Frostbitten (Otherworld 10)

He leaned out to look at the two men. "I don't think it's a sure bet either way."

"We'll try the flunky, then."

CULLING ONE FROM a herd of two can be tough, presuming the other one wants to object to his Pack mate being taken. This one didn't. As soon as he saw we'd homed in on his companion, he took off to find his brother.

Then Clay held Dan while I found and secured the interrogation room--a storage unit for a business that rented boats and fishing equipment, seasonal rentals that were now out of season.

Clay brought the mutt in. When we put him into a chair, he started to fight in earnest until Clay clocked him, dazing him enough to get the bindings on.

"This scenario seem familiar?" Clay said as he booted the rolling chair into the middle of the room. "Remind you of what you did in a cabin up near here? To an old friend of mine?"

Dan's mouth opened, ready to spew some variation on "It wasn't me--I was just following orders." But before he got the first word out, he snapped his mouth shut and switched to a new tactic--babbling in his mother tongue.

"You can skip the 'I don't speak the language' shit," Clay said. "It's only gonna piss me off, and it won't help you one bit. You know Roman Novikov, Alpha of the Russian Pack? He's offered to translate, make sure your civil rights aren't violated before I break your kneecaps."

"It's not Russian," I said.

Clay glanced at me.

"He's not speaking Russian. We can get Jeremy or Roman to confirm that, but I'm pretty sure of it."

To a unilingual ear like Clay's or Reese's, I'm sure it sounded like Russian--it did even to a bilingual one like mine. But my mother used to sing to me in Russian and taught me some words in language games, like the ones Jeremy and I play with the twins. So while I couldn't remember more than a half-dozen words, I knew Russian when I heard it--and this wasn't.

I told Clay it could be Polish or Ukrainian. Neither Jeremy nor Karl nor any of our other multilingual sources could help with those.

"That's that, then," I said. "If he can't answer our questions, he's of no use to us."

"Kill him?"

Dan's head jerked up fast enough to tell us his grasp of English was adequate.

"Should have grabbed the brother," Clay said. "Held him as a hostage. Think we can still catch up with him?"

"He's long gone. But we can use this one to send a message."

Clay nodded. "Have to make it a good one, though. Scare the shit out of them. Snapping his neck won't do."

I took out my hotel key card and lifted it, just out of the mutt's view. "How about this?"

"Shit." Clay rubbed his chin. "The last time we used that..."

"Messy, I know. But we need messy. The only problem is the screaming."

The mutt jerked around, moving the chair enough to see what horrific instrument of torture I held. When he did--and realized he'd outed himself--he let loose a stream of Anglo-Saxon profanity.

"Huh," Clay said. "Seems he knows some English after all. Let's see if we can expand his vocabulary."

He slammed his fist into Dan's jaw. The mutt gasped and snarled, then started to swear.

"Nope," Clay said. "Same words. Let's try--"

He grabbed an oar from the wall and swung it against Dan's kneecaps. Wood and bone crackled. Dan bit off a scream, his eyes rolling. Then he lifted those eyes to Clay.

"What do you want to know?" he said in perfectly serviceable English.

WE MIGHT HAVE removed the language barrier, but that didn't mean we were getting anything useful from him. We started with the most important issue: why had they killed Dennis? And the corollary questions: Did they know about Joey and if so why were they leaving him alone? We weren't worried about tipping Dan off about Joey--it wasn't as if this mutt would ever see his buddies again to tell them. But Dan insisted he had no idea what we were talking about. Other werewolves in Anchorage? Never met them. His scent found at the site of a murdered former Pack member? Huh, we must be mistaken. Maybe our sense of smell wasn't as good as we thought.

On to Reese, then. Nope, he didn't cut the fingers off any young werewolf in a museum. Hated museums. No, he hadn't witnessed any finger-cutting either. As for why his scent was there, he had no idea. Maybe another werewolf in Anchorage had a similar scent. Maybe that was the one we'd smelled in Dennis's cabin, too. All werewolves did kind of smell alike, you know.