1
I STARED AT MY REFLECTION IN THE MIRROR. I WASN’T
pretty, but my hair was thick and brushed my shoulders. My skin was
darker on my arms and face than it was on the rest of my body, but
at least, thanks to my Blackfoot father, I’d never be pasty
pale.
There were two stitches Samuel had put in the cut
on my chin, and the bruise on my shoulder (not extensive damage
considering I’d been fighting something that liked to eat children
and had knocked out a werewolf). The dark thread looked from some
angles like the legs of a shiny black spider. Aside from that
slight damage, there was nothing wrong with my body. Karate and
mechanicking kept me in good shape.
My soul was a lot more battered than my body, but I
couldn’t see it in the mirror. Hopefully no one else could either.
It was that invisible damage that left me afraid to leave the
bathroom and face Adam, who waited in my bedroom. Though I knew
with absolute certainty that Adam wouldn’t do anything I didn’t
want him to do—and had wanted him to do for a long time.
I could ask him to leave. To give me more time. I
stared at the woman in the mirror, but all she did was stare
back.
I’d killed the man who’d raped me. Was I going to
let him have this last victory? Let him destroy me as he’d
intended?
“Mercy?” Adam didn’t have to raise his voice. He
knew I could hear him.
“Careful,” I told him as I left off mirror-gazing
and began pulling on clean underwear and an old T-shirt. “I have an
ancient walking stick, and I know how to use it.”
“The walking stick is lying across your bed,” he
said.
When I came out of the bathroom, Adam was lying
across my bed, too.
He wasn’t tall, but he didn’t need height to add to
the impression he made. Wide cheekbones and a full, soft mouth
topping a stubborn jaw combined to give him movie-star beauty. When
his eyes were open, they were a dark chocolate only a shade lighter
than mine. His body was almost as pretty as his face—though I knew
he didn’t think of himself that way. He kept himself in shape
because he was Alpha and his body was a tool he used to keep his
pack safe. He’d been a soldier before he was Changed, and the
military training was still there in the way he moved and the way
he took charge.
“When Samuel gets back from the hospital, he’s
going to spend the rest of the night at my house,” Adam said
without opening his eyes. Samuel was my roommate, a doctor, and a
lone wolf. Adam’s house was behind mine, with about ten acres
between them—three were mine and the rest were Adam’s. “We have
time to talk.”
“You look horrible,” I said, not quite truthfully.
He did look tired, with dark circles under his eyes, but nothing
short of mutilation could make him look terrible. “Don’t they have
beds in D.C.?”
He’d had to go to Washington (the capital—we were
in the state) this weekend to clean up a little mess that was sort
of my fault. Of course if he hadn’t ripped Tim’s corpse into bits
on camera, and if the resultant DVD hadn’t landed on a senator’s
desk, there wouldn’t have been a problem. So it was partially his
fault, too.
Mostly it was Tim’s fault, and whoever had made a
copy of the DVD and mailed it off. I’d taken care of Tim. Bran, the
head-honcho werewolf above all of the other head-honcho werewolves,
was apparently taking care of the other person. Last year, I would
have expected to hear about a funeral. This year, with the
werewolves barely having admitted their existence to the world,
Bran would probably be more circumspect. Whatever that would
mean.
Adam opened his eyes and looked at me. In the
dimness of the room (he’d only turned on the small light on the
little table by my bed), his eyes looked black. There was a
bleakness in his face that hadn’t been there before, and I knew it
was because of me. Because he hadn’t been able to keep me safe—and
people like Adam take that pretty seriously.
Personally, I figured it was up to me to keep me
safe. Sometimes it might mean calling in friends, but it was my
responsibility. Still, he saw it as a failure.
“So have you made up your mind?” he asked.
Would I accept him as my mate, he meant. The
question had been up in the air too long, and it was affecting his
ability to keep his pack under control. Ironically, what happened
with Tim had resolved the issue that had kept me from accepting
Adam for months. I figured if I could fight back against the fairy
magic potion Tim had fed me, a little Alpha mojo wasn’t going to
turn me into a docile slave either.
Maybe I should have thanked him before I hit him
with the tire iron.
