The doorbell rang again as Warren held the door for me and followed me down, as if I outranked him.
I STOPPED IN THE BEDROOM TO GRAB MY CARRY GUN and tucked it, loaded and ready to go, in the back of my jeans. Warren didn’t say anything about it, just patted his lower back—he was carrying, too.
As we got to the bottom step, doors slammed and a car took off.
“Honda V6,” I told Warren.
J-series, if it mattered. But that didn’t tell him any more than it told me. There were a lot of Hondas with a V6 J-series, and there were different versions of the J-series. Hondas weren’t my manufacturer, so I couldn’t tell one version from another without having two different versions in front of me.
“Probably not a rental car,” said Warren.
Okay, so it told us something. Rental cars tended to be the stripped-down versions and the V6 was mostly an upgrade.
We were both speaking very quietly as we closed in on the door. Warren kept his eyes on the windows where people could look in. It was darker in the house than it was outside now, so it would be hard for someone to see us, but not impossible.
“Adam needs to get opaque curtains and use them,” said Warren.
“Then we can’t see out,” I told him, not paying as much attention to what I said as to the front door.
“I know he has cameras,” Warren answered. “He doesn’t need windows.”
He bent down and cautiously looked through the peephole and shook his head.
“Maybe it’s a Girl Scout,” I told him. “They’re short.”
“There, you’ve done it,” said Warren, reaching for the door. “Now I want a Thin Mint and it’s the wrong time of the year.”
He opened the door quickly, stepping away and to the side, but there was no attack. Instead, there was a body on the porch. It took me an instant that felt heart-stoppingly long to realize the body was breathing.
Warren leaned his head down, took a good scent, and then leaped across the porch and started running down the road as fast as he could—which was impressively fast, even in human form.
I was pretty sure that we were too late for catching the people who’d driven off, unless they had parked and come back to see what we did—which was possible. I checked out the man on our porch. I smelled unfamiliar werewolves, but I didn’t smell any blood. He appeared undamaged except for the part about him being unconscious.
Good. Because I liked him.
“Mary Jo,” I called out. “You want to come down. It’s Renny.”
The gift our werewolf invaders had left for us was Deputy Alexander Renton of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office. He was in uniform, so presumably they’d abducted him while he was on patrol.
Wolves in human form boiled down the stairs and out to the porch. Darryl and Auriele did the same sniff-and-go that Warren had done. Mary Jo dropped to her knees beside him.
“Damn it, Renny,” she muttered to the unconscious man as she peeled back his eyelids to check his eyes. “I told you it wasn’t a good idea for us to start dating again.”
She checked his pulse, then looked up at Adam. “I think he’s fine. His heart rate is normal, his color’s good. They hit him with a tranq of some sort, I think. His department is going to be in the middle of a mad hunt for him. We should call them.” That last was a request for permission.
“Do it,” said Adam. Narrow-eyed, he looked out at our surroundings—pausing at a small boat on the far side of the river, maybe a quarter of a mile away. “That boat has binoculars pointed at us,” he said in a conversational tone.
Virtually as one, the pack glanced at him to see where he was looking, then followed his gaze out to the river. They were intent enough that the pack magic rose among us and we, the pack, understood that there was no chance of getting to the boat before they fled, because Adam knew that. We also rejected using the handguns that some of us were carrying because it was too far for a clean shot, and besides, we weren’t sure Adam wanted them dead.
The boat’s engine got louder as the boat swung around and took its passengers upriver and out of our sight. The pack hunting magic subsided.
“We could intercept,” suggested Ben, who did some boating with friends from work. “That small engine is good for being quiet, but pushing even that little boat upriver will be slow going.”
Adam shook his head. “I don’t want them yet,” he said.
“I take it,” said Honey, brushing her honey-colored hair out of her eyes, “that the wolves who did this were another of the interesting discoveries you made last night?”
“Because by Saint Peter’s peter,” said Ben, “an arse-licking boogeyman wasn’t enough. We needed a bishop-beating bunch of mangy invading werewolves, too.”
Luke laughed and in a fake British accent said, “Fecking right, Ben, my lad. But it would be take a real gobshite to try to invade us right this moment.”
“Agreed,” said Honey, while I was still trying to figure out what a gobshite was. “They should wait a few more months until attrition has winnowed our numbers down sufficiently.”
A silence followed her words, broken only by Mary Jo’s quiet voice as she talked to the sheriff’s department.
It was true. Since we weren’t connected with the rest of the packs (for various political and doubtless correct reasons) in the Americas, when our wolves left, there were no replacements. We’d lost eight wolves since we’d broken with the Marrok. One of us had died, and the other seven had moved for the usual reasons—better jobs, family necessity, and the war-ready tension our pack had to operate under right now. Adam could have made them stay, but he refused to do that. Our pack, which used to have between thirty and forty people in it, was down to twenty-six.
Our wolves had given up on the chase and were jogging back to the house.
“They want to talk to you,” said Mary Jo, handing her phone over to Adam. “I’ll take him inside.”
“Put him in the spare bedroom,” I told her as Adam explained that he understood that the sheriff’s office was not happy with one of their people being taken. “The sheets on the bed are clean.”
She picked him up in a fireman’s carry. He was quite a bit taller and more massive than she was, so it looked a little odd.
“I’ll get the doors,” volunteered Ben.
It took Adam about ten minutes to negotiate a path forward with Renny’s sheriff that didn’t involve the sheriff’s department taking the town apart to look for the perpetrators. The chill effect of Honey’s words kept the rest of the pack quiet. Adam and I had talked about our declining numbers, but apparently it was a new thought for most of the pack. Or maybe hearing it said out loud made it harder to ignore.
Auriele, Darryl, and Warren were jogging up to the porch by the time Adam disconnected.
“Let’s go back upstairs,” Adam said. “I have some information for you about the wolves who dropped Deputy Renton on our porch.”
ONCE EVERYONE WAS SEATED AGAIN—INCLUDING Mary Jo and Ben, who’d returned from settling Renny, who appeared to be sleeping comfortably—Adam ran down the details of the wolf kill the night before.
“I identified two of the werewolves from last night, and I made some calls,” Adam said. “I have a pretty good idea who the leader of this pack is.”