Soul Taken

9 adam

Adam led Zee, George, and Tony to the Benton County Coroner’s Office, a small building set in the corner of the massive criminal justice center. Technically the grocery store murder victim’s body should have gone to the Franklin County Coroner’s Office, but Benton County had a specialist for supernatural crimes, so both the boy’s body and the witch’s body had been taken there.

“You okay?” George asked.

Adam nodded. It was as close to lying as he allowed himself. His wolf was very unhappy leaving Mercy behind in the SUV.

After she’d returned to her human shape, his mate had been unusually quiet and wracked with shivers. Normally he’d have said she was in shock—but normal went out the window when dealing with Mercy. She’d refused his offer to get food for her, and with the others in the car, he hadn’t pressed. When she’d proposed that she stay in the car because her feet hurt, he’d trusted her to know best how to take care of herself.

That had been a hard-fought battle. It was his nature, man and beast, to take care of the people around him. When he was courting Mercy, he’d come to the reluctant understanding that taking control of her life—even and maybe especially for her own good—was the opposite of care. Experimentally, he’d applied that understanding to his pack, and he’d seen it become healthier, stronger. Larry the goblin king had not been wrong when he said that Mercy was changing Adam and the pack.

Still, knowing that leaving Mercy when she asked him to was the right thing to do didn’t make it any easier.

Before abandoning her in the car, he’d wrapped Mercy in his coat because she was still shivering as if the SUV heater wasn’t blowing hot enough to boil water. He’d given her a look to let her know that he expected her to tell him what was going on as soon as she could. She’d nodded. And that unspoken promise had allowed him to shut her door and leave her behind.

Shivering.

There were a lot of reasons that she could be shivering like that. All the easy ones would have been something she could talk about in front of everyone. He frowned darkly.

Neither he nor his wolf was happy with her alone in the SUV. Something more bestial than his wolf stirred to life and brought a growl rising to his lips. He stopped that before it became audible.

Mercy still believed that Elizaveta the witch had called the malformed beast into being. Mercy had thought that when she broke the witch’s curse, the evil creature—who only resembled his wolf as a tank resembled Mercy’s beloved and deceased Rabbit—should have gone away. When it lingered, she had decided it would just need time to fade.

Adam knew better.

Elizaveta might have given it form, but that beast had been his for longer than Mercy had been alive, born when a God-fearing boy, who’d thought the world was mostly a good place peopled with mostly good folk, met a war in Southeast Asia. Adam had grown that beast to protect himself and used it to wade through scenes of such horror that, even though he’d lived as a werewolf for half a century, the memories still appeared in his worst nightmares. Adam had used the beast to follow orders that no moral being would have been able to carry out, because he knew that those orders were the right ones, no matter how horrific.

He had learned to control that monster, when other soldiers had given in to theirs. He’d killed some of those people—the man who hunted Vietnamese children after his platoon had been blown to bits by a shoeshine boy. The colonel who collected fingers. Adam didn’t even remember most of them, because their deaths had not bothered him and the graveyard in his soul was full to overflowing with the dead he did regret.

When Adam had first been bitten, controlling his wolf spirit had not been very difficult for him. He’d been staying on top of a far worse monster for a few years by then. His time in Vietnam had ended. He hadn’t needed the older, more primal beast, so he stuffed it in a cage and forgot about it until Elizaveta had freed it once more.

Adam was pretty sure it was here to stay this time. For a moment he flashed back to a night in Mercy’s garage when the beast had taken him by surprise and broken free.

Belief, he reminded himself fiercely, was important. He could control his monsters, both of them. And he’d use them to protect his pack, his territory. His mate.

“It is a bad sign when you growl, ja?” asked Zee.

“He’s good,” George said. “Hard to leave that little coyote when she’s having a bad time of it. Not like Mercy to stay behind when we go look at bodies. Maybe there’s a ghoul just waiting for us to leave her alone.” George was behind him, but Adam could hear the baiting grin in his voice. “He’s got to think like that. Tough to be the Alpha.” George thought Adam could control his monsters, too.

