"It needs gas," Kyle interjected the information quietly into conversation.
"I'll be fine alone," Atticus said.
"We don't even know if there are rooms available here." Ru waved his hand to indicate the hotel.
"Two rooms." Kyle paused in his typing. "Should I reserve them?"
Atticus glanced at the screen and saw that Kyle had the reservation form for the Boston Harbor Hotel up, the request for two rooms already filled out, his hand hovering over the enter key. "Do it."
Kyle tapped downward. "You two fight it out." He shut down his computer and unhooked it with swift efficiency. "I'm checking in."
Ru sat back on the desk as Kyle escaped. "I'm coming with you. This is different this time. These people know what you are. They know what it takes to really kill you. The playing field is level here, and I'm not going to let you go without backup."
Atticus sighed, recognizing the pattern. He was being overly cautious, and Ru was asserting his right to put everything on the line. If Ru didn't want danger—and the accompanying adrenaline rush—he'd have been a lawyer like his father had wanted him to be. "Fine."
***
Atticus decided to take the Jag, as it was faster. Ukiah would have to suffer in the cramped space pretending to be a backseat—if the Dog Warrior was even still at the beach house. It was possible that he had woken up, found them gone, and left. Atticus funneled his anger and fears into the car, and they roared down the highway at speeds that made it more low-altitude flying than driving.
They were nearly to the house when the car phone rang.
Ru answered it, putting the call on speaker. "What is it, Kyle?"
"It's the house security," Kyle said. "The front door has been triggered."
Atticus glanced at the GPS system showing their location. They were still twenty miles from the house, nearly fifteen minutes at the speed they were going.
"The door down to the basement just tripped," Kyle said.
Atticus swore. If it were Ukiah leaving, the doors would have opened in the opposite order.
"The bedroom door is open," Kyle reported. "Should I call 911?"
"Shit!" Atticus considered all the messy entanglements that calling the police would involve. It would jeopardize their whole operation.
"Atticus?" Kyle asked after a minute's silence.
Chances were that Ukiah could survive any attack until they got there. They owed him nothing. But if it was a normal human Atticus had just put in harm's way, wouldn't he do something?
"Call the Hyannis police."
There was a pause. "And tell them what? That we have a man that was shot five times locked in a dead man's basement?"
Atticus glanced at the GPS system again. "No. Forget it." He and Ru would be there before they could talk Kyle through a safe report.
***
The house was dark, no sign of any vehicles.
Atticus slammed the Jag to a stop and leapt out, pulling his gun.
The doorjamb of the front door was broken and the door hung open. He went in, gun leveled, splinters of wood under his shoes. The house was silent and still.
He knew he should go slowly, but he found himself moving quickly and quietly for the basement stairs. Let him be there! Let him be in the bed. Dead is fine, just be there!
The bedroom door had been smashed open. He crept to it, afraid of what he would find.
The room was empty, the bed innocent of blood.
What had happened? Who had broken into the house and taken him?
I shouldn't have left him alone. I should have found a way to keep him safe . . .
For the first time in his life, his senses failed to give him warning of an attack.
Atticus stood staring into the room, sick with fear for his brother, and someone slammed into him. In that hard collision of bodies, he lost his pistol. They smashed through the sliding glass door and tumbled out onto the sand. They rolled across the sand, the stranger growling a deep rumble.
Ukiah? But no, Ukiah would have felt identical to him, and there was an "otherness" to this man. Atticus twisted and wrenched himself out of his attacker's hold and scrambled backward.
Rennie Shaw stood grinning, teeth and eyes gleaming in the moonlight, his breath misting in the cold. Shaw topped Atticus by several inches—taller than Atticus expected from Animal's photo. Lean and fit as the Iron Horses described, the Dog Warrior wore biking leathers with savage style. With dark hair grizzled with silver, he smelled like a wolf and radiated the same prickly awareness that Ukiah had against Atticus's senses.
Pack knows Pack.
"So you are like two peas in a pod," Shaw murmured in a deep, carrying voice. "The question is, at the heart of it all, are you the same man that your brother is?"
"Where's Ukiah? Is he safe?"
"It's a little late to worry about that, boy."
What did that mean? Did the Dog Warriors have Ukiah, or had someone else come and taken him? If his brother was safe with the bikers, why had Shaw attacked Atticus?
"I want to scratch your surface a little." Shaw sneered. "See what's underneath."
Shaw lunged at him with inhuman speed, and his punch felt like being hit by a high-powered bullet. Atticus countered with two punches, both of which Shaw dodged as though the fight were choreographed, allowing Atticus to come so close to hitting that he could feel the heat of Shaw's skin.
"Come on, boy, you're thinking too much." Shaw struck him again, knocking him down the sand dune. Atticus tried to duck the next blow, but Shaw, grinning, landed it anyhow.
Shaw battered him down the hill and to the water's edge. Atticus fought with silent desperation, but his kicks and punches kept failing to land on their target. Shaw was as elusive as a shadow, always a fraction of an inch out of reach.
" If you're going to fight someone who can read your thoughts," Shaw said into his mind, " you have to fight without thinking."
Atticus went still with shock. He'd been gathering information on the Dog Warriors, watching the evidence mount up that they were much like him, but he'd somehow denied the deep truth. He wasn't one of a kind—he was part of a race that he knew nothing about. The vast shifting of his universe stunned him to his core.
With a scoffing laugh, Shaw tackled him into the surf. The water sucked them out, away from the shore, and then tumbled them back to the land.
A score of men and women lined the shore, waiting for them. Even standing still, they were sleek, dark, and dangerous in the way of poisonous snakes. The moonlight gleamed in their eyes, and the scent of wolves overrode that of humans. Over the roar of the surf, he could hear their growling, their hostility pressing against him, as irritating as his own anger.
His brother stood on the shore, flanked by Dog Warriors, wholly one of them.
CHAPTER FOUR
Hyannis, Massachusetts
Monday, September 20, 2004
Ukiah had only heard the car arrive, but he felt the Pack's arrival as they swept in behind it and broke down doors to get to him. Rennie reached him first, cuffing him lightly in rough affection. Then awareness moved through the Pack and they made way for an outsider among them. He recognized Indigo by her scent as she picked her way through the dark house to him. When he folded her into his arms, he found that she wore a plain black leather jacket, all signs of her being FBI hidden away. She clung to him hard and parted reluctantly.