Wild Card (61 page)

“Where’s that necklace?” I said quietly. “Great-grandma’s necklace.”

“How can you think of something like that now?” Taylor said.

“Because, like I said, it’s important.” I slammed the magazine back in the HK, making them both flinch.

“I don’t know,” Kath said.

“You’re lying,” I said. I knew it, and she could see I knew it.

“I lost it,” she tried. Her eyes were growing wider and more desperate.

“You’re still lying.”

“I threw it away!” Her voice was a reedy shriek. “It was just a stupid bead necklace. Are you satisfied now?”

I let her squirm for a minute.

“You’re not lying any more. But I’m not satisfied at all.”

This would just be another example of my craziness as far as they were concerned. And yet it was hugely important. Olivia’s life might depend on it.

It was the wrong time to take it further now. I felt the wolf as if she had expanded inside me, a frisson that seeped down my limbs until my hands and feet tingled. I wasn’t finished here but I had to go, and I couldn’t afford any more distractions.

“If I hadn’t escaped, I’d be dead, or as good as. Think about that. I can’t tell you what I’m doing at the moment. Maybe, sometime, I will be able to. It’s dangerous. Meantime, just leave me alone. Don’t even talk about me.” I holstered the HK and stood up. “And keep the hell out of my way.”

“Just go,” Taylor said defiantly.

I stared at him until he lowered his eyes.

I paused in their open doorway, and looked back. The cold wind trailed in ribbons of snow across their floor.

“I had a little sister once,” I said. “I loved her with all my heart.”

Chapter 64

We drew away from the house, Alex steering the SUV carefully down toward Speer Boulevard, where the snow had been cleared. I felt too tired and sickened to want to talk.

The necklace was gone. I’d made an oath to help Olivia. I couldn’t even think how to tell her that my best lead had vanished into a dump somewhere, let alone what I was going to do about it.

Alex broke the silence.

“Tell me what happened,” he said, slowing the SUV gently as we came to the end of the road.

The difficulty he was having driving got my head working again.

“Make for the stadium parking lot,” I said. “I want to pick up the truck.”

The Hill Bitch might be cold to drive, but she’d laugh at the snow.

“Got it.” He turned north onto Speer. Snowplows had been out here and the way was easier, although the snow was already drifting back across the road.

I gave them the short version, but there was no way of hiding the effect it had on me. At the end, reliving the terror of being helpless and imprisoned set my Athanate off. I had to stop every few sentences to calm myself down.

“Noble,” Alex said, his voice tight with anger. “I can’t believe it. I’ll…”

I put my hand on his arm, trying to short-circuit both his rage and my memories.

“We need to be sure,” I said. “We’re only going to get one chance at this. Melissa was right; one of the first things she said to me was that he’s leaving. All the years of hiding have been thrown aside. He’s left clues because it doesn’t matter anymore. But that’s not the same as telling us who he is. Or she is.”

“But you saw him.”

“I saw Noble. I saw you, too. And think about why Melissa would leave the house? Maybe she got a call and thought she saw José outside. Maybe I saw Noble’s face only because the rogue needed to use that to move around in the prison. What if he, or she, showed up at Noble’s house earlier looking like me, killed him and took all his IDs?”

“He knew things that you’d talked about with Noble.”

“Maybe the rogue tortured that information out of him.”

“Shit!” He hit the wheel with his hand. “It’s a freaking nightmare. How the hell are we supposed to prove anything?”

“If we get close enough, I can tell from the eukori.” I shuddered. “I won’t forget that feeling.”

He was shaking his head, but I pressed on. I felt as if my investigation had been blown apart, but I had the one strong gut feeling on this—that it was one of the pack. I needed to know what had been going on.

“Alex, what’s happened to the pack? What were you doing to Larsen?”

“We were up at Bitter Hooks. It’s his trial,” Alex said quietly.

“But he’s not the rogue,” I said. “We’ve got to call and stop it.”

“No, not that.” Alex ran a hand over his face, looking tired. “Larsen can’t change. His wolf never comes through. But the wolf keeps trying more and more. We call that the trial, when someone who can’t change is forced by the wolf to make the last attempt.”

