Smoke Bitten

10

I expected to see Adam, gun in hand.

I did not expect him to be eight or nine feet tall, looking like something horrible had happened to his change from human to wolf. I’d seen him in an in-between stage before, a blend between wolf and human that was oddly graceful, no matter how frightening. This wasn’t that.

This was a monster.

His skin was red and mottled with oversized veins standing out like tree roots on the forest floor. The only hair or fur on his body was a strip that started at the back of his neck and ended at the top of his hips. Even his pinned, oversized ears and his tail were bare.

His hulking shoulders bulged unnaturally and supported disproportionately long arms ending in clawed hands so massive that they made the big Ruger Redhawk look like a child’s toy from a bygone era. I had no idea how he’d managed to open the gun safe with those hands.

His torso gave a nod to a humanoid shape in that it was upright, but it was too long and bent too much, as if weighed down by those shoulders. His hips and legs were shaped more like a wolf’s and ended in paws that were two or three times the size of his own wolf’s.

The claws on his toes scored the concrete floor. By those marks, I could track him backward to the pile of clothes, which looked as though something had exploded in them. They weren’t ripped—they were confettied—including the heavy leather combat-type boots.

He had, I noted, taken a direct path straight to the gun safe.

His face was a nightmare version of a werewolf’s face, like something dreamed up by a comic book illustrator who was more worried about making something look scary than how viable what he drew was.

Adam’s massive lower jaw was undershot and more like a bulldog’s than a wolf’s, but it was wider than the upper jaw, too. The whole muzzle was too long for the width of his face.

Werewolves have lots and lots of big sharp teeth—but Adam’s teeth now would have done credit to a T. rex. They were black and looked as though you could drop a piece of paper on one and end up with two pieces. I could see most of his teeth because his lips were pulled back in a snarl.

But the most disturbing thing was his eyes. They were entirely human, entirely Adam’s eyes, trapped within the monster. And that was just wrong, because when a werewolf takes his wolf form, the first thing to change is his eyes.

Ugly. He was ugly.

I stood frozen, my hand on the light switch.

He ducked and twisted his head impossibly and let out a sound that was part scream and part wail, impossibly high-pitched with a bass rumble that followed behind and sent my hindbrain into fits. He took an aggressive step toward me and then two slow steps backward.

“After,” he said—and his voice was oddly clear, emerging from that mouth. Werewolves couldn’t talk in their wolf form. Like the eyes, his ability to speak just made this form more wrong. “Go to Bran. Follow his advice.”

And my stunned brain remembered why I’d been so worried about Adam having a gun.

I had a bare moment to figure out what to do. He was a soldier. That gun was going to go off and he would be dead. No hesitation, no fumble.

Worse than useless to wish that I’d been clearer when I told Bran that Adam and I were having troubles. Hard to get good advice from him when he didn’t have all the information.

Blow up the mating bond, Bran had said. Without those words, and if I hadn’t just inspected our bond, maybe I’d have tried something different. Maybe if there had been time to actually think about what to do, I’d have formed a clever plan. But all I had were my instincts. I needed time.

I stepped back into the otherness, where such a thing might be possible. Ever since this place had proven to be useful when I was lost in Europe, I’d been practicing. It was sort of like lucid dreaming, in that I could influence, both on purpose and by accident, what I found there—though that was not to say that I was in control. In this instance, needing time, I imagined a pocket of existence where time moved while no time passed in the real world.

As soon as I entered, I knew that I’d only been partially successful. This gift of time was not infinite. Adam’s gun was still moving and I had only bought myself a little grace to do something about it.

I could see our bond, still frozen, though this time I could see that there were deep fractures in the structure, awaiting just one hard hit to shatter into nothingness. It made me reluctant to move for fear I would shatter it. Bran had not said “shatter” or “cut,” either, for that matter. He had told me to blow it up.

I just needed a bomb.

