Smoke Bitten

7

I got home late from work on Saturday. Lucia had saved me dinner, which I ate by myself. That’s not to say that I was alone.

We were keeping an extra werewolf at the pack home because of the various threats—though since the night Kyle had shot one of the wolves, we had seen neither hide nor hair of the outsiders be they werewolves, smoke beasts, or vampires. Tonight our extra werewolf was Ben. He sat at the kitchen table opposite me while I ate and told me an incident in the ongoing efforts of the subversive IT personnel (which included computer programmers, system operators, and database administrators) to play mind games with the unfortunate corporate minions who were supposed to be in charge.

In this episode they’d (I was pretty sure that the unnamed perpetrator of most of these was Ben himself) adjusted the e-mail of one of the most disliked executives so that every e-mail he sent out also sent a copy to his wife and his boss. These e-mails included X-rated love letters between the executive and one of the HR people. Ben assured me—with example encounters as proof—that it couldn’t happen to a nicer pair of people. Since this had just happened today, the final outcome was yet to be determined.

He made me laugh, which was the point, I think, before he left me to go do some work he’d brought with him.

Jesse had some friends over and, after Ben left, they twice made forays into the kitchen for sustenance. They made popcorn and had to come back for it. On both incursions, Jesse’s friend Izzy kept giving me oddly apologetic looks. But I was too distracted by my own growing misery to worry about what Izzy had to apologize for.

Despite my initial victory, Adam had resumed his efforts to stay out until after I had to go to bed. He’d slept in the guest room the last few nights so as not to wake me up. My misery was complicated by my absolute conviction that if Adam didn’t want to make an effort, it didn’t matter what I did. A relationship was a two-way street. I would fight—but he had to fight, too.

Jesse’s friends went to their various homes. Jesse went to bed. And after a half an hour of internal debate, I gave up on Adam and followed her example.

I don’t know what made me glance out the window as I was getting ready to go to bed.

Wulfe was stretched out on the roof of my parts car. He’d placed small LED lanterns on the four corners of his chosen stage—all had been set to the night-vision-saving red light. The Rabbit was a small car, so Wulfe’s legs and bare feet dropped down the windshield.

And there went any chance that I was going to sleep anytime soon.

I was pretty sure he was naked, but it was hard to tell because the naughty bits were covered by a large piece of white cardboard. There was a picture drawn on the cardboard—a crudely drawn red flower with two leaves at the bottom of a long stem that looked remarkably like the pieces of anatomy that the cardboard was covering. Wulfe had died when he was still a teenager. His pale hair framed a face that would never grow old but also would never fulfill the promise of his not-quite-mature features. He looked younger than Jesse.

I wasn’t sure of the effect that he’d intended his theatrical staging to have on me—but I was pretty sure he hadn’t intended to make me sad.

The vampire saw me looking at him and blew me a kiss just as someone knocked on my door.

“A minute,” I said, grabbing my robe and wrapping myself in it.

It was Ben.

“Mercy,” he said. “Is there any legitimate reason for Wulfe to be running around outside? I’m catching his scent all over.” Apparently, he hadn’t seen Wulfe’s passion play on my Rabbit.

It was a sign of how much Wulfe bothered him that he didn’t use any swear words at all.

“He’s stalking me,” I told him. I’d forgotten that Wulfe hadn’t been one of the threats Adam had presented to the pack.

Ben’s eyebrows shot to his hairline. “Excuse the fuck out of me? Could you repeat that?”

And he was back to normal.

“He told us that he is stalking me,” I said again, though I knew Ben had heard me perfectly well the first time.

“Okay,” he said, then added a few sentences creatively spiced with expletives that boiled down to, “That would have been a good thing to let your security know in advance, don’t you think?”

He was right, and I had thought about it. “Adam didn’t tell the pack,” I told him. “So I didn’t know if he wanted it to be kept secret or not, and he hasn’t been around to ask.”

Ben tightened his lips and I decided without proof that he was upset with Adam, too. I knew that the pack was watching the two of us with concern. But Adam wasn’t the issue right now.

“Wulfe hasn’t made any aggressive moves so far,” I told Ben—reminding myself at the same time. “In fact, he’s the one who dumped me in the river to break the smoke demon . . . smoke beast’s hold on me, which saved my life.” The last thing I wanted was Ben going out and picking a fight with Wulfe. Werewolves were tough, no doubt, but Ben was not in Wulfe’s weight class. So I said, lamely, “Maybe he doesn’t intend any harm.”

