Night Broken

12

On the way to Honey’s, we decided to drive by the house to check on the cat and grab another change of clothing. Warren had left Medea with a mixing bowl filled with cat food and another with water because they’d spent an hour looking for her everywhere. He figured if he couldn’t find her, then neither, probably, could Guayota. There was a cat door in the house, so Medea could come and go as she pleased. If Guayota came and burned the place to the ground, hopefully she’d escape.

But I intended to stick her uncooperative rump in a cat carrier and take her with us. I wasn’t taking the chance of leaving her vulnerable.

I quit worrying about the cat when I saw the car parked in front of the house. A gray Acura RLX, a luxury sedan with horsepower, was sitting in Adam’s usual spot.

Adam slowed a little. “Do you know that car?”

I started to shake my head, then reconsidered. “No. But I bet it belongs to Beauclaire. I didn’t see what he drove, but I heard it, and the RLX fits what I heard.”

The SUV resumed its usual speed. “He’s early, and you left the walking stick at Honey’s house.”

“He can follow us to Honey’s—”

“I won’t take him to Honey’s house,” Adam said. “We’ve already exposed her enough by moving the pack there.”

“Fine. We can meet him at a place of his choice in an hour.”

Beauclaire was leaning against the front door, reading a book. A battered old copy of Three Men in a Boat; I’d had to read that in college. Twice. Now I couldn’t remember if I’d liked it or not. Beauclaire looked up when we drove in.

“Let me deal with him,” Adam said.

This wasn’t a John Wayne–esque “let the men deal with the situation, little lady.” There was a bit of sandpaper in Adam’s voice: he was still unhappy that the fae had invaded his house and made him sleep through it. He wanted to go establish dominance. Over Lugh’s son. Because that was a really smart idea.

While I’d been processing, Adam had already gotten out of the SUV. I shoved open my door and scrambled out, nearly tripping over the walking stick that fell on the ground as if it had been in the SUV and I’d kicked it when I hopped out. Which it hadn’t been, and I hadn’t done.

“Adam,” I said. “I’ve got the walking stick.”

He stopped halfway between the SUV and the house. He looked at me, and I trotted up to show him.

Beauclaire straightened, tucked the book in his suit-jacket pocket, where it didn’t bulge. Either he’d used glamour, or the suit was as expensive as it looked.

Adam put a hand on my back as I passed him in an unvoiced request, so I stopped next to him. Beauclaire came down the stairs to us, his movements so graceful I wondered how he had passed for years as human.

He paid almost no attention to Adam and me. His eyes were fixed on the walking stick. I couldn’t tell what he felt for it, and I expected to. I expected him to be … something more decipherable.

He stopped several feet away and for the first time looked at us. Looked at Adam.

“I will not apologize for coming into your home and making her retrieve my father’s walking stick,” he said. “It was necessary.”

“If,” said Adam, “if you had come to my house and knocked on the door, Mercy would still have done everything she could do to find Coyote and get the walking stick back for you. You have, as Lugh’s son, a just claim on the artifact. If you had done that, matters would have been even between us.”

“No,” said Beauclaire. “I would have owed you something for the service you had given me. I will not owe a human for anything.” Substitute “slimy toad dung” for “human,” and he might have said it the same way.

“Neither my mate nor I is, strictly speaking, human,” said Adam. “But you made your choices. And so the consequences will follow in due time.”

Beauclaire bowed without looking down or losing Adam’s gaze. His bow was almost Japanese in all the things it said and didn’t say. I accept that there will be trouble between us, though I will not seek it more than I already have. I disturbed your peace deliberately, and the consequences are upon my head. It was a long conversation for such a simple gesture.

I held out the walking stick. “Here. Coyote said he taught it a few things.”

Beauclaire looked at me. “I don’t know Coyote,” he said. “Maybe I will have to remedy that.”

Adam’s lips curled up in satisfaction. “I would pay money,” he said.

Beauclaire, who still hadn’t reached for the walking stick, narrowed his eyes at my mate.

“Oh?”

“You never get quite what you expect from Coyote,” I told him. “He was amazingly helpful this time, so I expect that something horrible will happen to us in the near future.” I wished I hadn’t said that as soon as the words left my mouth. I already knew that something horrible was coming. I wiggled the walking stick. “Would you take this already?”

“Of your free will,” he said.

I rolled my eyes as I repeated the phrase. “Of my own free will, I give you this walking stick”—and I kept going, though that was the end of the usual phrase I’d spoken every time I’d tried to give the walking stick back to a fae—“fashioned by Lugh, woken by the oakman, and changed by blood, changed by death, changed by spirit. Change comes to all things until the greatest change, which is death. This I entrust to your care.”

I tried to pretend that I’d intended to say all that from the very beginning, tried to ignore the way the walking stick was warmer than it should be in my hands and felt almost eager, as if it wanted to go to Lugh’s son. Adam knew I was acting, I could tell because the pressure of his hand on my back changed. Other than a sharp look, Beauclaire didn’t seem to have heard anything he wasn’t expecting.

I wished I knew whether it had been the walking stick or Coyote who had put those words in my mouth. It might even have been Stefan, for all I knew, but he should be asleep, and it hadn’t sounded like something he’d have said.

Beauclaire took the walking stick, closed his eyes, and frowned at it. “This is a fake.”

