Smoke Bitten

12

The food at the restaurant we’d decided upon was good, but it was the river view that brought people here. We took an outside table on the deck, which hung out over the water, and we weren’t the only ones who chose to brave possible bugs for the sunshine and river-freshened air.

The temperature had subsided as it sometimes did late in the summer. A few days ago, it had been in the triple digits, but this afternoon it was in the mideighties with a light breeze off the water. I saw a couple of people in light jackets and sweaters—ridiculous on the face of it. But the sudden drop in temperatures affected some people more than others.

Neither Adam nor I were wearing sweaters—I was a little chilled, but werewolves don’t feel the cold as much. I’d seen them run around naked in the middle of a Montana winter without so much as a shiver. Hot weather bothered them, but not cold.

Out in the late-summer sun, wearing a button-up shirt I’d bought him, Adam looked more relaxed than I’d seen him in a while. He also looked gaunt. He’d lost maybe ten or fifteen pounds over the last week. Werewolves need fuel for shapeshifting. I suspected that the monster needed even more fuel. Adam was eating, but he was burning it all.

“Hey, Mercy,” said someone I didn’t know as they passed by our table on the way out. “I read about your car accident. I’m so sorry—I’ve broken my nose a couple of times. It really sucks.”

One of the problems with being a local celebrity was that the newspaper and TV stations tended to cover any excitement. It provided an opportunity to frighten the daylights out of people, but also to do some PR. From the sounds of it, my Jetta’s fate had been used for the latter.

“I liked that car,” I told him with a friendly smile. “I’ll be fine, but we’re having a private funeral for the car on Wednesday.”

I’d said that last to be funny. We’d had a funeral for my old Rabbit, but the Jetta would actually just end up in my parts car graveyard without ceremony—though I might say a few words over her.

“Good to hear,” he said, and then his partner pushed him on with a nod to us and a “Let them eat, dear” to him.

When they left, I said, “I didn’t know the local news caught my high jinks with the car.”

Adam grunted. “Someone interviewed the police officers and got an official version. They called us, and my office sent a press release to all the news organizations. All of which downplayed the injuries so that your car’s death was the biggest news. Kept it off the front page of the newspaper and in the last five minutes of on-air news.”

“Huh,” I said.

“Do you want me to keep you up on when you make the news?” he asked. “One of my guys in the office tracks it for me—all the reporters have his name and contact information.”

“Like a movie star’s promotional manager,” I said, fluttering my eyelashes at him. “Assistant to Mr. Hauptman.”

He laughed. “I’ll tell him you said so. His main job is being big and scary to reassure clients we can protect them. He seems to be enjoying schmoozing the press—it’s a different look for him. He tells me that he’s just waiting until one of them actually sees him.”

“Butch?” I asked incredulously. “Butch is your PR guy?”

Butch was six-eight and over three hundred pounds of ex–football player and Marine. Aided by some facial scarring, he could compete with Darryl for scary.

“Yes.”

“You need to get him on the air,” I said. “No one will pay attention to a few werewolves if they can follow Butch around.”

“Do you want me to tell him to keep you updated?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know I should track that on my own, but . . .” I shrugged. “If I can get a heads-up, I won’t react to people like a goldfish.” I opened my eyes wide and made bubble-blowing motions with my mouth to illustrate my point. “It isn’t a good look for me.”

“I have to agree,” he told me with an appreciative grin. “Especially with the tape on your nose.”

I had forgotten all about the tape somehow between the mirror in my bathroom and the front door of the restaurant. Now I remembered. And the way the bruising on my left eye was darker and bigger than the one on my right. It gave me a lopsided appearance.

Self-consciously, I glanced around at the tables where people were studiously not looking at us: the very handsome—if too thin—man and the lopsided woman, who had just been making goldfish faces. Maybe, if they didn’t know Adam, they would just think that slender was his normal build.

“I think you are beautiful no matter how much tape is on your nose,” he said consolingly.

He wasn’t lying. There was a reason why—even though he had shut down our bond; now turned into a terrifying monster instead of a beautiful, terrifying werewolf; and could be completely unreasonable at times—I loved him to bits.

