“All right,” I agreed slowly.
“Only if I can come with her,” Samuel amended.
“An escort of her choice,” Stefan agreed. “Perhaps Adam Hauptman or one of his wolves. Dr. Cornick, please don’t take offense, but I don’t think you should come. My mistress was taken with you last time, and self-control in such matters is not her strong suit.”
“Tell me when you need me,” I said before Samuel could begin arguing. “I’ll find an escort.”
“Thank you,” Stefan said, then hesitated. “It is dangerous for you to keep reminding the seethe what you are.”
Walkers are not popular among the vampires. I’d gathered that when the vampires first came to this part of the New World, the walkers here had made themselves enough of a pest that the vampires had killed most of them off. Stefan wouldn’t tell me anything more detailed. Some things I’d figured out—like most vampire magic didn’t work on me. But I couldn’t see how I was any danger to them—unlike, say, a werewolf would be.
Stefan had known what I was for years, but had kept it from his seethe until I’d gone to them for help. He’d gotten into trouble for it.
“They already know what I am,” I told him. “I’ll come. What’s the second favor?”
“It’s already too light out for me to travel,” he said, waving a vague hand toward my window. “Do you have somewhere dark I might spend the day?”
The only place for Stefan to sleep was my closet. The closets in Samuel’s room and the third bedroom had slatted doors that allowed too much light to go through. All of my windows had blinds, but nothing dark enough to keep a vampire safe.
My bedroom took up one end of the trailer—Samuel’s room was on the opposite end. I opened my door to wave Stefan inside, but Samuel came, too. I sighed and didn’t fuss. Samuel wouldn’t leave me alone with Stefan without a fight I was too battered to enjoy.
My bedroom was littered with clothing, some dirty, some clean. The clean clothes were folded in stacks I hadn’t gotten around to putting in my drawers. Scattered among the clothes were books, magazines, and mail I hadn’t sorted yet. If I’d known I was going to have a man in my room, I’d have cleaned it.
I pulled open the closet and pulled out a couple of boxes and two pairs of shoes. That left it empty—except for the four dresses hanging on one side. It was a big closet, long enough for Stefan to lie down comfortably in.
“Samuel can get you a spare pillow and blanket,” I said, gathering clothes as I spoke. My need to be clean had been growing since I woke up, and now it was desperate. I needed to get the smell of the woman’s death off of my skin because I couldn’t get it out of my head.
“Mercedes,” said Stefan in a gentle tone. “I don’t need a blanket. I’m not going to be sleeping, I’m going to be dead.”
I don’t know why that was the final straw. Maybe it was the implication that I didn’t understand what he was—when I’d just had a graphic example of what vampires could do. I’d been halfway to the bathroom, but I turned back and stared at both men.
“Samuel is going to get you a blanket,” I told him firmly. “And a pillow. You are going to sleep for the day in my closet. Dead people don’t get to stay in my bedroom.”
I shut the bathroom door behind me and dropped the afghan I wore on the floor. I heard Samuel say, “I’ll get some bedding,” before I turned on the shower to let it warm up.
There’s a full length mirror on the door of my bathroom. One of those cheap ones with the imitation wood frame. When I turned to put my clothes on top of the sink where they wouldn’t get wet, I got a good look at myself.
At first, all I could see was the dried blood. In my hair, on my face, down my shoulder, arm and hip. On my hands and feet.
I threw up in the toilet. Twice. Then I washed my hands and face and rinsed my mouth out with water.
I was not unacquainted with blood. I am sometimes a coyote, after all. I’ve killed my share of rabbits and mice. Last winter I killed two men—werewolves. But this death was different. Evil. He hadn’t killed her for food, revenge, or self-defense. He’d killed her, and four other people, because he liked it. And I hadn’t been able to stop him.
I looked back at the mirror.
