Night Broken

6

The original crime scene had only one body, another woman. She lay in the middle of the hayfield in a section, roughly square, that had nothing at all growing in it. The soil was black, and it stained the bottom of my tennis shoes with soot. Someone had burned a chunk of field and put the dead woman in it like the bull’s-eye of a target.

“Staged,” I said.

“Yes,” agreed Tony. “And we’ll let the scene experts have their way, but, like Willis, I’m reading the other bodies the same way. Arranged for maximum effect.”

Unlike the other women, this one had been partially eaten. The soft flesh of her abdomen was completely gone and most of the thigh muscles. Something with big, sharp teeth had gnawed on the bones exposed by the missing flesh.

I stopped about five feet from the body and smelled. A lot of people had been roaming around the area, and if I hadn’t been looking for it, I wouldn’t have scented the same magic I’d detected at the other site. Magic, death—the bare remnants of the pain and fear that had also been present with the other bodies. Over it all hung a pall of burnt grass and earth. I didn’t smell any kind of volatile compound, though maybe the circle had been burned a few days earlier. Some things—like alcohol—evaporate pretty fast.

“I think it’s the same killer,” I said.

“We don’t get so many murders around here—especially where the victims are partially eaten—that anyone is going to argue with you,” said Willis. “But what are you basing that on?”

“The smell of magic is the same—and he killed her the same way he took out one of the horses,” I told him. You see enough hunts, you pay attention to how prey is killed. “He tore out the throat and ate it before disemboweling her, just like he did the horse. A lot of predators develop a favorite style of kill.”

I took a step closer, and the slight change in angle highlighted the ground. Paw prints, canid and huge, dug into the barren earth. They were bigger than my hand when I set it beside them. A timber wolf’s paw prints would have been bigger, too—but these were a lot bigger than any timber wolf’s.

“Not werewolf,” I said with a relieved sigh. “Werewolves have retractable claws that don’t dig into the dirt unless they are running—almost like a cougar’s. These have claw marks like any other canid.”

“Werewolves have retractable claws?” asked the officer who’d been still at the scene when we came here. “I’m forensics; why didn’t anyone ever tell me that? I can’t look for werewolves if I know squat about them. Do you have a werewolf who will let me examine him for a while?” The last question was directed at me.

“You’ll have to ask Adam,” I told her. Who would have to ask Bran, which I didn’t tell her.

“So what was it?” Most of the cops had stayed at the other site, but a couple of others had followed Willis, Tony, and me. It was one of those who asked.

“I don’t know,” I told him.

I knelt beside the body and put my nose down as close to the dead woman as I could get. She had been here longer and was beginning to rot. I sorted through odors as quickly as I could.

Between the rot and the burnt smell, it was difficult.

I sat up. “I definitely smell a canid, though not coyote, wolf, werewolf, or any dog I’ve smelled.” I looked at Tony. “I’d like to be more help. I’ll recognize the way our killer smells if I run into it again. If you want, we can have some of the werewolves take a shot at identifying it.”

“We are taking her word that it isn’t a werewolf?” asked Willis, disbelief in his voice. “The wife of the Alpha?”

“Yes,” said Tony. “We’re taking her word—but we’ll let forensics double-check. Would a werewolf have a better chance of identifying it than you, Mercy?”

My nose was as good as most werewolves’, better than some. But Samuel was very old, and he’d run into a lot of things over the centuries. He was not a member of the pack, but he’d come look if they’d let him.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” said Willis before I could express an opinion. “If this isn’t a werewolf, then we don’t want to bring any in to confuse the issue. Having Ms. Hauptman here is pushing it as it is.”

Willis dusted off his hands and looked at me thoughtfully. “This was not a werewolf?”

“No,” I said.

He pursed his mouth. “Damned if I don’t believe you. Whatever did this isn’t human.”

“Something supernatural,” Tony said.

I nodded. “I don’t know how to prove it, without anyone being able to smell this magic.”

“Fae, then,” said one of the other cops. “I’ve read all the fairy tales. The black dog is the most common of the shapes they take. Meet a black dog at the crossing of two roads or hear the call of the Gabriel Hounds, and you are sure to die.”

I shook my head. “Doesn’t smell like fae—and they have all retreated to the reservation, anyway.”

“There are other things out there besides werewolves and fae?” asked Willis.

I got to my feet and dusted the dirt off my jeans before I answered him. “What do you think?” I asked.

He frowned unhappily.

I nodded. “That’s what I think, too. I’ve never come across whatever did this. But judging from the tracks and the amount of meat he ate in a very short time—whatever this is, it is bigger than any werewolf I’ve been around. That means more than three hundred pounds.”

“On the way over, you just explained to me that you didn’t think it was a good thing to tell people that there were other things out there besides werewolves and fae,” Tony commented.

I waved my hand toward the crowd of police officers by the copse of trees. “If something is out there doing this, then I think that it’s too late to worry about what is safe for the public to believe in. This … I don’t know what this is. Finding out and stopping it is more important to public safety than trying to not make them paranoid.”

