It was raining again, but Jody had been raised in Eugene, where it only rained once a year-from January to December. Besides, he was a Pisces; water was his element.
He raised his face and let the rain wash down it. Practice had run a little late and the sun had set before he'd gotten out. The music had been good tonight; they'd all felt it. He pulled the sticks out of his back pocket and beat the air in a rhythm only he could hear. There was something he should change in that last measure...
He took the shortcut to his apartment-a dim little street barely wide enough for a car and a half. It wasn't late, but there was no one around except for an older man and a girl who looked about sixteen. They were both drenched and hurried toward him.
"Excuse me," said the man, "We're visiting and seem to have gotten turned around. Do you know where the nearest restaurant is?" The coat he wore was expensive-wool, Jody thought-and he had a bright gold watch on his wrist that looked like it cost a bundle. The girl-as they got closer he was pretty sure that there was more than a generation between the old gent and the girl; maybe she was his granddaughter-was wearing four-inch heels that made her feet look tiny.
She caught him looking and enjoyed his admiration. He couldn't help but smile back. She put her hand on his wrist, and said, "We need to find some food." And her smile widened a little more, and he saw fangs.
Strange, he thought, she didn't look like she belonged in the groups his ex-girlfriend had hung out with, where they all wore fangs and played that stupid game... not D &D, which was cool... something with vampires.
This girl wore a ponytail and looked more like Brit ney Spears than Vampirella. Her shoes were hot pink, and there wasn't a piece of her clothing that was black.
He didn't like it that his throat tightened in fear because she was wearing acrylic fangs.
"There's a place a few blocks away," he told her, twisting his wrist gently to get her to let go. "Serves Italian food. They have a great red sauce."
She licked her lips and didn't let go of his wrist. "I love red sauce."
"Look," he said, jerking his wrist free, "cut it out. That's not funny."
"No," breathed the man, who had somehow gotten behind him while Jody had been talking to the girl. "Not funny at all." And there was a sharp pain in his neck.
"Where is someplace private?" the old man asked after a little while. "Someplace we might play together for a while without anyone seeing us?"
And Jody led his new friends a few miles away to a place on the Sound where he knew no one would come.
"Good," said the man. "Very good."
The girl closed her eyes and smiled. "The traffic will drown out the screams."
The man leaned over and put his mouth to Jody's ear. "You can be scared now."
Jody was scared for a very, very long time before they threw him into the water for the fish.
***
"THE rocks will keep him underwater until they won't be able to tell how he died," said Ivan.
"I still think we should have left him naked hanging from a tree like that girl in Syracuse."
Ivan rubbed the top of her head. "Dear child," he said, and sighed. "That was a special case; she was a message to her father. This one was just play, and if we let the silly humans know we killed him, it would interfere with business."
She looked at the bloody drumsticks and sighed, tossing them in after the body. "And nothing interferes with business."
"Business keeps a roof over our heads and lets us travel when we want to," Ivan told her. "You need to wash your face, princess, and put your clothes back on."
A great mountain peak broke through the white mist and ruled in awesome splendor over the soft sky and Anna held her breath. Mount Rainier, she thought, though her geography of the Cascades was shaky. There were mountains spread out below them, but this one was orders of magnitude larger than the lowly ripples in the land below it. Gradually, other great peaks revealed themselves in the distance, drowning in clouds.
"Hey, Charles?"
The mountains were on Charles's side of the plane. Anna leaned as far toward him as she could without touching him-he was flying the plane, and she didn't want to distract him.
"Yes?"
They were wearing headsets that protected their sensitive ears from the noise of the engine and miked their voices to each other. In her headphone, his voice was low enough to make the speaker in her ear buzz even though it was turned to the lowest setting.
"Just how many planes does the pack have?"
This was the second she'd been in.
"Just the Learjet," he told her. "If you lean any farther, you're going to strangle yourself. This Cessna is mine."
He owned a plane? Just when she was starting to think she knew him, something else would come up. She knew that he handled the pack finances-and that their pack was not in any danger of being penniless anytime soon. She knew that he himself was financially stable, though they hadn't really talked about it much. Owning a plane was a whole different category of financially stable, like Mount Rainier was a whole different category of mountain from the hills she'd known in Illinois.
"Aren't we on pack business?" she asked. "Why did we take this one?"
"The jet needs five thousand feet to land," he said. "That means Boeing Field or Sea-Tac, and I don't want the government to be following us around all week."
"The government follows you?" She had a sudden picture of Charles strolling along with dark-suited men creeping behind him, trying to stay out of sight and failing, with cartoonish exaggeration.
He nodded. "We may be a secret from the rest of the world-but the wrong people know who we are."
And that was why the Marrok had decided it was time to bring the werewolves out to the public. "So the wrong people are following you?"
He smiled wolfishly. "Only when I want them to."
She considered that smile and decided she liked it on him. "So where are we landing?"
"At an airstrip maintained by the Emerald City Pack. It's about thirty miles from Seattle."
The plane bounced, dropping fast and tickling her stomach. She gripped her armrests and laughed as Charles brought the plane back to level. "I really like flying."
He dipped his head and looked at her over the top of his dark lenses for a moment. Then his mouth quirked up, and he turned his attention back to his instrument panel. The plane tilted to the left.