THE RUNT OF THE LITTER

Although the rest of the vamps were still seated around the conference table, Luc had moved closer to the door and was leaning against the back of a leather chair when we walked in. I appreciated the move. This way, we could both escort Jeff to the table, give him protection from two sides. While Catcher had once assured me that Jeff could take care of himself, and having seen the depth of Nick's fury, I didn't doubt the shifter had it in him. But at twenty-one, he was younger, by far, than everyone else in the room, and the member of a group that wasn't high on the vamps' list of favorites right now. Even if there wasn't much of a risk that we'd have to break out the weaponry, this ensured that the Masters kept their manners.

"Thank you for agreeing to speak with us," Ethan said, standing and extending a hand as we moved to the table. "Especially on such short notice."

"No problem," Jeff lightly said, taking his hand. "Glad I can help, I guess." He sat down in an empty chair; I took the seat beside him.

Ethan smiled and turned back to the rest of the table. "I believe you know everyone here, but we'll do the introductions for form." He made the intros and the vampires responded graciously, probably because I gave everybody the evil eye, a warning against snarking back to our House guest.

Introductions complete, Jeff looked at Ethan, then me. "So, what do you want to know?"

"As you know," I began, "we're looking into a threat against Jamie Breckenridge that was supposedly made by Cadogan vampires. But we haven't been able to find anyone - any vampires - with a grudge against Jamie." I paused. "We believe that the Breckenridges are shifters."

"Oh," Jeff said, surprise in his expression. "Okay."

"What we're trying to figure out," I continued, "is whether another shifter might have a grudge against the family."

Jeff frowned. "I'm not following."

"Jamie's always been a little aimless, wouldn't you say, Merit?" Ethan asked.

I nodded. "I think that's fair."

"However, it seems the Breckenridge family is now circling around him. No one else, as far as I'm aware, knows that the Breckenridges are shifter in origin. The theory we're working from is that maybe they're circling for a reason. Maybe Jamie's weak, has some sort of magical problem. And maybe some members of the Pack want to do something about that."

Jeff shook his head. "I still don't - " Then he stopped, mouth falling open, shock and dismay and, worst of all, hurt, in his expression. He sat back in his chair, as if deflated by the question. "Wow."

The room went silent, gazes dropping guiltily to the table, the vamps unable to make eye contact.

A minute or two passed in silence. I wanted to reach out a hand, to touch him, both to comfort him and to reassure myself, but the move seemed patronizing. Instead, I looked up, caught Ethan's eye, that line of worry between his brows.

"No offense, but this is why shifters don't like vampires," Jeff quietly said, drawing our eyes back to him. "The rumor, the speculation. That you would actually ask me that to my face - do you kill off members of your Pack? That's insulting."

He looked at me. "I know you're new and maybe you don't know better," he said, then looked at Ethan and the rest of the vampires, "but the rest of you have been around.Surely you do."

None of them, to their credit, offered their ignorance as an excuse.

"Now," Jeff continued, sitting forward in the chair and putting his elbows on the table,

"the fact that we don't exterminate members" - he gave us all a pointed look, suggesting he knew exactly which supernatural species did, and given the sword belted at my side, I thought he had a pretty good point - "doesn't mean we don't have intra-Pack struggles.

Just because Jamie won't actually be taken out doesn't mean he wouldn't be bullied by stronger Pack members, that folks wouldn't use his weakness, whatever it is, against him or his family."

"Blackmail?" I asked.

"Or extortion. It's happened before. 'Give me what I want, and I'll ensure your kid's protected,' that kind of thing. Pack members who are already pretty far down in the ranks try to make themselves feel better. Part of where you stand is, well, you know, immutable. Every shifter has a primary form. The animal they change into. Shifters are born that way. The form a shifter takes, that doesn't change. You're born to it, and that affects your rank in the pack. But part of it is muscle, strength. And that strength determines what you do with your rank - do you sit back, let the Pack make decisions?

Or do you try to have a role, try to influence Gabriel? The thing about blackmail, about the bullying, is that Pack members don't report that kind of thing to him."

"Because that's the kind of act that makes them seem that much weaker - not being able to handle their own problems?"

Jeff nodded at Scott. "Exactly. Gabriel is sovereign of the N.A. Central, the Pack as a whole, as a unit. He's not here to arbitrate family disputes or whatever. That's not his role."

Ethan held up a finger. "Unless they become Pack disputes." Jeff nodded. "Sure. If they become Pack disputes. But that doesn't happen very often. That's the nature of the Pack. We take care of our own. You get enough Pack members riled up, we take care of it on our own."

