Midnight in Berlin (4 page)

Jon looked between the two of them, looming on either side of me like an honor guard. Tobias still had a death grip on my arm. Sven was standing just a little too close for someone I wasn’t fucking, looking like he’d just eaten his own grandmother and was hunting for dessert. Jon’s eyes widened. “Shit, man, you in some kind of trouble?”

“Trust me, Jon. You don’t wanna know.” Damn, I was going to have bruises from where Tobias was holding on to me.

Jon gave me a long look, then held up his hands. I wondered if he just figured I must be into BDSM and Sven and Tobias had made me their bitch. The image that conjured up nearly made me toss my cookies on the scratched linoleum floor. “Okay, man,” Jon said, looking like he was trying as hard as I was to wipe that picture from his brain. “Cool. I’ll see you, like, whenever.” He half turned, then looked back. “Hey, you want me to get a message to anyone for you?”

Yes. Call my mom, call the goddamn CIA. Tell them I’ve been kidnapped by a bunch of monsters and turned into one of their own. “Uh, no. Thanks. Hey, but if you’re still looking for work, there’ll be a job going at Corvino’s. Just tell them I’ll be out of town for a while, and I said you could cover.” It wasn’t much. But maybe it’d persuade Jon to stick around awhile. I figured if the shit hit the fan, it wasn’t going to hurt to know where I could find a friendly face—especially one belonging to a guy who owed me.

We went up to my room. While I grabbed my backpack and started shoving stuff in, Sven and Tobias sprawled on the faded quilt, looking like a couple of off-duty bodyguards. Tobias even lit up a cigarette and passed another to Sven. He didn’t offer me one. I thought maybe I should tell them about the hostel’s no-smoking rules, but then I figured what the hell, it wasn’t like I lived here anymore.

I darted glances at them as I packed up my stuff, which would have taken all of about thirty seconds if I hadn’t been distracted. It was kind of ironic—any other time I’d have been glad to have a couple guys like that sitting on my bed. Maybe neither of them was going to win any beauty contests—not like Christoph—but they were both tall and well-muscled. The sort of build you get from hard, physical work outdoors, with tans to match. I guessed all those muscles would come in equally handy for beating the crap out of any reluctant recruits who tried to make a break for it. I shivered and hoped like hell they hadn’t noticed.

Tobias was taller, maybe six-three, six-four. His mid-brown hair had thinned to the point he’d have been better off shaving it, if only someone had the guts to suggest it to him—I sure as hell wasn’t planning on volunteering anytime soon. I figured he had a few years to go before he hit thirty, even so. Sven was better looking, if you like them mean, with a blond buzz cut and a jaw you could crack rocks on.

Right now neither of them was giving me a hard-on. My hands shook a little as I grabbed the last dirty T-shirt off the floor and crammed it into the top of the backpack. Shit, I didn’t want to be doing this. Once I walked out of there and left an empty room, there’d be nothing to stop Schreiber and his goons making damn sure Leon Jacobson was never heard from again. And here I was, making nice and helping them wipe away every last trace of me.

I’d always wondered, you know. About guys who dug their own graves just because some asshole with a gun told them to. I mean, hell, if the bastard’s going to shoot you anyway, why go out of your way to make his life any easier? But now I knew—when you’re in that situation, you’ll do
anything
. Because there’s this little demon called hope that keeps whispering in your ear that if you make nice with the gun-toting asshole, if you drag things out as long as you can, then maybe, just maybe, he’ll change his mind and you’ll come out of it alive.

So I picked up that shovel and I dug that grave, making sure the edges were straight and square, and when the bastards told me it was time to go, I said, “Sure thing!” and I jumped right into that fucking pit.

Okay, so it was actually a Porsche, not a pit. Didn’t feel any less like a funeral, though. We drove back to the house in silence, leaving civilization far behind us once again. Hell, I was silent, anyhow. Sven and Tobias exchanged a few words it didn’t seem worth the effort of listening in on.

“Where’s Christoph?” I asked as we walked in the door.

Sven and Tobias looked at each other. They were both wearing the kind of smile I really didn’t like. “Nowhere you need to worry about him,” Sven said.

“Like I’m worried about that bastard?” I managed. I was getting seriously freaked out by the lack of a straight answer, but I figured I’d better change the subject. Otherwise they might start thinking I gave a damn. “What happens now?”

