Adam gave me a quick hug, which I returned before dropping to my knees next to the cage.
“Gary?” I said. He didn’t respond to my voice at all.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” Adam told me, his hand warm on my shoulder. “He wouldn’t talk to us. It felt like he couldn’t talk.” He glanced at Jesse, who nodded.
Sometime since this morning, when I’d last seen her, Jesse had dyed her hair bright purple. I thought she’d given up on outrageous colors when she started college a couple of months ago. When Gary was sorted out, I’d ask her why she’d gone back to dying her hair.
“Who had the fight in the front yard?” I asked, just in case there had been a scent I hadn’t detected.
“Gary and I did,” Adam said. “I don’t think he’s hurt—beyond bruises. Nothing seems broken.”
He sounded defensive.
“The fight wasn’t Dad’s fault,” Jesse said.
“I could have stopped it,” he told her.
“What happened?” I asked. “From the top, please?”
“He knocked,” Jesse said. “Dad was in his office and I answered the door. He didn’t look right at me—not at my face. Mumbled something and took a seat on the porch. I didn’t realize he was your brother, Mercy. He didn’t look like who I remembered. I thought he was a lone wolf. He’s not the first of those who has shown up here. I got Dad because I thought he was going to freeze to death on our porch.”
“Werewolves don’t freeze to death,” observed Tad, who’d been silent up to this point. He sounded a little upset.
“He was shivering and sort of hunched.” She nodded toward Gary, but there was a bite in her voice directed at Tad. “He looked like he was going to freeze to death. I’m not equipped to tell werewolves from not-werewolves.” She gave Tad a look and said, “But I’m also not stupid.”
“You opened the door,” Tad said. “Your father wouldn’t have heard him tear your throat out.”
“When I got out here”—Adam said, evidently deciding that argument had gone on long enough, though I thought Tad had a point; maybe Adam had already had it out with Jesse—“he was sitting at the top of the steps.”
He wasn’t happy about the danger Jesse had been in, either; I knew Adam. But unlike Tad, he knew better than to rebuke Jesse as if she were a child. I foresaw more cameras around the house so Adam could better monitor things when he was in his office.
“He didn’t respond when I talked to him,” Adam continued. “He didn’t appear to hear me at all. I put a hand on his shoulder and he reacted as if I were an enemy. That’s when we fought.”
I looked up at him, and he flushed a little. “Too close to the full moon. He’s lucky I didn’t kill him.”
“Dad just pinned him,” Jesse jumped in, as if I’d already gotten mad at Adam.
I figured if Gary was still alive, it was because Adam hadn’t wanted to kill him—wolf in charge or not. Gary had a knack for making people want to kill him. That’s how he’d ended up in jail in the first place.
“I was putting my trash in the bins outside and I saw the two of them come over the roof,” said Tad.
Despite my concern for my brother, I could feel my eyebrows rise and I looked up at Adam. “Over the roof? I thought you just pinned him.”
He rubbed his face with the hand that wasn’t holding on to me and gave me a sheepish look. “I don’t remember that part. You know what a fight is like. And the moon is just past full.”
“He pinned him five or six times,” Jesse said. “But Gary kept escaping. He just wiggled out until Dad really landed on him.”
Adam winced at the last few words, maybe because of the enthusiasm Jesse used.
“He sort of gave up then,” she told me. “Or we thought he did. Dad checked him out and carried him into the house.”
“Unconscious?” I asked.
“No,” Adam said.
“Catatonic,” said Jesse.
“I’m sure you don’t have the medical qualifications to assess that,” Tad said dryly.
“Unresponsive,” Adam said, stepping into the argument.
And it had been an argument, hadn’t it? I wondered, briefly, if it had something to do with Jesse’s eggplant hair.
But I was more concerned with my brother.
“If he was catatonic,” I asked, “why is he in the cage?”
“Dad called you,” Jesse said, “and right in the middle of that he jumped up like a jackrabbit. We’d wrapped him in a blanket. He sat up and the blanket sort of trapped him. He panicked.”
“I came in about the same time,” Tad said, “so it could also have been my arrival.” He looked at me. “Smelling like I do, yeah?”
Fae, he meant.
“We’re not sure,” Jesse added. “Because neither Dad nor I heard when Tad came in, and Tad didn’t see Gary jump up.”
I glanced at Adam, because not hearing Tad’s entrance was weird. Particularly if Adam had been revved up from a fight with the wolf near the surface.
He shrugged. “The wolf part of me stopped noticing Tad’s movements a while ago. Not enemy. Not pack. Not dangerous to us.”
I nodded.
“I heard Tad come in,” Adam clarified, “but I didn’t pay attention to him. I was more concerned about stopping Gary from jumping out the big plate-glass window. I caught him, but he’s as quick as you are. If I hadn’t been moving and close, I wouldn’t have.”
“He’s scared, Mercy,” said Jesse. “Really scared.”
“It took Adam and me both to get him down here without hurting him,” Tad told me. “Though once we got him inside the cage, he just collapsed.”
Tad had been slouched back in the chair since I’d gotten there, but I’d been distracted by my brother. I finally took note of the deceptive casualness in Tad’s pose that was designed to hide that he was ready for action.
I’d known Tad since he was nine. He’d worked with me in my garage until he’d found a better-paying position as an undercover bodyguard. That meant he was going to school with Jesse, because being the daughter of the Tri-Cities’ own Alpha set her up for nastiness no one would have dared to take against a real werewolf. He’d moved into my old house across the back fence from us a few weeks ago for added security for our home.
Tad wasn’t a werewolf. He didn’t look like a badass. He looked like a nerd, complete with stick-out ears and a big, goofy smile. But looks were deceptive. He was the half-human son of a powerful and grumpy fae. He could take care of business.
I wondered why he thought he should be worried about my brother, who was looking pretty helpless just now in a cage designed to keep werewolves trapped.
“I called Honey,” Adam told me. “She should be here shortly.”
I glanced up at him in surprise.
He smiled faintly. “I’m not oblivious.”
“Peter’s only been dead a year,” I said. Peter’s ghost still followed Honey around, a faithful attendant to his living mate.
“Honey and your brother have been talking,” he told me. “Texting, mostly.”
I frowned at him. “Honey didn’t say anything to me.”
“Honey didn’t say anything to me, either,” he said. “I have ways.”
“Our wolf pack gossips like nobody’s business,” observed Jesse.
I decided I’d gotten as much information out of them as I was going to. Time to deal with my brother.
I tried his name again.
“Gary?”
He didn’t respond to my voice, which wasn’t a surprise. I’d been down here for a while now, and he’d had plenty of time to react to me. I took a deep breath, but the overwhelming smell of sweat and fear made it difficult to get anything more subtle.