5. Chapter 5 #2
He went for the lamp, swung it by the cord into the nearest face and felt it crack against something padded and hard, body armor under the black, and used the half beat it bought to put the bed between them.
The window was painted shut, he’d checked on the way in out of habit, so it was the door or nothing and the door was full of Venator.
He threw the cheap chair. The nearest one caught it on bracered forearms without slowing, the way you’d swat a branch.
He got a knee into a gut that didn’t give, an elbow into a throat, fast, faster than they expected from a half-blood, and for one bright second he thought he might punch a hole through them and run.
Then the woman caught his wrist mid-swing and turned it, calm as a mechanic, and the room tipped, and his cheek hit the carpet hard enough to split the skin over his eye.
“There it is,” she said, not even winded. “Knew you had a little fight. They always do, the ones who lasted.”
He bucked anyway, got a hand loose, clawed at whatever he could reach, until a knee came down on his spine and ground his face into carpet that smelled like a thousand strangers. Then came the cold.
The cuffs were silver-laced. He knew before they closed, the way you know a stove is hot a breath before it burns, and then they bit down around his wrists and the cold went all the way to the bone and took his wolf with it.
Everything in him that was strong just guttered out.
Leg irons next, the same dead cold. He was a sack of meat on a motel floor and his own body wouldn’t answer.
“Up,” the woman said.
They hauled him up. Blood ran warm into his eye and he blinked it back and made himself look at them, because he wasn’t going to be carried out staring at the floor.
And the only thought in his head, under the fear, over it, threaded all the way through it, was Roman.
Roman would come back across that lot with a creme soda and some dumb joke and find a wrecked room and a split door and no Lance.
No note. Nothing. Same as the first time, except this time Lance had started the leaving himself.
He’d wanted Roman to come back to an empty room.
He’d just wanted it to be his own choice. They’d taken even that.
Don’t come after me, he thought at the man who couldn’t hear him. For once in your chivalrous life, Romeo, stay home.
They walked him out into the night, quick and quiet, a body moved between bodies. Somewhere across the lot a vending machine clunked and dropped a can, the most ordinary sound in the world, and it nearly broke him worse than the cuffs.
***
Roman came back across the lot with a cold can in each hand. The scent hit him from the walkway. Fear, sharp and chemical, and under it almost nothing, no scent at all where there should have been three or four people. Scrubbed clean, on purpose.
He dropped the cans.
He read the room in one sweep, the way his father had drilled into him, before any Leitner son was allowed to call himself an alpha.
Lamp down. Chair overturned. The bedspread dragged half to the floor where a hand had fisted in it and lost. The window still painted shut, which left one way out, and the door hung off its top hinge, kicked clean through the frame.
Three sets of prints in the carpet, maybe four.
Lance had made them work for it. Good. Good that he’d fought.
And over all of it, the scent Roman would have known in his sleep, the one he’d spent days trying not to drown in, sweet and spiced and his. Wolfsbane, gone wrong, soured all the way through with terror. The smell of Lance afraid went into him like a blade between the ribs.
He let the wolf rise, up through his chest and into his eyes, until the part of him that wanted to go to its knees sank under and only the hunter was left.
He’d been gone minutes. A few lousy minutes and a can of soda, and someone had been waiting for exactly that, for him to leave Lance alone behind a door that didn’t lock.
The thought put a snarl in his chest and ice in his gut.
He shoved both down. Lance had minutes on him, maybe only minutes, and there was a trail to run.
Out, down the walkway, into the lot. The scent ran hard for the service road and then split, two ways at once, one trail loud and obvious, the other scrubbed down to almost nothing.
Their own scent wiped, the trail salted and split, silver still hanging in the air where they’d locked it around his wrists.
He knew the craft of it. Venators. And the Venators didn’t waste a false trail on whoever might chase a stray half-blood, not unless somebody had warned them a Leitner would come.
Which meant the pack. Somewhere in this was his own blood, and the thought put a low sound in his chest he didn’t bother to swallow.
He took the jeep as far as the river with the windows down and his head half out of one, running the true scent along the black shoulder until, at the water, it quit. They’d walked it into the river to break it. Smart. Nothing on the near bank, nothing he could reach from the road on the far side.
