Dog Warrior

"To be quite frank, I believe you're the only one who has a chance of getting anywhere with Ascii, but perhaps only in the first minutes of your discussion. Considering that you'll be able to ask only a handful of questions before she shuts down again, I would like to see that advantage be utilized to the utmost."

"Meaning?"

Agent Zheng flicked her gaze to Brukman, who was listening to their conversation. "I mean that in all probability, I can answer any question you may have, and there are questions of vital importance regarding things you know nothing about that need to be answered."

"While the FBI might think itself the fount of all knowledge, I doubt very much you know the answers to my questions."

"You might be surprised."

Frankly he was getting sick of surprises. Certainly there was one piece of information he knew that she didn't.

"The biker jacket in the truck of the cultist's car—do you know what they did to the Dog Warrior who wore it?"

"Yes," Agent Zheng said.

He should learn not to play word games—a case of going unarmed to battle. Atticus waited for more information, but none was forthcoming. Prosecuting attorneys must love her on the stand.

Ru took pity on him and asked, "What do you know about Pixie Dust?"

Agent Zheng flicked a look at Ru, and then returned her focus to Atticus. "Invisible Red?"

That was what Ukiah had called the drug.

"Yes," Atticus said.

"I know that the cult is manufacturing it," Zheng said. "And selling it to the Iron Horses, who are in turn redistributing it up and down the East Coast."

"How do you know that?" Atticus asked.

"I have my sources. If we're going to continue this conversation, I suggest we move to a more private place. We could walk outside."

She leveled a cold look at Brukman.

The ATF agent took the clue and saved face by glancing at his watch. "Well, I've got to run. Have fun, kids." With a wink, he took off.

Just beyond the parking lot was a small pond with Canada geese and a fence to keep out visitors. Zheng led Atticus and Ru around the prison to a country road that ran behind the prison. Across the road were horse pastures and well-kept barns. A sign identified the farm as the home of the National Lancers, and a memory attached to the bright sound of marching bands told him that they were a mounted honor guard.

"What do you know about Invisible Red?" Atticus asked Agent Zheng.

"The cultists raided a stash of bioweapons and stole four machines." Agent Zheng took out a pencil sketch and handed it to him. "This is a drawing of the machines. They're identical except for this design here." She pointed out an odd symbol in the center of the machine. "This is Loo-ae—Air Death. The other one"—she pointed out a second symbol in the corner of the page—"is Hu-ae—Little Death."

"Let me guess," Ru said. "Hu-ae makes the sex drug."

"Yes," Agent Zheng said.

"What language is this?" Atticus asked. "Who made these machines?"

"Let's stick to basics," Agent Zheng said. "Their names and what they produce are all you need to know about the Ae."

"I'm sick of being in the dark." Atticus thrust the picture to Ru to study. "I want to know where these machines came from."

Agent Zheng sighed. "About two hundred years ago, an alien spacecraft entered our solar system. It was a seed ship for a race called the Ontongard. Its sole intent was to land on Earth and replace all life here with its genetic code. Due to a rebel in their ranks, most of their force was decimated, but some survived and are in hiding among us now. They brought the Ae to Earth. The Temple of New Reason believes that the Ontongard are demons and are on a holy crusade against them. By wiretapping the aliens, the cult learned of the Ae's existence and stole the Ae from the Ontongard and, after years of study, have managed to get Hu-ae to work."

"W-w-what?"

"Shall we go back to the basics?" Agent Zheng asked. "There were four Ae. Two have been destroyed. Hu-ae makes Invisible Red. Loo-ae produces a deadly airborne virus that could kill every man, woman, and child on the planet. It's vital that we find this machine and destroy it before the cultists manage to use it."

"That sounds fairly basic to me." Ru handed the sketch back to Agent Zheng.

"We also need to find out what the cult intends to use as a key," Zheng said.

"Key to what?"

"The Ae won't work without a genetic key. The cult kidnapped five children in Pittsburgh, whom they were going to use as blood sacrifices. I want to know if the rescued children are still in danger from the cult."

"You haven't asked Ascii yourself?" Atticus asked.

"I've asked her," Zheng said. "She wouldn't answer me."

"Why do you think she'll talk to me?"

"Because she might mistake you for your brother."

How did she know about Ukiah? Was she here in Massachusetts because of Ukiah's jacket? If so, why was she chasing after his brother? How was Ukiah involved in the cult? And what did it mean for Atticus now that the trail led to him?

"Aliens and demons," Atticus scoffed. "Do you expect me to believe that?"

"Why not, Agent Steele? You are a half Ontongard, created by them to be a breeder. You were to be their tool for taking over the human race—only they misplaced you."

It took him a full minute before he could breathe again.

"Yesterday," Atticus countered as calmly as he could, "I was told I was a werewolf."

Why had it been so much easier to know that the bikers considered him inhuman? Because they couldn't truly inflict harm on him?

"Lately I've been keeping an open mind about old legends." Stunningly, Zheng seemed neither afraid of him nor hostile.

"What does the FBI plan to do about me?"

"Nothing," Zheng said. "The FBI doesn't know about any of this. Not about the Ae, the Ontongard, or about you and your brother. Only I know about this."

For a moment he was relieved, and then annoyed.

"You've got a group of madmen with a bioweapon they could set off in a city with a population of half a million, and you haven't reported it to your superiors?"

"I've let the FBI know that I suspect that the cult has biotoxins, type unknown, origin unknown. I've let them know that Boston is a possible target."

"You know a hell of a lot more than that."

"What am I supposed to say?" Zheng's voice went brittle with anger. "That the cult has stolen a device from aliens that they think are demons and are trying to prevent the Second Coming?"

Atticus glanced at Ru for suggestions. Ru shrugged, looking slightly panic-stricken.

"Currently they're wanted by the FBI for the kidnapping of five infants and the murder of two. ATF wants them for illegal weapons. NSA wants them for wiretapping and hacking government sites, including some top-secret spy satellites. Every law agency in this country is looking for them."

"This has the possibilities of being bigger than nine-eleven."

"I realize that. I also realize that the moment that aliens and demons are mentioned in my reports, my validity will be questioned. The cult has biotoxins. Their target is unknown. That anyone can believe and act on."

Agent Zheng glanced at her watch. "The public defender will be here shortly. If we want to get answers out of Ascii without him acting as a filter, we have to do it now."

Atticus studied Agent Zheng. If she was telling him the truth, their goals were identical—finding the cult. He considered the possibility that she was lying, but he couldn't ignore the simple fact that she'd known he wasn't human. "Okay, let's do this."

***

Atticus paused by the door into the questioning room, gazing through the two-way mirror to the room beyond. Sunlight shafted down from a high barred window, motes of dust making the light seem substantial as it cut down onto Ascii.

The cultist was as he remembered her from the turnpike: a pale, thin blonde. The black running suit had been exchanged for prison grays, making her look more colorless than before. She seemed nearly void of color, a watercolor stain on plain paper. Strangely the insubstantial look flattered her, her fragile features becoming ethereal. She sat composed at the questioning table—hands folded in her lap, staring off at the left-hand corner of the room, eyes unfocused.

She didn't seem like a ruthless killer, but Atticus had found that few murderers did.

Agent Zheng stood beside Atticus, a dark reflection of Ascii: black hair, expensive black pantsuit, focused with bitter intensity on the woman within. "There's no telling which way this conversation might go. You're going to have to stay sharp."

"Takahashi usually does the talking," Atticus said.

For some reason, that summoned a Mona Lisa smile, making Atticus aware of how tightly composed she kept herself. The smile slipped away.

Ru had been watching the exchange, and a small wrinkle of jealousy creased his brow.

Atticus opened the door, stepped into the room, and closed the door behind him.

Ascii didn't look up until he slid into the chair across from her, and when she did, stunned amazement took over her face. "You!"

That answered any question of her mistaking him for his brother.

"Oh, oh, forgive me," Ascii cried, hands hovering near her mouth in distress, as if she was torn between pleading for forgiveness and keeping her silence. "Please. Ice said we had to take you by force. It seemed so wrong to kill an angel of the Lord, but Ice said it was the right thing, but Ice wasn't touched by God like Core was, so . . . I'm sorry that we raised our hands against you."

What did you say to something like that? Atticus thought of Ukiah, battered, shot, bound and dead in the trunk, and rage went through him. Even a Dog Warrior shouldn't die like that. "It was an evil act."

"We weren't sure if you were really an angel. You're the first we've found. Even when the mice formed, we weren't sure if you weren't just a new type of demon, but then, when the police opened the trunk and you were gone, I knew. I knew. You'd ascended to heaven to take your place in the glory of God, and I was sore afraid."

He found himself standing, putting distance between himself and her.

Wan as she was, her eyes were vivid green, luminous in her pale face. "Forgive me, for I have sinned."

"Why would you do something like that? What if he . . . what if I were just a regular man?" And not a Dog Warrior."Thou shalt not kill; it doesn't get any clearer than that."

"Surely you of all beings can see the necessity—that the needs of the one or the few are nothing to the needs of the many. We are sacrificial lambs for the good of mankind. We will kill to protect, taking the sin upon ourselves to save the world. The demons are winning this war, and God might choose at any time to wipe the slate clean once more."

He wanted out of the room, but he still needed to ask Agent Zheng's questions. "Where is Loo-ae?"

"Ice has the founts."

"The founts? Is that what you call Loo-ae?"

She hesitated a moment, before asking. "Is that the wrong name?"

"We call them the Ae." When did it become "we"? Somehow with a flash of the badge, Agent Zheng had established herself as sane.

"Ohhh. I get it," Ascii said. "Loo-ae. Hu-ae. Doh. We've been calling them Huey and Louie. And there was Chewie and Dewey, but . . ." She eyed him, chewing on her bottom lip. "Core said they were like the Ark of the Covenant, most holy of relics. We called them the founts, because from them God's will would flow."

"Where are the founts?"

"I don't know. Ice didn't tell us where he was taking them. We were to go to the parking lot of the Salem train station and wait. We didn't know what vengeance we might be calling down upon ourselves in slaying you, so we who did the killing kept ourselves separate from the rest. And we were right to. Within hours I lost my child, and the others were dead, and despite our efforts, you were gone."

It would seem miraculous, except that Ukiah's ascension had been via Atticus's keen nose and Ru's lock picks. Ukiah had gone to a luxury beach house instead of heaven. If Atticus were inclined to believe in miracles, then one would be that he had been at the Ludlow rest stop, standing out in the parking lot, when the cultists arrived. Just a few seconds later, inside the Jaguar and out of the wind, he wouldn't have caught the smell of blood.

"We've long suspected that angels might walk the world," Ascii continued as if the dam had broken and the floodwaters would not stop. "Time and time again we'll find a demon nest ransacked and all that is left will be ashes. When we had you in our power at Eden Court, though, only Core recognized you—but he was touched by God."

"What?" The cult had held Ukiah prisoner at one point? But if he was going to keep pretending to be Ukiah, Atticus couldn't ask straight-out. He scrambled for another question. "Were you there—at Eden Court—when I was?"

"I'd gone on to the Western Reserve." It took Atticus a moment to realize she meant northeast Ohio, the infamous western reserve of Connecticut. "I wasn't there when Ice first captured you and Core shared you with Ping." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "They say that's why the house was destroyed—because Core drugged you and took you against your will."

They had raped Ukiah? "Why?" He caught hold of her by her prison uniform and could barely keep from shaking her. "Why would you do that to anyone?"

She didn't seem to notice the violence of his actions, gazing up at him without flinching. "We wouldn't have attacked you if the need wasn't so great!"

"What do you mean?"

"There has been a quickening to the demons' plans. A shift. Something has changed and we don't know what. We thought it was the events of June, but wiretaps we've translated recently mention Boston, and something of great importance. We might be too late already. It's taking us too long to work through the translation. We had to have help. We needed you!"

"What are the demons trying to do in Boston?"

"We don't know. We can't translate their conversations. We've tried to torture the information out of the demons, but it's quite impossible. They shatter down to mice without talking."

"So coming to Boston had nothing to do with Loo-ae?"

"Ice says if we have to, we will use Louie—Loo-ae—to kill everything that moves in Boston."

Ru rapped a signal on the door. Time was up.

Atticus scrambled to squeeze in Agent Zheng's second question. "What are you planning to use as a key for Loo-ae?"

Ascii gazed up at him, eyes wide and bright with religious fervor. "You."

CHAPTER SEVEN

MCI Framingham, Framingham, Massachusetts

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

The public defender who was assigned to Ascii stormed into the room. "I don't know what the hell you think you're doing. Anything she's said isn't admissible in court."

"So far all she's talked about is angels and demons." Atticus retreated to the door. He didn't want to discuss in front of this man the madness that suddenly was his life.

"Really?" The attorney made a note on a legal pad. "Then insanity is a possible plea."

Atticus fled the room. He knew that what made America great was that everyone was assumed innocent until proved guilty and that it was an honest attorney's job to do everything in his power for his client, but still, it grated. By her own admission, this woman had run a man down, shot him in the chest while he was helpless, and stolen his dead body. All evidence said that if Atticus hadn't rescued his brother, she would have hacked him to pieces and burned him to ash. All that, though, was inadmissible. She'd do a little time, if any, and be released. Yet all the time in the world wouldn't erase her discovery that it wasn't that hard to kill; and like everything else in life, it would only get easier with practice.

The guard who had been absent when Atticus entered the room stood quietly now in the corner. Agent Zheng waited beyond the two-way mirror, making notes in her PDA, no clue of what she was thinking on her face. It bothered him that he couldn't read her.

"This is insane," Atticus whispered to her. "Werewolves. Aliens. Angels. Demons. Everyone seems to be running with their own version of reality."

"Yes." Zheng put away her PDA. "But that's the way it's been from the beginning of time."

Inside the questioning room, the public defender introduced himself. Under his polished manner, he put out mixed signs of anger, impatience, and concern. The intercom was turned off, yet it was clear that the muted conversation ground down as the attorney met a stone wall of silence from Ascii.

Zheng had been correct when she guessed that Ascii would talk only to Atticus.

"I'd rather not be here when he gets tired of beating his head against the wall." Zheng picked up her black trench coat. "Let's find someplace private to discuss this."

He nodded—he had a million questions to ask her. Atticus expected another walk around the grounds of the prison, but storm clouds filled the sky, pouring down sheets of gray rain. They paused in the doorway, judging the rain and each other, being jostled by damp visitors dashing in from the downpour.

"I've got a suite at the Residence Inn," Zheng said, naming a hotel chain. "It's about a five- to ten-mile drive. We can talk there."

"We'll follow you," Atticus promised.

Zheng turned up the collar on her raincoat and went out, unhurried, into the rain.

"I don't know about you," Ru said as he watched the FBI agent stride purposely across the parking lot, "but she really creeps me out."

***

Atticus drove on mental autopilot, following Zheng in an SUV with Massachusetts plates—apparently a rental car. Angels. Demons. Evil aliens—Ontongard, Zheng had called them. What did this make him? Where did the Pack and Ukiah fit into this mess? Nothing in the reports Kyle pulled up suggested that the outlaw biker gang was hell-bent on global domination. And how did this fit into the shooting at Buffalo?

"The Ontongard," he murmured.

"What?" Ru asked.

"What if the shooters weren't Pack or the Temple of New Reason, but this third group? The Ontongard."

"The demons?"

"Yes. The cult steals Hu-ae from the Ontongard and starts producing Invisible Red and sells it via Animal. Only the drug leaves a trail back to the Iron Horses. The Ontongard tracks it back to the Buffalo chapter and ambushes the buy, looking for the cult and their machines."

"So you believe Agent Zheng's claim that the cult is using these alien machines to make Invisible Red?"

He had no problem accepting it. Why? Once he considered the drug's structure, he realized it was far more complex than anything he'd ever dealt with before. "Most drugs are a couple of molecules hung together off of sugar. This stuff . . . it reminds me of DNA; it's an incredibly dense lattice. And it can change. Daggit and I handled the same substance, and it reacted to us both as it came in contact with our skin. With me, it seemed like it was simplifying. But with Daggit, it grew more complex, like thorns growing. It was sensing us, and . . . and . . . unfolding . . . differently."

"Unfolding?"

"I think it's like a computer program. Parts of it were being triggered, going active, while other sections . . . terminated."

"So for you, it's safe to take, but it's going to kill Daggit?"

"Possibly."

" It's death," Ukiah had said " They're all dead men. You're a breeder. It will make you want to have sex but it won't hurt you. It was made to make you breed."

Did Agent Zheng know what his brother meant by "a breeder?" How safe was it to discuss what little Atticus knew with her? He'd always kept his differences hidden from everyone but Ru and Kyle, afraid of some dangerous fallout if the wrong person discovered how inhuman he was. Afraid that someone would see him as a monster. Afraid because it was often hard for him not to think of himself as one.

Suddenly he saw the Pack's "test" in a new light. Was that why they were testing him? Were they also afraid of being monsters?

Apparently, Ru had started out following the same line of thought, but diverged off in another direction. "What are we going to do about Zheng?"

"Call Kyle. Tell him to dig into her records. I want to know everything about her. I want to know how she knows all this shit about me."

Ru picked up the car phone, pausing before he dialed. "You okay?"

"I didn't think I would want to go back to being just a werewolf."

***

Agent Zheng had a room on the first floor of the hotel in the back. They found ready parking and dashed to the covered entrance; she opened the door with her card key. Ten steps and they were in her room, totally unseen by any other guest. He couldn't have picked a better room himself.

The hotel was maid-neat but still tainted with Zheng's scent. She hung up her black trench coat, asking, "Coffee? Root beer?"

"You have root beer?" Atticus found it surprising. Not many people stocked root beer, much less thought to offer it.

"I've been here a couple of days." Zheng ripped open a package of gourmet coffee and poured it into the filter of a coffeemaker. "I like this hotel chain, since it will do food shopping for you. No matter what time you get back to your room, there's decent food. No candy bar or pizza dinners."

"There are advantages to working with a team," Atticus said.

Zheng tilted her head, acknowledging this. "Do you want that root beer or not?"

"Yes, thank you."

The root beer was even IBC in the dark glass bottles. She had the refrigerator stocked well enough to feed a small army. How long did she expect to stay? She unloaded carrots, dip, blocks of cheese, a deli bag of sliced roast beef, buns, lettuce, brown mustard, and a massive bag of seedless grapes.

"I've got more than enough. Help yourself," Zheng said.

Out of habit, Ru dallied while Atticus sampled the fare, although it was unlikely that an FBI agent would drug the food. Finding it innocent, Atticus considered the woman herself. She gazed at him levelly over her cup of freshly brewed coffee, eyes a gunmetal gray. Judging by their vaguely Asian shape, she was at least partially Chinese. Her composed gaze went beyond normal law-officer stoic to something nearly Buddhist in its level of calm.

He had a million questions he wanted to ask her, starting with, "How do you know all this?" But in the world of drug dealing, admitting to ignorance rarely got you information and always put you in a weaker position. How much could he trust this woman—and perhaps as important, how much did she trust him? He was, according to her, the child of the enemy. Did she hold that against him? When his team invited someone into their hotel room, they always had the place bugged. Was this a trap? Had she offered them food to throw them off balance and admit to hidden cameras exactly what he was?

"You're completely right about the advantages of working with a team," Agent Zheng said. "That's why I propose we combine forces."

"Work together?"

"I'm not a fool; it would be suicide for me to continue searching for the cult in an unfamiliar area by myself. But my options are limited."

"And we look like handy fodder."

