Cool Hand (29 page)

“And look how well I’m doing,” snarked the little demon that lives in my throat.

That glimmer of humor made me snort. The fangs went away.

I bent my head and kissed her neck, just where I would have bitten.

She jumped at the touch and then laughed, realizing I was teasing.

“Thank you,” I said and let her go.

We got back in the truck.

“I’m sorry, Van,” I said. “That was shit you didn’t need from me.”

Savannah nodded jerkily, still trembling. Great. Now, along with Keith, I was somehow going to have to convince Savannah to trust me. If I survived—and managed to get Diana back—I was going to have a lot of fences to mend.

“Here’s the thing,” I went on. “Ben, I have to put you on a bus to Denver. I’ve done what I can for you, and I think you’ll be fine with a couple of days’ rest. I’m not sure whether they’d let me put you on the Greyhound unless someone goes with you.”

“I need to call—”

“I hear you. Listen, I’m going to have to call Felix tonight. You give me a contact number. I’ll get him to call your alpha. Felix can judge what to share. I’m guessing that’ll to carry more weight.”

He nodded reluctantly. Tullah gave him a pen and paper.

“Now, I’ve given a commitment to Zane, so what you heard in that room stays with you until I say otherwise. I’m not sure why Zane’s so touchy about it, but that’s not for you to be wondering about.”

I let a little of my alpha wolf bubble up. The guy had submitted to me. That didn’t make me his alpha, but it gave me some hold over him.

“You got the right, ma’am.” He ducked his head.

“Amber,” I said.

He managed a smile, but I thought it’d be a while before I got an Amber out of him.

I turned to Claude.

“Will you go with him, please, Claude?”

Savannah started to protest, and he looked nervously from me to her.

“What about Van?” he said.

“I need her as an introduction, if we can catch up with Romero and it turns out he hasn’t gone Basilikos as well.”

“Um. Boss.” Ben tried the name carefully. Of course his wolf ears had heard what Tullah called me. “I can make it to Denver okay on my own. If you’ve got a ski cap or something I can pull down, no one’s going to notice. It’s going to be the late bus. You wouldn’t believe the state of some people on those buses.”

I laughed.

“We’re running out of time.” Tullah checked her watch.

“Okay, okay,” I conceded. “
If
we can get you on alone.”

Ben was right. The man in the ticket booth barely glanced at him, and the driver was busy helping people load suitcases. Ten minutes later we waved Ben goodbye.

As we drew away from the station, I had Tullah stop and I got out.

All my earlier efforts to prevent the Albuquerque Were from seeing the Hill Bitch had failed.

The Troll who’d been trying to watch without us knowing looked embarrassed I’d made him, but he had the balls not to bolt. I gave him the GPS I’d taken from the Warders who’d come to kill Savannah.

“The routes logged in here might show you where the Warders are hiding in Albuquerque,” I said.

His eyes went wide and he stuttered thanks before leaping onto a Harley and smoking tires back to the Calle.

I grinned to myself. He was probably supposed to wait until he saw us leaving, but then maybe the GPS information would be more important. I hoped so.

Tullah turned the Hill Bitch east to leave Albuquerque for the Turquoise Trail.

Tullah drove and I worked the cellphone. Claude fell asleep leaning on his sister, but Savannah looked like she was pinching herself to stay awake. And watching me.

I called home first. There wasn’t time to cruise the streets and leech off unprotected internet signals, so I used one of the encrypting phones Tullah had brought. I was calling Manassah, so the phone system there would cooperate to make this a secure line.

Despite how late it was, Alex answered immediately. David and Pia were in the background.

“Jen?” I asked immediately.

“Nothing yet.” His voice was quiet in a way that told me he was barely controlling his emotions. He wasn’t a happy wolf. Pack and House had blurred together, so as alpha, I guessed Jen’s safety was his responsibility too.

Frustration soured my mind. There was nothing I could do about the situation in Denver from here. There might be nothing I could ever do. This was the Athanate world, the one I’d just been telling Savannah to accept. I’d made a decision. Jen had made a decision. Suck it up.

Instead, I told him what had happened earlier.

Whatever other problems Alex had were driven out by his reactions to the danger I’d put myself in and what I’d found out at the Calle. It took a while to persuade him to stay in Denver. It helped that I was already on the road out of Albuquerque. It didn’t help that I was heading into Santa Fe territory.

“Hopefully, I won’t need to go into Santa Fe itself at all,” I said. “I keep thinking, if Zane isn’t so crazy, then maybe the Santa Fe alpha isn’t either.”

“That reputation for violence? That’s not just rumor, Amber.” Anger was seeping into his voice.

I had to push onward. We were both angry and it wasn’t achieving anything.

“Yeah. But why do you think they put such an effort into it?” I said. “And why’re they so sensitive about secrecy?”

