Pack Dynamics

Acknowledgements

Writing is a lonely business. This is a given. You sit at the keyboard and bang out words you don't know if anyone but you will ever want to read. You swear. You cry. You drink. You consider defenestrating your computer.

And yet.

There are people who motivate you. People who encourage you. People who kick your butt and tell you that yes, those words matter, so sit down and write them, dammit. There are people who will never know how much they inspired you, who will never read your novel or the acknowledgements therein. And yet, if it wasn't for those people, this book would not be in your hands right now.

Joss Whedon, who said “Write fanfiction” and started me on this path. His characters caught my imagination by the throat and wouldn't let go. James Marsters, whom I actually did get to tell “It's your fault I'm a writer” and actually seemed touched by the sentiment. Robert Downey, Jr., who showed us all that it's possible to screw up so badly that no one ever believes that you'll be able to rise from the ashes—and then stands up anyway. Jim Butcher, whose character Michael Carpenter made me feel safe in a genre that I felt pretty alienated from for quite some time.

I've only ever interacted with two of those men personally (and briefly), and yet they had an enormous influence on who I am as a writer. None of them will (probably) even see this. But the gratitude is real.

Volunteers from my LiveJournal friends list stepped up and offered to read the whole thing, and their suggestions were invaluable. Jeri, Mandy, Danielle, Patrick Tracy, Deidre, Sunny, Mark, and my mom Jan Christensen (if you like mysteries, check out her books, they're awesome) —and probably several other people I'm leaving out because it was a long time ago, but you guys know who you are and I love you all. Without you, this novel would never have even seen daylight.

My roleplay partner Aspen Hougan helped me solidify Ben's characterization. Without her, I would not have known nearly as much as I do about him. She is amazing. When she tagged me all those years ago, I had no idea the journey it would take me on, or that I would gain a good friend. I feel truly blessed for both.

My editor Bryan Thomas Schmidt took a steaming pile of whatever-this-was and helped me shape it into the actual good book you’re holding in your hand. I honestly had no idea what I was doing when I wrote this thing, and it showed. Boy, did it ever. He was patient, he was on point, and he was right. I am eternally grateful to him.

Larry Correia introduced me to Kevin J. Anderson at Salt Lake ComicCon and said that he would blurb and book bomb me. He's always believed in my work, even while he hit the stars and I struggled back here on planet Earth. I hope this novel justifies his faith.

The wonderful people at WordFire Press gave this crazy thing a chance. Peter J. Wacks, Michelle Corsillo, Emma Michaels, and Kevin J. Anderson are terrific folks and it has been an absolute joy to work with them.

Thanks to them all, and to many others whom I have (to my everlasting shame) left out. I hope you enjoy what we’ve put together here.

Chapter One

Ben Lockwood couldn’t breathe.

They’d shocked him unconscious in the grocery store parking lot with one of the new-generation stun guns, dropping him before he had a chance to pull the Micro Desert Eagle he carried. He blinked awake with a massive headache in a dim, echoing room so big its walls were hidden in shadows. A man and a woman looked on as a tall guy with a crooked nose bound him to a cold metal chair with a scratchy rope, tight enough to numb his arms.

Ben was groggy, not quite all there yet, but aware enough to warn them, “No, bad idea, bad idea, that is such a
bad idea
,” and then the panic attack steamrolled him before he could tell them why.

Even as he wheezed like a broken accordion, he automatically catalogued height, weight, and demeanor. White male, buzz cut, brown hair, police baton—thug. White female, short blonde hair, scarred left eyebrow, hunting knife—scary competence. White male, tall, crooked nose, slight German accent—leader. All of them wore tight black t-shirts with an embroidered yellow logo he didn’t recognize, a stylized lower-case ‘I’ inside a cursive ‘O’ Tan cargo pants and heavy boots completed their ensembles.

They took turns demanding information about the new client of the private-eye firm he worked for. But talking was impossible—tying him down never went well, even when nobody was punching him.

The leader slid on a pair of fingerless sap gloves, leather and filled with lead, and shattered Ben’s glasses against his face, sending the eyewear tumbling away into some far corner of the room. A couple of ribs snapped next, and the pain made his vision go white for a few seconds before it went black around the edges and spotty in the middle. Ben caught the tail end of the question as his ears stopped ringing.

“... investigating for Alex Jarrett?” the leader asked.

“I don’t—I can’t—” Still breathless, memories roaring to the surface with the taste of blood—a dusty cave, an enraged Afghani insurgent. At least these guys spoke English. “Wait.” Ben fought desperately to get a grip on himself, but his heart pounded so hard against his ribcage he thought it might crack from the inside.

Jarrett, Jarrett, Jarrett, what…? Oh. Pharmaceutical espionage. The new case Ben’s boss, his girlfriend’s mom, had handed off to them while she vacationed in Australia. Supposed to be easy, and safe. Something he could do from his desk. Ha.

Now he recognized the logo on the shirts—Ostheim Industries, one of Jarrett’s big rivals. There’d been a sniff that Ostheim was involved somehow, but details were sketchy so far. Maybe they’d just become less so.

