Smoke Bitten

9

Because Makaya was in the car with us on the way home, and I didn’t want to scare her, I didn’t talk to Adam about Fiona or how Lincoln had been bitten. He knew what I knew, because I’d talked to him about it on the phone when I’d called him from Kelly’s house. There were still some important implications that we should discuss—but it would have to wait until we got home.

So for the ride home, I stayed quiet, nursing my broken nose, as Auriele organized a pack bunk-up on her phone. Bunk-up was one step shy of “everyone to the Batcave”—our house being the Batcave. Bunk-up meant that the wolves stayed in groups of two to four and avoided going anywhere alone.

I wasn’t sure how a bunk-up was going to keep anyone safe from the smoke weaver—though it probably would be effective against Fiona’s band, at least in the short run. But I didn’t say anything. What else could we do?

We could pull the human families of the pack into our home; we’d done that when the witches had become a problem. But we had too many werewolves to take them all into our home for long—and if we did, there was no way to lock the doors to keep them in and the smoke weaver out. Packed in like that for more than a few hours, we’d start having fights. Our wolves needed freedom to move. We literally could not do what the fae and the vampires had done to protect themselves. We also could not do it figuratively. We were the protectors of the Tri-Cities. It was our job to face the scary bad things—if we retreated, we left the field to the villains.

We arrived home and the mass chaos of too many people in too small a space was whipped into shape by the combined efforts of Auriele, Hannah, and Jesse. I tried to get Adam’s attention a couple of times—but he kept retreating with different people to confer in his office, where Ben couldn’t hear them. But also where there wasn’t enough room for me, not even on his desk.

“You look like you hurt,” Adam told me. “I know you have some things we need to discuss. I’ll come up as soon as I can. Take a bag of frozen peas and lie down. I’ll find you as soon as I have the security schedules lined out.”

We had ice packs, but I liked frozen peas better. They were gentler on swollen tissue. Frozen peas on my poor nose was a good idea, and finding a quiet place sounded amazing. I grabbed a bag from the freezer and went to our bedroom and shut the door.

Our bedroom was more or less soundproofed—not like Adam’s office, where the soundproofing was a serious thing. If the bedroom door was shut and the house was quiet, the werewolves could hear noise from the bedroom but probably not actual conversation. With the mass chaos in the house, being overheard was not a consideration.

I pulled out my phone and dialed a number by memory.

“Mercy.”

Just hearing the Marrok’s voice took a chunk of stress out of my day. Not that he couldn’t return the stress and add stomach-acid-producing interest, but just now he was the person I needed to talk to the most.

“We are in trouble,” I told him. Then considered who I was talking to and said, “Not anything we can’t handle.”

“I feel as though you should amend that,” Bran said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have called me.”

I thought of the vampires and the fae locking themselves away. And Ben down in the basement pretending there was nothing wrong.

Before anyone could stop them, Kelly’s kids had boiled down to the basement, where the electronic toys waited. And they had found Ben in the cage. Ben had dutifully admired Makaya’s bright pink casts, adorned with hot-glued glitter and plastic gemstones thanks to Jesse. And he’d begged us all with his eyes to get the kids upstairs before he lost it again.

We hadn’t quite made it, but Jesse told Makaya that Ben was playing.

Makaya had put her head down on Darryl’s shoulder (for all that he was scary as anything, kids loved Darryl) and said sadly, “Maybe I would have laughed like he wanted but that man scared me today. I don’t want to be scared again for a while.”

Yes, so maybe we were having trouble handling it.

“Okay. Let’s say that I have some concerns,” I hedged. “I think you might help with a couple of them.”

“You have some wolves invading your territory,” he said.

That photo montage and information organization had been mostly Charles. I would have known that even if I hadn’t heard Adam talking to him. Charles handed out information that was useful, organized, and succinct. But if Charles knew about our invaders, so would Bran.

Bran was more Socratic when delivering aid. “Adam,” he might have said, “where do you think you should go looking for information? If I were you I might look at . . . Texas.”

Which was why Adam had gone to Charles for help and not Bran. Well, that and Bran had formally washed his hands of our pack as a necessary step in the experiment of a werewolf pack being the neutral party while the humans and the fae worked out how they were going to live in the same world together. Our pack had to be independent so that if matters didn’t go well, we wouldn’t drag every werewolf in North and South America into a war with the fae or the humans—or both.