I’d been reading a lot of fairy tales since I’d put the pack in the place of peacekeeper of the Tri-Cities. Fairy tales weren’t factual, for the most part. But there was a surprising amount of information to be gleaned from them.

Since our Underhill escapee had started killing people, I’d read and reread a few more. The last fairy tale I’d read was the Perrault story “Diamonds and Toads,” where a girl is kind to an old woman at a well, and as a consequence, beautiful and valuable items spilled from her mouth every time she talked.

In the otherness, as in dreams, what I perceived was influenced with apparent randomness by the things that I’d been doing or thinking about.

Blow up the bond.

I opened my mouth and took out the golf-ball-sized pearl that emerged. It wasn’t exactly a bomb, for all that it was round. How was I going to blow up our bond with it? The pearl was luminous, the color a reminder that white was not colorlessness—in being white, the pearl reflected all colors. It struck me as something hopeful, that pearl.

Words are powerful things.

I don’t know where that thought came from. Maybe something I’d read, or something someone had told me. Maybe it was just a universal truth that came to me in that moment.

I brought the pearl up to my mouth and spoke to it. Then I took it and smashed it against the icy bond that stretched from my waist into the dark mist surrounding the little clearing I stood in. When the pearl hit, the bond cracked around it like the safety glass on my Jetta. I shoved the pearl inside and folded the cracked sheet of glass back around the hole. I wrapped my hands over where I’d damaged the bond, and it re-formed beneath my skin, becoming first smooth and then so cold I had to jerk my hands away.

What did you say?

I looked over and saw that a wolf whose gray coat, lighter on his back and darker on his face and feet, shimmered in the odd sourceless light of the otherness. He was curled up in the hollow of a tree growing on the edge of the mist. His tail wrapped around his body and draped over the top of his nose.

He was too small, too thin, and I’d never seen him hide from anything—but I knew him for Adam’s wolf.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him. This was my otherness and I had not summoned him—or Adam—here.

I’ve been driven out by the monster, he said, closing his eyes and starting to fade from my sight.

“Wolf!” I said, desperate to keep him with me. I was deathly afraid that when he disappeared, I would never see him again.

Do you have a question for me? he asked.

I opened my mouth to ask him something, anything to keep him here with me. And the words that came out of my mouth were: “What did the witch do?”

Ah, he said, lifting up his head. That is a good question.

Between us, separating us, a stage the size of a Manhattan apartment kitchen table rose until it was waist high. Mist from the edges of the clearing drifted to the top of the table and solidified until the witch Elizaveta and Adam stood facing each other upon the stage, both naked.

From this perspective I was struck by how perfect they both were. Her body was tall and strong with beautiful pale skin that looked very like the pearl I’d held in my hands. Her hair was long and dark. She looked like some artist’s rendition of an idealized female. And Adam . . . was Adam.

I’d seen this scene before but not from this observation point. Standing with the mists playing about their feet, they looked like something out of a Russian fairy tale—as if they belonged together.

Do not, warned the wolf harshly. Such thoughts have power here. We cannot afford to feed her magic with your foolish insecurities.

Right. I cleared my mind and tried to pay attention without judgment. There was something here that I needed to know.

The first time I’d seen this, I’d been in a position to watch Adam’s face. This time I could see Elizaveta’s as she stepped into his space, leaning her tall, naked body against his. She tilted her head and bent forward to kiss him.

Her lips touched his—and even though I knew what had happened and why, fierce possessiveness swept through me.

He was mine. She had no right to touch him.

Yes, said the wolf. We were yours.

Are mine, I thought fiercely. Are.

I didn’t say the words aloud, and I couldn’t tell if he’d heard me.

One of Adam’s arms wrapped around her waist, holding her to him, his hand flat against the small of her back.

He liked to hold me like that, protective and possessive.

His other hand cupped her face, then threaded through her long silky hair on its fatal journey to the back of her head.

