Fire Touched

5

I stalked out of the meeting room and ignored the surreptitious looks aimed my way as I stomped down the stairs. Adam wouldn’t be in our bedroom—he tried not to bring conflict there. Given his temperament—and mine—he was only partially successful at this. But he did try.

He wouldn’t want to linger among the wolves, either, not after his exit. He’d let them stew and absorb his edict on their own. Speaking of the wolves, as I got over myself enough to look around, the pack was still here. Lately, some of them lingered after meetings, choosing to go downstairs and play computer games, or stay to chat. They were lingering, chatting (pointedly not about me) and, if my ears didn’t deceive me, playing computers downstairs. But almost no one had gone home.

I thought about that a moment. Of course no one was going home—I’d made our home a target, and we needed the pack to keep everyone here safe.

“Where’s Zack?” I asked Ben, who was leaning against a wall scarfing down a couple of leftover hamburgers held precariously on a saggy paper plate.

He swallowed and ran his tongue over his teeth before opening his mouth. “Asleep. Tad suggested he take half the bed in his room, as it was likely to be quieter than anywhere else he could sleep tonight.”

That’s not exactly what Ben said, but I’d gotten good at ignoring the swearing ever since I figured out it was a defense mechanism. Occasionally, he got me with something truly creative.

“And our guest?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I think he went to bed, too. But honestly, Mercy, I don’t care, right? We promised to grant him sanctuary, but if he doesn’t stick around like a fly on a whore’s mattress, then I guess we’re off the hook.”

I wasn’t sure of that, but I was pretty sure, from his reaction on the bridge, that Aiden wasn’t going to be running off while he was still safe.

“Adam?”

Ben grinned at me. “In his office.”

Of course he was. Because he wasn’t a coward, he wasn’t afraid of fighting with me. The only reason he’d left Warren to talk to me was so that he could face off with Bran.

I knocked on Adam’s office door. Adam’s office was soundproofed, mostly. Which meant I had to be leaning against the door to hear anything inside.

“Who?” he asked.

“You know who,” I told him.

“Come in.”

I slipped in and closed the door behind me, locking it. Despite my expectations, he wasn’t on the phone. That was good, because I still had a few things to say to him.

“Afraid someone will interrupt us?” Adam asked, his face politely wary.

“Afraid you’ll run,” I told him seriously. “Apparently. From what you told Warren. And Darryl. Oh. And Zack.”

He flushed a little. “I only said that because—”

“Because you were afraid if you jumped in between the pack and me, I would run,” I said.

He folded his arms and looked unhappy.

That was okay. I was unhappy with him, too.

“Because,” I said with fierce irony, “you can’t count on me not to take off when the chips are down. Because every time we fight, I run away and lick my wounds. Because if you do something I don’t agree with—and we’ll get back to that—I’ll desert you and go looking to find myself like your ex-wife did.”

“Because,” Adam said carefully, “Bran told me that if I treated you the way I did Christy, you’d leave me, too. Maybe not that day, or the one after that, but eventually you’d burst free of any chains I tried to wrap you in, even if it was for your protection.”

I froze. Raised an eyebrow. “Did Bran really compare me to your ex-wife, or are you just saying that so I’ll be mad at him instead of you?”

“Would I do that?” he asked.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “In a heartbeat, you would.”

He laughed.

“Okay,” he said. “I deserved that. But those were his exact words.”

I took a deep breath. “There are two of us in this relationship, Adam. I love you. If you need to establish a rule I disagree with, but it is necessary for you—I can compromise.” I took a deep breath because I really, really didn’t like the gag order he’d issued. “I can live with the law you laid down on the pack tonight—I don’t like it. But I can deal—and so will they.” Just like Bran’s pack dealt with his wife, Leah. I hated her when I lived with Bran’s pack. But I’d never disrespected her to her face.

Adam relaxed.

“Of course,” I said, “not letting me know how badly the initial treatment of your broken shoulder had gone, that might get you in real trouble. But you would never try to keep something from me, like having to break your shoulder twice because the first time didn’t work, would you? Because you know that I would be really, really ticked off about that.”

He looked at me.

