7
I didn’t carry at work—with Tad there, there was no reason, and a gun just got in the way while I was squirming around in engine compartments and under cars. My carry gun, the 9mm, was locked in the safe with my purse. I wasn’t going into the office to open the safe because the office had big picture windows, and someone who had burned down a building that housed dozens of innocent people wouldn’t hesitate to break a few windows.
Paranoia meant I had a second gun tucked in a special lockbox attached to the underside of the counter nearest the office. My fingers pressed the code, and a half second later I had the cool and heavy Model 629 Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum in my hand. I wasn’t Dirty Harry, but I’d shot my foster father’s Model 29 since I was big enough to handle it. My foster father’s .44 was in the gun safe at home, but the only difference between it and the 629 was that the 629 was stainless steel. Both of them were too heavy for me to shoot for more than a few rounds, but I could hit a pretty tight pattern on a target at fifty feet with the gun as long as it was in the first twelve shots.
The gun was Adam’s, and he’d suggested I get another Sig Sauer 9mm like my preferred gun instead because it was lighter and, being an automatic, the 9mm was faster to reload. I’d told him it was a waste of money when he already had this one.
I had made the assumption that this guy was Christy’s stalker and not some poor lost traveler who stopped to use the phone or something. We hadn’t managed to get any kind of photo of him, but how many guys travel in rental cars with a wicked-looking dog?
I looked at the monitor again and tried to evaluate him in the black-and-white screen. He appeared to be tallish, and his hair was light-colored. Without anything that eliminated him from the description Christy had given, I decided I was okay with making the assumption that he was the bad guy. If not, I could apologize to him later.
Why had he come here instead of going after Christy?
Maybe he had, and all the people we had guarding her had made him rethink his plan.
Maybe he thought he could take me to use as leverage to get to Christy. Or, if he was really crazy—and burning down a building was acting crazy in my book—he might be planning on killing me to get back at Adam for keeping Christy from him.
Maybe he just wanted to ask me if I’d seen Christy. My understanding of psycho stalkers was not infallible. It was also very possible that I was overreacting.
My chest hurt, and I felt the stupid light-headedness that told me I was flirting with a full-blown panic attack. Panic attacks were stupid and counterproductive, rendering me helpless to protect myself until they were over. Happily, I didn’t have them as often as I used to, but now was not the time.
I reminded myself firmly that I had prepared for another attempted assault. I had a bolt-hole for the coyote to hide in. At the back of the garage, on the top of the floor-to-ceiling shelves, there was an old wooden box—a fake box. The front and most of one side were all that was left. Those I had wood-glued and screwed to the shelf so it wouldn’t fall off if I bumped it. A narrow opening at the back of the side not against the wall meant I could squeeze into the box, but I wasn’t trapped because the box had no lid. All the way up near the roof of my fourteen-foot-high garage meant it didn’t need a top to keep me hidden, and I had about a foot between the top of the box and the ceiling.
So why wasn’t I doing the smart thing and hiding up there as a coyote? He might know who I was and where I worked, but it was extremely unlikely that he knew what I was.
I watched the monitors as he tried the door, then looked around the parking lot. The camera angle wasn’t wide enough for me to see what he was looking at, but I was pretty sure it was my van. He couldn’t know I was still there unless he’d been watching the shop, but the van might make him suspicious.
That was assuming he knew what I drove, which might be giving him too much credit. Though he had apparently followed Christy from Eugene—and I knew that Adam wouldn’t have advertised the trip over here if he could help it. He’d figured out she was staying with us and found my garage. It wasn’t too much to assume he knew what I drove.
He walked away from the door and back to his car, the big dog pacing at his side without a leash—just as Lucia’s dog had done. I had time to hide.
The security camera had its eye focused on me, recording my every move. If I hid from this human, the whole pack would know what I had done. Christy was human, fragile, and no longer the Alpha’s wife. That she had gotten into trouble she couldn’t get out of by herself was to be expected.
In a wolf pack, the dominant members protect—they don’t need protection. I was not just the Alpha’s wife, I was his mate and a pack member. That all meant that what I did mattered, and I was expected to make a better showing than Adam’s fragile ex-wife, who’d driven this man off with nothing more than a frying pan. So I stood watching the monitors, waiting for him to break in, instead of hiding in safety. But the knowledge I chose to face him, that I had other options, seemed to have pushed the panic attack away.
