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He cooperated because he had no idea I was changing the rules of the game on him. I was not Coyote’s daughter, not quite. But that was okay because being almost Coyote’s daughter in my dream would be enough.
Adam’s lips came down upon my own and I opened my mouth. Looking into his eyes, I pulled the things that were killing him into me, swallowing down the silver that was poison to him and nothing to me. He didn’t understand at first, but when he did, he struggled, but it was my dream, not his. In this dream, I wasn’t a coyote shapeshifter trying to hold a werewolf, I was Coyote’s almost daughter, and I had all the strength of the world in my arms.
“Mine,” I told him, though my mouth was still fastene...
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I’d heard that kind of rage in Adam once before. He’d torn the corpse of a man I’d already killed into small pieces. The men who had made themselves our enemy had no idea what they had done.
Asil met my eyes. He knew how I got my information. He tilted his head a little and gave a shrug. He was the dominant wolf in the room. If he didn’t care what I told a federal agent about how werewolf magic works, maybe I shouldn’t, either.
There was a funny pause, and I looked up. “I thought.” Armstrong swallowed. “I thought that he was just a big dog. I like dogs.”
“Maybe for you,” I snapped at Asil, turning to finish the last four-or-five-stair climb to the second floor. “Me? I have friends.”
“Mi princesa,” he told me, his voice deep and flirty, “I was in Spain and I heard about the peanut butter. Two decades are nothing, I assure you—we will speak of it a hundred years from now in hushed voices. There are big bad wolves all over the world who tremble at the sound of his name, yet a little puny coyote girl peanut-buttered the seat of Bran Cornick’s car because he told her that she should wear a dress to perform for the pack.”
“He said Evelyn—my foster mother—should know better, that she should have made sure I had a dress to wear. He made her cry.”
And that sincerity was the last straw. I put my hand over my mouth and leaned against the door and laughed. I was worried, tired, and it felt like every muscle in my body ached—and all I could see was the peanut butter on the back of the Marrok’s elegant beige slacks and the expression on his face when he realized what had happened.
‘Can you imagine any of the pack putting peanut butter on the seat of my car to teach me a lesson?’”
“I pledge to you,” Asil said, meeting Ben’s eyes, “that I mean you and yours no harm. I recognize that you belong to Adam Hauptman, and I have no need for you to belong to me. I am an ally while Adam cannot be here, standing in for the Marrok, who has sent me to serve in his stead as lord over all the wolves as we are all his vassals. Do you accept me as such?”
It would be wrong. But wolves are gregarious, far more so than humans or coyotes, for that matter.
Asil shook his head. “What happens if Adam and the pack are gone?” I bared my teeth at him. “I go out for revenge—I don’t do peanut butter much anymore. But if they aren’t afraid of the pack, they aren’t going to be afraid of me. Bran is scarier—but they probably don’t know about Bran.”
When he’d been a boy, he’d thought that if you were just strong enough, tough enough there wouldn’t be anything to be afraid of—except for God, of course. His parents had been small farmers, patriots, and devout Baptist God-fearing Christians and raised him to be the same. But their best efforts had met the world, and, mostly, the world had won.
got, the more afraid you learned to be. It had also taught him that there were monsters in the world—and he had become one of them.
Then he’d come back home and found out that war didn’t cause fear—love did. He loved Mercy with a fierceness that still surprised him.
He understood that was how the pack bonds worked for her, that she saw things in symbols and pictures while he smelled things. Samuel had once told him that he and Bran both heard music.
“It’s a strange old world, you know? Never know who you’re going to find yourself in bed with.”
“I’ll save Mr. Jones for Honey,” he told Warren, then let the wolf take him.
He was at least as old as Elizaveta. She didn’t know it, would never know it because Adam understood people. Oh, she knew in abstract, unlike the public, that werewolves could live a good long time, but she’d never made the connection to him. He knew that because if she ever processed what she knew, she would hunt him down and try to make him turn her.
Darryl reached over and gave Warren’s hair a rough caress, an unusual sign of affection from the pack’s second. “Dead guys don’t get an opinion,” Darryl told everyone.
“We’re the good guys. That we’re scary doesn’t mean we’re the villains.”
He’d been brought in to deal with a lone wolf who had decided to build a pack, then started killing humans. Adam had stayed because the backbone of his business was security contracts with government contractors, and the Tri-Cities was full of them.
“Mercy?” asked Asil, who had sped up to keep pace with me. His beautiful accent made him sound like someone’s lover instead of a man who had killed a woman with as little thought as I gave to opening a jar of mayonnaise.
Asil had a baseball bat and was using it like a katana—turn and turn and never let the bastard get a good hard strike on your weapon.
“So I went hunting you and got here just in time to see you flying out of a hole in the third story of an apartment attached to a man’s leg.”
Tony rubbed his mouth to hide a smile. Tony had seen Tad in full-blown Look-At-Me mode before. It wasn’t that Tad was lying to the police officer, but, like a good stage magician, he’d keep the police looking where he wanted them to look. I didn’t know what Tad was trying to cover up, but with Adam here and safe, I didn’t really care.
