Smoke Bitten

11

A little buzzed and a lot less sore, I left Hannah making breakfast waffles in the kitchen and went down to the basement.

A red wolf paced restlessly back and forth in the cage. He didn’t seem to take any note of me, even when I stopped in to say, “Hello, Ben.”

Luke, on watch duty, looked up from the video game he was playing to say, “He shifted to wolf about two in the morning. I don’t know why or if it was his decision. And so I told Adam about two hours ago.”

It was six in the morning. That made yet another night of very little sleep for Adam. It was obvious from Luke’s tone of voice that he was worried, too. The last thing we needed in the middle of multiple crises was Adam impaired by lack of sleep.

I couldn’t do anything about Adam just then, but I did have one avenue of progress on other matters. If Adam had been home, I’d have taken him because he was better at negotiations than I was—as long as he didn’t lose his temper. And he’d have been better at this negotiation because Underhill, like most females, had a soft spot for Adam.

I knocked on Aiden’s door. “Up and at ’em. Hannah’s making waffles.”

“I’ll dress and be out,” he said, sounding alert. To survive terrible conditions, you learn to be alert.

I put my hand on his door.

“Waffles?” said Luke hopefully, and I let my hand fall as I turned to face him.

“I think you are on the top of the list,” I told him.

He smiled and went back to his game.

By the time Aiden made it upstairs, I’d carried Luke’s waffles down to him along with a cup of fresh-made coffee, and was arranging a second plate. Aiden had dressed in a sweater and jeans, even though the day outside looked to be warming up nicely. His fire had mostly returned, he’d told me, but there were lingering effects from what Wulfe had done to him.

The waffles I’d taken from Hannah’s second batch were an even golden brown. I’d poured a thin layer of homemade (by Christy) raspberry syrup and topped that with fresh whipped cream. I’d already dribbled some blueberries around and was slicing strawberries, which were the final touch on my gift for Underhill.

Aiden looked at the plate, raised his eyebrows, and said, “For me?”

“We’ll take it outside,” I told him, and comprehension lit his face.

He opened his mouth, glanced down the stairs, and simply nodded. “Sounds good.”

I started to pick up the plate and remembered another thing from my recent study of fairy tales. I got a small glass from the cupboards and said, “Hey, Hannah? Can I borrow your flask?”

I carried a glass three fingers full of Kentucky bourbon, made twenty years ago by Hannah’s grandmother in a batch she’d intended for family use only, out to the door in the wall in our backyard. Aiden brought the plate of waffles.

“I don’t know if she’ll come if you knock,” he told me.

“She’s a guest in our backyard. She’ll come,” I said with more confidence than I felt. I rapped the rough wood with my knuckles as if I meant business. Three times, because three is important in fairy tales.

Nothing happened.

Multiples of three are important, too, I told myself.

I knocked three more times. Waited. Knocked three more times. If this didn’t work, I’d take the plate and Aiden would knock. But my instincts told me that since I was asking her for information, I needed to be the one requesting her presence.

The door popped open and a cranky-looking Tilly stuck her head out. Her hair was dripping wet and had something that looked like seaweed in it. Even with my nose out of action, I caught a whiff of brine. Through the partially open door I heard surf and wind.

“What is it?” she snapped. “I’m drowning things and you’re inter—” She looked at my face and brightened. “Is there a fight?” Then her smile deepened. “Are you wounded?”

“She mostly killed a werewolf with her car,” Aiden said. “All he needed was the coup de grâce.” He paused and then in a mournful voice he said, “The car was sacrificed for the good of all.”

Tilly’s smile disappeared. “Alas,” she said. Tilly liked cars. She couldn’t get far enough from one of her doors to ride in one—and then there was all the cold iron. But she liked them anyway.

Aiden nodded his head in acknowledgment, then said, in a more hearty tone, “She managed the blow without harming the child the werewolf held over his head. She used one of her own werewolves—tossed her wolf onto the front of the car to catch the child. Mercy is a little hurt—but her enemy is dead.”

“You told that backward,” I said. And skipped most of the parts that would have made that story make sense.

