Wolfsbane Page 3

  John only clenched his jaw, but Felicia muttered a scrap of prayer in Spanish. Silver voiced the religious objection for all of them. “When the Lady was forced to leave Her children, she took the memory of her image with Her, so that it would not cause them pain. To create some pale semblance of it from your imagination is to mock Her sacrifice.” Silver’s tone stayed even, even a little softer in its intensity, but she had her good hand clenched.

  Tatiana tipped her chin up, a little bit of pride stealing into her expression. “Clearly, since you Were left the homeland, you have lost some of the trail to the Lady.”

  Andrew gave a bark of laughter. “And Russia is the homeland? Fits your worldview, does it?” Were weren’t native to the Americas, that much was clear, but it wasn’t as if they had archaeologists to guess at their origins as humans did. Their stories began in deep forest, nothing clearer than that.

  Tatiana said something with a prayer cadence in a language that might have been Russian, for all Andrew knew. “You say that, but you do not know our native tongue.” She took a deep breath and seemed to gather herself, emotions smoothing away to the earlier neutral politeness. “I do not think we will settle religious questions in a few minutes standing in the hallway. Whatever the truth, isn’t it better I take the icon home to Were hands, instead of leaving it for humans to find?”

  “Better to find it,” Silver agreed. Andrew shot her a look. He’d noticed that she hadn’t said anything about sending it home with the Russian, but he hoped that omission had escaped the envoy.

  “But right now, we can drop your things in the guesthouse.” Andrew gestured through the house. To give themselves the space they needed for the pack, they’d taken down the fence where two properties adjoined, and landscaped a path between the back doors. They could have pulled into the other driveway and entered from the front door of the second house they’d turned into the guesthouse, but this route showed more of the sweep of the property.

  Halfway down the hall, Felicia’s stupid cat poked its head out of a doorway and trotted over to yowl at her feet. Tatiana stopped dead and stared at it, which reminded Andrew how unusual it was. It didn’t look like much, lean and leggy, purple-gray with ghosts of tabby stripes, but it was perfectly at ease while surrounded by Were. Felicia gave it a few absent strokes, then tried to shoo it away with her foot.

  “A house cat,” Tatiana said, accent turning her incredulous statement into something exotic, like she’d accused them of having an endangered leopard.

  “It’s Felicia’s,” Silver said, at the same moment Felicia said, “It’s Silver’s.”

  Andrew exhaled his amusement. Tatiana was welcome to tell her alpha they kept a cat. Felicia had brought it home as an act of defiance a while back, but Silver had taken a liking to it and had been the one making sure it got fed while Felicia was roaming. Andrew himself found it amusing enough to not bother about. “Not enough meat on its bones to be worth hunting, and people will keep feeding it, so it hangs around.” He shrugged, lifted the cat, and slung it out of their way. It landed gracefully and wandered off again, nonchalant.

  Tatiana stared after the cat as she passed the doorway it had disappeared into, but didn’t offer any other comment. Tom interrupted them next, before they could reach the back door. He put his hand on Andrew’s arm and leaned close to speak. The envoy would still hear, but the gesture would hopefully make her aware that she shouldn’t ask prying questions about this piece of pack business. “Craig showed up while we were gone, apparently. They said they sent him to the guesthouse to stay out of the way.”

  Andrew nodded to dismiss Tom, and pressed his lips together tightly to avoid a growl. Craig? What could he possibly want? He didn’t much care for the man personally, but he trusted that when he chased Craig off until later, Craig would accept the delay gracefully in front of the stranger.

  Outside, the gravel path dragged at the suitcase’s wheels, so Felicia hoisted the larger one up by the side handle. Tatiana did the same with her carry-on. The weather was almost cooperating today, so while it was cold, the clouds were thin, and patches of sunlight in the distance promised a brighter late afternoon.

  The guesthouse was smaller, four bedrooms instead of seven, and the floor plan wasted less space on things like staircases and two-story rooms. Andrew opened the door to the sound of angry voices. Craig and . . . Sacramento, he supposed, as their only other houseguest at the moment, though she was supposed to have been out for the day.

