“Why not?”

Dorie sighed again. “Why not, why not? Because I didn’t want to be arrested. I didn’t want to go to jail. I just wanted it all to go away. I wanted my life back.”

“I’m sure Mulradin did, too,” I said. “Did anybody see you leave the crime scene?”

“No.”

I looked at Jim. “We have no witnesses and Hugh moved the body from the original scene.” A good defense attorney could do wonders arguing that any evidence found on the body was contaminated.

“You’re thinking surrender?” Jim’s eyebrows rose an eighth of an inch.

I was thinking I wanted to avoid killing Dorie and sending her head out on a pike.

“They filmed it,” Dorie said.

I turned to her. “What?”

“They filmed it,” she said. “While I killed him.”

Hugh had made a snuff film. Why was I not surprised?

“This alters things,” Thomas Lonesco said.

I nodded to Juan, one of Jim’s people standing by the door. “Put her under guard, please. Make sure she’s watched.”

He took her by the arm.

“What will happen to me?” Dorie asked.

“Come on.” Juan pulled her.

She came to life suddenly, flailing in his arms. “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die! Don’t kill me!”

He picked her up and carried her out of the room.

I waited until her sobs receded and stared down the Pack Council. My memory replayed Curran’s advice for dealing with the Council in my head. I never go into the Council room without a plan. You have to give them a range of possibilities, but if they discuss them too much, they’ll never make a decision. Steer them toward the right choice and don’t let them derail the train.

Steer them toward the right choice. Sure. Easy as pie. “As you know, the People intend to start a war. They are likely moving toward the Keep now. We have several courses of action opened to us. We can surrender Dorie to the People. Opinions?”

I waited.

“No,” Jim said.

“We’d lose too much influence,” Martha said. “Pass.”

“No,” Andrea said.

“No,” Thomas Lonesco said.

That gave me a majority. Surrendering to the People was off the table. “Option two, we can execute Dorie and show proof of it to the People.”

The pause was longer this time. They were thinking it over.

“No,” Robert said.

“No,” Martha agreed. “We don’t kill our own without a trial.”

A trial would take time. We all knew it.

Nobody else volunteered anything, so I kept going.

“Option three, we keep Dorie and tell the People to screw themselves.”

“The casualties would be staggering,” Thomas Lonesco said.

“If they want a fight, we can give them a fight,” Desandra said. “But we’re at reduced strength and it will be bloody.”

“This isn’t an option for me,” Jim said.

“So, we don’t want to execute Dorie or turn her over to the People, and we don’t want to go to war,” I said. “That leaves us with only one option. We can surrender her to state law enforcement.”

The silence dropped on the table like a heavy brick.

Desandra frowned. “So like what, here’s Dorie, here’s her confession, take her off our hands?”

“Yes,” I said. “Technically the murder was committed in Atlanta, which makes it the business of Atlanta’s finest. If they take her into custody, the People can deal with them. Our hands would be clean. We’d remove their pretext for the war.”

“We’d be abdicating control over the situation,” Thomas Lonesco said.

“Yes,” I confirmed.

Martha turned to Barabas. “If we do this, what are her chances in court?”

Barabas grimaced. “Under Georgia law, and U.S. common law in general, duress or coercion is not a defense to homicide. The idea is that a person should not place their life above the lives of others.”

“Could it be self-defense?” the beta of Clan Nimble asked.

“No,” Barabas said. “Self-defense, by definition, is only applicable against the aggressor. Mulradin wasn’t an aggressor, he was a victim. To impose any kind of criminal liability, one has to prove both actus reus, the guilty act, and the mens rea, the guilty mind. Dorie committed the act, and if she denied it, there is videotaped evidence. That gives us the actus reus. Even if everyone believes her defense, that she had to choose between her life and Mulradin’s, the fact is, she made that choice, which means she meant to kill him. We now have both ingredients for a speedy conviction.”

“So the death penalty?” the Jackal alpha asked.

“Not necessarily. The big question is what will the DA want to do with this. If this is malicious homicide, and they would be fools not to charge her with that, we have to fight the death penalty. We can try to negotiate it down to voluntary homicide, which is a pointless battle unless we have something to trade. It’s possible they hate d’Ambray and will want her testimony if they manage to apprehend him and charge him. It’s also possible that they don’t want to take d’Ambray on and they would rather bury Dorie six feet under. Can we use it to our advantage? It depends on who’s in charge of the prosecution. An election is coming up. Do they want to plead it out quietly or do they want to make it an election issue? If we do go to trial, can we poke holes in their evidence? We don’t even know what the evidence is at this point, but the video will be difficult to circumvent. Dorie herself will be difficult. She is an unlikable defendant: she is a prostitute who engaged in bestiality with a married man.”

“I’d think the married man would be more unlikable,” Andrea growled.

“And you would be right, but he isn’t on trial. We can put him on trial, but it’s always a gamble. Who is the judge? Who are the jurors? Will attacking the victim predispose them to hate our client? Dorie is a shapeshifter,” Barabas continued. “The general public views her as being prone to violence.”

“Can you just give us a straight answer?” Jim growled.

Barabas pointed at Jim. “See? Prone to violence. And no, I can’t. You gave me a client who committed a murder under duress and who will likely have to confess to it to satisfy the People and asked me a question about her chances. I’m answering.”

My head was beginning to hurt. “Could you give us the idiot version, then?”

