Winter Lost

3

Mercy

“Why did I marry Adam?” I asked, a little incredulously.

“Yes,” said Mary Jo.

“Because I love him.”

Mary Jo shook her head and waved a hand, casually (and maybe a little drunkenly still) dismissing the thing that lay at the heart of a couple of years of bitter resentment on her part.

“I get that. But you were already mates and had been taking all sorts of crap from the pack. We are werewolves, not coyotes—you were an interloper trying to take our Alpha from us. And we were pretty convinced you were a weakness that was going to bring us down.”

She paused, her mouth finding a frown. “A coyote. And not a supercoyote, or one brimming with Native American magics. A coyote who is even easier to kill than your human form. Which is as easy to kill as a normal human.”

Yep. That was who I was.

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Why aren’t you dead?”

I raised my eyebrows at her. “Is that a question or a wish?”

She waved a hand at me again. “No. No. I’m done with that. I don’t want you dead anymore.” She shook her head. “As long as we never have to clean up dead water fae glop again. The clothes I wore still smell like rotting fish and I’ve washed them three times.”

I was beginning to enjoy this sloshed version of Mary Jo—though the effect of whatever Uncle Mike had provided for her seemed to be coming and going.

“I suppose I’m not dead for the same reason you aren’t dead,” I told her.

She raised her eyebrows in mute question.

“Because no one has managed to kill me yet.” I’d meant to be funny. But a chill drifted over my skin and I remembered lying in the dirt while Bonarata walked away from Adam and me. I changed the subject. “But you asked me why I married Adam. I married him because I wanted to.”

“Okay,” she said. “I know that. But you’d spent most of your life trying to get away from us, from werewolves and our business. Why did you marry Adam—no. Before that. Why did you agree to be his mate in the first place? The cost to you, to your way of life, was so high—and you knew that it would be.”

That. He hadn’t asked. But he hadn’t needed to, really. I’d been lost and struggling and Adam had thrown me a lifeline that had saved me. But it had also hurt, and completed the process of burning to ashes the quiet, safe life I’d built for myself. I didn’t know if I owed Mary Jo that answer. I didn’t talk about that time, even to Adam.

“It wasn’t his good looks,” my mouth said dryly before I’d made up my mind to speak.

My mate was movie-star beautiful. The kind of looks that, if he chose to emphasize them, would have stopped people in the street. I thought they were part of what made him so dangerous—a distraction for his enemies.

There was a brief silence.

“Do you know,” she said, sounding almost surprised, “I believe you.”

She shook her head and murmured, “This is the wrong way to go about this.” She slurred the last “this” and looked surprised. Frowning, she took a gulp of the cider, then squared her shoulders. “Renny asked me to marry him.”

Renny was a deputy with the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office. He was so in love with Mary Jo it made me feel like songs should start spontaneously playing anytime they were together.

“Okay,” I said carefully. Because she hadn’t sounded happy about it.

Her hands tensed and her eyes lightened with her wolf again.

“He is human,” she said. “If this were a few years ago, that would be okay. But we’re under siege now. We have to keep our territory safe for everyone. That means our whole pack—and anyone we love—is a target. The bad guys already went after Renny once, and there are more and bigger bad guys all the time.”

As if in answer, my phone rang. I flinched. But I picked it up and looked at the caller ID.

“Ben,” said Mary Jo, who must have seen my phone’s face as I moved it. “You should answer.”

“I’ll call him back,” I said, hitting the red button so my phone shut up.

My phone chimed with an incoming message from Ben. I glanced at it.

I sighed, then turned my attention to the problem at hand.

“Mary Jo,” I said. “Tell me about Renny.”

“He’s going to die if he keeps hanging around with me—and now he thinks we should get married,” she said, a growl in her voice. She must have heard it, too, because she took a calming breath, and when she continued, she sounded steadier. “I never minded not having children—I didn’t want them in the first place. But Renny should have, I don’t know, twenty kids. He volunteers for Big Brothers and for the Special Olympics. He teaches tae kwon do for kids at the Martin Luther King Center.”

