Home at last, I decided that there was only one remedy for a night like this. My stash of dark chocolate was gone, and I'd eaten the last gingersnap, so I turned on the oven and pulled out the mixing bowl. By the time someone knocked at my door, I was pouring chocolate chips into the cookie dough.
On my doorstep was a sprite of a girl with Day-Glo orange hair that sprang from her head in riotous curls, wearing enough eye makeup to supply a professional cheerleading squad for a month. In one hand she held my camera.
"Hey, Mercy. Dad sent me over to give you this and to get me out of the way while he dealt with some pack business." She rolled her eyes as she handed me the camera. "He acts like I don't know enough to stay out of the way of strange werewolves."
"Hey, Jesse," I said and waved her inside.
"Besides," she continued as she came in and toed off her shoes, "this wolf was cute. With a little stripe here-" She ran her finger down her nose. "He wasn't going to hurt me. I was just rubbing his belly and my father came in and had a cow - oh yum, cookie dough! Can I have some?"
Jesse was Adam's daughter, fifteen going on forty. She spent most of the year with her mother in Eugene-she must be in town to spend Thanksgiving with Adam. It seemed a little early to me for that, since Thanksgiving wasn't until Thursday, but she went to some private school for brilliant and eccentric kids, so maybe her vacations were longer than the public schools'.
"Did you dye your hair especially for your father?" I asked, finding a spoon and handing it to her with a healthy glob of dough.
"Of course," she said, taking a bite, then continuing to talk as if her mouth weren't half-full. "It makes him feel all fatherly if he can complain about something. Besides," she said with an air of righteousness, "everyone in Eugene is doing it. It'll wash out in a week or two. When I was tired of the lecture, I just told him he was lucky I didn't use superglue to put spikes in like my friend Jared. Maybe I'll do that next vacation. This is good stuff." She started to put her spoon in the dough for another round, and I slapped her hand.
"Not after it's been in your mouth," I told her. I gave her another spoon, finished mixing in the chips, and began dropping cookie dough on the pans.
"Oh, I almost forgot," she said, after another bite, "my father sent the camera with a message. It was needlessly cryptic, but I knew you'd tell me what it meant. Are you ready?"
I put the first pan in the oven and started loading the next one. "Shoot."
"He said, 'Got a hit. Don't fret. He was a hired gun. " She waved her empty spoon at me. "Now explain it to me."
I suppose I should have respected Adam's need to protect his daughter, but he was the one who sent her to me. "I killed a man tonight. Your father found out who he was."
"Really? And he was a hit man? Cool." She dropped the spoon in the sink next to the first one, then boosted herself up to sit on my counter and conducted a rapid question and answer session all by herself. "Was that what you called him about earlier? He was fit to be tied. How come you called Dad? No wait. The man you killed was a werewolf, too, wasn't he? That's why Dad took off so fast. Who is the wolf he came back with?" She paused. " You killed a werewolf? Did you have a gun?"
Several. But I hadn't brought one with me to the garage.
She had paused, so I answered her last two questions. "Yep and nope."
"Awesome." She grinned. "Hey, how'dja do it?"
"It wasn't on purpose," I told her repressively. I might as well have tried holding back a tidal wave with my bare hands, it would have had as much effect.
"Of course not," she said. "Not unless you were really pi-" I raised an eyebrow and she changed the word without slowing down. "-ticked off. Did you have a knife? Or was it a crowbar?"
"My teeth," I told her.
"Ewwe-" She grimaced briefly. "Nasty. Oh, I see. You mean that you took him on while you were a coyote?"
Most humans only know about the fae-and there are still a lot of people who think that the fae are just a hoax perpetrated by the government or on the government, take your pick. Jesse, however, as the daughter of a werewolf, human though she was, was quite aware of the "Wild Things" as she called them. Part of that was my fault. The first time I met her, shortly after the Alpha had moved his family next to my home, she'd asked me if I were a werewolf like her father. I told her what I was, and she nagged me until I showed her what it looked like when I took my other form. I think she was nine and already a practiced steamroller.