“I know a good optometrist who can help you with that,” I told him, and he smiled at me.

“So everyone knows about the car wreck,” I said, because I couldn’t say, Let me take you to Bran and have him fix you. I wasn’t sure Bran could fix him—and I knew that he wouldn’t go as long as the smoke weaver and Fiona’s wolves were still running around.

“Better that than everyone wondering if I beat you up,” he replied.

“Hah,” I agreed.

The waitress came and took our orders. She didn’t even widen her eyes at the size of Adam’s—we’d eaten here before.

After she left, I said, “I don’t know why it’s so different eating here than it is eating on the river shore by our house.”

“We could clear the river area and put up picnic tables down on the shore,” Adam said. “But I like it better the way it is.”

“With weeds and rocks and mud for all the river wildlife to use,” I agreed.

“And,” said Adam, raising his water glass to me, “here we have a chance to eat an intimate meal without the pack interrupting four times an hour.”

“With the added benefit that neither of us has to cook,” I said lightly. How could it be an intimate lunch when Adam still had our mating bond locked down tighter than a miser’s penny jar?

I knew about the monster he’d been hiding, and he still wouldn’t let me in.

Conscious that we were under surveillance by the curious, we avoided talking about the smoke weaver, the intruding werewolves, or Wulfe. Instead we discussed Jesse’s plans for school and whether she should get an apartment near the campus in Richland, which would give her some independence and a lot less daily travel time.

“Larry’s people,” said Adam, meaning the goblins, “would probably keep a close watch on her and alert us if there are any problems—as long as we pay them.”

“We have a number of werewolves who live in Richland near the school,” I said. “That way if there was trouble, someone could get to her over there pretty darn quickly. The question is, would Jesse want to do that?”

“Let’s see,” said Adam, and he texted her, his mouth quirked up, knowing that whatever her decision on the matter, Jesse would be excited to consider it.

He liked making Jesse happy. I wanted him to be happy, too.

“Have you thought about talking to Bran or Charles about what Elizaveta did?” I asked very quietly so no one else would hear.

This was neither the time nor place for that question, but I was so worried about him. He stopped texting and the small smile left his face. He didn’t look at me. “I called Charles yesterday. I was going to tell you about it last night, but . . .”

He smiled ruefully, his eyes carefully on a cormorant on the river. If he’d had good news, he’d have been looking at me.

“Charles,” Adam continued, “told me that witchcrafted spells usually dissipate when the witch dies, which we all know already. Death curses are a lot more difficult to deal with. He’ll look into it and get back to me.”

“Okay,” I said. I’d been hopeful that Charles would know what to do. Tonight I’d call Bran—assuming he was taking my calls again—lay everything on the table, and see what he said. Maybe he’d have more useful advice than “blow up the bond” if he knew what was really going on.

I wasn’t sure I’d tell Adam before I called Bran. Better, maybe, in this case, to ask forgiveness than permission. I was already feeling guilty in advance because of Adam’s weird reaction to the last call I’d made to Bran—and wasn’t that interesting.

Adam had gone back to his texting, so he didn’t see my assessing gaze. Maybe I was only feeling like this was a private, hush-hush matter because Adam was treating it that way. As if getting whammied by a scary and powerful witch was something to be ashamed of. He knew better than that. It must be something the curse was doing to him.

An e-mail came through on my phone. I checked it—it was from Ariana. Short and sweet, it read:

I agree with your conclusions. Bargaining is a thing of rules, especially for the lesser fae, with balance being the most important part. Bargains, properly made, are complicated things. Above all else, a proper bargain is balanced. Each party gets something they want that is of equal value. I save your life—you give me your firstborn child. That is a balance. You give me your bubble gum, I give you my balloon. That is also balanced. Unbalanced bargains have no power—and you need a bargain with power. Good luck, my friend.

Adam finished his text to Jesse, glanced casually around, then said, “Let’s save other important things for the car. We are getting a lot of surreptitious attention.”

“Sounds like a smart thing to do,” I said agreeably, and watched his shoulders ease down.

Don’t worry, my love, I won’t peel open your pain until after I talk to Bran about how to do it most efficiently, I thought. But better to do that than to find out that Adam had given in to despair sometime when I wasn’t around to stop him.

