30

THIS LITTLE PIG WENT TO MARKET

There’s probably something ironic about werewolves gathering in the back of a Piggly Wiggly, but it worked for us. This particular grocery store was open twenty-four hours a day, and the entire night crew was made up of clan members, or members of their normal human families who were in the know, including the cleaning service that came in independently to do the floors. God help anyone who came in and tried to rob the place at 3 a.m.

“We’ve identified six hot zones just by having people drive around with their cell phones on continually.” Stacy was an intensely private woman, stocky and pale-skinned and radiating a kind of quiet authority. She had no combat capabilities and no interest in gaining them, and I could see how Matthew had fallen into a trap. After knowing her for a week, I was completely dependent on her. Administration and delegation and management aren’t my thing.

They actually weren’t Stacy’s thing, either—or at least, no more than they are for any elementary school teacher. She had taught third graders B.C. (Before Clan)—but I would never have guessed she wasn’t some kind of career civic leader. Matthew was scarier and kept people in line, but Stacy kept the trains running on time, so to speak. She didn’t have an official title.

“How come people haven’t noticed?” I wondered.

“Most of the zones aren’t places where people live or work.” Stacy dipped four potato chips at a time in some kind of salsa. I’ve probably mentioned this before, but werewolves love to eat, which was another advantage to meeting in a grocery store. The plastic-topped table we were sitting around was loaded with bear claws and cheese balls and crackers and salami wedges and assorted nuts and steaming beverages. “They’re just-passing-through kinds of places. Except for one.”

I was actually looking at the exception on the map she had given me. “This is excellent work, Stacy. Thank you.”

I meant it. It would have taken me a month to make that map, walking boundaries and recording times on my own, and Stacy had gotten it done in a few days. Whoever we were chasing was using some kind of Turn Away ward to perform their ritual dissections. The Abalmar Butcher wasn’t just invoking the Pax—the butcher was making people avoid specific locations for hours at a time without even manifesting an obvious threat. One alley in particular had been a thoroughfare, and cars had driven by the alley without even thinking about turning into it. People who lived above the alley hadn’t heard any screams. A store security camera facing the alley had gone on the fritz two hours before Caitlin Akers even went missing, and stayed that way for another four.

In other words, someone skilled in apotropaic magic had been making some serious preparations.

“What is this map about?” Barbara Ann asked. She was sitting across me, sort of pretty but overly made up. Her black hair had been tightly confined by a stylist and her body was tightly confined by clothes that were too small for her. Barbara Ann liked to ask questions about what everyone else was doing so that she could explain how it was her idea later.

“It’s about putting yourself in the place of your opponent,” I said. “This killer is probably doing some heavy-duty magical activity in the area.”

“How do you know that?” Barbara Ann demanded.

“These girls are being used in multiple divination ceremonies.” I was being patient, but only because being impatient wouldn’t have gained me anything. “Someone who uses magic has big plans, and they’re trying to reverse-figure something out by trying different things and seeing how their experiments impact the future.”

Barbara Ann’s face stayed blank.

“They also know that people like me are looking for them,” I said. “They can’t afford to draw attention from nosy neighbors or passing motorists or door-to-door missionaries or neighborhood watches.”

Stacy cut to the chase. “John thinks they’ve set up one of their wards around their base. And the ward interferes with cell phone reception. I’ve had people driving around with their cell phones on, recording times and places where the cell phones went dead.”

Barbara Ann started to say something else but I cut her off, addressing Stacy again. “Can you tell your people to look out for the smell of dillweed too? It’s really strong and bitter, and I caught traces of it at all of the crime scenes.”

Stacy scrunched her brows. “Can I get some from a local store to let them smell it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But if you can, it would be worth it to get a look at those stores’ invoices.”

I glanced over at Carl, whose age was hard to assess. He was eighteen years old when he became a werewolf, was twenty-six now, still looked fifteen, and dressed like he was fifty. His conservative suits and sweater-vests were always immaculately groomed. Like Stacy, he was a steadfast noncombatant and somewhat of an outcast because of it. “Hey, Carl, can I see the map you made of the places where the bodies were found?”

“You could, but…” Carl held up whatever the latest electronic notebook was called and shrugged helplessly.

Clan policy was that members change back and forth from wolves to humans before any meetings so that the magically charged atmosphere would keep anyone from remotely turning cell phones and computers into surveillance devices. But Carl was from Generation Text and was having a hard time adjusting to a world where technology wasn’t a constant. It was like I’d asked him not to rely too much on oxygen.

“Here.” Stacy had already dug through her notes and found a printout.

“Marry me,” I said. “We’ll have agendas and raise a bunch of issues together.”

