Winter Lost

2

Adam

Adam entered the virtual meeting room, and four faces, including his own, filled his computer screen.

He wished he were doing this in person. He could tell a lot more when his wolf could use his senses. He could, for instance, tell if someone was lying to him. Not that he had any reason to suspect the people in this meeting of being liars. But it might be nice to be certain. Relying on virtual communications made him uneasy.

“Welcome, gentlemen,” said the man running the show. His fair hair was a faint memory, trimmed short where it still traced a circle around his head, just above his ears. He wore black-rimmed glasses like the ones that Adam’s own father had worn more than half a century ago. He looked like a mild-mannered bank clerk and had spent twenty years as a Special Forces sniper. And despite the glasses, Don Orson could still put a bullet anywhere he wanted it to go—both literally and figuratively.

Don ran the New Mexico branch of Adam’s security company, and had done so for over a decade, since Adam had moved his main operations up to the Tri-Cities. They’d worked together for five or six years before that. Don was smart and resourceful and had a reputation for honesty and forthrightness that was almost as useful as the fact that he actually was both honest and forthright. He was also better than Adam at keeping a cool head in rough waters. The fire in his eye told Adam that Don’s cool head was deserting him now.

Don didn’t like losing people any more than Adam did. They’d both lost a lot of them in war—though their wars were in different centuries. It was not acceptable to lose them here and now.

“I want explanations,” said the third of the four people in the virtual meeting.

They’d been told they would be talking to someone in the Pentagon, but Adam didn’t recognize this person, a Black man with flawless skin that would have made him look a decade younger than Don except for the strain in his eyes. He was wearing a dress shirt, sleeves rolled up mid-forearm. The small buttons of his collar were undone, so he’d probably started today with a tie.

“We are going to have to go to the press,” he said. “I don’t want to do that without more information.” He showed no signs of introducing himself.

Adam rubbed his ear as though it itched. Don’s eyes widened slightly at the signal—Adam was usually better than Don at identifying random high-ranked political appointees.

A text announced its arrival quietly, and Adam glanced down at his phone to see that Orson had sent him information. SecDef. A name might have been good, too, but the position he held was more important.

Adam examined the man currently expressing his opinion of the recent events. At some point, Adam had lost track of who held the office of Secretary of Defense. The last few years had left him disliking politics even more than usual—he hadn’t approved of any politician since John McCain died. Maybe because he and McCain had been from the same era, born to the same values, and refined in the crucible of the same war. That was a reason, but not an excuse. Adam’s job was to keep his people—pack and employees—safe. To do that, he needed to keep track of the political climate.

Technically, the national laboratories at Los Alamos were, like the ones in the Tri-Cities, under the Department of Energy, even the secret labs like the one in question. That was why Adam’s security company was employed rather than the military. Adam wasn’t sure why they were talking to the SecDef instead of the Secretary of Energy. It might be important.

The SecDef demonstrated that he’d been a general at some point with a five-minute screed designed to make all of them sit up and pay attention. Orson looked serious but not worried, Adam’s own face was blank, and so—Adam noted with interest—was the face of their fourth member.

The young Hispanic man wore his Hauptman Security uniform with the same smartness he’d have worn his marine uniform. His straight back was obvious even in the limited screen view. His skin bore shadows that spoke of fatigue, and his eyes looked a little reddened. He’d been awake since he’d gone on shift last night, Adam knew. He’d refused to go home until after this meeting. He was their man on the ground.

Ortega had been patrolling with another guard when they’d been ambushed. His partner had been killed immediately. By Ortega’s account, Ortega had killed two people and wounded a third before the enemy withdrew, leaving only his dead comrade to verify his story. The enemy had taken their dead and wounded—and inexplicably (for now), the cameras in that area had been off.

That lack of corroborative evidence apparently bothered the SecDef, too. Eventually, he turned his considerable ire on the former marine corporal, Ortega.

Adam would have interfered then, but Ortega wasn’t flinching. If he could hold up under the barrage, it would do the whole situation a lot of good. If the SecDef learned a little respect for their witness, matters would be considerably cleaner. Adam caught Don’s eye and shook his head, telling him to stand down, too.

Adam wished they were all in a room together. It would be a lot easier to make these calls.

“And furthermore, girl,” said the SecDef—and that was when Ortega had had enough.

