Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson, #5)

by Patricia Briggs

I stumbled back away from the truck, shaking and sweating in the night air, the fae stick in one hand like a cudgel or a sword that could protect me from . . . being stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Damn Tim and all that he’d done for leaving me stupidly shaking while I stood perfectly safely in the middle of my own stupid driveway. I wanted to be myself again instead of this stranger who was afraid of being touched—and who had little voices in her head that made her throw bowling balls at children.

I smiled, which is tough when you’re ready to skin someone.

“No apologies from you,” he told me, his voice soft enough to melt my knees and most of my other parts. “First of all, as I already pointed out—you would make the same choices again, right? So an apology doesn’t work. Secondly, you, being who you are, could have made no other choice. Since I love you, as you are, where you are—it hardly makes sense for me to kick about it when you act like yourself. Right?”

My voice was steady. I don’t think I was getting braver, but after all the things that had happened lately, being frightened had lost its novelty.

Adam looked at me. “Trust you to bring a gun to a fistfight,” he said with every evidence of admiration.