Smoke Bitten

3

I went upstairs with the intention of washing up, but as I walked past Jesse’s room, I hesitated. Light edged the bottom of her door. I knocked.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“Me,” I said, then, in case she thought Adam was with me, “just me.”

“Come in,” she said.

I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t a completely cleaned room (though the carpet still needed vacuuming and some spot stain remover). It was dark outside, but I wouldn’t have thought we’d been away from the house long enough for Jesse to have accomplished tidy in her room—but here it was. She took on her room once a month, and she was about a week out from her usual weekend cleaning frenzy.

Not only that, she’d had time to dye her hair—and freshen her makeup.

With her newly teal hair still wet, lip gloss and eyeliner intact, Jesse was sitting cross-legged on her neatly made bed, where she had been reading something on her phone. She set her phone aside when I came in and motioned for me to shut the door. It didn’t guarantee privacy, but it did mean that any werewolf in the house wouldn’t overhear us whether they wanted to or not.

Her eyes were puffy, but her lips quirked up. “I thought I’d try rage-cleaning. You are right, it does help. You were also right when you warned me I should tell them up front about changing schools.”

“To be fair,” I said, “I didn’t expect this level of fireworks—and I’m not sure it would have been any better if you had told them both the day you made the decision.”

“It might have kept Mom from bringing Auriele into it,” Jesse said.

I snorted. “You underestimate your mother’s ability to get people to perform in the Stupid Olympics for her.”

“Hah,” she said. “Maybe.”

“I didn’t come up to talk about that,” I said, waving my hand. “From what Adam said, all of the offending parties have apologized for being stupid without proving they won’t be stupid again. Which is all you can expect from people who are basically truthful.”

She smiled. “To be fair, Mom can get me to compete in the Stupid Olympics, too. I can’t afford to be too judgmental. But if someone is keeping achievement award points, for the record, I think Auriele won, hands down.” Her mouth tightened, but she continued, “So what did you come up here for?”

“Gabriel left you a note when he moved out of my place.” I held out the key to the house and then tossed it on the bed. “Your father didn’t see it, I don’t think. I left it where it was and didn’t open it.”

Her face paled and her nose reddened. She wiped her eyes carefully so as not to smudge her eyeliner. I could have told her that was a lost cause. “This day just couldn’t get any better,” she muttered.

“I never challenge the fates that way,” I told her.

She smiled absently and focused on my face. “Did you and Dad have a fight?”

I glanced at the mirror on the top of her bureau. Jesse wasn’t the only one who looked like she’d spent some time crying.

Damn it.

“Not as such,” I said.

I caught myself before I told her that Adam was working out some issues—though he’d been frustratingly unclear about exactly what those issues were. I wasn’t going to invite her into our marriage any more than I’d discuss things with Zee and Tad.

“I hope you set him straight,” Jesse told me. “He’s been unreasonable and grouchy for long enough.”

“Can’t argue with that,” I muttered, wondering if I was breaking my rule about involving Jesse in my relationship with her dad if she was the one doing the commenting.

“So why have you been crying?” Jesse asked. “Did he say something?”

No. At least not the way she meant it. Her father was shutting me out, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. That had been only one of the reasons I’d broken down and cried all over Adam tonight.

I said, “Dennis and Anna Cather are dead.” And I teared up again, damn it, this time for my friends.

We hadn’t done a lot together after Adam and I got married. Part of that had been the change in proximity. Though Adam’s house was no farther from theirs than my old one had been, it was on a different street—no more driving past their house every day on the way to work and waving at them as they ate breakfast on their front porch. Like me, they had been early risers.

Mostly, though, I’d limited our interactions out of concern for them. For years I’d flown under the radar of the bigger nasties around. Once I’d married Adam, flying low had no longer been an option. I was exposed to the supernatural community—and even among normal people I drew attention. I didn’t want to give the bad guys any more targets than necessary, so I’d restricted the amount of time I spent among people who couldn’t defend themselves from the kinds of enemies I now attracted—like the Hardesty witches as only the most recent example.

I don’t know why I hadn’t considered that angle on their deaths earlier. I’d been thinking it had something to do with Underhill’s door. Had the Cathers been targeted because they were connected to me?

Jesse jumped off the bed to hug me. “Mercy. Oh jeez. Anna and Dennis? What happened? Car wreck?”

She hadn’t known them well, but she knew who they were.

I hugged her back and stepped away. “Stop that or I’ll turn into a wet noodle and I need to keep it together.”