I held my hand up at hip height. “Here’s my irritation level when someone jumps in to protect me when I don’t need it.” I thought about it and bent down until my hand was at my knee. “Nope. This is where my irritation level is. My irritation level is here”—back at my hip—“when he does it without warning me. My irritation . . . anger level is here”—I held my hand up to my eyes—“when you keep me out of something that is my concern. When I landed in the hospital after your ex-wife’s stalker tried to kill me”—he’d been an insane volcano god, the same one who’d destroyed my shop and turned my friend Joel into a tibicena—“I wasn’t trying to make everyone keep you away because the sight of me all beaten up might make you feel bad.”

“You were dying,” Adam said. “You had no choice.” But his face was tight. He didn’t like to be reminded about how close I’d come to dying.

“Yes,” I snapped. “And if you keep me away again, you only hope you’ll be dead when I find out about it.”

I was absolutely serious. The force of my anger took me by surprise. Adam was mine. I’d belonged at his side, not setting up a stupid barbecue. He’d sent me away—and I’d let him because I’d felt guilty for setting the pack up to face off with the fae, the vampires, and a host of other people and not-people who might take offense at my declaration that the Tri-Cities was our territory. It was probably myself I was maddest at, but Adam was a good substitute.

The computer chimed.

I marched around and saw that Skype was up, and hit the ANSWER button.

Bran appeared, his eyes half-lidded in the way they were when he was furious.

“Not now,” I told him. “Adam and I are having a fight about stupid wolves who don’t tell their mates when some damned iron-kissed fae has to break his shoulder because your son the doctor is running around Europe. We have some competent EMTs, but EMTs are not up to bone work—which they proved by breaking his shoulder wrong. Excuse us. I’ll call you back when we are done here.”

“Mer—”

I hit the button to hang up, turned to Adam—who was laughing. Laughing. It was going to be the last thing that he ever did.

“That might be the last thing either of us ever do,” he answered, and I realized I must have said that last thing out loud. “Bran doesn’t really appreciate being hung up on.” He sobered. “I plead stupid,” he said. “And prideful. In my defense, I was pretty badly hurt, and no one wants to get their shoulder broken. Three times today, actually, if you count the first one.”

“Four,” I said, hopping up to sit on his desk. “Because Warren said the reason their attempt failed was because you also had a hairline crack they didn’t know about. For it to be a hairline crack an hour later, it was a break at first.”

“Four,” he said. He moved his keyboard and mouse aside, then slid me sideways across the desk until I was sitting directly in front of him, one leg on either side of his. “And I was worried about what I had to do tonight. I couldn’t make everything work—my shoulder included—if I didn’t think. And if you were in that room, I wasn’t going to be thinking very clearly.”

“And getting Zee down into medical would let you talk him into letting someone take a look at his wounds, too,” I said thoughtfully. “Did you?”

“I can’t say,” he said. “I promised someone something as long as he wasn’t so bad that we couldn’t help.”

I didn’t say anything.

“He’s a tough old smith,” Adam said. “But they had a real go at him.” Bad, I thought, but not bad enough he needed more help than Darryl and Warren could provide. “For what it’s worth, they left Tad alone. Zee managed to convince them that Tad was fragile, and they don’t know enough about humans to torture without killing him.” Adam smiled coldly. “But what they did to Zee—one of their own—puts me squarely behind your offer of sanctuary for Aiden.”

“Good to know that you are both on the same side of this disaster,” said a voice.

I wiggled and ended up on Adam’s lap. He caught me and helped me manage a not-very-dignified pose across his lap that was still better than the floor, where I’d been headed.

“Good evening, Mercy. Adam,” said Bran from Adam’s computer screen. There was none of the usual Skype screen stuff—just Bran’s face. “Courtesy is for the courteous.”

“Thanks, Charles,” I said. “Always nice to know that your computer skills are still cutting-edge. And good evening, Bran.” I wrinkled my nose. “Courtesy is for the courteous? Really? Did you find that in a fortune cookie?” I felt awkward on Adam’s lap in front of Bran and Charles, but when I started to slide off, Adam held me where I was.

“You’re welcome,” said Charles’s voice from somewhere on the other side of the computer screen. Impossible to tell from his voice, but I think I’d amused him.

“My mother’s phrase, actually. Though not in those words. She didn’t speak English,” said Bran in a very soft voice. I don’t know anything about his mother except that Bran only mentioned her when he was seriously unhappy. “Are you finished, Mercy?”