He grunted. “I don’t know. I’ve heard of packs that were weak and tried to hide behind a reputation for violence. Packs that form associations can be defensive about it, because it might look as if they’re weak.”

“Confederation doesn’t have that problem.”

“I’m not saying it’s reasonable.” Alex snapped.

I couldn’t put into words the difference between the image everyone had of the Albuquerque Were, and the
feeling
I had from meeting them. Zane and Team Troll could tear you apart; Rita
would
tear you apart, and she’d do it with that dreamy, detached look on her face—but they wouldn’t do it indiscriminately.

Once I’d gotten past the rabid, psychopathic front, I decided I liked the Albuquerque Were. That was probably not a sane thing for a werewolf to admit. How was I going to explain it to Alex? Let alone Felix.

Long before that, I had more immediate explaining to do.

“So, in the end, I had to agree to a limited association with Albuquerque. We can visit them and they can visit us. And part of that bargain is for Felix to look after Ben, who’s on his way by Greyhound.” I paused.

I’d messed Alex around. I’d left him in Denver waiting by the telephone while things happened around him and there were dangers to pack and House. That wasn’t a good place for a werewolf, much less an alpha.

“Can you pick the cub up from the station and take him out to Coykuti?” I tried one last request, meekly.

“No,” Alex said. “I can’t, and I can’t wait for Jen to come home.” His voice sounded choked and I could almost feel the grip of his hand crushing the telephone. “Amber, I’ve got to go out there now.”

“Alex, what’s happening?” I said, and before he answered I knew.

“Olivia. Ricky’s taken her out there to Felix. It’s getting close, Amber.”

The sudden silence on the line was shocking.

Why take Olivia to Felix? Because I’d let her down.
Alex and I were her alphas, but I was away chasing other problems and I’d landed Alex in the middle of those problems as well. Olivia had joined our pack from Felix’s and now we’d failed her. Her only option was to go back.

I felt sick.

“Alex?”

“I’m going now, Amber. I’ve got to,” he said. “Call Coykuti as soon as you have a secure line.”

There was a muffled noise and then David spoke. “Hi, Amber.”

“Alex has gone?”

“Yeah. Look, I don’t really know all the background, but Olivia going out to Coykuti isn’t just about you not being here.”

David always saw things others wouldn’t. He knew me, and that meant he knew how bad I was feeling.

“Felix is hoping that having her around will send a message to the rest of the pack that he’s okay with her being in a sub-pack,” David went on, and slowed. “And I guess he’s also saying that getting her through her first change is more important than exactly where she is in the pack structure. He’s doing what he can. There’s a little time.”

“Thanks,” I said.

It was up to me to do the rest, if I could, in whatever the ‘little time’ turned out to be.

“I have something on Jaworski’s hideout,” he said.

I sighed. Just what I’d taught him to do: he was getting me to focus on what I could achieve now.

“You found it?”

“Maybe. It’s my best guess, anyway. I’ll send you an email with the details. Hold on. Just downloading some more satellite photos.”

There was a pause.

“Yeah. This feels right. Reasonably big place, all by itself, long way from anywhere else,” he said. “You’ll be able to get our email?”

“We’ll find a motel with a connection, or I’ll go hunting with Matt’s octopus. Thanks, David.”

“No problem. I’ll pick up Ben and take him out to Coykuti, too.”

I thanked him again, and we signed off.

Felix’s telephone system didn’t have Matt’s security modification, so I was forced to hold off talking to him for a while.

I spent the time with my fingers running over the necklace, wondering how on earth I was supposed to help Olivia with it, and then slowly falling back into the puzzling tangle of Were politics.

How had the Confederation and the New Mexico packs managed to overcome the perception that association between packs was a sign of weakness? The Confederation wouldn’t be considered weak now; it had sucked in all the Rocky Mountain packs between Cheyenne and Calgary. But it had started with three packs.

How many had the New Mexico packs kicked off with? Who’d made the first move? Zane? Didn’t feel right. If Half-head was the big boss, did that mean he’d started the association? How?

If the image Zane projected wasn’t the real wolf, what about Half-head? What was he like?

Where had he gotten the nickname?

I shuddered.

Tullah found us a motel, and twenty minutes later we were inside setting up Matt’s secure connection through the WiFi. There was only one internet signal, rather than the half-dozen his system usually used to chop the communications into bits, but Tullah assured me that this was a redundant level of security.

There are no redundant levels of security in the zone.

That had been instructor Ben-Haim, back in my Ops 4-10 days. I’d learned all my paranoia from him. In the paranoia stakes, I was not worthy to secure his sandals.

We sent Savannah and Claude use the bathroom first while Tullah downloaded David’s email and I called Felix’s number.

He picked up immediately.

“This had better be good, or bad,” he growled.

Bad, I guess.

“Felix, this is Amber. How’s Olivia?”