Adam isn’t Tim, I told myself. I thought of Adam’s
rage when he’d broken down the door to my garage, of his despair
when he persuaded me to drink out of that damned fae goblet again.
In addition to robbing me of my will, the goblet also had the power
to heal—and I’d needed a lot of healing by that point. It had
worked, but Adam had felt like he was betraying me, believed I’d
hate him for it. But he’d done it anyway. I figured it was because
he wasn’t lying when he said he loved me. When I’d hidden in
shame—I put that down to the fairy brew, because I knew ... I
knew I had nothing to be ashamed about—he’d pulled my coyote
self out from under his bed, bitten my nose for being foolish, and
held me all night long. Then he’d surrounded me with his pack and
safety whether I needed it or not.
Tim was dead. And he’d always been a loser. I’d be
damned if I was going to be the victim of a loser—or anyone
else.
“Mercy?” Adam stayed on his back on my bed, taking
the position of vulnerability.
In answer, I pulled the T-shirt over my head and
dropped it on the floor.
Adam was off the bed faster than I’d ever seen him
move, bringing the comforter with him. He had it wrapped around me
before I could blink ... and then I was pressed tightly against
him, my bare breasts resting against his chest. He’d tipped his
head to the side so my face was pressed against his jaw and
cheek.
“I meant to get the blanket between us,” he said
tightly. His heart pounded against mine, and his arms were shaking
and rock hard. “I didn’t mean you had to sleep with me right now—a
simple ‘yes’ would have done.”
I knew he was aroused—even a regular person without
a coyote nose would have known it. I slid my hands up from his hips
to his hard belly and up his ribs and listened to his heart rate
pick up even further and a light sweat broke out on his jaw under
my slow caress. I could feel the muscles in his cheek move as he
clenched his teeth, felt the heat that flushed his skin. I blew in
his ear, and he jumped away from me as though I’d stuck him with a
cattle prod.
Streaks of amber lit his eyes, and his lips were
fuller, redder. I dropped the comforter on top of my shirt.
“Damn it, Mercy.” He didn’t like to swear in front
of women. I always counted it a personal triumph when I could make
him do it. “It hasn’t even been a week since you were raped. I’m
not sleeping with you until you’ve talked to someone, a counselor,
a psychologist.”
“I’m fine,” I said, though in fact, once distance
had released me from the safety he brought with him, I was aware of
a sick churning in my stomach.
Adam turned so he was facing the window, his back
to me. “No, you’re not. Remember, you can’t lie to a wolf, love.”
He let out a breath of air too forcefully to be a sigh. He rubbed
his hair briskly, trying to get rid of excess energy. Obligingly,
it stuck up in small curls that he usually kept too short to look
anything but neat and well-groomed. “Who am I talking about?” he
asked, though I didn’t think the question was directed at me. “This
is Mercy. Getting you to talk about anything personal is like
pulling teeth at the best of times. Getting you to talk to a
stranger ...”
I hadn’t thought myself particularly closemouthed.
Actually, I’d been accused of having a smart mouth. Samuel had told
me more than once that I’d probably live longer if I learned to
bite my tongue occasionally.
So I waited, without saying a word, for Adam to
decide what he wanted to do.
The room wasn’t cold, but I was shivering a little
anyway—it must be nerves. If Adam didn’t hurry up and do something,
though, I was going to be throwing up in the bathroom. I’d spent
too much time worshipping the porcelain goddess since Tim had made
me overdose on fairy juice to view the thought with any
equanimity.
He wasn’t watching me, but he didn’t need to be.
Emotions have a scent. He swung back to look at me with a frown. He
took in my state with one comprehensive look.
He swore and strode back to me, wrapping me in his
arms. He pulled me tight against him, making low, soothing sounds
in the back of his throat. He rocked me gently.
I took a deep breath of Adam-scented air and tried
to think. Normally, this wouldn’t be difficult for me. But normally
I wasn’t all but naked in the arms of the hottest man I knew.
I’d misunderstood what he’d wanted.
To double-check, I cleared my throat. “When you
said you needed my answer to your claim today—you weren’t actually
asking for sex?”
