Kelley Armstrong - Bitten

Now he asked something of me. One favor, not even phrased as such. Just a request for help.

I couldn't refuse.

I told Jeremy I'd stay long enough to help them find and kill this mutt on the condition that, when it was over, I could leave without him or Clay trying to stop me. Jeremy agreed. Then he went to tell the others, taking Clay out back for an extended explanation. When Clay returned, he was in high spirits, joking with Peter, mock wrestling with Nick, chatting with Antonio, and offering me the couch when we went back to the study to resume the meeting. Since Jeremy wouldn't have sugarcoated my arrangement, Clay had obviously reinterpreted the facts through his own filter of logic, a logic as indecipherable as his code of behavior and ethics. I'd straighten him out soon enough. As expected, the plan was to hunt down and kill the mutt. Given the dicey nature of the affair, this would take place in one or two phases. Tonight, the five of us, excluding Jeremy, would go into town to track the mutt down. We'd split into two groups, Antonio and Peter in one, the rest of us in the other. If we found the mutt's lair, Antonio or I would determine whether or not the mutt could be killed safely. If it wasn't a safe kill, we'd gather information to plot the killing for another night. After the Jose Carter fiasco I was surprised Jeremy was willing to give me the responsibility of making such a decision, but no one else questioned it, so I kept quiet.

Before lunch I went to my room and called Philip. Downstairs, Peter and Antonio were loudly debating some fine point of high finance. Drawers in the kitchen banged open and shut and the smell of roasting lamb wafted up to me as Clay and Nick made lunch. Although I couldn't hear Jeremy I knew he was still where we'd left him, in the study poring over maps of Bear Valley to determine the best areas of town for our search that night.

Once in my room I walked to my bed, pushing back the canopy, crawled inside with my cell phone, and let the curtain swing closed, cutting off the outside view. When Philip didn't answer his office number, I tried his cell phone. He picked up on the third ring. As his voice crackled down the line, all noise from downstairs seemed to stop and I was transported to another world, where planning to hunt down a werewolf was only a B movie plotline.

"It's me," I said. "Are you busy?"

"Heading off for lunch with a client. Potential client. I got your message. I went downstairs for a thirty-minute workout and missed your call. Can I get your number there? Hold on while I find some paper."

"I've got my cell phone."

"Okay, I'm an idiot. Of course you do. So if I need you, I can call your cell, right?"

"I can't take it in the hospital. Against the rules. I'll check for messages though."

"Hospital? Damn it. I'm sorry. Five minutes into the conversation and I haven't even asked what happened to your cousin. An accident?"

"His wife actually. I used to come down here in the summers and a bunch of us hung out together, Jeremy, his brothers, Celia-that's his wife." Philip knew my parents were dead but I'd told him none of the gory details, such as how young I was when it happened, so I was free to improvise, "Anyway, Celia was in a car accident. Touch-and-go for a while, when Jeremy called me. She's off the critical list now."

"Thank God. Geez, that's awful. How's everyone holding up?"

"Okay. The problem is the kids. Three of them. Jeremy's really at loose ends here, trying to look after the little ones and worrying about Celia. I offered to stay for a few days, at least until Celia's parents get back from Europe. Everyone's pretty shaken up right now."

"I can imagine. Hold on." Static buzzed down the line. "Good. I'm off the expressway. Sorry about that. So you're staying to help out?"

"Until after the weekend. Is that okay?"

"Sure. Absolutely. If I wasn't so tied up with work this week I'd come down to help out myself. Do you need anything?"

"Got my credit card."

He chuckled. "That's all anyone needs these days. If you max out, give me a shout and I'll transfer some money from my account. Damn-passed my turn."

"I'll let you go."

"Sorry. Call me tonight if you get a chance, though I expect you'll be pretty busy. Three kids. How old?"

"All under five."

"Ouch. You will be busy. I'll miss you."

"It'll only be a couple days."

"Good. Talk to you soon. Love you."

"You too. Bye."

As I hung up, I closed my eyes and exhaled. See? Not so bad. Philip was still Philip. Nothing had changed. Philip and my new life were out there, waiting for me to return. Only a few more days and I could go back to them.

After lunch, I went to the study to check my dossiers, hoping to find something that might help me figure out which mutt was causing trouble in Bear Valley. One of my jobs with the Pack was to keep tabs on non-Pack werewolves. I'd built a dossier of them, complete with photos and behavioral sketches. I could recite over two dozen names and last known locations, and separate the list into the good, the bad, and the ugly-those who could suppress the urge to kill, those who couldn't, and those who didn't bother trying. Judging by this mutt's behavior, he fell into the last category. That narrowed it down from twenty-seven to about twenty.

I turned to the cupboards below the bookshelf. Opening the second one, I cleared a path through the brandy glasses and felt around the back panel for an exposed wooden nail. When I found it, I twisted the nail and the rear panel sprung open. Inside the secret compartment we kept the only two condemning articles in Stonehaven, the only things that could link us to what we were. One was my book of dossiers. When I looked, though, it wasn't there. I sighed. Only Jeremy would have taken it out and he'd left for a walk an hour ago. Though I could always go looking for him, I knew he wasn't just taking in exercise but was finalizing the plans for our mutt hunt that night. Interruptions were not appreciated.

As I was closing the compartment I saw the second book lying there and, on a whim, pulled it out and opened it, though I'd read it so many times before I could recite most of it from memory. When Jeremy first told me about the Legacy I expected some musty, stinking, half-rotted tome. But the centuries-old book was in better shape than my college texts. Naturally the pages were yellowed and fragile, but each Pack Alpha had kept it in a special compartment, free from dust, mildew, light, and any of the other elements that could kill a book.

The Legacy purported to tell the history of werewolves, particularly of the Pack, yet it wasn't a straightforward account of dates and events. Instead, every Pack Alpha had added what he considered important, making it a mishmash of history, genealogy, and lore.

One section dealt entirely with scientific experimentation on the nature and boundaries of the werewolf condition. A Pack Alpha during the Renaissance had been particularly fascinated with legends of werewolf immortality. He'd detailed every one, from the stories of werewolves becoming immortal by drinking the blood of infants to the tales of werewolves becoming vampires after death. Then he'd proceeded with well-controlled experiments, all involving mutts that he'd capture, work on, then kill and wait for their resurrection. None of his experiments worked, but he'd been remarkably successful at decreasing the European mutt population.

A century later, a Pack Alpha became obsessed with the pursuit of better sex-the only surprising part of this being that it took several hundred years for someone to do it. He'd started with the hypothesis that human-werewolf sex was inherently dissatisfying because it involved two different species. So he bit a few women. When they didn't survive, he concluded that rumors of female werewolves throughout the ages were false and such a thing was biologically impossible. Moving right along, he tried variations on sex in both forms-as a wolf and as a human with both normal wolves and humans. None approached being in good old-fashioned human form having human sex, so he went back to women and started experimenting with variations on positions, acts, locales, et cetera. Finally, he found the ultimate act of sexual satisfaction-waiting until the first notes of climax struck, then slashing his partner's throat. He described his formula in vivid detail, with all the flowery emoting of a new religious convert. Fortunately, his practice never gained popularity among the Pack, probably because the Alpha was burned at the stake a few months later, after having depleted his village's entire supply of eligible young women.