“Father told you to go without talking to me again,” Samuel said. He sounded detached, but he’d turned his back on me and was staring at a damp spot on the rug near his boots.
“I am not of his pack,” I snapped. “That has always been made perfectly clear to me. It means I didn’t have to obey Bran then. I shouldn’t have, and I knew it at the time. I’m sorry. Not for leaving, that was the right decision, but I should have told you what I was doing. I was a coward.”
“My father told me what he told you.” His voice started calmly enough, but there was a tinge of anger weaving itself through his words as he continued. “But you should have known all of that already. I didn’t hide anything.”
There was no defensiveness in his voice or in his posture; he really didn’t understand what he’d done to me—as stupid as that made him in my eyes. It was still good, somehow, to know that the hurt he’d caused me had been unintentional.
He turned, his eyes met mine, and I felt the zing that had once been as familiar as his face. Part of it was attraction; but part of it was the power of a dominant wolf. The attraction brought me to my feet and halfway across the room before I realized what I was doing.
“Look, Samuel,” I said, coming to an abrupt halt before I touched him. “I’m tired. It’s been a rough day. I don’t want to fight with you over things that are long past.”
“All right.” His voice was soft, and he gave a little nod to himself. “We can talk more tomorrow.”
He put his coat back on, started for the door, then turned back. “I almost forgot, Charles and Carl took the body—”
“Mac,” I told him sharply.
“Mac,” he said, gentling his tone. I wished he hadn’t done that, because his sympathy brought tears to my eyes. “They took Mac to our clinic and brought back your van. Charles gave me the keys. He would have returned them himself, but you left the room too quickly. I told him I was coming to deliver an apology, so he gave them to me.”
“Did he lock the van?” I asked. “I’ve a pair of guns in there, loaded for werewolves—” Mention of the guns reminded me of something else, something odd. “Oh, and there’s a tranquilizer dart of some sort that I found near Adam when I moved him.”
“The van’s locked,” he said. “Charles found the dart and left it at the lab because he said it smelled of silver and Adam. Now that I know where you found it, I’ll make sure to look it over carefully.”
“Mac said someone was using him to experiment on,” I told him. “They’d found some drugs that worked on werewolves, he said.”
Samuel nodded. “I remember you telling us that.”
He held out my keys and, careful not to touch his hand, I took them from him. He smiled as if I’d done something interesting and I realized I shouldn’t have been so careful. If I had felt nothing for him, touching his hand wouldn’t have bothered me. Living among normal humans, I’d forgotten how difficult it was to hide anything from werewolves.
“Good night, Mercy,” he said.
Then he was gone, and the room felt emptier for his leaving it. I’d better go in the morning, I thought, as I listened to the snow squeak under his feet as he walked away.
I was busy reading page fourteen for the third time when someone else knocked on the door.
“I brought dinner,” said a man’s pleasant tenor.
I set the book down and opened the door.
A sandy-haired young man with a nondescript face held a plastic tray loaded with two plastic-wrapped sub sandwiches, a pair of styrofoam cups of hot chocolate, and a dark blue winter jacket. Maybe it was the food, but it occurred to me that if Bran looked that much like the cliché of a delivery boy, it was probably on purpose. He liked to be unobtrusive.
He gave me a small smile when I didn’t step away from the door right away. “Charles told me that Adam is going to be fine, and Samuel made a fool of himself.”
“Samuel apologized,” I told him, stepping back and letting him into the room.
The kitchenette had a two-burner stove, six-pack-sized fridge, and a small, Formica-covered table with two chairs. After tossing the coat on the bed, Bran set the tray on the table and rearranged the contents until there was a sandwich and cup on each side.
“Charles told me that you didn’t have a coat, so I brought one. I also thought you might like something to eat,” he said. “Then we can discuss what we’re to do with your Alpha and his missing daughter.”
He sat down on one side and gestured for me to take the other seat. I sat and realized I hadn’t eaten anything all day—I hadn’t been hungry. I still wasn’t.
True to his word, he didn’t talk while he ate and I picked. The sandwich tasted of refrigerator, but the cocoa was rich with marshmallows and real vanilla.
He ate faster than I did, but waited patiently for me to finish. The sandwich was one of those huge subs, built to feed you for a week. I ate part of it and wrapped the rest in the plastic it had come in. Bran had eaten all of his, but werewolves need a lot of food.
My foster mother had liked to say, “Never starve a werewolf, or he might ask you to join him for lunch.” She’d always pat her husband on the head afterward, even if he was in human form.
I don’t know why I thought of that right then, or why the thought tried to bring tears to my eyes. My foster parents were both of them almost seventeen years dead. She died trying to become a werewolf because, she’d told me, every year she got older and he didn’t. There are a lot fewer women who are moon called, because they just don’t survive the Change as well. My foster father died from grief a month later. I’d been fourteen.
I took a sip of cocoa and waited for Bran to talk.
He sighed heavily and leaned back in the chair, balancing it on two legs, his own legs dangling in the air.
“People don’t do that,” I told him.
He raised an eyebrow. “Do what?”
“Balance like that—not unless they’re teenage boys showing off for their girlfriends.”
He brought all four legs back on the flour abruptly. “Thank you.” Bran liked to appear as human as possible, but his gratitude was a little sharp. I took a hasty sip of cocoa so he wouldn’t see my amusement.
He put his elbows on the table and folded his hands. “What are your intentions now, Mercy?”
“What do you mean?”
“Adam’s safe and healing. We’ll find out how your young friend was killed. What are you planning to do?”
Bran is scary. He’s a little psychic—at least that’s what he says if you ask. What that means is that he can talk to any werewolf he knows, mind to mind. That’s why Charles was able to be his spokesperson out in the woods. Bran uses that ability, among others, to control the North American packs. He claims it is all one way, that he can make people hear him but not the other way around.
The pack whisperers say he has other abilities, too, but no one knows exactly what they are. The most common rumor is that he really can read minds. Certainly he always knew who was responsible for what mischief around the town.
My foster mother always laughed and said it was his reputation for knowing everything that allowed him to appear infallible: all he had to do was walk through the room and see who looked guiltiest when they saw him. Maybe she was right, but I tried looking innocent the next time, and it didn’t work.
“I’m leaving in the morning.” Early, I thought. To get away without talking to Samuel again—but also to get started looking for Jesse.
Bran shook his head and frowned. “Afternoon.”
I felt my eyebrows rise. “Well,” I said gently, “if you knew what I was going to be doing, why didn’t you just tell me instead of asking?”