Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson Page 38

  Ben opened his mouth to swear, then closed it again.

  “I didn’t know how much the willingness to protect the others beneath a wolf in the pack structure affected the position of a dominant wolf until you came to our pack,” Adam offered gently. “Until then, I was pretty convinced that dominance was about who was the better or more aggressive fighter. You are as willing as Darryl is when it comes to taking on an opponent, and not half-bad in a fight—and still Darryl is much, much more dominant because the other wolves trust him to take care of them.”

  “Have a brownie, Ben,” Mercy said prosaically. “And congratulations.”

  Ben turned around and dropped into an overstuffed chair with a sigh, taking a brownie almost as an afterthought. “Congratulations on what?”

  “Your new upward mobility in the pack structure,” Mercy said. “They’ll figure out that you’ve changed pretty soon.”

  Adam met his eyes and smiled. Ben felt better suddenly, and it wasn’t Mercy’s congratulations or the brownie that did it, but the respect in his Alpha’s face. He remembered what Adam had told him a while ago. It might be taking a long time to get out from under what the Old Man had done to him, but he had time, didn’t he? A wolf’s immortality was a gift for him to use wisely or poorly.

  He finished the brownie, thanked Adam for his time, and headed back home, feeling like himself again. No. Better than that. He fed his better self a nice dinner, watched a little telly, and took himself off to bed with a smile on his face.

  • • •

  He’d dreamed about him that night. Woke up with the sound of his mother’s voice in his ears. “Benjamin, your father wants you to see him in the study.”

  Ben sat up, so certain he’d heard her voice that he was in a cold sweat, his heart beating like a bass drum in a marching band. Hard on the realization that he’d been dreaming was the knowledge that the wolf wanted out.

  He managed not to change—just barely managed. But the struggle left him with a headache and the temper of an asp that accompanied him all the way to work. He answered Mel’s cheery good morning with a growl and buried himself in his computer. He ignored lunch, which was stupid, because when Lorna Winkler came into his office without a word of warning, he emerged from coaxing a little more speed out of one of his database-monitoring programs hungry, and she smelled like food.

  “Ben, I was talking to Mark Duffy about your admirable attempt to stop swearing, and he suggested that we organize something for the whole division. It would raise morale if we could encourage people not to drink, smoke, or to lose ten pounds—and perhaps lower our health-insurance costs. I’d like you to spearhead the project.”

  Various responses occurred to him.

  “No,” he said mildly when he was sure that was what would come out of his mouth. Then he gave her his back and started typing random lines of code.

  “No?” Winkler’s voice was shocked, as if she thought she’d misheard because no one would refuse her suggestion.

  He didn’t look around when he said, “I’m a DBA, not a motivational speaker.”

  “Thank God,” someone said. Ben heard them, but Winkler wouldn’t have.

  “But—” she said.

  He slowly turned his chair around so he could see her. He met her eyes. “Ms. Winkler,” he said, “you pay me a lot of money to be a good nerd, which I am. There is not enough money in the world to make me be in charge of a company morale-improvement exercise.”

  She backed away from the expression on his face and left. He wondered, as he returned to work, if he was going to be fired. He hadn’t threatened her with words, but she and he both knew that there hadn’t been happy happy joy joy in his eyes. There might have been not-human stuff in his eyes, which was something he usually avoided because he had no intention of advertising to the world that he was a werewolf. The wolves who were out were expected to be exemplary and well behaved, which he was not. But his mood was so black that he couldn’t find it in himself to care one way or the other about the job or the wolf.

  He worked a while more, surfacing now and again because of the dream about his mother in a cold shaking sweat, imagining that he’d gotten a whiff of her perfume or heard her voice. But he was deep into the heart of Spock, who was at 84 percent capacity, when he was yanked out again.

  “I have that address for you, Mr. Duffy.”