Elizaveta had broken open something inside him, and I wasn’t sure that just getting rid of the spell was going to fix him.

“You are healing remarkably quickly from the car wreck,” he said. Apparently picking at my wounds was a good subject change.

Fair enough, mine weren’t as deep, and they were getting better.

“Right?” I said. “I’m still achy here and there—and my nose still hurts. But I’m a lot better than I expected to be at this point. I’m pretty sure it’s Hannah’s fault.”

I told him about Hannah’s granny’s bourbon and what Underhill had said about it. I’d told him the gist of the conversation with Underhill yesterday, but I’d forgotten about Hannah’s bourbon.

“It’s not going to bring anyone back from death’s door,” I told him judiciously. “But it beats any over-the-counter painkiller all to heck.”

“I wonder if Hannah’s granny’s fae blood is the reason that Kelly and Hannah have so many kids,” Adam mused. “Though it seems like the fae blood should work against them, because the fae have more trouble reproducing than werewolves do.”

“Maybe it’s Hannah’s granny’s secret ingredient,” I told him. “Take one sip before bedtime as needed for conception.”

He rewarded me with a laugh.

My cell phone rang. I dug it out of my purse and looked at the caller ID. Palsic. I turned it toward Adam so he could see.

His smile fled, and he nodded.

I answered it warily. “This is Mercy.”

“This is Nonnie Palsic.” She sounded rattled down to her bones. “Could you help us? I don’t know . . . I don’t know what to do. He’s . . . like the trolls in The Hobbit.”

I had to think a moment—and then realized what she was saying. “You mean when they turned to stone?”

Adam had already taken out his wallet and was counting out bills on the table, paying for the food that hadn’t come yet. There were protein bars in the SUV. I would feed him on the way.

“Sort of,” she said. “But like that. Yes. Can you help?”

“We’re coming,” I told her. “Who did the smoke weaver get?”

“Smoke weaver?” she said.

“Fae,” I told her. “He bites people and makes them kill. And he can change one thing into another—like the old alchemists tried to change lead into gold. That kind of thing.”

“God help us,” she said, and then she took a shaky breath. When she spoke again, her voice was steadier. “Your smoke weaver has changed my mate into stone.”

“Where are you?” I asked her as we hurried through the restaurant toward the parking lot. Adam paused briefly to talk to our waitress and then caught up as Nonnie rattled off an address.

Adam took out his phone and keyed in the location. As soon as we were outside, we both broke into a jog. I wasn’t sure there was a reason to hurry, though. James Palsic had been turned to stone. Even Tolkien’s trolls hadn’t come back from that.

“Is Fiona there with you?” I asked, belting in.

“No, I—wait.” She took another deep breath. And again, it seemed to help. When she started talking, she was calmer. “Things you need to know. Fiona and Sven are on their way to kill Warren Smith’s boyfriend, the one who shot Sven.”

I glanced at Adam.

“Kyle’s at work,” he said. “Both Warren and Zack are on guard duty at his work, too.”

“Fiona likes to shoot people,” Nonnie told us in a weary voice. “She hits what she aims at.” Almost to herself she muttered, “I told James that she was bad news—but, as he pointed out, we didn’t have a lot of options at the time.”

“Who is with you?” I asked, as Adam pulled out his phone and called Warren.

“Li Qiang and Kent,” she said. “James said you told him to call Bran yesterday.” She hesitated, then said, “We’ve been trying to fly under Bran’s radar. Fiona said that our defection from the Galveston pack would be a capital offense—that he’d send Charles out to hunt us. He would kill us all. Fiona said that once Harolford was Alpha here, we’d be safe from retaliation because your pack isn’t one of the Marrok’s.”

“We exist independently because Bran allows it,” I said dryly. “Bran hasn’t given our pack carte blanche, and he wouldn’t have overlooked Harolford taking over. Did James call Bran yesterday?”

“Yes,” she said. “And talked to him for a while, apparently. But he didn’t say anything until Fiona and Sven left to go after their target—we were supposed to go after ours then. That doesn’t matter. We didn’t. Once the four of us were alone, James explained to us that Fiona had been lying to us all along: we could have gone to Bran for help—but Fiona is under a death sentence. She needed us.”

