Stolen (Otherworld 2)

Ruth sat beside an empty chair. Like Paige, she wore a sundress. Across from them was a woman in her mid-forties, slender with short auburn hair. Beside her sat a young man with broad shoulders, a boyish face, and light brown hair tipped blond. On his left was a man on the far side of middle age, heavyset and graying. He looked aboriginal, probably Inuit, his smooth face a mask of meditative calm. So this was a gathering of the most powerful supernatural beings in North America? Oh, please. Central casting could have found a more likely bunch by plundering the Sunday night television lineup.

Across the room was the Ladies' Auxiliary snack table. Well, not exactly, but close enough. The only thing missing was the blue-haired matron doling out goodies and guarding her cash box. There was a table with a coffee urn, a margarine tub of white powder that was more likely to be creamer than cocaine, a pyramid of Styrofoam cups--one filled with sugar cubes--and a plate of powdered doughnuts. On the rear wall, a handwritten sign reminded snackers that coffee and doughnuts were a quarter each, followed by a line in red clarifying that this meant fifty cents for both a doughnut and coffee, not a quarter for the two combined. I really hoped the Legion folks were responsible for the goodies and the sign. Otherwise ... well, I didn't want to consider the alternative. Let's just say if anyone passed around a plate for membership dues, I was out of there.

Beside the table was a flip-board and, on the top page of the flip-board, the meeting agenda. I kid you not. They had an agenda, not just a rough list of topics, but a full schedule starting with greetings and refreshments at 10:00, background at 10:30, roundtable at 11:45, followed by lunch from 12:15 to 1:15. I glanced over my shoulder to see Jeremy reading the schedule, lips twitching.

"At least they're organized," he murmured, too low for Paige to hear.

Everyone turned as we walked in. Ruth stood, features rearranging themselves in a welcoming smile as she tried to hide her surprise.

"Hello," she said. "I thought you weren't coming until Monday."

"Our plans for the weekend fell through."

"Oh? Oh, well, yes. Come in then. Everyone, this is Jeremy ... Jeremy Danvers, the ... leader ... I hope that's right, leader? ... of the--"

"Jeremy is fine," he finished. "This is Elena."

The young man with the blond-tipped hair grinned. "The infamous werewolves? Funny, you don't look like werewolves. No connecting eyebrows, no hairy palms. Damn. Another myth shot to hell. And I thought all werewolves were male. That's definitely not a guy."

"Women's lib," I said. "We're every where now."

The young man's grin broadened. "Is nothing sacred?"

"Elena is the only female werewolf," Paige said as she walked to the empty chair. "Werewolves are made two ways, by inheriting the genes or by being bitten. Most werewolves are hereditary, since few people bitten by a werewolf survive. Because the genes pass only through the male line, female werewolves are extremely rare."

The young man rolled his eyes. "Next on the Discovery Channel, an in-depth examination of werewolves and feminism by Paige Winterbourne."

"Go to hell, Adam."

"Don't rush me."

&n

bsp; "Ignore them, please," Ruth said. "Adam and Paige have known each other since they were children. Sometimes I suspect they haven't come very far in the intervening years. Now, introductions. This one beside me is Paige and that young man is Adam, in case that wasn't perfectly obvious. Our younger generation. The poor man stuck between the two is Kenneth."

The middle-aged man blinked, as if startled back to earth. He looked at us and gave a confused smile.

"On Adam's other side is Cassandra."

The auburn-haired woman's smile didn't reach her eyes, which studied us with interest but little emotion.

"That's not what you really want to know, is it?" Adam said. "At least, that's not the good part, not who we are, but what we are, right? Though it's probably better to explain the two separately or it ends up sounding like an AA meeting for the damned. 'Hi, my name is Adam and I'm a half-demon.'"

"A half ...?" I said.

"Exactly what it sounds like. Mom's human. Dad's the living embodiment of absolute evil. Luckily, I got my looks from Mom's side. My father's not exactly GQ material. Don't ask me what my mother was thinking. Obviously one too many tequila shots that night."

"Demons take human form to rape or seduce human women," Paige said. "Half-demons are always human in appearance. They inherit other qualities from their fathers. Each has different powers, depending on the type of demon that sired them."

"The X-Men of the underworld," Adam said. "Now that Paige has so neatly summed up my biology, here are the goods on the rest. Paige and Ruth, witches, but you knew that. Cass, vampire. Ken, shaman. You know what a shaman is?"

"Yes," Jeremy said.

"So that's it. The major supernatural races, all in one place, like Satan's Ark."

"Adam, please," Ruth said. She turned to us. "Adam likes to joke, but I can assure you, we are not evil, not Satanists, nothing of the sort."

"Just regular folks," Adam said. "With a few quirks."