I’d gotten it completely wrong. Larsen was like Alex’s old girlfriend, Hope. Condemned to die by the transformation they couldn’t complete, their last minutes a torture as the body fought to change to wolf, and failed. The same thing that would eventually happen to Olivia unless I found some way to help her. I thought I’d been so close to the necklace. If I’d got it, maybe I would have been able to help Kyle.

The anger that boiled through me was useless. I had to let it go. I couldn’t mention the necklace to Alex with Olivia in the back. She was keeping it quiet, but I could feel her. Like the snow had blown into my sister’s house, gray strands of grief weaved around me in the car from both of them. The Call or eukori? I didn’t know. Olivia wasn’t meant to be able to use the Call until she changed, but I had.

Focus.

“Was Silas there?” I said.

Alex looked at me, sensing the emotions without realizing their cause. “Yes, from the start. Still is. They’re still there.”

Silas wasn’t the rogue.

And how come Alex and Olivia weren’t there? This was meant to be for the whole pack. They’d come away for me?

Focus.

“Who was missing?”

“Noble.” Alex’s tone told me he’d made his decision, but I waited. “Ursula,” he said. “Neither of them are answering their cells.”

Ursula.

She was big enough to be the wolf that made those bites. And on the other evidence, she knew the women from Melissa’s list of potential victims.

Or Noble. He wasn’t big enough as a wolf, but he’d probably came into contact with all the known victims. And he might have tried to mislead me about knowing Barbara Green.

Could Ursula masquerade as Noble? As a veterinarian, she had some medical knowledge. But she was so much bigger than Nobel. Had he looked taller than normal in the center? I hadn’t been able to see properly, trussed up on the gurney.

Or was it both of them? Some kind of sick sadistic relationship?

If it was more than one, why not suspect Silas again? But that path spiraled down to suspecting all of them.

Something taunted me from the edge of my memory. I’d heard or seen something important and I’d ignored it.

“Where do they live?”

“Noble’s got a townhouse down in Parker and Ursula has an apartment in Arvada.”

Opposite ends of Denver. Which first?

Alex interrupted my chain of thought. “Bian will have tried calling Jen as well. You’d better call both of them.”

“In a minute.”

My hand was still on his arm. We weren’t linked through eukori, but I still sensed a turmoil in him and I sensed it wasn’t about what had happened to me. There was something he was hiding from me about us, the pack and Larsen’s trial, something deep.

“Pull over and tell me what else is going on.”

We eased off the cleared street and stopped in front of a closed coffee shop.

“Aren’t you supposed to be with the rest of the pack?” I asked.

“When Bian called, I couldn’t ignore it. I had to come looking for you.” He looked aside, studying the front of the coffee shop. “I had to leave Kyle.”

There were echoes of his grief over Hope in there as well. I bit my lip, glad he’d come for me and sorry for the pain it’d caused him.

“That must have gone down well with Felix.” I said, feeling clumsy.

Alex didn’t answer.

Crap.

Felix and Alex must have argued over this.

I knelt on the seat, grabbed his jacket and twisted him around to look at me.

“Alex, you can’t do this. You’ll be thrown out.”

“Too late. I already have been.” He shook his head.

“What? Alex, this is crazy,” I yelled. “They’re your pack. You love being in the pack. You’ve earned your position, you can be excused for one slip. Both of you. You have to go back to Felix.”

“It’s not about a rule. It’s not even about not being there for Kyle. It’s about wanting, no, it’s
needing
to be with you more than I need the pack, more than I’ve ever needed anything else. It’s about choosing. It’s about a commitment.” He stopped for a moment, his eyes staring, seeming lost, looking anywhere but at me. “An absolute commitment.”

“Olivia?” I wanted her to talk some sense into him.

Olivia was almost whining. She leaned forward to touch my arm carefully.

What the hell was happening?

“I can’t go back,” Alex said.

“Why?” I shook him and for a second I thought I’d shaken sense into him. But his eyes flared gold and anger fired up through him.

“Because you’re my alpha!” he shouted.

Utter silence. My mouth moved wordlessly.

