Zee rolled out headfirst again, and there was a black grease mark running from his forehead to his chin where something had rolled across his face. A spot of blood lingered on his forehead, and there was a lump on his chin. “You may shut up anytime you choose, Kindlein,” he advised me sharply. Then he frowned. “I smell cookies, and you look tired. What is wrong?”
“I made cookies,” I told him. “I saved a bag in the car for you to take home. I brought more with me, but the horde is in possession.”
“Good,” he said. “Now, what is robbing you of sleep?”
He used to leave me alone. But ever since Tim . . . ever since I’d been hurt, he coddled me in his own way.
“Nothing you can help me with,” I said.
“Money?”
“Nope.”
He frowned, his white eyebrows lowering over his cool gray eyes.
“Vampires?” He snapped it out. Zee didn’t like vampires, much.
“No, sir.” I saluted his tone. “Nothing you can do anything about.”
“Don’t you sass me, girl.” He glowered at me. “I—”
One of Gabriel’s sisters screamed. I had a terrible vision of Sam chewing on one of the kids, and I was running.
I had my hand on the door and the door mostly open when Tia shouted, “¡Mamá, Mamá, una pistola! Tiene una pistola.”
Inside the office there were kids all over: hanging from shelving, standing on the six-inch sill at the bottom of the big window, on the floor wrapped around Sam.
A man, a huge man with a nasty-looking automatic in a steady two-handed grip, stood in the doorway between the outside and the office, holding the door open with one black leather-booted foot. The rest of him was dressed in black, too, with some sort of bright yellow design on the left shoulder of his leather pseudomilitary jacket. The only outlier in his generally soldier-of-fortune appearance was the shoulder-length silver-threaded red hair that flowed from his head in a manner that would have done credit to a romance novel cover model.
Just behind him, I caught a glimpse of another man, dressed in a button-up shirt and slacks. But the second man’s body language told me at a glance that it was only the first man, the man with the gun, who was a threat. The second man held something on his shoulder, but, beyond determining that it wasn’t a weapon, I ignored it and him to focus on the dangerous one.
Sylvia held a broom in her hand, but she was frozen because the barrel of the gun was aimed right at the littlest Sandoval. Maia was locked onto Sam with both hands and screaming Spanish in a manner that might be overly dramatic if there hadn’t been an automatic pointed at her.
I expect it was worry for her that kept the wolf motionless on the floor of the office, his eyes narrowed on the barrel of the gun as the skin over his muzzle moved in a soundless snarl.
If I’d had time to be scared, it would have been then, looking at Samuel. At Sam. Already I could see the tightening of the muscles in his hindquarters that preceded an attack. Gun or not, Maia or not, he wasn’t waiting long.
All of this I saw the first instant I opened the door, and I was moving even as I took in the scene. I snatched Sylvia’s broom, rounded the corner of the counter, and brought the broom handle down on the gunman’s wrists. It hit with a crack, knocking the gun loose before he, or anyone else in the room, had a chance to react to my entrance.
Aside from turning into a coyote when I feel like it, my superpowers are limited to an inconsistent resistance to magic and a turn of speed that is a bit on the far side of humanly possible. From the time I heard the first scream, I used every ounce of speed I had.
I swung at the man a second time, this time aiming at his body as if the broom were a Louisville Slugger, saying urgently, “Stay down, Sam.”
All that karate was good for something, I thought, as the man grabbed the handle and jerked back. I let it go. Off balance because he was braced for resistance, he took a step back, and I kicked him in the stomach, knocking him down the stair and onto the blacktop outside. Not incidentally, he took the guy who’d been behind him with him to the ground.
Now, if only the werewolf listens.
I snatched up the gun our intruder had dropped on the floor and stepped into the doorway, holding the door open as he had, with one foot. I pointed the gun at the stranger’s face—and waited for the real terror to begin.
But there was no roar behind me, no further screams as Sam shook off the air of civilization that made people look at him and think “pet” rather than “monster.”
I took a moment to breathe then, half-stunned by Sam’s restraint. It took me a moment to figure out what to do with the best-case scenario I’d been unexpectedly gifted with.