I was not surprised.

“You told him no,” I said.

She nodded, looked away from me, then after a moment wiped her eyes. When she looked back at me, those wet eyes were also yellow.

“I love him,” she said. “Who wouldn’t? Of course I told him no. It was the right thing to do. It was. And now I can’t sleep or eat.”

That was bad. Werewolves need to eat. I gave a quick thought to her behavior since I’d come into the room and rapidly replaced “ticked off at a dunk in the outhouse and a little drunk” with “sleepless sad werewolf who had too much to drink without eating properly,” and I shoved her bowl of stew at her.

“Eat that right now,” I said in the voice of authority that I no longer always had to borrow from Adam.

She gave me a startled, uncomprehending look—as if I’d responded in Cornish or Mandarin or something. I gave the bowl another push.

“Eat.”

I waited until she’d taken a couple of bites, then asked her, “How long since you turned down Renny?”

“A couple of days,” she said, and from the way she said it, I thought she could probably have given me the hours and minutes.

She settled down to eat in earnest. I ate mine, too. It was good stew, and after I’ve been terrorized, I’m usually hungry.

Two days. She knew better than to let her wolf starve for two days, especially when the full moon was so recent. She was lucky she hadn’t gone after one of her own team or the boy who’d fallen into the outhouse.

She needed more calories than she’d find in a single bowl of stew, no matter how filling. “Stay there,” I told her. “I’m going out for more food.”

I got up and opened the door to find Uncle Mike standing there like the Addams Family butler, with another, larger bowl of stew and a sliced loaf of bread with butter on the side.

I did not squeak in surprise.

Uncle Mike smiled, amused. “Any good tavern keeper knows when his guests are hungry.” Which was his version of “You rang?”

I took the tray from him and wondered how much else he could tell about his guests. I swallowed my discomfort. “I appreciate the food,” I said, which was not quite a thank-you.

He glanced at the table and said, “Drink the rest of that glass, Mercy.”

“Yessir,” I said dryly.

Unbothered by my sarcasm, he nodded. I backed into the room, shutting the door between us and the green man. I put the food on the table, took Mary Jo’s empty bowl, and set it on the tray and the tray on the floor because there was no room for it on the table.

“Renny asked you to marry him, and you broke up with him instead,” I said.

I picked up the glass and drank some more of Uncle Mike’s magic-spiked cider. More of my headache slid away, allowing some of the tension in my shoulders to release, too.

“I told him we were done.” Mary Jo looked miserable even as she dug into the larger bowl.

There were other humans in our pack, mates of werewolves. But they predated our ascent—or descent, depending upon your view—into our current job of being the protectors of the Tri-Cities. Mary Jo had been absolutely right that anyone associated with our pack had a target painted on their back. We’d been able to safeguard our vulnerable members, but none of the humans currently in our pack were adrenaline junkies like Renny. His job required the willingness to run toward danger when everyone with a lick of common sense would run away. He wasn’t going to stand back and let the werewolves keep him safe.

My phone rang and, distracted by Mary Jo, I picked it up.

“This is Mercy,” I said.

A soft dark laugh rang in my ear.

Mary Jo jerked up her head and stared at my phone.

“Hello,” I said in what I hoped was a disinterested tone. He didn’t usually call twice in one day. I found that I was terrorized out. Oddly, sitting across from Mary Jo steadied me, too. “Is there something I can do for you?”

A shivery tension filled the air. When silence answered me, I ended the call.

“He really defeated Adam?” Mary Jo asked in a smaller-than-usual voice.

My mate had cut his teeth in Vietnam and was one of the toughest werewolf fighters I had ever seen—and I’d grown up in the Marrok’s pack with the bunch of crazy werewolves he’d deemed too dangerous to inflict on any other Alpha. Adam was a born warrior.