Agent Zheng gave a slight exhale that could have been a sigh. "I would rather you didn't confirm my opinion that all male federal agents are egotistical jerks. I would be far more disappointed than you could imagine."

And what the hell did that mean? Judging by the darkening of Ru's face, it could be taken as a pass.

"I have to consider the welfare of my team first," Atticus said. "I know nothing about you." Yet. "Far as I know, you're a maverick who rushes into dangerous positions without an ounce of precaution." He stepped close to stress that he was a nearly a foot taller than her. "Some would say you're a fool to bring two strangers to her hotel room."

"You're Atticus Steele. No middle name. You were found abandoned as an infant in 1973. You joined the military in 1988 with what must have been a forged birth certificate and served for six years. In 1994, you were given an honorable discharge, and you applied to the University of Maryland . . ."

"Okay, so you did your homework, but that doesn't make us—"

". . . where you met your current lover, Hikaru Takahashi." Zheng played her hole card. "You two have been together for ten years and own a T Street row house in Washington that you've been renovating over the last five years. I'm told that you just refinished the floors and they're beautiful."

Atticus's opinion of her went from annoying to terrifying.

"Did you do a full background check on us?" Ru snapped.

"I was discreet," Zheng said. "But yes. You originally came on my radar screen as drug dealers. It wasn't until this morning that I learned you were actually undercover agents."

Atticus relaxed slightly. "I'm impressed. The agency provides us with fairly fireproof backgrounds so perps can run their own checks and we still come up clean."

"I have my resources," Zheng said.

Atticus glanced to Ru, who didn't look happy but nodded his agreement. "Okay. So you're good, and you're way ahead of us on this." And most likely the only way she'd catch them up to speed would be by their agreeing to work with her. Of course, agreeing wasn't the same as trusting. In some ways, it would be just another undercover assignment. "We're in."

Zheng accepted the announcement with a serene nod. Putting down her coffee cup, she took a folder out of her briefcase. "We have an ex-cultist working with us in Pittsburgh. Her cult name was Socket. She's a Boston-area heiress whom the cult recruited specifically to gain access to her fortune. Her total worth is ten million dollars, which is in a trust she can't touch—but it gives her a yearly income of a hundred thousand dollars. As one of their cash cows, the cult didn't subject Socket to the most brutal of their brainwashing techniques, but that also means she wasn't part of their inner circle."

"So, unlike Ascii, who will tell the FBI nothing, Socket spilled her guts, but there's not much there?"

"Exactly," Zheng said. "This is the only photo we have of Ice, current leader of the cult." It seemed to have been taken from a bank surveillance camera. In the grainy black-and-white photo, the tall, lean blond male was partially obscured by a potted plant. "Socket worked with us to create composite sketches of him and the other known surviving cultists."

Twenty laser printouts of pencil drawings followed. The cult favored military-short haircuts, and accepted a wide range of ethnic groups. Of the twenty, five were women and the rest men. All were identified only by single computer terms: Ice, Firewall, Mouse, Ether, Diskette, Ram.

"What do we know about this Ice?" Atticus asked.

Zheng consulted her PDA. "He's approximately six-one, a hundred and eighty pounds, blond with blue eyes, in his early twenties, and has black tribal tattoos on his back. He's skilled in martial arts and served as the cult's weapons trainer. While they didn't discuss it openly with Socket, she got the impression that he also taught the cult how to forge driver's licenses, pick locks, and steal cars. He was the cult's tactician for ambushes on the Ontongard Gets. The founder, William Harris, was the one with the vision—Ice was the one who made it happen."

"We don't have any real names for these people?" Atticus asked.

Zheng produced another artist sketch with a Polaroid attached. Atticus recognized him as the driver of the Honda. The photograph was of the man's dead body on the coroner's table. "We've identified him as John Pender, originally of New Hampshire. He joined the cult two years ago, breaking ties with his parents."

"I would think," Ru said, "that he's a total dead end."

Zheng's full mouth curved into her Mona Lisa smile and her eyes softened—there was warmth under that cool exterior. When not hard as steel, her gray eyes were surprisingly beautiful. "Perhaps. Perhaps not."

Atticus realized his paranoia was slipping and hugged it a little closer. Until he knew more about Zheng, he had to keep in mind that they weren't necessarily on the same side. "So far, you've not given us much to go on."

"Socket also gave us this list." Zheng shuffled through papers in her briefcase. What wasn't she showing them? Atticus controlled the urge to snatch up her briefcase and dump it out. "Through dummy corporations, the cult bought a good deal of property in New England. The only one they openly owned was a farm in New Hampshire, and they used it as a front for anyone investigating them." Zheng found the paper she was looking for and laid it on the table between them. "The top addresses were the ones that Socket knew about. I had the records pulled on these sites, and then found other property bought from the same bank accounts."

There were two dozen addresses listed scattered throughout New England. The first had notes after them: Farm— sold? Warehouse. Safe house. Offices. Burn site.Atticus compared the last with his photographic memory of the police report Kyle had found on the crime scenes of cremated bodies. Same place.

"So you think they might be at one of these locations?"

"One can hope," Zheng said. "The turnpike basically splits the state in half. Your team can take north or south, and I'll cover the other."

"By yourself?" Atticus said as Ru said, "Without backup?"

"I have backup." Zheng didn't explain further. "Because you look like your brother, Atticus, you're going to have to approach the cult with caution. They hunt Ontongard—they have gotten ambushing someone with your talents down to an art."

Atticus considered the list. Ascii had said that she and the other three cultists were taking Ukiah to Salem, which was north of Boston. None of the addresses were in the town famous for witch-hunts, not that that signified much. While the train station might have been a convenient meeting site, Ascii could have been lying about their destination, or the cult had a place that Zheng hadn't found, or Zheng herself was lying. Still, it was someplace to start. "We'll take north."

"Then I'll take south." Zheng glanced over what that left her. "It will take the rest of the day to do these. We should meet tomorrow and compare what we find." Zheng consulted her PDA. "I've arranged to meet with the NSA to discuss the cult at nine-thirty. What about eight?"

Mark up one basic difference between DEA and FBI: Atticus's team mostly worked evening and night hours. Drug dealers tended to be night owls.

Ru made a noise of disgust at the early hour. "Then it should involve coffee."

"And real food," Atticus added.

"Fine. Breakfast. Where?"

The trouble with two out-of-town teams: Neither knew of the good, cheap places to eat. At least it could be expensed.

"Our base—Boston Harbor Hotel."

"Fine." She made note of it in her PDA.

***

The rain had passed, leaving behind a gray sky filled with ominous clouds and bitter cold wind. They walked out together and paused beside Zheng's rental.

"Call me if you find anything." Zheng handed Atticus her business card, lightly perfumed with her scent.

Atticus glanced at it and handed it to Ru. "The Pack killed my phone last night."

"That sounds like them," Zheng said as Ru offered up one of his own carefully worded cards that they used while they were undercover. She tucked it away without glancing at it.

They watched her drive away.

"Indigo Zheng," Ru read off her card. "I wouldn't have guessed Indigo, but I don't know; it suits her."

"She still creeps you out?"

"Oh, yeah."

A sound like baying hounds made Atticus look up; Canada geese went overhead, flying in a ragged V formation, honking loudly. He wondered if they were the same ones they had seen earlier, resting on the prison's pond.

When he looked down, Ru was grinning at him from the other side of the Jaguar.

"What?"

"Gabble Ratchet."

"What's that?"

"The sound of wild geese supposedly heralds the arrival of the archangel Gabriel."

"I am not an angel—nor is my brother."

"If you say so."

He got in, started up the Jaguar, and dialed Kyle. "What did you find out about Agent Zheng?"

"Nothing," Kyle said with disgust. "Sumpter pulled me off it to"—he paused to make a noise of irritation and tap something into his computer—"look into something else. Someone did a deep sweep on you and Ru. Credit history. Priors. The works."

"We know." Atticus growled. "Agent Zheng did."

"Oooh, sexy woman," Kyle said. "The first hit was on Ru's phone about nine o'clock last night, and went from there. I'm getting trip-wire reports off everything here. She probably knows how deep his belly-button lint is at this point."

"I feel vaguely violated here," Ru complained.

"Your Agent Zheng is versatile. She hammered on Ru until well past midnight, and this morning she chewed into Atticus. No hits on me, though."

" You originally came on my radar screen as drug dealers. It wasn't until this morning that I learned you were actually undercover agents."

"Kyle, check Ru's call log," Atticus said.

"What am I looking for?"

"My brother had Ru's phone last night." And most likely still had it.

"A couple unanswered calls in, and one outgoing call," Kyle said, and then read out the number. It matched the cell phone number listed on Agent Zheng's business card.

"The bitch." Atticus searched back through his memories and found Zheng's scent tainting the basement's air. "She was at the beach house with the Dog Warriors before we arrived. She's working with them."

"She's dirty?" Kyle asked.

Unsure, Atticus glanced to Ru, who shrugged. "I don't know if it's that straight-forward. See what you can find on her, and anything you can dig up on a group called the Ontongard."

"How do you spell that?"

"I have not a clue."

"Ooooooookay. Do you have a first name yet for Miss Sexy Agent?"

Atticus found himself thinking of her Mona Lisa smile, her compact body, and the tantalizing flashes of camisole under the sheer white of her silk blouse. He shifted uneasily, slightly aroused by the memories. Where the hell did that come from?

"Indigo, like the color blue," Ru reported.

"And what do I tell Sumpter?" Kyle asked.

"Tell him that the FBI tripped over us." Atticus saw no reason not to stick to the truth.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Cape Cod Campground, Massachusetts

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Ukiah woke, naked and bundled against the cold. He lay under a lean-to, deep in rain-soaked woods of stunted oaks and maples, night cloaked tight around him. Beside the sturdily built shelter a small fire burned, hissing when water dripped from leaves overhead. The ocean was somewhere nearby, pounding on the earth, filling the air with salt and the faint aftertaste of fish. Harley motorcycles growled counter to the ocean's rumble, and headlights swept through trees. While Ukiah was alone by a small fire, he felt the Dog Warriors scattered in the darkness. He found Rennie's familiar presence, just beyond the shifting light thrown by the flames. " Is it the Iron Horses?"

" Seems to be."

Instead of tracking down the wanna-bes scattered to their mundane lives, Rennie had sent out word where the Dog Warriors would be camping instead. Judging by the weave of headlights, every member of the local chapter plus some had arrived.

Lambs to a slaughter.

" We won't hurt them if they tell us what we want to know." Rennie slipped through the shadows, staying hidden until the visitors' identity was fully known.

Ukiah sat up stiffly. All the bones of his left arm were once again knitted whole but not yet sound. The massive scabs covering the bullet wounds on his chest and back were hot and itchy; his body was still healing at its furious rate. His stomach knotted up, emptied during his long sleep. Surrounded by the Pack in a womb of safety, he had most likely been awakened by hunger.

Tucked beside him where it would be safe from the rain was a stack of clean clothes. By her scent and the selection—his black T-shirt, his favorite blue jeans, and his "Property of FBI" boxers—it was obvious that Indigo had been the one who raided his closet at Max's. Sitting in the lean-to, Ukiah pulled on his boxers and pants as the bikers settled around him, drawn by the fire.

Daggit had been in the lead, and he eyed Ukiah suspiciously as he killed his engine. "You here alone, puppy?"

"No," Rennie answered, drifting out of the darkness, his eyes gleaming from the reflected headlights. "He's not."

"Shaw." Daggit grunted. "So he is yours."

"Yes." Rennie paused beside Ukiah as he sat tying his boots and lightly touched the top of Ukiah's head. "This is our Cub."

"Does he have another name?"

"Not for you."

"What, you think we're going to cause trouble for him?"

"I think you're smarter than that."

Daggit understood the implied threat with a flash of fear that he shrugged away. "Whatever. Cub it is."

The bikers wandered into the campsite, loud and careless. They carried bottles of alcohol and offerings of food—they seemed to be expecting a party. Ukiah wondered what Rennie told his contact. Animal came into the light, carrying a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a bottle of expensive scotch.

While the Pack rarely drank, it made an exception for fine liquor, and the scotch qualified.

"Hey, Shaw, where have you been?" Animal shouted out with alcohol-tainted breath. "You haven't been in this area for a coon's age."

Rennie took the bucket of chicken, and flicked the lid into the fire. "We had Pack business."

"Which means we'll never know," Animal complained.

Rennie grunted at the truth of this and tilted the bucket to Ukiah. " Don't touch the sides of the bucket." A few stray flecks of Invisible Red glittered on the red-and-white container. "Eat."

Ukiah grabbed out a deep fried thigh and bit deep into the juicy dark meat.

"More," Rennie commanded. After Ukiah took a breast, Rennie selected a drumstick and passed the bucket to Bear.

Animal gazed at Ukiah with an odd look on his face. "Where did he come from? I've never seen him at a Gathering."

"Who he is," Rennie growled, "and where he came from is Pack business."

"You know, some of us have been loyal for years, waiting for our turn to be made . . ." Animal's complaint trailed off to slack-jawed drooling in a display of sexual desire that would have been cartoonish if Ukiah didn't know the strength of Invisible Red.

Ukiah glanced over his shoulder to follow Animal's gaze.

Hellena had stalked out of the woods, black leather pants clinging like a second skin, black silk camisole highlighting the shape of her breasts, long black hair spilling down over her shoulders in loose curls. She was lean, strong, and sexy.

"I-I-I've got an anniversary VRSCA V-Rod Harley." Animal pointed to his bike. "It's only a year old. I've got less than a thousand miles on it. I'll trade you."

Rennie frowned a moment, and then he too followed Animal's gaze.

" It's like being surrounded by rutting dachshunds," Hellena thought.

Rennie laughed at Hellena's silent comment, though anger flashed through him. "We don't trade our women. You should know that."

"Yeah," Animal whimpered. "But I hoped if I made the pot rich enough . . . I can throw in a pair of Desert Eagle pistols and a dozen nickel bags of Pixie Dust."

A growl rose from the Dogs. It was one of the differences between the Pack and the outlaw biker gangs that followed them; the humans treated women as objects to be traded and sold. Even if the Pack weren't morally against such debasement, there was the matter that the women of the Pack were physically equal to the men.

"Okay, okay, okay. I know 'no' when I hear it." Animal held up his hands.

Rennie tossed the bare drumstick toward the trash pit and hit it unerringly. "Where is the Temple of New Reason?"

"Those fairies?" Animal asked.

"Yes," Rennie rumbled.

"They're—"

Daggit gave Animal an angry shove to silence him. "Is it Pixie Dust that you want?" Rennie's silent snarl made Daggit try for a lighter tone. "Look, you can buy through us. We'll give you a good price."

Rennie struck Daggit with savage speed, catching him by the back of the head with a fistful of hair, and the other hand yanking him down to his knees until the leader of the Iron Horses crouched in the dirt in front of Ukiah. "Look at what the Temple has done to our Cub. They ran him down with a truck and shot him full of holes."

Daggit hissed in pain, but managed. "So it's true what they say—you can't keep a good man down."

"Where are they?" Rennie growled.

"I don't know," Daggit's voice went sharp as Rennie put pressure on his arm.

"He knows," Animal said quietly. "He won't tell you. But I can tell you everything I know."

"You don't know shit!" Daggit snarled.

"Who did they contact first? You? No, me!" Animal thumped on his chest with his index finger. "Me!"

"You don't know where they are," Daggit said.

"Yeah, but I know how to get ahold of them."

"We don't want to talk," Rennie said.

"I can set up a meeting."

"Shut up, asshole!" Daggit snapped, and hissed as Rennie tightened his hold. "You know what they're going to do to those idiots."

"I want to be Pack," Animal said. "I want to be fast and strong and cool."

"Dumb fuck," Daggit muttered and squirmed in Rennie's hold. "You don't have to fuck them over, Shaw. Your Cub is fine."

"Make me Pack, and I'll gift-wrap the bastards for you."

"Do you have any idea what you're saying?" Ukiah pulled on his shirt.

"My cholesterol is through the roof," Animal said. "I've got rheumatoid arthritis in my knees so bad I can barely sit on a bike, and all the men of my family die before they turn fifty. I figure I only have, like, ten years or so left. I'm willing to gamble."

Ukiah sensed the direction of Rennie's thoughts. " No. We can't make him a Get."

" We need to be quick and dirty," Rennie thought. " We need to find the cult before they can use that damn machine."

" No."

" Do we beat the information out of them instead? Torture them? Men can stay amazingly silent for lots of money."

Ukiah thought of the bundles of twenties that Kyle and Atticus had stashed away.

" The drug is killing him," Rennie pressed on. " The only way he's going to live is by becoming a Get."

" If he survives the process."

" There is that."

Ukiah studied the bikers, their clothes glittering with motes of Invisible Red. The concentration of it on their groins puzzled him until he noticed that they absently rubbed themselves, the lingering effects of the drug still stimulating them. There was not one unmarked by the shimmering dust—doomed by the exposure to Invisible Red. Rennie was right. They had to shut down Hu-ae and get Loo-ae back as soon as possible. " Okay."

Rennie shoved Daggit away and drifted back into the darkness. "Come." He motioned to Animal. "Walk with us."

"Animal!" Daggit tried to catch Animal's arm, but Smack blocked him. "Mike! Shit, man, think about this."

"I've thought about this for twenty years." Animal followed Rennie into the woods.

***

A half mile from the campsite, they stopped in a marshy clearing. While there was no house in sight, a knee-high stone wall meandered along the edge of the woods. The night sky overhead had cleared, but fog drifted through the trees, as if the clouds had sunk down out of the sky to hide. Some of the Dogs—Stein, Heathyr, and Smack—had stayed behind to keep an eye on the bikers. The rest ranged through the darkness, grim with the knowledge of what was about to happen.

"Okay!" Animal threw open his arms, welcoming the experience. "Make me Pack!"

"Tell us about the cult first," Rennie commanded. "Who's your contact? Where are they now? Everything you know, and then we'll do the mauling."

"Ahhh." Animal raked his hand through his wild red hair. "My sister has a boy, a stepson actually, Eddie." He shrugged his lean shoulder as if the boy were nothing of consequence. The lack of blood connection equaled lack of affection. "The kid gave her a lot of lip when she first got married, and his real mom didn't want to deal with him, so they shipped him off to military school. They brainwashed him on that God-and-country shit."

Animal took out a pack of cigarettes, tapped one out. His hands were shaking, and he laughed nervously as he fumbled with lighting it. "Look at me. Shaking like a virgin with his first whore." He took a deep drag, the tip of the cigarette glowing angry red in the darkness.

"What about Eddie?" Ukiah pushed Animal back to the cult.

"After graduation, Eddie joined the army or marines or one of those but got kicked out. He moved back with my sister for a few months, and then dropped out of sight completely. Didn't even show up for his father's funeral. It turns out he'd joined this cult—Temple of New Reason."

"Do you know his cult name?"

"Ice." Animal laughed, shaking his head. "I've met some of the others and they've got the shit-stupidest names: Mouse, Link, Ether, Ascii, and Io. What a bunch of dweebs. Though Socket and Ping are hot babes."

"Eddie what?" Ukiah tried to fit "Eddie" to the ruthless Ice.

"Eddie Howard," Animal said. "He got hold of me at the end of last year. He knew that I sold reefer and speed and sometimes handled cocaine, that I know people like Jay Lasker. He wanted me to sell this new shit. He gave me a free sample. After my first hit, I knew it was pure gold."

"Where is the cult?"

