Smoke Bitten

14

I couldn’t sleep.

A heavy arm wrapped around my shoulders.

“Feeling restless?” The growl in Adam’s voice made my toes curl—they knew what that roughness meant and they liked it.

So did I.

“Yes,” I answered, my own voice a purr.

“I can help with that,” he promised. And boy did he.

His efforts were above and beyond to the point that when his phone rang in the middle of the night, I only woke up long enough to hear a bit of the conversation.

“—false alarm, probably, sir, cameras don’t—”

There was no stress in Adam’s employee’s voice and it didn’t sound urgent, so I went back to sleep.

I woke up when Adam patted my butt. I cracked my eye open suspiciously and he laughed.

“Not waking you up for that again—not that it wasn’t fun. But we have some equipment problems. The alarms at the garage are going off again, though the cameras aren’t showing anything.”

The system at my garage had been developing quirks over the last couple of weeks. His IT people couldn’t run it down closer than “an intermittent glitch.” Adam had finally ordered a whole new system, but it wouldn’t be in for a couple of weeks.

“I’m going to check in on that, then drive out to work and give my people a surprise visit.” He did those to keep his people on their toes. And to let them know that he wasn’t asking them to do anything he wouldn’t do—because on his surprise visits, he’d sometimes pick a random pair of guards and do their patrols with them. Sure enough he continued, “I’ll be out most of the day. I have a couple of new people to torment.”

I grunted at him.

“Why don’t you sleep in this morning?” he said.

“How is it that you are this cheerful?” I asked him plaintively. “You didn’t get any more sleep than I did.”

“I am male,” he said, and wiggled his eyebrows like the villain from a B horror movie. “Sex is better than sleep.”

“Go away,” I moaned, rolling over to bury my face in my pillow.

He laughed and started to do that.

“But kiss me first.”

He rolled me back over and did that, too.

When my alarm went off an hour later, I was really tempted to sleep in. Then I remembered that it was Saturday and I would be the only one at work.

Jesse and her friends were going to a concert in Seattle. Adam had fretted about security—so Jesse had called Tad and invited him along as her “muscle.” Which was all well and good, but it left me alone to mind the shop. I could have asked Zee to come in, but he had a project of some sort going on and told me not to bother him for a couple of weeks.

My official hours didn’t start until noon on Saturday, but I had some cars to finish up and a boatload of paperwork. After a recent IRS audit, I was religious about my paperwork. In the end, I owed them $452.00, which they had graciously rounded down from $452.34. But at one point, before I finally located a box of receipts where I’d used it to balance a transmission, they had claimed I owed them a little over six thousand dollars. Which meant, my accountant (Lucia) pointed out, if I could have found the other missing box, the government would probably have owed me money.

So off to work I needed to go.

I felt better after a shower and some painkiller to ease away the ache of repeated vigorous nighttime activity. I paused as I was brushing my teeth. I never used to have to resort to painkillers. Was I getting old? Or had Adam started to use sex to make up for the fact he was keeping our bond closed down?

Hmm.

When I got to the garage, it was still early enough that the lights in the parking lot were on. I waved to the camera and imagined Carlos or Butch—or Adam—waving back. The office, when I let myself in, smelled overwhelmingly of gasoline.

I grimaced. Fuel odors were par for the course when running a garage—and at least gasoline was volatile and would clear pretty quickly once I opened the bay doors.

I’d parked a ’62 Mercedes convertible in the garage last night for safekeeping, and I assumed that was where the fuel smell was coming from. It belonged to a local car collector, the prize of his collection, and it was in for its annual checkup. It wasn’t surprising that it had developed a fuel line problem. Even the best auto engineers in the world didn’t factor in better than a half century of use.

It was a little odd that Adam hadn’t called me about it when he’d been here earlier to check the security system—but he knew I was planning on coming in early. And he knew that he’d left me short of sleep.

I was smiling as I tucked my purse in the safe and locked it. The safe was on the floor under the counter and my back twinged as I stood up. I stretched, touched my toes, and the ache dissipated. The stiff muscles clinched it, though. I would start with finding the fuel line problem, and that would give me plenty of opportunity to work out any lingering stiffness before I started on paperwork.

I turned on the stereo and found a soft-rock station. I hummed along with “Spirit in the Sky,” a song nearly as old as the ’62 Mercedes, as I opened the door to the bays.

