He started to say something, shook his head, and muttered, “Let me try this again.”
“Try what?” I asked.
Instead of answering me, he stopped dead and turned in a slow circle. “Do you smell that?”
Having sharp senses is one thing. Paying attention to them so they do some good is another. I inhaled. The hotel was in the middle of town; there were a lot of scents in the air. One of those scents just didn’t belong.
“Gunpowder?” I asked. “Why are we smelling gunpowder?”
I looked around but there weren’t any people outside the hotel who were near enough that the scent could be coming off them even if they’d spent the morning out shooting—even if they had rolled in gunpowder.
Paul focused on the cars, which made more sense because they were closer.
What we had were two minivans, a battered car with a pizza sign on the top, and, closest to us, a tour bus.
The silver bus purred at rest, her big luggage doors open to expose the belly of the beast. I took two steps toward her, but as soon as I did, the smell of her diesel engine overpowered the smell of gunpowder.
The diesel, being a volatile organic, would travel farther than the gunpowder. If I was smelling gunpowder outside the range of the diesel, it could only be because the gunpowder smell was coming from somewhere other than the bus.
Meanwhile, Paul had examined the first of the minivans. He shook his head at me and took a step toward the little battered car with a local pizza sign on the roof. Frowning, he tilted his head.
I ran up to him and got hit in the face with a wash of garlic, tomatoes, cheese, pepperoni—the usual. He looked at me and shrugged; his stomach rumbled. He grinned, a boyish expression he’d never turned on me before, then shook his head.
We both tried the second minivan, but it smelled of flowers and baby’s breath. The baby’s breath made Paul sneeze.
He gave half a growl, stalked back to the pizza car, and pulled open the driver’s-side door. He stuck his head in.
“Pizza is strong, but it shouldn’t smell like gunpowder,” he said to me. But by then I could smell it, too, wafting out of the open door. I saw him in my mind’s eye, the pizza delivery boy carrying one of those big vinyl pizza bags designed to carry multiple boxes of pizzas.
Paul and I both ran, leaving the door of the pizza car open.
When two people run into a crowded room, a lot of drama happens—shouts and shuffling and people with mouths agape. One of the things that doesn’t happen is a miraculous clearing of pathways. Paul did that all by himself.
I hoped that the old woman he shoved to the ground would be okay, but I didn’t hesitate when I jumped over her. Time enough to apologize and feel guilty after we hunted down the threat.
We ran for the boardroom. Once out of the crowd, I was faster than Paul, so I was in front when we turned the last corner.
“Adam,” I yelled. “Gun.”
The pizza man, one hand raised to knock at the closed door, turned a startled gaze at me. I supposed he hadn’t heard us until I yelled.
“Bomb,” corrected Paul, who had spent ten years in the SWAT unit of a large city back east. He’d never told me which one—we just didn’t talk that much.
The pizza man screamed, “Open the goddamned door, you freaks!” And, with a panicked look at my rapid approach, he did something with the pizza box.
The world stopped in a roar of sound and light.
One moment I was upright and running, the next I was facedown on the rough hotel carpet, struggling to breathe. The air was full of dust and my lungs didn’t want to work because of the heavy weight on top of me. Pain and loss shivered down the pack bonds with the even heavier weight of our dead.
Our dead.
“Paul,” I tried to say.
Though the lifeless weight of him on my back didn’t move, I felt the touch of his fingers on my cheek. They were warm, which I knew was weird.
They should have been cold. The touch of the dead is usually cold.
“Heyya, lady,” Paul said, his voice gentler than I’d ever heard it. “You’ll tell him, right?”
“Paul,” I said. “No.”
He laughed. “Yes, you will. You’re fair like that.” There was a little pause and he said a bit wistfully, “Tell Mary Jo that I loved her, okay?” Then he made a sharp sound. “No. No. That wouldn’t be right. Just make sure they all know what I did. So they will think well of me. I’d like that.”
And then Paul was gone, even though his body lay on top of me, the smell of him, of his blood, all around me.
7
It took Adam, Kelly, and Luke a while to dig me out of the debris. By that time, Paul’s extremities had cooled and his blood had stopped flowing over my skin. When they pulled Paul’s body off me, we were stuck together with his blood.