“My pronouns are ‘he,’ ‘him,’ and ‘his,’ ” he said in a flat voice that carried over the top of the SecDef’s. “And have been since I was asked to leave the marines. That is probably in one of the files you hopefully read before the meeting. If you had called me ‘boy,’ it would still have been offensive and demeaning.” He put up a hand to stop anything anyone might have said and continued. “If I had died with Kit—a situation that it seems you would prefer to this one—none of us would be here. I’d be dead and approximately ten unknowns would have had access to whatever they were after. Possibly without anyone knowing they’d been in and out at all. The only mystery would be why a couple of Hauptman guards ran off together, because those people were prepared to take bodies back with them, and I don’t think they expected the bodies would belong to their own men.”

Vincent Ortega took no prisoners, it seemed. Adam trusted that his face stayed blank. Only someone who had known Don as long as Adam had would have detected the amused pleasure in his old comrade’s face.

After a breathless moment, the SecDef settled back in his chair with a slight smile. “I spoke to your former commanding officer, Mr. Ortega. I am happy to see that he was right.” He rubbed his face—and suddenly looked every bit as tired as Ortega. “But it would be useful if we knew who it was—homegrown or international terrorists. Spies. Thieves. Something.”

Kidnappers, Adam added silently. There were, he knew, several potentially high-value targets who habitually worked at night in the labs. He didn’t say it because he didn’t indulge in speculation with people he didn’t know. Instead, he texted it to Don.

Don nodded once and said, “We’re running DNA tests on the blood at the scene—”

Don’s voice kicked over to background noise as anxiety struck through Adam’s mating bond. He waited—Don’s succinct outline of Hauptman Security’s investigation to date sliding past his ears—for something to happen. One minute passed. Two. Instead of texting him, she fiddled with their bond until he couldn’t sense her distress at all.

There were only two reasons Mercy would work so diligently to keep him unaware that something was bothering her. This didn’t have the feel of the ongoing issues she’d been having after the Soul Taker, that damned ancient artifact, had tried to remake her magic in its own image. Those tended to have more pain attached to them.

Bonarata had called again.

He picked up his phone and texted Ben, the pack’s computer expert. Ben would notify the rest of the people working on the Bonarata problem. It was unlikely to come to anything—they might manage to get his location for the duration of the call. But Bonarata, they had learned, was a lot more mobile than they’d previously understood. He was supposed to be located in Italy. Ben’s traces had proven that the old vampire had some way of traveling that allowed him to be in San Francisco one day and Barcelona the next without leaving a trail. That was why the Marrok—whom Adam and his pack no longer belonged to—allowed Adam access to Charles, the Marrok’s son, who was working on how Bonarata managed to get to Mercy through number, phone, and carrier changes.

In the end, Adam thought, it was going to come down to a battle one-on-one. But if they could stop the harassing phone calls, they’d force Bonarata to find another, possibly less effective means of terrifying Mercy.

Something Adam could sink his teeth into.

“—thought that the least you could do is pay attention,” thundered the SecDef.

Adam continued to watch his phone for another heartbeat. Though Ben’s “on it” had come through on the heels of the text, Adam’s wolf still wasn’t happy. SecDef’s attitude didn’t help.

Adam thought he had it under control, but when he looked up and saw his image reflected back at himself in the computer screen, his eyes were bright yellow. SecDef flinched—which wasn’t good. Scaring powerful people was not going to make anyone safer.

“I hear you,” Adam said. He paused to get the growl out of his voice. “Sorry. I had an emergency that I needed to deal with.” And then he lied. “It didn’t keep me from listening.” And followed it up with a truth. “Don has been keeping me briefed on this situation, so I am already up-to-date from our side of this—and it sounds like nothing is coming up on yours, sir. Your people are certain that no one got in?”

“Yes,” they all said with differing degrees of emphasis. Evidently this was something they’d already established and he hadn’t heard.

Well, people asked questions to make certain of things they already knew all the time.

“Good,” Adam said. “Vincent?”

The former marine corporal met his eyes.

“Good job. Thank you.”

The young man took a deep breath and his shoulders relaxed. He looked, Adam thought, about fifteen. Twenty-two was too damned young to be embroiled in this kind of bloody mess.

“Thank you, sir,” Vincent said.

Adam gave him a smile and said, “I’m not an officer—never was.” And withdrew from the virtual meeting before he could say something else that proved he hadn’t been listening to the last ten minutes. Don could finish up; he did diplomacy better than Adam. When they were through, Don would call him and they would have a meeting about the meeting.

Adam called Ben.

“Fucking Canada,” Ben said in a harried voice without greeting. “We think. He’s using a sodding stealth phone again.”

A stealth phone lied to the cell towers about who it was and what it was doing. It switched its own number by various fairly easy and quick methods depending on the make and model. The ones Bonarata had access to were better than anything Adam had heard of.

“Charles got a trace on him just before he hung up, though, and we’re following him,” Ben said with an edge of the moon madness in his voice. A hunt was a hunt.