“Not helpful,” Adam told him, knowing George would hear the grateful lie in his voice. Having George voice his confidence was helpful.

“Not accurate,” said Tony firmly. “She’s armed. She’s dangerous. And she is sitting in the parking lot of the criminal justice center, not in an ancient graveyard in the middle of Transylvania.”

Which had been, more or less, the thought that had allowed Adam to leave her when she’d requested it of him.

Adam held the office’s door open and waited for the others to go in. George gave him a sympathetic glance as he passed by. George was a reliable wolf; he did as he was asked, made good decisions on his own, and took care of the people around him as best he could. He generally thought a lot more than he talked—which was a good thing for a policeman and a werewolf.

Tony Montenegro . . . Mercy had acquired Tony before Adam had met her. He was quick-witted, adaptable, and—although Adam had never seen him in action—moved like someone who had been in a lot of fights.

Tony’d been an undercover agent. According to Adam’s contacts, Tony had been in deep cover a few times, though not in the Tri-Cities. He’d helped to bring down drug traders and a couple of rings of human traffickers. Adam rather thought that Tony probably had his own version of Adam’s beast. If so, he carried it well.

Tony was the ideal person to be their liaison with the KPD because Tony knew when to lie and he did it well enough that not even his fellow police officers knew when he was doing it. It was hard to find a liar with personal integrity.

Last to enter was Zee.

That story about the skull cups with jeweled eyes had not surprised Adam. Some of the Gray Lords in the local reservation had been considered gods—and they still walked softly around Zee. The only one who didn’t, Uncle Mike, was, in Adam’s judgment, the kind of person who ran toward danger rather than away.

Mercy treated Zee like a grumpy old mechanic, and that’s who he had become. Belief like that was important when dealing with magic. The longer Zee wore his glamour, his disguise, and the more people believed in that version of the Smith, the more the disguise became real.

Belief was important.

Adam’s wolf approved of Zee because he made their mate safer. Adam took great care to treat Zee the same way Mercy did, tried very hard to look at the stringy muscles and thinning hair and see only a tough old man. But he never forgot how dangerous the old iron-kissed fae was.

The interior of the coroner’s office was decorated in government cheap and long-wearing. It smelled like death. While a feral part of Adam came to alertness, the coroner, an Indian man in his early fifties, greeted George and Tony like old friends.

“Rahul, Tony and I’ve brought a couple of extra people,” George explained. “This is Zee Adelbertsmiter. Zee, Rahul Amin. We’re here to look at Aubrey Worth and Sarina, last name unknown.”

Amin gave the old man in the greasy mechanic’s overalls a professional smile. He did a pretty good job of professionalism when Adam was introduced, too, making an effort to treat Adam as he would any other visitor. He almost succeeded.

Adam had grown used to being a local celebrity, and he enjoyed the more recent addition of hero status because it meant fewer people were outright afraid of him. Like Mercy’s sword—her late sword—the locals viewed him as protection for them and not a dangerous weapon that could backfire. That attitude made everyone a little more safe.

“Dimitri, our specialist, won’t be here until tomorrow,” the coroner said as he led them through the door into the morgue proper. “So I have to ask you not to touch the bodies.”

“Of course,” Adam said.

The morgue was dominated by the large refrigeration unit on the wall opposite the door they entered by. The floors and walls were covered with materials chosen for easy cleaning. It could have been the kitchen of a high-end restaurant except for the smells. The whole room had a meat locker scent—fresh meat, old meat, old blood and new. Food.

Once upon a time he would have fought to put that thought to the back of his mind, but he’d accepted that he was a monster, that the wolf did not care what kind of meat he ate. He also was not much bothered by the smell of rotting flesh.

“Who do you want to see first?” Amin asked. “Fair warning, Sarina spent a couple of days at room temperature.” He glanced at Zee and Adam. Evidently the police officers were presumed to have stronger stomachs than the civilians.

“It is of no concern,” Zee said. “The woman first.”