So he’d run it, the animal way.
Roman left the jeep where it stopped, door open and keys in it, and stripped at the treeline, kicking off his boots, hauling his shirt over his head.
The jeans he kept, twisted into a rope and looped across his chest the way Lance had shown him, and then he shifted, and the wolf took off into the dark at a dead run.
The world went simpler and louder at once.
Rot and river, diesel, a fox upwind, the cold mineral of wet stone.
All of it read and thrown away in a single breath, because none of it was him.
He went up the bank nose down, pale eyes pulling in what little light there was, the whole reeking night narrowed to one question.
Where was the sweet. Where was the spice. Where was the wolfsbane.
There. Faint, threaded through with fear and the cold bite of silver and the scent of three carrying something that fought them the whole way, climbing off the water toward a low dark shape against the sky.
Not a truck stop, not a town. Somewhere with no lights and no neighbors, well off any road. The kind of dead-end the Venators used when they wanted to hand a body off with no one watching. Roman had grown up on the laws that let them do it. He ran faster.
He closed on it swiftly. The fury in him was cold and clean, almost like calm, and under it ran the truth he’d been outrunning since the cottage.
He wasn’t chasing a friend. He wasn’t even chasing the man he wanted.
He was chasing what was his. And if Lance was bleeding when Roman reached him, he’d take that place apart, wolf by wolf, and not feel a thing while he did.
The dark shape slipped expertly through the shadows and reached the thinning edge of the woods.
A long, gutted building, one weak light bleeding from a gap in the boards.
Voices inside. And one of them, bloody and defiant and unmistakable, was telling someone in explicit detail exactly where they could put their silver.
Alive. Mouthy. Alive.
***
Roman pressed belly-to-ground at the tree line and made himself watch before he moved, counting bodies, marking the silver, learning the ground. Holding still nearly tore him in half.
Through the gap in the wall he could see all of it. An old, abandoned equipment shed, one work light throwing a hard yellow circle. Lance knelt in the middle of it, wrists and ankles in silver, blood drying down one side of his face, and he was talking. Of course he was talking.
“...so that’s a no on the complimentary breakfast,” he was saying to the lead Venator, the woman from the motel, who stood over him with her arms crossed. “What about the wifi. You people have wifi in Bedlam, or is it more of a screaming-into-the-void situation?”
“You’re very funny,” she said, “for a dead man.”
“I’m hilarious for a live one. You should catch the full set.”
The Venator crouched in front of him and studied his face the way Roman studied a bug in his code, hunting the one line that wasn’t behaving.
“Here’s what I keep noticing about you,” she said.
“You’re cuffed in silver, you’re bleeding, you’ve got every reason to crack, and you’re doing crowd work.
The ones going over don’t do that. They go quiet, or they go wrong.
You’re neither.” She stood. “Which is a problem, because I was told you were nearly gone.”
“Told by who,” Lance said, and the lightness went out of it.
She didn’t answer, because that was when the others arrived.
Roman smelled them before he saw them, and everything in him went cold and still.
Pack. His pack. Merritt at the front, composed and unhurried, Evan at his shoulder, Amanda a step behind him, four more wolves fanned at their backs.
They moved into the yellow light slow and certain, wolves who thought the night already belonged to them, with no idea he was twenty feet away in the dark.
“Is your brother handled?” the Venator asked.
“We covered your trail from the motel,” Merritt said. “He won’t find this place.”
Just outside the light, Roman shifted back and dragged the jeans on, torn through at one knee and filthy from the run, and stepped into the work light as a man.
He didn’t rush them. He walked in barefoot and bare-chested and unhurried, and something came off him that lifted every hackle in the shed, because the first of Merritt’s wolves to catch sight of him made a sound that brought every head around.
Bloodied, half-dressed, unarmed, outnumbered eight to one, and still the most dangerous thing standing in that shed, and every wolf there knew it before he said a word.
“You were saying,” Roman said.
For one second, it was there on Merritt’s face. Surprise, then the smoothing-over, the Alpha sliding back in place. “Brother.”
“Have them take the silver off him.” Roman didn’t raise his voice. “Now.”