Текст книги "Frost Burned"

Автор книги: Patricia Briggs

Соавторы: Patricia Briggs
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

“Two different people?” I said.

Asil nodded.“So it seems to me. Moreover, a man who knew to hire these men, a man they would work for, would not have killed these mercenaries out of fear of what they know. These are very well-trained, sought-after mercenaries often hired by governments friendly to the US, Charles tells me. The kind of men who stay bought and don’t take kindly to being betrayed.”

“The Cantrip agents had the contacts but not the money to hire them,” I said slowly. “Federal agents are well paid—but not that well paid.”

“Can you contact Adam right now?”

“I can try.”

“Please do so. We need to let him know what we know—and see if there is any new information he can offer us about his location or the people who have taken him.”

I sat down on the floor and closed my eyes—reached down the rough golden rope that tied my mate and I together and—“Ow, ow, ow,” I said, my eyes watering. “Owie, owie, owie. Damn. Damn.”

Asil looked from me to the silver on the floor.“That will teach you not to use your bonds for things they were never intended,” he told me. “Especially not silver. Werewolves and silver do not mix.”

“Shut up,” I said fiercely and very quietly because the sound of his voice sent sharp, arcing lightning rods of pain from my eyes all the way through my skull.

“That is quite a lot of silver,” he observed. Then, sounding intrigued, he said, “And it is pure silver, though the substance that the tranquilizer dart uses is silver nitrate—which is a white powder.”

Asil got up and moved around. Ben came close—I could smell him—but he didn’t get close enough to touch. Werewolves are different when they are in their wolf shape, less human and less caught up in human manners. It would be wrong. But wolves are gregarious, far more so than humans or coyotes, for that matter. Normally, Ben would be pressing against me if I was in distress. Asil must still have been worrying him.

When my head quit feeling quite so breakable, I looked up—and Asil handed me a glass of water from the bathroom. I drank the whole thing and felt better.

“Don’t worry,” he told me when I handed him the empty glass. “I expect the effect is temporary. It’ll probably go away once the silver is out of your system entirely.” He touched my lips, a light, quick touch that didn’t allow me time to react.

He showed me his fingertips—which were red, as if he’d put his fingers in a flame. I touched my lips, too, remembering how black they were.

“They used to use colloidal silver in nose drops for people with asthma or bad allergies,” he told me. “People who used them regularly sometimes had their skin turn blue—there is a man who ran for the Montana Senate who is blue-skinned. I thought your lips were from lipstick—though you are a little older than most of the young ladies wearing black makeup.”

I stared at him in horror.“It won’t go away,” I told him. “I’m not a werewolf, my body won’t reject silver the same way yours does.” Gabriel’s little sister, Rosa, had done a report in school about a girl whose skin had turned gray when she was a teenager back in the fifties and nothing anyone had tried had made any improvement. I’d proofread it for her.

I scrambled to my feet and went into the bathroom to look at the mirror again. I took a washcloth and scrubbed at my lips, but they stayed black.

Asil didn’t follow me into the bathroom, but he stood at the door.

“You told Armstrong that you think this was aimed at the werewolves.”

“Don’t you?” I asked.

Asil shook his head.“It doesn’t matter what I think. Let’s look at the world through their eyes a moment. If Adam did exactly as they asked him to, what would be the result?”

“They kill the pack anyway—can’t have witnesses. They’d kill Adam, so he doesn’t kill them. The senator’s dead or wounded by werewolves. The people who think the only good werewolf is a dead werewolf would have more power.” I ticked them off on my fingers, then said, “Kyle and I, Adam and I, and just I have gone through this a hundred times.”

“Okay,” Asil said. “The rogue Cantrip agents like the last part, the one that lets them go hunting werewolves. Maybe they like the dead senator part, too. Campbell has been standing between them and their kill-’em-all hunting license for a long time. But who is after Adam or the pack? You think they are the ones this is aimed at—so who benefits?”

“Shouldn’t we do this part downstairs?” I asked, my throat tight. I didn’t want to go over and over how much danger Adam and the pack were in—I knew. “We were discussing this with Armstrong.”

Asil shook his head.“What happens if Adam and the pack are gone?”

I bared my teeth at him.“I go out for revenge—I don’t do peanut butter much anymore. But if they aren’t afraid of the pack, they aren’t going to be afraid of me. Bran is scarier—but they probably don’t know about Bran.”

