Pack of Strays (The Fangborn Series Book 2) (8 page)

“Stay.”

Gerry slammed backward into the brick. I heard a bone snap, the air whoosh out of his lungs. Distantly, something in me cried out for his pain and the idea I had caused it. The bracelet was more and more sensitive to my fear or danger, I realized.

Gerry didn’t move, pinned to the wall. He didn’t look unhappy; he looked rabid.

I didn’t feel much better. I was angry and scared to death on many fronts. And just as I’d worried, the silver light had drawn attention to us.

A shout from the crowds passing on the sidewalk. “What the fuck, man? Fucking movie people! Fucking filming at fucking rush hour? Take your bright lights and your cameras and shit and go home, movie people!”

“Hey, don’t be a douche!” another voice shouted. “If you yell, they’ll only take longer!”

“Fuck you! Fuck you and the movie people!”

An exchange followed that drew attention to the shouters and away from us. The crowds swept past to avoid the altercation, to avoid eye contact with either shouter. The silver light dimmed, leaving us again in shadow.

I overheard a final comment as the last of the pedestrians who’d seen us moved away. “Wait, I thought Comic-Con wasn’t for a couple of weeks?”

We were safe.

“I said,”—I took a deep breath—“I said, I don’t know what’s going on with me, but I’m not going back to that lab to be drugged and lied to. You listen to me, Gerry Steuben. I’m not … what you said. I’m working hard to do what we were doing before: keeping the Fangborn secret and keeping one step ahead of these Order bastards and what they’re cooking up. Oh, and keeping Senator Knight from locking me up as a lab rat. So I’m going to keep doing that until I figure out a better plan. And you tell everyone else the same thing.”

“Zoe? What’s going on? How can
you
do
this
?”

He looked almost like his old self, less haggard, less conflicted. Almost.

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“Look. I’m not getting … what I got before. It’s confusing me—”

“Me, too.”

“But I think whatever you’re doing is weakening, so …”

I could feel it, too, leaving as suddenly and as inexplicably as it had arrived, so I knew it wouldn’t hold him there for a hundred years or anything. That much was reassuring. I nodded and looked away. “I should go now. Gerry, that stuff down the street? That was a false scent. I think the Order of Nicomedia has come up with something to lure Fangborn.”

“What?”

“I told Will MacFarlane the same thing. I’m outta here.”

I Changed back to my skinself as I jogged down the alley. I heard an
oof
and a sound like a laundry bag being dropped: Gerry had been released. But I didn’t stop to look back as I found the subway. I couldn’t risk it, and the thought brought a lump to my throat.

A blast of hot, dank air washed over me as I descended into the dark. A roar of a subway arriving, and I hopped the turnstile with practiced ease, letting the crowds, the train, the city swallow me up.

Chapter Seven

Shit. It was five thirty-five and I was late for a date with a reluctant oracle.

It took ten more minutes to make my way through the rush-hour crowds up Sixth Avenue. I was sweating and rank by the time I got there. No time to clean up since my last tussle, but I did text Adam to let him know that I was alright, that I had to do something he couldn’t be in on. I knew he’d be annoyed, but given that
Victoria
Brooks said to come alone, I had to risk it.

I was searching frantically through the dwindling crowds leaving the elevators, convinced I’d missed her. There was nothing left to do but wait until tomorrow, and I couldn’t be here tomorrow—

There she was. Victoria looked pissed off.

“Let’s get out of here. I get everything pinned down and my outbox emptied for the weekend, and someone decides to call a meeting at four o’clock. Who does that on a Friday? The London office has been closed for hours—hell, they’ve been drinking since noon, it being Friday. There’s nothing I can do until Monday,
maybe
. So I ask you, what was the point of that meeting besides chafing my tits?”

She stared at me, waiting for an answer. Her eyes cleared when she realized I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Sorry. Not your problem.” The frown returned. “We still need to talk. But whatever you want, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be disappointed. We’re going this way.”

She guided me out, down the street, and around a couple of corners.

The bar’s flickering neon sign was the main source of illumination. “In there.”

I have a rule about not going into bars with no windows, and this one did not meet my minimum standards. But since I wanted to hear what she had to say, I wasn’t going to complain. “You come here a lot?”

“No. I hang out at a place in my neighborhood.” She took a moment to get her eyes adjusted, then found a booth. “No one knows me here. A couple of guys from work came to this place and got food poisoning, so no one from the office will be here, either.”

Great. As a strategy for keeping hidden, I’d keep it in mind. But there was no chance of filling my growling stomach.

A quick glance around the room, and when the bartender nodded at the woman, she held up two fingers. “Buds.”

It was what nearly everyone else was drinking. If she’d given up the Family, at least she still seemed to have some of the camouflage skills. Aside from a few curious glances from the regulars, we didn’t stick out too badly, I thought.

