Part Five

Grahme was asleep in the light when the phone began to ring.

"Don't," Casey whispered, flinging one arm over his chest.

He blinked the bedroom into view and lifted his head from the pillow.

"It's the special ring," he said. The special telephone ring was only used for emergencies.

She flexed her arm in front of his face. "Special ring," she agreed, and her wedding band flashed in the sunlight coming through the window.

Grahme smiled but reached out for the phone on the bedside table. "Wrong one," he told Casey.

A dial tone rang in his ear. "Still wrong," he muttered, knocking the phone off the table.

"Goddammit," Casey said. "We've only got two phones in this room."

She leaned over him, revealing a tantalizing stretch of her back and draping him in tangled red hair. "Hello?" she demanded, then flopped back onto the futon and shoved the receiver toward Grahme. "It's for you."

"Hi, Lauren," he said as he took it. She was the only one who ever used the phone's double-ring capability. Casey curled into the crook of his shoulder and twisted a lock of his hair with hers.

"I'm sorry to wake you." Lauren's voice was perfectly accentless, the English American businessmen heard themselves speaking.

"Not at all."

"My apologies to Casey, then."

He watched Casey braiding their hair together and wondered how old Lauren had been when she started addressing everyone so formally.

"She didn't need any more beauty sleep anyway. What's up?"

"I've been looking over a news report Arena Dya'Sona sent me from Minnesota."

"Don't tell me: the snow bunnies ‘shifters are revolting."

It didn't even sound as if Lauren smiled. "It's possible that the Night World has captured the fourth Wild Power."

Mentally, Grahme sat straight up in bed. In reality, he didn't move an inch. Turned to stone. Lost his body.

Casey looked at him. "What's wrong?"

He remained frozen. "It's also probable, given their recent behavior," Lauren went on. "There's been an unusual amount of activity in that area for the last several weeks."

Casey laid a hand of his chest. "Grahme, you're not breathing."

She smacked his breastbone and he inhaled roughly. "Where are you?" he asked.

"My office."

"I'm coming up."

He tried to hang the phone up and managed to dump it on the phone with its companion. "What the hell's wrong?" Casey asked as he stumbled off the platform their futon cushion rested on.

Grahme yanked open a dresser drawer and pulled out the first pair of jeans his hand touched. "Lauren thinks the Night World has the fourth Wild Power."

Another drawer, an undershirt.

Casey sat up in bed and said, "We're fucked, aren't we?"

He looked at her, eyes no longer sleepy, skin still damp from his mouth. "We don't know anything for certain."

She turned her gaze away. Her long, slender fingers rumpled the sheets further.

It didn't matter what he said, she was already leaping forward in her mind to the worst possible outcome. He buttoned up a sweater, then stepped to the edge of the bed and leaned against it.

"Don't jump to any conclusions," he told her. "Anything could happen."

"That's what I'm afraid of."

He kissed her forehead. "Go back to sleep. I'll call if there's news."

"Don't be afraid to use the special ring."

He didn't think she was talking about the telephone. "Thanks."

It was an hour past noon. The vampires of Thierry's great mansion were asleep, as was most every one else. A grizzly-shifter standing guard on the grand stairs nodded as Grahme passed him quickly. Lauren's office was on fourth, connected to her bedroom by a small door. The intense little room without windows or the spacious balcony of Thierry's office disturbed Grahme, as did the cell-like bedroom lacking in any sort of personal touches. He didn't make the trip often.

Her room was directly beneath the one where her brother slept with the Witch Child in his arms. Grahme was sure it was a coincidence.

Low lights lit dull edges on the photographs spread about the office. Lauren didn't work at a desk, she worked at a round coffee table large enough to map out a plan for world-wide domination on. When he entered, she was on her knees with a looking-glass and a pen light.

Grahme nodded to Gita and Bernard and closed the door behind himself. "You shouldn't have hung up so quickly," Lauren said. "You may not have needed to come down."

She was twenty-three years old, cool, elegant, untouchable, and the most confident person Grahme had ever met. He had loved her parents intensely, warm, homebody Garin and laughing, wicked Chai-Chablis, but if there had ever been anything of them in Lauren, it had died young.

He supposed that watching them be tortured to death might had done that to her.

Of course, Stephen-Kyle was entirely the opposite. He could light up a room with only his presence, make everyone feel at home. Lauren was beautiful and brilliant, but the air surrounding her made dinner feel like a meeting of the UN.

"What do you have?" he asked her.

She dropped the pretense of making the situation seem less dire and beckoned him quickly to her collage of photos. "Three weeks ago," she began, pointing to a snapshot of a short, balding werewolf. "Cedar Merril arrived in Lost River, Minnesota. He's not the sort of person the Night World would have sent for nothing."

"I remember him from Savannah," Grahme said.

"Right. Three days later, a van working for Dead of Night Music Corporation, which the Night World controls, arrived. Two days after, there's a poisoning at the home of Ashlea and Lewis Collary, which they share with their four children, Marie, Sarah, Lane, and Christopher. Their food is laced with enough LSD to cause Lewis to pull out his police weapon and open fire on his family. Marie, Sarah, and Christopher survive. Christopher is pronounced DOA at the hospital, Sarah spends four days in a coma before dying, and Marie is a vegetarian and is unaffected because she doesn't eat fish, so she had the sense to hide.