She laughed. “No, thanks.”

“Then would you marry Carl?”

“I don’t plan on marrying anyone in the Clan.” The humor went out of Stacy’s eyes. “I shouldn’t have to.”

After a moment, I tilted my chin to let her know I got it. From what I’d seen, all the primary leaders in the Clan were male, and women became secondary leaders by mating with them, whether this actually qualified them to lead or not. Barbara Ann was only at the meeting because she had achieved status by marrying Brett, Matthew’s childhood friend and second-in-command. I could have told her to go away, but Matthew was acting more like he was the sheriff and I was a visiting FBI agent than like I was the new man in charge, and I was okay with that attitude until I knew more.

If Brett really was ambitious and looking for ways to get Matthew to fail so that he could take over—and I still believed this to be the case, despite Matthew’s assurances—then I was willing to bet that Barbara Ann was the reason for Brett’s designs. She seemed like the type who would play Lady Macbeth to a macho but easily manipulated husband.

The Clan was kind of feudalistic in structure, come to think of it.

“Thanks again, Stacy.” I marked the hot zone Stacy had identified on the abduction map, and it pretty much confirmed what I’d visualized. The suburban area where cell phones consistently didn’t work was in the middle of the places where people had gone missing. Not directly in the center, and not forming a magical symbol or anything as far as I could see, but in the middle nonetheless.

“Why are we focusing on this mess?” Barbara Ann tended to sulk when she wasn’t the center of attention. “Aren’t we in the middle of a war?”

“If you’re thinking of some scenario where all the werewolves and all the knights meet on a big battlefield and go at it and kill each other in one big fight, then no.” I took the opportunity to grab a thick, soft pretzel. “We’re more like two groups spread out and knife-fighting in the dark.”

“That’s why we should be making alliances with other magical beings against the knights,” Barbara Ann snapped. “Not attacking them!”

“That’s an opinion,” I said carefully. “What’s a fact is that I am not allying myself with something that kills young girls and removes their entrails for some kind of ceremony.”

Barbara Ann started to respond angrily, and Stacy said, quietly, “Me either.” Barbara Ann paused. Stacy didn’t say things like that.

“Or me,” Carl chipped in.

Barbara Ann lost whatever momentum she was trying to build up. “I wasn’t saying we should all become serial killers!”

It was moments like this that kept me in the Clan. “Let’s talk about all of the werewolves pouring into Wisconsin.”

“Let’s not.” Stacy laughed. “Please? I’d like to get home in a few hours.”

“Where are we?” I insisted.

“We’re getting new arrivals every week,” Stacy said. “And those are people who are already werewolves. That doesn’t count the new werewolves that some of them are creating when they get here.”

“Give me a new werewolf any day.” Carl was munching on a bear claw. “We’re getting entire packs and families who are more loyal to each other than us.”

“Even them I can handle,” Stacy groused. “The lone wolves are the worst. You can’t tell the old-timers anything. They think they’re here to fight a war, but none of them want to follow orders.”

“Some of the new arrivals are being blackmailed to spy on us by the knights,” I said. “We’ve seen a lot of that in Milwaukee.”

“But that’s the whole problem!” Stacy elaborated. “We don’t have the resources to handle this. If we take the time we need to check them out, the new wolves are running around unsupervised. If we try to house them and feed them and hide them and train them while we vet them, we create a big honking target again, and where’s the money going to come from?”

The subtext here was that Matthew didn’t want to deal with any of this. Matthew was like the slob who lives with a woman but won’t help clean the house and doesn’t like being nagged about it. Stacy was the housewife who was getting increasingly unhappy and passive-aggressive.

“I’ll tell you what we need to do.” Barbara Ann jumped in again. “We need to start turning more civil administrators into werewolves. More police officers too. And some wealthy people while we’re at it…”

“Eight out of ten people bitten by werewolves don’t survive their first full moon, Barbara Ann,” I reminded her. “You’re talking murder.”

“Ten out of ten people don’t survive life!” Barbara Ann had a gleam in her eye when she said this. “Anyone would risk it all if they had a one-in-five chance of living for centuries.”

Just as a way of highlighting how messed up life is, Barbara Ann was a hospital administrator. I don’t know if that’s a comment on hospitals, administrators, or Barbara Ann.

“I think people will notice if we start killing four politicians or cops every time we want to recruit one,” I pointed out. “Or killing one multimillionaire, much less four.”

“So we cast our net wide,” Barbara Ann said. “They don’t all have to be locals.”

I gestured around the room and tried again. “Look around. There are four of you here with me. According to you, I should kill all four of you if it would make the next person to come along useful. And that’s assuming millionaires would automatically give up all their money to the Clan just because they became werewolves in the first place. Once people caught on to what we were doing, we’d be just as likely to make new enemies as new friends.”