“In what part of Canada?” Adam asked.

“Montreal,” Ben said. “That is now a for certain. Come on, you—” And some very British and a few American curses boiled out of Adam’s phone.

If Bonarata was in Montreal, he was not in Pasco, where Mercy was. Adam was reasonably certain that she’d be safe in Uncle Mike’s, even from the Lord of Night. Safer, anyway, than when she was in Adam’s company.

He’d done such a good job against Bonarata the last time.

He deliberately loosened his jaw. The past could not be changed. In the present, he carried a few more weapons on his person and in his SUV. Weapons were great equalizers; give him a big enough weapon and he could kill anything. He had also found a new sparring partner to step up his training.

Ben got creative with a few new expletive combinations that would doubtless find their way into the vocabulary of the pack, and ended them with “Lost him.”

“Next time,” Adam said.

“Or the one after that,” Ben agreed with a sigh. “It would be handy if we could keep track of him.”

Adam made a neutral sound. They weren’t going to track him down and destroy him. Bonarata was going to bring himself to them in his own good time. Adam wished he were more certain of the results. In the meantime, knowledge was power.

Ben grunted. “I could put a trace on Mercy’s phone if she’s not going to let us know when he calls her.”

“I know when he calls,” Adam said. “Leave Mercy’s phone alone.”

Ben grunted, but not as if he was unhappy. “How is she?”

“Today?” Adam asked. “Same.”

Neither said how worried he was about Mercy.

“Okay,” Ben said. “Would you let me know if someone—Sherwood or Zee or anyone—figures out how to fix her?”

“I will,” Adam told him, and they disconnected.

Adam stretched and played a few rounds of solitaire on his laptop.

Don phoned about ten minutes before Adam expected him to. This SecDef wasn’t as long-winded as the last one had been, then. Some changes were for the better.

“I was waiting for you to eviscerate him at the start,” Don said without greeting.

Adam grunted. “Looked to me like Vincent had things in hand. SecDef couldn’t throw too much sewage on him without looking like a bully.”

“Hasn’t stopped some of them in the past,” Don said.

“If he’d been one of those, I would have stepped in.”

“Good,” said Don. “I think SecDef might have come a cropper trying to squish him even if he’d really tried. Speaking of the good gentleman, did you really not know who we were talking to?”

“No,” Adam said. There was no excuse for that, so he didn’t bother making one.

Don laughed. “Well, you handled him spot-on. I thought the ‘I don’t talk but my eyes turn scary’ might be a bit much, but SecDef seemed to think that meant we were competent. So thanks for that.”

And the secret for making people think you knew what you were doing was keeping your mouth shut about what had really happened. If Don wanted to believe Adam planned all of that, it was okay by Adam.

“What did you think of Ortega?” asked Don casually.

Orson hadn’t told Adam that Ortega was trans when he’d hired him last year. But though Adam might have let the changes in the Pentagon slip by him, he’d never have okayed a hire without a thorough check.

“That was a good pickup,” Adam said. “You said one of your old friends recommended him?”

Don gave a sudden little laugh. “That boy doesn’t have an ounce of quit in him, does he?” There was a little pause. “He doesn’t bother you? Really?”

“I change into a wolf at the full moon,” Adam said dryly. “Who am I to worry about someone making decisions about who and what they are?” Don grunted, but Adam knew him inside out. He heard the relief.

“Yep,” Don said. “Ortega was fast-tracked for good things until people on top decided his kind of people weren’t good for the armed forces. He’s a crack shot and quick-witted.” He paused deliberately before saying, “And he is careful and willing to keep information to himself when necessary.”

“Were we keeping something from the SecDef?” Adam asked.

“We were indeed. It wasn’t a bullet that killed Kit, though they shot him in the head as soon as he went down. It was your kind of stuff. Ortega thinks it didn’t work on him because his grandmother was a bruja and he wears a protection of some kind that she gave to him.”

“Bruja” did not necessarily mean the kind of witch that Elizaveta had been.

Elizaveta.

Adam hurt whenever he thought of her. She had been a comrade in arms and reminded him so strongly of his own grandmother, also a Russian immigrant, that she felt like family. He’d called her for advice now and then. She’d been the head of a large and powerful family. She understood his job. But she’d also been a much bigger monster than he’d understood, and when he’d figured it out, he’d killed her.

Because of Elizaveta, he needed to find out what kind of a bruja Ortega’s grandmother was or had been. That might be a clue. Or a reason to distrust Ortega.

He really didn’t want to deal with witches again. But he would if he had to.

He spoke with Don for a while more, coordinating next steps. Once Adam understood that magic had been involved, his traveling to New Mexico was a given.

