Smoke Bitten

2

It was her voice that I recognized. My old neighbor, Anna Cather. I’d seen her just the day before yesterday at the gas station. The reason I hadn’t known her immediately was that the Anna I knew was in her seventies. The woman who stared at me while her blood pooled on the gray carpet, turning it black at her feet, was in her twenties.

Ghosts were like that.

I felt a rush of grief and though I knew better—of all people, I knew better—I hurried to her side and reached out to her. Her shoulder under my hand was as solid as any living person’s would have been, solid and cold as ice. Much colder than an actual corpse’s would have been.

She was dead, my happy neighbor who liked to eat my cookies and bring me bouquets of flowers from her garden.

Seeing ghosts was the other thing I did besides turn into a coyote. I knew that merely by paying attention to her, I made the ghost more real, gave her power. Gave it power—though I hesitated a lot more when I said “it” around ghosts than I used to. I was no longer convinced that all ghosts were nothing more than the shed remnants of the people they had been—things without feelings or thoughts. What exactly they were, I wasn’t sure, but I was doubtful that anyone else knew, either.

That I had noticed her was bad, but touching her was worse. If I didn’t want her shade haunting this house for years to come, I needed to walk away. But Anna was—had been—my friend.

So instead of turning my back on her, I left my hand where it was. “Anna, what happened?”

Tears slid down her face as blood started to trickle out of the corner of her mouth. She raised her hands to cover her mouth, then hugged herself with those bloody hands, hunching slightly as if her stomach hurt. She looked at me with horror-filled eyes.

“Why?” she asked me, sounding bewildered. “Why did he do it? He is the gentlest soul—you know how he is. He even takes spiders outside instead of killing them.”

“And live traps the mice,” I said in disbelief. “Anna, are you saying that Dennis killed you?”

Dennis, Anna’s husband, loved her with all of his gentle soul. They didn’t have a perfect marriage. I knew she took once-a-year vacations on her own, and that after his retirement left him following her around like a devoted dog just waiting for the next thing requested of him, she’d started volunteering at hospitals, animal shelters, and anywhere else that would get her out of the house. But she loved him, and he loved her—so they worked it out.

She hunched over and looked at me. “Why?” she said again. “Why did he do it? He is the gentlest soul—you know how he is. He even takes spiders outside instead of killing them.”

She wasn’t talking to me; she was on repeat.

Ghosts sometimes interacted with me as if they were still the person whose shade they were. But only sometimes. Sometimes they were locked into a particular moment, or sequence of moments. That Anna had repeated herself so exactly indicated that she was one of those. She had no answers to give me.

“Anna,” I said, knowing nothing I said could possibly make any difference. “I am so sorry.”

The wounds on her body might have been analogous to actual wounds—in which case someone (Dennis didn’t feel possible, despite what she had indicated) had attacked and stabbed her. But ghosts were not tied to physical reality. The wounds could represent what she felt when she died, or how she felt about death.

A 9mm gun spoke, breaking the normal early-evening sounds of light traffic, birdsong, and dogs barking. Anna and I both turned to look toward her house, though repeaters don’t usually notice things outside their narrow reality.

The sound of the gun left me with a heavy certainty in my chest, though gunfire in this rural neighborhood wasn’t uncommon. I felt sick. Anna’s face lit with a relieved smile.

“Oh,” she said. “Dennis?”

The blood disappeared from the carpet and from her body. The dark stains faded from existence between one breath and the next as if they never had been—because in some ways they had not. Only the tears on her cheeks and the lingering scent of fresh blood remained.

“Dennis?” she asked a second time, but this time her voice sounded like someone who hears a door open and is fairly sure of who has come in.

Her body softened with happiness. I stepped away, letting my hands fall from her. She took a step forward, not toward me, but toward something I couldn’t see. She lifted both of her hands, her whole body leaning to rest upon . . . Dennis, I supposed.

“My love,” she said, looking up—Dennis had been a great deal taller than she.

