Night Broken

7

I didn’t carry at work—with Tad there, there was no reason, and a gun just got in the way while I was squirming around in engine compartments and under cars. My carry gun, the 9mm, was locked in the safe with my purse. I wasn’t going into the office to open the safe because the office had big picture windows, and someone who had burned down a building that housed dozens of innocent people wouldn’t hesitate to break a few windows.

Paranoia meant I had a second gun tucked in a special lockbox attached to the underside of the counter nearest the office. My fingers pressed the code, and a half second later I had the cool and heavy Model 629 Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum in my hand. I wasn’t Dirty Harry, but I’d shot my foster father’s Model 29 since I was big enough to handle it. My foster father’s .44 was in the gun safe at home, but the only difference between it and the 629 was that the 629 was stainless steel. Both of them were too heavy for me to shoot for more than a few rounds, but I could hit a pretty tight pattern on a target at fifty feet with the gun as long as it was in the first twelve shots.

The gun was Adam’s, and he’d suggested I get another Sig Sauer 9mm like my preferred gun instead because it was lighter and, being an automatic, the 9mm was faster to reload. I’d told him it was a waste of money when he already had this one.

I had made the assumption that this guy was Christy’s stalker and not some poor lost traveler who stopped to use the phone or something. We hadn’t managed to get any kind of photo of him, but how many guys travel in rental cars with a wicked-looking dog?

I looked at the monitor again and tried to evaluate him in the black-and-white screen. He appeared to be tallish, and his hair was light-colored. Without anything that eliminated him from the description Christy had given, I decided I was okay with making the assumption that he was the bad guy. If not, I could apologize to him later.

Why had he come here instead of going after Christy?

Maybe he had, and all the people we had guarding her had made him rethink his plan.

Maybe he thought he could take me to use as leverage to get to Christy. Or, if he was really crazy—and burning down a building was acting crazy in my book—he might be planning on killing me to get back at Adam for keeping Christy from him.

Maybe he just wanted to ask me if I’d seen Christy. My understanding of psycho stalkers was not infallible. It was also very possible that I was overreacting.

My chest hurt, and I felt the stupid light-headedness that told me I was flirting with a full-blown panic attack. Panic attacks were stupid and counterproductive, rendering me helpless to protect myself until they were over. Happily, I didn’t have them as often as I used to, but now was not the time.

I reminded myself firmly that I had prepared for another attempted assault. I had a bolt-hole for the coyote to hide in. At the back of the garage, on the top of the floor-to-ceiling shelves, there was an old wooden box—a fake box. The front and most of one side were all that was left. Those I had wood-glued and screwed to the shelf so it wouldn’t fall off if I bumped it. A narrow opening at the back of the side not against the wall meant I could squeeze into the box, but I wasn’t trapped because the box had no lid. All the way up near the roof of my fourteen-foot-high garage meant it didn’t need a top to keep me hidden, and I had about a foot between the top of the box and the ceiling.

So why wasn’t I doing the smart thing and hiding up there as a coyote? He might know who I was and where I worked, but it was extremely unlikely that he knew what I was.

I watched the monitors as he tried the door, then looked around the parking lot. The camera angle wasn’t wide enough for me to see what he was looking at, but I was pretty sure it was my van. He couldn’t know I was still there unless he’d been watching the shop, but the van might make him suspicious.

That was assuming he knew what I drove, which might be giving him too much credit. Though he had apparently followed Christy from Eugene—and I knew that Adam wouldn’t have advertised the trip over here if he could help it. He’d figured out she was staying with us and found my garage. It wasn’t too much to assume he knew what I drove.

He walked away from the door and back to his car, the big dog pacing at his side without a leash—just as Lucia’s dog had done. I had time to hide.

The security camera had its eye focused on me, recording my every move. If I hid from this human, the whole pack would know what I had done. Christy was human, fragile, and no longer the Alpha’s wife. That she had gotten into trouble she couldn’t get out of by herself was to be expected.

In a wolf pack, the dominant members protect—they don’t need protection. I was not just the Alpha’s wife, I was his mate and a pack member. That all meant that what I did mattered, and I was expected to make a better showing than Adam’s fragile ex-wife, who’d driven this man off with nothing more than a frying pan. So I stood watching the monitors, waiting for him to break in, instead of hiding in safety. But the knowledge I chose to face him, that I had other options, seemed to have pushed the panic attack away.

I watched as Christy’s stalker walked back over and began working on the front door of my garage. Darkness hadn’t yet fallen, though the sun was low in the sky.

Five minutes until help arrived.

Five minutes if Tad was at home when Adam called him. If not, Adam would be here in fifteen.

What did it say about Christy’s stalker that he risked breaking into my garage with a crowbar when it was still light out? Was he stupid? Or did he think he had enough money, enough power, to escape the consequences of his actions?

I closed my eyes and stretched my neck and rolled my shoulders to loosen them.

The front door gave with a tremendous crack—but my ears are more sensitive than most. I leaned on the front of the Passat and left the gun resting on the hood, though I kept my hold on it. Lifting the gun up too soon would cause my arms to tire, and I’d lose accuracy. I didn’t worry that he would be too fast because I was as quick as any of the werewolves—and they were a lot faster than any human.

It was probably only seconds between the time he broke down the door and when he came into the garage bay, but it seemed like hours. I spent the time reminding myself that I wasn’t drugged up on some fae-magic concoction that prevented me from disobeying orders. That Tad was coming, that Adam was on his way.