Willis shook his head and looked at Tony. “The brass is going to want this to be werewolves.” He turned to me. “Fair warning. They are going to want to talk to your husband. Probably not for a few days, until the initial lab reports get back to us, but soon.”

“Is this really a conversation for dinner?”

Christy interrupted me in the middle of explaining what I’d been doing this afternoon. There was an odd pause because by interrupting me, she’d made it clear that she felt comfortable correcting me. If we’d both been werewolves, I’d have been forced to make her back down—and then her supporters would have stepped in to defend her.

That I wasn’t a werewolf gave me some leeway of behavior, but not much.

We were eating formally again, as we had been since Christy had moved in. Four werewolves, Adam, Jesse, Christy, and I meant eight people, which was, to give her credit, too many people for the kitchen table. Eating in the dining room with Christy cooking meant bouquets cut and arranged from the garden, good china, and cloth napkins folded into cute hatlike things or flowers.

The tablecloth tonight had been hurriedly purchased (Jesse had been sent out to the store earlier) because Christy’s favorite tablecloth, unearthed from the linen closet, had a stain on it—discovered just as I came in from work. She hadn’t looked at me, but the sad note in her voice had Auriele glaring at me and a few reproachful looks from everyone else, including Jesse. The other tablecloths were dirty, and there was no way we could eat at a table without a tablecloth.

I had not said a number of things—one of which was, if it was such a favorite of hers, then why hadn’t she taken it with her? Another unsaid comment was that if I’d known her grandmother had given it to her on her wedding day, I would have ripped it into shreds and used a paper tablecloth before I’d put it on the table for last Thanksgiving. Instead of saying anything, I’d ignored the whole dramatic show and gone upstairs to change my clothes from work, leaving Adam to listen to Christy try to decide if there was any way to salvage her grandmother’s tablecloth.

It had taken a pep talk with the mirror to get myself out of the bedroom and downstairs to eat with everyone else. Dinner had been served, the pack gossiped over, then Darryl asked me about the kill site the police had taken me to. I’d briefed Adam over the phone, but there hadn’t been time to really hash the matter out.

“I mean, Mercy,” Christy said, as if she hadn’t noticed the rise in tension when she interrupted me, “why don’t we hold off talk of dead bodies until after people are done with the food? I spent too long making this for it to go to waste.”

For tonight’s dinner, Christy had made lasagna (from scratch, including the noodles), and I’d been shuffling it around on my plate because knowing that she’d made the food made me not want to eat it. That it was pretty and smelled good wasn’t as much of an incentive to consuming it as I’d have thought it would be.

“It’s okay, Mom,” said Jesse with forced cheer, trying to defuse the situation. “Dinner is kind of when everything gets ironed out. Sometimes it’s hard to get everyone in the same room afterward.”

Ben, one of the four werewolf guards for the night, ate a big bite, swallowed, and said in a prissier-than-usual version of his British accent, “Mercy, when you say it gnawed on the bones, was it trying to get at the marrow or just cleaning its teeth?”

“Ben,” snarled Auriele. “Didn’t you hear Christy?”

Six months ago, Ben would have backed down. Auriele outranked him, both as Darryl’s mate and as herself. But he’d changed, grown stronger, so he just ate another bite and raised an eyebrow at me. Silent—but not very subservient.

“Playing, I think,” I said to attract Auriele’s ire. She wouldn’t attack me—and in her usual mode of Christy’s protector, she might do something to Ben. I’d decided the best way to deal with Christy’s interruption was to ignore her. “The bones weren’t cracked, just chewed on. At least on the body I got close to. No cracking means no marrow. And if it was just trying to clean its teeth, it would have chewed harder.”

I ate a bite of salad. It smelled like Christy because she’d washed the romaine herself. Swallowing it was an effort. Trying not to look like I was choking was an even bigger effort.

Auriele opened her mouth, but Darryl put his hand on top of hers, and she closed her lips without speaking, but not without giving him a hurt look.

Adam’s hand touched my shoulder and suddenly I could swallow again. I had allies here, and Adam had my back.

“The important thing,” he said, “is that we are careful. I don’t want any wolf to go out running alone until we know what made those kills.”

Darryl nodded. “I’ll see that word gets around.”

“Good,” Adam said. “I’ve got people out looking for Gary Laughingdog. Hopefully, we’ll find him before the police do—or he’ll find you, Mercy.”

“I’m pretty sure he wanted to talk to me,” I told him. “If so, he’ll find me before anyone finds him. I wouldn’t worry too much about the police finding him since he’s running around as a coyote.”

“Did you check if Bran had any insights into what it was that killed all those people?” Darryl asked.

Adam ate another bite of lasagna, paused to enjoy it, then gave me a slightly guilty look. I decided not to tell him it was okay if he liked Christy’s food. It was entirely understandable, but it was not okay, and I wouldn’t lie to him. I looked away.