"Marie claims that two women entered the house and were surprised to find that everyone was still conscious, which is when her father went for his gun. The police have their doubts, since she says that the women changed into animals when they were assaulted, but they put her in protective custody at her insistence. A week and a half later, three armored Night World vehicles enter the city. The day after, the back wall of the safe house she's staying in is blown up in a huge burst of what the neighbors insist was an explosion of blue fire. Those were their exact words. Marie's body is never found, the Night World is gone from Lost River by dawn."

She tapped pictures as she talked, of the Collarys' home, the jail, the safe house. "How old is Marie?" Grahme asked.

"She's in the time frame. But I don't think she's the fourth Wild Power."

He glanced at her. Only Lauren. "No?"

"Everything's too perfect."

"A botched kidnapping is perfect?"

She shook her head. "Look at the chain of events again. First off, why are there so many pictures from all this? We don't have the people to monitor every backwater town, we're lucky to keep track of what's going on in most major cities. Arena took these because she received a photography award and a free two-week vacation to Lost River, which has a population of 1,700 people and precisely two tourist attractions. Arena never entered the contest, the sponsors claim to have seen her work at a showing. Which showing was never specified. Second, a Night World power like Cedar Merril walking into a hotel lobby where a photographer for Circle Daybreak happens to be staying is absurdly lucky."

"Is she-"

"No, I already had her checked out. Arena's clean, it's the sponsors of the photography award we can't clear."

"Why would the Night World want us to know they were in Lost River capturing the Wild Power? We could have swooped in for the kill."

"Not if there is no kill. Point three, the Night World is sloppy, but not this sloppy. LSD is hardly a tranquilizer, only an idiot would use it like this. Four, what the hell were these next door neighbors doing sitting on their back porch in the middle of a December night in Minnesota, and isn't it convenient that they saw the explosion? They even used the words 'blue fire' in their statement to the police. Five," she opened the cover of a folder and removed three sheets of typed paper, "here is a report saying that there were traces of explosives found in the wreckage of the house. The absolutely non-magical kind a human might use to blow up a building. And finally, point six: If Marie is a Wild Power and she used the blue fire, how did the Night World still manage to capture her?"

Grahme had lowered himself until he was sitting on the floor next to her, the coffee table hitting him at waist-level. "All right," he said, "you've got me. What does all of this mean?"

"It means the Night World faked finding the fourth Wild Power to throw us. Tensions are running high, everyone is waiting for something to happen and nothing has."

"Why would they fake it?"

"Maybe to force us to admit that we don't know where the fourth is."

"Or?" Somehow he just knew there was an or.

"Or, they may have been trying to draw attention away from the construction of concentration camps in Texas."

Her bombshell had the desired affect. He stared at her, speechless, until she said, "Of course, we have a lot less proof of the camps. The Night World knows how to cover its tracks when it wants to."

The second set of photos was less impressive. Just trucks, with scribbled notes in the margins about what they were loaded with. Building supplies, concrete, barracks. Manicles.

"They think they're going to win," Lauren said, drawing him away from the images. "Assuming something happens on Solstice, and we still don't have the fourth Wild Power, all signs say they'll end up in power."

"Something has to be done."

"Agreed. I've sent a survailance teams to Texas already-"

"No, something bigger."

"We don't have any hard evidence."

"It doesn't matter, this isn't the time for us to take chances, not with the Millenium this close-"

"Grahme." Her eyes were hard. "There's nothing we can do, unless you want to wage war on the Night World, which certainly can't be done without consulting Thierry."

He stood up and paced around the side of the table opposite her. The office's tightness was bearing down on him. Lauren watched him with an expression of strength during a disaster, but there was something else on her face, a fierce pleasure she worked hard to hide, a twitch in her cheek bordering on glee. She didn't hate humans, she wasn't rooting for the Night World, but some part of her loved this war, the savagery of making decisions that could save or kill people. She was a kid playing Capture the Flag.

"Get the evidence. Do whatever it takes, but get it quickly and call me."

Lauren's nod was startled. She had obviously expected him to argue with her about not attacking immediately. He wondered how many dramatic protests she had already written in her mind.

He went into the hallway without saying anything else. His hands clenched around the banister until the metal bent. Below him, in the grand ballroom, his son was sitting with Iliana on a double-ended chaise lounge. A blanket covered their legs. There was a stack of magazines on the floor beside them. Stephen-Kyle leafed through one and showed Iliana a picture, which she laughed at before returning to the sketch pad in her hand.

The room was silent but for the steady click of a guard's heels. Grahme watched them sit together, their infrequent vocal explanations. Soon the time would come when they wouldn't need to speak at all, when they would be able to converse mentally from a continent away.

Lauren's strangeness couldn't be his fault, could it? Not when Stephen-Kyle had turned out so well. It must have been seeing her parents die like that, watching helplessly while her baby sister's scull was crushed. She had been old enough then to understand in a way her little brother couldn't, and maybe despite all the love Grahme had tried to give his adopted children, he hadn't been able to wash those memories away.

He wandered back to his room, edgy. He pulled the heavy black curtains shut and lay down beside Casey without waking her, then stared at the ceiling. He wouldn't call Thierry, not yet. His friend needed the time with Hannah, away from all this, and besides, there was no solid proof. He would wait until Lauren could show him something conclusive.

Pray Isis she never found anything conclusive.