“No,” I said. Coyote could have passed a fake walking stick to me, though that wasn’t quite in his character. But a fake walking stick would have stayed safely at Honey’s, tucked inside the locked tack room in the barn, where I’d left it.

Anger built in his face, and he tossed the walking stick back at me. He didn’t mean to hurt me because he didn’t throw it like a weapon. I could probably have caught it—but Adam caught it instead.

“Are you implying that we are lying to you?” Adam asked gently. He twirled the walking stick like a baton.

I put a hand on his and stilled the stick. “Thank you,” I told him when he let me stop him. “The walking stick has been just a little too happy to hurt people lately.”

He sucked in a breath as I took it out of his hands, then he opened and closed them a couple of times. He glanced up at the sky. “A few more days until the full moon,” he told me.

Werewolves were edgy around moon time. Edgier, anyway. I couldn’t help but wonder if the walking stick hadn’t helped his anger along just a bit.

“Mr. Beauclaire,” I said. “This is the walking stick that Coyote gave me after he showed it how to hide itself better. I left it this morning in a safe, locked in a place miles away from here. It fell out of my SUV just now.”

I handed it to him again, but I thought that it wasn’t as happy to go to him as it had been before. It felt rejected. Sulky.

“Behave,” I told it. Adam looked at me.

Beauclaire turned it around in his hands, felt over the silver knob, then ran his hands over the stick itself. He half closed his eyes and did it again. He gave them another of his indecipherable looks. “I told you that I would not apologize, but that was before I rejected the prize I sent you to get. This is my father’s walking stick, though it has changed from the last time I held it a thousand years ago, more or less. I did not expect that it would. His small magics tend to be more stable than the larger ones, which have, up to this point, showed themselves to be more adaptable.”

He met my eyes. “Mercedes Athena Thompson.”

“Hauptman,” added Adam.

“Hauptman. I apologize for my disbelief. I apologize for not recognizing the truth of what you told me. I apologize for not listening.” He paused, looked at the walking stick again, and his eyebrow rose, almost as if it had said something to him.

He gave me a faint, ironic smile. “My thanks for retrieving this one from the”—he paused—“sanctuary that you had found for it. I owe you a favor of your choice.”

“No,” I said. “No. You don’t. I know about favors from the fae.”

“That,” he said austerely, “is not for you to accept or reject.”

“Information, then,” I said. “Do you know anything about Guayota?”

He shook his head. “I have heard about your trouble. The fae do not live on the Canary Islands, and I know nothing more than that he is a volcano spirit taking flesh. Zee’s young one has been asking around without luck, I believe.” He hesitated. Gave me a look that said, There is another question to ask me here. But I can’t tell you unless you ask. Something about Tad.

“If I ask you to help us defeat Guayota?”

He smiled grimly. “If I were the Dark Smith of Drontheim, I would offer to help and leave you so far in my debt that you would be my puppet until the end of your days.”

“That’s what I thought,” I told him. “But I needed to ask.”

“Information would be a reasonable balance,” he told me. “You know that the Smith’s son has been requested and required to attend the fae court in the reservation. So that would not be new information to you.”

That there was a fae court was new information. I wondered if it was a court in the sense of a court of law, or a more traditional fae court. And what the answer to that might mean in the future.

But he’d told me the information he was willing to give us. “In repayment of the favor you owe me, is Tad being held prisoner?”

He smiled as if I’d been clever. “I was asked not to speak of this to you, but as I owe you a favor, I can disregard the earlier request. Tad is unhappy, and those who hold him are not listening. He is being held against his will, but those who hold him don’t know Siebold Adelbertsmiter as I do.” He said Zee’s full name with distaste. “I may not like him, but no one can hold such a one as the Dark Smith of Drontheim when he is unwilling. There are too many old fae who forget what they once knew and believe in the old quarrelsome man they see. There will be no need for a rescue attempt, and indeed, such an effort might backfire. You will not be able to contact them, however, until matters play out.” He raised an eyebrow at me. “I think that there is now balance between us. Though I include this as part of our bargain: if you have not heard from the Smith’s son in two months’ time, you may cry out the name you know me by and I will come and tell you how matters stand. I would not be surprised if it takes at least that long.”

Then, walking stick in hand, he gave Adam a respectful nod, got in his car, and drove off.

I took a deep breath. “That’s done.”

Adam shook his head. “Let’s hope so.

We collected our clothing, but it took a while to find the cat. Tracking a cat through a field? No problem. Tracking a cat through the house where the cat lived? That was miserable—and to add insult to injury, when I looked in our bathroom, I found that Christy’s shampoo and conditioner were in our shower. She hadn’t, however, put her makeup back on the counter. Maybe it was because she took her makeup with her to Honey’s house.

Adam found the cat eventually, on top of a bookcase in the living room where she’d been watching us look for her. Crouched behind a large copper pot filled with silk flowers, she was nearly invisible.

I gave the flowers, beautiful dusty gray-blue blooms that contrasted and complemented everything else in the room a little too well, a baleful look.

“Yes,” said Adam, petting my cat as he held her like a baby in his arms. She caught his hands and sank her claws into him just a little before her purring redoubled, and she snuggled deeper against him.

“Yes, what?” I asked.

“Yes, Christy picked out those flowers. The pot, however, was my mother’s. Feel free to fill it with something else. If you leave it empty, it collects dust and dead spiders.” His voice was so full of patience that I knew he found me funny.