“Now? We eat.”

Finally, a plan I could approve of.

I’d been expecting lunch, but the meal we all trooped into the kitchen for turned out to be dinner. It seemed I’d slept most of the day, which made me wonder if whoever had patched up my shoulder had slipped me some sedatives while they were at it. Somehow it didn’t surprise me that Schreiber might know his way around a date-rape drug or two. I was kind of rattled I hadn’t even noticed how low the sun was in the sky, though. I guessed my brain was still scrambled from whatever they’d doped me with—or from all the crazy stuff that’d happened.

Dinner was a casual affair, almost relaxed. If you weren’t me, that was. The food was good, at least—not your traditional
Abendbrot
of maybe one piece of rye bread and a slice of salami. We all got served man-size bowls of goulash, heavy on the meat, light on the spices, and ate sitting around the kitchen table like one big, happy family. “Pass the beans, John-Boy,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.

Nobody laughed. My fellow freaks talked in low voices about boring, normal shit, like football and the economy, and the place they all seemed to work at—I figured out eventually it was some kind of scrap yard. I got talking to one of the nameless guys, who turned out to be called Michael. “So, you got a family?” I asked him.

He looked at me with his eyes glazed like Silke had put ganja in the goulash. “The pack is our only family now.” All the emotion of a goddamn GPS. At the next brainwashed werewolf, turn left, I thought. And run like the hounds of hell are after you—because let’s face it, they probably are. I decided I’d liked the guy better before I’d gotten to know him.

“I guess that makes us all brothers, now, huh?” I said, trying to keep it light. “Even Christoph,” I added, because it was freaking me the hell out that he’d just disappeared like that. Not that I gave a damn about that asshole who’d bit me, oh no, but if
punished
was a euphemism for
buried in an unmarked grave
, I figured I’d like to know about it. Preferably before I risked setting a toe out of line, rather than find out when they took me on a one-way walk through the woods.

Michael’s eyes flickered over to Schreiber in a way I didn’t much like. “In every family, there must be discipline. Order. The welfare of the pack is more important than any one member.”

“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, huh?” I gave him the live-long-and-prosper salute, but he didn’t return it, just looked at me like I was a total dork. I guess the Trekkies never made it this far east. “So where is Christoph, anyhow?” I asked. Just to change the subject, you know? Plus I thought maybe this guy might give me a straight answer.

Michael eyeballed Schreiber again before he answered. “He is being confined.”

That was…interesting. Also, anticlimactic. Hell, it was starting to sound like a rest cure for the bastard. It pissed me off I’d gotten all worked up over nothing. “Yeah? How long for? What’s a fuck up like last night worth? A week in the slammer? Two? Shit, why not just give the asshole a pat on the head and a doggie treat?” My chair gave an ear-jangling scrape as I stood, breathing hard.

“
Leon!
” That was Schreiber. Since when were we on first-name terms, anyhow?

“What?” I said, my voice wavering a bit. The silence weirded me out. Everyone was staring at me. Even Silke at the sink was frozen like she’d been painted by Vermeer. Hey, I’ve been to art galleries. Mostly when it’s been raining and I’ve run out of cash, but it still counts, okay? Sometimes I even look at the pictures.

Schreiber stood too. Suddenly I was struggling to remember just what the hell I’d thought was worth making a scene over. Our eyes locked, and then somehow I was sitting down, even though I couldn’t recall making any decision to.

I was pissed as hell. I was also suddenly really interested in getting the last scraps of goulash off of my plate. Schreiber gave a grunt as he sat. The conversation all started up again, even quieter this time. Michael edged his chair away from mine like a Jehovah’s Witness who’d just found out he’d been socializing with a Satanist. I wasn’t bothered. I’d figured we were never going to be BFFs anyhow.

Time to try someone new. I nodded across the table at Ulf, who was on to his third helping of goulash even though I couldn’t recall having been offered seconds. “So how come you’re not in school?”

He grinned, shrugged bony shoulders and swallowed half a cow in one easy motion. “I’m eighteen. Old enough to work.”

“What about your mom and dad? Where do they fit in, in all this?”

A flicker of sadness. “I haven’t seen them for two years. When I was bitten, it was thought better…” Ulf shrugged again. “I have two younger sisters.”

