He smiled as if I’d been clever. “I was asked not to speak of this to you, but as I owe you a favor, I can disregard the earlier request. Tad is unhappy, and those who hold him are not listening. He is being held against his will, but those who hold him don’t know Siebold Adelbertsmiter as I do.” He said Zee’s full name with distaste. “I may not like him, but no one can hold such a one as the Dark Smith of Drontheim when he is unwilling. There are too many old fae who forget what they once knew and believe in the old quarrelsome man they see. There will be no need for a rescue attempt, and indeed, such an effort might backfire. You will not be able to contact them, however, until matters play out.” He raised an eyebrow at me. “I think that there is now balance between us. Though I include this as part of our bargain: if you have not heard from the Smith’s son in two months’ time, you may cry out the name you know me by and I will come and tell you how matters stand. I would not be surprised if it takes at least that long.”
Then, walking stick in hand, he gave Adam a respectful nod, got in his car, and drove off.
I took a deep breath. “That’s done.”
Adam shook his head. “Let’s hope so.
We collected our clothing, but it took a while to find the cat. Tracking a cat through a field? No problem. Tracking a cat through the house where the cat lived? That was miserable—and to add insult to injury, when I looked in our bathroom, I found that Christy’s shampoo and conditioner were in our shower. She hadn’t, however, put her makeup back on the counter. Maybe it was because she took her makeup with her to Honey’s house.
Adam found the cat eventually, on top of a bookcase in the living room where she’d been watching us look for her. Crouched behind a large copper pot filled with silk flowers, she was nearly invisible.
I gave the flowers, beautiful dusty gray-blue blooms that contrasted and complemented everything else in the room a little too well, a baleful look.
“Yes,” said Adam, petting my cat as he held her like a baby in his arms. She caught his hands and sank her claws into him just a little before her purring redoubled, and she snuggled deeper against him.
“Yes, what?” I asked.
“Yes, Christy picked out those flowers. The pot, however, was my mother’s. Feel free to fill it with something else. If you leave it empty, it collects dust and dead spiders.” His voice was so full of patience that I knew he found me funny.
Normally, our bond fluctuated on how much information I got from it, swinging pretty widely during the length of a day. But even within a few minutes there was some variation, like a swing moving up and down. One second, I was getting grumpy because he was laughing at me, and the next, I was flooded with this mix of tenderness, love, and amusement all mixed together in a potent bundle that meant happy.
Hard to get grumpy over that.
His smile grew, and the dimple appeared and … and I kissed him. I rested my body against him, at an angle so I didn’t squish the cat, and thought, Here is my happiness. Here is my reason to survive. Here is my home.
“I never forget,” I murmured to him when I could.
“Forget?”
“Forget who you are to me,” I said, petting him with my fingertips because I could, because he was mine. “I’ll be fretting about Christy, worrying about the pack, hoping Christy trips and spills her cardaywatsafanday stew—”
“Carbonnade à la flamande,” said Adam.
“—all over the floor, then I look at you.”
“Mmmm?”
“Yep,” I said, putting my nose against him and breathing him in. “Mmmm.”
I was just considering the empty bedroom upstairs and weighing it against the possibility that Guayota would choose that moment to attack when someone knocked at the door.
We broke apart.
“You have the cat,” I said. “I don’t want to spend another hour looking for her. I’ll get the door.”
“Be careful,” was all Adam said.
I checked through the peephole, carefully, because there had been that one movie on bad-movie night where someone had been killed because he’d put his eye to the peephole, and the bad guy had stuck a fencing sword through the hole and into the victim’s eye. We’d stopped the film to argue whether or not it was possible to do—and I remained forever scarred by the scene.
It was Rachel, one of Stefan’s menagerie, one of his sheep. Stefan was gentler on the people he fed from than other vampires I’d come into contact with. He found broken people or people who needed something from him so that the exchange—their blood and the course of their lives for whatever a vampire might provide them—was, if not even, a little more balanced. Most members of a vampire’s menagerie died slowly, but Stefan’s people, mostly, thrived under his care. Or they had until Marsilia had happened to them.