That if I shot him, then Christy would have to leave.

I’ve killed people before. If I’d felt like I had a choice, I wouldn’t have killed them. No choice meant I had no regrets for those kills. Maybe I should have felt worse about that; maybe it was being a walker or maybe being a predator. I didn’t think it would bother me to kill this man who had killed four innocent people—five if you counted the man who’d dated Christy a couple of times. Even so, I wasn’t going shoot him unless he made me do it, I told myself sternly.

Not even if it meant getting Christy out of my home.

I concentrated on keeping my expression cool, and when he stepped into the light, I said, “Mr. Flores, I presume?”

He stopped, and the big dog stopped, too, his shoulder precisely at his master’s leg. The dog’s gaze was alert, intelligent, and primal. Ancient.

I blinked, and the dog was just a dog. My first impression was probably a product of the stress of the moment, an accident of shadows.

Flores smiled and raised both hands to his shoulder height, palms out, dropping the crowbar as he did so. I flinched a little at the noise of the crowbar hitting the floor.

“I see that you were expecting me, Mrs. Hauptman.” He glanced at the monitors, and his smile widened. “I am not here to hurt you or yours, but your husband has something that belongs to me, and I want it back.”

Looking at his face under the light, and I knew why Christy had climbed right into bed with him. If Adam was movie-star handsome—this man was porn-star material. Eyes so dark blue they could only come from contacts, skin either tanned or naturally Mediterranean dark, and even, well-defined features with sensual overtones. Bright gold hair whitened in streaks by the sun or a skilled hairdresser swept back from his face in an expensive cut. But the most noticeable thing about him, the thing that Christy had never described, was the air of sexuality that he brought with him. No one would look at this man and not think male, sex, and dangerous.

“Christy appealed to us for protection from you,” I told him steadily. “If you know where she ran, if you know where I work, then you know what Adam is. We granted her protection, Adam and I and the whole pack. She doesn’t belong to you, she belongs to us. She never belonged to you. You need to leave. If you leave right now, my mate won’t kill you where you stand.”

“I don’t want to cause trouble,” he said, and he lied. His dog took a step forward.

I had the big gun out and aimed before the dog took another step.

“I might regret shooting the dog, but I won’t hesitate,” I told Flores.

He did something with his hand, and the big dog stepped back. The air-conditioning kicked in, and the air blew past them and to my nose, bringing with it the faint scent of magic. A faint scent that altered everything because I’d smelled that scent yesterday while I stared at a dead woman in a hayfield. I fought to keep my expression from changing and angled my face a little to the camera.

“You caused a lot of trouble in Finley,” I said, knowing the powerful little lens would catch my lips. Someone would figure out what I had said because there was not a chance in hell that I was coming out of this alive unless Tad or Adam made it here in time. “I saw what you did. Enjoy horsemeat, do you?”

A puzzled look crossed his face as if he were going to deny knowing what I was talking about … and then he smiled. His body language changed as he straightened, like an actor shedding a role. He licked his lips. “Horsemeat is not my first choice, no, but it sufficed at the time.” He liked to talk with his hands. “He understands the message I left in that field, your husband, does he not? I do not recognize his territory, and I hunt freely therein. He has taken she who is mine, so I shall take from him she who is his. Balance. Only then will I take his life—and that is vengeance. There is no one safe from my—”

I shot the dog. A clean killing shot to his head. He dropped without a sound. Alive one moment, dead the next.

Flores staggered back a few steps, clutching his chest almost as if I’d shot him there instead of his dog. He twisted to look at the dog, then turned to me, crouching a little with rage in his face. “You dare.”

“Your fault,” I said coolly, aiming steadily at him and not looking at the poor dog. “You signaled, and he gathered himself for attack. I warned you.”

“My children are immortal,” he told me in a breathless hiss and with theatrics that belonged onstage rather than in the mundane environment of my garage. Christy had been right, there was something European in his accent, but not anything I’d heard before. Vaguely Latinish, maybe, but not any Hispanic accent I was familiar with. The accent added melodrama to his already melodramatic words. “Tied to flesh that can be killed, but that mortal flesh is easily replaced. My son will not die but rise again, and so your efforts to defeat me and mine fail. Even so, you will suffer for this before you die.”

“Your children are immortal?” I asked, repeating the important part of his words for the camera to catch. The first security system had had sound, but when Adam had updated, he’d traded sound for better video. “Tied to mortal flesh. Who are you?”

“Guayota,” he said.

“Coyote?” I asked, and I know my eyes widened. He wasn’t Coyote.

“Guayota,” he said again, and I heard once more the odd pronunciation that Gary Laughingdog had used in the middle of his vision. Not Coyote with a weird accent but another name altogether.

“With a ‘g,’” I said.

But Flores, who called himself Guayota, was done listening to me. “Your husband thinks to keep the sun from me,” he said. “He will regret it.”

Something happened, something that smelled of scorched fabric and magic. I cried out as that heat seared my cheek. But even as the pain made my eyes water, I shot.

I aimed at Flores’s face, and I kept firing until the bullets were gone. Holes appeared in his face as I shot, two side by side in the middle of his forehead, one in his cheekbone. Then I switched targets and two more holes opened up around his heart, the final one a little low and right.

Out of bullets, I grabbed a big wrench and made a backward hop onto the hood of the Passat. It rocked a little under my weight, and I thought that I’d have to remember to tell the owner that it needed work on the shocks, too. Another hop put me on the roof of the car and gave me a little space.