“Yes,” I said. I tried not to picture my mate’s broken body on the ground, curled around an artifact that was trying to turn him into its slave. It had been so close.

Mary Jo looked at my phone.

“He found your number,” Mary Jo said heavily.

I shrugged. Worrying too much about it wasn’t useful, but shoving it to the side extracted its own toll. I wasn’t going to talk about Bonarata anymore.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You didn’t ask me to come here and tell you that you did the right thing in refusing Renny. You wanted me to argue with you, because I’m not any better armed against the bad guys than someone like Renny is.”

“Probably,” Mary Jo admitted.

“I can’t do that,” I said. “He is not equipped to deal with folks like—” I tapped the screen of my phone. I didn’t use Bonarata’s name any more than necessary.

She flinched but stiffened her spine and raised her chin.

“You didn’t come here to ask me why I accepted Adam as my mate,” I said. “I’m the wrong side of the equation. You came here to find out how Adam had the courage to take me as his mate.”

“Yes,” she said. “That.”

“I don’t know,” I answered her honestly. “I take great comfort knowing that Adam is very hard to kill. Bonarata left us that night thinking Adam would die—and he was wrong. I don’t know how Adam deals with the fact that I would not have survived the wounds he took that night.”

“You are hard to kill, too,” said Mary Jo. “You shouldn’t be, but you are.”

I wasn’t going to argue about that. It didn’t seem useful. Instead, I said softly, “Renny has a dangerous job. How are you going to feel if he gets shot trying to interfere in a domestic dispute or a standard traffic stop? Just because you don’t accept his marriage proposal, that doesn’t make him safe. It doesn’t mean that he won’t die in a car wreck on the way home tonight.”

The wolf in her eyes lit right up, and my phone rang.

“How are you going to feel then?” I asked.

I answered my phone. This time I didn’t check the caller ID because I didn’t want to. I wasn’t going to give Bonarata that power. Not with Mary Jo—my pack—here with me.

“Mercy,” said my husband. “You need to come home. Your brother is here.” There was a noise—I couldn’t quite make it out. And then Adam grunted and disconnected.

Mary Jo grabbed her wallet. “I’ll take care of the bill,” she said. “My invite. Go.”

“You need to wait before you drive,” I told her.

She smiled. “I promise. Go.”

I did not speed on the way home. I was very, very careful about when and how I broke the law, and right now a speeding ticket would cost me more time than the few minutes I would save speeding. When a light turned red in my face, I stopped.

I’d called Adam back before I left, but he didn’t pick up. The noises I’d heard before he’d disconnected had sounded like combat. But I couldn’t be sure. Who would he have been fighting?

I tapped my foot as I waited for the light to turn green.

Why had Gary come to my house? Gary and I weren’t close.

I had first met him this spring—I hadn’t known I had a brother, half brother really, before that. Though maybe I should have. There are a lot of tales about Coyote marrying beautiful women, and many of the stories mention his children. Gary was older than me, probably by at least a century.

I had the feeling he’d been alone a very long time.

He hadn’t been particularly friendly when we’d first met. He was rough around the edges. But I thought he was a good person, and he could be unexpectedly kind. He reminded me, in that way, of Kyle, Warren’s boyfriend.

We weren’t friends, Gary and I. I thought about that for a moment, because there was some kind of connection. We were fellow prisoners, maybe, both of us serving out the sentence of being our father’s children. But Gary had kept in touch with me—and I’d found myself talking to him more than I’d expected. My life had been in a constant state of upheaval for a long time, and Gary knew more than I did about what I was.

The last time we talked, Gary had been training horses for a quarter horse breeder in Montana. Jobs like that tended to be mobile and seasonal, so he could simply be visiting because his job had ended. His being in the Tri-Cities was unnecessarily dangerous because he was still wanted in Washington for escaping from Coyote Ridge Corrections Center.