I leaned forward, lowering my voice a little. “Who bit you?” Was he another of Christoph’s victims?

It was like he’d invented a whole new sign language:
say it with shrugs
. “I don’t know. I was walking home from my friend’s house one night, and it happened. It was my grandmother who recognized what had happened to me.”

“Yeah? Your little sisters wear red cloaks by any chance? You know, with hoods?” I added, in case he didn’t get the reference.

“Funny.” He grinned anyhow. “In the original German tale, it was a red hat and not a hooded cloak,” he added. Ordinarily I’d have put him down for some kind of smart-ass, but there was one hell of a lot of sincerity in those baby-blue eyes as he leaned forward across the table. “People often think Peter Stübbe was the first German werewolf, but the story of
Rotkäppchen
shows that we have existed for much longer.”

Jeez, how old was he? “Kid, I hate to break it to you, but Little Red Riding Hood is a fairy tale. You know, stories for the kiddies to keep them out of trouble while they waited for someone to invent the TV?”

Ulf wasn’t bothered. “The story is based on folk memories.” He gestured with his fork. “It reveals an older truth.”

Color me unconvinced. “Schreiber tell you that?” I asked, after a quick glance to make sure no one was listening in.

“Of course. You should ask him about our history. He knows a lot.”

“Let me guess, he wrote the book?”
Wrote
, as in
made shit up
, I figured.

Ulf laughed. “I don’t think we’d want a book like that published, do you?” He wiped his plate clean with a hunk of bread, which he shoved in his mouth while giving the empty pot of goulash a disappointed look. I’d forgotten Silke was even in the room, so I started a little when she handed him an apple, all furtive like she was worried it might turn out to be a capital offence. Ulf nodded his thanks. Was there something going on with those two?

A chair scraped as Schreiber stood. “Michael, Tobias—my office.” They nodded and followed him out of the room.

I guessed we were dismissed. I took the opportunity to head upstairs and change into my own clothes. Damn if I knew why—after all, I had a strong feeling I wasn’t going to be going out on the town anytime soon. But it felt good to get my own shit on again. When they put you in jail, Guantanamo Bay, whatever—hell, even when you join the army—the first thing they do is take away your clothes. If they’re really going for it, they cut your hair. Strip a guy of all individuality, and he’ll be easier to control.

I guess I just wanted whatever edge I could get in this situation. With that in mind, I took a few minutes to explore the floor I was on. There were three other bedrooms, one of which I figured must be Ulf’s, by the posters on the walls, a mix of American rock bands and some homegrown stuff. If those hadn’t clinched it for me, the
Water is Life
poster certainly would have done it. The other two rooms were tiny and didn’t look occupied. There was a small bathroom, not big enough for a tub, which looked like it had been converted from a closet around a decade ago. The facilities were modern enough, if kind of cheap, but take a wrong turn out of the shower and you’d end up with a foot in the toilet, it was so goddamn tiny.

I wasn’t sure what to do with the borrowed clothes, so I just left them in a heap out on the landing. I figured I could take them downstairs later. I checked out my shoulder while I had my shirt off, taking off the bandages and giving it a damn good look in the bathroom mirror. It weirded me out a little to see the wound had almost healed—there was scar tissue there already. I chucked the bandages in the bin, finding it hard to believe it had been less than twenty-four hours since I’d gotten bitten. It seemed like maybe there were some advantages to being a werewolf after all.

That didn’t mean I was okay with what that bastard had done to me. I wondered where the hell he was. “Confined” could mean a lot of things. Maybe it just meant he’d been grounded for a week or two—but then why the hell was everyone being so goddamn evasive when I asked about him? It gave me a bad feeling about the whole situation I was in. And you know what? I hadn’t been feeling any too good about it already. The way I saw it, if there was something they didn’t want me to know, then the sooner I found out about it the better.

I took a quick shower while I was there, seeing as I didn’t have to worry about keeping the wound dry anymore. Then I headed on downstairs and pretended to watch a badly dubbed episode of
NCIS
with the guys while my mind worked on other things.

Chapter Four

My cell—sorry, room—was starting to look almost homey by the time I’d scattered half my stuff around, digging to the bottom of my backpack. The item I was looking for didn’t get a whole lot of use in my everyday life.