“Do you think that’s likely?” he asked, keeping his voice down. Whatever had happened had scared her, and she needed to distract herself. It scared him, too, because it hadn’t felt like anything a big bad wolf could protect Mercy from.
Mercy started to shrug and then said, “I think that if we can find the killer, we might be able to break whatever is keeping Aubrey here. It’s not what Frost did to Peter, but it’s the same effect.”
Frost had been a vampire who fed off the souls of the dead, keeping his victims tied to their bodies, including one of Adam’s wolves. Frost had been a nasty piece of work.
“Okay,” he said, putting confidence in his voice. They’d handled every other damned thing that had come their way, including Frost. They’d handle this one, too. Hopefully.
“I don’t know what I’m talking about,” she reminded him. “I wish there were a Haynes or Chilton repair manual on how I work.”
“You’ll figure it out,” he assured her earnestly.
She turned to him, eyes alight with ire—and then frowned. “Quit baiting me.”
He grinned. Unable to help himself. What a gift she was.
Mercy sniffed again. Like Zee had been, she was careful not to touch the boy’s body. Her brows were drawn in puzzlement, and she tilted her head as if trying to catch some faint sound. Abruptly, she stiffened and closed her eyes, and Adam felt her draw upon the pack—not for power but as an anchor. Instinctively, he stepped forward and reached out to touch her.
Zee got in his way. Had it been anyone else in the room, Adam would have knocked them aside. But Zee was protective of Mercy, and he knew magic. If he didn’t think Adam should touch her, Adam had to trust his judgment. He didn’t have to like it, though.
“You know something of their deaths,” said Amin, watching Mercy. “Is there anything that I should tell Dimitri to be careful of during the autopsy?”
Mercy straightened, shivered, and looked at the coroner. “I think that you should put off the autopsies as long as possible. You aren’t going to learn anything helpful that points to this killer,” she said. “And . . .” She glanced at Zee.
The fae’s anger had not eased at all while Adam was gone. It gathered around Zee like the moment before lightning struck and felt a lot bigger than it had when Adam went to get Mercy. The awareness of the danger slid down Adam’s spine, and the smell of iron-rich battle fury brushed his nose like a future memory.
Adam was pretty sure Mercy could feel it—she just wasn’t moved by it. Growing up in the Marrok’s pack of crazies had left Mercy pretty unimpressed by temper.
George had put himself between the fae and the other two, which told Adam that George knew what was going on. But Tony and the coroner weren’t plastered against the wall and shaking with fear, so he figured they had no clue. That was probably just as well.
“Probably it would be safe enough,” Zee said, sounding cool as a cucumber. “But only probably.”
“It’s our job,” Amin said. He waved a hand at the refrigeration unit. “They are our charges. Dimitri’s and mine.”
“Could you give us a week?” Mercy asked. “We don’t really know what’s going on yet. If you could give us some time, we will know more.”
“Do you know who the killer is?” he asked.
“We know what killed them,” answered Zee. “The other question may be less interesting than you think.”
Amin shook his head. “We take care of them,” he told them. “ ‘Probably safe’ is good enough. Let me know if you find out ‘definitely not safe’; otherwise, we will follow procedure.”
At Zee’s request they stopped at the cemetery off the Bypass Highway that separated the Yakima River from Richland. He hadn’t said why, and no one in the SUV was stupid enough to ask. Tony was pretty sharp. He had caught on that there was something wrong. Probably from the way everyone but Mercy was treating Zee.
Zee directed them through the maze of well-tended gravel drives before he had them stop. Then he took Mercy and made the rest of them wait at the SUV.
“I hate this,” Tony muttered, watching the old man and Mercy traipse between the stone markers inset to make maintaining the grounds easier.
“I don’t much like graveyards myself,” admitted George, leaning against the SUV in a way that boded ill for the paint job.
Adam thought about objecting, but scratches were not what brought the resale value of his vehicles down. It had been a few years since he’d actually had one survive long enough to be traded in or sold.
“Graveyards are fine.” Tony tossed George an irritated look. He glanced over at the manicured grounds, green even in the late autumn chill. “Well, not fine. And this is a cemetery. Graveyards are next to churches. What I hate is knowing fuck all about what is going on while bodies are falling around me.” He frowned at Adam, as if Adam knew what was going on and was keeping it from him.
“You didn’t spend any time in the military, did you?” asked George wryly.
Adam felt his own lips twist. George’s time in the military had been during World War I, but some things did not change.
Zee and Mercy had stopped by a grave. Mercy sat down cross-legged on the grass and put her hand on a gravestone. Huh. Zee had said that Mercy had a better nose for magic than he did. And Mercy’s magic, nose driven or not, worked better with the dead. Not that she was happy about that.
Adam pulled out his phone and checked. This cemetery had been in existence since 1956.
“You will tell me what’s going on when you know?” asked Tony in a voice that clearly said he didn’t expect them to do that.
George shrugged. “You know how it is.”
They’d stopped at Mercy’s garage, where George and Zee had left their cars. Adam didn’t think that Mercy was planning on opening the garage until tomorrow, but she and Zee were fighting with the office door lock, so evidently she and Zee had something planned. Maybe she’d left something inside, but more likely they were going to talk through what they’d found.
Tony’s complaint at the cemetery had hit a chord with Adam. How often would knowing just a bit more above his pay grade have resulted in fewer people dying? That was a set greater than none, he thought.
“Tony,” Adam said thoughtfully, “just how far do you want to go down this rabbit hole?”
Tony stiffened, giving him a look. “Is that an offer?”
“You have had our backs for a while now,” Adam said. “I think it’s fair that you know where the bodies are coming from. I think they’re”—he nodded toward the door, where Mercy had stepped back and was watching Zee manage the lock—“not sure what’s going on. But I will tell you when we have a working theory.”
“Catch?”
“You’ll have to lie about it to your fellow officers, knowing that ignorance might get them killed—though maybe slower than actually knowing what’s going on.”
Tony’s eyes narrowed. “You think that’s new to me? I might not have fought in an organized war, but I’ve been in the trenches, where it’s hard to decide who is friend and who is foe.”
“Organized,” said George carefully, “war. I haven’t been in one of those.”
Adam gave a huff of laughter. “Isn’t that the truth.” He returned to the subject at hand. “There is still a hard limit to what I can let you know. Secrets that aren’t mine. I’ll share what I can without regard to your safety—but I will impose silence on you about things that outsiders cannot know. That will mean that sometimes when those bodies fall, you will know that it was your silence that let them die. Your silence, and not just mine.”