Barabas held up his hand. “Possible outcomes in order of most likely first.” He bent one finger. “One, conviction for malicious homicide, life in prison without possibility of parole or death penalty before a judge or jury. Two!” He bent his second finger. “Conviction for the lesser offense of voluntary manslaughter in front of a judge or jury. Three, a plea deal for a negotiated sentence or possibly immunity depending on how much they want to get at Hugh d’Ambray. That’s subject to many different factors. Four, acquittal before a judge or a jury based on reasonable doubt. Not bloody likely. Five, jury nullification. That would constitute a Hail Mary pass on our part. Jury nullification is much more rare than people think, and we would have to prove to the jury that Dorie was a victim of some great injustice. Six, we somehow blow holes in the prosecution’s case and get the whole thing dismissed. The likelihood of this last one is difficult to gauge because we don’t even know what evidence the prosecution has. Let me remind all of you that they may not have been notified of Mulradin’s murder.”

Silence claimed the table.

“If we go to the State with this,” Martha said, “they’ll use everything they have to smear all of us. There is a price to be paid here.”

“True,” the male beta of Clan Nimble said.

“We’ll face restrictions again,” the female alpha of Clan Jackal said.

“The alternative is worse,” I said.

“Depends on how you look at it,” Martha said. “No good choices, it’s true.”

I was losing them. My train was rapidly sliding off the rails.

Robert glanced at me and said very carefully. “What is the penalty for Dorie’s actions under Pack law?”

“Death,” Barabas said. “It was a malicious murder. A life for a life applies.”

He was helping me. I grabbed onto the straw. It was a weak straw, but people drowning in quicksand couldn’t be choosers.

“As alphas we have an obligation to our Pack members.” I made a mental note to thank Barabas again for making me learn the Pack laws backward and forward. “We must ensure the overall safety of the Pack and its individual members. Our first priority is the preservation of life.”

“We know, dear,” Martha said. “We’ve read the laws.”

“Barabas, what sentence would Dorie get if we gave her to the People?”

“Death,” he said.

“What if we try her?”

“Death.”

“What will she get if we turn her over to the State?”

“I don’t know,” Barabas said. “I can tell you that we will fight our hardest to keep the death penalty off the table.”

“So it’s a maybe?”

“It’s a maybe.” He nodded.

“Death, death, maybe.” I looked around the Council. “I vote for maybe. Who’s with me?”

Five minutes later the Council filed out of the room. Martha stopped next to me. “Nicely done.”

“Not really,” I said. “Have you heard from Mahon?”

She shook her head. “Don’t worry. They’ll show up.”

I hoped she was right.

At the door Jim spoke to someone and turned to me. “I just got a phone call from the city. The People have emptied the Casino’s stables. They’re coming for us.”

12

I STOOD ON the balcony of the main building, watching the last of the stragglers come in. They glanced at me as they arrived. I was wearing Evdokia’s sweater and doing my best to broadcast confidence. It was ten eighteen. There was no sign of the People yet, but Jim’s scouts reported a large number of vampires moving out of the city in the Keep’s direction. The scouts estimated at least seventy. Navigators had a limited range, which meant that the People’s Masters of the Dead and their journeymen had to be traveling with the undead.

This was an extremely unwise move. Somewhere en route, Ghastek was gritting his teeth. Keeping that many undead together in one place required iron control on the part of the navigators. There was a reason why the vampires spent most of their time under the Casino confined in steel cages and chained to the walls. Even a single loose bloodsucker was a disaster.

If I were ruthless, I’d take our renders, clear a path through the undead, and let my guys wipe out the People. Once the navigators were dead, the unchained vampires would swarm us. I wasn’t sure how many I could handle, but I was willing to bet I could control enough to push them off us and into the wilderness. They would make their way to the city and slaughter anything that breathed. By morning Atlanta would be the city of the dead. The blame would fall on the People and we would live happily ever after, at least until my father decided to engage in revenge for the shit storm this butchery would dump on his head.

Fortunately for Atlanta, I wasn’t Hugh d’Ambray. Atlanta wouldn’t die today if I could help it. Once the first vampire was sighted, the gates would be barred. I would do everything in my power to reason with the navigators, but if I failed, we would not attack. Curran had built this Keep to withstand a siege. If that was the way they wanted it, so be it. A line from my favorite book came to mind. Have fun storming the castle, Hugh.

A woman in faded jeans and a heavy jacket strode through the Gates. A hood hid her hair. She marched through the snow like she meant business: big steps, a determined set to her shoulders, and a straight spine. A tall man wearing a black robe walked next to her, carrying a staff on his shoulder. The top of the staff was carved into the semblance of a raven’s head with a vicious beak. I knew that staff. It had tried to bite me once. But then considering that its owner was a black volhv in service to an ancient Slavic god of dark and evil, ornery behavior was to be expected. I had it on very good authority that Roman also wore Eeyore pajamas, which made me reevaluate his character somewhat.

Roman was also Evdokia’s son, which meant the woman with him was likely a witch. My neutral witnesses had arrived.

The woman said something to Roman. He stopped, turned to her, and shook his staff.

She crossed her arms. I couldn’t see her face, but I read the body language well enough. “I shake my magic stick at you!” “Let me tell you what you can do with your stick . . .”

One of the shapeshifters, a muscular man in his forties, moved to block Roman’s path. Roman pointed at me. The man turned to look at me, and I waved them in. The shapeshifter stepped aside to let Roman and the woman pass.

“Jennifer would like to speak with you,” Barabas said.

I turned.

Barabas stood in the doorway of the room behind me. He hadn’t slept for the last twenty-four hours, but it barely showed. His face seemed sharper than usual, and his hair had lost some of its spikiness, but other than that he was no worse for wear.

I crossed the balcony back into the room. “Have you been able to get Detective Gray on the phone?”

He shook his head. “We’re still trying.”

Among our contacts in the PAD, Gray was the most sympathetic to the shapeshifters. Normally he always answered the phone, but today he was proving to be elusive. I hoped it was a coincidence. If he was deliberately ducking me, I was in big trouble.