On Fire

CHAPTER FOUR

Kate Argent sighted down the brand-new Uzi submachine gun as her brother Chris and the other hunters unloaded the fresh cache of weapons from the black panel van and stored them in the Argents’ garage. The Uzi was a little piece of heaven. Nothing beat the feel of cold, hard steel—unless it was the rippling muscles of a well-built man.

Smirking, she thought of Derek’s naked torso, how well he filled out his jeans. His piercing eyes, those eyebrows she used to trace so fondly; and that five o’clock shadow and sexy bad-boy pout. She highly doubted that Chris knew she and two of his guys had paid Derek a little visit yesterday. God, all those muscles. The last time she’d seen him, he’d still been in high school. Still a kid. A stupid, gullible kid, who should have died in the Hale house fire along with the rest of his family.

Talk about your loose end.

She pulled the trigger at a nonexistent target, imagining a werewolf kill with the unloaded weapon. Maybe she should have taken advantage of Derek while he’d been down on the floor, writhing from the nine hundred thousand volts she’d sent skittering through his kick-ass body. For old time’s sake.

Kate was all about taking advantage.

“I have egg salad and cold cuts,” Chris’s wife, Victoria, announced as she brought out a tray of sandwiches from the house. Victoria was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved black turtleneck sweater with a lot of gold chains. Her pixie haircut set off her big blue eyes.

Kate highly approved of her sister-in-law’s efforts to keep the troops well fed. What was the saying? An army traveled on its stomach? It sounded gross, but it was true. And while you couldn’t say they were an army, exactly, they definitely needed to keep up their strength. There was an Alpha in town, and two Betas, and in some ways, werewolves were like the bunnies they were so fond of ripping to pieces: they tended to multiply.

And they tended to love sex. At least, Derek did.

She sighed and put down the Uzi. Then she joined her brother as he examined a carton containing a bunch of Glock pistols. Ulrich, one of the guys who’d gone out hunting with her at Derek’s house, gave Kate a secretive nod as he stored a box of ammo inside a cabinet. His face was a little bruised from when Derek had thrown him across the room. What had he expected, with his stupid joke about Derek burying a bone in the yard?

Of course, he had, hadn’t he? His sister’s bones.

The call on Derek had been a rough morning for Kate’s two henchmen, but it had also been fruitful, if in a dead-end sort of way. It was obvious to Kate that Derek didn’t know who the Alpha was, and her first impulse was to kill him, because he was therefore useless. But she was actually glad she’d failed. Because he was still very useful. Maybe they could flush out the Alpha by observing him. If only she could figure out who the second Beta was. Maybe the sheriff’s kid. Maybe the one with the werewolf claw marks on his neck. What was his name—Jackson?

“Kate,” her brother said, and she shook herself out of her reverie. “I asked you if you’re weapons-qualified on these.” He picked up one of the Glocks and held it out to her.

“Oh, yeah, I am,” she cooed, wrapping her hand lovingly around the handle. “You have to watch for the slight recoil. But if you’re prepared, this is a really sweet weapon.” She smiled at him. “Like me.”

His gray eyes were hooded as he studied her. “You’ve had a busy year.”

“You know it, big brother. But you know I’m never too busy for you.”

“You called me, remember?” he said.

“As soon as I heard,” she replied. She flashed a sly grin at a hot Scandinavian type—total Thor material—walking behind her brother with a sandwich in one hand and a beer in the other. She’d like to chew that one up and swallow him whole.

“I’m going to get him for you, Chris,” she told her brother. “That Alpha and his two Betas. For your birthday.” She trailed her fingers along the gun, then set it back down.

“We do it by the code, Kate,” Chris said, somber, stern. “Just like we always have.”

“Right. By the code.” She looked at the weapons cabinet, already bulging with firepower. “What are you going to tell Allison about all these new weapons? That you made a great sale to the Beacon Hills Sheriff’s Department and they’re going to take over California?”

“Allison’s a good girl,” he said automatically, and then a cloud passed over his face.

Kate silently chuckled. Daddy’s good girl had just cut her first day of school, and Chris had laid down the law—for about twelve hours. It was Allison’s unbelievable good fortune that this weapons cache had arrived today. Chris was uneasy about how close Allison was getting to the truth about her family, so he had given her permission to “go study” at some girl’s house.