“Bran would have killed her, even if she and Harolford had succeeded here,” I told her.

“So James said,” she agreed.

“So how did James get turned to stone?” I asked.

“Bran invited us to Montana. As soon as Fiona and Sven left, we started packing,” she said. “James finished first so he went to get the car. He never came back. We were looking for him—and Li said . . . Li said, ‘Hey, Nonnie, do you remember a rock being there?’ And it was James.”

There was horror in her voice. I didn’t want to push her over the edge until she’d given us all of the information that we needed, so I didn’t ask her any more about James. I’d see him soon enough.

“When are you expecting Fiona back?” I asked. “We will help if we can, but I need to know what my people will be walking into.”

“Sven and Fiona are supposed to be back here by five,” she said. “But Fiona likes to savor her kills—and if you manage to keep her from her target . . . she doesn’t give up.”

I looked at Adam, who had just set his phone down. I hadn’t tried to follow his conversation.

“The three of them will stay indoors and away from windows until we give them an all-clear. Warren and Zack are armed. Kyle is sending everyone in his office home. We can hunt Fiona and Harolford down at our leisure.”

“Did you hear that?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Kyle Brooks is safe and likely to stay that way. We have time. I am going to hang up now and confer with Adam. Expect us about a half hour from now.”

“Okay,” she said mournfully. “We’ll wait.”

I hung up.

“We can’t help Ben,” Adam said. “And no one turned him to stone.”

“I’ve been working on how to deal with the weaver,” I told him. I grabbed the backpack we kept on the floor of the back seat and came up with the protein bars. “I’d like to have had more time to make sure I’m right. But I know who our villain is—and I think I know what we need to do.”

“Tell me,” Adam said.

“I can’t tell you his name—I think that might attract his attention in the wrong way.”

“But you’ve worked it out?” he asked.

I nodded. “Maybe. Probably. He’s not powerful as the fae go.”

Adam gave me a look.

“Really. Outside of the power that Underhill gave him, he is one of the lesser fae.”

“How do you know that?” he asked.

“The fae are creatures whose lives are bound by rules. That they cannot lie being the core rule all of them must follow.” I handed him a protein bar. “Here, eat this.”

“I never thought of them that way,” Adam said, taking the bar and starting in on it. I immediately felt a little calmer.

“That’s because you usually deal with the powerful fae,” I told him. “The Gray Lords, Zee, Baba Yaga, and the like. The powerful fae have a lot fewer rules and they are bendy.”

“Okay,” he said. “Yes, I’ve noticed that.”

“The other important thing to remember about the rules is that they constrain all the fae. But only the fae.” I frowned. “Dang it. I think that the rule about lying has to be an exception, because we know that the fae actually can lie—they just suffer a horrible fate if they do.”

“Maybe that is the rule,” Adam suggested. “If a fae lies, they will suffer a horrible fate.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling better. “That fits. And the fae can’t lie without suffering a horrible fate. But we could lie to a fae.”

“Only if we have a death wish,” said Adam. “But I know what you mean. I could tell Zee that you love orange juice. Which he knows isn’t true. But I could say the words and not suffer a horrible fate.”

“Right,” I told him.

“The weaker the fae, the more rules they have?” Adam asked, pulling the conversation back to the point.

“Yes.” I looked up and realized he was taking the most direct route to the address we’d been given. “Could we make a stop at home before we go see what the smoke weaver has done to James Palsic?”

His eyebrows went up, but he made a minor course correction that would take us home first. I unwrapped another protein bar and handed it to him. His lip quirked up, but he took the bar.

I watched him eat and thought about how I wanted to frame the information I’d put together. I needed him to believe me so that he would agree to the plan I’d devoted a lot of time to yesterday while I had been fixing cars. Because that plan required a certain amount of risk on my part—which was something that was hard for Adam. But I was the only person who could do it.

