Tarnished Page 16

  At the end, Andrew sighed. “If I had it to do over, I still wouldn’t stop Susan. Sacramento would have killed Silver, I have no doubt of that. Political ramifications don’t rate, balanced against that.” He took Silver’s hand awkwardly across her body, since the side nearest him was her bad side, and she squeezed back.

  Benjamin sat forward to brush crumbs off his slacks. “I would have done no different. At least if the human’s willing to continue to present herself as dominant, we might be able to get them to think about Sacramento’s behavior, and how reprehensible it was.”

  “I’m not using her trial for political leverage. Even without my promise to John, her life isn’t worth any amount of power I might gain if I throw her to the hunters,” Andrew said, trying to keep the frustration out of his voice. Benjamin didn’t deserve to be snapped at.

  Andrew had rolled his choices over and over in his thoughts on the way out here. Pretending Susan hadn’t known what she was doing seemed most likely to save her from punishment; admitting she had known seemed most likely to keep his goals of challenging from dying unborn. Andrew couldn’t see a way around that choice.

  Benjamin made a calming gesture, palm down. “Small steps. First we deal with making sure the human stays safe. Then we link Sacramento’s actions to Rory. I’m sure Rory’s beta was fully aware that his alpha was talking to Sacramento. The beta supports you.”

  “Laurence?” Andrew thought back to the last time he’d seen Rory’s beta. The man had come West to beg him to take over the pack, still suffering from the beating Rory had given him out of frustration with his own eroding control. Yet another reason Rory should be deposed, as if they needed more. A good alpha never took his emotions out on his pack. “He certainly doesn’t support Rory. I thought of him, I just wasn’t sure how to approach him without it looking underhanded.”

  “You’re right, we can’t ask him for visible support, but there’s no reason he can’t give us information. And if we ask the right questions in front of the Convocation, no one can fault him for answering them truthfully, can they?” Benjamin spread his hands, the picture of sober innocence.

  Andrew nodded. If they asked Laurence if he’d heard his alpha talking to Sacramento, the Convocation would be able to smell the truth in the answer, where Rory’s status would probably let him dodge any such direct question.

  “Then, from there, we lay out the other reasons Rory’s unfit.” Benjamin sat back. “A full quarter of the sub-alphas are with you. Another quarter are for anyone but Rory.”

  Andrew snorted. “But the rest vehemently want to be independent again, I assume. Sure, nothing easier.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. How was he ever going to pull this off? It sounded so simple when Benjamin laid it out, but Andrew knew things would never go that smoothly.

  Silver let a bark of exasperated laughter slip out. When Andrew looked at her inquiringly, she nodded to a patch of the floor. “Death wants to know why we’re bothering with a plan at all, when it won’t even last past the first conversation with these people.”

  Andrew rolled his eyes. Death had a talent for not only stating the obvious, but giving it an extra obnoxious flare. It was only a full second later, when he caught Benjamin’s expression, that he realized that Silver had slipped up. And he hadn’t noticed. They couldn’t afford that during the Convocation. Silver knew she shouldn’t talk to Death in front of people, but he couldn’t blame her for the mistake when he hadn’t noticed it himself.

  “Death?” Benjamin asked after a moment of silence, perhaps while he watched those realizations cross Andrew’s face.

  Silver winced and bent over her knees, pressing her hand to her face. After a moment, she drew a deep breath and straightened. “Sorry. I won’t let him trick me into that again.”

  Andrew rubbed a hand on her back. “Don’t stress about it now. We don’t have to worry about Benjamin.” He shot a hopeful look at the older man. Could Benjamin pretend he hadn’t seen that?

  “Dare never said you were dying.” Benjamin’s face creased with concern, and he invoked the Lady by pressing his thumb to his forehead. “You see Death coming for you?” He left the couch and knelt in front of Silver, setting a hand on her knee.

  Silver put her hand on his and shook her head. She seemed too surprised and touched by his concern to laugh, though Andrew imagined that Death was chuckling at the confusion.

