Susan started as Silver knelt beside her, appearing out of nowhere as far as her pounding heart was concerned. The man with the gun was still around. She couldn’t afford to be this distracted. Then John murmured her name, and Susan ignored even Silver again for a few moments. “John?”
John’s eyes went to her, then flickered closed. She cupped his cheek and shook his shoulder more urgently, but he didn’t open them again. “John?”
“He used all his energy in healing. He needs to sleep. And eat later, but for now, sleep.” Silver tugged John’s shirt down. She touched Susan’s shoulder, petted Edmond’s head. The baby’s crying faded into sniffles.
“Silver.” Sacramento’s voice cut off further explanations. He set the gun on a bookshelf and rolled his shoulders. Time to get down to business, his body language and grin said.
Silver sat back on her heels and regarded him as blankly as before. She didn’t go anywhere.
“If you’re our alpha now, you have another challenge to answer,” Pierce snarled, and started unbuttoning his shirt.
“Don’t make me laugh.” Sacramento didn’t touch his clothes.
Susan wanted to shout at them to stop, freeze until she’d forced someone to explain what was going on. Challenge? For alpha? Which Sacramento had won by half-killing John? Did they fight as wolves or humans?
Sacramento slammed a fist into Pierce’s nose while the man still had his head tilted down over his buttons. Pierce staggered back, unable to regain his balance before Sacramento rained a dozen other blows to his face, his jaw, his stomach. He got in a few blows in return, but none sounded like they carried as much force as Sacramento’s. “Come back to me when you’re a real alpha, little beta, and I’ll give you a proper challenge.”
Pierce half-collapsed and caught himself with one hand against the wall. Sacramento gave him time for a couple breaths, then grabbed a handful of fabric at his collar and dragged him farther along the wall. “Stay out of the way, hm, little beta?” A collar hung from a chain on the wall, and Sacramento picked it up and snapped it around Pierce’s neck. Susan had made John explain it once, so she knew it was something to do with controlling people who acted up in wolf form, not sex, but she still hated the look of it.
The chain had enough length to allow Pierce to sink to a sitting position. He tried to let his head sag forward, jerked against the collar, and brought up his knees to hide his face instead.
Sacramento dusted his hands together melodramatically. “Anyone
else
of low rank want to pick up a few bruises?” He stared around the room, and this time everyone sank back. Sank back with burning frustration in their eyes, in the case of some of the pack members, but sink they did.
Susan didn’t have to decide whether to sink or not, because Sacramento’s eyes passed over her head. She took one painfully tight breath, then another, and when the stalemate seemed to hold, she bent over John again. He was just sleeping, Silver had told her that. Susan watched to make sure he kept breathing anyway.
12
Silver had trouble pinpointing her cousin’s smell over the blood and Susan and the baby, but she could see from the steady rise and fall of his chest that his heart was laboring on despite his earlier wound.
Sacramento stepped to the side with his underlings, talking with them in low voices. He glanced once at the weapon that had started this all but didn’t pick it back up. Perhaps he thought he had no need of it now the pack was so cowed.
A thought nagged at Silver, however. Why wait to use the weapon on her cousin? Were were difficult to kill, but this weapon could do so even if that was not one’s intention. If he didn’t fear the risk of killing by mistake and bringing the wrath of all the Western packs down on himself, why not use it sooner? And if he was intelligent enough to realize that while lones such as herself and Dare might provoke only limited outcry, a dead alpha was a different matter entirely, why use it at all? Sacramento had held the weapon confidently enough, but Silver began to wonder if he’d really thought things through before her cousin forced his hand.
“And will you use his weapon against him?” Death paced a circle around her cousin’s prostrate wild self, as if assessing it for weakness. It looked hurt too, but not fatally. Death made no move to its throat for its voice.
Silver couldn’t talk here, not with Sacramento listening as well as Susan, but she glared at Death. She knew better than to make the same mistake as Sacramento. She was even less familiar with the weapon than him.
Death sat at her cousin’s head and thumped his tail once in impatience. “What will you do, then? Sacramento has won his challenge. You are the only one of high rank left, if you choose to admit to it.”