She gave me a sympathetic nod. “Boy, do I know how that feels. Joel sent his wife up. Lucia’s a hugger, which is awesome, but that’s why my eyes look like this. I managed to deflect her with helping me clean or else I’d still be bawling.” Which explained the mystery of how fast Jesse’s room had been cleaned. “What happened to Anna and Dennis?”

“Magic,” I told her, and then I gave her the full story as I knew it. If there was something running around that could cause Dennis to kill Anna, I wanted everyone I cared about to know about it.

“Witches?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Wrong kind of magic, I think. At least it doesn’t feel like any witchcraft I’ve ever been around. And there aren’t any witches around here anymore.” Not that we knew about, anyway. We’d killed them all. “It didn’t smell like fae magic, either.”

“Well, that shoots down my other thought,” she said. “With a door to Underhill in our own freaking backyard, I thought maybe something other than Aiden’s dangerous best friend had come strolling out.”

“I wouldn’t rule anything out about Underhill,” I said darkly. “But it’s a lot harder to get out of Underhill than into her.” I looked at the key that Jesse had clenched in her fist—and thought about her going past Underhill’s door to get to my mobile home.

“I hate to say this,” I told Jesse, “but I think that maybe you might want to wait until daylight before you go over to the house to retrieve the letter.”

She shook her head. “Nah. I needed to get out of this house tonight, so I called some friends and we’re all going out to a movie. One of them has a thing for Tad. It’s doomed, but it’s not my place to tell her that. But that’s why I invited him, too. I’m working on the theory that exposure will cure her of her crush from afar. Anyway, Tad offered to take us all in his new old van.”

Tad had just finished a build on a VW bus; well, mostly finished. Mechanically it was sound and the interior was completely redone, but he hadn’t decided on a paint job yet so it was still primer gray.

“He’s picking me up first,” Jesse told me. “He’ll be by in about fifteen minutes. I’ll have him stop at your house to pick up the letter.”

“Okay,” I said. If Tad couldn’t keep her safe, no one could. He was a good shoulder to cry on, too. “Have fun. Your dad and I are going out to chase rabbits.”

Finding the jackrabbit I’d seen was mostly an excuse to search. Something had hit Dennis with a lot of magic, and Dennis mostly just hung around his house, so whatever had happened had probably occurred nearby.

Jesse snorted; she knew that we weren’t hunting dinner. But she only said, “You two have fun killing cute fuzzy animals.”

I gave her a thumbs-up and headed out.

“Hey, Mercy?”

I stopped in the doorway and turned back.

“Be careful.”

“Always,” I told her—which might not have been entirely true.

Her laughter was a little sharp.

“I always try not to die,” I told her more truthfully.

“Okay,” she said. “And, hey, Mercy? Thanks for not reading Gabriel’s note.” There was an edge of bitterness I didn’t care for in her voice.

“Don’t give me too much credit,” I told her. “Your mother doesn’t willingly talk to me. If she did . . .” I shrugged. “She might have had me checking out his underwear drawer before I knew it.”

“Hah,” Jesse said, pointing at me. “I think you are the only person in this house who is totally immune to her.”

“That’s because I love you and I love Adam,” I told her in all seriousness. “That makes it impossible for me to love Christy.” That was probably more truth than I should have given her, but it had been a long day.

Her mouth turned sad. “Yeah,” she said. “I get that.”

I washed up in my bathroom, resting a cold washcloth on my eyes until they weren’t so puffy. I looked in the mirror and decided I was good enough, and headed downstairs.

I could hear Adam talking on the phone; I was pretty sure it was someone from work. Nothing important or he would have shut his office door. But if he was on his phone, then he wasn’t changing to his wolf. That gave me time to go talk to Aiden about the door to Underhill.

Aiden’s room was in the basement, so I just continued down the next set of stairs. He lived in what had previously been the pack’s safe room because Adam and his happy contractor (who said that fixing the damage routinely experienced by our house from a pack of werewolves had already paid for his kids’ college and was working on his grandchildren’s) had decided that it would be the easiest room in the house to fireproof. Aiden tended to have nightmares, and when he did, sometimes he started fires. There was a fire extinguisher in every room of the house and two in the main basement—one of them near the stairs, and the other on the wall next to Aiden’s bedroom.

Construction had begun on another safe room in the far end of the basement. Werewolf safe rooms kept everyone else safe from the occupant (presumably an out-of-control werewolf) instead of the other way around like safe rooms in human houses were intended to do.

A safe room started out as a cage constructed from silver-coated steel bars. Then it would be covered with drywall and turned into a fairly normal-looking room because cages don’t help anyone calm down. Our new safe room was still in the cage stage.