The bullets had knocked Flores back. He hit a rack of miscellaneous parts and sent it crashing to the floor. Flores bounced off the rack, almost followed it to the ground, but caught his balance at the last instant. I felt a cold chill because with three bullets in his face and two in the chest, he caught his balance and stayed on his feet.

A funny sound filled the garage; it made my throat hurt and buzzed my ears. He was laughing. A cold, hard knot in my belly told me that probably someone else was going to have to deal with the shocks on the Passat.

My shoes were soft-soled and so had no trouble sticking to the top of the Passat. The gun was of no more use except as a club, but I kept it in my left hand and kept the wrench in my right.

I didn’t have much of a chance, but that didn’t mean I was going to roll over and give the thing my throat. Adam was coming, and the camera was rolling. Even assuming he killed me, the longer I held out, the more information they’d glean from the recording.

Flores’s face changed as he laughed, flowing and darkening, but beneath the darkness, visible in cracks in his skin, was a sullen red light. My changes are almost instantaneous, the werewolves take a lot longer than that with the exception of Charles. But none of us glowed.

Flores … Guayota moved his hand, still laughing, and something flew at me. I dodged, but it slid over my shirt, which caught fire, and landed on top of the Passat.

A quick brush of my hands put my shirt out, leaving me with blisters on the skin along my collarbone and a hole in my bra strap. I slid back one step to see what he’d thrown at me without having to look away from him.

It was about the size of a finger, blackened and oozing on one end. I chanced a quick glance and realized that not only was it the size of a finger, it had a fingernail. I almost nudged it with my foot to be sure, but the paint was blackening and bubbling up around it, and directly underneath it, the metal was sagging.

I’d read an account written by a Civil War commander about how he’d seen the cannonball coming toward one of his men who was wounded and down. It had been coming so slowly, and he’d just reached down to deflect it—and had lost his arm.

I didn’t touch it.

Guayota had a distance weapon, however weirdly horrible, and that meant keeping back from him was no good. Time enough later to wonder at the finger and how he’d made it so hot it could melt the roof of the car; for now I had to concentrate on survival. Nor could I follow my sensei’s first rule of fighting—he who is smart and runs away lives to fight another day. The bay doors were closed, and I had no way to run.

Out of other options, I attacked. There had been no more than a fraction of a second between when he threw the finger and when I jumped off the car. His burning finger meant that I knew better than to touch him with my skin. The wrench I’d grabbed was a giant-sized 32mm; it weighed about three pounds and gave me almost two feet of additional reach.

I got four hits on him, three with the wrench and one with the gun, and in that time, I learned a lot about him. He wasn’t used to his prey knowing how to fight back. He had never been trained to fight hand-to-hand. He was slower than I was. Not much slower, but it was enough for me to get in four hits. He was oddly sticky, and I lost the gun to him when it sank into his flesh to be quickly consumed and absorbed.

And, finally, nothing I tried seemed to hurt him.

He continued to heat up as we fought, and before I got the next hit in, his clothes flared up in a wall of flames, then drifted to ashes. His face had melted into something with eyes and a mouth, but no other features that I could pick out in the wavy blackness of his skin.

Other than his face, his body remained in other ways humanlike, but there was nothing human about his skin. It was char black and formed into a bumpy, almost barklike surface. Fissures broke open as he moved, revealing, as I’d noticed before, something deep orange with red overtones. His outer surface reminded me of nothing so much as film I’d seen of the active lava flows in Hawaii.

He touched me, a glancing blow on my hip. I slapped my hip to put out the fire and refused to look because although my face still hurt, as did the skin across my collarbone, my hip had just gone numb.

My fifth hit landed in one of those odd fissures in his skin, this one on his left shoulder blade, or at least where a shoulder blade would have been had he been human. It knocked him forward: he wasn’t immune to the laws of physics. My arm and hand were spattered by hot chunks of liquid that burned.

Remembering the finger that sank into metal, I knocked the hot splatters off me, but the skin beneath them bubbled up into blisters that hurt. Flores reached out, a longer reach than he should have been able to manage, and grabbed hold of the end of my wrench. Where he touched, the metal glowed orange, and the glow rapidly spread toward my hand. I let go of the wrench before the glow touched my skin.

The air was smoky now—and not just with burning fabric. All sorts of flammable liquids spill on the floor of a garage; although I clean them by pouring on cat litter or HyperSorb and sweep them up, there was enough residue here and there to react as he brushed past them, so that there were several small fires burning reluctantly on the cement.

I spent an anxious and weaponless few moments just getting out of the way of his jabs and kicks before I could get close to something else I could use as a weapon. I tripped over the crowbar he’d dropped, but didn’t pick it up: it was all metal, and I’d just learned that I wanted something that didn’t transfer heat as well as metal did. But when I tripped, I knocked the big mop over on myself and grabbed it as I rolled to my feet.

The big wooden mop handle made an okay bo staff, and I used it to keep him from approaching me while occupying him seriously enough that he couldn’t rip off another finger—or other body part—to throw at me. The wood kept catching fire, but if I swung it fast enough, the air put the flames out before it could burn much away. It was getting rapidly shorter, but I was only using the very end to poke him rather than using it like a baseball bat.

I managed to lure him into leading with the top half of his body and hit him in the middle of his forehead with the end of the mop handle in a lunge that would have done a fencing master proud. The wood sank a good four inches into his forehead and stuck there. When he jerked away, he took the mop handle with him.

