Wolf at the Door Read online

  He was happy to comply. Edward assumed that was some kind of Pack rule of thumb, the being-safe-while-sleeping concept. He was slowly beginning to understand that Rachael hadn’t killed Orange T-shirt in the heat of battle, or even in the cold glow of vengeance. She’d killed Orange T-shirt out of fear for his safety. She’d killed Orange T-shirt to protect him, the same as she would have for the kids they would someday have.

  He supposed he should have been scared and worried, but he was too filled with pride, and his pride and his love were too big for any other emotion right now.

  Being able to sleep soundly while not getting shot at must be a really big deal to the Pack, he decided. He also decided that it was an excellent rule for him, too. He didn’t have to ask if Rachael was on board.

  “Well, well.”

  Edward had forgotten all about the vampire king, who had seen everything but had very little to say, which Edward was starting to think was a standard thing with this guy. “This will be interesting. I very much like interesting.” King Sinclair smiled and, in the gloom, white teeth flashed. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

  Fifty

  “Is your husband still—”

  “On Sofa Sentry? He told me your Edward called it that. I love it. It’s perfect. And yeah, bet your ass he is.”

  Your Edward. Rachael liked the sound of that. Lots. She lifted a hand to wave at Call Me Jim, who had just now come onto the porch. Edward was stretched out on the sofa, his head in her lap, reading the few clippings that covered the murders, which, to the public, had stopped as mysteriously and seemingly motive-free as they had begun. Given that Cain had been walking and talking (and lying, and killing) just a couple hours ago made this peaceful scene sort of reek unreality. But she wasn’t going to question it.

  “Listen, Betsy, I just have to know—”

  “It couldn’t wait for two hours from now?”

  “If I have to suck down one more smoothie I’m going to vomit raspberries for the better part of the week. Enough with the smoothies. You will not see me during Smoothie Time tonight. What I’ve been wondering about is that damned newsletter.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. This all started because you put your address in a newsletter, which you then mailed to strangers all over the country.”

  The queen laughed. “You make it sound like a bad thing.”

  “I’d hoped I was making it sound like a thing I didn’t understand.”

  “Yeah, I get that. You know I haven’t been the queen very long, right?”

  “I might have heard a few things.”

  “Mmmm. The CliffsNotes version is, I had to indirectly kill the last idiot who thought he was royalty of the undead. Which sent up a huge red flag to pretty much anyone worried about a vitamin D deficiency. There’s a new queen in town, watch out! Holy shit, what are we gonna do? Like that, right?

  “My husband wanted to hide in plain sight, behind a . . . what weirdo way did he describe—oh! Hide behind a shield of fear and intimidation. Like when Walmart brings out the lawyers. That’s what he wanted to do, and I came to see the sense of it.

  “Because let’s face it . . . once I created a vacancy and immediately (yet reluctantly) filled it, someone was always going to be coming after me. Fucking always. It was totally inevitable. We could have bet our lives on it. We did bet our lives on it, come to think of it. So, knowing that, accepting that, we put our contact info right out there. There was nothing we could have done to prevent someone from gunning for us. But we could do plenty about how the regime change was perceived. So! A newsletter. Hi, I’m Betsy, glad to be part of the team, looking forward to meeting you, come on by anytime, blahblah-blah.”

  “Sending the message that you in your new role are so powerful, you don’t care if other vampires can find you.” Rachael had to admire the audacity. If someone killed her cousin to run the Pack, and made a point of being extremely findable afterward, she knew she would instantly rethink strategy. She would assume the new guy wanted to be found, was making a point of it, which made the whole thing smell like a trap. “In fact, you want other vampires to find you. To pay homage or just acknowledge your sovereignty and . . . and . . . what do they do?”

  “Drop off bags of blood oranges.” The queen sighed. “Regular oranges symbolize the death of Christ. Blood oranges symbolize the rise of the new ruler, the one who rules after Christ and will for thousands of years. Which, um, is me.”

  “Okay.”

  “I know how it sounds.”

  “Okay.”