“So,” I said, not really sure how to start.

“So.”

“I’m Zoe.”

“Vee. What do you want with me?”

I took a deep breath. “I found your name, here.” I held up the card with her picture. “The guy who had this, he’s a member of a secret society that has been hunting … our kind … for centuries.” I swallowed, my mouth dry. “They’ve managed to get their hands on too much information, artifactual and otherwise, about us.”

I’d prepared what I’d say—concise, factual, and largely
anonymous
—most of the day. But when I said it, it sounded overly
dramatic
.

She took a pull on her beer; I noticed she wore two watches on her left wrist. “‘Artifactual and otherwise’ meaning what, exactly?”

As quietly as I could, I described the figurines, which had led to the battle at Ephesus—she’d heard about that; few in the
Family
could
not
have. I described the encounter I’d had with
Rupert
Grayling in London, and I mentioned that Dmitri Parshin had been torturing Fangborn in his quest to become a werewolf—and had held Danny hostage while I chased down artifacts for him. “But Buell—this guy, too. I know for a
personal
fact, you want to watch out for him and his Order of Nicomedia. They’re awfully close to setting some kind of trap for the Fangborn. Killing a lot of us.”

Her face went stony, jaw clenched, lips compressed. “Okay, bad. But not my problem.”

Not her problem? I’d just told her she was on a hit list. I also didn’t like revealing just how vulnerable I’d been to someone so unimpressed. “This card says otherwise; he’s hunting strays—” I held up my hand when she opened her mouth to protest. “I mean … unaffiliated—what are a group of oracles called? It’s not ‘nest’ or ‘pack,’ is it?”

“It’s a ‘cauldron.’ That’s just another example of how the
Family
discriminates against us. ‘Fangborn’ doesn’t even include those of us with Normal-sized canines.”

“Remember, I’m new to all this, so it may not—”

She banged her bottle down. “Then let me explain a few things. It wasn’t always so fang oriented; oracles used to be in charge, used to be the ones driving, telling the others where to go. The shamans directing the warriors, priests advising kings. Now, we’re a joke—no, not a joke. Less than that. Patronized, occasionally, when one of us is less inscrutable than the others or has a better than sixty percent hit rate.”

I couldn’t argue with her. “Politics change, societies change. Why not stay and try to fix it?”

“I hate the politics. I got tired. It was one more reason for me to leave.”

“What were the other ones?” They had to be pretty good. “I can’t imagine leaving the Family.”

“Then you’re not terribly imaginative.”

She picked at the label of her beer, a habit I loathed from a long habit of recycling bottles for the deposit. No label, no deposit.

Finally she said, “We had a disagreement. They leave me alone, I leave them alone. End of story.”

It was my turn to eyeball her. What was meant to be tough and cliché told me volumes.

She had powers the Family wanted.

She had powers great enough she could keep the Family at bay.

She determined the balance of that relationship, and the
Family
toed the line.

She had a major falling out with them, so severe, neither the ties of Family nor the compulsion of the Fangborn was enough to keep her where she didn’t want to be.

She’d voluntarily given up everything I might have given my eyeteeth for, not so long ago.

I tried to put my disbelief and resistance aside. After all, not everyone related to the Family like Gerry did, for example. I certainly didn’t; I’d disagreed with him on many occasions. I hadn’t drunk the Kool-Aid.

So maybe she was someone who’d understand.

“Lot of details missing there,” I said. “Don’t you think you could use a little backup right now? Now that you know some
psycho
is hunting you?”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Okay, okay, but maybe
I
could use a little backup—”

“No.” Another stony glance. Vee pointedly picked up her beer and swigged, without blinking or breaking off her stare.

I shrugged. An idea started nudging its way into my
consciousness
.

“What about you?” she said finally.

“What about me?”

“You’re not part of the Family, not the way everyone wants. How’d you bust out?”

So I explained about it not being a matter of busting out, unless you counted the TRG, and why I was on the run to avoid
Fangborn
and the TRG now.

She stared at me, I think trying to figure out if I was telling the truth. “Get the fuck out. I had no idea.”

I shrugged again. “As you said, it’s a complicated history we have. Most Fangborn don’t know about it.”

“Most Fangborn should.”

“Yeah, fine, but it seems that, first, Fangborn aren’t much for self-awareness—they roll with the impulse to fight evil. And
second
, getting a history sorted out has always been secondary to rolling with it.”

“Doesn’t leave a lot of room for us dissenters, does it?” For a moment, I felt a kinship with her. I recognized the loneliness of her self-imposed isolation.

“No, not a lot,” I said.

She gave me a funny look, but we all have our secrets.