As his fingers tightened, her eyes, which had been closed to savor his kiss, flashed open and comprehension slid across her face. In that second, when she knew she was going to die, magic slid from her mouth and into his.

Her magic carried her voice, her words, into him. You are the monster you think yourself to be.

He broke her neck, stepping away from her, allowing her body to fall away. But he put distance between them too late. Her death-gift sank into him, disappearing beneath his skin as he looked up and fell into parade rest.

Waiting, I remembered, for my judgment. I reached out for him and the scene faded away. My fingers brushed the stage and it altered under my touch, becoming the stump of a tree that some giant saw had cut more or less flat. The wood bit my finger and a drop of blood welled and landed on the stump.

This was my otherness, formed of things I knew. My stomach tight, I looked at the wolf and asked, “Was that something I saw, but didn’t—” That night had been one horror after another, I’d been so tired by that point. “—didn’t pay attention to?”

It is what was, the wolf said, seeming a little less substantial than he had before.

He said, He was lost in that moment, for he believed the truth of her words before she gave them to him. His voice faded, growing softer. Twice born those words, his and then hers. So they took hold in his belief and made it true.

I walked around the tree stump and knelt beside him. He was smaller now, the size of a German shepherd maybe.

“What’s happening to you?” I asked.

He is becoming, answered the wolf tiredly. I am unmaking.

I pulled another gemstone out of my mouth. This one was an amethyst about the size of a marble, uncut and rough-sided. I took it and spoke to it, too. When I was finished, I held it out to the wolf, who eyed it.

What do you have for me? he asked.

“It won’t work if I tell you,” I said, following my instincts. “Eat it.”

He opened his mouth and consumed the purple stone. I waited, but there seemed to be no effect for good or ill. Maybe it would take time—real time, not otherness time.

He was no bigger. He didn’t move his body, had not moved anything but his head the whole time we’d been here.

But his voice was steady when he asked, What did you do to the bond?

I looked at the bond then. The tie that bound me to Adam was now the same color and texture as the scabby red skin that covered Adam’s monstrous form. I touched it and the skin-like surface was rough under my fingertips. My wounded finger left a thin trail of blood behind that melted into the bond, which did not change again. Blood is one of those things, like words, that have unexpected power. The bond was ugly, but it did not look fragile.

“Well,” I told him, “I didn’t blow it up.” I’d intended the pearl to blow it up until that last second before it touched the bond. I didn’t want to lose Adam, and I wasn’t willing to risk breaking our bond—and the pearl had looked so hopeful.

“But maybe,” I said, “I instilled a little common sense and logic into the situation.”

What words did the pearl hold? he asked.

I took a breath and the otherworld faded to nothing. I was back in the auto bay with Adam and a gun that was moving quickly toward his head.

“You are mine,” I told him, using the same words I’d given the pearl. “I can’t stop you from using that gun. But you know what?”

I was so angry at him. As if the whole time I’d been in that otherness, anger had been filling the real me from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head and it was spilling out my mouth—as that pearl had done.

“It doesn’t matter if you live or die—you are still mine,” I bit out. “Alpha werewolf, nightmare creature—I don’t care. But don’t you forget who I am. You gave yourself to me, and now you can’t get away.” I took a step closer to him and jutted out my chin. “You die, and I will drag your butt back from the afterlife kicking and screaming. But let me tell you, mister. If you are dead, you’ll just have to watch us get hurt—without being able to do a damn thing about it. Because you will be dead and helpless and I won’t let you go. And. Every.” I pointed my finger at him, stabbing him with it figuratively the way I was tempted to do it literally. “Single. Day. I will say, ‘I told you that you would regret pulling that trigger, you bastard. I told you so.’”

I was shaking with rage when I finished saying the words I had sent inside our bond with the pearl. How dare he? How dare he try to kill himself?

He’d lowered the gun at some point during my speech. There was an odd expression on his face.

“Bastard,” I said again, though I had intended to stop after I told him the words I’d sealed into that pearl.