I opened the door.
Rachel, like Stefan himself, had gained a little weight back. She didn’t look like a crack addict anymore, but she didn’t look really healthy, either. Her skin was pale, and there were shadows in her eyes. She didn’t look young anymore—and she was around Jesse’s age. But she was back in her goth costume—black lacy top, black jeans, and long black gloves that disguised the two fingers Marsilia—or Wulfe—had cut off her right hand.
“Hey, Mercy,” she said. “I’ve been chasing all over looking for you—I assume you know that someone tried to blow up your garage? I gave up about noon, did the shopping and a few errands, and decided to try again before I drove home. This is for you.” She handed me an envelope with my name in elegant script.
I opened it and found a lined note card with an address: 21980 Harbor Landing Road, Pasco. And, underneath the address, in the same flowery script: Sorry.
“Hel-lo, handsome,” purred Rachel. “Man with cat is one of my fantasies.”
I didn’t look up. “He’s taken, Rachel, sorry. She’s underage, Adam, and—you’re taken. Rachel, this is my husband, Adam. Adam this is Stefan’s—” His what? “Sheep” wasn’t any word I’d ever use to describe someone I liked, no matter how accurate it was. “Stefan’s.”
“‘Sheep’ is the word you’re looking for,” said Rachel. “I’d better get going before the ice cream melts. ’Bye, Mercy. ’Bye, Mercy’s husband.”
She turned and trotted out to her car, a nondescript little Ford I hadn’t seen before. She waved and took off in a peel of rubber and gravel that made me wince a little as the splatter of small rocks rained down on the SUV.
I twirled the card in my fingers before handing it reluctantly to Adam.
“Here,” I said, more casually than I felt. “I think we’d better call Ariana and Elizaveta, don’t you think? Someone has got to know how to make werewolves fireproof.”
Warren met us at the door to Honey’s house.
“Hey, boss,” he said, drawling like there was nothing wrong, but I could tell that he was upset by the set of his shoulders. “We were taking Gary Laughingdog to the bus station like you asked—and Kyle says to tell you thank you for making him aid and abet an escaped convict like that—when he started having convulsions in the backseat. We pulled over, and he was unconscious, so we brought him back. He hasn’t woken up, and Kyle is pretty well resigned to losing his license to practice law.”
I gave the cat carrier to Adam and set down the bag of Medea necessities I carried. The cat box and kitty litter were still in the car, and so was my .44 S&W, which I’d retrieved from the house. “Here. You take the cat and Warren. I’ll take Kyle,” I said.
Adam gave me a look.
“Sorry. You heap big Alpha dog,” I told him. “I’ll let you call it next time. But I’m right, and you already know it. Kyle will just make you mad on purpose—and Warren will listen better to you than me about relationships because he’d feel comfortable storming away from me when I said something he didn’t want to hear. Where is Kyle?” I directed my question at Warren.
“Down the hall, third bedroom on the left. Watching over Laughingdog, who is still unconscious.” He frowned
at me. “Before Christy came, I never thought about how much you manipulate the people around you—it doesn’t feel like manipulation when you do it.”
“The difference is,” I told him, “that I love you and want everyone to be happy. And”—I lifted a finger—“I know what’s best for you.”
“And,” said Adam, “Mercy’s not subtle. When she manipulates you, she wants you to know you’ve been manipulated.”
I’d already crossed the living room toward the wing with the bedrooms, but I turned around to stick my tongue out at Adam.
“Don’t point that at me unless you are going to use it,” he said.
I smiled until I was safely out of sight.
The door to the bedroom Warren had indicated was shut, so I knocked.
Kyle opened the door. I’d seen Kyle angry before. But I don’t think I’d ever seen him that angry. Maybe it was because that anger was directed at me.
I slipped through the doorway, though I was pretty sure he’d intended to send me on my way. But I’m really good at sticking my nose in where no one wants it.
The room was one of those bedrooms that builders throw into huge houses because they know the kids aren’t going to get a vote about what house their parents buy. Honey’s house was huge. This bedroom was maybe ten feet by nine feet. Just big enough for a twin bed and a chest of drawers. I hadn’t seen Honey’s suite, but I was sure that it wasn’t ten feet by nine feet.
