52 
A DARK PLACE
You’d better go downstairs.” Ben Lafontaine smelled like gasoline and was covered with blood and clothes he’d taken off of a dead man.
I looked up. I was making burritos in the kitchen at the back of the school. There were a lot of werewolves doing a lot of healing who needed fuel, and Sig was hand-feeding Virgil food as fast as I could make it.
“I can take over here,” Ben said. He was tired. He’d been doing a lot of healing himself.
“You’re putting off gasoline fumes,” I reminded him. Ben was supposed to be soaking the school down with every flammable substance he could find. He wanted to burn the place down to cinders, and I didn’t have any argument.
“Oh. Yes.” Ben called for someone named Henry over his shoulder.
“What’s this about?”
Ben sighed heavily. He really didn’t want to talk about it. “There’s a reason the basement is soundproofed. It’s full of human women.”
My stomach muscles tightened involuntarily. I’d smelled the smells, but I’d assumed they belonged to former humans… scents of people who had recently been killed or were dead.
“Why?”
Somehow, Ben managed to look even more tired and worn-down. “All the women come from knight’s blood. A lot of them are pregnant.”
For a few seconds I stood there, wishing as hard as I’d ever wished anything that Bernard was alive again so I could… take deep breaths. “Then maybe I should get Sig or Tula to go down there.”
Ben shook his head. “This is knight business.”
I stared at him grimly. “I’m no knight.”
He didn’t blink. “Whatever you are, it will have to be enough.”
The female knight I’d seen at Abalmar greeted me at the foot of the stairs. Her left arm had been broken and crudely splinted with a broken board and strips made from torn clothing. She wasn’t putting weight on her right ankle. Her face was heavily bruised and swollen. I brought her a stack of some relatively clean clothes and a case of water bottles.
She was armed with a piece of pipe and covered only by ripped-out lengths of insulation wire wrapped around her chest and forearms and calves to make crude bracers. I couldn’t see any women… it sounded like they were huddled in the southeast corner of the room… but I could see several plain mattresses on the stone floor. No sheets. No pillows.
“We should be leaving in an hour or so,” I said. It had taken a while to hike outside the range of the ward and arrange transportation. We hadn’t anticipated having a lot of sick werewolves to move, because werewolves don’t get sick. “We’re letting you go when we do.”
She made no move toward the items I set on the stairs. Her eyes were unblinking and patient and savage. “You really are John Charming.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Bernard is dead.”
She saw me looking at the mattresses. “You’re not going to hold us hostage?”
“No,” I said.
“He’s been trying to make more werewolves like you.” Her voice was a monotone. “Artificially inseminating those of us who weren’t already pregnant. Waiting for us to near term so he could bite us and infect our human fetuses right before delivery.”
I didn’t respond. Bernard had been talking about looking for ways around the fact that werewolves couldn’t reproduce, and that was before I knew he was planning to start mass-producing werewolves.
“You’re really letting us go?” Her voice cracked momentarily.
“Yes.”
“I heard you make that fine speech in Abalmar.” Her voice had become a razor. “And then you turned me over to him.”
Emil had started this ball rolling when he threatened people I cared about. I had made the best decisions I could with what I knew. But I didn’t defend myself. I had turned her over to Bernard. And a lot of these women had probably been captured when I was identifying probable knight support networks in Milwaukee. Nothing I said was going to change that.
“If I bring you food and water, will you take them?” I asked.
“If we’re leaving in an hour or so?” I could almost hear her forehead hum with calculations and considerations. “No.”
“How many women do you need to transport?”
“How many of them can drive?”
She didn’t hesitate. “If they have to? All of them.”
I thought about it. “How about this? When we leave, I’ll leave you a working car and a cell phone and the GPS coordinates to this place. You or somebody else can drive out of the spell range and call the knights.”
Her face hardened. “So that we can lure them into another trap for you?”
I walked back up the stairs without taking my eyes off her. Armed or not, armored or not, injured or not, this was not someone to take lightly. “All right. I’ll find you three vehicles somehow.”