I watched as Christy’s stalker walked back over and began working on the front door of my garage. Darkness hadn’t yet fallen, though the sun was low in the sky.
Five minutes until help arrived.
Five minutes if Tad was at home when Adam called him. If not, Adam would be here in fifteen.
What did it say about Christy’s stalker that he risked breaking into my garage with a crowbar when it was still light out? Was he stupid? Or did he think he had enough money, enough power, to escape the consequences of his actions?
I closed my eyes and stretched my neck and rolled my shoulders to loosen them.
The front door gave with a tremendous crack—but my ears are more sensitive than most. I leaned on the front of the Passat and left the gun resting on the hood, though I kept my hold on it. Lifting the gun up too soon would cause my arms to tire, and I’d lose accuracy. I didn’t worry that he would be too fast because I was as quick as any of the werewolves—and they were a lot faster than any human.
It was probably only seconds between the time he broke down the door and when he came into the garage bay, but it seemed like hours. I spent the time reminding myself that I wasn’t drugged up on some fae-magic concoction that prevented me from disobeying orders. That Tad was coming, that Adam was on his way.
That if I shot him, then Christy would have to leave.
I’ve killed people before. If I’d felt like I had a choice, I wouldn’t have killed them. No choice meant I had no regrets for those kills. Maybe I should have felt worse about that; maybe it was being a walker or maybe being a predator. I didn’t think it would bother me to kill this man who had killed four innocent people—five if you counted the man who’d dated Christy a couple of times. Even so, I wasn’t going shoot him unless he made me do it, I told myself sternly.
Not even if it meant getting Christy out of my home.
I concentrated on keeping my expression cool, and when he stepped into the light, I said, “Mr. Flores, I presume?”
He stopped, and the big dog stopped, too, his shoulder precisely at his master’s leg. The dog’s gaze was alert, intelligent, and primal. Ancient.
I blinked, and the dog was just a dog. My first impression was probably a product of the stress of the moment, an accident of shadows.
Flores smiled and raised both hands to his shoulder height, palms out, dropping the crowbar as he did so. I flinched a little at the noise of the crowbar hitting the floor.
“I see that you were expecting me, Mrs. Hauptman.” He glanced at the monitors, and his smile widened. “I am not here to hurt you or yours, but your husband has something that belongs to me, and I want it back.”
Looking at his face under the light, and I knew why Christy had climbed right into bed with him. If Adam was movie-star handsome—this man was porn-star material. Eyes so dark blue they could only come from contacts, skin either tanned or naturally Mediterranean dark, and even, well-defined features with sensual overtones. Bright gold hair whitened in streaks by the sun or a skilled hairdresser swept back from his face in an expensive cut. But the most noticeable thing about him, the thing that Christy had never described, was the air of sexuality that he brought with him. No one would look at this man and not think male, sex, and dangerous.
“Christy appealed to us for protection from you,” I told him steadily. “If you know where she ran, if you know where I work, then you know what Adam is. We granted her protection, Adam and I and the whole pack. She doesn’t belong to you, she belongs to us. She never belonged to you. You need to leave. If you leave right now, my mate won’t kill you where you stand.”
“I don’t want to cause trouble,” he said, and he lied. His dog took a step forward.
I had the big gun out and aimed before the dog took another step.
“I might regret shooting the dog, but I won’t hesitate,” I told Flores.
He did something with his hand, and the big dog stepped back. The air-conditioning kicked in, and the air blew past them and to my nose, bringing with it the faint scent of magic. A faint scent that altered everything because I’d smelled that scent yesterday while I stared at a dead woman in a hayfield. I fought to keep my expression from changing and angled my face a little to the camera.
“You caused a lot of trouble in Finley,” I said, knowing the powerful little lens would catch my lips. Someone would figure out what I had said because there was not a chance in hell that I was coming out of this alive unless Tad or Adam made it here in time. “I saw what you did. Enjoy horsemeat, do you?”