To Darryl, Adam said, “I called Bran. Without checking out the site himself, Bran wasn’t able to pinpoint what could have done it. Taking the fae out of the picture leaves us with not much. Might even be a native creature. Bran said he once encountered a wendigo, and he believes that it was physically capable of killing this way. They smell oddly of magic, the way Mercy described them. But he didn’t think that it would have left canid paw prints—or left anything except bare bones. Their curse is that they hunger in a way that cannot ever be satisfied. Also, they tend to haunt the mountain passes, not the open shrub steppe. He’s having Charles do a little more research for us.”

“Charles who?” asked Christy.

“Bran’s son,” I told her, trying very hard not to be condescending and not succeeding. Maybe because I didn’t try that hard. She’d been Adam’s wife for over a decade, and she hadn’t bothered to learn anything if she didn’t know about the Marrok and his sons. “He’s half-Indian—Salish—and he has some people who will talk to him about things that are culturally sensitive—sacred things or stories they don’t want prettied up with all the original flavor lost so that it can be more effectively marketed as a genuine Native American story.”

“Have you asked Ariana?” Darryl was getting good at ignoring the almost battle between Christy and me and, at the same time, reducing the tension by changing the subject. I would never have thought Darryl would be such an adroit politician.

“No,” said Adam. “Not until we’ve looked at everything else. I’ll call Marsilia as soon as we’re done here, but I don’t expect her to have much for us. She might owe Mercy and need the pack to keep her seethe safe until she gets some more vampires with power here, but she doesn’t like us very much.”

Ben snorted. “You can say that again.”

“Why not ask this Ariana?” asked Christy.

“Because her father tortured her with his fae hounds until she went mad,” Adam told her before I could say something spiteful or petty. It would probably be a good idea if I refrained from answering Christy’s questions.

“She is Samuel’s mate,” Auriele said. When Christy looked blank, Auriele added, “Samuel is Bran’s other son. Samuel is a werewolf, but she’s coping okay with that. However, it is still an effort for her to be around any of the rest of us. Asking her about a giant dog killing people might just knock her right back off her applecart. Not only would that be unkind to do when we don’t even know if she would have useful information, but she’s a power in her own right. If she goes nuts, I don’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity.”

Ben took a second helping of lasagna, and said in a contemplative voice, “I keep having nightmares about that night when she alternated between doctoring my wounds and wanting to kill me.”

“Tad said he’d see if he can get a message to Zee,” I said. “If it is fae, Zee will know what it is.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t fae.” Auriele’s voice was neutral.

“It didn’t smell fae,” I said. “But some of the half-breeds don’t smell fae to me, for whatever reason. And Zee is old. He might have some idea even if it isn’t fae at all.”

“Did you tell that to the police?” Christy looked at me brightly. “That you wouldn’t have been able to tell if it had been a half fae?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because,” I said gently, “there are a number of half-blood fae around here because of the local reservation. Most of them don’t have enough magic to light a candle. Humans don’t have a habit of treating the people we are scared of very gently. No sense getting people killed unless they are actually guilty of something.”

“Mercy did the right thing.” George was the fourth werewolf on duty. He was also a Pasco police officer, which lent validity to his opinion even if the kill had been out of his jurisdiction. He had that whole “I was a Marine” thing going that stiffened his posture and made even his casual movements have a certain purpose to them. “Police need the real information, not something that will send manpower off chasing rabbits when they should be hunting bigger prey.”

As soon as he quit speaking, he returned to his plate. He ate with no wasted motion, and he didn’t look up from his plate while he did so. George was fairly far up the pack hierarchy, but the only wolf he outranked at this table was Ben. It was safer for him to keep his head down, so he did.

“What about the new wolf?” asked Jesse. “He could have done the killing before he joined the pack.” Unlike the police, she knew enough to understand that he couldn’t have done it once he was bonded.

“The first victim might have been before Zack joined the pack,” I told her, “but the others were more recent.”

“The killer isn’t Drummond,” Adam told her. “I called his last Alpha, who regretted losing him. Zack stayed for six months or so, then got restless. Warren says he’s pretty soft-spoken and quiet, as submissive wolves tend to be—and definitely not our killer.”

“Serial killers who move around are less likely to get caught,” said Jesse.

Ben shook his head. “I was over at Warren’s last night. If you’d ever met Zack, you wouldn’t have proposed him as your killer.” He fidgeted a little, and reluctantly said, “Is there something more we can do for him? Maybe a different job? Something with more of a future.”

“What’s he doing?” asked Auriele.

“Dishes,” I said.

“Dishes suck,” said Jesse, with feeling. She was working as a waitress for running-around money and had done a couple of stints on the dishes when someone else missed their shift.

“I’d rather wash dishes than pick apples,” said George in tones of non-nostalgia.

The talk around the table turned to “worse job” stories.