But the single word didn’t provide any relief for what I felt. I stomped my foot like a two-year-old. My eyes burned and tears formed . . . tears of something huge, bigger than grief, bigger than rage, and they burned down my face.

“Go talk to Bran, you said.” I was enraged at the thought. He’d given me words like a pat on the head—something to make him feel as though he weren’t leaving me alone. “Fuck that. You just try to leave me, you bastard, see how far that gets you—” I might have devolved into incoherence after that.

Adam put the gun slowly down on the counter. He tried to uncock it, but his oversized hands equipped with oversized claws apparently weren’t up to that, so he pointed the muzzle away from us both. I realized (and this didn’t lessen my anger one iota) that if I’d listened to him and replaced the gun in the safe with a 1911 instead of the Redhawk, he wouldn’t have been able to even try to kill himself with it because it would have been too small.

The gun safely dealt with (as safely as a loaded and cocked gun could be dealt with, anyway), Adam started walking toward me. He did it slowly, cautiously, as if he were afraid of me.

Or more probably, under the circumstances, because he was worried that his unusual form might scare me—or revolt me as it evidently did him.

Slowly he wrapped those too-long arms around me and hauled me to him, lifting me so my face could press against his neck. I was still yelling at him.

“Shhhh,” he said. “Sorry. You’re right. Of course you’re right.”

“I’ll monster you,” I growled.

“Of course you will,” he soothed. But there was something in his voice.

I was so mad I wouldn’t have been surprised if I gave him steam burns. “Are you laughing at me?”

“Maybe—” he began, and then choked. His arms jerked convulsively.

He set me down on my own feet abruptly. Took a step back and then dropped to the concrete on his hands and knees. He didn’t make any noise as he transformed from monster to human, but it was so fast it must have hurt. Under other circumstances, the popping and crunching sounds of bones doing something that bones aren’t really designed to do might have made me feel sorry for him. Made me worry for him. But I was still too . . . too something.

He wasn’t dying—anything else he did was his own problem.

I stalked to the gun, uncocked it, and put it back in the safe. I closed the safe door and stalked back past him and into the bathroom. I shut the door behind me and grabbed a washcloth to wipe my eyes and stopped when I saw myself in the mirror.

Holy cow.

My usually brown skin was blanched until it looked green. The two black eyes that had been oncoming after the accident were definitely bruised, and my nose was swollen with a trickle of blood dried on my upper lip. There was another bruise along the cheek next to the white scar that usually looked sort of like war paint. But now that I looked like an extra from The Walking Dead, it just completed the effect.

“I see your monster,” I muttered, turning on the water. “And raise you another one.” I leaned closer to the mirror. “Brainssss.”

As I held the washcloth under the flow, I tipped my chin to see if I looked better from another angle. Huh. There was a bruise and a friction burn on my neck where the seat belt caught me before it let me go too soon. I pulled back my shirt and . . . wowza.

I’d been in worse wrecks—and I’d been hurt worse in them. But I didn’t remember looking worse after a collision. No wonder Adam had been on edge. Well, that and apparently Elizaveta had gotten him with a curse as she died.

I didn’t know what to do about that curse. I’d bought us some more time, I thought. Bran might have an idea or two . . . but I was a little leery of contacting him after Adam’s over-the-top reaction. And Bran was weird about witchcraft. Maybe I’d call Charles; Charles had his own sort of magic.

I put the washcloth against my eyelids—very careful of my nose—and waited for a while. When I pulled the washcloth away, my eyes were still red like I’d been wearing bad contacts for a week, but they felt better. I wiped the blood off my lip.

I was tired of all the emotion. I didn’t want to open the door. I wanted to magically wake up tomorrow with the relationship between Adam and me reset to a normal place. My heart hurt.

I tried to think of a logical path to get home and in bed. First step: get in the car. But Adam, assuming he was changing back to his human form, which was what it had looked like, would be naked.