Animal shook his head again. "Eddie got really paranoid. He wanted everything set up without anything that could be traced back to him. Like it was some fucking French Connection."

"So you don't know where he is." Shaw glanced back to where Daggit was being detained.

"I know how to get ahold of him! We'd use the personals on the Internet." Animal named the Web site they used, an online dating service. "I'd post under the name Pokeyl02 and he posted under Gumby666."

Ukiah did not recognize the references for either one. "Why those names?"

"You don't use 'drug runner' and 'drug lord' as handles and expect to stay hidden from the narcs," Animal said. "You don't mention drugs or money or city or anything like that in the message. Usually I say something like, 'Drop me a hundred' and he'd post back, 'Cam noon Sunday.'"

"That was your last buy?" Rennie asked.

"Cambridge." Animal nodded. "I hadn't set up the next buy yet."

"You have preset places to meet? Cambridge sounds too general."

"Cambridge is the Cambridge Bridge. For the drugs, the buy is always on the bridge, and the drop weighted, so if the narcs try to bust us, we'd throw the bag over the side of the river, and it sinks. No evidence, no conviction."

"Which bridges do you use?"

"Cam is Cambridge. LF is Longfellow." Animal named a few more bridges, but the list was short.

"That's the complete list?" Ukiah asked, surprised that there were so few.

" This isn't Pittsburgh," Rennie said.

" But it's got a river and a harbor, right?"

" Pittsburgh went a little nuts when it came to bridges."

Rennie returned his attention to Animal. "What does Daggit know? Can he call and warn them?"

Animal started to swear that Daggit knew nothing, but then, with a hard look from Rennie, retracted the claim. "I'm not sure what Daggit knows. He's been selling them stuff like guns, explosives, and shit like that—hard-to-get equipment—while I've been running the drugs down to Philly, Baltimore, and places like that. But I really doubt Daggit knows crap. Eddie's a paranoid little shit. He doesn't even do the drug deals—he uses peons from the cult."

They questioned him further, but found out little else. Animal and his sister had had little to do with Ice most of his life before he joined the cult. With the exception of occasional weapon purchases, Animal had dealt with lower-level cult members.

"We are doing this? Right?" Animal dropped his cigarette and ground it out with his booted foot. "I've been steady for the Pack, right there, with whatever you guys needed. Guns. Bikes. You name it and I've supplied it. You fucking owe this to me."

"Not everyone survives this," Ukiah told him. "You can die."

"Or I could live forever," Animal said. "Life is a fucking crapshoot. You've got to play to win. So are we fucking doing this?"

"We're doing this." Rennie growled. He lifted his head, sniffing the wind, extending his Pack sense. While they'd talked, the other Dog Warriors had ranged out in all directions, making sure they were alone in the woods. They tensed now, hating what they must do, but resolved.

With the exception of the Kicking Deers, who had been made perfect hosts via Magic Boy's blood, most attempts to make a human into Pack led to death. Rennie had been the first to survive the process; he'd been shot in the shoulder and pinned under his dead horse on a Civil War battlefield. After countless failures, Rennie guessed, wolflike, that the weak made better prey than the healthy. He picked the sick and the wounded, and sought comfort in the knowledge that those who died had already been doomed.

Surviving, however, was not the same as thriving.

Ironically, the outlaw bikers proved to be not only willing, but also quite successful as Gets. They loved the life—the fighting and the nomadic existence—finding it a natural extension to a life they had already chosen. The bikers expected an initiation rite, and the Pack couldn't always afford to wait for one to become conveniently ill or hurt. Thus the maulings became a hated tool of necessity.

Animal shifted nervously. "Well?"

"Run," Rennie growled.

Animal's eyes went wide and he edged away from Rennie.

"Run!" Rennie roared.

And Animal bolted into a run.

" He's covered in Invisible Red," Rennie sent a hard thought Ukiah's direction. " Stay out of this." And then he was gone, loping after the running man.

Ukiah stood a moment in the empty clearing, feeling the hunt move through the woods without him. Rennie's howl went up, calling out the trail, and Ukiah felt the pull of kinship.

No, he wouldn't hunt, but he would stand witness.

Animal had said that he understood what a mauling entailed, but he couldn't really. The biker laughed as he ran, heavy footed and nearly blind, tripping and falling often as the Dogs paced him easily.

There was a mile of woods until the berm of a highway—the Dogs let Animal run half of it before the first hit. Bear had been running silently behind the biker; he surged forward and knocked Animal off his feet. As the biker scrambled in the wet dead leaves, churning up the rich black dirt to scent the night, Hellena broke his left arm with a hard, precise kick.

Animal cried out then, falling back into the autumn leaves. With carefully judged blows, they beat on the fallen biker, hurting him but not killing him.

Rennie stood over Animal, holding a syringe full of the Pack blood that would make the biker a Get or kill him, his thoughts on the red-haired boy with the mohawk who had come to the Gather nearly twenty years before. Rennie had seen the look of envy in Animal's eyes then, and known this was the probable end. "This only gets worse. If you want, you can stop it here, and we'll see that you get to a hospital."

"Fuck you," Animal whispered hoarsely. "You promised."

"So be it." Rennie pinned him and stabbed the needle home.

Silence fell except for Animal's harsh breathing and the distant roar of the surf.

"It's done." Rennie stepped away. "It's in God's hands now."

***

Animal died before sunrise.

CHAPTER NINE

Truck Plaza, Massachusetts

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Fog had thickened the air into a cold, damp blanket. Sunrise only paled the world. Leaving Bear to deal with Animal's body, the Dog Warriors had taken Ukiah north, away from the killing grounds. They stopped for gas, and Ukiah took advantage of the truck plaza's bank of pay phones to call Max.

"Bennett." Max answered the phone with his normal snap, and then groaned slightly. "Oh, God, what time is it?"

"Six thirty," Ukiah said. "I'm sorry, Max, I've been up all night . . . and . . . and . . ."

"Ukiah? What's wrong? You sound upset."

And with those simple words, Ukiah was torn. He desperately wanted Max there—morally steadfast in the most confusing of times. Yet at the same time, he was glad Max wasn't there to be tainted by the gray. He was ashamed to admit what he'd witnessed. Ashamed to admit having done nothing to stop it. He was tempted to lie to Max, but couldn't bear the thought of staining his trust.

"Things I can't talk about over the phone," Ukiah said finally, rubbing at his suddenly burning eyes.

"Ah."

"I'm sorry for calling you so early."

"No, no, I've been worried sick about you. When you didn't call back Monday, Sam and I did a background search on the owner of the cell phone you'd used—Hikaru Takahashi."

Ukiah groaned slightly. "He's Atticus's partner."

"Yeah, Indigo dropped the bomb about your brother yesterday. She called us to say they'd found you and to call off the background search."

"Which bomb?"

"It was a multiple strike. That you had a brother. That he was DEA. That the Pack had tested him. That the Pack raided the DEA and took their shipment of Invisible Red. She sounded pretty pissed—for Indigo, that is."

Ukiah winced. When he'd called Indigo early yesterday morning—to let her know that she'd be tripping over the DEA in the guise of his brother—he'd caught her between the postmortems of the cult members. She'd been focused on the discovery that Boston-area doctors had seen enough Invisible Red-related deaths to actually recognize the symptoms. They were, however, still mystified as to the cause.

The conversation had turned bitterly cold as he explained what had happened after she left. "Yeah, she is. I let her go knowing full well what could happen to Atticus."

"She's not angry enough to . . . ?" Max paused, searching for a tactful question. Ukiah realized that Max was still looking for the cause of Ukiah's distress, and hoping that the source was as mundane as a fight with his lover.

"I don't know." Ukiah thought of Animal, dead, even now being settled into a shallow grave. What was he going to tell Indigo?

There was a sudden blare of a deep horn from Max's side of the conversation.

"What the hell was that?" Ukiah asked as Max swore.

"A barge. We took the boat downriver a ways and slept on it. Just in case. The horns, though—they about put me through the ceiling every time."

We?Ukiah said nothing. Any precaution on Max's part was well justified at this point.

"You're coming home today?" Max asked as if the answer were an automatic yes.

"No. I need to see this through."

There was a long silence from Max, another blast of the barge horn echoing up the distant Ohio River valley in the background.

"I know you feel like you have to do something," Max said, "but if you want a life with Indigo and to be a father to your son, you can't run with the Pack. You can't do both. If you keep walking the edge, you're going to fall off."

"I know. But there's too much on the line here. Too many lives at stake."

Max sighed. "What can you do that the Pack can't?"

"Well, I can ask you to help me set up a trap for the cult. Computer literate, the Pack isn't."

***

The only problem with working undercover was dealing with the hours. Not so much the long hours, though occasionally that sucked, but the guilt of not spending every waking moment working when you were undercover. It wasn't a job you started at nine o'clock and did your eight hours for. No matter how late you stayed up the night before, as soon as you woke up, you felt the need to do battle with the forces of evil.

The clock read six thirty and they had an eight-o'clock meeting with Agent Zheng. It was, though, a perfect morning, and Atticus didn't want to stir. He and Ru were tucked together just right, the morning light through the window sublimely pale, and the cries of gulls mixed with the deep horns of ships. He could lie, watching Ru sleep, and feel a fragile peace. So fragile that moving, let alone questioning it, would shatter it all.

Then Ru stirred, opened his eyes, and smiled sleepily. "Morning."

"I love you," Atticus whispered.

"Good." Ru kissed his jaw and snuggled back down into the blankets. "Because I love you too."

And then Ru was asleep again, and the moment hadn't passed so much as changed. Atticus's happiness solidified, and he felt now that he could get up, shower and let in the world.

Kyle was waiting when he came out of the shower, two sweaters in hand.

"What do you think, the gray or the green?"

"What?"

"Which looks better on me?" Kyle held up first the green sweater. "The green brings out my eyes—don't you think?"

"What's the special occasion?"

"We're having breakfast with Indigo this morning." Kyle overlaid the green sweater with the gray. "This is much more macho, though, don't you think?"

It took Atticus a moment to connect "Indigo" with "Agent Zheng." "You've got to be kidding me. Agent Zheng?"

"She's a complete babe." Kyle ducked back into his connecting room and returned—sans sweaters—with a color photo of Agent Zheng. "She's really sharp. She has a mind like a diamond."

"Who uses a machete to cut through red tape," Atticus sang.

"Are you saying I don't have a chance?"

"I'm not saying that."

"If she knows you two are . . . you know . . . it's not like I have to compete with you."

Atticus sighed. He hadn't counted on Kyle wanting to join them at breakfast. "She knows. What did you find out about her?"

"She's twenty-six, like moi,and an Aries, extremely compatible with a Virgo like me. Her tax records claim that she's single and owns a luxury one-bedroom studiocondo in Pittsburgh." Kyle crooned the word "studio." "You know what that means—no live-in boyfriend. Her hobbies are science fiction and mystery novels, motorcycles, and cooking."

Cooking?The stocked refrigerator in Zheng's hotel room took on new meaning. "My God, she's a nerd's dream come true."

Undeterred, Kyle went on. "She's got a Suzuki Katana and a Ford Mustang, a black belt in judo, and is the Pittsburgh field office's top scorer in pistol."

Atticus shooed Kyle back into his room so Ru could go on sleeping. They'd been out late, working through the addresses Agent Zheng had provided. The places were so scattered that they drove nearly two hundred miles just to hit the first two.

On Kyle's laptop various windows were open to lingerie models.

"And the lingerie relates how?"

"These are all things she ordered last month from Victoria's Secret."

He was going to have to have a long talk with Kyle about what the words "find out everything" really entailed. "I don't know, Kyle. Women wear things like that when they have someone to show it off to."

"You think so?"

"Yeah."

Kyle dropped into a sulk.

"What about the Ontongard?"

He looked unhappier. "Either Indigo sanitized her reports completely or there just isn't anything. She joined the FBI in 1999, and I've been searching through five years of reports, but so far, officially, the only 'aliens' she's dealt with are Russian Mafia and Chinese Tongs. I'm sorry, Atty; I'll do some more digging."

Atticus went to gaze out Kyle's window, looking down on Boston Harbor. Fog masked all but the wharf at the foot of the hotel and its collection of sailboats and cabin cruisers. It felt like the fog extended through his soul; Atticus knew he wasn't human, but who was telling him the truth? Could he believe Agent Zheng merely because she was on the side of truth, justice, and the American way? Was "alien" any saner than "werewolf," "angel," or "demon"? Who knew the truth and who was deceiving themselves?

In the long run, did it really matter? After what he and Ru found yesterday, he knew that the cult needed to be stopped.

Deciding that Ice's instruction to Ascii might indicate a general direction to look, they investigated the northernmost addresses on the list. The New Hampshire farm had indeed been sold and the new owners were an investment banker from Boston, his pregnant wife, and their two children. After what they learned at the next site, Atticus nearly drove back to the farm and told the banker to pack up his family and flee any chance of interacting with the cult.

Zheng's list had innocuously noted: burn site.The police report had been dryly worded. What they found was little more than secluded acreage on the edge of extensive wetlands. There had been cinder blocks stacked around the bonfire, making crude fire tunnels, but they'd been numbered and hauled away to FBI crime labs. The ash had been gathered for bone fragments, the ground scraped for evidence, and all that was left was scorched earth and the scent of long-dead fires.

He searched anyhow, crouching in the cold wind, fingering the marshy edges of the clearing. In the break between two slightly singed bushes, he found where a woman had crawled through, missing a left arm and a right foot, burning hot enough to scorch the ground she scrabbled over. In a low hollow, fifty feet from the incinerator, she broke into a collection of mice—but that hadn't saved her. The cultists had smashed the mice with sledgehammers, doused them with gasoline, and burned them. The police missed or ignored the pitifully small, charred bodies. Atticus steeled himself to pick one up, breaking open the heat-mummified remains to find intact DNA.

The cult killed the mice while they were still caught between two species. This cell was a mouse. That cell was . . . well, one couldn't call it human.

"Is that what I think it is?" Ru had whispered from behind Atticus.

"Yes." He dug a hole in the damp, loose soil and buried the mice. There was nothing else he could do; he couldn't take them to the police and say, "These were a woman—someone just like me."

It was a chance encounter with the incinerator's neighbor that exposed the rest of the horror.

"They did it at night—to hide the smoke," she'd said only after they'd shown her ID. She had the doors of her car locked, and the window cracked only a finger width. "The wind usually blows west to east—so it goes out over the wetlands, but one night last fall I could smell it—I live the next lot down the lane—so I called the fire department. They needed to bring in a psychologist for the whole department—it was like something out of a Nazi death camp."

Ru tsked. Atticus hung back, letting Ru finesse her. People liked Ru and opened up to him. "It must be terrifying to have something like that so close to home."

"We've bought a dog and a gun and had alarms installed on all windows and doors."

"Very intelligent of you," Ru murmured.

"I wouldn't have stayed except we would have taken a terrible hit trying to sell our house—it was all through the news, and no one wanted to live next to that."

Ru made more encouraging noises.

"I can't believe those monsters were so close to my house—that I might have passed them in the car and looked them in the face."

"Have they caught any of the ones responsible?"

"No, no." She scanned the empty road, either becoming aware they were alone on the country lane, or looking for monsters in the form of men lurking in the bushes, or maybe both. Ironically, she'd probably mistake Ascii as an ally against the monstrous. What would she make of Atticus? "The police keep asking us, insisting we must have seen something. There were cars every now and then—and trucks of firewood—but I thought those were deliveries for someone farther down the road. The McBeals or the Henrys."

Ru showed her the artist sketches of the cult members, but she didn't recognize anyone.

"Is this drug related then?" She seemed incredulous, as if unmotivated murder was simpler to understand than drugs being sold in her neighborhood.

"That's what we're trying to find out."

In the end, she could enlighten them only about the aftermath, not about the murders themselves. She repeated her tale of calling the fire department, and expanded on the story, telling about the police canvassing the area to see if residents were missing, and how the local paper still carried stories each time a victim was identified. "They think there were thirty to forty bodies cremated there. Once the news came out, I called everyone I knew, just to check on them—even one thieving cousin I won't let in my house; he might be a bastard but I wouldn't wish that on him."

Was this where they had been taking Ukiah? Had the victims been other family members Atticus now would never meet? Or had they been humans who fell prey to the cult insanity?

Since they were operating on the assumption that their cover was blown, they gave her their business cards and asked her to call them if she remembered anything, or—in the way of a mild warning—noticed any new activity at the site.

The smell of coffee pulled Atticus out of the memory. Kyle had opened up a bag of instant coffee and poured it out into the filter of the hotel room's coffeemaker. The rich, dark aroma blossomed to fill the small room as few things could; it was a good thing that he liked the smell of coffee, if not the taste. Atticus shifted his attention to his room—Ru was up and in the shower.

"The police have apparently identified some of the victims of the cult," Atticus told Kyle. "Do you have the records on that?"

"Of course." Kyle transferred the water from the carafe to the coffeemaker, and started the coffee brewing. "But I haven't really done anything with them."

"Unless Zheng's come up with new leads, we're running out of options."

After the burn site, he and Ru worked their way south, hitting a house gutted by fire, an empty town house, and finally an empty storefront in Kendall Square that once housed the cult's recruitment center for Harvard and MIT students. The cult had only leased the last and the landlord more than willingly let them search the dusty interior. They found neither Zheng's supposed alien doomsday devices nor any leads to the cult's current location.

"There's a possibility, though, knowing the cult is behind the murders," Atticus said. "That we might be able to find a common factor among the victims which might pinpoint something not on Zheng's list."

Ru padded in from the adjoining room. He was naked except for the towel cinched around his slender waist, and a bejeweling of water. "You know, I was thinking in the shower," he said while scrubbing his fingers through his thick black hair, spiking it on end. He smelled of everything right and wonderful in Atticus's life. "It was listening to the boat horns this morning—we're on the coast."

"Doh," Kyle muttered at the keyboard.

"Salem is a harbor. What if Ice was going to meet them there with a boat, load Ukiah onto it, and abandon the car?"

They glanced at each other, weighing the idea.

"Yeah," Atticus said.

Kyle opened a search window and a moment later had a map and satellite photo for Salem displayed. "Bingo. This triangle here is the parking lot for the train station." He slid his finger over to a featureless gray area. "And this is open water."

"Deep enough for a boat?"

"Maybe; there are little pierlike things," Kyle murmured, tapping man-made structures jutting into the water. He zoomed in as much as the software allowed and panned northward from the train station. After a moment of fiddling, he swore, minimized that window, and started to call up others, quickly running through Salem Harbor Channel and then Danver River Channel and finally Collins Cove. "It would help if I knew anything about boating."

He hadn't minimized the lingerie ads, and they peeked around the edges of the other windows as he filtered through the massive information on the Internet, looking for the grain of data.

"What's with the panties and bras?" Ru whispered to Atticus.

"Our little boy is in love," Atticus whispered back.

"With who?"

"Agent Zheng."

Showing that Ru had heard Atticus singing earlier, he sang, "I want to love you madly; I want to love you now."

Atticus laughed. "You know, when I was growing up, I thought there was some weird affliction that made humans burst into song whenever they were in love."

" Kaiwaii!" Ru cried, which was Japanese for "cute." "Is this why you're so into karaoke?"

Was it?

Kyle sighed, apparently deciding that he had reached the balance point of time invested to payoff. "It's possible, but unlikely. Look at this chart. It shows the channels in and out of this river area. None of them point into this cove—although there are several rocks indicated. This document here talks about mooring field A located at the convergence of this channel and Collins Cove—which is the body of water beside the train station. It says there are roughly a hundred and eighty moorings—but that's up here at the mouth of the cove, and the train station is down here, but we're only talking . . . feet."