  “Because first of all, gross, blood oranges? What scary-ass universe did those come from? And second, lame. And third, lame. But! That’s the newsletter story. And hey! I never did get those shoes back from you.”

  “Sorry, I was busy with my first-ever kill.”

  “Oh, jeez, Roberta!”

  “Rachael.” It’s uncanny how the woman is so bad at names.

  “Yeah, I know, I was just testing you. How long are you gonna flog that as an excuse? ‘Boo-hoo, I had to shed Pack blood in defense of my den, yadda-yadda.’ You’re lucky you broke her neck, because if she’d bled on those shoes, you and I would be having a very different conversation right now. You know, I got those at a sample sale? And normally I don’t like sample sales, because I think it sets up an unfair advantage . . .”

  This woman is either brilliant or deranged. And either way, she’s got good people, which for a leader is more than half the battle.

  Brilliant.

  “—like anyone could just pop into the store and buy them straight off the rack like that! ‘No way,’ I said. You can’t—”

  No. Deranged.

  “—get outta town with that shit! Of course, he got all kinds of pissy when I knocked him off the roof. He only fell six stories and the parking ramp broke his fall, so I don’t—”

  No. Brilliant.

  Fifty-one

  “Wait, wait, wait. She went crazy? Mrs. Cain just up and went bonzo nutso and arranged for someone to start killing random strangers and that’s it? That’s the explanation? Because that sucks, Rache. Bad enough it’s about audits.” Edward turned to Nick Berry. “You believe that? Audits. I’m an accountant, and I still almost don’t believe it.”

  “Almost?”

  “Mmmmm . . . audits can be pretty nasty. But still . . . man, have some perspective!”

  She nodded. “I know, honey. When you put innocent lives up against cold numbers, it doesn’t seem just wasteful. Sinful, if you’ll pardon an old-fashioned reference.”

  “A classic,” Detective Berry said. When told of Rachael’s smoothie boycott, the laid-back cop had taken a stroll over to the hobbit hole to tie up the loose ends he’d been mulling over.

  Rachael hadn’t been at all surprised. In fact, she’d been counting on it . . . Call Me Jim had met Berry at the door with a plate of peanut butter brownies. The pitcher of ice cold milk hadn’t hurt, either.

  Now he was on the sherbet porch, wolfing down brownies and peppering her with questions. Even though it wasn’t his jurisdiction, a cop was a cop. And every one Rachael had met had curiosity bumps the size of railroad cars.

  “Wait. Wait. Wait.” Nick had stuffed the last of the brownie in his mouth and was holding up both hands like a cop who has just realized he can’t control rush hour in Boston. “Let’s get back to the motive, please. This whole thing. This sinister conspiracy? The murders? Getting Rachael sent to the wilds of Minnesota—”

  “St. Paul has a population of about three hundred thousand,” Rachael corrected mildly. “I don’t think wilds is the right word. And despite how it looks, Michael chose me to come out here. No one influenced his decision. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

  “—was all so two guys no one but you ever met could avoid an audit?”

  Rachael nodded. “Makes sense.”

  Nick rounded on her even as he snaked another brownie off the plate. “What? These things are gonna kill me. You eat like this all the time? Will you
r landlords let me move in, too? And again: what?”

  “Well, it does make sense, from a numbers perspective. You’ve never sat through an IRS audit.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve been in homicide for years. Except I am,” he admitted. “I am surprised. I am very surprised. Murder to avoid an audit.”

  She smiled at the earnest blond in the Cole Haan jacket. “I think it’s nice that you’re surprised.”

  “Oh, me, too,” Edward said, backing her up.

  “In a pathetic way. In the way that I no longer think of you as a real man because you could be surprised by this.”

  “You understand I can just start writing tickets on your rental right now? While I’m eating brownies?”

  “Brown shirt thug.”

  “So the guys you saw before you moved out here. They were trying to buy your client’s company.”

  “Yes.”

  “So they audited the bejeezus out of it. But in order to make the acquisition, their own numbers were gonna get flogged, too.”

