“He didn’t say anything about danger to him,” I told her truthfully and followed it with a small lie designed to lead her into telling me more details. “I thought it was just the car.”
“That’s Doc Cornick,” she snorted. “He wouldn’t let us do anything other than get the glass out of his skin—but just from the way he’s moving, you can tell he did something to his ribs. And he’s limping, too.”
“Sounds like it was worse than he told me,” I commented, feeling sick to my stomach.
“He went all the way through the windshield and was hanging on to the hood of the car. Jack—that’s the policeman—Jack said he thought that Samuel was going to fall off the hood before he could get there. The wreck must have dazed Doc because he was crawling the wrong way—if Jack hadn’t stopped him, he’d have gone over.”
And then I understood exactly what had happened.
“Honey? Honey? Are you okay? Here, sit down.”
She’d pulled out a chair when I wasn’t watching and held it behind me. My ears were ringing, my head was down between my knees, and her hand was on my back.
And for a moment, I was fourteen again, hearing Bran tell me what I’d already known—Bryan, my foster father, was dead—his body had been found in the river. He’d killed himself after his mate, my foster mother, had died.
Werewolves are too tough to die easily, so there aren’t many ways for a werewolf to commit suicide. Since the French Revolution pretty much unpopularized the guillotine in the eighteenth century, self-decapitation just isn’t all that easy.
Silver bullets have some difficulties, too. Silver is harder than lead, and the bullets sometimes blow right through and leave the wolf sick, in pain, and alive. Silver shot works a little better, but unless rigged just right, it can take a long time to die. If some busybody comes along and picks all the shot out—well, there’s all that pain for nothing.
The most popular choice is death by werewolf. But that wouldn’t be an option for Samuel. Very few wolves would take up his challenge—and those that would . . . Let me just say I wouldn’t want to see a fight between Samuel and Adam. Even odds aren’t what suicidal people are looking for.
Drowning is the next most popular choice. Werewolves can’t swim; their bodies are too dense—and even a werewolf needs to breathe.
I even knew why he’d chosen the location he had. The Columbia is the biggest river in the area, more than a mile wide and deep, but the three biggest bridges over it—the Blue Bridge, the suspension bridge, and the interstate bridge—all have two heavy-duty guardrails. There is also a fair bit of traffic on those, even in the middle of the night. Someone is sure to see you go over and attempt a rescue. It takes a few minutes to drown.
The bridge he’d chosen instead was not as heavily traveled and had been built before bridges were designed so that even morons would have a hard time driving off of them. The river is narrower at that point—which means deeper and faster—and the drop-off is . . . impressive.
I could see it, Samuel on the nose of the car and the police officer running up. It had been sheer dumb luck that the only other vehicle on the road was a police car. If it had been an ordinary bystander, he might have been too fearful of his own safety to attempt a rescue, and would have let Samuel drown. But a policeman might just follow him in and try to rescue him. Might put his life at risk for Samuel.
No, Samuel wouldn’t have fallen once the police officer found him.
No matter how much he wanted to.
My dizziness was fading.
“You be happy,” he’d told me when I’d left on my ill-fated date. A wish for my life and not for the date.
The jerk. I felt the growl rise in my throat and had to work to swallow it.
“He’s all right,” the nurse assured me. I pulled my head out from between my knees and noticed on the way up that her name tag read JODY. “We got the glass out, and though he’s moving stiffly, he hasn’t broken anything major or he wouldn’t have lasted this long. He should have gone home, but he didn’t want to—and you know how he is. He never says no, but sends you on your way without ever saying yes either.”
I knew.
“I’m sorry,” I told her, standing up slowly so as to give the appearance of steadiness. “It just caught me off guard. We’ve known each other a long time—and he didn’t tell me it was anywhere near that bad.”
“He probably didn’t want to scare you.”
“Yeah, he’s considerate like that.” My aching butt he was considerate. I’d kill him myself—and then he wouldn’t have to worry about suicide.
