Stefan had appeared in my living room before. He’d made me do things, too. Mostly things that had saved my life or his, but the idea that Stefan could force his will on me made my skin crawl. I finished with, “I have no idea.”
Adam followed my wiggle but didn’t touch me other than to kiss my temple. Even with the pumpkin-bruise, the brush of his lips was so tender it didn’t hurt. I knew if I pulled away again, he’d let me be.
I sighed and snuggled back into his warmth. “Assuming we don’t find him, I’d planned on trying to contact him through the blood bond after I’d gotten some sleep. I thought I’d wait until dusk.”
Adam grunted his approval. Eventually I felt him relax, but now I couldn’t follow him into sleep because thinking about Stefan’s bond left me edgy. My thoughts kept chasing each other around until, finally, I saw a new angle on Marsilia and decided Adam needed to take a look at it, too. A kind person would have left it until morning, but since he’d made sure I wasn’t going to fall asleep, I felt justified in waking him up.
“I am pretty sure she likes you,” I said thoughtfully, and felt him wake up.
He waited, but he’s not the only patient hunter in our family. Finally, he said, sounding a little wary, “Who likes me?”
“Marsilia,” I told him. “She likes you, and so sending you after Wulfe probably means that he’s not behind the weirdness at the seethe.”
He huffed a laugh at my logic.
“She’d send me no matter what, of course,” I continued. “You remember that she sent me after a vampire possessed by a demon.”
“I do,” agreed Adam with more heat in his voice than that deserved. It had been several years ago.
She was not happy that I’d survived and the demon-possessed vampire had not. She’d had plans for him.
“But she doesn’t like me,” I said. “She does like you.”
“She likes you better now,” Adam said. “She tells me that she enjoys watching you spread chaos over other people’s plans.”
I gave him an amused snort. “Not enough to care whether I live or die.” I thought about that for a moment, because Marsilia had unarguably risked a lot to help Adam find me after Bonarata had kidnapped me. I added, “As long as it didn’t affect her alliance with you.”
There was a little silence.
“If she thought Wulfe was someone who needed to be stopped,” Adam said carefully, “she would ask us to stop him. Instead, she’s sent us to find him.”
I lifted my head and glanced at his face to judge the seriousness of his expression. I put my head back down and said, in a voice that was smaller than I wanted it to be, “You think Larry is right.”
I could not for the world have articulated why I didn’t want Wulfe to be making trouble. Part of it was that I was more scared of him than of Bonarata. I’d escaped Bonarata. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have escaped Wulfe. Part of it, perversely, was that at some point I’d put Wulfe, terrifying as he was, on “our side.” He was one of our people.
Larry had been right: I didn’t think like a werewolf.
“I believe Marsilia sent us after him, and I doubt it’s for the reasons she gave us,” Adam said. Not quite arguing with me, just making sure I saw his point of view, too. “Other than that, I don’t know why she thinks we need to find him, and neither does Larry.”
“Larry is scared of Wulfe,” I said after a minute. “That might be affecting his judgment.”
“Yes, I think so, too,” Adam said. “That doesn’t make him wrong.”
“Does he scare you?” I asked. “Wulfe?”
Adam thought about that for a moment, and I was drifting off to sleep when he said, “In some ways. Bonarata scares me more. Bonarata wants your hide to nail to his wall as a trophy. I don’t think Wulfe would hurt you.”
That woke me up. “Why don’t you think he would hurt me?” I sat up and scooted around until I could see his face. I didn’t think Wulfe would hurt me, either. My certainty was based on Wulfe’s actions and manner. I hoped Adam had better reasons.
“Vampires are selfish creatures,” Adam told me. “They have to be, in order to become what they are. Whatever it was that you did to him in Elizaveta’s backyard when you were laying those zombies caught Wulfe’s attention. Made him think you are important to him or his survival.”
I’d been laying the spirits of the collected zombie dead that belonged to generations of a black witch family. Not being educated in the matter, I had been working with pure instinct. I’d managed to lay the zombies, but the spell effects had knocked Wulfe flat. I wasn’t sure if he’d been in some kind of waking coma or if I’d done something worse. What I’d done had been a product of a long and terrifying night, with magic of all kinds thick in the air, and I wasn’t sure I could ever do such a thing again.
Given that it was probably not repeatable, I didn’t want Wulfe to think it was important to his survival. That sounded like an unhealthy thing for me in the long run.
“How is it important?” I asked.
Adam pulled me back down into the bed and pulled the covers around me. If I hadn’t been there, he’d probably have slept on top of the covers. But I liked covers, and he liked to cuddle me, so he dealt with sleeping too warm.
“I don’t know. Neither does he,” Adam told me. “If he weren’t as confused about it as you are, he’d do something more pointed than following you around and giving you inappropriate gifts. Until he figures it out, he won’t hurt you. And that”—he hugged me tightly—“puts him far down the list of things I’m afraid of.”
From the roughness of his voice, I understood that there were things he was afraid of, things that he didn’t want to talk about. Like the fact that we were both worried about Elizaveta’s lingering curse. That Sherwood could still be a problem, even if he was a Cornick. That our pack might not be up to the task of protecting our territory, and our failure to do so could end in a war, with the humans wiping out any supernatural they could find.
We both had nightmares, both from our pasts and from what might happen in the future.
“Larry thinks that Wulfe has taken over the seethe with plans of taking over the world,” I said. “Do you think that’s likely?”
Adam’s husky laugh ruffled my hair. “Asking me the same question again won’t get you a different answer. I know why Larry is worried. I don’t know if that worry is justified. Something happened to the seethe. I think that there should be at least six hours of sleep between us and any further answers.”
I growled at him, just to make him laugh again. All the worries in my stomach relaxed a bit when Adam did.
“I expect we’ll find out eventually no matter what we do or don’t do,” he said. “We should sleep so we can deal with it when all hell breaks loose. Again.”
“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” I said direly.
He pulled me close and kissed me. “That’s my optimist,” he said, settling back in the bed to sleep.
“Love you,” I told him, then yawned.
“Love you, too,” he said.
I dreamed.
I sat on the edge of the abyss from my earlier encounter with the spell web. It loomed below me, both a bottomless, empty hole and a presence of blackness that was the embodiment of solid darkness.
Instead of the snow I’d walked in previously, the ground beneath me was something like the forest floor in the Douglas fir–dominated wilderness I’d grown up in. It was deeply packed with dried fir and pine needles until it made a cushiony layer over the hard ground. That was not the sort of ground one usually found on the edge of a cliff, since needles were easily scattered by a good hard wind. I dug my fingers into it.