I tried to think of a logical path to get home and in bed. First step: get in the car. But Adam, assuming he was changing back to his human form, which was what it had looked like, would be naked.
Tad had clothes here that might fit Adam, but werewolves could be funny about wearing someone else’s clothing—especially if that someone wasn’t pack. On a good day, maybe it would have worked. This day had been a whole bad year all by itself.
Adam’s SUV would have a change of clothes. Probably not footwear, but he had made his own bed and he could lie in it.
Second step: drive home and …
I had to put the washcloth on my eyes again. My hands were still shaking. If he had pulled that trigger … I could have been alone again.
Maybe ten minutes later, Adam knocked on the door. “Mercy? Are you planning on taking up residence in there?”
“Might as well,” I bit out. “My mate is an idiot.”
After I said it, I knew that those two things didn’t go together, except that I really had needed to say that last.
“Yes,” he agreed. “So why don’t we go home and you can punish me by telling everyone there how you feel.”
I froze. “We can’t do that,” I told him. “We have an invasion and a killer bunny. They need you invulnerable.”
“God,” he said with feeling, “are they going to be disappointed if that’s what they need.”
Then he laughed, and it sounded a little like I felt—shaky and damaged. Yes, tonight had altered the game board a little, but no one had won, yet. There was a soft thump as his forehead (I was pretty sure) hit the door.
“Elizaveta cursed you,” I told him.
“I know,” he admitted.
“How long have you known?” I asked gently. He and I both knew exactly how much anger was behind my tone. I had, after all, learned that from him.
“That is a complicated question.”
Holding a conversation through a closed door was stupid. I wasn’t afraid of him—and if I didn’t open the door, I would never be able to go home and pull the blankets over my head. I unlocked the door and opened it.
He was his usual gorgeous self, no monster to be seen. He was also naked as a jaybird. His unclothed and glorious body might have distracted me had he not looked at my face and winced.
I would have liked to think that he’d flinched from my wrath. But I was pretty sure it was the damage to my face. Just as well I’d been able to hide most of the bruising on the rest of me with the shirt.
“How complicated?” I asked.
“The wolf knew,” he said. “But I didn’t know until he told you.”
Just after my neighbors had died.
“And you kept it to yourself afterward because why?” I asked—more sharply than I meant to. But we had people who could help with witch curses, Bran and Zee—we even had Wulfe. The one thing that I knew about witch curses was that ignoring them—as tonight had made obvious—didn’t make them get better.
He looked away from me.
I was going to tell him exactly how smart I thought that keeping this to himself had been. I opened my mouth, and hesitated. Hadn’t he … hadn’t we been through enough today? He was going to have to put on his clothes and go back to the pack house and pretend that everything was okay. That he was fit and ready to face off with … heaven help us, Fiona. And the killer bunny. And Wulfe and whatever else decided to rain down on our heads because the universe was just generous like that.
He couldn’t afford to let anyone but me see the mess he was in. Because our pack was short of people to do the job we had to do. They were bearing up wonderfully for the most part—but the pressure wasn’t going to let up anytime soon.
“So,” I said, to change the subject. “Why did you want to get me alone to talk to me?”
“Because I thought you’d called Bran for advice, and he’d told you to get away from me.”
I blinked at him, utterly flummoxed. “What?”
He spoke more slowly. “Because I thought you’d called Bran for advice, and he’d told you to get away from me.”
“Funny guy,” I said. “I heard you the first time. I just never thought that you would utter such absolute … drivel.”
“It seemed logical at the time,” he said.
“Huh,” I growled at him. “What in the world makes you think that even if Bran told me to leave you, that that would be something I would ever do?”
And that started the waterworks again. I hated to cry—in this case it felt manipulative, as if I were punishing him somehow—when that was the furthest thing from my mind at the moment. I wiped my eyes with the bottom of my shirt—and caught my nose.
“Damn it,” I growled, batting away his hands.
“I’m cursed,” he said mildly. “It interferes with my thinking. Stop that. You’re hurting yourself.”
