I didn't remember any of the rest of Adam's pack acting submissive to me, though. But then I didn't usually run into Adam's pack in wolf form-and in human form… well, theoretically their behavior should be the same. But some things were harder on a human mind than a wolf's. I imagine they all had a hard time being submissive to a coyote, especially because they all knew I was Adam's mate only as a courtesy.
I felt my smile widen though, as I thought about the havoc I could cause by insisting that they all treat me with proper pack etiquette. Wouldn't work; I was actually surprised that Adam's claim had worked well enough to keep some of them from bothering me, but it might be worth trying just to see Adam's face.
Honey's summer coat wasn't as splendid as her winter one, but it revealed the play of muscle in a way her thicker fur would not have. She knew it, too, and found a square of sunlight to pose in.
Black took a step back as she approached, but, after that first step, he held his ground. Honey gave him time to adjust before she continued forward, sitting down within touching distance.
"She's beautiful," he said, his voice only a little tight. If I hadn't been able to hear the speed of his pulse, I wouldn't have known how scared he was. If he reacted this way to his daughter, it was no wonder she was having troubles.
Honey, though, had been a werewolf for a long time and her control was excellent. She gave no sign that he was able to detect how much the scent of his fear was exciting her, and after a few minutes his fear began to die down.
"My daughter could be like this?" he asked me, sounding more naked than a man should when surrounded by strangers.
I nodded my head.
"How soon?"
"On her own? That depends upon her. But in the presence of an Alpha, immediately."
"No more cages," he whispered.
I couldn't let him think that. "Not metal ones," I told him. "But once she is a member of the pack, she'll fall out of your control and into the Alpha's. That can be a cage of sorts, though a more comfortable cage."
He took a deep, shaky breath. "Can she understand me?" he asked, nodding toward Honey.
"Yes, but she can't talk."
"All right." He looked straight in her eyes, not realizing he was challenging her. I almost said something to him, but Honey didn't seem to be bothered, so I let it go.
"If you had a daughter," he asked her, "would you bring her here? Would you trust her to Hauptman?"
She smiled at him, not so widely as to display her sharp white teeth, and wagged her tail.
He looked at me. "If I bring her here, will he take her away from us?"
I wasn't sure how to answer him. Adam wouldn't see it that way, to him the wolves were all his family, but conveying that to someone who hadn't be around a pack was difficult-and I'm not sure that a father would find it any better. How do you give up your child, even for their own good? That was a question I had never asked my mother.
"He'll take her under his wing," I said at last. "He'll take responsibility for her welfare-and he will not lightly give up that responsibility. He'd never refuse to let you see her. If she is unhappy in Adam's pack, there are other options, especially once she has control of herself."
"She can become a lone wolf," he said, relaxing.
I shook my head. I wouldn't lie to him. "No. They'd never let a female out on her own. There are too few of them, for one thing, and the males… are too protective to allow a female to fend for themselves. But she could request to change packs."
The lines on his face deepened and he swore. Three times. Honey whined. She might have been sympathetic, or just protesting the foul language. I didn't trust myself to predict Honey anymore.
"What are your alternatives?" I asked him. "If she kills someone, the wolves will have to hunt her down. How would she feel if she hurts you or her mother?"
He took out his cell phone and stared at it.
"Would you like me to call him for you?" I asked.
"No," he said and riffled around in his pocket for the paper with Adam's phone number on it. He stared at it for a moment, then almost whispered, "I'll call him tonight."
CHAPTER 7
"Hey, Mercy, what'cha workin on? Looks like a miniature Corvette."
I looked up to see Tony, cop and old friend-usually in that order-leaning up against one of my work benches. Today he was dressed casually in a thin shirt and khaki shorts appropriate to the hot summer day. Tony looked a bit frayed around the edges. It had been a little over two weeks since the sorcerer had moved into town and, according to the local news, the crime rate had been skyrocketing.
"Good eye," I told him. "It's a ‘71 Opel GT, designed by the same guy who designed the Corvette. Friend of mine bought it from some guy who replaced its wussy original engine with a Honda engine."
"He didn't do it right?"
"He did it fine. Excellent job of refitting it, as a matter of fact. I couldn't have done a better job myself." I grinned at him. "Only problem is that a Honda engine turns to the right and the Opel was designed for a lefty."
"Which means?"
I patted the sleek fender and grinned at him. "It only goes twenty miles per hour forward, but can break one hundred backward if you use all four gears."
He laughed. "Cute car." He stared at it for a minute and the smile fell away from his face. "Listen. Can I take you out to lunch? Business, so I'll foot the bill."
"Kennewick PD needs a mechanic?" I asked.
"No. But I think you can help us."
I washed up, changed out of my work clothes and met him back in the office. Honey looked up when I came in. Last week, her second week of guard duty, she'd turned up in jeans (pressed) with a folding chair, small desk, laptop and cell phone. Working out of my office was almost as good, she claimed, as working out of her own. Ever since the incident with Black, we'd been treating each other with cautious friendliness.
