car with a local pizza sign on the roof. Frowning, he tilted his head.
I ran up to him and got hit in the face with a wash of garlic, tomatoes, cheese, pepperoni—the usual. He looked at me and shrugged; his stomach rumbled. He grinned, a boyish expression he’d never turned on me before, then shook his head.
We both tried the second minivan, but it smelled of flowers and baby’s breath. The baby’s breath made Paul sneeze.
He gave half a growl, stalked back to the pizza car, and pulled open the driver’s-side door. He stuck his head in.
“Pizza is strong, but it shouldn’t smell like gunpowder,” he said to me. But by then I could smell it, too, wafting out of the open door. I saw him in my mind’s eye, the pizza delivery boy carrying one of those big vinyl pizza bags designed to carry multiple boxes of pizzas.
Paul and I both ran, leaving the door of the pizza car open.
When two people run into a crowded room, a lot of drama happens—shouts and shuffling and people with mouths agape. One of the things that doesn’t happen is a miraculous clearing of pathways. Paul did that all by himself.
I hoped that the old woman he shoved to the ground would be okay, but I didn’t hesitate when I jumped over her. Time enough to apologize and feel guilty after we hunted down the threat.
We ran for the boardroom. Once out of the crowd, I was faster than Paul, so I was in front when we turned the last corner.
“Adam,” I yelled. “Gun.”
The pizza man, one hand raised to knock at the closed door, turned a startled gaze at me. I supposed he hadn’t heard us until I yelled.
“Bomb,” corrected Paul, who had spent ten years in the SWAT unit of a large city back east. He’d never told me which one—we just didn’t talk that much.
The pizza man screamed, “Open the goddamned door, you freaks!” And, with a panicked look at my rapid approach, he did something with the pizza box.
The world stopped in a roar of sound and light.
One moment I was upright and running, the next I was facedown on the rough hotel carpet, struggling to breathe. The air was full of dust and my lungs didn’t want to work because of the heavy weight on top of me. Pain and loss shivered down the pack bonds with the even heavier weight of our dead.
Our dead.
“Paul,” I tried to say.
Though the lifeless weight of him on my back didn’t move, I felt the touch of his fingers on my cheek. They were warm, which I knew was weird.
They should have been cold. The touch of the dead is usually cold.
“Heyya, lady,” Paul said, his voice gentler than I’d ever heard it. “You’ll tell him, right?”
“Paul,” I said. “No.”
He laughed. “Yes, you will. You’re fair like that.” There was a little pause and he said a bit wistfully, “Tell Mary Jo that I loved her, okay?” Then he made a sharp sound. “No. No. That wouldn’t be right. Just make sure they all know what I did. So they will think well of me. I’d like that.”
And then Paul was gone, even though his body lay on top of me, the smell of him, of his blood, all around me.
7
It took Adam, Kelly, and Luke a while to dig me out of the debris. By that time, Paul’s extremities had cooled and his blood had stopped flowing over my skin. When they pulled Paul’s body off me, we were stuck together with his blood.
Maybe it was shock or the shot the EMT people gave me, but I was pretty loopy. I remember the faces of the EMT people dealing with two unhappy wolves (Kelly and Luke had both shifted to dig rubble), which varied from terror to fascination. But other than that, I don’t remember getting from the hotel to the hospital.
In the emergency room, I collected information a little haphazardly, as people came in and out of my cubby, and as I was hauled out for X-rays. Some of the people were pack, some were the nonpack who worked for Adam, but a few of them were strangers who looked like alphabet agency types. The fog increased after they decided I didn’t have a head injury and gave me something stronger.
I woke up to an unfamiliar voice.
“—twenty-five years old. Grad student in viticulture at WSU.”
“What does making wine have to do with making bombs?” That was Kelly.