For Collin:

Editing: Anne Sowards, of course, but also Mike and Collin Briggs, Dave, Katharine, and Caroline Carson, Jean Matteucci, Ann (Sparky) Peters, Kaye and Kyle Roberson, and Gene Walker—brave folk who all read this book or parts of it in various stages of disrepair and did their best to help me shore up foundations.

German: Michael and Susann Bock of Hamburg—for their gallant efforts, Zee is truly grateful. Danke.

Research: Jana and Dean of the Butte Silver Bow Arts Foundation, George Bowen and the Kennewick Police Department, Cthulu Bob Lovely, and Dr. Ginny Mohl.

Map: Michael Enzweiler.

The author is especially grateful to Jesse Robison, who volunteered to step in when Mercy needed a bookstore and someone who knows his books.

And, of course, the dedicated folks of the Three Rivers Folklife Society and the many talented musicians who put on the Tumbleweed Music Festival every Labor Day weekend so that we should have music.

“A cowboy, a lawyer, and a mechanic watched Queen of the Damned,” I murmured.

Warren—who had once, a long time ago, been a cowboy—snickered and wiggled his bare feet. “It could be the beginning of either a bad joke or a horror story.”

“No,” said Kyle, the lawyer, whose head was propped up on my thigh. “If you want a horror story, you have to start out with a werewolf, his gorgeous lover, and a walker…”

Warren, the werewolf, laughed and shook his head. “Too confusing. Not many people still remember what a walker is.”

Mostly they just confused us with skinwalkers. Since walkers and skinwalkers are both Native American shapeshifters, I can sort of understand it. Especially since I’m pretty sure the walker label came from some dumb white person who couldn’t tell the difference.

But I’m not a skinwalker. First of all, I’m from the wrong tribe. My father had been Blackfoot, from a northern Montana tribe, and skinwalkers come from the Southwestern tribes, mostly Hopi or Navajo.

Second, skinwalkers have to wear the skin of the animal they change into, usually a coyote or wolf, but they cannot change their eyes. They are evil mages who bring disease and death wherever they go.

When I change into a coyote, I don’t need a skin or—I glanced down at Warren, once a cowboy and now a werewolf—the moon. When I am a coyote, I look just like every other coyote. Pretty much harmless, really, as far down the power scale of the magical critters that lived in the state of Washington as it was possible to get. Which is one of the things that used to help keep me safe. I just wasn’t worth bothering about. That had been changing over the past year. Not that I’d grown any more powerful, but I’d started doing things that drew attention. When the vampires figured out that I’d killed not one, but two of their own…

As if called by my thoughts, a vampire walked across the screen of the TV, a TV so big it wouldn’t have fit in my trailer’s living room. He was shirtless and his pants clung inches below his sexy hipbones.

I resented the shiver of fear that surged through my body instead of lust. Funny how killing them had only made the vampires more frightening. I dreamed of vampires crawling out of holes in the floor and whispering to me from shadows. I dreamed of the feel of a stake sliding through flesh and fangs digging into my arm.

If it had been Warren with his head on my lap instead of Kyle, he would have noticed my reaction. But Warren was stretched out on the floor and firmly focused on the screen.

“You know,” I snuggled deeper into the obscenely comfortable leather couch in the upstairs TV room of Kyle’s huge house and tried to sound casual, “I wondered why Kyle picked this movie. Somehow I didn’t think there would be quite so many bare manly chests in a movie called Queen of the Damned.”

Warren snickered, ate a handful of popcorn from the bowl on his flat stomach, then said with more than a hint of a Texas drawl in his rough voice, “You expected more naked women and fewer half-clothed men, did you, Mercy? You oughtta know Kyle better than that.” He laughed quietly again and pointed at the screen. “Hey, I didn’t think vampires were immune to gravity. Have you ever seen one dangle from the ceiling?”

I shook my head and watched as the vampire dropped on top of his two groupie victims. “I wouldn’t put it past them, though. I haven’t seen them eat people yet either. Ick.”

“Shut up. I like this movie.” Kyle, the lawyer, defended his choice. “Lots of pretty boys writhing in sheets and running around with low-cut pants and no shirts. I thought you might enjoy it, too, Mercy.”

I looked down at him—every lovely, solar-flexed inch of him—and thought that he was more interesting than any of the pretty men on the screen, more real.

In appearance he was almost a stereotype of a gay man, from the hair gel in his weekly cut dark brown hair to the tastefully expensive clothes he wore. If people weren’t careful, they missed the sharp intelligence that hid beneath the pretty exterior. Which was, because it was Kyle, the point of the facade.

“This really isn’t bad enough for bad movie night,” Kyle continued, not worried about interrupting the movie: none of us were watching it for its scintillating dialogue. “I’d have gotten Blade III, but oddly enough, it was already checked out.”

“Any movie with Wesley Snipes is worth watching, even if you have to turn off the sound.” I twisted and bent so I could snitch a handful of popcorn from Warren’s bowl. He was too thin still; that and a limp were reminders that only a month ago he’d been so badly hurt I’d thought he would die. Werewolves are tough, bless ’em, or we’d have lost him to a demon-bearing vampire. That one had been the first vampire I’d killed—with the full knowledge and permission of the local vampire mistress. That she hadn’t actually intended me to kill him didn’t negate that I’d done it with her blessing. She couldn’t do anything to me for his death—and she didn’t know I was responsible for the other.

“As long as he’s not dressed in drag,” drawled Warren.

Kyle snorted agreement. “Wesley Snipes may be a beautiful man, but he makes a butt-ugly woman.”

“Hey,” I objected, pulling my mind back to the conversation. “To Wong Foo was a good movie.” We’d watched it last week at my house.

A faint buzzing noise drifted up the stairs and Kyle rolled off the couch and onto his feet in a graceful, dancelike move that was wasted on Warren. He was still focused on the movie, though his grin probably wasn’t the reaction the moviemakers had intended for their bloodfest scene. My feelings were much more in line with the desired result. It was all too easy to imagine myself as the victim.

“Brownies are done, my sweets,” said Kyle. “Anyone want something more to drink?”

“No, thank you.” It was just make-believe, I thought, watching the vampire feed.

“Warren?”

His name finally drew Warren’s gaze off the TV screen. “Water would be nice.”

Warren wasn’t as pretty as Kyle, but he had the rugged-man look down pat. He watched Kyle walk down the stairs with hungry eyes.

I smiled to myself. It was good to see Warren happy at last. But the eyes he turned to me as soon as Kyle was out of sight were serious. He used the remote to raise the volume, then sat up and faced me, knowing Kyle wouldn’t hear us over the movie.

“You need to choose,” he told me intently. “Adam or Samuel or neither. But you can’t keep them dangling.”

Adam was the Alpha of the local werewolf pack, my neighbor, and sometimes my date. Samuel was my first love, my first heartbreak, and currently my roommate. Just my roommate—though he’d like to be more.

I didn’t trust either of them. Samuel’s easygoing exterior masked a patient and ruthless predator. And Adam…well, Adam just flat scared me. And I was very much afraid that I loved them both.

“I know.”

Warren dropped his eyes from mine, a sure sign he was uncomfortable. “I didn’t brush my teeth with gunpowder this morning so I could go shooting my mouth off, Mercy, but this is serious. I know it’s been difficult, but you can’t have two dominant werewolves after the same woman without bloodshed. I don’t know any other wolves who could have allowed you as much leeway as they have, but one of them is going to break soon.”

My cell phone began playing “The Baby Elephant Walk.” I dug it out of my hip pocket and looked at the caller ID.

“I believe you,” I told Warren. “I just don’t know what to do about any of it.” There was more wrong with Samuel than undying love of me, but that was between him and me and none of Warren’s business. And Adam…for the first time I wondered if it wouldn’t just be easier if I pulled up stakes and moved.

The phone continued to sing.

“It’s Zee,” I said. “I have to take this.”

Zee was my former boss and mentor. He’d taught me how to rebuild an engine from the ground up—and he’d given me the means to kill the vampires responsible for Warren’s limp and the nightmares that were leaving fine lines around his eyes. I figured that gave Zee the right to interrupt Friday Night at the Movies.

“Just think about it.”

I gave him a faint smile and flipped open my phone. “Hey, Zee.”

There was a pause on the other end. “Mercedes,” he said, and not even his thick German accent could disguise the hesitant tone of his voice. Something was wrong.

“What do you need?” I asked, sitting up straighter and putting my feet on the floor. “Warren’s here,” I added so Zee would know we had an audience. Werewolves make having a private conversation difficult.

“Would you drive out to the reservation with me?”

He could have been speaking of the Umatilla Reservation, which was a short drive from the Tri-Cities. But it was Zee, so he was talking about the Ronald Wilson Reagan Fae Reservation just this side of Walla Walla, better known around here as Fairyland.

“Now?” I asked.

Besides…I glanced at the vampire on the big-screen TV. They hadn’t gotten it quite right, hadn’t captured the real evil—but it was too close for comfort anyway. Somehow I couldn’t work up too much sorrow at missing the rest of the movie—or more conversation about my love life either.

“No,” Zee groused irritably. “Next week. Jetzt. Of course, now. Where are you? I will pick you up.”

“Do you know where Kyle’s house is?” I asked.

“Kyle?”

“Warren’s boyfriend.” Zee knew Warren; I hadn’t realized he hadn’t met Kyle. “We’re out in West Richland.”

“Give me the address. I will find it.”

It wasn’t hard to follow the scent of blood to the living room, where the fae had been killed. Blood was splattered generously over various pieces of furniture and the carpet, with a larger stain where the body had evidently come to rest at last. His remains had been removed, but no further effort had been made to clean it up.

To my inexpert eyes, it didn’t look like he’d struggled much because nothing was broken or overturned. It was more as if someone had enjoyed ripping him apart.

It had been a violent death, perfect for creating ghosts.

I wasn’t sure Zee or Uncle Mike knew about the ghosts. Though I’d never tried to hide it—for a long time, I hadn’t realized that it wasn’t something everyone could do.

That was how I’d killed the second vampire. Vampires can hide their daytime resting places, even from the nose of a werewolf—or coyote. Not even good magic users can break their protection spells.

But I can find them. Because the victims of traumatic deaths tend to linger as ghosts—and vampires have plenty of traumatized victims.

That’s why there aren’t many walkers (I’ve never met another)—the vampires killed them all.

If the fae whose blood painted the floors and walls had left a ghost, though, it had no desire to see me. Not yet.

I crouched down in the doorway between the entryway and the living room and closed my eyes, the better to concentrate on what I smelled. The murder victim’s scent, I put aside. Every house, like every person, has a scent. I’d start with that and work out to the scents that didn’t belong. I found the base scent of the room, in this case mostly pipe smoke, wood smoke, and wool. The wood smoke was odd.

I opened my eyes and looked around just in case, but there was no sign of a fireplace. If the scent had been fainter, I would have assumed someone had come in with it on their clothes—but the scent was prevalent. Maybe he’d found some incense or something that smelled like a fire.

Since discovering the mysterious cause of the burnt-wood smell was unlikely to be useful, I put my chin back on my front paws and shut my eyes again.

Once I knew what the house smelled like, I could better separate the surface scents that would be the living things that came and went. As promised, I found that Uncle Mike had been here. I also found the spicy scent of Yo-Yo Girl both recent and old. She had been here often.

All the scents that were left I absorbed until I felt I could recall them upon command. My memory for scent is somewhat better than for sight. I might forget someone’s face, but I seldom forget their scent—or their voice, for that matter.

I opened my eyes to head back to search the house further and…everything had changed.

The living room had been smallish, tidy, and every bit as bland as the outside of the house. The room I found myself standing in now was nearly twice as big. Instead of drywall, polished oak panels lined the walls, laden with small intricate tapestries of forest scenes. The victim’s blood, which I’d just seen splattered over an oatmeal-colored carpet, coated, instead, a rag rug and spilled over onto the glossy wood floor.

A fireplace of river stone stood against the front wall where a window had looked out over the street. There were no windows on that side of the room now, but there were lots of windows on the other side, and through the glass, I could see a forest that had never grown in the dry climate of Eastern Washington. It was much, much too large to be contained in the small backyard that had been enclosed in a six-foot cedar fence.

I put my paws on the window ledge and stared out at the woods beyond, and wonder replaced the childish disappointment of discovering the reservation to be a particularly unimaginative suburbia.

The coyote wanted to go explore the secrets that we just knew lay within the deep green forest. But we had a job to do. So I pulled my nose away from the glass and hop-scotched on the dry places on the floor until I was back out in the hallway—which looked just as it always had.

There were two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a kitchen. My job was made easier because I was only interested in fresh scents, so the search didn’t take me long.

When I looked back into the living room, on my way out of the house, its windows still looked out to forest rather than backyard. My eyes lingered for a moment on the easy chair which was positioned to look out at the trees. I could almost see him sitting there, enjoying the wild as he smoked his pipe in a haze of rich-smelling smoke.

But I didn’t see him, not really. He wasn’t a ghost, just a figment of my imagination and the scent of pipe smoke and forest. I still didn’t know what he’d been, other than powerful. This house would remember him for a long time, but it held no unquiet ghosts.

I walked out the open front door and back into the bland little world the humans had built for the fae to keep them out of their cities. I wondered how many of those opaque cedar fences hid forests—or swamps—and I was grateful that my coyote form kept me from being able to ask questions. I doubt I’d have had the willpower to keep my mouth shut otherwise, and I thought the forest was one of those things I wasn’t supposed to see.

Zee opened the truck door for me and I hopped in so he could drive me to the next place. The girl watched us drive off, still not speaking. I couldn’t read the expression on her face.

The second house we stopped at was a clone of the first, right down to the color of the trim around the windows. The only difference was that the front yard had a small lilac tree and a flower bed on one side of the sidewalk, one of the few flower beds I had seen since I came in here. The flowers were all dead and the lawn was yellowed and in desperate need of a lawn mower.

There was no guardian at this porch. Zee put his hand on the door and paused without opening it. “The house you were in was the last one who was killed. This house belongs to the first and I imagine that there have been a lot of people in and out since.”

I sat down and stared up into his face: he cared about this one.

“She was a friend,” he said slowly as his hand on the door curled into a fist. “Her name was Connora. She had human blood like Tad. Hers was further back, but left her weak.” Tad was his son, half-human and currently at college. His human blood hadn’t, as far as I could see, lessened the affinity for metals he shared with his father. I don’t know whether he’d gotten his father’s immortality: he was nineteen and looked it.

“She was our librarian, our keeper of records, and collector of stories. She knew every tale, every power that cold iron and Christianity robbed us of. She hated being weak; hated and despised humans even more. But she was kind to Tad.”

Zee turned his face so I couldn’t see it and abruptly, angrily, opened the front door.

Once again I entered the house alone. If Zee hadn’t told me Connora had been a librarian, I might have guessed. Books were stacked everywhere. On shelves, on floors, on chairs and tables. Most of them weren’t the kind of books that had been made in the last century—and none of the titles I saw were written in English.

As in the last house, the smell of death was present, though, as Zee had promised, it was old. The house mostly just smelled musty with a faint chaser of rotten food and cleaning fluids.

He hadn’t said when she died, but I could guess that there hadn’t been anyone here for a month or more.

About a month ago, the demon had been causing all sorts of violence by its very presence. I was pretty sure that the fae had considered that, and was reasonably certain the reservation was far enough away to have escaped that influence. Even so, when I regained my human form, I thought I might ask Zee about it.

Connora’s bedroom was soft and feminine in an English cottage way. The floor was pine or some other softwood covered with scattered handwoven rugs. Her bedspread was that thin white stuff with knots that I always have associated with bed-and-breakfasts or grandmothers. Which is odd, since I’ve never met any of my grandparents—or slept in a bed-and-breakfast.

A dead rose in a bud vase was on a small table next to the bed—and there wasn’t a book to be found.

The second bedroom was her office. When Zee said she was collecting stories, I’d somehow expected notebooks and paper, but there was only a small bookcase with an unopened package of burnable discs. The rest of the shelves were empty. Someone had taken her computer—though they’d left her printer and monitor; maybe they’d taken whatever had been on the shelves as well.

I left the office and continued exploring.

The kitchen had been recently scrubbed with ammonia, though there was still something rotting in the fridge. Maybe that was why there was one of those obnoxious air fresheners on the counter. I sneezed and backed out. I wasn’t going to get any scents from that room—all that trying would do was deaden my nose with the air freshener.

I toured the rest of the house, and by process of elimination deduced that she’d died in the kitchen. Since the kitchen had a door and a pair of windows, the killer could certainly have entered and left without leaving scent anywhere else. I made a mental note of that, but made a second round of the house anyway. I caught Zee’s scent, and more faintly Tad’s as well. There were three or four people who had visited here often, and a few who were less frequent visitors.

If this house held secrets like the last one, I wasn’t able to trigger them.

When I came out of the front door, the last of the daylight was nearly gone. Zee waited on the porch with his eyes closed, his face turned slightly to the last, fading light. I had to yip to get his attention.

“Finished?” he asked in a voice that was a little darker, a little more other than usual. “Since Connora’s was the first murder, why don’t we hit the murder scenes in order from here on out?” he suggested.

The scene of the second murder didn’t smell of death at all. If someone had died here, it had been so well cleaned that I couldn’t smell it—or the fae who had lived here was so far from humanity that his death didn’t leave any of the familiar scent markers.

There were, however, a number of visitors shared between this house and the first two and a few I’d found only in the first and third house. I kept them on the suspect list because I hadn’t been able to get a good scent in Connora the librarian’s kitchen. Also, since this house was so clean, I couldn’t entirely eliminate anyone who had been only in the first house. It would be handy to be able to keep track of where I’d scented whom, but I’d never figured out any way to record a scent with pen and paper. I’d just have to do the best I could.

The fourth house Zee took me to looked no more remarkable than any of the others had appeared. A beige house trimmed unimaginatively in white with nothing but dead and dying grass in the yard.

“This one hasn’t been cleaned,” he said sourly as he opened the door. “Once we had a third victim, the focus of effort changed from concealing the crime from the humans to figuring out who the murderer is.”

He wasn’t kidding when he said it hadn’t been cleaned. I hopped over old newspapers and scattered clothing that had been left lying in the entryway.

This fae had not been killed in the living room or kitchen. Or in the master bedroom where a family of mice had taken up residence. They scurried away as I stepped inside.

The master bathroom, for no reason I could see, smelled like the ocean rather than mouse like the rest of this corner of the house. Impulsively, I closed my eyes, as I had in the first house, and concentrated on what my other senses had to tell me.

I heard it first, the sound of surf and wind. Then a chill breeze stirred my fur. I took two steps forward and the cool tile softened into sand. When I opened my eyes, I stood at the top of a sandy dune at the edge of a sea.

Sand blew in the wind, stinging my nose and eyes and catching in my fur as I stared dumbfounded at the water while my skin hummed with the magic of the place. It was sunset here, too, and the light turned the sea a thousand shades of orange, red, and pink.

I slipped down through the sharp-edged salt grass until I stood on the hard-packed beach. Still I could see no end of the water whose waves swelled and gentled to wash up on shore. I watched the waves for long enough to allow the tide to come in and touch my toes.

The icy water reminded me that I was here to work, and as beautiful and impossible as this was, I was unlikely to find the murderer here. I could smell nothing but sea and sand. I turned to leave the way I’d come before true night fell, but behind me all I could see were endless sand dunes with gentle hills rising behind them.

Either the wind in the sand had erased my paw prints while I’d been watching—or else they had never been there at all. I couldn’t even be sure which hill I’d come down.

I froze where I stood, somehow convinced that if I moved so much as a step from where I was, I’d never find my way back. The peaceful spell of the ocean was entirely dispelled, and the landscape, still beautiful, held shadows and menace.

Slowly I sat down, shivering in the breeze. All I could do was hope that Zee found me, or that this landscape would fade away as quickly as it had come. To that end I lowered myself until my belly was on the sand with the ocean to my back.

I put my chin on my paws, closed my eyes, and thought bathroom and how it ought to smell of mouse, trying to ignore the salt-sea and the wind that ruffled my fur. But it didn’t go away.

“Well, now,” said a male voice, “what have we here? I’ve never heard of a coyote blundering Underhill.”

I opened my eyes and spun around, crouching in preparation to run or attack as seemed appropriate. About ten feet away, between me and the ocean, a man watched me. At least he looked mostly like a man. His voice had sounded so normal, sort of Harvard professorial, that it took me a moment to realize just how far from normal this man was.

His eyes were greener than the Lincoln green that Uncle Mike had his waitstaff wear, so green that not even the growing gloom of night dimmed their color. Long pale hair, damp with saltwater and tangled with bits of sea plants, reached the back of his knees. He was stark naked, and comfortable with it.

I could see no weapons. There was no aggression in his posture or voice, but my instincts were screaming. I lowered my head, keeping eye contact, and managed not to growl.

Staying in coyote form seemed the safest thing. He might think me simply a coyote…who had wandered into the bathroom of a dead fae and from there to wherever here was. Not likely, I had to admit. Maybe there were other paths to get here. I’d seen no hint of another living thing, but maybe he’d believe I was exactly what I looked like.

We stared at each other for a long time, neither of us moving. His skin was several shades paler than his hair. I could see the bluish cast of veins just below his skin.

His nostrils fluttered as he drew in my scent, but I knew I smelled like a coyote.

Why hadn’t Zee used him? Obviously this fae used his nose, and he didn’t seem powerless to me.

Maybe it was because they thought he might be the murderer.

I shuffled through folklore as he watched me, trying to think of all the human-seeming fae who dwelt in or about the sea. There were a lot of them, but only a few I knew much about.

Selkies were the only ones I could remember that were even neutral. I didn’t think he was a selkie—mostly because I couldn’t be that lucky—and he didn’t smell like something that would turn into a mammal. He smelled cold and fishlike. There were kinder things in lakes and lochs, but the sea spawns mostly horror stories, not gentle brownies who keep houses clean.

“You smell like a coyote,” he said finally. “You look like a coyote. But no coyote ever wandered Underhill to the Sea King’s Realm. What are you?”

“Gnädiger Herr,” said Zee cautiously from somewhere just behind me. “This one is working for us and got lost.”

Sometimes I loved that old man as much as I loved anyone, but I’d never been so happy to hear his voice.

