Kate Daniels 03 - Magic Strikes

eyes and looked as if he wanted to strangle me. I kept going until the whole story was out on the table. Jim decided he needed more tea. He probably needed something a lot stronger, but he’d have to fight Doolittle for it. The Pack doctor took a dim view of alcohol consumption.
    “Did you tell Curran?”
    “No.”
    “Does he know about this office?” Please say yes.
    “No. This is one of my private places.”
    “So as far as he knows, you and your crew went AWOL?”
    He nodded.
    “Rogue,” Doolittle said. “The correct term is ‘rogue.’ What the cat isn’t telling you is that right now Curran thinks a good chunk of his security force split from the Pack. He’s turning the city upside down looking for Jim. There is an order out for Jim to contact Curran.”
    “I’ll call him in the morning,” Jim said.
    “Which will only make things worse, because the Beast Lord will give the order to return to the Keep, and, you see, this young man here will decline.”
    Jim growled low in his throat. It bounced from Doolittle like dry peas from a hard wall.
    “Now why would you do that?” I stared at Jim.
    “I have my reasons,” he said.
    “To refuse a direct order is a breach of Pack Law,” Doolittle said. “By tradition, Jim will have three days to change his mind. And if he doesn’t, Curran will have to do what the alpha does when he is defied.” Doolittle shook his head. “It’s a hard thing to contemplate, killing your friend. Bound to make a man crazy.”
    Crazy Curran ranked right up there with monsoons, tornadoes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.
    I turned to Doolittle. “And you? How did he get you into this mess?”
    “We kidnapped him,” Jim said. “In broad daylight with much noise. He’s safe from Curran.”
    “And right after I got Derek into the tank, I had to treat my kidnappers for injuries.” Doolittle shook his head. “I didn’t take kindly to being shoved into a cart and sat upon.”
    Since Jim had gone through all this trouble to set Doolittle up as an innocent victim, Jim must’ve expected a shit storm of hurricane proportions when Curran found them.
    “I was kidnapped.” Doolittle smiled. “I have little to worry about. But someone who helps Jim hide from his alpha of her own free will, well, that is a completely different story.”
    “Don’t you have someplace to be?” Jim’s eyes flashed green.
    Doolittle got up and rested a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Think before you sign your death warrant.”
    He left the room. It was me and Jim.
    In a fight, Curran was death. He’d never liked me. He’d warned me to stay away from the Pack’s power struggles. I’d get no leeway this time.
    “Jim?”
    He looked at me and I saw it, right there, shining clear through all his mental shields: fear. Jim was terrified. Not for himself—I’d known him for a long time and threats to his personal well-being didn’t inspire terror in him. He was off balance, as if he’d been knocked down in the dark and had sprung to his feet, not sure where the next blow would come from.
    He had “his reasons,” and I needed to know them. “Tell me why I shouldn’t call Curran right now and blow this whole thing out of the water.”
    Jim looked into his glass. Muscles clenched on his arms. A brutal internal battle was taking place inside him, and I wasn’t sure which side was winning.
    “Seven years ago, a string of loup infestations hit the Appalachians,” he said. “I had just started with the Pack. They brought me along as an enforcer. Tennessee let us in right away, but it took North Carolina two years to decide they couldn’t handle that shit on their own. We went in. It’s all mountains. Old Scotch-Irish families, separatists, religious nuts, they all run there and squat on their own personal mountaintops and then they breed, and their kids set up trailers and cabins right there, a spit away. People come there to be by themselves. Everybody minds their own business. Nobody talked to us. Families had gone loup, entire clans, and nobody knew. And sometimes they knew and didn’t do anything about it. You’ve been to the Buchanan compound. You know what we found.”
    Death. They found death and kiddie pools full of blood and half-eaten children. Women and men, raped, torn to pieces, and raped again, after they were dead. People flayed alive. They found loups.
    “We were combing through Jackson County when the local cops called us. A house had caught on fire on