"Yep. I was just trying to get his attention so he'd chase me and leave Mac-that's the striped werewolf-" I imitated her finger-down-the-nose gesture. "He is pretty nice," I told her. Then, feeling I had to play adult in fairness to her father, I said, "But he's a newbie, and his control isn't terrific yet. So listen to your father about him, okay? If Mac bit you or hurt you, it would make him feel awful, and he's had a bad enough time of it already." I hesitated. It really wasn't my business, but I liked Jesse. "There are a few of your father's wolves that you really do need to stay away from."
She nodded, but said confidently, "They won't hurt me, not with my father. But you mean Ben, don't you? Dad told me to stay out of his way. I met him yesterday when he stopped by." She wrinkled her nose. "He's a snark-even if he has that cool British accent."
I wasn't certain what a snark was, but I was certain Ben qualified.
We ate the cookies as they came out of the oven, and I gave her a loaded plate covered with tinfoil to take back with her. I went out to the porch with her and saw a sales-lot of cars parked at Adam's house. He must have called in the pack.
"I'll walk you home," I said, slipping on the shoes I kept on the porch for when it was muddy.
She rolled her eyes, but waited for me. "Really, Mercy, what'll you do if one of the pack decides to bother us?"
"I can scream really loud," I said. "That's if I don't decide to use my newly patented technique and kill him, too."
"That's right," she said. "But I'd stick to screaming. I don't think that Dad would like it if you started killing his wolves."
Probably none of them would harm a hair of her head, just as she thought. I was almost sure she was right. But one of the cars I could see was Ben's red truck. I wouldn't leave a fifteen-year-old alone if Ben was around no matter whose daughter she was.
No one bothered us as we walked through my back field.
"Nice car," she murmured, as we passed the donor Rabbit's corpse. "Dad really appreciates you setting it out here for him. Good for you. I told him the next time he annoyed you, you were likely to paint graffiti on it."
"Your father is a subtle man," I told her. "I'm saving the graffiti for later. I've decided that the next time he gets obnoxious, I'll take three tires off." I held my hand out and canted it, like a car with one wheel.
She giggled. "It would drive him nuts. You should see him when the pictures aren't hanging straight on the walls." We reached the back fence, and she climbed cautiously through the old barbed wire. "If you do decide to paint it-let me help?"
"Absolutely," I promised. "I'll wait here until you're safely inside."
She rolled her eyes again, but grinned and sprinted for her back porch. I waited until she waved to me once from Adam's back door and disappeared inside.
When I took the garbage out before I went to bed, I noticed that Adam's place was still full of cars. It was a long meeting, then. Made me grateful I wasn't a werewolf.
I turned to go into my house and stopped. I'd been stupid. It doesn't matter how good your senses are if you aren't paying attention.
"Hello, Ben," I said, to the man standing between me and the house.
"You've been telling tales, Mercedes Thompson," he said pleasantly. As Jesse had said, he had a nifty English accent. He wasn't bad-looking either, if a trifle effeminate for my taste.
"Mmm?" I said.
He tossed his keys up in the air and caught them one-handed, once, twice, three times without taking his eyes off mine. If I yelled, Adam would hear, but, as I told him earlier, I didn't belong to him. He was possessive enough, thank you. I didn't really believe Ben was stupid enough to do something to me, not with Adam within shouting distance.
" 'Stay here a moment, Ben, " Ben said, with an exaggeration of the drawl that Adam's voice still held from a childhood spent in the deep South. " 'Wait until my daughter has had a chance to get to her room. Wouldn't want to expose her to the likes of you. " The last sentence lost Adam's tone and fell back into his own crisp British accent. He didn't sound quite like Prince Charles, but closer to that than to Fagan in Oliver.
"I don't know what you think it has to do with me," I told him with a shrug. "You're the one who got kicked out of the London pack. If Adam hadn't taken you, you'd have been in real trouble."