"I'm going to lunch with Tony," I announced. "I'll be back in an hour or so. Gabriel, would you call Charlie about his Opel, and tell him the price we got on that used Mazda RX7 engine? The cost won't make him happy, but the RX will fit."
Honey looked up at me, but she didn't protest me leaving, as I half expected her to.
"I hope you don't mind if we walk," Tony said as we stepped out into the sweltering heat. "I think better when I'm moving."
"Fine with me."
We took the shortcut into downtown Kennewick, over the train tracks and through a couple of empty lots. Honey trailed behind us, but she was good enough that I don't think Tony spotted her.
Downtown is one of the older sections of town, small businesses in old buildings surrounded by Craftsman and Victorian houses, mostly built in the twenties and thirties. Efforts had been made to make the shopping area look inviting, but there were a few too many empty shops for it to look prosperous.
I expected him to talk to me while we were walking, but he didn't. I held my peace and let him think.
"It's pretty hot for walking," he said finally.
"I like the heat," I told him. "And the cold. I like living somewhere that actually has all four seasons. Montana has two. Nine months of winter, three months where it almost warms up, then back to winter. Sometimes the leaves actually get to turn colors before the first snow hits. I remember it snowing on the Fourth of July once."
He didn't say anything more, so I supposed he hadn't been trying to make small talk-but I didn't know what else he could have been trying for with his comment, either.
He took me to a small coffee shop where we ordered at the counter and then were escorted into a dark, cool room filled with small tables. The atmosphere the owners had been trying for was probably an English pub. Never having been to England, I couldn't tell how close they'd gotten, but it appealed to me.
"So what am I here for?" I asked him finally, after soup and a largish sandwich appeared before me, and the waitress left us alone. It was late for lunch and early for dinner so we had the room to ourselves.
"Look,"
he said after a moment "That sour old guy who used to be your boss, the one who still comes in once in a while-he's fae, right?"
Zee had publicly acknowledged his heritage for a long time, so I nodded my head and took a bite of sandwich.
He took a gulp of water. "I've seen Hauptman, the werewolf, at your garage at least twice."
"He's my neighbor," I said. The sandwich was pretty good. I was betting they made their own bread. I'd had better soup, though, too much salt.
Tony frowned at me and said intensely. "You're the only one who always knows who I am, no matter what disguise I wear." Tony was an undercover cop with a talent for changing his appearance. We'd become acquainted after I'd recognized him and almost blown his cover.
" Mmm?" My mouth was full on purpose because I didn't want to say anything more until he got to his point.
"The fae are supposed to be able to change their appearance. Is that how you always know me?"
"I'm not fae, Tony," I told him after I swallowed. "Zee is. The fae change their appearance by magic-glamour, they call it. I'm not entirely sure that the fae can see through each other's glamour-I certainly can't."
There was a short silence as Tony adjusted what he had been going to say.
"But you know something about the fae. And you know something about the werewolves?"
"Because Hauptman is my neighbor?"
"Because you were dating him. A friend of mine saw you at a restaurant with him."
I looked at him and then pointedly around the restaurant.
He got it. "He said it looked like you two were pretty hot and heavy."
Defeated, I conceded. "I went out with him a couple of times."
"Are you still?"
"No." I'd put too much emphasis on it.
I'd made a point to stay out of Adam's way since I'd almost made out with him in his garage. Remembering that made me feel like a coward. I didn't want to talk about Adam if I could help it. Truth was, I didn't know what to do about him.
"I'm not fae." I decided not to eat the rest of the soup, but I opened the crackers and munched on them. "I'm not a werewolf."
He looked like he didn't want to believe me, but he chose not to confront my answer directly. "But you know some of them. Some fae and some werewolves."
"Yes."
Tony set down his spoon and gripped the edge of the table with both hands. "Look, Mercy. Violent crime always goes up in the summer. The heat makes tempers shorter. We know that. But I've never seen anything like this. It started with that murder-suicide in the Paseo hotel a few weeks ago, but it didn't stop there. We're working double shifts trying to handle the load. Last night I took in a guy I've known for years. He has three kids and a wife who adores him. Yesterday he came home from work and tried to beat her to death. This just isn't normal, not even in the middle of a heat wave."
I shrugged, feeling as helpless as I doubtless looked. I knew things were bad, but I hadn't realized how bad.
"I'll ask Zee, but I don't think it's anything the fae are doing." I had to quash any hint of that-it might be dangerous for Tony if he started poking around. The fae don't like the police prying into their business. "The last thing they want is to frighten the general population. If one of them were doing something like this, the whole community would search them out and take care of it."
I hadn't talked to Zee for a few days. Maybe I ought to call him and suggest that the police were looking toward them for answers to the outbreak in violence-without using Tony's name. I didn't know what they could do against a vampire who was also a sorcerer. The fae weren't very organized, and tended to ignore other people's problems. They knew about Littleton — because Zee knew-but they seemed to be content to let the vampires and wolves search him out. But if the situation started to put a little pressure on them, maybe they'd help find him-Warren and Stefan hadn't been making much headway. The trick would be to make certain that the fae applied their efforts against the villain, and not against the police.
"What?" asked Tony sharply. "What were you thinking?"
