Tarnished (7 page)

“Have you ever killed anyone?” Susan blurted it out and immediately regretted it. If the werewolves were that dangerous, pissing one off with rude questions was a bad idea. But no matter how she tried to think of predators, she couldn’t reconcile the idea of a secret society of stone-cold killers with Tracy’s delight in modeling shows. “I don’t mean— But you talked about them killing me, and you’re the only one who seems halfway … well, someone I could ask—”

“Halfway safe?” Silver smiled as she interrupted and saved Susan from digging herself deeper. She didn’t seem offended. “You’ll find many Were will automatically consider you weak too. I make it a policy to take the assumption and use it against them. You might want to do the same.” She looked out the window. “As to your question—yes and no.”

Susan swallowed convulsively, trying to imagine how one could only sort of kill someone. Fortunately, Silver continued before she had time to come up with anything graphic. “The man who did this to me.” She took the wrist of her bad arm and laid it over her lap. In the uncertain light, the raised texture of the scars extending upward from the elbow showed better than the color. “Poured the fire into my blood and killed all my pack. Dare and I killed him together when he returned for me.”

Susan picked a side street and pulled over in front of a house. Only the upstairs lights were on at this time of night. She shoved the car into park and allowed herself two breaths of openly staring at the scars. The scars themselves didn’t look so bad, but the limp stillness of the arm itself was upsetting on a subconscious level. “You’re serious?” she demanded. “This is how Weres—Were?—live?”

“No more than most humans live that way.” Silver scooted in her seat and tucked one leg up. Despite the relaxed position, Susan got the sense that she wasn’t entirely comfortable talking about that incident. “If not for the monster, I wouldn’t have killed anyone. Dare would, but that’s his job. To do that kind of thing so others can keep their hands clean.”

“So is he the one—”

Silver growled and took Susan’s chin in a strong grip. “No one is planning to kill you at the moment, I swear upon the Lady. Dare has too much honor for it. If someone else tries, defend yourself. I’ll show you how. You have no wild self for me to see the sharpness of her teeth or strength of her jaw, but humans have that spark. They just keep it somewhere hidden.” Silver released Susan’s chin and tapped a fingertip somewhere around her solar plexus. “But I think Death sees it. He hasn’t said I should stop wasting my time on you, which is telling.”

Susan choked a little. “Death?” Half of that hadn’t made any sense, and she was starting to doubt her choice of source for Were information. Wild self? Was this werewolf stuff, or was this Silver?

Silver looked away as if embarrassed. “Death walks with me. We were lonely, he and I. Me without my wild self, and Death without the Lady. You don’t need to worry. He doesn’t deal with humans.”

Susan turned off the engine to avoid wasting fuel and turned on the dome light to supplement the watery orange glow of the streetlight down the street. Crazy or not, this woman was offering to protect her—teach her to protect herself, even. Teach a man to fish and all that. Something in Susan’s gut-level read of Silver told her to accept. All right, then. Fair enough. The first thing to do seemed to be to start collecting information.

Susan tried to formulate her next question. What Silver had said about Death made her sound like a morbid goth teenager. If anyone looked the opposite of goth, though, it was Silver, with her fine features and soft white hair. “By ‘the lady,’ you mean the moon, right?” The other werewolves mentioned a lady often enough, but Susan knew nothing besides her connection with the moon.

Silver’s lips thinned. “Your mate is a fool. I can’t imagine what harm he thinks you’d do with that information. The Lady is our goddess. She made us as Her children, as your human gods made you. It’s Her light that calls us to ourselves.” Silver pointed upward. “That’s why we call it our Lady ceremony after we shift for the first time. It’s the time when a cub first truly meets the Lady.”

Susan’s attention sharpened. That, at least, John had talked to her about, given that it concerned her son directly. “That’s at puberty, isn’t it?”

Silver nodded. “For girls, it’s soon after the first blood. For boys, it’s harder to predict.” She smiled suddenly. “Though it’s easy enough for everyone but the cubs to tell when they’re getting close. It’s the itchiest feeling, and you’re cranky and restless for weeks. Unmistakable. Then when the Lady is near full, it builds and builds until it almost hurts and then you fall into your wild self, and it doesn’t hurt anymore.” Silver drew in a jagged breath, and her muscles spasmed. “Oh, Lady—” she gasped. “That’s a memory it does no good to call.”