“Saint Elmo’s hairy ass he doesn’t intend any harm,” Ben exploded. “If Wulfe is following you around, it’s not to sell you magazine subscriptions. Fucking hell, Mercy.”

I shrugged, though I agreed wholeheartedly with his assessment. It just wasn’t useful to run around shrieking in fear. “So far, Ben, all that he’s done is save my life.”

Ben opened his mouth, then frowned at the window. “Where’s that light coming from?” he muttered, and not to me. He pushed his way into the bedroom and stalked up to the window. He stared out for a few seconds and then pulled down the blinds. He gave me an unreadable look and pulled the blinds down on the other windows, too.

He walked back to me and, in a very gentle voice, swore for a solid thirty seconds without repeating himself once.

When he wound down, he said, “Mercy, he can walk right into this house because some damn fool brought him in when we thought he was dying.”

“I think he might have been able to come in anyway,” I said. “Even if a vampire is unconscious, you have to invite them into your home or they can’t come. Ogden says he did not invite him in, not that he remembers, anyway.”

Ben said, “I don’t know that I’m comfortable with you sleeping up here alone. Where is Adam?”

“Darned if I know,” I told him. There must have been something in my voice because his face softened.

“What is up with him?” Ben asked. “He has been a right bastard these past few weeks.”

There was a sudden wary look in his eye at the tail end of his sentence—as if he had been thinking awhile about how to bring it up. But he hadn’t really expected to bring it up just now.

“I know as much as he does,” I told Ben firmly. The pack didn’t need to know that neither of us really understood what was going on. “I’m not going to discuss it with anyone else.”

“Private,” he said, with a nod. There was relief in his posture. It was enough for him that he believed that I knew what was wrong. “I get that. Do you want me to go drive the vampire off?”

There was not a sparrow’s chance in hell that Ben’s going out to drive Wulfe away would end up with Wulfe leaving. But I could find a galaxy’s worth of scenarios where that ended in disaster.

“No,” I said. “I think he’s just playing right now. Testing us, maybe. I don’t want to do anything that makes him think that we are taking him seriously.” And that gave me an idea.

I pulled a blanket out of the hall closet—one of those fuzzy ones sold at Costco. This one was wine red, suitable for a vampire. I’d never had it on my bed. I think the last one to use it had been Christy, so it wouldn’t smell like me or Adam. Vampires have keen senses and I wanted to be very careful about the message I was sending with this blanket.

“Here,” I said, shoving it at Ben. “Take this out to Wulfe. Tell him I . . . no. Tell him we don’t want him to get cold.”

Ben took the blanket, but as I spoke, he’d frozen in place. He frowned at me a moment, then shook his head and finally grinned. “He doesn’t know who he is messing with.”

That Ben thought I was a match for Wulfe was nice—but it might be dangerous for him to continue to hold that misapprehension.

“He scares the socks off me,” I told Ben seriously. “He should scare the socks off you, too. Don’t underestimate him. Don’t let him lure you into thinking he is harmless. Or that Adam or I or even the Mistress of the vampire seethe can keep him from doing anything he decides to do. Take him the blanket, and get back into the house. If we keep him amused, then he won’t have to kill anyone out of sheer boredom.”

His face grew sober. “I get that,” he said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

He left and I waited for him to return. I wanted to watch out the window, but I was afraid that if I gave him an audience, Wulfe might do something horrible. I’d seen him do horrible things before.

Instead I went down to the kitchen and pulled out a bowl. I needed to get to sleep, but I wasn’t going to manage that for a while. I mixed up chocolate chip cookies. Just a double batch.

I heard the murmur of Lucia’s voice in the suite she shared with Joel. There was no answering voice—Joel had not managed to shift to human for the past few days.

Aiden’s fire had rekindled itself, but it wasn’t up to normal levels yet and he hadn’t been able to quiet the volcano spirit enough to allow Joel to emerge. That was a little disheartening because we’d been hoping that Joel had been gaining more control. Apparently, Aiden had been getting better at shutting Joel’s fire down instead. At least Joel had been able to stay in his presa Canario form so we didn’t have to worry about him burning down the house inadvertently.

The sounds of me making food in the kitchen lured Medea out of whatever dark corner she’d been sleeping in. She hovered around my ankles because she knew that hopping on the counters was forbidden. I gave her a small dab of dough before I mixed in the chocolate chips and walnuts. She purred as she ate, and the sound soothed me. Cats are good company when you are sad or worried.