And I was alone again in the living room.

Wasting no time, I ran to the Cathers’ house. In the short time I’d been inside, dusk had turned to night. The darkness didn’t bother me—I can see as well in the dark as any coyote. It did provide me cover so no one would notice that when I ran full speed, I was faster than I should have been. The Cathers had been my closest neighbors, other than Adam, but they were still nearly a quarter of a mile away.

No one else seemed to have been disturbed by the sound of the gun going off. But no one else had had Anna’s ghost in their living room, either.

When I reached Anna and Dennis’s yard, caution made me stop to get a good look around. Someone had shot a gun over here, and though I had my suspicions of what had happened, I couldn’t be absolutely certain. There might still be an active shooter.

Dennis’s gray Toyota truck was parked next to Anna’s silver Jaguar in the carport. Everything was neat and tidy except . . . I stopped by one of the big raised garden beds that Dennis had built for Anna. On one of the timbers that edged the beds was a box with a new sprinkler head. I could see that someone had been digging a hole—presumably to fix a sprinkler—but hadn’t gotten far.

Dread in my heart, I climbed up the steps to the front door. The Cathers’ house, like many in Finley, was a manufactured house—a much larger and grander version than the one I’d just left. Painted tastefully in gray and white, the house suited the Cathers, being neat and tidy. The only extravagance was the graceful wraparound porch.

I was wondering if I should wait for the police—and that meant I had to call them first—rather than open the door. If I just went in, I might ruin evidence. But if I waited for the police, they would go in first and mess up the scent markers that might allow me to figure out what had happened.

The front door, I noticed, was slightly ajar.

Trying to be as unobtrusive as possible, I pushed the door open with my foot, but it only opened about ten inches—stopped by a jean-covered leg on the tile floor. The smell of death washed over me—Dennis, and then a few seconds later I could smell Anna.

I’d been almost certain that Dennis was dead when I’d heard the gunshot. Closer to certain at Anna’s last words. I hadn’t realized how much I’d hoped I was wrong until I opened their door and found the body.

Faced with the reality that both Dennis and Anna were dead, I found that I was not very concerned with fingerprints and pristine crime scenes anymore. I slid through the narrow opening between the door and the frame, stepping over Dennis’s leg and into the Cathers’ living room.

Dennis’s body lay crumpled midaction, as if he’d been walking toward the door when he’d shot himself. He had shot himself. The trigger finger of his right hand was still caught in the trigger guard. He’d done it right—put the gun in his mouth and blown out the back of his head.

My ears and nose told me that there was no one alive in this house—and no one dead except for Dennis and Anna. She wasn’t in the living room, but she wasn’t too far. The danger, whatever the danger had been, had passed.

I knelt beside Dennis, staying clear of the blood spatter and resisting the urge to close his death-clouded eyes. I could justify, if only to myself, my need to figure out what had happened. But altering the scene, even by a little, would be wrong.

Without touching him, then, I examined his body with all of my senses.

As far as I knew, this had been the first time Dennis had ever had a gun in his hand. It was an STI Trojan, a 1911 model chambered in 9mm. Anna’s gun. She and I had gone target shooting a few times over the years—the Trojan was her favorite. Dennis had refused to go with us, his dislike of guns unyielding. Anna had told me that her father had been a Marine and had taught all of his daughters how to shoot. She was a better shot than I was, and I wasn’t terrible.

What had happened to Dennis that he’d decided to change a lifetime of habit and conviction this afternoon? Drugs or alcohol would be my first choice. As weird as it was to contemplate that Dennis had gotten drunk (he did not drink to my knowledge) or tried drugs, that wasn’t as weird as Anna having an affair or doing something that had made Dennis feel that a gun was his only recourse.

I couldn’t smell any alcohol near his face or on his clothing, but if he’d ingested it more than an hour ago or if he’d been drinking somewhere else, I wouldn’t be able to scent it from a distance. If he’d been drinking enough to go on a shooting spree, I should be able to smell it on his skin, but it might be subtle and I’d need to get close.

