He wasn’t talking about Bonarata. Neither of them thought Bonarata was done playing with them yet. He was talking about the way Mercy wasn’t recovering from the Soul Taker.
“I know,” Adam told him.
Darryl let him leave it at that, knowing that there wasn’t anything either of them could really do for Mercy except hope she’d get better.
They were deep in a discussion about a planned pack activity that was now going to have to go forward without Adam when a small red light flashed on his desk. The front door had been opened. It was too soon for Mercy to be coming home. Jesse was out there alone.
“Done,” Adam said, and cut the call.
His office was soundproofed so that even a werewolf could not overhear what went on inside it. That meant he couldn’t hear what was going on in the house, either. He’d taken some pains to make sure that didn’t become a liability. He stood up to go see why the door had been opened.
A soft buzz filled the room.
Jesse was the only one home, and she’d just hit the silent alarm.
The wolf roared so loud he had to fight to breathe—but it didn’t slow him down. At all.
He jerked open the door—registering the crack of wood as unimportant—and had to check himself so he didn’t bowl right over the top of Jesse, who was standing in front of his door with her finger on the button.
The analytic part of his mind—which was just watching the action—noted that she didn’t smell afraid. Not very afraid, anyway. And that might just be of him. He was aware that he could be alarming.
He picked her up and set her in the office. The only reason he didn’t close the door was because she’d gotten her foot in the way. Which she’d managed because there was something wrong with the hinges. Only then did he figure out she was speaking.
“—safe,” she said. “I’m safe. It’s not an emergency. I’m safe.” Mercy had taught her that—that Adam sometimes needed reassurances repeated when the wolf was in ascendance.
He took a deep breath and shoved the wolf down. Only when he was sure it was subdued did he step back and let her wiggle past him out of the office. It was probably too soon for relief, but he felt it anyway.
“Sorry, Dad,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
She was very nearly an adult, his Jesse. He could see her mother’s features and his eyes in her face. But when she started college, she’d let her hair go back to its natural dark blond. And every time he looked at her after that, he’d also seen his own mother. But sometime between when he’d shut himself in the room and now, she’d dyed it again.
She looked more herself with bright purple hair.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, fighting the adrenaline still pumping through him.
She pursed her lips. “I’m not sure, exactly. There’s a guy on our front porch. He knocked on the door, stared at me when I opened it, muttered something”—she looked uneasy—“something really weird, and sat down.”
Adam frowned and took a deep breath, but she must not have left the door open long, because he couldn’t pick out any strange scents.
“He looks pretty harmless,” she said. “Not a threat. I interrupted you because it’s cold outside and I am a little worried about him dying on our doorstep.” She paused. “I probably should have just knocked, right?”
“You can interrupt me any way you want,” he told her. “You come first.”
She rolled her eyes. “I know. But I don’t have to be stupid about it.”
The exasperation in her voice made him grin—which she returned. Jesse wasn’t stupid, though. If she had hit the alarm, it was because something had struck her as an emergency.
“He’s in bad condition,” Adam said, not making it a question. “Or do you think he’s dangerous?”
She had said he looked harmless.
“He’s in bad condition and it’s cold out there,” she said. Then, more slowly, “Yes. I think he could be dangerous.” More hastily, probably in reaction to his expression, she continued dryly, “If he wasn’t freezing to death on our porch. There’s something about him—like the wolves, Dad. Dangerous but not wicked.”
His daughter was pretty sharp about people. If she didn’t think this stranger was a threat, he probably wasn’t. He didn’t ask her to stay back when he went to the front door and opened it.
The figure huddled on his stairs looked miserable and cold, visibly shivering in the icy northern wind. His jacket was a good one—it should keep a man warm in colder weather than this. He smelled sweaty, like someone who was breaking a fever, though he didn’t smell sick. He smelled of fur and forest and a little like Mercy.
For a moment Adam wondered that Jesse hadn’t known who this was. But the man curled over on himself, his face drawn tight and hollowed, didn’t look like Gary Laughingdog. Jesse wasn’t a werewolf to identify people by scent.
“Gary?”
Mercy’s brother didn’t react to his name.
“Gary?” Adam said again, taking two quick steps until he was right next to him.
The man didn’t even twitch.
“Gary?” Adam softened his voice and put a hand on Gary’s shoulder.
That’s when it all went south.
Gary snapped up, the leg nearest Adam planting itself behind Adam’s foot. He got a wrestler’s hold around Adam’s leg, hands clasped just in front of Adam’s knee, with Gary’s shoulder laced over the top—turning Adam’s leg into a lever. Gary drove his head into Adam’s ribs to keep Adam from leaning forward and regaining his balance.
It was a good takedown, one that Adam used himself. It wouldn’t have worked if Gary had been a normal human. But he, like Mercy, was just a bit faster than Adam—and werewolves were supernaturally quick.
The natural progression of the move would have allowed Gary to knock Adam off his feet and away. If Adam had been thinking, if he’d kept his head, he would have allowed the move to do what it was supposed to do. Gary wasn’t his enemy—and this wasn’t a move designed to cripple or kill. It was designed to let Gary get away.
But Adam was surprised, the head in his ribs had not hit gently, and it was three days since the full moon. His instincts—powered up by the moon’s call and the unexpected pain—took over. As he told his pack over and over, you fight how you train. And he had trained for decades, for more than half a century, how not to allow an opponent to get what he wanted out of a fight.
He took advantage of his superior strength and the frost on the porch to slide his raised leg and Gary around just enough that he regained his balance. Gary had ended up on the top of the steps. When Adam didn’t fall as Mercy’s brother had intended, Gary threw his weight backward and sent both of them tumbling down the stairs.
On the ground, Gary pushed away with impressive speed and force. Maybe if the moon had been fainter in the sky; maybe if Gary’s frantic scramble away from Adam hadn’t meant that he was moving toward Jesse, who was standing in the doorway; maybe if Adam hadn’t hit the corner post of the porch railing with his shoulder and if the burn of magic healing the crack in his scapula wasn’t more painful than the original injury…maybe if all of that or some of that had been different, Adam could have stopped the fight right then.
But the moon was still large in the sky, and the adrenaline of hearing the alarm in his office when he knew Jesse was alone in the house sang in his blood. And Gary smelled—and acted—like prey. Adam could no more have stopped the wolf, his wolf, from going after his brother-in-law than he could have stopped the sun from shining.
Once the wolf took him, Adam retained only bits and pieces of the fight. Usually it didn’t work that way. Usually Adam could break down his werewolf’s actions with clinically sharp memory.