"You know how to work it?" the woman asked me. I nodded, took the glass tray from the scanner's storage compartment, and smiled at Corwin. "About that hair sample?"
He held his sideburn taut and flashed his claws. A clump of reddish hair fell into the tray. I put it onto the examining platform. Green beams flashed and the printer whirred. Finally it stopped and the slip of paper slid from the slot. I pulled it. The lines were there, a series of short, faint slashes of color. But in the wrong place. I twisted the paper, trying to get the right angle of light. Light yellow-green. No match. There goes my only suspect.
"Are you satisfied?" Curran asked.
"Yes. He's clear."
Obeying Curran's nod, Corwin rose and left.
"We agreed to a trade," Curran said.
"I remember. What can I do for you?"
Curran looked to the open door and Derek staggered in, unsteady on his feet. He slumped against the doorframe, his face haggard. He looked like he needed a few more hours of sleep and a good dinner. I felt a pang of guilt. Just a tired kid, caught in a pissing contest between me and his boss.
"You can take him with you," Curran said.
I blinked. "As what?"
"As a bodyguard. As a connection to the Pack. Take your pick."
"No."
Curran just looked at me.
"We agreed to an exchange of information," I said. "At no point did I say that I'd take someone with me. Besides, why the hell would I want a wolf who'll report my every breath back to you?"
"I'll bind him with a blood oath. He'll do nothing to harm you, physically or otherwise. He won't spy on you."
Derek tensed against the wall and I tried to be reasonable. "Even assuming that I believe you, I can't take him with me. Look at him. He's a kid. If I get in a fight, I won't know whose neck to save, mine or his."
"I can hold my own," the kid said hoarsely.
"You can't force me to take him," I said. "I don't want his blood on my hands."
"If you won't take him, his blood will be on your hands." Curran crossed his arms over his chest. "You caused this. You took possession of my wolf in front of the entire Pack."
"You left me no choice. Was I supposed to squeal for your help? I came here in good faith and walked into an ambush. The responsibility is yours."
Curran ignored me and plowed on. "You've brought my authority into doubt. I can't just let it go. As of now I have three options. I can teach you a public lesson in humility, and oh, I would very much like to do that." His face left me no doubt as to exactly how much. "But I have to suffer you because you're the Order's point of contact. I can punish him, which I don't want to do. Or I can give him to you and let it be known that he was yours since our last meeting. You looked distressed and the blood oath had driven him berserk. It will let him save face."
I shook my head. "I won't take him."
"Then I'll kill him," Curran said.
All blood drained from the kid's face. He pushed himself from the wall and stood straight.
"He disobeyed me," Curran said. "He touched you, so I'm well within my rights." Fur sheathed Curran's arm. Claws shot from his huge paw and pricked the skin under Derek's chin. The kid winced.
"I like him," Curran's voice was almost a purr. "It won't be an easy kill."
"Bleed him and I'll skewer you like a stuck pig," I said through clenched teeth.
"No, you will try. You'll wave your sword around and talk a lot of shit and then back off at the last minute. And then I'll snap your neck and his."
Sickle claws danced dangerously close to the faint flicker of pulse on Derek's neck. Time to learn how to write checks I can cover.
"You win, Your Majesty. Please bind him now. I have an appointment in three hours."
THREE RED DROPS FELL ON THE COALS BURNING in a metal brazier and hissed, bubbling. The smell of burning human blood permeated the chamber, fueling the tangled cords of magic. I grimaced.
A binding was taking place, a ritual of attaching Derek's oath to the magic of his blood. The trouble was that blood oaths guaranteed very little. Derek would have a strong aversion to breaking promises made under these circumstances, but that's where it ended. When given a choice between breaking a blood oath and a stronger obligation, such as loyalty to the Pack, he would most likely break the oath.
The tall, lean alpha-wolf intoned the words of the pledge. Derek repeated them, and the currents of power licked the round room, spiraling up the impossibly tall walls, to the ceiling lost in darkness. The Council, who had formed a circle around the brazier, uttered a single word in unison. Derek held his hand over the flame. The alpha-wolf slit Derek's forearm, letting his blood run into the fire of the brazier to seal the pledge. There were a lot of pledges. The shapechanger blood clotted quickly and the alpha had to reopen the wound every thirty seconds or so. The binding took nearly fifteen minutes. Halfway through it, Derek started clenching his teeth when the knife touched his skin. That arm had to be sore as hell.
I listened to the vows. Derek pledged to protect me with his life if need be. He pledged to be at my side in danger and in peace, for as long as the Pack required it. He pledged to uphold the honor of the Pack as a whole and of his Wolf Clan in particular. I was not getting a bodyguard. I was getting a second shadow and if someone frowned at me, he was honor-bound to rip them to pieces.
He stood there, wincing over and over, looking lost and pitiful and somehow infinitely younger than me. I turned and quietly walked away, out of the room, into the shadowy hallway outside. The air was cool and smelled faintly of lemon of all things. I leaned against the wall and covered my face with my hands, shutting the world out for a moment. The blood oath took a while to set in and Derek would have to be at my side for the duration, otherwise his pledge would be worthless. He would have to sleep in my apartment, he would have to eat dinner with me and come with me to the Casino… Casino. Ugh.
"Weak stomach," Curran said at my side.
I didn't jump. It was more of a small hop, really. "You do this on purpose, don't you?"