The wound was a host to strong smells—blood, gunpowder. If I was going to smell for drugs as well as alcohol, for something, anything wrong, I needed to find skin as far from the gore as I could. He’d been wearing a short-sleeved shirt and his left arm was outstretched from his body.

As I put my face near his arm, I noticed that he’d been bitten by something recently. I hesitated. There were two distinct marks, recently made, with small bloody smears on the surrounding skin. They looked as though he’d been bitten by a tiny vampire. Maybe that was why the hair on the back of my neck was crawling.

It could be from a snake, I thought, remembering the abandoned repairs in the yard. Rattlesnakes were scarce around here, in my experience. Bull snakes would bite, but they had no venom. Not that it mattered; no snake venom I knew about would turn a person into a murderer. I was no expert—maybe there existed a snake whose bite was hallucinogenic, but not any snake anyone would encounter around here.

It didn’t look that much like a snakebite, anyway. What it really looked like was a rabbit bite. I have had my fair share of rabbit bites—when I am a coyote, rabbits are fair game. But Dennis wasn’t a coyote shapeshifter, and they didn’t have rabbits.

For some reason I thought of the jackrabbit I’d seen, the one my coyote had taken notice of because there was something wrong about it. Had it been headed in this direction? Maybe.

Could it have been infected with rabies? Rabies was a disease that rabbits could carry, I knew. Other than being traumatized by Old Yeller when I was a child, I didn’t have any experience with it. Dogs, I thought, at least in Old Yeller’s case, foamed at the mouth and bit people. It seemed like a long way from that to causing someone to kill his wife and then shoot himself.

Deciding it was unlikely that venom or rabies was the culprit, I resumed my examination for some chemical cause. I closed my eyes and inhaled, looking for the scent of alcohol, drugs of some sort—or illness. Despite my care, my nose touched Dennis’s skin as I inhaled.

Magic filled my nose, burned into my sinuses, and brought tears to my eyes as I jerked back from the burn. I opened my eyes as I lost my balance, narrowly avoiding falling onto Dennis’s body—which glowed with the magic that still bit at my nose like menthol oil.

Adam was of the opinion that it wasn’t really my nose that allowed me to detect magic—otherwise he and the other werewolves would be able to smell it, too. He thought that my perception of magic felt like a scent to me because I had no other way of processing it, a sort of synesthesia. He may have been right, but that didn’t change that it was mostly my nose that told me when there was magic around.

Usually, though, with magic that affected me this much, I’d have been able to smell it from the front door—maybe from the road. My fingers buzzed with it, my nose burned—and to my eyes, Dennis’s whole body glowed. I didn’t understand why I hadn’t noticed it until I smelled Dennis’s skin. No. Until I touched his skin. A lot of magic reacted to skin on skin.

Given that there was a brand-new door to Underhill in my backyard, not a quarter of a mile away, my initial suspicion would have been that it was fae magic at work. But it didn’t smell like fae magic.

I can sort witchcraft from fae magic, werewolf from vampire magic. This wasn’t anything I was familiar with. I had once gone to an exhibit of South American artifacts, and the whole room they were displayed in smelled like magic I’d never sensed before—dark and complex. The magic in Dennis’s dead body was closer to that than to fae magic. Though not an exact match. It also reminded me of the magic that I’d scented around a sorcerer who had made a bargain with a demon—and a little, very little, like Underhill herself. No, not like Underhill—but there was some of the same lingering feel to it that I’d felt the whole time I’d spent in Underhill—something primordial.

I didn’t know what it was. I did know what it wasn’t. It wasn’t witchcraft. It wasn’t fae—though that was a little less definite. Some of the fae shared far less similarity to each other than I did to a milk carton. It didn’t smell like the magic I had sensed from any fae I had encountered, anyway. With a nod to the faint resemblance to something about Underhill—and I wasn’t sure that Underhill counted as fae—it was not an exact match to any kind of magic I’d ever run into before. It certainly hadn’t belonged to Dennis because he hadn’t had a molecule of magic to call.