The anxiety attack eventually faded, leaving him wrung out, soaked in sweat, and exhausted. And not just a little pissed off. “What the hell?” he managed. The shakes refused to stop, and panic crouched on the edge of his consciousness, waiting to pounce.

“Tell us what Alex Jarrett hired you for, and what you know!” the thug barked.

He had to be kidding. They’d snatched Ben out of a parking lot and broken his glasses and his ribs for
this
? He closed his eyes and decided to be disingenuous. Maybe they’d slip and give him more information. “We call it ‘
private
investigation’ for a reason. Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you.”

The woman crossed her arms, red-painted nails like claws drumming her biceps. “Unacceptable.”

“Fuck you.” Normally Ben didn’t use language like that in front of women or people who outranked him, but this one had kidnapped and beaten him, so she was special.

They hit him again. Several times. Shouting questions, which also never went well, and the breath caught in his throat as his heart tried to gallop out of his chest and adrenaline flooded his system. Intellectually, he knew what was happening, because he’d been dealing with panic attacks since he’d come back from Afghanistan nearly two and a half years ago—but logic didn’t particularly help in situations like this.

He hadn’t cracked for insurgents. No way would he crack for these clowns.

They stopped, eventually, whether to give themselves a break or to give him time to think about it, he didn’t know and couldn’t ask. Half-conscious and zoning out, he was brought back to full, sputtering, and pained awareness by the icy bucket of water the thug dumped over his head.

The woman backhanded him, snapping his head around and leaving another bleeding welt on his cheekbone from the oversized ring on her index finger. “No sleeping.”

The large and drafty room had an “empty warehouse” feel to it. A lone fluorescent shop light shone down, and Ben realized that night had fallen and people would be getting worried about him. He shivered in the breeze from the broken windows high above as his captors ate … something. The smell made his stomach flip over, and he clenched his jaw and swallowed hard to keep from vomiting. They didn’t offer to share their meal with him. Just as well.

The leader walked out with the thug, leaving the woman alone with Ben still bound to the chair. She stalked around him, carrying a knife with a wickedly-curved serrated edge. Ben tensed when she stopped behind him and laid the cold blade under his eye.

“We’re getting the information either way.” Her breath was warm in his ear.

“Go …” Ben swallowed thickly. “Go to hell.” For a second, he didn’t realize that he’d been cut, until the fresh blood ran over his lips and stirred another bout of nausea. He decided that talking was stupid and might get him killed, and he clamped his mouth shut and refused to say any more.

The woman got tired of asking questions that were answered with silence, and she sullenly slouched in her own chair with her arms crossed, kicking Ben awake every time he began to nod off.

The thug came back after a few hours, and Ben wasn’t any more talkative with him. When the leader arrived with the sun struggling through the grimy windows, he found his people in a state of frustrated agitation, and Ben in a far more battered condition than he’d been the previous night. Not talking, on reflection, hadn’t been smart either.

Ben was so out of it that the beating that commenced had the sense of happening to someone else. They hammered him with fists and a length of rebar and questions, and the more they abused him, the more determined he was to give them
nothing
. Army training stood him in good stead for this, and, hey, at least they weren’t poking him with syringes. They hadn’t figured out that particular button yet; with any luck, they wouldn’t.

The leader hefted a cattle prod in one hand and the stun gun in the other, eyeing Ben sideways with an expression that only superficially resembled a smile. “This,” he said casually, holding up the stun gun, “puts out up to five hundred thousand volts, according to the manufacturer. It knocked you out in the parking lot pretty as you please. However, we don’t want to knock you out. Knocking you out is counterproductive.” The new stun guns that would actually render an assailant unconscious had come in handy for Ben in his profession, but they had their downsides, too. One of them being that guys like this could get one as easily as Ben could.

“I’d prefer it,” Ben rasped, spitting blood. His blurred vision honed in on the cattle prod, which brought back all kinds of memories from Afghanistan. None of them were happy.

“Of course you would. Now this—” The leader let the shop light gleam off the metal tips of the cattle prod. “—only puts out about eleven thousand volts. It’s actually one of my most favorite toys, because it’s painful as hell but doesn’t cause any lasting damage, so I can use it repeatedly.” He paused. “Tell us what we want to know, and I won’t use it on you.”

Shit. Ben closed his eyes and tried to breathe. He thought about making something up, anything to stop them, but lies had a tendency to come back and take a bite out of his ass in a situation like this. He decided to keep it to a
simple
lie, at least. “I. Don’t. Know.”

“That’s really a shame.”

When it came down to it, the cattle prod wasn’t any more effective than their other methods. Less so. Flashbacks pushed him into oblivion at least twice, his overloaded mind shutting down as a defense mechanism against the raw, red agony. The leader
enjoyed
using it, and zapped him again and again, for what seemed like ages. Minutes and hours stretched and contracted, not linear or constant anymore, and Ben had no idea how many had passed. He reckoned time by how many blisters and burns the thing left on him.

