“Good,” Maven said, her tone approving. “I think you’re correct on all counts. But you have thrown a wrench into her plan, at least for the moment.”
Yeah . . . by accident, I thought but did not say. It scared me how close I’d come to leaving the witch meeting without stopping the werewolves. If Heather hadn’t chosen to attack early, or if Katia hadn’t come out to save me, the outcome could have been very different.
Quinn spoke up. “I don’t mean to be a downer, but the last time Morgan made a play, she had a backup plan established and ready—using John to get to Charlie. She’s gotta have contingencies.”
“I agree, but I don’t know what she might be planning,” I told him.
“I think perhaps the werewolves are the key to all this,” Maven said thoughtfully. “Was the woman who attacked you part of Dunn’s pack?”
“No, she wasn’t in the files. But I got the distinct impression she was one of Trask’s people.” I told them how Heather had reacted when I’d brought up Trask’s name.
“All right,” Maven said. “We need to locate the rest of the Cheyenne pack, starting with Mary and this Keith.”
Katia and I exchanged a look, and in the dashboard light I could see that she was thinking the same thing I was. Even if we could find them—and that was a big if, since they’d had enough time to be just about anywhere in the three surrounding states—why would we want to piss off the witches even more by bringing werewolves back into this?
“Uh . . . to what end?” I asked Maven, keeping my tone polite. “The clans still hate the werewolves—maybe even more than they did before this mess started.”
“True,” Maven replied. “But Morgan Pellar is using werewolves, and that changes things. We need allies—or at the very least, we need to make sure our former allies haven’t signed up with the enemy.”
I thought about that for a moment. Maven had a point—if the Cheyenne wolves were allies, we could use them to help us find the other pack, and if they were secretly our enemies, we needed to know that. My gut feeling was that Mary would never work for Morgan Pellar, under any circumstances. But that was just a hunch. “When we find Mary and Keith, what do you want us to do?”
“Either bring them onboard or get them off the board,” she said. I opened my mouth, but she was already adding, “No, I’m not saying you should kill them, if you can avoid it. But if we can’t trust them, I don’t want them anywhere near my state.”
That sounded next to impossible. Mary would want to find Dunn’s killer, and if she insisted on getting involved, was there really any way I could stop her? My magic didn’t work on them, and I didn’t exactly have a silver cage sitting in my basement. How could I possibly keep a couple of werewolves out of a mess I didn’t fully understand yet?
I started to say as much, but Katia shot me a look, shaking her head, and I closed my mouth as I realized her meaning. If I asked Maven for specifics, I would have to do whatever she ordered. As long as she was vague, I had wiggle room to get creative.
“All right,” I said instead. We would come up with something. “Meanwhile, do you want Katia and me back at the coffee shop?”
“No. Actually, I want you to stay away from here tonight. You too, Quinn.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because whatever Morgan is planning, she’ll expect us to be here. We need to be unpredictable.”
I agreed, and made plans to meet Quinn at Simon’s laboratory-slash-apartment. It was our safest bet, since Simon hadn’t moved in until well after Morgan was kicked out of Colorado. He’d kept its location from the rest of the witches—he hadn’t wanted them to know he was doing hard-core research for Maven—so Morgan’s spies wouldn’t know where to find it either.
I gave them our ETA, but before I could hang up, Katia abruptly said, “Maven . . . is it true that little Charlie helped a vampire with Lex’s disguise today?”
I shot her a look, but she was pointedly keeping her eyes on the road.
“Yes,” Maven answered.
“And both Lex and the vampire were acting on your orders?”
A pause, then: “Yes. Where are you going with this, Katia?”
“Charlie should be paid a consultant’s fee,” Katia said evenly. “Your current arrangement, to protect Charlie until she is eighteen, does not include her services. And her father now has to pay for the two of them to leave town, even though you are supposed to be protecting them. Charlie deserves compensation.”
I sat there with my mouth open, blinking at her. Maven recovered way before I did. “You know, Katia, you’re right. I should have thought of it myself. Lex, can you get me John’s banking information so I can make a deposit?”
“I—uh—sure. Yes,” I sputtered.
When we hung up a moment later, Katia was looking a bit smug. “I didn’t even think of that,” I admitted.
“That is because of how your mind works,” she replied. “You think in terms of service, sacrifice, the greater good. But in the Old World, nobody does anything for free. Maven knows this.”
“Huh,” was all I could say.