I had gone to Bran because I wasn’t looking for loads of information—I needed advice. Advice was Bran’s best thing.

“One of the invading wolves is Fiona,” I told him. I wasn’t actually sure of her last name, but I didn’t need it.

Bran inhaled, then said, “She’s dead.”

“Nope,” I said. “I just saw her tiny as life about three . . . no, five hours ago. Time flies when you are in the emergency room.” And I shouldn’t have said that last.

“Are you all right?” he demanded.

“Yes.”

“Mercy.”

“Jeez,” I complained, feeling about four. “I broke my nose running my car into a possessed wolf who was hurting one of the pack’s children. Because I broke my nose, she only has a broken wrist and ankle, and the wolf is dead. I’m all right with the results of today.”

“Semantics,” he growled.

“Truth,” I told him. “What can you tell me about Fiona?”

“Stay away from her,” he said.

I hoped he could hear my eyes rolling. “That’s what you told me when I was fourteen. I was hoping for something more useful now that I’m an adult and she’s trying to take over my pack.”

“Don’t roll your eyes at me,” he snapped. “And you were fifteen.”

I looked at the phone. “You remember how old I was?” I asked incredulously.

“It was the day Charles glitter-bombed my office,” Bran said darkly. “Of course I remember.”

“Charles?” There was no way. “Charles glitter-bombed your office.” Cold, scary, efficient, deadly—those were words that suited Charles. That the term “glitter bomb” and Charles’s name were in the same sentence was dumbfounding except maybe in something like “Charles discovered the glitter-bomber’s secret identity and hanged her by her toenails to teach the other people who stole her idea never to do that ever again.”

“Why did he glitter-bomb your office?” I asked.

“It was something I said,” Bran told me. “And not your business. What do you know about Fiona?”

“You told me to stay away from her,” I said, “which left me insatiably curious.”

“Of course it did,” Bran returned dryly. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Like a carrot in front of a horse,” I agreed. “But no one knew very much. She was your assassin that you sent out to do work that Charles wouldn’t do.”

“Yes,” agreed Bran.

“That she is as deadly as Charles.”

“Differently deadly,” he said. “Charles or Adam could take her in a fight. But she won’t engage them unless she has to. She will use people . . . Charles told me that there were six wolves invading your territory. Since he didn’t mention Fiona—and he would have—are there any others you know of?”

“No. The only ones I have personally seen are James and Nonnie Palsic,” I told him. “Oh. And Lincoln Stuart, but he doesn’t count because he is dead.”

“He is the one you killed?”

“He’s the one I hit with my car. I would have shot him, but there were too many onlookers. James Palsic killed him.” I could see that I had the choice of telling Bran what happened today one sentence at a time, or I could tell him the whole story. Actually, I was probably better off throwing everything into the mix in order to save time.

“I think,” I told him, “that I really need to start with the jackrabbit.”

“If that is what you think,” he said. “Then by all means, start with the jackrabbit.”

He was utterly silent while I was talking—so I really didn’t know how he persuaded me to tell him about Wulfe when I hadn’t intended to. Or Adam’s growing problem with whatever it was that was making him shift without meaning to and that was causing him to close down our mating bond. Or that was what Adam had implied as the reason for closing down our mating bond—sometimes just talking about something out loud pointed out information I’d missed.

I did manage to keep to myself that cold feeling I’d awoken to last night, when only Adam and I had been in the room. I know what it feels like to be the subject of a hunt. To be prey. It could have been my imagination, despite the I’m-sorry breakfast sandwich.

When I finally finished up with Ben scaring Makaya in the basement, I was a little hoarse. I waited for Bran’s response. It took long enough that I checked my phone to make sure we were still connected. I’d feel pretty stupid if I’d spent the last hour talking to myself.

“Bran?” I asked. “Are you still there?”

“Tell Adam to kill Fiona, whenever and wherever he gets a chance,” he answered briskly. “She is selling her services to the highest bidder. She doesn’t share her money with a team, so the others are probably useful tools. She does not make a good ally for anyone or anything she is not terrified of. If she has made, as you are concerned about, an alliance with the smoke weaver—proceed with caution.”