“Are you all right?” Susan frowned.

“My wild self is dead. It builds, but there’s nowhere for me to go—” Silver held her breath and clenched her hand for a moment, and then collapsed. “Lady, that hurts.” She curled up, pressing her cheek into the seat. Silence fell, until she broke it again unexpectedly. “That’s why they don’t want me to run with them, because I can’t keep up with human legs. Dare will run with me anyway, but they won’t.”

Susan remembered her earlier analogy. The bimbo girlfriend screwing things up indeed. What was a werewolf who couldn’t turn into a wolf? Back when she’d been a lowly teller at the bank, she’d had laryngitis for a week. Her supervisor had tried to find her clerical work to fill her hours, but Susan remembered the feeling of watching her coworkers chat with customers while she waited to struggle her way through communicating something simple and silly to one of them. She couldn’t imagine the sheer frustration of being stuck with that forever. “I’m sorry.”

“Sometimes things happen, and eventually you have to get up and keep hunting.” Silver straightened herself out in her seat, and Susan started the car.

They reached the twenty-four-hour grocery about two minutes later. It was still reasonably busy with people picking up a bottle of wine or late-night snacks. Silver trailed behind Susan, watching the people and examining the food with the same casual curiosity. She only broke away once in the produce section after sniffing the air. She returned with a couple of pears, surprisingly ripe for grocery store produce, held in her good hand rather than bagged.

After all the trouble of carting them around half the store, Silver set the pears down on a display table in the bakery area. Susan switched her basket to the other hand, but Silver grabbed her wrist before she could pick them up.

“He shouldn’t be here. Dare warned him once already.” Silver’s voice was difficult to hear. Susan leaned in only to be jerked up as Silver dragged her toward an emergency exit door. Where was the danger? Susan scanned the bakery and the sections of aisles she could see, but no one looked threatening.

“We have to pay.” Susan braced her feet and hefted her basket to illustrate. Silver pulled the basket from her, slid it beneath another display table, and kept dragging. Susan resisted the urge to suck the skin of her fingers that had been burned by the basket handles. Silver was
strong.
“Where are we going?”

“You may say that, but attacking Dare at the edge of Seattle’s territory is one thing. Showing up in the center is another,” Silver snapped at an empty patch of air. Susan pressed her lips together. Silver had seemed not quite all there before, and now she was talking to the air. It wasn’t that much of a stretch to assume that their pursuer might be just as imaginary. Maybe she should call John. But she couldn’t reach her purse while she was being pulled along like this, so she went along with Silver without protest. None of the woman’s crazy moments had lasted very long so far.

An emergency exit buzzer sounded briefly as they pushed through the doors. A man stepped away from the side of the building as they turned toward the main parking lot. Silver jerked to a stop when it became clear that the man would reach them before they reached the corner of the building.

“You must be Silver,” the man said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

Susan took a couple steps back. One piece of advice had always stuck with her, from a self-defense class she’d taken in college. Trust your instincts, your fear, about whether a person or situation is dangerous. There wasn’t anything about the man she would point to—he had a sharp face, gelled black hair, and had his hands in the pockets of expensive slacks—but she wanted to get away from him. The atmosphere out here didn’t help. Most of the light was only spillover from the streetlights covering the front parking lot and the delivery bays in the back.

“You have the advantage of me.” Silver gave him a dangerous smile of her own. Susan had to look away when her fingers fumbled too much to find her cell phone by feel. “I have permission to be here. Do you? I know your underling doesn’t.” Silver nodded to the store.

The man turned a blinding smile on Susan. “Silver here and I are old friends. Why don’t you let us catch up, hm? I’ll give her a ride home when we’re done.”

Susan froze when the man looked at her, phone halfway out of her purse. Like hell she was going to leave Silver alone with him. He smirked over her shoulder, and Susan whirled. A bleached-blond man with multiple gold rings along the tops of his ears swaggered around the side of the building from the front doors. He must not have wanted to set the emergency alarm off a second time by using the same side door as them.