I could hear noise behind me, but I ignored it. Zee was there; no enemy could come at me from that direction. The sobs and frightened voices softened and stopped. Sam wasn’t growling. I wasn’t sure if it was a good sign or not, but decided to think positively.
“Sylvia, call the police,” I told her after a half second of consideration. We were in the right. And thanks to Adam, who littered my workplace with security cameras, we’d have proof. As an added bonus, there were no werewolf attacks to explain away. No reason for Sam to play any role in this at all. “Tell them what happened and ask them to hurry.”
“Hey, lady, you don’t want to do that,” said the second man, breathlessly. He was beginning to struggle to get out from under the gunman—who was assessing me with cool eyes while his assistant kept talking. “You don’t want the police involved. This will go better the quieter we can keep it.”
If he hadn’t sounded so patronizing, I don’t think I would have pulled the trigger.
I shot to the side, far enough that there was no way it would hit either of them, near enough that the blacktop that was dislodged by the bullet hit them both.
“I’d stay still if I were you,” I said, adrenaline making my voice shake. My hands, the important part, were steady.
“I am calling Tony,” said Sylvia behind me in a low voice that the two men lying on their backs at the base of my steps wouldn’t hear. “That way there will be no mistakes made.” Her voice was calm and unhurried. All those years as a police dispatcher coming to her aid. Tony was my friend, Sylvia’s friend—and we both trusted him.
With the intruders under control, I became aware that there were other people outside. Not customers these. They stood by a full-sized black van that managed to look wicked and elegant in a custom paint job.
There were three people—two (one man, one woman) dressed like the gunman, right down to the flowing locks, and a girl in a gray T-shirt and a headset. The van had the same yellow lettering that was on the man’s jacket.
KELLY HEART, it said, I realized once I had leisure to read it, BOUNTY HUNTER. Underneath the yellow, in slightly smaller letters, it said: SATURDAYS AT 8PM CENTRAL TIME. CATCHING THE BAD GUYS, ONE AT A TIME.
“Smile,” I said grimly to the people who had my back: Zee, Sylvia and her girls, and Sam. “We’re on Candid Camera.” Zee and Sam needed to know there were unfriendly cameras pointed at them.
“Now, just you calm down,” said one of the people in black, the woman with bright yellow hair and red lipstick. As she started to talk, she began walking toward us briskly. “You’ll want to put down that gun. It’s just TV, lady, nothing to get excited about.”
I don’t take orders. Not from people invading my place. I sent a second shot into the pavement in front of her.
“Tanya, stop,” shrieked the techie-girl. “Don’t make her shoot again. Do you know what those silver bullets cost us?”
“You’ll want to stop right there,” I told them. Silver was for werewolves. They’d come hunting werewolves. “I was raised in the backwoods of Montana. I can hit a duck on the wing.” Maybe. Probably. I’d never shot a duck in my life; I prefer hunting on all fours. “Where I come from, a gun is a weapon, not a TV prop, and if all the bad guys are dead, our side of the story is the only one that gets told. Don’t make
me decide that would be easier.”
Tanya froze, and I pulled the barrel back to center on the man whose face was vaguely familiar once I knew he was a TV star. I was fighting against the growing urge just to pull the trigger and be done with it.
Coyotes, like werewolves, are territorial—and this gun-toting jerk had barged into my place as if he had every right to be here.
“Are the police on their way?” I asked Sylvia, as she hung up the phone. My voice was shaking with adrenaline and anger, but my hands were still very steady.
“He says he’ll be here in five. He also said that it would be a good thing to have backup. So there will be some other police as well.”
I smiled widely at the bounty hunter, showing my teeth like any good predator. “Tony is a police officer. He’s known these kids since they were in diapers. He’s not going to be happy with you.” Tony was also hopelessly in love with Sylvia—though I didn’t think she knew that.
