That smile of his never dimmed. “Maybe I wanted to see how you’d react if I just walked in. That kind of thing will tell you a lot about a pack.”
It would, indeed. “You’re not really endearing yourself to me.”
“Right. Sorry. I won’t cause trouble, I promise.”
Ben wasn’t any more tense than he’d been when the interview started. Which meant he didn’t sense any more threat than he had twenty minutes ago, when Darren first appeared. If Ben had reservations, he’d let me know. I couldn’t think of a reason to say no. Besides, if he was a friend of Nasser’s, that made him an ally. Theoretically.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll give it a try. You just have to follow the rules: be nice, and don’t be stupid.”
He stared at me. “Don’t be stupid? That’s it?”
“That’s it,” I said. And it really was. Anyone who couldn’t manage those two things, I probably couldn’t help. “Well, and I’d like your address and phone number so we can stay in touch. If you need a place to stay we can probably find you something.”
“No tithing?” he went on, and I shook my head. “No rituals of submission? No hierarchies?” He was talking about ceremonies that some packs went through—alphas demanding demonstrations of obedience, usually involving violence and bloodshed.
I said, “As a wise alpha wolf recently told me, if you have to beat people up, you’re doing it wrong. I’m not saying you won’t get challenged by anyone else in the pack, because you will, but we can be relatively civil about it. I prefer to put the ‘were’ ahead of the ‘wolf.’”
“Nasser also says you’re not subservient to the local vampire Master.”
“Rick? No. I mean, we’re friends. But just friends.” That sounded weird … Speaking of Rick, I still needed to talk to him about Hardin and her wanted poster.
“That’s really unusual,” he said. And was I pleased that he sounded impressed?
“We work together, hopefully for the good of everyone. And who’s interviewing whom, here?”
He spread his arms in a show of apology. “All right, then. What else do you want to know about me?”
Ben and I looked at each other—me passing the ball to him. Because just like “How old are you?” was the obvious question I always asked vampires, werewolves had their obvious question.
“How did you become a werewolf?” Ben asked. “Did you choose it or were you attacked?”
“I was attacked,” he said, without any self-consciousness. Totally straightforward.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It happened a long time ago. I was nineteen. Still a kid, really. I was out fishing near my family’s cabin, stayed out too late, the full moon was up. You probably hear stories like that a million times. The local pack took me in, helped me cope. I started making the alpha there nervous, so I left rather than cause trouble. I’ve been seminomadic for probably ten years now.”
“And how do you know Nasser?” I asked.
“I’ve helped him out a time or two, whenever he needed an extra pair of arms. Or claws.” His smile carefully didn’t show teeth.
That made him hired muscle, for whatever shenanigans Nasser got up to. Anti-Roman shenanigans, probably, but still. Darren the mercenary.
My skepticism must have shown through, because he quickly continued. “That was only when I was on my own. Lone wolf. When I’m here, when I’m part of your pack, I answer to you, and that’s it. I figure that’s part of ‘don’t be stupid,’ right?”
I smiled in spite of myself. “You’re catching on.”
“So, do I pass?”
I suddenly realized what was driving me crazy about this whole situation: I was being asked to decide someone’s fate for the immediate future. I shouldn’t have that kind of power. Most werewolves—and vampires, and probably a dozen other supernatural beings as well—would see it as completely normal. He’d asked permission to live in our territory, I could give it or not as I chose. But this wasn’t just about settling down; he was asking to become part of our family—and it was up to me to say yes. When really I should be calling up everyone in the pack, talking to Shaun and Becky, and Ben of course. Maybe even Rick. Might not hurt to consult Cormac as well …
“You’re thinking deep thoughts,” Ben said.
I’d been staring into space, my lips pursed. “No deeper than usual.” Darren was looking at me expectantly. “All right, you’re in. Don’t blow it.” I offered my hand for him to shake, which he did, again. Shaking hands was a human gesture, not a wolf greeting, but he overcame his wolf instincts without hesitation. He was civilized. Housebroken, even. Deal accomplished. I still felt weird.