Adam hadn’t sounded like it was a casual visit.

My phone—face up on the passenger seat—dinged and showed a message from Jesse.

My phone dinged again as Jesse corrected herself. *quit

The light turned green while I was looking at my phone, and the car behind me honked. As I stepped on the gas, I wondered if the reason Adam hadn’t answered his phone was because he was dealing with the police. Maybe they’d figured out Gary was connected to the pack, to me, even. That didn’t make sense. Even Gary hadn’t known we were related until I tracked him down.

Maybe the police had followed him to my house?

The crime he’d been in jail for hadn’t been violent. No one should be dedicated to searching for him as long as he refrained from thumbing his nose at the justice system too hard—by, say, running around a mere forty-odd miles from the prison he’d escaped.

Proximity was why he’d relocated to Montana, where, in his words, “even if they send out bulletins or whatever they use now, one Native looks like any other Native—as long as the cop who is looking isn’t Native, too.” And he added, “Besides, no one in Montana cares about what happens in Washington anyway.”

But in the Tri-Cities, if someone recognized him, Gary’s presence in our house could expose us to criminal charges.

I took a deep breath and forced myself to relax. We had a couple of werewolves who worked at Coyote Ridge. They told me that Gary’s breakout was legendary, that it had been elevated to urban myth. Prisoners escaped from time to time, but they always left a trail. Gary had left his locked room and disappeared without a trace. No one, I’d been assured, was seriously looking for him anymore.

But the noises I’d heard on the phone sounded a lot like combat.

There were no police cars at the house when I got there. I pretended I wasn’t relieved as I pulled into the driveway between Adam’s and Jesse’s cars. There was a battered old Ford truck with Montana plates parked somewhat askew, presumably Gary’s ride.

It had been snowing off and on all week. There were winters when we never got accumulated snow, but the snow around the house was currently a bit over ankle height. There was enough to make decent snow angels or—as demonstrated all over the porch and front yard—to leave impressions of what had clearly been a violent fight.

I inhaled deeply and did not smell blood. My nose said the only people who had been out here fighting were my brother and my mate.

I jogged up the stairs and opened the front door to a living room filled with upended furniture. Unusually for a fight involving werewolves, nothing was broken. I gave the fainting couch a frown. Sadly, even upside down, it seemed to be fine. Before I had time to wonder where everyone was, Adam called out from the basement.

“Down here, Mercy.” He didn’t sound particularly stressed, but I didn’t like the solemn note in his voice.

Downstairs I found Jesse and Tad, our neighborhood half-blood fae, seated near the cage we used to lock up dangerous wolves. Adam was standing beside the cage, looking at me with worried eyes.

Behind the silver bars of the cage, a man was curled in a fetal position, his back to the room. He reeked of sweat and fear. His hair had been French braided at one time, but the braid was disheveled, with hair sticking out every which way, as if he’d slept on it more than one night. Or maybe just engaged in a battle with a werewolf. He did not, I noticed with relief, smell like fresh blood. He wore jeans and a ripped and wet winter coat he hadn’t taken off. Huddled up like that, my brother looked smaller than I remembered.

Adam gave me a quick hug, which I returned before dropping to my knees next to the cage.

“Gary?” I said. He didn’t respond to my voice at all.

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” Adam told me, his hand warm on my shoulder. “He wouldn’t talk to us. It felt like he couldn’t talk.” He glanced at Jesse, who nodded.

Sometime since this morning, when I’d last seen her, Jesse had dyed her hair bright purple. I thought she’d given up on outrageous colors when she started college a couple of months ago. When Gary was sorted out, I’d ask her why she’d gone back to dying her hair.

“Who had the fight in the front yard?” I asked, just in case there had been a scent I hadn’t detected.

“Gary and I did,” Adam said. “I don’t think he’s hurt—beyond bruises. Nothing seems broken.”

He sounded defensive.

“The fight wasn’t Dad’s fault,” Jesse said.