Whoops. "I thought that it might be a good idea to let Zee know what you just told me. Just in case there's something they can do about it." I can lie, but living among werewolves, many of whom can smell a falsehood, had made me pretty adept at using the truth to my advantage.
"And the werewolves?"
I shook my head. "Werewolves are pretty simple creatures-that's why they make good soldiers. If there were a rogue werewolf out here, there might be dead"-I found a hasty substitute for bodies — " animals, but not regular people going berserk for no good reason. The wolves aren't magical like the fae are."
I slapped my hands lightly on my thighs and leaned forward. "Listen, I am happy to help you with what little I know about fae and werewolves. I will make a point of talking to Zee-but, as you said, we're in the middle of a heat wave. We've been in the three digits for a long time with no sign of cooler weather. It's enough to make anyone crazy."
He shook his head. "Not Mike. He didn't lose his temper when his wife wrecked his ‘57 T-Bird. I tell you I know this guy. I played basketball in high school with him. He doesn't have a temper to lose. He wouldn't just lose it and beat up his wife because his AC frizzed out."
I hate guilt. Hate it worse when I know that I have nothing to feel guilty about. I was not responsible for Littleton.
Still, how would it be to hurt someone you loved? I could see his friend's situation was eating at Tony-and I had a strong surge of sympathy, and guilt. I couldn't do anything either.
"Get your friend a good lawyer-and get him and his family to see a therapist. If you need names, I have a friend who is a divorce lawyer-I know he has a couple of counselors he recommends to his clients."
Tony jerked his head in a motion I took to be a nod, and we finished lunch in silence. I took a couple of dollars out of my pocket and tucked them under my plate for a tip. They were damp with sweat, but I expect the waitresses were used to dealing with that this summer.
As soon as we exited the restaurant, I could smell a werewolf-and it wasn't Honey. I glanced at the people around us and recognized one of Adam's wolves looking in the window of a secondhand store. Since he didn't look the type to be really interested in the display of old baby buggies, he must be guarding me. I wondered what had happened to Honey.
"What's wrong?" Tony asked as we walked past my security detail.
"Stray thought," I told him. "I guess the heat's making me crabby, too."
"Listen, Mercy," he said, "I appreciate you coming out with me like this. And I'd like to take you up on your offer to help us. Seattle and Spokane have specialists who deal with the fae for them-some of those cops are fae. We don't have anyone like that. We don't have any werewolves either"-they did, at least the Richland PD did, but if they didn't know that, I wasn't going to tell him-"and it would be good not to be wandering around totally in the dark for a change."
I hadn't meant to offer to help the police-that would be too dangerous. I opened my mouth to say so, and then stopped.
The trick to staying out of trouble, Bran had told me, is to keep your nose out of other people's business. If it became known that I was consulting with the police, I could find myself in big trouble.
Adam I could deal with, it was the fae I worried about, them and the vampires. I knew too much and I didn't expect that they would trust me to judge how much to tell the police.
Still, it didn't seem fair that the police were responsible for keeping the peace when they only knew the things that the fae and the werewolves wanted them to know. There were too many ways that could prove deadly. If something happened to Tony or one of the good guys and I could have prevented it, I'd never sleep a night through again. Not that I'd been doing particularly well at sleeping lately anyway.
"Fine," I said. "Here's some free advice. Make sure that none of your co-workers starts stirring up the fae over this."
"Why not?" he asked.
I took my first step out into the ab
yss, and told him something that might get me in real trouble. I glanced around, but if the werewolf was still tailing us, he was doing a really good job. Since Adam's people were usually more than competent, I dropped my voice to a bare whisper. "Because the fae aren't as gentle or powerless as they try to let on. It would not be a good thing if they decided someone was looking their way for this rise in violence."
Tony missed a step and almost tripped over a railroad tie. "What do you mean?"
"I mean never put yourself in a position where harm to you would make the fae community here safer." I gave him a reassuring smile. "It is not in their best interest to harm anyone-and they usually police themselves so that you don't have to. If one of them is breaking the law, he will be taken care of. You just need to be careful not to make yourself a threat to them."
He absorbed that for half a block. "What can you tell me about dealing with the werewolves?"
"Here?" I asked waving my hand vaguely at the city around us. "Talk to Adam Hauptman before you try to question someone you think might be a werewolf. In another city, find out who's in charge and talk to them."
"Get permission from their Alpha before speaking to them?" he asked a little incredulously. "You mean like we have to talk to parents before questioning a minor?" Bran had let the public know about Alphas, but not exactly how rigid the pack structure really is.
" Mmm," I looked at the sky for inspiration. None came, so I tried to muddle through it on my own. "A child can't rip your arm off, Tony. Adam can see to it that they answer your questions without hurting anyone. Werewolves can be… volatile. Adam can help with that."
"You mean they'll tell us whatever he wants us to hear."
I took a deep breath. "This is important for you to believe: Adam is one of the good guys. He really is. That's not true of all pack leaders, but Adam's on your side. He can help you, and as long as you don't offend him, he will. He's been pack leader here for a long time because he's good at his job-let him do it."
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