Hidden Trump (Bite Back 2) (42 page)

I took a head-clearing breath and looked at the darkness where they’d stepped from. My Athanate eyes saw clearly, now I was looking. There was another one there, seated, watching.
El Jefé
, the boss man, the one with the agenda to own a patch of turf, to get respect on the back of his crew. He wanted them blooded, outside of society and bound to him. The weak parallel with the Athanate made me snort, even as I realized there wasn’t a way out of this.

“Hey!” Half-head sneered when I just stood there as they got closer.
“Marimacha! Es’ chavala tiene cojones.”

“Why should she run away when she’s found what she wants?”

“Eh-ya,
la putita con buen culito.
I liked it better when she was looking the other way,” Big-mouth said.

“Shit, y’always do, nigga.”

The gang laughed and jostled each other as they crowded in. Oh, that was so funny.

The lookout at the far end started walking in, wanting to be part of it too. Mistake.

I stopped listening. My street Spanish wasn’t that good anyway. It was good enough to hear ‘little girl’ and ‘hot babe’ give way to ‘butch’ and ‘whore’ quickly. Hard on the heels came the gang insider jokes about anal rape. I hadn’t even said anything back to them, but they didn’t care about that. They didn’t want to think of me as a person; they wanted me to be a mindless thing, in their power, terrified and in pain.

And the boss watched from the shadows. The code was blood in, blood out—murder to get into the gang and execution if you tried to get out. Rape would do as a trigger for blood in. Once you’ve done it, you gotta kill the whore, don’t you? You owe it to your homies.

This was the side of humanity that fueled Basilikos. I would do well to remember that.

But I learned something else as I stood there. The elethesine hormone that fires up an Athanate boils off alcohol like spit in a furnace.

Half-head leaned and pointed. “Lookit the cute pin. She been pricked already, hey?”

Suddenly sober or not, my head was fresh out of words and what came out of my throat was a growl.

“Shit!” One of the gang with his tattoos still scabbed took a couple of steps back. “What the fuck?” A couple of them looked nervous.

“Ha!” Big-mouth spat. “Cut’s growling, must be hungry.” He grabbed his crotch. “Shame. Not your—”

Down where I’d turned in to walk up the alley, a man came around the corner. He interrupted Big-mouth, running up the alley and shouting. I loved him for it, but Agent Ingram really should have been waving his gun to come steaming in against these odds.

“Shut that motherfucker up,” Big-mouth said, shoving a couple of the others.

He turned back, wiped his mouth. Half-head reached out for my safety pin, teasingly slow.

I grabbed his wrist.

“Eh?” he looked bewildered. I was supposed to be cringing or trying to run away. This wasn’t how it had gone before. What had he done wrong?

He’d picked on one angry Athanate.

I slammed the heel of my hand up into his nose, breaking it. When he reeled back, I twisted and threw his body, face down, onto the ground. Then I pinned his arm with my boot and broke his elbow like a rotten branch. He screamed.

Big-mouth should have grabbed me; he had time. He went for his knife instead.

I don’t like knives. There’s the old joke that the winner in the knife fight is the one who gets to go to the hospital, and it has some justification. I got in close, gripping his wrist. My other hand thudded into his groin, got a good crushing hold and I lifted him up and tossed him, squealing like a captured rat, into an open dumpster.

The fight seemed to have gone from the remainder. Ingram was down, but safe enough.

I leaped into the recess where
el Jefé
had watched his crew come apart and caught him as he was desperately trying to find a way to escape into the house backing onto his turf. Too slow.

I dragged him out into the alley by his throat. His hands were frantically scrabbling, trying to ease my grip on him. His eyes were bugged out as he realized he had seconds to live. I lifted him, flicked his feet back and planted him down on his knees. Hard. I could hear the cracks.

My fingers hooked deeper. In a second I would rip and tear and his blood would splatter down onto the dirt of the alley. I wouldn’t deign to feed from filth like this, but the wolf in me wanted to hear his last sucking breaths as he drowned in his own blood.

“Sergeant Farrell! Sergeant! Stop. Let him go!”

I spun where I stood, dragging the gang leader around, and snarled at Ingram.