“No, Anna,” I murmured, though she wasn’t here that I could tell. “It wasn’t Dennis who killed you.” It had been, I was sure, given how well I knew Dennis, whatever had left so much magic in him.

I got to my feet and moved away from the body until my hands quit tingling, and then I went in search of Anna. I found her in the kitchen, collapsed on the white tile floor. She had fallen face-first, her blood pooling around her. At the edge of the dark pool was a white-handled French chef’s knife.

When I touched her body, it was still warm, and there was no bloom of the magic that saturated Dennis. Feeling confident that I’d found everything I was going to discover on my own, I pulled out my phone and called 911.

I sat on the lawn by the hole Dennis had dug and watched the police carry out their business. Adam showed up about the time the coroner’s office carried Anna’s body out of the house.

He stood beside me, watching the proceedings without speaking for a while. It seemed to me that he was trying to figure out what to say, rather than playing any kind of power game.

I thought of him, of all of the ways that he had risked his life since I’d met him. The image that had come to me earlier when I’d thought of my old home burning, the memory of Adam’s burned body in the hospital, lingered still. He had thought I was inside the inferno and nothing could stop him from diving in to find me. He’d nearly died to save me—and werewolves are hard to kill.

That man, that man I had to believe in. I had to believe that there was something going on that I did not understand—yet. Something that would explain why my mate was keeping me shut out of his life right now. Something other than the possibility that he didn’t want me anymore.

I hadn’t done more than glance up at Adam when he’d come over. I hadn’t even explained what had happened. It said a lot about our current relationship that he hadn’t asked me. How had we come to this? How had I let this happen? Because a relationship is a two-way street. It took both of us to let it get this bad.

I might not have been looking at him, but I felt him there, tense with uncertainty—even if our bond was shut down tight, I could still feel that much. It was not any lack of love, I decided, with the memory of his burned body fresh and real in my head, that had mangled our relationship.

Adam did not desert the people he loved. And he loved me. I would have faith that there was nothing wrong we could not fix.

I reached out and wrapped my hand around his ankle.

“Did you find them?” Adam asked, as if my touch had forced words out of his mouth. His voice was gruff.

I glanced toward my other side, where Anna’s ghost worked in her garden, pulling weeds only she could see.

“Sort of,” I told him. “Anna found me.”

“Murder?” he asked. He knew about me and ghosts.

“Oh yes,” I said.

The muscles in his leg tightened. “And you didn’t call me?”

Hurt, I thought—and an edge of anger. Too bad for you, I thought without sympathy. I might love the man, but that didn’t mean there weren’t consequences for the way he’d been acting.

“The danger was gone,” I told him—and then wondered if I was right about that. Since I try not to lie to Adam, even by omission, without good reason, I added, “As far as I could tell.”

And when that last increased the tension in his calf muscle, I wasn’t the least bit sorry. Petty of me, maybe—but I’d learned in a hard school that I couldn’t let a werewolf, especially a dominant werewolf, get away with pushing me around.

I told him what I knew, starting with Anna’s appearance in the living room of my manufactured house and ending with my calling the police. By the last bit, he’d calmed down about my not calling him. He didn’t know the Cathers very well. He didn’t go out making friends with the neighbors; he had enough to do running his company and the werewolf pack. I didn’t know the neighbor up the road from the pack house, either, for much the same reason, though I did make sure to send them something—flowers, candy, fruit baskets—every time there was a disturbance at our house. My relationship with the Cathers predated my relationship with Adam.

“Detective Willis was not best pleased with my entering the residence before they got here,” I told him, finishing my story. “But I don’t think he was serious about charging me with obstruction of justice.”