He wrenched it out and threw his head back and howled, a noise so high-pitched that it made my ears hurt. He bent double, and parts of his body stuck together, melting or melding. I took a chance and sprinted to one of my big toolboxes and grabbed a three-foot-long crowbar off the top. This crowbar had a big red rubber handle to protect my hands.

I was running back across the garage, crowbar held up and over my shoulder, when something really big flew past me, something large enough that the air disturbance in its wake fluttered my shirt as it passed.

It hit Guayota right in his center mass, scooped him off his feet, and carried him back five or six feet in the air before he hit the far wall and the floor at the same time. That wall was covered with a plethora of rubber hoses and belts hung in a semiorganized fashion. He set the ones he touched on fire, and a new wave of toxic smoke filled the air, as the thing that hit him fell to the ground with a dull smack that resolved itself into the motor from a ’62 Beetle that I’d had sitting in the office to be taken for scrap.

Adam was here.

A Beetle motor isn’t huge as motors go, but it still weighed over two hundred pounds. Even I don’t know all that many people who can fling an engine as if it were a baseball. But I didn’t look for him because—surprise, surprise—not even being hit by two hundred pounds had put Guayota out of the game.

He rose from the ground, covered in flaming belts and hoses that he shed as he moved. He was no longer even vaguely humanlike. Instead, he had the form of a huge dog shaped much like the dog I’d shot. His head was broad and short muzzled, and his ears hung down like a hunting dog’s. His mouth was open, revealing big, sharp teeth of the many, many category. The creature he’d turned into was bigger and heavier than any werewolf I’d ever seen.

This, this was the beast that had feasted on horses, dogs, and women next to that hayfield in Finley.

“Mercy is mine,” Adam said softly from somewhere just behind me. “You need to leave here, right now.”

“Yours?” The voice was still Flores’s, though liquid splattered from the doglike monster’s mouth to sizzle on the floor as he talked. “You took she who is mine. It is only meet that I take she who is yours.”

“Christy Hauptman is the mother of my daughter,” Adam said. “And I loved her once. She cared for me for years, and that gives her the right to ask me for protection from someone who frightens her. You have no right to her, no right to be here at all.”

The dog who had been Flores, who was evidently the Guayota my half brother had warned me about, stopped and tilted his head. The dog’s skin looked like it had when it was a human shape wearing it. On the dog, the charred, blackened crust resembled fur, fur that dripped molten and glowing bits of stuff onto the cement floor.

“No?” Guayota said, his voice an odd whispering hum that was almost soothing to listen to. “You are wrong. I found my love, who had been taken from me, and I celebrated the sun’s countenance, warmth, and beauty. I gave her all that I was, all that I had been, all that I could be.”

The hum rose to a hiss, and I shivered despite the heat because there was something horrible in that sound. It mutated into a howl that made my bones vibrate like wind chimes. The sound stopped abruptly, but I could feel the air pressure build up as if we were in an airplane climbing too rapidly.

“Then she left.” He sounded like the man who’d first come into the garage, almost human. Sad. But that didn’t last. “She left me, when I swore that would never happen again. Swore that never, once I finally found her, would I let her leave me.”

“That’s not a choice you get to make,” said Adam. “You are scaring her, and you need to leave her alone. I and my pack are sworn to defend her from danger. You don’t want to put yourself in my path, Flores.”

“I tremble,” Guayota said, smiling, his teeth white in the red heat of his mouth. “See?”

A low, groaning noise rumbled through the garage, and the floor rocked beneath me, making me stumble awkwardly to keep my feet. The cement floor cracked, and I could hear a crash of epic proportion as the earthquake sent one of the lighter-weight racks in the office area over in a crash of miscellaneous VW parts.

Guayota laughed and didn’t sound even vaguely human this time. “We all tremble witnessing the might of the Alpha of werewolves.” There was a popping sound, and steam escaped from one of the fissures in his back. Red glop dropped from his half-open mouth like slobber, but slobber didn’t hit cement and score it.

Adam scooped up the wasserboxer engine I’d just put together and threw it. The wasserboxer engine is a lot heavier than the old Beetle engine had been, and he threw it more at bowling-ball speed than baseball.

Guayota rose on his hind legs to meet the engine when it hit, and this time it only pushed him back two or three feet, and he stayed upright and in control of the slide. Like my gun and the mop handle, the engine sank into him and stuck there, metal glowing.

Then I felt a wave of fae magic, and the engine became a shining silver skin that flowed swiftly over whatever Flores had become and covered him entirely before he had a chance to move.

“Zee?” I asked, coughing as the acrid smoke of the garage finally became too strong to ignore. I kept my eye on Guayota, but the fae-struck aluminum of the engine block seemed to be capable of staying solid around a creature who had melted hardened steel. The metal flexed a bit before settling into a motionless shape approximately the size of the creature Guayota had become. Within the shiny skin, Guayota made no sound. My science background wasn’t all that strong, but I was pretty sure the only thing keeping the aluminum from melting was fae magic.

“Nope, just me,” Tad called, his voice a little strained. “Nice throw, Adam.”

“Thanks,” Adam said, sounding a little breathless himself.

Tad walked out from behind Adam—and he looked a little odd. The stick-out ears that had always given him an almost-comical appearance were now pointed, the bones of his face subtly rearranged to beauty as real and as human as Adam’s. His eyes … were not human at all: polished silver with a cat’s-eye pupil of purple. He was a little taller than usual, a little buffer, a little more graceful, and a lot scarier. I wasn’t used to thinking of Tad as being scary.