I was uncomfortable with the discussion. I never thought of myself as any kind of dissenter, only an unwilling outsider. Realizing, only now that I’d sat down and relaxed, that I needed to use the bathroom, I stood up. I found the most likely direction of th
e toile
ts, and made the “same again over here” circle-over-th
e-tabl
e gesture. The bartender nodded. “Be right back,” I told Vee.

I didn’t know if she’d be there when I got back, but I had to take the chance. It had been a long day.

If the ladies’ room had been darker, or less dirty, I might have gone to sleep, but brightly lit and unclean don’t make for a soothing combination, even when I was ready to fall asleep on my feet.

I stopped to wash my hands on the way out, after briefly debating the value of doing so with only cold water and no paper towel.

I looked into the mirror. A thought pounding in my mind, my proximity sense warning me:

There were strangers in the bar.

Well, duh. Of course, there are strangers. That’s one of the principal virtues of a bar …

There are strangers in the bar looking for
me
.

The ladies’ room was a dead end, no windows, down a hall with no other exits. Only way was back out past them.

No sense in waiting, no sense in subtlety—

A voice in my ear, with no one around. “Zoe, wait!”

“What Sean?”

“Um, isn’t there a better plan?”

“Like what?”

“Uhhh … anything?”

I shook my head. “No time.”

I barreled down the hall, stopping short of the beaded curtain that led to the bar. Nothing going down yet, but that didn’t mean—

Vee was gone.

Maybe she’d left before, ditching me and my problems, or maybe some oracular something told her it would be better to skedaddle. Maybe she’d called in the bad guys herself, and her story was horseshit? In any case, I was on my own.

Best thing to do: Throw money on the bar—no use getting the bartender pissed and calling the cops or pulling out his own piece—walk straight out the door, and lose myself, fast as possible. Hold my phone up to my ear to look like I’d had an emergency call, and there’d be no reason for me to stop and talk.

I tucked my phone between my ear and shoulder, put a frown on my face, and moved determinedly toward the bar. Reaching into my bag, as soon as I touched my wallet, I remembered.

My luck has ever been epically shitty. This time, my memory was, too.

I was out of cash. Used the last twenty at the other bar, this afternoon. Had never made it to the ATM today.

Plan B.

I pulled out a credit card and went up to the bar, beckoning.

“My friend didn’t happen to …”

“Didn’t pay, no.”

I handed him my credit card, and he swiped it. Seemed to take forever.

I tried to compose myself, which was getting harder and
harder
.
Warning bells were going off in my head, and I felt a rumble of the Call. I used everything I could to tamp it down, and to my surprise, I felt it decrease a little.

But it was as if the bartender had grown roots, he was moving so slowly.

I all but snatched the slip and my card away from him. “Sorry,” I whispered. “That guy who just came in?” I nodded toward the source of my anxiety, who I could now see was Buell. He’d cleaned himself up, lost the backwoods look, and was well dressed in a suit for bigger business than anyone would have found in this bar. He’d had a good shave, and his hair now looked like expensively styled waves, not a wild tangle. It did nothing to calm the dread that was filling me. The malice in his eyes was still the same, and now that he saw me, it was mixed with triumph.

My stomach clenched; memories of pain and despair came rushing back. “He’s my ex, and nothing but trouble. I need to get out of here fast. Any chance you could help me out?”

I sensed movement behind me and knew that my anxiety had more than one focus now.

“Sorry,” the bartender said. “His friend over there told me you ran out with his kid.”

I was totes screwed.

There were four new guys, plus the bartender. Of the original four in the bar, two had gotten up and walked out. The other two were uncertain of what was about to happen, but liked the idea of a fight. Four of them were there for a reason, and that reason was me. They’d be the real problem.

And I couldn’t Change. Not with those civilians there.

I picked up a beer bottle. For an instant, all I could imagine was the bartender lying on the floor with a broken jaw. I could almost feel the impact up my arm, the idea of cracking him in the mouth with the bottle was so strong—

With a wrench, I changed my aim and threw the bottle at the mirror behind the bar. He ducked and swore as the glass shattered and bottles tumbled to the floor. I moved straight for the door, hoping we could take it outside. Two stepped in front of the door right away.

Okay, then. If I couldn’t Change, they couldn’t afford to kill me right there, and they couldn’t use their guns or Tasers, either.

Buell stepped in front of me and grabbed my wrist. “We need to talk.”

I punched him straight in the nose. Before I could bring my knee up into his groin, a sharp blow fell across my back. I slammed forward into Buell and barely had time to tuck my chin. That worked for me, and my head smashed into his jaw. He went down, and I reeled to one side, my back ablaze with pain, and my forehead cut and bleeding.

One of the onlookers had decided it would be helpful to break a pool cue across my back. He still held the short thick end of the cue, a look of puzzlement on his face that I was still standing. His eyes widened, and my proximity sense told me one of Buell’s men was closing in behind me.