Yeah, right. Kate would bet her soul that Allison was with some boy. That cute guy, Scott, with the adorable brown eyes, to be specific. Warming the bench while he played lacrosse, with plans to warm him later. That little scamp had tried to snitch a condom out of Kate’s luggage.

Protection is good, Kate thought. That was why she’d given Allison the necklace with the Beast on it. The Argents were surrounded by enemies, and the sooner Allison knew that, the better. Chris was crippling his daughter by keeping all their secrets . . . secret. What was going to happen when the really big guns showed up?

Allison was the new generation of a centuries-old family of hunters. The family. And they were locked in a war that wouldn’t be over until the last werewolf was dead—at least, as far as Kate was concerned. The code—We hunt those who hunt us—was an outmoded relic of a different time. It had never worked—look at their history. It sure as hell wasn’t going to start working anytime soon. Not now, and not here.

Protection is vital.

“You didn’t used to care if Allison was home when you got a delivery,” Kate said, pushing him a little. “She knows you sell weapons, so what’s the big deal?”

He didn’t answer, but he got a funny look on his face, and Kate was intrigued. Maybe there was some kind of new weapon in these boxes. Something designed specifically to take out werewolves. She had her trusty bullets loaded with Northern Blue Monkshood, but she was always up for something new and different. Especially if it delivered an agonizing, painful death.

I thought I’d shot that Beta when I came into town, she mused. If I had, it would be dead. Maybe what I hit was just a big old cat. Poor kitty.

“Kate? Sandwich?” Victoria invited her, holding out the tray.

Kate grinned and took two sandwiches, one for each hand. “I’m starving,” she declared.

The woman screamed just as the buzzer on the motel’s front door went off. Scott’s first instinct was to throw his arms around Allison and duck, but she yanked open the door and barreled inside the motel like a superhero. He had no option but to trail after her.

“Allison, wait!” he yelled.

They entered a tiny, dingy room with nothing in it but a dusty counter littered with papers and a cash register. Behind the counter there was a closed door with a sign on it that read Pay in Advance—Cash Only. And to the left of the counter, a curtain made of strands of wooden beads swayed in an open doorway, signaling that someone had passed through.

They heard another scream, high-pitched and frightened. Scott pulled out his phone to call 911, but Allison ran through the beads and he had no choice but to go in after her.

“No!” he called. “Allison!”

Then she seemed to realize what she was doing. She turned on her heel and looked at him, just as the door to her left crashed open and a woman wearing a short shiny black bathrobe and a man in a pair of jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt almost crashed into her. The woman’s hair was bleached white-blond and her eyes were rimmed with heavy black liner.

“He said he saw something at the window!” the woman shouted.

Other doors were opening, and heads were peering around them, revealing unshaven men, and women who had seen better days.

At least, Scott hoped they had.

“I called 911,” the woman said. She looked around at the open doors. “Anyone here know CPR?”

“Who’s hurt?” Allison asked.

“No one’s hurt,” the man said. He shook his head at the blonde. “Tawny, the guy in your room is dead.”

“No, he can’t be. Oh, poor, poor . . . man,” the woman—Tawny—said, dissolving into tears. “Poor . . . whoever.”

Scott realized Tawny didn’t even know the dead man’s name.

“He said he was going to take care of me, get me my own place. And now he’s dead? And I didn’t even get paid!” She started to go back into the room. “Just let me get what I’m owed.” Her sorrow had dried up along with her tears. Now she was all business.

The man grabbed her arm. “I’ve got that handled,” he murmured. “Come with me.”

They started to walk past Scott and Allison. Then the man halted. “You need a room?” he asked Scott.

“No,” Scott said, stunned by his callousness. Then he recovered and said, “But we’re looking for somebody. “A guy.”

“This guy,” Allison said, clearing her throat as she held up her phone. Jackson was wearing his lacrosse uniform with his helmet against his hip.

“Never seen him,” the man said.

“What happened to the man in there?” Scott looked at the woman. “You said he saw something in the window?”