I opened my mouth to thank them both but all I did was cough. I trotted to the garage controls to raise the garage-bay doors to let the smoke out and some fresh air in. Adam grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and started putting out fires. Both Adam and I were choking on the foul smoke, but Tad seemed to be unaffected by it.

As the adrenaline faded, pain took over. I’d evidently hit my right knee on something, and my cheek felt like it was, figuratively I hoped, on fire. Despite my fears, my hip was fine, just a bit achy. There was a hole burned through my jeans and underwear, but the skin beneath looked okay. The burns on my arm, hand, and collarbone hurt like fiends.

Sirens sounded in the distance, either police summoned by Adam or the fire department summoned by someone who saw all the smoke.

I put my hands on my hips, standing just outside to stay out of the smoke. “You guys better have some explanation for coming in just when I’m about to wipe the floor with him and stealing my victory.”

Adam smiled, but his eyes were dark as he finished putting out the last fire. He set the fire extinguisher on the floor and stalked over to me. “Complain, complain, that’s all I get. Aren’t you the least bit happy to see me?”

I stepped into his arms, turning my head so the wine-dark silk shirt he wore pressed against my unhurt cheek and twisting so only the unburnt part of my collarbone touched him.

“I thought this was it,” I confessed in a whisper, and his arms tightened on me until I had to tap on his arm. “Too tight, too tight, too tight … better.”

“How long can you hold him?” Adam asked Tad, though his arms didn’t slacken.

“Longer than you can hold her,” Tad said dryly. “He quit struggling—probably lack of air. I could keep this up for an hour or two. If he fights like he was before, then a half hour, maybe a bit more. Aluminum is easier than steel. What are we going to do with him?”

“Jail’s not an option,” Adam said. “I’ll call Bran—but I expect we’re not going to have a choice but to call on the fae.”

Tad grunted unenthusiastically. “If someone told them I’m not as powerless as most of us halfies, they would want me to join them. Maybe someone can contact my dad, and he can take credit for this.” There was a metallic sound as if he’d tossed something at the metal prison he’d created from my nice wasserboxer engine.

“Hey, Mercy? Did you know there is a finger in the backseat of this Passat?” Tad asked.

I broke free of Adam and went into the garage to check out the Passat as I started to add up the damage. I’d need to get another wasserboxer engine to replace the one that melted. The Beetle engine had been no loss … but the Passat was going to need some bodywork.

The finger had melted all the way through the roof, through the lining, and dropped onto the off-white leather, where it left a small puddle of blood and black ash. It looked like anyone else’s finger.

“He pulled off his finger and threw it at me,” I told Tad. “Do you know of any fae that pull off body parts and throw them at people?”

“I think there are some German folktales about disembodied heads,” he said doubtfully. “And then there’s always Thing on The Addams Family.” He opened the back door of the car and touched the finger. “It’s not moving.”

I hugged myself and fought the urge to giggle. “Thank the good Lord for small favors.”

Adam moved Tad gently aside and used a hanky to pick up the finger and bring it to his nose.

“I don’t smell magic as well as you do, Mercy,” he said, setting it back on the seat. “But this finger smells human, not fae.”

“Human fingers don’t—”

Tad interrupted me. He jerked his head around until he faced his metal sculpture and made a pained sound. He staggered off balance, and Adam caught his elbow to steady him.

Sweat broke out on Tad’s brow, and he said, in a guttural tone, “Watch out. Something is wrong.”

The whole building shook again. There was a thunderous crash as a transmission fell off the top shelf of a Gorilla Rack. Adam grabbed my hand and held on to me. It was the hand I’d burned, but I just grabbed him back. Some things are more desperate than pain.

It lasted less than a second, and it left the cement floor of my shop buckled, car parts and boxes of car parts strewn all over. The high-pitched wail of the office smoke detector went off. It went off with some frequency when I showered too long, or someone cooked bacon in the microwave, but it had ignored all the smoke and fires in the garage. Apparently, it had decided that enough was enough.

Adam dropped his hold on Tad and me, grabbed his ears, and snarled. I knew exactly how he felt—and I knew what to do. I dashed into the office, hopped onto the counter, and snagged the stool as I jumped. I set the stool on the counter and climbed on top with speed and balance hard won with practice. Reaching up to the ceiling, I popped the battery out of the alarm.

Blessed silence fell. Relative silence, broken by things that were still rolling onto the floor and the sirens that were closer now. In the parking lot, a car engine purred to life, then revved hard as someone drove off with a squeal of rubber on asphalt. I looked out the window and saw Juan Flores’s rental car speeding away.

Tad was swearing in German. Some of the words I recognized, but even the ones I didn’t echoed my own sentiment exactly.

“Stupid,” he said to me, his eyes horror-struck. “I am so stupid. Er war Erd und Feuer.”

“English,” murmured Adam.

“Earth and fire,” said Tad without pause. “Earth and fire—and I trapped him and forgot what he was.”

Earth.

Tad clenched his fist and pulled at something invisible with enough force that it caused his muscles to stand out on his arms. With an almost-human shriek, the aluminum that had encased Flores peeled back, revealing a cavernous hole where the cement floor of my garage had once been.

Adam’s head came up, and he measured the sound of the sirens. “Stay here,” he said, and hopped down into the hole. He was gone less than a minute before he was back.

