Smoke Bitten

4

“Five in the morning is a crummy time for an all-hands meeting,” said Honey briskly as she came in the door.

“Mercy wanted it to be at three in the morning,” said Aiden. “But Adam told her that he needed everyone functional.”

He was curled up on one of the living room couches and wrapped in a blanket. He didn’t normally feel the cold, but whatever Wulfe had done to him was still lingering.

I was pretty sure I was right that if Wulfe had done something permanent, he would have bragged about it. I didn’t think Wulfe had enough power to undo something Underhill had created—but I was less sure of that today than I would have been before last night.

The wolves had given the blanket curious looks, but no one had asked Aiden about it. At his words, though, the stragglers who were lingering in the living room, mostly hovering over too-hot-to-drink coffee they’d gotten from the pot in the kitchen, directed appalled gazes at me.

I hadn’t been serious about three a.m. But at two in the morning, Adam had been on the phone, on the Internet, or pacing for hours and hadn’t seemed likely to sleep anytime soon. Aiden, who had been seriously spooked by the creature he thought might be wandering around our home—and by having his magic quenched so thoroughly—had kept me company as I made cookies and watched Adam pace until I declared “enough” and went to bed myself.

With the wee-hour light peeking into the windows, the pack accused me of torturing them with their sleep-deprived eyes, if not words. I shrugged. They didn’t need to know how wound up Adam had been about the intrusion of another pack into our territory. And his stress was not lessened by the trouble that he had characterized as a lack of control over the wolf (but his wolf seemed to think was something different). Adam would show them what he wanted them to see, what they needed to see: their Alpha strong and resolute.

So instead of explaining, I told them, “Adam said that it wasn’t anything that couldn’t wait for the morning. It had to be early morning so that we could get the whole pack here. You can blame Auriele, who has to be at the high school by seven at the latest. Adam is upstairs if you want to head to the meeting room. He’ll start as soon as everyone gets here.”

“Do you know what this is about?” asked Ben. He took a sip of his coffee and then exploded into expletives that had a couple of the wolves taking out their phones to look up a few of the words he used. He was British, our Ben, and had the foulest mouth I’d ever heard. One didn’t, I was pretty sure, have a lot to do with the other, but both of them occasionally required translations.

“We are holding a meeting,” I pointed out to him when he’d calmed down enough to listen, “so we don’t have to repeat the same stuff over and over as new people come in.”

Sherwood Post opened the door on the end of my sentence with a steaming Starbucks venti cup in one hand.

“Starbucks is open?” asked Luke. “I could have gotten Starbucks?”

“Hey,” I said. “Don’t diss my coffee.”

“How’s Pirate?” asked Honey.

Pirate was the one-eyed kitten that Sherwood had rescued. There had been a point at which we had all been certain the kitten wouldn’t make it. But as of last week, he’d been freed from the vet’s tender care.

Sherwood nodded at Honey, which meant that Pirate was fine. Then he looked at me and asked, “What’s up?”

“A meeting,” I told him. “So I don’t have to repeat myself over and over.”

Ben snorted a laugh.

Sherwood looked like a lumberjack in his red flannel shirt and khaki pants. He wore the peg leg today, so he was probably headed to work after this. The foot prosthetic was more expensive and he didn’t like to risk it. He’d just gotten a new prosthetic that looked like a modern artist decided to blend the idea of a foot with a spring. It was more useful and stronger than either of the other two, but he wasn’t comfortable in it yet, so he only wore it at home or at the gym.

No, he hadn’t told me all of that. He still didn’t talk much—but the whole damn pack gossiped about him like a bunch of fond mamas. His facility with magic—when his wolf took over—had resulted in a betting pool about the real identity of our amnesiac pack mate. I had instituted a one-dollar limit per bet, winners split the pot. It currently stood at $187.29.

There was, I had learned from the entries, an entire folklore about old wolves and their deeds that I had been unaware of. Being a history major, I was more than a little grumpy that no one had told me all those stories—but I was learning. I kept the betting book, and before I would write down the name, I made the wolf doing the betting tell me about their candidate for the position. Maybe sometime I’d record all the stories I learned. I couldn’t publish them since a lot of them demonstrated just how dangerous werewolves were—and we were currently trying to soft-pedal that for the humans we lived among so they didn’t decide that the only good werewolf was a dead werewolf. But still . . . someone should write them down.

The choices for Sherwood’s real identity weren’t limited to werewolf legends, though. Five people had put their money on Robin Hood.