I excused myself when the conversation drifted to some funny event that happened back when Christy was Adam’s wife, well before the pack had moved to the Tri-Cities. Even Adam got into it, had everyone in stitches about trying to find a bathroom for his very pregnant wife at 2:00 A.M. in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. It wouldn’t have bothered me if he hadn’t given Christy a tender look as she threw her head back and laughed. She had a beautiful laugh. I got up from the table, taking my plate and glass.

“Didn’t you like dinner?” asked Christy as I passed her, drawing everyone’s eyes to my almost-full dinner plate.

“I had a late lunch.” I continued on to the kitchen. “And then there were all those dead people afterward. Hard to keep the smell out of my head.”

That shut her up. I think that all the talk about the dead bodies really had bothered her. I was letting her make me petty.

I kept my movements slow and even as I scraped my plate off into the garbage. I loaded my dishes into the dishwasher and walked with deliberate steps up the stairs; by then Darryl was carrying the narrative. I didn’t run, didn’t even move with speed, but every step was in as direct a line with my bedroom as I could manage. I shut the door behind me and caught a deep breath.

If her stalker didn’t kill Christy soon, she might just drive me to it. At this point, I wasn’t even certain how much of it was her fault and how much of it was me being jealous. Not of Adam, Adam belonged to me, soul and wolf. If it were just Adam, I’d have more control. It was the pack.

Pack magic, I’d learned, was real. And if enough of the pack wanted you to do something, it was difficult not to do it. When I hadn’t been aware of it, some members of the pack had made Adam and me have a fight. They couldn’t do that anymore, but I could feel them pressing upon me. I suspected that if enough of them wanted me out of the pack badly enough, they would succeed. What I didn’t know was what that would do to Adam, but I was certain it wouldn’t be good.

I walked over to my chest of drawers and unfastened the chain around my neck and set it down, so I could look at it. It had been a graceful piece of jewelry when I’d only had the lamb on it. Even my wedding ring—which I wore on my finger only on formal occasions because I didn’t want to lose a finger when something caught on my ring while I was at work—was beautiful. The engagement ring had a single, large, pear-cut diamond. My wedding ring was plainer, just two small yellow topazes Adam said were the same color as my eyes when I went coyote. The rings had been brazed together so that the topazes flanked the diamond.

It was the dog tag that turned the necklace from jewelry to statement. The tag hadn’t been pretty to start with, and after nearly four decades of wear and tear, it was battered and rough. Adam wore the other tag at all times.

Symbols.

I closed my hand on Adam’s dog tag as the door to the bedroom opened and quietly shut again. Adam’s arms came around me, and he bent so he could put his head on my shoulder. There was a mirror on the top of the dresser, so I could see his face—and his eyes in the mirror met mine.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

He smiled, a peaceful expression that lightened suddenly with mischief. “For keeping the peace. You don’t think that I don’t know you could wipe the floor with a lightweight like Christy? You battled with Bran when you were just a kid and came out on top. Christy? She’s not a tithe on Bran.”

I snorted. “I don’t know where you get your information, but I didn’t win any battles with Our Lord and Master Bran Cornick who is the Marrok. No one does. That’s why he’s the Marrok.”

He snorted back. “That’s not what Bran says.”

“Then he’s doing it for his own reasons,” I told him. “Don’t put too much weight on his stated opinion. More than likely he’s just trying to get you to do something you don’t want to do.”

“Peanut butter,” Adam said, deadpan.

“He made my foster mother cry,” I said.

“Eggs.”

“That didn’t work so well,” I told him. “But I did learn not to arm my enemies.”

“Shoes.”

Shocked, I turned around, so I could see his face instead of just the reflection. “No one knows about the shoes. Bran doesn’t know.” I hadn’t thought that Bran knew about the shoes.

“I don’t know if Bran does,” Adam said. “Samuel said that he and Charles cooperated to keep Bran guessing because he was really enraged about the shoes.”

Charles had covered for me? I’d known that Samuel had seen me and not said anything—but I hadn’t known about Charles. Truth was that in my heart of hearts I’d been a lot more scared of Bran’s son Charles than I’d ever been scared of Bran. I just never believed that Bran would really hurt me. Charles … Charles would do whatever he had to. I was still more scared of Charles than Bran, but not as scared because Adam had my back.

“The shoes were not the brightest idea I’ve ever had,” I admitted. “But I was provoked.”

I met Adam’s eyes, and we stared at each other for a minute, then I started to snicker. He laughed and pulled me into his body. I relaxed—and it felt like the first time I’d relaxed since Christy came to stay with us.

“The shoes didn’t really have anything to do with Bran,” I told him.

“Leah is his mate,” he said. “Of course it had something to do with Bran. Especially when he couldn’t figure out who was stealing her shoes.”

I laughed again, tried to stop, while I said, “Only one shoe.”

“One of each pair. At a time. Forty-three shoes gone over a five-week period. Sometimes two or three shoes in the same day. Not a scent trace to be found. Just like a wizard had conjured them away.”

