Wild Country (The World of the Others #2)- Anne Bishop Page 0,173

pulled from the car. Her husband tried to tell the Others that it wasn’t their car, that they hadn’t been involved in whatever had happened, but …” Truman swallowed hard. “They ripped her husband apart right in front of her. Then a red-haired man riding a brown horse appeared out of nowhere. The moment he touched the car it started to burn. Once the car started burning, they let the woman go and just … disappeared.

“We saw the smoke. When we drove out to investigate, we found her staggering down the middle of the road. We brought her back here, and I called you.”

“Did she have the pills on her?” Jana asked.

“Don’t know. She wasn’t carrying anything when we found her, so she might have found the pills in the drawer. We’re still getting everything sorted and settled. We didn’t check the drawers, didn’t think she’d …” Truman rubbed his face with his hands. “That woman. Her husband. They didn’t hurt anyone.”

“You think her mate was killed by mistake,” Yuri said.

Truman gave Jana and Yuri a bleak look and nodded. “Do you think that will be a comfort to their daughter if you can find her?”

* * *

* * *

“It is regrettable, but mistakes happen,” Tolya said. Who had called Jesse to tell her about these humans, and why?

“Mistakes happen?” Jesse’s voice held cold condemnation. “Two innocent people died, and that’s all you can say?”

“Isn’t that what humans say when they do something similar?” Tolya snapped. “Namid’s teeth and claws have had little exposure to humans except when killing is required. The vehicle that was spotted was the same vehicle being driven by the humans who you sensed were a danger, who you hid from, who tried to burn down your store.”

“The vehicle was the same; the people were not. They were victims, Tolya, more so than me. The Elders killed that man right in front of his wife.”

“And humans have never done such a thing.”

He was angry—with her, with the Elders, and especially with the men who had caused this sudden schism between human allies and the terra indigene.

“You’re not going to see anyone’s side but your own, are you?” Jesse said.

“I could say the same about you.” He hung up on her, partly because her naïveté annoyed him. Having lived in an isolated town her whole life, she should have a better understanding of what lived just out of sight—except for those last moments when it appeared right in front of you. But the other reason for ending the call was Jana and Virgil walking into his office, both looking grim.

“They were innocent people,” Jana said. “Victims.”

“An ally had been threatened,” Tolya countered. “The Elders and Elementals responded to eliminate the threat.”

“Nobody was threatened by that man and his wife! They didn’t do anything wrong, and now they’re dead.”

“Look around you, Deputy,” Tolya said coldly. “You live in a town that was full of people who ‘didn’t do anything wrong’ and still ended up dead.” Having used up his patience talking to Jesse, he turned on Jana. “What should the terra indigene have done? Decline to track the vehicle that held humans who posed a threat? Should Fire have stood back and watched Jesse’s store burn?”

“No, but they didn’t have to kill those people! They could have apprehended them and waited for us to arrive.”

“They killed an Eagle,” Virgil snarled. “They had guns.”

“They, they, they!” Jana snarled back. “The they who killed the Eagle and tried to burn Jesse’s store were armed robbers, not two middle-aged people who were trying to find their daughter. I would think even the Elders could tell the difference.”

“Be careful, human,” Virgil said.

“Yes! I’m human. Sorry I don’t have fangs and fur.”

“Not half as sorry as we are.”

She took a step back and looked at the Wolf as if he’d just delivered a wound that would prove fatal.

And Tolya, too angry at her species to deny his predatory instinct, went in for the verbal kill. “Do you know why the Sanguinati don’t mind living around humans? Because you’re our preferred prey. But the Elders look at you and see a blight, a disease that spoils the world. They consider proximity to humans as a contamination, but some of them have to be contaminated now because too many of the shifters that used to watch your kind were killed by the Humans First and Last movement, so the choice, as the Elders see it, is to be close enough for some forced interaction or