Cool Hand (42 page)

If I’d said I would cooperate without the threat to Diana, he would have been suspicious.

He thought he had us completely in his control.

He was wrong. Wrong about both of us.

Whatever either of us said or did, whatever hold we pretended that Amaral had over us, it would be his last mistake to make a live broadcast to the Athanate of Diana’s support. Diana would never betray the vision of Emergence and Panethus that she’d built with Skylur.

Instead of supporting Amaral, with her last breath, she’d invoke all her support within the entire Athanate world to kill Amaral and put their weight behind Skylur and his plans.

I’d die. She’d die. The children would die.

I had till the broadcast to find a way out of it.

I heard them first, of course. A helicopter thudded overhead and landed on the tennis courts. An alpha. Before he even entered the convent buildings, I could feel him like a winter storm front.

This wasn’t Gold Hill. He had to be one of the Confederation alphas.

Amaral was on the phone to Prowser as the alpha led his wolves into the courtyard.

O’Neill. Wind River pack. I recognized his face from the information packet Alex had given me. Iversen’s alpha.

This isn’t good.

O’Neill was wearing bulky work clothes, heavy tan jacket, jeans and shit-kicking boots that would have looked more at home on a construction site.

Behind him were five more Were; all big, rough guys.

All looking like trouble.

The alpha scanned the space, passing his gaze over Amaral with a snarl, and coming to rest on me.

Oh, shit.

Evans half-turned to face him as the Wind River Were marched over to us. O’Neill just looked at him and Evans scurried back out of his way.

O’Neill stood right in front of me, hands on his hips.

“This one? She’s the one that killed my wolves?”

“Yes, sir,” Evans replied, his shoulders hunched.

I felt the alpha’s dominance press on me as if he were trying to push my head down. Nothing personal; it didn’t feel as if he was testing me like Zane and Cameron, but he sure as hell expected me to buckle anyway.

I got my feet underneath me. I was shaky, but none of that was because of O’Neill.

I’d had enough of alphas trying to show me how powerful they were. Playing dominance games. Expecting me to shrivel up before their magnificence. But I was an alpha, too.

It seemed a long way up, but I stood.

He was taller than me, of course. Six-four. Maybe two-eighty. Neck and shoulders like a buffalo. Eyes like a winter lake.

Pissed. Pissed that I’d killed his wolves and pissed that he couldn’t dominate me into cringing at his feet, but angrier than that. Far angrier. Angry in a sort of churning whirlpool that I could sense was being whipped to a frenzy by the foulness of the Gold Hill Call. An anger that needed desperately to find a way out.

So he lashed out at me, a backhand to the jaw.

I saw it coming. There wasn’t a lot I could do to block it with my hands tied, but I was moving as he hit, rolling with the blow. I let it spin me around, and ended up staring right back into his surprised and furious face.

“That make you feel better, asshole?” I said. The side of my face had gone numb and the words slurred.

“Shut the fuck up!”

“Yeah. Just shut up and take it. Like the Ute Mountain women that your men are raping.”

“We’re not!” he shouted at me.

It wasn’t a complete shot in the dark, and it wasn’t everything he was furious about, but it was good enough to work with.

“Just standing by, then,” I said. “Minding your own business.”

That got through to him. Old-style werewolves are paternalistic assholes, and they didn’t come any more so than the Confederation founders, including Wind River. Female werewolves were rarer than males and the crusty old alphas would be hugely overprotective of their females.

From the evidence here, outcasts like Gold Hill went a different way.

The behavior of Gold Hill to the Ute Mountain women was unthinkable to the Wind River alpha, and yet, here on territory he’d agreed belonged to Gold Hill, he clearly felt powerless to stop it. That Gold Hill Call felt sickening for me. For him, it had to feel like someone sandpapering an open wound.

I didn’t know the Ute Mountain women. If they were outcast, it was entirely possible they were as bad as the men. But I’d had some experience of the results of this kind of behavior from my missions with Ops 4-10. In one instance, we’d saved a group of women who’d been rounded up for ‘medical inspection and re-education’.