The sea fae didn’t move except to raise his eyes until I was pretty sure he was looking Zee in the face. I didn’t want to look away, but I took a step back until my hip hit Zee’s leg to reassure myself that he wasn’t just a figment of my imagination.

“She is not fae,” said the fae.

“Neither is she human.” There was something in Zee’s voice that was awfully close to deference, and I knew I’d been right to be afraid.

The stranger abruptly strode forward and dropped to one knee in front of me. He grabbed my muzzle without so much as a by-your-leave and ran his free hand over my eyes and ears. His icy hands weren’t ungentle, but even so, without Zee’s nudge I might have objected. He dropped my head abruptly and stood again.

“She wears no elf-salve, nor does she stink of the drugs that occasionally drop a lost one here to wander and die. Last I knew, rare though it is, your magic was not such as could do this. So how did she get here?”

As he spoke, I realized that it wasn’t Harvard I heard in his voice, but Merrie Old England.

“I don’t know, mein Herr. I suspect that she doesn’t know either. You of all people know that the Underhill is fickle and lonely. If my friend broke the glamour that hides the entrances, it would never keep her out.”

The sea creature grew very still—and the waves of the ocean subsided like a cat gathering itself to pounce. The wisps of clouds in the sky darkened.

“And how,” he said very quietly, “would she break our glamour?”

“I brought her to help us discover a murderer because she has a very good nose,” Zee said. “If glamour has a weakness, it is scent. Once she broke that part of the illusion, the rest followed. She is not powerful or a threat.”

The ocean struck without warning. A giant wave slapped me, robbing me of my footing and my sight. In one bare instant it stole the heat of my body so I don’t think I could have breathed even if my nose wasn’t buried in water.

A strong hand grabbed my tail and yanked hard. It hurt, but I didn’t protest because the water was retreating, and without that grip, it would have carried me out with it. As soon as the water had subsided to my knees, Zee released his hold.

Like me, he was drenched, though he wasn’t shivering. I coughed to get out the saltwater I’d swallowed, shook my fur off, then looked around, but the sea fae was gone.

Zee touched my back. “I’ll have to carry you to take you back.” He didn’t wait for a response, just picked me up. There was a nauseating moment when all my senses swam around me, and then he set me down on the tile of the bathroom floor. The room was dark as pitch.

Zee turned on the light, which looked yellow and artificial after the colors of the sunset.

“Can you continue?” he asked me.

I looked at him, but he gave his head a sharp shake. He didn’t want to talk about what happened. It irked me, but I’d read enough fairy tales to know that sometimes talking about the fae too directly lets them listen in. When I got him out of the reservation, I would get answers if I had to sit on him.

Until then, I put my curiosity aside to consider his question. I sneezed twice to clear my nose and then put it down on the floor to collect more people from this house.

This time Zee came with me, staying back so as not to interfere, but close on my heels. He didn’t say anything more and I ignored him as I struggled for an explanation of what had just happened to me. Was this house real? Zee told the other fae that I had broken the glamour—wouldn’t that mean that it was the other landscape that was real? But that would mean that there was an entire ocean here, which seemed really unlikely—though I could still smell it if I tried. I knew that Underhill was the fairy realm, but the stories about it were pretty vague where they weren’t outright contradictory.

The sun had truly set and Zee turned on lights as we went. Though I could see fine in the dark, I was grateful for the light. My heart was still certain that we were going to be eaten, and it pounded away at twice its usual speed.

Death’s unlovely perfume drew my attention to a closed door. If I’d been on my own, I could have opened the door easily enough, but I believe in making use of others. I whined (coyotes can’t bark, not like a dog) and Zee obediently opened the door and revealed the stairs going down into a basement. It was the first of the houses that had had a basement—unless they’d been hidden somehow.

I bounded down the stairs. Zee turned on the lights and followed me down. Most of the basement looked like basements look: junk stored without rhyme or reason, unfinished walls and cement floor. I padded across the floor, following death to a door, shut tight. Zee opened that one without me asking and I found, at last, the place where the fae who had lived here was murdered.

Unlike the rest of the house, this room had been immaculate before the resident had been murdered. Underneath the rust-colored stains of the fae’s blood, the tile floor gleamed. Cracked leather-bound tomes with the authentic lumpiness of pre–printing press books sat intermingled with battered paperbacks and college math and biology texts in bookcases that lined the walls.

This room was the bloodiest I’d seen so far—and given the first murder, that was saying something. Even dried and old, the blood was overwhelming. It had pooled, stained, and sprayed as the fae had fought with his attacker. The lower shelves of three bookcases were dotted with it. Tables had been knocked over and a lamp was broken on the floor.

Maybe I wouldn’t have realized it if I hadn’t just been thinking about them, but the fae here had been a selkie. I had never met one before that I knew, but I’d been to zoos and I knew what seals smelled like.

I didn’t want to walk into the room. I wasn’t usually squeamish, but lately I’d been walking in enough blood. Where the blood had pooled—in the grout between tiles, on a book lying open, and against the base of one of the bookcases where the floor wasn’t quite level—it had rotted instead of dried. The room smelled of blood, seal, and decaying fish.

I avoided the worst of the mess where I could and tried not to think too much about what I couldn’t avoid. Gradually what my nose told me distracted me from the unpleasantness of my task. I quartered the room, while Zee waited just outside it.

As I started for the door, I caught something. Most of the blood here belonged to the fae, but on the floor, just in front of the door, were a few drops of blood that did not.

If Zee had been a police officer, I’d have shifted then and there to tell him what I’d found. But if I pointed my finger toward a suspect, I was pretty sure I knew what would happen to the person I pointed it at.

Werewolves dealt with their criminals the same way. I don’t have any quarrel with killing murderers, but if I’m the one doing the accusing, I’d like to be absolutely certain, given the consequences. And the person I’d be accusing was an unlikely choice for killing this many fae.

Zee followed me up the stairs, turning off lights and closing doors as we went. I didn’t bother looking further. There had only been two scents in the basement room besides Uncle Mike’s. Either the selkie didn’t bring guests into his library, or he had cleaned since the last time. Most damning of all was the blood.

Zee opened the front door and I stepped out into full night where the silvered moon had fully risen. How long had I sat staring at the impossible sea?

A shadow stirred on the porch and became Uncle Mike. He smelled of malt and hot wings, and I could see that he was still dressed in his tavern-keeper clothes: loose ivory-colored khakis and green T-shirt with his own name in the possessive across his chest in sparkling white letters. It wasn’t egocentrism; Uncle Mike’s was the name of his tavern.

“She’s wet,” he said, his Irish thicker than Zee’s German.

“Seawater,” Zee told him. “She’ll be all right.”

Uncle Mike’s handsome face tightened. “Seawater.”

“I thought you were working tonight?” There was a warning in Zee’s voice as he changed the topic. I wasn’t sure whether he didn’t want to talk about my encounter with the sea fae, or if he was protecting me—or both.

“BFA was out patrolling looking for you two. Cobweb called me because she was worried they’d interfere. I sent the BFA off with a flea in their ear—they have no authority to tell you how long you can keep a visitor—but I’m afraid we’ve drawn their attention to you, Mercy. They might cause you trouble.”

His words were nothing out of the ordinary, but there was something darker about his voice that had nothing to do with the night and everything to do with power.

He looked back at Zee. “Any luck?”

Zee shrugged. “We’ll have to wait until she changes back.” He looked at me. “I think it is time to bring this to an end. You see too much, Mercy, when it isn’t safe.”

The hair on the back of my neck told me something was watching us from the shadows. I drew the wind in my nose and knew it was more than two or three. I looked around and growled, letting my nose wrinkle up to display my fangs.

Uncle Mike raised his eyebrows at me, then took a look around himself. He tipped up his chin and said, his eyes on me, “You will all go home now.” He waited and then said something sharp in Gaelic. I heard a crash and someone took off down the sidewalk in a clatter of hooves.

“We’re alone now,” he told me. “You can go ahead and change.”

I gave him a look, then glanced at Zee. Satisfied I had his attention, I hopped off the porch and trotted toward the truck.

Uncle Mike’s presence raised the stakes. I might have been able to talk Zee into waiting for some other evidence to confirm my suspicions—but I didn’t know Uncle Mike as well.

I thought furiously, but by the time I made it to the truck, I was as certain as I could be without seeing him kill that the blood I’d found belonged to the murderer. I’d been suspicious of him even before I’d found blood. His scent had been all over the other houses, even the one that had been mostly scrubbed clean—as if he’d been searching the houses for something.

Zee followed me to the truck. He opened my door, then closed it behind me before rejoining Uncle Mike on the porch. I shifted into human form and dove into my warm clothes. The night air was warm, but my wet hair was still cold against my damp skin. I didn’t bother putting my tennis shoes back on, but got out of the truck barefoot.

On the porch, they waited patiently, reminding me of my cat, who could watch a mouse’s hole for hours without moving.

“Is there any reason for BFA to have sent someone into all the murder scenes?” I asked.

“The BFA can do random searches,” Zee told me. “But they were not called in here.”

“You mean there was a Beefa in each house?” Uncle Mike asked. “Who, and how do you know him?”

Zee’s eyes narrowed suddenly. “There’s only one BFA agent she would know. O’Donnell was at the gate when I brought her in.”

I nodded. “His scent was in every house and his blood was on the floor in the library inside here.” I tipped my head at the house. “His was the only scent in the library besides the selkie’s and yours, Uncle Mike.”

He smiled at me. “It wasn’t me.” Still with that charming smile he looked at Zee. “I’d like to talk to you alone.”

“Mercy, why don’t you take my truck. Just leave it at your friend’s house and I’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

I took a step off the porch before I turned around. “The one I met in there…” I tipped my head at the selkie’s house.

Zee sighed. “I did not bring you here to risk your life. The debt you owe us is not so large.”

“Is she in trouble?” asked Uncle Mike.

“Bringing a walker into the reservation might not have been as good an idea as you thought,” Zee said dryly. “But I think matters are settled—unless we keep talking about it.”

Uncle Mike’s face took on that pleasant blankness he used to conceal his thoughts.

Zee looked at me. “No more, Mercy. This one time be content with not knowing.”

I wasn’t, of course. But Zee had no intention of telling me more.

I started back to the truck and Zee cleared his throat very quietly. I looked at him, but he just stared back. Just as he had when he was teaching me to put together a car and I’d forgotten a step. Forgotten a step…right.

I met Uncle Mike’s gaze. “This ends my debt to you and yours for killing the second vampire with your artifacts. Paid in full.”

He gave me a slow, sly smile that made me glad Zee had reminded me. “Of course.”

Tumbleweed was held in Howard Amon Park, right off the Columbia River in Richland. The stages were scattered as far apart as could be managed to minimize interference between performances. The River Stage, where Samuel was to perform, was about as far from available parking as it was possible to get. Normally that wouldn’t have bothered me, but karate practice this morning hadn’t gone so well. Grumbling to myself, I limped slowly across the grass.

The park was still mostly empty of anyone except musicians toting various instrument cases as they trudged across the vast green fields on their way to whatever stage they were performing on. Okay, the park isn’t really that huge, but when your leg hurts—or when you’re hauling a string bass from one end to the other—it’s big enough.

The bassist in question and I exchanged weary nods of mutual misery as we passed each other.

Warren and Kyle were already seated on the grass in front of the stage and Samuel was arranging his instruments on various stands, when I finally made it.

“Something wrong?” Kyle asked with a frown as I sat down next to him. “You weren’t limping last night.”

I wiggled on the lumpy, dew-dampened grass until I was comfortable. “Nothing important. Someone caught me a good one on my thigh at karate practice this morning. It’ll settle down in a bit. I see the button men found you already.”

Tumbleweed was nominally free, but you could show your support by purchasing a button for two dollars…and the button men were relentless.

“We got one for you, too.” Warren reached across Kyle and handed a button to me.

I pinned it on my shoe, where it wouldn’t be immediately obvious. “I bet I can attract four button men before lunch,” I told Kyle.

He laughed. “Do I look like a newbie? Four before lunch is too easy.”

More people gathered in front of Samuel’s stage than I’d expected, given that his was one of the first performances.

I recognized some of the emergency room personnel who Samuel worked with near the center of the audience with a larger group. They were setting up lawn chairs and chattering together in such a fashion that I was pretty sure they all worked at Samuel’s hospital.

Then there were the werewolves.

Unlike the medical personnel, they didn’t sit together, but scattered themselves here and there around the fringes. All of the Tri-City werewolves, except for Adam, the Alpha, were still pretending to be human—so they mostly avoided hanging out together in public. They’d all have heard Samuel sing before, but probably not at a real performance because he didn’t do them often.

A cool breeze came off the Columbia River, just a hop, skip, and a jump over a narrow footpath away—which was why the stage was the River Stage. The morning was warm, as early fall mornings in the Tri-Cities often are, so the slight edge to the wind was more welcome than not.

One of the festival volunteers, wearing a painter’s apron covered with Tumbleweed buttons from this and previous years, welcomed us to this year’s festival and thanked us all for coming. He spent a few minutes talking about sponsors and raffles while the audience shifted restlessly before he introduced Samuel as the Tri-Cities’ own folksinging physician.

We clapped and whistled as the announcer bounced down the stairs and back to the sound station where he would keep the speakers behaving properly. Someone settled in behind me, but I didn’t look around, because Samuel walked to center stage with his violin dangling almost carelessly from one hand.

He was wearing a cobalt blue dress shirt that set off his eyes, tipping the balance from gray to blue. He’d tucked the shirt into new black jeans that were tight enough to show off the muscle in his legs.

I had seen him just this morning as he drank his coffee and I ran out the door. There was no reason that he should still affect me like this.

Most werewolves are attractive; it goes with the permanently young-and-muscled look. Samuel had more, though. And it wasn’t only that extra zap that the more dominant wolves have.

Samuel looked like a person you could trust—something about the hint of humor that lurked in the back of his deep-set eyes and the corner of his mouth. It was part of what made him such a good doctor. When he told his patients they were going to be fine, they believed him.

His eyes locked on mine for a moment and the quirk of his mouth powered up to a smile.

It warmed me to my toes, that smile: reminded me of a time when Samuel was my whole world, a time when I believed in a knight in shining armor who could make me happy and safe.

Samuel knew it, too, because the smile changed to a grin—until he looked behind me. The pleasure cooled in his eyes, but he kept the grin, turning it on the rest of his audience. That’s how I knew for certain that the man who’d sat behind me was Adam.

Not that I’d been in much doubt. The wind was coming from the wrong direction to give me a good scent, but dominant wolves exude power, and Adam—all apart from him being the Alpha—was nearly as dominant as they come. It was like having a car battery sitting behind me and being hooked up with a pair of wires.

I kept my eyes forward, knowing that as long as my attention was on him, Samuel wouldn’t get too upset. I wished Adam had chosen to sit somewhere else. But if he’d been that kind of a person, he wouldn’t be an Alpha—the most dominant wolf in his pack. Almost as dominant as Samuel.

The reason Samuel wasn’t the pack Alpha was complicated. First, Adam had been Alpha here as long as there had been a pack in the Tri-Cities (which was before my time). Even if a wolf is more dominant, it is not an easy matter to oust an Alpha—and in North America, that never happens without the consent of the Marrok, the wolf who rules here. Since the Marrok was Samuel’s father, presumably he could have gained permission—except that Samuel had no desire to be Alpha. He said that being a doctor gave him more than enough people to take care of. So he was officially a lone wolf, a wolf outside of pack protection. He lived in my trailer, not a hundred yards from Adam’s house. I don’t know why he chose to live there, but I know why I let him: because otherwise he’d still be sleeping on my front porch.

Samuel had a way of making sure people did what he wanted them to.

Testing the violin’s temperament, Samuel’s bow danced across the strings with a delicate precision won through years…probably centuries of practice. I’d known him all my life, but it wasn’t until less than a year ago that I’d found out about those “centuries.”

He just didn’t act like an old werewolf. Old werewolves were uptight, easy to anger, and especially in this last hundred years of rapid changes (I’m told), were more likely to be hermits than doctors in busy emergency rooms with all that new technology. He was one of the few werewolves I knew who really liked people, human people or werewolf people. He even liked them in crowds.

Not that he would have gone out of his way to perform at a folk music festival. That took a little creative blackmail.

It wasn’t me. Not this time.

The stresses of working in an emergency room—especially since he was a werewolf and his reaction to blood and death could be a little unpredictable—meant that he took his guitar or violin to work and played when he had a chance.

One of his nurses heard him play and had him signed up for the festival before he could figure out how to get out of it. Not that he tried very hard. Oh, he made a lot of noise, but I know Samuel. If he really hadn’t wanted to do it, a bulldozer wouldn’t have gotten him up there.

He tuned the violin with one hand while he held it under his chin and plucked with the other. A few measures of a song and the crowd sat forward in anticipation, but I knew better. He was still warming up. When he really started playing, everyone would know it: he came alive in front of an audience.

Sometimes watching Samuel perform was more like a stand-up comedy act than a concert. It all depended on how he was feeling at the moment.

It happened at last, the magic moment when Samuel sucked his audience in. The old violin made a shivering sound, like an old hoot owl in the night, and I knew he’d decided to be a musician today. All the quiet whispers stopped and every eye lifted to the man on the stage. Centuries of practice and being a werewolf might give him speed and dexterity, but the music came from his Welshman’s soul. He gave the audience a shy smile and the mournful sound became song.

While getting my history degree, I’d lost any romantic notions about Bonnie Prince Charlie, whose attempt to regain the throne of England had brought Scotland to its knees. Samuel’s rendition of “Over the Sea to Skye” brought tears to my eyes anyway. There were words to that song, and Samuel could sing them, but for now, he let the violin speak for him.

As he played the last notes softly, over the top of it he began singing “Barbara Allen,” as close to a universally known song among folksingers as “Stairway to Heaven” is to guitarists. After the first few measures, he sang the rest of the first verse a capella. When he hit the chorus, he brought in the violin in eerie descant. By the second verse, invited by his smile, the audience was singing the chorus, too. The singing was tentative until one of the other professional groups who had been walking by on the black-top path stopped and sang, too.

He gave them a nod at the last verse and stopped singing, letting the other group showcase the tight harmony that was their trademark. When the song ended, we cheered and clapped as he thanked his “guest performers.” The audience had been filling in as he played and we all scooted a little closer together.

He set the violin down and picked up his guitar to play a Simon and Garfunkel piece. Not even the stupid Jet Ski that kept roaring past along the river a hundred yards away detracted much from his performance. He launched into a silly pirate song then put his guitar down and took up a bodhran—a wide flat drum played with a double-ended stick—and broke into a sea chantey.

I noticed the Cathers, the elderly couple who lived next door to me, sitting on a pair of camp chairs on the other side of the crowd.

“I hope it doesn’t rain. We wouldn’t want to miss seeing Samuel play,” she’d told me yesterday morning when I’d found her tending her flowers. “He’s such a nice man.”

Of course she didn’t have to live with him, I thought, chin on my knee as I watched him play. Not that Samuel wasn’t “a nice man,” but he was also stubborn, controlling, and pushy. I was stubborn and meaner than he was, though.

Someone whispered a polite “excuse me” and sat in the small square of grass in front of me. I found it a little too close for someone I didn’t know, so I scooted away a few inches, until my back rested firmly against Adam’s leg.

“I’m glad you talked him into playing,” murmured the Alpha werewolf. “He’s really in his element in front of a crowd, isn’t he?”

“I didn’t talk him into it,” I said. “It was one of the nurses he works with.”

“I once heard the Marrok and both of his sons, Samuel and Charles, sing together,” murmured Warren, so softly I doubt anyone else heard him. “It was…” He turned away from the stage and caught Adam’s gaze over the top of Kyle’s head to shrug his inability to find the words.

“I’ve heard them,” Adam said. “It’s not something you forget.”

Samuel had picked up his old Welsh harp while we were talking. He played a few notes to give the tech time to rush around and adjust the sound system for the softer tones of the new instrument. He ran his eyes over the crowd and his gaze stopped on me. If I could have scooted away from Adam without sitting on top of a stranger, I would have. Adam saw Samuel’s gaze, too, and put a possessive hand on my shoulder.

“Stop that,” I snapped.

Kyle saw what was happening and put his arm around my shoulders in a hug, knocking Adam’s hand away in the process. Adam snarled softly, but he moved back a few inches. He liked Kyle—and better yet, since Kyle was gay and human, he didn’t view him as any kind of threat.

Samuel took a deep breath and smiled, a little stiffly, as he introduced his last piece. I relaxed against Kyle as harp and harper made an old Welsh tune come to life. Welsh was Samuel’s first language—when he was upset, you could still hear it in his voice. It was a language made for music: soft, lilting, and magical.

The wind picked up a little, making the green leaves rustle an accompaniment to Samuel’s music. When he finished, the sound of the leaves was the only noise for a few heartbeats. Then the jerk on the stupid Jet Ski came buzzing by, breaking the spell. The crowd rose to their feet and broke into thunderous applause.

My cell phone had been vibrating in my pocket off and on for most of the song, so I slipped away while Samuel packed away his instruments and vacated the stage for the next performer.

When I found a relatively quiet place, I pulled out the phone to find that I had missed five calls—all of them from a number I wasn’t familiar with. I dialed it anyway. Anyone who called five times in as many minutes was in quite a lather.

It was answered on the first ring.

“Mercy, there is trouble.”

“Uncle Mike?” It was his voice, and I didn’t know anyone else who spoke with such a thick Irish accent. But I’d never heard him sound like this.

“The human police have Zee,” he said.

“What?” But I knew. I had known what would happen to someone who was killing fae. Old creatures revert to older laws when push comes to shove. I’d known when I told them who the killer was that I was signing O’Donnell’s death warrant—but I had been pretty sure that they would do it in such a way that blame would not have fallen anywhere. Something that looked accidental or like a suicide.

I hadn’t expected them to be clumsy enough to attract the attention of the police.

My phone buzzed, telling me that there was another call coming in, but I ignored it. Zee had murdered a man and gotten caught. “How did it happen?”

“We were surprised,” Uncle Mike said. “He and I went to talk to O’Donnell.”

“Talk?” Disbelief was sharp in my voice. They had not gone to his house to talk.

He gave a short laugh. “We would have talked first, whatever you think of us. We drove to O’Donnell’s house after you left. We rang the bell, but no one came to the door, though there was a light on. After we rang a third time, Zee opened the door and we entered. We found O’Donnell in the living room. Someone had beaten us to him, ripped his head from his body, a wounding such as I have not seen since the giants roamed the earth, Mercedes.”

