"No, not at all. I didn't answer because I thought it best to hold my tongue about the rest. If you think that's why you're upset--"
"It is."
He was quiet for a moment, then reached over to rub my back, fingers moving to the tight ball between my shoulders. "Whatever the reason for your worry, I don't hold you responsible for what happened. We've been through this before. I should have sent you two someplace else. I thought I was being clever, but I didn't even realize something happened until I tried contacting Clay that night--"
"Have you done it since?" I asked, straightening up and turning to face him. "Have you contacted Clay since he's been captured? You've tried, haven't you? What did he say? Is he--"
Jeremy put his fingers to my lips. "Yes, I've tried. Tried and tried again. But I can't get through to him. It's the drugs."
There was another possible reason why Jeremy couldn't get in touch with Clay, but I didn't dare speak it. Jeremy seemed to read it in my face, though, and shook his head.
"Don't think that. You saw today's picture. He doesn't look good, but he's alive."
He sounded so tired. The Pack was under siege, and the mutts were ripping down the defenses as fast as Jeremy could erect them. It was wearing him out. I wished I didn't see that. I wished I could believe, as Antonio and Nick did, that the Pack Alpha was indestructible. That's the way Pack werewolves were raised, secure in the knowledge that no matter what happens, their Alpha will protect them. That was wrong. Plain wrong. It worked great under normal circumstances, when the Pack was never troubled by more than one mutt at a time and the Alpha's job was more focused on settling internal dissent and presenting a united front against the mutts. Faced with a problem of this size, though, the Alpha needed help, not just in fighting the threat, but in deciding how to fight it. Such collaboration was unthinkable. Jeremy might bounce his ideas off Antonio, but he'd never think of asking for advice, nor would any Pack member dream of offering it. I did. I wanted to tell Jeremy what I thought and try to help him, but I knew I couldn't. If he felt overwhelmed now, having me second-guess his plans would only make things worse. Like Antonio and Nick, Jeremy was bound by the same misconception of leadership. The responsibility of saving the Pack fell squarely on his shoulders. The only way I could help was to plot strategies on my own.
CHAPTER 31
AWAKENING
The next morning, Jeremy and Antonio took off again. I went to work. Or, at least, I prepared to go back to work. I called the hospital to check on Philip, then sat at the desk in the study, fired up Clay's laptop, and sat there, looking from the phone to the laptop and back again. These were my only tools for finding Clay and I had no idea what to do now with either one. I pulled out a pad of paper and reviewed what I knew, hoping some new avenue of exploration would leap out at me.
We had two experienced mutts left, half of the original number. This was reassuring, until I reminded myself that we'd eliminated the lesser mutts, leaving the more dangerous ones alive. Not so good. We also had two new mutts. LeBlanc, I knew, and understood how he worked. Again, I felt a momentary burst of complacency before remembering that I hadn't even met Cain's protege, Victor Olson. So there it was, the next step: find out more about Olson. Of course, deciding what I was going to do wasn't the same as determining how I was going to do it. Of the two tools I had available, the Internet seemed the best bet, namely because I wasn't sure where to even begin with the telephone.
Cain had said that his protege's name was Victor Olson and that he'd broken him out of jail in Arizona where he'd been imprisoned for sex crimes. Since Daniel had found Olson, his crimes must have been big enough to warrant media attention. A simple search on the name and city brought up seven complete matches. The first one was for some long-dead city father named Victor Olson. The next four matches were for Vic "Mad Dog" Olson, which sounded promising, until I clicked on one site and found an advertisement for a personal injury lawyer. On the last two I hit pay dirt. Victor Olson had escaped from jail four months ago, cutting short a life sentence for raping and killing a ten-year-old-girl. I reread his victim's age several times. Cain said Olson had been in jail for "screwing around with a couple girls." I'd assumed by "girls" he really meant women. Obviously not. Suppressing my revulsion, I read the article. Olson was a lifetime pedophile who'd been charged several times with acts of indecency, but the charges had always been dismissed when the judge ruled his victims' testimony "unreliable." With the last victim, the judge had to admit the testimony provided by her dead body was reasonably reliable. I skipped to the news article on the other site and discovered why Daniel had chosen Olson. He was a stalker. He chose his victims with care and trailed them for weeks before making his move. One detective said he'd never seen someone so skilled at "the hunt"--his choice of words, not mine.