Both were true. I stopped trying to wipe my eyes with my shirt and used my hands instead.
I wasn’t going to cut him any slack on his muddled thinking, curse or no curse. He thought I was going to tell him I was leaving him. And then I put it together with his actions tonight.
“So your thinking was that I was going to tell you I was leaving you—so you were going to kill yourself and save me the trouble?”
His face went still. Then he said, “It sounds so stupid when you say it that way.”
“Good,” I snapped. I started to pinch my nose—Bran style—and Adam caught my hand.
He kissed my knuckles (which was pretty brave when he knew how much I wanted to hurt him) and folded my hand in his. “Don’t do that,” he said. “You’ll hurt yourself again.” He sighed. “I think I’ve done enough of that today.”
It echoed my earlier thought about him, that he’d been through enough today. I took a deep breath.
“This is maybe not the best time to hash this out,” I said.
“Agreed,” he said, his voice heartfelt. “What did you want to talk to me about? Or is that another minefield?”
It took me a moment to remember.
I held up a finger. “Bran thinks that we, that you, need to kill Fiona at first opportunity.”
“Fiona?” he said blankly, as if he’d forgotten who she was.
“Fiona,” I said. “Apparently she went rogue a while ago. Started selling her skills to whoever paid her. Bran thought that she died in a deal gone bad while she was working with some witches. You should maybe call Bran and talk to him about her.” He wasn’t taking my calls. “Bran has decided what we need to do with our invading wolves. Harolford is on the kill list, but less urgently so. Kent Schwabe is a question mark, but he’d like us to save Chen and the Palsics.”
“I’ll talk to him,” he told me.
He was still naked. It was distracting me—though I didn’t think he knew that yet.
I held up a second finger. “He told me that we should talk to Underhill about the smoke weaver.”
Adam’s eyebrow raised. “And that is a revelation how?”
“He told me to ask her about the bargain Underhill has with him or that she had with him. He told me to bribe her with something sweet that I’ve cooked myself. And he told me to approach her like we have a common problem and not like she released someone who killed innocents and now holds two people I care about in his thrall.”
“Okay,” he said. “That’s useful.”
I held up a third finger. “And he told me that if you kept shutting me out, I should blow up our mating bond.”
“Excuse me?”
“He hung up and won’t answer my calls,” I said. “I have no idea what he meant. Just what he said.”
“You did something to our bond, though,” he said slowly, and I felt a faint pull on the bond, a softening that, after a moment, stiffened back to where it had been.
“I didn’t blow it up,” I told him.
I decided not to tell him exactly what I had done.
I’d been influenced by the pack bonds and hadn’t enjoyed the experien
ce. Let him think that it was just me yelling at him that had made him put down the gun.
He didn’t need to know that I’d sent those words through our mating bond in a pearl before I’d given them out loud. Maybe yelling alone would have worked. It would have if he’d been in a normal headspace—but if he’d been in a normal headspace, he wouldn’t have been trying to kill himself. I was hoping that the words I’d given him would linger. That they would keep him from doing anything rash until we had a chance to talk to someone.
He’d been under the influence of Elizaveta’s spell. I was pretty sure that it had been my pearl that let me break through the effect of her curse—my hopeful pearl against her words.
“Why couldn’t you have told me this at home?” he asked. “Our bedroom is private enough.”
I gave him a wry smile. “Because I thought you were looking really tired and our house was full of people. I also wanted to see if I could get you to tell me what was wrong.”
He grinned at me abruptly and said, “Well, you got that part done in true Mercy fashion.”
“Anything worth doing is worth overdoing,” I intoned solemnly. I took in a deep breath and sighed loudly. “I suppose that I should quit enjoying the view and go get you some clothes from the SUV.”
I rose up on my toes and kissed him. “Don’t you give up on us, my love.”
“Okay,” he said. He kissed me back. “Nudge?”