Tad had clothes here that might fit Adam, but werewolves could be funny about wearing someone else’s clothing—especially if that someone wasn’t pack. On a good day, maybe it would have worked. This day had been a whole bad year all by itself.

Adam’s SUV would have a change of clothes. Probably not footwear, but he had made his own bed and he could lie in it.

Second step: drive home and . . .

I had to put the washcloth on my eyes again. My hands were still shaking. If he had pulled that trigger . . . I could have been alone again.

Maybe ten minutes later, Adam knocked on the door. “Mercy? Are you planning on taking up residence in there?”

“Might as well,” I bit out. “My mate is an idiot.”

After I said it, I knew that those two things didn’t go together, except that I really had needed to say that last.

“Yes,” he agreed. “So why don’t we go home and you can punish me by telling everyone there how you feel.”

I froze. “We can’t do that,” I told him. “We have an invasion and a killer bunny. They need you invulnerable.”

“God,” he said with feeling, “are they going to be disappointed if that’s what they need.”

Then he laughed, and it sounded a little like I felt—shaky and damaged. Yes, tonight had altered the game board a little, but no one had won, yet. There was a soft thump as his forehead (I was pretty sure) hit the door.

“Elizaveta cursed you,” I told him.

“I know,” he admitted.

“How long have you known?” I asked gently. He and I both knew exactly how much anger was behind my tone. I had, after all, learned that from him.

“That is a complicated question.”

Holding a conversation through a closed door was stupid. I wasn’t afraid of him—and if I didn’t open the door, I would never be able to go home and pull the blankets over my head. I unlocked the door and opened it.

He was his usual gorgeous self, no monster to be seen. He was also naked as a jaybird. His unclothed and glorious body might have distracted me had he not looked at my face and winced.

I would have liked to think that he’d flinched from my wrath. But I was pretty sure it was the damage to my face. Just as well I’d been able to hide most of the bruising on the rest of me with the shirt.

“How complicated?” I asked.

“The wolf knew,” he said. “But I didn’t know until he told you.”

Just after my neighbors had died.

“And you kept it to yourself afterward because why?” I asked—more sharply than I meant to. But we had people who could help with witch curses, Bran and Zee—we even had Wulfe. The one thing that I knew about witch curses was that ignoring them—as tonight had made obvious—didn’t make them get better.

He looked away from me.

I was going to tell him exactly how smart I thought that keeping this to himself had been. I opened my mouth, and hesitated. Hadn’t he . . . hadn’t we been through enough today? He was going to have to put on his clothes and go back to the pack house and pretend that everything was okay. That he was fit and ready to face off with . . . heaven help us, Fiona. And the killer bunny. And Wulfe and whatever else decided to rain down on our heads because the universe was just generous like that.

He couldn’t afford to let anyone but me see the mess he was in. Because our pack was short of people to do the job we had to do. They were bearing up wonderfully for the most part—but the pressure wasn’t going to let up anytime soon.

“So,” I said, to change the subject. “Why did you want to get me alone to talk to me?”

“Because I thought you’d called Bran for advice, and he’d told you to get away from me.”

I blinked at him, utterly flummoxed. “What?”

He spoke more slowly. “Because I thought you’d called Bran for advice, and he’d told you to get away from me.”

“Funny guy,” I said. “I heard you the first time. I just never thought that you would utter such absolute . . . drivel.”

“It seemed logical at the time,” he said.

“Huh,” I growled at him. “What in the world makes you think that even if Bran told me to leave you, that that would be something I would ever do?”

And that started the waterworks again. I hated to cry—in this case it felt manipulative, as if I were punishing him somehow—when that was the furthest thing from my mind at the moment. I wiped my eyes with the bottom of my shirt—and caught my nose.

“Damn it,” I growled, batting away his hands.

“I’m cursed,” he said mildly. “It interferes with my thinking. Stop that. You’re hurting yourself.”

Both were true. I stopped trying to wipe my eyes with my shirt and used my hands instead.