The bed that someone had tucked Gary into was a queen-size bed, and that meant there wasn’t room for a chest of drawers of any size and that Kyle and I were very close to each other. If he’d been a werewolf, I’d have been worried.
“So,” Kyle said mildly as he shut the bedroom door. “We’re driving to the bus station in Pasco with the guy who had stopped at my house to look for you. Warren, I want you to know, told me that he was a distant relative of yours. I don’t know if that’s the truth—and at this point, I don’t think I care. But I digress. The important part is that while I’m driving Gary to the bus station, I’m still at the point where I trust that what Warren tells me will be the truth. I’m just beginning to get a funny feeling, though, because I can’t figure out why Warren has been so concerned about ID. Even to get on a bus, Mercy, you need ID, but everyone has ID. Why is Warren worried if this guy—you know, your relative—if he has ID?
“I’ve just finished driving over the cable bridge when suddenly, Gary screams in my ear like Girl Number Two in some horror flick. It sounds like he is dying, so I pull right over on the side of the road instead of putting my foot on the gas and ramming the guy in front of me, which is that first reflex impulse I have when someone screams in my ear.” He paused, looking at me.
I figured that only a stupid person would say anything until he’d wound all the way down, so I stayed quiet and tried to look sympathetic.
Kyle’s foot tapped a rapid tattoo as he waited for me to respond. Finally, he said, “Warren gets out and opens the back door like he isn’t surprised. Like he expected Gary Laughingdog”—he bit out Gary’s name with special emphasis, separating the last name until the “Laughing” and the “dog” were really two separate words—“to break out screaming at any time. Warren whips off his belt and shoves it between Gary’s teeth because, Mercy, this relative of yours that we were just going to shove on a bus is having a grand mal seizure.
“So here I am, busy worried about what kind of people I’m associating with who are callously throwing a relative on a bus who has grand mal seizures so often that my partner isn’t surprised by it—when my brain catches up with what the newscaster on the radio has been announcing. Can you imagine my amazement that Gary Laughingdog escaped from the Coyote Ridge Corrections Center? All this time when I thought I was escorting your relative, I’ve really been harboring an escaped convict.” He waited again, but I wasn’t that dumb.
He rocked forward as if he wanted to pace, but there just wasn’t room. “I explode all over my partner because it is instantly obvious to me that you and Adam both knew where he’d come from—because you’d talked to him before he came to my house. Imagine my surprise when I found out that Warren had known, too. I’m the only one left out of the ‘hey, this guy is an escaped convict’ knowledge circle.”
This is when I could have spoken, after he enunciated his problem, but he didn’t stop talking so I could explain.
“I told Warren when he lied to me about what he was that I don’t like lies,” he said. “Liars can’t be trusted. He told me that he would never lie to me again.”
He stopped talking then, but I had no words. I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten how much he hated to be lied to. How could I have forgotten, when he and Warren had broken up over it? Not over Warren’s being a werewolf but over Warren’s not telling Kyle what he was. They’d gotten back together, but it had been rough.
Gary moved his arm over his eyes. “Drama, drama, drama,” he whispered.
“You shut up,” I snapped. Warren and Kyle were going to break up, and it was my fault.
“You quit yelling while you’re in the room with the guy with a migraine,” Gary told me. “Look, Kyle. I get you. We’ve been trying to keep the whole escaped-prisoner thing away from you—give you plausible deniability—but that’s obviously done. You go call the police and let them know you found me, and I’ll go quietly. You’ll keep your license—because you called them as soon as you found out, and we’ll all support you on that. But if you do, you have to know that it means that Warren and Adam will die.”
Kyle’s whole body turned to face the man on the bed. “What?”
“If I’m not here when the pack faces off with Guayota,” Gary said, very slowly and clearly like people do when they are talking to young children or people who don’t speak English, “then Guayota wins by killing all the wolves. That’s what this last Seeing was about.”
