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There was a rumor that the government had tried to bomb a reservation, but the entire flight of planes had disappeared—reappearing minutes later flying over Australia.
Because when I reached down the bond between Adam and myself, I could sense nothing but rage and pain.
Strong arms wrapped around my waist, jerking me almost off my feet. My nose told me the arms belonged to Ben of the British accent and foul mouth as he buried his face against my stomach,
“Your eyes are gold, Mercy,” said Gabriel as he slid into the front seat. “I didn’t know they did that.” Neither had I.
“Ariana,” I said, “I thought . . .” “That I had retreated to the reservation with my kin?” she asked. “My mate is here.
clung to Adam as tears and helpless anger wracked me, his and mine, while Honey’s agonized cry rang in my ears. I didn’t need to see it with my eyes because the pack bond and Adam told me who it was, told me it was fatal. By accident or design, Jones had killed Peter, with a clean bullet between his eyes, killed the heart of the pack, our sole submissive wolf, Honey’s mate.
Submissive wolves, rare, as precious as rubies, were not driven to be on top, so they could be trusted absolutely—cherished and protected from all harm.
Jones is dead, I promised. He just doesn’t know it yet. But we are patient, we can wait until the time is ripe. Adam went still. He forgets sometimes, does Adam, that I am as much a predator as he is.
Jesse and Gabriel were both standing between Ben and Ariana.
Peter had once charged out with a sword and saved the pack from an enraged fae that I’d brought to their doorstep.
“I liked Peter,” she said, and my heart started beating again. If she was tracking that well, we might be okay. “Samuel asked him to help us with my fear of werewolves. Peter was . . . kind.”
“Fine. If you’re too proud to say you’re sorry—I’ll keep him!” at the top of my lungs. I had sent her graduation announcements. She’d been there, in the back.
“Mamá, everything is black-and-white for you, but the world is gray. You asked me to abandon my friends because you thought they were dangerous. Life is dangerous, Mamá. I won’t run away from my friends, who are good people, because I am afraid. Because you are afraid.”
I am not going to leave my son, whom I love, to face danger alone for pride’s sake. Even I am not such a fool. Oof.”
We’d e-mailed once a week since he left, and I called him once a month to keep up. Tad was the little brother I’d never had, and in some ways we were closer than I was to my half sisters.
“I was twelve. Don’t you wolves have anything better to gossip about than things that happened twenty years ago?” “Mi princesa,” he told me, his voice deep and flirty, “I was in Spain and I heard about the peanut butter.
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.”
You would scheme and plan so no one would know—and never realized that he didn’t even have to investigate such an incident. ‘Who else could it be?’
Honey had been in his pack for nearly thirty years,
Elizaveta was nearly seventy; she was powerful, but her body was beginning to fail her. In the last two years, she’d lost both of the people she’d been training to take her place, the people who should have been helping her carry the burden of her work. Both of them were killed in incidents involving his wolves.
When he’d first spoken to Elizaveta in Russian, she’d recognized the accent of Moscow, her hometown, and it had created a bond that he deliberately used.
“Mmm,” Mercy said. “Right in front of me. I think she’s the same one that looks out of Zee’s dining room window sometimes.”
“Do they always flirt with biblical quotes?” Asil asked Tad. In long-suffering tones, Tad said, “They can flirt with the periodic table or a restaurant menu. We’ve learned to live with it. Get a room, you guys.”
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 her.”
She wanted the role she’d been assigned as his mate rather than the one that should have been rightfully hers as a dominant wolf. She didn’t want to be who she was; she wanted to be delicate and ladylike and feminine. She resented me for challenging that.
Werewolves can get volatile in extreme emotion and, as her Alpha, he could keep her from losing control. It was not uncommon for wolves who had lost their mates to have to be killed shortly thereafter.
“Those werewolves who killed that pedophile in Minnesota this past spring—they died within a few days of it. All of them.
I think that if disease and war had not decimated the Indians—and thus the walkers—there would be no vampires in the Americas.
The first rule of being married is to communicate where you are going and why.
He fell on his knees, his face raw with pain, sorrow, and need, tears sliding down his face. “Honey. Min prinsesse. Oh, Honey, I am lost.”
“You are right, Stefan,” she said. “I am sorry, Mercedes. Tonight, we need to be allies.” Marsilia had just apologized to me. Hell must have been experiencing some climate change.
“Only great love can inspire such heated rage,” agreed Stefan, and there was a glimmer of affection in his voice. “But Frost is right to be afraid. Even now, the Lord of Milan talks of you to his courtiers.”
“He called Iacapo and yelled at him. Said he was getting old and lazy if he couldn’t bestir himself to ‘squish’ Frost.” Stefan snorted. “That sounds like Wulfe.” “I have heard it said that Wulfe made Iacapo,” Hao said.
He was able to control every move of his vampires with very little effort, but he couldn’t get Marsilia to move one hand. It was true that she fought him, and his minions had given up, but he still had thirty vampires dancing to his tune. That Marsilia had resisted showed everyone here that Marsilia wasn’t just the Mistress of the City—she was a Power.
Stefan had a wrestler’s hold on Asil, and he was yelling at him. “Stand down. Stand down, wolf. I don’t want to have to kill you.” Honey just watched my battle with yellow eyes.
All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.’” Hao said, “Life is not safe. A man might spend his whole time on earth staying safe in a basement, and in the end, he still dies like everyone else.”
There was a loud sound—and it was Wulfe standing over Marsilia instead. Shamus lay in two pieces, and Wulfe had Zee’s sword in his hand.