“He said he was going to find a quiet place and rest for a minute,” Nurse Jody said, looking around as if he ought to appear from thin air.
“He said I could find him in the X-ray storage room.”
She laughed. “Well, I guess it is quiet in there. You know where it is?”
I smiled, which is tough when you’re ready to skin someone.
“Sure.” Still smiling, I walked briskly past curtained-off rooms that smelled of blood and pain, nodding to a med tech who looked vaguely familiar. At least the baby’s cries had muted to whimpers.
Samuel had tried to commit suicide.
I knocked on the storage-room door, then opened it. White cardboard file boxes were piled up on racks with a feeling of imposed order—as if somewhere there was someone who would know how to find things here.
Samuel sat on the floor, his back against a stack of boxes. He had a white lab coat on over a set of green scrubs. His arms rested across his knees, hands limp and hanging. His head was bowed, and he didn’t look up when I came in. He waited until I shut the door behind me to speak, and he didn’t look at me then either.
I thought it was because he was ashamed or because he knew I was angry.
“He tried to kill us,” Samuel said, and my heart stopped, then began to pound painfully in my chest because I’d been wrong about the bowed head. Very wrong. The “he” he was talking about was Samuel—and that meant that “he” was no longer in charge. I was talking to Samuel’s wolf.
I dropped to the ground like a stone and made damned sure my head was lower than the werewolf’s. Samuel the man regularly overlooked breaches of etiquette that his wolf could not. If I made the wolf look up at me, he’d have to acknowledge my superiority or challenge me.
I change into a thirty-odd-pound predator built to kill chickens and rabbits. And poor silly quail. Werewolves can take out Kodiak bears. A challenge for a werewolf I am not.
“Mercy,” he whispered, and lifted his head.
The first thing I noticed was hundreds of small cuts all over his face, and I remembered Jody the nurse saying that they’d had to get the glass out of his skin. That the wounds weren’t healed yet told me that there had been other, more severe damage his body had to address first. Nifty—just a little pain and suffering to sweeten his temper.
His eyes were an icy blue just this side of white, hot and wild.
As soon as I saw them, I looked at the floor and took a deep breath. “Sam,” I whispered. “What can I do to help? Should I call Bran?”
“No!” The word left him in a roar that jerked him forward until he was crouched on both hands, one leg knee up, one leg still down on one knee.
That one knee on the ground meant that he wasn’t, quite, ready to spring on me.
“Our father will kill us,” Sam said, his voice slow and thick with Welsh intonation. “I . . . We don’t want to make him do that.” He took a deep breath. “And I don’t want to die.”
“Good. That’s good,” I croaked, suddenly understanding just exactly what his first words to me had meant. Samuel had wanted to die, and his wolf had stopped him. Which was good, but left us with a nasty problem.
There is a very good reason that the Marrok kills any werewolves who allow the wolf to lead and the man to follow. Very good reasons—like preventing-mass-slaughter sorts of reasons.
But if Samuel’s wolf didn’t want them to die, I de
cided it was better he was in charge. For a while. Since he didn’t seem to want to kill me yet. Samuel was old. I don’t know exactly how old, but sometime before the Mayflower at least. Maybe that would allow his wolf to control himself without Samuel’s help. Maybe. “Okay, Sam. No calls to Bran.”
I watched out of the corner of my eye as he tilted his head, surveying me. “I can pretend to be human until we get to your car. I thought that would be best, so I held this shape.”
I swallowed. “What have you done with Samuel? Is he all right?”
Pale ice blue eyes examined me thoughtfully. “Samuel? I’m pretty certain he’d forgotten I could do this: it has been so long since we battled for control. He let me out to play when he chose, and I left it to him.” He was quiet a moment or two, then he said, almost shyly. “You know when I’m here. You call me Sam.”
He was right. I hadn’t realized it until he said it.
“Sam,” I asked again, trying not to sound demanding, “what have you done with Samuel?”