I blinked away tears and tried to stop laughing. It wasn’t that funny—it was the release of the tension that had been building up for days. “I actually can’t remember what it was Leah did, specifically. But I’m sure it was something worse than making me Enemy Number One because I let her tablecloth get stained.”

“Samuel said Leah put out a bounty on the shoes and the thief.”

That sent me off again.

“Her face,” I managed. “If only I had a photograph of her face.” Though I had a pretty good memory of it. “I thought she was just going to spontaneously combust right there in front of us—barefoot.”

“When Samuel told me about it, he asked me to find out how you managed it without leaving your scent behind. He said that when he asked you, you told him that you were keeping your secret in case you had to do the same to him someday.”

“Fishing pole and a big hook,” I told Adam because I’d do better than shoes if I had to get back at him for something. “The hardest part was shutting the closet without going into the room.” I thought about it. “Okay, the closet door and getting out of the house forty-odd times without getting caught. Thank goodness I spent a lot of legitimate time over at that house, so I didn’t have to try to cover up my scent except to keep it out of Bran’s bedroom.”

“What did you do with the shoes? Samuel said Bran searched your foster parents’ house for them.”

I snickered again. “Searched every day, sometimes twice a day—every time a shoe disappeared. Bryan got mad about it eventually, but Evelyn thought it was funny. I dumped the shoes in a glacial lake that was about three miles from our house. In between trips, because I couldn’t quite manage to make it there unseen every day, I hid them in the bed of Charles’s truck.”

“I thought you were afraid of Charles.”

I nodded. “So was everyone else, though. And he only drove that truck when he absolutely had to.”

“You said you tossed all of them in the lake. I thought one of those shoes returned a few years later? Where did you hide it?” His eyes were happy.

“In the lake with the rest.” I shivered in reflex. “It took me four hours of diving in that lake to find a shoe—and that was a glacier-fed lake. Most of the shoes had rotted into mush, but there was a steel stiletto with this wiry mesh stuff that looked pretty good. By that time, Bran had quit looking, so I didn’t have to be so careful.”

Bryan and Evelyn had both been dead then, too, and I’d been living alone in their house that no longer really felt like my own. Not even their ghosts had lingered with me. I didn’t tell Adam that, he was too perceptive, and I was too prone to self-pity with Christy living on the other side of my bedroom wall.

I cleared my throat. “I had to work on that stupid shoe for months before it didn’t look like it had spent two years in water. But her face at the sight of it sitting on top of the Christmas tree was so worth it.”

“She’d hurt you,” Adam said, his voice soft and certain.

“She couldn’t hurt me,” I corrected briskly if not truthfully. To earn the Christmas-tree topper, she’d made a disparaging remark about my foster father, Bryan, after he’d killed himself. “She made me mad.”

“She hurt you.”

I shrugged. “I was pretty sure she’d clean my clock after that one. I mean, even without evidence, who else could it have been?”

“She couldn’t.” Adam’s face was satisfied. “Samuel told me that when she tried to bring her case to Bran, Charles swore, in front of most of the pack, that you were with him all day working on cars during the only time the switch between the star and the shoe could have been made. No one could hear the lie, so she had to leave it or challenge Charles first.”

“He lied?” I said, shocked. Thought about it, and said in a hushed voice, “He lied, and no one could tell?”

“It’s Charles,” Adam explained as if that was enough—and it was. “You handled Bran, and you handled Leah. So don’t tell me you couldn’t put a stop to Christy’s taunts and teach her to behave herself until she goes home.”

I didn’t think it would be as easy as he made it seem. But he was right that I was backing away from a confrontation.

“If she goes before there is a knock-down, drag-out fight between the pro-me and the pro-Christy factions, it’ll be better for the pack.” My voice was small.

“And less collateral damage,” he said, kissing my nose, “Jesse has to deal with concerning her mother. She doesn’t need more drama. Auriele, Mary Jo—they don’t really know who she is. And that’s not a bad thing.”

“She’s not a horrible person,” I protested.

He smiled, briefly. “No. She makes people feel good for defending her, for doing things for her. Makes them feel like heroes—she made me feel that way once, too. Nothing wrong with that.” He kissed me. “But I like my women less helpless.”

I went limp against him, and said, dramatically, “I’m helpless against your kisses.”

He laughed like a villain in a cartoon. “Aha. So that’s how it’s done. Well, there’s no help for you, then.”

“No,” I said in a faint voice, putting an arm over my forehead as I arched back over his arm in the classic pose of the helpless ingénue. “I guess you’ll just have your wicked way with me again.”

“Cool,” said my husband, a wicked growl in his voice. “Don’t worry. You’ll enjoy every minute of it.”

I finished the wasserboxer engine I was rebuilding with great satisfaction. As if to make up for the chaos in my own life, the engine was going together as sweet as molasses and twice as easy. Like a gambler on a winning streak, I was worried that I’d ruin it in the last moves. But it buttoned up duck soup, as if I were putting it together in the factory instead of thirty years later.

