Chapter 5
Merely from the tense lines of Keeya’s back, Jeremiah would have known that the summit with the wolves was not going well, even if he had not been in the First Circle behind his matriarch, listening to every word.
“I was under the impression that the wolves were here to make amends for the attack on my clan,” she said, her voice low and commanding.
“My pack did not attack your people. The pack responsible for that raid has been wiped out. Reparations have been made.”
Jeremiah was pretty sure that the wolf pack’s alpha-male didn’t like being told what to do by a woman.
Too bad. Keeya’s in charge here.
“That’s not reparation, that’s retribution,” Keeya pointed out calmly. “We were assured both.”
“I don’t know who told you—” the alpha began.
“The Council,” Keeya interrupted. “Would you prefer to speak to them?” She waved a cell phone in the alpha’s direction, and although he could not see it, Jeremiah knew that she waited for an answer with one eyebrow raised, looking more patient than she probably felt.
“In any case,” the matriarch continued, “if you are not here to make reparations, then we have nothing further to discuss.” She began turning her back on the wolves.
That almost certainly had to be a bluff. Walking away from Council-coordinated negotiations could be a dangerous move.
“Wait,” the alpha said, shaking his head. “What do you want?”
The tiny smile at the corner of Keeya’s mouth disappeared by the time she was halfway around to facing the alpha and his pack.
Ah. Now that the posturing is over, they can get down to the real negotiations. In his animal form, it was all Jeremiah could do to keep from laughing aloud. He didn’t even try to stop his tongue from lolling out to one side as he opened his mouth in a hyena-style grin. The wolf directly across from him hunkered down and snarled. Without turning around, the alpha reached behind him with one hand and snapped at the growling animal, who instantly stilled.
Treats his people like dogs. Disgraceful.
Keeya would never do that.
Jeremiah allowed himself one more sniggering glance at the reprimanded wolf. Keeya might speak to him privately later, but she would never rebuke him in front of an opponent.
As he raised his head proudly in the air, he caught a whiff of something … familiar.
An image flashed across his mind of white-blond hair curling around his fingertips and trailing down his stomach.
Shadow?
Here?
He sniffed again, but the scent was gone.
No. Wait. There it was again, like a bright, hot trail through the night air. He wanted to follow it, needed to, but as the only Shield here, he couldn’t leave the First Circle during the negotiations.
He could interrupt, but doing so might ruin whatever finely tuned plans Keeya had in place. What would he tell her, anyway? That he had scented the human he had brought back to the hotel the night before?
No. He would have to wait, see if he could follow the trail later, when the summit talks had ended.
He needed to pay attention to the negotiations, in case they went awry. Keeya might need him to help keep the peace.
But that scent kept teasing his senses, drawing his attention away from the parley. Scenes from the night before unfurled before his eyes, and his beast all but laughed in delight. The wolf across from him curled a lip up to show a fang, assuming Jeremiah was laughing at him again. He wasn’t—but he couldn’t stop grinning, either, even though he knew that finding that scent here was not a good thing.
The way that muted smell kept teasing at him, drifting in and out of range, kept him half-distracted through most of the summit. He was sure it was Shadow’s scent, but he couldn’t pinpoint its location.
He did have a direction for it, though. At least, he thought he did. No matter how carefully he tilted his ears in that direction, though, he couldn’t make out anything unusual, nothing beyond the general shifting and rustling that came with any large group of shifters, in any form.
By the time the leaders began wrapping up their discussion, he had taken to surreptitiously sniffing himself to see if maybe some of her scent remained on him. It had still been on his hotel-room sheets that morning. Perhaps he had brushed against something that transferred her smell to him? That would account for its scarcity—though not the way it seemed to be carried to him on the breeze.
Keeya was summarizing the final agreement as it would be presented to the Council at large, Jeremiah realized. It sounded like the wolves were ceding much of the plains area near Dallas, Texas to Keeya’s clan.
Excellent.