“Important parts first,” said Tilly thoughtfully. “That’s how to tell a story. Skip the boring parts. End with the results, though. Good job, Fire. That was a good story—I especially liked the part where the car died. I do so love tragedy.”

She stepped through the door and closed it behind her, running a dirty finger around the latch. The magic she used sent a zing up my spine. Her white shift was drenched with water until she looked at it. Under her gaze, the cloth dried in a few seconds but looked stiff and crusted with salt. There were smears of green here and there. Something I was pretty sure was blood had soaked the bottom of her hem, which was about knee height.

“I need to ask you a few things,” I told her. “I brought you a gift as an exchange.”

Aiden held the plate out to her. She gave me a considering look before turning her attention to the food. She stuck a finger in the cream and licked it off. She ate a slice of strawberry. Waited. Then ate one of the blueberries as if it might be poisonous.

“Did you make this?” she asked.

And I wished I’d taken the time to make brownies or cookies or something, because the way she asked it, I knew it was important.

“I assembled it,” I told her. “My friend made the waffles fresh this morning and my stepdaughter’s mother made the syrup from the first fruits of summer. I whipped the cream”—thus ensuring that anyone in the house who was trying to sleep was awakened—“sliced the strawberries, and put it all together for you.”

“Friends and enemies,” she said. I couldn’t tell if it was a good thing or a bad thing. “Bitter and sweet. And the fruits of the earth. I accept.”

And she ate with the manners and speed of a starving stray dog as Aiden held the plate for her. She took it from him and licked it clean before handing it back. Her face was covered with whipped cream and syrup, and she wiped her hands on her white shift, leaving streaks of pink behind.

“Interesting,” she said. “I liked it.” She looked pointedly at the glass in my hand.

Aiden shook his head at me, so I didn’t say anything. Finally, she sighed, rolled her eyes, and said, “What do you have in your glass?”

“My friend’s grandmother’s bourbon,” I told her.

She had been reaching for the glass, but she hesitated. “I do not know bourbon.”

“Whiskey,” said Aiden. “Local variety.”

She reached for it again and I gave it to her. She said, suspiciously, “This has some magic within.”

“Huh,” I said. “It was more than just alcohol. I had some this morning and it took the ache out of my muscles. The woman who crafted it gave it to her granddaughter. She made it specifically for her family.”

Tilly sniffed it warily, then tipped the glass so she could touch her tongue to it. She smacked her lips together a couple of times. “Good,” she said. “Very good.” Then she drank the whole of it in one swallow.

She handed the glass back to me and said, “That is brewed with fae magic. Your friend’s grandmother has fae blood. It is an old magic she used, for healing and health.”

She dusted her hands and gave me a look out from under her hair. “Before you get all romantic about it, that spell was developed specifically”—she added weight to the word I’d used—“to keep human slaves working at full strength for as long as possible.”

I shrugged. “That was not the intent of this particular magic when it was mixed in with the drink.”

“No,” agreed Tilly. “But I thought it was interesting in the present company.”

“I am only half-human,” I told her. It was not something I said a lot, but it was important that she did not view me with the contempt she felt for humans—and fae, for that matter. Adam really would have been better for this. “My father is Coyote.”

She frowned at me. “I know that. It’s why I find you interesting.”

“I find you interesting, too,” I told her truthfully—and I meant it to be exactly as complimentary as she had.

She bounced up and down for a minute, then gave me a sly look. “Aren’t you going to ask me your questions?”

“Yes,” I said. “But first I wanted to tell you that it’s too bad the smoke weaver ran away. It seems to me that when someone loses a bargain, they should abide by the terms of that bargain and not scamper at the first opportunity.”

I was doing a little bit of guessing.

She scuffed her foot in the dirt. “Right? He cheated.” She sighed. “Okay, he didn’t cheat. I could do things to him if he had cheated. Our bargain was that I got to take him; I didn’t specify that he couldn’t leave.”

“Things” was not a nice word in that context.

“Is your bargain with him still in effect?” I asked.