“You said that she was supposed to be dead,” I said as I wondered who Fiona was working for—and didn’t like the obvious answer much. There were other people who wanted us dead besides the witches. She had been sincere when she told me that Adam and I could take three of our people and leave—so maybe she was here to create a base for herself, a pack independent from the Marrok and too important to his schemes for him to destroy.

“I was assured of her demise five or six years ago,” he agreed. He could remember that I had not glitter-bombed his office when I was fifteen, but he didn’t remember how long ago Fiona had died?

“Did you have her killed?” I asked, remembering the bitterness in Fiona’s voice.

“I would have,” he told me. “But no. She was working for a witch and the deal went bad.”

“Deals with witches frequently go bad,” I muttered.

“Exactly so,” he said gently. “You should tell Adam that the Palsics and Chen Li Qiang I would prefer saved if possible. Kent? Other than which pack he is affiliated or not affiliated with, I haven’t heard anything about Kent since the sixties, which I find concerning. Either he is hiding from me, or he has settled down into a boring life with a small blip when he joined the rebels in Galveston.”

“We don’t work for you anymore,” I said dryly. “You can’t just dictate to us.”

“Why am I helping you, then?” he asked equally dryly.

He had a point. And we’d try to do what he asked as far as the Palsics and Chen were concerned. I’d seen Carlos’s face when he talked about Chen. And I’d found myself liking James Palsic. I didn’t know about Nonnie—she hadn’t done or said anything remarkable, but it might be nice to have another woman in the pack. But I’d had to give Bran a hard time about his assumption that we’d obey his orders, if only for form’s sake.

“Okay,” I conceded. “I will inform Adam that you suggest that we should kill Fiona—and her mate?”

“Mate?” Bran asked.

“Harolford,” I told him.

“I’d forgotten about Harolford,” he said. “But by all means kill Harolford, too. Just remember that Fiona is the more dangerous of the two.”

“Okay,” I agreed. “We’ll do our best to absorb the Palsics and Chen into the pack and make up our own minds about Kent.”

“Good girl,” he said, and I could hear the squeak of his chair and knew he was leaning back in it. That was how you always knew he was happy with you.

And if I was pleased about making him happy, I was sure as shooting not going to let him know that.

“So have I solved one of your problems?” he asked.

“Nope,” I told him promptly. “But you’ve told me how you see it—and you have more information than we do. And I know that you are rooting for this experiment—our pack, the fae, and the vampires working together for the good of all—to work, so you are on our side in this. Which means we will take your advice seriously. And that, oh Marrok, makes it easier for us to solve our own problem.”

“Good,” he said, sounding pleased again. Making me think for myself, was he? As long as I thought what he wanted me to think, he liked it when I thought for myself.

“Now, about your problem with Wulfe.” His voice grew darker and arctic.

Just from that tone, I realized that someone had told Bran that Wulfe had been the reason that Bonarata, the king of the vampires (or at least the de facto ruler of the vampires), had captured me and taken me to Europe. Bonarata had asked Wulfe who the most dangerous person in the Tri-Cities was. Wulfe, who has an abysmal sense of humor as well as an almost fae-like ability to lie with the truth, told Bonarata that it was me. I am still not quite sure of the logic that Wulfe used.

“I think you can leave Wulfe to Adam and me,” I said hastily. “He’s just playing, I think. He saved my life. I don’t mean that he’s one of the good guys, but . . .” I drew in a breath and centered myself.

I didn’t want Bran to come destroy Wulfe, because it would be wrong. He had done nothing, up to this point, that deserved aiming Bran at him. Besides, I tried really hard not to aim Bran at anyone. I had a policy of not using nuclear devices to take out pesky flies because that tended to yield mixed results. I tamped down the small voice that wondered if even Bran could take on Wulfe. I needed Bran to be immortal and unstoppable.

Right this moment, I had to convince Bran not to kill Wulfe.

“I hurt him—badly, I think,” I told Bran. “He was trying to help us for whatever twisted reason guides him—maybe because Marsilia asked him, maybe because he was bored. But he was trying to help us and got caught in the backlash of me trying to lay the spirits of zombies to rest. It broke something inside him.”

Bran muttered something that might have been, “I can break something inside him, too.”

