40

PUTTING THE HELL IN HELLO

I take it back,” Sig said. “There’s no way I’d be in another situation as screwed up as this one if I hadn’t come to see you. You have a real gift.”

I didn’t respond. God knows, I get gallows humor. I can joke in a lot of situations where I probably shouldn’t, but right then I wasn’t in the mood. Grief had turned to anger, and I was wearing that anger like armor. We were walking back up past the Apraxin house, the bodies of dead knights still lying in the ground beneath our feet. They might not have been good men, but they were men, and they had been swallowed like bitter pills or passing bugs. Swallowed like truths that no one wanted to say or hear.

I needed to talk to Gabriel.

“You’re not going to do something stupid, are you?” Sig kept her tone conversational. She was so full of it, talking to me about acting stupid. Her sword was sheathed between her shoulders and she was carrying her spear at her side one-handed, and she was walking beside me when she should have been running as fast and as far as she could in the other direction.

It was kind of the way I’d been around her in Clayburg, come to think of it.

“The smart thing to do is nothing,” I answered bitterly.

Sig mulled that over. “Okay. So, how stupid are we talking here?”

“I haven’t worked that out yet,” I responded. “But if you’re going to do something wrong, you might as well do it right.”

Sig touched my arm, not punching it for once. “I’m serious. I’m letting you take the lead here because this is your turf and you know the players, but you need to cool down.”

We had reached the street. “What the hell?”

Sig looked around warily. “What?”

Nikolai was waiting for me outside the hot zone, him and Gabriel and maybe a whole claw I’d never seen before. The crowd had thinned out a little over the last few hours, but not much, and I could smell werewolves in the air. Virgil should have been back by now, but there was no sign of him or Stacy or Tula or Carl or Matthew or Boone.

Nikolai and Gabriel were standing beside the Apraxins’ mailbox, and I moved behind them, staring at the backs of their skulls from less than a foot away. I might as well have been on another continent.

“She could call me with a burner phone,” Gabriel was saying.

“Talk about this later,” Nikolai commanded tersely.

Nikolai hadn’t been around Gabriel for a while; maybe he’d forgotten that when Gabriel wanted to say something, he said something. “I don’t care who hears this. You can’t keep me from talking to my sister.”

“The knights have hit squads all over Milwaukee right now. If they can’t hurt Bernard, they’ll go after his mate,” Nikolai growled. “Catherine is incommunicado.”

“Then take me to her,” Gabriel said.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Nikolai said impatiently. “She’s on the move and not telling anyone where she is for the next few days, not even me. It’s the only way to keep her safe.”

Sig interrupted my eavesdropping. “What’s going on?”

“Keep yourself between these guys and the house,” I directed, motioning her next to me. “That’s where the effects of the ward are strongest.”

Sig followed my lead and repeated, “What’s going on?”

“This big guy is Nikolai Sokolov.” I nodded at Nikolai absently, still half listening to him argue with Gabriel about the importance of keeping Catherine’s location completely secret. “He’s Bernard’s troubleshooter, and he’s brought some extra muscle along.”

Sig moved beside me. “I still can’t get used to these people not hearing us. Why is he just waiting out here?”

“They hear us, but it’s like we’re the background hum of an air conditioner,” I said. “And nobody’s standing here to help them across. Or maybe Nikolai is taking my warning about spirits being set loose seriously.”

Sig nodded at that. “I would.”

“Yeah, but you have a lot of personal experience,” I agreed. “I wonder if Nikolai does.”

Sig bared her teeth. It was wolflike. “Maybe your friend Nikolai is taking evil spirits seriously because he knows exactly what a scary bitch this Mila Apraxin is.”

“Maybe,” I said. “The real question is why he’s here at all. Where are all the locals and the rest of my claw? Why isn’t Virgil back yet?”

Sig didn’t like where that was leading. “He’s isolating you.”

Nikolai rubbed the back of his neck where I was staring at it. I wondered if the two things were connected. He and Gabriel had lapsed into a sullen silence.

“Possibility One,” I speculated. “There’s been some kind of emergency. Bernard is dead, or there’s been a major knight attack or something, and Nikolai couldn’t reach me by phone because we’ve been in the hot zone for hours. So he came here personally.”

Sig frowned. “You said he brought help.”

I began to walk down the line where people were gathered against the ward, pointing my index finger at werewolves as I went. “I can’t really think of an emergency that would explain this, though. Let’s say Bernard has been assassinated. Nikolai would just call a local werewolf who wasn’t in the hot zone and have them send for me. He wouldn’t spend hours in a car to come get me. I’m just not that important. He sure as hell wouldn’t stand around waiting with a full claw doing nothing in the middle of a crisis. Same with a knight attack, or some monster popping up that the Clan wants me to handle.”

