“I can get another one,” he repeated.
Keep it casual, Hauptman, he cautioned himself. If he smothered her, she would leave. If he smothered her and she did not leave, he would be making her weaker. Less safe. And that was unacceptable.
He measured the pack straps against her and cut off another three inches.
“Another hour wouldn’t hurt them,” he tried.
“You tend to your horses before you tend to yourself,” she said, and he recognized both the cadence and the finality. Silently, he cursed Charles and anyone else who had taught Mercy about the care and feeding of horses.
He reminded himself that Mercy would be okay if she waited until she got back to eat. She’d eaten a big breakfast. She wasn’t a werewolf; she didn’t need the calories that the rest of the pack did.
His wolf wanted to insist on going with her. He’d already done that once, and it had gotten him here. But that had been different, and for a different cause. He didn’t mistrust her ability to take care of herself—he had wanted, had needed, her to know that she came first. Before pack.
His Mercy was prickly about her independence, and it had taken a battering over the past couple of years. He didn’t want to change her; he only wanted to keep her safe. Sometimes he had to admit he couldn’t do both. He had to trust her to know her limits. She was good about asking for help when she needed it.
The ranch wasn’t that far away, and the storm had subsided a little. Her coyote was probably even better equipped for traveling through this country in the winter than his wolf was. She was light enough to run on top of the snowpack, whereas he would have to break a trail.
He might still have insisted on coming if it hadn’t been for the reconsideration he’d seen in Liam’s face when Adam hadn’t fussed about Mercy going out in the storm on her own. Mercy was safer if everyone saw that Adam respected her ability to protect herself. It made them understand she was dangerous—even though most of them wouldn’t know why.
When Bonarata had demonstrated how easily he could have killed Adam, it had rubbed Adam’s nose in the fact that, at the levels Mercy and he were now playing at, he could not count on his werewolf being powerful enough to keep her safe. But he’d been dumped on his own, under-armed, in a country where he didn’t speak the language and had no good way of telling friend from foe. He’d been outclassed in Vietnam, too, and he’d survived. He’d done that by learning, by getting better at his job, and by figuring out how to do that job with inadequate tools.
So directly after Bonarata had finished educating Adam, Adam had gone to the scariest, most deadly warrior he knew and asked him for lessons. He was learning how to be more lethal, but he was also learning how to keep Mercy safe among the paranoid, powerful fae.
Zee told him that having your enemy overestimate you was as useful as having them underestimate you. Adam’s casual acceptance of Mercy running out alone in the storm made Liam wonder what Mercy was capable of.
If letting Mercy go alone to the ranch without a fight made her safer from the assorted crazy and powerful beings here, he could do that. He’d still rather have had her eat first, but that was her choice.
“Stop growling,” she said, stripping out of her clothes and stuffing them into the pack with her coat. “It’s cute but it won’t get you anywhere.”
Adam couldn’t help his sheepish smile—and didn’t bother fighting it because she wasn’t looking at him anyway.
She held up a boot to size it against the space left in the backpack, shrugged, and stuffed her tennis shoes in. He didn’t protest because she wasn’t going to be wearing them out in the storm. But he took her socks out of her hands and put a pair of his woolen hiking socks in the bag instead.
She laughed and then went to work zipping up the pack. The light shone along her naked back and flank, highlighting the faint silvery scars where some Montana rancher had unloaded a shotgun at a coyote. At least there wouldn’t be anyone out hunting coyotes in a storm like this.
He ran his hand over the scars—a reminder that his mate was a target, that he couldn’t protect her from everything, but also that she was a survivor. She leaned into his touch, and he bent until he could wrap both of his arms around her waist and pull her into his body.
“Not going to get this pack zipped up this way,” she said with a huff of laughter.
He tucked his head between her neck and shoulder, just below her ear, and breathed in. “You come back safely,” he said. “I don’t want to live in a world without you in it.”
“Don’t worry,” she told him. “If I die, I’ll be like Jack and come back to haunt you.”
He bet she would, his stubborn love. Oddly, that reassured him enough that he could let her go—though not before he kissed her bare shoulder.
Standing, he said, “Get a move on. How can I miss you if you don’t go?”
“Way to ruin a tender moment,” she mock-complained, tightening the compression straps so the pack was dense instead of puffy and sloppy.
Then she shifted to coyote.
He put the pack on her, making sure the straps around her shoulders and belly were just right—too tight and she wouldn’t be able to get out of it or shift safely back to human, too loose and it would hinder her travel. She could have put it on and then shifted, but she let him do that for her.
He understood her, and tried very hard to give her what she needed. She tried very hard to do the same for him.
He opened a window and she hopped out and was away. He stood, the winter blowing into the room, until he couldn’t see her for the woods and the flying snow. Then, very quietly, he said, “Come back to me, love.”
The scene in the dining room was very much as it had been at breakfast. Adam contemplated the goblins, who were carefully not looking at him, and the Heddars—and sat down at the table with Elyna’s people.
Peter was a little twitchy, but Adam had been getting a lot of practice at dealing with hyperdominant people. He had no trouble finding common ground at a table filled with those who dealt with humanity at their worst and best moments.
Peter and one of the other men had served in the marines. When Adam admitted to his ranger background, they exchanged the kind of ribbing the branches of military reserved for their allies. His security career was enough like police work that it gave him an entry with the rest of Peter’s pack—as Mercy had dubbed them after breakfast.
By the time the teenager—Emily—came in with glasses, a pitcher of ice water, and sandwiches, they were exchanging absurd work stories. When it was his turn, he told them about how four of his men, responding to an alarm, chased the suspect down into a back office—and encountered a skunk. The skunk won handily.
Tammy came in late, picking up her food in the kitchen. She looked unhappy, and when she sat down, she said, “I tried calling Zane, but it looks like the phones are still down.”
Adam’s sat phone still wasn’t working, but he didn’t think it would be useful to tell them that.
The table looked grim.
“What happens if he doesn’t make it?” asked Peter.
She glanced at Adam and said, “The end of my world.”
That was so obvious that Adam decided to clear the air a bit. So he nodded at Tammy and said, “The end of the world.”
The whole table looked at him with a fair bit of hostility.
What had Liam said? Something about how the wedding guests would come to an understanding about what the wedding was and their part in it. He wondered how that had happened. Had they just woken up knowing about the Great Spell and accepting it and everything that it implied?