  Andrew tossed a glance to Felicia. She must have understood his message, because she set the envoy’s suitcase down outside, delaying. Andrew strode forward through the kitchen to chase everyone out ahead of the envoy. Hopefully Tatiana would hang back with her luggage and give Silver and John a chance to distract her. He knew he didn’t need to signal Silver for her to do that.

  A shadow moved at the very edge of his vision as he reached the stairs. “And you thought everyone would behave,” Death said, too deeply black in silhouette to seem quite real, like a blind spot or optical failing. Ever since Andrew had been injured, some kind of mental trick or subconscious worry made him imagine he saw Death occasionally. He ignored him as usual. Death remained. “Your naïve hope is adorable.”

  Andrew gritted his teeth. He shouldn’t be surprised, he supposed. Since no one but Silver and now Felicia believed in the danger the Russians posed, they didn’t really have the visceral motivation to be on their best behavior.

  Andrew cleared his throat. “What’s going on?”

  Sacramento and Craig, facing off in the upstairs hall, both jumped and fell instantly silent. After a beat, Sacramento came down a couple steps toward him. She looked especially severe today, blond hair, brown at the roots, pulled into a tail high on the back of her head. The remains of her anger lent her features an angular cast. “Roanoke Dare. I got distracted on my way out. He . . .” She trailed off in the face of Andrew’s expression and looked at the carpet.

  Craig took a moment longer to shake off the argument. He had his head tipped down, square jaw clenched, apparently enduring but not accepting her earlier words. “The mistake I made was in the past. I have apologized for it.” He lifted his head. “Directly to the one I wronged, not you.”

  Andrew started up the stairs, ready to rein Craig in more directly, but the man had apparently said his piece. He, too, looked at the floor. “Whatever brought you here, it’s going to have to wait,” Andrew said.

  He stepped aside to let Craig by, but too late. Tatiana arrived at the bottom of the stairs, Silver and the others trailing her. Her expression showed slight curiosity, and perhaps Andrew was only imagining the smug cast to her smile.

  “Felicia? Why don’t you give Tatiana the grand tour of the main house? John can take her luggage upstairs.” The envoy had heard the argument and seen the guilty combatants now, so he supposed there was little point in hiding it anymore. He might as well get her out of earshot, then deal with it. And maybe with a little time alone together, she and Felicia could bond over being alphas’ daughters.

  Felicia led Tatiana away and Silver joined Andrew, attention tight on the combatants, probably trying to read their body language for what had set them off. John set the luggage ready to take upstairs when they were out of the way and leaned against the newel post.

  Andrew drew a deep breath to calm his frustration and looked from one to the other. “All right.” He nodded to Craig. “Why are you here?”

  Craig held his hands up, nonthreatening. “I didn’t come to cause trouble. I heard that you were making Sacramento interview betas. I have experience, and living alone isn’t suiting me.”

  Andrew speared Sacramento with a glare when she opened her mouth to retort. Craig was perfectly correct, but a more astute beta wouldn’t have phrased it that way. In the two years since Sacramento had been forced to dump her first beta, she hadn’t managed to keep one for more than a few months. For the past nine months or so, she’d essentially stopped trying to find one, which wasn’t he
althy for an alpha. He and Silver had dragged her up here and told her she couldn’t go home until she’d chosen one of the people they introduced her to. Until now, around Sacramento everyone had stuck to the polite fiction that Andrew and Silver were merely lending Sacramento their expertise.

  Sacramento crossed her arms. “You tried to force your last alpha out of office.”

  Craig shook his head. “That carcass was buried long ago. I was wrong about what was best for her, and what was best for our child. I told Michelle that.” He held his hands open, appealing more to his Roanokes than Sacramento, it seemed. “I’d never make the same mistake twice.”

  Silver padded over to Craig and set her hand on his arm. “You moved to your present home to be close to Portland and your son, didn’t you? Has something changed?”

  Craig shrugged, an awkward, minimal movement. “There’s an easy commuter flight. It wouldn’t take that much longer than driving does, with traffic. I could still see him every other weekend.”