If they had been older wolves, I would have been excited, but four of them were from the current generation and the other was, I think, joking. Still, Sherwood Post to Sherwood Forest made a certain amount of symbolic sense. And everyone knew that Robin Hood had lived in Sherwood Forest. So had Little John and Alan-a-Dale, Friar Tuck, and Will Scarlet. Little John had gotten two dollars. Alan-a-Dale and Will Scarlet one dollar each. No one had put money on Friar Tuck—our Sherwood just didn’t look like the friar type.

As Kelly had pointed out when he handed me his dollar for Robin Hood, Bran seldom did things without reason. When I told him the story I’d had from both Sherwood and Bran, that he’d picked the name because Bran had had a book by Sherwood Anderson and the treatise on manners by Emily Post on his desk, Kelly had snorted.

“Please,” he said. “Everyone knows that Bran keeps his books in his bookshelves and not on his desk unless he is actively reading. We had that from several different sources. Also, no one has ever seen Bran read Sherwood Anderson, before or since that day.”

I blinked at him. Apparently there had been a lot more serious investigation into Sherwood than I’d been aware of.

Misreading my expression, Kelly backtracked a little. “Elliot knows a couple of wolves from the Marrok’s pack. Luke knows a few more.”

“Might be right,” I said. “I don’t remember.”

Most of what I remembered about Bran’s study had to do with keeping my eyes down and pretending I was sorry (or mystified, if the evidence against me wasn’t strong) for whatever it was Bran was mad at me about. I hadn’t been paying attention to whether he had books on his desk.

Before I took his dollar, though, I told Kelly, “You should know that historians are not sure that Robin Hood was a real person. Or if he was, if he was as significant a figure as the stories about him make it appear.”

Kelly shoved the dollar into my hand and pointed to where three other names were behind “Robin Hood” on my notebook page. “And maybe he was a werewolf,” he said.

When someone asked Sherwood directly about the Robin Hood identity, he hunted me down and asked to see the betting book. Sherwood put a dollar down on Robin Hood himself—and another dollar on William Shakespeare.

“I can shoot arrows,” he’d said. “But I’d rather have been a poet.”

I still wasn’t sure how to take that. Sherwood certainly had given no sign of wanting to be good with words. On the other hand, poets don’t need to use a lot of words to get their point across, even if Shakespeare had.

This morning, our mysterious Sherwood gave me a nod. “Upstairs?”

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded again, this time at all the wolves gathered in the living room, raised his cup to me, and then headed up. After milling around a little more than they had been, the rest of the wolves in the living room followed him. Still wrapped in a blanket, Aiden tagged along behind. Adam had asked him to attend the meeting, too.

Darryl and Auriele came in a few minutes later.

Auriele brushed past me and up the stairs. She pretended not to notice me, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t embarrassment or regret or anything like that driving her. She was still mad at me.

Darryl gave me an apologetic shrug—because he knew she was still mad at me, too—and followed her up.

Warren was the last one to arrive.

“Everyone else is here,” I told him. “But you have fifteen minutes before the meeting starts.” Something struck me suddenly. “You know? This is the most punctual group of any I’ve ever seen.”

“Adam,” Warren said, taking off his hat and tapping it against his thigh, “appreciates promptness. He explained that by holding meetings every four hours until the whole pack managed not to be late. It took two days and nearly resulted in Paul’s death when he was late for the next-to-last meeting.”

Paul had died by other means. We both sucked in a breath before I said, “I could see that. Punctuality was never really his thing. It is yours. Usually you aren’t the last to arrive.”

Warren was wearing jeans and boots, as he had since I met him. But his jeans now fit with an edge that said designer, and his shirt was a polo that clung to the muscles of his shoulders. His clothes had been getting an upgrade lately. In well-fitted, flattering-colored clothing, Warren looked pretty good except for the drawn face and circles under his eyes that were due to more than a single early-morning meeting.

“I would have been here sooner, except the case I’ve been working has me pinched for time,” he explained. “It’s a rough one.”

“A case for Kyle?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he answered, and there was a little smile on his tired face as he started for the meeting room. “For Kyle.”

Kyle was his boyfriend, though that didn’t quite encompass what they were to each other. They hadn’t taken the final step—the human final step—of getting married. But Adam had told me that they were mates. I couldn’t read the pack bonds that well, but I trusted that Adam could.

Kyle was very human and a divorce lawyer—and was more than likely responsible for Warren’s wardrobe’s improvement. Warren worked for him as a licensed investigator who doubled as protection and intimidation where needed.