Aiden’s door showed its origins in that it was solid metal, but it no longer locked from the outside. I knocked on it twice.

Aiden opened the door. His hair stuck out in medium-brown swirls as it tended to when he got upset, because he ran his fingers through it and occasionally would grab and twist. Sometime since I’d left the house, he’d changed his clothes and cleaned up.

As soon as he had the door open, Aiden started apologizing.

“I am so sorry, Mercy. I had no idea Tilly was planning on this.”

“Not your fault,” I told him. “When an ancient powerful force of magic decides to do something, people like you and me don’t get much of a say in it.”

He didn’t look as though I’d relieved him of guilt. “If you hadn’t let me stay—”

“We like you,” I told him. “We’ll take you how you come.”

I’d told him that before. He was, I thought, starting to believe it.

He took a breath, then frowned at me doubtfully. “Ancient powerful forces of magic and all?”

“Yup. You’re in good company in this family.” I gave him a rueful smile. “Joel is possessed by a volcano spirit. I have Coyote, who likes to show up and make trouble whenever he chooses. Even Adam comes with Christy baggage that just keeps on giving.”

“Okay,” he said. “You are all cursed, and I fit right in.”

I laughed. Aiden learned fast. Anyone listening in would never think that he’d been trapped for who knows how long in that magical land and had only popped out just a few months ago. Jesse credited it to her tutoring with the aid of Netflix.

“I did come down to ask about Underhill’s door,” I said.

He nodded. “I already talked to Adam a little about it. She told me she put it there . . .”

He frowned trying, I knew, to recall Underhill’s exact words. Exact words were important to the fae—and Underhill, as far as I’d been able to tell, followed the rules that governed the fae. “She said, ‘I need a door to Mercy’s backyard. I miss you. The fae aren’t playing nice and I don’t want to owe any of them anything.’”

“Why would she owe the fae anything?” I asked.

Aiden shrugged. “I don’t know. But it wasn’t specific, so maybe it was something she said to distract me from the fact that she put a doorway in our backyard.”

“Can anyone else use the doorway?” I asked.

He nodded. “Me and Underhill. I made her spell it that way as soon as I saw it. She guards her doorways pretty zealously anyway, but there are monsters in Underhill and sometimes we get out.”

“Yep, well, there are monsters on this side of Underhill’s doors, too,” I told him briskly. “Don’t get feeling too special.”

He started to smile at me—and then his gaze grew suddenly intent. “Mercy, what happened?”

“My eyes aren’t swollen anymore,” I said, a little indignant. “I spent time with a cold washcloth.”

He reached up and put a hand briefly on my face—his hand was warm. “Your eyes are sad, Mercy. Washcloths can’t help that.”

I told him about my neighbors. I included the jackrabbit and the ghost. I left out my interlude with Adam.

“Their deaths hurt you,” Aiden said when I finished. “I am sorry for your loss.” Frowning, he leaned against the door. “There are a few things that can use a bite—use that blood contact to make people do their will. Vampires, for instance.”

“Marsilia would never permit it.”

Aiden shook his head. “Not Marsilia’s seethe. The ones in Underhill wouldn’t owe her any fealty.”

Like the rest of us, his thoughts had immediately gone to the door in our backyard when looking for a culprit.

“There are vampires in Underhill?”

Aiden said, “Everything you’ve told me about your neighbors’ deaths could have been done by the fae. Other than a few of the less powerful fae—and creatures like the goblins, whose control of glamour is different—they could all take on the form of a jackrabbit. And while the fae don’t use blood as often as, say, the witches do, there is a lot of magic in blood. But you told me that it didn’t smell like fae magic to you. That still leaves other options. When the fae were driven out, there were still servants, curiosities like me, and prisoners left behind in Underhill. Tilly opened the prisons when she exiled the fae who were their caretakers. Most of the prisoners were—or had been—fae, but not all of them were. There are some weird things roaming around. Weirder even than I am.” He shivered.

I was still stuck on vampires. “Vampires? Really? In Underhill? That’s like finding coyotes in ancient Egypt.”

“There weren’t coyotes in Egypt, right?” he asked.

“Not unless Coyote—” I held up a hand. “Sorry. Let’s get back to the idea that something escaped from Underhill through the door in our backyard and killed my friends.” I had a thought powered by his tales of creatures set free by Underhill. “How many escapees could there have been?”

“If something escaped, it would have had to be before I found the door,” he said. “I could believe that one creature escaped—but she doesn’t like to lose her captives.”

“It wasn’t there when I got home,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “That makes multiple escapees even less likely.”