She blinked at me, then tilted her head in thought. At last, she said, “There wasn’t a final term to it. And the whole thing was nonspecific. ‘Lose our bargain,’ I said to him—I think we were drinking mead—‘lose our bargain and I get to bring you here.’ He said, ‘What do I get in return?’”

She looked at Aiden fondly. “I thought about giving him Fire, because that’s my favorite, but I’m glad I gave it to you instead. You are a lot better friend than he was.”

“So what did you give him?” I asked.

“Body snatching,” she said with relish. “One of my favorite residents—because he was a hunter and brought me back such interesting beings to keep prisoner. He even had me help design his cells . . .” She got a faraway look in her eye. “He had a body snatcher. Those cells I never did open when I let loose the rest of the prisoners and slaves. Some of his prey might not play nicely with others.”

Aiden exchanged a look with me.

“That sounds like a smart thing,” I told her, and then kept going because I had the feeling that the world didn’t want her to keep thinking about those cells and whatever they held. “So you gave the smoke weaver the ability to take over bodies?”

She nodded. “He was primarily a transmogrifier—a shape changer.” She looked at me. “Better than you. He could change himself and others. The body snatching just made changing to new shapes easier.” Virtuously she said, “It wasn’t much of an alteration—and I gave it limits. He had to bite his prey, pilot them for a while to prime them for his use. When they were dead, their essence—their shape—was his to use until he wore them out. He wasn’t powerful enough for the magic, though.” She pouted. “He said it was a bad gift. I fixed it so that if he made his puppets kill some people, he could use that for power.”

She looked at Aiden. “If he’d known about Fire, he’d have bargained for that.” She paused. “I wouldn’t have given it to him. He didn’t need that much power. I just gave him a useful twist on his own.”

She had wanted to let him shapeshift more easily. To accomplish that she devised a method that involved taking over someone’s mind. Killing them—but not before they killed as many people as they could in order to power the magic—because the complex ability she gave the smoke weaver required more magic than he had. I thought of Ben and Stefan, Anna and Dennis, and even the poor hitchhiker who I had met only after she’d died, and I kept my mouth shut. No words that would come out of my mouth at that moment would be helpful.

“Very clever,” said Aiden, coming to my rescue.

Tilly beamed and curtsied. “I am clever,” she agreed.

“If the bargain is still in effect,” Aiden said after I remained silent, “does that mean you could recapture him?”

“Yes,” she said. “Oh, that would be lovely. I miss him.” She gave Aiden a scowl. “All of my friends leave me.”

He wisely ignored that.

“How can we help you invoke the bargain?” he asked. “What are the terms?”

“We were drinking very good mead,” she told him apologetically. “So it isn’t very complicated. He has a secret—and you have to tell him what that secret is.”

“I will do my best to see that your friend is returned,” I told her.

She looked at me, then sighed. “Your best. And you raised my hopes, too. That was silly of me. Okay, go on. Do your best.” She looked at Aiden. “The food and drink were very good. When she is dead”—she pointed her finger at me—“I hope you remember who your friends are. I shall be very lonely without you or the smoke weaver to talk to.”

She looked at me. “I’m sorry,” she told me. “I forgot who I was dealing with. I hope you die soon. Then, at least, I’ll get Aiden back.”

“No,” Aiden said. “I will always be your friend, Tilly. But I am not living in Underhill ever again.”

“Not ever,” she said, “means never. But never is a long time. I do not think it will be never.”

He bowed to her but didn’t say anything.

She pouted. “You aren’t being nice. I think I will go kill some things.”

She left, closing the door behind her with a thud.

“That could have been more useful,” Aiden told me. “I’m sorry.”

I shook my head. “It was useful, I think.”

I was glad to be working alone at the shop; it gave me plenty of time to think. I thought about Adam, mostly. But also I picked apart everything that Tilly had said, everything Beauclaire had said, and everything I had ever read about bargains. I was looking for a path through that did not involve me getting into a bargain in which I gave away my firstborn child.

Warren stayed in the office reading. He was a voracious reader—he’d told me once that he’d learned to love books when he’d been out for months on cattle drives. Warren had been a cowboy in the nineteenth century and it had become as much a part of him as the wolf was.