I’ve always heard it said that it wasn’t wise for people who were involved romantically to work together, especially when one of them worked for the other. But it seemed to be a good thing between Warren and Kyle.

I didn’t ask Warren what Kyle had him doing—Kyle didn’t believe in gossiping about clients. If there was something they needed from the pack, I’d hear about it. If not, it might show up in the nightly news.

Warren paused on his way up the stairs and gave me a long look. Then he walked back over, wrapped his arms around me, and kissed the top of my head. He was tall, made of whipcord and rawhide, my foster father would have said. He smelled like himself and a little like a new cologne or bodywash. I sank into the uncomplicated embrace; I hadn’t realized how much I needed a hug.

“Heard about Auriele,” Warren told me when I finally stepped away. “That woman is going to get herself killed trying to protect Christy from things she don’t need protecting from.”

“Truthfully,” I told him, “I’m more worried about Wulfe.”

I told him about my new stalker in as few words as I could manage. Warren knew Wulfe, so that cut down on unneeded explanations.

“A hobby, eh?” he said, the words casual enough, but there was a harsh edge to his voice.

“That’s what he said,” I agreed.

“That kind of hobby could get a vampire taken out of this world—you say he was immune to Aiden’s fire?”

“Yes,” I said. “And he was able to stop Aiden from being able to use his magic. And he can come into our house. When Ogden brought him here the night of the zombies—I don’t know that he was invited in, Warren. I think he just came.”

Warren’s mouth tightened, but what he said was, “Well, don’t that beat all. Guess you should have a conversation about him with Stefan.”

“That’s the plan,” I agreed. “I have a call in to him, but I expect that he won’t call now until tonight. We should go up so Adam can start the meeting.”

The door to the meeting room was shut, and Jesse, waiting just outside her bedroom door, flagged us down before we could go in.

“What’s the meeting about?” she asked.

“Jesse doesn’t know?” Warren asked.

“Jesse was a smart person,” I told him. “She came in and went to bed last night so she didn’t hear about how we found a nasty creature that might be some sort of boogeyman for the fae and another nasty creature who has decided to take up stalking me for a hobby. If she’d gotten up earlier this morning, I would have told her all about it then. But now we have to go have a meeting.”

Jesse raised her eyebrow in interest.

“Don’t worry, though,” I said, even though I’d made the whole situation sound funny so she wouldn’t be worried. “The stalker saved me from the evil nasty.”

“That’s just wrong,” Jesse said with a grin.

“I know, right?” I shook my head. “But that’s not why the whole pack got called in. Or that’s not the only reason why. There’s a strange group of wolves nosing into our territory.”

Warren stiffened. “Invaders?”

I shrugged. “Looks like. Adam’s been on the phone to various old friends all night putting together a possible list of suspects. He plans on introducing our guests to all of us digitally before we meet them.”

“Aiden went into the meeting,” Jesse said carefully.

As a rule, pack meetings were for pack members only. Aiden was there so he could inform the pack about our escapee from Underhill.

“Since the pack is the reason you had to shuffle your life around,” I told her, “I’d guess that you have a place in our meetings. Come on in if you want to—it will save me having to tell you everything again, anyway.”

“Awesome,” she said.

Warren looked at Jesse and gave a solemn shake of his head. “I thought you had more sense. I, for one, have always been grateful for the meetings I have not attended. But if’n you want to come in with us, I guess I’m a big enough shield that none of the others will try to drive you out.”

“Except Dad,” she said in a small voice.

I narrowed my eyes at the door. “He’s abject in misery and wallowing in guilt after falling into Christy’s”—I glanced at Christy’s daughter and exchanged “trap” for—“situation. He won’t object.”

She looked down at herself. “I’m in pajamas.”

“Go change,” I said. “We’ll wait.” I glanced at my watch. “You have three minutes.”

She jumped into her room and shut the door.

“Why?” Warren asked me.

“She deserves to be involved,” I said. “She’s making life-defining decisions because of the pack. Likely all three of our current crises will affect her one way or the other.”

“And because it will drive Auriele to distraction,” said Jesse, emerging from her room now clad in jeans and a shirt sporting a cat with an innocent look and a tail emerging from its mouth with the words Got Mouse? underneath. “Mercy is sneaky that way. Maybe I am, too.” She twirled. “Do I look ready for the vengeance games?”

I decided that the mouse T-shirt was calculated. Though we weren’t going to play cat-and-mouse games with anyone. I was not unaware that Auriele was going to squirm at the sight of Jesse, but that wasn’t the reason I’d included her.

I couldn’t stand to see her isolated. Not this morning, anyway.