His body jerked involuntarily as he laughed,
rubbing his jaw against my face. “So, you think I’m the kind of
person who’d do something like that? After what happened just last
week?”
“I thought that’s what it took,” I mumbled, feeling
my cheeks heat up.
“How long did you spend in the Marrok’s
pack?”
He knew how long. He was just making me feel
stupid. “Mating wasn’t something everyone talked to me about,” I
told him defensively. “Just Samuel ...”
Adam laughed again, one of his hands on my
shoulder, the other moving in a light caress on my butt, which
should have tickled but didn’t. “I just bet he was telling you the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth right
then.”
I tightened my grip on him—somehow my hands had
landed on his lower back. “Probably not. So all you needed was my
agreement?”
He grunted. “It won’t help with the pack, not until
it’s for real. But with Samuel out of the way, I thought you’d be
able to decide if you were interested or not. If you weren’t
interested, I could regroup. If you agreed to be mine, I can wait
until Hell freezes over for you.”
His words sounded reasonable, but his scent told me
something else. It told me that my reasonable tones had soothed his
worries, and his mind was now on something other than our
discussion.
Fair enough. Being this close to him, feeling his
heat against me, feeling his heartbeat race because he wanted me
... someone told me that knowing someone desires you is the
greatest aphrodisiac. It was certainly true for me.
“Of course,” he said, still in that curiously calm
voice, “waiting is much easier in abstract than reality. I need you
to tell me to back off, all right?”
“Mmm,” I said. He brought a cleanness with him that
washed the feel of Tim off my skin far better than the shower
did—but only when he touched me.
“Mercy.”
I lowered my hands, sliding them beneath the
waistline of his jeans and digging my nails lightly into his
skin.
He growled something more, but neither of us was
listening. He turned his head and tilted it. I expected serious and
got playful as he nipped at my lower lip. The roughness of his
teeth sent tingles to my fingertips, zings past my knees and down
to my toes. Potent things, Adam’s teeth.
I brought my suddenly shaking hands around to worry
at the button on his jeans, and Adam jerked his head up and put a
staying hand on mine.
Then I heard it, too.
“German car,” he said.
I sighed, slumping against him. “Swedish,” I
corrected him. “Four-year-old Volvo station wagon. Gray.”
He looked at me in surprise that quickly turned to
comprehension. “You know the car.”
I moaned and tried to hide in his shoulder. “Damn,
damn. It was the newspapers.”
“Who is it, Mercy?”
Gravel shooshed, and headlights flashed on my
window as the car turned into the driveway. “My mom,” I told him.
“Her sense of timing is unreal. I should have realized she would
read about ... about it.” I didn’t want to name what had
happened to me, what I’d done to Tim, out loud. Not while I was
mostly naked with Adam, anyway.
“You didn’t call her.”
I shook my head. I should have, I knew it. But it
had been one of those things I just couldn’t face.
He was smiling now. “You get dressed. I’ll go stall
her until you’re ready to come out.”
“There is no way I’ll ever be ready for
this,” I told him.
He sobered, put his face next to mine, and rested
his forehead against me. “Mercy. It will be all right.”
Then he left, shutting the door to my bedroom as my
doorbell rang the first time. It rang twice more before he opened
the outside door, and he wasn’t being slow.
I grabbed clothes and desperately tried to remember
if we’d done the dishes from dinner. It was my turn. If it had been
Samuel’s turn, I wouldn’t have had to worry. It was stupid. I knew
that she could care less about the dishes—but it gave me something
to do other than panic.
I’d never even considered calling her. Maybe in ten
years I might feel ready.
I pulled on my pants and left my feet bare while I
searched frantically for a bra.
“She knows you’re here,” Adam said on the other
side of the door—as if he were leaning against it. “She’ll be out
in a minute.”
“I don’t know who you think you are”—my mother’s
voice was low and dangerous—“but if you don’t get out of my way
right this instant, it won’t matter.”
Adam was the Alpha werewolf in charge of the local
pack. He was tough. He could be mean when he had to—and he wouldn’t
stand a chance against my mom.