"Assuming there is a boat," Atticus said, "where did they get it, and where is it now? It's not on the list of purchases that Zheng had."

"And where were they going to take Ukiah?" Ru said.

"Legend has it that vampires can't cross running water," Kyle said.

Atticus looked at him with horrified dismay. "No, don't add vampires to this."

"I thought we might as well cover all bases."

"Don't even go there."

"But the cult might lump demons and vampires together," Ru said.

Kyle's laptop played a sound clip from a Japanese anime film; "Ringu, ringu, wakey, wakey."

"Ack." Kyle started to save information and close windows. "I still need to shower and shave before we meet with Indigo!"

***

At a quarter to eight, Atticus called time for heading downstairs to meet with Zheng. Kyle, for once, had his five-o'clock shadow in check and borrowed some of Ru's cologne.

"Are you sure this isn't going to . . . you know . . . weird you out?" Kyle asked as he dabbed it on. "I mean, me smelling like Ru?"

"It combines differently with your body chemistry." Atticus shrugged into his shoulder holster and then his leather jacket to hide his pistol. "You don't smell the same."

"Really?" Kyle sniffed himself. "Not in a bad way? I smell good, right?"

"Better smell good, considering what I pay for that." Like Atticus, Ru had on his leather jacket with his shoulder holster underneath. He filled his pockets with his wallet, DEA ID, keys, change, PDA, and the team's backup cell phone.

"Cell phone!" Atticus snapped his fingers. "I forgot!" Which earned him a look from his partners. No, perfect recall wasn't the same as perfect memory. "Let me borrow your phone, Kyle." Atticus glanced at the hotel room's phone to memorize the number. "After breakfast, get hold of Darcy and have her FedEx us two new phones."

"Geesh, she's going to love that." Kyle handed over his phone. "Don't play any of the games, okay? Don't mess with the settings—it took me forever to download the various rings—and don't break it."

Atticus took it. "Can I at least set it to silent ring?"

Kyle took it, changed the ring, and handed it back.

They'd been prepping the rooms so all of them could leave at once. Ru had the bag with the money. Kyle had his laptop. Atticus had a heavier bag with all their most expensive equipment. They locked up the connecting doors, scanned the hall through the spyhole, and, seeing the way was clear, undid the dead bolts and security chain, and left.

It was nearly a perfect break.

When the elevator door opened, however, Sumpter stepped out, folder in hand. He nearly brushed past them before realizing who they were. He jerked to a surprised stop. "Where are you going?"

So much for arriving at the meeting site before their adversary.

"We've got a meeting with the FBI." Atticus let the elevator doors close. They'd found that Sumpter would follow them at great lengths to merely to finish a conversation. They would have to brush him off before getting on the elevator, or they'd have him at the meeting.

"Since when?" Sumpter asked.

"The background check on us was FBI stumbling over our sting," Atticus said.

"Johnston told me." Sumpter ignored the fact that Kyle was standing beside him. "But it's still not clear to me where they popped up. You didn't mention any Chinese men earlier."

Kyle chose the wrong moment to speak up. "Indigo's a woman. A real babe."

"Hmm?" Sumpter said with interest. "Where are you meeting?"

Atticus tried to be truthful with Sumpter, to save lying for important dodges. "Downstairs."

"Okay." Sumpter punched the down button. "Shall wesee what the FBI has to say?"

Riding with Sumpter was like riding with a stranger, only worse. Sumpter stood watching the numbers count down as Atticus and his team silently communicated.

I called her first.Kyle's face plainly said.

What do we do?Ru asked subtly with a nervous glance to Sumpter and a slight twitch of his upraised palms.

Fake a call,Atticus told them, thumb and pinkie extended to form a receiver, with a slight shake as if it vibrated with a silent ring.

Kyle started to sulk, as he was the one who normally set up such a ploy.

Ru took pity on him. He used the Japanese hand signal of pointing to his nose to indicate himself, a habit he got off his mother and grandparents. I'll do it.

Atticus nodded. Ru was more devious than Kyle, by far.

How soon?Ru asked by raising his left wrist and giving Atticus a querying look.

Atticus flashed all ten fingers and then repeated the phone sign. A time delay would keep suspicion off of Ru.

They hit the lobby and got off the elevator.

Ru made a show of searching his pockets. "Shoot," he said aloud for Sumpter's sake. "I think I left my phone and PDA upstairs."

"Lax, Takahashi." Sumpter sighed.

Ru handed Atticus the money. "I'm going to run back upstairs for it. I'll be back down in a couple of minutes."

Atticus urged Kyle toward the restaurant with a look. "Go see if Zheng is here yet." Atticus handed the money to Sumpter. "Could you put this in the hotel safe?" And then, to give him a little nudge, "Sir. We won't need it until Saturday."

A sharp glance from Sumpter indicated that the "sir" might have been over the top, but he took the bag without a word.

Having delayed Sumpter, Atticus felt he should make sure that Kyle had given the heads-up to Agent Zheng that Sumpter was outside the loop. Normally Kyle could be trusted to keep his eyes on the ball, but this time his eyes would be likely elsewhere.

A prickling awareness made Atticus check his stride. He focused and found he perceived a presence beyond the wall of the hotel, pretending to be relaxed, watching and waiting.

Pack.

" Good morning, Boy." Another's thoughts brushed against Atticus's mind with the impression of grizzled fur and a curious working nose. Atticus straggled to put a face to the psyche. " I'm Murray." And a face was supplied, picked from a perfect memory, created by a glance into a mirror: an unruly head of salt-and-pepper curls, a neatly trimmed beard, and dark eyes framed a nose formed by Jewish ancestry. " They call me Mouthpiece. Onetime lawyer, public defender, now Pack member. Going from one necessary evil to another."

A Jewish space alien?

" What are we?" Atticus wondered if he could trust Murray's answer any more than that of the Iron Horses or Agent Zheng. " Werewolves, space aliens, demon, or angel?"

" Angel is new." While the idea seemed to amuse Murray, there was no indication it was correct.

" Any of them true?"

" What we did to you on the beach, we did because you can't lie mind to mind. You can't create a believable memory any more than you can have a fully textured dream."

" So?"

" If you want the unassailable truth, you can examine our memories. See how our kind came to this world."

" Yeah, right." He wasn't about to let them back into his head. This casual intimacy—a stranger's emotions raw and honest—grated like sandpaper against his sense of privacy. It had been barely tolerable with Ukiah; despite everything, he had to admit—reluctantly—he'd been excited about finding his brother.

" You're the one who has to live in ignorance." Murray gave a mental shrug. " If you change your mind, we are denning tonight at Ponkapoag Camp, outside of Randolph."

How did you shut someone out of your mind? Atticus had never learned the trick of not listening that humans seemed to easily achieve. He stalked across the hotel lobby, hoping that distance could block Murray out.

The hotel had two restaurants. Breakfast was being served at the one named—ironically enough—the Intrigue Cafй. Kyle was hovering nervously by the door.

"I thought I would be able to recognize her." Kyle motioned at the various businesswomen already seated. "She's not one of these, right?"

"Not even close." Atticus took out his—Kyle's—phone and found the time was five minutes after. He dialed Zheng's number and was dropped immediately into voice mail. Her phone was either busy or off.

"Think she blew us off?" Kyle checked his own watch, and then compared it to his PDA. "Or maybe she got into trouble?"

If she was working with the Pack, wouldn't Murray have mentioned if Zheng had gotten into trouble? But when Atticus considered this, he realized that Murray was guardingZheng. She was somewhere close by. If she was on her phone, then perhaps she had sought out someplace private to talk.

"Get a table." Atticus patted Kyle on the shoulder. "I'll find her."

Now that he was focusing on her, he caught her scent on the air by the door. He drifted through the cafй. She must have left the doorway moments before the elevator delivered them to the ground floor. While the front of the hotel faced an elevated highway (which Kyle had told them would be torn down once the Big Dig was finished), the back was directly on the waterfront. Sleek yachts and sailboats were tied up to the U-shaped wharf, shrouded thick with fog. Globe streetlights still burned, extending his range of vision. A glass rotunda sat at the far end of the wharf, and a female figure stood within it.

Zheng?Atticus pushed out into the chilly, damp morning. Her scent led toward the building that signage identified as the Ferry Pavilion. She stood in profile to him, looking out into the fog, but her attention was on the cell phone she held to her left ear. Tension filled her body, although the only sign on her face was a slight gathering of her brow. The glass wall blocked her voice until Atticus pressed his hand against it and caught the vibration.

". . . felt better if you'd slept with me last night," she was saying.

Who was she talking to? There had been only a queen-size bed in her room at the Residence Inn. Had she worn her lingerie? Atticus considered Murray's presence and wondered if there were some Pack-to-panties correlations; maybe Zheng's involvement with the Dog Warriors had begun at the same time she had started to buy fancy underwear.

If so, who was the lucky Dog? He couldn't imagine the sleek and elegant Zheng with any of the Dog Warriors, but they said opposites attracted.

Judging by her body language, Atticus wasn't the only one having trouble hearing the other end of the conversation. Zheng pressed the phone closer to her ear and focused on the words.

"I'm fine. It just unsettled me. I hate walking blind into them—though Socket is right; it's like they're one person wearing borrowed skins. We should have expected this after Butler— I'm fine.Murray is here with me. Where are you now?"

Zheng paused to listen, rubbing her brow to soothe away the slight signs of distress. In a moment, she regained her serene composure. "What are you going to do about—are you on a pay phone? Call me when you can talk without being overheard." She glanced at her phone to check the time. "I'm going to be late to this meeting. Is that spelled how it sounds? H-o-w-a-r-d?" She started to turn toward Atticus. "Okay, I'll check my—"

Atticus rapped on the glass before she fully faced him, making it seem as if he'd just walked up and signaled immediately for her attention.

Interesting to note, her first reaction was to go for her pistol. As she registered his presence, she slipped her right hand into her trench coat, stopping only when she recognized him. More surprisingly, she actually blushed.

"I have to go," she murmured. "Call me later."

She hung up and stepped out of the pavilion. "Sorry to keep you waiting."

He wanted to grill her on the phone call and Murray's presence, but the longer they stood outside in view of the cafe, the more likely Sumpter would come looking. "My superior is sitting in on this. He's not in the loop."

"What does he know?"

"We're after a drug that the cult is manufacturing. That's it. I'm not even sure how he'd handle the whole alien invasion thing. I suspect he'd laugh in your face and yank us back to D.C."

"What does he know about your brother?"

Atticus felt a prick of guilt. Why did he continue to protect his jerk of a brother? "Nothing."

"This him?" Zheng indicated the cafe door with her glance.

Sumpter stood in the doorway, about to come out, kept inside only by the bitter cold.

"Yeah." Atticus motioned that they should join the others in the cafe, even though somehow it felt like walking into a lion's den.

Zheng introduced herself to Sumpter with the calm authority of someone expecting to be taken as an equal. The only thing feminine about her handshake was the pearl gleam of her carefully manicured fingernails.

"Randolph Sumpter." Sumpter did his impersonation of an undercover agent, Mr. Joe Cool. "It's good of you to meet with us and combine efforts on this."

"Thank you." The slightly rattled woman on the phone had vanished behind calm professionalism; whatever Zheng thought of Sumpter didn't show on her face or leak into her voice.

"You've met Agent Steele. His partners, Hikaru Takahashi and Kyle Johnston."

Sumpter had commandeered a large corner booth. Kyle had his laptop out and was immersing himself in calming data. Ru was finessing superior service out of the waitress.

On their introduction, Ru gave a smile without getting up, clearing the path for Kyle's bid.

Kyle stood and offered a handshake. "Kyle Johnston. I'm their hole man." He realized the possible sexual implications of the phrase. "I mean, backup man."

"Good to meet you." Was that a warmer greeting than the one she gave Sumpter?

Ru coughed slightly and indicated the steaming cup of coffee at the place setting beside Kyle.

"I got you coffee," Kyle said. "Hope you don't mind."

"Thank you." Her Mona Lisa smile appeared and vanished, proving that she did appreciate the kindness. She slid off her trench coat and folded it over the back of a chair. Under it she wore the same pantsuit and strand of pearls but with a different white silk blouse. Thanks to Kyle's research, Atticus recognized the "Angels" lace camisole under the sheer fabric and wondered if she wore the matching panties.

Ru noticed his gaze, and—judging by the slight frown—guessed his thoughts.

It was Atticus's turn to blush.

Ru had the waitress hovering, so they glanced over the menus. Sumpter waived his turn to see what Zheng ordered. Atticus ordered two eggs scrambled, bacon, and French toast. Ru went with coffee and a bagel with cream cheese on the side. Kyle kept to his standard of hot oatmeal, raisins, brown sugar, and milk.

"A poached egg, plain wheat toast, orange juice." Zheng glanced down over the menu. "And the fresh fruit."

"Ah, a woman with a healthy appetite," Sumpter murmured. "Steak and eggs for me, double order of white toast. Very rare on that steak; just let it shake hands with the fire." Obviously Sumpter missed the fact that Zheng's breakfast was low-fat and well-rounded. He did catch the hard look she leveled at him. "Most women would just get coffee and a bagel and talk about watching their weight."

Atticus winced, as that described Ru's order and reasoning.

"I run five miles every morning," Zheng said. "Weight-train three times a week, and study Muay Thai kickboxing."

"I thought," Kyle said slowly, "that you studied judo."

Atticus tried hard not to wince at Kyle's slip.

"I studied judo in high school." Zheng switched her cold look to Atticus. "I wanted something that offered more attack moves, so I switched to kickboxing."

Sumpter often talked about liking aggressive women. It was amusing to see him quail in the face of a real one. "What does your boyfriend think of the kickboxing?"

Zheng's gaze flicked down to Sumpter's left ring finger and noted it was bare. "Subtlety, I see, is not your forte."

Touchй.

Fortunately, the hotel proved its four-star rating by having the food arrive quickly. The presence of the waitress as she handed out plates, refilled water glasses, and topped off various coffee mugs curtailed conversation down to a game of "who do you know," as they compared people they'd worked with in each other's agencies. Zheng proved it was possible to eat elegantly and talk at the same time.

They had just rid themselves of the waitress when Sumpter's phone rang. He answered with a voice half an octave lower than normal. "Speak to me."

Atticus caught a puzzled "Who is this?" from the caller and recognized the department's administrative assistant, Darcy.

"Sumpter here."

"Randy?" Darcy said with an equal mix of surprise and accusation.

The cool composure cracked and Sumpter stood up. "Excuse me; I need to take this call."

Laughter danced in Ru's eyes as Sumpter hurried away, which confirmed Atticus's suspicion that his partner engineered the call.

"I couldn't help but overhear part of your conversation," Atticus confessed to Zheng. There was no telling how long Sumpter would be gone, so he had to cut straight to the point. "The disadvantage of having sharp ears is that you often hear things you weren't meant to," he covered with a partial lie. "What happened in Butler? Who did you run into?"

Irritation flashed across Agent Zheng's face and was quickly smoothed away. "The Ontongard had the Ae stored in shipping crates at an underground storage facility north of Butler. The Temple of New Reason stole the Ae several years ago; they booby-trapped the crates with high explosives and left them behind—so the cult would know when the theft was noticed."

Kyle had said something about an explosion at a storage facility on Tuesday night while Atticus was trying to get drunk.

"Iron Mountain?" Atticus earned a nod. "And there was a second explosion at the cult's mansion."

Zheng nodded again. "Rennie Shaw and Ukiah accidentally triggered the booby trap, and the explosion made live coverage for several hours. We know that the cult had memory mice in the mansion's basement. What we think happened is that the Ontongard, on their way through Butler to check on the Ae's condition, sensed the mice."

"What was the cult doing with mice?" Kyle asked.

"According to Socket, they had trapped several Gets and rendered them down to mice to perform experiments. They tested poisons, narcotics, stun weapons, tear gas, suffocation, and drowning on the mice."

"Eeewww." Ru wrinkled his nose in distaste.

Atticus thought of the cremation sites and felt sick. "So you're saying the cult didn't blow up the mansion? The Ontongard did?"

"We think so. Two cultists who had been patrolling the grounds of the mansion had been killed in a manner very atypical of the cult. The fire marshal verified yesterday that there're no bodies in the wreckage, so it means at least two cultists are definitely missing."

"Which ones?"

Indigo produced two photographs out of her briefcase. The first was obviously a senior high school photo of a blond young man. "This is Parity. His family owned the mansion. His real name is Thomas James DeMent."

DeMent? Poor kid. The name sounded like a flavor of Pepto-Bismol or "demented." Parity was an improvement.

"He's really this young?"

"Nineteen. His parents thought he was still at college. They flew back from Europe on Monday."

House leveled. Son missing. They couldn't be happy campers.

"This is Ping."

Atticus had noticed the absence of Core and Ping from the mug shots that Zheng gave them earlier and thought them both safely dead. He realized now how relieved he had been not to have to put faces to his brother's rapists; the lack of messy details kept it all nicely distant. He braced himself for Ping to be hulking, muscle-bound, ugly, and, most important, male; so he found himself oddly unprepared for the beautiful young Asian woman in the Polaroid photograph. She wore a nightgown transparent as smoke and a fuck-me look. The edge of the picture was singed, as if it been plucked from a fire.

"Wow," Kyle murmured.

Yes, but how had Ukiah felt about being shared between her and Core? Atticus recalled Ukiah, on the point of collapse, leaning on Ru as he warned them away from handling the drug; relaxed to the point of intimate. What direction did his brother swing?

"We don't have another name for her yet." Zheng had tried for a neutral tone and failed. The cold brittleness crept back into her voice. "She was extremely devoted to Core and would do anything for him; he used her more than once to lure recruits into the cult, including Parity."

She kept her gaze down, trying to hide the hurt and anger.

What had Ping done to Zheng? Or was the fact that the girl was missing the problem? "How does this relate to what happened to you yesterday?"

"I spotted an Ontongard near a house that the cult owned in Uxbridge," Zheng said, naming a town at the southern edge of the state. "It means that the Ontongard are definitely hunting the cult. It was a site known to all of the cultists, so Parity could have been the source of the Gets' knowledge. Ping was inner circle; she would know all the cult's secrets."

"So the clock is ticking."

"Yes. I'll be honest with you. You have not a clue how dangerous this is. The Ontongard Gets view themselves as completely disposable. They're fearless. They will attack until they're destroyed. If they kill you, Atticus, they'll either mistake you for a Dog Warrior—and burn your body—or they'll recognize you for what you are—a breeder—and break you down to mice. It's imperative that you never fall into their power."

Without conscious thought, Atticus stilled, expanding his focus away from Zheng and the table to the room and beyond. Instantly he knew the location of every human in the cafe, including Sumpter, walking through the lobby toward them. Once he realized what he'd done, he pulled back his awareness and took a sip of water. "I'm an undercover narc; I'm well used to dealing with danger."

Zheng frowned at him as Sumpter returned, dropping into his seat with a mumbled "Sorry about that. Now where were we?"

No longer talking about aliens.

"We searched these sites." Atticus steered the conversation to a safe subject by indicating the locations they had visited and found empty. "The cult hasn't been to any of them recently. We have a theory. Right, Kyle?"

"Oh. Um." Kyle pulled up the satellite photos he had searched out earlier. "We know that Ascii was to meet Ice at the Salem train station parking lot. See how close it is to the harbor? We're thinking that perhaps they had a boat."