“Hello, Mercedes Thompson,” Fiona said. “We have some business to conduct.”

She’d been waiting on the far side of the garage, where she had a clear shot at me. And she was standing in classic shooter position with—if I was not mistaken—Adam’s carry gun in her hands.

I took a moment to assess the situation.

A gas can had been overturned near the door, leaving a puddle of gasoline—designed to keep me from scenting an intruder. To keep Adam from realizing that he wasn’t alone, too. In the corner where the real brains of the security system lurked, Adam lay unmoving on the ground.

He wasn’t dead, I told my panicking soul. I would know if he were dead.

“If you cooperate,” she said, “I will not kill either of you today.

“There is a chair,” she said. “Go sit down.”

A couple of weeks ago I’d pulled one of the sturdy metal chairs from the office into the bays—I couldn’t remember offhand just why. She had set it in front of the lift in bay one. And on the ground around it were cuffs and chains that looked very businesslike.

I glanced again at Adam—he was breathing.

“Don’t worry, your mate is alive. He’ll stay that way if you follow my directions.” She wasn’t lying.

“What did you do to him?” I asked.

“Ketamine and silver,” she said. “A little trick I learned along the way.”

“Gerry Wallace has a lot to answer for,” I said. Gerry had been the first to concoct a tranquilizer that would work on werewolves. But I felt a little better. The tranquilizer could be fatal if the silver concentration was too great. But Adam was an Alpha werewolf. It would take a lot of the tranquilizer to kill him.

“Sit in the chair, Mercy.”

If I did that, all of my options were gone.

“The alarm glitches were you,” I said, to engage her in conversation.

“There is a reason that ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ is a classic,” she answered. “I have a way with electronics.” She nodded toward the corner where Adam and the heart of the surveillance system lay. “The video is currently playing a loop—after it replayed a segment of Adam coming in and leaving from a few days ago. His people won’t know that there is anything wrong until they don’t see you come in at noon.”

“But you needed more than just to game the security system,” I said. “This is not only your taking advantage of an opportunity. You had to watch us, track our habits—without anyone in a pack of werewolves noticing.” I put a little admiration in my voice.

There is very little that arrogant people like more than an appreciative audience. At the moment, I didn’t really care about reasons or methods; I was trying to buy time. I didn’t know what I would do with it yet—that depended upon her and whatever opportunities she gave me.

“That was trickier,” she acknowledged. “And more boring. Your house is supposed to be the home of a werewolf pack—so why are you teaching some kid to read? If I had to listen to another hour of ‘H is for horse,’ I’d have to shoot someone. Do you know that you have a baby vampire who likes to watch your house?”

“Yes,” I told her.

I’d thought she had watched us, but she’d done one better. She had bugged our house. Those lessons with Aiden took place in the kitchen, the heart of the home. But she hadn’t managed to bug all of it, I didn’t think. We didn’t talk about Wulfe a lot because we didn’t want to worry the pack, but he made sure that he didn’t go unnoticed. Two days ago, I know that Adam and I had talked about Wulfe in our bedroom. If she had overheard us—or come face-to-face with him—she would never have referred to him as a “baby vampire.”

After considering my words carefully, I said, “For the past few months we have had the government trying to bug our house on a regular basis. Adam does a daily sweep for bugs. How did you manage?”

I didn’t mention the fact that there were werewolves in and out of the house at all hours. She could not have done it without magic—and I didn’t remember her being able to use magic. Bran would have mentioned that when I talked to him. And magic . . . magic worried me. I thought about how she had called me by my married name that afternoon at Kelly’s house. She had known me by my maiden name. If she and her group of lost wolves were searching for a pack to take over, I was not important except as a weakness to exploit. But, in retrospect, I realized she had looked at me like someone addressing a target.

“Not all listening devices are electronic,” she told me. “I know a witch who specializes in surveillance.”

Suddenly I was a lot more concerned about why Fiona was still here than I had been a few seconds ago. I reevaluated our interactions with Fiona and her pack, adding in witches, and some patterns started to make sense. A wolf trying to take over a pack would not make an alliance with a fae creature—which was why none of the rest of her wolves had known about the smoke weaver. Witchcraft explained why the goblins hadn’t found Fiona or her people. Bran had told me that Fiona was selling her services to the highest bidder—and the witches certainly had reason to want revenge. Or worse. I had a bad feeling about why Adam and I weren’t dead.