Walnuts were a matter of contention in the pack, but I liked them and I was making these for me. I needed chocolate because Adam wasn’t here. And because it was taking a very long time for Ben to walk out and hand over a blanket.

Adam’s SUV purred into our driveway about the same time that the back door opened and Ben walked in sans blanket.

“What took so long?” I asked, trying not to listen to Adam’s door shut. Now that Adam was actually here, I was nervous. What if he was unhappy when he saw me? I didn’t want the sight of me to make Adam unhappy.

“I will trade information for cookie dough,” Ben bargained—so it wasn’t anything bad that had kept him.

I got a clean spoon from the silverware drawer, dipped it into the dough, then held it out toward him. When he reached to take it, his long sleeve slipped down to reveal two small red marks on his wrist. And from those two marks, faint wisps of smoke emerged. Aiden had identified our foe from the smoke that had, apparently, emerged from my wounds after the rabbit had bitten me. At the time, I’d been too busy trying not to die to pay attention to much of anything else.

I now understood what Aiden had been talking about. My heart stopped. Ben had been bitten by the smoke beast.

I pretended not to see the marks, hoping that my sudden terror went unnoticed, blended as it was with the adrenaline already racing in my veins after the sight of a naked Wulfe on the roof of my old Rabbit.

I didn’t know enough to save Ben. Not nearly enough. I knew the smoke beast took over its victims’ bodies and piloted them. I knew that it used those victims to kill others to gain power—and that it then killed its puppet and could shape itself into a copy of that person. I had no idea what it wanted or why. I had no idea how to save someone bitten by the beast—and if I couldn’t figure it out, Ben was lost. And I didn’t know that I could bear a world without our foul-mouthed wolf.

First problems first, I decided. First problem was to survive the next few minutes. Ben was a werewolf. That meant he was stronger than I was—and he outweighed me. Unlike George, Ben was significantly slower than I was. Maybe I could get him to chase me into the river.

I heard Adam’s footsteps on the porch, but Ben, licking the spoon clean, seemed oblivious. I gave a hard, panicked tug on my mating bond and the sound of Adam’s approach stopped. I had to hope that he had understood that there was something wrong.

“Want some with chocolate chips?” I asked.

He handed the spoon back to me. I dumped in a bag of chips and stirred with my bigger spoon before dipping his teaspoon in the mix—ignoring sanitary issues in favor of keeping him distracted.

Adam hadn’t just come in through the door, so I had a reasonable hope that I’d warned him enough. But what would allow him to connect my warning to Ben?

Ben closed his eyes, absorbing the buttery-sweetness-and-bitter-chocolate combination. Was there a difference in his expression? Or was it just that I knew that someone else might be home inside Ben’s head that made me think so?

Could I be mistaken? Was this Ben?

“So what’s the information you owe me?” I asked when his eyes opened again.

He took a step closer to me and I had to fight my instincts that would have sent me scuttling to the far side of the kitchen.

“What do you want to know?” he asked, his voice flirty. The British accent was the same, but the rhythm of speech was wrong. And there were no swear words for me to edit out.

“Was Wulfe actually naked?” I asked.

“Wolves are usually naked,” he said as if he were joking.

“For sure,” I agreed easily.

Upstairs a soft shshing of a window sliding up. I knew it was Jesse’s window, but if someone wasn’t familiar with the sounds of the house, maybe it would just blend into the various creaks and groans that were the normal sounds of any house. I didn’t know if Ben would know what that sound meant. I didn’t know how much of Ben’s memories the beast who had bitten him would have.

Jesse’s window was accessible from the porch roof—which was a security concern, but it was also an escape path if something bad was happening in the house. Adam had decided that risk and benefit balanced out. I listened, but no further noise emerged from upstairs. Either Adam had managed not to wake Jesse up, or she had realized that there was something going on.

Ben held out the spoon to me again. I scooped up more dough and held it out. But this time he grabbed my wrist.

“I have a secret,” he said.

He wasn’t hurting me. I let my wrist lie limp in his grip.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I let you see the marks,” he told me. “I even made sure to mark this body when I was wearing the rabbit so that you would know what you were looking at.”

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

Was there a squeak on the stairs? I took a deep breath and smelled the smoke beast’s magic. It filled my lungs and I couldn’t smell anything else over it.

“I wanted to see what you would do,” he said. “Why can’t I take you? I can kill you—I almost did the other night. But I am supposed to be able to take any but the most powerful of the lords of the fae. You are not fae at all. What are you?”

“Chaos,” I told him.