“Yeah, he was going to smoke a cigarette. And Charlie”—she gestured to the man—“doesn’t like the customers . . . er, guests, to smoke in their rooms, so he was going to open the window. So my, um, friend goes to the window and he pulls open the curtain and he shouts, ‘What the hell!’ and then he grabs his chest and he falls down.” She shuddered. “And I guess he died then.”

“What did he see?” Scott asked. It had to have been something terrifying. Sheriff Stilinski had some really blurry pictures of the Alpha crashing through the window at the video store. He couldn’t figure out what he was looking at. But maybe the guy who died saw the Alpha face-to-face, staring at him through his window.

“I don’t know, but it scared him bad,” she said. “I’ve never had anyone die on me before. Except for the other time.”

Scott detected the whine of a siren. He was about to say something when he realized no one else had heard it yet. If it was Stiles’s dad, Scott totally did not want to explain what he was doing with Allison Argent in a place like this.

Meanwhile, some of the other “guests” had shut their doors. Scott couldn’t imagine being so hard-hearted that you could go back to whatever you were doing after someone had just died. The deaths that the “mountain lion” had caused had upset everyone Scott knew.

“Hey, excuse me. Have you seen this guy?” Allison asked a woman who was still watching from her doorway.

But the woman hadn’t seen Jackson, and the siren had grown loud enough that Allison could hear it. She looked anxiously at Scott, who said, “We’d better go,” and she nodded.

They headed back through the reception area, to see the man in the T-shirt and the woman who’d been crying counting out dollar bills together. Scott realized that they’d taken the cash from the dead man. The woman flushed and the man avoided Scott’s gaze as Scott opened the door and together he and Allison hurried to her car. She was about to turn on the engine when the sheriff’s white car, followed by an ambulance, screeched up to the curb just in front of them. In unison, Scott and Allison scooted down in their seats to hide.

Peering up through the side window, Scott watched as Stiles’s father strode into the motel, followed by two guys from the ambulance in navy blue jumpsuits pushing a gurney. The clatter of the gurney’s wheels ricocheted inside Scott’s head like a pinball game.

He grimaced, hoping the guy in the T-shirt and the blonde didn’t mention two kids looking for a third.

“Okay, so this was . . . horrible,” Allison murmured. They stayed scooched down in their seats, and Scott counted off a couple of minutes. “Do you think it’s safe to leave yet?”

As if on cue, he heard the clattering wheels again. The door to the motel opened, and one of the paramedics pushed out the gurney. A heavyset, balding man lay beneath a blanket that was pulled up to his shoulders. A mask covered most of his face, and it was attached to what Scott guessed was a canister of oxygen. The second paramedic was holding on to the canister and squeezing it while jogging alongside.

“Oh, look, he’s alive,” Allison said happily.

I should find out what he saw in the window, Scott thought. Why would the Alpha be around here?

Faintly, Scott could hear Stiles’s dad questioning the man in the T-shirt, who was Charlie, the manager. Scott focused hard.

“Older guys, you know how it is, when they’re, y’know, having a good time. The ol’ ticker speeds up, they have a heart attack. It wasn’t nothing else.”

“Yeah,” Stiles’s dad said. “Well, thanks for your help.”

“I run a clean place,” Charlie went on. “Nothing going on here that shouldn’t be.”

“I think we should go now,” Scott said.

Allison started the car and shot away from the curb. Scott craned his neck to look back at the motel, allowing his enhanced vision to take over—risky, he knew, with Allison right beside him. He couldn’t let her see his glowing eyes. He counted off a row of windows, which were almost entirely hidden from his view by a row of dark green bushes. It would be simple for something to creep along those bushes and peek in. There might be footprints—paw prints—beneath the window.

He wanted to follow the ambulance to the hospital, but he wasn’t sure he should do it around Allison. What if the guy said something incriminating? I saw a monster? So what if he did? Allison would have no reason to believe him—or to connect that to Scott.

Allison’s phone trilled, signaling a text. He hesitated, torn between reading the message and respecting her privacy.

“Is that Lydia?” she asked.

He looked. Call me ASAP, the text said. L.

“She wants you to call her,” he affirmed.

“She’s on speed dial,” she said. “Press two.”

Scott wondered if he rated being on her speed dial. He didn’t ask, just called Lydia, who answered on the first ring. He put her on speaker.

