I didn’t want to know what he was feeling because it only made me stupider—and more vulnerable.
“I have to go in,” I told the stick in my hand because I couldn’t look up at Adam’s face just then. If I’d looked at him, I think I would have run, and he’d have chased me. Some other day, that might have been fun. Tonight, it would be disastrous. So I moved slowly.
He didn’t follow me as I walked to my door but said from where he stood, “I’ll send someone over to stand guard.”
Because I was the Alpha’s mate. Because he worried about me. Because of Tim. Because of guilt.
“No,” he said, taking a step closer to me, telling me the bond was stronger on his side at that moment. “Because I love you.”
I shut the door gently between us and leaned my forehead against it.
My stomach hurt; my throat was tight. I wanted to scream or punch someone, but instead I clenched the walking stick until my fingers hurt and listened to Adam get in his truck and back out of my driveway.
I looked down at the walking stick. Once—maybe still—it made all the sheep its bearer owned have twins. But it had been fashioned a long time ago, and old magic sometimes grew and developed in strange ways. It had become more than just a walking stick with agricultural applications. Exactly what that meant, no one really knew—other than it followed me around.
Maybe it was a coincidence that the first time I’d felt like myself since walking into the bowling alley was when I’d grabbed it in Adam’s truck. And maybe it wasn’t.
I’ve had a lot of fights with Adam over the years. Probably inevitable given who we were—the literal as well as figurative Alpha male and . . . me, who was raised among lots of dominant-type males and had chosen not to let them control me (no matter how benign that control might have been). I’d never felt like this after a fight, though. Usually, I feel energized and cheerful, not sick and scared out of my skin.
Of course, usually the fight is my idea and not someone using the pack bonds to play with my head.
I could be wrong, I thought. Maybe it had been some new kind of nifty reaction to my run-in with the not-so-dearly-departed Tim—as if panic attacks and flashbacks weren’t enough.
But, now that it was over, the voices tasted like the pack to me. I’d never heard of pack being able to influence someone through the bonds, but there was a lot I didn’t understand about pack magic.
I needed to shed my skin, free myself for a little while of the pack and mate bonds that left too many people with access to my head. I could do that: maybe I couldn’t get rid of everything, but I could shed my human skin and run alone, clear my head for just a little bit.
I needed to figure out for certain what had happened tonight. Distance didn’t always provide me with solitude, but it usually worked to weaken the bonds between Adam and me—and also between the pack and me. I needed to leave before whoever he decided to send over to guard me arrived, because they certainly wouldn’t let me run off on my own.
Without bothering to go to my bedroom, I stripped. Setting down the walking stick took more effort, which told me that I’d already convinced myself that it had served to block whoever had been influencing me.
I waited, ready to pick up the walking stick again, but there were no more voices in my head. Either they had lost interest because Adam was gone and they’d succeeded in their efforts. Or else distance was as much of a factor as I believed. Either way, I would leave the stick behind because a coyote carrying such a thing would draw too much attention.
So I slid into my coyote-self with a sigh of relief. I felt instantly safer, more centered, in my four-pawed form. Stupid, because I’d never noticed that changing shape interfered with either my mate bond or pack bond in the least. But I was willing to grab onto anything that made me feel better at this point.
I hopped through the dog door Samuel had installed in my back door and out into the night.
Outside smelled different, better, clearer to me. In my coyote skin, I took in more information than the human me. I could scent the marmot in her nearby den and the bats who nested in the rafters of my garage. The month was half-gone, and the moon was a wide slice that was orange—even to my coyote color-impaired eyes. The dust of the last of harvest was in the air.
And a werewolf in lupine form was approaching.
It was Ben, I thought, which was good. Darryl would have sensed my coyote, but Ben had been raised in London and had lived there until a year and a half ago. He would be easier to fool.
I froze where I stood, resisting the temptation to drop flat or hide. Motion attracts attention, and my fur is colored to blend in with the desert.