There was a movement to my right, and I snuck a quick glance to see Zee and Gabriel coming out the garage door. They must have gone back around. Zee had a crowbar in one hand and held it like another man might hold a sword. Gabriel had—
“Zee,” I squeaked. “Tell him to put the torque wrench back and grab something that won’t cost me five hundred dollars if he hits someone with it.”
“Won’t cost five hundred,” said Zee, but as I glanced over again, he nodded at the white-faced Gabriel, who looked at what he held as if he’d never seen it before. The boy slipped back into the garage as Zee said, “It wouldn’t break it—you’d just have to get it recalibrated.”
“We have a whole garage worth of tools—pry bars, tire irons, and even a hammer or two. There’s got to be something better than my torque wrench he could have grabbed.”
“Listen, lady,” Kelly Heart said in a calm, soothing voice. “Let’s take a deep breath and discuss this a moment. I didn’t mean to scare anyone. That little girl was about to get mauled by a werewolf.”
Truth.
It didn’t surprise me. Talking to Zee had steadied me, and I’d had a moment or two to think.
There might be a TV reality star somewhere who would point a gun at a cute little girl, but not while he was being filmed. The man behind him had been his cameraman—I could see the camera on the ground where it had been dropped when Heart landed on the second man with all his two-hundred-plus pounds of muscle.
If he’d come here hunting werewolves, he’d have figured out what Sam was right away. There’s a bit of wolf magic that encourages humans to see a dog instead of a wolf, but it is only a little bit of magic, and if someone is looking—they’ll see a wolf and not a dog.
So. How much to admit. I’d already paused too long to deny what Sam was. “He likes kids,” I said instead. “Gentle as a puppy.”
Sylvia had been murmuring to her kids, but her voice stopped at my words. There was a short silence, then the littlest one went off like a fire truck, a high-pitched fire truck. At a guess, Sylvia had just snatched her daughter away from the big bad wolf.
“I have a warrant for him,” continued Heart, wincing a little. I couldn’t tell if it was the volume that bothered him or the pitch, which was approaching ultrasonic.
I raised my eyebrows and indicated the gun with a jerk of my chin. “Wanted dead or alive?”
Samuel wasn’t out. And the only one I was worried about coming after Samuel would never send a bounty hunter. It would be Bran who killed him, when and if the time came. Heart’s warrant couldn’t be for Samuel.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out what werewolf people would expect to find around my place of work: Adam.
How a bounty hunter got a warrant for him, when, to my knowledge, Adam was in good standing as a law-abiding citizen, I didn’t know. I was vague on bounty-hunter lore, but I was pretty sure that they mostly hunt down people who are wanted for bail-skipping, and then the bail bondsmen pay them a percentage of the bail money they would have otherwise lost.
The Kennewick Police Department wasn’t very far away. Even so, the first vehicle in my parking lot was Adam’s. He parked his truck in front of the van, blocking it where it was.
“You’re mistaken,” I told Kelly Heart, Bounty Hunter, keeping my eyes on him no matter how much I wanted to look at the man who had just closed the door of his new truck. “There aren’t any werewolves around here who have a warrant out for their arrest.”
“I’m afraid you’re wrong,” Kelly told me kindly. Against my will, I was impressed by him. He was calm and cool while lying on his back like a turtle—on top of his cameraman, who was scared out of his mind and focused on the mouth of the gun I held.
Another truck door opened and closed—Adam had someone with him. The wind didn’t favor me, so I couldn’t tell who it was. And I wasn’t going to be stupid and look. Not that I really thought the bounty hunter was a threat anymore. At least, not a threat to the children behind me.
I could hear the woman in the T-shirt saying in a frantic voice, “Don’t make her shoot again, Kelly. Forty bucks. Forty bucks those cost. Each.”
“Don’t worry,” I called to her. “You can dig them out, and they’ll look just about like what they do now. You might even be able to reuse them.” Silver doesn’t deform as easily as lead, which makes it a lousy ammunition—unless you’re shooting at werewolves.
“She doesn’t seem too worried about you,” I told Kelly with mock sympathy as Adam walked toward us. “I guess silver bullets are harder to find than bounty hunters who look good in black leather.”