He gave another grunt, this one sounding a little amused. He hadn’t commented on the magic that had permeated Dennis’s body, or my possible imminent arrest, but the amusement was promising. I thought it was safe to change the subject.

“So are you going to kill Auriele?” I asked. “Or did you figure out a way around it?”

“Darryl should have his own pack,” Adam said, which wasn’t a yes. But it also wasn’t a no.

It was my turn to grunt. That made him laugh a little, though it was somber amusement, nothing that would draw attention when people were carrying bodies out of a house.

“Auriele was only a weapon Christy aimed at you,” Adam told me, his tongue apparently loosened by my imitation of his usual grunt. “Extenuating circumstance enough that I decided it wasn’t going back on my word to let her live. I explained to Auriele that it was time to practice some better judgment about what Christy has to say. The next time . . .” He sighed. “Hard to punish her for something I fell for as well. Of course you wouldn’t tell Jesse what to do. Of course she would use you as a sounding board before she confronted Christy or me. And it was Jesse’s place to inform both me and Christy.”

“Damn straight,” I growled, borrowing a phrase from my cowboy friend Warren. “So why did you fall for it?”

He didn’t answer my question. Instead he said, “Auriele apologized to Jesse. I’m not sure that took. Punishment enough maybe, for Auriele. At least as far as opening Jesse’s mail is concerned. She isn’t often in the wrong.”

True.

“I apologized to Jesse, too,” he said. “I think that went over better.”

“You didn’t open her mail,” I told him. “And Jesse knows how her mother works.”

“And that’s why she accepted my apology,” Adam agreed. “And why she talked to you about school before she brought it to me or her mother.”

“Jesse could have avoided all of this if she’d discussed matters with you before she talked to her mother,” I told him. “But Christy was easier. She’d only be hurt because Jesse wasn’t moving to Eugene. You were going to be hurt because you, and your position as Alpha of our pack, are the reason she doesn’t have more choices about where to go to school.”

Adam grunted again.

The coroner’s van pulled out of the driveway with the two bodies inside. As Anna continued to work in her flower bed, some of the real weeds got pulled. Only strong ghosts affect the physical world like that. Maybe she would haunt her own house instead of mine. I could hope.

“I can’t afford to lose Darryl now,” Adam said. “I talked to him alone about that. I apologized because, especially after this incident, he should be cut loose to get his own pack. Do you know what he told me?”

“He likes his job here,” I said, because I’d talked to Darryl about this a few weeks ago. “As far as the one with the salary is concerned, he could probably work remotely if he couldn’t find a job wherever his new pack would be located. It’s not like think tanks are available in every town. But he doesn’t want to work remotely, because he likes to meet face-to-face with his team and with the people who use his team’s work.” Like me, a werewolf gets a lot of information from scent and subtle body language cues.

“And—” I glanced up at Adam. This part Darryl hadn’t said, but I knew him. “He really loves the action our pack has been facing. He’s an adrenaline junkie. A new pack might be interesting until he got settled in, but I don’t think there is a pack in the US, other than maybe the Marrok’s, that is in for as exciting a time as ours.”

“That’s more than he said, but I think you have it right.” He smiled. It wasn’t exactly a happy smile, but it wasn’t one of those smiles I’d been getting lately that weren’t really smiles. He reached down and held out his hand.

“You are making me really uncomfortable sitting at my feet,” he told me.

“And you’re starting to get funny looks from the cops,” I said, taking his hand.

He laughed as he pulled me up. It was a quiet laugh—and this time I think he consciously pulled it down to suit the circumstances.

“Thank you,” he said when I was standing.

“I can just see the headlines,” I told him. “Alpha Wolf Makes Wife Kneel at His Feet.”

His mouth quirked up. “Don’t forget the ‘Human Wife’ part of that. There are still a lot of people who think you are my sex slave.”

“You wish,” I told him to the last part. “And it would be ‘Human? Wife.’” I lifted my voice on the end of “human,” so he could hear the question mark.