“Bonarata broke him for real a long time ago,” I told Bran. “Wulfe is a wizard and a vampire and a witch.” That last might be a secret. I certainly hadn’t known it before the Night of the Zombies, as Ben liked to call it. But I needed Bran to understand about Wulfe so he didn’t just have him eliminated the way he’d just assigned us to eliminate Fiona. “He has spilled blood for Bonarata and for Marsilia for centuries. Tortured and killed for centuries.”

Into my dramatic pause, Bran said, with palpable irony, “Yes, Mercy, I know.”

“And his witchcraft is white.”

This time the pause was his.

“Exactly,” I said. “He is a lost soul wandering in the darkness . . .”

“Drivel,” said Bran, who had written that particular line for a rather beautiful song I’d heard him sing once. I think the song was a few centuries old—but he had written it.

“Mawkish sentimentality doesn’t make it untrue,” I told him. And that was a Bran quote as well. One he used both ways—true or untrue—depending upon the circumstances.

“He is dangerous,” I told Bran, “and unpredictable and all of that. But maybe he can be turned into an ally. Adam has made Marsilia an ally.”

“Adam thought Elizaveta was his ally.”

“So did Elizaveta,” I returned. “But that is beside the point.”

He took a long breath, and I pictured him holding the bridge of his nose. The breath had that sort of sound to it.

“I will leave him to you and Adam, then,” he said finally. “For now.”

“Thank you,” I said, and he growled at me.

“A third problem,” said Bran. “The creature who escaped Underhill. What you know about him, even with Beauclaire’s additions, is not enough for me to figure out who he is. It may be that I do not know him, or that I only know him through attributes that you haven’t run into.”

“Okay,” I said. I had really, really hoped that Bran could help us with this one. “He has Ben and Stefan,” I reminded Bran.

“I know,” he said gently. “And I would not like to lose either of them. To that end, I have some conjectures that may be useful.”

“Okay,” I said hopefully.

“First—that Beauclaire could not give you the creature’s name. The fae place great store by names. There are a number of fae who protect their names by not allowing others to speak them.”

“Okay, so the name could be important, once we figure out who this creature is. But we are unlikely to find him just by looking for someone hiding his name—because they all do that.”

“Exactly.” He sounded pleased again.

I wasn’t a child anymore. I shouldn’t be happy that he thought I was a good pupil for his Socratic method of teaching.

“I think you should focus on the bargaining part of what Beauclaire told you,” he told me. And now I could hear in his voice that he thought I’d missed something obvious.

“But they all bargain, too,” I said. And maybe I was a little sharp.

“Indeed,” he said. And the patience in his voice made me want to dye all of his underwear purple, though that hadn’t worked out so well the first time I’d tried it.

But I was a grown-up now, so I set aside petty vengeance and thought about what Beauclaire had said about the bargain.

“But not all of the fae had a bargain with Underhill,” I said finally.

My reward for seeing what Bran had seen was him saying, “And someone I know has a door to Underhill in her backyard, and one whom Underhill treasures to knock upon it and ask her to come out.”

I thought about Tilly and sighed. “You don’t happen to have any hints for dealing with a bloodthirsty immortal being with the attention span of a ten-year-old, do you?”

“Feed her sweets,” he said promptly. “Or call Ariana and ask her. But I think something sweet, especially if you bake it yourself, might be a way to coax out whatever information she might have.” He paused and then said, “And treat her like a co-conspirator, not a naughty child who has loosed doom upon the world. She may not be able to tell you much, but she may be useful to you all the same. Something within the boundaries of the bargain she has with him.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.

“And Adam?” I asked him hesitantly. All I had told him about Adam was that Adam had shut down our bond after we’d killed all the witches.

“Blow up the bond,” Bran said. “See what happens.”

And he hung up.

I stared at my phone. I called him back, but he didn’t pick up. I guess he thought that I needed to figure it out. Did he mean that I should try to destroy the bond between Adam and me? How in the world would I do something like that? I didn’t want to do that.

I tried to call him back again. Maybe if I explained that it wasn’t just Adam changing to the wolf involuntarily? It was . . . what? What did I know? That Adam thought I’d be harmed if the bond between us was open?

What did Adam think it would do to me? Did he think I would get caught up in his madness—assuming he thought that he was becoming a monster? “Argh,” I said in frustration, and hit the red button on the screen.

Bran had obviously decided not to take any more calls from me tonight.

Someone knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” I grumped, trying to figure out what I could text to Bran so that he’d call me back.