I spent another hour going over what I knew. When that led nowhere, I tracked down Nick in the exercise room and repeated everything to him, hoping either he'd think of something or the very act of verbalizing it would help me think of something. Nick listened, but didn't have any ideas. Nick wasn't used to having ideas. That sounded worse than I intended. What I meant was that he was accustomed to following the plans of others. He was an enthusiastic lieutenant and a loyal friend, but he wasn't exactly--how do I put this nicely--not exactly a deep thinker. Talking to him didn't help me think of anything either. So I put aside my papers, turned off the laptop, and did the most mind-numbing, menial chore I could imagine. I did the laundry.
No one had done laundry since we'd gone to Toronto, probably because i
t was the last thing on anyone's mind. I didn't realize the full implications of that until I was folding the first load and came across one of Clay's shirts. I stood there in the laundry room holding the shirt. Clay had worn it the day before we left. I don't know why I remembered that. It was a dark green golf shirt, one of the few departures from Clay's plethora of plain white and black cotton T-shirts. It must have been a gift from Logan, who'd considered it his thankless job to add some fashion to Clay's wardrobe. I stared at the shirt, thinking about Logan and the grief surged fresh. Then I thought about Peter, remembered him ribbing Clay about his monochromatic wardrobe, threatening to give him a stack of the most garish concert T-shirts he could find. Blinking hard, I tucked the shirt under a stack of Nick's pants and kept going.
After I'd folded the first load, I took it upstairs to put the clothes away. I left Clay's pile for last. For several minutes, I stood outside his closed bedroom door and screwed up the courage to go inside. I rushed through the job, stuffing shirts, underwear, and socks into his drawers. His jeans went in the closet. Yes, he hung up his jeans, probably because if he didn't, there wouldn't be anything in there. I was putting the jeans on hangers when I saw the pile of wrapped presents on the closet floor. Without even checking the tags, I knew what they were. Part of me wanted to slam the door shut and run. I didn't want to see them. Yet I couldn't resist. I reached down and picked up the top gift. It was wrapped in Christmas paper, bright candy canes and bows. On the tag, one name scrawled across, obliterating the TO: and FROM: label. Elena.
Nick had said Clay expected me back. I'd half expected to come back last Christmas myself, not through my own volition, but magically, as if I could fall asleep in Toronto on Christmas Eve and wake up in Stonehaven the next morning. Easter, Thanksgiving, birthdays, they'd all passed unnoticed, untainted by the urge of return. Christmas was different.
Growing up, I'd hated Christmas. Of all the holidays, it was the one that most glorified the family, all those movies and TV specials and advertisements and magazine covers showing happy families going through the rites of the season. That's not to say I was deprived of the normal trappings of Christmas. My foster families weren't complete ogres. I got presents and turkey dinners. I went to parties and midnight mass. I sat on Santa's knee and learned to sing "Up on the Rooftop" for the school concert. But without real family bonds, all the rituals of the season were as phony as sprayed-on snow. So when I moved out on my own at eighteen, I stopped celebrating. Then I met Clay. That first year together, I finally felt that a true Christmas was possible. Sure, I wasn't surrounded by parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles, but I had someone. I had the first link to everything else I wanted so bad.
I should say that Clay had no idea how to celebrate Christmas. It wasn't an official werewolf holiday. Okay, there were no official werewolf holidays, but that wasn't the point. The Pack recognized Christmas only as a time to get together as they did umpteen other times a year. They exchanged presents, the same as they did on birthdays, but that was the extent of the celebration. So what did Clay do when I hinted that I wanted a full-blown Christmas? He gave me one.