“Maybe they do,” said Asil. “Maybe they’re after Bran.”

“They knew about Gerry Wallace’s silver/DMSO/ketamine cocktail,” I conceded. “They knew every wolf in the pack. Maybe they do know about Bran.”

“Mercy?” Kyle called up from the floor below. “Are you through telling the werewolf all the things we mere mortals shouldn’t know, yet? I’m making breakfast, and the sun’s coming up.”

“What were you planning on doing next before Agent Armstrong and I arrived?” asked Asil.

“I was going to go to get Adam’s people, the ones who work for his company, to see if they can figure out where the money is coming from. See if they can tell if it is government money or private. I was going to the vampires to see if they knew anything about where someone might be holding a pack of werewolves—they run this town’s supernaturals like the mob ran Chicago back in the day.” There was something else. Something I was supposed to be remembering. “Damn it,” I said, diving for my dirty, bloody jeans. “Tad. Damn it.”

I pulled out Gabriel’s sister’s phone and saw that I’d missed calls—and had twenty new text messages. There were fifteen calls exactly one half hour apart from a number I didn’t know. I didn’t bother to read the text messages, just dialed the strange number. Tad answered.

“So,” he said grumpily without waiting for me to say anything. “I take it you’re dead? Because, otherwise, there is no excuse for guilting me into sitting outside in winter watching the most boring family on earth for more than a whole day. They started sending out the kids with cocoa yesterday about two in the afternoon. Dinner was homemade burritos with Spanish rice and refried beans—and almost good enough to forgive you for making me think you might be dead.”

“How did they know you were there?” I asked.

“I knocked on the door to use the bathroom. Figured it was safer than leaving them to be slaughtered by enemy government agents while I went out to find the nearest gas station.” There was a pause. “You all right?”

“No,” I told him honestly, closing my eyes. “Not at all. Adam’s still gone. They had a few men here at Kyle’s—”

“That’s Warren’s boyfriend, right?”

“Right. Anyway Ben, I, and Stefan—mostly Stefan—got Kyle out of their clutches but spent the day at the police department answering questions.”

“Good for Stefan.”

I rubbed my eyes and thought.“I think the best thing to do might be to grab Gabriel and Jesse and bring them back here. There are police keeping an eye out on Kyle’s house, and Adam’s team is running security.” I looked at Asil, and asked—“Are you planning on staying here with us?”

He nodded.“Until Adam is found, yes.”

“Okay, did you hear that, Tad? I have one of Bran’s wolves here to help out, too.”

“I don’t have a car,” Tad told me. “I hiked over. You’ll have to come get them yourself.”

“No worries. I’ll be over in about fifteen minutes.” I opened my mouth to ask if he would consider helping us further but closed it again because he’d been standing guard all day.

“If Kyle has an extra bed in his mansion,” Tad said, “I’ll catch a few winks of sleep there, and I’ll help you until this is finished.” He paused, too. “I’m sorry I’ve been a jerk. Life hasn’t been a bed of roses lately, but I don’t have to take it out on you.”

“Sure you do,” I told him. “Who else would listen to it? I’ll be over as soon as I can.”

I clicked the phone off.

“I’ll come with you,” Asil said. “They know where you are—which makes you the shiniest target.”

“Fine,” I said. “If we leave Ben here, there will be room in Marsilia’s car.”

Asil looked at me.“Your vampire friend is Marsilia? Mistress of the TriCities’ seethe?”

I snorted.“Don’t be silly. Marsilia hates me and would love to see me rot in Hell. I stole her car so that the bad guys couldn’t find me—and because I wrecked my car. Ben’s already bled all over her Mercedes, though, so a few more miles on the odometer won’t make her any madder.” I caught sightof Ben. He was watching me intently and told me as clearly as he could without words that he didn’t intend to be left behind.

“You need to change back,” I told him. “You’ve been shot and dragged all over the place, and you’ve been wolf for nearly two days. Time to change back and rest up. All I’m doing is picking up Jesse and Gabriel and coming back here. Bran sent Asil over to be useful, so he will be and, unless I’m much mistaken, we’ll also have an escort of Adam’s finest trained professionals to make sure I make it back safely.”

“I’ll keep her safe,” Asil told Ben solemnly.

“Besides,” I said, “I’d like to leave Kyle with some real backup in case something happens.”

It was the truth—and that one worked. Ben liked Kyle—and Ben didn’t like very many people.