  “Correct.” Flogged. She’d have to remember that one.

  “Which would have exposed all sorts of numbers nastiness. Stealing company funds, stealing from clients, all that good shit.”

  “Yes. And because they knew I’d insist on doing the audit . . .” And she would have. Oh, yes. She still remembered their sneaky-nasty looks, their greasy smiles. “I would have audited the shit out of them.”

  “Oh my God.” Edward clutched her hand. “I just fell in love with you all over again. That was so hot. Say audited the shit out of them again, but this time do it topless. Beriberi, get lost.”

  “So they reached out,” he continued, doing his best to ignore Edward (which he knew from experience was nigh impossible), “to their cousin, right here in St. Paul: Mrs. Cain. And she came up with the people to kill, and how to implicate you and, even better, how to stir up more anti-vampire/Pack crap. One of them flew in from the Cape for the murders. And she was in a pretty good position to know how the investigation was going as well as how things were going between you and the vampires.”

  “Yes.”

  “But . . .” The detective chewed for a while and said nothing.

  Edward, who’d had his head in Rachael’s lap, sat up. “It doesn’t seem like enough, does it, dude?” he asked, kindly enough.

  “Yeah. I get why they were killed, but I’m not seeing Mrs. Cain’s metamorphosis from office manager to contractkiller-by-proxy.”

  No, he wouldn’t; he wasn’t Pack. But for her love, she would try to explain as she had to Edward.

  “If it helps, Mrs. Cain was what I consider to be clinically insane. It . . . it probably didn’t seem like it to you. It wouldn’t seem like it to a lot of people. But she’d been out here for so long . . .

  “Sometimes, if we’re separated from our Pack for too long, it exacerbates a condition that can form over time . . . there’s something wrong with us. At the fundamental level. Your people are much, much better suited to survival than we are. You vastly outnumber us.”

  Though he’d heard most of this before, she knew Edward was paying close attention. It sounded odd to her, using words like your people. She had so rarely thought about Pack vs. non-Pack in her old life. That was a habit she must change, and she was glad of it, even as she was a little intimidated.

  Edward will help me. We’ll help each other.

  “I think . . . I think part of the reason your kind thrive is because you’re missing that fundamental thing. The distance . . . the loneliness . . . it’s something that gets worse if we’re alone. Mrs. Cain basically came down with the Pack version of cabin fever. Except ours is based almost entirely on being homesick, or even just lonely. Not for nothing is our strongest urge to mate for life and have as many cubs as we can!”

  “Wow, mate for life, huh?” Berry said, straight-faced. “Score.”

  “Tell me.” Edward held out his knuckle for a bump from the detective.

  “Hilarious, you two. But back to Mrs. Cain . . . she got more and more lonesome out here, more and more isolated. When that happens, our judgment goes right into the toilet. After that, it gets much harder to tell right from wrong. The condition . . . it feeds on itself, do you understand? It’s like a Michael Crichton novel . . . one little thing goes wrong and suddenly the dinosaurs can open doors. People have . . .” She spread her hands, a helpless expression on her face. “Well. People have died.”

  “Jesus.” Edward was horrified and didn’t trouble himself to hide it. “That’s awful. That poor woman.”

  “Don’t feel too sorry for her. She had options.”

  “I wasn’t going to throw her a parade, don’t worry. And I’d never try to say I understood something that seems to prey pretty hard on Pack people. But maybe I can relate a little. I wasn’t exactly super-thrilled to come out here.”

  “No? It seemed to me to be much more your idea to come than someone else’s for you to leave.”

  “Yeah, but consider the someone elses! I left because I finally realized I was afraid to leave. And I was afraid to leave because I was afraid they’d—Boo and Greg—let me go. I knew I’d be the pathetic roomie who forces connections when you’re not roommates anymore. The guy who never, ever lets you off his Xmas list and who, when he’s in town to visit, insists on lunch and pretends you’re still really close. I couldn’t face it, not any of it, so I stayed. And stayed, and stayed. I’m an object at rest that loves remaining at rest.”