Warren looked at me.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and opened the door with fifteen seconds to spare.

And if I found Auriele’s face before I stepped aside so Jesse could enter? Maybe making Auriele squirm a little didn’t bother me at all.

From the front of the room, Adam looked up from his notes. He saw Jesse—and smiled at her. His smile widened when he saw me. Like Warren, he looked worn-out. I was pretty sure that he hadn’t gotten any sleep at all last night.

“By my count, that’s all of us,” I told him.

“George isn’t here,” said Elliot, one of the more dominant wolves in the room. He was a big man, massive if not as tall as Warren. Like several of the other wolves, he worked for Adam’s security company. Ex-military, I knew, but I didn’t think his military service had been in the last hundred years.

Elliot had bet one dollar on Sherwood being Rasputin, the mad monk of Russia. Which was ridiculous because there were photos of Rasputin and he didn’t look anything like Sherwood. Which I had told him at the time.

Elliot had grinned at me. “It’s the eyes,” he’d said. “You can tell by the eyes.”

Which meant that he was, like several of the others, putting out bets to tease Sherwood. Sherwood, when he’d seen it, had grunted, then said something in Russian. I’m not sure what it had meant, but it had sounded exasperated.

Unlike others, I didn’t put any stock in Sherwood’s prowess in Russian being a clue to who he had been. Adam spoke Russian, and he’d been born in Alabama. Bran, as far as I could tell, spoke every language on the planet—if sometimes in archaic versions. Living centuries gave a wolf plenty of time to become fluent in any language they wanted to make the effort to learn.

New languages would be especially easy for Sherwood to acquire. He wouldn’t need a large vocabulary because he didn’t talk a lot.

“George couldn’t get off work,” Adam told the room. George was a police officer with the Pasco PD—it got him out of a lot of meetings. “He’ll be here tonight and I’ll update him.”

Warren glanced at a couple of wolves and they got up, freeing the seats next to Aiden—who rolled his eyes at us.

“I don’t need a protection detail,” said Aiden, pulling his blanket closer around himself. “I don’t think there’s anyone here who wants to kill me.” He didn’t speak particularly loudly, but everyone in the room heard him just fine.

Jesse rolled her eyes back at him. She was better at it. “Just me,” she said in syrupy tones. She continued with sisterly affection as she sat down, “Stupidhead—we have to sit next to you. How else am I going to pass notes back and forth? And why are you wrapped in a blanket?”

“Shh,” said Aiden. “I’ll tell you later.”

Adam had leaned back against the table, legs crossed at the ankles and arms folded. “Anytime you are ready,” he said with faux patience.

“Sure, Dad,” Jesse told him, as Warren and I took our seats and the rest of the pack quieted down. “Go right ahead.”

He grinned at her cheeky response, showing a dimple. Properly, I suppose, he should have enforced discipline. But our pack was very stable at the moment, forced there by the gigantic task of keeping the peace in our territory.

Since I’d made us responsible for the safety of the citizens of the Tri-Cities area, and the fae had taken it a step further and signed a treaty that established the Tri-Cities as a neutral place, we’d been kept hopping, what with minor actors coming in to test our mettle and major offenses like the latest one with the zombies. We were too busy to stoop to squabbles—as a result, our pack was a tightly knit bunch.

I glanced at Auriele and amended my thought. As long as Christy quit sticking her fingers into our business, we were a tightly knit bunch. Today there was a thread of tension in the room that hadn’t been there a few weeks ago—or that I hadn’t noticed a few weeks ago.

Adam took a breath and looked around the room. “I didn’t ask you all here on a whim,” he said. “Yesterday brought us some problems.”

He explained yesterday in a concise and cogent manner—beginning with Underhill’s addition to the landscaping of the backyard, through Anna’s and Dennis’s deaths, and ending with the final act of the jackrabbit hunt that left us with the realization that we had an unknown but magically capable foe, probably an escapee from Underhill.

I noted that he left out my vampire stalker. I wasn’t sure why. I hoped that he wasn’t trying to spare me any attacks by Auriele, who had become very quick to point her finger at me since Christy had resunk her claws into the pack. I didn’t need him to protect me from Auriele; she didn’t worry me. Made me sad, yes; worried, no.

Of course, he’d left out the werewolves, too, so maybe he was just working his way down the list of our new and newly active opponents, one at a time.

“Aiden has some insight as to what we might be facing,” Adam said. “Since our adversary and the door to Underhill appeared on the same evening, we are making a guarded assumption that one has to do with the other. Aiden?”