“Me,” said Adam, opening the door. “Who were you on the phone with?”

“Bran,” I told him. “You and I need to talk.”

His eyes were so unhappy.

But his face was locked in his I-deal-with-messes expression, so I figured he didn’t know that I could see through it. It was easier to read him with our bond up and functioning—but I’d known him for a long time before we’d been mated, and I’d paid attention.

“I agree,” he said after a moment’s consideration. “But not here.”

“Not here,” I agreed. Too many sharp ears—and at least one of them had been co-opted by the enemy. But it wasn’t just that. With this many of the pack in the house, we wouldn’t have much time before someone needed Adam’s attention—as had been amply demonstrated when I’d been trying to talk to him earlier.

“Your house?” he asked, tipping his head toward my empty manufactured house.

I started to say yes, then hesitated. “I don’t want to run into Anna again,” I told him. “How about the garage? I can check the phone while we’re there.”

I had forwarded that phone to mine, but no one had called for the garage since this morning. That might mean that no one needed their car repaired. It might also mean that I’d flubbed it.

“Okay,” he said, holding the bedroom door wider and stepping back in invitation. “I’ll drive. Your cars are under the weather.”

“Ha-ha,” I grumbled, walking past him. “Poor Jetta.”

I was going to have to find time to work on the Vanagon, I thought, resigned. I hated to drive it until I got all the air bubbles out. The air bubbles wouldn’t actually hurt anything. All they would do was make the gauges tell me the van was overheating when it wasn’t. The big problem with that was that if the engine really did overheat, I’d ignore it because I’d think it was just air bubbles. That would ruin the engine.

“I will buy you a new Jetta,” Adam said, stepping into my path so I stopped.

He reached up and caressed my cheeks on either side of my broken nose. His touch was gentle enough that it didn’t make my nose hurt worse than it already did.

“I’m onto your devious plot,” I said, rising up on my toes to kiss his cheek. I did not wince when the move caused my ribs to remind me that they’d been injured, too. I didn’t want to devolve into a “Mercy is hurt” conversation again.

“No new Jettas,” I said, putting the emphasis on the word he’d tried to skate by me as I started for the stairs. “Even though they have airbags. I will be laughed at by all VW mechanics everywhere if I get caught driving a new car. I just have to find another old car. Those old VWs are engineered to fold around you so even without an airbag they do okay in accidents.”

I caught myself before confessing that I’d probably have been all right, or at least my nose would have been okay, if the seat belt hadn’t given way. Because that would feed his argument and not mine.

I thought about where I could start looking for another car as I started walking. It had taken me a while to find the Jetta. I’d call all the scrapyards here, in Yakima, and in Spokane, let them know I was looking for a car that was reasonably restorable. Maybe I’d have to give in and pay a little more—it was hard to find them cheap. At least those old Jettas and Rabbits weren’t doing what the Vanagons had done—Vanagons were more expensive to buy used than they’d sold fresh off the assembly line. My Syncro was worth a lot more now than it had been new.

“Maybe another Rabbit,” I mused. “My old Rabbit lasted me more than a decade. The Jetta didn’t even make it a year.”

“No more Rabbits,” said Adam. “At least not this week. I think we’ve had quite enough rabbits for one week.”

He trailed me down the stairs. Or maybe he was herding me down the stairs. I was starting to get an odd vibe from him.

I snuck a peek over my shoulder at him. Caught off guard, his eyes were still as unhappy as they had been when I opened the bedroom door.

“What?” Adam asked me.

But before I had to answer, Warren approached to ask him about the schedule for guard duty—and if we were still running with that plan after everyone had been told to bunk up.

It took us about a half hour before we actually got going. We didn’t talk in the SUV on the way to my office. I wasn’t sure why not.

I mean, of course I knew why I didn’t say anything. I was still mulling over what Bran had said, trying to organize it so it made sense. Sorting through the things Bran had actually said—and the things I’d extrapolated from those. The first being important, the second being a little more suspect.

But I didn’t know why Adam didn’t say anything. Maybe he’d forgotten what he wanted to talk to me about in the avalanche of questions he’d dealt with on our way out the door.

When I looked at him, his eyes were opaque in the shadows. For a moment, though, I was caught by the way the dashboard illuminated the planes and curves of his face. He had the kind of beauty that would make maidens in old tales throw themselves off cliffs in order to attract his attention. Mesmerizing.