  Something in his tone made Andrew turn to get a better read on his scent. His voice held the pain of someone who couldn’t stand living without a pack any longer. At the moment, he lived in Vancouver, Washington, just across the river from Portland, but even living across the river from a pack you didn’t really belong to was plenty lonely. Andrew knew that feeling, and remembered how it could twist so tight something in you started to tear.

  “That’s true, but are you sure you’d want to work with Sacramento, given your past disagreements over Portland and her baby?” Silver voiced the question on Andrew’s mind, leaning in to Craig, keeping her calming touch on his arm.

  “I can get past it if she can.” Craig lifted his head, chin high.

  “Maybe if I got some kind of real apology from him,” Sacramento snapped.

  Silver squeezed Craig’s arm, then slipped past Andrew to stare Sacramento down. Andrew stepped back, and Craig took the hint and did the same. Silver raised her eyebrows with misleading mildness. “You think apologies are still owed? I seem to recall he wasn’t the only disrespectful one during that debate.”

  Sacramento’s scent soured with embarrassment, and she stepped back up to the top of the stairs so she could dip to one knee. “Roanoke Silver. My apologies. I’ll get out of your way.” She looked over her shoulder at her room, and pushed back up to her feet at a nod from Silver.

  Andrew turned back to Craig, and looked the man over in silence for a few moments. He sighed. “I doubt you’ll ever talk her into it, and I would strongly recommend against trying, Craig. If you need a pack, we can help you some other way. But nothing’s going to happen immediately. We’ve got the Russian envoy to deal with. We’ll let you know when that’s done, you can come back, and we can discuss it.”

  Curiosity seeped into Craig’s scent, but he was smart enough this time not to ask. He nodded, and descended the stairs without saying anything else. John lifted the envoy’s suitcases again, and ferried them upstairs without comment.

  Silver waited until they were alone, then sighed and set her forehead against Andrew’s shoulder. “Their sense of timing for causing trouble would make Death proud.”

  “It’ll be all right. The envoy didn’t see much of it.” Andrew tried to convince himself of the words as he said them. “Unless in Russia there would have been blood on the walls by now, and she judges us for that.”

  “So I’m not the only one who felt judged?” Silver led the way down the stairs, tone growing dry. “I forgot how little I look the part on the outside until I saw her expression.” She stopped at the bottom and rolled her shoulder muscles on her bad side, making her dead arm fall in a slightly more open position.

  Andrew caught her bad wrist and helped her tuck the hand back into her pocket. “Anyone would only have to speak to you to know different.” He tried to make his tone as confident as possible, but he didn’t like the envoy’s manner either. She wasn’t a fighter, but that didn’t make her any less dangerous if she reported back to the Russians’ fighters that they were juicy targets. She couldn’t see the massive silver scars on his back, but the white in his hair certainly stood out.

  He glanced through the back door’s small beveled panes. They mostly caught a splash of low-slanting sunlight and an abstract bit of green from the lawn. He could imagine the path stretching away to the main house, however. “If she’s so on her guard with us, maybe it would be better to stall and let Felicia see what she can get out of her. Then again, we don’t want to make it seem like we need a long time to deal with a simple disagreement between our Were.”

  “We could walk back slowly. Let our scent be known in the den, so we’re back but not interfering,” Silver said.

  “Good idea.” Andrew led the way to the path. He offered Silver his arm so they could walk back in stately—and slow—style. Hopefully Felicia would get a better read on the envoy.

  Chapter 4

  Tatiana hid a smile as Felicia hustled her back to the main house. The young were so endearingly transparent sometimes. As if there was any doubt why they were leaving the guesthouse. In Felicia’s place, she wouldn’t have tried to pretend otherwise.

  Felicia stopped close to the main house’s back door and swept a hand to the backyard. “We haven’t been moved in for too long, so we’re still working on the landscaping. The previous owners had a water feature thing we might resurrect.” She indicated an empty plastic tub set into the ground. “Except the cubs will probably get continually wet, so maybe not.”