“I could have stopped it,” he told her.

“What happened?” I asked. “From the top, please?”

“He knocked,” Jesse said. “Dad was in his office and I answered the door. He didn’t look right at me—not at my face. Mumbled something and took a seat on the porch. I didn’t realize he was your brother, Mercy. He didn’t look like who I remembered. I thought he was a lone wolf. He’s not the first of those who has shown up here. I got Dad because I thought he was going to freeze to death on our porch.”

“Werewolves don’t freeze to death,” observed Tad, who’d been silent up to this point. He sounded a little upset.

“He was shivering and sort of hunched.” She nodded toward Gary, but there was a bite in her voice directed at Tad. “He looked like he was going to freeze to death. I’m not equipped to tell werewolves from not-werewolves.” She gave Tad a look and said, “But I’m also not stupid.”

“You opened the door,” Tad said. “Your father wouldn’t have heard him tear your throat out.”

“When I got out here”—Adam said, evidently deciding that argument had gone on long enough, though I thought Tad had a point; maybe Adam had already had it out with Jesse—“he was sitting at the top of the steps.”

He wasn’t happy about the danger Jesse had been in, either; I knew Adam. But unlike Tad, he knew better than to rebuke Jesse as if she were a child. I foresaw more cameras around the house so Adam could better monitor things when he was in his office.

“He didn’t respond when I talked to him,” Adam continued. “He didn’t appear to hear me at all. I put a hand on his shoulder and he reacted as if I were an enemy. That’s when we fought.”

I looked up at him, and he flushed a little. “Too close to the full moon. He’s lucky I didn’t kill him.”

“Dad just pinned him,” Jesse jumped in, as if I’d already gotten mad at Adam.

I figured if Gary was still alive, it was because Adam hadn’t wanted to kill him—wolf in charge or not. Gary had a knack for making people want to kill him. That’s how he’d ended up in jail in the first place.

“I was putting my trash in the bins outside and I saw the two of them come over the roof,” said Tad.

Despite my concern for my brother, I could feel my eyebrows rise and I looked up at Adam. “Over the roof? I thought you just pinned him.”

He rubbed his face with the hand that wasn’t holding on to me and gave me a sheepish look. “I don’t remember that part. You know what a fight is like. And the moon is just past full.”

“He pinned him five or six times,” Jesse said. “But Gary kept escaping. He just wiggled out until Dad really landed on him.”

Adam winced at the last few words, maybe because of the enthusiasm Jesse used.

“He sort of gave up then,” she told me. “Or we thought he did. Dad checked him out and carried him into the house.”

“Unconscious?” I asked.

“No,” Adam said.

“Catatonic,” said Jesse.

“I’m sure you don’t have the medical qualifications to assess that,” Tad said dryly.

“Unresponsive,” Adam said, stepping into the argument.

And it had been an argument, hadn’t it? I wondered, briefly, if it had something to do with Jesse’s eggplant hair.

But I was more concerned with my brother.

“If he was catatonic,” I asked, “why is he in the cage?”

“Dad called you,” Jesse said, “and right in the middle of that he jumped up like a jackrabbit. We’d wrapped him in a blanket. He sat up and the blanket sort of trapped him. He panicked.”

“I came in about the same time,” Tad said, “so it could also have been my arrival.” He looked at me. “Smelling like I do, yeah?”

Fae, he meant.

“We’re not sure,” Jesse added. “Because neither Dad nor I heard when Tad came in, and Tad didn’t see Gary jump up.”

I glanced at Adam, because not hearing Tad’s entrance was weird. Particularly if Adam had been revved up from a fight with the wolf near the surface.

He shrugged. “The wolf part of me stopped noticing Tad’s movements a while ago. Not enemy. Not pack. Not dangerous to us.”

I nodded.

“I heard Tad come in,” Adam clarified, “but I didn’t pay attention to him. I was more concerned about stopping Gary from jumping out the big plate-glass window. I caught him, but he’s as quick as you are. If I hadn’t been moving and close, I wouldn’t have.”