Fiona smiled at me; her expression would have been friendly if I hadn’t been able to see her eyes. “Now that you have finished flattering me, go sit in that chair or I shoot Adam in the head. In that case, I’ll have to kill you immediately, too, or risk getting caught by your pack. If you cooperate, I will not kill him. I know you can hear that I’m telling the truth. Now, you have three seconds. One . . .”

I sat in the chair. But not because she had started counting. Adam was coming around—I felt the draw on the pack bonds as he started fighting off the effects of the tranq.

I pulled the chair sideways a little so that it gave me a better view of Adam. Hopefully she’d think that was the only reason I’d done it. But it meant that while she was dealing with me, her back would be mostly toward him. I wanted her attention on me, though I didn’t think she’d ignore him entirely. If he moved, she’d react. But there was a good chance that she would trust the drug. That tranq was nasty business—but Adam had encountered it before.

“Funny,” she said. “But I don’t care which direction you face.”

I raised my eyebrows and turned the chair to face Adam directly.

“Put on the ankle chains,” she said.

The ankle cuffs were nylon and looked to be standard-issue. With them on, I could use my legs with the same grace as the average mermaid on land. I deliberately fumbled with them to give Adam more time. The power that he was pulling made me dizzy. That draw alone was going to alert the pack that something was wrong. Almost as soon as I thought that, Adam’s phone rang. Fiona’s time had just been limited; all I had to do was keep her occupied until someone figured out where we were.

“And now the wrist cuffs.”

She had used two old-fashioned metal handcuffs, attaching each one to opposite chair legs. The bracing on the chair legs ensured that the cuff wouldn’t just slide off if I tipped the chair upside down.

She knew I wasn’t a werewolf. Nylon cuffs wouldn’t hold a werewolf at all. The metal handcuffs would last longer—and really tick off the werewolf who broke them, because breaking them would hurt. She knew that I could change into a coyote. She had called me “Bran’s little coyote pet.” But she didn’t understand what I was, because otherwise she would know that the cuffs, any cuffs designed to hold a human, were worse than useless. Maybe she thought that it would take me a while to change shapes—the way it took a werewolf time.

As soon as I had the handcuffs on, she walked up to me. She bent down to tighten the cuffs on my ankles. Then, smiling, she pulled a collar out and wrapped it around my neck. It fit tightly enough that it was decidedly uncomfortable. I heard chain rattle as she attached that to the back of the chair. Unlike the cuffs, the collar would hold me, coyote or no, so maybe she hadn’t underestimated me as much as I thought she had.

“Coyote’s daughter, Kent told me,” she said. “That explains a lot—like why Bran decided out of the goodness of his heart to let bleeding-heart Bryan adopt you. I wonder what Coyote did for Bran for the Marrok to make a deal like that.”

I was pretty sure that it was my mother who had pushed Bran into accepting responsibility for me. But Fiona didn’t know my mother, so I could see why she would look for someone else. Bran wasn’t known for his soft heart.

“Kent?” I asked.

“He’s one of mine,” she told me. “Witchbound to my service like Sven was.” She gave me a thoughtful look that I’d seen on other people’s faces before. So I had my abs tight when she punched me in the stomach.

It hurt anyway. But she was a werewolf; if she had wanted to, she could have killed me with that blow.

“Hardesty family paying you?” I asked when I could breathe. I didn’t want it to be them, especially when Fiona seemed interested in keeping me alive. I had close-up knowledge of the kinds of things black witches did with living victims, and I didn’t know of any witches blacker than the ones in the Hardesty family.

Fiona smiled. “I understand you had a run-in with them recently. They are very unhappy with you. I might have been offered a reward should you die and a bigger reward for a live capture. They don’t know what you are, Mercy—I haven’t told them yet. But they know that you were the key in the deaths of their people—and they think that you might have been the one responsible for destroying a treasure that had taken them generations to build.”

Zombies.

“Charles will hunt you down,” I told her, and she flinched. She was afraid of Charles.

She should have been afraid of Adam. He had quit drawing power from the pack.