"What was wrong with the train?" Sumpter asked.

Kyle gave Ru a desperate look; they couldn't mention that the cult had arranged to move a body if the police hadn't found one in the car.

"They were covered with blood," Ru said. "That's what tipped off the people at the rest stop. That and the barely concealed weapons."

"If we can find the boat," Atticus said, "we might be able to find the cultist. It's going to be easier to find than a car—there's only a limited number of places they can dock it."

"When we thought that the cultists were going to poison the Pittsburgh water supply, we searched for any connections they had to boats," Zheng said. "Parity's family had a speedboat, but the marina where they docked it said that the family took it out of storage last summer and never returned it."

"And this helps us how?" Sumpter asked.

"Parity attended Harvard," Zheng said. "He might have brought the boat up with him."

"That's just across the river," Atticus said. "He would probably dock it someplace close by."

"That's what I'm thinking." Zheng sorted through her briefcase and pulled out a laser-printed photo of a sleek boat. "This is a picture of the model, a thirty-four-foot Sea Ray Sport Cruiser. It's named the Nautilus."

"Follow the money." Kyle turned his laptop so Zheng could view the screen. He had run a standard credit report on Parity. "The Charles River Yacht Club did a credit check on him on July seventh, 2003, and currently he's fifty-two days late on August 2004's fee."

Taking out his borrowed cell phone, Atticus dialed the marina. A machine answered immediately. "You have reached the Charles River Yacht Club," a cheerful female voice said. "We're either out on the docks or on another line. Please leave a message and we will get back to you." He hung up without leaving a message.

"It's just across the river. Ru and I can duck over and look to see if the boat is there. See if anyone knows anything."

"I think you're right in that they were heading for a boat, but you've got the wrong reason," Sumpter said. "There's tons of places they could have ditched the car and changed clothes without being noticed; you've got a list of sites right here that they know well. No, they need the boat to get someplace. An island."

Atticus hated when Sumpter finally got his head out of his asshole and used his brain; it made him so unpredictable. Would Sumpter be a raving idiot, or Sherlock Holmes's lost grandson? The most annoying thing was that Sumpter was completely right.

"With the number of ports they have to choose from, the question becomes why Salem?" Sumpter continued his brilliance. "Either it's the port nearest to the island or one that they know well."

"They had to know it fairly well to know you can easily reach the harbor from the parking lot," Zheng pointed out.

"How are they buying gasoline for cars? Cash or charge?" Sumpter asked.

"Charge." Zheng expanded the answer with, "They practiced identity theft on a large scale. After forging a change of address, they would apply for new credit cards to be delivered to a rented post office box. They've had at least twenty or thirty identities they can tap."

"Can you give a list of known credit card numbers to Johnston to cross-reference to marine fuel stations?" Sumpter asked. "If they're making frequent runs from the mainland to an island, it's going to show up in fuel purchases."

"I've got those here." Zheng took out her PDA and indicated she could transfer them to Kyle's laptop. "I'm meeting with the NSA to see what they have on the cult's wiretapping activities."

"Takahashi, it would be more efficient if you visit Boston DEA and ask them about local islands. Update them on the case and keep them in the loop."

Ru glanced to Atticus, who nodded.

"I need to go," Zheng announced as Kyle's laptop confirmed the receipt of her files. Her plate was clean. She took the last sip of her coffee to empty her cup.

Sumpter looked longingly at his nearly untouched steak and sighed. "I'll come with you."

CHAPTER TEN

Charles River Yacht Club, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

The Charles River Yacht Club, as its name suggested, was on the Charles River alongside Memorial Drive in Cambridge. It required Atticus to hunt for a parking space and then walk across four lanes of fast-moving traffic. None of the fifty or so boats tied up seemed to be the Nautilus,so he detoured into the marina's office.

A young suntanned woman sat behind the counter, taking a detailed message, with a series of "uh-huhs" as she scribbled on a message pad. He judged her to be nineteen or twenty. She had her blond hair braided into two short pigtails, and she grimaced with her wide, mobile mouth as the caller continued to talk. She wore deceptively simple clothes whose quality material meant money, and a large diamond engagement ring.

She rolled her eyes, held up a finger to indicate he was to wait, and finished with, "Okay, I'll let her know. Thank you."

She ripped free the message, shoved it into a bin on the edge of the counter, and looked expectantly to Atticus. "Can I help you?"

"Thomas James DeMent rents a boat slip here," Atticus said, giving her Parity's real name. "Can you tell me the boat's current location?"

She wrinkled up her nose. "I-I-I don't know if I'm allowed to do that."

He pulled out his ID and showed it to her. "I'm not going to search the boat; I'm just trying to determine where it is."

"Oh!" She thought a moment, eyes focused over the water, her tongue tracing over her upper lip. Atticus wondered if she knew how erotic it appeared, and if it was the cause of the engagement ring. "I suppose that can't hurt."

A moment of checking books, and she found the information Atticus wanted.

"He's still renting slip number ten. His boat is the Nautilus." She hiked herself up onto the counter and leaned far out to study the pier. "She's not down there."

"She?"

"The boat. It's the second slip to the end." She pointed.

"Do you remember the last time it was tied up?"

"I'm not sure. I think it was there yesterday. The phone's been ringing off the hook this morning, and I haven't been paying attention. You can check with the dock staff."

***

Between the thick fog and the bitter cold, it came as no surprise that the docks were nearly empty. The only person in sight was a man waxing the flying bridge of a fifty-foot yacht.

"Nice boat," Atticus called up to him.

"Thanks," the man said without stopping. "It's a lot of work, though. It's taken me three days to wax the whole thing. Some vacation."

Atticus pointed down the jetty to the empty slip. "Do you know anything about the Nautilus?"

The man halted to look down at Atticus. "Who's asking?"

Atticus produced his ID. "DEA."

The man shook his head. "I keep my nose out of other people's business."

"Look." Atticus held out Parity's photo. "The kid who owns the boat is in trouble. He fell into the wrong crowd and last weekend his parents' house was firebombed and he's gone missing. It's possible he's dead. The Nautilusmight be the only clue we have to finding him—helping him."

The man frowned at the photo. "He wasn't one of the men who took the boat out this morning."

"This morning?"

"Yeah, there were, like, five men and a woman. They pulled out maybe an hour ago."

Atticus took out his PDA and brought up the scanned copies of the artist sketches for the cult. "Are any of these people the ones who took the boat?"

The man clambered down off the boat to study the PDA screen. "Yeah. This one. And him. Maybe him. And she's the woman. I really didn't get a good look at the other two men." He'd picked off Ice and the cultists named Mouse, Link, and Ether. "They seemed to have scuba gear with them."

"Did you see which way they headed?"

The man waved toward the fog-shrouded river. "They would have gone downriver. The Nautilusis too tall to fit under the Harvard Bridge."

Atticus took out his business card. "Do me a favor—if they come back, call me. Don't try to approach them—they're quite dangerous."

The man looked dubious but took the card.

The river water gurgled quietly under the wooden planking as Atticus walked down the dock to the empty boat slip. While it was doubtful that the cult left any clues to where they were headed, they might have slipped up somehow. Wedged in the cracks of the decking, Atticus found a hypodermic needle filled with a clear liquid, its tip capped with wax. He recognized veronol, a powerful barbiturate sedative, from traces of drug on the outside of the syringe.

The cult was out hunting their demons again. But what was the scuba-diving gear for?

Atticus called their hotel rooms, eyeing the hypodermic in his hand. Thrusting the needle into flesh obviously would push the tip through the protective wax. How safe would it be to carry in his pocket?

Kyle answered with a faintly suspicious, "Yeah?"

"Ice was here an hour ago and took the boat out." Atticus filled him in on the other details.

"I'll get hold of the coast guard and have them keep an eye out for the boat, but in this fog, I don't know what luck they're going to have."

The Longfellow Bridge was just a smudge in the fog, crossing the water into whiteness. Atticus heard more than saw the T train cross over it along with the heavy Boston traffic. "That's the truth. I'm going to head back and hook up with Ru at the DEA."

"Ru called a little while ago. He's out in the Explorer somewhere."

"Somewhere?"

"Something about making a wrong turn onto Sorrow Drive, which is limited access. I'm not sure why he called, he hung up after telling me he was lost."

Unlike the Jaguar, the Explorer didn't have a navigation system.

Atticus sighed. "I'm heading for the DEA. Let him know."

As Atticus hung up, a blare of horns came from Memorial Drive. A man was crossing the four lanes of traffic, barely noticing the cars honking at him. He had an odd, mechanical gait. As Atticus watched, a second man made his way across the street. For a moment Atticus thought them twins, and then realized with a start that body-wise, they were nothing alike—only the second man had managed to completely mimic the first man's way of moving.

". . . it's like they're one person wearing borrowed skins."

Atticus scanned the area quickly. If these Ontongard had the same abilities as the Pack, they'd be able to match Atticus's speed and strength. And Rennie, at least, could match him too in fighting ability. He spotted at least three more on the other side of the highway, stiff and awkward as stick puppets.

Shit!Well, he would have to bluff his way through them. Zheng had walked into them and managed to slip away unnoticed.

Atticus started forward. A blond boy in a black running suit crossed the highway and joined the two males on the dock. The boy met his gaze and recognition jumped between them.

Parity?

For a supposedly kidnapped man, he seemed unfettered.

The boy looked startled, saying, "Wolf boy!"

Alerted, the two adult males focused on Atticus. A presence that was like Pack, and yet totally different, hit him, and the recognition went to a full knowledge of what he was. An all-encompassing hate followed the understanding, a flood of rage with the intent to destroy.

" Pack Dog!" The first male surged toward him.

All of Atticus's body reacted, recognizing a primal enemy. Adrenaline washed through him, sending his heart racing. "Oh, hell."

At least he didn't have to be worried about hurting them too much. Remembering how Rennie Shaw could anticipate his moves, Atticus closed his thoughts tight on the real him, going mentally into deep cover. I am nothing. I am invisible.

The male actually hesitated in midstride, off balance, as if Atticus had vanished from sight. Atticus punched the male in the face, putting all his weight and strength into the swing. It broke the male's jaw—Atticus heard it crack and felt the slight shift of bone as it snapped. The male stumbled, registered pain, but kept coming.

"Shit," Atticus swore. The second male and a newly arrived female were coming down the dock and would be on him in a moment. He realized that he still held the hypodermic filled with veronol from the demon-hunting cult. He stabbed the tip into the male's shoulder and pushed the plunger home. The male jerked back away from him—and kept falling, hitting the dock in an awkward sprawl of unconsciousness or death. Oops. Hopefully not dead. Oh, well.

Tossing the syringe aside, Atticus ducked under the punch of his second attacker. I am void. I am emptiness.

There was a boat hook on the dock beside where the boater had been waxing his boat. Atticus snatched the boat hook up as he dodged the blow and let it go where it wanted, flashing it through the nothingness achieved through years of martial-arts training. A power sweep shattered a knee of the second male. The woman, however, caught the hook's shaft. They stood a moment, both muscling for control of the steel-capped pole.

Atticus sensedthe second male behind him, the shattered knee reknitting itself with stunning speed. He could feel too the movements of the others around him; unlike the Pack, where the bristle of minds around him had been like electric auras of the individual Dog Warriors, these aliens merged at the mental level. They gathered around him, six bodies but one huge mental presence, like a multilimbed monster. One limb—specifically, one attached to the last man bearing down on him—held an axe. The monster planned to hack him down to mice.

Time to flee.

Atticus let go of the boat hook, knocked the off-balance female into the river, and scrambled over the boats to leap for the shore.

***

It was a simple trap that Ukiah devised. Animal had said that his nephew never made the drops himself, and without Animal they wouldn't be able to meet with whomever Ice sent. With his flaming red hair and thin frame, Animal had been too distinct for one of the Pack to pass as him. Since most of the cultists Ukiah knew on sight were dead or in jail, the Pack wouldn't be able to pick the bagman out of the crowd. They decided that setting up a normal sale and hoping to catch scent of the drugs was too risky.

So Ukiah decided for a straightforward tactic. Max had relayed from Indigo the result of Atticus's interview with Ascii. Apparently the cult's attack had been more than just simple malice; they wanted him to translate recordings of Ontongard conversations. Wanted him badly. The message to Ice had been simple: Wolf Boy desires to meet with Ice.

Max had reluctantly agreed to act as the go-between, posting the messages and reporting back that the cult wanted to meet on the Longfellow Bridge at ten A.M. "Remember, kid, you don't know this city at all, and this is their stomping ground and their choice of meeting place. Get to know the area, and keep the Dog Warriors between you and them."

There wasn't really time to learn the city well. Luckily Ukiah had Rennie's memories of Boston; they stretched from the late eighteen hundreds to the last time the Dog Warriors were through Boston. Rennie escorted Ukiah to Charlesbank Park, just downriver of the Longfellow Bridge, as the Pack roamed the surrounding area, reporting changes they found. Having never seen Boston for himself, Ukiah found himself disoriented. All of his borrowed memories—from those of horse-drawn carriages crowding the streets onward—held equal value. Every part of the city was at once familiar and strange.

At this point the Charles River, between the Longfellow Bridge and O'Brien Highway, was dammed into a wide lake with only a narrow slit giving it access to the river's mouth and the inner harbor beyond. The park was one in a series edging the river and obviously popular; despite the thick fog and the near-freezing temperature, dozens of joggers used the path encircling the park.

"Cambridge is over there, beyond the fog." Rennie pointed across the river as sculling boats cut out of the fog, gliding like knife blades through the water, ranks of oars dipping in time. They sliced by and vanished again into the fog.

"Bunker Hill," Rennie continued. This too was across river, but farther downstream.

"Wasn't there a battle there?"

"That was before my time," Rennie said. "My grandfather fought in it. My father was a drummer boy at the battle of 1812, down in New Orleans. Seems my family has fought one battle after another to be free."

Rennie turned away from the river to point inland. "Over there is the Old North Church; it used to be the tallest building in town. But now you couldn't see it even on a clear day—too much is in the way. That's the North End." He continued to turn, orienting Ukiah's memories as he indicated landmarks. "Beacon Hill. Boston Commons is beyond it."

"They call that a hill?"

"All the hills were taller once, I'm told. Again, before my time. Apparently since the first colonist landed, they've graded down all the hills to landfill the Back Bay and enlarged the city. They've always been big on urban development projects in Boston."

That would explain the mass of road construction that the Pack found cutting off favorite streets, making the entire downtown traffic scene a snarled mess. Rennie had memories of the start of the project they called the Big Dig, but they were jumbled in Ukiah's recall with those of the original highway project in the 1950s that tore down complete neighborhoods to cut a swath through the heart of the city. After a century and a half, Rennie barely paid attention to the changing world except where it related to killing Ontongard. Born in a simpler time, Rennie found the world too complex and crowded to do otherwise.

Now that Ukiah thought about it, he had had much in common with Rennie even before the Pack leader shared memories with him.

Rennie had followed his thoughts and grinned now, tousling his hair. "It will be time soon. Eyes sharp. Keep yourself safe."

The Pack gathered loosely around Ukiah, far enough out to make it appear he was alone, but close enough to rescue him out of any trouble that might arise.

Ukiah settled on a park bench, watching the joggers. Max jogged on a treadmill every morning, along with lifting weights, to keep fit. He bemoaned the lack of a nearby park to run in—he would have liked the wide, level paths along the serene river. Even with the Pack around him, Ukiah missed his partner's sane, level presence.

Senses filtering for the unknown and thoughts on home, Ukiah missed Ru's approach until his brother's partner was nearly up to him.

"What are you doing here?" Ru asked.

The sight of Ru flushed Ukiah with surprising delight—it was like drinking down heady wine. True, Ukiah had grown to like the man at the beach house; Ru had shown him open friendliness. But somehow being exposed to his brother's memories during his test, Atticus's feelings had reinforced his own; Ukiah recognized what he felt was love—as deep and true as what he felt for his moms, Max, and Indigo. He smiled his honest joy at seeing his brother's partner.

Ru frowned at him with open hostility and suspicion.

Even as Ukiah's smile faded, Ru's anger changed to puzzlement.

"Why are you here?" Ru paused, scanning the park to spot the various Dog Warriors mixed with the joggers and bicyclers. "I was going to say 'alone', but that's not the case."

"I'm . . . we're . . ." As Ukiah formed the words, he realized it might be a bad idea to admit their plan to trap the cultists. The Pack had insisted that they exclude Indigo, and reluctantly he'd agreed. Dealing with the Ontongard ruthlessly had been one thing—that the cultists were human put her on unstable ground. "You probably would be better off not knowing."

"Let me guess." Ru studied the park for a minute. "You're waiting for someone and you expect trouble." He turned to Ukiah and swept a gaze down over him. "You're the bagman."

"How can you tell that?" Atticus's memories hadn't warned Ukiah how clever Ru was.

"You're at the center of the pattern. Who are you meeting?"

"You should just go."

"Because what you're going to do is illegal?"

"Because I don't want you to be hurt."

Ru looked surprised. "Why do you care what happens to me?"

"I like you. And Atticus loves you; it would destroy him to lose you."

Disbelief and the desire to believe him warred on Ru's face. Abruptly he asked, "How's your arm?"

The question threw Ukiah off balance. "My arm?" Ukiah extended his hand to Ru and showed him how he could flex and bend his arm without pain. "It's all healed."

Ru took his hand and ran his thumb up the bone, inspecting the knits. He gave Ukiah another measuring look. "Here, let me see in your ears."

"My ears?"

"Yes, your ears." Ru turned Ukiah's head to peer into his ears. "Ah, yes."

"What?"

"There's something I want to check." He held Ukiah's head still and peered into his eyes, making little doctorlike noises. Ru took out a small pen flashlight and made Ukiah wince by shining the light into his eyes.

"Ru, why . . . why are you doing that?"

"They say that the eyes are the windows into the soul." Ru gazed into his eyes. "I'm looking at your soul."

Ru's eyes were black, almond shaped, with the elliptical fold under thick black eyebrows. There didn't seem to be anything mystical about them, and yet Ru seemed serious.

"What do souls look like?"

Ru leaned closer, as if to see better. "Oh, souls come in a range. Some are quite black. Some are dark blue. Others are red. The soul of a child is pure white."

"What color is mine?"

"Are you worried about the condition of your soul?"

"I-I'm not totally sure I have one. Magic Boy had one—but there's more than one of us now."

Ru winced. "You have one, babe. And it looks all nice and squeaky-clean to me."

Ukiah stared at Ru, trying to tell if Ru was telling him the truth. Ru gazed back, unwavering, so close that his breath brushed warm against Ukiah's wind-chilled cheek. It was the directness of Ru's gaze that finally convinced him—Ru was doing everything in his power to appear truthful. "You're lying to me."

"Of course I am." The facade breached, Ru gave a mischievous grin. "But the fact you weren't sure only goes to prove I'm right." He glanced off, over Ukiah's shoulder. "Are you hungry?"

Ukiah followed his gaze to the hot-dog vendor; just looking at it made his stomach clench up tight, reminding him that his body had been working on overdrive to heal him up. "The cult took my wallet. I don't have any cash."

Ru eyed the hand that Ukiah had pressed to his stomach, trying to soothe away the knot. "That was an offer—I'll buy you a couple of hot dogs."

"Thank you, but—Ru! Ru!"