Although I didn't know it at the time, Clay spent weeks researching the holiday. Then he gave me Christmas with all the trimmings. We went out and cut down a tree--then realized the impossibility of getting it back to his apartment on his motorcycle. We had the tree delivered and decorated it. We made shortbread, gingerbread, and sugar cookies, and discovered how hard it is to form gingerbread men without a cookie cutter. We made a fruitcake, which was probably still on the balcony of his old apartment, where we'd eventually used it to hold open the door. We bought lights for the balcony, then had to go back to the hardware store for an extension cord, then had to go back for wire cutters to snip a hole in the screen to slip the cord through. We listened to Christmas music, watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas and rented It's a Wonderful Life, though Clay fell asleep during the latter--okay, we both fell asleep during the latter. We drank eggnog by the fire, or by a magazine photo of a fire that Clay stuck on the wall. No tradition went unobserved. It was the perfect Christmas. We didn't make it to Easter.
There was no Christmas the next year. I assume Christmas still occurred in the outside world, but at Stonehaven, it passed unnoticed. I'd barely got out of the cage by winter. Clay was still banished. Logan came to see me, but I drove him away, as I'd driven him away the half-dozen other times he tried to visit. Nick sent a gift. I threw it out unopened. Before Clay bit me, I'd met both Logan and Nick, had even started considering them friends. Afterward, I blamed them for not warning me. So, Christmas came and went and I barely realized it.
The next year, Clay was still banished. I was well on the road to recovery by then. I'd forgiven Logan and Nick and even Jeremy. I'd started getting to know Antonio and Peter. I was coming to accept life as a werewolf. Then came Christmas. I expected it would pass again with little fanfare, like the year before. Instead, we had a full-blown Christmas, complete with presents under the tree, colored lights sparkling against the snow, and a turkey on the table. The whole Pack came to Stonehaven for a week, and for the first time, I knew how hectic, stressful, loud, and wonderful a family Christmas could be. I thought this was how the Pack normally celebrated Christmas, when they didn't have an angry new female werewolf to contend with. It wasn't until January that I learned the truth. Clay had contacted Jeremy and asked him to do this for me. That was his gift to me. My gift to him was to ask Jeremy to repeal his banishment.
For every year after that, we had a full Christmas at Stonehaven. The Pack indulged my fantasy completely, without ever making me feel that they were only doing it to humor me. I can't say that every Christmas was a good one. Sometimes Clay and I were getting along, more often we weren't, but we were always together. If this last Christmas away from Clay had been hard, one thing had made it bearable: knowing he was out there, somewhere. As I stared at the pile of presents in his closet, I realized this applied to my life every day of the year, not just at Christmas. Somehow, knowing Clay was there, waiting for me should I ever return, gave me a cushion of comfort in my life. In a perverse way, he was the most stable thing in my life. No matter what I did, he'd be there. What if he wasn't? The thought filled me with something so icy cold that my breath seemed to freeze in my lungs and I had to gasp for air. I hadn't lied to Jeremy the night before. This wasn't one of those fairy-tale romances where the heroine realizes her undying love for the hero after he's placed in mortal danger. There were no heroes or heroines in this story and there would be no happily ever after ending, even if we got Clay back. I still couldn't imagine living with him, nor could I envision my world without him. I needed him. Maybe that was unspeakably selfish. It almost certainly was. But it was honest. I needed Clay and I had to get him back. I looked at the gifts again and I knew I wasn't doing enough.
"I'm going to Bear Valley," I said.
It was the next day. Nick and I were on the back patio, lying on lounge chairs, luncheon plates on our laps. Jeremy and Antonio had left an hour ago. Since then, I'd been trying to figure out how to tell Nick what I'd planned. After a half-dozen false starts, I went with the blurt-it-out approach.
"I told Daniel I wanted to see him," I said.
"Is that what was in the note?"
When Antonio and Nick had gone to deliver Jeremy's latest missive to Daniel's post office box, I'd slipped Nick a note to add to Jeremy's. Nick hadn't asked what the note said, probably because he didn't want to know.
"Yes," I said. "I'm meeting him at two o'clock."