“You could’ve called the Casino. They would’ve unleashed a horde of lawyers.” Andrea poured peroxide onto the wet wood.
I straightened. “The First Response Unit is all trigger-happy jocks. They were still swimming on the high of taking out a bloodsucker. I listened to them pound bullets into the pavement for nearly five minutes. It was overkill. The only way their day could have gotten better would be if they could kill another vampire. Or perhaps several. If I called the Casino, no matter what I said, the People would send a vamp out. That’s their default response. The PAD would shoot it, and the People would retaliate. It would spiral out of control, and I wanted everybody calm so I could keep Emily breathing.”
“Did Ghastek say why they had a loose vamp running around?”
I grimaced. “Something about a pregnant girl fainting.”
Andrea wrinkled her nose in a telltale shapeshifter sneer. “I smell bullshit.”
She was right. Two navigators, both fainted while piloting the same vampire? Ghastek fainting? That just didn’t happen.
I got a dry rag and wiped up the peroxide. The stain didn’t look too bad now. Still, once blood stained something, it stayed there forever, even if you could no longer see it. My office was christened in Emily’s blood. Yay.
I dumped the rag into the bucket and looked at Andrea. “My day didn’t go well.”
“I see that.”
“The PAD probably wants to shut me down, the People will find some way to blame me for the slaughter of the vampire and expect restitution, and Curran found out that I risked my life to save a Master of the Dead, which means I’ll have a lot of explaining to do at dinner, because Curran believes I’m made of glass. If I had been shot and the Pack found out that the Beast Lord’s mate and sugar woogums had been injured as a result of the People’s fuckup, they would have collective apoplexy and storm the Casino.”
“Aha,” Andrea said. “I’m going to ignore that you just referred to yourself as ‘sugar woogums.’ Is there a point to this story?”
“The point is, I have no patience left. You will tell me where you went when you vanished. Now.”
Andrea raised her chin, as if daring me to take a swing. “Or?”
Or what exactly? “Or I will punch you right in the face.”
Andrea froze. For a second I thought she would bolt for the door. She sighed instead. “Can I at least get some coffee first?”
WE SAT IN THE KITCHEN AT THE OLD, SCARRED TABLE, and I poured two-hour-old burned coffee into our mugs.
Andrea looked into her cup. “I was on the north side of the gap when your aunt appeared for her final showdown. I was still pissed off about . . . things and it messed with my head. So I picked out a nice spot for myself on a pile of debris right on the lip of the gap and set up my rifle. It seemed like a good idea at the time. When your aunt made her grand entrance, I tried to shoot her in the eye. Except she moved and I missed. And then she started blasting fire all over. That’s where the lack of clear head bit me in the ass—I had no exit strategy. She barbecued me like a rack of ribs. By the time they peeled me from that debris, I had third-degree burns over forty percent of my body. The pain was too much. I passed out. Apparently I changed into my other self in the hospital bed.”
Shit. Lyc-V, the shapeshifter virus, stole pieces of the host’s DNA and dragged them over to its next victim. Most of the time animal DNA transferred over from animals to human hosts, resulting in a wereanimaclass="underline" a human who took on beast shape. Once in a while the process happened in reverse, and some unfortunate animal ended up as an animal-were. Most of them were pathetic creatures, confused, mentally shortchanged, and unable to comprehend the rules of human society. Laws meant nothing to them, and that made them unpredictable and dangerous. Regular shapeshifters murdered them on sight.
However, every rule had an exception, and Andrea’s father, a hyenawere, had been one. Andrea remembered very little of her father. She once said he had the mental capacity of a five-year-old. That didn’t prevent him from mating with Andrea’s mother, who was a werehyena, or bouda, as they preferred to be called. His blood made Andrea beastkin, and she went to great lengths to hide it. She joined the Order as a human, subjected herself to torturous methods to pass all the necessary tests, graduated from the Academy, and excelled at being a knight. She was on the fast track climbing the Order’s chain of command when a case went sour and got her transferred to Atlanta.
The head of Atlanta’s Order chapter, Knight-protector Ted Moynohan, knew that something was wrong with Andrea, but he couldn’t prove it, so he kept her on support duty. Ted didn’t play nice with shapeshifters. In fact, he didn’t even consider them human. That was one of the reasons I left. Despite it all, Andrea remained fanatically loyal to the Order. For her, the Order meant honor and duty and a sense of serving a higher cause. Shifting in the hospital bed had blown her closet door wide open.
Andrea kept her gaze firmly in her cup. Her face had a strained blank look, her jaw set, as if she were dragging a heavy boulder up a mountain and she was determined to make it to the top.
“The thing with your aunt didn’t go well. Ted had called in reinforcements from everywhere. Twelve knights died, among them two masters-at-arms, one diviner, and a master-at-craft. Seven others were severely injured. The Order conducted a hearing. Since my cover had been blown anyway, I thought it would be a good time to make a case that someone like me could be of use to the Order.”
Now things made sense. This was her crusade. I should’ve seen it coming. We’d talked just before I quit the Order, and Andrea had argued against my quitting. She wanted me to stay and fight with her to change the Order for the better from within. I told her that even if I tried to change the Order, I couldn’t. I wasn’t a knight. My opinion carried no weight. But Andrea was a knight, a decorated veteran. She saw it as her chance to make her mark.
Andrea took a small sip of her coffee and coughed. “Damn, Kate, I know you’re pissed but did you have to put motor oil into my drink?”
“That was the lousiest joke I’ve ever heard you make. Stop stalling. What happened?”
She glanced up and I almost did a double take. Her eyes were hollow and bitter.
“I had one of the best Order advocates in the South. He thought there was a chance we could make a difference. There are others like me in the Order. The not-quite-pure human. I wanted to make their lives better. He advised me to separate myself from the shapeshifters, so I wrote you that letter. I was going to bring Grendel back too, but we had to leave in a hurry, so I just took him with me and went to Wolf Trap.”
Wolf Trap, Virginia. The Order’s national headquarters. Everyone knowing Andrea was a beastkin. It must’ve been pure hell.
Andrea rubbed the rim of her cup, as if trying to remove some dirt only she could see. If she rubbed it any harder, she’d make a hole in it.
“We spent a month preparing twenty-four-seven, gathering documents, pulling all of my records. My advocate spoke for three hours at the hearing and made a very passionate, logical argument in my favor. We had charts, we had statistics, we had my service decorations on display. We had everything.”
A cold feeling sprouted in the pit of my stomach, telling me exactly how this would end. “And?”
Andrea squared her shoulders and opened her mouth.
Nothing came out. She clamped it shut.
I waited.
Her face paled. She sat rigid, the mouth of her line tense. A faint reddish glow tinted her eyes—the hint of hyena sneaking through under pressure.
Andrea unclenched her teeth. Her voice came out completely flat, sifted through the sieve of her will until every last hint of emotion had been scrubbed from it.
“They awarded me Master-at-Arms and retired me due to being mentally unfit for duty. The official diagnosis is posttraumatic stress disorder. The decision is final and I can’t dispute it. I can’t even accuse them of discrimination, because my final orders don’t address the fact that I’m beastkin. They simply refused to acknowledge it, as if it weren’t an issue.”