His eyebrows furrowed and his eyes narrowed with the beginnings of anger. He would have said something more. But quick footsteps came up from the basement and Aiden bounded into the kitchen.

The beast’s magic surged. Visions of that semi tractor melded with the concrete of the Pasco tunnel’s safety rail danced in my head. I didn’t know that he could do that to a living being—life affects magic. We might be just carbon compounds, but there was something about the state of living that was magical.

But if the beast was amassing magic at the sight of Aiden, I wasn’t willing to wait to see what it could do. While he was distracted by Aiden, I twisted my wrist, grabbed his wrist with mine, and swiveled my hips to pull him off balance. At the same time, I kicked his knee as hard as I could. He grunted as his knee popped audibly and he released me involuntarily, and I let go and jumped back.

There were a number of counters to that move—Ben knew them, but the creature controlling his body made no effort to use any defense. My attack had been quick and instinctive, and it had taken the beast by surprise. Impossible to say how much of Ben’s knowledge the beast had access to. Earlier he hadn’t known the difference between Wulfe and a wolf, but with the evidence I had I couldn’t assume that he couldn’t fight as well as Ben.

I also didn’t know if he would feel pain occupying Ben’s body, but it didn’t matter much at that moment. The damage to Ben’s knee was a physical thing that slowed his body down.

I grabbed for a weapon and came up with my marble rolling pin, but by the time I turned to face Ben again, Adam was there. I hadn’t heard him. I missed the first move, just heard the noise as Ben’s shoulder broke from a joint lock. As Ben fell, pushed by Adam’s hold, Adam brought his knee over and landed on the small of Ben’s back. I heard those bones crack, too.

“It won’t hold him long,” said Adam, but I was already running. I jumped over them both and ran down the stairs to the cage that would be our safe room once construction wrapped it in more civilized trappings. But the cage itself was finished and the silver cuffs and chains were hanging from a hook on a post just outside it.

I dropped the rolling pin—cracking it on the exposed concrete floor. I would feel bad about that later, because it had belonged to my mother’s mother. But at the moment, I was too busy grabbing the cuffs and chains. Beast or not, the creature was wearing Ben’s body and these bindings would hold a werewolf.

I ran back up the stairs to find the tableau unchanged. Ben writhed and jerked under Adam, seemingly unbothered by the pain of the broken bones—though his lower extremities were unmoving. Adam kept him down. About ten feet from them, fitful fire wreathing his hands, Aiden watched them with wary eyes.

I bound Ben’s legs together, then closed one of the cuffs on the wrist connected to his broken shoulder. Adam took over from there. Without consideration of the pain of Ben’s broken bones, he pulled Ben’s arms behind his back and cuffed his wrists tightly together. Then Adam connected the leg manacles until Ben was effectively hog-tied with steel and silver, his skin blackening where the metal touched him.

As soon as he was held immobile, Ben’s body went limp.

“God, oh God,” he whispered. “Don’t let me go. He’s still in my head. He wants her dead. She scares him and he wants me to kill her. No more fucking around asking questions, just kill her. Find out why later.”

Ben took a deep shuddering breath. “Don’t let me go.”

“Okay,” Adam said.

“Don’t let Mercy anywhere near me,” he said. “Oh God. He’s in my head and I can’t. I can’t . . . I can’t.” He went limp again.

“Is he breathing?” I asked, panicked. “This is my fault, Adam. I sent him out there.”

“He’s breathing,” Adam said. “Pulse is strong. Takes more than a few broken bones and an uncanny thing’s possession to kill a werewolf.” He looked at me. “He was on guard duty—in harm’s way. That was his job tonight.”

I wrapped my arms around myself. “I sent him out to talk to Wulfe,” I told Adam. “I forgot about the smoke beast.”

“It didn’t forget about us,” said Adam.

Running water didn’t help Ben.

Warren and Kyle showed up about ten minutes before Darryl because they’d been working at Kyle’s office. Ben’s bones had mended themselves by that time and he was half sitting, half lying on the fainting couch in the living room. Adam had put him there after deciding he didn’t want to try to get him down the stairs and into the cage by himself for fear of having to hurt Ben further. Werewolves healed fast, but even Adam, drawing on the power of the pack, would have had a hard time healing the kind of damage Ben had suffered in the half hour or so that had elapsed.

I couldn’t smell the beast’s magic anymore, but I didn’t make the mistake of thinking it was gone. Ben’s periodic bouts of madness would have disabused me of that if I’d trusted my nose too much. I already knew that sometimes I couldn’t detect this magic.