“Bra, bra, bra,” I chanted as I pulled one out of
the dirty-clothes basket and hooked it. I pulled the thing around
so fast I wouldn’t be surprised to discover I’d given myself a rug
burn. “Shirt. Shirt.” I ransacked my drawers and found and
discarded two shirts. “Clean shirt, clean shirt.”
“Mercy?” called Adam, sounding a little
desperate—how well I knew that feeling.
“Mom, leave him alone!” I said. “I’ll be right
out.”
Frustrated, I stared at my room. I had to have a
clean shirt somewhere. I had just been wearing one—but it had
disappeared in my search for a bra. Finally, I pulled on a shirt
that said 1984: GOVERNMENT FOR DUMMIES on the back. It was
clean, or at least it didn’t stink too badly. The oil smudge on the
shoulder looked permanent.
I took a deep breath and opened the door. I had to
duck around Adam, who was leaning against the door frame.
“Hey, Mom,” I said breezily. “I see you’ve met my—”
What? Mate? I didn’t think that was something my mother needed to
hear. “I see you’ve met Adam.”
“Mercedes Athena Thompson,” snapped my mother.
“Explain to me why I had to learn about what happened to you from a
newspaper?”
I’d been avoiding meeting her gaze, but once she
three-named me, I had no choice.
My mother is five-foot-nothing. She’s only
seventeen years older than me, which means she’s not yet fifty and
looks thirty. She can still wear the belt buckles she won barrel
racing on their original belts. She’s usually blond—I’m pretty sure
it’s her natural color—but the shade changes from year to year.
This year it was strawberry gold. Her eyes are big and blue and
innocent-looking, her nose slightly tip-tilted, and her mouth full
and round.
With strangers, she sometimes plays a dumb blonde,
batting her eyelashes and speaking in a breathy voice that anyone
who watched old movies would recognize from Some Like It Hot
or Bus Stop. My mother has never, to my knowledge, changed
her own flat tire.
If the sharp anger in her voice hadn’t been a cover
for the bruised look in her eyes, I could have responded in kind.
Instead, I shrugged.
“I don’t know, Mom. After it happened ... I stayed
coyote for a couple of days.” I had a half-hysterical vision of
calling her, and saying, “By the way, Mom, guess what happened
to me today...”
She looked me in the eyes, and I thought she saw
more than I wanted her to. “Are you all right?”
I started to say yes, but a lifetime of living with
creatures who could smell a lie had left me with a habit of
honesty. “Mostly,” I said, compromising. “It helps that he’s dead.”
It was humiliating that my chest was getting tight. I’d given
myself all the self-pity time I would allow.
Mom could cuddle her children like any of the best
of parents, but I should have trusted her more. She knew all about
the importance of standing on your own two feet. Her right hand was
balled into a white-knuckled fist, but when she spoke, her voice
was brisk.
“All right,” she said, as if we’d covered
everything she was going to ask. I knew better, but I also knew it
would be later and private.
She turned her angelic blue eyes on Adam. “Who are
you, and what are you doing in my daughter’s house at eleven at
night?”
“I’m not sixteen,” I said in a voice even I could
tell was sulky. “I can even have a man stay all night if I want
to.”
Mom and Adam both ignored me.
Adam had remained in position against my bedroom
door frame, his body held a little more casually than usual. I
thought he was trying to give my mother the impression that he was
at home here: someone who had authority to keep her out of my room.
He lifted an eyebrow and showed not even a touch of the panic I’d
heard in his voice earlier. “I’m Adam Hauptman, I live on the other
side of her back fence.”
She scowled at him. “The Alpha? The divorced man
with the teenage daughter?”
He gave her one of his sudden smiles, and I knew my
mom had made yet another conquest: she’s pretty cute when she
scowls, and Adam didn’t know many people gutsy enough to scowl at
him. I had a sudden revelation. I’d been making a tactical error
for the past few years if I’d really wanted him to quit flirting
with me. I should have smiled and smirked and batted my eyelashes
at him. Obviously, a woman snarling at him was something he
enjoyed. He was too busy looking at my mom’s scowl to see
mine.