I got the banking information, and Katia and I made a quick stop for food; then we spent the rest of the drive brainstorming about Morgan’s possible backup plans. My aunt had led a strange and difficult life—she’d run away from an abusive foster father as a teen, only to become the property of a truly evil vampire pimp named Oskar. Though Katia wasn’t as powerful as I was in many respects, she had a gift for pressing vampires, and her job had been to keep the prostitutes calm and complacent. That sounds bad, and it was, but Katia had thought—or maybe just hoped—she was helping them get through a horrible situation.
Oskar was dead now, and Katia had to deal with not just what she’d done, but the fact that she had spent twenty years out of time, trapped in one of the seedy, barbaric pockets of the Old World. Over the last year she’d worked hard to get her GED and put together some sort of life, but she had a unique perspective on things. She could think like a criminal because she’d spent so long serving one.
“Perhaps Morgan will try to kill Hazel,” was one of her suggestions. “If she makes it look like a vampire kill, surely the witches will ask her to be in charge.”
I shook my head. “It’s a good thought, but a) I’m not sure even Morgan is ready to kill her own mother, and b) her whole plan so far has been built on the message that Hazel’s been corrupted and is in cahoots with Maven. If the witches believe Maven has completely rejected any peace with them, they really will want to leave for Wyoming, and even if she does have the resources, I think Morgan is too arrogant to actually go through with that. She wants what was promised to her: to be witch leader of Colorado.”
Katia considered this for a moment. “You seem to understand her very well,” she remarked. From someone else, this might have been a dig, but I knew Katia meant it as a simple observation. And, a little bit, as a question to me.
“I understand roots,” I replied. “Morgan was born here, and she grew up thinking she’d spend her whole life here, and that she’d eventually inherit a great deal of power.”
“Like you?” Katia asked. “If you hadn’t joined the army?”
I smiled in the darkness. Katia was always curious about the Luthers. She couldn’t quite understand our family dynamic, because she had no frame of reference. “Not really. My family is all here—the Luther part, I mean—but even if I’d gone to college and come back to Boulder, I wouldn’t have taken over Luther Shoes. My dad never expected either of us to want the family business. Morgan, on the other hand, has been told her whole life that clan leader is her birthright.”
“Then why didn’t she wait to inherit the position?”
“Because of me,” I admitted. I didn’t like to think about it, but Morgan herself had told me that Hazel’s decision to allow a boundary witch in her town had been the catalyst for her would-be revolution. “Morgan is of the all boundary witches need to be destroyed school of thinking.”
“Ah,” was all Katia said. She had encountered this attitude plenty of times.
“Still. If it hadn’t been me, something else would probably have set her off,” I added. “I think Morgan’s marriage was falling apart, and her life hadn’t turned out like she thought, and she just kind of snapped.”
There was another moment of silence in the car while we both thought about that. Finally, I shook my head. “I don’t think we’re going to figure out what she’s planning. I might be able to understand Morgan’s reasoning, but she’s also good at being unpredictable.”
Katia tilted her head for a second, reminding me of Sam. “What?” I asked. “What would you do?”
“I would drive back to Wyoming and kill her,” she said quietly. “I know it isn’t how you do things, but she nearly killed you before, and she would have killed innocents tonight. If she is dead, the problem is solved.”
She had hunched her shoulders a little, worried that I would judge her. But I’d had the same thought myself—though I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to go through with killing Morgan in cold blood, if for no other reason than because she was my best friends’ sister.
“At this point, I’m not sure Morgan’s death would be the end of things,” I remarked, in a tone that showed I was unoffended by the suggestion. “She’s gotten the witches and werewolves so riled up that killing her would make her look like a martyr. And it’s not what Lily and Simon would want. Besides,” I added, “Maven would have to send someone to Wyoming to do it, and that would break her rules of engagement.”
Katia turned to give me a faint smile. “Always the soldier.”
We crossed the state line again, lapsing into a comfortable silence. A few minutes later, I felt Katia glance at me, and she said guardedly, “And how is Quinn?”
My aunt had nothing against Quinn personally, but she did have plenty of reason to dislike vampires. I had the distinct impression that she didn’t like that I was dating a vampire—but she still made an effort to be polite. “Oh, you know. The same.”
She choked out a little laugh at that, which made me happy. Then I thought about our argument the night before. “I don’t think he’s telling me everything,” I admitted. I knew Katia probably wasn’t the right person for this conversation, but Lily wasn’t available, and I was worried.
“Things about his history?” Katia asked, in the same careful tone.
“No, more like . . . Maven’s orders to him. I think something is going on with Maven, something kind of big. Quinn says he doesn’t know, but . . .” I shrugged. “Sometimes I get paranoid. He’s sworn troth to her, so if Maven really ordered him not to tell me something, he’d have to listen.”