“He’s here, but I cannot let him out. If I do, he’ll never let me get the upper hand again—and then we will die.”
“Cannot” sounded like “never.” “Never” was bad. “Never” would get him killed as surely as suicide—and maybe . . . probably a lot of other people along the way.
“If not Bran, what about Charles’s mate, Anna? She’s Omega; shouldn’t she be able to help?”
Omega wolves, as I understand them, are like Valium for werewolves. Samuel’s sister-in-law, Anna, is the only one I’ve ever met—I’d never heard of them before that. I like her, but she doesn’t seem to affect me the way she does the wolves. I don’t want to curl up in a ball at her feet and let her rub my belly.
Samuel’s wolf looked wistful . . . or maybe he was just hungry. “No. If I were the problem, if I were ravaging the countryside, she might help. But this is not impulse, not desperation. Samuel just feels that he no longer belongs, that he accomplishes nothing by his existence. Even the Omega cannot fix him.”
“So what do you suggest?” I asked helplessly.
Anna, I thought, might be able to put Samuel back in the driver’s seat, but, like the wolf, I was afraid that might not be a good thing.
He laughed, an unhappy laugh. “I do not know. But if you don’t want to be trying to extract a wolf from the emergency room, it would be good to leave very soon.”
Sam rocked forward to get up and stopped halfway with a grunt.
“You’re hurt,” I said as I scrambled up to give him a hand.
He hesitated but took it and used me to give him better leverage so he could get all the way to his feet. Showing me his weakness was a sign of trust. Under normal circumstances, that trust would mean I was safer with him.
“Stiff,” Sam answered me. “Nothing that won’t heal on its own now. I drew upon your strength to heal enough that no one would know how bad the injuries were.”
“How did you do that?” I asked, suddenly remembering the fierce hunger that had resulted in a rabbit-and-quail dinner on top of the salmon I’d had with Adam. I’d thought it had been someone in Adam’s pack—for the very good reason that borrowing strength was one of those things that came with apack bond. “We aren’t pack,” I reminded him.
He looked directly at me again, then away. “Aren’t we?”
“Unless you . . . Unless Samuel’s been conducting blood ceremonies when I was asleep, we’re not.” I was starting to feel panicky. Claustrophobic. I already had Adam and his pack playing with my head; I didn’t particularly want anyone else in there.
“Pack existed before ceremonies,” Sam said, sounding amused. “Magic binds more obviously, more extensively, but not more deeply.”
“Did you mess with my head on my date with Adam?” I couldn’t keep the accusation out of my voice.
“No.” He tilted his head, then snarled, “Someone hurt you?”
“No,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
“Lies,” he said.
“Right,” I agreed. “But if it wasn’t you who did it, the incident is something for Adam and me to handle.”
He was still a moment. “For now,” he said.
I held the door open for him, then walked beside him through the emergency room.
As we moved through the walkway and out the door, Sam kept his eyes on me, and his regard had a weight to it. I didn’t protest. He did it so that no one would see the change in his iris color—but also because when a werewolf as dominant as Samuel meets someone’s gaze with his wolf in the fore, even humans bow their knees. That would be pretty awkward and hard to explain. At this point, we were operating with the hope that it would matter to Samuel that he could come back and practice medicine here again.
I helped him into the backseat of the Rabbit—and noticed that the towel-wrapped book was still there. I wished that getting it back to its owner was the extent of my troubles. I grabbed it and put it in the far back, out of harm’s reach. Hopping in the front, I drove out from under the parking-lot lights as soon as I could. It was still the wee small hours, but Samuel was a big man, and it would be hard to miss him stripping in the back of my little car.
It didn’t take him long to dispose of the clothes and begin his change. I didn’t look, but I could tell when he started because the noises turned from shredding fabric to pained whines. What the wolves go through when they change is one of the many reasons I am very grateful to be what I am instead of a werewolf. For me, the change from coyote to human or back is virtually instantaneous. The side effects are nothing more annoying than tingles. For a werewolf, change is painful and slow. From the grunts he was making, he hadn’t yet fully finished his shift by the time I drove into my driveway.
