A Wolf After My Own Heart MaryJanice Davidson (children's ebooks online .txt) 📖

Shifter juveniles just to be a humongous dickcheese. He was breaking them—house-breaking them—for syndicate members who wanted their very own pet Shifters. But also…”

He trailed off and they both looked at her and she didn’t want to finish the sentence but she had to finish the sentence because the end of the sentence was perfectly, horribly obvious: “But also Stables. This Lund guy, he was selling werebears and werewolves and—and werefoxes and werelabradors and wereroos, he was selling them to people like me.”

“Not people like you,” Oz said firmly.

“People who know about werewolves and keep quiet, but only because they want to own one for their very own. Like slaves.”

“Told you it was bad.”

“But you got him.” She pointed at the Lund circle, which should be in red and scribbled over with great big loops of black. “He’s dead, you saved Caro. So why would you…d’you think some are still out there?”

“We’re very nearly positive,” Garsea replied as Lila drained half her glass. “Because it was never just Lund. He was simply—how’d you put it? Satan’s office manager. We had a mole at IPA. She would help Lund target vulnerable weres. Not to worry,” she added, anticipating Lila’s next question. “I killed her and ate her.” She smiled with a great many teeth, and Lila felt every hair on the back of her neck come to attention as she recalled an earlier conversation in that very room.

Be careful! If you make Oz mad, his sister will eat you.

Please tell me that’s hyperbole.

“Okay. Now I know why you work for IPA but don’t want to work at IPA. Because where there was one, there could be another. You’re pretty sure work is a safe place to do this stuff, but not a hundred percent. Am I getting that right?” She couldn’t imagine what it was like to find out a colleague—someone whose job description meant they had to be on your side—was complicit in the trafficking of children. “So Lund is dead, and the Sindicate member at IPA, she’s dead. And not just dead. Devoured, even. So, super-duper dead.”

“As well as a few SAS foot soldiers,” Garsea added.

“SAS?”

Garsea looked away while Oz rolled his eyes and replied, “They’re a fucking embarrassment. The Shifter version of the Ku Klux Klan.”

“Oh, charming.” But it wasn’t a surprise once she thought about it. Garsea and Oz and Auberon and probably Sally could all take her in a fight. They were faster, stronger, and at least one of them didn’t mind eating people. No surprise there were some supremacists in the mix. “Was there a war, like there was just before the KKK was founded? A reaction to, what would you call it—changing social mores?”

“Not a war,” Oz replied. And was he having trouble meeting her gaze? “More like a few lame skirmishes that most people never noticed.”

“Given the sudden lack of eye contact from you both, I’m pretty sure you’re downplaying.”

“It’s embarrassing,” Oz admitted. “Ten years ago, there was an attempted takeover. A bunch of SAS assholes and their allies staged a takeover attempt in Shakopee, which was gonna be the starting off point for a worldwide coup. They disguised it as a protest against climate change.”

“Are you talking about the Kiyuska thing?”

“Unfortunately,” Garsea replied sourly.

“But that really was about climate change. It made national news. It’s why they picked Shakopee, the town was built near the Mdewakanton Sioux burial mounds. I read about it when I was researching whether or not to move here.”

“That’s not the only reason the SAS picked Shakopee.”

“Well, sure. They also wanted to push a specific narrative: ‘We nearly wiped out this entire tribe, and P.S. we’re also destroying the planet, so pay attention and fix everything right n—’”

She cut herself off. Because there was something odd about that protest. It didn’t make national news solely because of the violence, or the unprecedented number of fatal casualties. There was something about the police response. They’d been essentially ineffective, because…

Her brain found the fact, grabbed it. “Their tear gas didn’t work. None of their crowd control stuff had much of an effect.”

“The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux are part of a sub-tribe called Kiyuska. And Kiyuska means ‘rule breaker,’” Oz said. “Want to guess how they came by it? Or why the settlers coming west wanted to kill them all so badly?”

“It wasn’t just Native Americans vs. encroaching Europeans, which was horrifying enough,” Lila said slowly. “It was also about Shifters.” Three hundred years ago, natives who could change into wolves and bears and possums would have been interpreted by Europeans as the basest of sorcerers practicing all manner of witchcraft. An evil not to be borne, monsters who had to be wiped out to the last man, woman, and child.

“Indigenous Shifters,” Garsea clarified. “Nearly all of whom were wiped out. And so Shakopee was to be a staging area for the ultimate Shifter takeover. It didn’t work,” she added, anticipating the question, “because sanity prevailed.”

“After a bunch of them died,” Oz pointed out. “It took a while for sanity to get the upper hand.”

“Enough of us—well, not ‘us,’ we were all teenagers at the time, and kids like Sally hadn’t been whelped yet—but enough Shifters found out and put a stop to it.”

“Why?”

Garsea stared at her. “I’m sorry, Lila, did you just ask me why Shifters didn’t let reactionary racists with delusions of superiority attempt the bloodiest of coups, which ultimately would have resulted in a six-figure body count at best?”

“But you guys are superior. And we are ruining the planet.”

“But that isn’t the way, Lila.” Garsea sounded equal parts exasperated and sad. “Obviously that’s not the way. Even if they had only killed half the Stables in the world, it’s still billions dead. So we put a stop to it before the movement could catch fire and spread all over the world. It wouldn’t have been a coup. With the population so reduced, it would have been Armageddon.”

“Huh. Well, on behalf of my species, thanks.”

“On behalf of mine, you’re welcome.”

“And