If Adam wanted me to stay on his lap, he had a reason for it. However, it felt really awkward to deal with an irate Bran while sitting on my husband’s lap. Still, I trusted Adam’s instincts, so I stayed where I was to mount our defense. And the best defense is a good offense, right?

“You really would have preferred we let a troll loose in a major human-population center?” I asked. If he was going to be mad, he was going to aim his mad where it belonged. At me. “Like you would have let one run around throwing cars all over Missoula without lifting a hand against it?”

Adam kissed my cheek—and I got it. He was worried Bran was going to be mad at me, and he wanted Bran to remember that we were a team. If he thought a little PDA would help, I was willing to let him run with it.

“You can stop at any time, Mercy,” Adam said. “As much as I’m enjoying your stepping in to rescue me, it is not only unnecessary, it’s likely to backfire.”

He turned his attention to Bran. “We got a call from the Kennewick police that they needed our help with a troll. We had no idea it was anything more than that. I had two wolves already there, so I grabbed the other pack member and Mercy and we headed in.”

Bran pinched the bridge of his nose. “Of course you did.”

Behind him, someone snorted.

“Go on,” Bran said.

“I have some video I e-mailed to you. Did you watch it?”

“It made the national news,” said Bran. “I’ve already watched it five times.”

Adam nodded. “Okay, then. You saw Mercy and Zack rescue a woman and her baby at the risk of their own lives. You saw Darryl get thrown off the bridge, get fished out by concerned citizens whom he did not hurt, and go running back up to fight the troll some more. ‘Heroic efforts’ was the phrase I heard over and over again. ‘We could not have stopped that thing without more lives lost,’ the police chief said. ‘We are grateful to Adam Hauptman and his werewolves, who saved a whole lot of people.’”

“Just wait until they get the bill for the bridge,” murmured Charles’s voice—earning an irritated look Bran sent over his shoulder.

Charles was trying to calm Bran down, I realized. I shook my head. Hard to be dignified when you’re sprawled across someone’s lap, but I tried. “They will send the bill to the fae.”

“If they can find the fae to give it to them,” Charles said.

“Werewolves fighting the fae,” said Bran.

Silence fell.

“I’ve been trying for six months to keep that from happening.” Bran’s voice had a rare growl in it. “To keep this from happening.”

“Neutral doesn’t work,” Charles said. “When you watch your allies commit atrocities and do nothing, who is more reprehensible? Those who rape and plunder or those who could have stopped it but do nothing?”

“You are misquoting your grandfather,” said Bran. “And you have caused me enough trouble. At least we could argue that the fae struck the first blow against us when you hunted down that fae lord in Arizona. Here, we are clearly the aggressor.”

He took a deep breath, raised his chin, and stared at Adam—who stared right back, though I could feel the pulse of his effort not to drop his gaze.

“Very well, then,” Bran said—and he was looking at me, not Adam. “Defend your territory.”

“You heard that part,” I said, fighting not to squirm. In retrospect, I regretted that my speech would have been at home on the set of Cleopatra, The Ten Commandments, or one of the other epic films from the middle of the last century before Hollywood decided to tone down the overacting. I could have done something more Dirty Harry and been just as effective—and less embarrassing.

“It’s been playing in various cuts on the news stations all afternoon,” said Charles. “CNN has a special show scheduled for tomorrow to discuss the fae and the werewolf pack that, and I quote, ‘protected the people who live in their territory.’ Unquote.”

Bran tapped the top of his desk. “So you two, you see if you can back up Mercy’s words. Your territory to hold when the fae come calling. There is a slim chance I can still keep this from being an all-out war between werewolves and the fae. There is a case to be made that we always have protected our territory from the fae—a fiction that stands only because they have not moved against the humans in five hundred years.” He took a breath through his teeth. “If you succeed, I’ll have to convince the other Alphas who live near the fae reservations to do the same—there are only two of them.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, thinking. When he opened his eyes again, the anger was gone, though there was a grimness to his expression that I didn’t trust. “Adam, be aware that if you let that boy go after twenty-four hours and something happens to him, all of the good publicity could easily turn against you.”

