Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson Page 21

  “I should be looking a nervous wreck,” she said, running the hand Charles had kissed through her airy, feathery-cut hair that, combined with her fine features, made her look like a fairy princess. She was shorter than Anna and finer-boned, but Charles had never made the mistake of thinking of her as fragile. “Justin came boiling in with some nonsense about a meeting tonight. He was all but incoherent—why did you enrage the boy like that?—and I told Leo I’d drop by to see what you were doing.”

  This was why he didn’t make friends.

  “Leo received my message?” Charles asked.

  She nodded. “And looked quite frightened, which is not a good look for him, as I told him.” She leaned forward and put a too-familiar hand on his arm. “What has brought you to our territory, Charles?”

  He stepped back. He didn’t much like to touch or be touched—though he seemed to have largely forgotten that while he was around Anna.

  His Anna.

  Forcefully he brought his attention back to business. “I have come to meet with Leo tonight.”

  Isabelle’s usually cheerful face hardened, and he waited for her to blow up at him. Isabelle was as famous for her temper as she was for her charisma. She was one of the few people to blow up in the Marrok’s face and get away with it—Charles’s father liked Isabelle, too.

  But she didn’t say anything more to him. Instead she turned her head to glance at Anna, whom, he suddenly realized, she’d been pointedly ignoring up to that point. When she returned her gaze to Charles, she began speaking, but not to him.

  “What tales have you been carrying, Anna, my dear? Complaining about your place in the pack? Choose a mate, if you don’t like it. I’ve told you that before. Justin would take you, I’m sure.” There was no venom in her voice. Maybe if Charles hadn’t already met Justin, he’d have missed the way Anna’s face paled. Maybe he wouldn’t have heard the threat.

  Anna didn’t say anything.

  Isabelle continued to stare at Charles, though she was careful to keep from meeting his eyes. He thought she was studying his reactions, but he knew that his face gave nothing away—he’d been prepared for the way his Brother Wolf surged up in anger to defend Anna this time.

  “Are you sleeping with him?” Isabelle asked. “He’s a good lover, isn’t he?”

  Though Isabelle was mated, she had a wandering eye and Leo let her indulge herself as she pleased, a situation almost unique among werewolves. That didn’t mean she wasn’t jealous; Leo couldn’t so much as look at another woman. Charles always felt it was an odd relationship, but it had worked for them for a long time. When she’d made a play for him a few years ago, he’d allowed himself to be caught, knowing that there was nothing serious about her offer. He hadn’t been surprised when she’d tried to get him to talk his father into letting Leo expand his territory. She had taken his refusal in good humor, though.

  The sex had meant nothing to either of them—but it meant something to Anna. He’d have had to be human to miss the hurt and mistrust in her eyes at Isabelle’s thrust.

  “Play nicely, Isabelle,” he told her, abruptly impatient. He put a little force in his voice as he said, “Go home and tell Leo I’ll talk to him tonight.”

  Her eyes lit with rage and she drew herself up.

  “I am not my father,” he said softly. “You don’t want to try the shrew act with me.”

  Fear cooled her temper—and his, too, for that matter. Her perfume might have hidden her scent, but it didn’t hide her eyes or her clenched hands. He didn’t enjoy frightening people—not usually.

  “Go home, Isabelle. You’ll have to swallow your curiosity until then.”

  He shut the door gently behind her and stared at it for a moment, reluctant to face Anna—though he had no idea why he should feel so guilty for doing something long before he’d ever met her.

  “Are you going to kill her?”

  He looked at Anna then, unable to tell what she thought about it. “I don’t know.”

  Anna bit her lip. “She has been kind to me.”

  Kind? As far as he could tell kindness had been pretty far from anything that had happened to Anna since her Change. But the worry in her face had him swallowing his sharp reply.

  “There is something odd going on in Leo’s pack,” was all he said. “I’ll find out exactly what it is tonight.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll ask them,” he told her. “They know better than to think they can lie to me—and refusal to answer my questions, or refusal to meet with me, is admitting guilt.”

  She looked puzzled. “Why couldn’t they lie to you?”

  He tapped a finger on her nose. “Smelling a lie is pretty easy, unless you are dealing with someone who cannot tell truth from lie, but there are other ways to detect them.”

  Her stomach growled.

  “Enough of this,” he said, deciding it was time to feed her up a little. A bagel was not enough. “Get your coat.”

  He didn’t want to take the car into the Loop, where it would be difficult to find parking, because his temper was too uncertain around her. He couldn’t talk her into a taxi, which was a new experience for him—not many people refused to listen when he told them what to do. But then, she was an Omega, and not constrained by an instinctive need to obey a more dominant wolf. With an inward sigh, he followed her down a few blocks to the nearest L station.

  He’d never been on Chicago’s elevated train before, and, if it weren’t for a certain stubborn woman, he wouldn’t have ridden one this time. Though he admitted, if only to himself, that he rather enjoyed it when a rowdy group of thugs disguised as teenagers decided to give him a bad time.