Amin, not having expected the decision from that quarter, glanced around at the others. George nodded at him. With a small shrug, the coroner pulled open a metal drawer.

The room was small for the five of them. Adam fell back, and caught Tony’s and George’s eyes so they did the same, leaving Zee and the coroner the space around the dead woman.

Her face was unharmed, and from it, Adam judged Sarina the witch to have been a well-preserved sixty. Her sleek black hair was short and sharply defined even after the indignities her body had suffered in dying and afterward. She’d worn her makeup heavy, nearly stage level. A spray of blood droplets scattered across the pallor of the cheek nearest Adam. Her blood-red lipstick was smeared.

The photos George had shown them had been accurate, as far as they went, but had missed the point. Viewing the actual body, it was obvious that though the wounds impacted the front of the woman, the worst of the damage was to the sides. The cuts were deep—the body nearly severed in two places that Adam could see clearly from where he stood.

He’d seen a lot of dead-by-violent-means bodies over the years, enough to form opinions of his own. The weapon had been wielded by someone who was stronger than a human, but it was in need of sharpening because the cuts were ragged. He also thought that the damage done reflected pretty accurately the scenario Zee had demonstrated at the kill site rather than George’s original version.

Zee ran his left hand over the body about an inch from her skin, and Adam was pretty sure that if he’d had Mercy’s senses, the room would have been filled with magic. As it was, the hair on the back of his neck was standing up. The old fae had a sour look on his face—which was his standard thoughtful expression. Adam was pretty sure Zee had not found anything that surprised him.

Adam wondered if he should warn the coroner that this corpse would be a target of any gray witch who knew about her—though Amin’s specialist should be able to tell him that. What could have spooked Helena, the witch who owned the antiques store, so she had not taken the corpse herself? What had scared her?

Like any predator, most gray witches had no problem with squeamishness. She had stopped to take photos. Why hadn’t she taken the body? Or parts of the body—the organs were the most useful, and there was no sign that anyone had tried to take the dead witch’s heart or liver.

“Zee?” Adam was starting to think he should have insisted on bringing Mercy in, and not because he was worried about leaving her alone. “Could you learn more if you touched the corpse?” As Helena presumably had—before leaving not only the crime scene but the whole city. What had she discovered?

“Ja,” he said, straightening up. He glanced at the coroner and said, “But we are guests here. I am ready to look at the boy.”

The second corpse hit Adam unexpectedly hard. He’d seen a lot of bodies, a lot of death, and nowadays, unless the dead person was someone he knew, he was generally unaffected. But Aubrey Worth was—had been—Jesse’s age.

While his daughter had been half a block away watching a movie, someone had ripped Aubrey’s flesh open, spilling his life onto a polished cement floor. He’d had plans, people he loved who loved him back. Now there would be a hole in the world where his life had previously fit.

They would find his killer and make sure that no more people died before their time. Adam made himself think about something else before his wolf decided to show itself.

The coroner must have figured out that Zee was scary while Adam was distracted. Or maybe he’d added two and two and gotten five when Adam asked Zee about touching the body. Whatever the reason, Amin had quit trying to make conversation and moved a few steps closer to Tony and George, without abandoning his post near the drawer. He looked a little protective of his dead charges, as if he was fighting not to put himself between Zee and Aubrey Worth’s corpse.

Zee began by treating the young man’s body the same as he had the first. But when he was done using his hands, he put his face quite close to the body. Amin looked as though he was going to protest—but Tony put a hand on his arm. Not restraint, exactly, but requesting cooperation.

Ignoring the silent argument, Zee closed his eyes and inhaled. Adam knew about scenting things. Sometimes holding the air in your lungs for a couple of seconds and then letting the air back out through your nose gave you a different take on subtle scents. He didn’t think that the old fae’s nose was as good as a werewolf’s, but he could have been wrong.

He was watching quite closely, so he saw the moment Zee froze. The old fae’s eyes opened, but Adam had the impression he wasn’t looking at anything. Zee’s eyes were usually some intermittent shade between blue and gray, but now they were the color of a shimmering silver blade, with neither pupil nor white in evidence, and the air in the morgue acquired the sharp scent of ozone and potential danger.