I had an urgent brake job left (brought in about fifteen minutes before). However, I’d decided last night, after Adam was sleeping beside me and looking more relaxed than he’d been in days, that I was finished leaving the battlefield to Christy—that was giving her too much advantage.

I’d have the brakes done by lunch tomorrow, and that would have to be soon enough. I patted the wasserboxer for being such a good patient and stripped out of my overalls in the oversized bathroom/laundry room. I got a can of soda from the fridge, and, clad in civilian clothes, I ventured into the main office.

“Closing time.”

“Sounds good,” Tad said, looking up from the books, where he was finishing recording an appointment. Gabriel had been trying to get me to set up the appointment schedule on computer, but Tad didn’t seem to mind the paper route. “You look tired, Mercy. Go home. Get something to eat. You look like you’ve lost ten pounds.”

“Maybe I should eat more red velvet cupcakes,” I said dryly. I’d brought two this morning, and Tad had eaten them both.

“Only if you make sure Christy knows they are for me or check them for arsenic,” he answered, using his keys to make the till run its daily total.

I opened my eyes wide. “Oh shoot. I’ve just been feeding them to you. Are you feeling ill?” I peered anxiously at his lips. “I think your lips are turning blue. Do you feel faint?”

He grinned at me. “Arsenic is a metal, Mercy. Don’t you remember your high-school chemistry?”

“Semi-metallic,” I told him.

“And Dad is iron-kissed, a master of metals.” He tucked his thumbs under his imaginary collar and grinned with lots of cheese. “I’m just a chip off the old block and safe from arsenic attacks of all kinds.”

“I’ll remember that the next time you drive me to attempted murder,” I said. I quit joking and sighed. “She’s going home soon. Then we can get on with our lives, as long as she wasn’t serious when she was threatening to move here.” I took a good long swig of my soda. “It’s only a matter of time before Adam finds her stalker and sends him off with the fear of Adam to keep him away from her for the rest of his life.”

He gave me a half smile because we both knew that it was a lot more likely that we’d have to kill the man. I should have felt worse about it, but I’d been raised by werewolves, and the bastard had burned down a building full of innocent bystanders—four people hadn’t gotten out of the apartment building before it collapsed.

“I talked to Da last night about your trouble with Beauclaire and Coyote,” Tad said unexpectedly. “The mirror still isn’t a good idea, but the old fae has a few tricks up his sleeve that none of the Gray Lords know about yet. I told him that you haven’t had much luck finding Coyote.”

“Did he have any advice?” I asked. It was unlikely that Zee would know how to contact Coyote, but I was ready for any help I could get. Today was Friday. I had two days left.

“He did,” Tad told me. “He said that if you hadn’t managed anything better by tonight, I was to tell you that you’ve been overlooking any number of avenues open to you in a way that is very un-Mercy-like.” He smiled. “His words.”

“What am I overlooking?” I’d called in all my markers. I’d even called Charles this morning, who had unhelpfully suggested I try a vision quest. Vision quests require fasting, which I could manage, but also a centered focus that I was never going to achieve with Christy in my home. He’d promised to call some shaman priests he knew, but warned me that, as I already knew, Coyote was elusive and mischievous. Searching and calling for Coyote was likely to result in exactly the opposite outcome.

Charles had been my last hope.

“You’ve been concentrating on Coyote when you should have been also looking at Beauclaire.” Tad held up a finger. “Without you, it is unlikely that Beauclaire will ever see the walking stick again—and he knows it.” Two fingers up. “Two: That means that you have a bargaining chip, and it also means that Beauclaire loses if something happens to you. Da also said you’ve been making Beauclaire the villain when he is more comfortably the hero. Beauclaire is honorable, as fae understand the word, and he has spent a human lifetime as a lawyer; he’ll understand compromise. If you can convince Beauclaire that you will sincerely return the walking stick to him when and if you see Coyote, he will probably grant you time to do so. Time, Da also asked me to remind you, is less precious to a Gray Lord like Beauclaire than it is to you.”

My jaw didn’t drop because I had it locked tight.

Tad grinned at me. “He said you’d probably figure it out on your own if you got desperate enough. Then I told him about Christy, and he gave me permission to talk to you tonight if you hadn’t worked it out already.”

I don’t know what expression was on my face, but Tad’s gentled. “Don’t feel too bad. Da knows Beauclaire, and it gives him an advantage. You’ll still have to bargain hard and fast—and be diplomatic. And, Da said, whatever you do, don’t mention his name, or all bets are off. Beauclaire knew that someone was going to have to take out Lugh. He was, apparently, girding up his loins to do just that when Da took care of it. That didn’t mean he didn’t swear vengeance.”

I shook off my chagrin and gave Tad a fist bump. “Thank you. I feel like a lead weight is off my back. I’ll keep looking for Coyote, but more time means that I might not be responsible for the Columbia rising up and out of its banks and wiping the Tri-Cities from the face of the earth.”