6

ADAM

Fear was a familiar friend. Adam sometimes thought that he’d been afraid since he’d stepped on the bus that took him to basic training all those years ago. And the older he got, the more he had to fear. Right now, he was afraid for Mercy, who didn’t have the sense to be afraid for herself.

When he’d been a boy, he’d thought that if you were just strong enough, tough enough there wouldn’t be anything to be afraid of—except for God, of course. His parents had been small farmers, patriots, and devout Baptist God-fearing Christians and raised him to be the same. But their best efforts had met the world, and, mostly, the world had won.

He’d left the farm first, and Vietnam had done its best to scour him of his patriotism. It hadn’t succeeded entirely, though he reserved the right to think most elected officials could do with a little jail time to mend their ways. Vietnam had also taught him that the tougher and smarter you got,the more afraid you learned to be. It had also taught him that there were monsters in the world—and he had become one of them.

Then he’d come back home and found out that war didn’t cause fear—love did. He loved Mercy with a fierceness that still surprised him.

Adam took a deep breath, and it didn’t hurt. Silver didn’t burn in his joints and dull his senses anymore. He tested his body, just to be sure. Someone watching would only see that he continued to sit with his back to the wall of the cold stone room where the pack had been imprisoned. He tightened and released muscle groups that responded with their usual quickness and force.

He didn’t understand what Mercy had done. No, that wasn’t quite true—she’d taken the silver poisoning his body into herself. He understood that was how the pack bonds worked for her, that she saw things in symbols and pictures while he smelled things. Samuel had once told him that he and Bran bothheard music. What he didn’t understand was how she’d used the pack bonds and magic to do the impossible.

And what really scared him was that he was fairly certain that Mercy hadn’t known what she was doing, either. She could have killed herself. Silver wasn’t poisonous to her. However, if someone had injected an average Joe human with the amount of silver that had been in his body, it wouldn’t have been good for the human, either. He wasn’t a doctor, but he was pretty sure it would have been fatal.

He could feel her, so she wasn’t dead, but the link felt

off—and that really scared him. He had to control the urge to run, to bull through anything that stood between them so he could protect her. But he wouldn’t waste her efforts, he would wait until the proper time, then he would go hunting.

Something changed in the room, and Adam pulled his head into the here and now. He listened. The almost constant soft clink-clink was the sound of his bound wolves moving restlessly, even drugged into almost unconsciousness because the pain of the silver in their bodies and in the chains that held them made it impossible for them to lie still. He could smell them, smell silver and sickness in spite of all that he could do for them.

Judging from their condition, the sacrifice he’d intended would not have helped the pack enough. Jones was afraid, and he’d pumped them all too full of silver. Adam, though, was now free of the effects of all those darts. He could do more for the pack, but he didn’t want Mercy to deplete herself keeping him healthy. So he would wait until it was necessary.

Perhaps the soldier who moved like water through the densely populated room would give him other opportunities. The human stepped over Warren’s still body and crouched, finally, in front of Adam. He settled in close, because Adam could feel the disturbance the man’s breath made in the air.

“Alpha,” said the man who’d reprimanded Mr. Jones after he’d shot Peter, the one who seemed to be in charge of the military or pseudo-military rank and file.

Adam opened his eyes. The other man was crouched so his head was level with Adam’s, close enough to see the whites of his eyes. He was wearing the familiar black armor, and his face was blackened and mottled with a fresh application of greasepaint.

Warren was lying just behind him, and Adam saw the gleam of his eyes in the darkness. Darryl slid closer, his chains silent as the big man moved. Adam made a move with the hand away from his enemy observer, and Warren, then Darryl subsided.

Adam was in no danger. Free of the silver and drugs, Adam could have crushed his throat before the man took his next breath. It was tempting. Very.

But this one wasn’t the man who’d killed Peter, so Adam waited to see why he was here. Killing was easy. It could be done at any time.

“We are going,” the other man said in a conversational voice. “Leaving our employment here.”

Adam lifted his head and met the other man’s gaze. After a brief count, his opponent turned his head.