“Well,” Warren told Ben, in a squeaky voice that was an obvious attempt to imitate someone, “here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten you into.”

“I suppose by that I’m to assume I’m Laurel?” asked Ben, trying to sound like himself, but his voice was tight and there was a rough growl on the edges.

“You aren’t Hardy,” said Adam.

I hadn’t made the connection. Laurel and Hardy were well before my time, before Ben’s time, too, as he was actually about my age. Adam, on the other hand, had a whole four decades more of cultural references than I did. It had never mattered to me before this moment.

I was discouraged to discover that I could be terrified for Ben—and still worried about the distance between Adam and me.

Warren glanced at me and then at Adam—so apparently I didn’t hide what I was feeling well enough.

Adam said, “We are just waiting on Darryl.”

Warren shook his head. “He’s not that heavy. You and I can carry him down to the river.”

“It’s not the carrying me that’s the problem,” said Ben, his voice shaky. “Anytime anyone comes within spitting distance I turn into that girl from The Exorcist.”

“Your head doesn’t spin around,” I said, trying not to sound as scared as I was.

“Don’t give it any helpful fucking ideas,” Ben scolded me.

He’d bounced around between calling the creature who controlled him by the masculine pronoun and by “it.” I was withholding judgment.

Darryl arrived eventually. “Sorry. Flat tire.”

“No worries,” said Ben. “Just sitting here possessed by an evil fae.”

The minute they touched him, Ben started to struggle. Undeterred, the three werewolves dragged Ben kicking and screaming out to the river.

I followed them, feeling sick. Kyle walked next to me, his hand on my shoulder. I almost didn’t flinch when another hand landed on my other shoulder and Wulfe, wrapped toga-style in the fuzzy red blanket, took up the space on my right.

“Nasty business,” said Wulfe conversationally.

“Yes,” I agreed. There was no way to signal to Kyle to back away—and I knew him well enough to know that he wouldn’t, even if I could ask him. I would just have to keep Wulfe’s attention on me and off the vulnerable human on my other side. Kyle, helpfully, kept silent.

Warren caught sight of Wulfe and got Ben’s bound feet in his stomach for his troubles. He was forced to pay attention to what he was doing.

“Interesting to see if the river works,” Wulfe continued.

“You don’t think it will?” I asked.

He pursed his lips, looking, in his toga, like an escapee from a frat party gone wrong. I knew he was older than Stefan, who had been made a vampire early in the Renaissance era, but he would never grow up to look like an adult. His feet were bare, but the rocks and tackweed didn’t seem to bother him.

“Should work,” he said, at last. “I don’t know why it would work for you but not for your little red riding wolf.” Ben’s wolf was red. I didn’t like that Wulfe knew that.

Wulfe tilted his head to watch the struggling wolves just ahead of us.

“But I have an odd feeling that it won’t,” he said in casual tones. “Shame. It was nice of him to bring me a blanket, don’t you think? Though that might have been your idea—I forget what he said.”

His hand tightened on my neck. When had he moved his hand to my neck?

I must have made some sound because Adam glanced over at me and asked if I needed help with a single look. I shook my head briefly. He needed to pay attention to Ben. I didn’t know if Ben could spread his contagion with a bite, but I’d feel better if no one had to worry about it.

Besides, I was fairly certain that Wulfe wasn’t ready to quit playing at whatever game he’d decided upon yet, so I should be safe enough. I wished Stefan would call me back. It wasn’t like him to not return my calls.

“I’m not supposed to be here, you know,” said Wulfe.

“Oh?” I asked.

“Marsilia has called all the vampires to the seethe because . . . oh. That’s why.”

I tried to make his words make sense, then realized he’d been talking to himself for the last bit. “That’s why what?”

“That’s why I don’t think running water will help your wolf. It didn’t help Stefan.”

I stopped. “Stefan?”

“We tried to dump him in the river,” Wulfe said obligingly. “But all that accomplished was getting a whole bunch of us wet. Good thing we don’t need to breathe or several members of the seethe would have drowned. He took one out anyway. But I didn’t like her, so I’m not sorry.”

I thought of all those phone calls I’d made.

I struggled to imagine Stefan caught up by the smoke beast and failed. Stefan was . . . reserved, controlled. I had a sudden memory of him in a rage, his face contorted. But even then Stefan had never moved even when the demon killed a hotel maid in front of him, and used demonic powers to inspire visceral bloodlust in my friend. There was no dignity in Ben’s desperate struggles—I didn’t want to imagine Stefan in the same condition.