"It wasn't me that done it," he growled ungrammatically. I refrained from correcting him with an effort. "And as for what you have to do with it, Adam told me you'd warned him to keep Jesse out of my way."
I didn't remember doing that although I might have. I shrugged. Ben had come to town a few months ago in a flurry of gossip. There had been three particularly brutal rapes in his London neighborhood, and the police had been looking in his direction. Guilty or not, his Alpha felt it would be good to get him out of the limelight and shipped him to Adam.
The police hadn't anything to hold him on, but after he'd emigrated the rapes stopped. I checked-the Internet is an amazing thing. I remembered speaking to Adam about it, and I warned him to watch Ben around vulnerable women. I'd been thinking about Jesse, but I didn't think I'd said that explicitly.
"You don't like women," I told him. "You are rude and abrasive. What do you expect him to do?"
"Go home, Ben," said a molasses-deep voice from just behind my right shoulder. I needed to get more sleep, darn it, if I was letting everyone sneak up on me.
"Darryl," I said, glancing back at Adam's second.
Darryl was a big man, well over six feet. His mother had been Chinese, Jesse had told me, and his father an African tribesman who had been getting an engineering degree at an American university when they met. Darryl's features were an arresting blend of the two cultures. He looked like someone who should have been modeling or starring in movies, but he was a Ph. D. engineer working at the Pacific Northwest Laboratories in some sort of government hush-hush project.
I didn't know him well, but he had that eminently respectable air that college professors sometimes have. I much preferred him at my back to Ben, but I wasn't happy being between two werewolves, whoever they were. I stepped sideways until I could see them both.
"Mercy." He nodded at me but kept his eyes on Ben. "Adam noticed you were missing and sent me to find you." When Ben didn't respond, he said, "Don't screw up. This is not the time."
Ben pursed his lips thoughtfully, then smiled, an expression that made a remarkable difference to his face. Only for an instant, he looked boyishly charming. "No fuss. Just telling a pretty lady good night. Good night, sweet Mercedes. Dream of me."
I opened my mouth to make a smart comment, but Darryl caught my eye and made a cutoff gesture with his hand. If I'd had a really good comeback, I'd have said it anyway, but I didn't, so I kept my mouth shut.
Darryl waited until Ben started off, before saying brusquely, "Good night, Mercy. Lock your doors." Then he strode off toward Adam's.
Between the dead wolf and Ben's wish, I suppose I should have had nightmares, but instead I slept deeply and without dreams-none I remembered anyway.
I slept with the radio on, because otherwise, with my hearing, all I did was catnap all night. I'd tried earplugs, but that blocked sound a little too well for my peace of mind. So I turned music on low to block the normal sounds of night and figured anything louder would wake me up.
Something woke me up that morning about an hour before the alarm, but though I turned down the music and listened, all I heard was a car with a well-muffled Chevy 350 driving away.
I rolled over to go back to sleep, but Medea realized I was awake and began yowling at me to let her out. She wasn't particularly loud, but very persistent. I decided it had been long enough since Adam's note that letting her run wouldn't make him feel like I was deliberately defying him. It would also buy me some quiet so I could catch that last hour of sleep.
Reluctantly, I got out of my warm bed and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. Happy to have me up and moving, Medea stropped my shins and generally got in the way as I staggered blearily out of my room, across the living room to the front door. I yawned and turned the doorknob, but when I tried to open the door, it resisted. Something was holding it shut.
With an exasperated sigh, I put my shoulder against the door and it moved a reluctant inch or so, far enough for me to catch a whiff of what lay on the other side: death.
Wide-awake, I shut the door and locked it. I'd smelled something else, too, but I didn't want to admit it. I ran back to my room, shoved my feet in my shoes, and opened the gun safe. I grabbed the SIG 9mm and shoved a silver-loaded magazine in it, then tucked the gun into the top of my pants. It was cold, uncomfortable, and reassuring. But not reassuring enough.
