45

ARE WE THERE YET?

I woke up bound and gagged in the trunk of a car, silver steel chains locking my hands and feet into a fetal position and one of the knight’s shock collars around my neck. The back of my head was covered with dried blood. The trunk was only separated from the main body of the car by vinyl, some stuffing, and a thin layer of cardboard covered in fabric, and my eyes had mutated to see in infrared. I could see two warm glows where bodies were pressed against the backseat. Virgil was talking to Shane from the passenger’s side of the front, commenting on some crazy-looking woman who was driving past them, and there was music playing low on the car’s radio. Kelly Clarkson, actually, singing some song I recognized but couldn’t name. I don’t know why that seemed bizarre.

Everything was going according to plan.

They’d had to sedate me. Shane and his claw had werewolf senses, and just pretending to be asleep wasn’t going to cut it. I know something about meditation and have integrated skills from a lot of different martial arts too, but putting myself in some kind of trance that resembles suspended animation or hibernation is beyond me. So my friends had sedated me, but they’d sedated me lightly. The dried blood was from where I’d made a shallow slice in my scalp in a place that would bleed profusely. We’d wanted to make it look like Virgil had shot me in the back of the head with a lead bullet just to play it safe.

Shane and his claw were taking me to Bernard’s hideaway.

There was a key hidden in the spare tire, and it wasn’t hard to work my way loose. The werewolves in the car had enhanced hearing, but between the music, Virgil, and the degraded state of Wisconsin’s highways, I had a lot of background noise to cover me. I was rattling around in the trunk like a castanet, and I timed my biggest movements and clicks with passing trucks, of which there were many.

Gabriel was similarly bound in the other car.

The next hour passed like a kidney stone. I didn’t take off all of my chains. I just freed my limbs enough that I could reach out and verify that there was a sawed-off shotgun lying under a nearby blanket. The sedation the knights used on werewolves still gave me a bad case of cottonmouth, and my muscles were stiff and cramped. I would have sacrificed a pinky or a small toe just to be able to stretch.

Virgil kept up a steady stream of background noise, chatting as if unaware of how tense the other werewolves in the car were. He fiddled with the radio, found pretexts to call Tula, who was in the car behind us with two other werewolves, and kept up a running commentary on the cars we passed, the people driving them, the weather, the time of year, and the background music. The only thing I really paid any attention to was the description of the places we were passing. The car was headed for Milwaukee.

The amazing thing is, Virgil wasn’t annoying. I could feel the atmosphere decompress a little all the way from the trunk as the other passengers gradually relaxed, lulled by the banality and repetition of Virgil’s words over time and the complete ease with which he spoke them. You never would have guessed that Virgil thought they were planning to kill him.

Eventually, the density of traffic sounds and the quality of the roads changed. The car headed to some secluded rural place, first traveling over gravel roads and then dirt ones on the way there. Everything was still going to plan—not that it was much of a plan—until I heard Virgil ask, “Why are you messing with the GPS?”

There was an awkward pause. A werewolf’s sense of direction is about as close to infallible as anything contained in mere flesh can get, and Shane obviously hadn’t anticipated this question. It was a werewolf in the backseat who answered. “This place is real hush-hush. We’ve never been here before.”

I couldn’t make out his heartbeat over all the other background hums and thumps, but I didn’t have to do so to know he was lying.

“Yeah.” Shane sounded a little too grateful for the intervention. He was tough, six feet of coiled, curly-haired, hard-eyed muscle, but Shane was no actor.

That’s when I realized that we’d forgotten something. Something critical.

Using a GPS was one of the ways we’d worked out for getting past the hot zone back in Abalmar. Shane had probably turned on his GPS for the same reason that Bernard had stopped calling every half an hour or so. Mila Apraxin was waiting at our destination, and she had set up another hot zone. The problem with that was, Parth was remotely tracking us by hacking into the cars’ online GPS systems and sending the coordinates to Sig and Matthew and Ben Lafontaine. If the hideaway was behind one of Mila’s magical barriers, all of that would go offline and our reinforcements wouldn’t be able to follow us in.

Screw that.