Normally, our bond fluctuated on how much information I got from it, swinging pretty widely during the length of a day. But even within a few minutes there was some variation, like a swing moving up and down. One second, I was getting grumpy because he was laughing at me, and the next, I was flooded with this mix of tenderness, love, and amusement all mixed together in a potent bundle that meant happy.

Hard to get grumpy over that.

His smile grew, and the dimple appeared and … and I kissed him. I rested my body against him, at an angle so I didn’t squish the cat, and thought, Here is my happiness. Here is my reason to survive. Here is my home.

“I never forget,” I murmured to him when I could.

“Forget?”

“Forget who you are to me,” I said, petting him with my fingertips because I could, because he was mine. “I’ll be fretting about Christy, worrying about the pack, hoping Christy trips and spills her cardaywatsafanday stew—”

“Carbonnade à la flamande,” said Adam.

“—all over the floor, then I look at you.”

“Mmmm?”

“Yep,” I said, putting my nose against him and breathing him in. “Mmmm.”

I was just considering the empty bedroom upstairs and weighing it against the possibility that Guayota would choose that moment to attack when someone knocked at the door.

We broke apart.

“You have the cat,” I said. “I don’t want to spend another hour looking for her. I’ll get the door.”

“Be careful,” was all Adam said.

I checked through the peephole, carefully, because there had been that one movie on bad-movie night where someone had been killed because he’d put his eye to the peephole, and the bad guy had stuck a fencing sword through the hole and into the victim’s eye. We’d stopped the film to argue whether or not it was possible to do—and I remained forever scarred by the scene.

It was Rachel, one of Stefan’s menagerie, one of his sheep. Stefan was gentler on the people he fed from than other vampires I’d come into contact with. He found broken people or people who needed something from him so that the exchange—their blood and the course of their lives for whatever a vampire might provide them—was, if not even, a little more balanced. Most members of a vampire’s menagerie died slowly, but Stefan’s people, mostly, thrived under his care. Or they had until Marsilia had happened to them.

I opened the door.

Rachel, like Stefan himself, had gained a little weight back. She didn’t look like a crack addict anymore, but she didn’t look really healthy, either. Her skin was pale, and there were shadows in her eyes. She didn’t look young anymore—and she was around Jesse’s age. But she was back in her goth costume—black lacy top, black jeans, and long black gloves that disguised the two fingers Marsilia—or Wulfe—had cut off her right hand.

“Hey, Mercy,” she said. “I’ve been chasing all over looking for you—I assume you know that someone tried to blow up your garage? I gave up about noon, did the shopping and a few errands, and decided to try again before I drove home. This is for you.” She handed me an envelope with my name in elegant script.

I opened it and found a lined note card with an address: 21980 Harbor Landing Road, Pasco. And, underneath the address, in the same flowery script: Sorry.

“Hel-lo, handsome,” purred Rachel. “Man with cat is one of my fantasies.”

I didn’t look up. “He’s taken, Rachel, sorry. She’s underage, Adam, and—you’re taken. Rachel, this is my husband, Adam. Adam this is Stefan’s—” His what? “Sheep” wasn’t any word I’d ever use to describe someone I liked, no matter how accurate it was. “Stefan’s.”

“‘Sheep’ is the word you’re looking for,” said Rachel. “I’d better get going before the ice cream melts. ’Bye, Mercy. ’Bye, Mercy’s husband.”

She turned and trotted out to her car, a nondescript little Ford I hadn’t seen before. She waved and took off in a peel of rubber and gravel that made me wince a little as the splatter of small rocks rained down on the SUV.

I twirled the card in my fingers before handing it reluctantly to Adam.

“Here,” I said, more casually than I felt. “I think we’d better call Ariana and Elizaveta, don’t you think? Someone has got to know how to make werewolves fireproof.”

Warren met us at the door to Honey’s house.

“Hey, boss,” he said, drawling like there was nothing wrong, but I could tell that he was upset by the set of his shoulders. “We were taking Gary Laughingdog to the bus station like you asked—and Kyle says to tell you thank you for making him aid and abet an escaped convict like that—when he started having convulsions in the backseat. We pulled over, and he was unconscious, so we brought him back. He hasn’t woken up, and Kyle is pretty well resigned to losing his license to practice law.”

I gave the cat carrier to Adam and set down the bag of Medea necessities I carried. The cat box and kitty litter were still in the car, and so was my .44 S&W, which I’d retrieved from the house. “Here. You take the cat and Warren. I’ll take Kyle,” I said.

Adam gave me a look.

“Sorry. You heap big Alpha dog,” I told him. “I’ll let you call it next time. But I’m right, and you already know it. Kyle will just make you mad on purpose—and Warren will listen better to you than me about relationships because he’d feel comfortable storming away from me when I said something he didn’t want to hear. Where is Kyle?” I directed my question at Warren.

“Down the hall, third bedroom on the left. Watching over Laughingdog, who is still unconscious.” He frowned at me. “Before Christy came, I never thought about how much you manipulate the people around you—it doesn’t feel like manipulation when you do it.”

“The difference is,” I told him, “that I love you and want everyone to be happy. And”—I lifted a finger—“I know what’s best for you.”

“And,” said Adam, “Mercy’s not subtle. When she manipulates you, she wants you to know you’ve been manipulated.”