Yes. Oh yes. There was so much emotion that my insides felt scoured with the tides. Sex … making love wouldn’t fix any of it. Wouldn’t break what Elizaveta had done to my husband. Wouldn’t change the reality that Adam hated himself so much that he thought he deserved to die. I did not lie to myself. I had spoken to his wolf. Elizaveta’s words would not have taken fruit if Adam hadn’t had the garden plowed and fertilized for it.
Sex wouldn’t fix that. But … sharing is a very powerful thing. And making love with Adam was generous and warm—powerful magic of its own kind. And ten minutes of not thinking sounded like heaven just now and I was pretty sure Adam felt the same way. It was not passion he was seeking with his “nudge”—it was surcease.
But … no way in hell was I going to let him see me naked while Elizaveta’s magic was still working on him. I knew my mate. Guilt—the failure of living up to his own expectations—was driving that curse. Adam had an overabundant sense of responsibility. My poor face had been the tipping point today, I was pretty sure. I wasn’t going to let him see that my entire right side was black where it hadn’t been scraped raw.
“Not tonight,” I told him. “We have wolves to kill and Underhill to talk to. Busy, busy.” And after misquoting The Princess Bride, I admitted the truth—a little of the truth. “As much as I’d like some nudging of my own, I think I need to give my body a break for a day or so.” I paused, and since it was true and I deserved a chance to whine a little, I said, “And my nose is throbbing.”
He hugged me gently and I didn’t so much as stiffen at the pain in my ribs—which I hadn’t actually noticed until I saw them in the mirror. I’d been too focused on a lot of things more painful than bruised ribs. Once all the drama had subsided, my body was more sore than it had felt before the whole Adam’s-got-a-gun scene had played out.
EVERYONE WAS TUCKED INTO BED BY THE TIME WE got home. Jesse called a good night to us as we passed her room, so they hadn’t been in bed for long.
I found the pajamas that I wore when I was sick—Adam wouldn’t think it strange for me to grab them when I had a broken nose. They were a gift from my mom—nothing I would ever have bought myself. It was ridiculous how much I loved them.
They were mint green and covered with pink ponies with improbable purple manes and tails. My mom had a thing for horses. But the important thing about them tonight was that they covered me from neck to feet.
I showered and dressed and by the time I was through I hurt so badly I wasn’t sure I could sleep. Every muscle in my body was stiff and sore. I crawled into bed and finally just lay facedown with a pillow under my chest and my face turned aside so that my nose didn’t hit the mattress. Nothing else was comfortable, either.
Adam showered and I must have dozed despite the discomfort because the next thing I knew the bed was moving under his weight.
“Mercy,” he told me. “Take off your shirt.”
I lay very still. Maybe he would think I was asleep.
“Your shirt rode up while you were poking your finger at me,” he said. “Threatening me with the dire consequences of dying around a ticked-off daughter of Coyote who can call the dead. You don’t have to hide your injuries from me—that’s our deal, remember?”
“You knew?” I asked.
“I just wanted to see how far you would take it. Strip off your shirt, tough girl, and I’ll see what I can do about making you feel better.”
He didn’t know I’d been hiding my bruises so that he didn’t have one more thing to feel responsible for. One more thing for Elizaveta’s curse to dig into him with. He wasn’t wearing a monster, so apparently I hadn’t needed to try to hide anything from him.
“I can’t move,” I whined, now that I didn’t have to pretend. “It hurts.”
He helped me roll over and gave me a bag of frozen peas, which he must have brought upstairs while I was dozing, for my nose.
“No, don’t press it,” he said. “Just let it rest there.”
And my nose settled down while he lit a vanilla candle I couldn’t smell and turned out the lights.
“I’m not being romantic,” he advised me. “The lights are going to hurt your eyes. The candle is warming the oil I’m going to use to help your poor abused muscles relax.”
I thought that sounded like a pretty romantic thing to do. Romantic didn’t always have to do with sex.
He unbuttoned the shirt of my pajamas and managed to get it off me without hurting me more. I had a bag of peas over my eyes so I couldn’t see what he looked like after getting a fully detailed report on my body.