It wasn’t the African savanna, but it would allow them space to run and hunt. He understood that had been the wolves’ reason for wanting the area, as well as the lions’. There were many fewer lion-shifters than wolves, though, and the hyenas’ relatively recent move to the area had caused more anxiety over territory than anyone had expected.
Our animal sides control our actions more than we like to admit.
There were other elements to the agreement, but the territory concession was the one that Keeya had been most concerned about. It meant that she wouldn’t have to move the clan yet again.
The hyenas had a permanent home again.
Thank all that was good.
As the parley began to break up, Jeremiah couldn’t help but aim a few whoops at the wolf who had been snarling at him. The other hyenas would recognize his voice, know that he was the one taunting their adversaries—even hyenas in the wild could differentiate one another’s whoops—but he didn’t care. His people had a permanent home, finally, and it made him feel like laughing.
* * *
Shadow had understood only about half of what the monsters in the center were saying—something about territory surrounding various areas near Dallas.
She hadn’t realized there were such large packs in Texas.
Hell, I hadn’t realized there were hyena-shapeshifters in the States at all.
That would have to be her next move, then. Gather up the boys and head west.
Assuming Erik agrees.
Sometimes, they butted heads over what direction her monster-hunting should take. He was about half-likely to tell her not to take on one of the bigger packs.
But Shadow was good at hunting around the edges, taking down the stragglers, the outliers, then striking at the heart of the monsters—their leader.
I can see who the leaders are, right here.
Now that their human masks—those faces that hid their monstrous hearts—were imprinted on her memory, she would be able to dispose of them. That would leave the packs in disarray, fighting among themselves.
And if I time it right, I can have them battling one another, as well.
She was certain that she was ready to take down a whole pack. She knew Erik had done it more than once, back in his heyday, by combining with other Scylds.
Just because we prefer to work alone doesn’t mean we’re required to.
If there were two big packs—wolves and hyenas—in Texas, then at least one of them needed to be put down.
As the discussion near the fountain began winding down, Shadow stepped silently backward, extricating herself from the foliage, moving carefully despite muscles that ached from remaining perfectly still for so long.
At the edge of the square, Shadow paused, still hidden by the leaves, to make sure no one saw her emerge from the vegetation. Covering up one hand with the sleeve of her hoodie, she swiped at the dark makeup on her face. As she prepared to step out onto the sidewalk, an eerie, yipping laugh stopped her.
Hyena, she realized. But its similarity to a human laugh had startled her more than she could have anticipated.
That connection, the almost-humanity of the beast’s voice, set her teeth on edge.
She didn’t have to leave. Technically, she didn’t even need Erik’s approval to take out a pack. Having it helped, certainly, as she relied on him for information and knowledge and even connections to her clean-up teams, half the time. But she was a Scyld in her own right, trusted to make decisions in the field.
Even if those decisions were based on the fact that the animal-call of one of the creep-show monsters she hunted sent chills running up and down her spine.
Instead of moving out of the foliage as she had originally planned, she turned around and made her way back to her viewing spot, where she crouched down and peered through the leaves again.
There. At the edge of the group, one hyena looked back over its shoulder at its wolf counterpart, its tongue lolling in an open-mouth grin, right before it let out another unnerving, barking laugh.
The woman who had been involved in the negotiations by the fountain fell back from her place in the middle of the group and put one hand on the hyena’s back. It was enough to act as some sort of reprimand, or maybe just a reminder, as the hyena faced forward again and began trotting next to her as she strode back to join the rest of the moving pack—but not without licking her hand, first.
Yuck.
Shadow shivered at the thought of the animal-human tongue on her skin.
These days, she didn’t even like to be around dogs.
She knew too much about what monsters some animals could become.
Tamping down her visceral reaction took a few additional moments. She didn’t know for certain, but she suspected that any kind of emotional response could increase some sort of chemical output that would make her more easily detected by the monsters.