“Why don’t I introduce you around?” I said, gesturing at the others to join us. “I imagine you’ll meet the rest of the pack on the next full moon.” I did the mental count in my head—eight days away. Sooner rather than later, then. We’d get to see both sides of the new kid.
Shaun approached obliquely from our side of the table, keeping a wary gaze on the newcomer. He was our lieutenant, the strongest wolf in our pack. Our backup. Becky and Tom were tough, but ranked lower than Shaun. They hung back to see how Shaun reacted.
“Everything cool?” he asked.
“Everything’s cool,” I said. “Darren, Shaun. And that’s Becky and Tom. Darren’s going to be staying with us for a while. And not causing trouble.”
Shaun’s lip curled. Yeah, he’d help keep Darren in line, if it came to that. I still couldn’t get a good read on the guy. He seemed unconcerned, smiling and friendly.
“Right,” Shaun said. “Can I get you a drink?”
“Sure, that’d be great,” Darren said.
Maybe this seemed weird because I felt like we should have been doing this out in the woods, on four legs, duking it out with growls and teeth instead of sitting at a table in a restaurant. We were acting human. But our wolves were sizing each other up. Full moon was going to be interesting.
Shaun brought beers, the others sat with us, and we embarked on a perfectly normal conversation, asking about jobs and work and places we’d lived. Tom knew about an apartment for rent, and Darren seemed to think it sounded good. They agreed to meet about it tomorrow.
Well, this seemed to be going well. Swimmingly, even. The tension around us faded a few notches. My shoulders relaxed, and I didn’t feel a need to keep watching Darren, waiting for him to strike. I was suddenly exhausted. I turned to Ben. “Time to go home?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Thanks, Kitty. I really appreciate it,” Darren said, beaming his calm smile at us.
Not only did he get in the first word, he had to get the last one, too. Whatever.
Shaun went back to work at the bar, but Becky and Tom stayed behind to talk to Darren. The glamour of the new.
Outside, a faint breeze brought the scent of distant mountains, of spring pines and stone, through the asphalt and fumes of the city. I filled my lungs, and the walk to the car was calm.
“Did I make the right call?” I asked Ben.
“We’ll find out,” he said.
“That’s not comforting.” I took his hand and squeezed.
“You’re still wondering if you’re doing this alpha thing right, aren’t you?”
“I’m pushing thirty. Isn’t life supposed to get easier?”
Ben laughed.
Chapter 7
RICK NEVER returned my call that night, and I worried. As I tossed and turned in bed, reaching to the nightstand to check my phone on the off chance I hadn’t heard the ring, Ben kept pointing out that Rick had survived a very long time and could reasonably be expected to take care of himself for the foreseeable future.
“Besides,” he added, “Columban didn’t seem interested in hurting Rick.”
“Then what about those arson cases in Europe? Rick doesn’t know about those and I doubt Columban would tell him.”
He murmured sleepily onto the back of my neck. “Kitty. Relax. Please.”
&n
bsp; I tried, honest I did. But I kept waiting for that call, as I watched dawn lighten the sky outside the bedroom window.
Somehow, I got myself to work and made a show of accomplishing something, despite all the potential interviewees who wouldn’t return my calls, press releases I was supposed to be reviewing, messages I should have been answering, my second book that wasn’t writing itself. The file for it glared on my monitor, displaying too much white space.
When my cell phone finally did ring, I dived for it. The prey had revealed itself at last, and I pounced. Even though in the middle of the day, in full sunlight, it couldn’t possibly be Rick, who was holed away in his lair, asleep. I hoped he was.
This call came from Cormac. Maybe he had some good news. I answered, “Yeah?”
“I think I found where your vampire priest is holed up.”
“You did? Where?” If we found Columban, I’d bet we’d find Rick.
“You want to go see?”
“We’re not going to be sneaking up on this guy, are we?”
