“You hired Hauptman security?” I asked. Jim Gutstein was the highest-ranking non-werewolf at Adam’s office.
“Only the best,” he said.
I filled him in on everything I knew that he didn’t until he tapped me on the shoulder to stop me.
“Finish your sandwich and go to sleep in a proper bed. After sleep, we can go buy guns, then tear the Tri-Cities apart looking for our men, right?”
Kyle was a smart man, and I followed his advice.
I smelled him first: the musk and mint that said werewolf, the other unique scent that said mine. I was so relieved. I’d been sure he was hurt and alone and I couldn’t find him … but, silly me. Here he was, right beside me.
“Adam,” I murmured.
The wolf stirred and put his nose on my shoulder. He was lying on top of me and making it hard to breathe under his weight. I vaguely knew it was a dream because Adam was both human and wolf at the same time, but Adam was more real than that thought, so I discarded it.
You are alive, he said, and there was a relief in his voice that shook me.
“Of course I am.”
Something stirred the ant’s nest, he said, nuzzling under my ear. What did you do?
I didn’t want to think about it because then I knew I’d remember that this was just a dream, and I wanted to be safe in our bed with Adam stretched out half on top of me, touching me as I allowed no one else to touch me.
This was a dream where he was safe, and there were no men in body armor armed with nasty weapons who were backed by someone powerful enough to put pressure on the police. Not powerful enough to suborn them entirely, or they wouldn’t have ridden to our rescue. But there was a lot of money involved and some raw power.
Figure out who they are, ordered Adam, pulling his head back so he could look me in the eye.
“Follow the money,” I agreed, pulling him back down. I needed his warmth against me more than I needed to see him. My body believed better than my eyes, which knew I was looking at a figment of memory. “Kyle already suggested it. Now if I can just work out a way to do that.” I could set Adam’s associate Gutstein on that, couldn’t I?
Gutstein can look. You were talking about the police. What have you been up to that the police were involved?
“When the bad guys took Warren, they took Kyle, too. Held him at his house.”
Adam growled, and so did someone else. I couldn’t see him or feel him, but my nose told me it was Warren.
“He’s okay.”
Adam stiffened, and that other wolf who was Warren snarled.
“I said okay, not terrific,” I grumbled at them. “I wasn’t lying. He got beaten up—Stefan killed the one who did it, though Kyle has to claim credit for it. He handled it, Warren. He’s smart and tough. He’ll be waiting, so you’d better survive this.”
The snarl died, and Adam and I were alone in our bed in the huge house that served as pack HQ and as our home.
“Ben and I helped Stefan,” I murmured to Adam. “They had Kyle alone and were trying to get him to speculate where Jesse and I would be likely to show up. Stefan killed the one and tied up the other. Kyle called the police, and they swarmed the house and saved the day.”
Jesse.
He didn’t have to say anything more. In this dream of mine I heard his terror, his fierce burning protectiveness.
“She’s safe,” I promised him. “I hid her with Gabriel and set Tad to watch over her.”
Adam’s body stilled, the stillness in a hunt that occurs just before something dies. Tad?
Here in my dream, safe with it just between us, I could tell him. “Zee told me that Tad could keep Jesse safe.” Not in those words, but that was what the grumpy old fae had meant. Truths that you can read between the lines in a fae who is your friend are as far from a lie as a fae can get.
Adam’s body softened, turning warm and melting into mine, the distance between us blurring into nothing. Then she is safe.
His mouth sought mine. He tasted of heat and love. But he tasted also of illness born of silver, and I was crying before he was finished. They were killing him, I could feel it. Much more silver, and he would no longer be able to link with the pack and he would die while the bastards who had him were still waiting for signs of weakness.
His chest rose and fell, and his heart stuttered against mine. I could feel how close his death hovered—too much silver, too much of the drug that slowed his reflexes.
Jesse is safe. You are safe. It’s all right, Mercy. You didn’t think I was going to die of old age, did you?
It was a joke, graveyard humor. Werewolves never died of old age because they didn’t age. But he had no business making a joke like that. Not now, not ever.
Anger roared through me and carried with it a tidal wave of terror because Adam had given up.
No. He told me. I haven’t given up anything. But the pack comes first. While they concentrate on me, the pack is working to free themselves. When I die, I can take the poison with me, and our pack will be strong enough to protect themselves. I love you, Mercy.
I absorbed what he said. He’d found something he could do. I’d seen him draw upon the pack to force silver out of his body. Apparently it worked in reverse. He was drawing the silver from that damned concoction Doc Wallace’s son had created. When he was finished, he’d be dead—but the pack would be free.
I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t respond. Adam intended to die.
Are you not my daughter, whispered another voice, Coyote’s voice, so quiet I almost missed it. Had I not been caught in that first moment of shock when everything goes quiet before the pain begins, I would not have heard it.
Coyote never loses, Coyote told me. Because I change the rules of the games my enemies play. What are the rules of your game?
Adam hadn’t heard that other voice. I knew because he still hovered over me, his mouth soft with our kiss, a terrible good-bye in his eyes. He’d found a solution to the game that his enemies played, found a way to win, because Adam was competent like that. The cost was too high.
“Find another way to win,” I said, my voice hoarse.
There is no other way, he said. I love you.
But I’d been talking to myself and not to him. I pulled him back down to me.
He cooperated because he had no idea I was changing the rules of the game on him. I was not Coyote’s daughter, not quite. But that was okay because being almost Coyote’s daughter in my dream would be enough.
Adam’s lips came down upon my own and I opened my mouth. Looking into his eyes, I pulled the things that were killing him into me, swallowing down the silver that was poison to him and nothing to me.
He didn’t understand at first, but when he did, he struggled, but it was my dream, not his. In this dream, I wasn’t a coyote shapeshifter trying to hold a werewolf, I was Coyote’s almost daughter, and I had all the strength of the world in my arms.
“Mine,” I told him, though my mouth was still fastened to his. “Mine.”
I meant that he was mine, but also that the silver he took from the pack to save them was also mine to bear, not his. I also used the word to call the silver from his body into my own, the silver and the ketamine and all the rest of the harm that had been done to him.
But he was an Alpha werewolf, and he was more than a match for me, even in my dream.