Brier’s arm whipped out and grabbed the man’s shirt collar. The Protector pulled the loud-mouthed man against the bars where his lips slammed into the silver metal. The man screamed and flailed his arms and those, too, knocked into the bars. He stiffened with his arms straight out behind him with small puffs of smoke coming out from his burn injuries. “Your rights end when you break the rules here,” Brier growled. Now I saw the family resemblance with the sheriff, but at least this Brier wasn’t harassing good people. “You make trouble again and I’ll see to it that you don’t leave this cell for that month. Got it?”
“Got it,” the man whimpered through his burnt lips. Brier let him go and the man stumbled back into the crowd behind him.
Brier looked around at the silent prisoners. “Anyone else want to argue with me?”
“I’ll give it a try,” a smooth voice spoke up. All eyes turned to the dungeon entrance where Stacy leaned against the wall on the bottom step. She had a smile on her impeccable lips, and pushed off the wall to walk up to the Protector. “Mind letting some of these prisoners go, Chief Protector?” she cooed.
Brier was unmoved by her powers of persuasion. “No.”
Stacy frowned and crossed her arms over her chest. She dropped the cute act and exchanged it for the businesswoman character. “What’ll it take to break a few of them out?” she asked him.
“A miracle.”
“I prefer a more reliable method.”
“That’s the only one you got because none of them are leaving until they’ve had a chance to cool down.”
“And that will be how long?”
He glanced over all of our tense faces. “A few hours.” He nodded at the idiot. “For him it’ll be twenty-four hours.” The man growled, but didn’t give any sass this time.
“What if the High Lord demanded it?” Stacy suggested.
That got Brier’s attention. “Has he demanded someone’s release?” he asked her.
Stacy shrugged. “Perhaps he has.” She looked over the crowds of prisoners eager for escape and settled on Luke and me. “Perhaps he wants those two freed,” she told him, pointing at us.
Brier looked over at us, and then back at Stacy. “Why them?”
“He demands to give his blessing for their union ,” she replied.
Brier gave her a penetrating look and Stacy returned it with one of her own. He scowled, but signaled to his men to free us. They pulled us from the cells and shoved us over to where Stacy stood close by the stairs. “This is done only once. Even the High Lord can’t bend the law to suit his needs too many times,” Brier told her.
“I’ll be sure to remember that, Protector,” she cooed.
We followed her upstairs and I was glad to breathe the clean air of the lobby. Luke glanced at her with a raised eyebrow. “Did your father really want us freed?” Luke asked her.
Stacy coyly smiled. “No, but his name has gotten me out of a few scrapes I figured it’d work for you two.”
“It may cost you if the Chief Protector finds you’ve lied to him,” Luke warned her.
She shook her head. “It was worth it. Something’s happened.”
Luke raised an eyebrow. “What something?”
“I’ll show you.”
Stacy led us through the maze of passages to the room beside ours that was occupied by Alistair. I noticed something on the floor and gasped. There was a small trail of blood on the stones, and the drippings led through the doorway of Alistair’s room. Luke’s eyes widened and his nostrils flared at the smell of the fresh blood. There was a grim expression on her face as she nodded and opened the door. Luke rushed inside and found Alistair on his bed. The man wasn’t moving. We hurried over to the bedside and were both relieved when we noticed he was breathing, though his gasps were ragged. His clothes were torn to ribbons and there were claw marks all over his body.
“Alistair?” he called to his manservant. Alistair didn’t acknowledge his name. Luke turned to Stacy. “What happened?”
“I found him out in the woods below the station crawling back to Sanctuary after an interview with an informant,” she explained to us. “He was barely conscious and half transformed. I barely recognized him.”
“He didn’t say who did this to him?”
She shook her head. “He couldn’t speak, and he collapsed before I carried him in here.”
“Does anyone else know about this?” Luke asked her.
