“Well, don’t say anything or she’ll think I told you!”I said.
“She won’t care,” Luis passed the bag of chips they’d been polishing off to Jace.“She’s too busy playing Furiosa.”
“What?”
He grinned some more.“She’s turning Wolf’s Head into an armed camp, or maybe a castle is closer.”
“Definitely castle,” Chayton said.
“Yeah, you should see the place.Last time I heard, they were talking about putting trebuchets on the walls.”
“What?”I said.
“They’re like fancy catapults—”
“I know what they are!”
“She’s thinking ‘bout flinging whole cars at her enemies,” he added.“Bought out a junkyard of everything they had.Now our ancestral meeting place looks like a used car lot, with rusted junkers everywhere.”
He said it so matter-of-factly that it took a moment to sink in.“She wants to dowhat?”
“Yeah.Sorry, but you’re not the only crazy Lupa around anymore.In fact, I think she’s coming for the title.”
“She has a way to go,” Noah said darkly.
Jason, who had gotten up to get a soft drink, thumped him on the head in passing, which did not appear to have much effect.
“It’s the kids,” Chayton explained.“She’s lost it over the threat to the kids.”
“There is no threat,” Andy argued.“No Were is going to make war on children—”
“Ha!”Noah said bitterly.
Andy frowned at him.“Is there a problem?”
“Yeah, there’s a problem!No war on children.What the hell areyou?”
“Not a child.”
“Not now.But what were you when your clan threw you out?What were any of us?People make war on kids all the time, and those bastards who joined Rand are cowards.They’d damned well attack kids if they could find them.”
“They won’t find them—”
“But you can be sure they’re looking!It’s probably them carving up people left and right in Tart—”
He cut himself off, but too late, judging by the sudden ratcheting up of tension in the room.
“What?”I asked.
Nobody answered.
“What about Tartarus?”I repeated, rapidly getting tired of this.I wasn’t questioning perps at HQ; I was talking to my clan.And when I asked a question, I expected an answer.
“He’s talking about the other day, when you fought the Circle,” Luis said, but he didn’t meet my eyes.
“Don’t lie to your Lupa,” I told him.I might have bought it normally—plenty of people had been carved up in that fight—except for my repeated “dreams.”Every time I closed my eyes lately, I was taken on a cinematic trip through the Vegas underworld.
One that I was starting to suspect might be real.