“What have you two been doing?” Lydia cried. “You were supposed to call me back right away!”

“This man had a heart attack,” Allison said, her voice shrill. “He said he saw something in a window. They thought he was dead.”

“A . . . window?” Lydia sounded odd.

“Yes,” Allison said, trading looks with Scott. He shrugged.

“But he wasn’t dead?” Lydia said.

“No.”

“Were you able to ask about Jackson?”

“No one saw him,” Allison said.

“Well, now he’s in the Beacon Hills Preserve,” Lydia said. “I refreshed the search. That’s why I asked you to contact me.”

“The forest? What’s he doing there?” Allison asked. “Did he call you?”

“No,” Lydia said, her voice low and tense. “I should probably go with you this time.”

Go with us? We are going? Scott thought, alarmed. He gave a quick shake of his head. He didn’t want Allison anywhere near the woods today. Not after his dream, and the window, and Jackson still missing.

“No, that’s okay,” Allison said, nodding at him to show that she understood what he was trying to say. “We’re closer. If we have to double back to pick you up, we’ll lose time. There’s only so much daylight.”

That’s not what I was going for, Scott thought. She had completely misread his head shake.

“Allison, that’s really sweet, but Jackson’s my boyfriend. My responsibility,” Lydia said.

“But what if my parents call your house?” Allison said. “We’re supposed to be showing up there soon, after ‘the library.’ You need to be there to intercept their calls.”

“Wow, I’m impressed,” Lydia drawled. “You definitely have a future as a party girl. God knows why your parents would bother mine, but we do still have a landline. It’ll be no problem to patch you in as a conference call and tell them you’re on an extension. But to do all that, I do to need to be here.”

“Right,” Allison said. “It’ll work as long as I have good cell phone reception.”

Scott stared at her, torn between being impressed, like Lydia, and worried that he was being a bad influence. He’d never figured Allison for a techie—or someone who would sneak around like that. Him and Stiles, yeah, but they had good reason.

Well, I’m her good reason, he thought, smiling faintly at Allison.

“I’m e-mailing you the page with the Where’s My Phone map,” Lydia said. “That’ll help you find him faster.”

“Okay. Send the WMP map to Scott’s, too.”

The two hung up and Scott turned to Allison. “Whoa,” he said. “An A in butt covering.”

She flushed. “I know what you’re thinking, and no, I have never snuck around behind my parents’ backs before. All that call-forwarding stuff actually came up in a class discussion back in San Francisco about government surveillance.”

He held up his hands. “It’s cool. But maybe you should go back to Lydia’s,” he said. “If your parents find out you’re with me, they’ll totally freak.”

“They won’t find out.” But the look on her face revealed her concern. “Look, we know where Jackson is, and we’re pretty close to the preserve. Let’s just go check it out.”

He frowned. “It’s not a good idea.”

She hesitated. “Scott, what? Are you scared? My dad killed the mountain lion. Things are back to normal.”

That sounded so odd, coming from her. Things had not been “normal” since she’d moved there. But as far as he could tell, she didn’t know that her father was a hunter, and she for sure didn’t know that she was dating one of the hunted.

“It’ll be okay,” she told him. “It’s still light out. We’ll only stay as long as the sun’s up.”

He was mortified. She was trying to talk him into going because she thought he was a big chicken. He rolled down the window and mimicked dropping something out of the car.

“Did you just throw something out the window?” she asked him as she stopped at a red light.

“Yeah. My masculinity.” He quirked a smile. “I just didn’t want you to go into the woods, Allison. I mean, what if you get hurt or something? Your parents will find out and—”

She brushed her lips against his. “I can take care of myself,” she murmured.

No, you really can’t, he thought, but he knew that was the last thing he should say to her. Along with the rush of her kiss, a wave of protectiveness washed over him. Maybe it was habit. He looked out for his mom, who was struggling to keep everything going—pay the bills, keep the car going, stop the roof falling in. And now he looked out for Allison, too. The women he . . . loved.

I just said I loved her. To myself, yeah, but still, I said it. He felt . . . different. Happy. Maybe a little scared. And like he’d just found out something very important that would change his life as much as becoming a werewolf had changed it.

He felt both as if he had more power, and less.

Floating, and falling.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”