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Edward stopped. My window glided down, and I looked up at Harpo. There was sweat beading on his naked chest. His breath came harsh and too quick. “Fuck,” he said.

“Did you want something?” I asked.

“Boss says—that you can all—come inside.” He was leaning his hands against the Hummer while he got his breath back.

“Okay,” I said.

Edward pulled the car back into the curb while Harpo moved so there was room. We all got back out of the car. Harpo was still not breathing right. “Aerobic exercise is the key to good cardiovascular health,” I said, sweetly, as we waited for him to start walking back to the bar.

“Fuck you.”

I thought about getting back in the Hummer, but I’d played the game as far as I was willing to go. I wanted to talk to Baco, but only with backup. Harpo had said I could do both. I’d achieved my goal. Anything else was pure childishness. I was feeling petty, but not that petty.

When he recovered, he was once again the sunglass-wearing muscle man, face impassive. He strode back, hands in loose fists, doing his best impression of a moving mountain of flesh. His otherworldly energy prickled along my skin. Just a whisper of power, as if it were leaking out without him meaning for it to. Which probably meant he was pissed. Strong emotions made it harder to hold all that vibrating energy inside.

None of us spoke on the short walk back. Men are usually not good at useless small talk or don’t see a need for it, and I was just too busy concentrating on walking normally without giving away just how much it hurt to sweat chitchat.

Harpo held the door for us. I glanced at Edward. He gave me blank eyes back. Fine. I walked inside and the others followed. Three days ago I’d have been nervous stepping into that dark with the vibrating energy of werewolves rising like an invisible tide. But that was three days ago, and there just wasn’t that much fear left in me. My body hurt, but the rest of me was oddly numb. Maybe I’d finally crossed that line that Edward seemed to live behind. Maybe I’d never really feel anything again. When even that thought didn’t scare me, I knew I was in trouble.

47

IT TOOK A SECOND for my eyes to adjust to the dark interior, but it wasn’t my eyes that told me something was wrong. It was the skin on the back of my neck. I didn’t argue with it. I had my hand on the Browning underneath the shirt and didn’t care if it gave away the fact that I was carrying a gun. They’d be fools to think we’d come in here unarmed. Los Lobos Biker Club might have a lot of faults, but being that kind of fool wasn’t one of them.

Nicky Baco was lying on the bar with his hands tied to his ankles so that the ropes formed a sort of handle like he was some kind of carry-on bag. His face was bloody and bruised, and the injuries were a lot fresher than mine.

I had the Browning out, and I felt rather than saw the other three fan out until we were the corners of a box, and each corner held a gun. Each corner watched its section of the room, and whether we liked each other or not, I trusted all of us to take care of our sections of the room, even Olaf. It was good to be sure.

My part of the room included the bar with Nicky on it; a tall man with a beard, and a curl of waist-length ponytail over one shoulder; two wolves the size of ponies; and a man’s body staring sightless at the room, his throat cut like a second mouth, red and screaming.

I had a peripheral sense of how full the room was of crowding bodies. The energy was thick enough to choke on. I heard a noise to the right and did three things almost simultaneously. I pointed the Browning at the noise, drew the Firestar left-handed to point at the man with the ponytail, and let my eyes flick to the side to see what I’d heard. Good that I’d been practicing left-handed firing drills. The heavy slithering sound came again from behind the bar. The bar was in my section of the room. It was my ball, so to speak. I felt the others surging forward like a trembling tide about to swallow us all. We could shoot