I’d already crossed the living room toward the wing with the bedrooms, but I turned around to stick my tongue out at Adam.

“Don’t point that at me unless you are going to use it,” he said.

I smiled until I was safely out of sight.

The door to the bedroom Warren had indicated was shut, so I knocked.

Kyle opened the door. I’d seen Kyle angry before. But I don’t think I’d ever seen him that angry. Maybe it was because that anger was directed at me.

I slipped through the doorway, though I was pretty sure he’d intended to send me on my way. But I’m really good at sticking my nose in where no one wants it.

The room was one of those bedrooms that builders throw into huge houses because they know the kids aren’t going to get a vote about what house their parents buy. Honey’s house was huge. This bedroom was maybe ten feet by nine feet. Just big enough for a twin bed and a chest of drawers. I hadn’t seen Honey’s suite, but I was sure that it wasn’t ten feet by nine feet.

The bed that someone had tucked Gary into was a queen-size bed, and that meant there wasn’t room for a chest of drawers of any size and that Kyle and I were very close to each other. If he’d been a werewolf, I’d have been worried.

“So,” Kyle said mildly as he shut the bedroom door. “We’re driving to the bus station in Pasco with the guy who had stopped at my house to look for you. Warren, I want you to know, told me that he was a distant relative of yours. I don’t know if that’s the truth—and at this point, I don’t think I care. But I digress. The important part is that while I’m driving Gary to the bus station, I’m still at the point where I trust that what Warren tells me will be the truth. I’m just beginning to get a funny feeling, though, because I can’t figure out why Warren has been so concerned about ID. Even to get on a bus, Mercy, you need ID, but everyone has ID. Why is Warren worried if this guy—you know, your relative—if he has ID?

“I’ve just finished driving over the cable bridge when suddenly, Gary screams in my ear like Girl Number Two in some horror flick. It sounds like he is dying, so I pull right over on the side of the road instead of putting my foot on the gas and ramming the guy in front of me, which is that first reflex impulse I have when someone screams in my ear.” He paused, looking at me.

I figured that only a stupid person would say anything until he’d wound all the way down, so I stayed quiet and tried to look sympathetic.

Kyle’s foot tapped a rapid tattoo as he waited for me to respond. Finally, he said, “Warren gets out and opens the back door like he isn’t surprised. Like he expected Gary Laughingdog”—he bit out Gary’s name with special emphasis, separating the last name until the “Laughing” and the “dog” were really two separate words—“to break out screaming at any time. Warren whips off his belt and shoves it between Gary’s teeth because, Mercy, this relative of yours that we were just going to shove on a bus is having a grand mal seizure.

“So here I am, busy worried about what kind of people I’m associating with who are callously throwing a relative on a bus who has grand mal seizures so often that my partner isn’t surprised by it—when my brain catches up with what the newscaster on the radio has been announcing. Can you imagine my amazement that Gary Laughingdog escaped from the Coyote Ridge Corrections Center? All this time when I thought I was escorting your relative, I’ve really been harboring an escaped convict.” He waited again, but I wasn’t that dumb.

He rocked forward as if he wanted to pace, but there just wasn’t room. “I explode all over my partner because it is instantly obvious to me that you and Adam both knew where he’d come from—because you’d talked to him before he came to my house. Imagine my surprise when I found out that Warren had known, too. I’m the only one left out of the ‘hey, this guy is an escaped convict’ knowledge circle.”

This is when I could have spoken, after he enunciated his problem, but he didn’t stop talking so I could explain.

“I told Warren when he lied to me about what he was that I don’t like lies,” he said. “Liars can’t be trusted. He told me that he would never lie to me again.”

He stopped talking then, but I had no words. I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten how much he hated to be lied to. How could I have forgotten, when he and Warren had broken up over it? Not over Warren’s being a werewolf but over Warren’s not telling Kyle what he was. They’d gotten back together, but it had been rough.

Gary moved his arm over his eyes. “Drama, drama, drama,” he whispered.

“You shut up,” I snapped. Warren and Kyle were going to break up, and it was my fault.

“You quit yelling while you’re in the room with the guy with a migraine,” Gary told me. “Look, Kyle. I get you. We’ve been trying to keep the whole escaped-prisoner thing away from you—give you plausible deniability—but that’s obviously done. You go call the police and let them know you found me, and I’ll go quietly. You’ll keep your license—because you called them as soon as you found out, and we’ll all support you on that. But if you do, you have to know that it means that Warren and Adam will die.”

Kyle’s whole body turned to face the man on the bed. “What?”

“If I’m not here when the pack faces off with Guayota,” Gary said, very slowly and clearly like people do when they are talking to young children or people who don’t speak English, “then Guayota wins by killing all the wolves. That’s what this last Seeing was about.”

He pulled his arm off his eyes and squinted at me. “Let this be a lesson to you, pup. Do not deal with Coyote. He’ll screw you over every time. Had I had this vision while lying in prison, I’d have let everyone die because, hey, what did I care? Bunch of werewolves I don’t know bite the big one, big whoop. But Coyote waits until I meet everyone first. I like Adam. He’s what an Alpha is supposed to be and so seldom is. I like Warren, and I really, really think Honey is hot. I can’t just go back to jail—no matter how safe from Coyote—and let them all die.”

“Coyote?” asked Kyle. He looked at me and frowned.