“The witches pay well enough that I can hide for generations if I need to—and they have promised protection, too.” She gave me a sisterly smile. “But you and I know how far to trust the word of a black witch. I have some value for them, too; they like to play with werewolves. Too much to ever put myself in their power.”

If she had let them witchbond people to her, she was already in their power. I didn’t exactly know what she meant by the term, but I knew witches.

“Kent told you what happened with the smoke weaver?” I asked her. It didn’t matter to me, but I needed to keep her attention on me. “Bastard. I trusted him.” True enough to keep her from reading a lie. But the bite in my voice was fake—I didn’t want her knowing that I was wasting time.

Something rose silently from the place where Adam had been lying. Something too big.

Oh, my love, what did you do?

But I knew. He’d had to pull everything he could to wash the silver and ketamine out of his system. He would not have been able to pull more to increase the speed of his shift usefully. Not to mention that she would have noticed if he had tried to shift to his wolf form—it was not a subtle thing. An unarmed human form against a werewolf with his own gun—the odds were not optimal. He’d have taken them, but he had another option.

I did not think it had taken him ten seconds to change from human to monster.

“Fucking Rumpelstiltskin,” Fiona said. “What is the world coming to when you have to make deals with a damned fae and he turns out to be Rumpelstiltskin?”

“Rumpelstiltskin” was the last word Fiona ever said. A giant nightmarish monster landed on her from fifteen feet away and ate her neck in the same motion. The gun went off because she’d had her finger on the trigger. She was dead by then, but the gun had been pointed at me and the bullet hit me in the arm.

The monster that had been Adam dragged Fiona’s body back into the corner with all the useless surveillance electronics and settled in to feed. Growling defensively, as if I might try to take his prey away.

I didn’t need to see his eyes to know that Adam wasn’t home. Adrenaline is the enemy of control for a werewolf, and Adam had had to build up adrenaline to fight the tranquilizer, even with the pack’s help. He’d changed without a moment to spare for gathering his thoughts, centering himself. If he had changed to his wolf, I would have been surprised if Adam had managed to hang on to control under the circumstances. But that would have been okay. I was the mate of Adam and his wolf; neither of them would ever hurt me.

I did not think I shared that link with the monster.

I shifted to coyote and lost the wrist and ankle cuffs, but my neck was pretty much the same size in either form. I shifted back and found that the monster was staring at me. The sound of the cuffs hitting the floor must have attracted his attention.

He inhaled, nostrils flaring. I didn’t know if he could smell my blood over the scent of gasoline. I met his eyes briefly—silver and bright like the moon—then quickly looked away and down.

He didn’t make any sound, but I felt him come over to me. His nose touched the top of my head and trailed to my neck. I raised my chin and tilted my head, giving him free access to the pulse that beat wildly there. I was breathing in shallow, openmouthed pants because I was so scared.

I could smell Adam on him—but I could not smell the wolf. Just a sour musk that smelled like rage and hatred and witchcraft. It had grown stronger since I’d last met it. I had made a mistake in not calling Bran sooner.

Something warm and wet hit the top of my shoulder. Drool.

He bit my neck. If I hadn’t been wearing that collar, I’d have been dead. I think there must have been silver in it because he yipped and then roared at me. I kept my eyes closed because I didn’t want my last sight to be this creature, born of witchcraft and self-hatred. But he retreated back to his meal.

He was so precise in his movements, the chair hadn’t even skidded on the floor. He’d bent the collar and it restricted my breathing now. The arm that had been shot wouldn’t obey me. But I raised my free arm and felt around the collar. I found the latch—and the lock.

With two good hands and a lockpick I could have opened that thing up in a few seconds. If wishes were horses . . .

I could feel the stirring in the pack bonds—the rise of alarm. They would come here soon, and they would be able to take this monster down—if they worked together. If they didn’t hesitate because it was Adam. But some people would die.

And I would be dead before they got here, because though he was eating again, his face was toward me, his eyes focusing on my exposed abdomen.

Blow up the bond, Bran had told me. And then refused to explain what he meant. And he’d given me that advice without a full explanation of the extent of the problem.

It wasn’t like I had a lot of options.

I closed my eyes again, because I couldn’t do this with the monster staring at me. Then I put myself in the place where I could see the bonds.

The pack bonds exploded into sound, as if I’d stepped into a firehouse in the middle of an all-hands three-alarm fire. I told them, “Not now—hush.” And the otherness quieted.

