1
"Mercy."
Adam peered down at me. His
feral, golden eyes held my gaze. Only a few bits of darkness lingered in
the bright depths, like bitter chocolate melting in butter. Icy rain
dripped from his forehead onto my face, causing me to blink.
The
gold was worrisome, I thought muzzily, wiping my cheek with a clumsy
hand. I should pay attention to the dangerous gold in his eyes.
"Pretty," I said.
Someone stifled a laugh, but it wasn't Adam. His frown deepened.
I
had just been . . . well, I couldn't remember exactly, but it had
definitely not been lying on the wet ground, icy rain-or possibly very
wet snow-sluicing down on my face as I stared up into Adam's wild eyes. I
reached up with a hand that didn't want to obey and closed my fist on
the collar of his shirt.
Though my brain still wasn't
tracking quite right, it didn't take much thought to make a connection
between the splendid headache that seemed to be centered around my
temple and my position on the ground. Something must have hit me hard. I
figured I'd be-cold water dripped on my cheek-right as rain in just a
minute, but judging by Adam's expression, it might not be soon enough to
prevent an explosion.
That could be bad. Worse than if
Adam merely lost out to his wolf. His usual wolf. The flash memory of
the twisted version of a David Cronenberg-inspired movie werewolf
worrying at my throat with huge, already bloodstained teeth served to
wake me more effectively than the cold water splashing my face from the
skies above us had.
I sucked in a breath with a sudden
surge of adrenaline that seemed to extinguish the last few dark bits of
humanity in Adam's eyes even as it left me thinking more clearly.
Neither he nor I knew if the vicious monster the witch Elizaveta had
cursed him to become when she died was gone or merely biding its time.
Adam
had warned the pack about the possibility that he could turn into
something more dangerous, a monster that he couldn't always control. But
in true werewolf fashion, they seemed to look upon it as a new
superpower Adam had achieved rather than the terrifying threat it was.
They hadn't witnessed it firsthand.
After the full moon
had come and only Adam's usual wolf form had answered that call, Adam
had been relieved. His temper, already easily roused, had continued to
be on an even-shorter-than-usual fuse, but I thought that could be
attributed to the unusual strain of the past few months. And yet . . .
I
examined my mate's face for a hint of the monster and saw . . . Adam.
He carried the experiences of this past year, and despite the
werewolf-bestowed youth, his eyes looked older. There was a tightness to
his features due to the bite of Elizaveta's curse and the various
horrors of the past few months. He still had the confident air that was
so much a part of him, but now it looked as though it was riding a
war-weary soldier.
I tugged a little harder on the collar of his shirt.
He
blinked and a ring of darkness solidified around the outside of his
irises. Reassured, I tugged hard enough to choke him, ignoring the
soreness this spawned in the newly healed muscle of my right arm where
an assassin had shot me shortly before Adam's monster had eaten her.
I
couldn't have pulled Adam down to me if he hadn't wanted to come. He
was a werewolf and I wasn't. I could have levered myself to him, but I
didn't have to make the effort. He bent down and brushed my lips
lightly, with a wry tilt of one eyebrow that told me he knew what I was
up to but he was willing to play my game.
He sat all the
way down on the ground, ignoring the slushy mud, and hauled me into his
lap. It was like sitting on a furnace. My whole body softened into him,
into his warmth and the rich smell of home. For a half second there was
another scent, a more rank scent-or maybe that was just my imagination,
because when I inhaled again, I smelled only Adam.
I
leaned my head into his shoulder, which was as hard as stone. That
wasn't just because he was tense with anger; he was just in that kind of
shape. What little softness there had been was worn away, leaving only
muscle and bone behind. There was no give to him, but if I'd wanted
soft, I would have had to look for someone who wasn't the Alpha of a
werewolf pack. Someone who wasn't Adam.
When my temple
touched his collarbone, I hissed, and he went rigid. I'd almost
forgotten. This had all begun when something had hit me in the temple
and dropped me.
"Was it Bonarata?" I asked. That didn't
seem right. The Lord of Night, vampire ruler of all he could survey, was
in Italy. But we'd killed all the witches, hadn't we? Even Elizaveta
was dead. And the fae-ish smoke dragon was gone to wherever fae-ish
smoke dragons go.
There were a few more smothered laughs.
If there were enemies around, there wouldn't have been people
laughing-and Adam wouldn't have sat down on the ground.
Someone
said, in a whisper that was not quite quiet enough, "Dang, she's going
to have another black eye." Honey, I thought. She usually had better
sense.
Adam tightened his arms and growled, a sound that
no completely human throat could have made. He was very and continually
unhappy about the damage I took as his mate-a position more usually
filled by a human, who would have been kept out of events whenever
possible, or a werewolf, who could hold her own. I wasn't either of
those things; I was a coyote shapeshifter, a member of the pack in my
own right, with all the privileges and the duties that entailed. I
didn't let them-or Adam-coddle me. It wouldn't have been good for any of
us, no matter how hard it was on him.