When he got off the phone, Adam continued making arrangements to go to New Mexico. He bought an airline ticket. He texted his office to tell them he wouldn’t be in for a few days, possibly more. When he’d done that, he punched in Darryl’s number. Darryl, whom Adam was about to drop into the middle of a screaming mess.

He made himself stop smiling before he hit the last number. People could hear when you were smiling.

His second answered on the third ring.

“I’ve been waiting for your call,” Darryl said with just a hair too much aggression.

Adam considered that tone, and also the words Darryl had used, before he said anything. There was no way that Darryl could have anticipated the reason he’d called him. He must feel that there was something else.

“Because?” Adam asked.

Darryl gave an almost angry huff. “Moon hunt.”

Three days ago. Adam’s wolf surged with satisfaction at the joy of that hunt. Speed had made his blood sing as they ran through the snow. The hunting sense connected all the pack so tightly, he felt as if he and they were one and the same. Their breath, their fangs, their strength all belonged to him—as his did to them. The power of the killing strike and the taste of blood.

Hastily Adam shoved the wolf back. He needed to pay attention here. What had bothered Darryl?

The beginning of the hunt had not been smooth. It was uncommon for beginnings to be without incident, and the pack was running hot all the time. When the wolf was tasting the moon, knowing a hunt was in the wind, it was hard to keep control. There had been a few pockets of violence, but they’d all been resolved without anyone dying, so Adam hadn’t considered that anything needed saying.

“No,” Adam said evenly. “I’m not calling about the moon hunt. I don’t need to. You handled it.”

A rumble of a growl echoed out of the phone. “I let Post do my job.”

Currently, Adam had a surplus of very dominant werewolves to manage. They were desperately needed, given the pressure the pack was under to defend their territory from all comers, but it wasn’t making life easy for any of them. Especially since Sherwood Post was considerably older and more dominant than Adam himself was.

Adam could feel his wolf bristle in defiant refusal at the thought of Post being more dominant. There was something that happened to a wolf once it had been in charge for a while. Very few Alphas were able to resume being answerable to anyone. Adam’s wolf’s determination gave him a lot of sympathy for Darryl, who was also supposed to be in charge of Post.

Darryl should be Alpha of his own pack. Adam and the Marrok had been in talks about finding the best fit for Darryl—something that would work for his career as well as for his wolf—when Mercy had made their pack responsible for maintaining the only place on earth where humans were safe from the things that go bump in the night. At that point, all of their options had changed.

If they were going to keep their promises and their bargains with the fae, Darryl was necessary. Post was necessary. Warren was necessary.

Now it was up to Adam to keep the three (four, if he counted himself, and he probably should) dominant werewolves functioning as a team.

He’d been privileged to serve for a few months under a staff sergeant who was gifted at team building. He’d put together a highly efficient crack team and managed to make them happy to serve under their idiot captain who should have been shot—and eventually was, amazingly enough by the enemy.

At the time, Adam hadn’t realized those lessons would be just about the most valuable things he learned from being in the army.

Which was why he intended to let them sort some things out on their own while he was gone. He knew his wolves. They understood what their pack had taken on and why it was important, necessary, not to fail. And if they were going to not fail, they would need every wolf. Without Adam, they would have to find a way to work together. He wished he could be a fly on the wall to witness it instead of running around New Mexico trying to figure out what happened on one hand and playing politics on the other.

“What was the job, the one you should have done, that you let Post do?” asked Adam.

“You were there,” growled Darryl.

“I can’t read minds,” Adam growled right back. “I want to know what you think. Post did a lot of things. Answer the question.”

“He broke up the fight between Mary Jo and George,” Darryl said.

“What were you doing instead?” Adam asked, though of course he knew. That wasn’t the point.

There was a pause while Darryl decided if he was going to let Adam lead. The length of the pause told Adam that it was a close-run thing.

“Guarding Zack,” Darryl said, but went on more quickly, as if he were arguing with Adam, “I could have stopped Mary Jo and George before it got violent. They would have obeyed me.”

That was true. Sherwood had been forced to tear into them hard enough that both still had open wounds until they had shifted back to human, well after the hunt was over.

“Werewolves are dangerous,” Adam said. “Being a werewolf is dangerous.”

“My job is to protect our pack, even from each other,” Darryl said.

“Yes,” agreed Adam. “You protected Zack. Our heart.”

Darryl growled. “No one was going to hurt Zack.”

“Even with the moon’s call riding them?” They both knew the answer to that. No, Zack hadn’t been safe from harm before Darryl had made him safe.

“Zack is a werewolf,” Darryl tried.