“Take brownies,” I said. “The lowest caste of brownies have very specific rules. They must find good people. Once they do, they clean their homes or do work for them—and this makes the brownies happy. But they can do these things only so long as the people they are working for never see them and never say anything about them. They must be given milk and bread—but cannot be thanked aloud. If they are seen, thanked, or not fed, the brownies have to move on and find someone else to serve. They have no choice about any of it.”

“What rules does the smoke weaver have?” Adam asked.

“He has to make bargains,” I told him. “If one is offered to him properly, he has to accept. That’s how Underhill caught him in the first place. And there’s a rule about his name, too. People who know it can’t tell anyone what it is. Before Underhill got ahold of him, he had only one power, to transform one thing into another. It is an impressive power—but it is also very limited.”

“Tell that to James Palsic,” said Adam.

“Yes, well.” I waved that away. It shouldn’t matter to my plan. I hoped. “Tilly told me that the intent of her upgrade was that he would have an easier time making himself look like a specific person. It made me think that was a problem for him before she changed him. Like maybe he couldn’t make himself look very much like a person at all.”

Sorting through the implications of Tilly’s story had taken me most of yesterday.

“The way to defeat him is to use the rules that he has to follow,” I said. Baba Yaga had told me something of the sort.

“I can already tell,” Adam said, “that I’m not going to like this.”

“Here,” I said. “Eat another protein bar.”

I drove Jesse’s car to the address that Nonnie Palsic had given me. Adam would collect what I needed from home and then follow me out; hopefully it wouldn’t take too long.

It wasn’t that far from our house—maybe ten minutes in a direction I seldom took, one of those out-of-the-way places that didn’t lie on a direct route between our house and anywhere I was likely to need to go. It was out in the hill country between the Tri-Cities and Oregon where there was no water available for irrigation and not enough houses that the city would pipe water out. This late in the summer the hills were a pale dirt brown dusted with sparse remains of grass.

I turned up a well-tended gravel road and followed it for a quarter of a mile that twisted around with the lay of the land, no houses in sight. It took a final turn, climbed a steep grade, and popped out on the top of a hill, where it ended in an asphalt circular driveway laid out before a huge house. The house had been carefully placed to hide itself from the highway below without impacting the panoramic views. A narrow ring of bright green grass circled the house, and there were a few raised flower beds that were unplanted.

I parked the car near the front door, as far as I could get it from the three people on the other edge of the driveway. It left me with about twenty yards to walk—it was a big circular drive. But I didn’t want Jesse’s car to suffer the same fate my last two cars had, so I wanted it well out of the action. I couldn’t do anything until Adam got here anyway.

I didn’t say anything as I approached the three werewolves because I was too busy looking at the tall, pillar-like rock they were huddled around. I had expected a detailed sculpture in stone—maybe because of Nonnie’s comparison to The Hobbit, or maybe because of how detailed the concrete version of the semi tractor’s tire at the Lewis Street tunnel had been. But this looked sort of like a basalt columnar joint—the kind houses like this used as landscaping focal points—except that it lacked the sharp-edged hexagonal structure.

I walked around to the side that the others were standing in front of, and I realized that the image I should have been imagining was more like Han Solo’s encasement than Peter Jackson’s stone trolls. This side of the rock had eyes and an opening through which I could hear the faint slide of air.

Nonnie looked at me with a tear-stained face and said, “He’s having trouble breathing now.”

It did sound shallow and irregular.

“Adam’s bringing what I need,” I told her.

“What kind of a place is this?” asked Kent, sounding traumatized.

“The kind of place where fairy tales live,” said Chen Li Qiang in a dreamy voice, “and monsters dwell.”

I gave him a concerned look, but he just hugged himself.

“We are the monsters,” he told me seriously. “And we are damned.”

I frowned at him and asked the others, “Has he been bitten recently? By anything, a rabbit, maybe?”

“No, he just falls into bad poetry when he’s sad. It was—” Kent Schwabe stopped as Adam’s big black SUV topped the rise and drove directly to where we stood.

Li Qiang watched it for a minute, then said, “Is there something wrong with the suspension? It seems to be bouncing more than nec—”

One of the rear windows exploded outward in a shower of glass.

