Hunting Ground (Alpha & Omega #2)(8)

He sounded... not worried. Intrigued. It was, Anna thought, going to be a different manner of fighting this week; not fangs and blood but a battle of wits. All those dominant wolves... most of the Alphas in the same room. Arguing. Maybe it wasn't going to be a different way of fighting. But for now, she was driving and had absolutely no idea where they were headed.

"Are we going to the hotel?"

"Yes." And he gave her directions. But as they turned off the highway and onto the streets of downtown Seattle, he said, "Let's do something first. Why don't we go see Dana, the fae who's agreed to moderate this mess." And maybe, like his father, he'd been doing some mind reading. "She's not just... a stand-in for a UN ambassador, a graceful host to help Angus. She's the one who's going to keep this civilized and keep us from paying to have Angus's carpets cleaned of bloodstains. I have a gift to give her from my father, to thank her for the help we are paying her a small fortune for."

"I didn't hear about the fae." Anna had never seen a fae before, not one she knew was a fae anyway. She felt a frisson of excitement and tightened her hands on the steering wheel. "Bran brought a fae into werewolf business?"

"It's necessary to have a neutral party to make sure the violence doesn't get out of hand."

Anna thought about the wolves she had known: the violence that had always gotten out of hand. She tried to imagine someone who could put a stop to it. Bran, Charles-but they would have to do it with more violence. "She can do that?"

"Yes. And more importantly, everyone knows it."

"What kind of fae is she? Isn't Dana a German name? I thought most of the fae were British-you know, Welsh, Irish, and Scots."

"Most of the fae we see in the US are Northern European: Celtic, German, French, Cornish, English. Dana isn't her real name. This decade or so she's been using the name 'Dana Shea,' a variant of daoine sidhe. A lot of the older fae and some of the witches won't use their own names-anything that belongs to them for such a long time develops power over them and can be used against them, the same way scraps of hair or fingernails can."

"Do you know what her real name is? Or what kind of fae she is?"

"I don't know it-I don't think even Da knows it. Though she is a Gray Lord, one of the most powerful fae. They rule the fae sort of like Da does the wolves." He glanced at her. "If Da was a psychotic serial killer, maybe. I do know what kind of fae she is, though. You meet her and talk to her a bit. Then tell me what you think."

Anna gave a half-amused huff. "What do I get if I'm right?"

His eyes lightened with the wolf who lurked inside him, and the hunger in his gaze told her exactly what he meant when he said, "The same thing you get if you're wrong."

She waited for the fear or even trepidation that thoughts of sex had usually brought to her-but it never came. Just a welcome tickly feeling in her stomach. In less than a month's time, he'd made serious inroads on her problems in that area. "Good," she told him.

He smiled at her and relaxed against his seat.

SEATTLE highways had a lot more vertical variation than those in Chicago. The roads rose above water, tangled and burrowed under hills where houses sat unmoved by the thousands of cars that traveled beneath them. Over the smell of the cars was the scent of water and salt from the Puget Sound and various other saltwater lakes and ponds. The gray skies leaked here and there, not enough to turn the wipers on full but too much to let the rain accumulate long.

Following Charles's directions, she exited the highway and found herself tootling along a slower road in what could just as well have been a small town in Britain as a part of Seattle. It looked old, quaint, and beautiful, if a little self-conscious. On the water to her right was a series of docks with boats and houseboats, while on her left, narrow buildings covered the side of a hill that got progressively steeper as she drove.

A huge silver bridge arched over the water and the road she was driving, soaring up to land on the top of a steep hill above. The name of the cross street that ran directly under the bridge had Anna pulling her foot off the gas so she could be sure that she was reading the street sign correctly.

"Troll?"

"What?" Charles had been looking toward the water, but he turned back to look at her.

"There's a street here called Troll?"

He smiled suddenly. "I'd forgotten about that. Why don't you follow it up the hill?"

She turned the car up the road and thought for a moment the decision was a mistake because the little blue car strained to crawl up the hill, which was even steeper than it had looked from the bottom. The road was narrow and claustrophobic, with the bridge for roofing, its steel feet closing in from left and right.

She was so busy worrying about driving that she didn't see it until they were quite close. The road they were on ended and teed into another road. The bridge overhead plowed into the top of the hill. And in the space between the road and the end of the bridge crouched a giant something.

Without consulting Charles, she parked.

Someone had sculpted a huge humanoid monster out of cement, rising from the sand: a troll for the bridge. Cement hair hung limply over one eye while the other stared over Anna's head at the waterway at the bottom of the hill they'd just driven up. One of its hands, which rested on a real VW Bug, was big enough to engulf the car. The Bug's nose burrowed beneath the troll's beard as if it sought refuge there.