Adam let that hang in the air. Zack had come to them broken. Adam didn’t know what had happened to him, just that he’d bounced around from pack to pack for the better part of a decade until the Marrok had sent him to them. Their pack’s lone submissive wolf was healthier than he’d been when he’d joined them, but he wasn’t up to handling scuffles breaking out with him in the middle of them.

Darryl finally grunted acknowledgment.

“Zack needs to know we have his back,” Adam said. “Sherwood broke up that fight—and you kept Zack safe.” He let that sit a moment and added, “Protecting Zack was the most important job. That means you or me—not Post.”

“But,” Darryl said, “if I had stopped Mary Jo and George, they would not be hurt—and Zack would have been safe, too.”

“There was another fight brewing right behind Zack,” Adam said. “Honey and Luke. If you hadn’t been right where you were, Luke couldn’t have used you to put distance between him and Honey.”

Darryl grunted.

“I know you saw that,” Adam said.

At the beginning of the hunt, with the moon madness easing into their bones, it didn’t matter how close their human halves were. Before they started the hunt, sometimes all the werewolf wanted was blood.

“I did,” said Darryl, though he still sounded ruffled. Then he muttered—as much as anyone with a chest like Darryl’s could mutter—“I didn’t know if you saw it.”

There was the key. Darryl knew he’d done the right thing. He needed to know that Adam understood that, too.

“I saw you and Sherwood working together to keep the bloodshed down,” Adam told him. “You trusted Sherwood to do his job. He trusted you to do yours. I trusted both of you to keep Zack safe. We are pack.”

“Sherwood is strong,” Darryl said. “Dominant.”

“So are you,” Adam returned. “I can’t tell you how this will play out between the two of you.”

“And Warren.”

Evidently Darryl was through pretending that Warren wasn’t dominant enough to have been Adam’s second, if dominance alone had been the decider. Good. That meant Darryl would have to figure things out there, too.

Adam thought Warren had been correct to take the third position in the pack when he’d joined—though he and Adam knew Warren was more dominant than Darryl. Their pack was, as Mercy put it, about half a century behind contemporary social norms. She’d usually add, “That means that you are about a century ahead of most packs.”

Adam had had to force the pack into accepting Warren. They wouldn’t have allowed a gay werewolf to step into a position that meant he might have to take over as Alpha—not then. But now their pack found themselves standing alone in the worst game of king of the mountain Adam had ever participated in. After the last six months, there wasn’t a wolf in the pack who wouldn’t follow Warren straight into hell and back again.

Some change was for the better.

“And Warren,” Adam agreed.

There was a pause, and Adam let Darryl think for a moment.

“You could have stopped that fight. All the fights.”

Adam was pretty sure Sherwood Post could have done it, too. But Darryl didn’t need to understand that yet.

“Yes,” agreed Adam. “I could have used the pack bonds and put everyone on the ground.” He decided to let Darryl in on a secret. “And even back in their human bodies if I’d had to. All of you.”

“What?” Darryl asked, sounding appalled.

It was supposed to be the kind of thing the Marrok could do to you. Not an ordinary Alpha. In fact, Adam had never done it to more than one wolf at a time. But Adam’s wolf was certain.

“Yes. I could have. But it would have hurt them a lot worse than Post hurt Mary Jo and George. It would have told them I didn’t trust them to control their wolves. It might have made them lose trust in themselves, in their ability to keep their wolves under control, when sometimes the only thing that allows them to do that is the belief that they can.”

Silence hung in the air for a moment.

“I’ve been in a pack like that,” Darryl said. Adam felt the muscles in his back release at the sudden lack of tension in Darryl’s voice. “With an Alpha so busy making sure no one lost their cool that not one of them could function without him.”

“Except you,” Adam said, because that had been something the Marrok had told Adam when he’d sent Darryl to join Adam’s pack.

“Except me,” Darryl agreed, and Adam could hear that the events of the moon hunt had been dealt with to Darryl’s satisfaction. “So why did you call me?”

Darryl had government clearances that were higher than Adam’s—working in a think tank made that a necessity. That meant Adam could lay the whole problem out for him.

“Sabotage?” Darryl said thoughtfully when Adam was finished.

“Or spies. Or someone on the inside playing games. Kidnapping, even.” He paused. “Vincent said they had been ready to carry off bodies. He thought that meant they intended to kill both of my people and take their bodies. Maybe they were intending to carry off a live person as well.”

“To what end?”

Adam shrugged, though Darryl wasn’t going to see him. “I don’t know. I don’t know what all they do in those labs—I’m not sure SecDef does, either. But one of my people got killed, so I’m going down. I need you to take charge of the pack for a few days—maybe a couple of weeks—while I go and bless some hearts and take some names.”