“Anytime,” he said. “My duties dispatched, I am off to home. Good luck with Christy and remind her that we work tomorrow, even though it is Saturday, so we’ll need something tasty to get us through the day. And you need to start eating, or your plan to pretend she doesn’t bother you will be revealed to anyone who looks at your ribs.”

I locked up after Tad and set Adam’s security system, Tad’s last words ringing in my ears. I started to get my purse out of the safe when I stopped and went back into the bathroom and peered into the mirror.

I looked just like me. Native American coloring, mostly Caucasian features inherited from my mother. Except, now that I knew to look at them, the shape of my eyes was like Gary Laughingdog’s. I tried to visualize Coyote’s face, but I didn’t know if I was imagining that his eyes were the same or not.

My hair was in the braids I usually wore to work in order to keep it out of the way so it didn’t get covered in grease when I pushed it out of my face. And Tad was right. My features were sharper.

There was no question that not eating the food Christy made was making me lose weight.

There was still a brake job I could do tonight. If I stretched it out, I’d miss dinner. That would give me an excuse to pick up some high-calorie fast food on the way home, food that didn’t taste or smell of Christy. I didn’t want Adam to notice I was losing weight because it would hurt him—my husband took care of the people around him. I didn’t want Christy to notice because she’d know she was getting to me.

I put my overalls back on, pulled on the sweat-inducing gloves, and hoisted the ’94 Passat up on the lift, so I could pull the back tires and take a look.

I was working on compressing the caliper and had just got the six-sided-dice (also known as a piston tool, but only at auto parts stores) to engage the caliper when my phone rang. I’d set my phone on a nearby counter, so I didn’t have to let go of anything to check the display.

Adam. Three days ago I’d have answered immediately, but the day before yesterday it had been Christy asking me to pick up a dozen apples and some butter. Real butter, no salt—make sure not to get the salted version because everyone eats too much salt.

Not a big deal at all. Stopping at the grocery store before I came home wasn’t a problem. Having Christy ask me to do it was a different matter.

Pack is all about hierarchy. I understood how it works even if, before marrying Adam, I had been on the outside looking in. Humans have hierarchy, too. What Christy had done was the equivalent of the new-hire office girl calling the CEO and asking him to bring coffee for the break room—and she’d done it in front of Adam and the four attending wolves. If they hadn’t known about it before, they would have known about it afterward. Pack hierarchy was one of those things I’d agreed to deal with when I married Adam, so I paid attention to make his life easier.

I couldn’t do much about Christy’s faux pas without looking like a jealous, arrogant bitch while Christy graciously apologized because she hadn’t realized what it was she had done—though she’d lived with the pack for years. So I’d filled her order, then brought two dozen Spudnut donuts for the pack.

Spudnuts is a Tri-Cities tradition; they make their donuts with potato flour instead of wheat. I might have lost hierarchy points, but Spudnut donuts bought me credit with the wolves who were at home. The wolves doubtless knew I’d done it to buy their favor—that didn’t mean it didn’t work. Even Christy couldn’t help but eat one.

Maybe I should bring them home every day, and that nicely rounded figure would just be rounded …

Dreams of petty revenge aside, she’d succeeded in making me paranoid to the point that Adam’s cell number on my phone’s display made me wary instead of happy. Four rings sounded before I gave in and answered. If it was Christy, I’d just say no to whatever she asked because I had to work late.

“This is Mercy,” I said neutrally, bracing myself.

“Aren’t you supposed to be getting home sometime soon?” It was Adam. I relaxed and felt my expression soften. “You’ve had the security system on for an hour, so I expected you home by now. But I see you are working still.”

I waved at the corner where the tiny camera was watching my every move. The cameras downloaded themselves onto Adam’s laptop as well as a backup at his office. The interior cameras ran all day long, the exterior cameras in the parking lot and around the outside of the building only turned on when I switched on the nighttime security.

“Hey, handsome. Just finishing up a brake job. Don’t wait dinner. I’ll grab something on the way home.”

“Tad’s with you?” he said smoothly. If he was watching his feeds, then he knew the answer, and that I’d broken my promise not to work alone and make myself a target to anyone looking to hurt Adam or the pack.

I cleared my throat. “Sorry, I got distracted. I’ll clean up and head home.”

I expected him to be unhappy with me again—as he’d been when Christy had tried to get me in trouble for going off alone. I should have thought about safety when I’d made my sudden decision to stay and work. I knew it wasn’t just me at risk, but the whole pack through me because I could be used as a hostage.

“If you need a night off,” he said, sounding sympathetic instead of angry, “you could go keep Kyle company. Warren is on guard duty over here tonight. Zack does fine as long as Warren is there because Warren isn’t exactly flaming. But he says he can tell from what Zack doesn’t say that when it’s only Kyle and Zack there, it’s pretty awkward.”