Zee closed his eyes again and took in another breath. When he straightened at last and opened his eyes, they looked stormy but human. Then he frowned slightly and turned to Adam.

“I think that we could use Mercy’s nose here,” he said, sounding utterly like himself.

In front of the others, the old fae would never say, “Mercy can smell some kinds of magic better than I can.” But Adam was sure that was what he meant.

Adam nodded. “I’ll ask her.”

Zee looked like a battered old mechanic again, hands in pockets, and thoughtful. But the air still smelled of ozone, and Adam’s skin twitched as he turned his back on the iron-kissed fae.

Adam found Mercy still huddled in his coat. Her face was tucked down into the fabric until only the top of her head stuck out.

He said her name before he tapped on her window to get her attention, so he wouldn’t startle her. She jumped a little anyway—a sign of how tense she still was. When he opened the door, the heat boiled out of the car, though he could hear her chattering teeth.

Since no one was watching, he unclipped her seat belt and pulled her against him, holding her the way he’d wanted to for the past hour. She snuggled against him. After a bit, her shivers died down.

He spared a thought for George and the humans trapped in the morgue with an unhappy fae. But this was more important—and he trusted Zee not to take out his temper on innocents with any more deadly weapon than a few sharp words. Probably that king’s children whose skulls had been turned into cups had not been innocents.

“I needed that,” Mercy said, her voice muffled in the folds of his coat. “Thank you.”

“Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?” he asked.

A car turned into the parking lot, but the driver didn’t turn her head to look at them. This mostly empty corner of the lot was a fair distance from the justice center; doubtless she was looking for a closer parking place.

Against his neck, Mercy whispered, “The killer didn’t have a scent.”

She sounded thoroughly spooked.

“He’s using some sort of magic that shields his scent?” Adam speculated. “But you followed him anyway.” He wasn’t doubting her assertion—he hadn’t been able to pick up the killer’s scent himself. But he knew what a hunt looked like, and she’d been on a trail.

She nodded her head and said with obvious reluctance, “This is going to sound stupid.”

He waited.

She sighed. “So when I broke through the spider’s spell web, I told you I saw a great dark abyss, right? And it was there again in my dream with Stefan. He didn’t know where it came from.”

He kissed the top of her head.

In a small voice she said, “I think I brought it with me. I think it sunk its jaws into me when I broke through the spider-thing’s web, and it’s been with me ever since.”

“Do you think it’s connected to the spines that Zee took out of your hands and feet?” he asked.

She considered it but shook her head. “No. It was somehow connected to the second spider-thing, the one in the basement, I think.”

“Okay,” he said. “How does that tie into the fact that the killer had no scent? Just so you know, I couldn’t scent him, either. My nose isn’t as good when I’m not the wolf, but I should have been able to pick up the killer’s scent when I was standing right next to his bloody footprints.”

She hesitated. “I worked out a theory while you were in the morgue. It’s pretty far-fetched.”

“Hit me,” he said.

“I tracked that killer by feeling the abyss,” she said. “It wasn’t really a scent, but it was a trace of something sort of like magic.” She paused and said, “I really need to talk to Zee about that, because there was something weird going on with magic at that scene.”

“He wants to talk to you, too,” Adam said. “But go back to the abyss that you think has its claws sunk into you—and is also tied to the murder of that boy.”

She shrugged. “I told you it was weird. Is weird. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s something with will and power and—” Her voice tightened. She didn’t finish that thought. “What I was following, the killer’s trail, was a trace it left behind.”

“Zee told us that the sickle—the one he came here looking for—was sentient,” Adam commented. “What if what you are feeling is that sickle?”

She nodded. “Someone is using it to kill people. Someone without a scent—but because I have this tie to the abyss, the sickle, I could follow it.”

“Your instincts are pretty good,” he said.