Bruises bloomed on my ribs and shoulder. Dark purple marks traced the path the harness had run around my chest and ribs. I must have done that while I was struggling against Stefan’s hold on my leash. The bruise on the outside edge of my right shoulder was more black than purple. The left side of my face was swollen cheekbone to jaw and red with the promise of a truly spectacular bruise.
I leaned forward and touched my puffy eyelid. I looked like a rape victim—except for the two dark marks on my neck.
They looked sort of like a rattlesnake bite, two dark half-formed scabs surrounded by swollen and reddened skin. I covered them with my hand and wondered how much I trusted Stefan’s assessment that I would neither be turned into a vampire nor be subject to Littleton’s control.
I took out my hydrogen peroxide and dabbed it over the wounds, hissing at the sting. It didn’t make me feel any cleaner. I took the bottle into the shower with me and poured the contents on my neck until the bottle was empty. Then I scrubbed.
The blood was soon gone, though it had turned the water at my feet rusty for a few seconds. But no matter how much soap and shampoo I used, I still felt dirty. The more I scrubbed the more frantic I felt. Littleton hadn’t raped me, but he’d violated my body just the same. The thought of his mouth on me made my stomach churn again.
I stood under the hot spray until the water was cold.
Chapter 3
My bedroom was empty and the door to the closet was shut when I finally emerged from the bathroom. I glanced at the clock. Fifteen minutes to make it to the garage if I was going to open on time.
I was glad no one was there to hear me grunt and groan as I got dressed. No one alive to hear me, anyway.
Every muscle in my body ached, especially my right shoulder, and as soon as I bent down to pull on my socks and shoes, the battered side of my face started to throb. It would hurt me even more, though, if I lost customers because I wasn’t open at my usual time.
I opened the bedroom door and Samuel looked up from where he’d been sitting on the couch. He’d been up all night, too; he ought to have gone to bed instead of waiting up to frown at me. He got up and pulled an ice pack out of the freezer.
“Here, put this on your face.”
It felt good and I sagged against the doorway to enjoy the numbness it brought to my throbbing cheek.
“I called Zee and told him what happened,” Samuel told me. “You can go to bed. Zee’s planning on working the shop for you today. He said he could do it tomorrow, too, if you need him.”
Siebold Adelbertsmiter, known to his friends as Zee, was a good mechanic, the best. He’d taught me everything I know, then sold the garage to me. He was also fae—and the first person I’d intended to go to for information on sorcerers.
Even though he sometimes filled in for me when I was sick, I hadn’t even thought about calling him for help with the garage—proof that it would probably be better if I didn’t try going to work today.
“You’re swaying,” said Samuel after a moment. “Go to bed. You’ll feel better when you wake up.”
“Thank you,” I mumbled before shutting myself back in my room.
I flopped facedown on my bed, groaned because that hurt my face again. I rolled until I was more comfortable, covered my head with my pillow and dozed for a while, maybe for all of half an hour.
I could smell Stefan.
It wasn’t that he smelled bad—he just smelled like himself, sort of vampire and popcorn. But I couldn’t get his statement about being dead during the day out of my head. Ugh. There was no way I was going to be able to sleep with a dead man in my closet.
“Thanks, Stefan,” I told him glumly as I heaved my sore body out of bed. If I couldn’t sleep, I might as well go to work. I opened the door to t
he living room, expecting it to be empty, since Samuel had been up all night, too.
Instead he was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee with Adam, the local Alpha werewolf, who happened to live on the other side of my back fence.
I hadn’t heard Adam come in. Once Samuel started sharing my house, I’d become careless. I should have realized that he would come over as soon as Samuel called him, though—and, of course, Samuel had to call him about the bloodbath at the hotel. Adam was the Alpha, and responsible for the welfare of all the werewolves in the area.
They both looked at me when I opened my door.
I was tempted to turn around and go back into my bedroom with the dead man in my closet. Now, I’m not very vain. If I’d ever been, making my living covered in various grease and dirt mixtures would have cured me quickly. Still, I wasn’t up to facing two sexy men when I had one eye swollen mostly shut and half of my face black and blue.