The DEA agent had already started for the cart, ignoring Ukiah's protest. Rather than shout after him, Ukiah trailed behind, at a loss for how to handle the situation. The Pack had listened with their sharp ears and now radiated mild amusement. Affection seemed to be a viral thing for the Pack—the Dogs had also been affected by Atticus's memories. It built on their gratitude that Ru's loving acceptance had kept Atticus mentally stable and provided a safe outlet for Atticus's sexual drive. That Ru was now treating Ukiah with kindness only sealed their opinion. It made Ukiah wonder about their affection for Indigo and Max—did his feelings make the Pack love them too? Was there a rebound effect, if his relationships soured? His moms talked about the difficulty of staying friends on both sides of a divorce.

He should keep it in mind.

Ru ordered him two chili dogs, fully loaded, and a root beer without asking his preferences—but it was what he'd normally order. He supposed that Ru—via Atticus—knew what he liked, just as Indigo or Max would know.

"Ru, there isn't time for this."

"It's chili dogs." Ru paid the vendor, collected the chili dogs, and handed them to Ukiah. "Not the Four Seasons. Eat them"—Ru cut off another protest—"before the chili falls off."

Ukiah bit into the sandwich in his right hand. In his post-battering state, it was the best chili dog he'd ever tasted. He suspected, though, that anything short of roadkill would be appealing; it was a trick his body used to get him to cooperate.

In certain ways, Ru was no different.

"What are you doing here?" Ukiah asked around a mouthful of chili, cheese, and bun.

"I made a wrong turn and ended up driving by." Ru waved toward the parking lot. The team's Ford Explorer with its Maryland plates sat among the cars bearing Massachusetts plates. "I saw you and thought I'd stop to talk."

"Why?"

"Because I like you," Ru echoed back Ukiah's reason; Ukiah wanted to believe he meant it. "And you're Atticus's brother—and much as Atticus currently wants nothing to do with you, that's important to him."

Ukiah sighed. "This has been one screwed-up reunion. I suppose it could have been worse, but frankly I'm not sure how."

"There's some rule of nature that says family reunions are supposed to be traumatic; I've never been to one that wasn't—but then, I'm gay, and that comes with interesting baggage."

Ukiah thought of how his Mom Jo's extensive family treated his Mom Lara. When the two presented themselves merely as college roommates, everyone had warmly accepted Lara. Gatherings became quiet battlefields after his moms confessed their true relationship.

He finished the first chili dog and asked, "Does your family know about Atticus? Do they accept him? Or do they blame him for making you gay?" Which was what Mom Jo's family accused Mom Lara of.

"I figured out in junior high school that I was gay, and I told my parents then." Ru opened the can of root beer and held it out to Ukiah. "They wanted their kids to be unprejudiced, so I was kind of clueless about what I was announcing to them. Gay people were okay in my parents' book, so I thought it would be okay for me to be one. After that little bomb went off, they were a little more specific as to what 'okay' constituted. You know, Catholics are nice people, but don't marry one."

Ukiah took a deep gulp of root beer and felt it wash sugary goodness through his calorie-starved system. "What is wrong with Catholics?"

"I'm not sure! Part of my parents' 'unprejudiced' campaign was never telling us anything badabout other religions and races. After I told them I was gay, though, it became clear that they only wanted me to marry a straight, Japanese Buddhist—they were hoping this being gay stuff was a phase I was going through. High school was rough, and I made it rougher by rebelling against the norm at every step. They were afraid to send me to college—that either I'd self-destruct or the big wide world would chew me up and swallow me down without a trace. By the time Atticus showed up, they were glad to see him. He grounded me back to someone they could relate to."

"I'm glad then." Ukiah finished the second chili dog and the last of the root beer. "I wish I could have been there for him when he was growing up. Being alone nearly destroyed him."

Ru gazed at him for several minutes, as if searching for some truth in his eyes. If he loved Ru because of Atticus's memories, what did Ru feel, with Ukiah having Atticus's face? "What about the future?" Ru broke his silence. "Are you going to be there for him from now on?"

"You said yourself, he doesn't want anything to do with me." Ukiah stood. It was nearly ten. He held out his left arm to Ru as a reminder. "He made himself fairly clear on that point."

"He was scared, and that made him angry." Ru clasped Ukiah's hand. "I could talk to him—make it right between the two of you."

Possibilities unfolded for Ukiah. He could be the brother that Atticus always wanted. He could share with him Magic Boy's memories. They could go to Pendleton together, and meet their many nieces and nephews, giving Atticus all the family he always wanted, had desperately needed as a child. "You could?"

"You'd have to work with me." Ru tightened his hold on Ukiah's hand. "Tell me what you're planning. Keeping us out is not going to build trust, and I think that's all that's needed here. Honesty and trust."

What Ru said felt right; Ukiah couldn't argue that.

"We've set up a trap," he said reluctantly. "For Ice—he's the leader of the Temple of New Reason. I'm the bait."

"Are you insane? After what they've done to you?"

"They want me to translate some . . ." Ukiah paused as he felt a distant jolt of fear and surprise. He turned to gaze across the river, reaching for Atticus and finding a tight knot of Ontongard Gets.

"What is it?"

Distant gunshots thundered and a flash of pain came from Atticus.

"Atticus!" Ukiah cried, and started running.

" Cub! Cub, no!" Rennie's will pushed against him, trying to get him to stop. " Stay; we'll deal with it. We can't risk you falling to Hex too."

Ukiah paused, recognizing the wisdom of what Rennie said, but he could sense Atticus pitching a running fight, heading away from him. Already Atticus was at the edge of what he could sense, and he was the one most connected to Atticus. His brother lacked the bonds Ukiah had with the Pack, from Rennie's blood mouse to months of close acquaintance; the Dogs were reacting to Ukiah, not Atticus. Wait—Ru might know where Atticus was. Ukiah turned back, surprised to see he'd covered a city block and stood at the foot of the bridge. The park bench was empty and the Explorer was gone from its parking space.

"Shit." Ukiah ran a hand through his hair, looking back across the bridge to the sprawling city where Atticus was. He could sense the Pack already across the bridge, racing toward Atticus. His brother was a more experienced fighter than he was, he reminded himself. Still, he started across the bridge at a sprint, dodging pedestrians.

Suddenly one of the joggers slammed into him, jabbing a hypodermic needle into him. Ukiah jerked back, surprised and then panicked as he felt some drug surge through his system, carrying numbness.

Oh, this is bad.

Other joggers veered toward him, and he realized he'd been seeing them for over a half hour, circling him on the paths around the park. The cult had laid their own trap and he was neatly in it.

As his legs folded, the cultists caught hold of him, pressed him up against the railing, and then flipped him over.

The Charles River expanded to fill his vision, and he hit hard, a flash of stunning pain. Then he was flailing in the icy water.

Oh, God, this is so bad.

There was someone in the water with him, snagging something onto his jacket. As he was dragged upward, he considered slipping free of his coat, and then realized that in his current condition, if he did, he'd drown. Moments later they broke the water's surface, and he coughed and sputtered for air.

The boat loomed up beside him, a wall of white, and hands were tugging him upward.

"Well, look what we landed," Ice drawled as Ukiah was dragged aboard. "An angel fish."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Atticus ran like a fox before the hounds. The chase went through the quiet treed lawns and stately old brick buildings of MIT's campus, and out onto its busy main street. He was used to dashing through cars and crowds—although usually running aftersomeone rather than from—but the principle was the same. The trick was making eye contact with drivers and other pedestrians and convincing them with a hard stare to keep the hell out of your way.

He'd just made the opposite side of the street when a bullet struck him high in the left shoulder. He stumbled and fell, the window above him shattering as a second bullet missed him. He hit the sidewalk in an explosion of pain that threatened to black him out. A bullet kissed the sidewalk beside his cheek and ricocheted off in a whine. Another tugged at him as it plowed through the leather of his jacket. He rolled and fumbled out his pistol. He hated to use a gun in an urban situation, but he had no choice.

He scrambled to his knees, braced himself, and aimed down on the shooter, who was nearly on top of him. His first bullet took the shooter square in the chest, sprawling the man backward onto the sidewalk with a meaty, lifeless thump. Recoil sent a shock of fresh pain through Atticus. Gritting his teeth, he aimed at the second man. His pistol kicked pain through him as he fired, the first bullet only grazing the man's shoulder. Unlike a normal human, the man—no, creature—didn't even flinch, coming straight at him as if pain and death didn't matter. Atticus squeezed off two more shots, nailing his attacker this time.

His SIG Sauer had a magazine of twelve bullets plus one in the chamber. As he lined up the axe man, he counted the bullets down. Nine. Eight. Seven.

Six bullets left, he thought as he lurched to his feet, ears ringing. Three down, but would they stay down? There were rats forming in the pooling blood from the first, and he sensed the body knitting together heart muscle at stunning speed.

The other two—Parity and the woman—were closing. He could wait and shoot them, but then what? He'd be out of bullets and the first man would be healed. He needed breathing room and more of a plan.

He ran east, along the busy street. Behind him he sensed the first dead man come to life and start after him.

A human Atticus could outrun, even if he was hurt. Wounded, against these creatures so like himself, he could sense the gap between them quickly closing. There was the Jag, though, parked close by; if he could get to it, he'd be home free.

Bullets whined past him, striking storefront windows, marking his trail with fractured flowers of destruction in the safety glass.

He was running past a red-trimmed building when a bullet caught him in the leg. He stumbled out of his full run, and the female Ontongard tackled him through a window. They dropped down a stairwell beyond. Atticus hit worn tile a story and a half below, the female on top of him, a smothering blanket of hate in human form.

They were on a subway station platform, and the handful of people waiting were startled by their sudden, violent appearance. An outbound train had just pulled in, its doors clattering open. From the dark tunnel of the inbound line came the ominous roar of an incoming train.

Not good.

The gunman and axe man he'd shot, the ones who should still be dead, dropped down to land lightly beside him.

Atticus lashed out at the woman, slamming her off him and coming up in sweeping kick to take out the axe man. He couldn't reach the gunman in time.

This is going to hurt.

Suddenly Rennie Shaw was between him and the gunman, wearing a black leather jacket with the picture of a snarling dog and the words "Dog Warrior." The gun thundered, booming in the enclosed space. The bullet punched through Shaw, exiting out of his back in a fist-sized hole. Blood splattered Atticus and crawled, gathering together into a tiny mote of snarling anger.

The female punched Atticus hard in his wounded shoulder, distracting him from the sentient blood. He caught her arm and broke it as he swung her into the axe man. Humans would have fumbled, but the two dodged each other with choreographed ease. The female grasped Atticus's arm, her bones already knitting, and held him as the axe man swung back his axe. Behind them the inbound train thundered into the station.

With a snarl, Hellena Gobeyn dropped from street level to the axe man's feet, picked him up, and flung him into the path of the oncoming train. The man vanished under the bright steel wheels with a bloom of blood scent. A moment later, rats swarmed out up out of the pit.

Another Ontongard and a wave of Dog Warriors rolled down the stairs, already locked in battle. The subway platform became a mass of snarling, struggling bodies.

The door-closing chime sounded on the outbound train and Atticus found himself suddenly hauled up and thrust into the subway train.

"Go!" Rennie Shaw barked, producing a sawed-off shotgun from under his duster like in a magic trick. He turned, firing at one of the Ontongard in a roar of sound and a cloud of gunsmoke.

Then the door closed and the train pulled away from the carnage.

Atticus grabbed a pole to keep from falling. His phone vibrated. He pulled it out to discover he'd missed two calls already.

"Steele."

"Where are you?" Ru cried through the phone. "Cambridge looks like a war zone! What the hell happened?"

"I'm on a subway train." Atticus turned to ask the other passengers the train's destination and found that they had crowded to either end of the car, as far away from him as they could. "Where are we going?"

"C-C-Central is the next station, "the nearest of the passengers stuttered, "then Harvard, and . . . oh, God, I don't remember."

"Porter, Davis, Alewife," someone behind Atticus said, but when he turned, he couldn't tell who. Everyone had big doe eyes of fear.

The train pulled into Central, and when the doors opened the passengers bolted, throwing frightened glances back to see if he was getting off too. He didn't have the heart to follow them; he couldn't stand them looking at him like he was a monster. The door-closing chime sounded. The doors closed and the train pulled out of the station.

"Atty?" Ru's voice pulled his attention back to the phone.

"I'm on a train going to Alewife." Atticus sighed and sat down in the now empty car. "Come get me there."

"Okay."

He hung up and sagged back in the seat. What the hell was that? Zheng had warned him, but with quiet, reasonable words. She had left out that they would recognize him from a distance and how profound their hate for the Pack ran. Why? Weren't they the same race? What the hell was that all about?

***

Usually Ru bandaging him up was a soothing activity, but Atticus found his mind racing over the last few days, the little scraps of information that he'd pieced into an imperfect patchwork quilt of knowledge. He was finding gaping holes in his knowledge. He wasn't even sure which theory to believe about himself: werewolf, angel, demon, or alien? Who did he trust to tell him the truth? Agent Zheng? The Pack?

"You know," he said to break the silence of his own thinking, "Batman was just a nutcase."

"Hmm?"

"No, here he was, stinking rich, huge house, no need to do any work at all, and what does he do? Get a wife? Adopt some needy kids whom he doesn't bend to his own vigilante lifestyle? No. He sulks around at night, breaking the law, ruining crime scenes, and destroying any chance of building a criminal suit against any of these lowlifes. No wonder the badly run insane asylum was full—by the time he stomped through a case, the only thing you could legally do with these criminals was commit them and then lose the paperwork."

Ru paused in stripping the sterile wrapper from an oversize bandage. "Is this a 'we should get a life and go on vacation' speech?"

"What?"

Ru shrugged and gingerly pressed the bandage in place. "The line of reasoning usually goes: He let a petty criminal define his life, he should have moved on, all that money and he never kicks back and enjoys it, let's go to Bermuda."

"You missed that he should at least have bought a few politicians and pushed through stronger gun-control laws and three-strikes-you're-out programs."

"Oh, yeah, that too."

Atticus considered the battered neighborhood around the Alewife train station's parking garage, bleak and cold with autumn rain. "Yeah, Bermuda might be a good idea, but that wasn't the point I was trying to get to."

"It wasn't?"

"No. I never told you this, but I've always hated Batman because he's racist. At least in the new canon."

"Really?"

"Yeah, he distrusts Superman because he's not human. Sure, he'll fuck Catwoman, a cheap petty criminal, but trust an alien that has done nothing but risk his life for others, nope, nope, can't do it."

"Sooo?"

"Well, it doesn't stop him from joining the Justice League and fighting with Superman."

"And this relates how?" Ru asked.

"I don't trust Zheng to tell me the truth. Superman, when he needed to know about who he really was, he retreated to Fortress of Solitude and sought knowledge from the source."

Ru busied himself putting away the bandages, radiating unease.

"What?"

"Atty . . . you know . . . sometimes it worries me that you get your moral guidance from comic books."

"Where else am I going to go? Everything else assumes you're human."

" Sou desu." It was a Japanese phrase meaning "that is so," which neither agreed or disagreed with the speaker, just confirmed the facts.

"I need to talk to the Dog Warriors."

"They know you're a DEA agent."

"Yeah, but there's a bigger picture here that I'm not seeing, and I think not knowing is going to get me killed."

***

Ponkapoag Camp—once they figured out how to spell it—proved to be an eighty-five-hundred-acre wildlife reservation just fifteen miles from Boston. Its Web site claimed that the campground was a collection of twenty rustic cabins dotting the shore of Ponkapoag Pond.

As he drew close to the reservation, he could feel the Dog Warriors, a hard, angry knot of Pack presence. There were motorcycles lining the campground's road, dozens of them, and an occasional pickup truck. Men walked the road, reluctantly moving to the edge to let him pass. They wore leather jackets, and the club badges identified them as various New England motorcycle clubs, from Gold Wing Riders to Hell's Angels.

The Pack was having a party.

The partygoers had built a bonfire on the edge of Ponkapoag Pond, the flames reflecting in the dark water. The bikers had brought a portable stereo, and it thumped out, ironically enough, "Smoke on the Water."

Atticus pulled in and got out of the Jaguar. Coming now felt like a mistake. He was glad, though, that he'd been able to talk Ru into staying with Kyle, playing his backup instead of his voice. He wanted to be alone when he heard all the dark secrets the Pack might tell him.

"Hey." Someone—a regular human—shone a flashlight onto the Jaguar, seeking him out. "This is a private party."

"And he's invited," a voice rumbled out of the dark. The flashlight flicked to the speaker, and hit Rennie Shaw as he drifted out of the shadows. The light reflected in his eyes with the greenish gleam of a wild dog's. There was a bullet hole in Shaw's leather jacket—a reminder of the Dog Warrior's intervention that afternoon. "This is our Boy."

The light jumped back to Atticus, finding his face. He squinted against the glare, as his eyes had been getting accustomed to the dark.

"Oh, I see," the wielder of the flashlight said, and the light snapped off.

The hairs on the back of Atticus's neck rose. Am I that much like them?

"Mouthpiece said you might be coming around, Boy." Shaw motioned that Atticus was to follow.

"You're having a party?" Atticus covered his disquiet.

"We're having a Gathering of the clans." To the bikers, Shaw called back. "Nothing happens to the car, or you'll be the ones we track down."

"Does that mean we have to stand here and guard it?" One of them whined, and was immediately cuffed by the man standing beside him.

"Okay, Rennie," the wielder of the flashlight said. "You can count on us—sir."

"Hell's Angels calling you sir." Atticus murmured as he and Shaw moved into the woods. "That's pathetic."

"They have their uses. Mostly that the cops have to wade through them to get to us."

There were knots of parties scattered through the campground; the largest concentration of people being down by the bonfire. He could feelsolitary Pack members moving through the crowds like herd dogs. It surprised him that he recognized some as they brushed against his awareness.

The humans carried flashlights, or stumbled through darkness. He and Shaw moved quietly through the trees, eyes growing accustomed to the dark, the night becoming vivid grays.

Atticus eyed the bullet hole in Shaw's jacket, the leather scorched by the muzzle flare, tainted slightly by burned blood. Shaw showed no sign, though, of being wounded. The Dog Warriors must heal as readily as himself—or perhaps faster, like the Ontongard. Still, it had to hurt. "Thanks for the save."

"We're your family. You're our Boy."

Another time, Atticus would have snapped a denial to that, but now . . . what did he know? "Am I?"

"Here. Take my hand." Shaw paused to hold out his right hand, as if to shake. "Go on. I don't bite—much."

Atticus reluctantly reached out and took Shaw's hand. The fingers closed like a steel trap on his, holding him tight.

"Do you know how to use those senses of yours?" Shaw asked. "Can you feel down deep to the pattern of life?"

During their fight on the beach, Atticus had sensed that Shaw wasn't human, but hadn't focused on how. Now, without distraction, he could study Shaw's genetic pattern. Whereas his own DNA was one smooth pattern, alien as it was, Shaw's was a mass of confusion. There was a scant human part—like a veneer—of a tall, lean, Anglo-Saxon man. Under the man, though, ran a thread of wolf and mouse, and then, like a raging river under it all, was something fully alien. Yet he could find familiar landmarks, similarities that lay in himself.

His family.

"So what are you to me? Uncle? Cousin? Brother?"

"The answer isn't that simple."

"Why not?"

"Because we don't reproduce like humans." Shaw started to walk again.

"How do you reproduce?"

"Actually, as little as possible."

After a minute of silence, it became obvious that Shaw wasn't going to elaborate. He tried another line of questions. "What happened after you put me on the train?"

"Do you really want to know? It's a grisly tale."

"Yes, I do."

"We had the advantage of numbers. Eighteen to four."