He did not doubt for a minute she was correct. Her magic, a gift of Coyote, was exactly like any gift a trickster god might bequeath—irrational, chaotic, and only sometimes useful. But Mercy was adept at sussing out how to deal with it using instincts and intellect.

She was also good at throwing herself into danger, following where her magic led her. An image of the dead woman’s ruined body flashed in his mind. That would not happen to Mercy. He wouldn’t let it.

“You believe me?”

“I do,” he told her.

“Okay,” she said. Then her body stiffened a little as though she was forcing herself to talk. “I think that the murderer might be Stefan.”

“Why?”

Like Adam, Stefan was a killer. But there was a reason his name in the vampire world was the Soldier. Like Adam, by preference, Stefan’s kills were neat and quick. The kind of theatrics at play here didn’t feel like Stefan, even if he were wielding an artifact.

An artifact that Zee had told them could control its wielder. Stefan was old and powerful. Adam had a hard time believing an artifact could control him.

“Because I trailed the killer,” Mercy said. “He appeared, just appeared, in the store. Then disappeared in the back lot. He didn’t get in a car—there’s a feel to the trace when a door closes.”

Adam knew what she meant. Since he hadn’t been able to sense the killer, he didn’t know how what happened to scent when someone got into a car translated to whatever Mercy had sensed. But he trusted her judgment that whatever and whoever the murderer was, he had disappeared in the same way that he had come. And that sounded like something Stefan could do—Stefan and Marsilia, Stefan’s maker.

“Could it have been Marsilia?”

“There wasn’t a scent,” Mercy said. “Stefan could tell me not to recognize his scent.”

“He couldn’t have told me,” Adam reminded her. “I couldn’t scent the killer, either. Marsilia can teleport, too.”

“After he’d killed—” She hesitated. “After he or she killed the boy—” She paused again.

“Aubrey Worth.”

She sighed and bounced her head against the side of his jaw gently. “I didn’t want to know that. I didn’t want his name.”

“After he or she killed the boy . . . ?” Adam asked, since she didn’t seem inclined to finish her thought. When she still didn’t say anything, he said, “Maybe the sickle makes it so we can’t scent its wielder.”

She made a frustrated noise.

“Once you add magic in, it’s hard to know how to limit it,” Adam observed sympathetically.

“It was magic—or rather there was a lot of magic all over.” She let out an irritated huff of breath, sounding, for the first time, almost normal.

She got like that when she was trying to explain magic with words when all she had were feelings. Especially since, as a female mechanic, she was leery about explaining things that might be called into question without empirical evidence—even to Adam. The more “woo-woo” (her words) something was, the more defensive she got.

“I’d like to talk a bit to Zee about what I think I felt there. What he thinks it all means. When that boy—” Her voice broke off. “Okay, okay.”

She sucked in a breath, gave an irritated growl, and wiggled to put some space between them. When she was done, she was sitting sideways in her seat as if ready to get out of the SUV. He stepped back against the open door so she could get out if she wanted to—and to give her space, which is what he thought she really needed.

He wasn’t hurt. He’d been expecting her physical withdrawal as soon as her shivering lessened. Mercy wasn’t much given to public displays of affection—still less if they were driven by a need for comfort. She didn’t lightly reveal weakness—he understood that entirely.

She waved her hands as if in surrender. “Okay. Okay,” she said again. “It helps if I talk through this. I’m sorry if it’s too woo-woo.”

“No problem,” he said.

She gave him a suspicious look, but evidently he was successful in hiding his amusement at her discomfort, because she started talking. “When Aubrey died, there was some sort of explosion of magic, too. I could feel the remnants of it. It felt as if the blood on the floor was still connected to the killer in some way. I could trace that feeling both ways.”

“To Aubrey and to the killer,” Adam said, not liking the way that sounded.

She nodded, and her body gave a convulsive shiver. Her eyebrows rose a bit, and she took another deep breath. She met his eyes.

“I think I could track that magic because it’s attached to me, too. A sort of awful three-way tie.” She glanced in the backseat, and her face tightened.

