I didn’t have the walking stick, but I could see the struggle that Joel still fought. Stefan had said something about bonds when he’d been apologizing for not breaking the one between us. He’d implied that a bond taken willingly was stronger than one that was forced.
“Answer the questions I ask you, and I can help,” I said, my tongue thick in my mouth. I had practice drawing on my mate’s power, and now I drew it around me, finding that I could borrow a little strength. That was useful, but the important part of Adam’s power that I preempted was his authority. “You don’t have to say your response out loud. Joel Arocha, I see you.”
Garnet eyes glittered with borrowed light.
“Will you join with us, the Columbia Basin Pack, to hunt, to fight, to live and run under the full moon?” There were ritual words, but I’d been taught that the ritual was secondary to intent in all werewolf magic. I thought of Joel—tough, thoughtful, and big-hearted—and welcomed him into my family.
I paused but held his eyes. “I claim you,” I told him, feeling the familiar gathering of pack magic until it burned in my throat, until the next words were determined more by the magic than by me. “We claim you, Joel Arocha, son of Texas, son of the Canary Islands, guardian of four-footed cousins. By my flesh and blood that is the flesh and blood that belongs to the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack is our bond sealed. From this day forward, you are mine to me and mine.”
Pack ties, mating ties did not break the bond between Stefan and me because they were two different magics: vampire and werewolf. But the spells I’d seen wrapping around Joel were similar to pack bonds.
The first sign that what I’d done had worked was the now-familiar burn in my chest as the pack absorbed another member. Joel staggered, and for a moment his weight pressed down on me unbearably. I think I blacked out because my vision did that weird jump thing, where one moment I was staring at one thing, then the next I was looking at something different, though I couldn’t remember moving my gaze.
The tibicena who was Joel was no longer standing over me, but fighting with the other tibicena. I couldn’t see Darryl, but Auriele was lying with a knee bent in the wrong direction, and she wasn’t moving.
“What did you do?” Guayota’s voice was oddly slurred, but I could hear the anger in it. I couldn’t turn my head, but Guayota moved into my field of view.
The huge fiery-dog form that Guayota wore was oddly lopsided. His left side looked exactly as I remembered. Glowing red eye, crackled skin that showed the moving currents of molten substance that flowed just beneath. The other side was dark, the light beneath wholly extinguished, and as he staggered, half dragging himself from the battleground to where I lay, the outer surface of the dead side began to lighten to gray and crumble when he moved.
“How did you steal—” said Guayota—and then Adam was there, a great blue-silver wolf. Adam and Warren and Honey, who landed on Guayota at the same time, their fury as bright and shining as Guayota had ever been.
“Screw me and stake me out.” Gary’s voice was in my ear. “I think she’s dead. How could she be burned this badly and not be dead?” He was talking about me, I realized, but I didn’t remember getting burned. Coyote had told me my neck was broken. Gary was still talking. “I’ve sent back steaks that were this overdone. Mercy?”
There were other noises in the background: growls and howls and cries of pain.
“Not dead yet,” I told Gary. I had to say it again before he understood me.
He huffed half a laugh. “Finally found a sibling I could stand to talk to for more than ten minutes, and…” He didn’t finish that sentence. “I gotta tell you, you look bad, Mercy.”
I licked my lips. They cracked, but I talked anyway. “Got here sooner than expected. You did, I mean. Did you get a call?” Is Adam here? I’d be safe if Adam was really here. But that wasn’t true, was it? Coyote had told me I was dying.
“No, but someone’s phone was going off every two minutes until one of the werewolves killed it. Please save me from being trapped in a car with that many angry werewolves ever again. They were all mostly changed to wolf, barely, when I had another Seeing, one of the big ones. Saw you and a couple of werewolves fighting Guayota on Honey’s front lawn and realized why I had to go with the wolves. Took me a while to get them to understand. And once they did, I had to drive because they were all too much werewolf already—and let me tell you, oncoming headlights when you have a migraine are no kind of fun.”
A cry, the same kind of bone-chilling cry that Gary and I had heard once before, cut through the sounds of battle and Gary’s soothing voice like a knife.
Gary turned to look, and that let me see one of the tibicenas bite deep into the other and shake it until it turned into a much smaller thing. I recognized the mutated woman that the walking stick had once shown me. Joel, the tibicena who was Joel, dropped her to the ground. She writhed once, then was still.
“Look,” Auriele said, and I was happy to know she wasn’t dead. “Look at Guayota.” I strained my eyes to the side until I could see the wolves fall away from the thing that had been Guayota. One of those wolves was Adam. Something inside me loosened. Adam was alive.
Guayota’s dog form dissolved around the man whom Christy had known as Juan Flores.
Though there were wolves all around him, it was my eyes Guayota sought. “I’m so hungry,” he said. “Where is she? She was supposed to be here.” And then there was just nothing where he’d stood. Nothing. No wisp of clothing falling to the ground, no dust or ash. He was just gone.
Adam turned to look at me, and I tried to get up. But the movement sent sparkles through my vision, and I was lost in darkness.
The smell of cleaning solution woke me briefly.
“…broken neck blah-blah-blah.” It sounded like Samuel, but there was something wrong with his voice. He sounded so sad, so I tried to listen. Maybe I could cheer him up. “And the burns … I’m sorry, Adam—”
Adam said something, and I sank into his voice like it was a warm sea.
“It’s probably better if you talk to me and don’t pay attention to all of that,” said Coyote.
I was lying on a thick field of new-mown grass that smelled a lot better than the cleaning fluid had. I watched the sky where small groups of clouds chased each other like little ducks.
“Mmmm,” I said dreamily.
Coyote chuffed a laugh. “They do have you on some strong stuff. But you’ll remember this anyway. Guayota isn’t dead. You can’t kill one of his kind unless you destroy what he represents. That need not concern you—although I wouldn’t be in a hurry to go visit the Canary Islands for a while. A few years, and he’ll forget. He shouldn’t have worn a human-seeming for so long.”
“Like you did when you became Joe Old Coyote,” I said.
“Not at all,” he told me indignantly. “That cloud looks like me, don’t you think?”
“The bigger one?” I asked.
“Yes, that one that looks like it’s about to eat an egg.”
“No. That one’s a rabbit.”
“Rabbit,” he said indignantly. “That’s a coyote.”
I laughed, but that was a mistake. My vision went black for a few minutes, then, slowly, the sky, clouds, and grass were back.
“Don’t do that,” said Coyote. “It makes it difficult to hold you here. I break things, a lot of things, but I don’t want one of them to be you. So just rest here.”
“What about…” It was difficult to be worried; most of me wanted to just watch the clouds drift by.
“Let me talk,” Coyote said. “You don’t know what questions you want to ask. Unusual decision to bring Joel into the pack. You could have used the walking stick to cut the threads of Guayota’s spell, and that would have done the same thing as you managed to do with the pack spell.” He paused. “Maybe. Maybe it would have just burned to ashes. I don’t know. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the pack with a tibicena in it.”