Silver looked down at her hand on her cousin’s bloody chest. Lady, it stank in this room. Blood mixed with everyone’s fear, with nowhere to go, no source of fresh air. Easier to think about that than Death’s question. What did he expect her to do? Her challenging Sacramento head on was laughable. And even if she did, why would anyone here listen to her? They all thought she was crazy. They wouldn’t want a madwoman as their alpha.
Silver swallowed around a twisting, knotted lump of frustration. A challenge wasn’t the only way. She had to wait, keep Susan calm, and seize any opportunity to distract or trick Sacramento that presented itself. Her cousin couldn’t hear her, but she began a song to him anyway, words soft under her breath. The song would do Susan as much good, especially if she thought it was for her lover’s sake.
* * *
“—Lady’s light over forests and the sea.”
It took Susan three or four lines, but then the niggling familiarity of Silver’s tune crystallized into recognition.
When true simplicity is gained
… She matched the snippet of words remembered from some elementary school concert with the line Silver had just sung, and so lost the thread of the next. “That’s ‘Simple Gifts,’” she said when Silver let the song trail off. “That’s a human song.”
Silver threw her a small smile. “And no human ever reused a tune? There are those that were ours in the first place, too.”
A young man flopped down at John’s feet. The puppyish bounce had gone out of his movements, and he let his dishwater-blond-haired head hang a little. Tom, the name floated to the surface of Susan’s mind. She’d met him at breakfast.
He seemed to have started a general movement, because the rest of the pack followed him, surrounding them in a huddled mass, children at the center. She could feel the people around her practically vibrating with anger, but none of them
did
anything. There were only three bad guys, and a dozen adults in the pack.
Edmond must have felt the tension too, because he started to wail. She bounced him, desperately, but he was unhappy and determined to let everyone know it. The Hispanic man glanced over on his way past to stand at the foot of the basement stairs, then away again, dismissing them. With him looming in front of the stairs there was nowhere else for anyone to escape. There were windows high on one side of the room, but they were so narrow only Edmond might have fit through.
Maybe Edmond’s upset would be good for something, though. Under cover of the noise, Susan leaned over to Silver. “Why doesn’t everyone rush them at once?”
“It keeps low-ranked Were safe, if they don’t fight whoever defeats their leader. Leaders come and go, but if you keep your head down, you can endure. If you don’t fight, you don’t get hurt.” Silver said it without emotion: not judging, but not agreeing either.
“And when the new leader is batshit? You’re just screwed?” Susan waited, but Silver only made a frustrated noise.
Sacramento retrieved his gun and smirked when everyone flinched. Susan held Edmond closer, shushing him desperately. If Sacramento would just allow them a quiet moment, she’d feed him. Sacramento snapped his fingers at his blond thug, and the man waded between everyone to jerk Silver up with one hand under her bad shoulder. He dragged her over to Sacramento and stepped back.
“Now.” Sacramento backed Silver up until she was pressed against the wall. He dragged a thumb along his scar and then mirrored it by caressing the silencer down her cheek. She kept her eyes steady on his face, but he pretended like she’d looked at the gun. “What, this? I like to call it poetic justice. I could kill you and ship him the body with a self-satisfied phone call about how you’d gotten what you deserved for your crimes—if my son had crimes, I’m sure you do—but I think Dare deserves something a little more personal. Something that takes a little more time.” He lifted the gun away, holding it and his other hand up in a parody of surrender. He set it on top of the bookshelf again. “Guns make everything too quick.”
Sacramento took out his phone and slid his finger across the screen to find the number he wanted. He smirked as he lifted it to his ear. “You’re missing playtime at the Seattle house, Dare,” he said after a pause for Dare to answer, and hung up.
He slipped his phone away and pressed his palms together. “So. We have perhaps half an hour while he turns around and speeds back here. What do you think we can do with that time?” He turned to Silver to ask the question. She stayed pressed against the wall, though her chin lifted a few degrees, maybe from defiance she couldn’t suppress.
Sacramento lifted Silver’s good hand, settling it over his in a parody of a courtly dance hold. Then with great deliberation he took her pinkie and started to bend it back.