I stood ankle-deep in a creek so cold it made my feet ache; the bond I shared with Stefan was still wrapped around one ankle and I felt his attention on me even though it was daylight and he should be dead for the day. I could have called him to me, I thought. Stefan would not hesitate when faced with the monster my mate had become.

“No,” I told him. “Not now.”

The bond around my waist was grotesque and repulsive, the red skin cracked open in places and oozing green slime.

I opened my mouth and pulled out a diamond the size of a baseball. It had been faceted into a princess cut and was clear and flawless—and cold.

I pressed my lips against it to warm it. And I told it the same thing I had told the wolf when I fed him the amethyst.

“I love you,” I said.

This was a place where words were powerful things, and feelings even more so. What I imbued that diamond with was more than the words I spoke—it was the huge ball of emotion that those words invoked in me: all the memories, the laughter, the joy.

When I took my mouth away and looked at the gemstone again, it glowed with every color I could imagine. I cupped it in both of my hands and told it sternly, “I am going to feed you into my mating bond—and you are going to blow it wide open for me.”

The pearl had been a soft thing; the diamond was a more suitable weapon. I used the pointed end—which was sharper than any reputable gem cutter would have left—to widen one of the damaged places in the mating bond. When I had a hole big enough, I shoved the gemstone inside. The slick green slime acted as lubricant, making my job easier. When the gemstone was entirely covered, I rubbed the poor bond apologetically as the green slime hardened, sealing the wound.

“Not your fault,” I told it. “We’ll fix this.”

I waited for a long time, watching the bump that was the gemstone slide toward Adam’s side of our bond. When it felt like the right time, I said, “Now.”

And the world went white.

I expected to wake up back in the garage, but that’s not what happened.

I woke up lying on a stone table in a small . . . What was the proper term for a building that had a floor and ceiling but no walls, just archways that held up the roof? It had the form of a temple—though there was no sense of worship here.

The floor and archways—and the stone table I occupied—were hewn from a tawny sandstone the color of a lion’s pelt. The whole building sparkled a little in the afternoon sun.

I sat up. I was wearing something that looked very much like the toga I may or may not have worn to a toga party in my dorm when I was a freshman in college. It was the same color as the sandstone right down to the sparkle.

I found that my hands and arms were bedecked with jewels. And there were gemstones on the sandals I wore, too. I stood up and walked over to the edge of the building, and a beautifully carved waist-high barrier appeared in front of me—as if it had always been there and I just hadn’t noticed it.

The air was sweet-smelling and the temperature perfect. In the corner of the room on a small table was food and drink. Music began to play, something catchy from the big band era that Adam was still secretly fond of.

“This is ridiculous, Adam,” I said.

Because I was in Adam’s otherness—on the far side of our bond. I had no real way to be sure of it—I hadn’t thought that anyone else even had this weird place they could go to. But my instincts had never steered me wrong, and in the otherness, instincts were strong enough to feel like a guide through the weirdness. I was in Adam’s space and, even here, he was trying to protect me.

Below the hill I was on, I could hear mortar fire. I’d never been on a battlefield—not an official battlefield—but I’d seen the movies. I knew what mortar fire sounded like.

I kicked off the shoes, hitched a hip on the barricade, and landed on the hill beyond. The big band music accompanied me as I walked for about a mile on a path that kept trying to take me back up to the top of the hill.

Finally, I stood still, put my hands on my hips, and said, “Adam, that’s enough.”

Then I stepped off the path and began wading through the dense foliage. About four paces into the woods, the music quieted and a path formed under my bare feet. This path took me down into a valley filled with dead bodies.

I picked my way through them. Some of them I knew. Paul. Mac. Peter. Others I’d seen pictures of. People from Adam’s military past. People who had worked for him. There was a whole section of people in Vietnam-era US military uniforms; some of them were missing body parts—and some of those had the parts they were missing stacked at their feet. Another section was filled with people I was pretty sure were Vietnamese—though that was not an ethnicity I had much experience with. Some of these were in uniform; some of them were not. Every face was unique. I had absolutely no doubt that every body corresponded to a person that Adam had killed—or he felt responsible for their death in some way. Adam organized his guilt in neat rows.

And then there was the field of children—maybe twenty in all. Some of these had faces, but some were featureless, as if there was a blanket of skin hiding who they were.