He’d brought three books with him and I was pretty sure there were a couple in the truck in case he wanted something different to read. He usually had six or eight books midread at any given time.

He was on his third year of working his way through War and Peace. He’d told me privately once, in a bout of frustration, “I think you have to be Russian in order to read this book. Especially if you are going to try to remember who is who.”

To combat his frustration with Tolstoy, he’d brought his old copy of The Princess and the Goblin. It had been read to tatters, and sometimes he’d quote from it. “Seeing is not believing—it is only seeing.” Or “That is the way fear serves us: it always sides with the thing we are afraid of.”

The third book he’d brought, the one he was really reading today, was Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers. It struck me that this book was something very interesting for a werewolf to be reading. What was a pack, really, but a military unit that sought to keep its members alive and make the world a better, safer place?

He’d offered to help—and he wasn’t a bad mechanic—but I needed to be alone in the bays so I could fix things and ponder.

We ate lunch at the soup-and-sandwich shop not too far from the garage. He read War and Peace (because he welcomed interruptions while he was reading it), and I did Internet searches on my phone to find more fairy bargain stories. “The Pied Piper” was promising in that all of the children and the piper disappeared at the end. But it didn’t fit anything else.

I was pretty sure that I knew which story our smoke weaver had come from—and that story told me his secret. Beauclaire had given me most of it. But I was also pretty sure that defeating the smoke weaver could not be as simple as shouting his secret to him—especially if I wanted to also save Stefan and Ben.

When we got back, I sat down at the office computer. I had been calling Ariana off and on since our first encounter with the smoke weaver. Now I composed an e-mail with everything I knew about the creature, and all the conclusions I’d come to. And I asked her about fae bargains—not the bargains made by Gray Lords or the most powerful of the fae, but the bargains the lesser fae made. And I sent that e-mail to Ariana and to her mate, Samuel, who was Bran’s firstborn son, and hoped that somewhere in Africa or wherever they were they could get e-mail.

As I was getting up to go back to work, I noticed a piece of paper on the floor in front of the printer. I picked it up and found myself looking at the bill for a generator.

I hesitated, then called the phone number Mr. John Leeman had left for us.

“Hello?” said a cautious voice—one I recognized.

“James Palsic,” I said. “This is Mercy Hauptman. Is Fiona there?”

“No,” he said. “What do you want, Ms. Hauptman?”

“I have information you should know—” And I told him what Bran had told me. Told him what he’d said about Chen, the Palsics, Schwabe, and Harolford. And I told him what Bran had said about Fiona.

“She’s not rogue for hire,” he said with conviction. “She’s killed a lot of people—in Bran’s service, I might add. But she is not for sale to the highest bidder.”

“Bran doesn’t lie,” I told him. “And his truths are generally not the kind of shaded truths the fae use, either. Look. You are going to do what you are going to do. I understand that. But I think that you should call Bran”—I gave him Bran’s number, and I heard the sound of a pen moving across paper as he wrote it down—“and you should talk to him. Ask him your questions and why Fiona told you that you could not go to Bran for help.”

“Is that all?” he asked.

“Yes,” I told him, and I hit the button on my phone that disconnected us.

Warren was watching me. “That might be putting the fox in the henhouse.”

“If he calls Bran,” I said. “If not—jeez. I should have called him on the shop phone because I just gave him my cell number to trace. I probably should have discussed that with Adam first.”

“Your cell number is on your card.” Warren tapped his finger on the counter just in front of the card holder with my business cards. “But if you had Palsic’s number, why didn’t you do that sooner?”

“I got distracted and didn’t think about it,” I told him—and I kept right on talking, hoping he wouldn’t ask me what had distracted me. I was not telling anyone in the pack about Adam’s monster until I was sure that was the right thing to do.

“I found the bill last night in hopes that it might have information we could use, but Adam and I got to talking—”

That wasn’t a lie, and if Warren drew the wrong inference—and he had, judging by his grin—it wasn’t my fault. It also wasn’t my fault that the whole pack seemed to be way too interested in Adam’s and my sex life. I didn’t feel guilty about using it against Warren.