“What else have you tried?” I asked, starting toward the river again. There was nothing I could do for Stefan right this moment.

Wulfe shrugged. “The usual. After the river, salt, silver, torture, fire. Nothing seems to work.”

“Do you know how to kill it? Or if killing it will save Ben and Stefan?” I asked, fighting not to visualize someone torturing Stefan. Wulfe was old—Middle Ages old. And he was a sorcerer, a witch, and a vampire. He should know something about this beast.

“I meant to ask you what you knew about it,” he responded, as if we were walking to tea instead of watching Adam, Warren, and Darryl struggle to hold on to the bound form of Ben long enough to get to the water’s edge.

I told him everything I knew. It didn’t take long.

“Smoke beast,” said Wulfe as Ben arced out over the water and entered with a splash. “Never heard of it. Smoking bites don’t ring any bells, either—and I know a lot about things that bite.” He snapped his teeth together.

Kyle let me go and I broke free of Wulfe so I could get a better look at Adam, Warren, and Darryl trying to drag Ben out of the water. He seemed to be trying to slip out of their fingers, and werewolves don’t float—they sink. Too much muscle, not enough fat. Or maybe it was something about the way their magic worked.

All four of them were wet by the time they dragged Ben back to shore. He choked up water in great heaving coughs that strained his bound limbs. The river had almost succeeded in drowning him.

When Adam reached for the cuffs, Ben shook his head. “No!” And after he spoke that single word, he coughed up another burst of river, only to collapse in a limp heap.

“He’s in me,” he said. Then tears leaked out as if he’d absorbed some of the river into his eyes as well as his lungs. “He’s still here. Don’t let me free.”

“Shh,” said Adam. He looked at me.

“Did you hear Wulfe?” I asked.

He nodded, then kissed the top of Ben’s head—avoiding the snap of Ben’s teeth without apparent effort. “We have a problem. Let’s get him back to the cage where I can at least get him out of the cuffs. I’ll call Marsilia and check on Stefan.”

That would work better, I acknowledged silently. She liked Adam and she really didn’t like me. Especially she wouldn’t like me asking about Stefan. She tended to view him as her property—and viewed me as the reason he’d broken free of the seethe. He was the only vampire in the Tri-Cities who did not belong to her. We could work together when we had to, but there was no reason to push it now.

And all of that gave me something to think about other than our poor Ben and Stefan caught up in the same hell. And I had nothing I could do to help.

“Where did the scary vampire go?” asked Kyle in a low voice.

“Wherever scary vampires go,” answered Warren. His voice acquired a hard edge. “Don’t worry. He’ll be back.”

We settled Ben in the cage with a mattress on the floor and the chains and cuffs off.

Releasing him from the cuffs had almost resulted in disaster. If Kyle hadn’t been carrying a stun gun and been unafraid to use it, Ben would have broken free.

Adam called Marsilia and she confirmed what Wulfe had told us. The beast had indeed gotten Stefan, though when asked, she said the bite marks on his shoulder were more akin to a big snake—a very big snake—than to a rabbit. She sent photos. Two red marks, the size of a dime, marred the white flesh of his left shoulder. According to the measuring tape, the marks were four and three quarters of an inch apart.

“That’s the size of a horse’s mouth,” Warren said. “More or less.”

“Does he know what bit him?” Adam asked.

“He has not been able to share coherent information with us,” said Marsilia. “We can keep him . . . indefinitely, I suppose. But I would not keep anyone I cared about in this state for long.”

“No,” agreed Adam, watching Ben, who stared back at him with eyes that were not Ben’s. “But we are working on it.”

“Except for Wulfe—with whom it is not practical—I have brought all of my people and their flocks to our seethe and locked us in,” Marsilia said. “I understand that you think that you need to do something about this, but I advise you to do the same. Think about what the news organizations will do when one of your wolves is bitten and goes on a killing spree.”

“Is that what Stefan did?” I asked. Then I had a panicked thought: “What about his people?”

Vampire hearing was good, too. She said, “All of his sheep are safe.”

I did not add “those who survived,” but I wanted to. Marsilia had killed some of Stefan’s people (he had never, in my hearing, referred to them as sheep or his flock) in order to perpetrate some desperate scheme or other. He had never forgiven her.

She blamed me. Not for her having to kill his people, but for his lack of forgiveness. It didn’t make sense, but emotions don’t have to make sense.

“How did you discover what had happened?” Adam asked.

