Page 11 of Twice Bitten
“Yeah. I mean, unless his accomplice turned on him. But they have to have been accomplices to start with, and probably still are, if I had to put money on it.”
And Brent had probably been riding his accomplice’s dick all the way to Lancaster, if I had to put money onthat, but I kept my mouth shut about that particular opinion.
Jack nodded and reached for his boots. “Then we should go and do some recon, don’t you think?”
“You’re certain that Brent won’t be able to feel you coming? That we have until dawn before they expect you to be here? Because I don’t want to walk into an ambush. My suit might not survive contact with the enemy.”
Jack stared at me for a moment, and I lifted my chin and stared back, refusing to look as sheepish as I suddenly felt. Yes, to a werewolf like Jack with his workman’s boots and his absurd leather jacket, my suits might seem equally silly.
But I’d spent nearly a century developing my appreciation for fine wool fabric.
He could suck it.
Even if I privately acknowledged that houndstooth suits weren’t, perhaps, the very most practical attire for vampire enforcement.
Very privately, as in I wouldn’t admit it even under torture.
“That would be a terrible shame,” he said, so deadpan that I couldn’t even tell if he meant it sarcastically.
Until the corner of his mouth quirked up and cast the deciding vote. Bastard. I sniffed at him and turned for the door, his low laugh following me as I opened it with more than necessary force and stalked out to the parking lot.
“My car,” I called back over my shoulder. “Less noticeable.” Brent would surely recognize Jack’s truck, and my car had a lower profile period.
To my shock, Jack didn’t argue, simply locking the motel room door and climbing into the passenger seat, the suspension creaking as he settled in. I’d thought alphas always insisted on driving, but he seemed game enough to be chauffeured—although the way he placed his hands awkwardly on his thighs made me think he almost never rode in a car without being behind the wheel.
I stuck the key in the ignition, pulled my phone out of my pocket to send Esther a quick update, and then hesitated. While she didn’t micromanage and generally caused anyone who needed it some variety of physical pain and/or existential anguish, she hated being kept out of the loop.
What she hated even more? Half-assed updates.
“You didn’t really answer my question. Brent won’t be able to sense us coming?”
He shook his head. “I really do have my end of the bond locked down. Brent…doesn’t. He doesn’t—” Jack broke off, shook his head again, and sighed. “He doesn’t have a lot of control.”
“You don’t say.” I grinned to myself as I started the car. Two could play at the dry sarcasm game, thank you very much. “All right. Where are we headed? I need to let Esther know.”
“Look, I know you’re helping me and I’m here on sufferance, but it’s my family—”
“I am helping you, you are here on sufferance, and if we end up outnumbered or outgunned, Esther’s the one who’s going to be sending the cavalry. So shut up and tell me where we’re going.”
A moment’s silence fell.
“North,” he said, growling again. Well, given how stubborn alphas could be, I could live with a little sullen growling. “Maybe about fifteen miles as the crow flies.”
I pulled up a map on my phone. North fifteen miles put us in the middle of exactly fucking nowhere, not that Lancaster had a reputation for being a center of bustling urban commerce or anything. I zoomed in. No, not quite nowhere. A scattering of cabins, a gas station, and a bar a little ways even further out.
Fucking great. The hostile rural locals, who tended to dislike Lancaster’s vampire population in the first place, would all be drunk.
My text to Esther left out my editorializing. And, after a moment’s thought, I left out the purpose of the artifact, too, feeling a little uneasy about it but somehow unable to make myself type it out.
Did I trust Esther? Yes, mostly. Did I think anyone, even someone as self-contained and sensible as she was, would be tempted by something like that? Also yes. She might not be able to use it herself, but she could damn well force Jack to do it.
Fuck. How could Jack not realize the potential of this thing he’d somehow inherited from his Idaho werewolf family? And how the fuck had they ended up with it in the first place?
Not like he’d tell me. I pulled out of the parking lot and navigated to the small highway that wound through the woods to the north, the loops of it making our fifteen-mile as-the-crow-flies distance more of a thirty-mile trek. But it was still early, and we had until dawn, supposedly. Plenty of time.
Plenty of time for me to brood over it, anyway.
I hit the gas, and we headed north, the pines surrounding us and filtering what little moonlight there was into crawling shadows, giving the night an ominous feel.
