“This is the point where you say, ‘Yes, Alpha,’ ” Derek said.
Ascanio shot him a look that was pure murder. “Yes, Alpha.”
This wasn’t going to end well, I just knew it.
CHAPTER 9
IN ANOTHER LIFETIME, JOHN WHITE PARK HAD housed a golf course flanked by a nice middle-class neighborhood of brick houses and arbitrarily curving streets. The houses still survived, but the park had gone to hell some time ago. Dense underbrush flanked the crumbling asphalt road, and past it tall ashes and poplars reached their way to the sky, vying for space with mast-straight pines.
The pre-Shift maps put the park at around forty acres. The recent Pack map, which was the envy of every law enforcement official in the area and of which I was now a proud owner due to being the “Consort,” put it closer to ninety. The trees had eaten a chunk of the subdivision south of Beecher Street and chomped their way through Greenwood Cemetery.
Ninety acres of dense woods was a lot of ground to cover.
I turned the corner. A large duck sat in the middle of the street. To the left of the duck, a deep ditch took up half of the road. No way through.
The magic was up and my Jeep made enough noise to give a thunder god a complex. You’d think the stupid bird would move. I honked the horn. The duck stared at me, ruffling its brown feathers.
Nothing.
“Move, you silly bird.”
The duck remained unimpressed. I should get out more. This mated life made me too soft. I couldn’t even scare a duck off the road.
I got out of the Jeep and walked over to the duck. “Scoot!”
The bird gave me an evil stare.
I nudged her gently with my boot. The duck rose and flopped on my foot. The bill pinched my jeans and the bird tried to pull me to the left. One of us was nuts and it wasn’t me.
“This isn’t funny.”
The bird turned left and let out a single loud quack.
“What is it? Did Timmy fall down a well?”
“Quack!”
I took a few steps forward and saw a narrow gap in the wall of green. A path, diving deep into the park. I peered at the forest. It didn’t give off an “I’ll kill you with my trees” vibe the way Sibley did, but it didn’t look welcoming either.
The underbrush was too dense for a duck flight. Hard terrain to cross on foot, especially if you have to waddle.
“How am I supposed to follow you in there, you demented bird? You can’t fly through that wood. Unless you’re planning on dropping ten pounds . . .”
The duck shivered. Feathers crawled, sinking back into flesh, folding on themselves. My stomach lurched. Dense fuzz sprouted as the duck’s body flowed, reshaping itself. The blob that used to be duck stretched one last time and snapped into a small brown bunny.
I closed my mouth with a click.
The bunny swiped some nonexistent dust from his nose with both paws and hopped down the path.
I went back to the Jeep, shut off the engine, and chased the duck-rabbit down the path into the dense thicket of the John White woods.
THE FOREST TEEMED WITH LIFE. TINY SQUIRRELS dashed up and down the trees. A ruffed grouse shot from the forest floor. Somewhere to the left a feral pig grunted. Three deer watched me pick my way down the path from a safe distance. I sank into the quiet measured gait I used when walking through the woods: quiet and deceptively unhurried. The little rabbit fell in step and scampered down by my side.
A bowstring snapped. I jerked to the side and jumped behind an oak. The rabbit crouched by my feet, shivering.
I leaned out just enough to see. An arrow sprouted from the ground where my foot had been a second ago. The angle was high. I looked up. Across the path, a man crouched in an old tree, poised in a spot where the trunk split into two massive branches. Young, mid- to late twenties. Tattered jeans stained with brown and green, plain brown T-shirt. Looked like Army issue. Hair cut short. The branches obscured his face and most of his chest. No place to sink a throwing knife.
When unsure of the stranger’s intentions, the best policy is to open a meaningful dialogue. “Hey, dickhead! Who taught you to shoot, Louis Braille? That arrow missed me by a mile.”
“I was aiming at the rabbit, you stupid bitch.”
“You missed.” If I pissed him off enough, he might move to get a better shot at me. My throwing knives couldn’t wait to say hello.
“I see that.”
“I figured I’d let you know, since you must be blind. Maybe you could practice by aiming at a barn.”
A bowstring twanged. I ducked back behind the tree. An arrow sliced the leaves a hair left of the oak. He was good, but not great. Andrea would’ve nailed me by now.
“You alive?” he called out.
“Yep. Still breathing. You missed again, hotshot.”
“Look, I have no problem with you. Give me the damn rabbit and I’ll let you go.”
Fat chance. “This is my rabbit. Get your own.”
“It’s not your rabbit. It’s the witch’s rabbit.”
Figured. “You got a problem with the witch?”
“Yeah, I got a problem.”
If Evdokia wanted him dead, he would be dead by now. This was her forest. She hadn’t killed him, which meant she was amused by his antics, or worse, he was a relative or a son of a friend. Injuring him was out of the question, or I could kiss good-bye any chance of cooperation from Evdokia.
“Last chance to give me the rabbit and walk away from this.”
“No.”
“Suit yourself.”
A shrill whistle burst through the woods, lancing my eardrums. It drowned all sound and shot up, higher and higher, to an impossible intensity. I clamped my hands over my ears.
The whistle built on itself, slicing the petals off wildflowers to the left and right of the oak, stabbing through my hands into my brain. The world faded. I tasted blood in my mouth.
The whistle stopped.
The sudden quiet was deafening.
Russian fairy tales talked of a Nightingale Bandit, able to bend trees with his whistling. I seemed to have run into the real-life version.
“You alive?” he called out.
Barely. “Yep.” I dug in my brain, trying to recall the old Russian folk tales. Did he have any weakness . . . if he had, I couldn’t remember any. “You whistle so prettily. Do you do weddings?”
“In five seconds I’m going to split that tree down the middle and you with it. Hard to make jokes with your lungs full of blood.”
I slid a throwing knife from the sheath on my belt and sneaked a glance. He sat in a tree, one leg under him, the other dangling down. Relaxed and easy.
“Fine, you got me. I’m coming out.”
“With the rabbit?”