“No one. I cleaned up what I could of his blood, but I heard the commotion downstairs and went to investigate. I thought there might have been an attack on the whole building,” she explained to him.
Luke leaned down and sniffed Alistair, and he scowled. “Was he like this when you found him?”
“She already said yes,” I spoke up.
“That’s not what he’s meaning,” Stacy told me. “There’s no scent on Alistair other than his own. If he was attacked by anyone else there should be some scent.” She gently took one of Alistair’s hands and lifted it up to show off his dirty fingernails. “There’s even blood underneath his nails, and yet I can’t smell anything from it.”
“So is this a big deal?” I asked them.
“Very big,” Luke replied. “The werewolf society is held together without the use of a large policing force because we have the ability to smell one another.”
“So if someone commits a crime they just need to follow the trail?” I guessed.
“Exactly. Without the ability to track, and with no modern policing methods at our disposal, the crime in the werewolf world would explode,” he finished.
“That’s not good.”
“No, it’s not, and that’s what raises the stakes here,” Luke added.
“What really raises the stakes is that vote tomorrow,” Stacy argued. “Lance is a shoe-in to win unless we can buy some votes or convince everyone he’s the last werewolf they want for the job.”
Luke grimly sighed. “And we can’t leave Alistair alone for a moment. If our enemies can’t be smelled and they learn he’s alive then they may try another attempt on his life.”
“If we want to avoid them finding out he’s alive then I’m going to need help cleaning up his scent leading to his room,” Stacy pointed out as she rubbed her hands together. “It isn’t easy cleaning these stones of his blood droplets.”
“I can help,” I offered.
“And I will stay here and watch him,” Luke replied.
“Good, let’s get mopping, Becky,” Stacy encouraged.
We armed ourselves with the necessary cleaning supplies and a couple buckets of water. There was one chemical I didn’t recognize that was packaged in a green bottle with a wolf silhouette as the emblem. Stacy caught me staring at it before we left on our mission. “It’s a special cleaner used to eliminate tough odors, specially made in one of the werewolf regions,” she explained to me. “It’s the only thing that will remove the scent so a werewolf can’t be smelled by hunting dogs or other werewolves.”
“Wouldn’t something like this make werewolves invisible to each other?” I pointed out.
She tossed me a pair of thick rubber gloves. “No, because for us it’s dangerous to the touch, so we have to wear these gloves to scrub with it.”
We snuck out into the hallway and the area was quiet because so many of the rowdy guests were still incarcerated in the dungeon. Stacy retraced her steps and I followed along with both of us thoroughly and quickly scrubbing the floor. She’d taken one of the less-used hall and stairwells, and since we were alone I decided to ask her a few questions.
“So, um, how long have you known Luke?” I wondered.
She smiled, but didn’t look up. “A few centuries. He was made fifty years before me.”
“Wow. That’s a long time to know somebody,” I commented. “ After that long you two must be really good friends.”
Stacy paused and glanced up from her scrubbing. “This is about my liking Luke, isn’t it?” she guessed.
I hung my head and gave a nod. “Yeah,” I mumbled.
“Are you afraid I’m competition?” she mused with a chuckle in her tone.
“You are kind of prettier than I am,” I pointed out.
Stacy shook her head and sighed. “I’ll admit I wish we were competition, but I’m afraid looks or how long you’ve known someone don’t decide if you’ll be their mate.”
“So what does?” I asked her.
“The scent.”
I blinked. “The scent?”
She laughed and returned to her scrubbing. “You really are green. Hasn’t that ninny taught you anything?”
“He’s taught me he can be an ass,” I replied.
“Unfortunately, he can be, but you can’t completely blame him for choosing you. It was the scent that brought you together, a sort of subconscious tingling in the back of our minds that tells us we’ve found the person we were meant to be with,” she explained to me.
“Like finding a soul mate?” I guessed.
“Sort of, but on a more primitive level. We are descended from wolves, after all,” she told me.