I wasn’t going to cut him any slack on his muddled thinking, curse or no curse. He thought I was going to tell him I was leaving him. And then I put it together with his actions tonight.

“So your thinking was that I was going to tell you I was leaving you—so you were going to kill yourself and save me the trouble?”

His face went still. Then he said, “It sounds so stupid when you say it that way.”

“Good,” I snapped. I started to pinch my nose—Bran style—and Adam caught my hand.

He kissed my knuckles (which was pretty brave when he knew how much I wanted to hurt him) and folded my hand in his. “Don’t do that,” he said. “You’ll hurt yourself again.” He sighed. “I think I’ve done enough of that today.”

It echoed my earlier thought about him, that he’d been through enough today. I took a deep breath.

“This is maybe not the best time to hash this out,” I said.

“Agreed,” he said, his voice heartfelt. “What did you want to talk to me about? Or is that another minefield?”

It took me a moment to remember.

I held up a finger. “Bran thinks that we, that you, need to kill Fiona at first opportunity.”

“Fiona?” he said blankly, as if he’d forgotten who she was.

“Fiona,” I said. “Apparently she went rogue a while ago. Started selling her skills to whoever paid her. Bran thought that she died in a deal gone bad while she was working with some witches. You should maybe call Bran and talk to him about her.” He wasn’t taking my calls. “Bran has decided what we need to do with our invading wolves. Harolford is on the kill list, but less urgently so. Kent Schwabe is a question mark, but he’d like us to save Chen and the Palsics.”

“I’ll talk to him,” he told me.

He was still naked. It was distracting me—though I didn’t think he knew that yet.

I held up a second finger. “He told me that we should talk to Underhill about the smoke weaver.”

Adam’s eyebrow raised. “And that is a revelation how?”

“He told me to ask her about the bargain Underhill has with him or that she had with him. He told me to bribe her with something sweet that I’ve cooked myself. And he told me to approach her like we have a common problem and not like she released someone who killed innocents and now holds two people I care about in his thrall.”

“Okay,” he said. “That’s useful.”

I held up a third finger. “And he told me that if you kept shutting me out, I should blow up our mating bond.”

“Excuse me?”

“He hung up and won’t answer my calls,” I said. “I have no idea what he meant. Just what he said.”

“You did something to our bond, though,” he said slowly, and I felt a faint pull on the bond, a softening that, after a moment, stiffened back to where it had been.

“I didn’t blow it up,” I told him.

I decided not to tell him exactly what I had done.

I’d been influenced by the pack bonds and hadn’t enjoyed the experience. Let him think that it was just me yelling at him that had made him put down the gun.

He didn’t need to know that I’d sent those words through our mating bond in a pearl before I’d given them out loud. Maybe yelling alone would have worked. It would have if he’d been in a normal headspace—but if he’d been in a normal headspace, he wouldn’t have been trying to kill himself. I was hoping that the words I’d given him would linger. That they would keep him from doing anything rash until we had a chance to talk to someone.

He’d been under the influence of Elizaveta’s spell. I was pretty sure that it had been my pearl that let me break through the effect of her curse—my hopeful pearl against her words.

“Why couldn’t you have told me this at home?” he asked. “Our bedroom is private enough.”

I gave him a wry smile. “Because I thought you were looking really tired and our house was full of people. I also wanted to see if I could get you to tell me what was wrong.”

He grinned at me abruptly and said, “Well, you got that part done in true Mercy fashion.”

“Anything worth doing is worth overdoing,” I intoned solemnly. I took in a deep breath and sighed loudly. “I suppose that I should quit enjoying the view and go get you some clothes from the SUV.”

I rose up on my toes and kissed him. “Don’t you give up on us, my love.”

“Okay,” he said. He kissed me back. “Nudge?”