“He’s scared, Mercy,” said Jesse. “Really scared.”

“It took Adam and me both to get him down here without hurting him,” Tad told me. “Though once we got him inside the cage, he just collapsed.”

Tad had been slouched back in the chair since I’d gotten there, but I’d been distracted by my brother. I finally took note of the deceptive casualness in Tad’s pose that was designed to hide that he was ready for action.

I’d known Tad since he was nine. He’d worked with me in my garage until he’d found a better-paying position as an undercover bodyguard. That meant he was going to school with Jesse, because being the daughter of the Tri-Cities’ own Alpha set her up for nastiness no one would have dared to take against a real werewolf. He’d moved into my old house across the back fence from us a few weeks ago for added security for our home.

Tad wasn’t a werewolf. He didn’t look like a badass. He looked like a nerd, complete with stick-out ears and a big, goofy smile. But looks were deceptive. He was the half-human son of a powerful and grumpy fae. He could take care of business.

I wondered why he thought he should be worried about my brother, who was looking pretty helpless just now in a cage designed to keep werewolves trapped.

“I called Honey,” Adam told me. “She should be here shortly.”

I glanced up at him in surprise.

He smiled faintly. “I’m not oblivious.”

“Peter’s only been dead a year,” I said. Peter’s ghost still followed Honey around, a faithful attendant to his living mate.

“Honey and your brother have been talking,” he told me. “Texting, mostly.”

I frowned at him. “Honey didn’t say anything to me.”

“Honey didn’t say anything to me, either,” he said. “I have ways.”

“Our wolf pack gossips like nobody’s business,” observed Jesse.

I decided I’d gotten as much information out of them as I was going to. Time to deal with my brother.

I tried his name again.

“Gary?”

He didn’t respond to my voice, which wasn’t a surprise. I’d been down here for a while now, and he’d had plenty of time to react to me. I took a deep breath, but the overwhelming smell of sweat and fear made it difficult to get anything more subtle.

“You think it could be magic?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Adam said.

“Maybe,” Tad said slowly. “But it’s nothing I’m familiar with—and I can’t read anything through that cage.”

I gave Tad a surprised glance. Silver shouldn’t have any effect on fae gifts.

“Sherwood’s been playing with it,” Adam said with faint disapproval.

Sherwood, our no-longer-amnestic werewolf, had some unusual magic at his beck and call. He could remember who he was now, but he still had a lot of holes in his memory—and his magic. It made for some interesting times.

If Sherwood had a go at it…I decided—without much basis for my judgment—that he wouldn’t have done anything that would hurt anyone. I reached through the bars to touch Gary. I wasn’t a werewolf, so the silver didn’t bother me. But my arm wasn’t quite long enough from this side of the cage. I crawled to the side nearer to Gary and tried again. This time I managed to get my fingertips on his shoulder.

He jerked as if startled, even though we’d been making a lot of noise. After a bare instant he rolled over and up, until he was crouched over his heels. He grabbed the hand I’d had on his shoulder before he’d moved and brought it to his face, inhaling deeply.

He made a garbled sound that tried and failed to be a word. He followed that with a dozen other noises that also might have been words. I didn’t think they were, though. There was something about them that felt wrong—the opposite of communication.

Gary looked up and his gaze swept over mine as if he couldn’t see me. Then he closed his eyes, nodded once, and banged his hand against the bars of the cage. After the second bang he released my hand and waited. He was obviously making an effort to be still.

The cage locked with a key, but it also had a fingerprint lock that was much more convenient—as long as Adam was in the room. I gestured, and Adam opened the cage. There was a high-pitched beep and the lock clicked. I pulled open the door.