Adam nodded, his body stiff. There was something going on that I wasn’t reading, something hard and tense between Adam and Bran. I was getting a bad feeling about this conversation.

“Your pack has made enemies among my Alphas,” said Bran. “Change is not easy on the old wolves. Your wholehearted embrace of it has created a lot of conflict, and they know, the old ones, exactly where to aim their ire. You should expect some challenges to your leadership from outside the pack, Adam, from other Alphas.”

That was so unusual as to be almost unheard-of. Outside challenges usually came from lone wolves too dominant to be welcomed into a pack on their own. One of the secrets of Bran’s successful rule was that he tried to keep track of the lone wolves and found places for them to be useful—even building new packs—to accommodate their needs. It didn’t save them all, or even most of them, but it helped.

One Alpha only challenged another when two packs were too close together—or if an Alpha had a personal vendetta against another. Such battles were supposed to be one-on-one, but, historically speaking, unless an Alpha was utterly useless, his pack would fight for him, too. Quite often both Alphas and most of both packs would die in the fight.

“I am aware,” Adam said.

One of the things Bran had done was virtually eliminate fighting between packs. He’d send Charles out at the first hint of real conflict—and none of the werewolves wanted to have Charles land in the middle of their business. If he thought an Alpha was taking liberties without provocation, he was likely to take out that Alpha. He’d done it a couple of times I knew of, and I expected that the werewolves, who had longer memories, would know of other times.

So why was Bran issuing a warning now?

“Make her declaration real,” Bran said in a low voice. “Give us grounds to make some places safe. Let us be heroes as well as monsters.” He looked at me then. “And do not make this into a full-scale war.”

“Unless you can’t help it,” murmured Charles.

“You know what this means,” said Bran.

“I do,” agreed Adam.

The two of them stared at each other for a moment, then Bran said, “I repudiate you and your pack. You are sundered from me and mine.”

Something happened to the pack bonds, a shivery pain slid through them into my head and was gone a moment later. It hit Adam harder; he took a deep breath, and his whole body broke out in a light sweat.

Bran’s eyes caught mine. He started to say something, then shook his head.

The monitor went blank for a moment, then the familiar Skype screen reappeared.

“He had to do that,” Adam said. “Or else there would have been a war between werewolves and the fae. By cutting us off, by making us a rogue pack, he made sure that this stayed a local matter. We should expect that he will get word to the other packs and to the fae immediately, or else there would be no point.”

He waited, then said in a soft voice, “Mercy, he had to do this.”

“Of course he did,” I said, still frozen on Adam’s lap.

He leaned sideways and grabbed his cell phone off his desk. I started to get up, but his arm wrapped around my middle. He hit a button on the phone.

“Yes,” said Darryl.

“We’re on our own,” Adam told him.

“I felt that,” Darryl said, “and you warned us. I’ll let the pack know.”

“Tell them they can leave if they want to,” he said.

Darryl laughed. “Like that will happen. After your performance tonight, you couldn’t pry anyone out of this pack with a crowbar and a bucketful of dynamite, as Warren would say. No worries, we’ve got this.”

Adam disconnected and set the phone back on the desk.

“I suppose,” I said, my voice more wobbly than I liked, “that it’s a good thing you yanked the pack’s chain. If it’s going to be us against the world, we better all be fighting the enemy instead of each other.”

My stomach felt like I’d been kicked. Bran wasn’t my father, wasn’t even my foster father, but he had raised me just the same. “You knew this was going to happen?”

“I thought it might.” Adam relaxed back against his seat and pulled me more tightly against him.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“Not your fault,” he said.

“Uhm.” I considered the progress of events again. “Yes, it is.”

He shook his head. “Nope. If you hadn’t given notice to the fae—what would they do next? I’m not willing to allow them to prey upon our town.” He paused. The Tri-Cities are three towns . . . and a bunch of small towns tucked right up against them. “Towns. Our towns.” He growled, and I made a sympathetic noise. He said, finally, “Our territory.” That sounded right.

Bran might have cut me loose, but Adam would never do that. Adam was mine, and I was his. Sometimes I chafed a little at all the belonging I’d been doing lately: belonging to Adam, to Jesse, to the pack, and having them belong to me in return. Oddly, the responsibilities of taking care of them didn’t bother me at all; only being taken care of brought out my claustrophobic reactions. I had spent most of my life being independent, and it took an effort to have to answer to other people, no matter how much I loved them. Loved him.