Stefan, being dead, was unlikely to notice what I looked like—and I’d never dated Stefan. Not that I was dating either Adam or Samuel at the present.
I hadn’t dated Samuel since I was sixteen.
I’ve known Samuel for as long as I can remember. I grew up in the Marrok’s pack in northwestern Montana, a werewolf pack being as close to what I was as my teenage mother could find. It was just chance that her great uncle belonged to the Marrok. Lucky chance, I’d come to believe. A lot of werewolves would just have killed me outright—the way a wolf will kill a coyote who invades his territory.
Bran, the Marrok, in addition to being the ruler of all the North American wolves, was a good man. He placed me with one of his wolves and raised me almost as if I belonged. Almost.
Samuel was the Marrok’s son. He’d been there for me as I struggled to live in a world with no place for me. I’d been raised by the pack, but I wasn’t one of them. My mother loved me, but I didn’t belong in her mundane human world either.
When I was sixteen, I’d believed I’d found my home in Samuel. Only when the Marrok showed me that Samuel wanted children—and not my love, did I finally understand I had to make my own path in life rather than finding someone else’s to join.
I’d left Samuel and the pack and hadn’t seen either again for more than fifteen years, almost half my life. All that changed last winter. Now, I had the Marrok’s cell phone number on my speed dial, and Samuel had decided to move to the Tri-Cities. More specifically, he had decided to move in with me.
I still wasn’t quite sure why. Fond of it as I am, my home is a single-wide trailer as old as me.
Samuel, being a doctor, is used to a slightly higher standard of housing. Granted his paperwork nightmare had taken a long time to settle. Only the month before had he at last gotten his license to practice medicine in Washington as well as Montana and Texas. He’d given up his job as a night clerk at an all night convenience store and begun working in the emergency room at the hospital in Kennewick. Despite the increase in his income, he hadn’t shown any sign of leaving. His temporary stay in my house had turned into six months and some change.
I’d refused him at first.
“Why not with Adam?” I’d asked. As Alpha of the local werewolf pack, Adam was used to having short-term guests and he had more bedrooms than I did. I didn’t ask why Samuel didn’t buy his own house—Samuel had already told me that he’d spent too much time alone the past few years. Werewolves don’t do well on their own. They need someone, pack or family, or they begin to get odd. Werewolves who get odd tend to end up dead—and sometimes take a lot of other people down with them when they go.
Samuel had raised his eyebrows and said, “Do you really want us to kill each other? Adam is the Alpha—and I’m a stronger dominant than he is. Now we’ve both lived long enough to control ourselves up to a point. But, if we’re living together, sooner or later, we’d be at each other’s throat.”
“Adam’s house is only a hundred yards from mine,” I told him dryly. Samuel would have been right about any other wolf, but Samuel made his own rules. If he wanted to live in peace with Adam, he could manage it.
“Please.” His tone was as far from pleading as it was possible to get.
“No,” I told him.
There was another, longer pause.
“So how are you going to explain to your neighbors that there is a strange man sleeping on your front porch?”
He’d have done it, too—so I let him move in.
I told him that the first time he flirted with me, he’d be out on his ear. I told him that I didn’t love him anymore, though it might have had more effect if I had been entirely certain of that myself. It helped that I knew that he didn’t love me, hadn’t loved me when he tried to elope with me when I was sixteen—and he was who-knows-how-old.
It was not really as bad as it sounded. He grew up at a time when women married much younger than sixteen. It’s hard on the older werewolves to adjust to modern ways of thinking.
I wish I could hold it against him, though. It would help me keep in mind that he still only wanted me for what I could give him: children who lived.
Werewolves are made, not born. To become a werewolf, you need to survive an attack so vicious that you nearly die—which allows the werewolf ’s magic to defeat your immune system. Many, many of the werewolf ’s kin who try to become werewolves themselves die in the attempt. Samuel had outlived all of his wives and children. Those children of his who had attempted to become werewolf had all died.