“Everyone knows that’s your security company down there,” said Darryl. “If I wanted to get you to leave the pack to its own devices, this is how I would do it.”

That thought had not escaped Adam. He had it every time he had to go to DC, too, for the same exact reason. “Yes.”

“Why aren’t you calling Sherwood to hold the pack?” Darryl asked, his voice carefully neutral. “Since he quit hiding his light under a barrel, it’s pretty obvious that he is tougher than I am.”

Than I am, too, thought Adam, but that wouldn’t be useful to say aloud. He wasn’t sure his wolf would let him do that, anyway.

“Who cooks the pack Sunday morning breakfast?” Adam asked softly.

Darryl didn’t answer.

“You love this pack. Warren loves having a pack to belong to, but there are some of our wolves that he’d be just as glad to kick to the curb. Sherwood is just finding his balance. He lost a lot, and sort of regaining his memory”—the whole pack now knew about that—“has been a mixed bag.”

“He’s got pretty good balance from where I’m sitting,” muttered Darryl.

“So do you,” Adam said. “And my wolves look to you to take care of them. They trust you. Being a second, being an Alpha, is a two-way street. The pack has a place in those decisions.”

“Okay,” Darryl said. “I hear you.” He cleared his throat, evidently done with that subject, too. “I felt a flash of something through the pack bonds tonight. Mercy get another call?”

“Yes,” Adam said.

“She tried to hide it from you again.” Darryl sounded grimly amused. “If she hadn’t, I’d have felt more than a flash.”

Darryl was getting sensitive to the pack bonds—another sign that he was ready to take on his own pack. That was understood between them. But Darryl wasn’t going to desert this pack until the heat was off them, even if it took years. Which was a good thing, because Adam was very much afraid that he couldn’t let him go until that time. His wolf wouldn’t let him weaken the pack like that.

“Mercy doesn’t want me to worry when there is nothing I can do. We’re tracing the calls when we can. Knowledge is power and all that. But we’re in a waiting game.”

“Sucks,” Darryl said, agreeing with the sourness of Adam’s tone. And with those words Adam felt the bond between him and his second settle back into place. And for the first time since the moon hunt, it felt right. Darryl had been correct; Adam should have called him sooner.

“Yep,” Adam said. “Defense always does.”

Darryl made a sympathetic noise. Then, gravely, he said, “We’ll take care of her while you’re gone.”

He wasn’t talking about Bonarata. Neither of them thought Bonarata was done playing with them yet. He was talking about the way Mercy wasn’t recovering from the Soul Taker.

“I know,” Adam told him.

Darryl let him leave it at that, knowing that there wasn’t anything either of them could really do for Mercy except hope she’d get better.

They were deep in a discussion about a planned pack activity that was now going to have to go forward without Adam when a small red light flashed on his desk. The front door had been opened. It was too soon for Mercy to be coming home. Jesse was out there alone.

“Done,” Adam said, and cut the call.

His office was soundproofed so that even a werewolf could not overhear what went on inside it. That meant he couldn’t hear what was going on in the house, either. He’d taken some pains to make sure that didn’t become a liability. He stood up to go see why the door had been opened.

A soft buzz filled the room.

Jesse was the only one home, and she’d just hit the silent alarm.

The wolf roared so loud he had to fight to breathe—but it didn’t slow him down. At all.

He jerked open the door—registering the crack of wood as unimportant—and had to check himself so he didn’t bowl right over the top of Jesse, who was standing in front of his door with her finger on the button.

The analytic part of his mind—which was just watching the action—noted that she didn’t smell afraid. Not very afraid, anyway. And that might just be of him. He was aware that he could be alarming.

He picked her up and set her in the office. The only reason he didn’t close the door was because she’d gotten her foot in the way. Which she’d managed because there was something wrong with the hinges. Only then did he figure out she was speaking.

“—safe,” she said. “I’m safe. It’s not an emergency. I’m safe.” Mercy had taught her that—that Adam sometimes needed reassurances repeated when the wolf was in ascendance.

He took a deep breath and shoved the wolf down. Only when he was sure it was subdued did he step back and let her wiggle past him out of the office. It was probably too soon for relief, but he felt it anyway.

“Sorry, Dad,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

She was very nearly an adult, his Jesse. He could see her mother’s features and his eyes in her face. But when she started college, she’d let her hair go back to its natural dark blond. And every time he looked at her after that, he’d also seen his own mother. But sometime between when he’d shut himself in the room and now, she’d dyed it again.

She looked more herself with bright purple hair.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, fighting the adrenaline still pumping through him.