A puzzled look crossed his face as if he were going to deny knowing what I was talking about … and then he smiled. His body language changed as he straightened, like an actor shedding a role. He licked his lips. “Horsemeat is not my first choice, no, but it sufficed at the time.” He liked to talk with his hands. “He understands the message I left in that field, your husband, does he not? I do not recognize his territory, and I hunt freely therein. He has taken she who is mine, so I shall take from him she who is his. Balance. Only then will I take his life—and that is vengeance. There is no one safe from my—”
I shot the dog. A clean killing shot to his head. He dropped without a sound. Alive one moment, dead the next.
Flores staggered back a few steps, clutching his chest almost as if I’d shot him there instead of his dog. He twisted to look at the dog, then turned to me, crouching a little with rage in his face. “You dare.”
“Your fault,” I said coolly, aiming steadily at him and not looking at the poor dog. “You signaled, and he gathered himself for attack. I warned you.”
“My children are immortal,” he told me in a breathless hiss and with theatrics that belonged onstage rather than in the mundane environment of my garage. Christy had been right, there was something European in his accent, but not anything I’d heard before. Vaguely Latinish, maybe, but not any Hispanic accent I was familiar with. The accent added melodrama to his already melodramatic words. “Tied to flesh that can be killed, but that mortal flesh is easily replaced. My son will not die but rise again, and so your efforts to defeat me and mine fail. Even so, you will suffer for this before you die.”
“Your children are immortal?” I asked, repeating the important part of his words for the camera to catch. The first security system had had sound, but when Adam had updated, he’d traded sound for better video. “Tied to mortal flesh. Who are you?”
“Guayota,” he said.
“Coyote?” I asked, and I know my eyes widened. He wasn’t Coyote.
“Guayota,” he said again, and I heard once more the odd pronunciation that Gary Laughingdog had used in the middle of his vision. Not Coyote with a weird accent but another name altogether.
“With a ‘g,’” I said.
But Flores, who called himself Guayota, was done listening to me. “Your husband thinks to keep the sun from me,” he said. “He will regret it.”
Something happened, something that smelled of scorched fabric and magic. I cried out as that heat seared my cheek. But even as the pain made my eyes water, I shot.
I aimed at Flores’s face, and I kept firing until the bullets were gone. Holes appeared in his face as I shot, two side by side in the middle of his forehead, one in his cheekbone. Then I switched targets and two more holes opened up around his heart, the final one a little low and right.
Out of bullets, I grabbed a big wrench and made a backward hop onto the hood of the Passat. It rocked a little under my weight, and I thought that I’d have to remember to tell the owner that it needed work on the shocks, too. Another hop put me on the roof of the car and gave me a little space.
The bullets had knocked Flores back. He hit a rack of miscellaneous parts and sent it crashing to the floor. Flores bounced off the rack, almost followed it to the ground, but caught his balance at the last instant. I felt a cold chill because with three bullets in his face and two in the chest, he caught his balance and stayed on his feet.
A funny sound filled the garage; it made my throat hurt and buzzed my ears. He was laughing. A cold, hard knot in my belly told me that probably someone else was going to have to deal with the shocks on the Passat.
My shoes were soft-soled and so had no trouble sticking to the top of the Passat. The gun was of no more use except as a club, but I kept it in my left hand and kept the wrench in my right.
I didn’t have much of a chance, but that didn’t mean I was going to roll over and give the thing my throat. Adam was coming, and the camera was rolling. Even assuming he killed me, the longer I held out, the more information they’d glean from the recording.
Flores’s face changed as he laughed, flowing and darkening, but beneath the darkness, visible in cracks in his skin, was a sullen red light. My changes are almost instantaneous, the werewolves take a lot longer than that with the exception of Charles. But none of us glowed.
Flores … Guayota moved his hand, still laughing, and something flew at me. I dodged, but it slid over my shirt, which caught fire, and landed on top of the Passat.
A quick brush of my hands put my shirt out, leaving me with blisters on the skin along my collarbone and a hole in my bra strap. I slid back one step to see what he’d thrown at me without having to look away from him.
It was about the size of a finger, blackened and oozing on one end. I chanced a quick glance and realized that not only was it the size of a finger, it had a fingernail. I almost nudged it with my foot to be sure, but the paint was blackening and bubbling up around it, and directly underneath it, the metal was sagging.
I’d read an account written by a Civil War commander about how he’d seen the cannonball coming toward one of his men who was wounded and down. It had been coming so slowly, and he’d just reached down to deflect it—and had lost his arm.