“But when I picked that bill up just now, I thought, Palsic was horrified that Lincoln had been sent to attack Kelly’s house, where there were children. Bran seems to think Palsic is one of the good guys—why not give him the information he needs to save himself?”

Warren nodded. “Sounds like good thinking to me.”

“Nothing might come of it,” I told him as I texted Adam what I’d just done.

“I don’t see how it could hurt us,” Warren said.

Adam asked me to text him the number, so I did.

I will try to put a trace on it so we can follow his movements, Adam texted. It will take time. I think what you did might bear more fruit.

By six I’d finished everything I’d promised and the last car went home with its owner—who had grumped at me over the bill to the point that I was casting worried glances at Warren, who was supposedly reading his book. He finally paid his bill so I would give him the keys to his car and stormed out, vowing never to come back. He always did that. That was why he was one of my special customers whose car I had to fix instead of sending him elsewhere. Someone else might overreact or hurt his feelings—or overcharge him.

“Someone once told him that if he made a big fuss, people would give him discounts,” I told Warren. “And then it worked. So now he does this every time.” I watched him drive sedately off. “I think this might be his only social outlet. I’m not as fun as Tad. Tad can keep him going for twenty minutes some days.”

“If he had come an inch closer to you, he would not ever bother you again,” Warren said, closing his book with a snap.

Yep. I had been right to be worried.

“The day I need protection from Pat Henderson is the day you decide that pink is a real color.”

He grunted. “I’ve worn pink.”

“Because you love Kyle,” I said. I looked at him more closely. “You look better.”

He grunted. “We had a case turn bad. Leaves a sour taste in your mouth when you know something is going to happen and you can’t do anything about it.”

I watched him, watched his eyes brighten to gold.

“Oh?” I asked softly.

“Happens I did something about it,” he said. “Kyle will start speaking to me again in a few days. I didn’t do anything he wouldn’t have done if he could have—and I reckon that makes him madder.”

“Good guys must win?” I asked.

“And bad guys must lose,” he agreed, and we fist-bumped.

Adam came in late, but I was waiting up for him.

“Bed,” I said sternly.

His eyebrows rose and I could all but hear the occupants of the house prick their ears—even the ones in human form.

“Oh?” he said slowly. Trying to decide if he should take offense at my tone.

“Oh,” I said. “Yes. You. Me. Bed. Now.” I could raise my eyebrows, too. “Is that simple enough? Or do you need poetry? I might be able to do a haiku if you’d like.”

“I vote for a limerick,” called George from the basement. “There was a young lady named Mercy . . .”

“You don’t get a vote,” I called back.

There was a general round of friendly and interested laughter from various places in the house.

“It seems I am summoned,” said Adam, giving in—as I had hoped—to the pressure of the house’s expectations.

He had a smile on his face, but his eyes were worried.

“You bet, buster,” I told him, and I led him up to the room where I already had the oil warming. Because every good deed deserves reciprocity.

That night I dreamed of Stefan, dreams that had me sitting up in a cold sweat. Adam was asleep so deeply that I didn’t wake him. By my count he’d been averaging two or three hours a night for weeks; it was hardly surprising that he was out.

Still . . .

I touched his well-oiled shoulder and he grumbled, wiggling down until his face was tucked against my hip, his hand gripping my knee briefly. Apparently reassured, he went limp again.

Leaving my hand on his shoulder, I slipped back into my otherness so I could look at the bonds that tied me to my people. This time, somewhat to my surprise, I took both the bedroom and Adam with me. Adam . . . was lit up with tiny strings of light that crossed and crisscrossed his skin before they went off in all directions. Our mating bond was thicker than it had been but was still the same monster-skin texture and color. It felt . . . sated. Which was, I hoped, a good thing.

But that wasn’t what I was looking for tonight. I found the bond I shared with Stefan. This time it was a strand of lace the color of coffee grounds. It was so brittle that when I touched it, a small piece broke off.

I opened my mouth and pulled out a dandelion in full flower, fuzzily golden and cheerful. I stared at it a moment, because I had thought I was reaching for a gemstone—though in the Perrault story, the virtuous daughter also had flowers fall from her mouth.