Aiden stood up and gave the same précis he’d given Adam and me last night.

Darryl stood up when Aiden finished. Adam nodded.

“What makes you certain that Mercy’s jackrabbit and your . . . smoke demon are the same creature?” Darryl asked. “I’m not doubting you. Just asking for clarification.”

“Her wound smoked,” Aiden said. “I don’t know of any other creature that leaves smoking wounds with only a bite. Not in Underhill, at least.”

Darryl sat down and Honey stood up.

“Are you certain it is something that escaped from Underhill?” Honey asked. “There are a lot of magically gifted others who are not werewolf, vampire, or fae. Could one of them have been attracted by all of the notice being paid to us? Maybe its appearance at the same time as the new door is just a coincidence.”

Downstairs, the doorbell rang.

Jesse said, “Since I’m only here for curiosity’s sake, I’ll go get it.”

“Wait.” Adam held up a hand.

I gave voice to his thought. “It’s five thirty in the morning and someone is ringing the doorbell?”

“Warren,” Adam said. “Would you go down with Mercy and see who it is?”

By traditional accounting, Warren was third in the pack, after Adam and Darryl. As Adam’s mate, I shared his rank—because women didn’t get their own rank—traditionally speaking, anyway.

Our pack had started to . . . broaden our reality a bit. Pack members could still easily rattle off the ranking of wolves according to tradition—but they treated Honey as if she were ranked in the pack just below Warren, instead of the bottom-of-the-pack ranking where an unmated female would normally be accounted.

Honey blamed me for this—and she might have been right. Sometimes she chafed at it, but more and more she owned that rank. Auriele, as Darryl’s wife, outranked everyone except for Adam, me, and Darryl in that order. But the pack had started treating her as if she were right behind Honey. And it felt like a promotion—even though technically she had dropped in rank.

Adam told me that he was just holding his breath and hoping that it continued. Werewolves are volatile creatures. It is hard for the human to hold the wolf in check—and when it didn’t work . . . Well, there was only one thing to be done with an out-of-control werewolf. And now that the wolves were outed to the human world, there were no second chances.

Anything that could be done to strengthen the ties that bound the pack together also helped everyone manage better. Adam maintained that by actually paying attention to the real order of dominance, our pack members were better adjusted and not nearly so likely to go off on another member of the pack because their wolf was confused about who was actually dominant.

To that end we all pretended that we didn’t see what was really going on, and only occasionally did it pop up in conversations. We weren’t ignoring it—but we were pretending that nothing had changed.

The Marrok’s son Charles, who treated his own wolf spirit as if it were another sentient being who shared his skin, once told me that wolves were straightforward creatures on the whole, and that most of the mess that was werewolf culture had been brought about by the human halves of the werewolves. I was beginning to see what he meant.

We also pretended—Adam, Darryl, Warren, and I—that Warren was not more dominant than Darryl. Warren was gay—and a lot of our werewolves had grown up in eras in which that was something not tolerated. The survival rate for gay or lesbian werewolves was far lower than for straight werewolves—which wasn’t anything to brag about, either. Warren was the only gay werewolf I knew. The bigoted members of our pack had been bludgeoned (literally and figuratively) into first tolerating Warren and then appreciating him. But none of us was sure if that would hold should Warren become Adam’s second—who would be counted upon to lead the pack should something happen to Adam.

All of that meant that Adam had just picked out the most dangerous werewolf in the pack besides himself to escort me downstairs. Maybe it was only because Warren had been sitting next to me, but I doubted it.

The doorbell rang again as Warren held the door for me and followed me down, as if I outranked him.

I stopped in the bedroom to grab my carry gun and tucked it, loaded and ready to go, in the back of my jeans. Warren didn’t say anything about it, just patted his lower back—he was carrying, too.

As we got to the bottom step, doors slammed and a car took off.

“Honda V6,” I told Warren.

J-series, if it mattered. But that didn’t tell him any more than it told me. There were a lot of Hondas with a V6 J-series, and there were different versions of the J-series. Hondas weren’t my manufacturer, so I couldn’t tell one version from another without having two different versions in front of me.

“Probably not a rental car,” said Warren.

Okay, so it told us something. Rental cars tended to be the stripped-down versions and the V6 was mostly an upgrade.

We were both speaking very quietly as we closed in on the door. Warren kept his eyes on the windows where people could look in. It was darker in the house than it was outside now, so it would be hard for someone to see us, but not impossible.

“Adam needs to get opaque curtains and use them,” said Warren.

“Then we can’t see out,” I told him, not paying as much attention to what I said as to the front door.