I'd never actually shot anything but targets. If I hunted, I did it on four paws. My foster father, a werewolf himself, had insisted I learn how to shoot and how to make the bullets.
If this was werewolf business, and, after the previous night, I had to assume it was-I needed a bigger gun. I took down the. 444 Marlin and loaded it for werewolf. It was a short rifle, and small unless you took a good look at the size of the barrel. The lipstick-sized silver bullets were guaranteed, as my foster father used to say, to make even a werewolf sit up and take notice. Then he'd put a finger alongside his nose, smile, and say, "Or lie down and take notice, if you know what I mean." The Marlin had been his gun.
The rifle was a comfortable, fortifying presence when I quietly opened my back door and stepped out into the predawn night. The air was still and cold: I took a deep breath and smelled death, undeniable and final.
As soon as I rounded the corner of the trailer I could see the body on my front porch, blocking my front door. He was on his face, but my nose told me who it was-just as it had when I first opened the door. Whoever had dumped him had been very quiet, wakening me only as they drove off. There was no one else there now, just Mac and me.
I climbed the four steps up to my porch and crouched in front of the boy. My breath fogged the air, but there was no mist rising from his face, no heartbeat.
I rolled him onto his back and his body was still warm to my touch. It had melted the frost off the porch where he had lain. He smelled of Adam's home; a fragrant mix of woodsmoke and the pungent air freshener favored by Adam's housekeeper. I couldn't smell anything that would tell me who had killed Mac and left him as a warning.
I sat on the frost-coated wood of the porch, set the rifle beside me, and touched his hair gently. I hadn't known him long enough for him to have a hold on my heart, but I had liked what I'd seen.
The squealing of tires peeling out had me back on my feet with rifle in hand as a dark-colored SUV shot away from Adam's house like the fires of hell were behind it. In the dim predawn light, I couldn't tell what color it was: black or dark blue or even green. It might even have been the same vehicle that the villains had driven last night at the shop-newer cars of a similar make all look alike to me.
I don't know why it had taken me so long to realize that Mac dead on my front porch meant that something bad had happened at Adam's house. I abandoned the dead in hopes of being of use to the living, tearing across my back field at a sprinter's pace, the rifle tucked under my arm.
Adam's house was lit up like a Christmas tree. Unless he had company, it was usually dark. Werewolves, like walkers, do very well in the dark.
When I came to the fence between our properties, I held the rifle away from my body and vaulted the barbed wire with a hand on top of the post. I'd been carrying the Marlin at quarter cock, but as soon as I landed on the other side of the fence, I pulled the hammer back.
I would have gone through the back door if there had not been a tremendous crash from the front. I shifted my goal and made it around the side of the house in time to see the couch land half-in and half-out of the flower bed that lined the porch, evidently thrown through the living room window and the porch rails.
The werewolf I'd killed last night notwithstanding, werewolves are taught to be quiet when they fight-it's a matter of survival. Only with the broken window and the front door hanging wide open, did I hear the snarls.
I whispered the swear words I usually only bring out for rusty bolts and aftermarket parts that don't fit as advertised to give me courage as I ran. Dear Lord, I thought, in a sincere prayer, as I ran up the porch stairs, please don't let anything permanent have happened to Adam or Jesse.
I hesitated just inside the door, my heart in my mouth and the Marlin at the ready. I was panting, from nerves as much as exertion, and the noise interfered with my hearing.
Most of the destruction seemed to be concentrated in the high-ceilinged living room just off the entryway. The white Berber carpet would never be the same. One of the dining room chairs had been reduced to splinters against the wall, but the wall had suffered, too: broken plaster littered the floor.
Most of the glass from the shattered window was spread outside on the porch; the glass on the carpet was from a mirror that had been jerked off the wall and slammed over someone's head.