“You didn’t kill him.” I could breathe again. If Zee hadn’t killed O’Donnell, there was still a chance for him.

“No. And as we stood there dumb and still, the police came with their lights and bean sí cries.” He paused and I heard a noise. I recognized the sound from my karate. He’d hit something wooden and it had broken.

“He told me to hide myself. His talents aren’t up to hiding from the police. So I watched as they put him into their car and drove away.”

There was a pause. “I could have stopped them,” he said in a guttural voice. “I could have stopped them all, but I let the humans take Siebold Adelbertskrieger (the German version of the name, Adelbertsmiter, Zee was using), the Dark Smith, to jail.” Outrage didn’t completely mask the fear in his voice.

“No, no,” I told him. “Killing police officers is always a bad plan.”

I don’t think he heard me; he just kept talking. “I did as he said and now I find that no matter how I look at it, my help will only make his position worse. This is not a good time to be fae, Mercy. If we rally to Zee’s defense, it could turn into a blood bath.”

He was right. A rash of deaths and violence not a month past had left the Tri-Cities raw and bleeding. The tide of escalated crime had stopped with the breaking of a heat wave that had been tormenting us all at the same time. The cooler weather was a fine reason for the cessation of the pall of anger that had hung in the air. Driving the demon that was causing the violence back to the outer limits by killing its host vampire was an even better one, though not for the consumption of the public. They only knew about a few werewolves and the nicer side of the fae. Everyone was safer as long as the general population didn’t know about things like vampires and demons—especially the general population.

However, there was a strong minority who were murmuring that there had been too much violence to be explained by a heat wave. After all, heat came every summer, and we’d never had a rash of murders and assaults like that. Some of those people were looking pretty hard at blaming the fae. Only last week there had been a group of demonstrators outside the Richland Courthouse.

That the werewolves had, just this year, admitted their existence wasn’t helping matters much. The whole issue had gone as smoothly as anyone could have hoped, but nothing was perfect. The whole ugly anti-fae thing, which had subsided after the fae had voluntarily retired to the reservations, had been getting stronger again through the whole country. The hate groups were eager to widen their target to include werewolves and any other “godless” creatures, human or not.

In Oklahoma, there had been a witch burning last month. The ironic thing was that the woman who burned hadn’t, it turned out, been a witch, a practitioner, or even Wiccan—which are three different things, though one person might be all three.

She’d been a good Catholic girl who liked tattoos, piercings, and wearing black clothing.

In the Tri-Cities, a place not noted for political activism or hate groups, the local anti-fae, anti-werewolf groups had been getting noticeably stronger.

That didn’t mean spray-painted walls or broken windows and rioting. This was the Tri-Cities, after all, not Eugene or Seattle. At last week’s Arts Festival, they’d had an information booth and I’d seen at least two different flyers they’d sent out in the mail this past month. Tri-City hate groups are civilized like that—so far.

O’Donnell could change that. If his death was as dramatic as Uncle Mike indicated, O’Donnell’s murder would make every paper in the country. I tried to quell my panic.

I wasn’t worried about the law—I was pretty sure that Zee could walk out of any jail cell, anytime he wanted. With glamour he could change his appearance until even I wouldn’t know him. But it wouldn’t be enough to save him. I wasn’t sure innocence would be enough to save him.

“Do you have a lawyer?” Our local werewolf pack didn’t have one officially, though I think Adam had a lawyer he kept on the payroll for his security business. But there weren’t nearly as many werewolves as there were fae.

“No. The Gray Lords own several firms on the East Coast, but it was deemed unnecessary for our reservation here. We are low-key.” He hesitated. “Fae who are suspected of crimes tend not to survive to need lawyers.”

“I know,” I replied, swallowing around the knot in my throat.

The Gray Lords, like the werewolves’ Marrok, were driven to preserve their species. Bran, the Marrok, was scrupulously fair, though brutal. The Gray Lords’ methods had a strong tendency to be more expedient than fair. With prejudice so loud and strong, they’d want to hush this up as soon as possible.

“How much danger is Zee in?” I asked.

Uncle Mike sighed. “I don’t know. This crime is about to become very public. I do not see how his death would benefit the fae more than his survival right now—especially since he is innocent. I have called and told Them that this death is not on his head.” Them was the Gray Lords. “If we can prove his innocence…I don’t know, Mercy. It depends upon who actually did kill O’Donnell. It wasn’t a human—maybe a troll could have done this—or a werewolf. A vampire could have, but O’Donnell was not killed for food. Someone was very, very angry with him. If it is a fae, the Gray Lords will not care who it was, just that the case is solved quickly and finally.”

Quickly, like before a trial could call more attention to the crime. Quickly, like a suicide with a note admitting guilt.

My phone beeped politely, telling me I had a second call.

“I assume you think that I can be a help?” I asked—otherwise he’d never have called me.

“We cannot come to his aid. He needs a good lawyer, and someone to find out who killed O’Donnell. Someone needs to talk to the police and tell them that Zee did not kill this scum. Someone they will believe. You have a friend on the Kennewick police force.”

“O’Donnell died in Kennewick?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll find a lawyer,” I told Uncle Mike. Kyle was a divorce attorney, but he would know a good criminal defense lawyer. “Maybe the police will keep the worst of the details out of their press releases. They’re not going to be all that interested in having the press of the world descend upon them. Even if they just tell people he was beheaded, it doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Maybe we can buy a little time with the Gray Lords if it stays out of the major papers. I’ll talk to the policeman I know, but he might not listen.”

“If you need money,” he said, “let me know. Zee doesn’t have much, I don’t think, though you can never tell with him. I do, and I can get more if we need it. But it will have to go through you. The fae cannot be more involved with this than we already are. So you hire a lawyer and we will pay you whatever it costs.”

“All right,” I said.

I hung up, my stomach in knots. My phone said I’d missed two calls. Both of them were from my friend Tony the cop’s cell phone. I sat down on the knob of a tree root and called him back.

“Montenegro here,” he said.

“I know about Zee,” I told him. “He didn’t kill anyone.”

There was a little pause.

“Is it that you don’t think he could do something like this, or do you know something specifically about the crime?”

“Zee’s perfectly capable of killing,” I told him. “However, I have it on very good authority that he didn’t kill this person.” I didn’t tell him that if Zee had found O’Donnell alive, he would most likely have killed him. Somehow, that didn’t seem helpful.

“Who is your very good authority—and did they happen to mention who did kill our victim?”

I pinched the top of my nose. “I can’t tell you—and they don’t know—just that the killer was not Zee. He found O’Donnell dead.”

“Can you give me something more substantial? He was found kneeling over the body with blood on his hands and the blood was still warm. Mr. Adelbertsmiter is a fae, registered with the BFA for the past seven years. Nothing human did this, Mercy. I can’t talk about the specifics, but nothing human did this.”

I cleared my throat. “I don’t suppose you could keep that last bit out of the official report, eh? Until you catch the real killer, it would be a very good idea not to have people stirred up against the fae.”

Tony was a subtle person, and he caught what I wasn’t saying. “Is this like when you said it would be very good if the police didn’t go looking for the fae as a cause of the rise in violent crime this summer?”

“Exactly like that.” Well, not quite, and honesty impelled me to correct myself. “This time, though, the police themselves won’t be in danger. But Zee will, and the real killer will be free to kill elsewhere.”

“I need more than your word,” he said finally. “Our expert consultant is convinced that Zee is our culprit, and her word carries a lot of weight.”

“Your expert consultant?” I asked. As far as I knew, I was the closest thing to an expert consultant on fae that the Tri-Cities police forces had.

“Dr. Stacy Altman, a folklore specialist from the University of Oregon, flew in this morning. She is paid a lot, which means my bosses think we ought to listen to her advice.”

“Maybe I should charge more when I consult for you,” I told him.

“I’ll double your paycheck next time,” he promised.

I got paid exactly nothing for my advice, which was fine with me. I was liable to be in enough trouble without the local supernatural community thinking I was narking to the police.

“Look,” I told him. “This is unofficial.” Zee hadn’t told me not to say anything about the deaths on the reservation—because he hadn’t thought he would have to. It was something I already knew.

However, if I spoke fast, maybe I could get it all out before I thought about how unhappy they might be with me for telling the police. “There have been some deaths among the fae—and good evidence that O’Donnell was the killer. Which was why Zee went to O’Donnell’s house. If someone found out before Zee, they might have killed O’Donnell.”

If that were true, it might save Zee (at least from the local justice system), but the political consequences could be horrific. I’d been just a kid when the fae had first come out, but I remembered the KKK burning a house with its fae occupants still in it and the riots in the streets of Houston and Baltimore that provided the impetus to confine the fae on reservations.

But it was Zee who mattered. The rest of the fae could rot as long as Zee was safe.

“I haven’t heard anything about people dying in Fairyland.”

“Why would you?” I asked. “They don’t bring in outsiders.”

“Then how do you know about it?”

I’d told him I wasn’t a fae or a werewolf—but some things bear repeating so eventually they believe you. That’s the theory I was working with. “I told you I’m not fae,” I said. “I’m not. But I know some things and they thought I might be able to help.” That sounded really lame.

“That’s lame, Mercy.”

“Someday,” I told him, “I’ll tell you all about it. Right now, I can’t. I don’t think I’m supposed to be telling you about this either, but it’s important. I believe O’Donnell has killed”—I had to go over it in my head—“seven fae in the past month.” Zee hadn’t taken me to the other murder scenes. “You aren’t looking at a law enforcement agent who was killed by the bad guys. You are looking at a bad guy who was killed by—” Whom? Good guys? More bad guys? “Someone.”

“Someone strong enough to rip a grown man’s head off, Mercy. Both of his collarbones were broken by the force of whatever did it. Our high-paid consultant seems to think Zee could have done it.”

Oh? I frowned at my cell phone.

“What kind of fae does she say that Zee is? How much does she know about them?” I figured if Zee hadn’t told me any of the stories about his past, and I had looked for them, this consultant could not possibly know any more than I did.

“She said he’s a gremlin—so does he, for that matter. At least on his registration papers. He’s not said a word since we picked him up.”

I had to think for a minute on how to best help Zee. Finally I decided that since he was actually innocent, the more truth that came to light, the better off he would be.

“You’re consultant isn’t worth squat,” I told Tony. “Either she doesn’t know as much as she says she does, or she’s got her own agenda.”

“Why do you say that?”

“There are no such things as gremlins,” I told him. “It’s a term made up by British pilots in the Great War as an explanation for odd things that kept their planes from working. Zee is a gremlin only because he claims he is.”

“Then what is he?”

“A Mettalzauber, one of the metalworking fae. Which is a very broad category that contains very few members. Since I met him, I’ve done a lot of research on German fae out of sheer curiosity, but I’ve never found anything quite like him. I know he works metal because I’ve seen him do it. I don’t know if he’d have had the strength to rip someone’s head off, but I do know that there is no way that your consultant would know one way or another. Especially if she’s calling him a gremlin and acting like that is a real designation.”

“World War One?” asked Tony thoughtfully.

“You can look it up on the Internet,” I assured him. “By the Second World War, Disney was using them in cartoons.”

“Maybe that’s when he was born. Maybe he’s where the legends come from. I could see a German fae tampering with the enemy’s planes.”

“Zee is a lot older than World War One.”

“How do you know?”

It was a good question, and I didn’t have a proper answer for it. He’d never really told me how old he was.

“When he is angry,” I said slowly, “he swears in German. Not modern German, which I can mostly understand. I had an English prof who read us Beowulf in the original language—Zee sounds like that.”

“I thought Beowulf was written in an old version of English, not German.”

Here I was on firmer ground. History degrees aren’t entirely useless. “English and German both come from the same roots. The differences between medieval English and German are a lot smaller than the modern languages.”

Tony made an unhappy noise. “Damn it, Mercy. I have a brutal murder and the brass wants it solved yesterday. Especially as we have a suspect caught red-handed. Now you’re telling me that he didn’t do it and that our high-paid, expert consultant is lying to us or doesn’t know as much as she says she does. That O’Donnell was a murderer—though the fae will probably deny that any murders ever took place—but if I so much as ask about it, we’re going to have the Feds breathing down our necks because now this crime involves Fairyland. All this without one hard, cold piece of evidence.”

“Yes.”

He swore nastily. “The hell of it is that I believe you, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how I’m going to tell any of this to my boss—especially as I’m not really in charge of this case.”

There was a long silence on both our parts.

“You need to get him a lawyer,” he said. “He’s not talking, which is wise of him. But he needs to have a lawyer. Even if you are sure he is innocent, especially if he is innocent, he needs a very good lawyer.”

“All right,” I agreed. “I don’t suppose I could get in to get a look”—a sniff, actually—“at the crime scene?” Maybe I’d be able to find out something that modern science could not—like someone who’d been at one of the other murder sites.

He sighed. “Get a lawyer and ask him. I don’t think I’m going to be able to help you with that. Even if he gets you in, you’ll have to wait until our crime scene people are through with it. You’d do better to hire a private investigator, though, someone who knows how to look at a crime scene.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll find a lawyer.” Hiring a human investigator would either be a waste of money—or a death sentence for the investigator if he happened upon some secret or other that the Gray Lords didn’t want made public. Tony didn’t need to know that.

“Tony, make sure you are looking farther than the length of your nose for a killer. It wasn’t Zee.”

He sighed. “All right. All right. I’m not assigned to this case, but I’ll talk to some of the guys who are.”

We said our good-byes and I looked around for Kyle.

I found him standing in a small crowd a little ways away, far enough from the stage that their conversation didn’t interfere with the next performer’s music. Samuel and his instrument cases were in the center of the group.

I put my cell phone in my back pocket (a habit that has destroyed two phones so far) and tried to blank my face. It wouldn’t help with the werewolves, who would be able to smell my distress, but at least I wouldn’t have complete strangers stop and ask me what was wrong.

There was an earnest-looking young man wearing a tie-dyed shirt talking at Samuel, who was watching him with amusement apparent only to people who knew him very well.

“I haven’t ever heard that version of the last song you played,” the young man was saying. “That’s not the usual melody used with it. I wanted to find out where you heard it. You did an excellent job—except for the pronunciation of the third word in the first verse. This”—he said something that sounded vaguely Welsh—“is how you said it, but it should really be”—another unpronounceable word that sounded just like the first one he’d uttered. I may have grown up in a werewolf pack led by a Welshman, but English was the common language and neither the Marrok nor Samuel his son used Welsh often enough to give me an ear for it. “I just thought that since everything else was so well done, you should know.”

Samuel gave him a little bow and said about fifteen or twenty Welsh-sounding words.

The tie-dyed man frowned. “If that’s where you looked for pronunciation, it is no wonder you had a problem. Tolkien based his Elvish on Welsh and Finnish.”

“You understood what he said?” Adam asked.

“Oh, please. It was the inscription on the One Ring, you know, One Ring to Rule Them All…everyone knows that much.”

I stopped where I was, bemused despite the urgency of my need. A folk song nerd, who would have thought?

Samuel grinned. “Very good. I don’t speak any more Elvish than that, but I couldn’t resist playing with you a little. An old Welshman taught me the song. I’m Samuel Cornick, by the way. You are?”

“Tim Milanovich.”

“Very good to meet you, Tim. Are you performing later?”

“I’m doing a workshop with a friend.” He smiled shyly. “You might like to attend it: Celtic folk music. Two o’clock Sunday in the Community Center. You play very well, but if you want to make it in the music business, you need to organize your songs better, get a theme—like Celtic folk songs. Come to my class, and I’ll give you a few ideas.”

Samuel gave him a grave smile, though I knew the chances of Samuel “organizing” his music was about an icicle’s chance in Hell. But he lied, politely enough. “I’ll try to catch it. Thank you.”

Tim Milanovich shook Samuel’s hand and then wandered off, leaving only the werewolves and Kyle behind.

As soon as he was out of earshot, Samuel’s eyes focused on me. “What’s wrong, Mercy?”

Kyle found a lawyer for me. He assured me that she was expensive, a pain in the neck, and the best criminal defense attorney this side of Seattle. She wasn’t happy to be defending a fae, but, Kyle told me, that wouldn’t affect her performance, only her price. She lived in Spokane, but she agreed that time was of the essence. By three that afternoon she was in Kennewick.

Once assured that Zee wasn’t talking to the police, she’d demanded to meet with me in Kyle’s office first, before she went to the police station. To hear the story from me, she told Kyle, before she spoke to Zee or the police.

Since it was a Saturday, Kyle’s efficient staff and the other two lawyers who worked with him were gone, and we had his luxurious office suite to ourselves.

Jean Ryan was a fifty-something woman who had kept her figure with hard work that left taut muscles beneath the light linen suit she wore. Her pale, pale blond hair could only have come from a salon, but the surprisingly soft blue eyes owed nothing to contact lenses.

I don’t know what she thought when she looked at me, though I saw her eyes take in my broken nails and the ingrained dirt on my knuckles.

The check I wrote to her made me swallow hard and hope that Uncle Mike would be as good as his word and cover the amount—and this was for only the initial consultation. Maybe my mother had been right, and I should have been a lawyer. She always maintained that at least as a lawyer my contrary nature would be an asset.

Ms. Ryan tucked my check into her purse, then folded her hands on the top of the table in the smaller of Kyle’s two conference rooms. “Tell me what happened,” she said.

I had just started when Kyle cleared his throat. I stopped to look at him.

“Zee can’t afford for Jean to know just the safest part,” he told me. “You have to tell her everything. No one knows how to sniff out a lie like a criminal defense lawyer.”

“Everything?” I asked him, wide-eyed.

He patted my shoulder. “Jean can keep secrets. If she doesn’t know everything, then she’s defending your friend with one hand tied behind her back.”

I folded my arms across my chest and gave her a long, level look. There was nothing about her that inspired me to trust her with my secrets. A less motherly looking woman I’d seldom seen—except for those eyes.

Her expression was cool and vaguely unhappy—whether it was caused by driving a hundred and fifty miles on a Saturday, defending a fae, defending a murderer, or all three, I couldn’t tell.

I took a deep breath and sighed. “All right.”

“Start with the reason why Mr. Adelbertsmiter would feel the need to call in a mechanic to examine a murder scene,” she said without tripping on Zee’s name. I wondered uncharitably if she’d practiced it on the drive over. “It should begin, ‘Because I’m not just a mechanic, I’m a—’”

I narrowed my eyes at her; the vague dislike her appearance had instilled in me blossomed at her patronizing tone. Being raised among werewolves left me with a hearty dislike of patronizing tones. I didn’t like her, didn’t trust her to defend Zee—and only defending Zee would be worth exposing my secrets to her.

Kyle read my face. “She’s a bitch, Mercy. That’s what makes her so good. She’ll get your friend off if she can.”

One of her elegant eyebrows rose. “Thank you so very much for the character assessment, Kyle.”

Kyle smiled at her, a relaxed, full-faced smile. Whatever I thought of her, Kyle liked her. Since it couldn’t be her warm manner, it must mean she was good people.

I’d have felt better if she’d had pets. A dog or even a cat would have hinted at a warmth that I couldn’t see in her, but she only smelled of Chanel No. 5 and dry-cleaning fluid.

“Mercy,” coaxed Kyle in a tone he must have perfected with the women whose divorces he handled. “You have to tell her.”

I don’t go around telling people I’m a walker. Outside of my family, Kyle is the only human who knows.

“Freeing your friend might mean that you have to take the stand and tell a whole courtroom of people what you are,” said Ms. Ryan. “How much do you care about what happens to Mr. Adelbertsmiter?”

She thought I was a fae of some kind.

“Fine.” I got out of the sinfully comfortable chair and walked over to the window to look down at the traffic on Clearwater Avenue for a moment. I could see only one way to get this over with quickly.

“I’m not just a mechanic,” I told her, using her words, “I’m Zee’s friend.” I spun abruptly on my heel so that I faced her and pulled my T-shirt over my head, using my toes to push off my tennis shoes and socks at the same time.

“Are you trying to tell me you’re a stripper, too?” she asked, as I took off my bra and dropped it on top of my shirt on the floor. From her tone of voice, I could have been doing sit-ups instead of undressing.

I unsnapped my jeans and pushed them off my hips along with my underwear. When I stood wearing nothing but my tattoos, I called the coyote to me and sank into her shape. It was over in moments.

“Werewolf?” Ms. Ryan had scrambled out of her chair and was backing slowly to the door.

She couldn’t tell a coyote from a werewolf? That was like looking at a Geo Metro and calling it a Hum-Vee.

I could smell her fear and it satisfied something deep inside me that had been writhing under her cool, superior expression. I curled my upper lip so she could get a good look at my teeth. I might weigh only thirty or so pounds in my coyote shape, but I was a predator and could have killed a person if I wanted to: I’d killed a werewolf once with nothing but my fangs.

Kyle was up and beside her before she could run out the door. He took her arm in a firm grip.

“If she were a werewolf, you’d be in trouble,” Kyle told her. “Never run from a predator. Even the best behaved of them will have a hard time restraining themselves from chasing after prey.”

I sat down and yawned away the last of the change-tingles. It also gave her another look at my teeth, which seemed to bother her. Kyle gave me a chiding look, but continued soothing the other lawyer.

“She’s not a werewolf; they’re a lot bigger and scarier, trust me. She’s not fae either. She’s something a little different, native to our land, not imported like the fae or werewolves. The only thing she can do is shift to coyote and back.”

Not quite. I could kill vampires—as long as they were helpless, imprisoned by the day.

I swallowed, trying to get moisture to my suddenly dry mouth. I hated this sudden, gut-wrenching fear that assaulted me without warning. Every time I saw the little hitch in Warren’s walk, I knew I would destroy the vampires again—but I paid the cost of their elimination with these panic attacks..

Kyle’s calm explanation had given Ms. Ryan time to restore her calm facade. Kyle probably couldn’t tell how angry she was, but my keener senses weren’t fooled by the cool control she’d regained. She was still afraid, but her fear was not as strong as her rage.

Fear usually made me angry, too. Angry and careless. I wondered if showing her what I was had been such a good idea.

I changed back into my human self and ignored the growl of hunger that the two quick changes left me with. I put my clothes back on, taking time to tie my tennis shoes so that the bow was even before I resumed my seat, giving Ms. Ryan time to regain her composure.

