"Because," he grumbled, "it was apparently her idea, not her mother's. Besides, the word from the pack is that she doesn't approve of wolf clubs. Hates what they represent."
"She's a werewolf, isn't she? How the hell can she disapprove of the clubs?"
"Who the fuck knows? Maybe she's a prude."
Was it even possible to be a werewolf and a prude? It certainly wasn't a likely combination. "If you think it's going to be that bad, don't go."
He snorted. "My mother will make my life hell if I don't go. Trust me."
I grinned. Stane was afraid of his mother. Imagine that. "And the storage container?"
"Oh. Yeah." There was a brief whoosh of sound, and I had the mental image of him scooting from one screen of his massive computer "bridge" to the other. "I couldn't find anything listed under John Nadler's name, but I did find one under Genevieve Sands."
Who was one of Nadler's heirs, according to the information I'd gotten from a ghost. Nadler was the man behind the consortium that had been buying up the land all around Stane's shop. Not that he wanted the land, per se; he just wanted to control what lay underneath it—a major ley-line intersection. Such intersections were places of great power and could be used to manipulate time, reality, or fate. But they could also be used to create a rift between this world and the next, and we very much suspected that whoever had stolen the first key had used the power of the intersection to access the gray fields and find the gates.
Which, in turn, meant that John Nadler was either involved with the sorcerer, or was the sorcerer himself. Unfortunately, he was also a face-shifter, and it was damnably hard to track someone who could alter their facial features at will. Of course, I was also a face-shifter, but that didn't make it any easier for me to spot others of my kind.
This particular face-shifter had assumed the identity of the real John Nadler after he'd killed him—a fact we were sure of only because the body of the real Nadler had turned up just as we were getting closer to pinning down the fake. We suspected that at least one of the three people named in Nadler's will was in fact the face-shifter, but so far we'd yet to track any of them down.
"You want to send me the address?" I said. "I might go check it out."
"Just sent you that. I've also hacked into their security cams so we can screen who might be coming and going. But is there anything else you need done?"
I couldn't help smiling at the hint of desperation in his voice. "Haven't we already given you enough?"
"No. I mean, I have a double date I need to get out of, remember."
I chuckled softly. "Think of your mother's wrath, and—as they say in the classics—suck it up, princess."