Those words, spoken by a skinny twenty-one-year-old computer programmer, hovered uncomfortably in the air.

"Jeff," I asked, "do you know anything specific about a plan to harm Jamie, or any animosity toward the Brecks?"

"I didn't even know they were shifters until you told me. It's not like there's a list or radar or something. Remember, we're still kind of... in the closet, I guess. And while we're lumped into packs, there are only four packs in the U.S., and that's really just geography. We're born, not made like you, so we operate on more of a, I guess you'd say, family level."

"Like the Mafia," Scott suggested.

"We're not that bad," Jeff said.

Ethan looked around. "If Jamie, indeed, has some sort of magical injury, that information could be used to his detriment by other individuals inside the Pack. What can we extrapolate from that?"

"If it's true," Jeff put in, although I think the question had been meant for vampires, "and someone discovered it, they'd have found a trigger for the Breckenridges. Something that could completely set them off."

"Something that has set them off," Ethan darkly corrected.

"And if the owner of that information was a vampire," Luc said, fear in his expression,"that trigger could spark a war between us."

The room went silent.

Ethan sighed heavily, then looked around at the folks at the table. "As we've barely half an hour until dawn, if we have nothing else productive to contribute today, I'll contact RDI and ask that they supplement our investigation during the day. In the meantime, please canvass as best you can to determine if anyone has additional pertinent information. I suggest we meet here, an hour after sunset, to reconvene and share what we've learned. Any objections?"

"Best we can do on a short time frame," Scott said, pushing back his chair. Noah did the same. Scott and Noah nodded at Ethan, then went for the door. Morgan's exit was slower. He pushed back his chair, rose and waited until Noah and Scott were out the door, probably headed for cover as the sun threatened to peek above the horizon.

Morgan looked at me, fury in his eyes, then shifted his gaze to Ethan. Morgan walked toward him, stopped within inches of his body, and whispered something that flattened Ethan's expression.

Without glancing back at me, Morgan walked away and out the office door, slamming it shut behind him.

Ethan, still standing at the head of the table, closed his eyes. "Someday, if he prepares for it, he could be a leader of vampires. God forbid that day comes before he is prepared."

"I think that day is here," Malik muttered to me. I nodded my agreement, but rued my impact on Morgan's interaction with the rest of the Masters. He'd been flummoxed by me, and yet had tried to be protective when I broached the rave topic. I didn't really know what to think about that.

"Jeff," Ethan said, "thank you again for venturing into Cadogan House. We appreciate the information more than we can say."

Jeff shrugged. "No problem. I'm happy to help correct the facts." But then he lowered his head, leaned toward me, and whispered, "About the other thing."

I glanced back at him. "Not here?"

He shook his head, and I nodded my agreement.

"I'll walk him out," I said aloud, then pushed back my chair. Jeff did the same.

"You're dismissed," Ethan said, walking back to his desk and picking up the handset of his phone. "I'll see you both tomorrow."

It wasn't until we were outside the House, halfway between the front door and the wrought-iron fence, that Jeff stopped me with a hand on my arm. He glanced around, gaze darting to and fro. He looked like he was casing the House.

"Avoiding the paparazzi," he explained, "and, no offense, but the guards - I'm not a fan."

We both glanced over to where they stood, dark and severe, at the Cadogan gate. As if on cue, they simultaneously glanced over their shoulders and regarded us.

"They're a little creepy," I agreed, then looked at Jeff. "What did you learn?"

"Okay," he said, both hands moving as he began to explain, "it took a few tries, but I managed to trace the e-mail address. The IP address was a non-starter, unfortunately.

Way too many roundabouts, and even if I found an origin address, that's only going to give me a location, right? It's not going to tell me who sent the e-mail."

I blinked at him for a second. "I seriously have no clue what you just said."

He stopped talking and looked at me, then waved his hands before starting up again.

"Doesn't matter. The e-mail address is the key. The e-mail to Nick was sent from a generic address. The kind you can set up for free on the Web. I managed to drill down into it, get the original setup data, but the info was fake. The name on the account was Vlad."

I rolled my eyes. "Points us in the right direction, I guess, but it's not very creative."

"Exactly what I thought, so I tried something else. Every time you set up one of these generic accounts, you have to enter another e-mail address. A place the company can send your password if you forget it or something like that."

"I assume the other e-mail address was fake, too?"