“Would she know if something escaped?” I asked. “And more importantly, would she know which something escaped?” And hopefully give us more information on what it was and how to kill it.

He nodded. “I think so. But she will know that I’ll be mad at her over it—so getting her to tell us if something escaped will be hard. I’ll call her and see what she will tell me. It might take a while for her to answer.”

He didn’t mean that he’d use the phone.

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.” I started to go, then paused. “I should let you know that Adam and I are going out hunting jackrabbits.”

He frowned. “I think I should come along,” he said. “Just in case. Let me get my tennis shoes on.”

By the time we went back upstairs, Adam was waiting for us in his wolf form.

“I talked to Aiden. He agrees it might be something escaped from Underhill,” I told Adam. “He has decided to come help.”

Adam looked at Aiden, who gave him a cool look and said, “You are lethal, no doubt. Mercy is quick. But I lived in Underhill for a long time, and I made some friends there as well as enemies. Some of them . . . I know what they did in Underhill, but I have no idea what they could do out here. Magic works differently out here. Maybe we’ll run into someone I know and we can chat. And if not—well, most things burn when I want them to.”

Adam huffed a reluctant agreement. We didn’t like using Aiden as a weapon. He was under our protection, not the other way around.

But he was right—he knew things we didn’t.

“Okay,” I said. “But if I say run, you run.”

He gave me a look. It was probably not a look of agreement. Who was it that said leadership is a matter of never giving orders that you know will not be obeyed? I figured that his silence was the best I was going to do.

I stepped into Adam’s office to change. Modesty was a thing that I’d left behind a long time ago, but Aiden looked like a kid. Unless there were dying people involved, I would strip naked out of his sight.

Once I was changed into my coyote self, Aiden let Adam and me out of the kitchen and closed the door behind us. They followed me through the backyard. Night had fallen and the stone fence looked strange in the light of the waxing moon, out of place and mysterious. We all climbed through the old barbed-wire fence instead of climbing over the stone.

I had thought that I remembered exactly where the jackrabbit had been. But though I could smell a mouse somewhere nearby—and Adam scared up a pair of rabbits of the regular variety following the only rabbit trail we could find—there were no jackrabbits.

We went to the Cathers’ house and sniffed around the garden. I found a rabbit trail, but it was crossed and recrossed by a dozen people walking over it. I finally found a bit of it that led off the property, and the three of us set off through fields and backyards to find out if it was a jackrabbit.

Rabbits of all kinds smelled like rabbits. I could tell one individual rabbit from another—but to my nose there was no difference between a Flemish giant and a cottontail.

As soon as the trail took us through private property belonging to other people, Adam called pack magic to make us harder to notice. I didn’t argue; people shoot at coyotes and I had the buckshot scars on my backside to prove it. The danger was reduced because it was night—but there were three of us, and a 250-pound werewolf and a boy weren’t as good at stealth as a coyote was.

Rabbits don’t travel in straight lines, and this one had rambled all over. Our bit of hometown was a patchwork quilt of large fields and once-large fields broken up into odd-shaped properties with homes ranging from 1960s trailers to modern mansions and everything in between, as well as a few industrial plants on the river.

We passed by or through hayfields, marijuana farms, organic farms, berry farms, and a few small vineyards, though the best vineyard country is on the other side of the Tri-Cities, and we ran through a lot of backyards, too. There were horses, cows, goats, chickens—all of whom ignored us, wrapped as we were in pack magic. The cats saw through the magic, as did the foxes. But they only watched our passing without sounding any alerts.

At one point we jumped into a backyard that was full of old cars. Most of them were rotted husks, with kochia, tackweed, and Virginia creeper growing up through the old floorboards—but there was a row of cars next to the house that were covered in tarps, and one of them . . .

I ducked my head low and tried to see under the tarp without being too obvious about it. Adam nipped me lightly on the hip and Aiden laughed. A light went on in the house and we all scrambled to get out of the yard before the back porch light turned on.

Fortunately, there was a break in the fence big enough for Aiden to get through, and even more fortunately, that was the hole the rabbit had used to get out, too.

Trailing prey by scent for long takes a lot of concentration, even when there aren’t mysterious tarps hiding what I was pretty sure was an old Karmann Ghia. Adam and I started trading off who was following the trail every ten minutes or so.

Rabbits are usually more territorial than this one was. I’d trailed rabbits in circles before, but never such a long trail over new territory. We didn’t run into any old trails where the rabbit crossed its own path, as it would if this were its usual haunts. It made me think we might be on the right track.