  The voice belonged to one of the women who worked in human resources, though it wasn’t her voice, but Duffy’s name, that jerked Ben out of his databases. He blinked and saw that it was dark out. Really dark. As soon as he noticed, the moon’s song lit him up from the inside, and his monster was ready to tango.

  It wasn’t full moon yet, but he usually changed for the nights on either side because fighting it was tough. No use at all fighting if the moon was full, she called his wolf right out. It was dangerous to be at work this late, this close to the full moon.

  “Thank you, Karen,” Duffy said. That was the human-resources woman’s name, Karen Sinclair-Ramsay.

  If Ben could trust his ears, Duffy was somewhere near the elevator. If there had been more people in the building, Ben would never have been able to hear him so clearly.

  “I forgot to ask Mel before she left,” Duffy was saying smoothly, “and she said she’d get the figures worked up for me for Monday if I got her the information tonight. I think I’ll stop and get her a bottle of wine for putting up with me.”

  The wolf that was Ben lunged to the fore with a snarl. His human half pulled him back. Mel was no concern of his despite what Adam had said. Ben cared for no one and nothing. No one had watched out for him, and he’d survived, hadn’t he? That’s what he’d had that dream for, to remind him about people.

  Karen Sinclair-Ramsay sounded a little uncomfortable when she said, “I’m sure she’d appreciate a bottle of wine.” Maybe it was only now occurring to her that Mel was the DBA secretary, that Duffy had his own secretary. That a bottle of wine was just . . . not quite the right thing to be bringing a secretary who’d agreed to work the weekend.

  No. It was none of his business. Mel wasn’t pack, wasn’t his. It wasn’t his job to watch out for her.

  Benjamin, your father wants you. He could almost see her sitting in front of him, his beautiful mother sipping her tea as she read a magazine about the latest fashion. He could see, as if it were right before his eyes instead of decades in the past, the high-heeled black-and-white sandals worn by the model on the cover of the magazine. Be a dear and go to the study. She didn’t look at him when she spoke, her reading apparently absorbing his mother’s attention.

  She didn’t need a reply. Back then, he’d been a good kid. He’d done exactly what he was told. The destructive anger and black despair that drove him now, that hadn’t affected him much yet.

  Ben had almost opened his mouth, almost asked her if she knew what his father wanted him for in that study. But he was afraid, so afraid, that she knew. And if she knew . . . his world would self-destruct and take him with it.

  But even as he walked down the stairs to his father’s study, some part, the hidden, angry part that was growing inside and would, eventually, consume him, understood that she had to know. She was such a good mother, everyone said so. Her son was well mannered, well-groomed, and did well in school. Wasn’t he lucky to have such a good mother?

  • • •

  Ben left work with his head down and with quick strides aimed at letting people know that he didn’t have time to talk. He smelled Karen Sinclair-Ramsay in the parking lot and deliberately looked up at her. She was dressed in a business suit that looked good on her without being inappropriate. She had her hair braided back to display nicely shaped ears and dangly earrings. She was pretty in a well-cared-for, comfortable way.

  Women were always smiling and pretty on the outside.

  He got into his truck and backed out of his parking spot. He did not
look at Duffy’s red Mustang as he drove past it on his way out of the parking lot and out onto the Bypass Highway he needed to take home.

  • • •

  Mel’s rental house was very small. The wind whistled through it, and the floors creaked. Chris had told her he didn’t want his wife living in a building he thought was going to fall over in the next good storm. But Chris was overseas, and she wouldn’t get to see him again for six months.

  He didn’t have to live by himself in a house with too many ghosts and not enough people. When Chris’s unit left for overseas, Mel had moved to Richland to take care of her mom, who had just been diagnosed with cancer. She was supposed to have had more time, but Mel had still been unpacking when her mom died.

  So Mel sold the house she’d grown up in to pay her mother’s medical bills and rented a one-bedroom cottage built when Richland was born during World War II. It wasn’t fancy, but it was charming once she’d gotten through with it. If she hadn’t sent Chris a photo when he’d requested it, he wouldn’t have worried about it. But he’d asked and she’d sent and so she had to deal with the consequences.