  “Hey, Injun Joe,” said a baggy-clothed boy. “You a stranger in town? That’s a foxy lady you have there. If she likes her meat brown, there’s plenty here to go ’round.” He tapped himself on his chest.

  There were real gangs in Chicago, raised in the eat-or-be-eaten world of the inner city. But these boys were imitators, probably out of school for the holidays and bored. So they decided to entertain themselves by scaring the adults who couldn’t differentiate between amateurs and the real deal. Not that a pack of boys couldn’t be dangerous under the wrong circumstances . . .

  An old woman sitting next to them shrank back, and the smell of her fear washed away his tolerance.

  Charles got to his feet, smiled, and watched their smugness evaporate at his confidence. “She’s foxy, all right,” he said. “But she belongs to me.”

  “Hey, man,” said the boy just behind the one who had spoken. “No hard feelings, man.”

  He let his smile widen and watched them shuffle backward. “It’s a nice day. I think that you should go sit in those empty seats up there where you see your way more clearly.”

  They scuttled to the front of the car and, after they had all taken a seat, Charles sat back down next to Anna.

  • • •

  There was such satisfaction in his face when he sat down that Anna had to suppress a grin for fear that one of the boys would look back and think she was laughing at one of them.

  “That was a prime example of testosterone poisoning,” she observed dryly. “Are you going to go after Girl Scouts next?”

  Charles’s eyes glinted with amusement. “Now they know that they need to pick their prey more cautiously.”

  Anna seldom traveled to the Loop anymore—everything she needed she could find closer to home. He evidently knew it better than she did, despite being a visitor. He chose the stop they got off at and took her directly to a little Greek place tucked in the shadow of the L train tracks, where they greeted him by name and took him to a private room with only one table.

  He let her give her order and then doubled it, adding a few dishes on the side.

  While they were waiting for their food, he took a small, worn-looking, leather-bound three-ring not
ebook from his jacket pocket. He popped the rings and took out a couple of sheets of lined paper and handed them to her with a pen.

  “I’d like you to write down the names of the members of your pack. It would help if you list them from the most dominant and go to the least.”

  She tried. She didn’t know everyone’s last name and, since everyone outranked her, she hadn’t paid strict attention to rank.

  She handed the paper and pen back to him with a frown. “I’m forgetting people, and other than the top four or five wolves, I could be mistaken on rank.”

  He set her pages down on the table and then took out a couple of sheets with writing already on them and compared the two lists, marking them up. Anna took her chair and scooted it around the table until she sat next to him and could see what he was doing.

  He took his list and set it before her. “These are the people who should be in your pack. I’ve checked the names of the ones who don’t appear on your list.”

  She scanned down it, then grabbed the pen back and marked out one of his checks. “He’s still here. I just forgot about him. And this one, too.”

  He took the list back. “All the women are gone. Most of the rest who are missing are older wolves. Not old. But there’s not a wolf left who is older than Leo. There are a few younger wolves missing as well.” He tapped a finger on a couple of names. “These were young. Paul Lebshak, here, would have been only four years a werewolf. George not much older.”

  “Do you know all the werewolves?”

  He smiled. “I know the Alphas. We have yearly meetings with all of them. I know most of the seconds and thirds. One of the things we do at the meetings is update the pack memberships. The Alphas are supposed to keep the Marrok informed when people die, or when new wolves are Changed. If my father had known so many wolves were gone, he would have investigated. Though Leo’s lost a third of the pack membership, he’s done a fair job of replacing them.”

  He gave back the list she’d written—a number of names, including hers, were also checked. “These are all new. From what you’ve told me, I’d guess that they are all forced Changes. The survival rate of random attack victims is very poor. Your Leo has killed a lot of people over the past few years in order to keep the number of his pack where it is. Enough that it should have attracted the attention of the authorities. How many of these people were made wolves after you?”

  “None of them. The only new wolf I’ve seen was that poor boy.” She tapped the paper with her pen. “If they didn’t leave bodies and spread out the hunt, they could have easily hidden the disappearance of a hundred people in the greater Chicago area over a few years.”

  He leaned back and closed his eyes, then he shook his head. “I don’t remember dates too well anymore. I haven’t met most of the missing wolves, and I don’t remember the last time I saw Leo’s old second except that it was within the last ten years. So whatever happened was after that.”

  “Whatever happened to what?”

  “To Leo, I’d guess. Something happened that made him kill all the women in his pack except Isabelle and most of his older wolves—the wolves who would have objected when he started attacking innocent people, or quit teaching new wolves the rules and rights that belong to them. I can see why he’d have to kill them—but why the women? And why didn’t the other Chicago Alpha say anything to my father when it happened?”

  “He might not have known. Leo and Jaimie stay away from each other, and our pack is not allowed to go into Jaimie’s territory at all. The Loop is neutral territory, but we can’t go north of here unless we get special permission.”

  “Oh? Interesting. Have you heard anything about why they aren’t getting along?”