Eighteen? Then the Dog Warriors weren't there in full force. Zheng must still have her Pack backup. And four was wrong too.

"There were six." Though Atticus did leave the one drugged, possibly dead, on the docks.

"Once the police started to arrive, we didn't have the luxury to search for stragglers. We grabbed the ones we could and went to the city pound. They cremate the dogs they put down. We borrowed the facilities."

He thought of the woman, so like himself, crawling through the weeds on fire, and felt slightly sick.

"Don't pity them!" Shaw snapped. "They're the enemy of all life on this planet. They won't stop until they're put down, or they've corrupted everything into their image."

"Okay, so I don't know what the hell is going on. Why don't you tell me? What the hell are they? What are we? Werewolves? Demons? Angels?"

"You're asking for a history lesson that stretches back thousands of years and covers multiple star systems."

"So we're aliens?"

"Mostly."

Atticus jerked to a halt. "Just give me a straight answer, damn it."

"You didn't fight four men this morning," Hellena Gobeyn said, moving ghost silent through the trees to join them. "You faced one creature." She reached out and took Atticus's hand in hers. "As you have five fingers that can act as one fist"—she curled his hand into a fist—"the Ontongard act as one being."

"One body—ten bodies—a thousand—it doesn't make a difference," Shaw said. "It's one monster with one thought—to grow."

"But we're like them." Atticus freed his hand from Hellena's. "They heal like us, and the mice."

"Prime—the first of us—was a mutation of Ontongard," Hellena said. "He had a will of his own. He had hopes and dreams and desires of his own making."

"You're a lot like him," Shaw said. "An angry young male, surrounded by beings that seem like you but aren't, made a loner by the very fact that you aren't one of them. He hated the Ontongard." Shaw gave Atticus a questioning look. "Do you hate humans?"

"No," Atticus snapped.

Shaw pushed against him mentally, seeking the truth.

"Don't do that!" Atticus backed away from him, unsure how to break the mental contact.

"Don't lie to me then." Nevertheless, Shaw backed off. "I've seen into your mind. You enjoy beating the hell out of them."

"No, not all of them. I couldn't hate the entire race. For every shitheel that crawls the earth, there are a dozen good people worth protecting."

"Ah, there's the difference then. For Prime, there was only one being, and it was a monster. He tried his best to kill them all."

"He almost succeeded," Hellena said. "At least, as far as Earth is concerned. Prime sabotaged the seed ship so it would self-destruct and then joined the crew of the scout ship. When he crashed it into the Blue Mountains in Oregon, he killed all but one—Hex."

"But one was too many," Shaw said. "Oregon, late seventeen hundreds. There was nothing there that could stand against Hex. Arrows with stone heads. Hell, we can barely stand against his Gets now, and we're on an even footing."

"In his dying minutes, Prime made us, the Pack, to carry on his fight," Hellena said. "We've fought Hex and his Gets for hundreds of years."

"Made? How did he make the Pack?"

"The Ontongard reproduce virally, Boy. They might look human, but you're looking at a million of them in one body. That's how we can make the mice—shape or size isn't important—though it does affect intelligence. They inject themselves into a host—a human—and take the body over."

They walked out of the woods at last, into a clearing. It was like stepping back in time. A small cook fire was the only source of light. A deer carcass hung from a high branch; cuts of it were being grilled over the wood flame. Beings pretending to be human dressed in leather and carrying guns moved through the flickering firelight. When they looked up, their eyes gleamed in the darkness like wolves'.

His family. God had to be laughing at him now.

Shaw pointed to the nearest man. "This is Grant; he leads the Wild Wolves." And from there, he continued, spilling out names to which the owner nodded in greeting. Wild Wolves. Dog Warriors. Hell Hounds. Devil Dogs. Demon Curs. Shaw meant it when he said the clans were gathering.

"What is your fixation on dogs?" Atticus asked after the last of them were introduced.

"Prime didn't infect a human." Degas, who led the Demon Curs, answered with a look toward Shaw, as if rebuking him for not being clearer. "His only Get was a wolf; it was the wolf that created the Pack."

"We have him stamped on our minds," Shaw admitted. "His DNA laced through our genetics—his instincts threaded through our soul. Sometimes when we dream, we run the dappled green on four furred feet."

"There are those who are most comfortable running around like packs of wolves." Degas made it clear with his sneer that he excluded himself. "Some of us, though, aren't totally happy with embracing the way of the beast, Boy."

Atticus understood then that they had given him a nickname, one as stupid as Cub: Boy. "No, I'm Atticus. Atticus Steele."

Degas smirked, apparently pleased that he'd nettled Atticus. "Where's your chew toy?"

It took Atticus a moment to realize Degas meant Ru. In a flash of anger, Atticus lashed out, striking without holding back as he normally would. He caught the clan leader totally unaware and Degas dropped with a sickening crack of his neck. Atticus had always had a morbid curiosity of what he could do with his full strength—the day had been a continuous lesson.

"He will get better from that?" he asked guiltily.

"Shortly," Hellena murmured.

Shaw snorted a laugh. "Except his pride. He did ask for that."

"I-I didn't realize I could hit so hard."

"Degas would have killed you if he could. He tried to kill your brother—it was a close fight."

Atticus glanced about, realizing whom he most wanted to see. "Where's Ukiah?"

A low growl rose from the Pack, rage and anger unifying them nearly as tight as the Ontongard had been. They stood out, though, as individuals in their fear, anxiety, and worry.

"They have him," Shaw said.

"What? Who?"

"Those religious nutcases!" Shaw snarled. "We've spent the day looking for him."

"How did this happen?"

Hellena explained their plan to trap Ice and how they'd been distracted by the Ontongard's attack on Atticus. Her distress grew as she talked until there were tears in her eyes. "Somehow, they took him so quickly, he didn't get a chance to call for help. We scoured the park and found no trace of him."

Shaw put a hand to her shoulder and she grasped it tightly.

Had the cult killed Ukiah again? Would they burn him, as they had done with the others?

Atticus pushed away memories of the burned mice to focus on what he knew of the cult. "Ascii said that they need him to translate something. He's probably safe as long as he's useful to them." But that was far from comforting. If the cult had grabbed him instead, thinking Atticus was also an angel, he wouldn't be able to translate diddly. "Does Ukiah understand the Ontongard language? Can he translate like they want him to?"

"Yes, I gave him one of my mice." Then, seeing that Atticus didn't understand, Shaw explained. "Our memories are genetically coded. Absorbing another person's mouse adds their memories to yours. I gave Ukiah all my memories, which extend back to the beginning of the Ontongard race."

His brother's life was so weird. "He can do it then?"

Shaw looked away.

Atticus turned to Hellena. "Can he or can't he?"

"Our Cub . . ." Hellena's voice quavered with strong emotions. "He believes strongly in doing what is right—no matter the cost to himself."

And a wave of sorrow and anger went through the Pack.

They know Ukiah won't cooperate.

From the pond's edge, the bikers started into a drunken chorus.

"Why aren't you out looking for him?" Atticus asked. "What are you doing here—having a party?"

"We've tried looking blindly all day," Shaw snapped. "Now we're waiting."

"For what?"

Stillness ran through the Pack. Atticus could sense them listening, focused on the rumble of incoming motorcycles.

" It's them," someone near the road mentally reported.

The Pack melted into the woods, leaving him alone with Shaw, Hellena, Degas, and the Demon Cur's alpha female, Blade.

"You should leave." Shaw gave him a slight push toward the clearing's edge, back toward the Jag.

Atticus resisted. "What's happening?"

"We don't have time for niceties anymore. Things are going to get messy."

"What are you going to do?"

"Daggit knows where the cult is. We're going to do everything short of tearing his head off his shoulders to get that information. And the only reason we're stopping there is because dead men don't talk."

"You can't torture him."

"We're in this mess because that's what your brother said," Shaw said. "Go home. Better yet, go back to Washington."

"No."

Oddly, Shaw's stare was neither as feral nor penetrating as Ukiah's. "Don't interfere. We will kill you and drop your body with your team if you try. We won't let even you stand between us and getting our Cub back."

"Fine."

The Iron Horses entered the campground cautiously, but the noose was already tightening around them. The Pack moved silently through the woods, surrounding the bikers, communicating mind to mind.

They took Daggit down hard, knocking him from his bike. After disarming him of various knives and guns, they dragged him kicking and swearing to the clearing. Having suffered the same treatment just days before, Atticus found himself wincing in sympathy.

As the Blue Oyster Cult sang "Don't Fear the Reaper" on the distant stereo, two Dog Warriors—Bear Shadow and David Stein—flung Daggit to the ground in front of Shaw, and the Pack closed ranks around the man.

"Let's try this again, Daggit," Shaw rumbled, his voice full of menace. "Where is the Temple of New Reason?"

Daggit scrambled to his feet, his sweat sour with fear, his nose running with blood. Still he managed, "Go fuck yourself, Shaw."

"They have our Cub, Daggit." Shaw began to circle Daggit.

"You should have watched him a little more carefully then." Daggit backed as far away from Shaw as the watching Pack allowed, turning to keep the Pack leader in front of him. "You knew they were after him."

Shaw lashed out, faster than even Atticus could see. In a blur of savage motion, he had Daggit down on his knees, right arm dislocated and forced up behind his back. As Daggit flailed at him with his left arm, Shaw leaned down and growled into Daggit's ear. It wasn't the sound of a man imitating an animal, but the deep chest growl of a true beast that raised the hairs on the back of Atticus's neck.

"I'm not going to tell you squat!" Daggit cried.

"We're not going to take 'squat' as an answer." Shaw shifted his hold and broke Daggit's right pinkie.

Daggit grunted but otherwise remained stoic in the face of the pain. The ring finger broke with the snap of a dry branch. On the middle finger, Daggit cried, "I don't fucking know!"

"Animal said you knew."

"Animal was wrong." Daggit panted and peered at the encircling Pack. "Funny thing, I don't see him here."

"Focus. Your life is on the line, Daggit. Blink wrong and you're dead. Now, where are they?"

"I don't know." This time Daggit's voice quavered with fear.

"After we break your fingers, we'll cut them off. And we'll keep cutting till we hack off your dick." Shaw snapped the next finger.

"Okay! Okay, okay! They've got this island. They were talking about it last time I saw them. They've been digging in. They wanted claymores and napalm. They were getting ready for a fucking war."

"Not good enough." Shaw growled, drawing a bowie knife.

"I really don't know!" Daggit shouted. "It's out of Salem, like out by South Goosberry, or Bakers Island, but farther out! I think it's like three or four miles from shore! A little shit of an island. There's just one fucking house on it!"

Shaw ignored him, putting the blade up against the base of the broken pinkie.

"Wait." Atticus caught Shaw's arm. "Parity kept a boat on the Charles River. Ice took it out this morning. That's what I was doing in Cambridge. And Ascii was taking Ukiah to Salem, before I got him out of the trunk."

Shaw grunted and released Daggit. The big man cradled his broken hand, glaring at the Pack. "If you're lying to us, Daggit, we will hunt you down and cut out your liver and feed it to you."

As Stein dragged Daggit away, Atticus's mind was filled with images of the Pack waging war with the cult, leaving a trail of stolen boats and dead humans floating in their wake. "I'll set up a raid with Zheng. We'll get Ukiah back. Just give me twelve hours."

"No," Shaw growled.

"What about the Ontongard? Why do you think they were in Cambridge? They were down at the marina. They're hunting the cult. If you go after the cult, you'll be caught between them."

"All the more reason for us to go, not you and Zheng."

"You can keep the Ontongard busy. That's what you were made for, right? To fight the Ontongard."

Shaw snarled as an answer.

"There's the problem of finding Hex's Gets," Grant said. "We know where the cult is."

"If the cult really have been killing and burning these Gets," Atticus said, "then a profile of the victims from the cult's burn sites probably will give last known addresses and such. All you have to do is get close, right? Then you can feel them? My team's already working on the information."

Consensus moved through the Pack, with hard knots of resistance coming from the Dog Warriors, who knew Ukiah best.

"Fine, twelve hours," Shaw said. "Make it noon tomorrow."

***

"Well?" Ru greeted him when he pulled the Jaguar in beside the Explorer.

Atticus could feel the Pack following behind him, waiting for the information he'd promised. What the hell was he thinking? "We have to pull rabbits out of our ass to save my brother." He explained the situation as quickly as he could. "They think Ukiah is too moral to cooperate with the cult."

"Possibly. He's actually quite sweet."

Atticus frowned at Ru. "Based on what? We barely got to talk to him."

"I ran into him this morning. Things got so crazy, I forgot to mention it." Ru hesitated, looking troubled. "But there's something wrong with him."

"Which is he? Sweet or screwed in the head?"

"I gave him a street test. He failed so bad."

"Street test" was what Ru called his method of seeing how street-smart a kid was. A lot of kids who crossed their paths were already hardened criminals. Others, though, were good kids about to be swallowed down; those were the ones they tried to steer toward havens, getting them off the street before they could be eaten.

"So he's naive," Atticus grumbled.

"I've never seen a kid over the age of ten let me go this far. He's a complete babe in the woods. He let me do the fucking penlight in the eyes, Atty."

Atticus found himself thinking of the sturdy naked toddler he'd protected in the forest as a wolf. He tried to ignore it. Ukiah probably only looked younger because of the odd way they aged. "If he's like me, then he's perfect. He could be just pretending to get on your good side."

"Are you sure? Think about when he first woke up in the bathroom. That wasn't an act. It was like he's feral."

Yes, that was true. Even the Pack with their wolf taint didn't seem half as wild.

I left him in the woods— how long did it take for someone to find him?

CHAPTER TWELVE

Temple of New Reason Commune

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Ukiah woke with something warm and furry gently touching his cheek. He opened his eyes to find a yellow tabby kitten sitting beside him, patting at his face. Its eyes seemed oversize for its large head, and all its fur was puffed out in a wild, disorganized manner. It was a tiny scarecrow version of a cat.

"You're a lot nicer than what I'd expected to wake up to." Ukiah heaved himself up to a sitting position, which made the room spin.

Said room was ten foot square and made of cinder-block walls, a steel door, and no windows. Except for the bare foam pad he sat on, a plastic twin food-and-water dish for the kitten, and a yet unused litter box, the room was empty. Light came from single bare bulb. The air was stale, as if circulation was limited. "Yeah, this is more what I expected."

The kitten clambered over his bare knees, needle-sharp claws coming out sporadically as it needed more traction. Ukiah petted it absently, generating a steady rough-engine purr, as he searched for Pack presence.

" Rennie? Bear? Hellena?" he silently called, and then, truly desperate, " Atticus?"

But there was no one there to reach. He was utterly alone in this desolate corner of the world.

Things could be worse, he reminded himself. He was at least alive and not a prisoner of the Ontongard—only a cult of homicidal lunatics.

"In circumstances like this," he told the kitten, "you have to keep things in perspective."

The cult had stripped him out of his soaked clothes and dressed him only in a pair of dark flannel boxers. If his situation weren't so dire, he'd mourn the loss of his black tracking shirt and favorite blue jeans. Maybe the cultists were just washing his clothes. His body reported massive bruising and demanded food. Closing his eyes and shutting out the kitten's furry warmth, he could sense the pounding of the surf in ceaseless rhythm and the heaviness of air that he'd come to associate with Massachusetts. How far from the coast did you have to get to escape those effects?

The kitten, which had been licking his thumb, decided to chew on it instead with tiny sharp teeth.

"Ow, ow, ow, stop that!" Ukiah jerked back his hand and checked to see if he was bleeding. Even a small amount of his blood could transform the kitten to a hybrid of himself. "And we don't need that on top of everything, now, do we?"

Outside, footsteps came quietly up to the door. The walker was wearing something soft-soled, like tennis shoes. Ukiah breathed deep, expecting to catch the person's scent, but the stale air reminded him that the room was close to airtight; there wouldn't be advance warning by that means.

Thus he was mildly off balance when a slot at eye level on the door slid open, revealing Ice's steady gaze.

Did Ice know that Ukiah had been fighting with Core when he'd been killed? Did he blame Ukiah for his lover's death? Did he hate Ukiah?

"They say eyes are the windows of the soul," Ice whispered after several minutes of silent study, echoing Ru's comment. Knowingly? Unknowingly? Ice's eyes were the color of the winter sky, a blue paled nearly to white. If Ukiah was seeing Ice's soul, it was a cold and emotionless thing. "I'd been so busy looking at the lost fount, the spoiled plans, the fleeing time, and Core's desire that I missed you completely. If I had just looked,I'd have seen that you were not human, and avoided all this."

What was "this"? Ukiah was afraid to ask.

"The question is," Ice continued, "what exactly are you?"

Ice seemed to want an answer.

"I'm hungry," Ukiah said. "And I need to pee."

"We left you a litter box, water, and food."

"That?" Ukiah pointed to the kitten's food to clarify that they were referring to the same thing. Yes, Ice meant the cat food. "I'm not eating that."

"What, it's not good enough for you?"

"If I eat it, what would the kitten eat?"

"Schrцdinger Five? He's food too."

It took a moment for Ukiah to realize he meant the kitten. "I'm not eating him!"

"Perhaps if you get hungry enough, you will."

The view slot slid closed.

***

Ukiah used the litter box, and was surprised at how well it absorbed the smell of urine. Afterward, he distracted his empty stomach by playing with Schrцdinger. What was the point, he wondered, of kidnapping him if the cult only planned to starve him to death?

He'd been awake for approximately four hours when someone came furtively up to the door. Ukiah felt half-blind, unable to guess who was on the other side. The slot slid open, letting in a male's scent. The eyes looking in were dark brown; they glanced first to the kitten in Ukiah's lap and then rose to meet his gaze.

"Are you still hungry?" the man whispered.

"I'm starving," Ukiah said truthfully.

"Shhhhh." The man turned his head, showing that his hair was dark brown, straight, and cropped tight around his ears, making them seem too large for his head. The cultist looked down the hall for a minute, apparently trying to judge whether their conversation was being overheard. "I have something you can eat," he whispered once he was convinced that it was safe. He poked a candy bar in through the narrow slot and jiggled it.

The smell of chocolate pulled Ukiah across the room to snatch the candy bar quickly before the cultist could change his mind.

"Thank you," Ukiah mumbled out of habit around the warm, rich hit of complex carbohydrates. It was a stupid thing to say, he realized, considering the situation.

"I'm Mouse," the cultist whispered.

"Why are you giving this to me?"

"I wanted to ask you a question."

"What?" Ukiah asked, leery of answering any of their questions. He'd die before he gave up Kittanning or allowed the cult near his moms.

"Is Joachim Wolf correct in his theory of holon principles?"

Ukiah paused in chewing, confounded. "Hmmm?"

"Well, he points out that people living in a two-dimensional world would perceive a sphere passing through their plane of existence as a circle that grows larger and shrinks. And that if a number of cylinders were scattered onto their dimensions, they couldn't perceive that those lying on their sides—appearing as rods—were the same objects as those standing upright—thus seeming to be circles."

"Yeah," Ukiah said, meaning he understood.

"So if a four-dimensional creature intersected its hand into their plane," Mouse illustrated with his fingertips and the slot, "the two-dimensional inhabitants would see the fingers as separate beings and not as a unified whole."

Ukiah stuck to an "uh-huh."

"So it's reasonable to correlate that humans are in essence all members of an ьber-being that we can't perceive, yet is immanently in us. Just as flocks of birds fly together because of the ьber-being of birds, and schools of fish swim together because of the ьber-being of fish, so do humans follow lines of thinking when there is no apparent means of communication. The same idea occurs to individuals who aren't exposed to the same materials or line of thought—as if there's an ether-space that we share."