“You aren’t as foggy as my employers think, secret knock ’em out darts that work on werewolves or not,” said the enemy soldier. “They don’t affect you the way they are supposed to, I saw that right off, even ifJones chooses not to. So you might have picked up that I had some men waiting at Kyle Brooks’s house with orders to capture your wife, your daughter, and Ben Shaw because our intelligence said that was where they would probably go. Early this morning, the police broke up the party—” He quit speaking for a moment and stared at Adam’s face. “And how do you know that?” He shook his head and spoke to himself. “Freaking supernatural bullshit. I told them we should stay out of it, but the money was too good, and we always like to keep the government happy with us. Keeps us employed.”

He sat there in front of Adam and thought some more. Patience, Adam counseled himself, there was more information here, and it would be easier if the man chose to tell him about it himself.

“So we ended up with one of ours dead and three in custody—and your wife is talking to the police about how someone kidnapped your pack and wants you to go kill the good Senator Campbell. I thought maybe one of my boys talked out of turn—which they wouldn’t. But maybe she knew about it the same way you know what went down this morning, huh?”

He waited a moment, but both he and Adam knew that Adam wasn’t going to respond.

“Now my outfit is pretty big news, and we make good money. With no civilians dead, it didn’t take our lawyers long to get the rest out—and once out, they’re all the way out. Too many eyes on them to make them useful for this operation. No worries, we have the resources to replace them with operatives with clean slates and redeploy the hot ones somewhere less worrisome—out of the country until certain people forget the ones who work for a paycheck and keep after the people who pay the money, you know what I mean?”

Adam didn’t say anything, just waited for the man to get to the point.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said slowly, as if he had all the time in the world. Maybe he did. “I asked to be in on this. You are demon spawn, you werewolves and the fae and the witches. All of you need to die, and someday I hope to be one of the people called upon to rid your scourge from the earth.”

And Adam smelled the fear on him for the first time, fear and eagerness for blood. Adam was sympathetic; he was afraid for his people, for Mercy—and hungry for blood, too.

“But I didn’t get where I am by working against the rules,” the mercenary said. “Rules keep people alive and keep the money flowing. Rules say that the people who hire us don’t get to kill us when we’ve served our part or because we know things they don’t want to get out. We don’t talk—and we police our own if someone thinks about singing inconveniently.” He met Adam’s eyes briefly again. “You know about rules, you wolves. I’ve heard that.”

The mercenary paused, waiting for a response that didn’t come. When it was clear his invitation to talk had been turned down, he continued. “So these guys had a flight out of here for the morning, but Slick—one of the ones who got away—he went over to the hotel where everyone should be and surprised a government cleanup crew and the bodies of my men who should have been alive. He managed to get away and contact me. All casualties, no survivors but Slick. He’s taking a roundabout way to a rendezvous, and I’m taking my boys out. The word to eliminate the men who were arrested didn’t come from our company—no one who works for our company is that stupid. We’re leaving; and then we’ll deal with the betrayal.”

Adam asked,“Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t like your kind,” said the mercenary. He looked around and spat on the dirt floor. “But that’s personal. Someone screws us over? That’s business. They killed my boys because they didn’t want them to talk. Don’t know what we know that is so valuable, but I’m telling you what I know in hopes that it torpedoes their plans.” He paused. “Those men took my orders, and that makes their deaths personal.”

“I understand,” said Adam.

The other man frowned at him.“I’d heard that about you, that you wore the uniform.”

“Ranger,” said Adam.

The man examined him, taken aback.

“Doesn’t mean I’m not a monster,” Adam continued. “But I do understand how a soldier works. You follow orders, and in return, you expect the men above you to have your back while you risk your life. When they don’t

” Adam shrugged. “Something needs to be done.”

The other man nodded, took a deep breath.“That’s right. Okay. Folks pay us—we work for them all the way. We don’t take better money, we don’t talk. But our employers broke the rules. If they’re afraid of something getting out—well, maybe I think that might be a start on teaching them not to betray the soldiers who work for them. The folks giving us the orders—they’re regular government—Cantrip Agency. You know, the ones who are running around screaming that the fae and werewolves and all the rest are dangerous and need to be exterminated when their job was supposed to be learning about the supernatural world and acting as intermediaries between you and the government. The rhetoric they’re spouting is that they want the power to go wolf hunting before some other agency gets it. They’re tired of having to call the cavalry because they can’t have their own army.”

The mercenary frowned at Adam.“But you probably guessed that.”

“Most of the competent people end up elsewhere,” agreed Adam. “FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, National Security Administration, Secret Service, or one of a few other agencies. Cantrip has been a dumping ground for the screwups for years, and this has the same sort of FUBAR painted all over it that I’ve seen whenever desks try to run real operations.”