  Tatiana didn’t care about landscaping, so she tuned the rest of the babble out. That’s all it was, too. She could smell the young woman’s nervousness. It matched the sort of scent her European contacts usually gave off, but it was nothing like the beta’s scent. He’d seemed almost cavalier about her, which was unexpected. The alphas had control of themselves not to reveal anything either way, of course.

  A mass of contradictions, these people. The arguing Were had fallen silent instantly when Andrew arrived, yet they’d felt comfortable enough to act out in the alphas’ house in the first place. And he hadn’t laid a hand on them. Tatiana supposed he could be beating them now, but she’d heard no blows as she left the guesthouse, just talking. Words had their place, certainly, but only when supported by strength.

  Felicia’s babbling paused as she led Tatiana inside the house, and Tatiana took the opportunity to slip in a few questions. The Roanokes had done her a favor. The argument in the guesthouse had already stopped by the time she had gotten close enough to hear details anyway, and now she could draw information out of Felicia alone. “How long has your father been with his mate? They look very comfortable together.”

  Voices murmured in the next room, but when they entered the kitchen, it was empty. Felicia scanned the room and dived on an empty mixing bowl and an abandoned spoon on the island. She tidied them into the sink. “Four or five years, I think. I wasn’t around when they met.”

  Tatiana glanced around the kitchen, but it was mundane enough. Huge, shiny appliances and gleaming granite counters. Low-level heat radiated from the oven, presumably dinner cooking. It wasn’t far enough along to give off much scent through the door yet.

  Now she was back in the house, Tatiana kept getting hints of a human scent too, worn in like the owner of the scent had lived here as long as the Were had. Why would a human live in a pack house?

  Tatiana set that aside to consider later. Perhaps she could find some leverage in their sympathy for a human. That was weak, certainly. “How long have they been Roanokes?” That fact, at least, she trusted her sources about. Even the Alaskan Were had agreed with everyone else about when the North American packs had united, so the question would be a good gauge for Felicia’s other answers.

  Felicia hesitated, discomfort clear on her face. Oh, to be that young and unguarded again. Tatiana wondered if the Roanokes had neglected to brief her on what she should and shouldn’t reveal. It certainly looked that way. If so, Tatiana would be happy to take advantage of it.
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  “Four years.” Once she decided to answer, Felicia accessed the number instantly, without need to think back or count. Tatiana raised her brows to comment on the similarity of the numbers and Felicia laughed. “Yeah, it’s kind of related. Partly because when Dad helped Silver, it exposed how incompetent the former Roanoke was, but also you’ve met them. Put those two together and they’re too dominant not to lead something.”

  “Helped Silver?” According to the Alaskan, Andrew had saved Silver from something—probably not actual death—and he’d slaughtered, or she’d slaughtered, or they’d both slaughtered her enemies. And so she had been Lady-touched. Tatiana knew she’d probably have to get the truth of that story from someone, if she were to find Silver’s weaknesses.

  “You’ll have to ask Silver about that.” Felicia glanced one more time around the kitchen, then led Tatiana to the dining room. The alpha’s children clustered around a long, scarred but sturdy table, writing and reading busily. The youngest looked about seven, and the eldest, a young woman, looked only a year or two younger than Felicia. Her brown hair was cut short and asymmetrical, a slight wave turning into a curl at one side of her face. It suited the delicacy of her features. In contrast, her makeup had the thick, trying-too-hard look of a young Were not yet sure she could attract chasers.

  She stared into space rather than at her textbook. The other children had been studying more seriously, but when their attention locked onto the stranger and Felicia, several squealed, and nearly all of them tumbled off their chairs. Their English was too sloppy, overlapping, and shrill for Tatiana to follow, but she caught Felicia’s name, and anyone could see they were excited to see her.

  Felicia hugged as many as she could at once, looking bemused. “I haven’t been away that long. You just want to get out of homework, you little monsters.”

  The eldest young woman, clearly supposed to be in charge, growled at them. “She’s right; homework time’s not over yet.” She had to glare at several of the children before they finally climbed back into their chairs and bent their heads over their work. Tatiana collected stares sidelong rather than outright.