She held the phone my direction and raised one eyebrow in inquiry.
“I’ve been in prison,” I said in a sad voice. And left it at that. Honey flashed a grin at me, the expression startling because I was so used to the reserve she’d been carrying around with her.
There was a brief silence. “Okay,” Adam said. “Was your undoubtedly brief sojourn the cause of your phone call earlier today? Christy said you didn’t leave a message.”
“Christy answered your cell phone, and you thought Mercy should leave a message?” Honey’s voice let everyone know exactly what she thought of that.
“No,” said Adam with gently emphasized patience. “I thought that she should have told Christy to give me the phone.”
“You were unavailable,” I told him.
Silence followed. Unhappy silence. And then I remembered who the enemy was and what she wanted to do to Adam and me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I let her get to me. But not to the point I did something stupid, I promise. I called Honey, and she came with me to see a man about summoning Coyote. Hank gave me his name. It was safe enough.”
Adam made a man sound that could have meant anything, but I took it to mean that we were okay again. When he used actual words, the subject wasn’t Christy anymore. “What did you learn from Hank’s contact?”
A lot. Important things I didn’t want to talk about on the phone. So I gave him the least of it. “He doesn’t summon Coyote because he’s pretty sure that’s the stupidest thing anyone could do. But apparently Coyote has a habit of showing up when he finds one of us–his descendants–interesting.”
Adam laughed ruefully. “Shouldn’t take you long, then.”
“That’s what I told her,” Honey said.
“Any word on the fire?” I asked.
“Arson is confirmed,” Adam said, “though there seems to be some confusion about the accelerant used. Whatever it was, it got really hot, really fast.”
“Do you think he’s done this kind of thing before?” I asked.
“The fire investigator seemed to think so. We’re looking for suspicious fires tied to an overzealous lover. We’re also looking at the European angle. There’s another trail, too. Warren got descriptions of this man’s dogs out of Christy. Looks like they are some sort of mastiff. She said they were valuable and difficult for anyone except Juan–her stalker–to handle.”
“That doesn’t sound like a mastiff,” I told him. “There’s a guy in the Montana pack who was breeding all sorts of big dogs. The mastiffs were mostly big sweeties.”
“I’m not sure she’d know a poodle from a sheepdog. But Juan Flores apparently took special pleasure in pointing out that both of his dogs outweighed Christy, who is a hundred and ten pounds.”
Hah. Christy was at least twenty pounds heavier than that.
“Hah.” Honey snorted with derision. “Christy is at least one thirty or one thirty‑five.”
“Big dog,” I said.
Adam laughed. “I’ll let you know if there is anything new, and Mercy?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t do anything too interesting.”
He disconnected before I could reply.
“Don’t underestimate Christy,” Honey said. “She’s not nearly as helpless as she pretends to be.”
“I know that,” I said. I glanced at Honey, then looked back at the road. “I thought you liked her.”
She growled. “Helpless bitch had the whole pack–Adam included–hopping to her tune. Couldn’t mow the lawn, change a tire, or carry her own laundry up the stairs. Even Peter fell for it, and he usually had better sense. She didn’t like Warren–I thought at the time she was worried he was going to make a play for Adam, but mostly, I think, he didn’t fall over himself to be her slave. Darryl’s helpless against her, but at least he knows it. All that might not have been too bad, but she played them all off each other. I had my own private celebration when she left Adam.”
Her lips twisted. “I don’t like you,” she told me, but there was a lie in her voice, and she stopped talking, looking almost surprised. She started again, her tones softer than they had been. “I don’t enjoy change,” she said. “And you are change, Mercy. I am comfortable with the old ways, and you are tossing them aside whenever they don’t suit you, while Adam looks on with satisfaction. But one thing I’ve always known is that you were trying your best to make things better. Christy, she looked out for herself first. I don’t imagine that has changed. Only a fool would say the same about you–though I frequently disagree with your methods and goals.”
I cleared my throat. “So. Do you want to see a man about some dogs?”
5
I pulled into Joel’s driveway, and our presence was announced by a chorus of barking fit to wake the dead. Joel might work in the vineyards and fix cars as a hobby, but dogs were his passion. He and his wife bred, showed, and trained dogs. I figured that he might be able to help us figure out what kind of dogs Christy’s stalker had. It was a shot in the dark, but I was willing to do anything to shorten Christy’s time in my house. I’d called Joel, and he’d told me to meet him at home.
Mostly, the dogs barking at us were just excited, but I heard the true anger of a dog whose territory is breached in at least one bass voice.
“Maybe I should wait,” Honey said. “Dogs are afraid of me.”
I shook my head. “Most dogs get over their fear of werewolves pretty fast, given a chance.”
I hopped down out of the Vanagon. While I waited for Honey to come around the vehicle, the front door opened, and a small woman came out of the door with a leashless dog that was nonetheless at heel. The dog was white, female, and looked to be a purebred Staffordshire terrier. The woman greeted me in Spanish.
I get mistaken for Hispanic a lot.
I shook my head, but didn’t bother objecting to her assumption. “Sorry. No hablo Español. ¿Esta Joel aqui?”
She stopped when she was about ten feet away, and the dog sat as soon as she quit moving. All of the dog’s attention was on the woman.
“No,” the woman said, then paused. Maybe she’d had to take a moment to switch languages. “You must be Mercy. Joel called and told me what you wanted. I told him to stay at work because I know the dogs as well as he does.” Her English was good, with only a touch of accent.
She gave Honey a slightly wary look, and the dog focused on her, too. “I am his wife, Lucia. Joel tells me that you are the Mercy who keeps him in parts for his old cars. Come into my house, and I will help you as much as I can.”
Her house, when she ushered us in, was not fancy or large, but it was clean enough that I would have eaten off any surface. We sat on an old leather couch while Lucia retreated to her kitchen.
The big white dog who’d accompanied her outside followed her into the kitchen, leaving us under the watchful care of the three lesser dogs who were occupying the living room. All of the living‑room dogs were male and all the same brindle tan. One of them ignored us entirely as he tried to destroy a hard rubber bone. One sat across the room and stared at us. I fought the urge to stare him down and nudged Honey when she started to do just that.
“We’re guests,” I reminded her. “Neutral territory.”
The third dog, the biggest of the three, sat on my foot and put his chin on my knee. I rubbed him gently behind the ears. He closed his eyes and made snuffly‑content noises. The dog who’d been staring at us heaved a disgusted sigh and wiggled around until his back was to us, not happy about the intruders but too well trained to object.
None of the dogs seemed to have an issue with having a werewolf in the house.
There was not a lot of furniture, but what there was was good. Some of it handcrafted, so maybe Joel did some woodworking. Maybe Lucia did the woodworking. On the wall across from me was a framed Texas state flag flanked by good amateur paintings of dogs. One of them could have been the big white dog that followed Joel’s wife around, and the other was a yellow Lab with a Frisbee in its mouth. There was a case with a display of championship ribbons. On a bookcase were a number of trophies, some of which had dogs on the top of them.