“Company?” Adam asked. He’d gotten used to that aspect of her power. “I can’t tell.”

He could sometimes sense the ghosts—even see them, as he’d seen the boy in Stefan’s house. But if he could, it was a bad thing. Whenever he walked into Mercy’s old house, he felt like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

She nodded, a flicker of relief crossing her face. He couldn’t tell if she was relieved that the ghost was weak enough he couldn’t perceive it, or if she was relieved that she didn’t have to talk about it and risk making it stronger. He could make an educated guess about who the ghost was.

“That magical connection gave me insights into the boy”—she grimaced and twitched her shoulder as if someone had prodded her—“into Aubrey that I don’t normally get. Sort of a spiritual equivalent of the scent of a person. You know how a good sniff can tell you what shampoo they use, if their car has leather upholstery, how many cats claim them?”

Adam nodded.

“Well, I can tell you that our victim was not too bright but sweet as they come. He was half in love with one of his roommates and half in love with a cute girl in one of his study groups that so far he had been too shy to speak to. He loved bubble tea and sushi. Someday he wanted to visit Japan. He was good at math but had no business being enrolled in computer science.”

That evidently got some sort of reaction from the ghost because Mercy scowled over her shoulder before catching herself. She rubbed her hands over her face and slid out of the car. She stiffened just a little but otherwise covered up the fact that her feet were still sore. She moved into Adam and let her forehead fall forward until it rested on his chest.

“Makes it feel like you lost a friend instead of a stranger,” Adam said gently, rubbing her arms. He made a point of not looking in the backseat, where he was pretty sure Aubrey’s ghost was sitting.

She nodded. Silence fell between them, and he was content with that.

After too short of a time, Mercy said, “Why are you out here without the rest of them?”

“Zee sent me out to see if you would come in. He wants you to look at the bodies. Something he figured out in there made him pretty upset.” Adam considered his memory of Zee’s face. “Angry, I think.”

Both of her eyebrows shot up. “He wants me to do what? Since when am I an expert on dead bodies?” She pursed her lips to disguise her smile as she continued in an appalled tone. “And you kept them waiting in the morgue while I chatter on about stupid woo-woo stuff? When Zee is angry?”

“They’ll wait,” he said.

She snorted and clambered back into the SUV to turn it off. She locked it, handed his keys to him, and set off for the coroner’s office, limping.

“Do you want to go coyote?” he asked, following her closely. He didn’t ask if he could carry her in; he wasn’t stupid.

She shook her head. “I can’t talk that way. If Zee needs the coyote’s help, I’m sure there’s a bathroom I can change in so I don’t shock anyone.”

She stopped abruptly. Tensed. Adam looked around, but he couldn’t see anything to cause her reaction.

“Okay,” she muttered to herself. Then she turned and looked at someone standing on his right—Aubrey’s ghost, he presumed.

“Look,” she said. “You need to go. Go into the light or whatever.” Pause. “I don’t know what light. There’s supposed to be a light. Or a path.” Pause. “Look, I don’t have a freaking manual. I don’t know what to do—but I think that you should.” Pause. “Because most people die and go somewhere. Their souls don’t linger around even if their ghosts do. I don’t think it’s good for you.” Much longer pause.

Adam put his hand on her shoulder and his lips to her ear. “Pull on the pack,” he said. “On me. Tell him to go.”

“What if that just leaves him wandering around somewhere away from me?” she said, her shoulders hunching under his hand.

“You can’t help everyone,” he told her.

She gave him a look. “The day you take that advice is the day I listen to it from you.”

That was fair.

“Can you call someone to help?” he asked. “Your brother, Gary? One of the other walkers?”

She shook her head. “Tad always says that the real cool thing about being half one thing and half another is that no one can figure you out. He was being sarcastic about the ‘real cool’ part.”

“I gathered.”

“Even Gary’s powers work differently than mine do,” she said. She frowned a moment, and Adam felt her draw on the pack bonds—he pushed a little to speed things up.