She pursed her lips. “I’m not sure, exactly. There’s a guy on our front porch. He knocked on the door, stared at me when I opened it, muttered something”—she looked uneasy—“something really weird, and sat down.”

Adam frowned and took a deep breath, but she must not have left the door open long, because he couldn’t pick out any strange scents.

“He looks pretty harmless,” she said. “Not a threat. I interrupted you because it’s cold outside and I am a little worried about him dying on our doorstep.” She paused. “I probably should have just knocked, right?”

“You can interrupt me any way you want,” he told her. “You come first.”

She rolled her eyes. “I know. But I don’t have to be stupid about it.”

The exasperation in her voice made him grin—which she returned. Jesse wasn’t stupid, though. If she had hit the alarm, it was because something had struck her as an emergency.

“He’s in bad condition,” Adam said, not making it a question. “Or do you think he’s dangerous?”

She had said he looked harmless.

“He’s in bad condition and it’s cold out there,” she said. Then, more slowly, “Yes. I think he could be dangerous.” More hastily, probably in reaction to his expression, she continued dryly, “If he wasn’t freezing to death on our porch. There’s something about him—like the wolves, Dad. Dangerous but not wicked.”

His daughter was pretty sharp about people. If she didn’t think this stranger was a threat, he probably wasn’t. He didn’t ask her to stay back when he went to the front door and opened it.

The figure huddled on his stairs looked miserable and cold, visibly shivering in the icy northern wind. His jacket was a good one—it should keep a man warm in colder weather than this. He smelled sweaty, like someone who was breaking a fever, though he didn’t smell sick. He smelled of fur and forest and a little like Mercy.

For a moment Adam wondered that Jesse hadn’t known who this was. But the man curled over on himself, his face drawn tight and hollowed, didn’t look like Gary Laughingdog. Jesse wasn’t a werewolf to identify people by scent.

“Gary?”

Mercy’s brother didn’t react to his name.

“Gary?” Adam said again, taking two quick steps until he was right next to him.

The man didn’t even twitch.

“Gary?” Adam softened his voice and put a hand on Gary’s shoulder.

That’s when it all went south.

Gary snapped up, the leg nearest Adam planting itself behind Adam’s foot. He got a wrestler’s hold around Adam’s leg, hands clasped just in front of Adam’s knee, with Gary’s shoulder laced over the top—turning Adam’s leg into a lever. Gary drove his head into Adam’s ribs to keep Adam from leaning forward and regaining his balance.

It was a good takedown, one that Adam used himself. It wouldn’t have worked if Gary had been a normal human. But he, like Mercy, was just a bit faster than Adam—and werewolves were supernaturally quick.

The natural progression of the move would have allowed Gary to knock Adam off his feet and away. If Adam had been thinking, if he’d kept his head, he would have allowed the move to do what it was supposed to do. Gary wasn’t his enemy—and this wasn’t a move designed to cripple or kill. It was designed to let Gary get away.

But Adam was surprised, the head in his ribs had not hit gently, and it was three days since the full moon. His instincts—powered up by the moon’s call and the unexpected pain—took over. As he told his pack over and over, you fight how you train. And he had trained for decades, for more than half a century, how not to allow an opponent to get what he wanted out of a fight.

He took advantage of his superior strength and the frost on the porch to slide his raised leg and Gary around just enough that he regained his balance. Gary had ended up on the top of the steps. When Adam didn’t fall as Mercy’s brother had intended, Gary threw his weight backward and sent both of them tumbling down the stairs.

On the ground, Gary pushed away with impressive speed and force. Maybe if the moon had been fainter in the sky; maybe if Gary’s frantic scramble away from Adam hadn’t meant that he was moving toward Jesse, who was standing in the doorway; maybe if Adam hadn’t hit the corner post of the porch railing with his shoulder and if the burn of magic healing the crack in his scapula wasn’t more painful than the original injury…maybe if all of that or some of that had been different, Adam could have stopped the fight right then.

But the moon was still large in the sky, and the adrenaline of hearing the alarm in his office when he knew Jesse was alone in the house sang in his blood. And Gary smelled—and acted—like prey. Adam could no more have stopped the wolf, his wolf, from going after his brother-in-law than he could have stopped the sun from shining.

Once the wolf took him, Adam retained only bits and pieces of the fight. Usually it didn’t work that way. Usually Adam could break down his werewolf’s actions with clinically sharp memory.

The next clear thought Adam had was when he sat on top of Mercy’s brother, who was face down in the snow. They were in the backyard.

Gary was pinned but showed no sign of trying to throw Adam off. He was absolutely still. Limp.

