Paul nodded, looked at Warren, shook his head, and said, “Yes, boss,” with graveyard humor. Paul had tried to kill Warren once because Warren was the wolf just above him in rank and because Warren was g*y. Now he was going out to a battle that Adam didn’t think they would come back from, and he, like Honey, was telling Warren that he had his back. People can change.
“George.”
“Yes, boss,” said the quiet policeman.
Maybe I should have kept the walking stick. It had worked against a vampire, against the river devil—surely the river devil had been as powerful—more powerful with its ability to remake the world—and it had been the walking stick that had brought it down.
“Mary Jo?” he asked.
“Fighting fires is what I do,” she told him. “Yes, boss.”
Mary Jo loved my mate, too. She’d protect him if she could. I was glad that she was going. My grief was so huge that I had no room for jealousy.
The walking stick … was made of wood and silver, and no matter how magical it was, wood was wood. I had no doubt that someone could throw it into a campfire and it would emerge unscathed, but a campfire was not a volcano. If the walking stick could do some great magic that would kill a fire elemental like Guayota, Coyote would have told me. I was pretty sure Coyote would have told me.
“Alec?” I didn’t know Alec as well as I did some of the other wolves. He was a friend of Paul’s, and Paul didn’t like me much.
Maybe Coyote would have told me if the walking stick could kill Guayota. He’d told me that mortal means could not harm the tibicenas when in their tibicena form. Did he mean that the walking stick might?
“Yes, boss.”
I was pretty sure that the walking stick had served Coyote’s purpose by showing me what lay within the tibicenas. If it would have been effective against them, he’d have told me—or couched it in some kind of riddle that I’d still be puzzling out when one of the tibicenas killed me.
“That’s enough,” said Adam. “If Ariana has more magic when she has dealt with us, then I will call for more volunteers.”
Because of her fear of the wolves, Ariana worked with them one at a time, in the kitchen. I thought Samuel was going to go with her, but he came and sat next to me instead.
“We don’t have any idea on how to kill this thing,” Samuel said. “Ariana tells me that as far as she knows, the only way to kill a primitive elemental like Guayota would be to destroy his volcano, and even then, he would not die for centuries.”
“El Teide is the third highest volcano in the world,” I told him, pressing my cheekbone into my knees. The burn reminded me that turning to my other cheek would have been smarter. “I think it’s a little beyond our capabilities. Killing the tibicenas, his two giant dogs, might do it. But you can only kill their mortal forms, when they look like mostly normal dogs instead of polar-bear-sized monsters. I suspect they are not going to be fighting werewolves in their mortal forms.”
“Ariana would come with us,” he told me, “but she doesn’t have the power she once had, not even a tenth of it. And fire-dogs are too close to her nightmares; there is no guarantee that she wouldn’t do as much damage to us as she would to Guayota and his beasts.”
“I’d come with you,” I said, “but Adam doesn’t want me to die, and for some reason, he seems to think that’s his decision to make.”
Samuel hugged me. “Don’t mourn us until we’re dead,” he said.
“I’ll spit on your graves,” I told him, and he laughed, the bastard.
“Nice,” said Adam, crouching in front of me. “I had to watch you go up against the river devil.”
“That sucked, too,” I told him without looking up from my knees. “But we had a plan that we thought might work.”
“Based on a story,” he said roughly. “It wasn’t a plan; it was a suicide mission.”
I looked up and met his eyes. I didn’t say, So is this. He knew it; it was in his eyes.
“Honey has made her suite available to us,” he said. “Will you come?”
I unlocked my fingers from around my legs and rose out of Samuel’s embrace and went into Adam’s.
“Yes, please,” I whispered.
No one in the room spoke, but they watched us leave, knowing where we were going, and I didn’t care.
Honey’s suite was a bedroom, office, and bathroom, all done in shades of cool gray. It surprised me until I remembered that this had been Peter’s room, too. The gray suited the man he’d been.
We didn’t speak. All of the words had already been said. When he stripped my clothes off me, I noticed that Honey kept her house a little cooler than ours because I was cold—or maybe that was just fear.
Naked, I took off Adam’s clothes and folded them as I set them down, as if taking care with his clothing might show him how much I longed to take care of him. Unusually, his body was slow to awaken, and so was mine—but that was okay because this was about saying good-bye. About impregnating my skin with his scent so that I would have him with me after he was gone. About remembering exactly—exactly—what the soft skin just to the side of his hip bone felt like under my fingertips and under my lips. It was about love and loss and the unbearable knowledge that this could be the last time. Was probably the last time.
I could feel Ariana’s magic on him, and I hoped that it would be enough to keep him safe.
He lay on his back on Honey’s bed and pulled me on top of him as he’d done the first time we’d made love. He let me touch him until his body was shuddering, and sweat rose on his forehead. He pulled my face up to his and kissed me tenderly despite the speed of his pulse.
“My turn,” he whispered. I nodded, and he rolled me beneath him and returned the favor, seeking out his favorite places and the ones where I was most sensitive. He brought me to climax, then lay with his head on my stomach, his arms around me, catching his breath before he started to build the pace again.
We ended as we’d begun, with me on him, watching his face as I moved on him and he in me. The expressions he wore told me to speed up or slow down until his bright yellow eyes opened wide, and he grabbed my hips and helped me take us both where we were going.
I lay down on him and put my face in his neck, and if I cried, I didn’t show him my tears. He ran his hands up and down my back until I could pretend I hadn’t been crying.