“That’s right, ma’am.” Adam quit leaning against
the door and took a couple of steps into the room. “Good to meet
you at last, Margi. Mercy speaks of you often.”
I didn’t know what my mother would have said to
that, doubtless something polite. But with a popping sound like
eggs cracking on a cement floor, something appeared between Mom and
Adam, a foot or so above the carpet. It was a human-sized
something, black and crunchy. It dropped to the floor, reeking of
char, old blood, and rotten corpses.
I stared at it for too long, my eyes failing to
find a pattern that agreed with what my nose told me. Even knowing
that only a few things could just appear in my living room without
using the door couldn’t make me acknowledge what it was. It was the
green shirt, torn and stained, with the hindquarters of a familiar
Great Dane still visible, that forced me to admit that this black
and shrunken thing was Stefan.
I dropped to my knees beside him and reached out
before snatching my hand back, afraid to damage him more. He was
obviously dead, but since he was a vampire, that wasn’t as hopeless
a thing as it might have been.
“Stefan?” I said.
I wasn’t the only one who jumped when he grabbed my
wrist. The skin on his hand was dry and crackled disconcertingly
against my skin.
Stefan has been my friend since the first day I
moved here to the Tri-Cities. He is charming, funny, and
generous—if given to miscalculations on how forgiving I might be
about innocent people he killed trying to protect me.
It was still all I could do not to jerk away and
rub off the feel of his brittle skin on my arm. Ick. Ick. Ick. And
I had the horrible feeling that it was hurting him to hold on to
me, that at any moment his skin would crack and fall off.
His eyes opened to slits, his irises crimson
instead of brown. His mouth opened and shut twice without making
any sound. Then his hand tightened on mine until I couldn’t have
pulled free if I had wanted to. He sucked in a breath of air so he
could talk, but he couldn’t do it quite right, and I heard air
hissing out of the side of his ribs, where it had no business
escaping from.
“She knows.” His voice didn’t sound like his at
all. It was rough and dry. As he pulled my hand slowly toward his
face, with the last of the air from that breath, he said intently,
“Run.” And with those words, the person who was my friend
disappeared under the fierce hunger in his face.
Looking into his mad eyes, I thought his advice was
worth taking—too bad I wasn’t going to be able to break free to
follow it. He was slow, but he had me, and I wasn’t a werewolf or
vampire with supernatural strength to help myself out.
I heard the distinctive clack of a bullet
chambering, and a quick glance showed me my mother with a
wicked-looking Glock out and pointed at Stefan. It was pink and
black—trust my mom to have a Barbie gun, cute but deadly.
“It’s all right,” I told her hastily—my mother
wouldn’t hesitate to fire if she thought he was going to hurt me.
Normally I wouldn’t worry about someone shooting at Stefan,
vampires not being that vulnerable to guns, but he was in bad
shape. “He’s on our side.” Hard to sound convincing when he was
pulling me toward him, but I did my best.
Adam grabbed Stefan’s wrist and held it, so instead
of Stefan pulling me toward him, the vampire was slowly raising his
own head off the floor. As he came closer to my arm, Stefan opened
his mouth and scraps of burnt skin fell on my tan carpet. His fangs
were white and lethal-looking, and also a lot bigger than I
remembered them being.
My breathing picked up, but I didn’t jerk back and
whine, “Get it off! Get it off!”—full points to me. Instead, I
leaned over Stefan and put my head into Adam’s shoulder. It put my
neck at risk, but the smell of werewolf and Adam helped mask the
stench of what had been done to Stefan. If Stefan needed blood to
survive, I’d donate to him.
“It’s all right, Adam,” I said. “Let him go.”
“Don’t put down the gun,” Adam told my mother.
“Mercy, if this doesn’t work, you call my house and tell Darryl to
collect whoever is there and bring them here.”
And, in an act of bravery that was completely in
character, Adam put his wrist in front of Stefan’s face. The
vampire didn’t appear to notice, still pulling himself up by his
grip on my arm. He wasn’t breathing, so he couldn’t scent Adam, and
I didn’t think he was focusing any too well either.