"Hey, boss," said Warren's casual voice, the one he used when he thought he wasn't talking to a rational being.
I
glanced over to see that the tall, lanky cowboy had taken a
deliberately relaxed stance about ten feet away. It would have been more
convincing if his eyes hadn't been showing a hint of gold. A couple of
yards behind him, the pack hovered in a mud-spattered, silent aggregate.
Adam looked, too.
Under the impact of Adam's attention, the pack backed away. Warren turned his head so he wasn't even looking in our direction.
But
his voice was still calm and steady as he continued, "You sure you
should be moving her around? Mary Jo should maybe see if she has a
concussion."
Mary Jo wa a firefighter, and she had EMT training.
Again,
Adam didn't answer, and the tension grew. Which was exactly the
opposite effect our outing to the pumpkin patch was supposed to
engender.
Our pack, the Columbia Basin Pack, was
unaffiliated with any other werewolves, the only one on the North or
South American continent that did not belong to Bran Cornick, the
Marrok. His goal was the survival of the werewolves, and he was ruthless
in that pursuit-which was why weÕd ended up on our own.
A
wise pack, bereft of the Marrok's protection, needed to keep its
collective head down if it wanted to survive. Unfortunately, that wasn't
an option for us.
It wouldn't be vanity to say there
wasn't another pack as well-known as ours anywhere, at least in the eyes
of the mundane world. Adam, our Alpha, my mate, was recognizable on any
street corner in the US. That had begun as an accident of his contacts
in the military, his willingness to talk to news agencies, and the good
looks that had been the bane of his life long before he'd become a
werewolf.
But it was my fault that the whole pack suffered along with him.
A
few years ago, the worst thing most of the people (and other sentient
beings) living in the Tri-Cities of Washington State had to worry about
on an epic scale was the possibility of one of the Hanford nuclear waste
tanks-filled with the caustic sludge by-products of the early,
experimental years of nuclear science-leaking its goop into the Columbia
River. Or possibly exploding.
There were nearly two
hundred of the aging tanks, some holding as much as a million gallons.
Each tank contained a unique mix of very bad radioactive soup, and
worse, due to the secretive nature of nuclear weapons development, no
one really knew exactly what was in any of them.
There really were scarier things than monsters.
Anyway.
The
Tri-Cities, in addition to being right next to a Superfund cleanup
site, were about an hour's drive from the Ronald Wilson Reagan Fae
Reservation, which the fae had turned into their own seat of power in
their (mostly) cold war with the US government.
Because it
suited them and because I claimed the Tri-Cities to be under our pack's
protection (it was a stupid heat-of-the-moment thing), the fae let it
be known that they acknowledged and respected the Columbia Basin Pack's
right to protect our territory and the people, mundane and supernatural
alike, who lived within it. We had signed a bargain with them that we
would do that-and, more significantly, they would not harm anyone under
our protection.
We hadn't had a choice, and neither, I am
pretty sure, had they. But bargains with the fae, even when both parties
entered into the agreement with the best of intentions, tended to end
badly, which was why the Marrok had cut us loose.
No one
wanted a war between the fae and the werewolves. If our pack stood
alone, whatever happened between us and the fae-or the vampires, other
werewolf packs, ancient gods, or demons-werewolfkind would not be forced
into that conflict. Our pack's demise would not start a war between the
supernatural world and the human, so long as we stood alone.
Or so everyone hoped.
The
bargain with the fae made the Tri-Cities a neutral zone where humans
could rub shoulder to shoulder with the magical world because they were
protected. We had suddenly become a point of interest in national,
international, and supernatural politics-and there were consequences.
Weaker
supernatural beings flocked to a place of (perceived) safety, causing,
among other things, a housing shortage. Hotels were booked solid and the
Airbnb market went through the roof, because there was now a "safe"
place to go see fae mingling with regular folks.
More
quietly, predators came here, too, creatures who did not think they had
to worry about a mere pack of werewolves interfering in their plundering
of the rich hunting ground the Tri-Cities had become. We'd killed two
of those predators in the past week alone.
Our pack was
fierce. Adam was awe-inspiringly awesome. We had support from the
fae-though admittedly that was nearly as dangerous as it was useful. The
local vampire seethe helped us for their own reasons. Our pack, all
twenty-six of us, bore the brunt of protecting our territory, and
because we were not affiliated with the Marrok, we weren't going to get
any more wolves very easily.
Adam had responded to the
situation by turning us into a finely tuned fighting unit. Some of that
meant training in fighting techniques. Some of it meant becoming a more
tightly knit pack.
Which was why Adam had rented a giant
pumpkin patch and corn maze on a Tuesday night in October so that our
pack could play together.
Who knew that a pumpkin patch could be dangerous?
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