A growl began in Silver’s throat, but Susan was already pushing herself to her feet. She couldn’t just stand here, like the others. She couldn’t. “Don’t! She heals like a human!” That was what Dare had said, wasn’t it? If Were weren’t used to real injuries, maybe she could stretch the truth to exaggerate the danger. “You hurt her too much, she’ll go into shock. Humans die from shock. Too much trauma and the body shuts down.”
Sacramento turned to her. Susan felt his gaze like a tangible weight, as if she’d interrupted the CEO in full flood to defend another, only to get herself fired. “And you
are
a human. One who keeps turning up in the oddest places. Places she shouldn’t be, listening to things she shouldn’t hear.”
He stepped up to her, reaching like he would take her chin as he had Silver’s. Susan hugged Edmond tightly, determined that whatever else he did, he would not hurt her child. Not while she was still breathing.
And he stopped. His eyes went to the top of Edmond’s head and his nostrils flared. He turned the reach into a mocking gesture to indicate her, but the hesitation had been there. “Has he told you all his secrets, then? Is it true love that transcends the bounds of species?”
“Twoo wuv…” Tom muttered into his hand and tittered like someone whose involuntary response to fear or upset was dumb humor. He grunted at a smack from behind, someone probably putting their own panicked fear into the strength of the blow.
Sacramento ignored the young man. He pushed into Susan’s personal space rather than touch her, an extra edge to his suppressed violence now. More and more of Susan’s instincts joined the chorus screaming at her to cower as Silver had pretended to. He’d already shot John. Neither she nor Silver could survive it if he shot them the same way. Sacramento chuckled. “Maybe I should take care of John’s dirty little problem while I’m here, don’t you think?”
“Why not?” Pierce threw himself to the extent of the chain, jerking a strangled noise from his throat. “You’ve already assured he’ll beat you into a whimpering pulp when he recovers. Why stop halfway?”
Sacramento growled. Between one blink and the next, he was gone from in front of Susan and had Pierce by one wrist. He began with Pierce’s forefinger. There was no slow bend back this time, just a quick snap. Pierce whimpered, but that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was Sacramento’s grin as he held the finger back. When he let go half a minute later, the finger stayed, healed in that position. Then the middle finger, then the ring. “If you’d accept my authority as your alpha, I wouldn’t need to hurt you. An alpha doesn’t hurt his pack. But if you keep challenging me…”
Susan wanted to vomit. She wanted to scream at the others to do something. But wasn’t she herself standing idly by? But they didn’t have a baby to consider, they all healed quickly. Maybe they were keeping themselves safe, but what about Silver? What about Pierce?
“No!”
The tone of the word so matched Susan’s own feelings it took her half a second to figure out who’d actually said it. Silver’s voice vibrated with rage and she threw herself at Sacramento as the man moved on to Pierce’s pinkie. He casually backhanded Silver into the wall. She landed bad shoulder first with a dull thud that suggested concrete behind the paneling.
Susan drew in a sobbing breath. Edmond hiccupped from his recent tears and started to squirm. Sacramento had stopped when he noticed the baby in the way. Was that a Were thing? Would even a guy like Sacramento refuse to hurt a child? If that was true, Susan was safer than most people here while holding him.
The thought gave her enough courage to speak up again. “Silver never challenged you. Why are you hurting her?” When Sacramento transferred his attention to her she held Edmond high to make sure he noticed the baby.
“Sorry, sweetheart. She’s not part of the Seattle pack.” Sacramento grinned. “Fair game.”
Susan overfilled her lungs and held it, trying to use the tight feeling to still her shaking. “What about me? I was the alpha’s mate. What status does that give me? High enough? I can’t fight, not with the baby to take care of, but can’t I name a champion or something?” Susan had no idea if any of that was true for Were, but the longer Sacramento was listening to her babble, the longer he wasn’t hurting anyone. Dare would be here eventually.
“I’d fight for you!” Tom stood and ducked his head to her, almost a bow. He needed a haircut, and the motion made his bangs fall into his eyes. Susan tried to read him. Did he understand what he was getting into, or had he accepted her pretensions to authority and was following orders instinctively? Scary thought. He’d be more ready for it than Pierce had been, but he’d be letting himself in for a world of hurt. Could she really in good conscience ask him to do that?