I should have tried to stop Adam—I’d fed Stefan
before without any ill effects that I knew of, and I was
pretty sure that Stefan cared whether I lived or died. I
wasn’t so sure how he felt about Adam. But I was remembering Stefan
telling me that there “shouldn’t” be any problems because it had
only been the once, and I’d met a few of Stefan’s band of sheep—the
people who served as his breakfast, dinner, and lunch. They were
all completely devoted to him. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a great guy
for a vampire—but I somehow doubted that those people, mostly
women, could live together devoted to one man without some sort of
vampire mesmerism at work. And I’d sort of had my fill of magical
compulsion for the year.
Any protest I made to Adam would be an exercise in
futility anyway. He was feeling especially protective of me at that
moment—and all I would do was stir up tempers, his, mine, and my
mother’s.
Adam pressed his wrist against Stefan’s mouth, and
the vampire paused his incremental closing of the distance between
my arm and his fangs. He seemed confused for a moment—then he drew
air in through his nose.
Stefan’s teeth sank into Adam’s wrist, his free
hand shot up to grab Adam’s arm, and his eyes closed—all so fast it
looked like the motion of a cheaply drawn cartoon.
Adam sucked in his breath, but I couldn’t tell if
it was because it hurt him or because it felt good. When Stefan had
fed from me, I’d been in pretty rough shape. I didn’t remember much
about it.
It was strangely intimate, Stefan holding me as he
drank from Adam’s wrist, and Adam leaning harder into me as Stefan
fed. Intimate with an audience. I turned my head to see that my
mother still held her gun in a steady two-handed grip, pointed at
Stefan’s head. Her face as calm as if she saw burnt bodies appear
out of nowhere, then rise from the dead to sink fangs into whoever
was closest to them all the time, though I knew that wasn’t true. I
wasn’t sure she’d ever even seen one of the werewolves in wolf
form.
“Mom,” I said, “the vampire is Stefan, he’s a
friend of mine.”
“I should put the gun away? Are you sure? He
doesn’t look like a friend.”
I looked at Stefan, who was looking better, though
I still wouldn’t have recognized him without my nose. “Truthfully,
I’m not sure how much good it would do anyway. Bullets, if they are
silver, may work on werewolves, but I don’t think any bullets do
much to vampires.”
She tucked the Glock, hot, into the holster inside
the waistline of the back of her jeans. “So what do you do to
vampires?”
Someone knocked on the door. I hadn’t heard anyone
drive up, but I’d been a little distracted.
“Don’t let them in your home in the first place,”
suggested Adam.
Mom, who’d been on the way to the door, stopped.
“Is this likely to be a vampire?”
“Better let me get it,” I said. I wiggled my arm,
and Stefan released me and took a better grip on Adam. “Are you all
right, Adam?”
“He’s too weak to feed fast,” Adam commented. “I’m
good for a while yet. If you’ll get my phone out for me and hit the
speed dial, I’ll call for some more wolves, though. I doubt one
feeding will be enough.”
With Mom watching, I behaved myself while I dug his
phone out of the holder on his belt. Instead of taking the time to
sort through his contacts, I just punched in his house number and
handed him the ringing phone. Whoever was outside was growing
impatient.
I straightened my shirt and took a quick look at
myself to make sure there wasn’t anything that said, “Hey, I have a
vampire in my house.”
I was going to have a bruise on my forearm, but it
wasn’t too noticeable yet. I slipped past Mom and opened the door
about six inches.
The woman standing on the porch didn’t look
familiar. She was about my height and age. Her dark hair had been
highlighted with a lighter shade (or her light brown hair had been
striped with a darker color). She wore so much foundation that I
could smell it over the perfume that a purely human nose might find
light and attractive. Her grooming was immaculate, like a purebred
dog ready to be shown—or a very expensive call girl.
Not a person you’d expect to find on the porch of
an old mobile home out in the boonies of Eastern Washington at
night.
“Mercy?”
If she hadn’t spoken, I’d never have recognized her
because my nose was full of perfume and she didn’t look anything
like the girl I’d gone to college with. “Amber?”
