“No,” said Adam. “Not until we’ve looked at everything else. I’ll call Marsilia as soon as we’re done here, but I don’t expect her to have much for us. She might owe Mercy and need the pack to keep her seethe safe until she gets some more vampires with power here, but she doesn’t like us very much.”
Ben snorted. “You can say that again.”
“Why not ask this Ariana?” asked Christy.
“Because her father tortured her with his fae hounds until she went mad,” Adam told her before I could say something spiteful or petty. It would probably be a good idea if I refrained from answering Christy’s questions.
“She is Samuel’s mate,” Auriele said. When Christy looked blank, Auriele added, “Samuel is Bran’s other son. Samuel is a werewolf, but she’s coping okay with that. However, it is still an effort for her to be around any of the rest of us. Asking her about a giant dog killing people might just knock her right back off her applecart. Not only would that be unkind to do when we don’t even know if she would have useful information, but she’s a power in her own right. If she goes nuts, I don’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity.”
Ben took a second helping of lasagna, and said in a contemplative voice, “I keep having nightmares about that night when she alternated between doctoring my wounds and wanting to kill me.”
“Tad said he’d see if he can get a message to Zee,” I said. “If it is fae, Zee will know what it is.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t fae.” Auriele’s voice was neutral.
“It didn’t smell fae,” I said. “But some of the half-breeds don’t smell fae to me, for whatever reason. And Zee is old. He might have some idea even if it isn’t fae at all.”
“Did you tell that to the police?” Christy looked at me brightly. “That you wouldn’t have been able to tell if it had been a half fae?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because,” I said gently, “there are a number of half-blood fae around here because of the local reservation. Most of them don’t have enough magic to light a candle. Humans don’t have a habit of treating the people we are scared of very gently. No sense getting people killed unless they are actually guilty of something.”
“Mercy did the right thing.” George was the fourth werewolf on duty. He was also a Pasco police officer, which lent validity to his opinion even if the kill had been out of his jurisdiction. He had that whole “I was a Marine” thing going that stiffened his posture and made even his casual movements have a certain purpose to them. “Police need the real information, not something that will send manpower off chasing rabbits when they should be hunting bigger prey.”
As soon as he quit speaking, he returned to his plate. He ate with no wasted motion, and he didn’t look up from his plate while he did so. George was fairly far up the pack hierarchy, but the only wolf he outranked at this table was Ben. It was safer for him to keep his head down, so he did.
“What about the new wolf?” asked Jesse. “He could have done the killing before he joined the pack.” Unlike the police, she knew enough to understand that he couldn’t have done it once he was bonded.
“The first victim might have been before Zack joined the pack,” I told her, “but the others were more recent.”
“The killer isn’t Drummond,” Adam told her. “I called his last Alpha, who regretted losing him. Zack stayed for six months or so, then got restless. Warren says he’s pretty soft-spoken and quiet, as submissive wolves tend to be—and definitely not our killer.”
“Serial killers who move around are less likely to get caught,” said Jesse.
Ben shook his head. “I was over at Warren’s last night. If you’d ever met Zack, you wouldn’t have proposed him as your killer.” He fidgeted a little, and reluctantly said, “Is there something more we can do for him? Maybe a different job? Something with more of a future.”
“What’s he doing?” asked Auriele.
“Dishes,” I said.
“Dishes suck,” said Jesse, with feeling. She was working as a waitress for running-around money and had done a couple of stints on the dishes when someone else missed their shift.
“I’d rather wash dishes than pick apples,” said George in tones of non-nostalgia.
The talk around the table turned to “worse job” stories.
I excused myself when the conversation drifted to some funny event that happened back when Christy was Adam’s wife, well before the pack had moved to the Tri-Cities. Even Adam got into it, had everyone in stitches about trying to find a bathroom for his very pregnant wife at 2:00 A.M. in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. It wouldn’t have bothered me if he hadn’t given Christy a tender look as she threw her head back and laughed. She had a beautiful laugh. I got up from the table, taking my plate and glass.