Before she set out to follow the hyenas, determined to put down the source of that creepy laugh, she opened the package of baking soda she kept in the front pocket of her hoodie and sprinkled it over her hands, then patted it across her face, and inside her shirt. Finally, she dusted it across her hair and rubbed it into her scalp.
That should help keep her invisible, at least in terms of scent, as she followed the boisterous company.
The hyena-shifters didn’t stay in a large group.
That was a smart move, Shadow had to acknowledge. The animals peeled off almost immediately after leaving the square, loping off into the darkness in ones and twos. Except the one she wanted. It stayed next to the woman who led the group.
Soon, the men began splitting off, too—not a bad move, either. A large group of rowdy black men in the historic district of a city in the Deep South could look like a problem to some kinds of people.
If only they knew.
Race issues. Race was nothing. It didn’t matter if people were black or white or goddamn green, as far as Shadow was concerned—as long as they were people.
These people weren’t people at all.
Still, something about them pinged her memory.
She shook it off.
The disappearance of the men helped her cause. As long as they weren’t protecting their young, females were sometimes easier to kill.
Not that these women looked soft. In fact, in direct opposition to the males, they were stern-faced and serious.
Tall and muscular, too.
Whatever.
Her goal was to put down one hyena shifter tonight, test their skills and strengths, and see if she could learn anything about them from it. Then she would make a plan to deal with the rest of them.
* * *
Jeremiah kept his senses focused on his surroundings, determined to protect Keeya and the other women of the clan as they walked back to their hotel. When they turned onto Whitaker Street, headed toward the Savannah River, he allowed Keeya to slide around him so that he walked on the house-side of the sidewalk, but only because sixteen-year-old Hawa walked on the other side of their matriarch, and she had aspirations of becoming a Shield herself.
He had finally decided that the occasional whiff he caught that smelled of Shadow was either some remnant of her scent trapped on his own body, when a sudden gust of wind brought it to him again, this time clearly from somewhere behind them.
In the darkness, anyone who passed their group was likely to think him a dog, and although the thought of it galled him a little, he knew it was necessary to participate in the deception. At least stopping to sniff the air wouldn’t seem particularly odd. The closer they got to the river, the more the smells of water and river industry muddied the one scent he wanted to track.
After Keeya is safely returned to the hotel, he promised himself. Then he would go back out and track down the source of the smell that he found so distracting and alluring.
They were still several blocks from the hotel when Keeya stopped and pointed to a dark space between two houses. “Go. Change.” She held out her hand to one of the women, who pulled clothing out of a printed, cloth bag she carried and placed it over Keeya’s outstretched arm. In turn, Keeya draped it across Jeremiah’s back. He whined and pawed the ground, wanting to explain his need to track later and his desire to conserve energy that an additional shift would expend, but his matriarch shook her head and pointed.
“Now. We will wait here.”
He didn’t think she would yield, even if he could explain.
Shifting this far from the savanna of his birth always hurt more than it had back in Africa. He couldn’t explain it, or know why that should be so, but the other hyenas had mentioned it, as well.
It left him feeling drained, as well, and ravenous.
Before he could go back out to track the elusive Shadow-scent, he would need to eat.
Even the thought made his stomach growl.
From the sidewalk, Keeya laughed. “I heard that. Kopano just texted me. The other males have gone to the hotel restaurant. You may join them.”
Still buttoning his pants, he stepped out onto the sidewalk, where he took a pair of leather sandals from Keeya and stepped into them. “After I see you safely back to your room, Mme,” he said, using the Setswana word for mother.
Keeya patted his cheek. “You are a good boy.” Turning away, she headed back toward the river. “But the wolves are no threat tonight, and even if they were, I can take care of myself. We all can.” With a wave of her hand, she encompassed all the women surrounding her.
“But this is my job, and I will do it.” Jeremiah knew he sounded petulant, but he had worked hard to gain the title of Shield, and he would not allow his matriarch to come to any harm—or even to go out in public without a guard.