Amber had been my college roommate Charla’s best
friend. She’d been studying to be a veterinarian, but I’d heard
she’d dropped out her first year in vet school. I hadn’t heard from
her since I’d graduated.
When I’d last seen Amber she’d been wearing a
Mohawk and had had a ring in her nose (which had been bigger) and a
small tattooed hummingbird at the corner of her eye. She and Charla
had been best friends in high school. Though it had been Charla who
had decided they shouldn’t room together, Amber had always blamed
me for it. We had been acquaintances rather than friends.
Amber laughed, doubtless at the bewildered look on
my face. There was something brittle in the sound, not that I was
in any position to be picky. My manner was stiffer than usual, too.
I had a vampire feeding from a werewolf behind me; I wondered what
she was hiding.
“It’s been a long time,” she said, after a short,
awkward silence.
I joined her out on the porch and shut the door
behind me, trying not to look like I was keeping her out. “What
brings you here?”
She folded her arms over her chest and turned to
gaze at my scraggly-looking field where a rusty VW Rabbit rested on
three tires. From where we stood, the graffiti, the missing door,
and the cracked windshield weren’t visible, but it looked junky
anyway. The old wreck was a joke between Adam and me, and I wasn’t
going to apologize for it.
“I read about you in the paper,” she said.
“You live in the Tri-Cities?”
She shook her head. “Spokane. It made CNN, too,
didn’t you know? The fae, werewolves, death ... how could they
resist?” For a moment there was a flash of humor in her voice,
though her face stayed disconcertingly blank.
Lovely. The whole world knew I’d been raped. Yeah,
that might have struck me as funny, too—if I’d been Lucrezia
Borgia. There were a lot of reasons I’d never bothered to keep in
contact with Amber.
She hadn’t driven over from Spokane to hunt me down
after ten years and tell me she’d read about the attack, either.
“So you read about me and decided it might be fun to tell me that
the story about how I killed my rapist was all over the country?
You drove a hundred and fifty miles for that?”
“Obviously not.” She turned back to face me, and
the awkward stranger had been replaced by the polished pro who was
even more a stranger to me. “Look. Do you remember when we took a
day trip to Portland to see that play? We went to the bar
afterward, and you told us about the ghost in the ladies’
room.”
“I was drunk,” I told her—which was true enough. “I
think I told you I was raised by werewolves, too.”
“Yes,” she said with sudden intentness. “I thought
you were just telling stories, but now we all know that werewolves
are real, just like the fae. And you’re dating one.”
That would have come out in the newspaper story, I
thought. Double yippee. There was a time when I tried to stay out
of the spotlight because it was safer. It was still safer, but I
hadn’t been doing so good at stealthy living the past year.
Unaffected by my inner dialogue, Amber kept
talking. “So I thought if you were dating one now, you had probably
been telling the truth then. And if you told the truth about the
werewolves, then you were probably telling the truth about seeing
ghosts, too.”
Anyone else would have forgotten about that, but
Amber had a mind like a steel trap. She remembered everything. It
was after that trip that I quit drinking alcohol. People who know
other people’s secrets can’t afford to do things that impair their
ability to control their mouths.
“My house is haunted,” she said.
I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. I
took a step toward Amber and turned a little. I still couldn’t see
anything out there, but with Amber a little downwind so her perfume
didn’t ruin my nose, I could smell it: vampire.
“And you want me to do something about it?”
I asked. “You need to call a priest.” Amber was Catholic.
“No one believes me,” she said starkly. “My husband
thinks I’m crazy.” The porch light caught her eyes, just for a
minute, and I could see that her pupils were dilated. I wondered if
it was just the darkness of the night or if she was on
something.
She was making me uneasy, but I was pretty sure it
was just the weirdness of seeing Amber, queen of the
unconventional, dressed up like a rich man’s mistress. There was
something soft and helpless about her now that made me think
prey, while the Amber I’d known would have taken a baseball
bat to anyone who annoyed her. She wouldn’t have been afraid of a
ghost.
Of course, my unease could have been caused by the
vampire lurking in the shadows or by the one in my home.