The werewolf was still there, a sizable chunk of mirror embedded in her spine. It wasn't a werewolf I knew: not one of Adam's because there were only three females in Adam's pack, and I knew all of them. She was near enough to truly dead that she wasn't going to be a problem for a while, so I ignored her.
I found a second werewolf under the fainting couch. (I liked to tease Adam about his fainting couch-How many women do you expect to faint in your living room, Adam?) He'd have to buy a new one. The seat was broken with splinters of wood sticking through the plush fabric. The second werewolf lay chest down on the floor. His head was twisted backward, and his death-clouded eyes stared accusingly at me.
I stepped over a pair of handcuffs, the bracelets bent and broken. They weren't steel or aluminum, but some silver alloy. Either they were specifically made to restrain a werewolf, or they were a specialty item from a high-ticket BDSM shop. They must have been used on Adam; he'd never have brought a wolf he had to restrain into his house while Jesse was here.
The noises of the fight were coming from around the corner of the living room, toward the back of the house. I ran along the wall, glass crunching under my feet and stopped just this side of the dining room as wood cracked and the floor vibrated.
I put my head around the corner cautiously, but I needn't have worried. The fighting werewolves were too involved with each other to pay attention to me.
Adam's dining room was large and open with patio doors that looked out over a rose garden. The floors were oak parquet-the real stuff. His ex-wife had had a table that could seat fifteen made to match the floor. That table was upside down and embedded in the far wall about four feet from the floor. The front of the matching china closet had been broken, as if someone had thrown something large and heavy into it. The result of the destruction was a fairly large, clear area for the werewolves to fight in.
The first instant I saw them, all I could do was hold my breath at the speed and grace of their motion. For all their size, werewolves still resemble their gracile cousin the timber wolf more than a Mastiff or Saint Bernard, who are closer to their weight. When weres run, they move with a deadly, silent grace. But they aren't really built for running, they are built for fighting, and there is a deadly beauty to them that comes out only in battle.
I'd only seen Adam's wolf form four or five times, but it was something you didn't forget. His body was a deep silver, almost blue, with an undercoat of lighter colors. Like a Siamese cat's, his muzzle, ears, tail, and legs deepened to black.
The wolf he was fighting was bigger, a silvery buff color more common among coyotes than wolves. I didn't know him.
At first, the size difference didn't bother me. You don't get to be the Alpha without being able to fight-and Adam had been a warrior before he'd been Changed. Then I realized that all the blood on the floor was dripping from Adam's belly, and the white flash I saw on his side was a rib bone.
I stepped out where I could get better aim and lifted the rifle, pointing the barrel at the strange werewolf, waiting until I could take a shot without risking hitting Adam.
The buff-colored wolf seized Adam just behind the neck and shook him like a dog killing a snake. It was meant to break Adam's neck, but the other wolf's grip wasn't firm, and instead he threw Adam into the dining table, sending the whole mess crashing onto the floor and giving me the opportunity I'd been waiting for.
I shot the wolf in the back of the head from less than six feet away. Just as my foster father had taught me, I shot him at a slight downward angle, so that the Marlin's bullet didn't go through him and travel on to hit anyone else who happened to be standing in the wrong place for the next quarter mile or so.
Marlin. 444's were not built for home defense; they were built to kill grizzlies and have even been used a time or two to take out elephants. Just what the doctor ordered for werewolves. One shot at all but point-blank and he was dead. I walked up to him and shot him one more time, just to make sure.
I'm not usually a violent person, but it felt good to pull the trigger. It soothed the building rage I'd felt ever since I'd knelt on my porch next to Mac's body.
I glanced at Adam, lying in the midst of his dining table, but he didn't move, not even to open his eyes. His elegant muzzle was covered in gore. His silver hair was streaked dark with blood and matted so it was hard to see the full extent of his wounds. What I could see was bad enough.
Someone had done a fair job of gutting him: I could see pale intestines and the white of bone where the flesh had peeled away from his ribs.