“It’s over. It’s over,” he said. “You don’t need to do that. Put him down.”

Ingram. FBI. Everything flooded back, dispersing the animal rage. I opened my hand and
el Jefé
pitched forward and stirred feebly in the dirt.

The rest of the gang were gone and the three that were still here weren’t going anywhere in a hurry.

I squatted down beside Ingram, trembling.

“You okay?” I said. My voice was hoarse.

“Yeah. Thanks.” He tried to regain a little composure. I offered him a hand up, the left one without all the blood, and pulled him back to his feet.

“Yeah, I am,” he repeated. “Thanks to you.”

 “You wouldn’t have been out here if it wasn’t for me, so I guess it’s my responsibility, in a way,” I said. “You were chasing after me, weren’t you?”

“I prefer ‘shadowing,’” he said.

“Have it your way.” I held up my right hand and looked at it. Normal hand, no claws. I wiped the blood off on my jeans. “Ahh, were there any casualties this afternoon?”

He shook his head.

Thank goodness. Even if they were trying to trap me.

“They’re not talking and no one has popped out of the woodwork and claimed them yet, either. But they will, they will.”

I snorted. “Why’d you call me Sergeant back there?” I said. Stupid thing to ask.

“I called you a whole lot of things, Ms. Farrell. That was just what got through, it seems. What in hell was all that?” He made a vague gesture at everything that had gone on.

Another figure arrived at the mouth of the alley. Never got Tweedledum without Tweedledee, I guessed.

“I’m outa here,” I said, turning to walk the way I’d been going. It
was
a short cut.

Griffith called after me, but I ignored it. Ingram hushed him and I heard them calling an ambulance for the gangbangers.

What was all that, indeed? The feelings that had run through me like electricity hadn’t been what I was expecting from the Athanate side. My hand hadn’t just clawed at
el Jefé’s
throat, the nails had gone hard and sharp like daggers. I’d known that I could rip his throat out. I’d known it, not at an intellectual level, at a physical level. My body knew it could do that. I’d part-changed into a wolf.

Having Were and Athanate mixing in me felt dangerous. Were blood lust, if that’s what it had been, had seemed to be as close to Athanate rogue as I’d been warned. Maybe they would feed from one another, if I let them.

Just as I needed help from Altau on my Athanate side, I was going to need help from the pack on my Were side. As Liu had said, that anger deep down inside wasn’t good for anyone. It needed better management. And having the Were come through while I was still learning the Athanate stuff made it all feel insanely volatile.

How would Top have put it?
Use a flamethrower to shed a little light on what you got in the ammo store, why dontcha?

I was finished being dumb tonight. I reached the car and got in with a sigh. What if that’d been Matlal’s crew I ran into in the alley? Being so smart and picking bars with mirrors was pathetic. They could have just waited outside.

Instead of three injured gangbangers and Griffith hyperventilating about me walking off, I could have been delivered up to Matlal by now. Whatever he wanted would have been worse than the gang.

I slapped the visor down and slid the cover off the little vanity mirror.

“All the mirrors, in all the bars, in all of Denver, and now she wants to talk,” Tara said.

“Sorry, sis. Plain dumb, huh?”                          

“You said it.”

“You know anything about what happened when Keith…”

“Can’t see what you can’t see, sis. Get your ass to Haven, now.”

I got.

Chapter 41

Reception at the gatehouse was cool, formal. I guessed the appearance of unhappiness from Skylur had filtered down and everyone believed I was not the flavor of the month. The deception might be over, but the truth hadn’t been made available. Either that, or by not coming in immediately when he texted, I was genuinely back on the shit list.

Following directions, I made my way through the silent house to the room that David and Pia had been allocated. Late as it was, they were still out working. The room was large and luxurious, with a bed the size of a small swimming pool. Nice to know they were being looked after.

Bian arrived, throwing open the door and startling me. I had a glimpse of an escort in the corridor and steeled myself. She saw where my eyes went and kicked the door closed.

I wondered nervously which Bian I had tonight.

It was the Diakon, maybe.

“My escort, not yours, Round-eye.”

“In Haven?” I couldn’t quite keep the incredulity out of my voice.

She just looked at me.

