5. An Interrogation of Sorts
Chapter five
An Interrogation of Sorts
Bodie had called while they were still on the road.
An address. A turnoff north and east of Magnolia Creek. Jasper hadn't written any of it down. Neither had Eli. They never needed to. Eli remembered everything worth remembering.
The truck rattled over gravel while darkness pressed against the windshield. Jasper drove. Eli sat beside him with the leather case on the floor between his boots. He hadn't said a word about it. Jasper hadn't asked.
The silence rode with them all the way out of town.
The property appeared without warning. One moment there was pine forest, the next, the trees opened and the road spilled them into a clearing.
A house sat in the middle of it. Or what used to be a house.
The paint had long since given up pretending to be paint.
The porch sagged. The roofline bowed. Beside it stood a barn.
Newer. Not cared for. Not loved. Maintained.
There was a difference. The kind of difference that made the hair on Jasper's arms stand up.
Someone had let the house rot. Someone had made sure the barn stayed standing.
The truck rolled to a stop. Jasper was out before the engine finished ticking.
A man sat on the porch steps. The man looked at him, and stood slowly.
Jasper looked back, and never changed his stride.
Jasper saw it. The moment of recognition, that minor shift in the man's stance.
The man made the critical mistake of hesitating.
Jasper didn't. Nor did he give it another thought. His attention was already on the barn.
The doors were closed. Not locked. That gave him pause.
An hour before dawn. A property this isolated. A barn full of something worth guarding. The doors should have been chained, padlocked or at the very least barricaded. Instead they stood shut and waiting. Like whoever was inside already knew who was coming.
Eli came up beside him. The sky was beginning to pale beyond the trees, little more than a thinning of the dark, but it was enough.
Jasper looked at his brother and felt something tighten in his chest. Eli's eyes had that look again.
The one they got after too many nights buried in forbidden journals.
Archivist. More wolf than man. The line between them worn thin.
The leather case hung from Eli's left hand.
Together they walked toward the barn. Neither of them hurried. Neither of them needed to. Whatever waited inside wasn't going anywhere.
***
Glenn was sitting on a hay bale at the back of the open space, where the lantern light was thin and the dust hung in the air the way dust hangs after something has been moved.
He looked up when the brothers came in.
His face made the same expression Jasper had noted in his own backyard, the night Glenn had stood over the destruction he had incited and grinned at Serena like a man delivering a calling card. The same face. Older now, somehow, in a way Jasper couldn't quite put his finger on.
He did not get up.
“Voss,” Glenn said. Just the one word. Then: “I figured.”
Jasper crossed the barn in five strides and lifted Glenn off the hay bale by the front of his shirt and put him against the back wall hard enough that the wall gave a half inch.
“I figured you’d be polite about it,” Glenn said into Jasper’s face. The corner of his mouth pulled. “Disappointed.”
Jasper did not answer.
Glenn’s mouth pulled wider. “I figured, but didn’t count on it.”
Then he moved.
He came off the wall with the speed of a wolf who had been pretending he was tired and was not.
Claws came out of his fingers in the same motion that brought his arm around in an arc Jasper had to twist his head to keep his throat out of.
The arc clipped Jasper’s jaw instead. The line of it opened along the bone. Jasper did not slow down.
He hit Glenn in the chest with his shoulder and put him through the side of the hay bale.
Glenn rolled. He was good. He came up on the other side of the bale low to the ground, half-shifted, the bones of his face moved into a configuration that was no longer a man’s face and not yet a wolf’s. His teeth elongated. He came in fast.
They went into each other.
Jasper had a wolf’s reflexes and pack discipline, and Glenn had the kind of speed only a wolf who had done forbidden things to his own body could have.
For a stretch of the next several breaths the barn became a place where two wolves were trying to put each other on the floor.
Jasper took claws across his ribs through his shirt.
Glenn took Jasper’s elbow through the side of the head hard enough that the loose end of one of Glenn’s teeth came out into the dust, and the partial shift hesitated for the fraction of a second Jasper needed.
Jasper put him down.
He put a knee on Glenn’s neck and he held him there. Glenn’s wolf was still pressing at the inside of his face but there was nowhere for it to go. The half-formed claws scraped at the dirt floor. A line of blood ran down from one of Glenn’s ears.
Jasper did not move.