“Nothing wrong with the SUV,” I said, and turned my attention back to James. His eyes, encased in stone, were red and dry. He couldn’t blink because he did not have lids. I wondered if the smoke weaver had done that deliberately, or if it had been a cruel accident. Regardless, they didn’t move. I couldn’t tell if that was because he couldn’t move them—or because he didn’t move them.

If it weren’t for the shaky breathing, I would never have believed that he was still alive.

“Oh my God,” said Jesse beside me.

“What are you doing here?” I said, horrified.

“There wasn’t anyone to drive the car,” she told me.

“Oh,” said Aiden in a small voice. “This. He’ll take a day or two to die all the way.”

“Not going to happen,” I said, with a lot more sangfroid than I actually felt.

I looked around and said, “Li Qiang? I am putting you in charge of making sure that Jesse and Aiden don’t get hurt. Jesse”—I tapped her on the shoulder—“is our human daughter. This is our son, Aiden.” I tapped him. I met Chen Li Qiang’s eyes. “I am trusting you because everyone else I trust will have their hands full—and Carlos has vouched for you. I trust Carlos’s judgment.”

Li Qiang gave me an oddly formal bow that would have been more at home on another continent. “You can help my friend?”

“I hope so,” I told him.

“Then I will keep them safe this day as long as I have breath in my body.”

I turned to Jesse and Aiden and started to say something, but Aiden beat me to the punch. “Your son.”

I raised an eyebrow. “It would be weird the other way around, don’t you think?”

His smile was a little tentative and he gave me a nod.

“Okay—you two and Li Qiang, I want you to stand . . .” There was nowhere safe, not until I was further into my gambit.

“Next to each other out of the way,” said Jesse.

“I’ll help keep them safe,” Kent said to me. He had to raise his voice a little to be heard over the sounds coming from the SUV. “If you are what I have heard, you will know I am telling the truth.”

He was. But he was also the one that Bran had been unsure of. I hesitated—but Aiden was capable of protecting himself, now that his fire was mostly recovered from what Wulfe had done to it.

“Thank you,” I said, nodding toward Li Qiang, so he would know I meant him, too. I liked having the (more or less) innocent bystanders innocently bystanding instead of getting hurt.

I looked at the SUV and said, “Hey, Jesse. You and Aiden are here. And that looks like Luke, Kelly, and your father in the car. Who is minding the fort?”

“Joel is there,” she said. “Darryl and Auriele are on their way—about twenty minutes out. Dad was going to leave Kelly behind but”—another of the back windows in the rocking SUV exploded—“they were having more trouble than they expected. It took all three of them to get him into Dad’s SUV, and it took all three of them to keep him in. Finally, Dad said that given that Fiona and Harol-somebody were out fruitlessly hunting Kyle, the house should be safe enough for twenty minutes.”

Ben would have heard that—which meant the smoke weaver knew it, too. So I should hurry and get started. Once I had begun, hopefully he would be too busy to launch a counterattack.

Aiden touched my arm. “Joel is good protection,” he said. “Hard to bite a tibicena.” And that was very true. Some of my worry left me. “I thought I might be useful here given my background. But maybe I should have stayed home, too?”

“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “Tough call to make. For what it’s worth, I’m happy to have you here. If you hear me about to do something stupid, you might warn me.”

He nodded. “Don’t put me so far away I can’t help.”

Nonnie touched the rock and then told me, “I will help guard your children. Help Li and Kent. I will keep them safe if it is in my power.”

“I will do my best for James,” I said, nodding. “I have a couple of guys who need rescuing from the smoke weaver, too. I’m going to try to do it all at once.”

She nodded mutely. Frowned and then said, “You aren’t the Alpha. You aren’t even a werewolf. Fiona says that your only gift is turning into a coyote. Why are you in charge?”

“Because Fiona is wrong about me,” I told her.

I didn’t say anything more, because I had no idea who else or what else might be listening. And because they were not pack—and they didn’t need my secrets.

When Li Qiang led the group the short distance to the lamppost that I had indicated, Nonnie followed. About that time, Adam, Luke, and Kelly managed to get Ben—shackled, chained, and in werewolf form—out of the back of the SUV, which now looked as though I was going to get a second chance to try to talk Adam into something other than black.