Sig took her spear in both hands and held it like a bo staff.

“If this was a real emergency, he wouldn’t be standing here waiting,” I continued. “And if it weren’t, he wouldn’t have come personally. The only thing that kind of makes sense is if some local thing has come up that Nikolai wants to handle personally, and he wants my help with it.”

Sig examined Nikolai and Gabriel critically. “So what’s Possibility Two?”

She already knew.

“My time in Abalmar is almost up,” I said. “Maybe Mila Apraxin really is helping Phoenix with his magical research now, and Nikolai knows me well enough to know that I won’t sit still for that. He knows about my geas too. He knows I won’t stop looking for the bitch.”

“Don’t forget Mila Apraxin might have some say in it,” Sig reminded me. “You killed some of her Baba Yaga personally, right?”

“I shot the Day Horseman while she watched through a mirror,” I said. “He might have even really been her husband. I killed the Sun Horseman too.”

“If she’s really working for this Bernard now, your death might be her price,” Sig guessed.

My mind stopped working for a few seconds. For some reason, the idea that the Clan would sell me out to an outsider was more upsetting than the idea that they might kill me as a matter of clan policy. Wolf instincts again? I worked my teeth silently, baring and gnashing them.

Sig pulled me back. “If any of this is true, this Nikolai doesn’t know you suspect them yet.”

I agreed. “This whole pack instinct thing has been messing with my head. I’m only suspicious now because of what you just told me, and I still don’t want to believe it.”

Sig focused on Nikolai. “Or you could just be paranoid because of the mind-set I put you in. We don’t have any proof.”

I shrugged, though I really wasn’t feeling all that nonchalant. “Nikolai does Bernard’s dirty work. Sending everyone else away makes sense if I’m the problem he’s here to deal with. Nikolai has always thought I was dangerous. He wouldn’t trust anyone else to handle me.”

“What would you be doing right now if I hadn’t shown up?” Sig still hadn’t taken her eyes off Nikolai. In fact, she was staring at the place between his shoulder blades where his heart would line up, sighting on it in a way that made me want to adjust his life insurance premiums. “If you were still clueless, I mean.”

“I’d be bringing Nikolai over here to talk,” I admitted. “My first instinct would be to worry that something seriously bad had happened.”

“So you’d be alone with him and six other werewolves,” Sig said. “In a magically warded place where none of the people who have grown to care about you could see or hear what they did.”

My voice went down a few octaves. It was coming from deep in my chest, almost choking in my throat. “Yes.”

“So what are we…” Sig paused as I removed the USP Tactical Compact pistol. It was a good gun, and I was getting used to it.

“Do you trust me?” I asked.

“Yes?”

I shot Nikolai in the back of the head.

My left hand was reaching for his collar even while my right hand pulled the trigger, and I yanked Nikolai across the ward as he started to collapse.

Gabriel began to turn. He had caught Nikolai’s movement, but when he moved to track it… Where had Nikolai… Was that blood on that guy’s…

I shot Gabriel in the back of the head too, and yanked his body into the hot zone an instant later.

Sig stared at the two men lying on the street. She was the only person who was. The sound of the gun had originated on my side of the wards. “Does that gun have silver bullets?”

“No, I put a regular clip in it,” I assured her as I walked down to the next clan member in line. “They’ll wake up when their brain tissue heals and pushes the bullets back out.”

The fourth and fifth ones were also easy. The sixth one was farther into the crowd, and I had to walk past the hot zone to get him.

“Come on.” I motioned to him. “Nikolai wants me to help you across the ward, since it doesn’t affect me.”

The sixth werewolf was burly and bearded and young, and he looked around wildly. “Where…”

I sighed and pointed straight at the Apraxin house. “Over there. He’s waving at you to hurry up.”

He squinted as if that would help. He thought he was turning his neck far enough to see the house, but he wasn’t. “I can’t…”

“Is something wrong?” I looked at him suspiciously.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he assured me hastily. “Magic just freaks me out. What do I have to do?”

I led him to the line and got behind him. “I just have to push you across. Ready?”

“I…”

I shoved him over the ward with my right hand, hard, stepping behind him and shooting him in the back of the head with my left while he was still regaining his balance. The last claw member, a young up-and-comer named Shane, wandered over to the edge of the hot zone to see where we’d gone. His hand was on a gun butt somewhere under his coat.

A moment later, he was lying across his friend and I was checking the bullets in their magazine clips. They were silver. An entire claw armed with werewolf-killing weapons.

Sig surveyed the bodies. “That was easier than I was expecting.”

“It’s about to get a lot harder,” I said reluctantly. “And you’re going to have to let me handle the next part alone, Sig. This is clan business.”