“Hurry up,” the sharp-faced man behind Susan said. Leaving Silver alone looked like the lesser of two evils now. She needed to get help. Susan started to run past the blond to the light and people and safety, but he moved so
fast.
One breath he was at the corner of the building, the next his hand was on Susan’s shoulder as he slammed her into the gray-painted cinder blocks of the store wall. Agony bloomed up from her temple, making it hard to see for a moment. Her phone fell with a distant clatter. Tears stung her eyes from the unexpected force of the pain. Susan mentally screamed at herself to move, to do something when the man stepped away from her. Instead she continued to hug the wall, waiting for the throbbing pain to fade enough for her thoughts to move again.

*   *   *

With Susan taken care of, the underling caught Silver’s good wrist and twisted her arm, forcing her into the wall. She whimpered, and let him. Time to play wounded little thing. She had a weapon of her own, but if she used it too soon, they could still rush her, two against one. Better to draw them in close and let them relax.

“You do stink of silver, just like the gossip said,” the alpha murmured with mocking casualness. “Is there really some still in your blood?”

“Watch what you say,” Silver said, twisting to get at least her cheek away from the wall. “The human—” Of all the people who might discover Susan knew about the Were, this man had to be one of the worst. Everyone knew not to reveal themselves in front of the humans, though. If she could get the alpha to play along with that, he’d never have the opportunity to notice that Susan was much less surprised than she should have been.

“Is stunned, poor thing.” The alpha leaned in so close Silver could feel his breath on her cheek, smell his satisfaction with her weakness. “Even if she could hear this far.”

“Call for your lover.” Silver raised her voice so Susan could hear. “Leave anyone else out of this.” The last thing they needed was more humans. A beat later, the underling slammed a fist into her back. Apparently the alpha didn’t approve of her order to Susan. Silver closed her eyes to weather the surge of pain.

“This party is for Dare. No need to be inviting others. Unless your mate happens to have a human piece on the side.” Some anger sneaked into the alpha’s tone, but he was back to mocking by the end.

The underling pulled Silver back and slammed her into the wall again. She went limp and managed to lead with her shoulder. Pain clawed at her, but only enough force reached her temple to scrape it. The smell of her own blood fogged her nose. She rolled her other shoulder, but it only pulled her bad hand free to hang dead and useless. “Dare will be coming, don’t worry.”

The alpha laughed. “Oh, good. I’m looking forward to talking to him.” He looked pityingly at Silver. “I didn’t think it would be so easy.”

“If you have never learned the lesson that once in a while a cowering enemy bites all the harder when you least expect it, I think you are about to,” Death said. He stood proud and tall silhouetted against the Lady’s piercing light, and the underling’s sandy-colored wild self showed its belly. The alpha’s wild self was gray and built low to the ground, probably perfect for a lifetime of hugging the shadows before jumping out to attack. He didn’t even seem to notice Death, more fool he.

Silver tested the underling’s hold, and he smashed another punch into the same place on her back for her trouble. Shadows sucked in her vision for a moment. She whimpered for effect, though if she was honest, it wasn’t far from the truth. The blood trail down her cheek turned from warm to chill. “Why hurt me, if it’s my mate you want? Why anger Seattle with this trespass?”

“I’m doing Seattle a favor, getting the Butcher out of his territory for him. He should be grateful.” The alpha touched a fingertip to her chin and then rocked back. “You’re my message. Since Dare doesn’t wish to listen to what I have to say.”

Silver ignored the alpha for a moment to gather her thoughts, though she was careful to leave her muscles limp. She didn’t want to give the underling any warning. Then she smashed her head back and heard the satisfying snap of the underling’s nose. He didn’t drop her, but his grip loosened enough for Silver to pull free.

The underling was back on her a moment later, but a moment was all Silver needed. She wormed her fingers into her pocket and found the comforting chill of her necklace chain. She pulled the silver metal out and the underling flinched back.

The alpha hissed in shock. “Lady, how can you
touch
—” He fell silent and stared at her fingertips, as if searching for burns that didn’t exist.