What the hell was going on?

I retrieved the SD with the recording from my laptop and handed it over.

She stared at it lying in the palm of her hand like it was a scorpion.

“This is that bad?” I asked.

Her fingers closed around the disk. “This is not good for me, personally. Or for Altau,” she said.

The door opened again.

Skylur. An angry Skylur.

He closed the door behind him with exaggerated care and motioned me to a seat in front of the window. Bian sat on the edge of the bed.

He folded himself into the seat opposite me and laid his linked hands in his lap. His eyes were hooded, the brilliant blue gleaming from the depths of shadow. He looked tired.

“You got my message,” he said quietly.

It wasn’t a question, but I nodded.

“And you’ve turned up here in the middle of the night. Twelve hours later.” He ran his eyes up and down me. “You’ve been in a fight. Matlal?”

“No.” The bruises and torn jeans were from Alex, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. “A gang jumped me as I was making my way to the car to come here.”

“What were you doing wandering around Denver?”

I was in the wrong, but I wasn’t going to sit and listen to this for too long.

“Look, Matlal didn’t get me. The closest he got was when I used your secure phone and they were tracking it.”

It got so quiet I could hear them talking in the corridor. I shouldn’t have stayed out there, but my argument was sort of valid. The most dangerous thing happening was that Altau had a spy feeding Matlal information.

I wanted Bian to say I had a good point, like Diana would have, but she didn’t. In fact, Skylur was the one to admit it, even if it was with the curtest of nods.

“I grant you that. You provided us with the proof and you evaded the Matlal teams yesterday.”

I thought that was better, but he went on.

“Which was a fraction of the number of Athanate and Were searching for you as soon as they found out you’d tricked them. Over two hundred, Amber. Not just their elite squads. In fact, most of House Matlal.”

He let that sink in. I’d thought a couple of dozen at worst.

“And they knew enough about you to track you down at any of your usual places. I’ve had to change long-running plans and use assets that I held in reserve to cover you, flush the ambushes. The ramifications are still running. I keep things secret for a purpose,” he said, his voice going colder. “I do
not
like my purposes crossed.”

“There are so many Basilikos in the city that even the Warders have had to admit they’ve noticed it and make complaints to Matlal,” said Bian. “And everyone,
everyone,
now knows that you’re being hunted by Matlal, and most of them think they know why. And Panethus are demanding to know why there appear to be no Altau in the city.”

“Hold on, I’m not responsible for leaking information,” I snapped back. “I’m not responsible for the numbers of Altau, which you won’t even explain to me. And the rest of what I was doing out there was important. If it crossed your purposes, you should’ve briefed me better.”

Skylur sat forward, frustration coloring his voice. “Perspective, Amber! Matlal was distracted. You achieved that. You provided us with the evidence on the spy. Everything else was just more risk. Unjustifiable risk.”

Well, some of it had been risky and not agreed to with Skylur, like working with the FBI. But Diana had specifically said I must not discuss Emergence with Skylur—he had to have plausible deniability in front of the Assembly. Which gave me another problem. How was it going to look if I said that I needed to speak to Bian privately about that, if she was under some suspicion herself? Better to keep this until I could talk to Diana. The same about the colonel as well.

But it was becoming clearer to me that although Skylur might be angry at me, there was something else he was even angrier about. Okay. He was taking it out on me because I happened to be in the way. Not so okay, but I could handle that.

“Well, now that we’re talking about it, what else have I done wrong?”

“You’ve represented us to the werewolves without authority,” said Bian quietly.

“I talked to them, on a matter for them. When it became apparent there’s been a breakdown in communications with Altau—”

“Stop. I understand, Amber,” Skylur cut across me. “I am much less concerned with that anyway. Simply inform me in future.”

I seethed, but quietly. What part of ‘a matter for them’ didn’t he understand? But the wording of the oath I was scheduled to take the next day came back to me. That didn’t give me leeway. I was being herded into something I didn’t fully buy into by the lack of alternatives. And I saw the contradictions in my thinking. If I said there were matters that were just for the pack, then I had to accept there were matters that were just for the Athanate. Both increasingly felt wrong, but they weren’t something to fix tonight.