Home wasn’t the safest place to bring him. No werewolf who saw him would miss what had happened, and Adam’s house—visited often by members of his pack—was just behind my back fence. But I couldn’t think of anyplace better.
Eventually, we’d have to tell Bran—I knew it, and I suspected that Samuel . . . Sam knew it, too. But I’d give him what time I could—assuming he didn’t go on a rampage and start eating people.
That meant keeping him out of sight of Adam and his pack.
My pack. My mate and my pack.
It felt wrong to hide things from him. But I knew Adam, and one thing he was very good at was honor and duty. It was one of the reasons I’d grown to love him—he was a man who could make the hard choice. Duty and honor would force him to call Bran. Duty and honor would force Bran to execute Samuel. Samuel would be dead, and two good men would suffer as well.
Luckily for all of them, my sense of duty and honor was more flexible.
I got out of the car and turned in a slow circle. I caught Ben’s scent, fading. Otherwise, we were alone with the more mundane creatures of the night: bats, mice, and mosquitoes. The light was on in Adam’s bedroom, but it went dark as I was watching. Tomorrow, I’d need to come up with a better place for Sam.
Or a good reason to avoid the pack.
I opened the back door of the Rabbit, keeping it between Sam and me in case he came out of the change in a bad mood. The pain of the change does not make for a happy wolf—and Sam was already hurt when he started. But he seemed okay. When he hopped out, he waited politely for me to close up the car, then followed me to the door.
He slept on the foot of my bed. When I suggested he might be more comfortable in his room, he regarded me steadily with ice-colored eyes.
Where does a werewolf sleep? Anywhere he wants to.
I thought it would bother me, thought it would scare me. It ought to have bothered me. But somehow I couldn’t work up the energy to be too worried about the big wolf curled up on my feet. It was Sam, after all.
* * *
MY DAY STARTED OUT EARLY DESPITE MY LATE NIGHT.
I woke up to the sound of Sam’s stomach growling. Keeping him fed had attained a new priority level, so I bounced up and cooked him breakfast.
And then, because coo
king is something I do when I’m upset or nervous—and because it sometimes helps me think, especially if the cooking involves sugar—I indulged myself with a spate of cookie baking. I made a double batch of peanut butter cookies, and while they were in the oven, I made chocolate chip, for good measure.
Sam sat under the table, where he was out of my way, and watched me. I fed him a couple of spoonfuls of dough even though he’d eaten several pounds of bacon and a dozen eggs. He had shared the eggs with my cat, Medea. Maybe that was why he was still hungry. I fed him some of the baked cookies.
I was in the middle of putting cookies into baggies when Adam called.
“Mercy,” he said. His voice was fuzzy with fatigue, his tone flat. “I saw the light was on. Ben told me what you said. I can help you with that.”
Usually, I follow Adam’s conversations just fine, but I’d had less than three hours of sleep. And I was preoccupied with Samuel, which he could not know anything about. I rubbed my nose. Ben. Oh. Adam was talking about how the pack had screwed up our date. Right.
I had to keep Adam away. Just until I figured out some brilliant plan to keep Samuel alive . . . And here before me was the perfect excuse.
“Thank you,” I said. “But I think I need a break for a few days—no pack, no . . .” I let my voice drift off. I couldn’t tell him I needed space from him when it wasn’t true. Even over the phone he might pick up the lie. I wished he was here. He had a way of making things black-and-white. Of course, that meant that Samuel should be killed for the good of the wolves. Sometimes gray is the color I’m stuck with.
“You need some distance from the pack—and me,” Adam said. “I can understand that.” There was a small pause. “I won’t leave you without protection.”
I looked down. “Samuel’s off for a couple of days.” I needed to call before heading to work and get him time off, but that didn’t change the fact that he wasn’t going to be at work for the next couple of days. The wreck made a convenient excuse. “I’ll keep him with me.”
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