  She shrugged. There had been a lot of talk. “Someone told me that Jaimie wouldn’t sleep with Isabelle. Someone else said that they had an affair and he broke it off, and she was insulted. Or that he wouldn’t break it off and Leo had to step in. Another story is that Jaimie and Leo never got along. I don’t know.”

  She looked at the checks that marked the newer wolves in her pack and suddenly laughed.

  “What?”

  “It’s just stupid.” She shook her head.

  “Tell me.”

  Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. “Fine. You were looking for something that all the newer wolves had in common. I was just thinking that if someone wanted to list the most handsome men in the pack, they would all make the cut.”

  Both of them were surprised by the flash of territorial jealousy that he didn’t bother to hide from her.

  It was probably a good time for the waiter to come in with the first course of food.

  Anna started to move her chair back to where it had been, but the waiter sat his tray down and took it from her, seating her properly before he got back to setting out the dishes.

  “And how have you been, sir?” he said to Charles. “Still haven’t given up and moved to civilization?”

  “Civilization is vastly overrated,” Charles returned as he put the sheets of paper into his notebook and shut the cover. “As long as I can come up once or twice a year and eat here, I am content.”

  The waiter shook his head with mock sadness. “Mountains are beautiful, but not as beautiful as our skyline. One of these days I’ll take you out for a night on the town and you’ll never leave again.”

  “Phillip!” A bird-thin woman stepped into the room. “While you are here chatting with Mr. Cornick, our other guests are going hungry.”

  The waiter grinned and winked at Anna. He dropped a kiss on the woman’s cheek and slipped through the door.

  The woman suppressed a smile and shook her head. “That one. Always talking. He needs a good wife to keep him in line. I am too old.” She threw up her hands and then followed the waiter.

  The next twenty minutes brought a series of waiters and waitresses who all looked as though they were related. They carried food on trays and never said anything about it being odd that two people should eat so much food.

  Charles filled his plate, looked at hers, and said, “You should have told me you didn’t like lamb.”

  She looked at her plate. “I do.”

  He frowned at her, took the serving spoon, and added to the amount on her plate. “You should be eating more. A lot more. The change requires a lot of energy. You have to eat more as a werewolf to maintain your weight.”

  After that, by mutual consent Anna and Charles confined their conversations to generalities. They talked about Chicago and city living. She took a little of a rice dish and he looked at her until she took a second spoonful. He told her a little about Montana. She found he was very well spoken and the easiest way to stop a conversation cold was to ask him about anything personal. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk about himself, she thought, it was that he didn’t find himself very interesting.

  The door swung open one last time, and a girl of about fourteen came in with dessert.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” Charles asked her.

  She sighed. “Vacation. Everyone else gets time off. But me? I get to work in the restaurant. It sucks.”

  “I see,” he said. “Perhaps you should call child welfare and tell them you’re being abused?”

  She grinned at him. “Wouldn’t that get Papa riled up. I’m tempted to do it just to see his face. If I told him it was your suggestion, do ya suppose he’d get mad at you instead of me?” She wrinkled her nose. “Probably not.”

  “Tell your mother that the food was perfect.”

  She braced the empty tray on her hip and backed out the door. “I’ll tell her, but she already told me to tell you that it wasn’t. The lamb was a little stringy, but that’s all she could get.”

  “I gather you come here often,” Anna said, unenthusiastically picking at a huge piece of baklava. Not that she had anything against baklava—as long as she had
n’t eaten a week’s worth of food first.

  “Too often,” he said. He was having no trouble eating more, she noticed. “We have some business interests here, so I have to come three or four times a year. The owner of the restaurant is a wolf, one of Jaimie’s. I sometimes find it convenient to discuss business here.”

  “I thought you were your father’s hit man,” she said with interest. “You have to hunt down people in Chicago three or four times a year?”

  He laughed out loud. The sound was rusty, as if he didn’t do it very often—though he ought to, it looked good on him. Good enough that she ate the forkful of baklava she’d been playing with and then had to figure out how to swallow it when her stomach was telling her that it didn’t need any more food sent its way.

  “No, I have other duties as well. I take care of my father’s pack’s business interests. I am very good at both of my jobs,” he said without any hint of modesty.

  “I bet you are.” He was a person who would be very good at whatever he decided to do. “I’d let you invest my savings. I think I have twenty-two dollars and ninety-seven cents right now.”

  He frowned at her, all amusement gone.

  “It was a joke,” she explained.

  But he ignored her. “Most Alphas have their members give ten percent of their earnings for the good of the pack, especially when the pack is new. This money is used to ensure there is a safe house, for instance. Once a pack is firmly established, though, the need for money lessens. My father’s pack has been established for a long time—there is no need for a tithe because we own the land we live on and there are investments enough for the future. Leo has been here for thirty years: time enough to be well established. I’ve never heard of a pack demanding forty percent from its members—which leads me to believe that Leo’s pack is in financial trouble. He sold that young man you called my father about, and several others like him, to someone who was using them to develop a way to make drugs work on us as well as they work on humans. He had to kill a number of humans in order to get a single survivor werewolf.”