She was seated when I looked up, but she’d moved to the other side of the table and taken the chair next to Kyle’s.

“Zee is my friend,” I told her again in measured tones. “He taught me everything I know about fixing cars and sold me his shop when he was forced to admit he was fae.”

She frowned at me. “Are you older than you look? You’d have been a child when the fae came out.”

“All of them didn’t come out at once,” I told her. Her question settled my nerves. It was Zee whose life was at stake here, not mine. Not just yet. I kept talking so she wouldn’t ask why Zee had come out. The one thing I absolutely couldn’t tell an outsider was the existence of the Gray Lords. “Zee only admitted what he was a few years ago, seven or eight, maybe. He knew that being a fae would keep people away from the shop. I’d been working for him for a couple of years and he liked me so he sold it to me.”

I collected my thoughts, trying to tell her what she needed to know without taking forever about it. “As I told you, he called me yesterday to ask for my help because someone had been killing fae in the reservation. Zee thought my nose might be able to pick out the killer. I gather I was sort of a last resort. When we got to the rez, O’Donnell was at the gate and wrote down my name when we drove through—that is on record. I imagine the police will find it, if they think to look. Zee took me through the murder scenes and I discovered that one man had been present at each house—O’Donnell.”

She’d been taking notes in a stenographer’s notebook but stopped, set down her pencil, and frowned. “O’Donnell was present at all the murder scenes and you verified that by smelling him?”

I raised my eyebrows. “A coyote has a keen sense of smell, Ms. Ryan. I have a very good memory for scents. I caught O’Donnell’s when he stopped us as we went in—and his scent was in every one of the murder victims’ houses I visited.”

She stared at me—but she was no werewolf who might rip my throat out for challenging her—so I met her stare with one of my own.

She dropped her eyes first, ostensibly looking at her notes. People, human people, can be pretty deaf to body language. Maybe she didn’t even notice that she’d lost the dominance contest, though her subconscious would.

“I understand O’Donnell was employed by the BFA as security,” she said, turning back a few pages. “Couldn’t he have been there investigating the deaths?”

“The BFA had no idea there were any murders,” I told her. “The fae do their own internal policing. If they had gone to the Feds for help, I’m pretty sure it would be the FBI who would have been called in, not the BFA anyway. And O’Donnell was a guard, not an investigator. I was told that there was no reason O’Donnell should have been in every house that there was a murder in, and I have no reason to doubt that.”

She’d started writing again, in shorthand. I’d never actually seen anyone use shorthand before.

“So you told Mr. Adelbertsmiter that O’Donnell was the murderer?”

“I told him that he was the only person whose scent I found in all the scenes.”

“How many scenes?”

“Four.” I decided not to tell her that there had been others; I didn’t want to tell her why I hadn’t gone to all the murder scenes. If Zee hadn’t wanted to talk about my trip Underhill with me, I thought it would not be something he wanted me discussing with a lawyer.

She paused again. “There were four people murdered in the reservation and they did not ask for help?”

I gave her a thin smile. “The fae are not fond of attracting outside attention. It can be dangerous for everyone. They are also quite aware of the way most humans, including the Feds, feel about them. ‘The only good fae is a dead fae’ mentality is quite prevalent among the conservatives who make up most of the rank and file in the government whether they be Homeland Security, FBI, BFA, or any of the other alphabet soup agencies.”

“You have trouble with the federal government?” she asked.

“As far as I know, none of them are prejudiced against half-Indian mechanics,” I told her, matching her blandness with my own, “so why would I have a problem with them? However, I can certainly see why the fae would be reluctant to turn over a series of murders to a government whose record for dealing with the fae is not exactly spotless.” I shrugged. “Maybe if they’d realized sooner that their killer wasn’t another fae, they might have done so. I don’t know.”

She looked down at her notes. “So you told Zee that O’Donnell was the killer?”

I nodded. “Then I took Zee’s truck and drove home. It was early in the morning, maybe four o’clock, when we parted company. It was my understanding that he was going to go over to O’Donnell’s and talk to him.”

“Just talk?”

I shrugged, glanced at Kyle, and tried to decide how far I trusted his judgement. All the truth, hmm? I sighed. “That’s what he said, but I was pretty sure that if O’Donnell didn’t have a good story, he wouldn’t wake up this morning.”

Her pencil hit the table with a snap.

“You are telling me that Zee went to O’Donnell’s house to murder him?”

I took a deep breath. “You aren’t going to understand this. You don’t know the fae, not really. Imprisoning a fae is…impractical. First of all, it’s damned difficult. Holding a person is hard enough. Holding a fae for any time at all, if he doesn’t want to be held, is near impossible. Even without that, a life sentence is highly impractical when fae can live for hundreds of years.” Or a lot more, but the public didn’t know that. “And when you let them go, they aren’t likely to shrug it off as justice served. The fae are a vengeance-hungry race. If you imprison a fae, for whatever reason, you’d better be dead when he gets out or you’ll wish you were. Human justice just isn’t equipped to deal with the fae, so they take care of it. A fae who commits a serious crime—like murder—is simply executed on the spot.” The werewolves did the same.

She pinched the bridge of her nose as if I were giving her a headache.

“O’Donnell wasn’t fae. He was human.”

I thought about trying to explain why a people who were used to dealing out their own justice would care less that the perpetrator was human, but decided it was pointless. “The fact remains that Zee did not kill O’Donnell. Someone got there first.”

Her bland face didn’t indicate belief, so I asked, “Do you know the story of Thomas the Rhymer?”

“True Thomas? It’s a fairy tale,” she said. “A prototype of Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle.’”

“Uhm,” I said. “Actually, I’m under the impression that it was mostly a true story, Thomas’s I mean. Thomas was, at any rate, a real historical person, a noted political entity of the thirteenth century. He claimed that he’d been caught for seven years by the queen of the fairies, then allowed to return. He either asked the fairy queen for a sign that he could show his kin so they would believe him when he told them where he’d been, or he stole a kiss from the fairy queen. Whatever the reason, he was given a gift, and like most fairy gifts, it was more curse than blessing—the fairy queen rendered him incapable of lying. For a diplomat or a lover or a businessman, that was a cruel thing to do, but the fae are often cruel.”

“Your point?”

She didn’t sound happy. I guess she didn’t like thinking any of the fairy tales were true. It was a common attitude.

People could believe in the fae, but fairy tales were fairy tales. Only children would really believe in them.

It was an attitude that the fae themselves promoted. In most folktales, the fae are not exactly friendly. Take Hansel and Gretel, for instance. Zee once told me that there are a lot of fae in the rez, if left to their preferred diets, would happily eat people…especially children.

“He was cursed to become like the fae themselves,” I told her. “Most fae, including Zee, cannot tell a lie. They are very, very good at making you think they are saying one thing, when they mean another, but they cannot lie.”

“Everyone can lie.”

I smiled at her tightly. “The fae cannot. I don’t know why. They can do the damnedest things with the truth, but they cannot lie. So.” I sighed unhappily. I had tried to figure out a way to leave Uncle Mike out, but unfortunately there was no other way to tell this part. Zee and I hadn’t talked since his arrest; that was a matter of public record. I had to convince her that Zee was innocent. “I haven’t spoken to Zee yet, so I don’t know what his story—”

“No one has,” she said. “My contact at the police department assured me that he hasn’t spoken to anyone since he was arrested—a wise move that allowed me to talk to you before I speak to him.”

“There was another fae who went with Zee—he’s the one who told me Zee didn’t kill O’Donnell. He and Zee walked in and found the dead body about the same time the police showed up. The other fae was able to hide himself from the police, but Zee did not.”

“Could he have hidden, too?”

I shrugged. “All the fae have glamour which allows them to change their appearance. Some of them can hide themselves entirely. You’ll have to ask him—though he probably won’t tell you. I think Zee did it so that the police wouldn’t look too hard and find his friend.”

“Self-sacrifice?” Maybe someone who hadn’t been raised with werewolves wouldn’t have seen the scorn she felt for my theory. Fae, she apparently thought, weren’t capable of self-sacrifice.

“Zee is one of the rare fae who can tolerate metal—his friend is not. Jail would be very painful for most fae.”

She tapped the end of her notebook on the table. “So the point of all of this is that you say that a fae who cannot lie told you Zee didn’t kill O’Donnell. That won’t convince a jury.”

“I was hoping to convince you.”

She raised her eyebrows. “It doesn’t matter what I think, Ms. Thompson.”

I don’t know what expression was on my face, but she laughed. “A lawyer has to defend the innocent or the guilty, Ms. Thompson. That’s how our justice system works.”

“He isn’t guilty.”

She shrugged. “Or so you say. Even if Zee’s friend can’t lie—you aren’t fae, are you? At any rate, no one is guilty until convicted in a court of law. If that’s all you have to tell me, I’ll go talk to Mr. Adelbertsmiter.”

“Can you get me into O’Donnell’s house?” I asked. “Maybe I can find out something about the real murderer.” I tapped my nose.

She considered it, then shook her head. “You’ve hired me to be Mr. Adelbertsmiter’s attorney, but I feel some obligation to you as well. It would not be in your best interest—nor in Mr. Adelbertsmiter’s best interest—to prove yourself something…other than human at the moment. You are paying for my services, so the police will look at you. I trust they won’t find anything.”

“Nothing of interest.”

“No one knows that you can…change?”

“No one who would tell the police.”

She picked up her notebook and set it down again. “If you have been reading the papers or following the national news, you’ll know that there are some legal issues being brought up about the werewolves.”

Legal issues. I suppose that was one way to put it. The fae, by accepting the reservation system, had opened up the path for a bill to be introduced in Congress to deny the werewolves full citizenship and all the constitutional rights that came with it. Ironically, it was being proposed as an amendment to the Endangered Species Act.

Ms. Ryan nodded sharply. “If it comes out that you can become a coyote, the court might find your testimony inadmissible, which might have further legal consequences for you.” Because they might decide I was an animal and not human, I thought. “Anything you find would be flimsy evidence even if it was admitted. The court is not going to have the same view on your reliability as Zee apparently did. Especially as you will have to declare yourself a separate species—which might be a very dangerous thing for you to do at this time.” The werewolf bill wouldn’t pass—Bran had too much influence in Congress—but I was neither werewolf nor fae, and the same protection might not cover me.

She frowned and moved her notebook restlessly. “You should know that I belong to the John Lauren Society.”

I looked at Kyle. The John Lauren Society was the largest of the anti-fae groups. Though they maintained a front of respectability, there had been allegations last year that they had funded a small group of college-age kids who had tried to blow up a well-known fae bar in Los Angeles. Luckily their competence hadn’t matched their conviction and they’d only managed to do a little minor damage and send a couple of tourists to the hospital for smoke inhalation. The authorities had caught them rather quickly and found an apartment full of expensive explosives. The kids had been convicted, but the authorities hadn’t managed to build a case against the larger, wealthier organization.

I had access to information not available to the authorities and I knew that the John Lauren Society was a good deal dirtier than even the FBI suspected.

Kyle had found me a lawyer who not only disliked fae—she’d like to see them eliminated.

Kyle patted my hand. “Jean won’t allow her personal beliefs to interfere with her job.” Then he smiled at me. “And it will make a point, having someone so active in the anti-fae community defending your friend.”

“I’m not doing it because I believe he is innocent,” she said.

Kyle turned his smile to her and it became sharklike. He seldom showed anyone that side of him. “And you can tell the newspapers and the jury and the judge that—and it still won’t stop them from believing that he must be innocent or you wouldn’t have taken the case.”

She looked appalled, but she didn’t disagree.

I tried to imagine working a job where your convictions were an inconvenience that you learned to ignore—and decided I’d rather turn a wrench no matter how much better her paycheck was than mine.

“I’ll stay away from the crime scene, then,” I lied. I wasn’t a fae. What the police and Ms. Ryan didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. The coyote is a sly beastie and no stranger to stealth—and I wasn’t about to let Zee’s fate depend wholly on this woman.

I’d find out who killed O’Donnell and figure out a way to prove him guilty that didn’t involve me telling twelve of my peers that I smelled him.

It watched me from the hall doorway, as if it had simply found the open back door and flown in. But ravens are not night birds despite their color and reputation. If there had been nothing else, that alone would have told me that there was something off about this bird.

But that wasn’t the only thing. Or even the first.

As soon as I caught the glitter of the moon’s light in the shine of its feathers, I smelled it—as if it hadn’t been there until then.

Ravens smell of the carrion they eat overlaying a musty sharp scent they share with crows and magpies. This one smelled of rain, forest, and good black garden soil in the spring. Then there was its size.

The Tri-Cities has some awfully big ravens, but nothing like this bird. It was taller than the coyote I was; easily as big as a golden eagle.

And every hair on my body stood up to attention as a wave of magic swept through the room.

It took a sudden hop forward, which moved its head into the faint light that trickled through the windows. There was a spot of white on its head, like a drop of snow. But what caught most of my attention were its eyes: bloodred, like a white rabbit’s, they glittered eerily as it stared right at me…and through me, as if it were blind.

For the first time in my life I was afraid to drop my eyes. Werewolves put great value on eye contact—and I’d blithely used that all my life. I have no trouble dropping my eyes, acknowledging anyone’s superiority and then doing whatever I please. Among the werewolves, once dominance was acknowledged, the dominant werewolf could, by custom, do no more than cuff me out of his way…while I then ignored him or plotted how to get back at him as I chose.

But this wasn’t a werewolf, and I was consumed with the conviction that if I moved at all, it would destroy me—though it was not making any sign of aggression.

I value my instincts, so I stayed motionless.

It opened its mouth and gave a rattling cry, like old bones shaken roughly in a wooden box. Then it dismissed me from its notice. It strode to the corner and knocked the walking stick to the floor. The raven took the old thing into its mouth and without so much as a glance over its shoulder took flight through the wall.

I didn’t bother going around to the front of Adam’s house, just opened the kitchen door and ran in. There was no one in the room.

Adam’s kitchen had been built to cordon bleu specifications—Adam’s daughter, Jesse, had once told me that her father could really cook, but mostly they didn’t bother.

As in the rest of his house, Adam’s ex-wife had chosen the decor. It had always struck me as odd that, except for the formal living room, which was done in shades of white, the colors in the house were much more welcoming and restful than she had ever been. My own house was decorated in parents’ castoffs meet rummage sale with just enough nice stuff (courtesy of Samuel) to make everything else look horrible.

Adam’s house smelled of lemon cleaner, Windex, and werewolves. But I didn’t need my nose or ears to know that Adam was home—and he wasn’t happy. The energy of his anger had washed over me even outside the house.

I heard Jesse whisper, “No, Daddy,” from the living room.

It was not reassuring that the next sound I heard was a low growl, but then Ben wouldn’t have called me if things had been good. I was pretty surprised he’d called me at all; he and I weren’t exactly great friends.

I followed Jesse’s voice into the living room. The werewolves were scattered all over the big room, but for a moment the Alpha’s magic worked on me and all I could pay much attention to was Adam, even though he was facing away from me. The view was nice enough that it took me a moment to remember that this must be a crisis situation.

The only two humans in the room huddled together under Adam’s intense regard on Adam’s new antique fainting couch that had replaced the broken remains of his old antique fainting couch. If I had been Adam, I wouldn’t have wasted money on antiques. Fragile things just don’t fare well in the house of an Alpha werewolf.

One of the humans was Adam’s daughter, Jesse. The other was Gabriel, the high school boy who worked for me. He had an arm around Jesse’s shoulders, and her diminutive stature made him look bigger than he actually was. Sometime since I’d last seen her, Jesse had dyed her hair a cotton candy blue, which was cheerful, if a little odd. Her usual heavy makeup had slid down her face, striping it with metallic silver eye shadow, black mascara, and tearstains.

For a moment I thought the obvious. I’d warned Gabriel to be careful with Jesse and explained the downside of dating the Alpha’s daughter. He’d heard me out and solemnly promised me that he’d behave himself.

Then I realized that under the streaks of makeup were the faint marks of new bruises. And part of what I’d thought was more mascara was actually a trickle of dried blood that ran from one nostril to her upper lip. One bare shoulder had a patch of road rash that still had gravel in it. No way that Gabriel had done that—and if he had, he wouldn’t be living now.

Damn, I thought, growing cold. Someone was going to die today.

Gabriel’s submissive posture must have been a reaction to something Adam had done, because as I watched him, he straightened his shoulders and lifted his gaze to Jesse’s father’s face. Not a really smart move with an enraged Alpha, but brave.

“Did you know them, Gabriel?” I couldn’t see Adam’s face, but his voice told me that his eyes would be bright gold.

I took another step into the room and a wave of his power almost sent me to my knees—as it did all of Adam’s wolves, who fell to the floor almost as one. The motion made me actually look at them and realize that there weren’t as many as I’d originally thought. Werewolves have a tendency to fill up the spaces in a room.

There were only four. Honey, one of the few women in Adam’s pack, and her mate had their heads bowed and were holding each other’s hands in a white-knuckled grip.

Darryl kept his face up and expressionless, but there were a few drops of perspiration on the mahogany skin of his forehead. Chinese and African blood ran in his veins and combined in a rather awesome mixture of color and feature. By day he was a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; the rest of the time he was Adam’s second.

Next to Darryl, Ben looked as pale as his hair and almost fragile—though that was deceptive because he was tough as nails. Like Honey, he’d been gazing at the floor, but just after he’d dropped to the floor, he looked up and gave me a rather frantic look that I had no idea how to interpret.

Ben had fled England to Adam’s pack to avoid questioning in a brutal multiple rape case. I was pretty sure he was innocent…but it says something about Ben that he’d have been my first suspect also.

“Daddy, leave Gabriel alone,” said Jesse with a shadow of her usual spirit.

But neither Adam nor Gabriel paid attention to her protest.

“If I knew who they were and where to find them, sir, I wouldn’t be here now,” Gabriel said in a grim voice that made him sound thirty. “I’d have dropped Jesse off with you and gone after them.”

Gabriel had grown up the oldest male in a house that had more than a passing acquaintance with abject poverty. It had made him driven, hardworking, and mature for his age. If I thought him reckless for going out with Jesse, I thought Jesse very wise for choosing him.

“Are you all right, Jesse?” I asked, my own voice more of a growl than I’d planned.

She looked up with a gasp. Then jumped up from her seat, where she’d been trying not to lean too close to Gabriel and give her father a target for his anger. She ran to me, burying her face in my shoulder.

Adam turned to look at us. Being a little better versed in prudence than Gabriel (even if I used it only when it suited me), I dropped my gaze to Jesse’s hair almost immediately, but I’d seen enough. His eyes blazed just this side of change, icy yellow, pale like the winter morning sun. White and red lines alternated on his wide cheekbones from the force he was using to clench his jaws.

If a news camera ever captured a shot of him looking like this, it would ruin all the spin-doctoring the werewolves had been doing over the last year. No one would ever mistake Adam in such a fury for anything except a very, very dangerous monster.

He wasn’t just angry. I’m not sure there is an English word for just how much rage was in his face.

“You have to stop him,” Jesse murmured as quietly as she could in my ear. “He’ll kill them.”

I could have told her that she couldn’t whisper quietly enough that her father wouldn’t hear, not when he was in the same room with us.

“You protect them!” he roared in outrage and I saw what little humanity he was clinging to disappear into the anger of the beast. If he hadn’t been as dominant, if he hadn’t been Alpha, I’m not sure he wouldn’t have already changed. As it was, I could see the lines of his face begin to lose their solidity.

That’s all we needed.

“No, no, no,” Jesse chanted into my shoulder, her whole frame shaking. “They’ll kill him if he hurts someone. He can’t…he can’t…”

I don’t know what my mother intended when she sent me to be fostered with the werewolves on the advice of a cherished great-uncle who was a werewolf. I don’t know that I could have given away my child to strangers. But I’m not a teenage single parent working a minimum wage job who’d discovered her baby could change into a coyote pup. It had worked out for me—at least as well as most people’s childhoods. And it had left me with a certain skill for managing enraged werewolves, which was a good thing, my foster father had told me often enough, since I sure had a talent for enraging them.

Still, it was easier to deal with them when I wasn’t what had set them off. The first step was to get their attention.

“That’s enough,” I said in firm, quiet tones that carried right over the top of Jesse’s voice. I didn’t need her warning to know that she was right. Adam would hunt down and kill whoever did this to his daughter, and damned be the consequences. And the damned consequences would be fatal to him, and maybe to every werewolf anywhere.

I raised my eyes to meet Adam’s fierce gaze and continued more sharply. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough to her? What are you thinking? How long has she been here and no one has cleaned her wounds? Shame on you.”

Guilt is a wonderful and powerful thing.

Then I turned, hauling Jesse, who stumbled in surprise, over to the stairs. If Darryl hadn’t been in the room, I couldn’t have left Gabriel. But Darryl was smart, Adam’s second, and I knew he’d keep the boy out of the line of fire.

Besides, I didn’t think Adam would stay in the living room for very long.

We made it only about three steps before I felt Adam’s hot breath on the back of my neck. He didn’t say anything, just stalked us all the way up to the upstairs bathroom. There seemed to be about a hundred steps more than the last time I’d come up here. Anything feels longer when you have a werewolf behind you.

I sat Jesse down on the closed lid of the toilet and glanced back at Adam. “Go get me a washcloth.”

He stood in the doorway for a moment, then turned and punched the door frame, which buckled. Maybe I should have said “please.” I gave a worried glance upward, but other than a little plaster dust, the ceiling seemed unaffected.

Adam stared intently at the splinters that were splattered with blood from his split knuckles, though I don’t think he really saw the damage he’d done.

I had to bite my lip to keep from saying something sarcastic like “Now that was helpful” or “Trying to keep the local carpenters in work?” When I get scared, my tongue gets sharp—which is not an asset around werewolves. Especially werewolves who are mad enough to take out doorways.

Jesse and I both waited, frozen, then he screamed, a sound more howl than human, and he hit the door frame again, and this time he took out the whole wall, his fist pushing through the remnants of the frame, the next two wall studs, and all the drywall between.

I risked a glance behind me. Jesse was so scared I could see the whites all the way around her eyes. I suspect she could have seen mine if she were looking at me instead of her father.

“Talk about overprotective fathers,” I said in a suitably amused tone. The lack of fear in my voice surprised me as much as anyone. Who’d have thought I was such a good actor?