“That’s because I didn’t see all of their faces,” Adam told me. “The Vietcong used children—so did the South Vietnamese, for that matter. I don’t keep the adults whose faces I never saw—but the children were different.” He pointed to one faceless body. “That one was up in a tree, keeping us pinned down for two days. I shot him, but Christiansen was the one who found the body and told me our sniper had been a kid. I never saw his body—but I should have gone to find him myself. I was the one who killed him.” He gazed out at the row after row of his dead and said, “I owed it to that boy to look at what I had done, but I chose not to.”

I reached out to hold Adam’s hand, but he stepped away from me. When I turned to face him, I was back on the top of the hill, in the building without walls, but this time there was no sunlight. A rainstorm thundered all around and I was not alone.

Elizaveta Arkadyevna Vyshnevetskaya stood with one hand on the stone barrier, the other holding an apple from the plate on the little table. She, like me, was wearing a toga, but hers was burgundy. Most of the time that I had known her, she’d been an old woman. Here, as on the day she had died, she was young and beautiful.

“He doesn’t keep me in his garden of failures,” she told me. “I wonder why that is.”

“Because he does not regret your death,” I told her, but I knew as soon as I said it that it wasn’t quite right.

“No,” she said. “Because you absolved him of my death.”

“You think I am perfect,” said Adam’s voice behind me. “Beautiful, even. I need to be perfect for you.”

“Or she won’t love you,” said Elizaveta, and here in the otherness her voice had a power that tried to seep into my bones. “She needs you to be her hero, Adam. As beautiful and perfect as your face. You don’t want to hurt her with your darkness, do you, Adam? And you carry so much ugly darkness inside you, don’t you?”

“Buddy,” I said, turning my back to Elizaveta to face Adam, though leaving her behind me made my skin crawl. “If you think I believe that you are perfect, you’ve got another think coming.”

He stood on the other side of the room, and I noticed that that corner of the building was falling apart. The roof was not even sufficient to keep the rain off him.

Off the monster.

He was bound—as I had been bound—to a metal chair, larger than the one in my garage to accommodate his size. And the bindings weren’t handcuffs and nylon leg cuffs; they were vines of thorns that smelled of black magic.

“Don’t free me,” Adam said urgently. “I will destroy you; I destroy everything I touch.” He looked away from me. In a low voice he said, “I didn’t want you to see me like this.”

Elizaveta walked behind him and bent down to whisper in his ear. I couldn’t hear what she said, but Adam looked at me and spoke. “You are so perfect, so strong, my Mercy. I don’t deserve you.”

“Perfect?” I asked. I looked down at myself and realized that I was missing a few things.

“Ahem,” I said, addressing neither Adam nor Elizaveta, but the otherness that made this confrontation possible. “I survived the wounds that gave me my scars; I would like them back, please.”

It felt as though a finger touched my skin with sparkly pain that faded quickly but left the marks of my life behind. When it was finished—and I deliberately chose not to hear the faint laughing cry that might have belonged to a coyote—I peeled off my toga and displayed my imperfect self to Adam.

“I jump into things before I think about how it will affect other people,” I told him. “I am prickly and overreact when you try to protect me because I don’t want to trust anyone to have my back. I dislike your ex-wife and won’t make an effort to get along with her anymore—no matter how much easier that would make everyone’s life.”

I took a deep breath. “I hurt you because sometimes I need to walk out on my own.” I frowned at him. “And I’m not going to change any of it—though it would make your life better.”

“And you like to make me mad,” Adam said in a whisper. “Even though you know I’m dangerous when I’m mad.”

I smiled at him and nodded. “Yes. That’s your fault, though. I wouldn’t do it if you weren’t so sexy when you’re mad. And I love the knowledge that no matter how angry you are, you would never hurt me.”

Elizaveta bent to whisper in his ear again, but I took the walking stick in my hand. I noticed that it had made itself into a spear, as it sometimes did when I needed a sharp weapon. I thrust it into her, forcing her away from Adam. The spear sank deep, and blood the color of her toga bubbled out of the wound. I shoved her into the balustrade.

“You are dead,” I told her. “Go away.”

