To my relief, Mac was leaning on Stefan's van when I loped into the parking lot. He held a gun loosely in his hand, the barrel bent.
"Mercy?" he asked me, when I approached, as if he expected me to talk.
I ducked my head once, then darted around the front of the garage where I'd left my clothes. He followed me. But when I shifted back, and he saw that I was naked, he turned his back to let me dress.
I pulled on my clothing quickly-it was cold out. "I'm decent," I told him, and he faced me again.
"You have blood on your chin," he said, in a small voice.
I wiped it off with the bottom of my T-shirt. I wasn't going shopping tonight, so it didn't matter if I got blood on my clothes. Don't throw up again, I told myself sternly. Pretend it was a rabbit. It hadn't tasted like rabbit.
"What are you?" he asked. "Are you one of theirs? Where is... is the wolf?"
"He's dead. We need to talk," I told him, then paused as I collected my scattered thoughts. "But first we need to get the dead werewolf out of the street. And before that, I guess we should call Adam."
I led him back to the office-this time turning on the light. Not that either of us needed it for anything other than comfort.
He put his hand on top of mine when I reached for the phone. "Who is Adam, and why are you calling him?" he asked.
I didn't fight his hold. "The local Alpha. We need to get the body out of the road-unless you want both of us disappeared into some federal laboratory for science to pick over for a few years before they decide they can learn more from us dead than alive."
"Alpha?" he asked. "What's that?"
He was new.
"Werewolves live in packs," I told him. "Each pack has an Alpha-a wolf strong enough to keep the others under control. Adam Hauptman is the local Alpha."
"What does he look like?" he asked.
"Five-ten, a hundred and eighty pounds. Dark hair, dark eyes. I don't think he has anything to do with your wolves," I said. "If Adam wanted you, he'd have you-and he'd have found you a lot sooner. He can be a jerk, but competence is his forte."
Mac stared at me, his brown eyes looking yellowish in the fluorescent lighting of my office. Truth to tell, I was surprised he was still in human form because watching one wolf change tends to encourage others. I met his gaze calmly, then dropped my eyes until I was looking at his shoulder instead.
"All right," he said, slowly removing his hand. "You saved me tonight-and that thing could have torn you apart. I've seen them kill."
I didn't ask when or whom. It was important to take action in the right order to avoid worse trouble. Call Adam. Remove body from the middle of the street where anyone could see it. Then talk. I punched Adam's number from memory.
"Hauptman," he answered, with just a touch of impatience, on the fourth ring.
"I killed a werewolf at my garage," I said, then hung up. To Mac's raised eyebrows I said, "That will get a faster reaction than spending twenty minutes explaining. Come on, you and I need to get the body off the street before someone spots it." When the phone rang, my answering machine picked it up.
I took Stefan's bus because loading something large into a bus is just easier than loading it into my little Rabbit. The bus smelled of Mac, and I realized he'd not lied to me when he said he had a place to spend the night. He'd been sleeping in it for a couple of nights at least.
The bus was without brakes until we fixed it, but I managed to get it to drift to a stop next to the body. Mac helped me get it in the bus, then dashed back to the garage while I drove. When I arrived, he had the garage open for me.
We set the dead man on the cement floor next to the lift, then I parked the bus back where it had been and pulled down the garage bay door, leaving us inside with the body.
I walked to the corner farthest from the dead werewolf and sat down on the floor next to one of my big tool chests. Mac sat down next to me, and we both stared across the garage at the corpse.
Half-changed, the body looked even more grotesque under the harsh lighting of the second bay than it had under the streetlight, like something out of a black-and-white Lon Chaney movie. From where I sat I could see the slice in his neck that had killed him.
"He was used to healing fast," I said, to break the silence. "So he didn't pay attention to his wound. But some wounds take longer to heal than others. He didn't know any more than you do. How long have you been a werewolf?"
"Two months," Mac said, leaning his head back against the tool chest and looking at the ceiling. "It killed my girlfriend, but I survived. Sort of."
He was lucky, I thought, remembering the suppositions I'd had while overhearing his phone call earlier. He hadn't killed his girlfriend after all. He probably wasn't feeling lucky though, and I wasn't going to tell him that it could be worse.
"Tell me about your life afterward. Where did those men come from? Are you from the Tri-Cities?" I hadn't heard of any suspicious deaths or disappearances in the last six months.