The newspapers had indeed begun to question just how human I was. That was a problem because one of the reasons the pack had been accepted so easily by the mundane population of the Tri-Cities was that people viewed me as one of them. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out that I wasn’t—strictly speaking—human. But I hoped that by then, they’d be happy with us because we were the good monsters who protected them from the bad ones.

“Back to our previous conversation,” I said, “we get to keep Darryl and Auriele.”

I was sorry when the slight smile slid away from his face and his expression regained its grim neutrality.

He said, “Or at least we put that off for another day. Auriele understands what she nearly caused to happen, though I don’t think she is apologetic about anything except for hurting Jesse. And that she still believes is your fault.”

I blew out a breath. “Figures.”

“You haven’t asked me about Aiden and Underhill,” he said.

“Do I want to know?” I asked.

Before he could answer me, Detective Willis approached. Willis was moderately tall, and graying, and carried himself like someone who’d been in a few fights. He was closer to retirement age than to his rookie years, but not by much. He was one of those men who used his size and his anger to intimidate people he thought needed intimidation, but he was capable of toning his presence down to gentleness when caring for trauma victims. He was smart, dedicated—and we got along all right for the most part.

“Generally speaking,” he said, “when either of you show up at a scene, it’s because something is afoot.” He stopped in front of us, his hands on his hips—but he knew better than to stare into Adam’s eyes. Instead he stared at me.

“My people tell me this looks like a classic murder-suicide,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Magic.”

He grimaced. “God damn it. I knew it had been too quiet around here.”

“I might believe it if Anna had stabbed her husband and then shot herself,” I told him. “But Dennis was possibly the least violent person I know.”

“And that’s why you think there was magic involved?” asked Willis, sounding hopeful.

“It is all over Dennis’s body,” I told him. “I’ve never seen anything like it. He is lit up with magic—I wouldn’t be surprised if someone could see him glowing from space.” A thought occurred to me. “You might want to be careful with his body.”

“Are you thinking witches and zombies?” asked Adam.

I shook my head. “Not witches, I don’t think. But there is a lot of magic in Dennis’s body—he wouldn’t want to hurt anyone else.”

“I’ll speak to the coroner’s office,” said Willis. “Do you have any idea what got him?”

I shook my head.

“Of course you don’t,” he said. “And you wouldn’t tell me if you did.”

“I don’t,” I told him. “But you might be right about the last. Your guys aren’t exactly the stand-back-and-let-the-werewolves-take-care-of-it kind of guys. Some things a gun works just fine on—and some things you need grenade launchers for.”

“And werewolves are the grenade launchers?” He sounded a little amused. He didn’t argue about my assessment of his people.

“That’s about right,” said Adam mildly.

Willis glanced back at the house. “Murder-suicide would be a lot easier than unknown magical cause.”

“It wasn’t a murder-suicide,” I told Willis. “Don’t let their kids think that it was.”

He nodded, his mouth softening. “We’ll call it an ‘under investigation’ situation. When you figure out just what happened, we’ll let the family know.” He started to leave, but paused. “It looked to me like he was heading out that door when he killed himself.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” I said.

“You think he stopped himself from killing anyone else?” Willis didn’t sound like an experienced detective. He sounded like someone who needed to believe in good guys.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “But he picked up the gun after he killed Anna—and if whatever had him had just intended for him to kill himself, that knife could have done the job. Dennis was the kind of person who would have killed himself to prevent anyone else getting hurt.”

Willis nodded, as if I’d answered a question for him, then continued back to his car.

Adam and I left the Cathers’ house. I started off at an angle, heading home, but Adam veered toward my manufactured house. I gave him a puzzled look, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“I see that Underhill decided to redecorate the backyard,” I told him.

He growled low in his throat. “That gate has to stay for a year and a day,” he said. “Then she can remove it, if we still wish her to.”

I laughed, I couldn’t help myself—I think I was mostly just punchy. But there was something funny about the disgruntled way he repeated Underhill’s words.