He pulled his arm off his eyes and squinted at me. “Let this be a lesson to you, pup. Do not deal with Coyote. He’ll screw you over every time. Had I had this vision while lying in prison, I’d have let everyone die because, hey, what did I care? Bunch of werewolves I don’t know bite the big one, big whoop. But Coyote waits until I meet everyone first. I like Adam. He’s what an Alpha is supposed to be and so seldom is. I like Warren, and I really, really think Honey is hot. I can’t just go back to jail—no matter how safe from Coyote—and let them all die.”
“Coyote?” asked Kyle. He looked at me and frowned.
“Dear old Dad,” said Gary. “Mine and hers. That’s how we’re related.”
“Not mine,” I snapped. “My father was Joe Old Coyote who rode bulls and killed vampires. The vampires killed him and made it look like a car wreck. If my father was Coyote, then he abandoned my mother when she was sixteen and pregnant. If Coyote was my father I’d have to hunt him down and kill him.”
My father was Joe Old Coyote, who died on a road in the middle of nowhere in Montana before I was born. He didn’t know that he was just a shell Coyote wore because Coyote had grown bored. He wouldn’t have left us if he’d had a choice. After he died, my mother had to leave me with werewolves because she didn’t know what to do with me and because she was too young to work at most jobs full-time. So she’d left me. And I was a freaking grown-up, so I could just deal. I was happy. My mother was happy.
And my father was dead. And if my father was Joe Old Coyote, I didn’t have to kill him.
Both Gary and Kyle were looking at me oddly, and I realized that I must have said all of that out loud. I cleared my throat. “So, yes, daddy issues. Both of us, Kyle. Gary was in jail because Coyote managed to facilitate his breaking the law, then left him to be picked up by the police.” I looked at Gary. “You know, if you wanted to be really paranoid, you might consider that Coyote wouldn’t be excited about having Guayota here, in Coyote’s playground. You might think that maybe you were in jail so that you were somewhere I could find you when I needed to ask someone how to get it touch with Coyote.”
He closed
his eyes and nodded. “I’ve had the same thought. But didn’t you come find me because some fae dude wanted the walking stick you gave Coyote? He’d have to have manipulated him, too.”
I dropped to the floor because it was just barely possible. Here I’d been complaining about Christy’s manipulations. But she was minor-league next to Coyote.
“It wouldn’t take much, right?” I mused. “Beauclaire isn’t fond of humans. And here is one of his father’s artifacts in the hands of a human despite all the fae who’d tried to take it from her. I’m sure Coyote knows a few of the fae who might whisper in Beauclaire’s ear.” I looked at Gary. “Tell me I’m just being paranoid.”
“The thing you have to ask yourself is this,” Gary said. “Is it Guayota Coyote wants to rid the world of, or us? I can tell you that he won’t care if we die. Death doesn’t mean the same thing to him as it does to us. Possibly it’s a test of strength. Survival is one of those Catch-22s. If you live through one of Coyote’s games, it delights him because then he can push you into one that is more dangerous. On second thought”—he opened his eyes and looked at Kyle—“please, call the cops.”
“Why were you in jail?” asked Kyle.
“Seriously? Do you know how many guilty people are in jail? None.” Gary’s voice rose to imitate a woman’s voice. “Honest. I didn’t kill him. He fell on my knife. Ten times.”
“I saw Chicago,” said Kyle. “You won’t lie to me because Mercy can tell if you lie. And I’m a lawyer, and, current circumstances aside, I’m pretty good at hearing lies, too.”
Gary stared intently at him for a moment, then shrugged, letting the tension in his body slide away. “I guess it doesn’t matter to me. I could tell you that I got drunk, stole a car—though I’m pretty sure that was Coyote, but I was drunk, so who knows. Then I stole four cases of two-hundred-dollar Scotch—I’m pretty sure that might have been Coyote, too, but all I remember is watching him opening one of the bottles. Finally, I parked the car in front of the police station and passed out in the backseat with all but one of the bottles of Scotch until the police found me the next morning. That I am sure was Coyote. If I told you all of that, it would be true.”