Right now, belonging felt a lot better than being alone. The last time Bran had abandoned me, I’d been alone.

“Are you done being mad at me?” Adam asked. He was changing the subject for me, I knew. There was nothing more to be said about Bran.

“I wasn’t really mad at you,” I told him. It wasn’t a lie, because it had been myself I’d really been angry with. “You’d have known if I’d really been mad.”

“For a good time, call—” he said, and I gave a watery laugh and put my forehead against his shoulder—his good shoulder.

The old VW still sat facing the backyard of this house, looking more and more disreputable every day. Once, Adam threatened to have it towed, and Jesse—not me—told him, seriously, that it was a bad idea.

“As long as Mercy has that way to torment you,” she’d told her father, “you’ll know where it’s coming from. If you get rid of that now, you’ll never know what to watch out for.”

“She just wants to save it because she likes the bunny she painted on the trunk last week,” I’d said.

Adam had laughed, and the wreck stayed where it was, with “For a Good Time Call” followed by Adam’s phone number scrawled across it for anyone (in our backyard) to see.

“I am not mad at you,” I told him. “But you should be aware that if you try to keep me away from you when you are hurt again, I will take you down when you least expect it.”

“Seriously,” he said, “I didn’t expect it to work.”

I lifted my head and looked at him. Maybe I hadn’t been the only one I disappointed when I hadn’t hunted him down in the infirmary. “I thought you were mad at me,” I said. “I mean—look what I did when you couldn’t defend the pack. I agreed to protect a boy that the fae had sent a troll after, and to cap it off, I told the world that we would protect the whole Tri-Cities from whomever and whatever. I figured that you needed time to cool down. I didn’t realize how bad it was—though I knew it was bad enough—until I talked to Warren later. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have let your anger, however righteous, keep me away.”

“You stayed away because you thought I was mad?” he said, sounding . . . smug. Which was better than hurt.

“I stayed away because you wanted me to stay away,” I growled at him. “That’s not going to happen again.”

He hugged me hard. “Good,” he said, his voice muffled in my hair. “Don’t let it happen again.”

“We’ll be okay, right?” I said. If I’d been sitting on anyone else’s lap, I’d have been embarrassed by how little my voice was.

“You and I,” he said, “will always be okay. I can’t promise anything more.”

“Me, either,” I told him. “So what do we do about Aiden?”

What we could do, evidently, was let him sleep.

Tad was sitting on the floor in the rec room directly in front of the lockup-room door (which was shut, not locked). Cookie was curled up next to him, asleep. His legs were crossed in front of him, and they held a battered laptop. He had earphones in, and his fingers made castanet sounds on the keyboard. His mouth was moving silently. Reading his lips and making some educated guesses, he was saying, “Come on, come on, come on. I’ve got this, see? And boom, boom, boom. Like that, suckers. Just like that.”

“Success?” Adam asked.

Tad looked up. For a moment his face was somber and . . . old. Then his mask came back up. “You betcha. I have really missed”—he raised his voice—“playing with you guys.” There was a universal, but friendly, groan that echoed through the room where people, intent on their own laptops, were draped over various seats and couches like cats in a dry sauna, limp and happy.

“And they all died before me greatness, the scabbied old lot of ’em,” he said. “Who is the greatest pirate of all?”

“Me,” declared Paul. “The king of CAGCTDPBT. The ruler of ISTDPBF.” CAGCTDPBT and ISTDPBF were the pack’s favorite computer games. Codpieces and Golden Corsets: The Dread Pirate’s Booty Three, and Instant Spoils: The Dread Pirate’s Booty Four, respectively. “You talk too much—and now you are dead, you lowly deck scrubber. Nothing but a landlubber with salty aspirations. Yarr harr and yohoho.”

“Argh, verily, argh!” chorused the rec-room occupants obediently, though none of them raised their gazes off their monitors. Cookie woke up and barked a couple of times.

Tad looked at his laptop and scowled. “Now, that’s not right. No one should die buried in fish eggs.”