The trail eventually took us across a road and into Two Rivers Park, a swath of green space along the river where the Snake joined the Columbia. Two Rivers wasn’t all that far from our home, but we hadn’t taken anything like a direct route here. Some of the park is groomed for picnics and recreation, but a fair bit is left wild with trails shared by equestrians and hikers. That was the part that the rabbit led us to.

Aidan stopped by a big sagebrush. “Hey. Over here,” he said. “I think I’ve found your rabbit. Parts of him, anyway.”

We trotted over to him but we didn’t get quite there before we discovered something else. I froze, but Adam growled, the silvery ruff around his neck rising up, as did the hair along his spine.

I changed into human. I was taking a chance because we weren’t out of sight of the road, but it was dark. Humans would need more light than that to see that I was naked. Nonhumans probably wouldn’t care.

Aiden could see just fine in the dark. But we needed to communicate and it was a lot faster for me to change than for Adam to do it. He could, if the occasion warranted, pull on the pack for power to make the change more quickly, but then he’d be stuck walking home naked. A lovely sight, sure, but also illegal.

“Werewolves,” I told Aiden. “Strangers.” I glanced at Adam when I said this. I didn’t know the three wolves I’d scented, but he was older than I and had traveled more among the werewolves. He knew a lot more of them than I did.

Adam just looked at me.

“Strangers to me, but Adam knows them.” And he wasn’t happy about it.

“Invaders,” said Aiden.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Is this your rabbit?” Aiden asked me, gesturing at the bits of dead cottontail he’d found. It wasn’t the jackrabbit, for sure. But we hadn’t been certain we were following the jackrabbit’s trail.

My nose isn’t as good in human shape. I glanced at Adam, who stuck his nose closer to the rabbit—and shook his head.

“No,” I told Aiden. “This isn’t our rabbit. They left this one as a challenge and a test. We’re too close to pack headquarters; they wouldn’t have killed something unless they were investigating how well we patrol our territory.” I looked at Adam for confirmation.

He growled, the sound rumbling deep in his chest. He bumped me with his shoulder, pushing me toward home.

“But what about the jackrabbit?” I asked him.

He gave me an impatient huff.

“Something made Dennis kill his wife,” I said. And, damn it all, I teared up again. “That rabbit is a clue.”

“How do you know that the rabbit we’ve been chasing is the jackrabbit you saw?” asked Aiden reasonably. “It could be any old rabbit. Do you smell magic? I don’t feel any.”

I shook my head. He was right.

“Even if it was that rabbit, Mercy . . . there is not, right now, any proof that the jackrabbit had anything to do with the killing of your friends. Though parts of Underhill are infested with jackrabbits—and the creatures that feed upon them—I don’t know of any killer bunnies.”

I gave him a narrow look. “Is that a reference to Monty Python?”

He grinned. “I like Monty Python. I understand the jokes. So if there is danger out here that isn’t related to whatever it is that attacked your friends, maybe we should listen to Adam and go home to regroup.”

“Three wolves,” I muttered, though I knew better. “I’m not worried.”

Adam gave me a look and I threw up my hands. “Yes, all right. Okay. I know. Where there are three, there could be more. We could be looking at a pack. And yes, I don’t want to meet a hostile pack when it is just you, me, and the firebrand.” I glanced out toward the river in the direction that the rabbit we’d been trailing had run. “But the rabbit we’ve been following isn’t acting like a normal rabbit and I want to know why.”

Adam sneezed.

“Home,” I told Aiden, resigned.

Back in coyote form, I led the way home with Aiden in the middle and Adam following from behind. We took a more straightforward way home, but since we also went by road instead of through fields and backyards, I wasn’t sure it was any faster.

“Do you feel that?” asked Aiden almost soundlessly. “Someone is watching us.”

By the pricking of my thumbs, I thought, though in this form I didn’t really have thumbs. But Aiden was right, I could feel the hair on the back of my neck spark with the feeling that we were being observed. I glanced upward but didn’t see anything in the night sky except for stars.

Adam huffed agreement and pushed us into a jog. We weren’t running away, but the faster pace might force the person or people—or rabbits—following us to break cover. It was harder to stay hidden at speed.

We turned down the road that led to our house, and whatever or whoever was following us was still behind us. Adam waited until a small grove of big old trees hugged the road, and he disappeared into the shadows there without a sound. He must have pulled a little more pack magic out, because the ground around the trees was covered with crackling-dry leaves and even Adam wasn’t good enough to get through those without making some noise.

Aiden and I kept to our jogging pace as if nothing were wrong—and a jackrabbit leaped out of the bushes and bit me on the neck, really sinking its teeth in.

