“Then he won’t get rid of us.” Zack groaned. “I don’t like the idea of making myself useful to a monster.”
“We’re biding time to make a plan.”
“That’s what weweredoing.”
Takashi cupped Zack’s cheek. “We were waiting for Roger before. You’re not a piece needing instruction anymore, Zack. You’re a player at the board.”
I have power. Zack nodded. “Right. Okay then. Let’s go see what my ‘father’ wants.”
Grimsby was waiting out in the hall for them, and without a word, he led them through the mansion to the first floor. The interior of the mansion was a labyrinth with room upon room of stuff. Zack was pretty sure they passed at least two libraries, some kind of art gallery, three different sitting rooms, and a multimedia room with the biggest screen he’d seen short of a movie theater.
Zack could pick out a multitude of tiny sounds—a distant heartbeat here, a soft footfall down that corridor—but thequiet was oppressive. Each sound felt like it was breaking an unspoken sanctity.No, it’s like prey not wanting to be noticed.
Voices drifted from farther down the hall, and they lacked the trepidation of the mansion’s other sounds. The knowing in the back of Zack’s mind easily found Seamus’s voice when they were still too far for him to make out words. He was walking ever closer toward the magnet pulling on his soul. The hunger churning in his gut settled into an annoying itch rather than a burning heat. Without it clouding his focus, data was clicking into place. He was picking up more details with his heightened senses—from the brushstrokes in various paintings to the exact stench a group of vampires made.
Somehow, being near my sire makes me stronger? My vampiric magic must be missing its source. Two halves of a whole until we heal.
I knew you were clever, the Seamus voice said.
Zack frowned and put a hand to his temple. That had been a little … eerie. But imagining the other half of conversations was something he often did, especially with people he hated.I don’t hate Cal.
Yes. You do, his rational voice replied.
Whatever. I’m about to walk into a hunter’s worst nightmare, so this will wait. Zack lowered his hand and continued walking. Takashi was a half step behind him, but when Zack tried to match him, he fell back again. Zack glanced over his shoulder, a question on his lips. Takashi shook his head and mouthed, “Trust me.”
Grimsby stopped beside an archway. He bowed his head and motioned into the room.
“Thank you,” Zack said softly.
Grimsby dipped his head a touch farther, which Zack guessed was supposed to be some sort of “you’re welcome.”
Then Zack took a big, unnecessary breath and strode into the room.
One of Zack’s favorite rooms at his grandparents’ house had been the War Room, where the Wrights, and to some extent the Gladwells and other hunters, organized bigger hunts and operations. When the room wasn’t hosting a meeting, Grandpa used it to track hunters and their targets on maps. Even though a lot of things went digital, he persisted in using physical maps. He claimed he’d seen enough of those CSI shows to know that some sort of digital thing could be dug out fifty different ways, but a destroyed paper map was always unintelligible.If they haven’t burned the most recent set of maps and reorganized the hunters, they will when they find out about me.
Seamus’s War Room had a long dark wood table down the center. The ten vampires sitting at it were all on one side, and across from them on the wall was a bank of monitors. There were twenty screens in total, and only two of them were blank. A different person was projected onto each of the remaining eighteen. One vampire was complaining, “If my peer in Champaign would keep her werewolves from terrorizing my campus?—”
“I hardly call Eastern acampus,” another vampire on-screen said, snorting in derision.
The first straightened. “This disrespect is exactly what I mean! My alliance with the Whetstone Creek Panthers is contingent upon keeping werewolves from the university. She’s letting them infect students in my territory!”
The second rolled her eyes. “The number of canyons you had to jump in order to reach that conclusion isstaggeringand, honestly, a bit insulting. The pack in Decatur could just as easily be infecting your precious students.”
“No, they couldn’t,” Zack said automatically.
All attention turned toward him. The vampires on the screens were suddenly looking down at their keyboards and fussing—they had to be adjusting their views on the room.
The sheer amount of power in the room became abundantly clear. Not only was Seamus sitting at the center of the table, but he had Anton on his right and Candide on his left. The other seven vampires in the room were ones that Zack recognized from his research on the coven leadership. The remaining captains—Lucille and Dempsey—were also present. The other vampires were lieutenants, among them Marcus and Xenofon, and were more directly in charge of sets of vampire or territory than the captains were. Which meant the ones on the screens were lieutenants in the rest of Seamus’s huge domain.
And I just corrected someone. Panic started to set in. With that, the realization that everyone in the room would be able to feel his fear. His spiral started to spin and descend faster. Little pop-ups of others’ emotions began to crowd his mental real estate. Malicious desires left vague impressions, but he got the sense that several people in the room wanted him to fail.
Then Takashi put his hand gently on his back, and Zack could pick out his pop-up from the rest. He longed for something good to happen, for Zack to shine.
I can do this. Zack continued. “The Decatur Pack are natural-born shifters, and there’s never been a case of contracted lycanthropy associated with their pack. In fact, they see their wolf form as an aspect of their true selves and reject ‘infected’ wolves on the assumption that everyone who gains lycanthropy winds up seeing it as a separate beast rather than accepting it into themselves. They’re kind of dogmatic assholes. They wouldn’t work on spreading their strain of werewolf except through having more kids.”
The silence in the room suddenly matched the rest of the mansion. Zack was standing in the heart of the damn predator’snest with over two dozen monsters staring at him.Not monsters, the Seamus voice said.Peers. They’re your peers now.
“Who the hell is that?” the Champaign lieutenant demanded.