“Wulfe brought him in,” she said. “It was not pretty—and there was no doubt that something or someone else was controlling him. He did not try to blend in. At all.”

“Thank you for the information,” Adam said. “If we find out anything useful, I’ll make sure you get word.”

“I would appreciate that,” Marsilia told him.

Warren and Kyle left to go home and sleep. Darryl settled in as our guard, since Ben had been retired from the field. Adam and Darryl were still discussing how to patrol safely when I went up to bed. I was pretty sure that Adam wouldn’t come up to bed until I was safely asleep, so I left them talking and went upstairs.

I paused in front of Jesse’s door, then gave in to my need to see someone safe tonight and cracked the door. She was curled up on the bed with a stuffed elephant that I knew Gabriel had gotten her. I shut the door again and left her to her dreams.

I was just pulling the bedding up to my chin when my phone rang. Caller ID said the number was unavailable. I hesitated—but it was the wrong time of night for a robocall.

“Mercedes,” said Beauclaire, son of Lugh and Gray Lord of the fae. “Uncle Mike asked me to call you tonight. A few days ago, he informed me that Underhill created a door to her realm in your backyard and in the process, she released a predator, one that Aiden told you was called the smoke beast.”

“Yes,” I told him.

“I know of that one,” Beauclaire told me, and I felt a shiver of relief.

Beauclaire knew things about the creature who held Ben and Stefan. He would know what to do about it so we could save Ben, and save Stefan.

“You know that Marsilia has locked down her seethe because Stefan was taken.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you hear about the accident on Highway 240? The terrible tragic accident where a tanker sideswiped two other cars? All three drivers and their passengers died. Eight people in all.”

That accident had happened the same night that Kyle had shot one of the werewolves. It had made the front page and relegated Kyle and Warren’s encounter to the Public Records section of the newspaper.

“Yes,” I said, sick to my stomach because Marsilia was fond of using car wrecks or house fires to account for “problem bodies” that needed to be explained. She had told me that Stefan’s people were safe, but she had not answered my first question about a killing spree—and I hadn’t noticed until just now.

“A few hours ago, one of the fae, not a Gray Lord, but one who had power and skill, walked into Uncle Mike’s with a sword and used it and her magic to kill as many as she could. Fourteen fae died and also three humans and two goblins. Uncle Mike was on other business so he was not present. Had Larry the goblin king and the snow elf not been there, more people would have died.”

There was no such thing, as far as I knew, as a snow elf. It was just what our resident frost giant liked to be called. I thought about how powerful a fae had to be if it took both the goblin king and a frost giant to subdue.

“Some of those who died were very old and very powerful beings,” Beauclaire told me. “Uncle Mike says that your previous encounters with the smoke beast seemed to indicate that it was having difficulty acquiring power. I thought you should be warned that, as of tonight, that is no longer the case.”

“I see,” I said. I no longer was hopeful that Beauclaire was going to provide me with an easy way to save my friends.

“Because of tonight’s incident—and because of the problems the vampires have experienced—I have called all the fae in the area back to the reservation, including Siebold Adelbertsmiter and his son.” There was a bite to Zee’s full name. Zee had killed Beauclaire’s father a zillion years ago—but the fae have long memories.

“Is there anything that you can tell me that would help us defeat it?” I asked.

“Yes.” A pause, as if Beauclaire was being careful with his words. More careful than usual. “I cannot tell you who he is.”

And that was important or it wouldn’t have been the first thing he said in answer to my question.

“Cannot,” I said. “As opposed to will not. Like a geas?”

“To you, perhaps that is the best way to explain it. It is a quirk of his nature. I can tell you a few, very few things about him.”

“Please,” I said, tightening my grip on the phone.

“In addition to ‘smoke beast,’ some call him ‘smoke weaver’ or ‘smoke dragon,’ all three referring to his nature—none of them are his name or bear any resemblance to his name.”

“Because you cannot speak his name,” I said, to tell him that I caught the import of what he was telling me.

“That is so,” he said. “Long ago he was captured by Underhill, a result of a bargain he made with her. He needed to bargain, as a part of the nature of the creature he was. A human woman gained the upper hand that somehow triggered the terms of his bargain with Underhill. Underhill swallowed him and we . . . I had thought him safely caught up in her nets for all these years.”

“Needed,” I said. “As in no longer needs.”

He didn’t answer me right away. “Any answer I make to you may be misleading,” he said.

“We think Underhill let him out on purpose,” I told him.