He looked at Tad. “You need to be out of here before those sirens get close. Can you change your appearance so no one will recognize you?”

Tad nodded.

“Change shape, then,” Adam said. “You understand that it won’t just be the police coming here. Even the dumbest cop is going to see that there was magic afoot here. We’re going to have government agents, and if they get a glimpse of what you can do, they are going to want you. You are too powerful for anyone to let you run around loose: human, shapeshifter, or fae. No one but your dad knows exactly how powerful you are—let’s leave it like that.”

Tad changed like I do—between one breath and the next. He was a little taller than usual and a lot handsomer. He looked clean-cut and real. I wondered if he’d stolen the appearance from someone or if he practiced in front of a mirror.

“That’s good,” said Adam. “Go.”

“Thank you,” I told him.

He grinned, and Tad’s grin looked odd on the stranger’s face. “You aren’t supposed to thank the fae, Mercy. You’re just lucky I like you.” Then he strolled casually outside and away.

Adam pulled out his cell phone. “Jim. Get rid of all copies of the feed to Mercy’s garage after I hit Flores with the engine. Blur or get rid of anything that shows Mercy’s assistant after he left when she closed up.”

“Got it.”

He hung up the phone and looked at me. He’d seen it faster than I had. Tad was incredibly powerful to do what he’d done. He was also young, and with his father locked away in Fairyland (the Ronald Wilson Reagan Fae Reservation’s less respectful nickname), he was vulnerable: no one but family could know what he was. I looked at the sheet of aluminum, now crumpled and torn aside. It could have been an airplane or a tank or … We needed to keep him safe.

“The hole goes underground out to the parking lot.”

“He told me his name was Guayota,” I said—and that’s when I saw the naked dead man lying on the floor where a dead dog should have been.

I blinked twice, and he was still there, belly down, but his head turned to the side so I could see the single bullet hole in his forehead. My bullet hole.

“Adam?” I said, and my voice was a little high.

He turned his head and saw the man, too. “Who is that?”

“I think,” I said slowly, “I think that’s the dog I shot.” I remembered that too-intelligent, ancient gaze.

“I saw it on my laptop on the way over,” Adam said. “You shot a dog.”

“It wasn’t a dog.” I gave a half-hysterical hiccough. “They’ll arrest me for murder.”

“No,” Adam said.

“Are you sure?” I sounded a little more pathetic than usual. My face hurt. My garage was in ruins that would make my insurance company run to find their “Acts of God not covered” clause. I’d killed a dog that had turned into a naked dead guy, and someone had thrown a finger at me.

“Flores essentially ate your gun, so no weapon for ballistics,” Adam said. “And you were attacked in your garage.” He didn’t say any more out loud, but I heard what he left unspoken. There wasn’t a member of the local police department who hadn’t seen or at least heard of the recording of what had happened to me in this garage before, if only because the imagery of Adam’s ripping apart the body of my assailant left a big impression.

His arms closed around me, and we both looked at the dead man. He looked like someone’s uncle, someone’s father. His body was spare and muscled in a way that looked familiar. Werewolves don’t have extra fat on their bodies, either. They burn calories in the change from human to wolf and back, and they burn calories moving because a werewolf doesn’t have the proper temperament to be a couch potato.

“Sweetheart,” Adam said, his voice a sigh as the first official car pulled into my parking lot. “It was clear-cut self-defense.”

I closed my eyes and leaned against him.

“Hands up,” said a shaky voice. “Get your hands up where I can see them.”

Adam let go of me and put his hands up. I turned around, stepping away from Adam so they could tell I wasn’t armed. The man approaching us wasn’t in uniform, but his gun was out. His eyes weren’t on me, all of his attention was for Adam. Of course, it didn’t take a genius to figure out which one of us would be the bigger threat. If I looked like I felt, I looked tired, scared, and hurt—I put my hands up anyway.

“Mr. Hauptman?” said the armed man, stopping just inside the bay door but in the middle of the open space so that the Passat didn’t interfere with his ability to cover both of us. He was younger than me, and he was wearing slacks and a jacket and tie, which only made him look even younger. I noticed almost absently that true night had fallen in the short time between when I’d first thrown open the bay doors and now.

“Adam Hauptman?” he said again. His voice squeaked, and he winced.

“Keep your hands where we can see them,” said another, calmer voice. This one was dressed in a cheap suit and held his gun as though he’d shot people before. His eyes had that look that let you know he’d shoot right now, too, and sleep like a baby that night. “Agent Dan Orton, CNTRP. This is my partner, Agent Cary Kent. You are Adam Hauptman and his wife, Mercedes?”

Feds. I felt my lip curl.

“That’s right,” Adam agreed.

“Can you tell me what happened tonight?”

“You’re here in response to my call?” Adam asked instead of answering him.

“That’s right.”

“Then,” said Adam gently, “you already know some of it. I think we’ll call my lawyer before the rest.”

I’d have spent the night repeating what happened endlessly to a series of people who all would hope for the real story. I’ve done it before. With Adam present, neither of us said anything because they weren’t letting Adam call the lawyer.

Agent Orton of CNTRP, better known as Cantrip, and Agent Kent, the nervous rookie, wanted to arrest us on general principle because Adam was a werewolf, and there was a dead body on the ground. And, possibly, because they weren’t happy with our not talking to them.

Luckily, we were under the local police jurisdiction, barely, because Adam’s initial call had only told them that there was a man who might have been responsible for murder and arson trying to break in to my garage. Human attacking human, even if she was the wife of a werewolf, was not enough to allow Cantrip to take over the case.