  “Death stalked me once, but we were both so lonely. He without the Lady, I with my wild self burned away by the fire poured into my veins.” She patted her bad arm. Her voice had fallen into the pattern she used when telling a story, or speaking of the aspects of her world most divorced from reality. “So now we walk together.” Her tone lost the story weight, and resumed her usual humor. “And he seems to think that the world is dying for his opinions.”

  A black canine silhouette slipped out of the far bedroom and loped into Andrew’s peripheral vision. “It’s easy enough to explain away Silver, but what would he think if you told him what you see? I dare you to admit to it.” The hallucination of Death chuckled at his pun and ghosted through the front door.

  Andrew gritted his teeth. Of course Death would show up at the worst possible moments. That’s when his unconscious would be dwelling on Death, hoping he wouldn’t appear. Andrew should view this as getting it out of the way, before he had to keep his cool in front of all the other alphas.

  Benjamin pushed to his feet, smell of his concern fading as he smiled. “Having the gods speak to you is not something to apologize for. At least to me. There are enough alphas of Dare’s mind on this continent that it is perhaps something to keep quiet, however.”

  Andrew shook his head, and refused to rise to the bait. Benjamin knew he was an atheist, and after one abortive attempt to push Andrew into finding solace in the Lady after his wife’s death, Benjamin had left him alone. He didn’t begrudge Benjamin his personal faith, any more than he did Silver. “Real or not, Death’s probably right. We may be at the point of waiting to see what people say before we can plan further.”

  21

  Half an hour into her walk, Susan started to feel flushed. She winced when she checked her arms. If her skin was this red already, she’d be a lobster when the sunburn finished ripening. The altitude must have made the sunlight worse. The sun was getting low in the sky, but it would still probably be a good idea to get inside. She glanced over at Tom, but he was only tanned. Noticeably more so than when they’d left the cabin. Was that part of the werewolf accelerated healing process? They burned, it healed, and turned into a tan?

  She didn’t feel like going back to the cabin full of strange Were, so she angled her path toward the main hall they’d passed on the way in. She heard the low rumble of voices inside as she approached a back door, open presumably for air flow. Damn. If it was full of Were, she didn’t want to go in there either. She checked her watch. It was getting on for dinnertime.

  “Want to spy on them?” Tom tipped his head to the open door. “I know the secret spot.”

  Susan glanced back to the building. Did converted barns have secret spots? She’d have imagined them as pretty open inside. “How are we going to spy when everyone will just hear or smell us or something?”

  “We’ll be upstairs. No one on the main level will smell a thing with the scent clusterfuck you get down there.” Tom illustrated the two levels with his hands.

  Susan stepped into the doorway without even token hesitation. Not only was she curious, but getting more information about the Convocation by seeing it in action seemed like a good idea. If Tom thought they would be safe from Were notice, she presumed they would be.

  The back door led into an industrial kitchen, all stainless steel with stacks of boxed produce and other food on a central table. The fridges were undoubtedly packed full too. Susan didn’t even want to think about how much food a whole hall full of Were could eat. Farther in, double doors led into the main room. Susan got a glimpse through their windows of crowded movement set against
more dark, weathered boards.

  Tom interposed himself before she could cross the threshold. “The teens will be around cooking dinner,” he said in a low voice. “I’ll cut through to open the other door, but you’ll have to meet me there.” He leaned around the doorframe and pointed along the wall. Susan assumed he meant around the corner, because there were no other doors to be seen on this wall.

  Susan crunched slowly around the building to give Tom time to converse with anyone he met inside. She saw the door as soon as she turned the corner, and it opened a few seconds later. Tom gestured her enthusiastically into a room stuffed with lights, wires, and other AV equipment. Stairs disappeared up into dimness. Tom put a finger to his lips and led the way up, walking on the balls of his feet so the metal stairs didn’t clang.

  At the top they emerged onto a balcony of sorts. It looked like it had once been a hayloft, but now it extended only about ten feet into the room. Wires snaked everywhere, linking speakers and lights into a complicated snarl. Susan wondered if they held concerts down below. A girl had found a few feet of railing without a light clamped to it, and was peering over.