He smiled. “She thinks so. Look, can I get up? I promise not to try anything, but I outweigh Joe here by a hundred pounds. If I lie on him much longer, he might stop breathing.”
“Go ahead and put up the gun, Mercy,” said Adam. “Get it out of sight before the police are here. It’ll be easier that way. We might even get out of this without anyone getting arrested.”
My will broke at the sound of his voice, and my head turned with as much inevitability as a sunflower turning its face to the sun.
Adam was in a three-piece suit with a Mickey Mouse tie his daughter had bought him for Christmas—and he managed to look much, much more dangerous than the man on the ground. I’d known he would come, even after this morning’s conversation.
I’d hurt him, and still he’d come when the security cameras he had posted all over the place at my garage told him I was in trouble. I’d never doubted for a minute that he would come; Adam is staunch and true, like the tin soldier in the old children’s story. Stauncher and truer than I, who’d pushed him away to save Samuel.
“Sylvia called Tony. The police might already know about the gun.”
“Even so,” said Adam. “People make mistakes when there are guns about.”
Kelly didn’t want to take his eyes off me while I was holding a gun on him, but he was caught up in the same spell everyone in Adam’s sphere found themselves in. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the bounty hunter’s face turn to Adam, who’d come up from the side so as not to put himself in my line of fire if Kelly had popped up and started running.
“Right,” the bounty hunter said. “Just put down the gun, Ms. Thompson. As this gentleman suggests.” Maybe he thought Adam would be more reasonable than I was. Kelly Heart wouldn’t understand what the bright gold flecks in Adam’s eyes meant.
“I came here to bring in a werewolf I have a warrant for,” he told Adam, and I could tell he believed it. “I saw the werewolf with the kid and thought there would be trouble.”
He was telling the truth—he’d told the truth to me, too. I fumbled a little, putting the safety on the unfamiliar gun. With Adam here, who needed a gun?
Zee came up and held out his hand. “I’ll take it and make it disappear,” he told me.
Heart rolled off his cameraman, keeping his hands up as he eased himself to the side. He was still mostly paying attention to me, as if I were the threat and not Adam. I ratcheted my estimate of his intelligence do
wnward.
Adam slipped on a pair of sunglasses—but he kept his gaze on the bounty hunter as Heart came to his feet. Adam took a step back when Heart offered a hand to his cameraman, and his foot crunched on something.
Adam knelt, a graceful movement, over in a moment. When he stood up, he was holding the camera.
“I’m afraid this didn’t survive the fall.”
The cameraman made a moaning sound as if someone had hit him. He snatched the camera and tucked it against his belly as if that could somehow make it better.
Adam looked at the cameraman, then beyond him to the van, where Heart’s people were frantically conferring. He glanced at Ben. When he had the other werewolf’s attention, he motioned toward the van with his chin. As simply as that, he let Ben know that he wanted him to go keep tabs on Heart’s crew. Adam didn’t leave things to chance, and he wouldn’t ignore possible hostiles on the other side of the parking lot.
“I am sorry for scaring you,” Kelly told me, sincerely. This time he was lying. “And for upsetting the children.” He wasn’t worried about that either. I wondered how many people actually believed that sincere act.
A pair of police cars, followed by Tony’s truck, pulled into the parking lot.
“No sirens,” said Adam. “Probably Tony didn’t tell them about the gun.”
Sam stepped around me, making me bump into the door. I dropped one hand and wrapped it in the ruff of his neck—no way was I stupid enough to grab his collar. My touch was a request, not an order . . . but Sam had already stopped beside me. He surveyed the approaching police from the top of the steps, a position that was higher than theirs.
Sam, Heart paid attention to. He glanced longingly at Zee—because the gun was out of sight—and took a step away from the werewolf.
“This is a misunderstanding,” he said in a voice designed to carry to the approaching police. “My fault.”
I saw the moment the first officer on the scene recognized him because his eyes rounded, and his voice was a little awed as he told the older patrolmen who followed him, “It’s all right, Holbrook, Monty. It’s Kelly Heart, the bounty hunter from TV.”
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