Had I considered it beforehand, I would have envisioned roses or orchids, but maybe Stefan needed something less hothouse and more tenacious. That sounded right—because I needed him to be tenacious.

I put it to my lips and said, “Here is a bit of hope for you. Stay strong, my friend.” I would have said more, but that felt like all the words the little flower could carry.

I held the flower over the lacy ribbon and hesitated. There was no way to open this bond, which was already so fragile that it crumbled at my touch.

After a moment’s thought, I crushed the flower between my fingers and let the small bits of gold and green fall on the lace. When all of the flower was scattered in small bits, they melted into the bond—and a small spark popped and skittered from where the flower bits had been toward Stefan. Who now lay supine on the floor, though Adam and I had been alone in my otherness just a moment ago.

I slid out of the bed, knowing with certainty that Adam would not awaken here. I was still naked, but my bathrobe was awaiting me on the foot of the bed. I put it on and tied it securely before going to Stefan.

It took a lot more steps than it should have to cover the distance to him. And each step was weighty, as if I were traveling much more than the ten or twelve feet that lay between Stefan and my bed. Like dreams, the otherspace was sometimes richly symbolic and sometimes just weird. The trick was in figuring out which kind of weirdness I was dealing with.

As I neared Stefan, the carpet vanished between one step and the next, becoming the polished concrete of my garage auto bays, complete with the scratches from Adam’s monster’s claws. My bathrobe altered to jeans and a red T-shirt that said Scooby Snacks Forever in black letters across my chest. Little black bats began at the final “r” in “Forever” and concentrated over my left shoulder so that the shoulder of the shirt and left sleeve were black.

I didn’t own a T-shirt like that. Why my subconscious thought I should be wearing something so Stefan-like, I didn’t know.

Stefan himself was wearing all black, like a stagehand in a play. His eyes were closed and his face was tilted toward where the bay doors would have been if they had made an appearance here, but instead it was only inky blackness—like when I met Adam’s monster. There was a distant rumble of sound, and I forced myself to quit thinking about the monster.

Instead, I knelt beside Stefan and put my hand on his shoulder. The result was explosive.

He went from still to full speed in the blink of an eye, rolling away from me and up and onto his feet in what was obviously some sort of martial and practiced maneuver. But once on his feet he stood swaying, his hands to his face, covering his eyes.

“Stefan?” I asked tentatively. Because I suddenly had the worrying thought that it might not be Stefan. The smoke weaver could take his shape.

But as soon as the worry found me, I knew that whatever shape he wore in the real world, here in my otherness, he would still be the smoke weaver. And unless I summoned him, the smoke weaver could not visit me here.

Stefan let his hands fall to his sides and gave me a wild look. “Go,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“No,” I told him patiently without rising to my feet. “It’s okay. This is my space. You can come here because you are invited.” I indicated the coffee-colored lace bond that was tied around my right ankle and stretched to his left ankle.

He dropped to the ground as if his knees just quit working. If he’d been human, in the real world, and had fallen like that onto my concrete floor, he’d have been in agony. But it hadn’t seemed to have hurt Stefan—maybe because I hadn’t wanted Stefan hurt.

We sat there for a moment, about four feet apart.

Finally, he said, in a voice filled with wonder, “It’s so quiet here.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

His fingers played with a small place on the floor where Adam’s claws had left a stuttering arc. “Sorry,” he said, seeming to gather himself together, a mask suitable for social interaction forming on his face. “It’s been a long time since it was quiet in my head.”

“I need you to listen to me,” I told him.

He looked up—and there was such . . . despair in his eyes. “I killed people, Mercy,” he told me. “Innocents in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ve done it before.” He opened his arms to remind me of what he was. “But I swore that I would never do so again. And until this, I kept my vow.”

I crawled over to him and put my hand on his jaw. “Hang on, Stefan. I promise you that there is help coming if you can just hang on.”

He said, sadly, “I am not a hero to be holding on for one minute longer.”

I recognized the reference, though I couldn’t remember the author—someone German, I thought.

“I disagree,” I told him. “Just hold on, Stefan. Help is coming.”