Mass rape wasn’t something that only out-of-control werewolves could do.

And the length of time it had gone on here, some of the Ute Mountain women would be dead or dying.

If I took a couple of backhands for them and managed to stop it, I was fine with that.

Another helicopter came in low overhead.

“Just standing by,” I said again, yelling over the noise and downdraft. “How’s that gonna play in the rest of the Confederation when it gets out? What’re the neighboring packs going to think about it? About
you
?”

He might have hit me again, but Amaral hastily concluded his call and intervened.

“You,” Amaral said to Evans. “Go stop that business right now.” He made an impatient gesture to send two of his Athanate guards along for muscle.

Better late than never, but his intervention didn’t go the way as he expected. O’Neill turned on him, with all that anger still seeking an outlet.

“You said you had control here,” he yelled at Amaral. “It’s a fucking disaster. I screwed with Iversen to get you the timing and you’ve completely fucking blown it.”

“It’s not happening exactly as planned, but things are well within param—”

“Can that shit!” O’Neill said. “The Albuquerque Weres ran you out of town and killed most of your Warders. You can’t even show your face in Santa Fe. Just how is that
within parameters
?”

“
You
failed to provide all the teams you promised.”

This was great—enemy alliances falling apart. I could listen to it all day, but I needed to see if there was something I could do to help Diana. The Adepts were still there, maintaining their lock on her, but the Athanate guards were drifting in to flank Amaral and balance the five angry Wind River Were behind O’Neill.

I edged toward Diana, but I was stopped by nuns coming out of the church.

Two of them that I’d fought were carrying the one I’d wounded. They passed me with no more than a hateful glance. Two more stood in front of me, idly spinning their
bō
, bleak-eyed and looking at me as if they wanted another round.

What now?

I heard voices behind me and looked over my shoulder. Three more nuns had just come in on the helicopter. All of the nuns were in their slinky charcoal-gray uniforms, but the arrivals were armed with top-of-the-line military weapons—HK MP7 and G36 assault rifles.

I turned to face them.

They surrounded me, just five of them, but effectively cutting me off from everything else.

One of them was carrying a spare cloak. She put it around my shoulders and fastened it at the front.

“Thank you,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I was being polite to them, but it seemed better than getting my jaw broken by O’Neill. He’d just shouted at Amaral that half his force was tied up making sure Taos didn’t fill up with New Mexico Were, and he couldn’t spare any more to secure the meeting site.

“This doesn’t seem to be going well for them,” the nuns’ leader said, her eyes flicking across to where O’Neill and Amaral argued. She was old Athanate. A voice like satin, and brown eyes, oddly soft.

I snorted at her comment. And then winced at the pain that caused in my face.

“And you are?” I said.

Her ninja-nun outfit was complemented by a slimline black tactical vest, a Beretta Px4 handgun strapped to one leg, and an MP7 to the other. She was carrying a comms-enabled black battle helmet under her arm. Her dark hair was held back in a ponytail. Her face still had smudges of camo.

I didn’t know which war she’d just come back from, but these nuns took their fighting seriously.

“Mirela Tucek,” she said. A slight smile skewed her thin mouth. “I’ll drop the ‘Mother’ now. It’s served its purpose.”

“You aren’t upset by their problems,” I said.

“Let’s say that their path isn’t necessarily our path.” She glanced over at the arguing men. “We’ve traveled together. They may yet reach their destination, and it may yet serve our purposes, but it’s not essential.”

I was keeping my guard up and at the same time trying to sense anything from them with eukori. They might as well have been wearing mirror shades over their minds.

But one thing I did sense: we were related, Athanate-wise. These nuns were Carpathian.

“Whose purposes are those?” I said, afraid I knew the answer already.

“The purposes of House Lazar.”

“Carpathian,” I confirmed. “I guess that means you answer to Vega Martine.”

She looked surprised, and a genuine smile broke across her face.

“You
are
well informed about some things,” she said. “We do serve the Lady.”