“Holy doorways, Batman,” I said. “We have an entrance to Underhill in our backyard.”

He looked at me then, though he didn’t quit walking. “Are you sure that it wasn’t fae magic that caused Dennis to kill his wife?”

I quit laughing and looked at the border wall between Adam’s house . . . Adam’s and my house and my old place. The stone wall, even incomplete, looked better than the old barbed-wire fence had.

“I’ve never felt magic exactly like this,” I told Adam. “It didn’t feel fae.”

“Coincidences happen,” Adam said. But he didn’t say it like he believed it.

“It smelled a little like Underhill—but not like Underhill,” I told him. “I suppose it could be something that came through her door. But it also smelled a little like that vampire who was also a sorcerer. More that than Underhill. It didn’t smell fae to me.”

“He was bitten,” said Anna, walking beside us.

“Bitten by what?” I asked her. “Was it the rabbit?” I was going to end up with my house haunted. Maybe I could make that a feature and rent it out as an Airbnb.

Adam didn’t ask me who I was talking to—he’d gotten used to it. Instead he said, “You’re going to end up with Anna haunting you if you aren’t more careful.”

“Most of them haunt places, not people,” I said uneasily. Because I knew of at least one case in which a person was haunted. That one had had some fae magic thrown in to help the weirdness along, but there was magic afoot here, too.

Anna hadn’t answered me. She was scuffing her shoes in the dirt and squinting up at the sky. “Looks like rain,” she said.

The skies were clear. Maybe they looked different if you were dead.

“Smoke.” Dennis’s voice in my ear made me jump.

I turned around, but he wasn’t visible. And Anna was gone, too.

“What?” asked Adam.

I shrugged, but unease left over from that whispering voice in my ears made me look around.

“I think I’m going out hunting a jackrabbit tonight,” I told him. Finding the rabbit would make me feel better. I was still pretty sure it was just an ordinary rabbit—but I wanted to make certain. I thought I would have noticed something that could pour that kind of magic into Dennis, notice it with more than the mild interest my coyote self had evinced. But then I hadn’t sensed the magic in Dennis’s body until I’d touched it.

“Did you get a reply?” asked Adam. “About what bit Dennis? I assume it was Dennis who was bitten.”

I nodded. “I don’t know that he was answering me. He just said, ‘Smoke.’ They are both gone now—not that ghosts are good at communication.”

“How can you be bitten by smoke?” asked Adam. “And why would that mean that you need to go hunting jackrabbits?”

I explained about the rabbit I’d seen and how the marks on Dennis’s wrist looked like a rabbit bite. We had reached the porch of my little house by the time I finished. Adam opened the door I’d left unlocked without saying anything about it.

“Anna told me, ‘He was bitten.’ I am assuming she was talking about Dennis—especially since I saw the bite myself. But that might not have anything at all to do with her death, just a leftover thought. It was Dennis who said, ‘Smoke.’ Then they both left. I don’t know if one had to do with the other.”

Adam closed the door behind us but didn’t step farther into the house. He bowed his head for a moment before meeting my eyes.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I know I hurt you today. I have been angry and short-tempered and I took it out on you. On you and Jesse.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk about this. What is up with you? Why the shutdown of our bond? Why no time together? Why no—” I was trying to keep my voice clinical, but if I’d said “no making love,” I would have had trouble doing it. So I said, “—sex?” And my voice wobbled a little anyway.

He nodded, as if he’d been waiting for those questions.

“The short answer is that I don’t know,” he said. “But something is wrong.” He thumped his chest.

I frowned at him. “With your wolf?”

He shook his head, but then said, “Maybe? It doesn’t feel like that—though the wolf is part of it.”

I raised an eyebrow at him.

“See?” he said. “It doesn’t make sense out loud.”

“Is it me?”

He huffed out a humorless laugh. “I promise that this is not an ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ speech.” His eyes brightened to gold. “I won’t let you go.”