He looked back at us. “Jesse’s in her room—she said something about ‘homework waits for no woman,’ and barred the door. I decided keeping an eye on Aiden would be useful. But after the barbecue, he wandered around the house, then retreated down here. I think he’s asleep now.” He frowned at his keyboard, debating with himself. Then he said, “He locked the window bars and came out ten minutes later and locked the door from the inside. He looked pretty spooked, and the locks make him feel safer.” Tad glanced at the door to Aiden’s room and shivered. “I don’t know how long he was in Underhill, but a week would be enough to make me sleep in the closet with the door shut. It’s not a place that feels like it could ever be safe.”

I’d been there once, by accident. It hadn’t lasted long, but it had not felt safe. I crouched, balancing on my heels, so my head was more on a level with Tad’s. “What can you tell us about him?”

Tad shook his head. “Not much. Your buddy who broke us out brought him to us.” He waited.

“What buddy?” I asked.

Tad raised his eyebrows and waited.

“You know which buddy,” said Adam. “Think about it.”

There was a certain Gray Lord who’d promised to help Tad and Zee in return for my giving him back the walking stick. But the walking stick hadn’t stayed with Beauclaire, so I’d figured that he would count that bargain null and void. “Buddy” wasn’t a word I would ever apply to Beauclaire.

“Okay,” I said. “I know what buddy you’re talking about. Though I’m a little surprised because—” Because I still had the walking stick. I swallowed my words. If Tad didn’t think it was a good idea to talk about Beauclaire, then I would go along with his judgment. The whole pack knew that Beauclaire had come to me to get the walking stick, so I couldn’t mention the stick or the reason I was surprised Beauclaire had helped them.

Tad waited until I’d finished working it out. Then he nodded. “Your buddy talked to me a couple of times. So I was prepared when he opened the cell where I’d been spending my alone time when they weren’t torturing Dad to get me to perform for them.” He sucked in a breath, and muttered, “Don’t look like that, Mercy. They’ll regret that for the rest of their short lives because . . . hey, it’s Dad. And they’ve forgotten what Dad can do.”

There was something dark and not-Tad in his voice. I was used to that when dealing with the werewolves. Sometimes in the middle of the conversation, there would be a switch, and instead of talking to my friend Warren or my husband Adam, I was talking to someone a little more direct, someone who could eat little coyotes for breakfast. So I was used to it, but I’d never seen something . . . someone so dark and violent in the man I thought of as a kid brother, a guy who was a little bit of a clown to cover up just how competent he was.

It was only for a moment. His voice was faintly cheerful as he said, “So your buddy opened the door, and he had Dad with him—and this kid. He told us that was as much as he could do, but that the kid could get us out and on our way. The kid, Aiden, had agreed to do this in return for my father’s help in gaining him a little time—twenty-four hours of safety under the pack’s protection. Hoping—as you probably have figured out—to see if he could finagle that into something really useful, like getting him away from here to somewhere else. Somewhere that he’s not so likely to end up back with the fae”—the darkness was back, just for that one word—“who would like to take him apart to see how he works.”

“We’ll see,” said Adam, as if Tad had asked him a question. “We need to know a lot more about him than he’s told us. I’m not unhappy to thumb my nose at the fae—but I won’t do it over someone who will turn around and stab my friends in the back. Not even if that someone looks like a helpless little kid.”

Tad looked down at his computer screen and brushed it with a forefinger. “Sometimes it’s hard to remember he’s not just a kid, Adam. He was just human, not witchborn or anything. No one knows how he can do fae magic the way he does—not even the fae. They know it’s something Underhill did, and they’re jealous—as if Underhill stole something they thought belonged to them and gave it to a human.”

Like Tad, I thought. Mostly the half fae were just messed up, but Tad had come out with a powerful talent for metal magic—which was rare even in full-blooded fae. Were they jealous of that, too?

Tad rubbed his face. “He’s just human. But all I can think of is Star Trek and ‘Charlie X.’”

“Star Trek?” I asked, puzzled.

Adam grunted. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Charlie is a kid who survived a spaceship crash and was rescued by aliens,” he said grimly. “They gave him powers so that he could survive. And, after a very long time, the Enterprise and her crew show up and rescue him. So he survived and is rescued . . . but he has all of this power and is turned loose on the universe without the experience of growing up human. He doesn’t understand how to interact with people, how to listen when someone tells him ‘no.’ And because of his power, no one can make him stop. Eventually, the aliens have to come and take him back with them, where he will be alone for the rest of his life—because it’s not safe for him to be out with the rest of the universe.”