“Didn’t you like dinner?” asked Christy as I passed her, drawing everyone’s eyes to my almost-full dinner plate.
“I had a late lunch.” I continued on to the kitchen. “And then there were all those dead people afterward. Hard to keep the smell out of my head.”
That shut her up. I think that all the talk about the dead bodies really had bothered her. I was letting her make me petty.
I kept my movements slow and even as I scraped my plate off into the garbage. I loaded my dishes into the dishwasher and walked with deliberate steps up the stairs; by then Darryl was carrying the narrative. I didn’t run, didn’t even move with speed, but every step was in as direct a line with my bedroom as I could manage. I shut the door behind me and caught a deep breath.
If her stalker didn’t kill Christy soon, she might just drive me to it. At this point, I wasn’t even certain how much of it was her fault and how much of it was me being jealous. Not of Adam, Adam belonged to me, soul and wolf. If it were just Adam, I’d have more control. It was the pack.
Pack magic, I’d learned, was real. And if enough of the pack wanted you to do something, it was difficult not to do it. When I hadn’t been aware of it, some members of the pack had made Adam and me have a fight. They couldn’t do that anymore, but I could feel them pressing upon me. I suspected that if enough of them wanted me out of the pack badly enough, they would succeed. What I didn’t know was what that would do to Adam, but I was certain it wouldn’t be good.
I walked over to my chest of drawers and unfastened the chain around my neck and set it down, so I could look at it. It had been a graceful piece of jewelry when I’d only had the lamb on it. Even my wedding ring—which I wore on my finger only on formal occasions because I didn’t want to lose a finger when something caught on my ring while I was at work—was beautiful. The engagement ring had a single, large, pear-cut diamond. My wedding ring was plainer, just two small yellow topazes Adam said were the same color as my eyes when I went coyote. The rings had been brazed together so that the topazes flanked the diamond.
It was the dog tag that turned the necklace from jewelry to statement. The tag hadn’t been pretty to start with, and after nearly four decades of wear and tear, it was battered and rough. Adam wore the other tag at all times.
Symbols.
I closed my hand on Adam’s dog tag as the door to the bedroom opened and quietly shut again. Adam’s arms came around me, and he bent so he could put his head on my shoulder. There was a mirror on the top of the dresser, so I could see his face—and his eyes in the mirror met mine.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
He smiled, a peaceful expression that lightened suddenly with mischief. “For keeping the peace. You don’t think that I don’t know you could wipe the floor with a lightweight like Christy? You battled with Bran when you were just a kid and came out on top. Christy? She’s not a tithe on Bran.”
I snorted. “I don’t know where you get your information, but I didn’t win any battles with Our Lord and Master Bran Cornick who is the Marrok. No one does. That’s why he’s the Marrok.”
He snorted back. “That’s not what Bra
n says.”
“Then he’s doing it for his own reasons,” I told him. “Don’t put too much weight on his stated opinion. More than likely he’s just trying to get you to do something you don’t want to do.”
“Peanut butter,” Adam said, deadpan.
“He made my foster mother cry,” I said.
“Eggs.”
“That didn’t work so well,” I told him. “But I did learn not to arm my enemies.”
“Shoes.”
Shocked, I turned around, so I could see his face instead of just the reflection. “No one knows about the shoes. Bran doesn’t know.” I hadn’t thought that Bran knew about the shoes.
“I don’t know if Bran does,” Adam said. “Samuel said that he and Charles cooperated to keep Bran guessing because he was really enraged about the shoes.”
Charles had covered for me? I’d known that Samuel had seen me and not said anything—but I hadn’t known about Charles. Truth was that in my heart of hearts I’d been a lot more scared of Bran’s son Charles than I’d ever been scared of Bran. I just never believed that Bran would really hurt me. Charles … Charles would do whatever he had to. I was still more scared of Charles than Bran, but not as scared because Adam had my back.