Adam straightened and stared at me. I knew he wasn’t as large as he looked—he wasn’t that much taller than me—but in that hallway he was plenty big.

I met his gaze. “Could you get me a washcloth, please?” I asked as pleasantly as I could manage.

He turned on his heel and stalked silently toward his bedroom. Once he was out of sight, I realized that Darryl had followed us up the stairs. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, letting out two long breaths. I tucked my cold hands in my jeans.

“That was too damn close,” he said, maybe to me, maybe to himself. But he didn’t look at me as he pushed himself upright with a shrug of his shoulders and headed back down the stairs, taking them two at a time in a manner more common among high school boys than doctors of physics.

When I turned back to Jesse, she held a gray washcloth to me with a shaking hand.

“Hide that,” I said. “Or he’ll think I sent him away just to get rid of him.”

She laughed, as I’d meant her to. It was wobbly, and stopped abruptly when a cut broke open on her lip. But it was a laugh. She’d be all right.

Because I didn’t really care if he knew I’d sent him on a useless errand, I took the washcloth and used it to thoroughly clean the scrape on her shoulder. There was another road rash on her back just above the waistline of her jeans.

“You want to tell me what happened?” I asked, rinsing the washcloth to get rid of the gravel on it.

“It was dumb.”

I raised an eyebrow. “What? You thought you’d add some more color to your complexion so you punched yourself a couple of times and then skidded on the pavement?”

She rolled her eyes, so I guess I wasn’t as funny as all that. “No. I was at Tumbleweed with some friends. Dad brought me over and dropped me off. I was supposed to get a ride back, but there were too many kids to fit in Kayla’s car when we got to the parking lot. I’d forgotten my cell phone at home, so I started walking back to find a place to call.”

She stopped talking. I handed her the washcloth so she could do her own face. “I’ve been running cold water over it; it should feel okay on your bruises. I think your dad will feel better if you get cleaned up a bit. You’ll look pretty bad tomorrow, but most of the bruising won’t show for a couple hours yet.”

She looked in the mirror and gave a gasp of dismay that reassured me that most of the damage was surface. She hopped off the toilet and opened the medicine cabinet and pulled out makeup remover.

“I can’t believe Gabriel saw me looking like this,” she muttered, dismayed, as she scrubbed at the mascara on her cheeks. “I look like a freak.”

“Yep,” I agreed.

She looked at me, started to laugh, and then her face crumpled again. “Tuesday, I have to go to school with them,” she said.

“They were Finley kids?” I asked.

She nodded and went back to cleaning her face. “They said that they didn’t want a freak in their school. I’ve known—”

I cleared my throat rather loudly, interrupting her—and she gave me a little smile. Her father could hear us, so it was better not to give him too many hints about her attackers. If they’d done more to her, I wouldn’t be so concerned for them. But the incident wasn’t worth people dying over it. What was needed was an education, not a murder. However, those boys needed to understand just how dumb attacking the Alpha’s daughter was.

“I didn’t expect it at all. Not from them,” she said. “I don’t know what they’d have done if Gabriel hadn’t seen what was happening.” She gave me a smile then, a real smile that didn’t stop when she pressed the cold cloth against her lip, which was beginning to swell up pretty well. “You should have seen him. We were in that little parking lot behind the art gallery, you know, the one with the giant paintbrushes out front?”

I nodded.

“I guess Gabriel was walking on the little road below us and heard me cry out. He was up the hill and over the fence as fast as my father could have done it.”

I doubted that—werewolves are fast. What I didn’t doubt was that the effect of being rescued by someone like Gabriel, who, with his velvety brown skin, his black eyes, and his fair share of muscle, was not exactly hard on the eyes at any time.

“You know,” I told her with a conspiratorial smile, “it’s probably a good thing that he didn’t know who they were, either.”

“I’ll find out,” said Gabriel behind my right shoulder.

I’d heard him coming. Maybe I should have warned her, but he deserved to hear the hero worship in her voice. He wasn’t the only one in the hall, but the wolves, who’d all followed him up, were keeping out of Jesse’s sight.

Gabriel gave me an ice pack and watched Jesse duck behind the washcloth to hide her blush. His face was set. “I could have caught up to them, but I wasn’t sure how badly hurt Jesse was. Cowards—” He started to spit, then realized where he was and restrained himself. “Takes a pair of real macho men to pick on a girl half their size.”

He looked at me. “On the way home, Jesse said that she thought she’d been set up. Those girls she was with, one of them, the girl with the car, has a thing for one of the boys. And the boys knew where to wait for her. There aren’t many places you could beat someone up without people seeing them. They’d pulled her behind one of those big dumpsters. Someone put a lot of planning into this.”

Finley High is a small school.

“Do you want to transfer to Kennewick High?” I asked her, knowing that her father was listening from the bedroom. I couldn’t hear him, but I could feel his intent and see it in the stiff postures of the wolves. If we weren’t very careful, the whole pack would be after those stupid boys.

“Gabriel goes to Kennewick, and I know he has a lot of friends who will watch out for you. Or you could go to Richland, where Aurielle teaches.” Aurielle was another of Adam’s three female wolves, Darryl’s mate, and a high school chemistry teacher.

Jesse whipped the washcloth off her face and gave me a look that reminded me that she was her father’s daughter. “I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction,” she said coldly. “But they won’t take me by surprise again. I fought like a girl because I couldn’t believe they were really going to hit me. I won’t make that mistake again either.”

“You’ll have to start practicing aikido again, then,” said Adam, his voice as quiet and calm as if he hadn’t just thrown a hissy fit a few minutes ago. “You’re three years out of practice, and if you are only half their weight, you’ll have to do better than that.”

He walked out of his bedroom, a dark blue washcloth in his hand. If his eyes had been darker, I’d have bought the calm facade. He’d managed somehow to stuff all that anger and Alpha energy down and out of sight. But I’d believe the cold yellow eyes before I believed the quiet voice. He handed me the washcloth, but his gaze was on Jesse.

“Yes,” she said with grim determination.

“She hurt them,” Gabriel said. “One of them had a bloody nose and the other was holding on to his side while he ran off.” He gave her an assessing look, which I was glad Adam didn’t see. “I bet they’re more hurt than she is.”

Darryl cleared his throat, and when Adam looked at him, he said, “Send her with an escort to and from school.” Jesse was a general favorite. If Adam hadn’t been so enraged, there would have been a lot more growls from the wolves. Darryl’s eyes were lighter than they usually were, too. The gold was eerie in his dark face.

“Send her with a werewolf,” I suggested, “in wolf form. For the first few days he can wait for her in front of the school, somewhere very visible.”

“No,” said Jesse. “I won’t be a freak show.”

Adam raised an eyebrow. “You’ll do as you’re told.”

“It’s a territorial thing,” I told Jesse. “Even mundane people play those stupid games. They tried a power play and your father cannot just let it go. If he does, the harassment will get worse—until someone dies.” That’s what all the werewolf politics and posturing that I complained about so much really did, kept people alive.

“You should call the police and the school and warn them,” said Honey. “So no one gets hurt.”

“Do a show and tell,” suggested Gabriel. “Call Jesse’s biology teacher—or aren’t you taking a course in Current Affairs? That would be better. You can take your class out and give them an up-close and personal with a werewolf. Same effect but less embarrassing for Jesse.”

Adam smiled, showing lots of teeth. “I like that.”

Jesse brightened a little. “Maybe I can get extra credit.”

“The school will never go for it,” Darryl said. “The liability is too great if something happened.”

“I’ll check into it,” Adam said.

Jesse was a little pale, but she wasn’t seriously injured. A hot shower would help with the soreness—and she needed to shower before her father calmed down enough to realize that she didn’t need to tell him who had attacked her. If I could get their scent, so could he.

I made a dismissive gesture at the whole lot of them, Gabriel, Adam, and werewolves. “Go downstairs and work it out,” I told them. “I want to get a better look at some of Jesse’s bruises so I can make sure that she doesn’t need Samuel to come check her out.”

I took Jesse by the hand. “We’ll use Adam’s bathroom…” I couldn’t actually remember if he had a bathroom, but I couldn’t imagine that this house didn’t have a master bedroom suite, and besides, he’d come out of it with a washcloth. “Since Adam has chosen to remodel this one.” Sure my tone was a little snide—but if he was irritated with me, he wasn’t going to be thinking about finding Jesse’s assailants.

Jesse followed me through the crowded hallway and into Adam’s bedroom. There was an open door on the far side that could only be a bathroom. I tugged her into it and shut the door.

Then I whispered, very, very quietly, “You need to shower and get rid of their scent before your father thinks of it—if he already hasn’t.”

Her eyes widened. “Clothes?” she mouthed.

“Everything,” I said.

She gave her tennis shoes a rueful glance, but turned on the shower and stepped into the big stall, shoes, clothes, and all.

“I’ll go get clean clothes,” I told her.

Adam met me at the hall doorway. He jerked his chin toward the bathroom, where anyone could clearly hear that someone was showering. “Scent,” he said.

“Her clothes were very dirty,” I told him a little smugly. “Even her shoes.”

“Sh—” He bit it off before he could complete the word. Adam was a little older than he looked. He’d been raised in the fifties, when a man didn’t swear in front of women. “Shoot,” he said, the word obviously not giving him the satisfaction to be gotten out of cruder terms.

“Cheeses crusty, got all musty, got damp on the stone of a peach,” I agreed. He looked blank, so I repeated it with proper emphasis. “ChEEZ-zes crusty. Got Al-musty. Got DAMp on the StoneofapeaCH. My foster father used to say those around me all the time. He was an old-fashioned sort of wolf, too. He especially liked the Stoneofapeach. ‘Stoneofapeach, Mercedes. You don’t have the sense God gave little apples.’”

Adam closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the door frame.

“Gonna be expensive if you break another wall,” I offered helpfully.

He opened his eyes and looked at me.

I threw up my hands. “Fine. You want to support the Carpenters’ Union, that’s your business. Now move, I told Jesse I’d be back with clothes.”

He stepped back with exaggerated courtesy. But when I walked past him, he swatted my rump. Hard enough to sting.

“You need to be more careful,” he growled. “Keep interfering in my business and you might get hurt.”

I said sweetly as I continued to Jesse’s room, “The last man who swatted me like that is rotting in his grave.”

“I have no doubt of it.” His voice was more satisfied than contrite.

I turned to face him, yellow eyes and all.

“I’m thinking of picking up a parts car for the Syncro. I have plenty of room in the field.”

Someone listening in might have thought my last comment was off topic, but Adam knew better. I’d been punishing him with my Rabbit parts car for several years. Clearly visible from his bedroom window, it now sat on three tires and had various pieces missing. The graffiti was Jesse’s suggestion.

If Adam hadn’t been as uptight, it wouldn’t have worked—but he was one of those “everything in its place and a place for everything” kind of people. It bothered him—a lot.

Adam grinned briefly in appreciation, then his face sobered. “Tell me you, at least, had the brains to catch their scent.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Why would I do that? Then instead of harassing Jesse, you’d be tormenting me.”

One of them had been a stranger to me, but the other…there was something about his scent that was ringing a bell, but I’d wait until I was out of here before I tried to work it out.

He gave a bark of fierce laughter.

“Liar,” he said.

He took two quick steps forward, wrapped a hand around the back of my neck, and held me for his kiss. I hadn’t expected it—not while he was still so close to changing. I’m sure that’s why I didn’t pull out of his hold.

The first touch of his lips was soft, tentative, asking where his hands had demanded. The man was diabolical. I could have resisted force, but the question of his kiss was an entirely different matter.

I leaned into him because he asked with the light touch and the gentle withdrawal of his lips that begged me to follow where he led. The heat of his body, welcome in the overcooled house, rewarded me as I leaned closer to him, as did the hard planes of his body, so I was drawn to press even tighter against him.

He danced like that, too. Leading instead of pulling. It had to have been deliberate, something he worked at, because he was as dominant as they came—Alphas are. But Adam was more than just dominant: he was smart, too. And he didn’t play fair.

Which is how he ended up against the wall with me plastered all over him when someone…Darryl, quietly cleared his throat.

I jerked free and hopped back to the middle of the hallway. “I’ll just get Jesse’s clothes now,” I told the carpet on the floor and then took my red face into Jesse’s room and shut the door. I didn’t mind getting caught kissing, but that had been a lot more carnal than a kiss.

Sometimes good hearing isn’t a blessing.

“Sorry,” Darryl said, though his voice carried more amusement than apology.

“I bet,” growled Adam. “Damn it. This has got to stop.”

Darryl gave a full-throated laugh that lasted quite a while. I’d never heard him laugh like that. Darryl was pretty uptight usually.

“Sorry,” he said again, sounding more apologetic this time. “Looked to me like you’d rather it not stop.”

“Yeah.” Adam sounded suddenly tired. “I should have gone after her a long time ago. But after Christy got through with me, I wasn’t sure I wanted another woman ever. And Mercy is more gun-shy than I ever was.” Christy was his ex-wife.

“Then Samuel came to compete for the prize,” Darryl said.

“I am not a prize,” I muttered.

I knew they both heard me, but all he said was, “Samuel has always been the competition. I prefer him here, so at least I’m competing with a flesh-and-blood man, and not a memory.”

“If you’re going to talk about me behind my back,” I told Adam, “at least do it where I can’t hear you.”

They must have followed my request because I didn’t hear any more of their conversation. The shower was still going, so I sat down in the middle of Jesse’s room—pulled a bottle of nail polish out from under one hip—and then took the opportunity to pull myself together. Adam was right; this had gone on too long.

Samuel had been behaving himself like an angel, for the most part—and Adam had been likewise. But it seemed to me that Adam had been more restless than usual and his temper more uncertain.

That was troubling news because Adam had a hot temper, worse even than most werewolves. Otherwise, Samuel had told me, the Marrok would have used Adam more heavily as one of the spokesmen for the werewolves. He had the looks and the speaking abilities for it. Adam had attracted some attention from the press anyway because he was doing some consulting and negotiating in Washington, D.C. His control was very, very good, but when he lost it, he went berserk and the Marrok wouldn’t risk it.

I was pretty sure that Adam would have exploded over Jesse’s bruises anyway—but maybe he’d have regained his control better if he hadn’t already been on edge.

Jesse’s door opened and Honey came in, shutting the door behind her. Honey was one of those people who can make me feel grubby, even when I’m wearing a perfectly presentable T-shirt. She could have been a recruitment poster model for the trophy wife. She intimidated me in an entirely different way than the werewolves usually did, and it had taken me a long time to get over it.

She stepped gingerly over the usual teenager mess that Jesse had scattered on her floor—Jesse’s room looked even worse than mine usually did, which made it pretty bad.

“You’ve got to do something, Mercedes,” she told me softly. As long as the rest of the pack was downstairs, they wouldn’t hear us. “The whole pack is restless and short-tempered—and Adam almost lost it today. Pick someone, Adam or Samuel, it doesn’t matter. But you have to do it soon.” She hesitated. “When Adam declared you his mate—”

For my safety, he said, and he was probably right. Timber wolves will kill a coyote in their territory—and werewolves are every bit as territorial as their smaller brethren.

“He didn’t ask me,” I interrupted her, with heat. “I wasn’t there and I didn’t find out about it until it was done. It wasn’t my fault.”

She shook her mane of honey-colored hair and crouched down beside me. If she could have seen the floor, I think she’d have been sitting like I was, because she was technically lower in the pack (thanks to Adam declaring me his mate), but she was too fastidious to sit on a pile of dirty clothes.

“I’m not saying it is anyone’s fault,” she said. “Fault doesn’t change what is. We can all feel it, the weakness in the pack. It is allowed for you to refuse him absolutely, and then things will return to normal. Or accept him, and things will change another way, a better way. But until then…” She shrugged.

It was easy, even for someone like me who was around them all the time, to forget that there was more to the magic of the werewolves than their change. I think it’s because the change was so spectacular—and the rest of the magic is the pack’s business and affects no one else. I didn’t consider myself pack—and until Adam had made his claim, no one else had either.

My foster father told me once that he was always aware on some level of all the other pack members. They knew when one of their own was in distress; they knew when one died. When my foster father committed suicide, it took a while for them to find the body, but they’d all known when to go looking. I’d seen Adam call his pack to him with more than the sound of his voice and had seen them heal him of silver damage that should have killed him.

I hadn’t realized that there might be more to Adam declaring me his mate than the simple act until I’d been able to help Warren control his wolf when he was too hurt to do it himself. I’d been grateful, but I hadn’t looked at it any closer.

I was getting a headache; dread sometimes does that to me. “Tell me that again and be clear, please.”

“When he declared you his mate, he offered you an invitation to join us. He opened a place for you that you have not filled. That opening is a weakness. Adam mostly keeps it from us, but he only does it by absorbing all of the effects himself. His wolf knows there is a weakness, a place where harm might come to us, and it leaves him on alert, on edge, all the time. We can feel that, and respond to it.” She gave me a tight smile. “That’s why I was so unpleasant to you when he sent me to play bodyguard against the vampires. I thought you were playing games and leaving us to pay the price.”

No. No game playing. Just a lot of panicking. Whomever I chose in the end, Adam or Samuel, I’d lose the other one—and that was more than I could bear.

“All of us depend upon our Alpha to help us live among the humans,” Honey said. “Some of Adam’s wolves have human women as mates. It is his willpower that allows us to control ourselves, particularly as the moon nears her zenith.”

I put my aching head on my knees. “What was he thinking? Damn it.”

She patted me on the shoulder, an awkward touch that managed to convey both comfort and sympathy. “I don’t think he was thinking of anything except to place his claim on you before another wolf killed or claimed you.”

I gave her a look of disbelief. “What is going on? Is everyone losing their minds? I haven’t had so much as a date for ten years and now there’s Adam and Samuel and—” I’d have bitten off my tongue before I continued and mentioned Stefan. I hadn’t seen the vampire since he and the Wizard had killed two innocents to take the blame for killing Andre so Marsilia didn’t kill me. It was just as well as he wasn’t my favorite person.

“I know why Samuel wants me,” I told her.

“He thinks that the two of you could have children—and you can’t forgive him for wanting you for practical reasons.” There was something in Honey’s voice that told me that she liked Samuel—and maybe it hadn’t been just my perceived “game playing” with Adam and her pack that she’d resented. But the expression on her face told me more. She understood Samuel’s point from experience; she wanted children, too.

I don’t know why I started talking to Honey. I didn’t know her that well—and had spent most of that time disliking her. Maybe it was because there was no one else I knew who was in a position to understand.

“I don’t blame Samuel for realizing that a shapeshifter who changed into a coyote and was not bound by the moon might be a good mate,” I told her, speaking very quietly. “But he let me love him without telling me exactly why he was so interested. If the Marrok hadn’t interfered, I’d probably have been his mate when I was sixteen.”

“Sixteen?” she said.

I nodded.

“Peter is a lot older than me,” she said, speaking of her husband. “That was hard. But I wasn’t sixteen and…” She paused, thinking. Finally she shook her head. “I don’t recall ever hearing how old Samuel is, but he’s older than Charles, and Charles dates back to Lewis and Clark.”

The outrage that filtered into her voice, still pitched not to carry to the other werewolves, was like a balm. It gave me the courage to tell her a bit more.

“I am happy with who I am,” I told her. “The incident with Samuel let me break with the pack and join the human world. I’m independent and good at my job. It’s not glamorous, but I like fixing things.”

“And still,” she said, voicing the thing I hadn’t said.

I nodded. “Exactly. And still…what if I’d taken him up on his offer? I tell myself that I’d be a lesser person, but Samuel isn’t the kind of man to iron all the personality out of his wife. Half the trouble I got into when I was a teen he got me into—and got me out of the other half.”

“So you’d be a doctor’s wife, and free to do as you please—because Samuel’s not the control freak that most of the dominant males are.”

There it was. Oh, not Samuel. She, like most people, saw what he wanted them to see. Gentle, laid-back Samuel. Hah.

But, I’d always wondered why Honey had married her husband, who was so far down in the pack power structure when she was as dominant as all but the top two or three wolves. Since she took her rank from her husband, she was a lot lower than she’d been before she’d taken Peter as her mate. There weren’t actually all that many submissive wolves out there. The kind of determination it takes to survive the Change isn’t usually found in a person who isn’t at least a little dominant.

“Samuel is as much a control freak as any of them. He just hides it better,” I said. “The reality of it is that he’d have wrapped me in cotton wool and protected me from the world. I’d never have grown or become the person I am.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Like what, a mechanic? You work for less than minimum wage. I saw Gabriel do the paychecks—he clears more than you do.”

I’d been wrong. She’d never understand.

“Like owning my own business,” I told her, though I knew it was futile to expect her to comprehend what I meant. I’d turned down everything that she’d wanted out of life—status, both in the werewolf world and the human one, and money. “Like being able to take something that doesn’t work and fix it. Like being able to hold my own with Adam today instead of falling on my knees and looking at the ground. Like deciding what I’m going to do every day—including going after that demon-riding vampire who almost killed Warren. I’m not all that, especially not compared to the werewolves, but you have to admit that I was uniquely suited to taking him out. The werewolves couldn’t. The vampires and fae wouldn’t. What would have happened if I hadn’t been able to kill him? Samuel would never let his wife risk her life to do something like that.”

I realized something then. As scary as it had been (and I had the nightmares and the scars to prove it), as stupidly dangerous as it still was—and possibly deadly—I was proud of killing those two vampires. No one else would have been able to do it. Just me.

Samuel would never let me do something like that.

I could never have Samuel without giving up something I cherished about myself. It was the first time I’d let myself look at that because then I’d have to admit that Samuel could never be for me.

The question was, would Adam be any better? And if I took Adam, Samuel would leave. Part of me still loved Samuel, and I was not ready to give him up.

I was so screwed.

“You think that Adam would have let you go after that thing if you were his mate?” asked Honey in disbelief.

Maybe.

“I didn’t mean to walk in on anything,” said Jesse in a small voice.

I realized that I hadn’t been hearing the water from the shower for a while. I hadn’t heard her approach either.

She’d wrapped a towel around herself, but she was still quick at closing the door behind her. She gave Honey a wary look, but then dismissed her.

“I overheard that last part,” she told me. “Dad told me to stay out of his affairs. But I thought you ought to know that he told me not too long ago that if you don’t fall out of a plane now and then, you never learn to fly.”