Ben didn’t even glance my way, and as soon as he rounded the corner—obviously heading toward my front porch—I took off through the sagebrush and dry grass, off into the desert night.
I was on my way to the river, to a rock beach where I could be alone, when a rabbit broke out of the brush in front of me. And it was only then I realized how hungry I was.
I’d eaten a lot at dinner—there was no reason for me to be hungry. Not just a little hungry. Starving. Something was wrong.
I set that thought aside as I gave chase. I missed that rabbit, but not the next, and I ate him down to the bones. It wasn’t nearly enough. I hunted for another half hour before I found a quail.
I don’t like to kill quail. The way the lone feather sticking up on top bobs in opposition to their heads when they walk makes me smile. And they are silly, without a sporting chance against a coyote, at least not against me. I suppose they can’t be that vulnerable because I’m not the only coyote around, and there are a lot of quail. But I always feel guilty about hunting them.
As I finished my second kill, I planned what I’d do to the person who made me so hungry I had to eat quail.
A werewolf pack can feed off of any of its members, borrowing energy. I wasn’t sure exactly how it worked, though I’d seen it often enough. It’s part of what makes an Alpha wolf more than he was before he took on that mantle.
None of that had ever affected me before I’d become a member of Adam’s pack, so I hadn’t worried about it. No one had been able to get inside my head and make me think that throwing a bowling ball at a toddler was a good idea. Or make me take out my frustration on Adam.
Finished and full, I made it to my final destination without further incident.
I don’t know if anyone owned this little bit of the river; the nearest fence was a hundred yards away, the nearest house a little farther than that. There were a few old beer cans scattered around, and if the weather had been a little bit warmer, I might have run into people.
I climbed on the big rock and tried to feel the pack or Adam. I was alone. Just me, the river, and, far up on the Horse Heaven Hills, the little lights from the windmill farms. I don’t know if it was the distance, or if there was something special about this little bit of ground, but I’d never been able to feel the touch of mate or pack bond here.
Thank goodness.
Only when I was certain Adam couldn’t hear me did I let myself dwell on how creepy it was to have someone else in my head, even Adam, whom I loved. Something I would never, if I could help it, allow Adam to know.
Oddly, because Adam had been a wolf for longer than I was alive, I accepted him as a werewolf more easily than he did himself. Knowing that I was freaked-out by the greatest gift any wolf could give another wouldn’t surprise him (as it did me), but it would hurt him needlessly. I would adjust in time—I didn’t have any choice if I wanted to keep him.
If I had to deal with only the mate bond between Adam and me, it would be easier. But he’d made me pack, too, and when the link worked as it was supposed to, I could feel all of them there, with me. And with that bond, apparently, they could suck energy from me and make me fight with their Alpha.
Alone in my head, it was easy to look back and see how it had happened—a nudge here, a push there. I would do a great deal to keep Adam from being hurt, but
not endanger an innocent—and I have never in my life given anyone the silent treatment. Anyone who offends me deserves to hear exactly how they trespassed—or needs to be lulled into a false sense of security before the sneak attack when they aren’t paying attention. But silence had been Adam’s ex-wife’s weapon of choice.
Whoever had worked on me was trying to drive us apart.
So who had it been? The whole pack? Part of the pack? Was it deliberate—or more that the whole pack hated me and was trying to force me away? Most important of all, to me anyway, was: how did I stop it from ever happening again?
There had to be a way—doubtless if a werewolf could influence a pack member as easily as they’d influenced me, Alphas would have much tighter control of their packs than they did. A pack would run more like a cult and less like a bunch of testosterone-laden wild beasts momentarily subdued by the threat of immediate death under their leader’s fangs. That or they’d have killed each other off entirely.
I’d needed Samuel to be home so I could ask him about how things worked. Adam doubtless knew, but I wanted to go into this conversation knowing how to approach him.