“The shoes were not the brightest idea I’ve ever had,” I admitted. “But I was provoked.”
I met Adam’s eyes, and we stared at each other for a minute, then I started to snicker. He laughed and pulled me into his body. I relaxed—and it felt like the first time I’d relaxed since Christy came to stay with us.
“The shoes didn’t really have anything to do with Bran,” I told him.
“Leah is his mate,” he said. “Of course it had something to do with Bran. Especially when he couldn’t figure out who was stealing her shoes.”
I laughed again, tried to stop, while I said, “Only one shoe.”
“One of each pair. At a time. Forty-three shoes gone over a five-week period. Sometimes two or three shoes in the same day. Not a scent trace to be found. Just like a wizard had conjured them away.”
I blinked away tears and tried to stop laughing. It wasn’t that funny—it was the release of the tension that had been building up for days. “I actually can’t remember what it was Leah did, specifically. But I’m sure it was something worse than making me Enemy Number One because I let her tablecloth get stained.”
“Samuel said Leah put out a bounty on the shoes and the thief.”
That sent me off again.
“Her face,” I managed. “If only I had a photograph of her face.” Though I had a pretty good memory of it. “I thought she was just going to spontaneously combust right there in front of us—barefoot.”
“When Samuel told me about it, he asked me to find out how you managed it without leaving your scent behind. He said that when he asked you, you told him that you were keeping your secret in case you had to do the same to him someday.”
“Fishing pole and a big hook,” I told Adam because I’d do better than shoes if I had to get back at him for something. “The hardest part was shutting the closet without going into the room.” I thought about it. “Okay, the closet door and getting out of the house forty-odd times without getting caught. Thank goodness I spent a lot of legitimate time over at that house, so I didn’t have to try to cover up my scent except to keep it out of Bran’s bedroom.”
“What did you do with the shoes? Samuel said Bran searched your foster parents’ house for them.”
I snickered again. “Searched every day, sometimes twice a day—every time a shoe disappeared. Bryan got mad about it eventually, but Evelyn thought it was funny. I dumped the shoes in a glacial lake that was about three miles from our house. In between trips, because I couldn’t quite manage to make it there unseen every day, I hid them in the bed of Charles’s truck.”
“I thought you were afraid of Charles.”
I nodded. “So was everyone else, though. And he only drove that truck when he absolutely had to.”
“You said you tossed all of them in the lake. I thought one of those shoes returned a few years later? Where did you hide it?” His eyes were happy.
“In the lake with the rest.” I shivered in reflex. “It took me four hours of diving in that lake to find a shoe—and that was a glacier-fed lake. Most of the shoes had rotted into mush, but there was a steel stiletto with this wiry mesh stuff that looked pretty good. By that time, Bran had quit looking, so I didn’t have to be so careful.”
Bryan and Evelyn had both been dead then, too, and I’d been living alone in their house that no longer really felt like my own. Not even their ghosts had lingered with me. I didn’t tell Adam that, he was too perceptive, and I was too prone to self-pity with Christy living on the other side of my bedroom wall.
I cleared my throat. “I had to work on that stupid shoe for months before it didn’t look like it had spent two years in water. But her face at the sight of it sitting on top of the Christmas tree was so worth it.”
“She’d hurt you,” Adam said, his voice soft and certain.
“She couldn’t hurt me,” I corrected briskly if not truthfully. To earn the Christmas-tree topper, she’d made a disparaging remark about my foster father, Bryan, after he’d killed himself. “She made me mad.”
“She hurt you.”
I shrugged. “I was pretty sure she’d clean my clock after that one. I mean, even without evidence, who else could it have been?”
“She couldn’t.” Adam’s face was satisfied. “Samuel told me that when she tried to bring her case to Bran, Charles swore, in front of most of the pack, that you were with him all day working on cars during the only time the switch between the star and the shoe could have been made. No one could hear the lie, so she had to leave it or challenge Charles first.”