“He gave me bodyguards,” I told her dryly. Honey had been one of them.

She rolled her eyes at me. “He’s not stupid. But if there is something you have to do, he’ll be at your back.” I gave her an incredulous look and she rolled her eyes again. “Okay, okay, he’ll lead the way. But he won’t make you stay behind. He doesn’t waste his resources that way.”

When Jesse had been missing, and Adam too hurt to do anything about it, he’d all but recruited me to find her, knowing that the people who had her had almost killed him. For some reason that recollection let me breathe deeply again.

Knowing that I could not have Samuel hurt. I think giving up Adam might just break me—which didn’t mean that I might not have to anyway.

I hopped to my feet.

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I told her and then changed the subject. “How are you feeling?”

She smiled and held out a rock-steady hand. “I’m fine. You were right; a hot shower really helped. I’ll have some bruises, but I’m all right. Gabriel helped, too. He’s right. I did defend myself, better than they expected. I know to watch for them now and…” Her smile widened just short of splitting her lip again. “Dad’s given me bodyguards.” She said it in the same exasperated tones I used.

Sometimes it seems like the distance between Adam’s house and mine changes. Just an hour or so earlier, it had taken me only a moment to get from my door to his. It took me a long time to walk back home and I mourned all the way.

I would not choose Samuel. Not because I didn’t trust him, but because I could trust him absolutely. He would love me and care for me, until I chewed off my arm to be free—and I wouldn’t be the only person I’d hurt. Samuel had been damaged enough without me adding to it.

When I told him how I felt, he would leave.

I hoped he would still be gone, but his car was parked next to my rust-colored Rabbit. I stopped in the driveway, but it was already too late. He’d know I was outside.

I didn’t have to tell him today, I thought. I wouldn’t have to lose him today. But soon. Very soon.

Warren and Honey were right. If I didn’t do something soon, blood would flow. It was a testament to the control both Adam and Samuel had, that there had been no fighting up until now. I knew in my heart of hearts, if it ever came down to a real fight between them, one of them would die.

I could bear losing Samuel again if I had to, but I could not bear being the cause of his death. And I was certain that it was Samuel who would die in a fight with Adam. Not that Adam was a better fighter. I’d seen Samuel in a fight or ten, and he knew what he was doing. But Adam had an edge of ruthlessness that Samuel lacked. Adam was a soldier, a killer, and Samuel a healer. He would hold back until it was too late.

The screen door of the house creaked and I looked up into Samuel’s gray eyes. He wasn’t a handsome man, but there was a beauty to his long features and ash brown hair that went bone deep.

“What put that look on your face?” Samuel asked. “Something wrong at Adam’s house?”

“A couple of bigoted kids beat up on Jesse,” I told him. It wasn’t a lie. He wouldn’t know that I was just answering his second question, not his first.

For an instant anger flew across his face—he liked Jesse, too. Then his control reasserted itself, and Dr. Cornick was on the spot and ready for action.

“She’s all right,” I told him before he said anything. “Just bruises and hurt feelings. We were worried for a bit that Adam was going to do murder, but I think we’ve got him settled down.”

He came down off the porch and touched my face. “Just a few rough minutes, eh? I’d better go check Jesse over anyway.”

I nodded. “I’ll get something on for supper.”

“No,” he said. “You look like you could use some cheering up. Adam in a rage and Zee locked up, both in one day, is a little much. Why don’t you get cleaned up and I’ll take you out for pizza and company.”

My bedroom was dark, but I didn’t bother to turn on the light. I had worse things to worry about than the dark.

I headed for the bathroom and took a hot shower. By the time the water had cooled and I got out, I knew a couple of things. First, I was going to have just a little time before I had to face Adam. Otherwise he’d already have been waiting for me and my bedroom was empty. Second, I couldn’t do anything about Adam or Zee until tomorrow, so I might as well go to sleep.

I combed out my hair and blow-dried it until it was only damp. Then I braided it so I could comb it out in the morning.

I pulled back my covers, knocking the stick that had been resting on top of them to the ground. Before Samuel moved in, I used to sleep without covers in the summer. But he kept the air-conditioning turned down until there was a real chill in the air, especially at night.

I climbed into bed, pulled the covers up under my chin, and closed my eyes.

Why was there a stick on my bed?

I sat up and looked at the walking stick lying on the floor. Even in the dark I knew it was the same stick I’d found at O’Donnell’s. Careful not to step on it, I got out of bed and turned on the light.

The gray twisty wood lay innocuously on the floor on top of a gray sock and a dirty T-shirt. I crouched down and touched it gingerly. The wood lay hard and cool under my fingertips, without the wash of magic it had held in O’Donnell’s house. For a moment it felt like any other stick, then a faint trace of magic pulsed and disappeared.

I searched out my cell phone and called the number Uncle Mike had been calling me from. It rang a long time before someone picked it up.

“Uncle Mike’s,” a not so cheerful stranger’s voice answered, barely understandable amid a cacophony of heavy metal music, voices, and a sudden loud crash, as if someone had dropped a stack of dishes. “Merde. Clean that up. What do you want?”

I assumed that only the last sentence was directed at me.

“Is Uncle Mike there?” I asked. “Tell him it’s Mercy and that I have something he might be interested in.”

“Hold on.”

Someone barked out a few sharp words in French and then yelled, “Uncle Mike, phone!”

Someone shouted, “Get the troll out of here.”

Followed by someone with a very deep voice muttering, “I’d like to see you try to get this troll out of here. I’ll eat your face and spit out your teeth.”

Then Uncle Mike’s cheerful Irish voice said, “This is Uncle Mike. May I help you?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “I’ve got a certain walking stick that someone left on my bed tonight.”

“Do you now?” he said very quietly. “Do you?”

“What should I do with it?” I asked.

“Whatever it will allow you to do,” he said in an odd tone. Then he cleared his voice and sounded his usual amused self again. “No, I know what you are asking. I think I’ll give someone a call and see what they’d like. Probably they’ll come and get it this time, too. It’s too late for you to be awaiting for them to come callin’. Why don’t you put it outside? Just lean it against your house. It’ll come to no harm if no one collects it. And if they do, well, then they’ll not be disturbing you or the wolf, eh?”

“You’re sure?”

“Aye, lass. Now I’ve got a troll to deal with. Put it outside.” He hung up.

I put my clothes back on and took the stick outside. Samuel wasn’t back yet, and the lights were still on at Adam’s house. I stared at the walking stick for a few minutes, wondering who had put it on my bed and what they wanted. Finally I leaned it against the mobile home’s new siding and went back to bed.

Wednesday night I ate dinner at my favorite Chinese place in Richland then drove out to Tim’s house. Since O’Donnell’s killer was almost certainly fae, I didn’t know how much good it would do me to attend a Bright Future meeting—but maybe someone would know something important. I only had until Friday to prove Zee innocent or Tad would be putting his life on the line, too.

The more time I had to think about it, though, the more sense it made for Tad to come back. I certainly wasn’t getting any nearer to figuring out anything. Tad, being fae, could go to the reservation and ask questions—if the Gray Lords didn’t kill him for his disobedience. Maybe I could persuade Nemane that it was in the fae’s best interest that Zee’s son come home to help me save his father. Maybe.

Tim’s address was in West Richland, a few miles from Kyle’s. It was in a block so new that several houses didn’t have lawns yet, and I could see two buildings under construction on the next block over.

Half of the front was beige brick and the rest was adobe the color of oatmeal. It looked upscale and expensive, but it was missing the touches that made Kyle’s house a mansion rather than a house. No stained glass, no marble or oak garage doors.

Which meant that it was still several orders of magnitude nicer than my old trailer even with its new siding.

There were four cars parked in the driveway and a ’72 once-red Mustang with a lime green left fender parked on the street in front. I pulled in behind it because it’s not often I find a car that makes the Rabbit look good.

As I got out of the car, I waved at the woman who was peering out at me from behind a sheer curtain in the house across the street. She jerked a window shade down.

I rang the doorbell and waited for the stocking-footed person who was hopping down a carpeted staircase to open the door. When it opened, I wasn’t surprised to see a girl in her late teens or very early twenties. Her footsteps had sounded like a woman—men tend to clomp, thunder, or like Adam, move so silently you can barely hear them.

She was dressed in a thin T-shirt that sported crossed bones, like a pirate flag, but instead of a human skull it boasted a faded panda head with exes for eyes. She was a little overweight, but the extra pounds suited her, rounding her face and softening her strong features. Under the distinctive aura of Juicy Fruit, I recognized her scent from O’Donnell’s house.

“I’m Mercy Thompson,” I told her. “Tim invited me.”

She looked me over with sharp eyes and then gave me a welcoming smile. “I’m Courtney. He said you might be coming. We’re not started yet—still waiting for Tim and Austin to get back with goodies. Come on in.”

She was one of those women cursed with a little girl’s voice. When she was fifty, she’d still sound like she was thirteen.

As I followed her up the stairs, I did the polite thing. “I’m sorry to intrude on this meeting. Tim told me that one of your members was just killed.”

“Couldn’t have happened to a nicer man,” she said airily, but then stopped on the stair landing. “All right, that didn’t need to be said, sorry. I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t know him.”

“Well, he started our Chapter of Bright Future and he was all right to the guys, but he only had one use for women and I was getting tired of fighting him off all the time.” Her eyes really focused on me for the first time, “Hey, Tim said you were Hispanic, but you aren’t, are you?”

I shook my head. “My father was an Indian rodeo rider.”

“Yeah?” Her voice was mildly inquiring. She wanted to know more, but didn’t want to pry.

I was starting to like her. Somewhere under all the bubbles, I was pretty sure she was hiding a sharp brain. “Yeah.”

“A rodeo rider? That’s pretty cool. Is he still?”

I shook my head. “Nope. He died before I was born. Left my mother a pregnant unwed teenager. I was raised w—” I’d been spending too much time with Adam’s pack and not enough with real people, I thought as I hastily replaced werewolf with whitebread American. Happily she wasn’t a werewolf, and didn’t sense my lie.

“Wish I was Native American,” she said a little wistfully as she started back up the stairs. “Then all the guys would go for me—it’s that mysterious Indian thing, you know?”

Not really, but I laughed because she meant me to. “Nothing mysterious about me.”

She shook her head. “Maybe not, but if I were an Indian, I’d be mysterious.”

She led me into a large room already occupied with five men who were tucked into a circle of chairs in the far corner of the room. They were evidently deep into a very involved conversation because they didn’t even look up when we came in. Four of them were young, even younger than Austin and Tim. The fifth looked very university professorish, complete with goatee and brown sport coat.

Even with people in it, there was an unused air to the room. As if everything had just come fresh from a furniture store. The walls and Berber carpet were in the same color scheme as the house.

I thought of the vivid colors in Kyle’s house and the pair of life-sized, Greek-inspired, stone statues in the foyer. Kyle called them Dick and Jane and was quite fond of them, though they’d been commissioned by the house’s former owner.

One was male, the other female, and both of their faces had a dreamy, romantic expression as they looked up toward heaven—an expression that somehow didn’t quite go with the spectacular evidence that the male statue wasn’t thinking heavenly thoughts.

Kyle dressed Jane’s naked body in a short plaid skirt and an orange halter top. Dick generally wore only a hat—and not on his head. At first it was a top hat—but then Warren went to a thrift store and found a knitted ski cap that hung down about two feet with a six-inch tassel on the end.

In contrast, Tim’s house had no more personality than an apartment, as if he didn’t have enough confidence in his taste to make the house his own. Even as little as I had talked to him, I knew there was more to him than beige and brown. I don’t know what someone else would think, but to me, his house all but screamed with his desire to fit in.

It made me like him more: I know what it’s like to not quite fit in.

The room might have been uninspired, but it was still nice. Everything was good quality without being excessive. One corner of the room had been set up as an office. There was a dorm-sized fridge next to a well-made, but not extravagant, oak computer desk. The long wall opposite the door was dominated by a TV large enough to please Samuel with waist-high speakers on either side of it. Comfy-looking chairs and a couch, all upholstered with a medium brown microfiber designed to look like suede, were scattered in a manner appropriate to a home theater.

“Sarah couldn’t make it tonight,” Courtney told me as if I should know who Sarah was. “I’m glad you did, otherwise I’d have been the lone woman out. Hey, guys, this is Mercy Thompson, the woman Tim told us might be coming, you know, the one he met at the music festival last weekend.”

Her voice penetrated where our entrance had not and the men all looked up. Courtney walked me up to them.

“This is Mr. Fideal,” she said, indicating the older man.

Close up, his face looked younger than his iron gray hair made him appear. His skin was tanned and healthy and his eyes were a bright blue with the intensity of a six-year-old.

I didn’t remember his scent from O’Donnell’s house, but it was obvious that he was comfortable in this group—so he must be a regular attendee…

“Aiden,” he corrected her kindly.

She laughed and told him, “I just can’t do it.” To me, she explained, “He was my econ teacher—and so he’s forever enshrined upon my heart as Mr. Fideal.”

If I hadn’t shaken his hand, I don’t know if I would have noticed anything odd about his scent. Though brine is not usually a fragrance I associate with people, he might have had a saltwater aquarium hobby or something.

But his grip made my skin buzz with the faint touch of magic. There are things other than fae that carry a feel of magic: witches, vampires, and a few others. But fae magic had a certain feel to it—I was willing to bet that Mr. Fideal was as fae as Zee…or at least as fae as Tad’s bookstore guy.

I wondered what he was doing at a Bright Future meeting. It might be that he was here to keep track of what they were doing. Or maybe he was a part-breed and didn’t even know what he was. A drop of fae blood could account for those young eyes in the older face and for the faintness of the magic I felt.

“Good to meet you,” I told him.

“So you know what I do to earn my bread,” he said in a gruffly friendly voice. “What is it that you do?”

“I’m a mechanic,” I said.

“Righteous,” declared Courtney. “My Mustang’s been making odd noises for the last couple of days. Do you think you could take a look at it? I don’t have any money right now—just paid for this semester of school.”

“I do mostly VWs,” I told her, taking a card out of my purse and handing it to her. “You’d be better off taking it to a Ford mechanic, but you can bring it by my shop if you want. I can’t do it for free. My hourly rates are better than most places, but since I don’t work on a lot of Fords, it’ll probably take me longer to fix.”

I heard the front door open. A moment later Tim and Austin arrived with a case of beer and a couple of white plastic grocery bags filled with chips. They were greeted with cheers and mobbed for food and beer.

Tim set his burdens down on a small table next to the door and escaped being buried by foraging young men. He looked at me for a moment without smiling. “I thought you might bring your boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend anymore,” I said—and the relief of that made me smile.

Courtney saw my relief and misread it. “Oh, honey,” she said. “One of those, eh? Better off without them. Here, have a beer.”

I shook my head, softening my refusal with a smile. “I never learned to like the stuff.” And I intended to keep my wits about me to catch any clues that came my way, though my already-not-high hopes of that had been falling by the minute. I’d thought I was going to infiltrate an organized hate group, not a bunch of beer-swilling college kids and their teacher.

I was willing to swear there wasn’t a murdering bastard among them.

“How about a Diet Coke,” Tim said in a friendly voice. “I used to have a six-pack of ginger ale and another of root beer in the fridge, but I bet these turkeys have already finished them off.”

He got a bunch of denying catcalls back that seemed to please him. Good for you, I thought, and quit feeling sorry for him because he didn’t have a purple wall or a statue wearing a hat. Find your own group to fit in with.

“Diet Coke would be great,” I told him. “Your house is pretty impressive.”

That pleased him even more than the catcalls had. “I had it built after my parents died. I couldn’t stand to stay in that old empty place alone.”

Since Tim stayed to talk, Courtney was actually the one who got the pop for me. She handed it over and then patted Tim on the head. “What Tim isn’t telling you is that his parents were rich. They died in a freak car accident a few years back and gave Tim an estate and life insurance that left him set for life.”

His face tightened in embarrassment at her rather bold announcement in front of a relative stranger. “I’d rather have had my parents,” he said stiffly, though he must have gotten over whatever grief he’d felt, because all he smelled of was irritation.

She laughed. “I knew your father, honey. No one would rather have had him than money. Your mother was a sweetie, though.”

He thought about getting mad, then shrugged it off. “Courtney and I are kissing cousins,” he told me. “It makes her pushy—and I’ve learned to tolerate her.”

She grinned at me and took a long pull of her beer.

Over her shoulder I could see that the others had pulled the chairs around into a loose semicircle and were starting to get settled down with munchies propped on a couple of small, strategically placed tables.

Tim took a seat that someone else had moved and motioned to me to sit beside him, while Courtney went to scrounge her own chair.

Since it was his house, I’d kind of expected him to take the lead, but it was Austin Summers who stood in front and let out a loud whistle.

I wish he’d warned me. My ears were still ringing when he began talking.

“Let’s get started. Who has business to address?”

It only took a very few minutes to discern that Austin was the leader. I’d seen the possibilities of his dominance at the pizza party, but I’d been talking to Tim instead of watching Austin. Here his role was as established as Adam’s was in his pack.

Aiden Fideal, the fae teacher, was either second in line or third behind Courtney. I had a hard time deciding—because so did they. From the uncertainness of their placement, I was pretty sure that O’Donnell had occupied that spot previously. A petty tyrant like O’Donnell wouldn’t have accepted Austin’s leadership easily. If Austin had been fae, I’d have put him on the top of my suspect list—but he was more human than I.

Tim faded into the background as the meeting continued. Not because he didn’t say anything, but because no one listened to him unless his remarks were repeated by either Courtney or Austin.

After a while I started to put some things together from chance remarks.

O’Donnell might have started Bright Future in the Tri-Cities, but he hadn’t had much luck until he’d found Austin. They had met in a class at the community college a couple of years earlier. O’Donnell was taking advantage of the BFA program that paid for continuing education for the reservation guards. Austin divided his time between Washington State University and CBC and was almost through with a computer degree.

Tim, who had no need to find work, was older than most of them.

“Tim has a masters in computer science from Washington State,” Courtney whispered to me. “That’s how he met Austin, in a computer class. Tim still takes a couple of classes from CBC or WSU every semester. It keeps him busy.”

Austin, Tim, and most of the students had belonged to a college club—which seemed to have had something to do with writing computer games. Mr. Fideal had been the faculty advisor for that club. When Austin got interested in Bright Future, he’d preempted the club. CBC had dissociated itself with the group when it became obvious the nature of their business had changed—but Mr. Fideal had kept the privilege of dropping in occasionally.

The first bit of business for Bright Future this meeting was to send a bouquet to O’Donnell’s funeral as soon as the time for it was arranged by his family. Tim accepted the assumption that he would pay for the flowers without comment.

Business concluded, one young man got up and presented methods sure to protect you from the fae, among them salt, steel, nails in your shoes, and putting your underwear on inside out.

In the question-and-answer session that followed, I finally couldn’t keep my mouth shut anymore. “You talk as if all the fae are the same. I know that there are some fae that can handle iron and it would seem to me that the sea fae, like selkies, wouldn’t have a problem with salt.”

The presenter, a shy giant of a young man, gave me a smile, and answered with far more articulation than he’d managed during his presentation. “You’re right, of course. Part of the problem is that we know that some of the stories have been embellished past all recognition. And the fae aren’t exactly jumping up and down to tell us just what kind of fae are left—the registration process is a joke. O’Donnell, who had access to all the paperwork on the fae in the reservation, said that he knew for a fact that at least one in three lied when answering what they were. But part of what we’re trying to do is sift through the garbage for the gold.”

“I thought the fae couldn’t lie,” I said.

He shrugged. “I don’t know about that, exactly.”

Tim spoke up. “A lot of them made up a Gaelic-or German-sounding word and used that to fill out the form. If I said I was a Heeberskeeter, I wouldn’t be lying since I just invented the word. The treaties that set up the reservation system didn’t allow any questions asked about the way the registration forms were filled out.”

By the time the meeting was wrapping up, I was convinced that none of these kids had anything to do with O’Donnell’s killing spree and subsequent murder. I’d never attended the meeting of any hate group—being half-Indian and not quite human, I’d have been pretty out of place. But I hadn’t been expecting a meeting conducted with all the passion and violence of a chess club. Okay, less passion and violence than a chess club.

I even agreed with most of what they said. I might like a few individual fae, but I knew enough to be afraid. Hard to blame these kids for seeing through the fae politicians and speech making. As Tim had told me, all they had to do was read the stories.

Tim walked me to my car after the meeting.

“Thanks for coming,” he said, opening my door for me. “What did you think?”

I smiled tightly to disguise my dislike of the way he’d grabbed my door before I had. It felt intrusive—though Samuel and Adam, both products of an earlier era, opened doors for me, too, and they didn’t bother me.

I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, though, so all I said was, “I like your friends…and I hope you aren’t right about the threat the fae present.”

“You don’t think we’re a bunch of overeducated, under-socialized geeks running around yelling the sky is falling?”

“That sounds like a quote.”

He smiled a little. “Directly from the Herald.”

“Ouch. And no, I don’t.”

I bent to get in the car and noticed that the walking stick was back, lying across the two front seats. I had to move it so I could sit down.

I glanced at Tim after I moved it, but he didn’t seem to recognize the stick. Maybe O’Donnell had kept it out of sight during the Bright Future meetings; maybe it had kept itself out of sight. Nor did Tim seem to see anything odd about a person who had a walking stick in the front seat of their car. People tend to expect VW mechanics to be a little odd.

“Listen,” he said. “I’ve had a little time to brush up on my Arthurian myths—read a little de Troyes and Malory after we got through talking. I wonder if you’d like to come over for dinner tomorrow?”

Tim was a nice man. I wouldn’t have to worry about him practicing undue influence via some werewolf mojo or turning control freak on me. He’d never get mad and rip out someone’s throat. He wouldn’t kill two innocent victims in order to protect me or anyone else from the mistress of the vampires. I hadn’t seen Stefan since then, but I often went months without seeing the vampire.

For a bare instant I thought about how nice it would be to go out with a normal person like Tim.

Of course, there was the small problem of telling him what I was. And the little fact that I wasn’t interested in getting into his bed at all.

Mostly, though, I was more than half in love with Adam, no matter how much he scared me.

“Sorry, no,” I said, shaking my head. “I just got out of one relationship. I’m not about to start another.”

