“We’ll do that,” I said. “Margaret and I had fun.”
Margaret opened her eyes and, in a sleepy voice, said, “Take care, Mercy. And thank you. I hope not to need the big guns.”
I laughed. “I think you’ll find that your guns are plenty. Safe travels.”
Thomas turned and headed for the hotel entrance.
I stalked to the SUV, and said, “There is nothing wrong with the SUV.” Zee kept tinkering. I stood on my tiptoes to see what he was doing. “Is there?”
Zee removed himself from under the hood and held up a small device. “Not anymore. Someone’s been tracking you.”
Adam held his hand out, looked at the device, and snorted. He passed it to me. It bore a neat label with the SUV maker’s logo on it. I’d never had to do anything more complicated than an oil change on the SUV. If I’d noticed the little box, I’d have assumed it belonged.
“Feds, I bet,” Adam said. “We are persons of interest.”
“How did you find it?” I asked Zee.
“Nothing you could do, Liebling,” he said. “I felt it transmit. It didn’t bother me much, but since we had a moment here, I thought I’d take a look.”
Adam stuck it under the bumper of the Chevy parked next to the SUV. The Chevy bore all the signs of a rental vehicle, including a license-plate surround that advertised for Enterprise. I patted its trunk. “May someone rent you for a very long drive to Alaska,” I told it.
Adam snorted, then asked Zee, “Could you tell how long it has been there?”
Zee nodded. “Six months, maybe a bit more. Someone wants to keep tabs on you, Adam.”
This time it was my turn to snort. “If I’d known it was there, we could have done something more interesting—like drive out to the middle of the Hanford Reach every full moon and park for the night.” Which we did, mostly. We had other hunting spots, but the Reach was the best. “Sorry I didn’t find it, Adam. I’ll keep a better eye out next time.”
“No worries,” said Adam softly. “I’ll have a talk with a few people I know about boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed. It won’t happen again.”
We arrived home to find every door and window in the house open, and the smell of burning wool in the air.
“Hey, Boss,” said Warren, as we came through the doorway, his expression somewhere between pained and amused. “We had a little mishap. Aiden was sleeping when his blankets burst into flame. Happily, Mary Jo was here. While we were all trying to figure out what to do—besides hold our ears to try to shut out the fire alarm—she grabbed the fire extinguisher from the garage and put the fire out. Mattress is a goner, but the room’s okay. We have the situation under control.”
About that time, Mary Jo came up the stairs, carrying an armful of sodden, blackened fabric that had at one time been a Pendleton wool blanket. She looked at me, and said, “Life is never boring around here.” Then she grinned at me, an expression she hadn’t turned on me in a very long while. “Your fire demon says that he needs to leave. We convinced him that it would be rude to leave before you got back, but I’m not sure we could have kept him here much longer.”
As she finished speaking, Aiden came up the stairs. His hair was wet, and he was wearing sweats from the pack stores—I made a mental note that we were going to have to get him clothes if he was going to stay here long.
“My apologies,” he said as soon as he reached the landing. He didn’t look at either of us. “I am not safe to be around. I didn’t light fires in my sleep when I was in Underhill—at least, not that I know of. I will find somewhere else to sleep tonight. I appreciate the help you have given me thus far.”
“Why are you planning on leaving?” Adam asked.
That made Aiden raise his face briefly. “I have damaged your home.”
Adam shrugged. “We house werewolves here, Aiden. I don’t think anyone has tried to burn the house down before—”
“No,” I agreed, “that was my house.”
Adam gave me a rueful grimace. “At least you weren’t in it. Werewolves can be very destructive. My contractor sends me Christmas cards and most-valuable-customer presents every year.”
“And this time the damage was confined to a mattress and some bedding,” I told him. “That’s cheap by werewolf standards.”
“The mattress might have been all right,” Mary Jo said, “if Ben hadn’t dumped a five-gallon bucket of water on it. I told him I had it under control with the fire extinguisher. So the mattress isn’t really Aiden’s fault.” She wrinkled her nose. “Excuse me, though, I’m going to get rid of this blanket.”
Aiden opened his mouth, then shut it again.
“No worries,” Adam said. “We’ll just make sure to keep a fire extinguisher around. Until the situation with the fae stabilizes, we’ll have to have twenty-four/seven guards at the house anyway. I’ll just make sure that they keep watch for fire, too.”
10
“It’s not quite the biggest crane in the world,” said the Lampson guy to the police officer. He’d introduced himself as Marley.
The Pasco police officer, whom I’d seen before but didn’t know personally, was Ed Thorson. He was the only police officer left on the scene because I’d asked him to get rid of as many people as he could. No one is proud like a dominant werewolf in front of an audience. If there were too many people here, we might end up with him jumping, even if he didn’t intend to do it in the first place.
Above us, nearly forty stories up, on the top of the Transi-Lift LTL-3000, was one of our werewolves. I couldn’t see him, I’m not sure I could have seen him even in the daylight without binoculars, but he’d been seen climbing up it at the end of his shift, and everyone was very sure that he hadn’t climbed back down—or jumped.
Three days had passed since we’d confronted the fae in the hotel meeting room—and we hadn’t heard anything from them. We’d had to step down our security because we just didn’t have enough people to stay at high alert for very long.
Though Adam made sure that there were at least two werewolves at our house at any given time, mostly everyone’s lives had returned to normal. Even Aiden’s setting something on fire when he slept felt normal—one of Adam’s techie guys was working on rewiring some smoke alarms so that instead of shrieking, they just buzzed a little.
Back to normal meant when Adam got called to work after dinner, he left me in charge. So when the police called to tell me that one of our wolves was sitting on the top of the big Lampson crane and they were worried about him jumping, I was the one who got to go fix it. If Darryl, Warren, or George had been our guard wolves, I’d have sent one of them because I’d exchanged about four words with Sherwood Post. “Yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am” only counted as four words, even if they’d been said every time I’d tried to strike up a conversation with him. But as luck would have it, Ben and Paul were the watch wolves on duty, neither of whom I could trust not to drive a suicidal werewolf right off the edge—both metaphorically and literally speaking. Sherwood Post had come to us a month ago from the Marrok. He was too quiet, too polite, and missing his left leg. Werewolves heal. They heal broken things, they heal crushed things, and they heal amputated things. But apparently not if witches were involved.
About four or five years ago, there had been a nasty coven of witches in Seattle. Their leader had been killed by the Emerald City Pack. When the pack went to clean out the home of the leader, to make sure that there were no nasty magical surprises left behind, they had found, among other things, an emaciated werewolf in a cage. He was missing his leg.