of
anger,
like standing too close to a fire. And a noise like a dying man’s breathing.

What the hell?

How weird was this going to get?

I’d delivered myself, handed over my weapons, sat defenseless in a tiny box waiting for an alpha that the Cimarron Were believed was stone crazy and dangerous.

Crazy, weird or deadly. I was about to find out.

I braced myself for my door to open.

What I really wasn’t expecting was for the other door to be opened and the confessional to creak as the alpha sat, separated from me by the thin wooden wall.

What was he doing?

Leaving someone waiting and unable to see was standard technique. But he’d gone and given up a double handful of advantages. By shutting himself in the confessional as well, he’d lost the ability to physically intimidate me and he’d lost any clues from my body language.

Which was scary. It meant he didn’t need those advantages. Or he thought he didn’t. He was going to rely on his paranormal capabilities. So I needed to exercise mine.

The anger I felt from him: it was reeled in. Underneath it, his marque felt complex. It was deep and strong. And strange. And…restrained. Prickly, defensive. A threat of violence barely held back. I felt his dominance pushing at me, probing and pressing behind my eyes. A bit like Felix, more like Zane, not exactly like either of them.

A little slot beside my arm slid open with a bang, making me jump.

“I guess
Father forgive me, I have sinned
is the way these conversations usually start,” the demon in my throat slipped out.

My wolf was feeling prickly right back at Cameron, but why pick
this
alpha to needle?

There was a moment of beguiling calm. Then, without warning, his anger erupted.

“What the fuck are you doing here in New Mexico?” The force behind his words hit me like a punch. His voice was deep and buzzy. Not because he was sick or had a problem with his throat—he was using a voice distorter.

Why? Would I recognize the voice somehow?

“I explained to Zane—”

“I know what you said to him,” Cameron cut across me. I could feel him stand and press hands against the panel between us as if he were about to break through. I braced myself, just in case.

“The idiot screwed it up,” he shouted. “He screwed the whole fucking thing sideways to hell.”

Shit.
Even through the distorter, there was no disguising the fury.

Did he think I had something to do with Amaral killing Romero? No, he couldn’t be that angry about the death of an Athanate who’d betrayed the Were.

The guy might be as unstable as the rumors said he was; he seemed like he was likely to go off at any moment. And I’d been trying to convince Felix the New Mexico Were weren’t crazy.

Except…the elaborate setup and carefully planned meeting were the work of someone impulsive and unstable.

I tried to analyze the situation. The anger was real. Had I fallen into some New Mexico Were politics? Involving what? Something that happened at the Calle. To do with the Gold Hill pack? The Confederation?

There hadn’t been a hint of it when Zane called me this morning.

So something must have happened during the course of the day. Or Zane had played me. Sent me to take the brunt of the alpha’s anger.

The confessional didn’t let air circulate. Sweat beaded on my brow.

I couldn’t afford to get caught up in local problems. I didn’t have time. Diana didn’t have time.

Wolf didn’t care if I was being played or not. Wolf wanted out. I dug fingers into my thighs and tried to keep my head clear.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. Calmly. “I’m only here to find my colleague, Diana. Zane suggested—”

Cameron steamrollered over me. “Larimer sent Evans down to infiltrate the Gold Hill pack, or make a deal with them.”

“No!”

Shit!
If they thought Evans and I were down here on pack business, they’d leap straight to the assumption I would have in their place—we were spying in preparation for an attack on them.

“Evans was expelled from the Denver pack,” I said. “Felix suspected he might head to the border packs, but it’s nothing to do with us where he chose to go.”

“What deal did Larimer make with the Confederation?” he shouted. He was still up against the wall of the confessional. I could see it quivering.

“None!” My wolf growled, too angry to hide now. “We kicked them out and we’ll fight them.”

Cameron grunted. Hell, it was almost as if he liked me snarling back.

Was he testing me, like Zane? Or would he come through that panel and go for my throat if I said the wrong thing?

“And Altau and this new House, Amaral,” he said. “What association do they have?”

“None. Romero broke the old association by kidnapping Diana. Now he’s dead and Amaral has her. I have to get her back. It’s urgent. I thought Zane understood that,” I said, and swallowed. “What the hell has happened?”

“Why did Altau send you alone? Isn’t Diana important?”

“We didn’t
know
what had happened until today. Altau will be coming.”

He grunted again. “They will indeed.”

I wouldn’t say he’d calmed down, but the ferocity of his aura was no longer pounding against me like storm surf.

My wolf lay back down, muttering unhappily.
Fight. Fight.
If he was trying to put me off balance, he was succeeding.

I closed my eyes and tried again. “What’s happened?”

There was a creak as Cameron sat.

His voice was still distorted, but at least the level was normal. Now the anger was replaced by sarcasm: “This morning, ‘acting in response to an appeal from their associates, Gold Hill’, a team from the Confederation took out the Ute Mountain alpha and three of his lieutenants. The Ute Mountain pack is now part of Gold Hill.”

Shit! And part of the Confederation.

“I need to call—” I was on my feet.

“Sit down. Larimer knows now, if he didn’t know beforehand.”

“He wouldn’t have known beforehand,” I sank back down onto the seat. “I’ve spoken to him about Gold Hill and he thinks they’re scum. He won’t talk to the Confederation.”