A Wolf After My Own Heart by MaryJanice Davidson (good books for high schoolers .TXT) 📕

be the envy of the prop guy from an R-rated movie about cops and gangsters. Boxes and boxes of rifles, pistols, shotguns.

“He’s not violating the ‘No food, no drinks, no fireworks, no propane, no chemicals’ policy, at least.”

“Jeez, Annette. We’re in a bad guy’s super-duper secret weapons storage chamber and you’re still reading the brochure?”

Annette ignored his excellent point. “But this firepower definitely breaks the ‘nothing worth more than $5,000’ rule. And the boxes are all precisely four inches from the wall. I’m serious, does anyone have a ruler? I swear they’re all exactly four inches. It’s amazing.”

“Sounds exhausting,” Oz replied. “Not amazing.”

“This is damning,” Berne observed after walking around the death room. “I’d think Gulo would be more careful.”

“Naw,” Oz replied. “It actually makes sense that he’d use a place like this. After spending what had to be three months of his life sterilizing it, I mean. There are thousands of storage spots just like this all over the Twin Cities and millions in the Midwest. Without the address, you’d never find it. Plus, if cops are looking for any of this, they can’t come in here without a warrant. So anything they found would be inadmissible.”

“But padlocks? To protect all this?”

“It’s got to look normal from the outside. If he put up a fancy electronic lock or security grid or what-have-you, it would draw exactly the attention Gulo wants to avoid. ‘Gosh, what’s in there that he wants to protect so badly? Let’s look and see!’ But who’s gonna case a place like this and think, ‘I’ll pick that random storage space on the very off chance that it has $100,000 worth of new weapons and ammo in it’?”

Annette was groping the wall next to the bench. “Besides, if someone wants in badly enough, they’ll get in. So he—or they—didn’t waste money on locks, it was spent on space, climate control, and ease of access. Thus the elevators,” she added, because holy shit, there was an elevator behind the reloading bench. You had to push the bench aside to access it, which was why Oz hadn’t seen it; Annette had found it because she wanted a closer look. Not to mention…

“The lighting in here is for shit. Gulo must hate it—did you notice how bright the lights were in the morgue?”

“This is all puzzling and probably terrible, but it’s not helping me figure out Gulo’s connection to the Smalls and the genocide his family may or may not have planned. And we’ll need to figure out who else is involved.”

“D’you suspect Debbie, lad?”

“A wereroe who nearly passed out when you raised your voice? Gulo wouldn’t have any use for her. He wants fighters. Resentful fighters who feel disenfranchised and pissy.”

“SAS members,” Berne sighed, resigned.

“Such a stickler for details, Oz,” Annette teased. “I’ve only seen you apply that to your wardrobe.”

“Ugh. Even your compliments sound bitchy.” Oz’s complaint was pure reflex—he and Annette had been sniping at each other for over a decade—because he was beginning to realize the implications of a reloading bench and crates of new weapons. The smell of gun oil was sharp and earthy and got stronger when Berne pried open one of the crates; even in poor light, the blue-black barrels gleamed. “Fucking guns, the irony isn’t as clever as they think it is. Just hypocritical.”

“What d’you mean?”

Berne looked up from the crate and Oz was startled at the man’s haunted expression. “SAS is trying another takeover. Or something just as bad. There are too many guns in a storage space rented by a coroner who falsified evidence for it to be anything else.”

“It’s the anniversary weekend,” Annette said dully. Oz could practically read her mind: What a waste, what a waste, and now a new bunch of people are going to die. And for what? “And what better way than to use Stable weapons against them?”

“Point,” he agreed. Shifters tended to look at guns as crutches and the people who wielded them as dangerous small-minded adolescents. Annette was the only Shifter he knew who even owned a gun, and it stayed locked up in her closet 99 percent of the time. Which was sensible, because whenever she took it out of the closet, people died. Was there a metaphor in there somewhere? Lila would know. He couldn’t wait to tell her about all this. Given her ease with firearms, she’d probably pick up on things he’d miss. He loved her fierce protective instincts, all the more admirable because she was new to…well. Everything. The neighborhood, Shifters, his nutty extended family, house fires—

No, not house fires.

Maybe he shouldn’t say anything. She’d been pulled into Shifter madness, into his family’s chaos on top of all her chaos. If he really cared about her, he’d leave her the hell alone and fuck Kama-Rupa, which wasn’t the lovely soul mate fable he’d been told as a kid but just an adult rationale for why Shifters got crushes on strange Stables they scented from a distance.

Focus. Guns. Murder. Impending doom. Remember?

He turned back to Berne and Annette. “Gulo and Co. might think guns are the tools of primitive adolescents, but they learned from their mistake a decade ago. If you’re going to try to take power from billions, you’ll need more than teeth and claws. The worst of it is, it probably won’t work. But a lot of people are gonna get shot before SAS figures that out.”

“Lad, I have t’tell you something,” Berne said dully, just as they heard the hum of the elevator and saw the doors start to slide open.

“Hold that thought, Magnus.” Oz was happy to see Annette and Berne stay put, despite the imminent arrival of bad guys. Bolting wasn’t an option with all that was at stake, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t tempting.

“It will work,” Dr. Gulo said.

“Rude,” Annette observed. “No one was talking to you.”

Gulo glared and started to shout something, then got hold of himself. He pushed the reloading bench away from the elevator doors and stepped out. “It’ll