“He found your number,” Mary Jo said heavily.
I shrugged. Worrying too much about it wasn’t useful, but shoving it to the side extracted its own toll. I wasn’t going to talk about Bonarata anymore.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You didn’t ask me to come here and tell you that you did the right thing in refusing Renny. You wanted me to argue with you, because I’m not any better armed against the bad guys than someone like Renny is.”
“Probably,” Mary Jo admitted.
“I can’t do that,” I said. “He is not equipped to deal with folks like—” I tapped the screen of my phone. I didn’t use Bonarata’s name any more than necessary.
She flinched but stiffened her spine and raised her chin.
“You didn’t come here to ask me why I accepted Adam as my mate,” I said. “I’m the wrong side of the equation. You came here to find out how Adam had the courage to take me as his mate.”
“Yes,” she said. “That.”
“I don’t know,” I answered her honestly. “I take great comfort knowing that Adam is very hard to kill. Bonarata left us that night thinking Adam would die—and he was wrong. I don’t know how Adam deals with the fact that I would not have survived the wounds he took that night.”
“You are hard to kill, too,” said Mary Jo. “You shouldn’t be, but you are.”
I wasn’t going to argue about that. It didn’t seem useful. Instead, I said softly, “Renny has a dangerous job. How are you going to feel if he gets shot trying to interfere in a domestic dispute or a standard traffic stop? Just because you don’t accept his marriage proposal, that doesn’t make him safe. It doesn’t mean that he won’t die in a car wreck on the way home tonight.”
The wolf in her eyes lit right up, and my phone rang.
“How are you going to feel then?” I asked.
I answered my phone. This time I didn’t check the caller ID because I didn’t want to. I wasn’t going to give Bonarata that power. Not with Mary Jo—my pack—here with me.
“Mercy,” said my husband. “You need to come home. Your brother is here.” There was a noise—I couldn’t quite make it out. And then Adam grunted and disconnected.
Mary Jo grabbed her wallet. “I’ll take care of the bill,” she said. “My invite. Go.”
“You need to wait before you drive,” I told her.
She smiled. “I promise. Go.”
I did not speed on the way home. I was very, very careful about when and how I broke the law, and right now a speeding ticket would cost me more time than the few minutes I would save speeding. When a light turned red in my face, I stopped.
I’d called Adam back before I left, but he didn’t pick up. The noises I’d heard before he’d disconnected had sounded like combat. But I couldn’t be sure. Who would he have been fighting?
I tapped my foot as I waited for the light to turn green.
Why had Gary come to my house? Gary and I weren’t close.
I had first met him this spring—I hadn’t known I had a brother, half brother really, before that. Though maybe I should have. There are a lot of tales about Coyote marrying beautiful women, and many of the stories mention his children. Gary was older than me, probably by at least a century.
I had the feeling he’d been alone a very long time.
He hadn’t been particularly friendly when we’d first met. He was rough around the edges. But I thought he was a good person, and he could be unexpectedly kind. He reminded me, in that way, of Kyle, Warren’s boyfriend.
We weren’t friends, Gary and I. I thought about that for a moment, because there was some kind of connection. We were fellow prisoners, maybe, both of us serving out the sentence of being our father’s children. But Gary had kept in touch with me—and I’d found myself talking to him more than I’d expected. My life had been in a constant state of upheaval for a long time, and Gary knew more than I did about what I was.
The last time we talked, Gary had been training horses for a quarter horse breeder in Montana. Jobs like that tended to be mobile and seasonal, so he could simply be visiting because his job had ended. His being in the Tri-Cities was unnecessarily dangerous because he was still wanted in Washington for escaping from Coyote Ridge Corrections Center.
Adam hadn’t sounded like it was a casual visit.
My phone—face up on the passenger seat—dinged and showed a message from Jesse.
We are okay. Come home. Don’t speed. Dad says quite reading this and pay attention to your driving.
My phone dinged again as Jesse corrected herself. *quit
The light turned green while I was looking at my phone, and the car behind me honked. As I stepped on the gas, I wondered if the reason Adam hadn’t answered his phone was because he was dealing with the police. Maybe they’d figured out Gary was connected to the pack, to me, even. That didn’t make sense. Even Gary hadn’t known we were related until I tracked him down.
Maybe the police had followed him to my house?
The crime he’d been in jail for hadn’t been violent. No one should be dedicated to searching for him as long as he refrained from thumbing his nose at the justice system too hard—by, say, running around a mere forty-odd miles from the prison he’d escaped.
Proximity was why he’d relocated to Montana, where, in his words, “even if they send out bulletins or whatever they use now, one Native looks like any other Native—as long as the cop who is looking isn’t Native, too.” And he added, “Besides, no one in Montana cares about what happens in Washington anyway.”
But in the Tri-Cities, if someone recognized him, Gary’s presence in our house could expose us to criminal charges.
I took a deep breath and forced myself to relax. We had a couple of werewolves who worked at Coyote Ridge. They told me that Gary’s breakout was legendary, that it had been elevated to urban myth. Prisoners escaped from time to time, but they always left a trail. Gary had left his locked room and disappeared without a trace. No one, I’d been assured, was seriously looking for him anymore.
But the noises I’d heard on the phone sounded a lot like combat.
There were no police cars at the house when I got there. I pretended I wasn’t relieved as I pulled into the driveway between Adam’s and Jesse’s cars. There was a battered old Ford truck with Montana plates parked somewhat askew, presumably Gary’s ride.
It had been snowing off and on all week. There were winters when we never got accumulated snow, but the snow around the house was currently a bit over ankle height. There was enough to make decent snow angels or—as demonstrated all over the porch and front yard—to leave impressions of what had clearly been a violent fight.
I inhaled deeply and did not smell blood. My nose said the only people who had been out here fighting were my brother and my mate.
I jogged up the stairs and opened the front door to a living room filled with upended furniture. Unusually for a fight involving werewolves, nothing was broken. I gave the fainting couch a frown. Sadly, even upside down, it seemed to be fine. Before I had time to wonder where everyone was, Adam called out from the basement.
“Down here, Mercy.” He didn’t sound particularly stressed, but I didn’t like the solemn note in his voice.
Downstairs I found Jesse and Tad, our neighborhood half-blood fae, seated near the cage we used to lock up dangerous wolves. Adam was standing beside the cage, looking at me with worried eyes.
Behind the silver bars of the cage, a man was curled in a fetal position, his back to the room. He reeked of sweat and fear. His hair had been French braided at one time, but the braid was disheveled, with hair sticking out every which way, as if he’d slept on it more than one night. Or maybe just engaged in a battle with a werewolf. He did not, I noticed with relief, smell like fresh blood. He wore jeans and a ripped and wet winter coat he hadn’t taken off. Huddled up like that, my brother looked smaller than I remembered.