There was a wrench inside me, as if a dislocation that I hadn’t been aware of had been suddenly reset. All the talk before of being a pack had felt good. It’d just been talk. My House was not my pack. It was nothing like it.

Naming me as his alpha
made
us a pack.

I felt like I’d been gut-punched.

I’d come to love the Athanate and I loved being Athanate, belonging to that vast structure with it’s the huge arrays of loyalties and obligations. I was a little scared of it as well, feeling the complexity of the structure respond to me. I loved being House Farrell and sensing my House around me.

But that wasn’t pack.

Pack was a big old V8 spinning up inside me. It was a sense of power building, a bonfire catching. It was liquid fire in my limbs and the roar of the crowd shaking the stands.

I wanted to scream and shout.

I hugged Alex to me. Olivia reached from the back seat, ran her face along my arm. Her eyes were down and her breath keened in her throat. I pulled her roughly into the hug.

Emotions churned through us. Kyle. Melissa. Being strapped down on the gurney. Being unable to change. But also Jen and Alex, joy and making love, pride and elation.

Like a river after the rapids, the seethe of emotions calmed slowly into a gentle euphoria. We floated. We’d just officially formed a pack. And as I thought that, I felt our Call; smaller, sweeter, more intense, more focused than the Denver pack.
Our
Call.

Reality came crashing back.

“We are so screwed.”

Alex snorted. “You think?” But the crazy jubilation leaked between us and it bubbled out in nervous laughter. We were behaving like a group of teens, completely caught in the moment and ignoring the consequences of our actions.

We couldn’t take the time this deserved. Even Felix and the huge problems this caused with him would have to wait.

I kissed them and let them go. I’d probably half-throttled Olivia, reaching over the backrests. No wonder the Were went for bigger cars. We needed the extra room.

Then I sat back down and pointed at the road. Time to be back on track.

My pack.     

I preened.

I turned my cell back on. Jen was first of course.

But I didn’t get a chance to dial before the cell beeped. José. He’d have been able to put a monitor on my cell. That he was still sitting there waiting in the early hours of the morning made me feel a little better.

“Amber?” he said.

“I’m fine now, José.” That didn’t satisfy him and I had to recount what had happened again. I didn’t reveal Noble’s part yet and I had to call him off from arresting my sister. Not that she’d done anything actually illegal, but I appreciated his support.

He told me that as soon as the snow allowed it, there would be a team down at the Aurora Center trying to find out how on earth they’d accepted someone under a false name. By the time they got that far, they’d be hearing Noble’s name. I had however much time that was, to come up with a story that would hide the paranormal aspects of the case.

I’d finished as we entered the stadium parking lot. It was a field of white with no more than a few bumps down at the end, where the cars were parked.

“José, I gotta go. One quick question, if you’re getting info on the search from the FBI.”

“Oh, we got it, Amber. Seems like there’s been a sudden change over there. We have a feed to at least some of their notes, courtesy of Agent Ingram, and a request for information sharing. What’re you looking for?”

I was staring at the Hill Bitch as she emerged from the snow. Alex had left me inside his SUV and dug into the mounds until he found her.

“The house at Glenmore Hills. What do they say about vehicles in the garage?”

“Garage was empty,” José said after a moment.

That was what I was afraid of.

“Okay. You have some information to feed back to them. The killer is mobile and driving a field-green Ford F-250 with huge tires.” I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled the license from the depths of my brain.

“You sure?”

“The truck was in the garage, and now it isn’t.”

We left it there and I called Jen, feeling guilty as I watched Alex and Olivia trying to unfreeze the manual locks to get in my truck.

Jen answered immediately. She hadn’t slept and once she heard the even shorter version of the story, she was all for suing Kath, Taylor, the Aurora Center, the FBI and probably the city of Denver before I calmed her down.

She’d be back that evening. I promised I would be fine and we’d talk through everything before we ended the call.

I needed to talk to Bian as well, but that would wait a few minutes. Alex had gotten the Hill Bitch open and I went over there.

I’d gotten a ticket, naturally. Only the snow had saved me from being towed.

“It might need a jump start,” Alex said.