If Adam thought one of his pack members was trying mind-influencing tricks on me . . . I wasn’t certain what the rules were for something like that. That was one of the things I wanted to find out from Samuel. If someone was going to die, I wanted to make sure I approved, or at least knew about it before I pulled the trigger. If someone was going to die, I might just keep this to myself and create a suitable punishment of my own instead.
I’d have to wait until Samuel got back from work. Until then, maybe I’d just keep a good hold on the walking stick and hope for the best.
I stayed out on the little rocky beach watching the river in the moonlight as long as I dared. But if I didn’t get back before Ben realized I was gone, he’d call out the troops. And I just wasn’t in the mood for a pack of werewolves.
I stood up, stretched, and started the long run back home.
* * *
WHEN I ARRIVED AT MY BACK DOOR, BEN WAS PACING back and forth in front of it uneasily. When he saw me, he froze—he’d started realizing something was wrong, but until he saw me, he hadn’t been sure I wasn’t there. His upper lip curled, but he didn’t quite manage a snarl, caught as he was between anger and worry, dominant male protective instincts and the understanding that I was of higher rank.
Body language, when you know how to read it, can be more expressive than speech.
His frustration was his problem, so I ignored him and hopped through the dog door—much, much too small for a wolf—and straight to my bedroom.
I changed out of my coyote form, grabbed underwear and a clean T-shirt, and headed for bed. It wasn’t horribly late—our date had been very short, and my run hadn’t taken much longer. Still, morning came soon, and I had a car to work on. And I had to be in top form to figure out just how to approach Samuel so he wouldn’t tell Adam what I was asking.
Maybe I should just call his father instead. Yes, I decided. I’d call Bran.
* * *
I WOKE UP WITH THE PHONE IN MY EAR—AND THOUGHT for a moment that I’d completed the task I’d decided upon before falling asleep, because the voice in my ear was speaking Welsh. That didn’t make any sense at all. Bran wouldn’t speak freaking Welsh to me, especially not on the phone, where foreign languages are even harder to understand.
Muzzily, I realized I could still almost remember hearing the phone ring. I must have grabbed it in the process of waking up—but that didn’t explain the language.
I blinked at the clock—I’d been asleep less than two hours—and about that time I figured out whose voice was babbling to me.
“Samuel?” I asked. “Why are you speaking Welsh? I don’t understand you unless you talk a lot slower. And use small words.” It was kind of a joke. Welsh never seems to have small words.
“Mercy,” he said heavily.
For some reason my heart started beating hard and heavy, as if I were about to get some very bad news. I sat up.
“Samuel?” I addressed the silence on the other end of the phone.
“Come get—”
He fumbled the words, as if his English were very bad, which it wasn’t and never had been. Not as long as I’d known him—which was most of my thirty-odd years of life.
“I’ll be right there,” I said, jerking on my jeans with one hand. “Where?”
“In the X-ray storeroom.” He barely stumbled over that phrase.
I knew where the storeroom was, on the far end of the emergency room at Kennewick General, where he worked. “I’ll come for you.”
He hung up without saying anything more.
Something had gone very wrong. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be catastrophic if he was going to meet me in the storeroom, away from everyone. If they knew he was a werewolf, there would be no need for storerooms.
Unlike Adam, Samuel was not out to the public. No one would let a werewolf practice medicine—which was probably smart, actually. The smells of blood and fear and death were too much for most of them. But Samuel had been a doctor for a very long time, and he was a good one.
Ben was sitting on my front porch as I ran out the door, and I tripped over him, rolling down the four steep, unyielding stairs to land on the ground in the gravel.
He’d known I was coming out; I hadn’t tried to be quiet. He could have moved out of my way, but he hadn’t. Maybe he’d even moved into my way on purpose. He didn’t twitch as I looked up at him.
I recognized the look though I hadn’t seen it from him before. I was a coyote mated to their Alpha, and they were darned sure I wasn’t good enough.