Tad nodded earnestly. “Now, your buddy who was repaying a favor to you, for a fae, he is pretty softhearted. I think he couldn’t stand to watch what the fae were prepared to do to figure Aiden out. They killed the last one of these kids they found—last year. That one was water touched. They told Aiden that the water-touched boy was crazy, but from what your buddy told me, he wasn’t crazy when he came out of Underhill. That happened later.” He took a breath. “I don’t think your buddy knows any more about what this kid is like than you or I do. I think he felt sorry for him. I do, too. He sure deserves a chance, don’t you think? After surviving Underhill for all those centuries?”

“But ‘Charlie X’ weighs on your mind,” Adam said. “Are you guarding him from harm, or us from him?”

Tad smiled. “Both, if you don’t mind.”

“You need to sleep,” I said.

He nodded around the room at the occupied chairs and sofas. “I’ll sleep down here just fine. Let Zack have the bedroom.” He took a breath and smiled brightly. “I’d just as soon not be alone for a while anyway.”

Paul glanced at him obliquely, met Adam’s gaze, and nodded. Our pack had Tad’s back. Tad could keep Aiden safe, and us safe—and the pack would keep him safe.

I made Adam strip and let me look at his shoulder.

There were bruises and swelling—a testament to how bad it had been. There had been other hurts, too. Places where I could see the faint remnants of bruises and damage. I touched those to make sure that what I was seeing was true healing and not some inner bleeding finding its way out.

Something that had been tight since I watched him run up the bridge for the first time relaxed. He was okay. He’d fought a troll and come out okay.

“Your turn,” he said, while I ran my hands over a bump on his lower ribs.

“My turn?” It was an old bump, gotten before he’d become a werewolf. He’d told me that it used to be much worse: ragged, purple-edged scars over a broken rib where someone had shot him in another life on another continent. Some of his scars had disappeared overnight after he was Changed. But that one was fading gently. Someday it would be gone.

“Your turn.” His voice was dark with something other than pain. “That’s how we do this, remember. You check me out, I check you out.”

I looked up at him to meet his eyes and saw heat that had nothing to do with the room temperature. “I don’t think you are looking for bruises,” I told him.

He put his hand under my chin, and without any kind of force, lifted me to my feet. “I’ve been a soldier,” he told me, his home state of Alabama thick in his voice. “Been Alpha longer than that. Sometimes I think that I’ve been on the front lines for most of my life, one way or the other. And no one, but you, wants so badly to keep me safe. You’ll have to forgive me if I find that sexy.” He kissed me, and when he pulled back, the Southern gentleman was gone. “But I am not blind, so although I want you naked in the worst way,” he told me conversationally, “I’ve also been watching you limp around all evening. So strip down and let me take a look.”

I snickered. “You get many girls with that line?”

“Which one? The ‘sometimes I think I’ve been on the front lines’?”

I waved my hand. “Nope. The”—I dropped my voice down in imitation of his—“‘strip down and let me take a look’ line.” In my own voice, I said, “On the other hand, if you pulled out the wounded-soldier line, you’d be batting them off like flies.” I paused, frowned at him. “You do know that the time for your using that line is gone, right? No more pickups for you. Alpha or no, I’ll torture you to death, one day at a time.” I looked at him, and he didn’t seem to be taking me seriously. “Drip. Drip. Drip,” I said. “If you even think about another woman like that.”

He waited, a small smile on his face. “I understand,” he said after waiting a courteous moment to make sure I was finished. “And just to keep such matters on the up-and-up, if I catch you flirting seriously with someone, I will rip out his throat.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “For the record, the ‘strip down and let me take a look’ line is not very sexy.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Mercy”—he deepened his voice—“strip down and let me take a look.”

I shook my head. “That’s not fair. The voice doesn’t count.” But as I talked, I stripped down. Because underneath the sexy voice was worry, as if just because he’d hidden how bad his wounds were from me, I would have done the same to him.

My knees were skinned, one shin was bruised, and when Adam touched my chin, it hurt.