I snapped back at it and missed but gave chase as it bolted through the underbrush and into an alfalfa field. We both tunneled through the bushy stuff using the furrows where the alfalfa grew thinner. A werewolf—I could hear Adam crashing behind me—wouldn’t be able to run through this at the same rate.

Jackrabbits are built for speed. They can run as fast as an ordinary coyote. I was not an ordinary coyote—and I was determined this rabbit wasn’t going to get away from me. I felt, faintly, as though there were a pressure on my head—like an incipient headache—but the sensation was lost in the greater drive of the hunt.

I pounced and snapped my teeth on flesh and fur. I had it between my teeth, though it didn’t feel or taste quite right, not like a rabbit. And then it was gone. Not run away—gone. It turned from flesh into smoke in my mouth, an acrid-vinegary smoke that burned my lungs and tasted like the magic that had filled Dennis’s body.

I dropped to the ground gasping and choking. My eyes burned and my throat felt like I’d tried to swallow a hot coal, and I curled up into a ball with the force of my coughing. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t . . .

Cold arms picked me up and began running with me slung over a shoulder. I heard a wolf growl—and the vampire carrying me growled, too, and said words I was not able to pay attention to. I didn’t have a clue where the vampire had come from and I was too busy trying to breathe to care.

The next thing I knew I was flung through the air and cold water closed over my head. It should have made everything worse—water not being conducive to breathing, either—but as soon as it surrounded me, the burning went away.

Survival instincts kicked in and I started trying to swim—and a wolf shoved his head under me and tossed me out of the water. We must not have been too deep because although he didn’t get me all the way out of the river, I landed on solid ground with only a few inches of water rushing around my legs. And I could breathe.

I stood there for I don’t know how long—probably not as long as it felt—just letting the sweet cool air rush in and out of my lungs as water swirled around my paws and dripped off my fur. Adam stalked out of the river to stand beside me, his teeth bared in a snarl aimed at the vampire standing on dry ground.

“Don’t be dramatic,” said the vampire. “I was just saving her life. You should be thanking me.” He gave a sad sigh. “I am afraid that Marsilia is correct when she says that good manners are a casualty of this modern age.”

“Why the river?” asked Aiden in a mild tone. He was standing on the shore, but he was wet, so he must have jumped in after me, too. I hadn’t noticed.

“Everyone who ever read Washington Irving knows that running water can wash away magic,” said the vampire. “Or is that story the one that says evil can’t cross running water? I forget.”

“Huh,” said Aiden, keeping a wary eye on Wulfe. “How fortunate that you were here.”

Wulfe was the scariest vampire I had ever met—and I’d met Bonarata, he who ruled Europe. But Bonarata was predictable to a certain extent—which Wulfe was not. I’d known that Wulfe could work magic, too, that he was a wizard—able to manipulate nonliving things with magic. I had known he could do a little of other sorts of magic, but I’d always assumed that it was something to do with being a vampire, a very old vampire. And all that might be so, but I’d recently learned that he was also a witch.

I was afraid of witches. I was afraid of vampires. I was very, very afraid of Wulfe.

The night all the witches had died, I’d used my affinity with the dead to lay an army of zombies to rest. I’d gathered them up in my magic and told them, “Be at peace.” They’d all been released from the hold the witches had bound them with. As one, they had dropped to the ground and left their corpses behind. Wulfe had been touching me at the time—and he’d dropped to the ground, too.

I’d been worried that I’d killed him . . . destroyed him. I needed to figure out a word that encompassed what happened when a vampire ceased to exist. “Dead-dead,” maybe? An end to living death? But Wulfe had recovered, leaving me caught between relief (he had been there because he was helping me) and worry—Wulfe alive was a lot more of a problem than the guilt I’d have felt for inadvertently ending his vampiric existence.

Whatever it was I had done had interested him very much. Ever since the night of the witches, I’d been catching his scent around our yard when there was no reason for him to be there. I’d even caught a glimpse of him now and then, when he wanted me to know he was nearby.

I’d treated him as I preferred to treat ghosts. If I didn’t pay attention to him, maybe he’d go away.

“Not fortunate,” demurred Wulfe, answering Aiden with a coyness that would have been more appropriate from a Southern belle in an old movie. In old movies, overacting was standard fare. “Not mere luck. I am stalking Mercy. Of course I was around, because that’s what stalkers do, or so I’ve read. It’s my new hobby.”

I stared at him, and then I coughed up some river water, which felt a lot better than that smoke had but was still not fun. Then I stared at him some more—and started shivering. It might have been the water and the night air.