We didn’t correct them when they speculated that our intruder was the dead man. We said nothing about a supernatural creature who could turn into a volcanic dog and cause earthquakes because Cantrip was dangerous. There were people in Cantrip who would love to see us just disappear, maybe into Guantanamo Bay—there were rumors, unsubstantiated, that a whole prison block was built to hold shapeshifters and fae. Maybe they would just report that we had escaped before they could question us and hide the bodies. Adam, because he was a monster, and me because I slept with monsters. When I’d shifted to coyote in front of Tony a few months ago, I’d also shifted in front of a Cantrip agent named Armstrong. He’d told me he wouldn’t say anything about it, and apparently, based on these two, he had not.

There were good people in Cantrip, too; Armstrong was a good person, so I knew that it wasn’t just a pretend thing—like Santa Claus. But a growing number of incidents between Cantrip and werewolves or the half fae who’d been left to defend themselves when the full-blooded fae disappeared indicated that the good agents were in a minority.

The fire department arrived on the heels of the Feds, took a good look around for hot spots (none), marveled at the “damned big hole in the floor,” and left with the promise of sending out someone to evaluate the scene in daylight. EMTs arrived while the fire department was still there.

One guy sat me down and looked me over with a flashlight while the younger Cantrip agent took it upon himself to make sure I didn’t make a break for it.

The EMT made a sympathetic sound when he looked at my burns. “I bet those hurt, chica,” he said. “I have good news and bad news.”

“Hit me,” I told him.

“Good news is that these all qualify as minor burns no matter how nasty they feel.”

“Bad news?”

“I think your cheek is going to scar. There’s some chance that it will fade, but you’ve got dark skin like me, and dark skin and burns aren’t a happy combination. Also, there’s nothing to do for the burns. If the air bothers them, you can try wrapping them, but that will only be easy to do with the burns on your hands. If you see any sign of infection, take yourself down to your regular doctor.”

“I can deal with scars,” I said with more confidence than I felt. Who knew I was vain about my face? I wasn’t beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, so I certainly hadn’t expected the pang I felt knowing I’d bear Guayota’s mark the rest of my life.

“It should look dashing,” he told me. “Just a pale streak, and you can make up all sorts of stories about how you got it. Frostbite on your third polar expedition. Dueling scar. Knife fight in the ghetto.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” His matter-of-fact tomfoolery settled me. Impossible to believe in volcanic dogs when this EMT was so calmly cracking jokes as he got over the heavy ground as lightly as he could.

“I do have some advice, before I let you go,” he told me.

“What’s that?”

“Chica,” he said seriously, “next time some firebug starts throwing burning things at you, run away.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” I promised him solemnly.

The second EMT came back from looking for other victims. “There is a finger in the backseat of the car in there,” he said. “Does anyone know who it belongs to and if I should get it in ice? It might need to be reattached. Or is it evidence, and I need to leave it alone?”

I just shook my head, unwilling to talk in front of the Cantrip agent, and left the two EMTs to their debate. I wandered back over toward Adam. I don’t know what the EMTs decided, but they left before the police cars started showing up.

The Kennewick police arrived while the fire department was still having a look-see, though the big red trucks toddled off soon thereafter. The local police interrupted the stalemate of our not talking and the Cantrip agents’ not letting us call our lawyer. Not that we talked to the local police, either, but their presence put a damper on the Feds. Tony wasn’t with the police who came, but Willis was.

“Word is that this was your husband’s ex-wife’s stalker,” Willis told me after he’d gone inside to see the hole for himself. His suit was muddy, and so were his hands, so he must have gone down and followed the tunnel like Adam had. He sounded grumpy. “He cause this?” He glanced around the remains of my shop. “With some kind of a bomb, maybe?”

Dan Orton and his sidekick were trying to work on Adam without antagonizing the police. They were ignoring me because I wasn’t a werewolf. Adam had subtly eased them farther away from me while I talked to Willis.

I looked at the Cantrip agents thoughtfully, then at Willis. “You know that site we both looked at yesterday?” I kept my voice down.

He grunted, but his eyes were sharp.

“I think this incident has a lot to do with that other. You and Tony should show up at tomorrow’s deposition when Adam and I talk in the presence of our lawyer. The one we still need to call.”

He looked at me, a long, cool look. “The crime you are referring to is officially a Cantrip case. And neither I nor Detective Montenegro are your puppets to call.” Despite the hostile words, he sounded less grumpy than he had been.

It was my turn to grunt. “Fine by me.” He couldn’t fool me. Now that he knew the two were connected, you couldn’t keep him away with a legion of superheroes. He’d tell Tony, and they’d both be there tomorrow.

“Does the dead body with the bullet in his forehead belong to the stalker?” he asked.

“Tomorrow, Adam and I will be happy to talk,” I said, firmly keeping myself from explaining. “You mind if I call our lawyer?”

He glanced at the Cantrip agents and smiled grimly. “You aren’t under arrest. Without the assurance that there was magic afoot here, Cantrip doesn’t have the authority. And I am not inclined to arrest anyone without more information. Without an arrest, I don’t see that I have any say over what you do.”

My phone was intact, which was something of a miracle in and of itself. Willis put himself between me and the Cantrip agents while I called the pack’s lawyers. Their phone system forwarded me to the lawyer on call, and the woman who answered sounded harried. I could hear kids screaming in the background, but since the screams were interspaced with wild laughter, I wasn’t too concerned.