“Look,” I said. Stefan and what had been done to
him were more important to me than what had happened to Amber, or
anything she might want from me. “I can’t get away right now—I have
company. Why don’t you give me your phone number, and I’ll call you
as soon as things calm down.”
She fumbled her purse open and handed me a card. It
was printed on expensive high-cotton paper, but all that was on it
was her first name and a phone number.
“Thank you.” She sounded relieved, the tension
flowing from her shoulders. She gave me a small smile. “I’m sorry
that you were attacked—but I’m not surprised you got your own back.
You were always rather good at that.” Without waiting for me to
answer, she walked down the steps and got into her car, a newer
Miata convertible with the soft top up. She backed out of the
driveway without looking at me again and sped off into the
night.
I wished she hadn’t been wearing perfume. She’d
been upset about something—she’d always been a terrible liar. But
the timing was just a little too convenient: Stefan arrives, tells
me to run, and Amber arrives with a place for me to run to.
I knew what Stefan had been telling me to run from,
and it wasn’t him. “She knows,” he’d said.
“She” was Marsilia, the Mistress of the Tri-Cities’
vampires. She’d sent me out hunting a vampire who’d been on a
killing spree that risked her seethe. She’d figured I was her best
chance to find him because I can sense ghosts that other people
don’t see, and vampire lairs tend to attract ghosts.
She hadn’t thought I would really be able to kill
him. When I did, it made her very unhappy. The vamp I’d killed had
been special, more powerful than the others because he’d been
demon-ridden. That the demon had made him crazy and he’d been
killing humans left and right hadn’t bothered her except that it
might have exposed the vampires to the human world. He’d gone out
of control when he’d grown more powerful than his maker, but
Marsilia believed that she could have fixed that, taken control of
him. She used me to find him—she’d been sure he’d kill me.
And she’d have been right if I hadn’t had
friends.
Since she’d sent me after him, she couldn’t seek
retribution without risking losing control of her seethe. Vampires
take things like that very seriously.
I’d have been safe if it hadn’t been for the second
vampire.
Andre had been Marsilia’s left hand where Stefan
was her right. He’d also been responsible for creating the
demon-possessing vampire who’d killed more people than I could
count on both hands. And Andre and Marsilia had intended to make
more. One had been more than enough for me. So I’d killed Andre,
knowing that it meant my death.
But Stefan had hidden my crime. Hidden it with the
deaths of two innocent people whose only crimes had been that they
were Andre’s victims. He’d saved me, but the cost had been too
high. Their deaths had bought me two months.
Marsilia knew. She’d have never hurt Stefan so
badly for anything else.
She’d tortured and starved him and let him free to
come to me. I looked down at the red marks Stefan had put on my
arm—if he’d killed me, no blame would have fallen on her.
There was a noise, and I looked up. Darryl and
Peter were walking past the battered hulk of the Rabbit.
Darryl was tall, athletic, and Adam’s second. He
got his dark skin from his African father and his eyes from his
Chinese mother. His perfect features came from the happy
combination of very different genes, but the grace of his stride
came from the accident that had turned him into a werewolf. He
liked nice clothes, and the crisp cotton shirt he wore probably
cost more than I made in a week.
I didn’t know how old he was, but I was pretty sure
he wasn’t much older than he looked. There’s something about the
older wolves, an air they carry of being not quite of this age of
cars, cell phones, and TVs, that Darryl didn’t have.
Peter was old enough to have been in the cavalry,
but here and now he worked as a plumber. He was good at his job,
and he had a half dozen people (human) on his payroll. But he
walked to the right and behind Darryl because Darryl was very
dominant and Peter was one of the few submissives in Adam’s
pack.
Darryl stopped at the foot of the porch. He didn’t
like me much most of the time. I’d finally decided it was
snobbery—he was a wolf and I a coyote. He was a Ph.D. working in a
high-priced think tank, and I was a mechanic with dirt under my
fingernails.
And worst of all, if I was Adam’s mate, he had to
follow my orders. Sometimes the chauvinism that permeates the rules
by which the werewolves operate works backward. No matter how
submissive the mate of the Alpha is, her commands are second only
to his.
When he didn’t say anything, I just opened the door
and led Adam’s two wolves into my home.