  “You think you didn’t want to leave?” Rachael asked. “Try being raised in a Pack society with mega-strict hierarchies and being told to leave.”

  “Sounds sucky,” he agreed. “Say, you’re not one of those people who feel compelled to one-up every story you hear, are you?”

  “I absolutely am. I can never resist. It’s a huge compulsion for me.”

  “I’ve never hated someone I’ve loved so much . . . Listen, so Mrs. Cain, she just cracked up? From being so lonesome and missing the Pack? What if that happens to you?”

  “It’s rare.”

  “So? I don’t want something awful and rare to happen to you. If we need to move to Werewolf 90210, or whatever the hell you guys call it, then we’ll move. We’ll move tonight if you want.”

  “I’m fine, idiot. I was explaining something that happens very occasionally under horrific circumstances. We don’t need to rent a U-Haul right this minute. Oh, that reminds me. I’ll be in season this time next week, so when we have sex, I’ll probably get pregnant. We should keep that in mind when we’re looking for a permanent residence. I love my hobbit hole, but it would be crowded for two, never mind three.”

  “And on that note,” Berry said, rising, “I think I’ll head out. Thanks for your time. Oh, and thank Mr. . . . nuts, he told me his name, but I—”

  “Call me Jim,” he said, stepping on the porch. “You gotta leave now?”

  “Well,” Berry said, eyeing the plate of brownies so fresh out of the oven they steamed, “not right this very second . . .”

  “It’s nice when stuff can get wrapped up like that, huh?” Edward said.

  “I’m not sure I consider this stuff wrapped up. But a few explanations are better than none at all, I guess. At least we—”

  Edward sat bolt upright, horrified. “What? What?” Rachael tried to look in five directions at once.

  “Boo! I forgot all about Boo! She’s trying to get a flight out here and I haven’t called or checked my phone or—oh, fuck! Oh, she’s gonna kill me. Oh, shit, I’m dead. I am a walking, talking corpse. Except not a vampire. Or a zombie. No, they’re the lucky ones when you compare them to what she’s gonna do to me. Ah, jeez, I told her all about Marc the zombie and . . . oh, fuck!”

  “What’s a boo?” Berry asked thickly, reaching for another glass of milk.

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  Epilogue

  “You want to explain to me why there’s a “Sold” sign in my landlord’s front yard?�
��

  “Really?” Her cousin’s voice on the phone, deep and amused. “You need an explanation? You can’t make that deductive leap all by your lonesome?”

  “Michael . . .”

  “Because that would make you a terrible accountant.”

  “Michael!”

  “Well, it would.”

  She ground her teeth. “There was never a ‘For Sale’ sign, so how could it even be sold?”

  “Before you even went out there, when I talked to Cain and Cain talked to them, they’d discussed wanting to sell their family home—too big for them for years—so they could retire more and move to North Dakota.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “Oh, sure it does, what with the real estate market being in such a slump. They were smart not to bother listing until the market began to recover.” Then, softly, to someone else: “Two minutes, honey. Then Daddy will push you on the swing. Gotta finish with cousin Rachael.” Louder: “Lara says hi and she loves you.”

  “You know what I mean, you deliberate goob, and tell Lara I love her, too. And what is this retire more? And who retires in any capacity in order to end up, on purpose, in North Dakota?”

  “The way I got it from Cain—may she rest in peace or burn in hell as long as she’s gone forever—these two aren’t very good at retiring.”

  “They’ve made a lot of pies in the two weeks I’ve been here,” Rachael admitted.

  “So they wanted to retire more, and build their dream home in the most beautiful place they knew, which happens to be in the state of North Dakota beside the lake where they’d honeymooned.

  “After Cain was out of the picture and I heard that, I found out what fair market value was for their home and made a cash offer, which they took. They never even had to list their house. Which, by the way, is now your house. So now you can sleep in the turret. Or sell it. Or keep it and rent it out.”

  “Or sleep in the turret,” she said excitedly. “We can fit a queen-sized bed in there!”