What he said, after a moment, was “Okay, pants off, too.”
And he lifted and moved my limp body around. At one point he stopped and said, “These are your favorite pajamas.”
“Yes,” I said.
He grunted. “Easier if I could rip them off, but I’ll manage.”
And so he did.
Then he rubbed warmed oil all over my sore muscles. Not a massage, just gentle repetitive motions that took the edge off. I fell asleep with his strong hands rubbing my shoulders. I still hurt, but I didn’t care as much as I had.
I DON’T KNOW WHAT TIME IT WAS THAT I WOKE UP TO the hairs on the back of my neck crawling.
“Adam?”
A low growl from the far side of the room answered me. It wasn’t Adam’s usual growl, but it was him. I thought about the ugly, ugly monster.
“For Pete’s sake,” I complained after a moment of thought. “Get back to bed. I’m cold.”
Something very, very heavy got into bed beside me. I was worried the bed was going to break. A very big, hot body curled around me and rough skin touched my own. Adam rested his very large chin on the top of my head.
“Better,” I grumped, snuggling into his warmth. “Go to sleep.”
HE WAS GONE WHEN I WOKE UP IN THE MORNING—AND I woke up early because moving hurt. It didn’t hurt as much as it might have if Adam hadn’t given me a hot oil treatment. Today was Monday, and though I was shutting down the garage until further notice, on Monday I had promised to fix the cars that absolutely only I could do. If I was going to have to go to work this morning, it was probably a good thing that I’d gotten up early.
Hannah was in the kitchen when I finally came down, feeling like I was a hundred and ten years old. She took one look at me and winced.
“Adam said you’d be in rough shape this morning,” she said. Then she walked over and kissed me on the cheek. “I’d hug you if it wouldn’t hurt both of us. Thank you for saving my little girl.”
“You’ve got me mix
ed up,” I told her. “Auriele saved Makaya. I just hit the bastard with my car.”
“Yes, well, thanks for that, too,” she said. “I hurt too much to sleep in, so I thought I’d come down and make my granny’s secret recipe for all that ails you.”
She brewed it all up in a double boiler, then poured it into two cups, took out a flask that had Granny’s Secret Ingredient engraved on the side, and added generously to the result.
She sniffed one of the cups, then added a teaspoon of honey. She sniffed it again.
“That’s smells right,” she said. Then she added another teaspoon of honey to both cups and shoved one in front of me. “Drink that.”
I looked at her. I knew what had gone into that pot. Moreover, I had a fair suspicion that there was something potent in Granny’s flask of alcoholic splendor.
“Just plug your nose,” she advised.
“Ha-ha,” I told her. “Funny.”
She drank it down. All of it in one gulp. When she was done, her eyes watered and she couldn’t talk—but she pointed her finger at the cup in front of me.
It was a gift, I knew. A thank-you that she’d gotten up ungodly early to prepare and feed to me.
It was the kind of gift that was unrefusable.
I followed her lead and drank the whole thing before I could think too much about what I’d seen her put in the brew.
When I was in college, after my first and only drunken bout, I realized that I knew too many people’s secrets to be drinking. After that, I’d made a habit of avoiding alcohol of any kind—so I didn’t know if my reaction to Hannah’s gift would have been the same if I’d gulped a glass of any old alcohol.
My skin warmed, my ears tingled, and so did the backs of my knees. My broken nose buzzed with a feeling that I was worried was going to wake up nerve endings that didn’t need to be roused. Instead, it settled into a pleasant sort of hum that drove the soreness away.
I couldn’t breathe or see for as much as a full minute, and my taste buds would have run away from my mouth in full revolt if they could have. But that was a fair price to pay for the lack of pain.
When I could focus properly again, Hannah said, “Warren’s going with you to the garage today. He’ll be here pretty soon. I would let him drive. But by the time you get to the garage, you should be okay for handling tools again.”
Smoke Bitten: Mercy Thompson: Book 12 Page 22
