Libor looked nothing like I imagined him—at least not as I’d imagined him when I was a child. Probably that was a good thing for him.
His hair was medium brown and cut almost brutally short. His face was clean-shaven but, like Adam tended to, he already had a shadow of a beard making itself felt this late in the afternoon.
Libor, the Alpha of Prague, was a big man, not so much tall as massive. There was something more leonine than lupine about him. His features were of average attractiveness. He was neither beautiful nor ugly. It was a strong face and intelligent. He reminded me, superficially, of Bonarata, in that people would look at him and expect brutality and risk missing the intelligence altogether.
But Bonarata had been cold all the way to the bone. Any warmth I’d seen in him was an illusion created by a master manipulator.
Libor, my coyote informed me, was many things, but cold was not one of them. He smiled as I met his eyes and held them. His smile expected me to turn my gaze away and leave him in charge. His problem was that I had just had a few very bad days and was done with being vulnerable and lost. A minute passed. Two.
“You tread upon dangerous ground, Little Wolf,” he said softly.
“My apologies,” I said insincerely, without dropping my eyes. One of the cool things about my coyote is that dominance battles aren’t usually a problem for me. I could stare down just about anyone except for the Marrok himself. Libor wasn’t my Alpha, and I was just not going to give in.
After a moment, my brain kicked in. Staring down a werewolf was dumb. I’d spent my life trying not to be any dumber than I had to be.
After a few more heartbeats, during which time I acknowledged to myself that I was antagonizing someone I hoped to elicit help from, and being dumb with no end in sight, I said, “I’m trying for strong enough to pay attention to but polite enough not to cause a real fight. How am I doing?”
He lost his smile, which was good because it had become sharp around the edges, and he narrowed his eyes until I could feel his power beating at me angrily.
“As I said,” he told me, his voice as casual as his eyes were not, “dangerous. You should probably consider how . . . thrilled? Yes, that is the word. How thrilled I am to have the daughter of Bran’s heart here in my territory. It is something that gives me great pleasure.”
He didn’t look like a man who was pleased. He looked like a starving wolf who’d caught a glimpse of a wounded deer. “Pleased” was such a bland word for that emotion.
I tried to figure out how to answer him.
Death threats—and he had just issued one, if obliquely—are to be gotten through as lightly as possible. I’d noticed that if I paid too much attention to them, matters tended to proceed from bad to worse.
I was tired, and I’d hesitated too long to deny that Bran had treated me like a daughter, before he’d abandoned me and the pack for political reasons. Our pack was the only pack in North America not affiliated with the Marrok. We stuck out like a big sore thumb, and someday soon, someone was going to give in to curiosity and see what happened when they hit us—as they would not dare do to one of the packs under the Marrok.
I took a breath. Had I misread Bonarata? Had that been what he was doing? Did his kidnapping of me have nothing to do with Marsilia at all?
But Bonarata was in Italy, and I was sitting across the table from a werewolf I needed to pay attention to instead of playing my I-wonder-why-the-big-bad-vampire-took-me game.
I had missed my chance to claim that Bran didn’t care about me. Likely, Libor wouldn’t have believed my disclaimer anyway because I only mostly believed it. Bran hadn’t abandoned us because he didn’t love me anymore; he’d abandoned us because he had a Greater Cause, the survival of the werewolves, that he loved more.
So. Death threat.
It was likely that Libor didn’t intend to kill me unless I pushed him into it. First, Charles had sent me here. Though Charles maintained that he wasn’t good with people—which was true enough—it didn’t keep him from reading people pretty well. Second, and even more telling, I wasn’t already dead. Alpha werewolves don’t tend to be the kind of people who dither.
I realized I was watching my fingers tap on the table. At some time during my thinking process, I’d dropped my eyes to the table. It hadn’t been because I’d been intimidated, or at least I didn’t think so. But if I was going to get into a staring contest with a dominant wolf, I probably should have been paying more attention.
“I had heard that you and Bran weren’t on speaking terms,” I said. “So . . . you’d have killed me already, but you don’t want me to die before I satisfy your curiosity?” I hazarded lightly. Not afraid of the Big Bad Wolf—no, sir, not me. “You want to know what I’m doing, alone, in your territory and why I mentioned the Lord of Night?” I shrugged. “Otherwise, I’d probably be dead instead of fed good food and left to sleep in safety.”
He leaned back comfortably in his chair (it creaked alarmingly) and said nothing.
“I am here because of Bonarata,” I said blandly. “He kidnapped me about a mile from my home in the US. Apparently he was under the impression that I was the most powerful supernatural entity in the territory of his discarded mistress and One True Love. I think he’d forgotten all about her until recent events put the TriCities of Washington—state of—USA into national and international news. Reminded of his love, he chose to go after her by kidnapping me.” That was my current favorite theory. Or maybe it was a hit directed at Bran—or the pack. But I’d go with my first instinct. So I nodded as if he’d said something, and continued, “I know. It struck me as stupid, too. But I’m not an ageless vampire, so I’ll cut him some slack.”
“Are you?” Libor asked.
“Am I what?”
“The most powerful supernatural entity in the Tri-whatsit city?”
“I change into a coyote,” I countered. “That’s my superpower. What do you think?”
He’d been sarcastic with his question, but at my answer, he straightened ever so slightly and looked . . . intrigued.
“I had forgotten that about you,” he said slowly. “And I do not think that you have answered my question. Which I find very interesting. Are you the most powerful supernatural creature in your territory?”
I shrugged uncomfortably because I couldn’t lie to him. “Maybe,” I said. “Possibly. But not because of what I am. More because of who I know. I was raised in the Marrok’s pack. I’m mated to Adam Hauptman, who is Alpha of our pack, and not least among Alphas in the other packs. I have a friend who is fae—and he is someone even the Gray Lords don’t mess with.” They were looking for more pieces of one of the Gray Lords who had ticked Zee off. My informant (Tad) was pretty sure that they would find them all. Eventually.
“I have a friend in the human police department and another in the local vampire seethe.” I shrugged again. “Anyway, Bonarata was disappointed because he’d expected someone . . .” I tried to decide how to explain it.
“More powerful,” Libor supplied.
I shook my head. “Whose power wasn’t all in the people she knows. Intrinsic power.” I waved a hand vaguely down myself. “Stronger, at least. Anyway, he decided to engineer my failed escape during which I would conveniently die, and he could blame it on me—and humiliate my mate for failing to take care of me. Instead, I really did escape, hopped on a bus, and ended up here. Penniless. Friendless. And passportless.”
“Pathetic, in fact,” he said dryly.
I widened my eyes and nodded, answering the humor in his eyes with my own sincerity. “On the way here, I got pickpocketed. They stole half of my money. I have about two hundred koruna left.” That I had stolen first. Borrowed, really, since I intended to pay it back with interest, but borrowed without consent was, strictly speaking, theft.
“I’m about as pathetic as it gets,” I told him honestly.