  Chris wanted her to move back to the base in North Carolina, but she’d grown up in Richland, and she liked her job—except for the last month or so, and even that was better now. When Chris came back, they would talk. Until then, she’d wait for him here.

  She was watching TV when someone knocked at the door. Though it was dark, it wasn’t late; the news was just coming on. She didn’t even think about checking to see who was at the door. Richland was a safe place to live.

  She got a look at who waited on the porch and put her leg and shoulder against the door to hold it where it was.

  “Mr. Duffy,” she said, trying not to show the fear she felt. What was he doing here?

  He smiled at her and held out a bottle of wine. “Mel, honey. We need to talk.” He brushed past her and into her house without her quite knowing how he did.

  He glanced at her living room and walked by it into the small kitchen, set the bottle on the table, and started opening cupboards.

  “Charming house,” he said. “I just knew it would be. You have a way of making a place warm wherever you go.”

  “Mr. Duffy,” she said, instinct keeping her by the front door because it felt like an avenue of escape. “This is inappropriate.”

  He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “Now where do you . . . there they are.” And he got down the long-stemmed crystal glasses that had been a wedding present from Chris’s sister. He popped the cork with a corkscrew he’d brought and filled the glasses with wine.

  “Come in and sit down, Mel,” he said, with a sharp smile. “And let me explain a few things to you.”

  She twisted the front doorknob.

  “You do need your job,” he said. “I’m afraid I have some proof that you are selling proprietary secrets.”

  For a moment, indignation overcame fear. “I did not.”

  He sat down at her table and swirled the rust-colored wine, then sipped it. “But I have proof. I’ll show it to you. We are going to talk about how you will end up jobless and in jail. But that’s just you. You need to consider how it will look for your Marine if his wife is convicted of selling the location of nuclear material to interested parties.”

  She felt the blood leave her face as she understood just how far he was willing to go. She should have left when she had a chance.

  “Or”—he smiled and her stomach tightened with revulsion—“you can become my secretary with a healthy raise. Marie is transferring to another department and her post is open. Of course, you’ll have to persuade me.”

  “Persuade you?” Her voice sounded wobbly, and she wished, harder than she ever had in her life, that Chris were here. Chris would wipe the floor with him.

  Duffy tilted his glass toward the untouched one on the table. “Sit down, Mel. Don’t look so terrified. I’m hardly a rapist. Who knows? You might like it.”

  • • •

  Ben drove home from work trying not to think about anything, but the scent of his mother’s perfume lingering in his imagination left him restless and angry. He made it into his house, then stared unseeing at the food in his refrigerator. He knew he needed to eat, but he was too distracted to focus on food.

  He hadn’t felt like this in a long time. Not since he’d killed Terry.

  He stopped in the middle of his kitchen and did some deep breathing to keep the wolf back. Now that he was home, there was no one who would know or care what he was. But it was a bad idea to let the wolf out while he was this angry, and thoughts of Terry made him . . . very angry or something very near it.

  He paced from the fridge to the door and back, kicking the dustbin in frustration when it got in the way. He hadn’t thought of Terry in months.

  Terry had been the pack’s second in London, in Ben’s first pack. He worked for the Alpha, who was a loan shark. The whole pack worked for him, really, but Terry got paid for it. Terry’s job was to go collect from people who weren’t making their payments. Shortly after Ben was Changed, he was sent to tag along to make sure matters were discreet. The Alpha felt that Terry might forget himself and hang around until the police came by.

  So after his real IT job, Ben got to trail Terry around three days a week, and that’s when he found out what he’d really been sent to do. Terry didn’t just beat up the people because they weren’t quick with their money; he beat up people because he liked it. Ben’s real job was to stop him before there was a dead body. Murder was more interesting to the police than loan-sharking.