Instead of arguing, Mercy just smiled and got into the passenger seat without a word. Inexplicably, that sent his temper flaring worse than if she’d argued.
Yes, howled the beast that lived in his heart. There is something wrong with Mercy. I’ve been trying to tell you, but you thought it was just from the fighting. It isn’t. This is like what happened to her before, when we couldn’t protect her.
“I am always careful with the truth. It is a powerful thing and deserves respect.”
Spiegel spieg’le finde,Vaters Bild und Stimme, in der Tiefe Deiner Sinne, seiner Worte seiner Form, meiner Worte meiner Form, führe, leite, führ’ zusammen, deiner Wahrheit Bindeglied, verbinde unsere Wirklichkeiten, Wesen und Natur im Lied!
The wolf was convinced that as long as he held her, nothing could touch her.
The better to see you with, my dear, said the Big Bad Wolf.
But her easy compliance made his wolf want to jump out of his skin. The last time she’d been caught in this kind of magic, she’d been raped, and he remembered it, both wolf and man.
Mercy shivered, as if she were suddenly cold, again. “I don’t like being obedient.” Adam hugged her and wished he could go back and kill the man who’d done this to her last time before he’d hurt her. Wished, at the very least, he could protect her from her memories because if this was making him remember, it had to be doing the same to her. Rage choked him—and Mercy patted his arm in reassurance.
He pictured his Mercy in his mind. Mercy holding a plate of cookies in the hope that they would make her neighbor feel better after his wife left him. Mercy baring her teeth at him because he’d annoyed her by trying to make her stay safe. Mercy pulling the damned tires off the wreck in her backyard because she was mad at him. Mercy shooting Henry before the cowardly wolf could challenge Adam while he was hurt.
This, this was his Mercy, and he wanted her—mind, body, and soul, she was his. And he was hers. The kiss warmed up, and he pulled her tighter into his body and let the heat of their kiss spread through his body in hopes it would catch flame in her.
“Damn it, damn it, Adam,” she raged at him, while Adam caught his breath. “You don’t let me hurt you like that. You haven’t eaten since God knows when because I can see your ribs. You’ve lost twenty pounds in two days. Too much shapeshifting, not enough food—and having to heal yourself every time you touch me just makes it worse. And then you let me hurt you, you stupid, stupid . . .” She was so mad, the words wouldn’t come out of her mouth. “Or you could try to force her to do something absolutely against her will,” said Zee casually. “That works more often on this kind of magic than love’s
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on me. Didn’t want to hurt Adam again. Didn’t want to touch him with my filthy skin, I was dirty, dirty. That was wrong. I knew that was wrong.
with the release of a magical spell I hadn’t really believed in until it left, and with a shadow of memory. I remembered listening to Tad tell us that I’d had my will stolen away, and I had been . . . uninterested. I’d felt that way before.
“You broke the spell the minute something happened that you didn’t want. You were never really in its power. Not once you didn’t want to be.”
“It was when Adam came back,” Tad said. “It isn’t easy to steal someone’s will. With Huon’s Cup . . . before . . .” He made an unhappy sound. Looked at Asil, who might or might not know about that incident. Before. When I’d been raped because I could not resist the magic of the cup I’d drunk. Tad cleared his throat. “The cup that worked on Mercy before used the act of drinking out of it to imply consent, and it was a more powerful artifact in the first place.
“If they could all point their swords in the same direction for more than ten seconds, they just might manage something scary. The reality is that everyone is tired of merely surviving and is looking for a way to thrive in this new world of iron.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what will happen except that things are changing.”
“Hatred is not a useful thing.” “To hear you say that—that is a thing I never thought to hear no matter how old I became.” Asil laughed and Zee raised an imperial eyebrow and someone who didn’t know him might not have seen the wry humor in his eyes.
But I wasn’t stoned by fae magic this time.
“Hey,” Adam said, quietly into my ear. “I called you first, but your phone was dead. Then I called Elizaveta.”
She grinned at him. “Maybe I’ll just get pregnant and work at fast food for the rest of my life.” She turned and trotted off the way she had come before he could formulate a reply.
“Too bad for you,” I commiserated. “I know it’s rough. My husband tried to kill himself to save the pack, you know. And earlier today, he faced down a fae he knew nothing about—and some of the fae are forces of nature.” “My wife was going to fight him,” explained Adam. “I had to protect him from that.” I laughed.
“You know what Jesse’s mother would have done if the feds came and took the pack while she was my wife?” he asked. “Filed for divorce,” I hypothesized. It was his turn to laugh. “Point to you. And then she would go to everyone she knew and tell them how awful her life was, how people expected too much of her. Do you know what my second wife did?” “Got beaten up and ran in circles mostly while you rescued yourself,” I told him. “She cared for the pack that was left,” he said. “She got my child to safety. She got word to Bran—who sent help. She stepped between my child and those who would harm
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