“Not your choice,” I told him. “But as it happens, you’d have a hard time shaking me off. You are mine, and I’m pretty stubborn about things like that.”

His whole body relaxed with an odd shudder. He closed his eyes. My stomach settled for the first time in a few days. We could work this out.

And then he said, in a voice that was not his own, “You’d leave if you knew what was inside me.”

The wolf, I thought, after a weird moment. It was just Adam’s wolf. We’d spoken a time or two. But it hadn’t sounded quite right for the wolf.

“Nope,” I told him—wolf and man. “Not happening.”

“You should leave.” This time I was sure it was the wolf who spoke. “It would be safer for you.” And then Adam’s yellow eyes opened, but he gave a half laugh. “Yes, I know, that just guaranteed you are going to stick around until bodies start dropping.”

“Are bodies going to start dropping?” I asked.

“Mercy,” he said. “I don’t trust myself. I’ve been a werewolf for longer than you’ve been alive, and it’s been decades since I’ve had trouble with it. But now I wake up and I’m in my wolf’s shape—without remembering how I got there.”

Two weeks ago, I thought. He’d been a wolf when I woke up. I’d just assumed that he’d had a restless night; we both were prone to those after the witches. Sometimes on bad nights we’d go out for a run—on two legs or four. I’d thought he’d decided to let me sleep. It had been after that night that the odd distance he’d forced between us had happened; it might have been right after that night.

He saw me remember and nodded. “Yes. That time. But it doesn’t feel like the wolf is trying to take over. I know how to control that.”

“We cannot keep the people around us safe from ourselves,” growled his wolf.

I couldn’t find it in myself to be frightened of Adam—though I remembered clearly the look in his eyes when I confronted him on the stairs. He hadn’t hurt me then—and he would never hurt me. But I wasn’t the one who needed convincing.

“Is it something to do with the witches?” I asked tentatively.

“I don’t think so,” said Adam. “It doesn’t feel like magic.”

“Yes,” contradicted the wolf—startling Adam.

It was pretty weird having a three-way conversation when there were only two of us in the room. Adam and his wolf were usually more integrated than this.

“Okay, then,” I said. “Do we believe your wolf? It was something the witches did?” They had made him obey them—it was a gift one of the Hardesty witches had. One of the nightmares Adam had after that night was that under the witch’s orders, he killed me or Jesse.

Adam shook his head. “I don’t think he knows anything I don’t.”

“Okay,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I agreed. “Now that we have all that out in the open, how about you open up our mating bond?”

“No,” Adam said with emphasis. “I don’t want this spilling out on you.”

“No,” agreed the wolf.

“All of what spilling out on me?” I asked.

Adam flattened his lips.

“Adam?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

He backed up against the door when I tried to put a hand on his shoulder. I raised both my eyebrows and stalked forward until he was flat against the wall and I pressed myself against him.

He could have pushed me away. Instead I could feel him try to pull himself back, as if he wished his body could dissolve through the door so we would no longer touch.

He turned his head from me, his eyes . . . ashamed.

“To hell with that,” I muttered. He was only about four inches taller than I was, which meant that if he was trying to keep his lips away from me, there was still a lot of him I could reach. I kissed the skin under his jaw, soft but for the bristly hint of beard growing in. Then I rested my face against his neck and just breathed.

Gradually, his breathing matched mine and his body relaxed, melting into mine. Finally, his arms wrapped around me.

“I’m sorry,” he told me, his lips on my temple. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I told him. “Fix it.”

His chest huffed with a silent laugh, though the expression in his eyes hurt me. “I don’t know how.”

“Figure it out,” I told him. “The first step might be letting me in.” And I tugged lightly on the mating bond between us so he would be in no doubt about what I meant.

“No,” he said adamantly. “There are things . . .”

“What kind of things?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Just things.” His arms tightened around me and we stood, wrapped around each other like two children in the dark.

But he would not let me in.