She tried to say something, and a viper fell out from between her lips followed by two asps, and then she faded away. The spear had no trouble killing the snakes. I liked snakes. If these hadn’t come from Elizaveta, I’d have let them be. But I didn’t want to leave anything of Elizaveta’s free to roam about in Adam’s otherness.

I turned to Adam again—and the vines and the chair were gone, the smell of black magic replaced by pine with a hint of mint. But Adam still wore the monster’s guise, wounds weeping where the thorns of Elizaveta’s vines had dug in.

“I am ugly inside,” he told me.

“Me, too,” I said. “And I’m not as pretty as you are on the outside, either.”

“I’m jealous and spiteful,” he said. “I don’t like it when men call you. When Bran calls you—or Beauclaire.”

I nodded. “I’m jealous, too. And I think I outmatch you for spite. I hate that Christy was your wife and is Jesse’s mother.” I looked around and then grabbed his horrible hand and dragged him to the balustrade, still stained with Elizaveta’s blood.

I climbed on top of it, and the blood disappeared before it could touch my dirty bare feet. Balanced on top of the stone, with his big hand making sure I did not fall, I leaned over and kissed him.

“I pick you,” I said—and the world dissolved around me.

I sat in the stream in my own otherness. The water was really, really cold.

A big gray wolf, his feet and muzzle much darker than the silvery fur on his back, waded in beside me. He put his muzzle on my shoulder.

I wanted to tell you that I love you, too, he said.

I blinked up at the shop light that was suddenly over my head.

“Your arm is broken,” said Adam, his voice ferocious. “I have it wrapped to stop the bleeding, but as soon as Carlos gets here we’re taking you to the hospital.”

“Fiona was working for the witches,” I said. His face filled my world, and I realized he was in his own human skin.

“I know that,” he told me. “I heard.”

“We need to tell Bran that Kent was witchbound, whatever that means.”

“I will,” he said. “Shut up now. Save your strength.”

“I love you even though you aren’t perfect,” I said.

He met my eyes. “I know that.”

“I’m not perfect, either,” I told him.

“I know that, too,” he said, his voice growly.

“You need to find some clothes to wear, and I think I’m in shock.” And I passed out before he could tell me that he knew that, too.

About a week later I was sitting at the kitchen table and Adam sat down beside me and kissed my shoulder, the one connected to my unbroken arm.

“Hmm,” I said, writing down the parts number from the catalog I was ordering from.

The guy who ran this particular parts yard didn’t believe in the Internet, but he had parts that no one else carried. The order was made more difficult because I had to write everything down with my left hand.

But mostly I kept writing because I could feel Adam’s amusement traveling through our mating bond. He was about to do something or tell me something that he thought was really funny.

“Okay,” I said, looking up.

His face was lit with laughter—and it looked good on him.

“First,” he said, “I need to tell you that Izzy’s mother is very sorry. She didn’t realize that the client she was talking to is the sister of a reporter for a tabloid.”

Izzy’s mother sold essential oils. I couldn’t imagine what she . . .

“Butch apologizes,” Adam continued, “because when I told him to watch the newspapers and TV news—he did not consider tabloids until he caught one of our new guards reading one of them.”

Adam set a stack of tabloid newspapers on the kitchen table in front of me. There must have been ten or twelve of them. The front page headline of the one on top said: Human(?) Wife Says Alpha Werewolf Is Sex Fiend, Seeks Help from Friend.

And that wasn’t the worst one.

I laughed until I cried. Then Adam picked me up, careful not to jostle my broken arm, and growled, “Nudge.”

“Help,” I called as he carried me up the stairs. “My mate is a sex fiend. Help.”

There was no help for me.

Adam got called into work that night, so I was alone when the sounds of a guitar and a violin drifted through my closed window. I got up and shoved the window open—which would have been easier without the stupid broken arm.

Sitting cross-legged on the hood of my old Rabbit parts car, Wulfe played a violin. In front of him, standing on the ground but with one foot on the bumper, Stefan played a guitar. They managed a pretty good version of “The Sound of Silence.” Small hesitations here and there made me think they hadn’t practiced it.

When they were done, Wulfe slid off the car and took a bow with a flourish worthy of a Shakespearean actor. But it was Stefan’s grin, not Wulfe’s bow or the performance, that put a smile on my face as I closed the window.

On the top of my chest of drawers, just as though it had always been there, the walking stick lay in its usual place.