“Over here,” I said.

And they half carried, half dragged Ben to where I stood. All three of the men were bloody—all four if you included Ben. His rear legs looked like hamburger from the car windows. Ben, on his own, was no match for any of them by themselves, let alone all three. But they didn’t want to hurt him—and the smoke weaver had no reason to worry about hurting any of them, including Ben.

“Ben,” I said. “Hold on.”

“Don’t get any closer,” growled Adam.

He was right. I didn’t heal the way that the werewolves did, and I was not nearly as strong. So I stood back and did not touch him the way I wanted to.

“I see you,” I said. “And I have a bargain for you.”

Ben quit thrashing.

Adam murmured, “Set him down.”

The other two gave him incredulous looks. But he was their Alpha and they were used to doing what he told them to.

“A bargain,” I told him, “must have something that I want—and something that you want.”

And I realized I had a problem. “I need Ben to be able to talk,” I told Adam.

He didn’t tell me it was impossible, as he had every reason to do. I thought it might be impossible, too. Poor James’s breathing didn’t sound like he had time to wait at all. But this wouldn’t work if Ben’s body couldn’t speak.

Usually it doesn’t matter much that werewolves cannot speak in their wolf form. They communicate very well using body language, and they can scratch out letters if something is very important. If a matter is truly urgent, then sometimes the pack bonds provide a way to communicate with Adam.

None of that would work for the smoke weaver—what I needed to do required a voice.

Adam sent Jesse to the SUV to grab a ring of keys that was in the glove compartment. She had to rummage a bit but found it. She threw the keys to me before going back to where I’d asked her to wait.

Adam unlocked all of the chains that bound Ben. Undid the silver muzzle and the band around his chest. The only binding he left on was a heavy silver collar and a thick chain attached to it, which Adam kept hold of. Ben’s fur was burned where the bindings had wrapped him.

If there were any other way to hold a crazed werewolf, Adam would have done that instead. But the wolf had very few weaknesses, and steel bindings alone were not enough to hold the strongest of them. And, Bran had told me once, never assume that you have one of the werewolves who can be restrained without silver. If you make that mistake, it might be the last time you get a chance to be wrong.

Ben sat still for it all.

Adam glanced my way—and that was when the smoke weaver went for him. I knew it was not Ben. I didn’t need to see it in his eyes to know that Ben would never attack Adam.

Adam had the other wolf on the ground so fast I didn’t see him move. He put his head next to the great mouth as it snapped and growled.

“Change,” said Adam.

I felt the hard tug from the pack bonds as he pulled power from all of us. Kelly staggered and Luke reached out to steady him.

Adam leaned closer and licked Ben’s face where blood gathered from a small wound. “Change.

“Hold him down,” Adam said, his voice strained.

Luke and Kelly piled on. Changing for a werewolf is a horrible, painful, and slow process. The more dominant wolves can change relatively quickly—ten or fifteen minutes, a little faster if they pull hard on pack bonds. Wolves lower in the pecking order, like Ben, took longer—except when their Alpha forced power into the change.

But the painful part was important. I tried really hard not to touch a werewolf who had recently changed to either form for a few minutes because their skin was hypersensitive—and their muscles and bones ached from being reshaped and moved. Ben, changing to human with Adam, Luke, and Kelly on top of him, had to be in agony.

I hoped the smoke weaver would feel some of that, too.

I glanced away from Ben and my eyes fell upon the rock that held—or that was—James Palsic, and I found myself wondering why he’d been turned to stone instead of made a puppet.

According to my calculations, the smoke weaver was limited in the number of people he could control, and not being able to take me over at all had made him, according to Ben, obsessed with me. He had taken Ben, who belonged to our pack, and Stefan. How had he known about Stefan? Maybe Stefan had been coming to our house when I didn’t answer his call? The hitchhiker didn’t count, because she had been earlier. Lincoln could also have been lurking around our house when he’d been bitten, but the weaver had been riding him while still controlling Ben and Stefan—which meant that he should be able to control three people at a time.

It made sense, having taken Lincoln, that the smoke weaver was aware of these wolves and could choose another victim from among them after Lincoln died. But why had he turned James into a rock? Why hadn’t he bitten him if he could control one more person?

