The basement was empty, though it was obvious that there had been people here fairly recently. They left behind the smell of body armor, gunpowder, and greasepaint as well as trails of footprints and marks where things had been dragged. Two of the rooms, identical to where they had been held, had been used as living quarters. The only difference was that the heavy wooden door that had been barred to keep wolves in was removed and set inside the rooms that had housed the mercenaries. Presumably so that no one could keep them in.
The mercenary commander who had talked to him had been right, Adam decided. Under other circumstances, Adam would have liked him, too.
In the distance, Adam heard diesel engines start up, the same engines, he was pretty sure, that had hauled the pack out to whatever distant proto-winery Cantrip had found to use as werewolf storage. The mercenaries had either parked a fair distance away from their temporary HQ, or - and he thought it more likely, given the dismantled doors - they had pushed the vehicles away from the building until someone deemed it safe to start them. The noise was faint to Adam's ears. He doubted a human would hear it even if he'd been listening for it instead of asleep.
He found the stairs and climbed them silently. They brought him to an empty room, designed to be open and airy. The walls were unpainted, but the floors were tiled in sandstone that was difficult to walk across without allowing his claws to click. A double door designed to open easily at a push led to the outside. He pushed one of the doors, and it opened. He went outside to take a recon of the layout and was unsurprised to find that they were out in the boonies somewhere. There were dead grapes everywhere - he'd been right about the winery. The building was surrounded by maybe a couple of hundred acres' worth of gray vines that had been dead well before winter hit. He could see the sad-looking dried-up starts of grape bunches.
He padded out onto what had been meant to be a grand wraparound porch, but it was missing the railing and several sections of flooring. A parking lot had been laid out, one big enough for ten cars or maybe a bus or two, but it hadn't been paved. There were four black SUVs and a Nissan with a plate frame advertising a national chain of rental cars in the lot.
The house/winery was about halfway up a hill from a two-lane highway that stretched in either direction and vanished around the wrinkled, hilly country. An orchard of apple trees bordered the would-be vineyard to the west and a rather better tended vineyard on the east.
Neither of the nearest properties looked to have a house on it. The closest neighbor was out of sight - doubtless it was the reason this place had been chosen by ... whoever had chosen it. He'd find out who that was.
He considered crippling the cars, but decided against it. He turned back into the house. It was time to show these people why they should be afraid of werewolves.
He followed the sound of breathing to a hallway with rooms on either side, as if the original designs for the winery had also provided for a bed-and-breakfast.
The first room had the same unfinished walls as the public rooms did, but here the floor was also unfinished. The plywood squeaked just a little under his weight, but the man sleeping on the temporary cot didn't wake up. He was in his thirties, from the look of his face, which was ... ordinary. He snored a little.
It had been nearly half a century since Adam's first kill. He'd like to have said that he remembered them all - a man should take notice when he killed another man. But there had been too many. Some of them had been sleeping peacefully.
He crushed the man's throat with his jaws and tried not to pay attention to the taste of his blood. Since he'd become a werewolf, he'd eaten a few people, but that was harder to live with than just killing them. So he tried to avoid it when he could.
The second man was older, in his fifties, but in decent shape. He had the good haircut of a bureaucrat planning on rising in the ranks of his profession. His hair was dyed, but it was a good dye job, leaving him with just a touch of gray.
Adam didn't remember seeing him - but he'd be the first to admit that he hadn't been at his best since his kidnapping. This one woke up before Adam killed him, but he didn't have a chance to cry out.
He continued down the hall. The next two who died were also easy kills.
He came to a room empty of people, but he opened the door anyway. He should have just kept going, but when he glimpsed a photo of Mercy, he shouldered the door further open and went in. One wall was filled with photos of his pack and their families, including Mercy and Jesse. Each labeled with a name so that people could come in and study the wall, get so they would recognize their targets.
It was a kill list.
Every single one of the pack was on it - and their immediate families, human and wolf alike, young and old. Sylvia Sandoval was there and so were her girls.
They were planning on killing the children.
Adam's next three kills weren't so clean after that, nor so silent. He let the fourth one scream because he was sleeping with a smile on his face.
They were planning on killing children, and this one was smiling.
When Adam got through with him, the man's corpse reeked of terror and pain. Adam needed to control himself better; he couldn't afford to lose control of the wolf because he might never regain it. He had a job that no one else could do to his satisfaction, a duty. The thought settled him; he knew about duty, both man and wolf.
The next bedroom was empty, though it smelled of a woman. He memorized the scent because if she'd taken flight, he'd have to hunt her through the dead vineyard. Part of him, the human part, knew he would have to give that hunt to someone less ... eager than he was. Warren. Darryl, Adam's second, was still too much a gentleman to kill a woman without suffering for it. Warren was more practical.
The modern doorknobs designed for handicapped access were so much easier for a wolf to open than the traditional round ones were. The whole ground floor was designed especially for handicapped access, so he made no sound as he opened the next room to discover that there would be no need for him to hunt anyone yet. He'd found the woman from next door, and she and Mr. Jones had evidently found themselves too involved in each other to notice his last victim's cries.
He'd promised Jones to Honey.
It was harder than it should have been to leave them alone, but he closed the door as quietly as he could. There were three more people to kill - he could hear them. He was getting hungry.
He broke the next man's neck with a swat of his paw - like a grizzly. It was quick and clean. The second one was a woman, crouched behind her cot, which she'd knocked over to provide cover. He had a momentary thought that someone had been watching too much TV, because a cot is no kind of protection at all - and then the woman pulled out one of the dart guns and started firing.
The first dart hit badly and bounced off his shoulder. Warned, he dodged the second two and jumped the cot to crush her skull between his jaws. He shook her once to break her neck and make sure of the kill, then dropped the body. He didn't enjoy killing women.
He stopped where he was, the corpse on the ground halfway between his front paws, and fought off the urge to eat her. Woman or not, his wolf was hungry, and dead, she was just meat. He didn't have time for it - and the strength of the urge meant the wolf was gaining the upper hand. When he was certain he had himself under control he headed off to hunt down the next one.
That one had barricaded himself in one of the rooms Adam had visited earlier. The door was ironbound and thick, meant to look like the old colonial Spanish doors. It stopped the bullets that the man shot into the door as soon as Adam touched the doorknob - it must not have been a large-caliber handgun.