I was just getting out of the shower when Jackson and Clarke arrived back, and I couldn’t help wondering what their reaction might have been if they had gotten back a little earlier.

Clarke would surely have been exasperated, once again, to find his friend sleeping with the enemy – or at least banging the enemy against the wall of a shower cubicle. But what might Jackson have thought? What he and I had shared had been rough, spur of the moment, and absolutely not to be repeated, but I still didn’t think he’d have been happy to find that I had quickly moved on to one of his friends.

No man would.

Plus, for all that it had been rough and spur of the moment, it had also been… special. I didn’t want it to have been, but something in the back of my mind insisted upon it. I wanted to believe that it was just awesome sex, and nothing more, but even as I looked at Jackson now, I felt a flutter of something that I did not feel when I looked at most men. More worryingly, it was the exact same flutter I got when I looked at Colt. I had to stop doing this or it was not going to end well for anyone – werewolves might be cool with the whole multi-partner thing, but I was pretty sure that humans weren’t.

All that flashed through my mind pretty quickly, which was good, as Jackson had more important information to share.

“Did it work?” I asked, almost breathless with anticipation. “Did my plan work?”

“Our plan,” Colt put in – the latter part had been his, so fair enough.

Jackson sighed. “It worked well. Better than we could have hoped.”

“And yet, you’re not smiling.”

Jackson grimaced. “You know how you might go to a doctor and he says, ‘The good news is we have a machine that can tell you exactly what’s wrong with you’. It’s good that he knows what’s wrong with you, but it still may not be news you want to hear.”

I sat down, folding my robe over my bare legs, feeling suddenly vulnerable. “Guess I’d better hear the lot.”

“We followed the wolves,” said Clarke. “You were right, they headed straight back to a Brotherhood hideout – a basement underneath an abandoned church.”

“Nice.”

“I know, right,” Clarke acknowledged. “They know how to do cool hideouts.”

“We gave them a minute then followed them in,” Jackson took up the story. “There was a pair of angled skylights low to the ground that looked down into a crypt and we climbed in through them. We could hear the wolves talking in the adjoining room but couldn’t make out a lot of what was being said. They didn’t meet for long – seems like they must have told the heads of their local chapter that they had important information and needed a meet. We were able to watch them leave through the skylight, but didn’t get a good look at anyone’s face. Once they were gone, we went into the main room where they were meeting, another part of the crypt, where all the really expensive burials are.” He shook his head. “People must have paid so much money to get a good spot in the crypt, someplace where God is going to know you were worth something, now, the whole place is falling down around them. In a few years, those people’s posh graves are going to be buried in rubble.”

“Is that strictly relevant?” I asked.

“No,” Jackson admitted. “But it might help you put things in perspective. There were a couple of other side rooms and we searched them. The first one was old church stuff – candles and so on – but the second had been used by The Brotherhood to store stuff.”

I sat forward eagerly. “Was there anything to tie them to the MacKenzie Pack? Or to any other pack for that matter?”

Jackson shook his head. “Nothing like that. Mostly it was weirdly boring stuff – admin stuff. I guess even secret societies have bills to pay. We found a few notes between members but nothing really pertinent. The one thing we found…” He looked at Clarke, and the younger Wolf Taker reached into his pocket and produced two sheets of paper stapled together. They were badly creased, as if they had been crumpled up.

“They were in the trash,” Clarke explained. “It’s a photocopy. Our best guess is that copies got sent out to all the local Brotherhood chapters and they were told to memorize and destroy, but someone got lazy with the destruction.”

I took the sheet of paper from him. It was a daily schedule, a list of dates and places and times. Someone had highlighted some of the lines in either yellow, green or red, which presumably denoted some level of priority. I began to read; ‘9.30am, Pack Lodge for ascension ceremony; 12 noon, Lunch at Lodge or apartment with HJ’. It went on but I didn’t have to read any more to know what it was and to know why the guys had been so concerned.

“This is my schedule,” I said, quietly. “They know where I am at any time.”

“So, running off without telling anyone was probably a pretty good call,” pointed out Colt, trying to lighten the mood a little.

But Jackson wasn’t smiling. “Do you understand what this means, Bailey?” It was the first time he had called me by my given name.

“It means we still don’t have anything to link The Brotherhood to any pack.”

“Not exactly,” said Jackson, grimly. “We don’t have anything to tie The Brotherhood to the MacKenzie. But this schedule is privileged information. There’s no way they could have gotten hold of it without having someone on the inside in your father’s pack. There is a traitor, somewhere near the top of the Hokkai.”

The words landed like lead in my mind with a heavy clang. A traitor amongst my father’s court? Amongst the people around whom I had grown up? How long had they hated me? All my life? Was this part of some larger plot to destabilize my father and take control of the pack? Or was it all about me? Had someone watched me grow up, seen me transform from carefree young girl into taboo-breaking wild child and hated what they saw? Were they repelled by the adult I had grown into? Did they feel that my behavior was a disgrace to the name Hokkai and to the honor of my father’s name and the reputation of our pack? I knew that there were people who felt that way, but the idea that any of them might have been this close to me all my life was a horrifying one. Someone I saw on a daily basis had done this to me. That was going to take a little time to sink in.

But I was not destined to be given that time. As I sat, staring at the floor with the guys around me, for once in complete sympathy with my position, the silence was shattered by a loud banging at the door of the apartment.

“Open up!”

The guys were instantly in fight mode. They seemed to physically grow, rising up on their toes, ready to take on whatever might be thrown at them.

“You’ve got the wrong room!” Clarke yelled back.

“Open this door now.”

“Why should we?”

“Open this door in the name of MacKenzie Sean and the MacKenzie Pack. You are harboring an interloper from another pack. We know that Hokkai Bailey is in there, if she does not come with us peacefully, then you will all die.”

Clarke took a long hunting knife from his bag. “Well, we won’t be the only ones.”