“Do you?” he asked, but more as if he found the idea interesting. “To what purpose, I wonder? And why at the door in your backyard instead of in one of those in the reservation where his prey would be so much more interesting, where he could cause so much more death?”

“And become so much more powerful?” I half asked, half stated. Then I had a worrying realization. “As he did tonight at Uncle Mike’s?”

“I am speculating now,” Beauclaire said in apology—or as close to an apology as a Gray Lord was comfortable giving. It was a matter of tone rather than words. “I do not know why Underhill does what she does. But it is interesting that the first thing that happened when she put a door in your yard was that the smoke beast escaped.”

“Do you know what he wants? What his goal is?” I asked. “He seems to be sticking around here.”

“I don’t know what he wants,” said Beauclaire, and again there was an apology in his tone. “I myself never met him personally. But he can take any of the fae—”

“He said he couldn’t,” I interrupted him. “To me. He’s taken one of our wolves. He said he could take all but the most powerful of the fae lords.”

“Interesting,” said Beauclaire. “But we cannot risk it. The one he took tonight was powerful. Our gates are closed indefinitely.”

“How do I save them?” I asked. “My friends who he has taken?”

“I don’t know,” he said. And he was fae, so it had to be true. “But I will ask if any do. Should I gain that knowledge, I will see that you are told.”

“How many can he take and hold at a time?” I asked.

“I don’t know that, either. Likely that depends upon the power he amasses.”

In other words, more people now than he could have controlled before tonight.

“How do I kill him?” I asked.

“I don’t know that, either,” he answered. “No one has managed to do so yet. I do know that he can only be harmed in his own form, whatever shape he wears, not in the bodies of those he takes. That his own form shifts to smoke as he wills, so he cannot be easily imprisoned. Underhill managed—you might speak to her.” He paused. “There is a story about him. And it has to do with bargains.” He stopped again. “My incomplete knowledge of the smoke weaver—and creatures of his ilk—makes me leery of telling you more than this—”

His voice changed, deepened, and developed an odd resonance. It sounded more feminine—and that voice was familiar. “The key to his undoing is in his basic nature. Do not pay attention to smoke and appearances.”

“Baba Yaga?” I asked.

Beauclaire sighed. “She will have her games,” he said. “But her advice is good.”

He disconnected. I set my phone on the bedside table—and then realized that Adam was standing in the doorway. I didn’t know how long he’d been there. There was something . . . alien in his eyes that reminded me of the night we’d had the fight over Jesse’s school.

“How much of that did you hear?” I asked cautiously.

“I came up when the phone rang,” he said. “I wonder why Beauclaire called you instead of me.” There was an edge of anger in his voice. Probably, I decided, that was because Ben was locked up in a cage, possessed by an escapee from Underhill, and we couldn’t do anything about it.

“I don’t know,” I said. And that was true. He could have called Adam. I wondered if Beauclaire’s calling me instead was a message, too. The fae could be very subtle creatures.

Adam’s jaw tightened at my reply, but he didn’t say anything. He just shut the door and went back downstairs. I waited for him for a while, but it was nearing one in the morning and I was going to have to get up early to post a Closed until Further Notice sign on my business and call everyone who had an appointment at the shop.

Without Tad or Zee, the shop made me a target. Not just for invading werewolves or escaped prisoners of Underhill, but also any crackpot, supernatural or not, who wanted to launch an attack on our pack. Most people, even most preternatural people, thought I was a mundane human. That I could turn into a coyote was pretty cool—but it didn’t make me a superhero.

I set my alarm, pulled the covers over my head, and closed my eyes, but I didn’t really go to sleep until I felt the mattress sink under Adam’s weight. For whatever reason, he hadn’t gone to the spare room to sleep tonight, and I was grateful.

I woke up facedown on my pillow with the urgent feeling that I was under threat. I could feel eyes on me, feel the hunt engaged with me as its target. I lay very still and breathed shallowly through my mouth.

Was it Wulfe? I couldn’t smell anyone but Adam and me in the room.

Adam moved on the bed and the feeling gradually faded. Probably it was the leftover of a very bad dream. I rolled until I could touch Adam—and my fingers slid through his fur. I was pretty sure that he’d been in his human form when he’d come to bed, but I’d been mostly asleep so I could have been wrong.

I buried my face in the fur at his neck, and the scent and feel of him brushed away the last of that paranoid feeling that had awoken me. I was very tired, so it didn’t take long to start drifting back to sleep.

“Good night,” I murmured.

Sleep, the wolf told me through our bond, the threat is over for tonight.