“Dear old Dad,” said Gary. “Mine and hers. That’s how we’re related.”

“Not mine,” I snapped. “My father was Joe Old Coyote who rode bulls and killed vampires. The vampires killed him and made it look like a car wreck. If my father was Coyote, then he abandoned my mother when she was sixteen and pregnant. If Coyote was my father I’d have to hunt him down and kill him.”

My father was Joe Old Coyote, who died on a road in the middle of nowhere in Montana before I was born. He didn’t know that he was just a shell Coyote wore because Coyote had grown bored. He wouldn’t have left us if he’d had a choice. After he died, my mother had to leave me with werewolves because she didn’t know what to do with me and because she was too young to work at most jobs full-time. So she’d left me. And I was a freaking grown-up, so I could just deal. I was happy. My mother was happy.

And my father was dead. And if my father was Joe Old Coyote, I didn’t have to kill him.

Both Gary and Kyle were looking at me oddly, and I realized that I must have said all of that out loud. I cleared my throat. “So, yes, daddy issues. Both of us, Kyle. Gary was in jail because Coyote managed to facilitate his breaking the law, then left him to be picked up by the police.” I looked at Gary. “You know, if you wanted to be really paranoid, you might consider that Coyote wouldn’t be excited about having Guayota here, in Coyote’s playground. You might think that maybe you were in jail so that you were somewhere I could find you when I needed to ask someone how to get it touch with Coyote.”

He closed his eyes and nodded. “I’ve had the same thought. But didn’t you come find me because some fae dude wanted the walking stick you gave Coyote? He’d have to have manipulated him, too.”

I dropped to the floor because it was just barely possible. Here I’d been complaining about Christy’s manipulations. But she was minor-league next to Coyote.

“It wouldn’t take much, right?” I mused. “Beauclaire isn’t fond of humans. And here is one of his father’s artifacts in the hands of a human despite all the fae who’d tried to take it from her. I’m sure Coyote knows a few of the fae who might whisper in Beauclaire’s ear.” I looked at Gary. “Tell me I’m just being paranoid.”

“The thing you have to ask yourself is this,” Gary said. “Is it Guayota Coyote wants to rid the world of, or us? I can tell you that he won’t care if we die. Death doesn’t mean the same thing to him as it does to us. Possibly it’s a test of strength. Survival is one of those Catch-22s. If you live through one of Coyote’s games, it delights him because then he can push you into one that is more dangerous. On second thought”—he opened his eyes and looked at Kyle—“please, call the cops.”

“Why were you in jail?” asked Kyle.

“Seriously? Do you know how many guilty people are in jail? None.” Gary’s voice rose to imitate a woman’s voice. “Honest. I didn’t kill him. He fell on my knife. Ten times.”

“I saw Chicago,” said Kyle. “You won’t lie to me because Mercy can tell if you lie. And I’m a lawyer, and, current circumstances aside, I’m pretty good at hearing lies, too.”

Gary stared intently at him for a moment, then shrugged, letting the tension in his body slide away. “I guess it doesn’t matter to me. I could tell you that I got drunk, stole a car—though I’m pretty sure that was Coyote, but I was drunk, so who knows. Then I stole four cases of two-hundred-dollar Scotch—I’m pretty sure that might have been Coyote, too, but all I remember is watching him opening one of the bottles. Finally, I parked the car in front of the police station and passed out in the backseat with all but one of the bottles of Scotch until the police found me the next morning. That I am sure was Coyote. If I told you all of that, it would be true.”

He looked at Kyle, his eyes narrowed in a way that told me his head was still hurting. “However, the real reason I went to prison was because a few months before I woke up in front of the police station, I slept with the wife of the man who was later my state-appointed lawyer. I didn’t know that he knew I slept with his wife until after I was serving my sentence, when another of his clients was happy to tell me.” Gary closed his eyes. “That the car we stole was a police car didn’t help.”

Gary laughed, winced, then said, “The funny part is that I had not had a drink of alcohol since I went on a five-day bender in 1917 and woke up to find I’d volunteered for the army.” He smiled and moved his arm back over his eyes. “It’s not safe, you see, to get drunk when Coyote might be watching.”

“He’s telling the truth,” I said, after it became obvious that Gary was through talking.

“And you escaped because you knew that we were about to get hit with some kind of volcano god when we were expecting Mr. Flores the stalker,” Kyle said.

Gary grunted. “I didn’t know about Mr. Flores. All I knew was that Mercy was trying to get an artifact back from Coyote. But then somehow this volcano manitou was going to kill someone, and it was connected to Mercy.” He looked at me and then away. “And Mercy was my sister.”

Kyle rubbed his face, drew in a breath, and looked at the curtain covering the window. Then he said, with a sigh, “Plausible deniability, eh?”

“If you didn’t know Gary had escaped from prison, you couldn’t be held responsible,” I said. “Warren was pretty mad at us for putting you into a situation that could hurt you like that. Adam told him that he’d take care of you and see that you wouldn’t get hurt.”

“And if you go with the pack to deal with Guayota,” Kyle said to Gary, “Warren survives.”

Gary shook his head very slowly, like it hurt. “Not how it works. All I know is that if I don’t go, they all die. Maybe if I go, we all of us die much more horribly than they would have otherwise.” He moved his arm so he could see Kyle’s face and grimaced. “Yes. I recognize that expression. Anyone who deals with Coyote wears that expression eventually. And no, I don’t know why my going makes a difference.”