“I know he has cameras,” Warren answered. “He doesn’t need windows.”

He bent down and cautiously looked through the peephole and shook his head.

“Maybe it’s a Girl Scout,” I told him. “They’re short.”

“There, you’ve done it,” said Warren, reaching for the door. “Now I want a Thin Mint and it’s the wrong time of the year.”

He opened the door quickly, stepping away and to the side, but there was no attack. Instead, there was a body on the porch. It took me an instant that felt heart-stoppingly long to realize the body was breathing.

Warren leaned his head down, took a good scent, and then leaped across the porch and started running down the road as fast as he could—which was impressively fast, even in human form.

I was pretty sure that we were too late for catching the people who’d driven off, unless they had parked and come back to see what we did—which was possible. I checked out the man on our porch. I smelled unfamiliar werewolves, but I didn’t smell any blood. He appeared undamaged except for the part about him being unconscious.

Good. Because I liked him.

“Mary Jo,” I called out. “You want to come down. It’s Renny.”

The gift our werewolf invaders had left for us was Deputy Alexander Renton of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office. He was in uniform, so presumably they’d abducted him while he was on patrol.

Wolves in human form boiled down the stairs and out to the porch. Darryl and Auriele did the same sniff-and-go that Warren had done. Mary Jo dropped to her knees beside him.

“Damn it, Renny,” she muttered to the unconscious man as she peeled back his eyelids to check his eyes. “I told you it wasn’t a good idea for us to start dating again.”

She checked his pulse, then looked up at Adam. “I think he’s fine. His heart rate is normal, his color’s good. They hit him with a tranq of some sort, I think. His department is going to be in the middle of a mad hunt for him. We should call them.” That last was a request for permission.

“Do it,” said Adam. Narrow-eyed, he looked out at our surroundings—pausing at a small boat on the far side of the river, maybe a quarter of a mile away. “That boat has binoculars pointed at us,” he said in a conversational tone.

Virtually as one, the pack glanced at him to see where he was looking, then followed his gaze out to the river. They were intent enough that the pack magic rose among us and we, the pack, understood that there was no chance of getting to the boat before they fled, because Adam knew that. We also rejected using the handguns that some of us were carrying because it was too far for a clean shot, and besides, we weren’t sure Adam wanted them dead.

The boat’s engine got louder as the boat swung around and took its passengers upriver and out of our sight. The pack hunting magic subsided.

“We could intercept,” suggested Ben, who did some boating with friends from work. “That small engine is good for being quiet, but pushing even that little boat upriver will be slow going.”

Adam shook his head. “I don’t want them yet,” he said.

“I take it,” said Honey, brushing her honey-colored hair out of her eyes, “that the wolves who did this were another of the interesting discoveries you made last night?”

“Because by Saint Peter’s peter,” said Ben, “an arse-licking boogeyman wasn’t enough. We needed a bishop-beating bunch of mangy invading werewolves, too.”

Luke laughed and in a fake British accent said, “Fecking right, Ben, my lad. But it would be take a real gobshite to try to invade us right this moment.”

“Agreed,” said Honey, while I was still trying to figure out what a gobshite was. “They should wait a few more months until attrition has winnowed our numbers down sufficiently.”

A silence followed her words, broken only by Mary Jo’s quiet voice as she talked to the sheriff’s department.

It was true. Since we weren’t connected with the rest of the packs (for various political and doubtless correct reasons) in the Americas, when our wolves left, there were no replacements. We’d lost eight wolves since we’d broken with the Marrok. One of us had died, and the other seven had moved for the usual reasons—better jobs, family necessity, and the war-ready tension our pack had to operate under right now. Adam could have made them stay, but he refused to do that. Our pack, which used to have between thirty and forty people in it, was down to twenty-six.

Our wolves had given up on the chase and were jogging back to the house.

“They want to talk to you,” said Mary Jo, handing her phone over to Adam. “I’ll take him inside.”

“Put him in the spare bedroom,” I told her as Adam explained that he understood that the sheriff’s office was not happy with one of their people being taken. “The sheets on the bed are clean.”

She picked him up in a fireman’s carry. He was quite a bit taller and more massive than she was, so it looked a little odd.

“I’ll get the doors,” volunteered Ben.

It took Adam about ten minutes to negotiate a path forward with Renny’s sheriff that didn’t involve the sheriff’s department taking the town apart to look for the perpetrators. The chill effect of Honey’s words kept the rest of the pack quiet. Adam and I had talked about our declining numbers, but apparently it was a new thought for most of the pack. Or maybe hearing it said out loud made it harder to ignore.