“Spoilsport,” Gabriel said from where he was sitting in the corner.

“What if all four of us were going to die if you didn’t make some hard choices anyway?” Barbara Ann’s voice was getting shriller.

I swallowed a particularly chewy lump of pretzel. “I don’t know, Barbara Ann. But you just got my vote for person-I’d-least-want-to-be-stranded-in-a-life-boat-with.”

Barbara Ann scowled. “I thought knights were supposed to be hard-asses.”

“I kill dangerous monsters who threaten the Pax, Barbara Ann.” My voice and manner were pleasant. “If I ever decide you’re one, you won’t survive the experience.”

Her mouth opened and Gabriel interrupted. “I’ve seen him when he gets like this. You’d be better off quitting now.”

Calculation washed over Barbara Ann’s face and receded like a wave over a beach shore. Whether she believed me or not, she didn’t want to get into it with the brother of Bernard’s mate.

Stacy intervened. “I’ve been thinking about getting someone in the Clan to start a homeless shelter. From what I understand, we’d have some discretion about who we let in as long as we kept our beds filled, and our people could run off anyone who wasn’t a werewolf quickly. It would be tax-free, and we could house and feed a lot of people cheap and off the grid while Matthew trains and vets them. Plus, we wouldn’t have to worry about making a profit for the IRS.”

Carl hesitated before making the transition. “Even if that weren’t crazy, it would still cost a lot of money we don’t have.”

“I actually have some discretionary funds that I don’t think I’m going to have to use now.” I wrote a number on Stacy’s notepad. “I think it’s a good idea. Do you think this would get you started?”

Stacy looked at the figure and her mouth tightened. Was she angry that I had that kind of money at my disposal while she was begging for scraps, or was her mind already thinking about how much work would be involved? “It would help.”

“At the very least, it’s worth looking into,” I said. “You could get donations from werewolves with jobs too, and volunteers to work on construction and such. You keep complaining that we’re not enough of a community here.”

“Earl Dylan would probably head it for you,” Carl said thoughtfully, getting on board. “He keeps making noise about wanting a religious service for werewolves. I’ll bet he’d help if he got a chance to offer an optional service. He’d probably be good at getting donations from businesses and churches too.”

I looked at Carl. “I don’t like the idea of taking money that might go to actual homeless people, personally. But Earl is a good idea.”

Stacy’s expression became contemplative. “I’ll start asking around if you’ll stop threatening to kill people.”

I looked at Barbara Ann and smiled grimly. “I was just making a point.”

Barbara Ann flushed. Her voice shook with shame and fury. “Do you have a task for me, master?”

“No,” I said.

Barbara Ann abruptly stood up and walked out of the room. She didn’t stalk. She was retaining dignity. I nodded at Gabriel, and he quietly unsheathed a knife and slipped out of the room after her.

Okay, no, I didn’t. And no, he didn’t. Dammit.

Stacy waited until Barbara Ann was out of hearing. It took a while.

“That was kind of gratifying, but you need to stop making points that way if you want me to work with you,” Stacy said darkly. “We get enough of that from Matthew.”

“I do want to work with you,” I told her. “I need your help, and you’re great. But it’s way too easy to talk about killing people when you’re not the one who has to do it or see it up close.”

“You seem to talk about it easily enough.” Stacy’s lips were tight.

“Maybe that’s why it’s a sensitive subject.” I tapped the map. “I’m about to try to kill someone for real. I worry that it’s getting too easy for me.”

Stacy held my eyes, then nodded quietly. “I believe that. You’ve been a nice surprise for the most part.”

“Listening to some coward who will never take any risks…” I shook my head, unable to find the right words and unable to quit trying. “I mean, yeah, right now, Barbara Ann is a blowhard, but tapping into anger and fear is an easy way to get power. I’m old enough to remember when we imprisoned Japanese-American citizens during World War II, and the Jim Crow laws, and Hiroshima, and the McCarthy hearings. This stuff isn’t just theoretical to me.”

“You’ve convinced me.” Carl made a pistol out of his hand and acted like he was sighting down his index finger at me. “The next time somebody shoots their mouth off, I’m going to shoot their mouth off.”

Carl was a bit of a smart-ass. I liked him.

I laughed reluctantly and held up my hands in surrender. “Fine. But listening to some sociopath go on about killing people just because they’re not like us… I didn’t sign up for that.”

Gabriel spoke up unexpectedly. “That’s easy for you to say. But as the only one here who grew up as a conquered people? Personally, I’d rather be on the winning side than the right one this time.”

I didn’t have anything profound to say to that.