“It’s the middle of the day, what can he do? I’ll pick you up.”
Twenty minutes later his Jeep was at the curb in front of KNOB. Bag and jacket in hand, I piled into the passenger seat. He drove off without a word.
We’d gone six or seven blocks before I couldn’t stand the silence anymore. “So what’d you find?” I asked.
He wore a thin, wry smile. “You gotta ask yourself, if you were a priest, and a vampire, where would you go?”
“I’m not really in the mood for this,” I said.
“It’s pretty funny.”
“Come on? Where?”
He was enjoying himself too much to give the surprise away. I crossed my arms and slouched.
We crossed the freeway into downtown, and he turned from Colfax onto the Auraria campus, a collection of university buildings on a surprisingly pastoral campus for being the middle of downtown Denver. He made a couple of turns into a warren of buildings and parked in a circular drive beside a large, pink church. It had two square, neo-Spanish colonial towers in front; a curved, graceful roofline; gray trim. It must have been almost a century old, and the rest of the city had clearly grown up around it.
“Here it is.”
I pointed at the crosses at the top of the building. “It’s a church.”
“Yup.”
“I thought vampires couldn’t go into churches,” I said. “Consecrated ground and all that.”
“But this one’s not a church anymore. The parish moved out in the seventies, and it’s been used as an auditorium ever since. There’s a dinosaur museum in the basement.”
So, where do you go to find a vampire priest? A deconsecrated church. Of course. I chuckled. “Well, that’s cute.”
He opened the door and climbed out.
“Wait, what are you doing?” I called, scrambling out of my side of the Jeep. “You can’t go staking him or anything. Rick’ll kill us.”
He glanced at me sidelong, and I growled under my breath.
“I’m only guessing he’s here,” he said. “A vampire isn’t going to leave a trail or reveal himself unless he wants to. Nothing’s better at hiding than they are. But you’ve seen it before—don’t look for the vampire, look for what he’s using to protect himself. I made a list of likely places and started visiting them, and I found something.”
We walked around to the back of the building, to a quiet space by a house connected to the church—the former rectory. A row of shrubs and a flower garden, daffodils nodding and lilacs filling the air with a heady smell, sheltered the space from the foot traffic on the sidewalk.
Cormac knelt on the ground, and I knelt with him, watching. He pulled items out of his pockets and arranged them on the lawn in front of him, which meant he was going to work a spell. Or, Amelia was. Because of her, I never knew what Cormac was going to draw from his figurative hat next. His pockets always had arcane bits and pieces in them.
He picked up a stub of a red candle, the wick already blackened; a sprig of some herb; and a piece of black twine. He wrapped the herb to the candle with the twine, then lit the candle using a cheap lighter, which seemed wrong somehow. A real wizard ought to be able to spark it out of thin air, right? But I’d hung around with enough magicians over the last few years to know the answer to that: you don’t waste magic on something you can do without it. The cheap lighter ignited the candle’s wick just fine.
Cormac’s lips moved, mouthing words. He stepped forward, toward the church wall, holding the candle in front of him, its flame wavering with the movement. About twenty steps away, the yellow drop of fire went out. The air was still, but a stray breeze might have extinguished it. I looked around, as if expecting to find that some invisible person nearby had blown it out.
He backed up, and the candle flared to life again. He walked a little ways farther down, following the line of an invisible circle, moved toward the building—and again the flame died. He tried it two or three more times, and each time he crossed that invisible threshold, the candle went out, or relit.
“That’s really weird,” I said, unnecessarily.
“Yeah, Amelia saw markings, there and there.” He pointed to black squiggly marks, one on a corner of the church, another on a nearby tree, and a third on the back of a NO PARKING sign near the street. I’d have figured they were random graffiti tags, if I noticed them at all. But now that he’d pointed them out, they had a pattern—pairs of stylized letters, medieval alchemical or zodiac signs maybe.