His smile widened a little and grew pained. “Funny, me, too. We’d been dating for three years and I’d just gone to Seattle to buy a ring. I took her to our favorite restaurant, the ring in my pocket, and she told me she was getting married in two weeks to her boss. She was sure I would understand.”

I hissed in sympathy. “Ouch.”

“She was married in June, so it’s been a couple of months, but I don’t really feel like getting involved again either.” Evidently tiring of bending down, he crouched beside the car, putting his head just a little below mine. He reached out and touched me on the shoulder. He wore a plain silver ring, the once smooth surface scratched and worn. I wondered what it meant to him because he didn’t seem to be the kind of man who normally wore rings.

“So why invite me to dinner?” I asked.

“Because I don’t intend to turn into a hermit. In the spirit of ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down.’ Why shouldn’t we sit down and have a nice meal and a little conversation? No strings and I don’t intend us to end up in bed. Just a conversation. You, me, and Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.” He gave me a twisted smile. “As an added bonus, one of the things I’ve taken a lot of classes in is cooking.”

Another evening of arguing about Arthurian writers of the Middle Ages sounded like a lot of fun. I opened my mouth to accept but stopped without speaking the words. It might be fun, but it wasn’t a good idea.

“How about seven thirty,” he was saying. “I know it’s late, but I have a class until six and I’d like to have dinner ready when you come.”

He stood up and shut my door, giving it a pat before he strolled back to his house.

Had I just accepted a date with him?

Dazed, I started the Rabbit and headed for the highway home. I thought of all the things I should have said. I’d call him as soon as I got home and could look up his number. I’d tell him thanks but no thanks.

My refusal would hurt his feelings—but going might hurt him more: Adam would not like me having dinner with Tim. Not at all.

I’d just passed the exit for the Columbia Center Mall when I realized that Aiden Fideal was behind me. He’d pulled out of Tim’s house at the same time as I—and about three other people. I’d only noticed him because he was driving the Porsche, a 911 wide-body like the ones I’d always lusted after—though I preferred black or red (clichéd as that was) to bright yellow. Someone around town drove a purple one that was just mouthwatering.

A Buick passed me and my headlights caught his bumper sticker: Some people are like Slinkies. They aren’t really good for anything, but they still bring a smile to my face when I push them down a flight of stairs.

It made me laugh and broke the odd worry that seeing the Porsche just behind me had caused. Fideal probably lived in Kennewick and was just driving home.

But it wasn’t long before the nagging feeling that I was being hunted came back to settle on the nerves in the back of my neck. He was still behind me.

Fideal was a fae—but Dr. Altman was the fae’s hit man and she knew they couldn’t attack me without retaliation. There was no reason for me to be nervous.

Calling Adam for help would be overkill. If Zee hadn’t been in jail and if we’d been on speaking terms, I’d have called him, though. He wouldn’t overreact like Adam might.

I could call Uncle Mike—assuming he didn’t share Zee’s reaction and that he would take my phone call.

Uncle Mike might know if I was being stupid to let Fideal panic me unnecessarily. I took out my phone and flipped it open, but there was no welcoming light. The screen on the phone was blank. I must have forgotten to charge it.

I risked a speeding ticket and took the Rabbit up a notch. The speed limit was fifty-five here, and the police patrolled this stretch of highway often, so most of the traffic was actually traveling only sixty or thereabouts. I did a little weaving and breathed a sigh of relief when Fideal’s distinctive headlights slipped out of sight behind a minivan.

The highway dropped me off on Canal Street, and I slowed to city speeds. This must be my night to be stupid, I thought.

First, I’d accepted an invitation to eat with Tim—or at least I hadn’t refused—and then I’d panicked when I saw Fideal’s car. Dumb.

I knew better than to accept an offer to dinner from Tim. No matter how good the conversation might be, it wasn’t worth dealing with Adam about it. I should just have said no right then. Now it was going to be harder.

Oddly enough, it wasn’t the thought of Adam’s temper that dismayed me—knowing he was going to be angry if I did something usually just encouraged me to do it. I provoked him on a regular basis if I could. There was something about that man when he was all angry and dangerous that got my blood up. Sometimes my survival instincts are not what they should be.

If I went to Tim’s house for a dinner for two—and whatever Tim had said, dinner alone with a man was a date—Adam would be hurt. Angry was fine, but I didn’t want Adam hurt, ever.

The Washington Street light was red. I stopped next to a semi. His big diesel shook the Rabbit as we waited for a flood of nonexistent traffic. I passed him as we started up again and glanced in my rearview mirror to make sure he was far enough behind me before I pulled into the right-hand lane in preparation for my turn onto Chemical Drive. He was far enough back—and right next to him was the Porsche, which gleamed like a buttercup in the streetlights.

Sudden, unreasoning fear clenched my stomach until I regretted the Diet Coke. That I had no real reason for the fear didn’t lessen its impact. The coyote had decided I was ignoring her and insisted that he was a threat.

I breathed through my teeth as the reaction settled down to an alert readiness.

I’d been willing to believe that we might have the same path home. That little stretch of highway was the fastest way to the eastern half of Kennewick—and you could get to Pasco and Burbank that way, too, though the interstate on the other side of the river was faster.

But as I turned onto Chemical Drive, which led only to Finley, he followed me—and I’d have noticed if there were a 911 yellow wide-body in Finley. He was following me.

Instinctively I reached for the cell phone again—and when I grabbed it out of the passenger seat, it dripped water all over my hand. I realized then that the smell of brine had been getting stronger and stronger for a while. I dropped the useless phone and brought my hand to my mouth. It tasted of swamp and salt, like a salt marsh rather than seawater.

Although Adam’s house and my house share a back fence, his street turns off a quarter mile before mine does. I couldn’t remember if Samuel was at work tonight or not—but even if Adam wasn’t at his house, there was bound to be someone there. Someone who was a werewolf.

Of course, Jesse was likely to be there, too, and Jesse could protect herself even less than I could.

I took the turn onto Finley Road to give myself a chance to think. It was the long way around and I’d have to get back onto Chemical before I went home, but I’d made so many stupid moves tonight, I had to take time to make sure bringing this fae, whatever his intentions were, to Adam’s house was a smart idea.

I shouldn’t have worried. Just as I was passing Two Rivers Park, where the road was nice and deserted and the houses far away, the Rabbit coughed, sputtered, and choked before it died.

There was no shoulder to the road, so I guided the car off the blacktop and hoped for the best. If I left it on the road, some poor person, coming home late, could hit it and kill himself. The Rabbit bounced over some rocks, which didn’t do my undercarriage any good, and came to rest in a relatively flat spot.

The car felt like a trap, so I got out as soon as the wheels quit turning. The Porsche had stopped on the highway and sat growling its throaty song.

Full dark had fallen while I was driving back, and the lights were hard on my sensitive eyes, one of the downsides of good night vision. I turned my head away from the headlights so when Fideal got out of his car, I heard it rather than saw it.

“Odd seeing a fae drive a Porsche,” I told him coolly. “They might have an aluminum block, but the body is steel.”

The car made a hollow sound, as if it had been patted. “Porsche puts many coats of good paint on their cars. I have an additional four coats of wax and I find that it doesn’t trouble me at all,” he said.

Like the water in my phone, he smelled of rotting vegetation and salt. Not being able to see him bothered me; I needed to get away from the headlights.

I could have run, but running from something that might be faster is more of a last resort than a first action. Maybe all he wanted was that stupid walking stick. So I got onto the road and walked a big semicircle around the car until I was facing the side of his car rather than the lights in front.

As my shoes hit the blacktop, I felt a well of magic that seemed to be spreading out through the asphalt. Strong magic usually is almost painful, like touching my tongue to both sides of a nine-volt battery. Tonight there was something more, something…predatory about it.

Fideal was not as weak as he’d appeared at Tim’s party.

I hissed between my teeth as sharp pains shot up my legs. I stopped on the far side of the road. My eyes were still burning, but at least I could see him standing by the driver’s side door. He looked a little different than he had at Tim’s. I couldn’t see him well enough for fine details, but it seemed to me that he was taller and broader than he’d been.

Courteously he’d waited until I stopped moving before speaking. It is generally a bad thing when someone hunting you is polite. It means they are sure they can take you anytime they want to.

“So you are the little dog with the curious nose,” he said. “You should have kept your nose to your own kind.”

“Zee is my friend,” I told him. For some reason the “dog” part of that offended me. It would sound stupid to say, “I’m not a dog,” though. “You fae were going to let him die for someone else’s crime. I was the only one willing to look elsewhere for a murderer.” I thought of a reason he might be upset with me. “Am I looking at a murderer now?”

He threw his head back and laughed, a full-throated barrel-chested laugh. When he spoke again, his voice acquired a Scot’s brogue and had dropped half an octave. “I didn’t kill O’Donnell,” he said, which wasn’t quite an answer.

“I have protection,” I told him quietly, careful not to put a challenge in my voice. “Killing me will start a war with the werewolves,” I told him. “Nemane knows all about it.”

He shook his head from side to side, like an athlete stretching out the muscles of his neck. His hair was longer, I thought, and rustled wetly when he moved.

“Nemane is not what she once was,” he said. “She is weak and blind and troubles herself overmuch with humans.” He inhaled and he grew. When he finished breathing in, the outline of his form was larger than any human male I’d ever seen by about a foot, and he was almost as wide as he was tall. My eyes were adjusting and I could see that size wasn’t the only change.

“The call for your death has been set,” he said. “It is too bad that no one told me until too late that the orders had been recalled.”

He laughed again and it shook the froth of dark strands that covered him like a tattered overcoat. His lips were larger than they had been and there were long, pale shapes in the dark cavern of his mouth. “It has been so long.” His voice was wet and sloppy. “Human flesh is sweet to my tongue and I have not partaken for so long that my very bowels cry out for sustenance.” He roared like a winter wind as he leaped across the road in a single jump.

I was in coyote form and hightailing it at top speed down the road before he landed. Bits of clothing scattered behind me as I ran. I tripped once when my foot caught in my bra, but I rolled with it and shed the bra in my fall.

He could have had me then, but I think he was enjoying the chase. It must have been the reason he didn’t just go back and get the Porsche. It might take him a minute to shrink down so he could get into it, but the car was a lot faster than I was, and it could run forever.

I had to stay on the road until it crossed the canal. Otherwise it was too far for me to jump across and I wasn’t swimming anything with a water fae of some kind after me.

As soon as I was past it, I dodged down the road that paralleled the canal, running toward the river. I jumped through the fence behind the first house and tore through the field. By the time their dog noticed me and began barking an alarm, I was in the next field over and running through grass taller than I was. After a half mile of running, I slowed to a trot.

The ground was soft and there were horses and cows in the fields. A donkey chased me through its paddock with murderous intent, but I just picked up the pace until I could jump out of its paddock. Horses mostly don’t care about coyotes, nor do cows. Chickens run, but donkeys hate us every one.

When I heard hoofbeats behind me, I thought maybe the donkey had jumped its fence—until the horse I’d just passed let out a terrified squeal.

Kelpies could take on the form of a horse, I thought as I moved back into top gear.

I learned that whatever Fideal was, he didn’t like railroad tracks. Though he could cross them, they slowed him down and made him shriek with evident pain. Finley has lots of railroad tracks and, after that, I crossed them wherever I could without slowing down my headlong run for Adam’s house.

On the flats Fideal was faster than I was, but he couldn’t get through or over obstacles as quickly as I could. I scrambled over a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence that surrounded one of the big industrial compounds and wished it were iron. The barbed wire at the top made it a little interesting, but I managed.

The fence bent down under his weight and I heard the metal groan as the fence collapsed. It slowed him down. So I avoided the open gate and scrambled over the fence on the other side of the compound, too.

Though I hadn’t turned, the river had, and I had to run about a half mile along the shore past several old barges that had been tied up along the shoreline. He gained on me until I found the big hedge of blackberries.

This was part of one of my usual trails and over the years I’d built a path under the bushes and so I could run almost unhindered. Fideal, being a lot bigger, didn’t have that luxury.

When I cleared Adam’s fence, I couldn’t hear Fideal behind me so I changed as I ran. I mistimed it a bit and stumbled painfully to my knees in Adam’s gravel driveway. Darryl’s car was there, and Honey’s Toyota. The little red Chevy truck belonged to Ben.

“Adam!” I yelled. “Trouble on the way!” My legs didn’t want to work right as a single pair instead of two pairs, and I stumbled as I tried to regain my feet and run at the same time.

By the time I was on the porch, Darryl had the front door open. I fell again and this time I just rolled until I hit the outside of the house, just under the big picture window.

“Some kind of water fae,” I told him, panting hard and coughing with the force of my breathing. “Might look sort of like a horse or some hooved animal. Or it could be a swamp thingy as big as Adam’s SUV. A monster with fangs.”

I must have sounded like a ninny, but it didn’t faze Darryl.

“You keep bothering the monsters, Mercy, and someday something’s going to eat you.” He sounded calm and cool as he kept his eyes on the fence I’d jumped over. He had a big automatic in one hand—he must carry concealed because I hadn’t noticed him holding one when he opened the door.

“Oh, I hope not,” I said in between gasps. “I don’t want to be eaten. I’ve been counting on the vampires to kill me first.”

He laughed, though it wasn’t that funny. “Everyone else is changing,” he told me, and he didn’t mean clothes. But I could feel them, so he didn’t need to tell me. “How far behind you is this thing?”

I shook my head. “Not far. I led it into the blackberries, but—There! There! From the river.”

Darryl shifted his aim and began firing at the thing that emerged from the black water and trailed over Adam’s groomed gravel beach.

I hastily plugged my ears in an attempt to save my hearing. Even with Adam’s porch light and my own night vision, I couldn’t really focus on the thing that Fideal had become. It was as though his body swallowed the light and left me with an impression of marsh grasses and water.

The bullets slowed him a little, but I didn’t think they were doing enough damage to stop him. I’d caught my breath, even if my legs felt like they were made of rubber, and I had no intention of sitting here like bait.

I started to get up and Darryl grabbed my arm and jerked me down as the big plate glass window over me shattered and a werewolf leaped over my head and landed on the porch railing ten feet away. He paused there, examining Fideal.

“Careful, Ben,” I said. “It’s as fast as I am and it has great big teeth.”

The lanky red werewolf glanced back and the porch gave a warning creak. Ben sneered at me, an expression infinitely more impressive with gleaming white fangs than it was when he did it as a human. He jumped off the porch and barreled silently into Fideal.

A black wolf, tipped with silver like a reverse Siamese cat, jumped out behind him. He turned Adam’s eyes to me, where I sat covered in glass shards, and then looked at Darryl.

“Right,” said Darryl, though I know Adam couldn’t talk to his pack while he was in wolf shape the way the Marrok could.

Darryl dropped the gun he’d been firing continuously and picked me up gingerly. “Let’s get you off the glass. If you bleed to death, Adam’s going to make mincemeat out of Ben.”

I looked down and realized that I was bleeding from small cuts all over my bare skin. I let Darryl carry me out of the glass and into the house before wriggling free.

He let me go and started tearing off his own clothes.

Another werewolf, this one tawny and beautiful, streaked by me, knocking me a step sideways. Honey. She was followed by another pair of wolves; one was brindled and the other gray. More of Adam’s pack, though I couldn’t have named either of them.

“Mercy, what is that thing?” Honey’s husband, Peter, was still in human form. He saw my look and said, “Adam told me to stay human. I’m to get Jesse away if things go badly.”

I quit paying attention to him when I heard a yelp from outside. It would have taken a lot of pain to wring a sound out of a wolf this close to the pack’s den. They were trained to fight silently so as not to attract undue attention. That yelp meant someone was badly hurt.

I’d brought it here. I had to help fight.

“Cold iron.” My voice jittered with adrenaline. “Salt won’t work on that one, I don’t think—and I’m a little short of underwear to turn inside out. No shoes. I need something steel.”

“Steel?” asked Peter.

I ignored him and ran into the kitchen and grabbed a French chef’s knife and a butcher knife out of the set of Henckels that Adam had paid a large fortune for. They weren’t stainless steel because regular, high-carbon steel holds a better edge. It also works better on fae.

As I charged out of the kitchen, Honey’s husband landed at the base of the stairs, right in front of me. I think he’d just jumped down the whole thing—werewolves can do things like that. He held a sword in his hand.

“Mercy,” he said. His voice sounded different than I’d ever heard it. His pleasant Midwest accent disappeared and he sounded vaguely German, not like Zee exactly, but close. “Adam bound me to watch over Jesse and not help.”

Something hit the side of the house hard.

A sword was better than two little knives. “Can you use that thing?”

“Ja.”

As Adam’s declared mate, I could change his orders—though I’d have to answer for it if he got ticked off.

“Go help. I’ll stay out of it and get Jesse out of here if it looks like it’s going badly.”

He was gone before the last words left my mouth.

I tried to look out the living room window, but the wraparound porch hid too much. Jesse’s room would have a better view—and she might have clothes that would fit me.

I started up the stairs at a run, but by the time I hit the top, I was lucky to be walking. In coyote form, I can trot for hours, but sprinting is different. I just didn’t have any more running in me.

Jesse must have heard me because she stuck her head out of her bedroom and then rushed over. “Can I help?”

I looked down to see what caused the consternation in her face. It wasn’t my nakedness. She’d grown up with werewolves, and shapeshifters can’t afford too much modesty. For the wolves, the change is a slow process and it hurts; if they are tearing up clothing as they change, it just hurts that much worse. Makes them even grumpier than usual—so mostly they take their clothes off first.

No, it wasn’t my nakedness; it was the blood. I was covered with it.

Appalled, I looked behind me at the carpet that was stained with my blood all the way up the stairs. “Darn it,” I said. “That’s going to be expensive to clean.”

I heard a roar that shook the house and quit worrying about the carpet. I let go of the railing that I’d been using to hold me up and stumbled over to Jesse’s window, which was opened wide. She’d pulled the screen off the window already. With the knives still in each hand, I crawled out and down onto the roof of the porch, where I could see what was going on.

The werewolves were badly battered. Ben was crumpled against Adam’s SUV and there was a huge dent in the quarter panel just above him.

Darryl circled the fae, his brindled coat fading into the shadows. If he hadn’t been moving, I don’t know that I’d have seen him at all. Adam perched on the fae’s back, his front paws raking through the fronds like a giant cat’s, but I couldn’t tell how much damage he was doing. Honey and her husband were working as a team. She’d harry the fae with quick leaping nips until he turned to her and her husband would take advantage of its inattention to dive in and rake it with his sword.

From my vantage point, I could hear Peter mutter, “Can’t find flesh in all this seaweed.”

“I can’t tell if they’re winning or losing,” Jesse said as she climbed through the window. She threw her comforter over me and knelt near the edge of the roof.

“I can’t either,” I started to say, but I stopped halfway through the last word as a wave of magic brushed painfully over me and dumped me on my rump.

“Careful,” I yelled to the wolves below. I was up and on the edge of the roof as quickly as I could manage—which was just in time to see the fae make an incredibly quick move across the stretch of beach and into the inky river. Adam was still on his back.

Werewolves can’t swim. Like chimpanzees, they have too little fat: they are too dense to float. My foster father had committed suicide by walking into a river.

I started to jump off the roof. I could have changed in midair, and on four legs I’d have been in the water in seconds—but I’d promised to watch Jesse. Just because a promise becomes desperately inconvenient doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep it.

Peter dropped his sword and waded into the river without wasting an instant. The porch light showed me his head as it disappeared under the water.

Jesse’s hand closed over mine in a bone-crushing grip.

“Come on, come on,” she muttered, then let out a yip of joy as Peter reemerged, towing a coughing and sputtering wolf in his wake.

I sat down and buried my face in my hands in relief.

“You are covered with blood and glass,” Jesse snapped at me as she helped me drag my tired bones over the windowsill. “All that blood isn’t going to do anything to help the wolves calm down.”

“I have to go down and check,” I insisted doggedly, not for the first time. “Some of them are hurt and it’s my fault.”

“They enjoyed every minute of that fight and you know it. It’ll take them a bit to calm enough to be safe anyway. Dad’ll come up when he’s fit to talk. You get in the shower before you ruin the carpet.”

I looked down and saw that I was still trailing blood. My feet started to throb as soon as I noticed.

With a little more prodding on Jesse’s part, I shuffled off to the shower (in Adam’s bedroom, since the hall shower was still exposed to the world). Jesse stuffed a pair of old sweats and a T-shirt that told everyone that I loved New York into my arms and shut the bathroom door behind me.

With the excitement done, I was so tired I could hardly move. Adam’s bathroom was decorated in tasteful browns that somehow managed to escape being bland. His ex-wife, whatever her other faults—and they were many—had excellent taste.

While I waited for the shower to warm up, I glanced in the full-length mirror that covered the wall between the shower and the his-and-her sinks—and despite the guilt of bringing the fae down upon Adam’s unsuspecting pack—I had to grin.

I looked like something out of a bad horror flick. Naked, I was covered from fingertip to elbow and toe to knee with marsh muck: it always amazes me how much swamp there is in the Tri-Cities, which is pretty much a desert. The rest of me sparkled, as though I’d covered myself with some glitter lotion instead of having a window broken over my sweat-covered body. Here and there were larger chunks of glass that dripped off me every time I moved—my hair was littered with them.

And everywhere, I was covered with tiny cuts that oozed blood. I picked up my foot and removed a largish splinter that was responsible for the small pool of blood that was growing around me. All the cuts were really going to hurt tomorrow. Not for the first time, I wished I healed like the werewolves did.

Steam began to rise from the shower and I trudged in and shut the glass door behind me. The water stung and I hissed as it hit tender bits—then swore when I stepped on another shard of glass, probably one of the ones that had fallen out of my hair as soon as the water hit me.

Too tired to fish the glass out, I leaned against the wall and let the water pour over my head and relief rolled over me with it, robbing my knees of their last bit of starch. Only the fear that I’d sit on glass and cut something more dear than my feet kept me from sinking to the tiled shower floor.

I took inventory.

I was still alive, and with the possible exception of Ben, so were the werewolves. I closed my eyes and tried not to think of the red wolf lying in the grass. Ben would probably be all right. Werewolves can take a lot of damage and there had been the others to keep the fae off him while he was helpless. He’d be all right, I reassured myself—but it didn’t matter. Somehow I was going to have to work up the energy to get out of the shower and check.

The bathroom door opened, and I felt the wash of Adam’s power.