  “Ginnie-gin!” Tom said in a low, laughing voice, and held out his arms for a hug. The girl whirled and ran for him. She looked about ten, with delicate features and brown hair fastened into a ponytail with parental tightness. She threw her arms around Tom’s neck and her legs around his waist. He made a production of staggering around like she was terribly heavy. “When did you get so huge? You’re like a sea wolf. What if you keep on growing forever without stopping?”

  “Nuh-uh. Sea wolves are only in stories. Humans would see ’em on satellites.” Ginnie seemed quite proud to be able to correct Tom’s woeful ignorance. She smiled at Susan, perhaps hoping for an appreciative audience.

  Then the smile slipped and disappeared. “She’s a human!” Ginnie whispered into Tom’s ear, giving it the stentorian quality that would be called stage-whispering in an adult. “She’s not supposed to be here.”

  Tom hesitated and Susan stepped into the silence. Not only would she have to explain to the Were below, she’d have to tell Edmond someday too. Better to practice now. “My mate and my son are Were. And I’m at the Convocation for some business I’m involved in.”

  “Oh.” Ginnie’s expression suggested she was only accepting that provisionally.

  Tom took her over to the railing and pointed down. “Isn’t it fun to spy on everyone? Do you know all the alphas?” Tom’s covert glance at Susan suggested that this was for her benefit, but Susan couldn’t distinguish any of the Were the girl pointed to from the rest of the mass of people milling below.

  She came right to the railing to get a better look anyway. The gathering looked like some kind of athletic event. The Were were so fit and well-muscled, and they all looked pretty young. Their voices created a constant rumble of conversation.

  “And Billings, and Philadelphia.” Ginnie looked at Susan for a reaction again, and she nodded like she had any idea if that was correct.

  “Every alpha can bring his mate and his beta.” With Dare and Silver doing it so much, Tom had started to pick up their habit of lecturing her at random too. Though maybe Susan should give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was talking to the girl. “Except for Roanoke when he brought Dare as his enforcer too. No one wanted to argue with him. The rule keeps the numbers limited, so nobody feels strong enough to start fights. And then roamers, like me, who want to find a girlfriend or boyfriend or a new pack or whatever. We’re not allowed to attend the meetings.”

  “And I can come because both Mommy and Daddy are here and Daddy doesn’t want to leave me at home anymore.” Ginnie looked a little put out by the idea of such smothering, but her excitement at being there overshadowed it a second later.

  “Look, there’s Mr. Dare too!” Ginnie leaned over the railing to point at the full extent of her arm. Susan leaned too. Andrew sat down at one of the tables below, Silver beside him. John seated himself on Silver’s other side a beat later. Susan’s heart sped seeing him without the baby, but then she remembered the nursery. They must have decided it was getting too late, and left for the meeting without waiting for her to return to the cabin.

  Seeing Were she already knew in this context, their positions undoubtedly so carefully calculated, made Susan’s perceptions twist again. She supposed every decision on how to sit or stand down there reflected dominance in one way or another.

  Footsteps on the stairs up to the balcony distracted her. Another girl arrived from the stairwell, expression haughty. “No wonder it stinks up here. What’s a human doing here?”

  The girl looked momentarily like a young woman in the uncertain light, but Susan was familiar enough with teens to subtract two or three years’ worth of makeup and plunging neckline. That yielded an age of roughly fifteen or sixteen. She would be a knockout in a few years if she stopped trying so hard. She had deep black hair and a smoky quality to her skin and eyes. A faint flavor of accent to her words completed the exotic picture.

  Ginnie pushed past Tom to face the older girl. Tom seemed to hardly notice, he was staring so hard at her. “Don’t be a cat,” Ginnie told her sternly. “Just because she’s a human doesn’t mean you don’t have to be polite.”

  Susan rubbed at her temple. Sea wolves, cats … Maybe that was the girl’s translation of catty? Then she got it. Were would hardly call someone a bitch, would they?

  “What’s your name?” Tom asked, still staring.