“Where is she?” he asked.
Glenn smiled. The smile had blood in it. “Who?”
Jasper bent his head closer.
“Fillion. I will take your throat out with my teeth in this barn tonight if I have to. And then I will rip your balls off and put them on the hay bale beside you. Your fucked-up wolf might heal things out of the ordinary, but I swear to you it will not heal that. Every wolf you meet for the rest of your unnatural life will smell what you let happen here. Where is she?”
Glenn’s eyes did not move.
“You can have them,” he said. Slowly. Like a man making sure he was being heard. “Take them. There are things much scarier than you.”
Jasper held him there a beat longer.
He had known. Halfway through the fight, he had known for sure. Glenn was not the kind of wolf you broke this way. Glenn had broken himself a long time ago and rebuilt himself for a different set of leverage points, and Jasper’s good old-fashioned wolf challenge just wasn’t gonna cut it.
Jasper let him go.
He stood up. His ribs were bleeding through his shirt. His jaw was bleeding. Glenn stayed on the floor where Jasper had put him, breathing through his teeth, the half-shift slowly easing back into the shape of a man.
Jasper stepped back exactly one step.
Glenn’s face did something Jasper had not seen it do tonight, or any of the other nights he had stood across from Glenn before tonight.
The corner of his mouth had a tremor in it.
His pupils were the wrong size for the lantern light.
The half-shift had been instinct. Fight.
Wolf. All of it was gone now. What was left was a man on a barn floor whose body had finally registered that they were far from finished with him.
The stench of Glenn’s fear burned the hairs in Jasper’s nostrils, and yet at the same time, it pleased his wolf.
He had heard Eli move. He came up alongside Jasper, and set the leather case on the floor. He had not opened it yet.
“Fillion,” Eli said.
Glenn’s eyes moved to Eli.
“You know what I am about to do.”
Glenn was quiet for the length of a slow breath.
“These things have a price,” Glenn said.
“I know.”
“You will pay for it the rest of your life.”
“That is mine to pay.”
A silence.
Glenn looked between the two of them. He looked at Eli’s hands, which had gone perfectly still. Then his eyes moved to Jasper and stayed longer than they should have. The way a wolf clocks a threat he had not put on his list.
“Where is she?” Eli asked.
***
“Hold him still,” Eli said.
Jasper shifted to Glenn’s other side and pinned his arms to the dirt. Glenn bucked, snarled, but Jasper had one brother down already, a mate that may be lost to him forever if they didn’t get answers soon and Glenn’s corrupted strength was nothing against that.
Eli knelt beside Glenn’s head. He pulled the leather case open. Inside were tools: a bone stylus, a vial of something dark, and a strip of leather inscribed with symbols older than the English language.
“No.” Glenn’s eyes went wide. The terror was real. The kind that came from recognizing something and knowing exactly what it could do. “No, don’t — you can’t — that’s old law, you have no right —”
“Old law for an old wolf.” Eli dipped the stylus in the vial. The liquid that coated the tip was black, viscous, and hummed with a frequency Jasper could sense in his teeth.
“Involuntary rune work is forbidden.” Glenn was writhing now. Real panic cracking through everything else. “The council banned this magic centuries ago —”
“The council also banned experimenting on yourself with dark magic.” Eli’s voice was like ice. “And yet.”
He pressed the stylus to Glenn’s forehead.
Glenn screamed.
The sound was nothing like his earlier sounds.
This was agony, pure and absolute, torn from somewhere deeper than flesh.
His back arched off the dirt, every muscle locking rigid, veins standing out in his neck like cables.
The rune Eli traced burned itself into Glenn’s skin, black lines that glowed faintly before sinking beneath the surface.
Then a second rune, on his throat. A third, over his heart.
Each one drew a fresh scream. By the third, Glenn was weeping. Black tears that streaked his twisted face.
Eli sat back. His hands were steady. His expression was not.
“Now,” Eli said. “Tell us everything. Understand that the runes will not let you lie. They will not let you omit. Every attempt to resist will feel exactly like the application did.”
Glenn’s mouth opened. Closed. He fought it. Jasper could see the muscles in his jaw straining, his corrupted wolf thrashing against the compulsion. A vein in his temple pulsed. His body arched again, and another scream ripped through him.
Then the words came. Pouring out of him like blood from a wound.