“There’s a Porsche sitting in the middle of Finley Road, right in front of Two Rivers Park,” I said, though I hadn’t remembered it until just that moment. “Someone’s going to hit it and get killed if it doesn’t get moved.”

The door opened again and there was a quiet murmur of voices.

Even over the drowning spray of the water, I heard someone say, “I’ll take care of it.” Honey’s husband again, I thought, because the werewolves can’t talk in their wolf shape and he was the only one who had stayed human. Some of the wolves could have changed back by now—but without a good reason to do so, they’d probably just stay wolves for the night. Except for Adam.

Changing so quickly to fight the fae I’d brought him, the actual fight, then changing back in under an hour weren’t going to leave him in a cheerful mood. I hoped he’d eaten something before he came up here—changing cost a lot of energy and I’d rather he not be hungry. I was bleeding too much for that to be good.

Telling Adam to take care of Fideal’s car was supposed to have given me enough time to get out of the shower and wrap up in a towel, but I couldn’t work up the energy to do anything but stand in the shower stall.

The big glass door swung open, but I didn’t look up. Adam didn’t say anything, but turned me with his hands on my shoulders so I was facing the showerhead. I bowed my head farther and took a step forward so the spray hit the top of my head rather than my face.

He must have picked up a comb, because he started to comb my hair free of glass. He was being very careful not to touch me anywhere else.

“Watch it,” I said. “There’s glass all over the floor.”

The comb hesitated and then resumed its task. “I have my shoes on,” he said. The rumble of his growl told me that the wolf wasn’t far away no matter how human or gentle the hands that worked through my hair were.

“Is everyone all right?” I asked, though I knew he needed quiet now.

“Ben’s hurt, but nothing that won’t heal by morning—and nothing he doesn’t deserve after jumping through the window. Glass is heavy and sharper than a guillotine’s blade. He’s lucky he didn’t cut his own throat—and luckier still that all you have are cuts.”

I could feel the anger vibrate through him. Werewolves, in their wolf form, are not always angry—just as a grizzly bear is not always angry: it only seems like it. If what Honey had told me was correct, Adam’s temper was even more uncertain than usual. The fight wouldn’t have helped it.

All that meant I couldn’t cover my own uncertain state by pricking his temper—it wouldn’t be fair to him. Damn it.

I was too tired to be playing the kind of games that kept werewolves calm—and keep him from knowing just how scared I had been at the same time.

“I’m not hurt,” I said. “Just tired. That fae could run.”

He growled at the mention of his recent opponent, and it wasn’t a human sound.

I swore, though I usually tried not to do that in front of Adam, as he had the sensibilities of a man raised in the nineteen fifties when nice women didn’t swear. “I’m too tired for this. I’m going to shut up now.”

He resumed combing my hair and I waited patiently until he was satisfied that he’d gotten all the glass out. He shut off the water and got out of the shower stall to grab a towel out of a cabinet beside the door. I looked at him then, while his head was turned away so there was no chance of catching his gaze. Though he’d taken his shirt off, he was dressed in a very wet pair of jeans and tennis shoes.

As soon as he shifted his weight to turn, I dropped my eyes. He came back to the shower stall and dried me with a fluffy, sweet-smelling towel. It had spent too much time with a dryer sheet, so it wasn’t very absorbent, despite the thick nap. I bit my lip so I wouldn’t tell him so.

This close to him, I could smell how near his temper was to the surface, so I kept my gaze on our feet and made myself stand submissively while he worked off his temper by taking care of me.

I can fake submissive with the best of them. It’s a survival technique around werewolves.

He paused when he came to my belly. He let the towel drop away and dropped to one knee until his face was on level with my navel. He closed his brilliant eyes and pressed his forehead against the vulnerable softness under my rib cage.

The flesh of the belly is soft and sweet, unprotected. But my nose told me that he was definitely not thinking of food. For a breathless moment we both waited.

“Samuel told me about your tattoo,” he said, his breath warm against my skin.

Hadn’t he seen it before? Being very careful not to tease him meant that I kept my clothes on around him—so maybe not.

“It’s a coyote paw print,” I told him. “I had it done when I was in college.”

He raised his face until he was looking up at me. “It looks like a wolf print to me.”

“Is that what Samuel said?” I asked. I wasn’t unaffected by the close contact—I couldn’t help but let the fingers of one hand slide through his hair. “What did he say? That I’d marked myself his property?” Oh, he wouldn’t lie, not to another werewolf; it doesn’t work. But a hint here and there was just as effective.

Adam pressed his head against me until all I could see was the top of his head. His cheek and chin were prickly, which should have tickled or hurt, but that wasn’t the sensation that I was feeling. His hands slid up my legs to my rump, where they tightened, pulling me harder against his face.

His lips were soft, but not as soft as his tongue.

This was about to go one step further than I was ready for—and for a long moment I considered it. I closed my eyes. Maybe if it had been someone other than Adam, I’d have let him. But one of the things that the Marrok had taught me is that with werewolves you are always dealing with two sets of instincts. The first belonged to the beast, but the second belonged to the man. Adam wasn’t a modern man, content to hop from bed to bed. In his era you didn’t have sex unless you were married or getting married and I knew that he believed that.

Having been the result of a casual night of sex and grown up belonging to no one—I believed that, too. Oh, I’d fooled around a bit, but I didn’t much anymore.

Would it be so bad to be Adam’s mate? All that I had to do to let this relationship go one step more was nothing.

“My college roommate had grown up helping her parents run their tattoo shop and she put herself through college by doing tattoos. I tutored her in a few subjects and she offered to give me the tattoo in return,” I told him, trying to distract one of us.

“Still scared of me?” he asked.

I didn’t know how to answer him because that wasn’t it, really. I was scared of the person I became around him.

He sighed and leaned back until none of his skin touched mine before coming back to his feet. He tossed the damp towel on the floor and stepped back out of the stall.

I started to get out, too.

“Stay there.”

He grabbed another towel and wrapped me in it. Then he picked me up and set me on the counter between the sinks.

“I’m going to change out of this wet stuff and find something for your feet. There’s glass scattered all over downstairs and everywhere you walked. You stay on this counter until I get back.”

He didn’t wait for my agreement, which was probably for the best as I would have choked on it. That last sentence would have made me bristle even if his tone of voice hadn’t been military-sharp. Why was it that I was always trying to handle the werewolves instead of the other way around?

Maybe because Adam’s other form had big claws and great big teeth.

I could reach Jesse’s clothes without leaving the counter and so I ditched the towel and scrambled into the sweatpants and then the T-shirt. My T-shirts were the old-fashioned thick cotton kind, but Jesse wore fashionably thin ones that clung to every curve. Since my skin was still damp and the shirt was tight, I looked like a refugee from a wet T-shirt contest.

I snagged the towel and used it to cover my assets just as Adam strode back in. He was wearing clean, dry jeans and a different pair of tennis shoes. He hadn’t bothered putting on a shirt: after two changes in under an hour, his skin must feel raw, like a bad sunburn. The shower wouldn’t have helped that.

I focused on his feet and clutched the towel a little closer to my chest.

To my surprise, he took a good look at me and laughed abruptly. “You look so meek. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you meek before.”

“Looks are deceiving,” I said. “What I am is exhausted, scared, and stupid. I’m sorry I brought it here and endangered Jesse.”

I watched his shoes as they approached the counter. He leaned close, enveloping me in his power and in his scent. His face rubbed against my hair, and the faint trace of stubble caught on the wet strands.

“You have a few cuts on your scalp,” he said.

“I’m sorry I brought him here,” I told Adam again. “I thought I could lose him in the chase, but he was too fast. He has another form, some kind of horse, I think, though I was too busy running to look.”

His head stilled and he took a deep breath, assessing my mood.

“Exhausted, scared, and stupid, you said.” He paused as if he were evaluating what I’d said. “Exhausted, yes.” If he could smell exhaustion, his nose was a lot better than mine, which I didn’t believe. “And I can catch a faint trace of fear, though the shower took care of most of that. But stupid I don’t believe. What else could you have done but bring it here where we could handle it?”

“I could have led it somewhere else.”

He tipped my chin back and forced me to look into his bright gold eyes. “You’d have died.”

His voice was soft, but the wolf’s eyes were hot with the fire of battle.

“Jesse could have died…you almost did.” For a moment I felt the gut-wrenching twist of seeing him disappear under the water.

He let me hide my face against his shoulder so he couldn’t read my expression—but I felt the power that had been buzzing against my skin drop a notch. My reaction to his near-drowning pleased him.

“Shh,” he said and one of his big, calloused hands slid under my hair and around the back of my neck to hold me against him. “I coughed up a gallon or two of river and am as good as new. Much better than I’d have been if you’d gotten yourself killed because you didn’t trust me to take care of one lone fae.”

Leaving my head tucked against him was as dangerous as anything I’d done tonight, and I knew it. I just couldn’t seem to care. He smelled so good and his skin was so warm.

“All right,” he said at last. “Let me take a look at your feet.”

He did more than that. He washed them in hot water in the sink and scrubbed them with a brush he pulled out of a drawer that would have been uncomfortable even if my feet hadn’t been all cut up.

To my yips, he purred a little, but it didn’t slow down his scrub brush. Nor did I have a chance of pulling a foot out of his hand because he kept a firm grip on my ankle as he worked. He doused my feet in hydrogen peroxide and then dried them off with a dark towel.

“You’re going to end up with bleached spots on the towel,” I told him, pulling my feet away.

“Shut up, Mercy,” he said, catching an ankle and dragging me over until he could hold the foot with one hand and use the towel to wipe my foot off with the other.

“Dad?” Jesse peered carefully around the door. When she got a good look at us, she trotted through the door and held out a cordless phone. “You have a phone call from Uncle Mike.”

“Thanks,” he said and took the phone and tucked it against his ear. “Could you finish up here, Jesse? She just needs drying off, bandaging, and something on her feet before we let her out of here.”

I waited until he took the phone out of the room and down the stairs before I grabbed the towel from Jesse, who was giggling.

“If you could just see your face,” she told me. “You look like a cat in a bathtub.”

I dried my feet and then opened the box of bandages Adam had set on the counter next to me. “I can dry my own damn feet,” I snarled. “Sit here, stay here.”

I was sitting between the sinks so there was room on the far side of the one nearest the door for Jesse to hitch a hip on it and half sit. “So why did you listen to his orders?”

“Because he just saved my bacon and I don’t need to rile him more than he already is.” There were only three cuts that needed bandages, all of them on my left foot.

“Come on,” she said. “Admit it, you enjoyed him fussing over you just a little bit.”

I gave her a look. When she didn’t back down, I turned my attention to peeling the paper off a bandage so I could stick it on my foot. I wasn’t going to admit to anything. Not with Adam just downstairs where he might overhear something I didn’t want him to hear.

“How come you’re wearing a towel?” she asked.

I showed her and she giggled. “Whoops. I forgot you wouldn’t have a bra. I’ll get a sweatshirt for you to wear over that.”

When she was safely gone, I smiled to myself. She was right. There is something about having someone take care of you, even when you don’t need it—maybe especially when you don’t need it.

Something else made me happier, though. Even though Adam was on edge, even though he’d been issuing orders left and right, I hadn’t felt that desire to do whatever he asked me that was part of his magic as the Alpha. If he could manage that under these circumstances…Perhaps I could be his mate and keep myself at the same time.

Jesse’s shoes, which Adam had brought in for me, were too small, but in addition to the sweatshirt, she managed to scrounge up a pair of flip-flops that worked.

Honey’s husband walked in the door as I came down the stairs, Honey, as gorgeous in wolf form as she was in human, at his side. He gave me a friendly smile when he saw me.

“I didn’t find the Porsche, but your Rabbit was off the side of the road with the keys in the ignition. I couldn’t start it, so I locked it up.” He handed me the keys.

“Thanks, Peter. Fideal must have gone back for his car. That means he wasn’t badly hurt.” I’d been going to head over to my house, but with Fideal running around, it didn’t sound like such a good idea.

Peter obviously shared my displeasure at the fae’s state of health. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The steel would have done it, I think, but I couldn’t find his body under all the fronds.”

“How is it that you’re so comfortable with the sword?” I asked. “And why did Adam have a sword here anyway?”

“It’s my sword,” Jesse said. “I got it at the Renaissance Faire last year and Peter’s been teaching me how to use it.”

He smiled. “I was a calvary officer before I Changed,” he explained. “We used guns, of course, but they weren’t accurate. The sword was still our first weapon.” He sounded as he always had, his Midwest accent firmly back in place.

He’d been Changed during the Revolutionary War era or a little before, I thought, to use guns but rely on swords. That would make him, other than maybe Samuel and the Marrok himself, the oldest werewolf I’d ever met. Werewolves might not die of old age, but violence was part and parcel of their way of life.

He saw my surprise. “I’m not a dominant, Mercy. We tend to last a little longer.” Honey pushed her face under his hand and he rubbed her gently behind her ears.

“Cool,” I said.

“Fideal is in safe hands,” said Adam from behind me.

I turned to see him replacing the phone in its base on the kitchen counter.

“Uncle Mike assures me that it was a mistake—an overeagerness on the part of Fideal to carry out the Gray Lords’ orders.”

I raised my eyebrows. “He told me he was hungry for human flesh. I guess that could be overeagerness.”

He looked at me and I couldn’t read his face or his scent. “I talked to Samuel earlier. He’s sorry to have missed the excitement, but he’s at home now. If Fideal follows you home, he’ll have Samuel to contend with.” He waved his hand around. “And there are plenty of us here to come to your aid.”

“Are you sending me home?” Was I flirting? Damn it, I was.

He smiled, first with his eyes and then his lips, just a little, just enough to turn his face into something that made my pulse pick up. “You can stay if you’d like,” he said, flirting right back. Then, a wicked light gleaming in his eyes, he went one step too far. “But I think there are too many people around for what I’d like you to stay for.”

I dodged around Honey’s husband and out the door, the flip-flops making little snapping sounds that didn’t cover up Adam’s final comment. “I like your tattoo, Mercy.”

I made sure that my shoulders were stiff as I stalked away. He couldn’t see the grin on my face…and it faded soon enough.

From the porch I could see the damage the fight had done to both the house and the SUV. That dent in the side of the shiny black vehicle was going to be expensive to fix. The side of the house had taken some damage, too, and I didn’t know how much it would cost to repair. When I’d had to have the siding replaced on my trailer, the vampires had picked up the tab.

I started adding up the cost of the fight. I didn’t know exactly what Fideal had done to my car, but it was going to take hours to fix, even if I could scrounge all the parts off the dead Rabbit presently annoying Adam in my back field. And somewhere I was going to have to come up with money to pay off Zee (and I really didn’t want to borrow it from Samuel)—unless Zee had been playing some elaborate game to keep me from investigating the murder.

I rubbed my face, suddenly tired. I’d kept mostly to myself since I left the Marrok’s pack when I was sixteen. The only problems I’d stuck my nose into had been my own. I stayed out of werewolf business and Zee kept me out of his. Somehow in the past year all that careful management had gone to hell.

I wasn’t sure that there was a way back to my old peaceful existence, or if I even wanted it. But my new lifestyle was starting to get expensive.

A piece of gravel slid between the flip-flop and my sore foot and I yelped. It was getting painful, too.

I called Tim the next morning before I went to work. It was early, but I didn’t want to miss him. He’d caught me off guard last night, but I had no business dragging a human into my mess of a love life—even if I liked him that way, which I didn’t.

Maybe I couldn’t live with Adam—but it looked like I was going to try. If I went to Tim’s, it would hurt Adam and give Tim the wrong impression. It had been stupid not to just refuse yesterday…

“Hey, Mercy,” he said as he picked up the phone. “Listen, Fideal called me last night—what did you do to tick him off? Anyway he told me that you came to our meeting to do some investigating into O’Donnell’s death. He said you knew the suspect they have in custody.”

There was absolutely no anger in his voice, which pretty much meant that he must have been speaking the truth when he said he wasn’t interested in a romantic entanglement. If he’d been interested in me, he’d have felt used.

Good. He wouldn’t feel bad when I told him I couldn’t go.

“Yes,” I said cautiously. “He’s an old friend. I know that he didn’t do it, which is more than anyone else investigating can say.” Zee’s name was still being withheld from the press, as well as his being a fae. “Since no one else was doing anything, I’ve been poking around.”

“I suppose we’re on the top of the list of suspects,” said Tim matter-of-factly. “O’Donnell wasn’t exactly rolling in friends.”

“On top of my list until I attended one of your meetings,” I told him.

He laughed. “Yeah, none of us is exactly murderer material.”

I didn’t agree with him—anyone can be driven to kill, given the right cause. Except for Fideal, though, none of them were capable of killing someone the way O’Donnell had been killed.

“I didn’t think of it at the time,” he said. “But after Fideal talked to me, I started thinking. That walking stick in your car was O’Donnell’s, wasn’t it? He’d just bought it off of eBay a couple of days before he died.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think it had something to do with his death? I know the police say they don’t think that robbery was the motive, but O’Donnell started collecting Celtic stuff a couple of months ago. He claimed it was pretty valuable.”

“Did he say where he got it?” I asked.

“He said he inherited some of it and the rest he picked up on eBay.” He paused. “You know, he said that it was all magical fae stuff, but he couldn’t get any of it to do anything. I assumed that he was just being conned…but do you suppose he actually got something that really belonged to the fae and they decided to take it back?”

“I don’t know. Did you get a good look at his collection?”

“I recognized that staff,” he said slowly. “But not until Fideal told me that you had a connection with O’Donnell. There was a stone with some writing on it, a few battered pieces of jewelry that might have been silver—or silver plate…If I took a look at his collection, I might be able to tell you what is missing.”

“I think the whole collection is missing. Except for the walking stick.” I saw no need to tell him that the fae had gotten some of it back.

He whistled. “So it was a robbery.”

“That’s what it looks like. If I can prove that, then my friend is no longer a good suspect.”

The Gray Lords didn’t want any mortals knowing that they had magical artifacts, and I could see their point. The problem was that the Gray Lords could be ruthless in making sure that no word got out. Tim already knew too much.

“Did Fideal know about the collection?” I asked.

Tim considered it. “No. I don’t think so. O’Donnell didn’t like him, and Fideal never went to O’Donnell’s house. I think the only ones he showed it to were Austin and me.”

“Okay.” I took a deep breath. “Look, it might be dangerous to know about that collection. If he did manage to find something that belonged to the fae, they wouldn’t want that known. And you, of all people, know how ruthless they are. Don’t talk to the police or anyone else about it for now.”

“You do think it was a fae who killed him,” Tim said, sounding a little taken aback.

“The collection is gone,” I said. “Maybe one of the fae sent someone after it, or maybe someone else believed O’Donnell’s stories and wanted it. I might be able to figure out more, if I knew what he had. Could you make a list of what you remember?”

“Maybe,” he said. “I only saw it the once. How about I do my best to write it down and we can take a look at them tonight?”

I remembered that I’d called him to cancel our dinner.

He didn’t give me a chance to say anything. “If I have all day to think about it, I should be able to put together most of it. I’ll see Austin at school; we usually do lunch together. He saw O’Donnell’s collection, too, and he’s a pretty decent artist.” He gave a rueful laugh. “Yes, I know. Good looks, intelligence, and talented, too. He can do anything. If he wasn’t so nice, I’d hate him, too.”

“Drawings would be terrific,” I said. I could compare them to the drawings in Tad’s friend’s book. “Just remember that this is dangerous stuff.”

“I will. See you tonight.”

I hung up the phone.

I ought to call Adam and tell him what I was doing. I dialed the first number and then hung it up. It was easier to get forgiveness than permission—not that I should need permission. Getting a list of what O’Donnell had stolen was a good enough reason that Adam would understand why I went to Tim’s house. He might get mad, but he wouldn’t be hurt.

And Adam angry was really an awesome sight. Was I a bad person that I enjoyed it?

Laughing to myself, I went to work.

I woke up with the smell of Adam in my nose and my stomach cramping. I didn’t have time to wonder about my surroundings. I dove off the bed and made it to the bathroom just in time to throw up in the toilet.

Fairy brew tastes a lot worse the second time around.

Gentle hands pulled my hair out of the way—though it was too late for that—and wiped my face with a damp washcloth. Someone had put a pair of underwear and one of Adam’s T-shirts on me.

“At least you made it to the loo this time,” Ben said prosaically. And then, just so I could be absolutely sure it was really him and not some kinder, nicer clone, he said, without affection, “Good thing, too. We are almost out of sheets.”

“Happy to oblige,” I managed before heaving up some more—so hard it came burning out my nose as well as my mouth. By the time I finished, I’d have been crying on the floor if the idea of doing that in front of Ben hadn’t been so repugnant.

He waited until it became apparent that getting to the bathroom was as good as I was going to manage before he sighed and heaved me up with more effort than I knew he felt. He was a werewolf; he could probably pick up a piano. My weight wasn’t enough to make him sweat.

He tucked me back in the sheets with surprising efficiency. “The fae told us you’d sleep a lot for a while. The vomiting surprised her, though. Probably something to do with your resistance to magic and how much of the stuff you had. Best thing for you is sleep.” He paused. “Unless you’re hungry.”

I turned my head out from the pillow far enough that he could see my face.

He smirked. “Yeah, well, I’m not excited about cleaning up another mess either.”

For a whole day I indulged myself. I slept on my bed with whatever wolf had been sent to stay with me. Whenever I started to have a nightmare, someone was always there. Samuel, Warren, Honey, and Darryl’s mate, Aurielle. Samuel dragged one of the kitchen chairs into my room and played his guitar for hours.

The next morning I woke up and knew I had to do something or all this pity and guilt was going to make me go stir crazy. If I let them all treat me like I was broken, then how was I going to convince myself I wasn’t?

It was Friday. I should be at work…My lungs froze at the thought of going back into my shop. I breathed my way through the panic attack.

So I wouldn’t go to work. Not today at least.

What to do…

I lifted my head to the pile of wolves that were threatening to make my twin bed collapse under their weight and considered my minions. Darryl wouldn’t work. He wouldn’t twitch without Adam’s say-so—and Aurielle wouldn’t go against her mate. She opened her eyes to look at me. Like me, both of them should have been at work: Aurielle at her high school and Darryl at his high-price think tank. Neither of them would do for the main project, but for now it didn’t matter. Today would be reconnaissance.