I tried to visualize what the candle told us was there in spirit. “Someone cast a protective circle here,” I said. “Protecting against what?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Cormac said. “May be nothing. May be a habit of his.”
“You’re sure it’s Rick’s vampire friend that did it?”
“Because we don’t know any other vampires who are magicians, right?”
My shoulders unconsciously bunched up, an imitation of hackles rising. He was talking about Roman, who’d spent part of his two thousand years as a vampire learning how to work magic. Guy could do it all.
“Are you saying Columban is with Roman?”
“I’m just saying that vampires and magic aren’t mutually exclusive. And that this guy knows how to cover his ass and doesn’t seem to need any help doing it. The symbols are European, medieval—it’s what I’d expect from a vampire working for the Vatican.”
“So he’s a vampire Catholic priest and a magician. I’d have assumed those would all be mutually exclusive.”
“I don’t think we can make any assumptions. Guy’ll do what he needs to do.”
Didn’t really make the situation any better.
Cormac continued, “This is just a defense against a supernatural threat. Won’t stop someone with a stake, if it comes to that.”
“He may have mundane servants for that,” I said. “So no, we’re not staking him. This is Rick’s problem.” For now. I really had to let him know about Hardin’s police sketch.
“We know where he’s most likely staying, now. We can keep an eye on him.”
That would have to be enough. I looked over the building. It probably had a basement or cellar, or at the very least a windowless utility closet, locked and protected. People moved around here all day, never knowing about the vampires lurking here.
We returned to the Jeep. I mulled possibilities. Not knowing what to expect next made planning ahead difficult. Was Columban worried about something specific? Did I need to be worried about it, too? Or was this a general precaution? I asked, “Would a protective circle like that work if the church were still consecrated? Still a church, I mean?”
“If it were still a church you wouldn’t need the circle. But then, the vampire wouldn’t be there.”
Maybe that was why Columban did it, and for no other reason. He couldn’t use a real church, but he could make a facsimile of one.
Cormac asked, “If Rick decides to go with this guy and leave
Denver, what are you going to do?”
I couldn’t imagine such a thing. Rick leaving Denver—Rick was Denver. He’d been around since before there was a Denver. He couldn’t leave Denver. I almost blurted the words, unthinking. But Columban represented something Rick thought he lost centuries ago. I remembered the way he looked that night, as if the universe had rearranged itself around him.
“Try to talk him out of it?” I said. I honestly didn’t know what I’d do if Rick left. Try to be happy for him.
I had a bigger question. We were supposed to be working to oppose Roman together. The only way this whole opposition thing worked is if Rick and I were in it together. If Rick left to become some kind of vampire priest, I’d be on my own. Would vampires like Nasser even listen to me, then?
“You should know,” I said. “Hardin’s looking for this guy, too.”
“I’m not telling her about this,” Cormac said, with the contempt he held for all cops.
“That’s what I thought. I need to hold her off until I can get ahold of Rick.”
“She won’t hear it from me.”
Cormac drove me back to work, waiting until we were in the parking lot at KNOB to ask, “Heard there’s a new werewolf in town.”
I looked at him, startled. “How do you know about him?”
“Keep my eyes open, that’s all.”
Cormac hadn’t been at New Moon last night, I was sure of it. Had Ben told him? “Are you spying on us? On New Moon?”
“Like I said, just keeping my eyes open. So, how’s that going?”
I slouched in the seat and growled. “It’s fine, everything’s fine,” I said, noncommittal. He gave me a sidelong look.
“When’s full moon, Saturday? He going with you?”
“What, you thinking of tagging along, just in case?”
“I could.”
I glared at him. “And how exactly would you accomplish that? You think you’re going to dig some of your silver bullets out of storage and sit on a hillside playing sniper?” That was exactly the kind of thing he’d have done in the old days, before his time in prison. Now, as an ex-con, handling firearms could get him thrown back into prison. Ben and I seemed to treat the threat more seriously than he did. Or he was purposefully pulling our chains. I would never know. “No. We’ll be fine.”