He might be alive, I told myself. My ears were still ringing. I was breathing too hard, my heart racing too fast and loud: it might be enough to cover the sound of his heart, of his breath. This was more damage than I'd ever seen a werewolf heal from, far more than the other two dead wolves or the one I'd killed last night.
I put the rifle back on quarter cock, and waded through the remains of the table to touch Adam's nose. I still couldn't tell if he was breathing.
I needed help.
I ran to the kitchen where, in true Adam fashion, he had a tidy list of names and numbers on the counter just below the wall phone. My finger found Darryl's name with his work, home, and pager number printed in black block letters. I set my gun down where I could reach it fast and dialed his home number first.
"You have reached the home of Dr. Darryl Zao. You may leave a message after the tone or call his pager at 543-" Darryl's bassy-rumble sounded intimate despite the impersonal message.
I hung up and tried his work number, but he wasn't there either. I'd started dialing his pager, but while I'd been trying to call him, I'd been thinking about our encounter last night.
"This isn't the time," he'd told Ben. I hadn't given it a second thought last night, but had there been a special emphasis in his voice? Had he meant, as I'd assumed: not after all the effort Ben had put into being on his best behavior since his banishment from London? Or had it been more specific as in: not now, when we have greater matters to deal with? Greater matters like killing the Alpha.
In Europe, murder was still mostly the way the rule of the pack changed hands. The old Alpha ruled until one of the younger, hungrier dominant males decided the old one had grown weak and attacked him. I knew of at least one European Alpha who killed any male who showed signs of being dominant.
In the New World, thanks to the iron hand of the Marrok, things were more civilized. Leadership was mostly imposed from above-and no one challenged the Marrok's decisions, at least not as long as I had known him. But could someone have come into Adam's house and done this much damage without help from Adam's pack?
I hung up the phone and stared at the list of names, none of whom I dared call for help until I knew more about what was going on. My gaze dropped and rested on a photograph in a wooden frame set out beside the list.
A younger Jesse grinned at me with a baseball bat over her shoulder and a cap pulled a little to one side.
Jesse.
I snatched up my rifle and sprinted up the stairs to her room. She wasn't there. I couldn't tell if there had been a struggle in it or not-Jesse tended to live in a tumult that reflected itself in the way she kept her room.
In coyote form, my senses are stronger. So I hid both of my guns under her bed, stripped out of my clothes, and changed.
Jesse's scent was all over the room, but I also caught a hint of the human who'd confronted Mac at my garage last night. I followed the trail of his scent down the stairs because Jesse's scent was too prevalent to find a single trail.
I was almost out the door when a sound stopped me in my tracks. I temporarily abandoned the trail to investigate. At first I thought perhaps I had only heard one of the pieces of overturned furniture settling, but then I noticed Adam's left front paw had moved.
Once I saw that, I realized I could hear the almost imperceptible sound of his breathing. Maybe it was only the sharper senses of the coyote, but I would have sworn he hadn't been breathing earlier. If he was alive, there was a very good chance he'd stay that way. Werewolves are tough.
I whined happily, crawled over the wreckage of his table, and licked his bloody face once before resuming my search for his daughter.
Adam's house is at the end of a dead-end road. Directly in front of his house is a turnaround. The SUV I'd seen take off-presumably with Jesse-had left a short trail of burning rubber-but most cars have very little individual scent until they grow old. This one had not left enough behind for me to trail once the tang of burnt rubber faded from its tires.
There was no more trail to follow, nothing I could do for Jesse, nothing I could do for Mac. I turned my attention to Adam.
That he was alive meant I really could not contact his pack, not with him helpless. If any of the dominants had aspirations to become Alpha, they'd kill him. I also couldn't just bring him to my house. First, as soon as someone realized he was missing, they'd check my place out. Second, a badly wounded werewolf was dangerous to himself and everyone around him. Even if I could trust his wolves, there was no dominant in the Columbia Basin Pack strong enough to keep Adam's wolf under control until he was well enough to control himself.
I knew where one was, though.