"What?"
"Never mind."
I rubbed my face, but the fatigue wouldn't go away. Just an adrenaline cooldown. It would be over in a few minutes and then I would be as good as new.
"You're out of your league," Curran said.
No shit. "I really didn't handle this whole thing too well, did I?"
"No," he said. His voice held no sympathy.
I wanted to ask for a do-over. I would be more restrained the second time around. Less mouthy. Unfortunately in real life you rarely got a do-over.
"I'm heading to the Casino from here. I need to know if I can take Derek with me. Nataraja likes to fuck with me. If Derek goes wolf, it would really screw things up." An understatement of the year.
"You know anything of the Code?"
" 'The Code is the Way,'" I quoted the Code of Thought. "'It is Order among Chaos; it is sanity amidst the oblivion.'" He glanced in my direction. Surprised, Your Majesty? Yes, I did read it. Many times over. "Without the Code, the shapechangers lose their balance. The Beast overwhelms them, compelling them to murder and cannibalize their victims. Consumption of human flesh triggers a cataclysmic hormonal response. Violent tendencies, paranoia, and sexual urge shoot into overdrive, and a shapechanger degenerates into a loup—a psychopath that engages in every perversion involving blood and sex that a human mind can imagine. A human mind can imagine quite a bit."
I was definitely tired now. Slowly I slid down and sat on the floor. Screw him, if he wanted to stand over me, so be it. "I was at Moses Creek when the Guild busted Sam Buchanan's compound of horrors," I said.
Like a servant overly eager to please, my mind thrust a memory before me. The front yard of Buchanan's holdout, past the trenches and the mud wall from which his deranged pack had sprayed shotgun blasts at us. Fall grass strewn with bodies of dead loups, a kiddy inflatable pool—blue with yellow ducks—full of blood and clumpy pale strings of entrails, and a woman, naked and bloody, black holes gaping where her eyes once were. Her hands spread before her, she stumbles on the corpses, searching blindly, grabbing the trunk of a pine for support, and calling, her voice barely above a whisper, "Megan! Megan!" And us, two dozen mercs in battle gear, unable to tell her of the tiny dark-haired body hanging from a noose in the branches of the tree to which she clings.
I clenched my teeth.
"Bad memories?" Curran asked.
"You have no idea," I said hoarsely and remembered whom I was talking to. "But then you probably do."
I shook my head, flinging the memories from me like a wet dog shakes off water. That was my third job with the Guild. I was nineteen and the nightmares were still vivid. And Buchanan had gotten away, ran into the woods while we pounded his berserk loups into wet mush. We never caught him. Knowing that was worse than any nightmare.
Curran was watching me. I opened my mouth to ask him why hadn't he done something about that rabid loup and then remembered that Jackson County had barred the Pack from interfering. That was six years ago. Today they would not dare.
My mouth was open so I said, "What does any of it have to do with Derek?"
"Derek's parents were Southern Baptist separatists. He was the oldest son and allowed to attend school. For a while at least, until his father had gone deeper into religion. He remembers burning books in the front yard, Dr. Seuss and Sendak."
I nodded. The shift to "deep religion" wasn't unusual. Half of the mountain towns had gone "deep" before the "Live-Life-with-God" movement gave them a new dogma.
Curran rubbed his neck, biceps rolling under the sleeve of his shirt. "When the kid was fourteen, they went to an end-of-the-world tent revival and daddy brought home the Lyc-V."
He sat next to me. "He didn't know what the fuck it was or how to deal with it. He didn't even know enough to get help. Went loup within days. Loups are contagious as hell. Derek's mother killed herself after she got infected and left her rabid husband alone with seven kids. Five of them were girls."
I swallowed the hard clump in my throat. "How long?"
"Two years." Curran's face was grim. "They killed a passing lycanthrope midway through the first year and Derek found the Code on his body. That and starvation kept him sane."
"So how did it end?"
"The way it always does. The kid became competition for the females and the father tried to kill him. The kid has a good beast-form and he can keep it steady."
The beast-form is the warrior form, superior to both animal and man. Most first-generation shapechangers have trouble with beast-form, unable to maintain it longer than a few seconds. They get better with practice, but it takes years of trial and error.
"Derek killed his dad?"
"And set the house on fire."
"What of the other children?"
"Dead. Two from starvation, three from daddy's affections, and the last one burned to death. We went through the rubble and buried the bones."
"And now you're giving him to me? Why, Curran? I can't be responsible for him, I'm doing a piss-poor job of being responsible for myself."
His gaze held enough contempt to drown me. "Derek can handle himself. I don't tolerate loss of control. He's been tested and he won't lose his way when he smells the blood. In your place, I'd worry more about your own ass."
"Well, you're not in my place." I rose to my feet. Time to go.
We walked back to the room, where Curran said a few words to Mahon and left. Mahon approached me. "I'll show you out. Derek'll meet us at the entrance."
"Please make sure he takes a shower," I said. "Lots and lots of Irish Spring. I don't want the People smelling blood or wolf on him."
Mahon led me a different way, through the maze of dim passages and branching tunnels that brought us to a wooden door. Mahon leaned his palm against it and it swung open.
"Curran wanted you to see this before you left," he said.
In the room, on a simple metal table under a glass hood laced with preserving spells, lay the head of Sam Buchanan.