I’ve killed Mercy’s brother.

For an instant he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. And then Gary’s whole body shivered and Adam realized he—Gary, not Adam—was breathing in little gasping pants, like a terrified rabbit.

“Dad, don’t hurt him,” Jesse said urgently.

She was, he thought with gratitude for her common sense, all the way across the yard. He didn’t look at her—you never look away from your prey. Your opponent, he corrected himself.

Except it is okay to look away if you have them immobilized—and Mercy couldn’t break this hold, so he assumed Gary couldn’t, either. He glanced over at his daughter.

Jesse was standing in the back doorway. “That’s Mercy’s brother. He’s not an enemy.”

She’d heard him call the man by name. Or maybe she’d recognized him once they’d started fighting. In any case, he hadn’t been about to kill Mercy’s brother. Probably. If the wolf had wanted Gary dead, Gary would be dead.

“He’s okay,” Adam growled to Jesse, and saw her whole body relax in relief. She started forward—but Adam didn’t trust himself that much. “Stay back.”

She nodded and stayed where she was, allowing him to turn his attention to his prisoner. His brother-in-law, he reminded himself.

“Gary,” he said, and he tried to keep the roughness out of his voice with indifferent success. “Gary, what’s wrong with you?”

Instead of answering, the wiry man under Adam tried to get free. But Adam had wrestled in high school, and he had Gary in a highly illegal but effective hold.

“That dog won’t hunt,” Adam told him. “Settle down.” And then, because the smell of fear was still tugging at Adam’s control, he said, “Easy now. You’re safe, you’re safe here.”

If it had been Mercy he was holding down, Adam figured that would have set her into a fit of sarcastic laughter. Gary was trapped, face down, under a werewolf—in human form—on six inches of freshly fallen snow, not something that screamed “safe.” Adam glanced over his shoulder and saw, by the disturbed snow, that they had gone right over the top of the house. Adam didn’t remember going over the roof. It had been years, decades, since he’d let the wolf out far enough that he didn’t remember what the wolf did.

His chest gave a familiar zing of pain, and he hastily took a deep breath to expand his rib cage. Happily, the bone moved just a little as the lupine power that kept his body and face young, when his youngest brother was an old man, healed the broken rib.

“I promise, you are safe,” Adam said. And this time he could hear the truth ringing in his words.

Gary’s body gave one convulsive jerk, went totally limp again, then began shaking like a man kept out in the cold too long. Possibly because he was face down in the snow. The shaking stopped.

Adam released him cautiously, finally getting off him altogether. When Mercy’s brother didn’t move, Adam put a hand to his shoulder and rolled him over.

He was unconscious.

“Is he dead?” asked Jesse tightly.

“No,” Adam said. “Go find a blanket. Let’s get him inside and warm him up.”

Abruptly, Gary clenched into a fetal position. Adam had to check an instinctive urge to land on him again. But Gary didn’t move after that. Adam thought Gary’s ability to curl that tightly probably meant that his spine was okay, but before Adam picked him up, he did a quick exploration anyway.

He hefted Gary carefully, but apparently there was nothing painful enough to make him struggle. Also a good sign. Adam’s wolf hadn’t wanted to hurt Gary any more than Adam did.

Jesse brought the big comforter from her bed out onto the porch, but didn’t approach farther than that. “I have the blanket.”

“Not out here,” Adam said, starting toward the house. “Let’s get him inside.”

Mercy’s brother was a little taller than Adam, but he didn’t feel much heavier than Mercy did, maybe twenty pounds more. The steps were icy—he’d shoveled them a few hours ago, but the snow had been falling ever since—so Adam was careful to keep his weight centered.

“I can’t believe I didn’t recognize him,” Jesse said, holding the door wide so Adam could maneuver through without slamming Gary against the frame. “What’s wrong with him? Why did he attack you?”

“I don’t know.”

In the distance, a coyote sang. The coincidence made Adam pause.

Jesse’s eyes widened. “Do you think…?”

“Let’s get him warmed up and maybe he can tell us,” Adam said.

Jesse threw the comforter on one of the big recliners in the living room. Adam set him in it and bundled him in the fluffy thing like a baby. He would have taken off Gary’s boots if he’d been awake. But Adam didn’t want to have his head down around the semiconscious Gary’s feet—the man kicked like a mule, and he’d already demonstrated that he was prone to panic.

Jesse frowned. “He’s soaking wet. I’ll go downstairs and get him some dry clothes.”

They kept clothing on hand, both in the basement and packed in the vehicles. Mostly a mix of unisex sweats and T-shirts. She should be able to find something that would fit.

“I’ll call Mercy,” Adam said.