“Aubrey Alan Worth,” she said with the punch of Alpha that let Adam force his pack members to obedience.

Adam hadn’t known Aubrey’s middle name. He didn’t think that anyone had said it aloud in Mercy’s hearing, either.

“Your time here is done.” Her voice, for all the power she was putting in it, was gentle. “Be at peace.”

Adam seldom felt magic—other than the magic inherent in being a werewolf and Alpha of his pack. But Mercy was his mate, he was touching her, and she was using his power to amplify her voice. He felt the weight of her magic—and he felt the backlash as something cold and old and empty pushed back.

She staggered, and for a moment Adam was sure that the only thing keeping her on her feet was his hold. She reached up and grabbed one of his hands with her cold one and held on tight.

“No,” she said quickly, her voice soothing. “I see. I see. I understand. You can’t go yet. No. Don’t panic. We’ll fix it. Calm down.” That last she put another push of pack magic into.

“Okay,” she said. “I understand. But I won’t take you into that building because it’s not a good place for you. Could you wait by the SUV?”

She waited, then released Adam’s hand to stride off toward the coroner’s office, muttering, “If I’m going to be haunted for the rest of my life, at least it will be by a sweet boy who takes orders.”

“Do you think that’s likely?” he asked, keeping his voice down. Whatever had happened had scared her, and she needed to distract herself. It scared him, too, because it hadn’t felt like anything a big bad wolf could protect Mercy from.

Mercy started to shrug and then said, “I think that if we can find the killer, we might be able to break whatever is keeping Aubrey here. It’s not what Frost did to Peter, but it’s the same effect.”

Frost had been a vampire who fed off the souls of the dead, keeping his victims tied to their bodies, including one of Adam’s wolves. Frost had been a nasty piece of work.

“Okay,” he said, putting confidence in his voice. They’d handled every other damned thing that had come their way, including Frost. They’d handle this one, too. Hopefully.

“I don’t know what I’m talking about,” she reminded him. “I wish there were a Haynes or Chilton repair manual on how I work.”

“You’ll figure it out,” he assured her earnestly.

She turned to him, eyes alight with ire—and then frowned. “Quit baiting me.”

He grinned. Unable to help himself. What a gift she was.

Mercy sniffed again. Like Zee had been, she was careful not to touch the boy’s body. Her brows were drawn in puzzlement, and she tilted her head as if trying to catch some faint sound. Abruptly, she stiffened and closed her eyes, and Adam felt her draw upon the pack—not for power but as an anchor. Instinctively, he stepped forward and reached out to touch her.

Zee got in his way. Had it been anyone else in the room, Adam would have knocked them aside. But Zee was protective of Mercy, and he knew magic. If he didn’t think Adam should touch her, Adam had to trust his judgment. He didn’t have to like it, though.

“You know something of their deaths,” said Amin, watching Mercy. “Is there anything that I should tell Dimitri to be careful of during the autopsy?”

Mercy straightened, shivered, and looked at the coroner. “I think that you should put off the autopsies as long as possible. You aren’t going to learn anything helpful that points to this killer,” she said. “And . . .” She glanced at Zee.

The fae’s anger had not eased at all while Adam was gone. It gathered around Zee like the moment before lightning struck and felt a lot bigger than it had when Adam went to get Mercy. The awareness of the danger slid down Adam’s spine, and the smell of iron-rich battle fury brushed his nose like a future memory.

Adam was pretty sure Mercy could feel it—she just wasn’t moved by it. Growing up in the Marrok’s pack of crazies had left Mercy pretty unimpressed by temper.

George had put himself between the fae and the other two, which told Adam that George knew what was going on. But Tony and the coroner weren’t plastered against the wall and shaking with fear, so he figured they had no clue. That was probably just as well.

“Probably it would be safe enough,” Zee said, sounding cool as a cucumber. “But only probably.”

“It’s our job,” Amin said. He waved a hand at the refrigeration unit. “They are our charges. Dimitri’s and mine.”

“Could you give us a week?” Mercy asked. “We don’t really know what’s going on yet. If you could give us some time, we will know more.”