“He lied?” I said, shocked. Thought about it, and said in a hushed voice, “He lied, and no one could tell?”
“It’s Charles,” Adam explained as if that was enough—and it was. “You handled Bran, and you handled Leah. So don’t tell me you couldn’t put a stop to Christy’s taunts and teach her to behave herself until she goes home.”
I didn’t think it would be as easy as he made it seem. But he was right that I was backing away from a confrontation.
“If she goes before there is a knock-down, drag-out fight between the pro-me and the pro-Christy factions, it’ll be better for the pack.” My voice was small.
“And less collateral damage,” he said, kissing my nose, “Jesse has to deal with concerning her mother. She doesn’t need more drama. Auriele, Mary Jo—they don’t really know who she is. And that’s not a bad thing.”
“She’s not a horrible person,” I protested.
He smiled, briefly. “No. She makes people feel good for defending her, for doing things for her. Makes them feel like heroes—she made me feel that way once, too. Nothing wrong with that.” He kissed me. “But I like my women less helpless.”
I went limp against him, and said, dramatically, “I’m helpless against your kisses.”
He laughed like a villain in a cartoon. “Aha. So that’s how it’s done. Well, there’s no help for you, then.”
“No,” I said in a faint voice, putting an arm over my forehead as I arched back over his arm in the classic pose of the helpless ingénue. “I guess you’ll just have your wicked way with me again.”
“Cool,” said my husband, a wicked growl in his voice. “Don’t worry. You’ll enjoy every minute of it.”
I finished the wasserboxer engine I was rebuilding with great satisfaction. As if to make up for the chaos in my own life, the engine was going together as sweet as molasses and twice as easy. Like a gambler on a winning streak, I was worried that I’d ruin it in the last moves. But it buttoned up duck soup, as if I were putting it together in the factory instead of thirty years later.
I had an urgent brake job left (brought in about fifteen minutes before). However, I’d decided last night, after Adam was sleeping beside me and looking more
relaxed than he’d been in days, that I was finished leaving the battlefield to Christy—that was giving her too much advantage.
I’d have the brakes done by lunch tomorrow, and that would have to be soon enough. I patted the wasserboxer for being such a good patient and stripped out of my overalls in the oversized bathroom/laundry room. I got a can of soda from the fridge, and, clad in civilian clothes, I ventured into the main office.
“Closing time.”
“Sounds good,” Tad said, looking up from the books, where he was finishing recording an appointment. Gabriel had been trying to get me to set up the appointment schedule on computer, but Tad didn’t seem to mind the paper route. “You look tired, Mercy. Go home. Get something to eat. You look like you’ve lost ten pounds.”
“Maybe I should eat more red velvet cupcakes,” I said dryly. I’d brought two this morning, and Tad had eaten them both.
“Only if you make sure Christy knows they are for me or check them for arsenic,” he answered, using his keys to make the till run its daily total.
I opened my eyes wide. “Oh shoot. I’ve just been feeding them to you. Are you feeling ill?” I peered anxiously at his lips. “I think your lips are turning blue. Do you feel faint?”
He grinned at me. “Arsenic is a metal, Mercy. Don’t you remember your high-school chemistry?”
“Semi-metallic,” I told him.
“And Dad is iron-kissed, a master of metals.” He tucked his thumbs under his imaginary collar and grinned with lots of cheese. “I’m just a chip off the old block and safe from arsenic attacks of all kinds.”
“I’ll remember that the next time you drive me to attempted murder,” I said. I quit joking and sighed. “She’s going home soon. Then we can get on with our lives, as long as she wasn’t serious when she was threatening to move here.” I took a good long swig of my soda. “It’s only a matter of time before Adam finds her stalker and sends him off with the fear of Adam to keep him away from her for the rest of his life.”