Kyle stretched his neck to relieve tension and gave a miserable half laugh. “I suppose if Warren’s possible death makes me feel like this, I should give him the benefit of the doubt, right?”

“People make mistakes,” I said. “Even people we love.”

“Hell of it is, I’m not sure where the mistake was,” said Kyle.

“Not killing Coyote the first time I saw him,” said Gary. “Not that he’d have stayed dead, but I think the experience might have made the rest of my life more bearable.”

“Kyle,” I said. “I love you like a brother. Go out and make up with Warren before he heads out to try to get himself killed.”

Christy made dinner with Lucia’s and Darryl’s help: baked herb-and-flour-encrusted stuffed chicken. I ate it and had seconds. It was very good—and right now I was too scared to be jealous.

Honey didn’t have a table big enough to seat the whole pack—and Adam had called the whole pack together. Samuel and Ariana showed up toward the end of dinner.

Elizaveta could have made a spell to make one werewolf resistant to Guayota’s elemental fire magic—her term, not mine—but she would have needed a piece of his hair or fingernails. If I’d stuck Guayota’s finger in my pocket, she could have used that, but I didn’t think we’d have much luck getting it back from the police.

Ariana said she could help. With fireproofing, not finger-stealing.

We all settled down in the big upstairs room to see what she had to offer. She and Samuel stood in front of the big-screen TV.

Dr. Samuel Cornick was tall, compelling but not handsome, and when I was sixteen, I’d thought he was the love of my life. He’d thought I was someone who might be able to give him children that lived. It was a relationship that was doomed to make neither of us happy, and his father, the Marrok, had seen it before we’d fully committed tragedy and so had sent me away. For a long time, I’d compared every man I met to Samuel—Adam was the only one who had stood up to the comparison.

Samuel’s mate, Ariana, stood in his shadow. Where he drew the eye, even in a crowded room, she could go unnoticed. Her hair was blond, her eyes gray, her skin clear, and her entire aspect unremarkable. But that was a fae thing. Being too beautiful or too ugly made someone interesting, and mostly, the fae would rather go unnoticed. I’d seen what she really looked like under her glamour, and she was spectacularly beautiful.

“Okay,” she said when everyone was in the room. She held Samuel’s hand with white-knuckled strength because she was afraid of us, all of us. To say she had a canine phobia was a masterly understatement. “I command earth, air, fire, and water—though not as well as I once did. That I command fire means that I can protect you, some of you, from this demon-god. I don’t know how many I can spell. I think it unlikely that I can do more than ten, but probably at least five. Adam, you should pick the ones you need to take with you in order of the most useful in battle.”

Adam nodded and stood up, but before he could speak, Samuel said, “I’m going, and she’s already tried out the spell on me.”

Adam gave him a look.

“This is not my pack,” Samuel said to Adam’s unspoken comment. “But Mercy is part of my family by my choice, and that makes you, by extension, my brother by marriage. I’m going. You don’t get a choice.”

So the fear I’d seen in Ariana’s eyes hadn’t just been because she was in a roomful of werewolves.

Adam said, “I would not have asked, but I’m very glad to have you on our side.”

Then he looked around the room, his gaze touching each of us as he spoke. “Guayota is our enemy. He is not our enemy because he hurt one of our own, though he has. He is not our enemy because he violates our territory, though that is also true. He is not our enemy because he attacked my mate. He is not even our enemy because he is evil. He is our enemy because he kills those who cannot protect themselves against him. Because he will not stop until someone stops him.”

He paused and took a deep breath. “I have seen him fight—and so have you. I am not sure this is a fight we can win. But there is one thing I do know, and that is that we will not, we cannot, wait around until he kills another innocent. We might die fighting him, but if we do not try and stop him, we are already defeated.”

The room was silent and at the same time it echoed with the power of his words.

He looked at Darryl. “We don’t always see things the same way, but you have always put the pack first and foremost. I have fought Guayota, and I tell you that without Tad’s help, he would have defeated me. Ariana can make us invulnerable to his heat—but you saw the video. I don’t know that he can be killed, or if he can, how it might be done. I have spoken to Bran, and if we fail here tonight, then he will send Charles. But Guayota invaded my territory. This is my fight. You should also know that Ariana told me what she could and could not do, and I’ve had time to think. Darryl, I need you to protect the pack if this fight doesn’t go well.”

He looked around at the whole room, and we were all silent, even Lucia, Jesse, and Christy, who were not pack, even Darryl, who wanted to protest. We were silent because he wanted us to be so, and he was the Alpha. His eyes lingered on mine, and if there was grief in them, I think it was only our mating bond that let me see it. He didn’t think he was going to survive this—or he’d have taken Darryl with him.

“I will take the walker Gary Laughingdog, who brings a prophecy that he must come,” Adam said into the silence. “Then myself. The rest of you are volunteers. Feel free to say no because the estimate that Ariana gave me was six wolves. If you would rather not die tonight, or rather wait until another night, there is no shame. Warren?”

Warren drawled his “Yes, boss” without hesitation.

The wolves stirred and began to howl. Emerging from human throats, it was not as pure or carrying as it would have been out of the wolves, but the emotion was the same. There was respect and a celebration of his bravery in accepting and in the honor of being chosen to fight beside his Alpha.