He shook his head. “Marsilia won’t let me die by his hand,” he told me. “But he will not let me feed. I weaken moment by moment until soon, there will be no more of me.”

I thought about that one. Then, wordlessly, I held out my arm to him.

Stefan bit my wrist—and I let him, just as I had let him before. The feeding wasn’t real except as dreams were real, or powerful except as dreams were powerful. He didn’t drink blood from my veins—he drank strength, conviction, and hope.

When he had finished, he kissed my wrist, then rubbed it with his thumbs until the small wounds disappeared. He looked up. “I don’t know whether to thank you or to curse you.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “As long as you hang on.”

Much as an actor in an artsy one-act play might have done, he lay down on the ground and faded into the darkness that now surrounded me.

I ran my finger over the same mark on the floor that Stefan had touched, feeling the roughness against my skin. I looked around and like the spotlight that lit where I sat, the bed was illuminated. I could see my mate lying asleep, his face turned away from me. Faintly, I could see the hulking monster curled around him like a lover.

I got up and walked through the darkness to the bed. When I finally reached it, I climbed in and wrapped my body around Adam as if I could protect him from himself.

“Hope,” I said out loud, because I didn’t have another pearl for him. “Hope, my love.” And then I closed my eyes and slept.

Adam was still asleep beside me when I woke up the next morning. He didn’t stir when I got up and hastily pulled on clothes as quietly as I could—I didn’t see my bathrobe anywhere.

I had made it all the way to the door when Adam said, with lazy satisfaction, “You should shower, Mercy. You smell like sex.”

“I was trying to let you sleep,” I told him, coming back to the bed.

He smiled without opening his eyes. “Go shower. I’ll sleep until you get out.” And as I walked to the bathroom he said, “Thank you.”

“No, sir,” I said. “Thank you.”

I took breakfast—eggs and bacon and French toast—down to Ben, who was still in wolf form.

Luke, back on guard duty, shook his head as I walked by him. “He hasn’t eaten anything since yesterday morning.”

I frowned and approached the cage. I started to tell Ben that he needed to keep up his strength—and remembered Stefan, and what he’d said. I remembered how the last time I’d come down here, Ben had ignored me. But the time before that—when I knew it had been our Ben speaking—that time he hadn’t wanted me anywhere near him.

Ben would be telling me to leave.

Instead of addressing Ben, I said, conversationally, “It takes a long time to starve a werewolf to death. As they grow more desperate for food, their wolf takes over from the man. I wonder if you can hold the wild beast you will be letting loose.” I slid the plate through the long, narrow opening designed for that purpose and left Ben’s breakfast in front of him. “If you can, it will take a lot of magic. You couldn’t even hold me.”

Ben’s wolf gave me a baleful glare—but he got up and ate the food. He ate the second plate I brought down, too. And then he curled up with his back to the room and I couldn’t help but remember how Adam’s wolf had taken the same position when I fed him the amethyst. I hadn’t seen the wolf since.

“Hope,” I told Ben. I said it to myself, too.

I did some laundry—the sheets and bedding had gotten oil-stained. I didn’t flinch at the knowing looks that were sent my way by everyone from Kelly to Medea. The cat might have been my imagination, but she purred from her perch on top of the warm, clean bedding. She didn’t stop even when I lifted her off so I could fold them.

Adam worked from his office most of the morning, but he came up to the laundry room as I folded the last of the sheets.

“Have you been getting the looks, too?” I complained.

He laughed and took the folded sheets from me. “If you hadn’t issued your invitation so that the whole household overheard, you might have avoided some of this.”

I was pretty sure if I hadn’t issued the invitation in front of the whole house, he wouldn’t have taken me up on it. I grabbed the comforter, rolled it together until it made a manageable bundle, and said, “Sure I would have.”

He laughed again and followed me as I took the comforter back to our bedroom. “How about I take you away from all of this for an hour or so. Want to go out to lunch?”

Get out of the house filled with werewolves with sharp ears and noses—and one werewolf trapped in a cage. I liked the hustle and bustle and organized chaos. But getting away from the pleased and knowing looks?

“That would be amazing,” I told him.