Mouse said this with the fire of someone who considered himself correct, but then squelched the fire with, "Right?"

"I suppose that's how it would seem," Ukiah said carefully.

"Well, it would explain why the Fallen all seem to be one creature. They are, in essence, evil intersecting our plane of existence—one creature, appearing as many—yet, when you look closely, you can recognize each piece as part of the same whole."

Since Mouse was right and wrong, Ukiah decided to stick with saying he was completely right. "Yeah."

"Wow," Mouse whispered. "Can you touch me?"

From his scent, Ukiah recognized him now as one of the cultists on the boat. Surely they'd come in contact several times, but apparently Mouse wanted something much more focused.

Why was it that as individuals the cultists seemed, by and large, good people, yet as a whole the cult was ruthless and deadly? Was there something to this ьber-being theory, where the cultists had been massed together into something more dangerous than any one alone would have been? Ukiah extended his fingers into the slot and touched Mouse's hand resting on the sill beyond.

"Thank you," Mouse breathed. He eased the slot closed with obvious reluctance and scurried away.

***

Mouse proved to be the first in a series of odd conversations. A pale-eyed woman by the name of Ether came whispering questions about string theory, offering up a sausage wrapped in a pancake. Luckily ancient memories from the Pack held information of how the universe worked from civilizations that had greater knowledge than Earth.

The third cultist was a green-eyed man called Link, who wanted to know if his father, a soldier, was in heaven. The light dawned on Ukiah: The cultists, suddenly finding themselves in possession of an angel, wanted to tap his holy knowledge.

"Yes" seemed the best answer to give Link.

"Even though the commandment is: 'Thou shalt not kill'?"

"A father gives his children rules, so they can know 'good' from 'bad,' but he also forgives them when they do wrong, because he knows that it's part of growing up. What child can be perfect?"

Link gave him a pack of gum as a treat. Ukiah rationed himself to one, crinkling up the silver wrapper to make a cat toy for Schrцdinger.

***

Ukiah recognized Ice's stride when he returned. He got to his feet, wondering what would happen now.

Ice opened the door this time and gazed at Ukiah with an odd, uncertain look. While Ice didn't point it at Ukiah, he carried a stun baton. The kitten, Schrцdinger Five, darted about their feet, blissfully unaware.

"We only suspected that you were an angel, but you know, you don't really look . . . holy." Ice swept his gaze down over Ukiah, and shrugged. "Perhaps the Mormons are right."

"How do you know . . ." It felt wrong to claim he was angelic, so Ukiah let the question trail off.

"Demons are usually easy to spot," Ice explained. "They all hold their bodies the same. It's like one person wearing different skins. They shuffle around like automatons." Ice slowly circled Ukiah. "But you . . . you've got that wild-animal grace, so we didn't spot you. And then there's the matter of the Blissfire—you could pour a bag over a demon and it might as well be water. You reacted."

"No, it doesn't work on them," Ukiah observed truthfully.

"And when you capture a demon, it's like a rabid dog. There's no reasoning with a demon, and certainly you can't intimidate it."

And the cult had done both with him.

"So when we caught you and took you to Eden Court, we thought you were just a human, guarding over the nephilim." Ice shook his head. "We'd only dug into your past deep enough to find your name and address. Something made me double-check our information, and there it was, like handwriting on the wall—in June you'd been shot dead."

"You didn't sound sure that I was an angel before."

"The cat was the last test."

"Schrцdinger?" Ukiah glanced down at the small tuft of fur currently chewing on Ice's shoelaces.

"You put a living animal in with a demon, and it's dead in minutes." Ice picked up the kitten and examined it. "Demons can't stand to have life near them." Ice handed Ukiah the kitten. "Usually they'll eat the cat."

Schrцdinger Five, as in, numbers one through four had already been killed.

"Come," Ice said. "We'll find you something to eat."

Ice led Ukiah down a hallway lined with steel doors. Ukiah eyed them, wondering what else the cult had hidden behind them. The Ae? If nothing good came of this mess, then at least he had a much better chance of finding and destroying the Ae before the cult could use them.

"Where are we?" Ukiah asked.

"This is our ultimate haven," Ice said. "We call it Sanctuary."

They went up a flight of stairs and through another steel door into a large and surprisingly elegant kitchen. Natural stones formed the exterior walls. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over roiling surf, revealing that the building sat on a bluff next to the Atlantic. A dozen cultists were gathered in the kitchen, working on a meal. Ukiah recognized Mouse and Link from talking to them. Some of the cultists he recognized from Eden Court, their names gleaned from conversations there: Meta, Ray, Cursor, Qwerty, and Boolean. The other five Ukiah didn't know.

Ether entered the room carrying a bright yellow bottle of laundry detergent and a stack of folded clothing. "Link, you said you needed a buoy for the new lobster pot? I emptied the last of this out into a quart jar and"—she saw Ukiah and went shy—"rinsed it well."

"Thank you." Link took the empty bottle. "Cool, neon yellow. That will be easy to see."

"Here." Ether held out the clothing to Ukiah, blushing.

"Thank you," Ukiah said out of habit, and found that while the clothes were his, they no longer felt right; the seawater and harsh detergent had washed away everything familiar.

"You can . . ." Ether started to say something but then, glancing to Ice, fell silent.

She had been about to offer him privacy, Ukiah guessed, but Ice had stopped her. Angel or not, Ice still wasn't about to trust him. Putting the kitten down, Ukiah dressed, aware that the cultists watched him, some with awe, others with guarded suspicion. He had the package of gum tucked into his waistband. As he took the pack out, Ice stopped him long enough to see what he had in his hand. The cult leader gave Link a hard look, but let Ukiah pocket the gum.

Like Atticus's beach house, Sanctuary was an open, sprawling home. From where Ukiah stood, he could see into a living room with a vaulted, rough-timbered ceiling and a dining room that could seat twelve people without squeezing. Like the kitchen, the windows of both rooms looked out over the ocean.

He was zipping up his pants when the realization hit him. "We're on an island!"

"Yes." Ice watched him with the cold blue eyes.

Ukiah went out the kitchen door to a flagstone patio. The stone house had been built on the highest point of the low-slung island, probably sometime in the eighteen-hundreds. Ukiah could see that from the north to the south points, the island was a mile long and a quarter of that distance from east to west. Grass and low shrubs made up most of the vegetation—less than a dozen pine trees dotted the island. The only creature moving seemed to be a solitary seagull riding a stiff wind overhead; its cry echoed his inward cry of dismay.

A thin veil of fog hazed the sky, obscuring the horizons. To the west he could make out tiny barren islands and then an immense nothingness of water and fog. To the east the land curved around a small bay with a dock and a garage-sized boathouse. Two boats sat tied to the docks; one was the one that the cult had used to kidnap him. Four cultists, heavily armed, guarded the boats.

Of the mainland, Ukiah could see nothing. Never in his life had he felt this alone.

Ice and Mouse had trailed out behind him, apparently not afraid he would try to escape. Escape to where?

"How far is it to the mainland?" Ukiah asked them.

Mouse glanced toward Ice. "Too far to swim, really it is."

Rennie had shown Ukiah a map of New England—yesterday? Tuesday? He'd been losing track of days since the cult entered his life. If they were north of Cape Cod, swimming west would get him to the mainland. If they were south of the Cape's peninsula, however, he could swim for days before reaching land.

What should he do?

Ukiah retained enough of Rennie's memories to know that, in his place, Rennie would have tried to kill as many of the cultists as he could before they took him down, snarling and biting. Animal's recent death, however, strengthened Ukiah's abhorrence of killing a human. And even if he wanted to kill the cultists, he wasn't sure he could—so far they were seriously outclassing him in fighting.

What would Max do in his situation? Try as he might, Ukiah couldn't imagine Max ever being mistaken for an angel by homicidal Christians.

Atticus? His brother would pretend to cooperate, gather information, and wait patiently for the chance to put it to use.

Mouse nervously gestured to the kitchen door. "Come. Get some food."

Ukiah's stomach clenched tight on the thought of food, so he let himself be led back into the house to eat. The seating at the table had obviously been carefully planned. Ice took the thronelike chair at the head of the table—angel or not, the new cult leader wasn't giving up his position to Ukiah. Surprisingly, it was quiet Mouse that sat to Ice's right, and Ether to his left. The remaining cultists sat in the ten chairs flanking the table.

The only chair left open for Ukiah was the one at the foot of the table. Ukiah sat, wondering whose place he was filling. Core's? No, he would have been at the head in the throne, with Ice to his right.

"Let us say grace." Ice held out his hands to Mouse and Ether.

The cultists joined in a chain of hands and burly Meta and diminutive Qwerty shyly held out their hands to Ukiah. He eyed them uneasily for traces of Invisible Red and could see no telltale glitter. He reached out and clasped them loosely.

"Our Father, who art in heaven," Ice prayed aloud. The other cultists had closed their eyes, but Ice kept his cold blue stare on Ukiah. "We—your chosen, your holy warriors—give thanks for our daily bread and the new weapon you've put in our hands. Guide us to use him wisely. Watch over us and protect us as we face evil. Amen."

Ukiah silently said his own prayer. Oh, God, help me find the Ae before these idiots do something stupid. Amen.

"Amen," the cultists echoed.

The cult had been taking advantage of the sea and land; the table was laden with lobster bisque, baked cod, late squash, roasted potatoes, and pumpkin bread. For several minutes the food sucked in all his attention. Luckily the soup came first, and after its jolt of creamy calorie richness, he managed to pull his focus back to the cultists.

They'd been watching him with a mix of shy reverence and intense curiosity. Silence reigned at the table, broken only by the chime of silverware on china and the soft slurping of soup.

"So, if you . . . know"—Ukiah almost said "think" but decided that "know" was a safer word—"that I'm an angel, why did you attack me? What is it you want from me?"

"We need your help," Ice said. "Or at least, we hope you can help us. Can you speak the language of the demons?"

"Of course he can." Mouse flinched from the hard look Ice gave him. "Well, he's an angel."

Was it safe to admit he did, or was this another test? "I don't understand. There aren't any demons here."

"We have recordings of their conversations," Ice said. "We knew from the start that it would be suicide to try to take out the demons where they nest. Studying their habits, finding their weaknesses, and exploiting them are the only intelligent methods."

Ukiah nodded at the soundness of this.

"By doing statistical modeling," Mouse said, "we've identified certain patterns in their behavior."

"The number of the beast is six-six-six," Ether said with bright eyes.

"Um, yeah." Mouse was momentarily derailed. "What that means is that the demons usually perform any function in a collective of six."

"Unless a demon is trying to pass as a human—then they go solo," Ether inserted.

Mouse bobbed his head to agree that this was true. "Six of these collectives gather into nests for a total of thirty-six individuals typical for any one nest. And each geographic area will have six nests, arranged in a hexagonal figure."

"So any one occupied area will have two hundred and sixteen demons," Ice said. "And we can't take on that number by ourselves."

This was news to Ukiah. While Hex acknowledged that he was most comfortable as six individuals, Ukiah suspected that the adherence to the multiples of six was totally unconscious. With their memories of the Ontongard, the Pack assumed they knew everything they needed to know about their enemy without realizing there were things that the Ontongard didn't know about themselves. "You mapped the nest locations and noticed a pattern?"

"There seems to be some variation to that which might be caused by geographic anomalies." Mouse rearranged the silverware, stealing some from those near him, to form a six-sided figure of forks and knives. "Normal hexagon." He placed a saltshaker at one point, and then dimpled the lines of that corner. "One with a body of water, highways, or whatnot in the way."

"Mouse, I'm sure he knows all this," Ice said.

Apparently there were some drawbacks to pretending to be a perfect being.

"Well, I just want to make sure all our assumptions are sound," Mouse said. "This has all been guesswork."

Ice sighed and waved his hand, inviting Mouse to continue.

"Well, we experimented on burning them out of a nest to see how they chose nest sites." Mouse removed the saltshaker and reformed the hexagon. "We discovered that we could predict where they move to. Their movement is very simple and organic, and we created a computer program to mimic it. If you burn one nest, they'll abandon all the surviving nests except one to maintain the hexagonal shape and yet avoid the area of the destroyed nest." Mouse shifted the hexagon around the point that once held the saltshaker. "They always keep the nest farthest from the burn, rotating it in this manner."

Ice made a noise of disgust. "Destroying them would have been faster if we could have done a full assault on the nests."

"Their senses are very keen, so laying traps for them once they're settled in is nearly impossible," Mouse said. "Also there's the slight problem of getting into a nest after they establish it. But by being able to predict where they'll move to, we can prep a nest, bugging all the rooms and wiretapping the phones."

"The bugging devices are useless," Ice said. "They don't talk to one another. We think they have some type of telepathy that allows them to act as units without premeditating their actions."

"They do," Ukiah said.

"But they do use the phone," Mouse said. "We think there's a limited range to their telepathy, which the nests fall within. The only time they use the phone is to communicate with demons not at one of the nests."

"When we firebombed one nest, the other five nests reacted instantly," Ice said. "We did a hit-and-run operation and still barely escaped. They definitely have some type of ranged telepathy going on."

"They're very insectlike," one cultist noted. "Like bees in a hive making honeycombs, they exhibit the same behavioral patterns again and again. I'm not even sure that you could term them intelligent in the same manner that we classify humans."

"Let's not get into the intelligence fight," Ice snapped.

"They don't spend a lot of time talking on the phone," Mouse continued. "When they do, it's in a mix of English and demon tongue. What seems to happen is that they need to talk about something that doesn't have the equivalent English word available, and they switch into demon tongue until an English word will yank them back out. Because of their switching back and forth, we've been able to create a dictionary of sorts."

"But the conversations are cryptic," Ice complained. "It's more like they're dictating notes to themselves than having actual dialogue. Never any chitchat: How's the kids, what's the weather like."

Because in truth,Ukiah thought, the telephone acts more like an artificial neuron, connecting two halves of the same brain, than a device that two very different people use to communicate.

Schrцdinger Five chose that moment to climb up his leg, all needle-sharp claws extended.

"Ow! Schrцdinger!" Ukiah caught the kitten before he could wreak more havoc. "What? Are you hungry? Here." Ukiah offered a bit of his baked cod to the kitten, which it needed to sniff cautiously for a full minute before deciding it was fit to eat.

The cultists had gone silent. He looked up to find them watching him with nervous intent. Letting him live, he suddenly realized, was a supreme act of faith and courage for them—they knew what a Get was capable of. His existence had balanced completely on the well-being of the kitten. They watched now—with bated breath—to see if they'd been wrong.

Blissfully ignorant of his importance, Schrцdinger rumbled into a tiny, contented purr.

"I'm not one of them." Ukiah carefully selected another bite of fish for the kitten.

"You are too gentle to be one of them." Ice was a man whose vision was limited by his belief. He knew evil, recognized it at a distance. But his universe contained only two types of good: human and angel. He had seen Ukiah as wholly human until proved otherwise—but that left only angel. Apparently, though, common sense was warring with his beliefs; he sounded dubious even as he confirmed that Ukiah wasn't a "demon."

"You recorded their conversations." Ukiah distracted him back to the Ontongard.

"Yes." Ice delayed saying more by taking a bite of his cod and chewing it thoroughly. After carefully choosing his words, he continued. "The conversation gives us glimpses of their plans, but it's like a large jigsaw puzzle, flung out onto the ground and then partially obscured. We've been picking up the pieces, turning them this way and that, trying to fit them together and usually failing."

"Actually, part of the problem is that there are several puzzles all mixed together." Mouse seized the analogy.

"We think." Ice cautioned Mouse with a look, "for example, they suddenly moved a seed nest to Buffalo. We saw it as an opportunity to learn more, and followed. The demons there did extensive land surveys, apparently testing the stability of the area. They killed several key employees of the local electric company. They infiltrated a truck dealership. They secured warehouses in the middle of nowhere and shipped in extensive supplies of cable and wire. There were only thirty-six demons, and we raided the nest when we knew it was practically empty. We were hoping for written plans, records, anything that would give us an idea what they were planning. Nothing."

Because the Ontongard's ability to pass on perfect memories negated the need for written plans.

"They referred to Buffalo with a word we haven't been able to translate," Mouse said, and then he cleared his throat and attempted the word, a rough guttural bark.

"No," Ether said. "It's more . . ." She got the pronunciation right and Ukiah recognized the word: Landing site/invasion point.

"You know what it means." Ice leaned forward, his gaze intense. "Tell us."

The Ontongard must have planned to land the seed ship at Buffalo and tap into the extensive power grid of Niagara Falls. Luckily, the Pack had triggered the ship's self-destruct, and all their plans were now moot. But explaining the ship to the cult, who believed the Ontongard were demons, perhaps wouldn't be wise.

The cult stirred, put into disquiet by his silence.

"Ah, it . . . it's got a lot of meanings . . . if that's really the word they were using." Ukiah wished for his brother's smooth lies. He decided on the less specific of the meanings. "I think they were using the word that means 'invasion point.' They planned to launch a massive assault from Buffalo."

"Planned," Ice echoed. "But something happened in Pittsburgh. Things went very wrong for them. And you were there."

What to tell them? He was a horrible liar. He decided to stick to a version that Max and he created to tell authorities. "They stumbled into me. They attempted to kill me and they kidnapped my son."

"And the others? Your foster father? The female FBI agent? Are they angels too?"

"No!" Ukiah bolted to his feet, spilling the kitten out of his lap. "Leave them alone!"

The cult reacted with impressive speed. Even before the kitten hit the ground, all the cultists had weapons drawn and pointed at him.

Ukiah put up his hands, warning off their attack. "Wait!" And when the cultists didn't fire, he continued, trying to keep his voice level. "They're human. You mustn't harm them. If you hurt them, they're not like me—they won't survive what you've done to me! Please don't involve them."

"We'll leave them in peace as long as you cooperate with us." Ice motioned for him to sit. "Eat, and then we'll start working."

Ukiah sat stiffly and ate only because he would need the food later, after he learned where the Ae were stored.

***

After a tense dinner, the cultists split into two groups. Ice, Mouse, Ether, and Link herded him like shepherds with a flock of one into the living room, which was crowded with computer equipment. The rest stayed to clear the table and relieve those who hadn't eaten yet.

They indicated where Ukiah should sit, and Mouse settled nervously beside him.

"We've got hours of recordings, broken up into shorter sound bites to make them easier to handle." Mouse handed him a headset. "What we're going to do is play a recording for you to translate. Speak into this microphone. It's hooked to that computer there with speech-recognition software. It will type in your translations as you talk."

"Okay." Ukiah slid the headset on. The word "okay" appeared on the monitor beside him.

"Here's the first." Mouse opened a folder labeled "Angel" and clicked on the first file.

A man spoke, in Hex's emotionally dead voice, a phrase in the Ontongard language: "Returning/rejoining/regrouping at gathering/den/nest."

"The speaker is returning to the nest," Ukiah said, and the words wrote themselves on the text.

Mouse glanced to Ice, who nodded. "All right, and the next one?"

They played through eleven more segments, growing longer in length, but of no great importance; all in Ontongard with no English intermixed. The speakers changed, but not the tone or delivery. Played back-to-back, it was like listening to a dozen people trying to mimic one person. Mouse nodded as Ukiah translated them, as if he already knew what the clips contained.

They were testing him, Ukiah realized. They were seeing if he actually understood the language and was not just making up random comments.