It took Warren entirely by surprise. He grabbed Kyle’s hand and held on as his eyes brightened with tears that threatened to spill over.

Warren had spent most of his very long life alone, when wolves are meant to live in packs. I’d first met him while he worked at a gas station near here. I’d introduced him to Adam—who I resented at the time but couldn’t help but respect. As Gary had said, Adam was what an Alpha should be, and I’d known it. Adam had welcomed Warren into the pack, but the pack had taken him in with mixed feelings.

Their support told him that there were no mixed feelings left. Not at this moment.

When the howl faded, Adam said, “Honey?”

There was another stir in the pack; this time it was more shock than approval. Women didn’t fight, not in traditional packs. Honey was now unmated, which should have left her rank at the lowest of the pack, even below Zack, our new submissive. But Honey wasn’t a submissive wolf, not even close.

Honey didn’t need their approval. She raised her chin, looked at me—because Adam’s call had as much to do with me as it did with the pack. She’d resented it when I had refused to leave the traditional relegation of women alone. She’d liked that being married to Peter meant she was low-ranking.

She gave first me, then Warren, for whom she’d always had a soft spot, a savage smile. “Yes, boss,” she said.

Me. I thought hard at Adam—and I knew he heard me. Pick me. If everyone who goes is going to die anyway, why not pick me?

I need you to survive, he answered me without speaking, without looking at me. I need to know you survive.

I need you to survive, too, I thought, but I tried not to send it to him. There was a faint chance he’d listen—and what if one werewolf instead of a coyote made a difference? What if I was the reason he died? So I kept silent.

“I’m sorry,” said Christy suddenly, before Adam could name anyone else.

Adam gave her a tender look that she didn’t deserve. God help us and keep us from receiving what we deserve—it was a favorite saying of my foster father, Bryan.

“It’s not your fault, Christy,” Adam said. “It is just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

She got up from the couch where she was sitting next to Auriele. “No. Not that, Adam. I’m sorry that I wasn’t strong enough to live your life. I left you—you would never have left me.” She looked at me and looked away. The tears on her face weren’t crocodile tears, they were the real, unattractive thing complete with runny nose. She still was beautiful. “I’m glad I left, for your sake. You found someone who can stand beside you. I couldn’t live with what you are, but that’s my problem, not yours.” She looked down, then straight into his eyes. “I love you.”

If she hadn’t done that last part, I would have kissed her—figuratively speaking—and cried friends. There are some things that honest, honorable people don’t do to the people they love. They don’t propose marriage on TV. They don’t bring home small cuddly animals without checking with their spouses first. And they don’t tell their ex-husband they love him in front of a crowd that includes their daughter and his current wife right before he goes off to almost certain death. It didn’t help that most of us could tell that she wasn’t lying.

Adam said, “Thank you.” As if she’d given him a great gift. But he didn’t tell her what, exactly, he was thanking her for.

She caught the ambiguity. She gave him a rueful smile and sat down. Auriele hugged her fiercely.

I pulled my legs up and wrapped my arms around them.

Maybe they won’t die, I thought. Maybe something Gary does keeps them from dying.

All this time, since the first time he kissed me, I’d been worried about growing old, about leaving Adam alone. And it turned out that it was going to be the other way around.

“Paul,” Adam said. Paul’s name wasn’t a surprise, not like Honey’s.

Paul nodded, looked at Warren, shook his head, and said, “Yes, boss,” with graveyard humor. Paul had tried to kill Warren once because Warren was the wolf just above him in rank and because Warren was gay. Now he was going out to a battle that Adam didn’t think they would come back from, and he, like Honey, was telling Warren that he had his back. People can change.

“George.”

“Yes, boss,” said the quiet policeman.

Maybe I should have kept the walking stick. It had worked against a vampire, against the river devil—surely the river devil had been as powerful—more powerful with its ability to remake the world—and it had been the walking stick that had brought it down.

“Mary Jo?” he asked.

“Fighting fires is what I do,” she told him. “Yes, boss.”

Mary Jo loved my mate, too. She’d protect him if she could. I was glad that she was going. My grief was so huge that I had no room for jealousy.

The walking stick … was made of wood and silver, and no matter how magical it was, wood was wood. I had no doubt that someone could throw it into a campfire and it would emerge unscathed, but a campfire was not a volcano. If the walking stick could do some great magic that would kill a fire elemental like Guayota, Coyote would have told me. I was pretty sure Coyote would have told me.

“Alec?” I didn’t know Alec as well as I did some of the other wolves. He was a friend of Paul’s, and Paul didn’t like me much.

Maybe Coyote would have told me if the walking stick could kill Guayota. He’d told me that mortal means could not harm the tibicenas when in their tibicena form. Did he mean that the walking stick might?

“Yes, boss.”

I was pretty sure that the walking stick had served Coyote’s purpose by showing me what lay within the tibicenas. If it would have been effective against them, he’d have told me—or couched it in some kind of riddle that I’d still be puzzling out when one of the tibicenas killed me.

“That’s enough,” said Adam. “If Ariana has more magic when she has dealt with us, then I will call for more volunteers.”

Because of her fear of the wolves, Ariana worked with them one at a time, in the kitchen. I thought Samuel was going to go with her, but he came and sat next to me instead.