Yes. Oh yes. There was so much emotion that my insides felt scoured with the tides. Sex . . . making love wouldn’t fix any of it. Wouldn’t break what Elizaveta had done to my husband. Wouldn’t change the reality that Adam hated himself so much that he thought he deserved to die. I did not lie to myself. I had spoken to his wolf. Elizaveta’s words would not have taken fruit if Adam hadn’t had the garden plowed and fertilized for it.

Sex wouldn’t fix that. But . . . sharing is a very powerful thing. And making love with Adam was generous and warm—powerful magic of its own kind. And ten minutes of not thinking sounded like heaven just now and I was pretty sure Adam felt the same way. It was not passion he was seeking with his “nudge”—it was surcease.

But . . . no way in hell was I going to let him see me naked while Elizaveta’s magic was still working on him. I knew my mate. Guilt—the failure of living up to his own expectations—was driving that curse. Adam had an overabundant sense of responsibility. My poor face had been the tipping point today, I was pretty sure. I wasn’t going to let him see that my entire right side was black where it hadn’t been scraped raw.

“Not tonight,” I told him. “We have wolves to kill and Underhill to talk to. Busy, busy.” And after misquoting The Princess Bride, I admitted the truth—a little of the truth. “As much as I’d like some nudging of my own, I think I need to give my body a break for a day or so.” I paused, and since it was true and I deserved a chance to whine a little, I said, “And my nose is throbbing.”

He hugged me gently and I didn’t so much as stiffen at the pain in my ribs—which I hadn’t actually noticed until I saw them in the mirror. I’d been too focused on a lot of things more painful than bruised ribs. Once all the drama had subsided, my body was more sore than it had felt before the whole Adam’s-got-a-gun scene had played out.

Everyone was tucked into bed by the time we got home. Jesse called a good night to us as we passed her room, so they hadn’t been in bed for long.

I found the pajamas that I wore when I was sick—Adam wouldn’t think it strange for me to grab them when I had a broken nose. They were a gift from my mom—nothing I would ever have bought myself. It was ridiculous how much I loved them.

They were mint green and covered with pink ponies with improbable purple manes and tails. My mom had a thing for horses. But the important thing about them tonight was that they covered me from neck to feet.

I showered and dressed and by the time I was through I hurt so badly I wasn’t sure I could sleep. Every muscle in my body was stiff and sore. I crawled into bed and finally just lay facedown with a pillow under my chest and my face turned aside so that my nose didn’t hit the mattress. Nothing else was comfortable, either.

Adam showered and I must have dozed despite the discomfort because the next thing I knew the bed was moving under his weight.

“Mercy,” he told me. “Take off your shirt.”

I lay very still. Maybe he would think I was asleep.

“Your shirt rode up while you were poking your finger at me,” he said. “Threatening me with the dire consequences of dying around a ticked-off daughter of Coyote who can call the dead. You don’t have to hide your injuries from me—that’s our deal, remember?”

“You knew?” I asked.

“I just wanted to see how far you would take it. Strip off your shirt, tough girl, and I’ll see what I can do about making you feel better.”

He didn’t know I’d been hiding my bruises so that he didn’t have one more thing to feel responsible for. One more thing for Elizaveta’s curse to dig into him with. He wasn’t wearing a monster, so apparently I hadn’t needed to try to hide anything from him.

“I can’t move,” I whined, now that I didn’t have to pretend. “It hurts.”

He helped me roll over and gave me a bag of frozen peas, which he must have brought upstairs while I was dozing, for my nose.

“No, don’t press it,” he said. “Just let it rest there.”

And my nose settled down while he lit a vanilla candle I couldn’t smell and turned out the lights.

“I’m not being romantic,” he advised me. “The lights are going to hurt your eyes. The candle is warming the oil I’m going to use to help your poor abused muscles relax.”

I thought that sounded like a pretty romantic thing to do. Romantic didn’t always have to do with sex.

He unbuttoned the shirt of my pajamas and managed to get it off me without hurting me more. I had a bag of peas over my eyes so I couldn’t see what he looked like after getting a fully detailed report on my body.