I was already letting Shane’s claw drive me God knew where into God knew what surrounded by God knew how many guards while I was shut up in a lunchbox; I wasn’t doing it without backup. Risk I can handle. Even insane risk if the stakes are high enough. But I wasn’t committing outright suicide.

And with the GPS coordinates, I didn’t need Shane’s claw to show me where Bernard’s hideout was any longer, anyhow.

Change of plan.

We were on a gravel road, not going very fast, and I couldn’t hear any other cars except for the claw members following us. I grabbed the shotgun, pointed it at one of the warm red glows where the werewolves in the backseat were showing up on my infravision, and pulled one trigger, then moved the barrel slightly to the left and unloaded the other barrel.

The shotgun’s shells were a mix of lead pellets and small silver beads, and the blasts tore through the backseat and ripped into the werewolves while they were still shifting at the sound of my activity behind them.

I wished I’d remembered to bring earplugs.

The backseat of the car was filled with blood and feathery down and viscera as the car abruptly braked. I was hurled forward through the hole I’d made of the backseat, into the corpses of two werewolves and against the front seats where Virgil and Shane were wrestling. I fumbled through the chaos until I found a gun still holstered at the side of one of the dead werewolves.

Shane hadn’t managed to get his seat belt off, and his movements were hampered while Virgil managed to get him in a headlock. From there, it was over. Virgil used his greater body weight and leverage to snap Shane’s neck.

My body was still stiff, and being hurled through the car hadn’t helped. My leg circulation was impaired, and I still had chains tangled around me, and I actually fell out of the backseat while trying to fumble my way out of it. We were on some kind of rural road curving around a mountainside, and the car behind us had screeched to a halt in the middle of it. Gabriel had taken his cue and unloaded his own shotgun from the trunk, but Tula had not managed to subdue her driver. He was a large werewolf who looked like a linebacker.

One of my chains had snagged on something, and I lay on the road and tried to train my gun on the big head of Tula’s attacker. He and Tula were thrashing around frantically. Cursing, I lurched to my feet and wriggled out of my bonds and my legs buckled and dropped me to my hands and knees. There was a shot behind me, and then Virgil slammed a car door and walked past me. Part of his left ear was missing and the top of his left shoulder was ragged and bloody.

Tula was helpfully digging her thumbs into the large werewolf’s throat and pushing his head up above the dashboard when Virgil threw open the driver’s side door and shot him.

I didn’t give them much time to think or process. “You two need to go up opposite sides of the road and keep any cars from passing through while I get my circulation back,” I gasped. “Tell them there’s been an accident and the police are waiting for a tow truck.”

Virgil said something that I couldn’t hear through ruptured eardrums, but I could tell he saw the sense of what I’d said. The cars were a mess. Literally. So much so that it was kind of surreal. All around us, a thin layer of frost coated the trees on one side of the road and the embankment leading to a creek on the other. The air was heavy and still and sad and solemn. It was as if I were standing in the middle of an unintentionally somber Christmas card.

We hadn’t brought a lot of water or industrial-strength cleaners or rags, which was probably another oversight.

By the time Sig and Matthew and Ben pulled their vehicles up and parked as far to the side of the road as they could to join us, Gabriel and I were on our feet and moving down to the creek, taking shirts we’d removed from our victims to soak into the water.

Sig was driving a Honda Fit by herself, and Matthew was driving a Firebird with three werewolves that he still trusted in it. Ben was driving a moving van whose storage area was full of Anishinaabe warriors.

One of the werewolves Matthew had brought along took one whiff of the inside of the cars, saw what I was doing, and vomited. I briefly explained why the plan had gotten yanked sideways.

“How far away do you think we are?” Sig was looking around nervously.

“If there’s a hot zone, we’re about twenty miles away from it, according to the GPS.”

But Sig wasn’t nervous about being near Bernard’s lair. My forearms began to break into gooseflesh and my neck tensed. The temperature around us was dropping and wisps of mist were beginning to gather in response as hot and cold air currents collided. My heart was beginning to pump blood faster in a fight-or-flight response.

Ghosts were in the air.