The other man grinned at him.“What you said. I’m going to repeat that to my superiors.”

“Okay,” Adam said. “But where is the money coming from? I know what Cantrip’s budget is; they don’t have enough of a black-ops slush fund to work this. Maybe if they all gave up their salaries, they’d be able to hire something like your operation without alerting someone. You guys are more likely to be out protecting some drug lord in South America or fighting the war when the Geneva Convention is too restrictive for the home troops.”

The other man put a finger along his nose and pointed it at Adam.“I could like you if you weren’t a hell spawn, you know? No. Cantrip doesn’t have that kind of money, though they would if a werewolf killed the Billionaire Senator, right? If his party didn’t see to it, his very rich and very, very powerful family would. Word is that the head of this operation is cooperating with some money man, a rich son of a bitch anonymous puppet master who seems to have it in for you, Hauptman. He funded this operation, and the only stipulation was that it was your pack that got elected for assassination duty. Don’t know who he is, but people are afraid of him.”

And that wasvery interesting. Adam found himself settling in, ready to hunt. That it was personal made his enemy specific. Not people who hate werewolves, which was a very large group, but a man who hated him.

“Your intelligence was very good,” Adam said. He needed to know where the information came from. “Traced cell phones for where the pack members who weren’t at my house for Thanksgiving would be—that would have been Cantrip. But how did you find all the pack members?”

The other man nodded.“Right track. It’s where I would have looked first. The list of pack members was provided to us—came from a different source. Same folks who provided the tranq. If I were to guess, I’d say it was someone high up in the military who doesn’t like werewolves. But he wasn’t the man funding this—just an interested bystander.”

The tranq and information both could have come from Gerry Wallace before he’d been killed. Adam’s pack hadn’t changed since Gerry’s death. Gerry’s job had been to keep track of the lone wolves—and to do that he had a pretty extensive list of who was in which pack as well. Adam would have to warn Bran that someone had that information and was making it available.

“Did you ever see him?”

“Which him?”

“The money man or the information man.”

The other man tilted his head.“Just the money man, once, I think. Said he was a flunky, guys with lots of money always have flunkies. He was soft-looking, looked like a civilian through and through. Dressed in a suit and looked like butter wouldn’t melt. But he made the hair on the back of my neck crawl—and I always trustmy gut. He looked soft, but he didn’t move like a civilian, get me? Moved on the balls of his feet, and when he pulled a chair up, it didn’t take him as much effort as it would have taken a civilian. He was stronger than a man who looked that soft should have been.”

“You don’t think he was a flunky.”

“You read people, too,” the mercenary said. It didn’t sound like it bothered him. “No. I think he was the money man himself. I’ve trained a lot of men. Some of them are better at giving orders than taking them. He was one of those. But subtle about it.”

“When and where?”

The other man shook his head.“Now, that is too much. More my company’s secret than my ex-employers’.” He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Crouching for that long wasn’t easy, especially if the one doing it was a human over thirty. But the mercenary didn’t seem to find it uncomfortable.

“My doctor tells me if I don’t quit smoking, I’ll die of cancer someday,” he said.

“If it ruins your endurance, it’ll kill you sooner than that,” said Adam. “Smokers don’t run as fast or as long.”

The man laughed.“Tell you what. A couple of days ago word came to me that these folk aren’t Cantrip. Oh, they work for the agency all right. But they’ve gone rogue, and Cantrip has a group out looking for them.” He looked at his cigarette, then put it back in his mouth and inhaled. “Cantrip’s problem-solver got into town last night—just in time to do the cleanup on my boys.”

A small red light flashed on his wristwatch. He tapped the watch and ground the cigarette out on the sole of his boot.“Son,” he said. “If I have to depend upon running fast to stay alive, I’m already dead. Got to go now.” He pulled out a key and frowned at it. “It’s a strange old world, you know? Never know who you’re going to find yourself in bed with.”

He stood up and tossed the key toward Adam, who let it fall to the ground next to him.

“Good luck, now.” The mercenary stepped over Darryl on the way to the door. “You aren’t a bad sort for an abomination.”

“I could say the same to you.”

The mercenary glanced back and laughed.“Yeah. There is that.” He opened the door, and said, quietly, “I heard one of them say that there’s another assassin on the senator’s security detail.”