What he said, after a moment, was “Okay, pants off, too.”

And he lifted and moved my limp body around. At one point he stopped and said, “These are your favorite pajamas.”

“Yes,” I said.

He grunted. “Easier if I could rip them off, but I’ll manage.”

And so he did.

Then he rubbed warmed oil all over my sore muscles. Not a massage, just gentle repetitive motions that took the edge off. I fell asleep with his strong hands rubbing my shoulders. I still hurt, but I didn’t care as much as I had.

I don’t know what time it was that I woke up to the hairs on the back of my neck crawling.

“Adam?”

A low growl from the far side of the room answered me. It wasn’t Adam’s usual growl, but it was him. I thought about the ugly, ugly monster.

“For Pete’s sake,” I complained after a moment of thought. “Get back to bed. I’m cold.”

Something very, very heavy got into bed beside me. I was worried the bed was going to break. A very big, hot body curled around me and rough skin touched my own. Adam rested his very large chin on the top of my head.

“Better,” I grumped, snuggling into his warmth. “Go to sleep.”

He was gone when I woke up in the morning—and I woke up early because moving hurt. It didn’t hurt as much as it might have if Adam hadn’t given me a hot oil treatment. Today was Monday, and though I was shutting down the garage until further notice, on Monday I had promised to fix the cars that absolutely only I could do. If I was going to have to go to work this morning, it was probably a good thing that I’d gotten up early.

Hannah was in the kitchen when I finally came down, feeling like I was a hundred and ten years old. She took one look at me and winced.

“Adam said you’d be in rough shape this morning,” she said. Then she walked over and kissed me on the cheek. “I’d hug you if it wouldn’t hurt both of us. Thank you for saving my little girl.”

“You’ve got me mixed up,” I told her. “Auriele saved Makaya. I just hit the bastard with my car.”

“Yes, well, thanks for that, too,” she said. “I hurt too much to sleep in, so I thought I’d come down and make my granny’s secret recipe for all that ails you.”

She brewed it all up in a double boiler, then poured it into two cups, took out a flask that had Granny’s Secret Ingredient engraved on the side, and added generously to the result.

She sniffed one of the cups, then added a teaspoon of honey. She sniffed it again.

“That’s smells right,” she said. Then she added another teaspoon of honey to both cups and shoved one in front of me. “Drink that.”

I looked at her. I knew what had gone into that pot. Moreover, I had a fair suspicion that there was something potent in Granny’s flask of alcoholic splendor.

“Just plug your nose,” she advised.

“Ha-ha,” I told her. “Funny.”

She drank it down. All of it in one gulp. When she was done, her eyes watered and she couldn’t talk—but she pointed her finger at the cup in front of me.

It was a gift, I knew. A thank-you that she’d gotten up ungodly early to prepare and feed to me.

It was the kind of gift that was unrefusable.

I followed her lead and drank the whole thing before I could think too much about what I’d seen her put in the brew.

When I was in college, after my first and only drunken bout, I realized that I knew too many people’s secrets to be drinking. After that, I’d made a habit of avoiding alcohol of any kind—so I didn’t know if my reaction to Hannah’s gift would have been the same if I’d gulped a glass of any old alcohol.

My skin warmed, my ears tingled, and so did the backs of my knees. My broken nose buzzed with a feeling that I was worried was going to wake up nerve endings that didn’t need to be roused. Instead, it settled into a pleasant sort of hum that drove the soreness away.

I couldn’t breathe or see for as much as a full minute, and my taste buds would have run away from my mouth in full revolt if they could have. But that was a fair price to pay for the lack of pain.

When I could focus properly again, Hannah said, “Warren’s going with you to the garage today. He’ll be here pretty soon. I would let him drive. But by the time you get to the garage, you should be okay for handling tools again.”

I moved my right shoulder, working it around in a circle. “I just might live,” I told her.