And I thought of Fiona’s reactions to Lincoln. She dealt with witches, why not fae? Assuming that she did not care about Lincoln—which I thought might be a safe assumption to make about her. What if she had bargained with the fae instead of opposing him? They had, after all, a similar goal. The smoke weaver, like Fiona, was driven to attack my pack. I didn’t know why.

James was taking Fiona’s pack from her, and the weaver had acted against him. That made sense. But again, why turn him to stone when he’d be of more use bitten? His mate would know that he was bitten, I thought. And then I had a terrible thought. What if he had not bitten James—because he had bitten someone else?

Oh. Oh no.

He had bitten someone else. Not Li Qiang, not Kent or Nonnie. I would know if it were one of them; I was pretty confident that I could read the signs. He had bitten either Fiona or her mate. And I was betting on her mate. And that meant—

“He can talk now,” said Adam sounding tired.

One enemy at a time, I told myself firmly, squelching panic as far down as I could. This was a chance, possibly my only chance, to send our unwelcome visitor back to Underhill.

Kelly and Luke pulled Ben up to his knees so he was looking at me. Adam kept hold of the chain.

“Mercy,” Ben croaked, his eyes terrified. Because he’d known all along what I’d just understood. It hadn’t been the smoke weaver kicking the bejeebers out of Adam’s SUV. It had been Ben, desperate to convey the information we all equally desperately needed.

“I know,” I said. “I just figured it out.”

Adam frowned at me and I shook my head. It didn’t matter because there was nothing to be done until this was finished.

“We’re here now, Ben. Now we have to do it this way or it will be an even bigger disaster.”

“Okay,” he said. “Hurry.”

“Smoke weaver,” I said. “I have a bargain.”

Bargains, properly made, Ariana’s e-mail had read, are complicated things.

“Bargains must be made,” he said. His voice was Ben’s, but it was not Ben.

“If you come here, in your own—”

“Blood and bone,” supplied Aiden.

“Blood and bone,” I said, trusting him. “You may bite me once to test your power against mine. You in your most powerful form.”

I was guessing that this was a factor. What bit Stefan had been much bigger than the rabbit who bit Ben. If the rabbit had been enough, why would the weaver trade up to bite Stefan at nearly the same time and place? Stefan was a very old vampire and a power in his own right among his kind. Ben might be a beloved member of our pack, but his actual age was very close to my own, and he was pretty far down the pack structure in power. Stefan was much tougher prey than Ben.

“If I win?”

“Then I am yours,” I told him.

He snorted. “What then the incentive? I could come upon you when you least expect it and have the same result.”

Could he? I wondered. Why hadn’t he, then? But it is important when dealing with immortal creatures to not allow them to distract you from your goal.

“Ask me what happens should you lose,” I told the smoke weaver.

“What happens if I lose?” he asked.

“Because I have defeated your magic once before,” I said, “it is only fair that I should pay you a penalty for the opportunity to make a bargain where the odds are not in your favor.”

Above all else, a proper bargain is balanced. I hoped that I had judged it correctly.

“Yes,” he said.

“What would you?” I asked.

“Answer three questions,” he said.

I pretended to consider it.

“I will answer one question because you come here where I am,” I told him. “I will tell you one true thing because I have already withstood your bite once.”

He stared at me. “Why do you bargain?”

“Fair question,” Aiden said.

“It is important to know if your bite at fullest power will affect me—or else I will always be worried that you will sneak up behind me in the dark.” True—but not the answer to his question.

Flattered, he smiled. It was Ben’s face, but it was not Ben’s smile. “I come,” he said.

And then Ben went limp in Kelly’s and Luke’s arms, and he began, brokenly, to swear. He looked up at me once, and I shook my head. It would take too long to explain—and at this point there was no good to be had telling the others. The weaver knew that we’d left our vulnerable alone in our home with only one protector—because Ben knew we’d left our vulnerable alone in our home with only one protector. And what Ben knew, the weaver knew, and what the weaver knew—Fiona and her mate knew.

Joel was home. That would have to be enough.