"It is?" Ukiah froze.

"The motion detector for the security system." Atticus pointed upward, not down at the floor where Ukiah had been focused. A cord dangled down off the corner unit. "We're not in its range, but we will be in a step or two."

"So how do we get around it?"

Atticus tugged on Ukiah's braid. "We don't. We leave it to experts."

"But . . ."

"Take it from your older, more experienced brother—don't play with bombs!" Atticus pulled him backward via the braid. "Come!"

Atticus didn't let go of his hair until they were on the elevator.

"The Ontongard normally don't bomb their own dens." Ukiah rubbed the back of his head where all the roots were complaining of his brother's rough treatment. "Things blowing up attracts more attention. Also, their means of communication is so loose, a returning Get is more likely to set it off than a human."

"Why did they leave in the first place?"

"If the cult attacked one of the other dens in the hexagon, then they would abandon all the rest except one."

Atticus swore. "Not the cult, the Pack. They went after a den in Watertown this morning while we went to the island."

The elevator door opened to the foyer. Through the tinted glass walls, as they walked toward the doors, they could see the police were arriving, several squad cars' worth.

"Let Ru do the talking." Atticus put a hand to Ukiah's shoulder as they walked out the door.

Ru had found some office workers, and he herded them across the parking lot to where the Jaguar and Explorer sat, screened by some low bushes. Atticus steered Ukiah toward the crowd. The police car passed Ru and pulled up to the building. Atticus ignored it, propelling Ukiah along.

"We got a call on a bomb threat," the officer called after Atticus.

"Yes, it's up on the fourth floor and it's booby-trapped!" Atticus shouted back, not stopping.

The policeman glanced at the building and then started after Atticus and Ukiah, leaving his cruiser behind, door open, lights flashing. "Were you the ones who called this in?"

Ukiah paused, only to have Atticus shove him forward.

"Yes! We found it!" Atticus kept walking.

"Hold on, I need to get your names, take your statement." The officer's hand was now riding his pistol grip.

"DEA! Agent Steele! And the number one rule of bombs, Officer, is clear the area."

As Kyle had the Explorer in the far reaches of the parking lot, they were now over two hundred feet from the building. The policeman paused, glancing back at the building and his cruiser in front of it.

"Don't you think this is a little excessive?" the policeman called.

The building exploded, floors flashing out like Chinese firecrackers, one after another. When the ground floor flared, the blast flipped the police cruiser like a toy. Atticus started to push Ukiah down and then they were both smacked to the ground hard; Atticus shielded him as the deafening noise, smoky heat, and flying glass blasted over them. Ukiah felt a dozen prickles of pain from Atticus as if they were his own.

The sound had been indescribably loud, and the silence afterward was shocking.

Atticus scrambled to the police officer while Ukiah's body was inclined to stay put—it seemed safer that way. The policeman got up, swearing, clearly no worse for the experience.

"Obviously," Atticus said, "it wasn't excessive enough."

***

The golden afternoon blurred with the arrival of fire trucks and police cars and various government agencies. Atticus tried to keep a hand on Ukiah at all times while fending off offers to take them both to the hospital. True, he had slivers of glass embedded in his back, making him feel as grouchy as a porcupine, but Ukiah withdrew alarmingly into himself. With another man, Atticus would have taken this as an attempt at duplicity, but he could feel his brother's endurance was thread thin and fraying.

He made his way toward the Explorer, pulling Ukiah along with him. Kyle was still holed up in the SUV, eyeing the crowd with dismay.

"You killed your earbud." Kyle reported, motioning to his own ear rather than touching Atticus.

Atticus found the remains dangling from his shoulder, a thin coat of his dead blood on it. Gingerly he explored his ear—a piece had blown off but it had found its way back. Unfortunately the earbud couldn't similarly repair itself.

"I've been trying to tell you," Kyle continued. "They blew the other four dens too."

Atticus glanced at the office workers being grilled by police about their missing employers. If his team hadn't evacuated the building for the expected gunfight, all seventy-some employees would have been in their offices when the bomb went off. The midafternoon time might have been chosen to ensure maximum kill. "Do they have any idea of a body count yet?"

"I called in bomb threats on all the addresses we had when you found this bomb."

"Good work!" Atticus gripped Kyle's shoulder.

Kyle grinned shyly at the praise, and then confessed, "Well, your brother stressed the symmetry of the dens, so I figured if they'd blow this one, they'd do the rest too."

Kyle had trusted a virtual stranger, someone he'd seen only twice and had every reason to mistrust, because he was Atticus's brother. Atticus supposed that was the nature of family, but he found it faintly alarming. In the old adage of blood and water, why did thickness make the fluid more trustworthy? Was Ukiah someone who could be trusted? Atticus had wanted to take the den with a SWAT team, but the plain truth was that the machines of justice moved slowly. Everyone in the six buildings would have been killed while they decided how to deal with perps who had already fled the scene. Would Ukiah's conviction that Ping was being held in the office building have been good enough to warrant a search? In the end, Atticus suspected, the law officers involved would have weighed their decision on the fact that Ukiah was his brother.

Atticus saw Agent Zheng stopped at the police barrier by a uniformed policeman. She showed her ID to pass it; another person of questionable reliability gaining automatic trust in the brotherhood of law officers. There had been a thawing of Zheng's arctic north; dismay registered as she saw the extent of the destruction to the office building. She spotted him and something passed through her eyes at the moment of recognition, a flicker of excitement then extinguished by something she saw in his face.

What was that all about? Did he communicate something to her without knowing?

She glanced past him and summer came to the arctic.

From behind him, Atticus feltan answering warm outbreak.

Ukiah—of course.

The two threaded through the crowd as if they were alone in a forest, the people around them no more interesting than trees. Ukiah took Zheng's hand, looked into her eyes, and a calmness washed over him.

"That explains much," Ru murmured in his ear.

Atticus glared at his partner.

Ru only laughed at him. "I've never seen a straight woman resist you so completely—but she's got her own little honeypot."

Ukiah's love was a deep current dragging Atticus along to places he didn't want to go. Beauty, they said, was in the eye of the beholder. Tainted by Ukiah's love, Atticus suddenly could see Zheng's glacial demeanor as Indigo's beautiful calm—serenity that all the world's madness didn't invade. A refuge.

For his brother, at least, this was the true thing, a love to die for. Did Indigo feel the same? Ukiah would give Indigo access to the Pack. It was easier to imagine her using his brother than her falling in love with him. Her strong self-control eliminated the obvious attraction: Ukiah's lean, well-defined body and handsome face. He was wolf silent with all-seeing feral eyes—what would they talk about?