“Not good,” he said abruptly. “I’m hoping you’re with the Adepts and calling because you’ve discovered the way to help Olivia.”

Oh, God. Straight in.

“No. Not yet. I’m sorry.” I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment. Olivia. My pack. Her eagerness, her sharp sense of humor and the trust in her eyes when she looked at me. I’d promised her I would find a way, and here I was, on a mission to save someone else. And myself. Nothing for Olivia except a necklace and some cryptic comments I hadn’t begun to understand.

I took a deep breath and tried to focus. “There’s a problem with the Denver Adept community,” I said. “The leadership has changed and I’m not welcome. In fact, I think I’m going to have a serious problem with them.”

“Are you safe? Where are you?”

Whether he intended it or not, the fact that he was immediately concerned that I was safe made me feel better about this conversation.

“I’m safe at the moment. As to where I am, well, I was able to find a shaman-Adept, and she gave me a replacement token. A necklace like the one Speaks-to-Wolves used. The problem is, no one seems to know exactly how it works. I haven’t figured that part out yet.”

“That’s something. Why am I hearing in your voice that there’s a problem? Why not bring it here?”

“I can’t just yet,” I said. “The thing is, following that trail has taken me to New Mexico.”

There was a brief silence.

“Well, you’re calling me. Either you’ve managed to evade the New Mexico Were, or you’re going to tell me you’ve started a war.”

In a way, I’d have preferred to have him shout at me. The joking covered real, deep problems, and his voice sounded so tired. Even though Olivia had switched packs, I didn’t think that had changed his feeling of protectiveness for her. He’d lost a pack member like this last week. Another so soon would be devastating.

“Uh. No and no,” I answered his questions. “It’s complicated.”

“I’m listening.”

“I didn’t come here just to find the necklace. I have Athanate obligations as well.”

“Naryn knows this, and he refused you.”

“Yeah.”

I could hear him summing up all of it to himself. Disobeying my alpha. Disobeying Naryn. Problems with Adepts. Worst of all, not there when my pack needed me. He really didn’t need a loose cannon like me.

“I needed to rescue some kin,” I went on, “and it turned out that meant I had to go visit the Albuquerque alpha.”

“You met Zane, and you’re telling me you just walked away.”

His tone was surprised, shocked even, but he let me take him through what’d happened. What I had to say was more important than whether I’d disobeyed him. He was smart enough to prioritize—the strategic overview came first. Tactical stuff like chewing me out could wait. I just hoped that the chewing wasn’t going to be literal.

I had to do the same with my worries for Olivia, put them on the back burner, however much it hurt.

The bare bones of what had happened didn’t take long.

I needed convince Felix that Zane was an acceptable neighbor and not a rabid alpha. Even if Felix didn’t want to form an association with the New Mexico packs, it made sense for us to be allied against the Confederation. More than sense; maybe it was the only way we’d all survive. When the Confederation heard that their plan to go around Colorado by making a deal with the New Mexico packs had failed, they’d turn their attention back to us in Denver. They’d tried the careful approach last time, sneaking in by allying themselves with outcast Were. This time, their desperation might lead to something much more direct.

And if Felix was having problems, some of them caused by me and Alex, he might be vulnerable.

Could I fix everything in one shot?

No matter how important I thought it was, I had to persuade Felix first. It was like pushing water uphill.

“No, Felix, Zane’s not crazy. Think about the way he handled the border packs,” I said. “He has no intention of making any deals with them. Those packs are a problem, you said so yourself. So he sent Evans back with the idea that maybe Gold Hill would be acceptable if they took out Ute Mountain. From what he said to Fuller afterwards, what he’s done is chop the problem in half. Gold Hill will take out Ute Mountain, and then at some stage he’s going to get rid of Gold Hill.”

Felix flat-out didn’t like it. “That’s Athanate-style politics,” he said.

I guessed I’d convinced him that the Albuquerque Were weren’t rabid, but at the expense of suggesting to him they weren’t good Were.

Crap.

“And it’s the same thing for this Cimarron cub,” Felix went on. “I’ll take him, and I’ll make the phone call to his alpha about Gold Hill. I have no real problem with that, but this is exactly Naryn’s style of dealing with things. Zane’s trying to get Denver tangled up in a territory dispute, and using us and Cimarron against Gold Hill, so he has less to do at the end. We take damage and he’s stronger.”

And I could see the logic. Face to face, maybe I could convince him that wasn’t what Zane was doing. Over the phone, I was limited.

Felix didn’t want to hear much about the Albuquerque alpha that was good. The news that I’d had to agree to a limited association to free Savannah and Claude only added fuel to the fire.

The thought of Zane in Denver as my guest and possibly talking to Altau had him pacing restlessly. I could hear the pad of his bare feet against the wooden floors.

He went back through what had happened, concentrating on Zane’s efforts to dominate.