  Ginnie finally seemed to notice that his attention had wandered away from her. She tugged on his hand. “Her name’s Felicia. She’s from Spain. Her and her family’s staying with Daddy right now.”

  “Hi, Felicia.” Tom scraped Ginnie off his hand so he could offer it to shake. Felicia considered it suspiciously for a moment before accepting it. She dropped it almost immediately to glance over her shoulder at the room below. She seemed nervous, perhaps about someone down there.

  “I have an appointment,” she said abruptly. She encountered Ginnie’s stern look once more and snorted. “See you later,” she added with precise politeness, then disappeared down the stairs. Tom followed her with his gaze until she was completely out of sight.

  Susan turned her head so Tom wouldn’t be able to see how much she wanted to roll her eyes. She could practically see his metaphorical tongue hanging out. Ginnie looked so unhappy, Susan bent to put herself on the girl’s level. She pointed into the room. “Which alpha is your daddy?”

  “My daddy’s Roanoke. He’s really important.”

  Tom finally snapped out of it. “Staying with your daddy, Ginnie?” When the girl nodded, he grabbed Susan’s wrist and dragged her toward the stairs. Susan jerked out of the hold on principle, but then decided to follow anyway. What was wrong? What did he know that she didn’t?

  “See you later, sweetie,” she told Ginnie as she jogged after Tom. She caught up to him at the foot of the stairs, where he hesitated, staring through the kitchen to the doors into the main room.

  “What was that about?” Susan asked in a low voice.

  Tom rocked on the balls of his feet, full of thwarted urgency. “Ginnie’s father is the one Dare wants to challenge. But Dare’s in-laws are from Spain. Rumor says they wanted to kill him, before he came back here. If Roanoke’s working with them, that’s really bad.” He listened, head tilted. “Lady damn it, they’re starting already. They’ll notice an interruption, but someone should warn him. I don’t want to leave you alone either, though.”

  Susan drew in a deep breath. The family showing up for revenge fit with what Silver had told her about what happened with Dare and his wife. “Go,” she urged Tom, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll walk straight back to the cabin from here, no detours. Cross my heart. And you’re just a good-for-nothing roamer sneaking around, right? No one will think anything of it.”

  Tom nodded and strode through the kitchen. Susan hung back, sending silent good luck wishes after him. Just when it seemed like
the politics of the situation were impossibly complicated, something else sprang up.

  22

  Silver watched Dare sideways during the opening prayer. While he bowed his head and pressed his thumb to his forehead with the rest, his lips didn’t move with the words. Death snickered, and she tried to kick him under the table. Things would be very serious from here on out. She needed her attention on what the alphas were saying, not on Death’s remarks.

  Roanoke rose. Silver had met him once, but the snakes in her arm had been alive then. Her memories were full of holes. He gave the same impression of muscle-bound strength, but she saw less confidence in him than she remembered. More bluster. “We are met in Convocation. I stand for Roanoke. Who else stands?”

  “I stand for Boston.” Boston rose next.

  Silver tried to keep track of the names at first, as the Roanoke sub-alphas and then the Western packs introduced themselves in order of the length of time that each alpha had held that rank. But names were slippery. She found more value in watching everyone’s wild selves. Wild selves couldn’t hide emotions the way tame could. More than just Roanoke seemed ill at ease. Several wild selves snapped defensively at the air while their tame selves smiled blandly.

  The wild self of Roanoke’s beta was the worst. Where the other wild selves stood beside the tame’s legs, his hid behind them. A bad sign, that the man who they’d hoped would have information seemed so afraid, crouched low with ears flat and tail tucked in. But they couldn’t ask him anything until this ceremony was over.

  They came to the point that her cousin—she needed to learn a new name for him now he was no longer Seattle, she supposed—should have stood. Silver schooled her face to neutrality and kept her breathing slow. Her heartbeat should follow, and hopefully her excitement would not be too much of a stink in the air. They had far more controversial things to convince these alphas of later. Her becoming Seattle with Dare should be the least of her worries, but it was the first obstacle to jump, so it loomed largest at the moment.