I heard the capital letter and only just managed to stop my throat demon from passing a comment about her Ladyship.

Tucek saw it and laughed easily.

I had to admit, she was a lot friendlier than I would have been to someone who’d shot one of my team in the gut. Then again, I was the one who was trussed up like an oven-ready chicken.

If there was a choice, I’d take her over Evans and Amaral.

Was that what she was offering?

“You and the Lady are closer in mind than you think,” the nun to Tucek’s right said. “We believe in Emergence. We’re not fools like Correia, who believe we can hide forever.”

“And neither are we backstabbing psychopaths like Amaral,” Tucek said. “Who’s plotting his betrayals even while he negotiates his friendships and alliances: Romero, the Albuquerque Were, the Warders, the unsettled Houses in the US, the Confederation. Who’s next?”

The part about Amaral was right on. But Vega Martine and Emergence, that didn’t make sense, surely?

“Vega Martine supported Matlal,” I said. “Basilikos—”

“Basilikos and the Assembly would have supported Emergence if Altau hadn’t destroyed the Assembly in his grab for power.”

Well, they would put their spin on it. Were they trying to convince me that we were on the same side?

“Which he did while getting Matlal locked up, too,” I said. “I guess it’s hard on you that Matlal is a prisoner of Basilikos.”

Tucek smiled. “Not anymore. I put him on a helicopter in Santa Ana not four hours ago. We’ll be joining him and the Lady soon.”

Crap. She and her ninja-nuns have sprung Matlal from Basilikos. But why? He can’t be worth anything to them now.

Despite everything, I was feeling some grudging admiration for Tucek and her ‘convent’.

“It’s not about Panethus and Basilikos any longer,” the second nun was saying. “The real division is Altau on one hand and everyone else on the other. Not even Altau’s new allies, Theokos, really believe his line that Athanate and human are equal. It’s amazing he’s kept Panethus together, but it can’t last.”

She was right, in some of that anyway. Arvinder had given me the dummies’ introduction to Theokos. They believed that humans should worship Athanate.

“Panethus can’t last now that the Warders have been dismantled,” Tucek said. “The Assembly, and its artificial division of Panethus and Basilikos, is gone. Whatever replaces it will have to include the unaligned groups, and we don’t agree with Altau, let alone with what the Empire of Heaven believes.”

“So you claim,” I said, but I was arguing with Athanate who knew much more of what was going on than I did. How
did
things stand now that there was no means to maintain the Assembly?

Were they so bad, these ninja-nuns? My paranoia twinged. They were putting a lot of effort into talking to a prisoner.

The mental clarity that had seemed to linger after the shock from the
bō was ebbing away now. I needed to be thinking of…what?

Tucek came closer.

“But really, you need to be thinking on a more personal level,” Tucek said. She ran one gloved hand gently down the side of my face. “I’m not the Lady, but I can sense the turmoil inside you. Were and Athanate, fighting each other. It must be exhausting, even without
this
.”

It felt like she’d switched on small light inside my head. Monsters prowled my mind in the darkness. Within the weak glow of the light was what remained of my strongbox—the place I’d kept the things I didn’t want to get out.

“The Lady can cure all this,” she murmured.

No. Something very important.

Dungeons.

That’s it.
Something about dungeons. Not how nice the nuns were being to me. Dungeons in the basement of the convent. Dungeons that had been used recently. That stank of fear and despair.

Yes. That’s what I needed to think about. What they had been using the dungeons for.

“You used the dungeons downstairs to
discipline
the children, didn’t you?” I said. “To break them, until they did whatever you wanted.”

Tucek’s face went suddenly blank, and the strange feeling of admiration for the nuns disappeared.

“Mother Tucek, not trying to walk off with my prisoner, are you?” Amaral eased his way into the circle. He was smiling, his voice almost jovial. Underneath, he was primed like an explosive. His Athanate were right behind him. O’Neill had stomped off, hopefully to make sure the assaults on the Ute Mountain women had stopped.