He shook his head. "I'm from Naperville." At my blank look, he clarified. "Illinois. Near Chicago." He glanced at the body, closed his eyes, and swallowed. "I want to eat him," he whispered.
"Perfectly natural," I told him, though I have to admit I wanted to move away from him. Heaven save me, stuck with a new werewolf in a garage with fresh meat was not anyone's idea of safe. But we had to wait here until Adam came. It could have been worse: it could have been nearer the full moon, or he could have been as hungry as he'd been that first day.
"Deer not only tastes better, it's easier to live with afterward," I said, then reflected that it might be better to talk about something other than food. "What happened to you after that first attack? Did someone take you to a hospital?"
He looked at me a moment, but I couldn't tell what he was thinking. He said, "After... after the attack, I woke up in a cage in someone's basement. There was someone in the room and when I opened my eyes, he said, 'Good, you'll live. Leo will be happy to see it. "
"Wait," I said. "Leo. Leo. Chicago." Then it came to me. "Leo James? Looks as though he ought to be a Nordic skiing champion? Tall, long, and blond."
Leo was one of the Chicago Alphas-there were two of them. Leo held territory in the western suburbs. I'd met him once or twice. Neither of us had been impressed, but then, as I said, most werewolves don't take kindly to other predators.
Mac nodded. "That sounds right. He came down the stairs with the first guy and another man. None of them would talk to me or answer any of my questions." He swallowed and gave me an anxious glance. "This shit just sounds so weird, you know? Unbelievable."
"You're talking to someone who can turn into a coyote," I told him gently. "Just tell me what you think happened."
"All right." He nodded slowly. "All right. I was still weak and confused, but it sounded like Leo was arguing money with the third guy. It sounded to me like he sold me for twelve thousand dollars."
"Leo sold you for twelve thousand dollars," I said, as much to myself as to Mac. My voice might have been matter-of-fact, but only because Mac was right: it was unbelievable. Not that I thought he was lying. "He had one of his wolves attack you and your girlfriend and when you survived, he sold you to someone else as a newly turned werewolf."
"I think so," said Mac.
"You called your family this afternoon?" I asked. I smiled at his wary look. "I have pretty good hearing."
"My brother. His cell phone." He swallowed. "It's broken. No caller ID. I had to let them know I was alive. I guess the police think I killed Meg."
"You told him that you were after her killer," I said.
He gave an unhappy laugh. "Like I could find him."
He could. It was all a matter of learning to use his new senses, but I wasn't going to tell him that, not yet. If Mac did find his attacker, chances were Mac would die. A new werewolf just doesn't stand a chance against the older ones.
I patted his knee. "Don't worry. As soon as we get word to the right people-and Adam is the right people-Leo's a walking dead man. The Marrok won't allow an Alpha who is creating progeny and selling them for money."
"The Marrok?"
"Sorry," I said. "Like I told you, except for the occasional rogue, werewolves are organized into packs under an Alpha wolf."
It used to be that was as organized as werewolves got. But the only thing it takes to be Alpha is power, not intelligence or even common sense. In the Middle Ages, after the Black Plague, the werewolf population was almost wiped out along with real wolves because some of the Alphas were indiscreet. It was decided then that there would be a leader over all the werewolves.
"In the US, all the packs follow the Marrok, a title taken from the name of one of King Arthur's knights who was a werewolf. The Marrok and his pack have oversight of all the werewolves in North America."
"There are more of us?" he asked.
I nodded. "Maybe as many as two thousand in the US, five or six hundred in Canada, and about four hundred in Mexico."
"How do you know so much about werewolves?"
"I was raised by them." I waited for him to ask me why, but his attention had drifted toward the body. He inhaled deeply and gave an eager shudder.
"Do you know what they wanted with you?" I asked hurriedly.
"They told me they were looking for a cure. Kept putting things in my food-I could smell them, but I was hungry so I ate anyway. Sometimes they'd give me shots-and once when I wouldn't cooperate they used a dart gun."
"Outside, when you were talking to them, you said they had others like you?"
He nodded. "They kept me in a cage in a semitrailer. There were four cages in it. At first there were three of us, a girl around my age and a man. The girl was pretty much out of it-she just stared and rocked back and forth. The man couldn't speak any English. It sounded like Polish to me-but it could have been Russian or something. One of the times I was taking a trip on something they pumped in me, I woke up and I was alone."