Auriele, Darryl, and Warren were jogging up to the porch by the time Adam disconnected.

“Let’s go back upstairs,” Adam said. “I have some information for you about the wolves who dropped Deputy Renton on our porch.”

Once everyone was seated again—including Mary Jo and Ben, who’d returned from settling Renny, who appeared to be sleeping comfortably—Adam ran down the details of the wolf kill the night before.

“I identified two of the werewolves from last night, and I made some calls,” Adam said. “I have a pretty good idea who the leader of this pack is.”

He let that sink in a moment, then continued, “And we can put some other names in the probable category. I don’t think it’s a big group; more than likely there are only six of them. Warren, could you get the lights?”

Warren reached over his shoulder and flipped the light switch. Adam pulled down the shades and turned on the projector.

A somewhat grainy photograph of the top quarter of a man appeared on the screen. He had a narrow, aquiline face, a long nose, and big dark eyes.

“Harolford,” said Elliot as soon the photo came up. He didn’t sound happy. The big man growled. “Bastard. Nasty opponent in a one-on-one fight—wiped the floor with me.” Elliot looked at Adam. “That was before I came here—and I’m a better fighter now. But I don’t have any appetite to go at it again with him. He’s a good strategist—thinks a few steps ahead. I don’t like him. At all. But he isn’t stupid.”

Adam looked around the room. “I haven’t met him,” Adam said. “Does anyone else know anything about him?”

“Maybe,” said Auriele. “I don’t know him, but if that is Sven Harolford—”

“It is,” said Adam.

“Then I’ve had two women—werewolves both—who told me never to be alone with him,” she said. Then she smiled, a dark and hungry smile. “Which makes me want very much to do exactly that.”

There was a short silence.

“Don’t remember him,” said Sherwood. “But my wolf is pretty unhappy about him. I’d be okay with killing him.”

When no one else said anything, Adam pulled up another face. No one knew that one.

“He has been going by the name Lincoln Stuart, though he is old and that is not his original name.”

“Was he the guy who was second to . . .” Mary Jo snapped her fingers impatiently. “A pack in Nebraska, but I can’t think of the Alpha’s name.”

“I know who you mean,” Adam said. “And no, you’re thinking about Lincoln Thorson. He’s still second in the Lincoln, Nebraska, pack—which is why everyone remembers him. This isn’t that Lincoln.”

He brought up another photo; this one was the kind of photo taken on vacations. An Asian man and woman were standing in front of what I was pretty sure was the Grand Canyon. The shot looked as though it had been taken thirty years ago. The man was smiling at the woman, who was pointing up at him with both of her index fingers in a “look what I caught” pose that was completed by her over-the-moon smile.

“Chen Li Qiang.” Carlos was not a big man, nor did he look like the badass he was. He worked for Adam, and his specialty, I knew, was de-escalating FUBAR situations. “Damn it, Adam,” Carlos said with feeling. “Damn it. Li Qiang, he’s a friend. I served with him in Korea.”

“His name is Chinese,” said Darryl. “And he looks Chinese.”

“He is,” said Carlos. “But he’s lived in the States since he came over to work on the railroad and ran into a werewolf. He worked as a translator for the USMC because his Korean is almost as good as his Cantonese and Mandarin.” Carlos rubbed his hands together and shook his head. “That girl in the photo was his wife. She died about five years ago—I went to the funeral.”

“I remember,” said Adam.

“I haven’t seen him since,” Carlos admitted. “I heard he didn’t adjust to his wife’s death well and he left his pack.”

Honey knew the next one, a soft-faced man with gray eyes and medium-brown hair.

“That’s Kent Schwabe,” she said, sorrow in her voice. “He was a good man, Adam. Ended up in a bad pack, though—I think in Florida. Charles killed that Alpha back in the 1960s, and the whole pack was dismantled. We were casual acquaintances, though, so I don’t know what happened to Kent after that.”

“He moved to Texas,” Adam told her. “He ended up in Galveston.”

“That’s Gartman’s pack,” said Warren, sitting up a little straighter.

It hadn’t been a question, but Adam nodded. “That’s right.”

Warren growled. “Some damn fool should take that Alpha right out of existence. World would be a better place.”

Adam tipped his head toward Warren. “Oh?”

“I expect you’ve heard people say he keeps the peace. That his wolves don’t cause no trouble and they never say a bad word about him,” said Warren. “I know, because I talked to Bran about that one a few times. Bran is watching him, but he can’t do anything until he gets a complaint or something happens.”