With his words, Wulfe had destroyed my ability to ignore his lurking. Stalking. My friend Stefan, who was also a vampire, had warned me that Wulfe thought I was interesting. And that had been before I’d done whatever I’d done to him.

Wulfe smiled at me. To someone who didn’t know him, hadn’t seen him with enslaved victims he was slowly killing, that smile might have been sweet. But I knew better. His expression sent cold chills into my chest. There was intent in his eyes. He was hunting and I was his prey.

When I get scared, it sometimes manifests as anger. I wanted very badly to shift back to human so I could tell him what I thought about his hobby. I didn’t, though. I didn’t want to be naked in front of him. It wasn’t modesty. Naked is vulnerable in front of predators like Wulfe.

Adam moved between me and Wulfe and met the vampire’s gaze. It wasn’t something I’d have advised; vampire powers work just fine on werewolves. But I could feel Adam draw on the pack ties, so he must have done it as a deliberate show of power. I hoped he was right, that the pack had enough juice to neutralize the vampire’s magic.

Wulfe raised an eyebrow and his smile grew sharper. He stared at my mate. It felt to me as though it might have been hours, but I think it was less than ten seconds before Wulfe looked down. He was still smiling.

“Oh goodness,” he said. “A challenge. What fun.” He looked at me. “Are you going to live? You’ll have to tell me how you ran into a field chasing a rabbit and ended up enspelled and dying.” His smile widened. “And then I saved you. You owe me for your life.”

“You will leave her alone,” said Aiden, and his voice was no longer mild.

I looked over. Aiden might be dripping with water, but he didn’t look cold, though the night air had an edge of chill that preceded true autumn. In fact, as I watched, steam was starting to rise off him. He was standing much, much too close to the vampire.

Wulfe’s eyelids lowered and he smiled. “Make me, Fire Touched. Make me.”

Aiden was too close to the vampire, too far away from Adam and me for either of us to prevent what happened next. Aiden reached out and touched the vampire’s arm, and Wulfe was engulfed in fire.

The vampire screamed, a high-pitched, terrified sound, his body so bright with fire that it hurt to look at. He flailed his arms as if trying to put the flames out—or trying to fly. He stumbled backward, away from Aiden. Sparks started drifting from his burning body, landing among the dry leaves and weeds, which started to burn.

Still screaming, Wulfe rolled on the ground, but it did no good; the flames continued undaunted. His flesh bubbled up and blackened—the air began to smell like someone was holding a barbecue. The warmth from the fire brushed my skin.

Unlike a gunshot, screams were not common around here, but no lights went on and no dogs barked. I realized that Adam must still be holding on to the pack magic that kept people from noticing us.

And still Wulfe burned.

Adam climbed onto the bank and bumped his shoulder lightly into Aiden’s side and the boy reached over (not down, because Adam is a werewolf and Aiden is not very tall) and put his hand on Adam’s back, closing his fingers on Adam’s fur. Other than that, the boy looked unmoved by the gruesome sight of Wulfe burning.

I came up on Aiden’s other side more slowly.

Wulfe rose to his knees and reached out as if to touch Aiden—but lacked the strength to close the distance between him and us. “Please,” he said. “Please. I don’t want to die . . .”

And he lied. I had become much better at telling truth from falsehood. It used to be that vampires were difficult. It used to be that I needed scent to smell the lie. But now, sometimes, I could hear it.

I took a step forward, ignoring Adam’s growl.

Wulfe dropped to the dirt, facedown. He stopped moving, but his body still burned, flesh blackened and smelling like burned fat.

Then he turned his head and looked up at me. In an entirely normal voice he said, “Too much, right?”

The flames around him died, leaving us all in the dark as Wulfe bounced up to his feet.

I had never seen something that Aiden could not burn. I’d seen him melt metal and crack stone with his fire. A vampire was not metal or stone. Vampires are vulnerable to fire.

There were not a lot of ways to kill a vampire. Fire was the best one I knew of. I had trouble pulling air into my lungs again, but this time it wasn’t magic that caused my difficulties—it was fear. I would not have thought that anything could make Wulfe more terrifying to me before this moment. I had been wrong.

The skin and burned muscle tissue reknit itself as Wulfe dusted off the remnants of his clothing, which seemed to have fared a lot better than they should have, given all the burning that had been going on. His pants were nearly intact, if blackened and smelly. He looked at Aiden and the smile died away from his face. Aiden stepped closer to Adam.

“Child,” he said. “I gave you your chance. I won’t give you another.”