Jeff smiled. "Now you're getting it. I drilled down into six accounts - "

I interrupted him with a hand. "Wait. When you say 'drilled down,' you mean 'hacked,'right?"

Jeff had the grace to blush. It was charming, in its highly illegal way. "I'm totally white hat," he said, "not that you know what that means, but I am. It's all public service, when you think about it. And I'm a public servant, anyway."

I glanced up as he rationalized, suddenly realizing that the sky was beginning to pinken at the edges. "We need to hurry this up if at all possible, J, before I become considerably crispier. What did you find?"

His smile faded. Jeff looked around again, then pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket. His expression dour, he handed it over.

"This is the chain I discovered," he said. "All the e-mails I could find, leading back to the origin e-mail at the bottom."

I unfolded the paper. I recognized nothing until I got to the very last name on the list. An e-mail address I'd seen before, the name giving it all away. I muttered a curse at the sight. "This is so not what I wanted to see."

"Yeah," he said. "I figure we're even on those favors now."

I stood on the portico for a moment after Jeff left, staring at the closed front door.

Symbols were posted above the threshold, indications of the House's alliances.

Unfortunately, given the results of Jeff's search, we were probably going to need those.

Even with only minutes left until dawn, I decided this wasn't something I could sit on. I headed for the basement stairs and the Ops Room. I'd guessed wrong about the would-be perpetrator; Kelley was cleared by Jeff's e-mail search. I couldn't say the same for the guard that actually sent it. Regardless, that guard fell under Luc's supervision, so I opted to start with him. Besides, no way was I taking this to Ethan without backup.

I pushed open the door and scanned the room, my heart thudding in my chest as I prepared to hand over the evidence of a colleague's betrayal. Even this close to dawn, the room buzzed with activity as vampires prepared to cede control over House security completely to RDI.

Lindsey and Kelley sat at their computer stations. Luc stood behind Lindsey's chair, his gaze on her monitor as she worked, but glanced back as I closed the door behind me.

"Sentinel," he said, straightening. "I didn't expect to see you back. What's up?"

"Where's Peter?"

Luc lifted his eyebrows. "Probably back in his room. He had the early shift. Why?"

I held out the e-mail. "Because he sent the threat."

The room went silent, Lindsey and Kelley turning, eyes wide, to face me.

"That's quite an accusation, Sentinel."

I glanced over at Lindsey. "Do you have a copy of the e-mail from Peter that had the paparazzi information on it?"

"Um, sure," she said. She looked confused, but opened a folder beside her computer station and pulled the printout from it, then spun in her chair and extended it to me. I grabbed it, then laid both pieces of paper flat on the conference table. Luc walked over, arms crossed defiantly over his chest.

I pointed to the first document. "This is the e-mail from Peter about the paparazzi."

Luc looked the e-mail over, a frown pulling his features. "Sure," he said. "He sent it to me from his Cadogan e-mail address. I printed it out."

"I know. I gave the e-mail with the threat against Jamie to Jeff Christopher. He traced it back through multiple addresses, all bogus. But at the end of the chain was this one." I pressed my finger onto the list Jeff had given me a few minutes ago and pointed at the final e-mail on the list - Peter's Cadogan e-mail address.

Silence for a moment, then unmitigated swearing.

"Son of a bitch." Luc looked up, jaw tight, nostrils flaring as he realized the betrayal.

"He's been playing us. The whole time, playing us."

Luc put his palms flat on the table, head bowed. Then, without warning, he pulled back and punched a fist into the tabletop with a crack that split the air like thunder - and notched a fist-sized divot in the wood.

"Luc," Lindsey said. She popped up from her chair and wrapped an arm around his waist, her other hand on his shoulder. "Luc," she repeated, her voice softer.

I bit back a small smile; I was beginning to think that Lindsey protested too much about our intrepid guard captain.

"I know," he said, then looked up at me, his eyes blazing. "He's not in this alone. Not to turn against the House after all these years. If he's in this, it's because someone else is pulling the strings."

I thought of the "she" who'd left a message for Nick. "I know," I told him. "I think you're probably right about that."

"Would it be too much for me to ask that in addition to having this evidence, you have a sly plan to nail this little asshole?"

I smiled coyly. "Of course I have a sly plan. I am a Merit, after all."

Two minutes later we were on the first floor. Luc had Kelley deliver an update about the Breckenridge threat to Peter's room, confirming he was still in the House. We also alerted RDI, who were told to stop him in the event he tried to bolt.