Adam said, carefully, “I understand that he’s a hard man.”

“Hell,” Warren said. “I don’t mind a hard man.”

“I’ve heard that,” said Ben, his British accent carrying through the room.

Warren gave him a roguish look—he and Ben were friends.

“Kyle aside,” Warren said—and there were a few soft laughs from the pack. “Gartman’s not hard, Adam, he’s polecat mean. Some of his pack stay with him because they like that—he allows them to be mean, too. Most of them are too afraid to squeak.”

“Good to know,” Adam said. “I hadn’t heard anything bad about him—until last night.” He changed the photo again.

This time it was a thin-faced woman in profile. No one knew her.

“This is Nonnie Palsic. She’s old. My informant—”

Charles, I thought, though officially Charles shouldn’t be giving us information since we weren’t affiliated with the Marrok. I’m sure the Marrok told Charles that, too, knowing exactly how well his son would follow that directive.

“—tells me that she’s around four hundred years old. She’s mated to this man.”

He changed the screen to show an ordinary-looking guy with a baseball in one hand and a bat over his shoulder.

Adam looked over the room, and when no one spoke up, he announced, “This is James Palsic. He is older than his mate, possibly a lot older than his mate. I met James about twenty years ago—so did any of you who were in my pack when we were in Los Alamos. He was an engineer on assignment. Worked at the National Lab down there for two months before he went back to Washington, D.C.”

When no one said anything, Adam smiled. “I have noticed that people don’t tend to remember him. I’ve been told that it’s not magic. Not sure I believe it. It is true that he is very low-key. He was one of the wolves I scented last night. Li Qiang was the other.”

“I didn’t know that you knew Li Qiang,” said Carlos.

“I’ve never met him,” Adam told him. “But I picked you up at the airport when you came back from the funeral.”

Carlos flushed and looked away.

“Hey,” said Adam. When Carlos looked at him, Adam told him, “Not anyone’s business.”

The words and the tone had a bite to them, were a reproof. But Carlos relaxed, gave a nod, and settled back in his seat. “All right,” he said.

“About six months ago,” Adam continued, “there was a disturbance in Gartman’s pack. By the time Bran found out about it, it was over. Gartman had executed four wolves, and Harolford and a few of the remaining rebels were on the run. No sign of them since then, though Bran and Gartman have both been looking.”

“Those six you just showed us,” said Warren.

“Yes,” Adam agreed.

“I’ve also heard of Gartman,” said Darryl, his voice so deep that if Gartman had been in the room, he’d better have hoped he could run faster than our second. “Harolford and the others, they are in trouble and they have to find somewhere out of Gartman’s reach. Our pack, not affiliated with the Marrok, might look like a good place to make a stand—if they can take us.”

“They hunted on our territory until you noticed,” Honey said. “To see how alert we are.”

“No telling how long they’ve been in the Tri-Cities,” Elliot said.

I cleared my throat. “The goblins keep a pretty thorough watch. Unless they have someone with Adam’s skills, if they had been here long, we’d have known about it.”

We paid the goblins to keep watch for us—as did the vampires. There just weren’t enough werewolves to cover the whole of the Tri-Cities and the surrounding areas. I didn’t have any idea how many goblins there were. But if a supernaturally gifted being stepped foot on our territory, mostly we knew about it within a few hours.

“Maybe they paid off the goblins,” said Auriele.

I was about to disagree when Adam said, “Or maybe they are owed a favor—the goblins wouldn’t betray us for money. But all of the fae have to abide by the bargains they make. These wolves have done a couple of things that make me think they’ve been watching us awhile—or that maybe they have a way to get information on us that doesn’t involve them being here.”

“Renny?” asked Mary Jo.

Adam nodded. “That’s one. How would they know about Renny without being here?”

Jesse stood up.

Adam nodded at her.

“Facebook,” she said. “Mary Jo posted a photo of their last date together.” She sat down triumphantly.

Mary Jo slumped lower in her seat, but she nodded when she did.

“Facebook,” said Adam, sounding blindsided.

Darryl stood up. “It would be a good idea for the pack members who are out to avoid having a social media presence.”

“Make it so,” Adam said as Darryl sat down. “Too many people know who you are—and that makes your friends and families targets.”

“To those who want to take the pack from us,” said Darryl heavily, his dark eyes flecked with gold.

Adam smiled—and for the first time in weeks it was a happy smile. Though nothing could erase the exhaustion on his face, that expression lit his face and sweetened the beautiful features.

“Yes,” he agreed.