Lore vs. The Summoning (3 page)

The bartender, a man far too old for this dump, leaned close enough for me to order another, "Strongbow."

Waif was pouting when I glanced back over at my quarry. The Alpha said something in her ear that brightened her disposition. Then he stood to walk in my direction.

"Four dollars," the bartender mouthed at me while lifting as many fingers.

Before I could get my fingers into the pocket of my jeans a big hand pushed beside me to hand him a crispy five-dollar bill. "Keep the change," a rumbling voice spoke.
 

I didn't need to look back to know it was the Alpha. Low-level power poured off him, brushing against my skin. This was definitely no vanilla human.

The bartender nodded his head in thanks. I could almost see the internal monologue in the old guy's head saying: "
ooh, big spender
".

"Aren't you gonna thank me?" The rumbling voice said in amusement from far too near.

I nudged the drink aside. "I don't accept drinks from strange men."

"You haven't looked to see if I'm strange or not," he pointed out in an unreadable tone.

"You're the guy that was just over there chatting up the waif-like model." It probably wasn't a good idea to start our meeting on a snarky note but I couldn't seem to help myself. There was something about this guy that just...irked me.

His rumbling voice smoothed out a little, "Jealous?"

It was a good sound. I knew it would be a heady experience to hear it murmuring naughty things in my ear. I bet he knew just what to say too. But conceited guys irritated me. Maybe I could bring him down a peg or two.

"I like my women with a little more meat on them," I countered.

"Mmm," he purred in my ear. No doubt he was conjuring up all manner of imagery in that messy-haired head of his.
 

He reached forward to take my hard cider. I heard him gulp the entire thing down as quickly as his throat could work. It was just as well, he'd paid for it and I needed to be sober for what would be happening later.

The Alpha pressed his lower half against my back when he reached forward to set the empty glass atop the bar. It had been intentional. He wanted me to feel that he was well endowed. I was thanking the gods that I had been facing away so he didn't see the red creeping into my cheeks.

"So you're not into guys?"

I didn't say anything in answer partially because as a werewolf he'd be able to sense a lie and because I was desperately trying not to picture him naked.

"What about threesomes? We could prowl together. It'd be hot."

Just then I was thinking how fitting it was that he'd been infected with the werewolf virus because he was most certainly a dog. Only one other thing would have been better: the wereboar virus. My lips quirked at the thought of him turning into a giant pig during the full moon cycle.

"You always this stuffy? Or just when you're out on business?"

His odd question made me turn enough to look at him. At that proximity I could see that his eyes were mahogany with flecks of green. They dropped down to my lips.

"Business?" I asked, moving the lips he'd fixated on while trying not to notice how ruggedly handsome he was. That plaid flannel was absolutely perfect on him.

"You're Laura, right?"

My eyebrows lifted a smidgeon. He'd known whom I was when he'd walked over. I hadn't given him a description of myself or told him what I'd be wearing like he had. How the hell had he known?

"Yeah," I said with a twist of my mouth.

"You enjoy the show?"

I glanced over at the band then realized he wasn't talking about that. "I was giving you time to score a phone number if you wanted it."

His lips spread for a wolfish grin. "That bag of skin and bones wouldn't have been able to handle me." But he eyed me up and down as if he were contemplating if I could.

The discomfort of his obvious leering made me snappish. "We doing this here or what?"

"Here or we could go back to my place," he positively purred.

My response was a disgusted, "Yeah, no. Here is fine."

He fixed the couple next to me with a dark eye until they grew flustered enough to give up their seats. Their departure cleared that corner of the bar for us. I wasn't going to complain because I didn't have any interest in going someplace private with this guy.

"Thank you for meeting me on short notice." I attempted a little courtesy. Then I got straight down to business. "I need to talk to one of yours and I need truth out of him."

The Alpha immediately replied. "I can't force truth out of mine."

That was a lie but I wasn't going to call him on it. "I'm not asking you to. I'm merely asking for the right to question him."