“From tripping while I was carrying you,” I told him.

He nodded and turned his attention to a scrape on my hip. He was tanned, but my skin was still a shade or two darker than his, so mostly my bruises don’t stand out as much as his. “This didn’t come from a fall.”

“It’s just a scrape,” I said.

He raised an eyebrow. Okay, it was a scrape and bruises that were still blossoming in glorious profusion.

“I honestly have no idea,” I said.

He put his forehead against mine. “I’m sorry.”

“About what?” I asked.

“Fussing,” he said.

I wrapped my arms around him, trying not to see the troll lift a car over his head. “I fussed first,” I said shakily. “I fussed first.”

When he kissed me, it was a gesture of comfort. But with the both of us naked, it didn’t stay that way for long. We made love on the soft carpet, and afterward, he fell asleep on top of me. Exhausted, I thought, from the fight and from the healing that followed. I held him and wondered what I’d done to us. Wondered what changes the boy would bring.

Coyote had told me once that changes were neither good nor bad—but brought with them some of both.

I closed my eyes and prayed for more good than bad, for Adam’s safety, for Jesse and the pack. Then I thanked God for helping to return Tad and Zee out of the hands of our enemies. I fell asleep before I was finished.

The phone rang at four in the morning. My face was buried in my pillow—though I didn’t remember moving from the floor to my bed. Adam moved, and the phone quit making that annoying noise—I almost fell back asleep.

“They told me, Wulfe told me, I should call you. That you’re taking care of such matters now,” said a high-pitched but sexless voice.

Wulfe’s name had me sitting upright on the mattress.

“I see,” said Adam.

The voice said, “We are paid to watch the hotels and motels around town and to call the Mistress’s people when one of their kind shows up.”

“I see,” said Adam again.

There was a pause. “Are we going to get paid?”

“I am sure you will,” Adam said. “I will call the Mistress and discuss the matter with her further. Is this a good number to reach you at?”

“Yassir,” the voice said.

Adam ended the call.

“Do you know who that was?” I asked.

“Probably a goblin,” Adam replied. “But I’m going to call and check.”

Wulfe answered the phone himself. “Adam,” he purred. “How lovely to hear from you.”

“Goblins?” Adam asked.

“I see they contacted you,” Wulfe said. “They are a little unreliable, so I wasn’t sure they would.”

“How much are you paying them?”

“Three hundred for every stray vampire they find,” Wulfe told him. “And a thousand a month to keep them looking.”

“I’ll pay the three hundred,” Adam said. “But I won’t pay the thousand.”

“Good luck finding the vampires who show up around here, then, darling,” said Wulfe.

“Oh, I’ll find them all right,” Adam told him. “From what I understand, most of them are after Marsilia. I’ll just keep an eye on the seethe, and when they find her, I’ll find them.”

There was a little silence. “Smart boy,” said Wulfe, “aren’t you just a smart boy. Fine. We’ll pay the thousand. But they’ll report to you, and you will pay for the actual sighting.”

“Yes,” Adam agreed.

The first change, I thought.

Adam disconnected and called the goblin back—explaining the new order to . . . him or her, I couldn’t be sure from the voice alone.

Goblins, according to Ariana’s book, were neither fish nor fowl. They qualified for status as fae—they could disguise what they were with illusion spells. But the fae didn’t want them. For human purposes, the goblins counted themselves fae, without argument from the Gray Lords, but the goblins didn’t want to be fae, either. Part of the problem seemed to be that goblins could reproduce as fast, if not faster, than humans, and the other part was that many of the fae considered goblin flesh a delicacy.

When Adam got off the phone, I said, “So the vampires are punishing you because I got uppity?”

He shook his head. “They’re seeing if we’re serious. Do you want to come with me to the hotel?”

I considered it. “Bran sends minions; he only goes himself if he needs to rain death and destruction down upon the world.”

“Yes,” Adam said. “But I’m awake, I might as well go check it out myself. I thought you might like to go along for the ride.”

I couldn’t help smiling—and it was stupid. There was a strange vampire in town, and my own hasty words meant that we had to go confront him or her. But Adam wanted me with him on an adventure.

“I’m coming,” I said. I glanced at the clock. Six hours of sleep was plenty.