“Nyet,” I said. “Not for all of us. But”—I hesitated before grinding out the most difficult combination of words to make sense of in any language—“I think Max is right.”
“If Gabe wants to be alpha, why take Jess?” Pietr wondered aloud.
“As an offering to Marlaena?”
I countered Max’s question with my own. “But why Jess?”
“Because Marlaena wants…” Amy paused. “Wait. Because Gabe wants you—”
Pietr’s eyebrows shot up.
“Not like that,” Amy said with a snort. “Let me finish. He wants you—all of you—to go after Jessie. Maybe he wants a fight,” she concluded.
I nodded. “He wants to be alpha, but he does not have a chance of winning Marlaena. So he is uniting the pack beneath him through a foreign war strategy.”
“A what?”
“Come,” I said, leading them back toward the modest house. “It is a traditional strategy among governments that when things are going poorly at home—domestically—the way to get people’s minds off the failure of their own leadership is to make someone else appear to be a bigger enemy than they are. Start a foreign war and people unite beneath whoever declares it.”
“That’s insane,” Amy muttered.
“Study your history and you will see it may seem insane, but it works time and time again.”
“So we go with the ‘start a foreign war’ theory,” Pietr muttered. “Fine. He wants a fight, he’ll get a fight. Let them unite under Gabriel. We can worry about the fallout later. Our priority needs to be getting Jess back safely.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Let us do so. Now.”
Mr. Gillmansen followed us to the house, and unfortunately now was minutes from my designated now as we explained the situation and told him why he should not come along and why we were the best solution.
I found myself being creative about the last bit.
We, of course, were also the problem.
Without us in Jessie’s life, she never would have become entangled in such strange and dangerous situations. In the end, Mr. Gillmansen offered his truck, saying, “Four-wheel drive.”
Annabelle Lee dashed inside and back out of the house again, and held out three flashlights to me. “You may need these.”
“Maglites,” I said.
Annabelle Lee nodded. “Jessie’s favorite type,” she said with a shrug.
I reached out and gave her a quick hug.
We took the flashlights and squeezed into the cab. Pulling the truck out of their gravel drive and onto the country road I allowed myself a moment to speculate while Max, Cat, and Pietr argued what we should do next and Amy punched holes in their plans.
If we had never come to Junction, Jessie would have never known us—although she was doing significant research on the Phantom Wolves of Farthington. Perhaps she still would have crossed our path.
I shook my head. What were the odds that a chance meeting regarding her research would have sparked such a mutual interest as had developed between Pietr and her? Love at first sight? That was not how things truly worked.
If we had never come to Junction, Jessie’s life would have remained relatively simple. Nice. She would have dated someone who attended school with her for years, not a recent arrival who happened to be a Russian-American werewolf, an oborot, as my people said: one transformed.
The boy would have been from a family with a more legitimate income than that obtained through the black market and hustling pool tables. He probably would have been a bright, handsome, clean-cut sort of guy.
Not unlike Derek.
I blinked. She had dated Derek.
With or without us, Jessie would have found the same danger. But without us there would have been no Max to make a rescue from Derek’s bedroom when rescue was most definitely needed.
Derek had proven himself to be one of the most insidious of our opponents: a charming football player with a bright future and tremendously destructive psychic abilities allowing him to manipulate anyone with a touch. Even though he was dead, it seemed he had left a handprint on the psyches of Jessie, her friend Sophia, and Sarah Luxom.
I slapped the steering wheel, noting the silence that had filled the truck. Our appearance in Jessie’s life had been a blessing of sorts, considering.
What a screwed-up place small-town America was. “What is the battle plan? Home first?”
Pietr opened his mouth to respond, but Amy glared at him. I had missed something.
Pietr shut his mouth again, and Amy began: “You’re going to take me to the house. I’ll get a gun—”
I turned in my seat to better look at her. “Exactly how much weapons training do you have?”
She tried to stare me down.
I clenched my jaw and stared back. “How much?”
She looked away, her lower lip sticking out and her chin trembling before she puffed out a breath and regained control. “None,” she admitted. “But you need as much help as you can get, and I don’t want to be sitting at home just hoping for the best.…”
Max reached out for her, but she pushed his hand away.
“Amy,” I said in a voice both soft and firm, “we cannot have someone untrained going into a fight. It is more dangerous for all of us. A gun”—I paused, having her full attention—“is as dangerous in the hands of the untrained as it is in the hands of the enemy. You may have the best of intentions, but without the training to back them up, you, my dear, are more a liability than an asset.”
“Then teach me so I’m no longer a liability,” she said, crossing her arms.
“We will,” I promised. “If that is what you want, we will. But it takes time, and we have none to spare today,” I said. “Our first stop should still be the Queen Anne. I presume we should then head to the motel where they are staying.”
Pietr leaned back as far as he could, his brow lowering. “Da. That is a logical place to start.”
“Has anyone wondered how they’re affording a motel?” Amy asked.
Pietr and Max turned to look at her.
“Seriously?” Amy sighed. “Okay. Maybe I’m more valuable to this crew than I realized.” She wiggled in her seat belt. “There’s a lot of them. A lot of werewolves. And werewolves—at least these werewolves—are territorial. They like having room to move. So it’s not as if you can stack them like cordwood. You can only get a few in a room. Maybe four—that’s the legal maximum, anyhow.”