  One day, as they were leaving the apartment where their last reminder call lived, a woman walked by who caught Terry’s eye.

  “My old girlfriend,” he’d said, and even now Ben wasn’t sure it was true. He wasn’t sure that was the first one for Terry, or if he’d been controlling himself because Ben was a new watcher.

  He didn’t kill her. But she wouldn’t be walking around in her high-heeled black boots for a few months after he finished with her. Bruises and a broken leg, the newspaper reported the next day, and two men whose faces she hadn’t been able to see in the dark.

  Terry was higher-ranked in the pack, and most of the pack were afraid of him. Ben wasn’t—there wasn’t much Terry could do to him that hadn’t already been done—but he was a realist. Terry could wipe the floor with him. And . . . there had been something cathartic about watching Terry beat up the woman.

  Ben had come a long way from the good little boy of his childhood. He’d gotten in more than a little trouble that his father’s money had bought him out of. He’d never hurt anyone, but he’d done about everything else. He still wondered about the fate that made him end up a werewolf instead of dead in a dark alley of an overdose or a knife in his belly. Time was he’d been convinced that he’d ended up with the worst end of that stick.

  When he approached his Alpha about Terry’s transgression, the old wolf had just grunted. “Your job isn’t to police what Terry chooses to do,” he’d said. “He’s the one making the calls. You just make sure no one is killed and keep watch for the police.”

  Ben went out and bought a knife, and he did as he’d been ordered. Terry went hunting with Ben as observer; sometimes it was one of the other wolves, but mostly it was Ben—and Terry liked that part of it, too—and so did some dark part of Ben. At first it had only been once every couple of months, but by the end it was weekly. Terry liked those black, high-heeled boots. He’d follow women who wore them home and wait until the lights went out, then he and Ben would break in, muffling the sound of violence with the magic of the pack.

  When Ben got home from those nights, he spent the next hour or so in the bathroom until there was nothing more to throw up. It hadn’t escaped his notice that he’d taken on the role of his mother, which was bad enough. But the thing that made it nigh unbearable was that he liked it. When the wom
an screamed, it was his mother’s voice he heard. And he craved it as much as Terry did.

  Terry always cried afterward, patting his victim’s heads and calling them darling as he blamed them for making him beat them up. They were a proper unhinged pair, he and Terry. None of their victims died because the object of Terry’s kink was not murder but pain.

  And so it went for almost a year and a half, fourteen victims. The fifteenth lay unconscious on the floor, her skirt rucked up over a hip displaying a tattoo of a wolf.

  “Well, my boyo, lookee there,” Terry said. “She’s marked herself for me.”

  The sickness was already churning in Ben’s gut. “You’ve done what you came for,” he said. “Time to go.”

  “No,” Terry said, unzipping his trousers. “Time to step up the game for you.” He smiled. “I’ve been teaching you and you’re learning pretty well. Now we get to the good stuff.”

  And the woman on the ground wasn’t Ben’s mother anymore.

  “Time to go,” Ben told Terry. The woman was like him, like Ben. A victim. And he could take the easy route, like his mother had, as he had been doing all this time, or he could stop it.

  Terry gave him an irritated look. “Bugger off yourself, then.” He bent down and patted her tattoo. “This one’s mine.”

  And Ben did what he’d told himself he was going to do when he bought the knife in the first place. He cut Terry’s throat, then ripped off his head. He left the body in the poor woman’s apartment.

  He’d cleaned up and headed over to turn himself in to the Alpha for punishment only to find that there had been a change in leadership. The wolf who ruled the rest of London had decided to take over the rival pack. Ben was too freaked from killing Terry to recognize that the pack bonds had been trying to tell him the old Alpha was dead.

  The new Alpha didn’t kill Ben, but the police were looking for Terry’s accomplice. So he’d exiled Ben to the good old U. S. of A., and Ben had been given to Adam to see if there was anything worth saving inside Ben’s skin. Luckily for him, Adam seemed to view him as a challenge.