I read between the lines that Kyle was giving Zack a hard time without Warren there to make sure he behaved. Like a kid in a candy shop, Kyle really enjoyed making people squirm. It was part of what made him such a good lawyer.

“I have no intention of deserting you for the night,” I told him firmly. “Kyle and Zack will just have to manage—Kyle is good at that sort of social stuff when he wants to be. I’ll be home in a half hour.”

“Get food first,” he said. “You need to eat, and I can see why you might have trouble eating here. I’ll see you home in an hour or an hour and a half.”

“I love you,” I said with feeling.

“Of course you do,” he agreed with a nonchalance that made me grin as he disconnected.

I let the car down and put jack stands under the rear axle. The hoist had a very slow leak that didn’t matter when someone was there to raise it periodically, but overnight it would lower itself until the car was on the ground. I probably ought to get it fixed, but the garage was barely eking along in the black for once, and I was reluctant to dump it back in the red.

A blip on the monitor on the wall between the garage and the office attracted my attention as the outside security cameras switched from daylight-colored to nighttime black-and-white. The monitor sat on a shelf on top of a rectangular computer box big enough to look serious—though it and the monitor were mostly there so that anyone breaking in would think that was the whole of the security system and, after trashing the system, would quit worrying about the cameras.

No, I didn’t need a system that sophisticated to watch over my garage where I repaired cars with sticker prices usually a lot less than the security Adam had installed. But Adam worried, and it cost me less than nothing to let him update the system every few months.

I stripped out of my overalls in the bathroom for a second time that day. I paused by the mirror, sighed, and washed my face because, while the gloves worked fine for hands, they still transferred grease to my cheek and mouth.

I wished I could get rid of the smell of my job as easily as I scrubbed the black smudges off my face. Christy couldn’t smell it, but the werewolves all could. Christy wore some kind of subtle perfume that smelled good to werewolf noses … and mine, too. Apparently, Adam had found it for her while they were still married, and she still wore it—or at least she was wearing it while she was here.

I left the bathroom and reached out to hit the lights when, in the security monitor, I saw a nearly new Chevy Malibu pull into the parking lot in front of the office. I wouldn’t have been alarmed—people can be optimistic about finding mechanics for cars that just have to be ready for a trip at 5:00 A.M. tomorrow—except that there was a big dog in the backseat.

It wouldn’t hurt to err on the side of safety. I reached for my phone.

“Hello,” said Christy cheerily. “Adam’s phone.”

“Get Adam,” I said, watching the lights on the Chevy turn off as he parked the car. There was a bumper sticker advertising a rental car chain on the back of it.

“I’m afraid—”

“You should be,” I told her in a low voice. Hungry and tired from the long hours I’d put in, I was abruptly sick of her stupid games and ready to quit playing. “Get Adam. Now.”

“Don’t snap at me,” Christy said, all cheer gone. “You don’t get to order me around, Mercy. You haven’t earned the right.”

The man who opened the driver’s door didn’t look like someone to be afraid of; he was wearing expensive clothes and slick-soled shoes. But the dog he let out of the backseat more than made up for his owner’s civilized appearance.

The dog looked like the photos I’d seen of the presa Canario, but in my parking lot it seemed bigger and nastier, a male with a broad face and broader chest. Lucia had said that people trimmed their ears to make them look fiercer, but no one needed to make this dog scarier.

The dog was just a dog, though. No matter how big and fierce a dog was, after running around with werewolves, no dog scared me. So there was no reason, really, for me to be afraid of them, a man and his dog. But I was.

The image of the dead bodies on the edge of the hayfield in Finley insisted on making itself present, and I tried to shove it off to the side. The worst of the fear, I thought, was because I’d been raped here in my garage, and I no longer ever really felt safe here, security system or not.

Christy’s ex-boyfriend was no one to be underestimated, but he was human and I had a gun readily available. The chill of fear that slid down my spine was unimpressed by logic.

In my ear, Christy was nattering away about manners and me being jealous for no reason.

“Christy,” I interrupted her, and let menace color my voice because I refused to let her hear the fear, “if you don’t give Adam the phone right the hell now, so help me, I will put you out with the rest of the trash in the morning.”

From the speaker on my cell phone I could hear some shocked exclamations. Apparently, there were some other werewolves in the room when Christy answered, and they’d overheard me threaten her. I’d probably care about that later.

“I won’t stay where I’m not wanted,” she said tearfully. “Not even in the home that was mine before—” She squeaked, and her voice cut out, replaced by Adam’s.

“Mercy?” His voice was very calm, that “people are going to die” calm only he could do. As soon as he started to speak, silence fell behind him because I wasn’t the only one who knew that voice. “I see him on the camera. You stay right there, don’t make any noise, and hopefully he won’t be sure you are in there. I’m on my way. Sit tight, and don’t let him in. I’m going to hang up right now and call the police and Tad.”

Adam was fifteen minutes out—but Tad was only five. What could happen in five minutes?