Female werewolves can’t have children; their pregnancies spontaneously abort during the moon’s change. Human women can have children with werewolves, but they can only carry to term the babies who have only human DNA.
But I was neither human, nor werewolf.
Samuel was convinced I’d be different. Not being moon called, my changes aren’t violent—or even really necessary. I once went three years without shifting to my coyote self. Wolves and coyotes could interbreed in the wild, why not werewolves and walkers?
I don’t know what the biological answer to that is, but my answer is that I didn’t care to be a broodmare, thank you very much. So, no Samuel for me.
My feelings for Samuel should have been neat and tidily put in the past—except that I hadn’t entirely been able to convince myself that all I felt for him was the lingering warmth anyone would feel for an old friend.
Maybe I’d have come to some conclusion about Samuel who had, after all, been living in my home for better than half a year, if it hadn’t been for Adam.
Adam had been the bane of my existence for most of the time I’d lived in the Tri-Cities, where he ruled with an iron hand. Like the Marrok, he had a marked tendency to treat me like one of his minions when it suited him, and like a human stray when it didn’t. He was high-handed, to say the least. He’d declared me his mate before the pack—and then had the gall to tell me it was for my own protection, so his wolves wouldn’t bother me, a coyote living in their territory. Once he said it, it was so—and nothing I could say would change it in the eyes of his pack.
Last winter, though, he had needed me, and it changed things between us.
We went on three dates. During the first one I had a broken arm and he’d been very careful. On the second, he and his teenage daughter, Jesse, took me to the Richland Light Opera Company’s presentation of The Pirates of Penzance. I’d had a great time. On the third date my arm had been almost healed and there had been no Jesse, no middle school auditorium to cool any passionate impulses we might have had. We went dancing and only his daughter waiting for him at his home, and Samuel waiting for me at mine, had kept our clothes on.
After he’d taken me home, I recovered enough to be scared. Falling in love with a werewolf is not a safe thing to do—but falling in love with an Alpha is worse. Especially for someone like me. I had fought too long to belong to myself, to allow myself to fall into line with the rest of his pack.
So the next time he called to take me out, I was unexpectedly busy. Avoiding someone who lives
next door requires a lot of effort, but I managed. It helped that when the werewolves became public, Adam’s time was suddenly taken up with trips back and forth between Washington D.C. and the Tri-Cities.
Though he was one of the hundred or so werewolves who’d revealed themselves to the public, Adam wasn’t one of Bran’s front men—he didn’t have the temperament for being a celebrity. But after working with the government for forty-odd years, first in the military and later as a security consultant, he’d developed a network of contacts as well as an understanding of politics that made him invaluable to the Marrok—and to the government as they tried to decide how to deal with yet another group of preternatural creatures.
Between his schedule and my clever avoidance tactics I hadn’t seen him for almost two months.
Even to my monocular gaze, he was beautiful, more beautiful than I remembered him being. I wanted to linger on his slavic cheekbones and his sensuous mouth, damn it. I jerked my gaze to Samuel—which was hardly safer. He wasn’t as pretty, but that didn’t matter to my stupid hormones.
Samuel broke the silence first. “Why aren’t you in bed, Mercy?” he drawled. “You look worse than the accident victim I had die on the table last week.”
Adam came to his feet and crossed the living room in four long strides while I waited like a rabbit in a snare, knowing I should run, but unable to move. He stopped in front of me, whistling softly between his teeth as he examined the damage. When he leaned closer and touched my neck, I heard a noise from the kitchen.
Samuel had broken his coffee cup. He didn’t look up at me as he set about cleaning the mess.
“Nasty,” Adam said, drawing my attention back to him. “Can you see out of that eye?”
“Not as well as I see out of the other,” I told him. “But I see well enough to tell that you aren’t on your way to D.C. like you were supposed to be.” He’d had to come back for Moon’s Night, but I knew that he’d flown in yesterday afternoon and had been scheduled to fly out an hour ago.