Maybe it was shock or the shot the EMT people gave me, but I was pretty loopy. I remember the faces of the EMT people dealing with two unhappy wolves (Kelly and Luke had both shifted to dig rubble), which varied from terror to fascination. But other than that, I don’t remember getting from the hotel to the hospital.
In the emergency room, I collected information a little haphazardly, as people came in and out of my cubby, and as I was hauled out for X-rays. Some of the people were pack, some were the nonpack who worked for Adam, but a few of them were strangers who looked like alphabet agency types. The fog increased after they decided I didn’t have a head injury and gave me something stronger.
I woke up to an unfamiliar voice.
“—twenty-five years old. Grad student in viticulture at WSU.”
“What does making wine have to do with making bombs?” That was Kelly. So I must have dozed off long enough ago that he’d had time to shift back. He sounded indignant, as if people who grew plants (like he did) should not contemplate blowing up hotels. It struck me as funny.
The bed moved a little, so I pried open my eyes.
A grim-faced man was sitting on the end of my bed. Apparently disaster makes us all friends because it was the caustic Secret Service guy from the meeting, now a little more battered and dusty.
He said, “Nothing. But growing up in a family with a demolition business does. I don’t know what the connection with Ford is, but the FBI is working on that.”
“Ford?” I asked; my voice came out a little wobbly.
Adam leaned in to look at me. He was seated on a rolling, backless chair pulled up to my bed. He and his clothing were filthy with blood and dirt, but his face and hands were clean.
It made me aware that sometime between when I was last functioning and now, I’d been stripped out of my blood-soaked clothing and put in a clean hospital gown. Parts of me were clean and parts of me were horrid. I smelled like gunpowder, muck, and Paul’s blood.
Adam touched my face with gentle fingers. “Back with us again, I see,” he said. “How do you feel?”
“Floaty,” I said, instead of telling him I wanted to crawl out of my skin to get Paul’s blood off me. “Floaty” was true, too. “It’s nice. What does the bomber have to do with trucks?”
He smiled—it was a real smile, though his face was tired. “Not much, sweetheart. But Ford is the name of Rankin’s man. Right now it looks like he’s the one who arranged for the bombing.”
“Okay.” I couldn’t quite remember which of the men in the meeting was Rankin’s man. Rankin was one of the Democrats, included because he was on the House committee on fae and supernatural affairs. That committee had undergone so many name changes over the past few years that I couldn’t, right off the top of my head, come up with what it was officially called. I knew it wasn’t the Tinker Bell Committee, which is what most people called it.
The filth and the blood and the dust that everyone was wearing told me that it was probably still the day of the bombing. The position of the sun told me that it wasn’t more than a few hours later.
“What’s the situation?” I asked Adam.
I didn’t have to spell out for him what I needed.
“Paul is dead. The bomber is dead,” he said.
“Did you—” I glanced hurriedly at the Secret Service guy, who glanced blandly back at me. This was why I didn’t drink. Too many minefields.
“I didn’t kill the bomber, no,” Adam said, his voice a little harsh. “I didn’t need to because he did it for us.”
“How about everyone else?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
“We got tossed around a little. The windows went and we lost chunks of ceiling and wall. No one was seriously hurt—Abbot has a broken arm. The rest of us just got bumps and bruises.”
“Luke broke his shoulder,” Kelly added. “But it healed up. Adam sent him home with Darryl.”
Translation: Luke was too worn out by the healing to change back to human and too upset by the bombing to be trusted out in public without a wolf dominant enough to make him mind.
“Okay,” I said. I looked at the Secret Service guy. “If the bomber died at the scene, how did you figure out—” I was still not at the top of my game because I had to run down truck brands until I came up with the right one. Not Dodge or Chevy. “—Ford was responsible?”
“I missed all but the end of it,” said the Secret Service guy regretfully. “I was too busy not dying and then scrambling out from under Kelly—thank you. But as soon as he realized he was alive, Ford started screaming that it was fifteen minutes early.”
“Abbot got the whole thing on his cell phone,” said Adam.
“We contacted Representative Rankin,” said the Secret Service guy. “You’ll be surprised to know that he was shocked and appalled.”
The Secret Service guy sounded honestly regretful when he added, “Unfortunately, I think that shock was real, at least. I’d love to pin this to that slimy toad. But it’s likely that the whole thing rests on Ford.”
“What is your name?” I asked. “I can’t just keep calling you the Secret Service guy.”