I wouldn’t have taken it either.
“I’ve got some money put away, so I don’t have to look for work right this second. Maybe I’ll take up fishing. I suppose eventually I’ll have to find something, probably in law enforcement. Just not now. They’ll do background checks and I don’t want to deal with it.”
“Would you like to work here with me?”
Andrea stared at me.
“We have no clients and the pay is shit.”
She kept staring. I couldn’t even tell if she heard me.
“Even if business were booming, I still couldn’t afford to pay you what you’re worth.” No reaction. “But if you don’t mind sitting in the office drinking motor oil coffee and bullshitting with me . . .”
Andrea put her hands over her face.
Ah crap.
I kept talking, keeping my voice as light as I could manage. “I have an extra desk. If the PAD comes to shut us down, I might need sniper support, and I can’t shoot a cow from ten feet. We can turn our desks over and lob grenades at them when they storm the door . . .”
Andrea’s shoulders shook slightly.
She was crying. Fuck me. I sat there, not sure what to do with myself.
Andrea kept trembling, eerily quiet.
I got off my ass and came back with a handkerchief. Andrea took the hanky and pressed it to her face.
Pity would only make it worse. She wanted to keep her pride—it was all she had left and I had to help her preserve it. I pretended to drink my coffee and stare at my mug. Andrea pretended not to be crying, while trying to mop up her tears.
For a few minutes we sat like this, awkward and grimly determined to act like nothing was happening. If I glared at this mug a moment longer, it would burst into flames from the sheer tension.
Andrea blew her nose. Her voice came out slightly hoarse. “Do you even have anything to shoot the PAD with?”
“I have an armory upstairs. The Pack gave me some guns and ammo. It’s in boxes to the left.”
Andrea paused. “In cardboard boxes?”
“Yeah.”
Andrea groaned.
“Hey, guns aren’t my thing. If they had brought me swords, that would be different. That’s where you come —”
Andrea got up and hugged me. It was a split-second hug, and then she was off, going upstairs, handkerchief in hand.
This best friend thing was seriously kicking my ass.
Upstairs something clanged.
Okay. I had to get on with the program. I took her keys from the table and went to get Grendel out of her truck before he demolished it.
CHAPTER 4
HALF AN HOUR LATER I SAT AT MY DESK, THINKING up a proper amount of money to bill Ghastek for the capture of the vampire. The vamp was now deceased, but it didn’t change the fact that I had caught it. The huge shaggy monstrosity that was Grendel sprawled at my feet. When I first found him, his fur had solidified into foul- smelling dreadlocks and the groomer ended up shaving the whole mess off. Now his fur had partially grown out and it looked like a karakul coat I once saw on one of the Guild’s upper-class clients: short, curly, and glossy black. He even smelled halfway decent.
Grendel raised his head and licked my hand. I opened the top drawer, took out an oatmeal cookie, and offered it to him. He took it very carefully out of my hand and sucked it in without chewing, as if he hadn’t been fed in a thousand years.
Over at the second desk, Andrea rummaged through a giant cardboard box she had dragged down from upstairs.
“There is a loup cage in one of the rooms,” she said.
It was the biggest loup cage I’d ever seen too, eight feet wide, eight feet long, seven feet tall. They had to bring it into the office in pieces and assemble it in the room. The steel-andsilver-alloy bars were as thick as my wrist. All Pack offices came equipped with a loup cage. The shapeshifters knew better than anyone how quickly they could snap. But since I was technically a human, Jim kept trying to find some diplomatic name for it. He thought calling it a loup cage would scare off my clients.
“It’s not a loup cage, you know,” I told her. “It’s a holding cell. Or safe room. Or secure room. I don’t think Jim ever settled on a term he could live with.”
“Aha. It’s a loup cage.” Andrea cleared her throat. “I touched it with my finger and it hurt. Is that in case of marital problems?”
“Did the Order return your sense of humor as part of the severance package?”
“Oh, burn. Burn!” Andrea hesitated. “Kate . . . Are you happy? With Curran, I mean.”
“When I can get out of my own way.”
She glanced at me. “And the rest of the time?”
“The rest of the time I’m in a state of silent panic. I’m afraid it will end. I’ll lose him. Lose Julie. Lose everyone.”
“I’ve done that,” Andrea said. “Lost everyone. It’s a bitch.”
No kidding.
Andrea lifted a black firearm, holding it as if it were covered with slime. “This is a Witness 45. It has a molding flaw on the grip right here, see? If you fire it, it will blister your hand.”
She picked up another gun. “This is a Raven 25. They haven’t made them since the early nineties. I didn’t even know they were still around. It’s a cheap junk gun. They used to call them Saturday Night Specials. You can’t put twenty rounds through it without it jamming, and the way this one looks, I wouldn’t even risk loading it. It might blow up in my hand. And this? This is a Hi-Point, otherwise known as a Beemiller.”
“Is that supposed to tell me something?”
She stared at me. “It’s like the crappiest gun out there. Normal guns cost upward of half a grand. This costs like a hundred bucks. The slide is made out of zinc with aluminum.”
I looked at her.
“Look, I can bend it with my hand.”
I’d also seen her bend a steel rod with her hand, but now didn’t seem the best time to mention it.
Andrea put the Hi-Point on the desk. “Where did you get these again?”
“They’re surplus guns from the Pack. Confiscated, from what I understand.”
“Confiscated during violent altercations?”
“Yes.”
Andrea sagged into her chair. Her blue-tipped hair drooped in defeat. “Kate, if someone used a gun against the shapeshifters and now the shapeshifters have said gun, it wasn’t a very good gun, was it?”
“I’m not arguing with you. I didn’t have a choice. That’s what was here when I moved in.”
Andrea extracted a fierce-looking silver handgun from the box. Her eyes widened. She looked at it for a moment and tapped it on the corner of her desk. The gun responded with a dry pop.
She looked at me with an expression of abject despair. “It’s plastic.”
I spread my arms at her.
Andrea tossed the plastic gun to Grendel. “Here, chew on this.”
The poodle sniffed it.
A careful knock echoed through the door.
Grendel surged to his feet and snarled, bouncing up and down.