“We don’t have any idea on how to kill this thing,” Samuel said. “Ariana tells me that as far as she knows, the only way to kill a primitive elemental like Guayota would be to destroy his volcano, and even then, he would not die for centuries.”

“El Teide is the third highest volcano in the world,” I told him, pressing my cheekbone into my knees. The burn reminded me that turning to my other cheek would have been smarter. “I think it’s a little beyond our capabilities. Killing the tibicenas, his two giant dogs, might do it. But you can only kill their mortal forms, when they look like mostly normal dogs instead of polar-bear-sized monsters. I suspect they are not going to be fighting werewolves in their mortal forms.”

“Ariana would come with us,” he told me, “but she doesn’t have the power she once had, not even a tenth of it. And fire-dogs are too close to her nightmares; there is no guarantee that she wouldn’t do as much damage to us as she would to Guayota and his beasts.”

“I’d come with you,” I said, “but Adam doesn’t want me to die, and for some reason, he seems to think that’s his decision to make.”

Samuel hugged me. “Don’t mourn us until we’re dead,” he said.

“I’ll spit on your graves,” I told him, and he laughed, the bastard.

“Nice,” said Adam, crouching in front of me. “I had to watch you go up against the river devil.”

“That sucked, too,” I told him without looking up from my knees. “But we had a plan that we thought might work.”

“Based on a story,” he said roughly. “It wasn’t a plan; it was a suicide mission.”

I looked up and met his eyes. I didn’t say, So is this. He knew it; it was in his eyes.

“Honey has made her suite available to us,” he said. “Will you come?”

I unlocked my fingers from around my legs and rose out of Samuel’s embrace and went into Adam’s.

“Yes, please,” I whispered.

No one in the room spoke, but they watched us leave, knowing where we were going, and I didn’t care.

Honey’s suite was a bedroom, office, and bathroom, all done in shades of cool gray. It surprised me until I remembered that this had been Peter’s room, too. The gray suited the man he’d been.

We didn’t speak. All of the words had already been said. When he stripped my clothes off me, I noticed that Honey kept her house a little cooler than ours because I was cold—or maybe that was just fear.

Naked, I took off Adam’s clothes and folded them as I set them down, as if taking care with his clothing might show him how much I longed to take care of him. Unusually, his body was slow to awaken, and so was mine—but that was okay because this was about saying good-bye. About impregnating my skin with his scent so that I would have him with me after he was gone. About remembering exactly—exactly—what the soft skin just to the side of his hip bone felt like under my fingertips and under my lips. It was about love and loss and the unbearable knowledge that this could be the last time. Was probably the last time.

I could feel Ariana’s magic on him, and I hoped that it would be enough to keep him safe.

He lay on his back on Honey’s bed and pulled me on top of him as he’d done the first time we’d made love. He let me touch him until his body was shuddering, and sweat rose on his forehead. He pulled my face up to his and kissed me tenderly despite the speed of his pulse.

“My turn,” he whispered. I nodded, and he rolled me beneath him and returned the favor, seeking out his favorite places and the ones where I was most sensitive. He brought me to climax, then lay with his head on my stomach, his arms around me, catching his breath before he started to build the pace again.

We ended as we’d begun, with me on him, watching his face as I moved on him and he in me. The expressions he wore told me to speed up or slow down until his bright yellow eyes opened wide, and he grabbed my hips and helped me take us both where we were going.

I lay down on him and put my face in his neck, and if I cried, I didn’t show him my tears. He ran his hands up and down my back until I could pretend I hadn’t been crying.

“I suck at this,” I told him. “I suck at words when they count.”

He smiled at me. “I know.”

“I understand,” I told him. “I understand why you have to go and why I have to stay. I think that you are doing the right thing, the only thing you can do. I wish…” My stomach hurt and it would have been kindness to put me out of my misery, but I wasn’t going to share that with Adam.

I know, he said.

“You weren’t supposed to get that,” I told him.

“I know that, too,” he said, his voice tender. “You should know that you can’t hide things from me.”

“Good,” I said, my voice fierce. “Good. Then you know, you know I love you.”

We showered the sweat off our bodies in Honey’s shower, wordless. His hands were warm, and he was patient with my need to touch and touch. I wished futilely that this time would last forever, but eventually he turned off the water and we dressed.

“Willis asked you to call the police if you figured out where Juan Flores was,” I said, jerking a comb through my hair.

Adam took the comb away and took over the job. His touch was gentle and slow, as if there were all the time in the world to do the job properly. As if untangled hair mattered.

“He did,” Adam said. “And I saw enough cannon fodder in ’Nam to last me a lifetime.”

He saw my flinch and paused in his combing to kiss me. Neither of us talked again until he set the comb aside.

“I love you,” I told him rawly. “And if you don’t come back, I will spit on your grave.”

He smiled, but not enough to bring on his dimple. “I know you do, and I know you will. Mercedes Athena Thompson Hauptman, if I have not said it, you should know that you brought joy into my life when I thought there was no joy left in the world.”

“Don’t,” I said, tears spilling over as I frantically scrubbed them away. “Don’t say things like that when I’m going to have to go out there and face all of them. Don’t you make me cry.” Again.

He smiled, this time with dimple, and mopped my face with the shirt he hadn’t put on yet. “You’re tough, you’ll deal,” he said. “And at least I didn’t leave you a letter.”