He didn’t notice me watching him, though—too focused on whatever had been keeping him quiet the rest of the drive. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a good thought, judging by the tension in his shoulders.

I put my hand on his thigh. I wasn’t sure he noticed. That was really not like him at all. By the time we made it to the garage, I was starting to worry about him—or about what he had to say. Maybe he knew something more than I did about our current circumstances, but it didn’t feel quite like that.

The parking lot was lit up a lot better than it had been before we’d rebuilt the garage. I could have sat on the front step and read a book. The light made it easier for Adam’s security cameras to get clear pictures.

I stopped on the way to the office and stared at one of the cameras. Not that I could see it—it was really small. But I knew where it was.

“Adam,” I said thoughtfully. “How often do you purge the surveillance video from here?”

“I don’t,” he said.

That distracted me. “Really? Never? Doesn’t that take up a lot of data storage?”

“Data storage is cheap at twice the price,” he said. “You have been attacked here by werewolves, vampires, volcano gods, and—” He stopped and grimaced.

“A Tim,” I told him stoutly. “Though he came out the worst in that encounter.”

He gave me a short nod. “I don’t erase anything.”

“Okay,” I said, getting my brain off Tim and onto more current matters. “If you don’t erase it, do you have some nifty way of sorting through it?”

“What do you need?” he asked.

“James Palsic brought a car in for me to repair a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t notice him then, because I am pretty sure that remember-me-not thing he has going is a variation of pack magic that he’s learned to twist to his own use. Zee was here that day—and he didn’t even notice James was a werewolf.”

“If you didn’t recognize him then, how did you figure out he came in?” he asked. “Did he tell you?”

I shook my head. “Something clicked while we were exchanging words at Kelly’s house and that magic quit working on me. Apparently, it quit retroactively, too. Because as soon as it quit working, I remembered him.

“If you can find him on the feed, maybe he left some clue about where they are staying,” I said.

We had the plates to the Ford truck, but they were registered to a fictional address, according to George. They did tell us that the wolves had been here for long enough to acquire Washington plates. I didn’t expect the plates on his VW bug to be any more use. Especially because I was pretty sure those plates had been from out of state. But he had given us a phone number that might be of use.

Adam nodded and sounded more like himself when he said briskly, “Sounds like a good idea.”

I keyed in the sequence that would unlock the door—for a garage that specializes in inexpensive repairs to cars that tend to be older than I am, my shop’s security is pretty high-end.

“I know it’s a long shot,” I told him. “But I hate waiting for the bad guys to make a move. We could head to your office after we get done here.”

“I don’t like defensive wars, either,” Adam agreed. “I can access the video files from here.”

I let us in but didn’t turn the lights on in the office. There were windows all the way around, which was awesome for working there. But just now, lighting up the office would make us a perfect target for someone sitting outside with a gun.

It was true that the immediate threats I knew about were unlikely to be sitting outside with a gun. Though werewolves (and I supposed Wulfe, too) could use guns just fine, shooting us in an attempt to take over the pack would make them look weak. A bullet wouldn’t be enough fun for Wulfe to try.

But there were a lot of people who were unhappy about the changes taking place in the world, and everyone knew that the Columbia Basin Pack’s Alpha was mated to Mercy, who owned that garage in east Kennewick.

There were shades on the windows for just that reason, but they were a pain in the butt. They were supposed to be electronic, but that had lasted exactly a week. We were in discussions with the manufacturer that felt like they might take a long time.

“Can you see well enough to get into the video system?” I asked Adam. “I could just pull the shades and turn on the lights if that’s useful.”

“I can see fine.” He walked toward the door to the bays instead of to the corner of the office where a monitor that scrolled through the cameras sat on an expensive-looking pile of electronics.

“Adam?” I asked. “Where are you going?”

“The controls in the office are dummy controls,” he told me. “The real controls are in the garage proper.”

“Huh,” I said.

“We give the bad guys something to ‘shut down’ and they quit looking,” he explained. Which was why he made the big money in security.

“Okay,” I said. “While you do that, I’ll search the receipts. We require a phone number and an address. The address may be bogus—but we called him to get his car.” I was pretty sure he hadn’t given the name James Palsic. That was an odd enough last name, I’d have remembered it. And a pseudonym might be a clue, too.