“Aimed at whom?” asked Adam.

The mercenary nodded.“I do like you. That is the right question. For you if you succeeded, for the senator if you didn’t.” He left without another glance.

As soon as the door shut behind him, Darryl and Warren both looked up at Adam. Darryl inhaled and gave a soft growl, too drugged from the ketamine to bring out words.

“Yes,” said Adam. “I’m better.” He didn’t say why or how. They’d think it was Bran, and his legend would help them get up and on their feet.

He used the key to free himself and opened the shackles that held Darryl first, then Warren. When Warren sat up, Adam dropped the key into the old cowboy’s hand. Warren was in the best shape next to Adam.

“Free everyone, but stay here until I get back or summon you,” he told Warren. “Free Honey last, and be ready in case she really loses it.”

Then he stood up and stripped out of his clothes. The final thing that he had learned in Vietnam, even before he’d been turned into a werewolf, was that he was good at killing.

Naked, he walked to the door and turned the knob—his mercenary visitor had left the door unlocked and unbarred. It opened into the small antechamber where Mr. Jones’s desk was still in place. The room was dark, but they were underground—or so his nose told him, though the ceilings were higher than usual for a basement.

The steel bar that kept them imprisoned was lying on the floor. Adam bent down, picked up the bar, and set it on the ground next to Darryl, who closed his hand on it and tried to get to his hands and knees. Adam’s second was functioning on instincts.

“Shh,” Adam told him, and put a hand on his shoulder until he subsided. “Wait and protect. I’ll be back. See if you can get them to change.”

Warren’s yellow eyes met his.

“I’ll save Mr. Jones for Honey,” he told Warren, then let the wolf take him.

By the time he rose on all four feet, most of the pack had been freed of their chains, but they were still unable to stand. Honey looked up into his face.

“Are you going to kill them all?” she asked him.

Murder, his father had taught him, was a sin.

Honey had been in his pack for nearly thirty years, she knew better than to ask if hecould kill them all. He nodded once and loped out of the open door with an eagerness he made no attempt to check.

Adam had long ago accepted that he was not going to make it to Heaven.

He’d thought that they’d been stowed in some sort of government facility—there were a lot of places out in the Hanford Site near the nuclear facilities that were all but deserted. But as he paced through the long hall, he realized that this was some sort of commercial building rather than a government building. There was a sign leaning back-out against the wall. He pulled it away from the wall until he could see the front. TASTING ROOM, it said. He was in the unfinished basement of a winery.

That would explain the high ceilings and large, empty rooms. Their jail cell had been meant to hold racks of barrels of aging wine, as were the rooms on either side of the hallway he now paced down.

The winery had not been put to use for its intended purpose—he couldn’t smell any grapes or wine. The half-dirt, half-tile floors and the hallway drywallsans tape and texture meant that someone had stopped while the building was still in the construction phase.

The basement was empty, though it was obvious that there had been people here fairly recently. They left behind the smell of body armor, gunpowder, and greasepaint as well as trails of footprints and marks where things had been dragged. Two of the rooms, identical to where they had been held, had been used as living quarters. The only difference was that the heavy wooden door that had been barred to keep wolves in was removed and set inside the rooms that had housed the mercenaries. Presumably so that no one could keep them in.

The mercenary commander who had talked to him had been right, Adam decided. Under other circumstances, Adam would have liked him, too.

In the distance, Adam heard diesel engines start up, the same engines, he was pretty sure, that had hauled the pack out to whatever distant proto-winery Cantrip had found to use as werewolf storage. The mercenaries had either parked a fair distance away from their temporary HQ, or—and he thought it more likely, given the dismantled doors—they had pushed the vehicles away from the building until someone deemed it safe to start them. The noise was faint to Adam’s ears. He doubted a human would hear it even if he’d been listening for it instead of asleep.

He found the stairs and climbed them silently. They brought him to an empty room, designed to be open and airy. The walls were unpainted, but the floors were tiled in sandstone that was difficult to walk across without allowing his claws to click. A double door designed to open easily at a push led to the outside. He pushed one of the doors, and it opened. He went outside to take a recon of the layout and was unsurprised to find that they were out in the boonies somewhere. There were dead grapes everywhere—he’d been right about the winery. The building was surrounded by maybe a couple of hundred acres’ worth of gray vines that had been dead well before winter hit. He could see the sad-looking dried-up starts of grape bunches.