Ethan's door was closed. Luc rapped knuckles against the door, but didn't wait for a response before opening it.

Ethan was behind his desk, flipping closed a laptop as if preparing for dawn himself.

"Lucas?" he asked, brows furrowed at our entry.

I looked at Luc, who nodded, then made my request. "I need permission to kill two birds with one stone."

Ethan arched an eyebrow. "You need permission to kill fowl?"

"She's serious, Ethan." Luc's voice was quiet, severe, and it drew Ethan's eyes and put a look of surprise on his face. I was surprised, as well - I'm not sure I'd ever heard Luc refer to Ethan by his name.

They exchanged a look, then Ethan nodded and looked at me. "Sentinel?"

"It's Peter," I said. "He sent the threat to the Breckenridges."

I watched a bevy of emotions cross his face, from shock to denial to a fury that filled the air with an electric tingle, and narrowed his eyes into slits of glassy green... and then quicksilver.

"You have evidence of this, I assume?"

"He sent the e-mail," Luc said. "The message to Nick that threatened Jamie. It was routed through a lot of fake addresses, but originated in Peter's Cadogan address."

Ethan adjusted his jaw, and when he finally spoke, his voice was low, thick and dangerous. "He sent a threatening e-mail to a shifter from this House?"

He stood up, then pushed back his chair with enough force that it continued to roll after he'd walked away toward the conference table at the other end of the room. I snapped my gaze to Luc, who shook his head. A warning, I assumed, not to interfere.

Ethan paced to the bar along the wall with the slinking intensity of a panther, grabbed a glass from the bar, and with a turn and windup of his torso, propelled it across the room.

The glass flew, then crashed into the wall on the other side of the conference table.

Glass fractured, shattered, and splintered to the ground.

"Liege," Luc said, quiet but stern.

"In my House," Ethan said, then turned back to us, hands on his hips. "In my goddamn HOUSE."

Luc nodded.

"Two traitors in my House, Lucas. In Peter's House. How? How is this possible? Is there anything I haven't given them? Anything they've lacked?" His gaze snapped to mine.

"Sentinel?"

I dropped my gaze to the floor, unable to bear the pain and fury and betrayal in his. "No, Liege."

"Liege," Ethan muttered, the word rendered a joke.

"Merit has a plan," Luc put in.

Ethan looked at me, eyebrows raised, a bit of appreciative surprise in his expression.

"Sentinel?"

"Killing two birds," I reminded him. "It's too late now, the sun's nearly up, but I think I know how we can confront him without risking the rest of the vampires in the House.

We'll lure him out."

"And how will we accomplish that?"

"We offer Celina as bait."

His gaze went a little bit wicked, as if he fully condoned the manipulation. "Do what you have to do, Merit."

"That's permission?" I confirmed.

Ever so slowly, he raised his gaze to mine, then looked at me, this Master of vampires, emerald eyes glowing. "Nail him, Sentinel."

The plan set, and the sun glowing at the edge of the horizon, I returned to my room, and found my cell phone angry and blinking. Mallory had left four voice mails, each more consoling, slightly less angry, than the one before it. She seemed to have worked off some of her steam, but I couldn't say that mine had lessened. The vampire drama had focused my attention elsewhere, certainly, but it hadn't eliminated the dull current of anger. I just wasn't ready to talk to her.

And that wasn't the only thing waiting for me. I thought, at first, that the red paper on the floor of my room had slipped from the packet of mail I'd brought back from Mallory's house. But I knew there'd been no crimson envelope on the hardwood floor when I'd changed clothes a few hours ago.

It was the same envelope as the card sent to Mallory's, but this time it was addressed to me at Cadogan House. I picked it up, then lifted the heavy flap. No card inside this time, but there was something else. I upended the contents into my hand. Out came a rectangle of translucent red plastic about the size of a business card. It bore a single thin white line, the inscription RG, and a stylized fleur-de-lis.

The card in my hand, I went to the bed and sat down, then put the envelope on the comforter beside me. I flipped the card back and forth, held it up to the light, tried to read through to the reverse side. Nothing.

The envelopes had both been addressed to me - one at my old address, one at my new one. Someone had known where I'd lived and had discovered that I'd moved. Someone who wanted to give me random bits of paper and plastic? Were these supposed to be messages? Clues?

The sun rising, and my tolerance for mysteries having been exhausted for the day, I put the card on the nightstand beside my bed. I changed into pajamas - a long-sleeved, oversized Bears T-shirt - ensured that the shutter over the window was secure, and climbed into bed.