“So he’ll be on the cameras twice,” Adam said.

“Yep. He came in about four p.m., maybe as early as three thirty, but no earlier than that. Not last week but sometime in the previous two weeks,” I told him.

“Okay.”

He waited in the open doorway while I settled myself on a box behind the counter and pulled the office keyboard and monitor down where I could use them. Tucked behind the counter, they were low enough that no one would see the light from the monitor from the outside.

“Why did we put all the windows in here, again?” Adam asked as I sat down. I think he was trying for a teasing tone, but his eyes were focused on my face. On my nose. The tape strapped across the bridge of my nose was going to be my friend for a week or so; I’d get rid of it about the same time my black eyes would turn yellow. At least they hadn’t had to pack it.

“Because windows are more friendly than walls,” I told him, touching my nose a little self-consciously. “And mostly we are in the bays anyway.” Having our bond shut down was making me ridiculous. Adam loved me, broken nose and all. I reassured myself of that with the memory of his face when he’d first seen me in the hospital. Even so, I couldn’t help but say, in a voice that was a little wobbly, “They said it would heal without a bump.”

“You get hurt a lot,” he said softly.

I couldn’t read his body language or his tone, which was unusual. But where he was standing was oddly shadowed, the strong light from the window obscuring the lower half of his face.

“This was my choice,” I told him. “Me or Makaya. My nose or her life—it wasn’t even a difficult decision.”

Adam grunted and disappeared into the bays, where he’d hidden the real controls to the surveillance system. Good to know that if I wanted to shut the system down, I’d have to go looking for the secondary controls . . .

I wanted to say something more to him. Something that would feel better than that last exchange did. Still, Adam was pretty good at communication—better than I was. Maybe I just needed to give him some space. Resolutely I turned my attention to the files.

We fixed maybe fifteen cars on a good day with all three of us working. That didn’t count the parts we sold, but it wasn’t an insurmountable number. It took me about ten minutes to find the right bill, but only because we hadn’t put the year and model of the car in the computer.

But the notes jibed with what I remembered.

Generator not charging, does not respond to polarizing. Recommend new generator. Customer agrees.

The bill was complete with address and phone number. He’d paid with a credit card in the name of John Leeman, his address was out in north Richland near the Uptown Mall, an area with a lot of apartments, and looked suspiciously like the false address that had been used to register the plates on the truck. But the phone number could be useful.

“Got it,” I said, and told Adam the date of the bill. “Time stamp on the charge is eleven twenty-eight.”

Adam grunted.

He sounded odd.

“Adam?”

“What did you want to talk to me about, Mercy? That we couldn’t talk about at home?” He was speaking so softly I could barely make out his words—and my hearing was coyote-good.

“I have a few insights I wanted to share about the werewolves we are facing,” I told him cautiously.

There was a long pause. I didn’t want to conduct a serious discussion with him in there and me out in the office. I set the keyboard on top of the counter and bent to heft the monitor.

“I thought you might want to discuss last night.”

The monitor skidded on the counter as I set it back where it belonged, so I thought I might have misheard him. “Last night?”

Locking up Ben? But he made it sound as if something had happened that needed discussion. Something personal. Oh.

“Are you talking about the reason you made me an apology breakfast sandwich? Thank you, by the way.” I had everything put away in the office. I could have headed into the bays to talk to him, but I hesitated, my instincts keeping me right where I was.

“I put you in danger,” he said.

I loved Adam and trusted him in a way I’d never trusted anyone. I had never been afraid of him. Not really. Okay. He was a werewolf—but this was different. It was the way his voice was traveling out of the darkness. My heartbeat picked up.

“I put myself in danger,” I told him. “You certainly had nothing to do with my broken nose today.”

He didn’t answer. Aching cold shivered through me like a blade drawn through my chest—and it wasn’t an emotion, it was my mating bond, our mating bond. I reached out for it in that place where I could see the ties that bound me.

I understood that no one else in the pack had a place like that they could go. I supposed my place, my otherness, had something to do with the fact that the first time I beheld the pack bonds was when a fairy queen locked me into my own head while she held me imprisoned. The Marrok, possibly with the help of a rogue fae walking stick, used the bonds to locate me. In the process, he pulled me someplace where he could show me the spiritual and magical ties I bore. Over time, I had learned how to get there on my own. Mostly this otherness had a dreamlike quality in that it was changeable and responsive to my subconscious. But in some ways, it was more real than any other place I had ever been.

