CHAPTER 6
I didn't bother going around to the front of Adam's house, just opened the kitchen door and ran in. There was no one in the room.
Adam's kitchen had been built to cordon bleu specifications—Adam's daughter, Jesse, had once told me that her father could really cook, but mostly they didn't bother.
As in the rest of his house, Adam's ex-wife had chosen the decor. It had always struck me as odd that, except for the formal living room, which was done in shades of white, the colors in the house were much more welcoming and restful than she had ever been. My own house was decorated in parents' castoffs meet rummage sale with just enough nice stuff (courtesy of Samuel) to make everything else look horrible.
Adam's house smelled of lemon cleaner, Windex, and werewolves. But I didn't need my nose or ears to know that Adam was home—and he wasn't happy. The energy of his anger had washed over me even outside the house.
I heard Jesse whisper, "No, Daddy," from the living room.
It was not reassuring that the next sound I heard was a low growl, but then Ben wouldn't have called me if things had been good. I was pretty surprised he'd called me at all; he and I weren't exactly great friends.
I followed Jesse's voice into the living room. The werewolves were scattered all over the big room, but for a moment the Alpha's magic worked on me and all I could pay much attention to was Adam, even though he was facing away from me. The view was nice enough that it took me a moment to remember that this must be a crisis situation.
The only two humans in the room huddled together under Adam's intense regard on Adam's new antique fainting couch that had replaced the broken remains of his old antique fainting couch. If I had been Adam, I wouldn't have wasted money on antiques. Fragile things just don't fare well in the house of an Alpha werewolf.
One of the humans was Adam's daughter, Jesse. The other was Gabriel, the high school boy who worked for me. He had an arm around Jesse's shoulders, and her diminutive stature made him look bigger than he actually was. Sometime since I'd last seen her, Jesse had dyed her hair a cotton candy blue, which was cheerful, if a little odd. Her usual heavy makeup had slid down her face, striping it with metallic silver eye shadow, black mascara, and tearstains.
For a moment I thought the obvious. I'd warned Gabriel to be careful with Jesse and explained the downside of dating the Alpha's daughter. He'd heard me out and solemnly promised me that he'd behave himself.
Then I realized that under the streaks of makeup were the faint marks of new bruises. And part of what I'd thought was more mascara was actually a trickle of dried blood that ran from one nostril to her upper lip. One bare shoulder had a patch of road rash that still had gravel in it. No way that Gabriel had done that—and if he had, he wouldn't be living now.
Damn, I thought, growing cold. Someone was going to die today.
Gabriel's submissive posture must have been a reaction to something Adam had done, because as I watched him, he straightened his shoulders and lifted his gaze to Jesse's father's face. Not a really smart move with an enraged Alpha, but brave.
"Did you know them, Gabriel?" I couldn't see Adam's face, but his voice told me that his eyes would be bright gold.
I took another step into the room and a wave of his power almost sent me to my knees—as it did all of Adam's wolves, who fell to the floor almost as one. The motion made me actually look at them and realize that there weren't as many as I'd originally thought. Werewolves have a tendency to fill up the spaces in a room.
There were only four. Honey, one of the few women in Adam's pack, and her mate had their heads bowed and were holding each other's hands in a white-knuckled grip.
Darryl kept his face up and expressionless, but there were a few drops of perspiration on the mahogany skin of his forehead. Chinese and African blood ran in his veins and combined in a rather awesome mixture of color and feature. By day he was a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; the rest of the time he was Adam's second.
Next to Darryl, Ben looked as pale as his hair and almost fragile—though that was deceptive because he was tough as nails. Like Honey, he'd been gazing at the floor, but just after he'd dropped to the floor, he looked up and gave me a rather frantic look that I had no idea how to interpret.
Ben had fled England to Adam's pack to avoid questioning in a brutal multiple rape case. I was pretty sure he was innocent…but it says something about Ben that he'd have been my first suspect also.
"Daddy, leave Gabriel alone," said Jesse with a shadow of her usual spirit.
But neither Adam nor Gabriel paid attention to her protest.
"If I knew who they were and where to find them, sir, I wouldn't be here now," Gabriel said in a grim voice that made him sound thirty. "I'd have dropped Jesse off with you and gone after them."
Gabriel had grown up the oldest male in a house that had more than a passing acquaintance with abject poverty. It had made him driven, hardworking, and mature for his age. If I thought him reckless for going out with Jesse, I thought Jesse very wise for choosing him.
"Are you all right, Jesse?" I asked, my own voice more of a growl than I'd planned.
She looked up with a gasp. Then jumped up from her seat, where she'd been trying not to lean too close to Gabriel and give her father a target for his anger. She ran to me, burying her face in my shoulder.
Adam turned to look at us. Being a little better versed in prudence than Gabriel (even if I used it only when it suited me), I dropped my gaze to Jesse's hair almost immediately, but I'd seen enough. His eyes blazed just this side of change, icy yellow, pale like the winter morning sun. White and red lines alternated on his wide cheekbones from the force he was using to clench his jaws.
If a news camera ever captured a shot of him looking like this, it would ruin all the spin-doctoring the werewolves had been doing over the last year. No one would ever mistake Adam in such a fury for anything except a very, very dangerous monster.
He wasn't just angry. I'm not sure there is an English word for just how much rage was in his face.
"You have to stop him," Jesse murmured as quietly as she could in my ear. "He'll kill them."
I could have told her that she couldn't whisper quietly enough that her father wouldn't hear, not when he was in the same room with us.
"You protect them!" he roared in outrage and I saw what little humanity he was clinging to disappear into the anger of the beast. If he hadn't been as dominant, if he hadn't been Alpha, I'm not sure he wouldn't have already changed. As it was, I could see the lines of his face begin to lose their solidity.
That's all we needed.
"No, no, no," Jesse chanted into my shoulder, her whole frame shaking. "They'll kill him if he hurts someone. He can't…he can't…"
I don't know what my mother intended when she sent me to be fostered with the werewolves on the advice of a cherished great-uncle who was a werewolf. I don't know that I could have given away my child to strangers. But I'm not a teenage single parent working a minimum wage job who'd discovered her baby could change into a coyote pup. It had worked out for me—at least as well as most people's childhoods. And it had left me with a certain skill for managing enraged werewolves, which was a good thing, my foster father had told me often enough, since I sure had a talent for enraging them.
Still, it was easier to deal with them when I wasn't what had set them off. The first step was to get their attention.
"That's enough," I said in firm, quiet tones that carried right over the top of Jesse's voice. I didn't need her warning to know that she was right. Adam would hunt down and kill whoever did this to his daughter, and damned be the consequences. And the damned consequences would be fatal to him, and maybe to every werewolf anywhere.