His mahogany eyes darkened a little as his pupils dilated, "With force."

"If need be," I admitted.

"What kind of questionin'? What does this pertain to?" He didn't seem like the kind of guy that used words like "pertain" often. Or maybe he'd been playing a role for the women in the bar.
 

In my best matter-of-fact tone I replied, "Someone is trying to do something bad. I'm trying to stop them. One of yours may have information I need to do that."

"What exactly are you, Laura?"

I didn't like that he felt free to use my given name when I didn't have any of his. The only thing I knew about him was that he was the Alpha of the Greater Boston lupus pack and that his email address was [email protected]. It was only fair that I keep a few things from him as well.

Instead of answering I said, "Why does it matter?"

"Are you capable of stoppin' somethin' bad?"

"Yes," I replied without blinking.

He eyed me again and this time it wasn't with lust in his eyes. His skeptical up and down scan told me he was trying to reconcile my relatively benign look with the truth of my words. I definitely didn't come off as a woman who could hold her own amongst werewolves. But if he were intelligent he'd know that looks are deceiving.

"Are you a witch?" He asked, still hung up on what kind of creature I was.

He wasn't getting that out of me. Defensiveness had me reacting in my typically confrontational manner. "I need to talk to your wolf. Are you going to give me the okay?"

"You contacted me because you're plannin' on doin' somethin' that'll piss me off," he correctly deducted. "I'm not givin' my blessin' until I know what I'm agreein' to."

"I can't tell you more or I risk information falling into the wrong hands." With a palm held out toward him I added, "Hell, for all I know you could be in on it."

"In on what?"

I pressed my eyes shut with a sigh. I liked him better when he was behaving like an unscrupulous dog. When I opened them again I saw that his formerly frisky expression was long gone.

The Alpha's lips thinned grimly. "You understand that when mine pledge to me, I vow to keep them safe from people like you. You gotta give me somethin' to go on."

"No, actually, I don't."

His gaze darkened until the pupils threatened to drown out the rest of the iris. "Then no, I'm not givin' the okay for you to talk to one of mine. And if somethin' happens to any of them, I know who to look to."

My response was a brisk nod. I swiveled on the stool, dropped to my feet and then glanced back at him. "I'd say that it was nice meeting you, but it would be a lie." Especially since I hadn't actually met him.

CHAPTER THREE

The shot ricocheted off the stone wall close enough to the state's employee's ear that he'd probably have a nice red welt in the morning.

"You're fuckin' crazy!" He shouted the six stories up to where I stood peering over the edge of the roof.

"Sweet talk like that isn't gonna save you," I called down with a sugary voice wielded like a whip of sarcasm. "Now tell me what I want to know!"

"What the fuck is this? Your own personal prison? You serial killer fuck!"
 

He thought he was being clever, distracting me with insults while he looked for an exit from the trap I'd maneuvered him into. But I was good enough at what I did to take the bait while still keeping an eye on him. "If I were a serial killer I'd probably use something more personal than a gun. No, this is about information."

"I don't know nothin'." My quarry insisted while furtively scanning the courtyard for signs of weakness.
 

There were none because someone a whole lot more devious than me had created the death trap. Nonetheless his bushy head turned ever so slightly from right to left as he passed his keen, supernaturally enhanced eyes over every bit of rock in the courtyard. I knew even with the help of the sole tree he couldn't get up to the roof. And by the way his head lifted I suspected he was mentally judging the distance anyway.

"Talk like that is going to get you hurt," I informed him in what I hoped came off as an "eerily calm" tone.

"You gonna kill me?" Yup, it had definitely come off as that because I could hear the beginnings of actual fear in his voice. "I don't know nothin'! I'm just a mailman!"

"A werewolf mailman who is holding out on someone who can kill you in the most painful way imaginable with little effort." I didn't know if tit were the most
painful
way but I knew it wasn't exactly false.

"What?" He said with a nervous laugh of desperation, clearly hearing at least some truth to my words. I had his attention now that I'd mentioned his supernatural affliction. "Nah, I wouldn't do that."