“Do you know who the killer is?” he asked.

“We know what killed them,” answered Zee. “The other question may be less interesting than you think.”

Amin shook his head. “We take care of them,” he told them. “ ‘Probably safe’ is good enough. Let me know if you find out ‘definitely not safe’; otherwise, we will follow procedure.”

At Zee’s request they stopped at the cemetery off the Bypass Highway that separated the Yakima River from Richland. He hadn’t said why, and no one in the SUV was stupid enough to ask. Tony was pretty sharp. He had caught on that there was something wrong. Probably from the way everyone but Mercy was treating Zee.

Zee directed them through the maze of well-tended gravel drives before he had them stop. Then he took Mercy and made the rest of them wait at the SUV.

“I hate this,” Tony muttered, watching the old man and Mercy traipse between the stone markers inset to make maintaining the grounds easier.

“I don’t much like graveyards myself,” admitted George, leaning against the SUV in a way that boded ill for the paint job.

Adam thought about objecting, but scratches were not what brought the resale value of his vehicles down. It had been a few years since he’d actually had one survive long enough to be traded in or sold.

“Graveyards are fine.” Tony tossed George an irritated look. He glanced over at the manicured grounds, green even in the late autumn chill. “Well, not fine. And this is a cemetery. Graveyards are next to churches. What I hate is knowing fuck all about what is going on while bodies are falling around me.” He frowned at Adam, as if Adam knew what was going on and was keeping it from him.

“You didn’t spend any time in the military, did you?” asked George wryly.

Adam felt his own lips twist. George’s time in the military had been during World War I, but some things did not change.

Zee and Mercy had stopped by a grave. Mercy sat down cross-legged on the grass and put her hand on a gravestone. Huh. Zee had said that Mercy had a better nose for magic than he did. And Mercy’s magic, nose driven or not, worked better with the dead. Not that she was happy about that.

Adam pulled out his phone and checked. This cemetery had been in existence since 1956.

“You will tell me what’s going on when you know?” asked Tony in a voice that clearly said he didn’t expect them to do that.

George shrugged. “You know how it is.”

They’d stopped at Mercy’s garage, where George and Zee had left their cars. Adam didn’t think that Mercy was planning on opening the garage until tomorrow, but she and Zee were fighting with the office door lock, so evidently she and Zee had something planned. Maybe she’d left something inside, but more likely they were going to talk through what they’d found.

Tony’s complaint at the cemetery had hit a chord with Adam. How often would knowing just a bit more above his pay grade have resulted in fewer people dying? That was a set greater than none, he thought.

“Tony,” Adam said thoughtfully, “just how far do you want to go down this rabbit hole?”

Tony stiffened, giving him a look. “Is that an offer?”

“You have had our backs for a while now,” Adam said. “I think it’s fair that you know where the bodies are coming from. I think they’re”—he nodded toward the door, where Mercy had stepped back and was watching Zee manage the lock—“not sure what’s going on. But I will tell you when we have a working theory.”

“Catch?”

“You’ll have to lie about it to your fellow officers, knowing that ignorance might get them killed—though maybe slower than actually knowing what’s going on.”

Tony’s eyes narrowed. “You think that’s new to me? I might not have fought in an organized war, but I’ve been in the trenches, where it’s hard to decide who is friend and who is foe.”

“Organized,” said George carefully, “war. I haven’t been in one of those.”

Adam gave a huff of laughter. “Isn’t that the truth.” He returned to the subject at hand. “There is still a hard limit to what I can let you know. Secrets that aren’t mine. I’ll share what I can without regard to your safety—but I will impose silence on you about things that outsiders cannot know. That will mean that sometimes when those bodies fall, you will know that it was your silence that let them die. Your silence, and not just mine.”

Tony met his gaze and held it long enough that Adam had to put a hold on his wolf.

“Fair offer,” Tony said. “Can I think on it?”

“Open offer,” Adam agreed. He waited outside until George’s car pulled out of the lot.