He looked at me, hugged himself, and rocked back and forth to the rhythm of my heartbeat because creepy was what Wulfe did. In a fade-away voice he said, “Well, boys and girl, I think my stalking is done for tonight. This was much more exciting than I thought it would be. Ta.”

He waved a hand, then turned on his heel and walked back down the road. We all watched him go. I didn’t think it was an accident that, at the same bunch of trees that Adam had used to disappear, before the rabbit had bitten me, Wulfe blended into the shadows and was gone.

In high-alert mode, Adam pushed us all back down the road toward home. Nothing more tried to kill us before we made it into the kitchen.

I made a beeline for Adam’s office. Emerging a few minutes later, wearing my clothes and in human form, I found Aiden waiting for me at the table. Like mine, his hair was still wet.

“Adam went upstairs,” Aiden said. “I think he’s going to change and come back down. I told him that I needed to talk.”

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He laughed, sounding tired. “I am never okay, Mercy. But some days I am more okay than others. This is one of the ‘other’ days. Wulfe did something to me. Look.”

He held up his hand and nothing happened. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be looking at.

“Since Underhill made me, Mercy, I have never not been able to call up fire.” He wiggled his empty fingers and put them back down on the table. In a small voice he said, “I’m not even sure how I feel about that. I can’t protect myself. But at the same time, it might be good to be just . . . ordinary.”

“Don’t get used to it,” I warned him. “If Wulfe did something permanent, I’m pretty sure he would have bragged about it.”

“Is that what you wanted to talk about, Aiden?” asked Adam, entering the kitchen still buttoning his shirt. His skin was flushed from the change and he was barefoot.

Jeez, he was sexy.

Aiden shook his head. “I know what killed Mercy’s friends,” he said. “And it is bad.”

Adam pulled up a chair opposite Aiden, all business. “What can you tell us?”

“Did you see her wounds?” Aiden asked Adam. “Before Wulfe threw her in the river.”

Adam started to shake his head—then stopped. “I thought it was a trick of light. But it looked like there was steam rising from the bite on her neck.”

Aiden shook his head. “Not steam. Smoke.

“When I lived with my friends in Underhill”—before they all died, he meant—“there were places we knew not to go. Sometimes it was because one of us saw something—or one of us died. But mostly Tilly would warn us about them. This was before we knew what she was—though we sometimes wondered where she learned all the things she knew. One of the places Tilly warned us about was a cave where a beast lived. If it bit you, it could take your body over. Eventually it would tire of playing with you—and it would kill you. But when it bit you, the smoke that was its magic would fill you up and leak from your wounds. And once you were dead, it could take on your shape and go after your friends.” He shivered a little more, as if he couldn’t get warm. “She liked to tell those kinds of stories when we were huddled in the dark, already afraid. She called this creature the smoke beast.” He bit off the word, shook his head, and looked a little ill.

I recognized that look. When he’d escaped Underhill into the ungentle hands of the fae, they’d gifted him with a translation spell. Even the most finely crafted translation spells, I’d been told, are traumatic. They ruffle through memory and thought for the meaning of the word that needs translation. And the one they’d imposed upon Aiden had been of the quick-and-dirty variety.

“That’s not quite the right word,” he said. “Maybe ‘smoke demon’ is a better translation.” His mouth tightened again. “Though not a demon as you understand it. Evidently there is not an adequate word for it in English. I don’t know if it was one of a kind or if there are more of its kind loose in the world. I haven’t heard anyone saying anything about it.” He shook his head. “Anyway—supposedly it can become anyone or any living thing.”

“The fae can do that,” observed Adam.

Aiden nodded. “Yes. Which makes it interesting that its ability to shapeshift was one of the things Tilly warned us about. Maybe it wasn’t fae—but she didn’t say that. But the main thing she warned us about was that if he bites you, he takes over your body. I have the distinct impression, though I don’t remember why, if it takes you over, your death is inevitable.”

Something had bitten Dennis, I thought. And he had killed Anna and then himself. I remembered the tight feeling in my head, just before I’d gotten my jaws around that rabbit.

I have a limited and unpredictable resistance to magic. Maybe this was one of those kinds of magic that didn’t affect me. I felt a chill of retroactive relief at not being some sort of mind slave to the jackrabbit smoke beast who had bitten me.

“What does it want?” I asked.

Aiden shook his head. “That’s all I know about it. Other than that it was dangerous enough that Tilly warned me to stay away. I’ll ask Tilly what she knows—but you might also ask Lugh’s son if he knows anything. It was imprisoned in a territory of Underhill that his family controlled.”

“Did she release it on purpose?” I asked.

Aiden shrugged. “I don’t know.” He looked at me. “It isn’t out of the question.”