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Benny-wolf paid no attention to Benny-man. The wolf was on a hunt, even if he was still in human form. The wolf probably would have shifted, but Benny had persuaded him that having a gun would be useful when they reached the sniper.
The wolf seemed skeptical. He wanted to shred the man with his claws for shooting Ryder. And Benny admitted it had appeal. But he also wanted some answers about this conspiracy, and they were fast eliminating all the people who might have answers.
If the sniper was a Campbell, moreover, he might know things like who was the Chinese Alpha who wanted to wage war on Tanaka for control of the World Council. Were there other partners? What were the plans? And maybe even information about the Pied Piper. Where was he? Did Campbell know his name? How did he send wolves to the Penticton pack?
Benny-man had questions. He smiled a bit at that. He always had questions.
The wolf was just intent on his mission — kill the sniper.
Even as a human, Benny moved quietly, although he was more of a creature of the city than of the forest. Only his few years in the Okanogan had involved any kind of woods-craft. He’d learned to pass almost unnoticed in Southeast Asia as a teenager, blending in to the masses of people there who were on the move. Refugees flowing into Thailand, people trying to return home to Vietnam and Laos. And of course all of the people fleeing Cambodia. Benny had moved among them, carrying whatever needed to be moved — information, money, weapons, drugs. A small, teenaged boy could go places adults couldn’t.
Teen boys had no sense of death. Benny had been fearless because of it. He had nothing to lose — it was already gone. His home, his pack, his father. After a while, he could hardly remember any of it. There was just the adrenaline rush of the underground, and the companionship of his wolf.
He hadn’t wanted to leave it when his father appeared one day and said they were going to the States. Benny barely knew where the United States was, and for most of the men he worked with, the U.S. was the enemy who had abandoned them to another enemy and left them with despots like Pol Pot. Benny did not want to leave Chang Mai. His father didn’t listen. And his father was dominant enough to make his son come with him, whether he wanted to or not.
And the country he’d ended up in was as different from the country he’d left as could be. He experienced snow for the first time. He was in a rural high school with its unfathomable prejudices, and giggly girls, and sports teams that made no sense.
He spoke English, although he wasn’t convinced his new classmates did. He also spoke Khmer, Thai, Vietnamese, and French. He didn’t admit it. He thought his classmates were foolish, immature and silly.
He got kicked out of school for fighting his first week there. A kid had taunted him, calling him names. The names meant nothing to Benny, but he recognize the intent — and he’d lashed out with his foot, clipping the boy’s kneecap, and putting him in the hospital. He was suspended for three days, while his father smoothed everything over.
No one taunted him again.
No one spoke to him at all. No one, except Ms. George, the high school counselor. And she had helped him to see the high school as just one more environment to study and understand. One more group of people to fit into seamlessly. She’d gotten him into a martial arts dojo. Encouraged him to use his linguistic abilities to learn Spanish — the only ‘foreign’ language the school offered. And she got him to read books. At first he read because he liked Ms. George. And then he read because the books were about the war he’d been a part of. They were wrong about a lot, he told his father. His father agreed. “They often are,” his father said. “But good authors ask us to think. And that’s important. But accurate observation is difficult. Perhaps even impossible. Can you accurately describe your school to me? Are you sure?”
And that became a game between him and his father —Benny’s observations of a rural Washington high school and its mix of whites, Mexican migrants, and Colville Native Americans, and all the conflicts that produced. And a bemused Ms. George helped him find books to answer some of his questions.
His father had gone down to the school to thank Ms. George personally, and fell for her. But by then Benny was graduating — at the top of his class — and headed to University of Washington, planning to major in anthropology, with a specialty in languages. At UW, he’d learned Japanese and Chinese —not Russian, for some reason. He had been learning Russian from Ayta....
His father had cautioned him to not reveal his experience in Southeast Asia, and his facility for languages. “You’ll end up working for the CIA as I did,” he said grimly. “And I don’t want that for you.”
No, instead he’d worked for his father, who by then a pack Alpha, and for the Northwest Council of Alphas. Alpha Johannsen had ambitions, and the Council was all powerful, back then. Powerful in part because of Benny’s abilities as an intelligencer — to gather information and make sense of it.
He’d developed a new way of passing unnoticed — he created a persona of a carefree playboy with the financial resources to indulge himself. It allowed him to travel throughout the West Coast — anywhere really. He tamped down his personal dominance, just as he had as a teenager in Thailand. He used charm instead of his fists.
Usually the charm worked, but Benny was under no illusions how dangerous the work was. He honed his martial arts skills. He had never had a lot of concern about killing someone —it had been kill or be killed when he was in Chang Mai. But he got interested in the benefits of yoga, tai chi, meditation, in part because he heard the anguish in so many pack houses about the number of girls who didn’t make it through first shift. Maybe if shifters learned to calm the girls’ fears and empower them?
And then it had blown up when Benny had come face-to-face with what the Council really did with his information. He quit. Ended up with Margarite for a few years. Good thing he’d stayed with Muay Thai and the other martial arts. The Council hadn’t taken kindly to his resignation. But they finally backed off —probably his father had something to do with that, or maybe they realized he wasn’t talking about Council secrets. The assassins stopped coming.
But he felt trapped, and it was Margarite who had sent him off to school at Berkeley.
He smiled thinking about it. Some key women in his life had made sure he went to school.
And then he’d drifted into Stefan Lebenev’s orbit and Wolf Harbor.
Benny shut down his thoughts there. No, he told himself. I can’t face that and take care of this crisis too. While he’d been musing about his past, though, his wolf had worked his way around behind the sniper. Didn’t the sniper sense Benny?
Well he would soon enough.
Let me have control back, Benny asked his wolf — and that in itself was a change. The man ordered and commanded his wolf, he didn’t ask it. But Benny was accepting the fact that his wolf was as dominant as he was —and didn’t that sound like schizophrenia? Multiple personalities? Graduate school in psychology had been a revelation —Benny had felt like he was a walking version of the whole DSM-5.
But his wolf ceded power back to the man. Benny blinked a bit, and then brought his gun out of his waistband. “Campbell?” he said. “Let’s talk.”
The man whirled, but Benny’s steady stance with a pistol pointed at his head, stopped him from bringing the rifle around. “You forgot to watch your back,” Benny observed.
The man said nothing. He was poised, watchful. Benny didn’t make the mistake of thinking he was submitting. Instead, Benny increased his own wariness. Watch our back, he told his wolf. We may not be alone out here.
“So you’re out here doing your grandfather’s work?” Benny said conversationally. “He leaves you out here, while your cousin gets to try for pack rank? What do you get out of it?”
