Paul glanced at him obliquely, met Adam’s gaze, and nodded. Our pack had Tad’s back. Tad could keep Aiden safe, and us safe—and the pack would keep him safe.
I made Adam strip and let me look at his shoulder.
There were bruises and swelling—a testament to how bad it had been. There had been other hurts, too. Places where I could see the faint remnants of bruises and damage. I touched those to make sure that what I was seeing was true healing and not some inner bleeding finding its way out.
Something that had been tight since I watched him run up the bridge for the first time relaxed. He was okay. He’d fought a troll and come out okay.
“Your turn,” he said, while I ran my hands over a bump on his lower ribs.
“My turn?” It was an old bump, gotten before he’d become a werewolf. He’d told me that it used to be much worse: ragged, purple-edged scars over a broken rib where someone had shot him in another life on another continent. Some of his scars had disappeared overnight after he was Changed. But that one was fading gently. Someday it would be gone.
“Your turn.” His voice was dark with something other than pain. “That’s how we do this, remember. You check me out, I check you out.”
I looked up at him to meet his eyes and saw heat that had nothing to do with the room temperature. “I don’t think you are looking for bruises,” I told him.
He put his hand under my chin, and without any kind of force, lifted me to my feet. “I’ve been a soldier,” he told me, his home state of Alabama thick in his voice. “Been Alpha longer than that. Sometimes I think that I’ve been on the front lines for most of my life, one way or the other. And no one, but you, wants so badly to keep me safe. You’ll have to forgive me if I find that sexy.” He kissed me, and when he pulled back, the Southern gentleman was gone. “But I am not blind, so although I want you naked in the worst way,” he told me conversationally, “I’ve also been watching you limp around all evening. So strip down and let me take a look.”
I snickered. “You get many girls with that line?”
“Which one? The ‘sometimes I think I’ve been on the front lines’?”
I waved my hand. “Nope. The”—I dropped my voice down in imitation of his—“‘strip down and let me take a look’ line.” In my own voice, I said, “On the other hand, if you pulled out the wounded-soldier line, you’d be batting them off like flies.” I paused, frowned at him. “You do know that the time for your using that line is gone, right? No more pickups for you. Alpha or no, I’ll torture you to death, one day at a time.” I looked at him, and he didn’t seem to be taking me seriously. “Drip. Drip. Drip,” I said. “If you even think about another woman like that.”
He waited, a small smile on his face. “I understand,” he said after waiting a courteous moment to make sure I was finished. “And just to keep such matters on the up-and-up, if I catch you flirting seriously with someone, I will rip out his throat.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “For the record, the ‘strip down and let me take a look’ line is not very sexy.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Mercy”—he deepened his voice—“strip down and let me take a look.”
I shook my head. “That’s not fair. The voice doesn’t count.” But as I talked, I stripped down. Because underneath the sexy voice was worry, as if just because he’d hidden how bad his wounds were from me, I would have done the same to him.
My knees were skinned, one shin was bruised, and when Adam touched my chin, it hurt.
“From tripping while I was carrying you,” I told him.
He nodded and turned his attention to a scrape on my hip. He was tanned, but my skin was still a shade or two darker than his, so mostly my bruises don’t stand out as much as his. “This didn’t come from a fall.”
“It’s just a scrape,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow. Okay, it was a scrape and bruises that were still blossoming in glorious profusion.
“I honestly have no idea,” I said.
He put his forehead against mine. “I’m sorry.”
“About what?” I asked.
“Fussing,” he said.
I wrapped my arms around him, trying not to see the troll lift a car over his head. “I fussed first,” I said shakily. “I fussed first.”
When he kissed me, it was a gesture of comfort. But with the both of us naked, it didn’t stay that way for long. We made love on the soft carpet, and afterward, he fell asleep on top of me. Exhausted, I thought, from the fight and from the healing that followed. I held him and wondered what I’d done to us. Wondered what changes the boy would bring.
Coyote had told me once that changes were neither good nor bad—but brought with them some of both.
I closed my eyes and prayed for more good than bad, for Adam’s safety, for Jesse and the pack. Then I thanked God for helping to return Tad and Zee out of the hands of our enemies. I fell asleep before I was finished.
The phone rang at four in the morning. My face was buried in my pillow—though I didn’t remember moving from the floor to my bed. Adam moved, and the phone quit making that annoying noise—I almost fell back asleep.
“They told me, Wulfe told me, I should call you. That you’re taking care of such matters now,” said a high-pitched but sexless voice.
Wulfe’s name had me sitting upright on the mattress.
“I see,” said Adam.
The voice said, “We are paid to watch the hotels and motels around town and to call the Mistress’s people when one of their kind shows up.”
“I see,” said Adam again.
There was a pause. “Are we going to get paid?”
“I am sure you will,” Adam said. “I will call the Mistress and discuss the matter with her further. Is this a good number to reach you at?”
“Yassir,” the voice said.
Adam ended the call.
“Do you know who that was?” I asked.
“Probably a goblin,” Adam replied. “But I’m going to call and check.”
Wulfe answered the phone himself. “Adam,” he purred. “How lovely to hear from you.”
“Goblins?” Adam asked.
“I see they contacted you,” Wulfe said. “They are a little unreliable, so I wasn’t sure they would.”
“How much are you paying them?”
“Three hundred for every stray vampire they find,” Wulfe told him. “And a thousand a month to keep them looking.”
“I’ll pay the three hundred,” Adam said. “But I won’t pay the thousand.”
“Good luck finding the vampires who show up around here, then, darling,” said Wulfe.
“Oh, I’ll find them all right,” Adam told him. “From what I understand, most of them are after Marsilia. I’ll just keep an eye on the seethe, and when they find her, I’ll find them.”
There was a little silence. “Smart boy,” said Wulfe, “aren’t you just a smart boy. Fine. We’ll pay the thousand. But they’ll report to you, and you will pay for the actual sighting.”
“Yes,” Adam agreed.
The first change, I thought.
Adam disconnected and called the goblin back—explaining the new order to . . . him or her, I couldn’t be sure from the voice alone.
Goblins, according to Ariana’s book, were neither fish nor fowl. They qualified for status as fae—they could disguise what they were with illusion spells. But the fae didn’t want them. For human purposes, the goblins counted themselves fae, without argument from the Gray Lords, but the goblins didn’t want to be fae, either. Part of the problem seemed to be that goblins could reproduce as fast, if not faster, than humans, and the other part was that many of the fae considered goblin flesh a delicacy.