He wiped his eyes with his thumb and looked up at me. His laughter had died altogether. “You don’t know how fragile you are, Mercy. The last time we got into trouble, you spent months in a wheelchair. You fight as long and as hard as any werewolf, without any of the weapons we’ve been given. You are smart. You are careful. And you’ve been very, very lucky. And that scares me more than any spriggand carrying one of Zee’s swords or a Cantrip zealot armed with silver. Luck runs out.”
“I tell you what,” I said, sitting beside him and biting down the urge to feed him the line he’d given me: did you think I’d die of old age? I hadn’t found it funny at the time and didn’t think that he would, either. “Think of me as Coyote’s daughter, if that helps you. Coyote is lucky.”
Adam shook his head. “No, Mercy. Coyote isn’t lucky. Coyote is rash, and everyone around him dies—including him. But when the sun rises, he’s all better and he goes out to look for new friends. Because Coyote is immortal.” And you are not. He didn’t say it, but we both heard it.
I tapped on the floor and then leaned forward. Time for a distraction. “This coyote is all better right now. Are you and I going to be friends, wolf?”
He canted his head and touched my chin with his hand. “I don’t know. Are you going to keep doing your best to get yourself killed?”
It hadn’t been I who had been trying to commit suicide—I hadn’t realized I was still mad at him about that. I turned my head and nipped his finger. I’d meant it as chastisement, but he didn’t take it that way. Gold lit his eyes with fire, and he left his finger where it was.
“I guess so,” he said, sounding resigned, but his lips were soft on mine.
Both of us dozed a bit afterward, not really asleep but too content to get up. I buried my nose under his ear, where his scent could wrap around me. I licked tenderly at the warm skin of his neck.
“Peter is dead,” he told me suddenly.
I put my weight on his chest, so he wouldn’t feel so alone. “Yes.”
“It was my job to protect him.”
“The average werewolf lives ten years after he is changed,” I reminded Adam. “A human has seventy years or so upon the earth before his time is done. Peter was older than that, four times older than you are. His was not a short life, and his death was quick.” It wasn’t enough, and I knew it. But it would count for something later, when his death wasn’t so … near.
“My fault,” Adam said. Someone who didn’t know him would have thought his voice was calm. “There were not so many of them. If I had attacked them when they came to take the pack …”
“You thought they were feds,” I said. He knew all of this, but if he needed to have me say it again, then I would. “If werewolves start killing federal agents, soon there won’t be any werewolves. It was the right thing to do. I was there when Peter was killed, and it could have been any one of you. Jones had decided to kill someone, and nothing would have stopped him.”
“Jones is dead.” But his body was relaxing underneath me. Adam wasn’t stupid. This wasn’t the first time bad things happened that he couldn’t control.
“I’m not surprised.”
He huffed a laugh. “I didn’t kill him.”
I lifted my head so I could see his face. “That does surprise me.”
“I killed the rest of them and let Honey kill Jones.” He watched my face closely. He’d hidden what he was from his first wife, who had been entirely human, and she’d still run away from what little she’d glimpsed.
“Good,” I said. “That way, I won’t have to.”
He laughed again, and his body softened as much as it ever did—there just wasn’t much soft about Adam. “I love you,” he said.
“I know,” I told him seriously. “How could you help it?”
He laughed again and rolled over until I was on the bottom, and flexed his hips against mine. “I tried,” he whispered in my ear. “But it didn’t work.”
I breathed into his ear for the pleasure of feeling him shiver against me. “Of course not.” He smelled like home, like safety, like love. “Of course not.”
“I promise I won’t spank you,” he told me, his voice rough and low as he added, “not unless you ask me to.”
I let him feel my laugh against his shoulder. “That’s because you aren’t genuinely suicidal.”
We loved again then, the short nap of the rug soft under my skin and the warmth of him surrounding me.
Afterward, he fell asleep while he was eating, between one bite and the next, like a toddler. I don’t think that he had slept since the pack was taken. He didn’t even stir when I pulled away from him to go put my clothes on.
The room might have been finished, but it was not heated. Adam was a werewolf, which meant the colder the better for him—not so for me. Fully clothed, I sat down next to him to watch over him while he slept.
The quiet time didn’t last.
The door between house and garage opened no more than twenty minutes after Adam dropped off. Warren called, “Sorry, boss. You’re needed if you don’t want Kyle to shoot the rest of the pack.”
He didn’t speak that loudly, but Adam’s eyes opened up anyway. He smiled at me, and said, “Good to know. Tell Kyle to hold up, and I’ll be right down.”
Warren steadied the rope ladder when Adam tossed it out of the trapdoor. “We’ve put the pack downstairs in the big room to create some space apart from the Sandoval girls.” The big room was the largest room in the house, and it had a pool table and a stairway leading to an outside door into the backyard. Kyle’s house was bigger than ours, but not set up for groups of people quite this large.
“They wouldn’t do anything on purpose,” Warren said, as I climbed down the rope ladder behind Adam. “But we’re all on edge.”
“Silver-sick doesn’t help,” I said. “Tad can help with the silver.”
“And then we’ll send most of them to their own homes,” said Adam. “Even if our enemy has teeth left, it will take them a while to regroup. For the short term, we should all be safe enough.”
Warren grunted, and, with my feet safely down on the cement floor, I took a good look at him. Warren was my first friend in Adam’s pack—he’d been my friend before he’d joined the pack.
“You look better than I expected you to,” I said, and, to my surprise, he flushed.
“Food,” he said with a shy smile.
Adam snorted. “Kyle.”
“Well, yes,” agreed Warren, then his eyes went cold as he tossed the rope ladder back up into the hole in the ceiling. “Mercy, next time you see our favorite bloodsucker, you tell him I owe him one.”
“I’ll tell him, but he did it for Kyle.”
Warren nodded and hopped on top of the metal shelving that lined the wall so he could close the trapdoor properly.
There were no digs, humorous comments, or even sly looks when Adam, Tad, and I joined the pack in the great room in the basement. I took that as a sign of how bad everyone was feeling.
Some of the wolves were notable by their absence.
“Darryl and Auriele went to their home,” Warren told us. He glanced at Adam. “They seemed mostly recovered from the silver, and he is supposed to participate in a conference call with some Chinese scientists on Sunday.”
“All the most dominant wolves seem to be pretty well clean of silver,” Tad said.
“He told us it’s because you used your mate bond to pull the silver out of Adam, and through Adam, the pack,” said Honey. She was sitting on the pool table with her legs crossed underneath her. She was pale, and her mouth was tight, but other than that she looked mostly like herself. “I didn’t believe him until Kyle showed us the silver on the floor.” She frowned at me. “What kind of freak are you?”