“You heard about the fight tonight,” I told him.
He laid his ears back and put his nose on his front paws.
“Then someone should have told you that they were using the pack bonds to mess with my head.” I hadn’t meant to say anything about it until I had a chance to talk to Samuel, but falling down the stairs had robbed me of self-control.
He stilled, and the look on his body was not disbelief, it was horror.
So it was possible. Damn. Damn. Damn. I’d hoped it wasn’t, hoped I was being paranoid. I didn’t need this.
Sometimes it felt like both the mate and the pack bonds were doing their best to steal my soul. The analogy might be figurative, but I found it nearly as frightening as the literal version would have been. Finding out that someone could use the whole mess to make me do things was just the flipping icing on the cake.
Fortunately, I had a task to take my mind off the mess I was in. I stood up and dusted myself off.
I had planned on waiting and talking to Adam directly, but there were some advantages to this scenario, too. It would be a good idea for Adam to know that some of the pack were . . . active about their dislike of me. And if Ben told him, he couldn’t read my mind to figure out that I wasn’t weirded out only by the mind control, but also by the whole bond thing, pack and mate.
I told Ben, “You tell Adam what I said.”
He would. Ben could be creepy and horrible, but he was almost my friend—shared nightmares do that.
“Give him my apologies and tell him I’m going to lie low”—Adam would know that meant stay away from the pack—“until I get a handle on it. Right now, I’m going to get Samuel, so you’re off duty.”
Chapter 3
I DROVE MY TRUSTY RABBIT TO KGH AND PARKED IN the emergency lot. It was still hours before dawn when I walked into the building.
The trick to going wherever you want unchallenged in a hospital is to walk briskly, nod to the people you know, and ignore the ones you don’t. The nod reassures everyone that you are known, the brisk pace that you have a mission and don’t want to talk. It helped that most of the people in triage knew me.
Through the double doors that led to the inner sanctum, I could hear a baby crying—a sad, tired, miserable sound. I wrinkled my nose at the pervading sour-sharp smell of hospital disinfectant, and wi
nced at the increase in both decibels and scent as I marched through the doors.
A nurse scribbling on a clipboard glanced up at my entrance, and the official look on her face warmed into a relieved smile. I knew her face but not her name.
“Mercy,” she said, having no trouble with mine. “So Doc Cornick finally called you to take him home, did he? About time. I told him he should have gone home hours ago—but he’s pretty stubborn, and a doctor outranks a nurse.” She made it sound like she didn’t think that should be the proper order of things.
I was afraid to speak because I might thrust a hole into whatever house of cards Samuel had constructed to explain why he had to go home early. Finally, I managed a neutral, “He’s better at helping people than asking for help.”
She grinned. “Isn’t that just like a man? Probably hated to admit he trashed that car of his. I swear he loved it like it was a woman.”
I think I just stared at her—her words made no sense to me.
Trashed his car? Did she mean he had a wreck? Samuel had a wreck? I couldn’t picture it. Some werewolves had trouble driving because they could be a little distractible. But not Samuel.
I needed to get to Samuel before I said something stupid.
“I better—”
“He’s just lucky he didn’t get hurt worse,” she said, and turned her eyes back to whatever she was writing. Apparently she could carry on a conversation at the same time, because she continued. “Did he tell you how close he came? The policeman who brought him in said that he almost fell into the water—and that’s the Vernita bridge, you know, the one on Twenty-four out in the Hanford Reach? He’d have died if he made it over—it’s a long way down to the river.”
What the heck had Samuel been doing all the way out at the bridge on the old highway north of Hanford? That was clear on the other side of the Tri-Cities and then some, and nowhere near any possible route between our house and the hospital. Maybe he’d been running out in the Reach, where people were scarce and ground squirrels plentiful. Just because he hadn’t told me that he was going out hunting didn’t mean he hadn’t. I wasn’t his keeper.
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