“Trevellyan,” she said in a breathless voice. She cleared her throat and continued in a much more lawyerly fashion, though her voice was still very Marilyn Monroe. “Good evening, Ms. Hauptman. How can I help?”

I gave her a brief explanation—stalker, break-in, dead body. Not telling her anything Willis, who was watching me with grim amusement, didn’t already know. I told her Adam wanted to get out of here tonight and give a statement tomorrow.

“Don’t say anything,” she said. “Don’t let Adam say anything. I’ll be right there.”

She strode onto the scene, a five-foot-nothing warrior with iron gray hair and eyes clear and sharp blue. She took one good long look around and marched up to Clay Willis, having evidently determined he was in charge.

“Are my clients under arrest?” she asked Willis.

Adam, trailing his pair of Feds, approached in time for Willis to answer, “No, ma’am.”

“We still have some questions,” said Agent Orton.

“Which my clients will answer tomorrow in my office.” She gave them her card. “Call that number tomorrow at eight thirty sharp, and someone will tell you when to come.”

She ushered Adam and me to Adam’s car.

“Now run while you can,” she murmured. “I will do the same. The grandmother magic will wear off in a minute, and someone will decide that the dead body means they should arrest someone. Don’t answer your phone unless you know the number and come into my office tomorrow at seven thirty.”

“She’s good,” I said. “Tough, smart, and funny as a bonus. I wonder if there really is grandmother magic.”

“For what we pay her, she’d better be good,” agreed Adam. “She doesn’t need grandmother magic to make people scramble at her command.” He pressed a button on his steering wheel, and said, “Call Warren.”

A woman’s voice from his dash said, “Calling.”

“Boss?” Warren answered. “Everyone okay?”

“Mercy’s singed, but still swinging.”

“Good to hear. I got quite an earful from your security chief, who deleted a lot of interesting material.”

“Then you know most of it. I need you to get everyone out of our house right now. Apparently, Christy’s stalker is some kind of supernatural who can set things on fire.”

“You want me to take them home?” Warren asked.

Adam took in a deep breath. “What do you think?”

“I think that our place got a lot of attention in the press when those rogue agents kidnapped Kyle.”

“Suggestions?”

“How about Honey’s place? It’s big enough to house everyone if we don’t all need bedrooms, and it hasn’t been plastered all over the newspaper.”

Honey’s house was in Finley, too. Another large house like ours, though it wasn’t built to be a pack den, so while there was plenty of room, it was short on beds.

“Sounds good. Call Honey, then get everyone out of the house.”

“You two okay?”

Adam’s eyes traveled to me. “Yes.”

“Kyle called about ten minutes ago and said to tell you that a Gary Laughingdog is at our house and would like to talk to Mercy on a matter of some urgency.”

“Tell him we will be right there.” Adam pulled a U-turn. “We’ll move them on to Honey’s house. Call me if Honey has a problem, and we’ll come up with something else.”

“Right. Is Laughingdog the guy Mercy visited in prison?”

I said, “Yes.”

There was a little pause. “So he broke out of jail?”

I said, “Yes,” again.

“Kyle doesn’t know that,” Warren said. “If the wrong things happen, Kyle could lose his license to practice law for having him in the house.”

“You get everyone safe,” said Adam, “and I’ll take care of Kyle.”

“Movin’ on it, boss.” Warren hung up the phone.

“Do you think he’ll go after our house?” I asked. “Guayota, I mean.”

“I don’t know enough about him to be making predictions,” Adam said.

“Why do you think that he believes she—” I stopped speaking.

“What?”

“I almost saw it then,” I sat up straighter and turned toward Adam. “I’m stupid. When Tony took me to look at the crime scene in the hayfield, I thought for an instant that one of the bodies he’d left was Christy’s.” The ghost could have been her sister. “She was the right age, right hair color, and right body type. All of the women were, I think—though it wouldn’t hurt to double-check.”

“We need to find out who this guy is,” said Adam grimly. “And we need to find the walking stick, so that Beauclaire doesn’t kill us before Flores does.”

“We have his name,” I said. “Guayota. That might help. And Zee gave Tad some insight he shared with me about Beauclaire and why not running Coyote down before Sunday might not mean disaster.”

He glanced my way and back at the road, inviting me to keep talking. So I explained Zee’s reasoning. When I was finished, Adam gave me a short nod. “Might work. It would be better to have the walking stick, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Zee’s insights into the problem with Beauclaire and the walking stick have showed me I need to start thinking outside the box more,” I said.

“Oh?” Adam glanced at me, then back at the road.

“I thought we should apply that kind of thinking to the matter of Christy’s stalker.”

He gave me a skeptical look.

“No, really,” I said. “Now that we know that Flores is really this nasty, fiery, superpowerful nothing-can-kill-me demon from hell, maybe we should consider just giving Christy to him?”

He laughed.

“I’m serious,” I said. And I was. Really. If only a little bit.

“Right,” he said affectionately. “I know exactly how serious you are. We’ve got a twenty-minute drive ahead. Why don’t you close your eyes and rest up?”

It sounded like a plan. My hands hurt, my hip hurt, my cheek throbbed, and someone had thrown a finger at me—and I hadn’t eaten today. Adam’s hand curled around the top of my knee, and I relaxed and let myself drift off. Nothing was so bad that Adam’s touch couldn’t make it better. Even if he wouldn’t let me give Christy to the fire-dog from hell.