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure you not only would, but you are," I drawled. "Now tell me what I want to know, or so help me gods, I'm going to stop intentionally missing." I made a dramatic show of sighting down the sleek Kahr handgun I was holding in my right hand.

He was going to make a move soon. It had been a series of minuscule movements masked as nervous fidgeting. But I'd seen it. He'd positioned himself so that he could launch onto the middle bough of the sole tree within the courtyard.

The fact that he wasn't simply giving me answers made me reconsider how I was going to handle this. I'd thought him a hostile witness that just needed a little push. This was more than that. This mailman had something to hide. There was something bigger and badder out there than me and that something had its claws in him. I was probably going to have to get more brutal than I was comfortable with getting.

"You know, if you get out of here alive, whoever you're protecting is going to assume you squealed. You're as good as dead out there," I pointed out with the gun still trained on his right thigh.

There was a tiny easing of his pose. He was listening to me. That was a good sign.

He called up, "You offerin' your protection?"

My eyebrows lifted because I hadn't thought this far ahead. "I didn't say that." Protecting humanity at large was kind of my thing but keeping just one person alive, I wasn't so good at.

"So either I die out there," he gestured over the roof and then pointed to the ground, "Or I die in here."
 

His legs bunched. He was going to jump. I braced myself for it.
 

"Sorry, sweetheart, I choose out there." The moment the final word left his lips he launched upward.
 

I did nothing. I could have shot his leg like I'd intended to do. I'd had enough time to line it up so that factoring in speed, velocity and all that mumbo jumbo I'd hit his ankle. Something in me told me not to. I listened to that something because it rarely led me astray.

He'd gotten to the middle bough on the tree with ease but from there he'd have problems. The walls were sheer stone extending fifty more feet up from where he was. Curiously the courtyard lacked even gutters, bad for the roof but superb for interrogating members of the Underground. I calmly watched while he sprung upwards in a feat of incredible athleticism only a member of the factions could boast.
 

It wasn't incredible enough to get him out of the trap. He landed against the wall three feet too low, scrambled to get a hold of something, anything and then hurdled to the gravel below after his fingers had merely slid along the smooth stone. The seventy-foot drop hadn't killed him. Probably.

I peered over the edge of the roof to see how he'd landed. A tibia through the chest would cut his chances of survival a bit even with the supernaturally fast healing. It didn't look like anything quite that detrimental had resulted from his attempt at escape. He was face down, sprawled spread eagle as if he'd performed a belly flop onto the granite chips. That couldn't have felt good.

"Mailman," I called down. "You alive?"

His answering moan was promising.

"You know I can't let you leave without the information I need."

There was no response for a full minute. I'd begun to think maybe he'd taken a turn for the worse before he rolled himself enough to peer up in my general direction. It was too dark for me to make out what shape his face was in without the moon's help. His hair was blocking that.

"I don't have any information," he said in a pained voice.

I ignored his boldfaced lie. "Tell me about the packages you're dropping off at the club."

He coughed. It wasn't a pained or ill cough. That was the kind of sound a guy made right before he
lied
. "I don't know what you're talkin' about."

"Yes. You do." It was my don't-fuck-with-me tone. "The packages you're dropping off at the club, who are they for? Where are they from? When do they arrive?"

"What club?"

I sighted down the gun to a granite chip a foot and a half to his left and squeezed the trigger. The bullet struck it on the right side, kicking it into his face a centimeter below where I thought his eye would be. He howled in pain. It wasn't a human noise but thankfully this part of the city was deserted at night.

"Tell me about the packages," I repeated.

"I'm not tellin' you shit," he snarled.

These are the ones I disliked most, the informants who weren't cowed enough by my inherited brownstone's interrogation trap to spill the beans with a simple request. I switched back into my sarcastically sweet voice. "Dyin' ain't the worst thing that can happen to you. I can take you to the brink of death only to bring you back again, rinse and repeat. Tell me what I want to know."