They wouldn’t let him eat or sleep, which added even more hallucinatory happy-times to the intermittent panic attacks that his exhausted body and brain insisted on hitting him with at random moments. He was allowed up once to take a leak, and he noted almost clinically that it came out bloody. But that didn’t seem too serious, because he was bleeding from a lot of places by then and one more was just … one more.

After they’d shoved his head under water for the eighth or tenth or fifteenth time—he’d forgotten how to count by then—and his story didn’t change, they were convinced he didn’t have what they needed. They stopped asking questions, handcuffed him to a horizontal bar suspended from the ceiling far overhead, and lashed his back with a dog chain, over and over and over the network of scars left by Afghani insurgents.

The last “I have no idea, really, I don’t” had been wrung from him hours (days?) ago, and he reverted to his Army training, chanting his name, rank, and social as a litany. He couldn’t remember where he was, here or there; the experiences bled together in his head and across his shoulders and he didn’t know what anyone wanted from him anymore. Maybe they didn’t know either. Maybe it didn’t matter.

The leader grabbed a handful of his hair, wrenched his head up, and growled into his face. “You people had better back off. Or your girlfriend is next.”

Janni
…! His body tensed as his mind roused, and he struggled against the ropes. “Don’t you touch her,” Ben tried to say. It came out in a hoarse, incomprehensible whisper through cracked lips. While the leader watched with wry amusement, Ben continued struggling until he exhausted himself, then hung there by his bruised and bleeding wrists, limp and panting and wishing like hell he could pass out. The chain slashed across his chest once, then back across his stomach, and his wish was granted.

O O O

“Are you going to behave yourself tonight, Mr. Jarrett?” Megan Graham asked her boss.

They stood in the sitting room just off the front foyer of his Beverly Hills mansion, a room crowded with comfortable dark leather furniture and light wood accents. Over his protests, she appropriated his scotch glass and set it on the heavy oak mantelpiece surrounding a fireplace large enough to roast a whole elk in. Frowning, she set to work re-knotting his tie and flicking imaginary lint off his tux, getting him ready for yet another charity fundraiser. One strand of his shaggy brown hair would
not
stay off his forehead, and she gave up trying to make it cooperate. She made a mental note to schedule him for a trim—and make sure he actually went. He’d skipped out on the last two appointments, so she was going to have to get his barber to come to the house. Again.

“You wound me, Miss Graham,” Alex Jarrett said. He was the CEO and head researcher at Jarrett Biologicals, and she’d been his personal assistant for over five years. They’d fallen into an easy routine. “I always behave myself.” He gave her a roguish grin. “I’d behave even better if you’d come with me.”

Part of that easy routine consisted of him hitting on her—without meaning it—and her shooting him down. Sometimes she wondered how he’d react if she didn’t shoot him down.

But tonight wasn’t the night to test her theory that he’d actually run screaming in the other direction if she accepted his teasing advances. “No, you’d be worse. And for once, I’m getting a well-deserved night off.” Actually, she was getting a well-deserved and
rare
night off that didn’t involve her lycanthropy, which he didn’t know about. If she had her way, he never would.

With as much energy as Alex had, keeping her inner wolf at bay was difficult at the best of times, and tonight he was emitting pheromones like crazy. The full moon would rise in a couple of nights, and the timing made her itchy, which she covered by swatting his hand when he reached for the scotch again. He must have worked out a knotty problem in his basement lab earlier, she thought; he was practically bouncing. She only
had
to Change during the moon, but sometimes she did it under undue stress.

Working for Alex Jarrett put her in many, many stressful situations.

She was almost surprised he hadn’t twigged to the wolf, but he could be remarkably oblivious at times for someone who was supposed to be a genius. She guessed people saw what they expected to see … and, much like the Spanish Inquisition, no one expected lycanthropy. Werewolves and vampires were only “out” to each other and people who needed to know, because the days of torches and pitchforks weren’t too far out of memory. As the CEO of a big pharma company, Alex knew about it in general, but he didn’t know about her in particular, and that’s how she liked it.

Megan put a hand on her hip, shook a finger under his nose, and continued. “I swear, if you call me at midnight to bail you out of whatever trouble you get into, I’ll take a month-long vacation to Hawaii. And leave my cell phone at home.”

He lifted his eyebrows in mock alarm. “You wouldn’t. Who’d dress me and tie my tie?”

“What are you, three? You’re perfectly capable of getting yourself dressed, and Chambliss can tie your tie.” She gave him a subtle sniff. At least he’d showered and didn’t actually reek of scotch. Maybe he’d only had the one.

“He’s not my type.” Alex twitched his lips. “Also, last time he did my tie, he nearly strangled me. I think he was mad.”

“No! Shocked, shocked, I am, that you’d manage to tick your butler off with some form of outrageous behavior.” She turned him around and shoved him toward the entry and his waiting red stretch Bentley. “Go to the fundraiser and try not to embarrass me. Here, take your coat, it’s pouring out.”

“You’re awfully eager to get rid of me tonight. Big plans?” He shrugged the overcoat on as they stepped into the elaborately marbled foyer.