37

IF YOU WANT TO CLEAN UP, YOU HAVE TO GET YOUR HANDS DIRTY

The sun was coming up and I was starving, but I was standing on the stairs of the Apraxins’ porch, and I wasn’t eating or drinking anything that came from that damned house. A Heckler and Koch USP Tactical Compact pistol that I’d taken off of a dead knight was holstered by my side. There were only eight bullets in its magazine, but they were all silver. I was afraid that I was going to need every single one of them.

Kneeling or lying in the yard in front of the porch were nine bound and gagged knights whose lives we had been able to salvage. Some of them were burned or broken or listless after being heart-started, although I know that’s not a real phrase.

One of the knights was a woman. A woman in full combat gear. I couldn’t see much of her—a werewolf had undone her braids while searching for needles and picks, and her shoulder-length black hair hid everything except high, chiseled cheekbones and angry hazel eyes—but she must have been fierce in spirit to have made it to that yard among those men. It was a sign of how desperate things must be getting for the knights if they were willing to overcome their insistence on women being good little knight-breeding factories.

Behind the knights stood twenty-five werewolves facing me. We had lost eleven of our number during the raid. Brett, Matthew’s second-in-command, was not one of them.

“What are we waiting for?” he said belligerently.

“Your wife,” I said.

He thought I was saying that the same way I might have said “Your mom,” but I was actually watching Virgil pull up into the hot zone in a large U-Haul. Barbara Ann, Stacy, and Carl were all crammed into the wide front seat with him.

We were going to trank the knights and send them to Bernard in that U-Haul, but I wanted them as witnesses first.

Barbara Ann made her way to Brett’s side. She tried to take his hand, and he moved it away before settling his fingers next to his sidearm again. Not my gun hand, woman. Maybe he was smarter than he looked.

“This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you that we won a victory today,” I addressed the small crowd. “But we didn’t. Someone warned the Apraxins that an attack was coming, and the real Butcher of Abalmar got away.”

The werewolves rumbled at that. The backs of those knights with intact spines stiffened, and their eyes rose up to look at me. Brett opened his mouth but Barbara Ann dug her nails into his forearm.

I held up a small envelope with my left hand and they quieted down. I hadn’t had to search very hard for it. “The letter that went with this envelope is gone, but this was mailed to the Apraxins’ house two days ago. They didn’t bother to burn it or hide it because they’re not used to thinking like wolves.”

I took a deep whiff of the envelope. This was pure theatrics, but it made my point. “Do you want to tell me exactly what you had to say to a bunch of child-sacrificing witches, Brett? Barbara Ann?”

Matthew turned slowly and alertly toward Brett as if he’d just heard a snake rattle. “Brett?”

Brett moved suddenly, and I shot over a kneeling knight and put a bullet in Brett’s forehead. Just because we were both werewolves didn’t mean we were equally fast any more than all humans are equally fast.

If the wards around the Apraxin house could divert people’s attention away from all the noise we’d made last night, I wasn’t going to worry about my handgun.

“Everybody chill!” Matthew screamed, but the wiry blond kid from Mathew’s claw ignored him and also rushed for his gun. The kid was fumbling and panicking, though, and he lost the pistol while it was clearing his holster, actually tossing it into the air in front of him. It took three shots before I put a bullet in his brain, just because he was jumping around so much while people were running about trying to get out of the firing zone.

I didn’t shoot the three other werewolves who tried to draw on me, though. Two of them were killed by Gabriel and Tula, firing from the second-story windows of the house. If the two werewolves were part of a conspiracy, they really should have established where the rest of my claw was before trying anything. If they were just reacting to the sudden violence by drawing on me, they really should have stayed out of it.

The third one was shot by Matthew, who walked up calmly and shot the man point-blank in the head while he was trying to train a Magnum on the second-floor windows. “I SAID CHILL!”

Barbara Ann screamed and started to raise her hand to point at me, but perhaps from Gabriel’s vantage point, all he saw was her arm coming up. He shot her through the side of her temple, at any rate.

It took a minute for everyone to quiet down after the last bullet was fired. The crowd was no longer a throng but people spread out all over the yard, some out on the street, crouching behind whatever cover they could find or huddled or lying on the ground.

“LISTEN TO ME!” Matthew yelled, still holding his gun, though it was down at his side. “THERE HAS GOT TO BE A LINE! AND NO CLAN OF MINE IS STANDING BEHIND PEOPLE WHO KILL CHILDREN!”

He looked around. “Anybody else want to join this debate?”

No one did.

Matthew addressed me then. “You got anything else you wanted to tell us, John?”

I wanted to say that it was a pleasure to meet him, but I didn’t. “That about covers it,” I said.

After a moment, he nodded.