“When you tried to get into Took’s head, he saw your secrets,” Madoc said. He kicked Waring’s foot to make sure the young man paid attention. “Did you see his?”
The shadow of a haunted expression crossed Waring’s lean, on its way to handsome, face. It would have to be answer enough.
“You can trust him,” Madoc told him. It wasn’t a question, and it didn’t need an answer. “If you tell him where to find your friends, or whatever they are to you, we’ll do our best to help you. Hold your tongue, and whatever happens is on you. I think that will hurt you more, in the long run, than whatever the magic does to you.”
He left Waring to think about that under the VINE pilot’s watchful eye, while he went to find Took. There had been a time he’d hunt Elizabeth’s enemies from one end of the territory to the other. If he couldn’t find one awkward vampire in the middle of a Nevada town, he would take himself under The Salt to rot.
And when he found him? Madoc weighed that question as he loped across the pocked runway to the flimsy wire fence. No answer immediately occurred to him.
Chapter Seventeen
GABRIEL TOOKthe phone and looked at the photo of the dead man on the screen as he took a sip of straight scotch from a grubby tumbler. It wasn’t, Took supposed dourly as he sat back and tried to ignore the itch of eyes on the back of his neck, as if the Hound had to worry about germs.
The lore said it was easy to pick out a werewolf. They were bestial in appearance and behavior, stank of raw meat, and could barely control their appetites, whether it was lust or gluttony. Of course the lore came from VINE and had been written by vampires. Gabriel’s palms weren’t hairy, his eyebrows didn’t meet in the middle, and if his eyes shaded too much toward yellow, it wasn’t beyond human norms. The outward betrayal that Gabriel was anything but human was the glimmer of eyeshine as he looked up, the bar’s fluorescent lights reflected green from his pupils. As a kid, Took had just thought he was a human with a quick temper, less volatile than a lot his friends’ parents who just drank away the full moon.
Took wondered what it was that gave him away as a vampire—other than the fact he’d bared fang in a dick-measuring contest outside.
“Don’t get cocky,” Gabriel said as he looked back down at the phone screen. “Harry out there isn’t a Hound, he’s barely a Hunter.”
There were plenty of Hunters who’d argue with the order that Gabriel put that in. Took let it stand as he picked up the beer he’d ordered. The narrow neck was cold against his fingers as he lifted it to his lips.
“I worked that out when his arm came out of the socket like an overcooked chicken wing.” Took took a swig of beer. At least he knew no one had spat in it, since watering it down could only have improved the taste. “Do you know him or not?”
Gabriel put the phone down and pushed it back across the table. The Hunter from Charleston stared blankly out of it, black hole in his forehead like a third eye. “What’s it to you?”
“He tried to kill me.”
“He’s a Hunter,” Gabriel said. “The only thing wrong with that sentence is that he only tried, not succeeded.”
It shouldn’t have stung. Took expected nothing else, yet some adolescent part of him still wanted to dance for Gabriel’s approval. Family knew you too well. It made it easy for them to find the quick and dig in. Of course, the opposite was true too.
“Well, send a Hound to do a Hunter’s job,” Took drawled as leaned back. “And what can you expect but for him to piss on the carpet?”
Gabriel glanced at him and then at the photo. “If I’d sent a Hound after you, Luke, you wouldn’t be here to ask questions.”
“He had the ink.”
That made Gabriel scowl. Hunters might be happy to have a werewolf to send into a firefight, but few wanted to drink or train with one. The werewolves had made a virtue of exclusion and stuck with their own and their wannabes, if the dead man had been a Hound, then Gabriel would have known.
“You sure?” Gabriel asked with a small tilt of his chin.
“In his armpit,” Took said. “I couldn’t tell you how old it was off the top of my head, but it wasn’t raw. He’d had it on him at least a few months. He wasn’t a wolf.”
That was something Took hadn’t been sure of until now. He’d never smelled a werewolf before, not as a vampire. His childhood memory of what Gabriel smelled like was of whiskey, blood, and clean sweat, but now he could smell the sour, wet-fur stink of the curse on him. He’d have noticed that in the morgue.
Gabriel scowled. “And he wasn’t one of my Hounds. I don’t know him,” he said. “Some groupie who thought our mark would get him jobs, let him coast on my reputation. Does it matter? It doesn’t look like he’ll do it again.”
“I shot him in the foot,” Took said as he reclaimed his phone. “His associates finished him off. If he got that so he could tell them he was a Hound, then they don’t have much respect for you.”
They stared at each other for a second, and then Gabriel sat back. He slung his arm over the back of his chair. The glass of scotch tapped against the wood. It wasn’t that he didn’t see the trap Took had set, he just admired the setup.
“What if they knew he wasn’t?”
“And they let him get away with it?” Took said. He shook his head. “That shows even less respect.”
“I’m not sure that quite tracks,” Gabriel said. “But not a bad effort. I tell you what. If you give me a truth, then I’ll give you one.”
“Flip it,” Took said.
