Silence Fallen (Mercy Thompson, #10)

by Patricia Briggs

But leaving Mercy behind when he’d just found her was painful. And whatever the old witch had done to allow him to contact Mercy, now that their brief conversation was over, it had left the werewolf magic, both his pack ties and his mate bond, in a state of outrage—a painful state. The combination of loss and pain left him unable to speak in Russian or English. He closed his fingers around the necklace and drew a deep breath. When that wasn’t enough, he shut his eyes and rested his head against the back of the airplane seat. His wolf was fighting for control in a way it hadn’t since he’d been very new—and had been pretty much since Mercy had gone missing. He’d forgotten how tiring it was to fight the beast to a standstill. He’d had decades to become complacent, to believe that he had a handle on just how bad things could get. As the hours had passed, and Mercy was no closer than she had been, the wolf had fought and fought and fought. When his mating bond had found Mercy again, faint though the signal had been, just after he’d gotten on the plane, he’d thought he would be back to normal. But once the wolf figured out just how far away Mercy was, how poorly the bond was functioning . . . He’d found a quiet corner in the plane designed to please the kinds of people who rented private jets as a matter of course and had been trying to meditate to keep his beast under control when Elizaveta found him.