The pack bonds were still there. This time there were no lights, but they were still bright-colored and festive Christmas garlands strung in all directions as if they were part of a giant spider’s web. Sometimes I perceived the wolves in the pack as rocks or bricks. Once, they were flowers, and I never did figure out why. But this time the bonds just stretched out into the darkness. If I’d needed to know which was which, I could have grabbed one and yanked on it, but for now, none of those were the bond I was looking for.

The bond I usually tried not to pay too much attention to was there as well. Visually that one changed a lot more than the other bonds. Even so, another time it would worry me that the tie that existed between me and Stefan was a gossamer black weaving that looked as though a good wind would blow it away. Not that I enjoyed being bound to a vampire, even Stefan—but that frailty didn’t say good things about my friend and his battle with the smoke weaver.

Sometimes the most important thing I looked for, here in the otherness, was the last thing I found. The bond between Adam and me was wrapped securely around my waist—where it burned me with its cold. The cord itself had changed from the thick red cord I’d last seen to something like a flexible cable made of ice.

I blinked that image away and stood once more in my garage office, feeling neither enlightened nor reassured. Having our bond turn to ice, even if only in the imagery of my other place, could not possibly be a good thing.

“Adam?” I said cautiously, not moving from where I stood behind the counter. “What are you doing to our bond? I don’t like it.”

“You need to get out of here.”

That wasn’t Adam. That was the wolf speaking from Adam’s throat. I heard a ripping noise.

“Adam, are you okay?” I asked, ignoring the wolf’s advice.

The silence was so deep that I started when Adam spoke, his voice gravelly as it sometimes got when he was changing into his wolf form. I could usually smell the magic gathering when one of the wolves was changing form—but my nose was broken. For all that Adam maintained that I wasn’t really smelling magic, that I was just interpreting it as a scent, I couldn’t tell if he was really changing or not without my nose working.

“When you spoke to Bran, did you talk to him about me, Mercy mine?”

That didn’t sound like any tone I’d ever heard from Adam. It didn’t sound like Adam or the wolf.

I remembered the way Ben had sounded. Had the smoke weaver bitten Adam?

The creature hadn’t been able to fool me for more than a few minutes when he’d been using Ben. And my instincts, which had never steered me wrong so far, told me that this had nothing to do with the smoke weaver. Stefan’s bond in my otherness, I now remembered, though I hadn’t noticed at the time, had an odd odor—just like the jackrabbit. It had smelled like the smoke weaver. Apparently even with a broken nose I could smell when I was in that other place.

The bond between Adam and me had still smelled . . . tasted like us. This, whatever this was, was about whatever had been troubling Adam long before the smoke weaver had escaped.

“I asked you a question,” he growled from the depths of the big space beyond the office door. “Did you go to Bran with the trouble you are having? With me?” The last was a roar that sounded more wolf than human and hurt my ears with the sudden volume.

I didn’t answer, didn’t know how to answer.

“Mercy?” The soft question came out singsong, emerging from the echoing bays, sounding more menacing than the blast of sound that had preceded it.

I didn’t think that telling him yes would be smart right then. But I wouldn’t lie to him. And I didn’t think this was a conversation we should be having while I cowered behind a counter that would be no barrier against a werewolf.

This is Adam, I reminded myself. Whatever his troubles, whatever was happening to him, he would not hurt me if he could help it. He was in trouble and I had to help him.

I walked to the door to the bays. Inky darkness stretched out endlessly in front of me. I can see in the dark pretty well, but my eyes were adjusted to the relative light of the office, and the bays were as dark as a cave. I reached for the lights.

Adam said, “Don’t.”

“What’s going on?” I asked. I couldn’t use my nose, and the sound effects of the empty bays kept me from pinpointing where Adam was.

“You should leave,” he said, his voice gritted, almost vicious. “God damn it, Mercy.” Desperate. “Obey me for once in your life and get the fuck out of here.”

I heard him open the under-the-counter gun safe that held a loaded gun. However cautious I was around agitated werewolves, I was absolutely certain that Adam wasn’t about to shoot me.

I hit the light.