Gary kept his eyes closed and, nostrils flared, crawled out of the cage and to me. Not stopping until his arms were wrapped around my middle and his face was buried under my jaw, knocking me on my butt on the floor in the process. He sat there, rigid, for a long moment, then his whole body went limp and he began sobbing. Adam sat on the edge of the couch and put a hand on my brother’s head as if he were one of the pack who needed comforting.

Quietly, Tad said, “I am increasingly uncomfortable with the knowledge that he drove from Montana in that state.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Gary was damp—wrestling in the snow could do that. This close, the scent of his terror and sweat was unpleasant. We’d have to get him a shower followed by clean, dry clothes. But that was something for later, because I was picking up a new odor stronger than any of the other scents Gary was carrying.

Sherwood had done something to that cage, all right. He’d created some sort of barrier that had locked away the magic swirling around my brother so well, I hadn’t sensed it until the door opened. I thought of the time we’d locked Ben in the cage when the smoke dragon had controlled him, and wondered if Sherwood’s modification would have helped Ben by cutting off the smoke dragon’s magic.

We are all preparing to fight the previous war, I thought. Maybe the cage’s new properties would come in handy the next time an ancient fae predator decided to make puppets out of our wolves.

“He reeks of magic,” I told them. “It’s a bit odd—it reminds me of fae magic, but it isn’t anything I’ve been around before.”

I had one hand on the back of Gary’s head and the other on his shoulder. Even through the padding of the ripped jacket, his body was rock-tight. He did not react when I spoke.

“I can’t sense it,” Tad said—which was unusual, I thought, though I wasn’t sure. Tad’s power, since he was a half-blood fae, was weirder than mine, as well as an order of magnitude or two more powerful. I could smell magic, but Tad could work it. “Do you want me to call Dad?”

Zee had been…strange…since he’d destroyed the Soul Taker, an ancient and sentient artifact. Tad and I had decided that the resolution of Zee’s long hunt had brought some part of his older, more dangerous self back into the forefront. I sometimes felt as though the older beings I knew had their personalities in geological layers. We’d cracked the ground to release the Dark Smith once more into the world. Now Zee didn’t always fit neatly into the shape of the old mechanic who had been Tad’s father.

I was glad Tad saw it, too. Otherwise, I’d have to put Zee’s sudden strangeness down to whatever the Soul Taker had done to me.

“Zee was fine at work today,” I said, rubbing my temple with a finger. “What do you think?”

Tad touched the side of Gary’s face with his fingers, then withdrew them and shook his head. “I can’t sense anything at all. We should talk to either my dad or Uncle Mike.”

“Call Zee,” Adam said.

I looked at him.

He gave me a faint smile. “You’ll break his heart if you go to someone else with this.”

Tad let out a breath. “That’s true. But it doesn’t make it a good idea.”

I met Adam’s eyes.

“Have Tad call Zee, Mercy,” my mate said. “The Dark Smith of Drontheim destroyed a fascinating power for your sake. He won’t hurt you.”

“We made a bargain,” I said. “It wasn’t for my sake.”

“I forgot,” Adam lied—which he only did deliberately. He was making a statement, and he stared me down.

My brother’s sobs had slowed to uneven breathing. I petted his head and nodded at Tad. “Call him, please. Jesse, could you get some water? And maybe some food.”

Honey came before Zee arrived.

She wore a red sweater over leggings and managed to make it look like she was ready to attend a board meeting. But she crouched beside Gary and me without reacting to the way he smelled. She leaned close but didn’t try to touch Gary. For his part, he didn’t seem to notice her. In fact, he seemed to be actively trying not to notice anyone or anything.

I hadn’t been able to tempt him with food or water. He’d quit sobbing, but he kept his head down and he hadn’t loosened his hold on me.

The various witnesses to Gary’s arrival repeated their parts of the story. It had already acquired bits and pieces that were told in the same words. Honey had a good game face, but I was pretty sure she was as worried as I was.

“He hasn’t said anything since Dad brought him in the house,” Jesse told Honey.

“That’s not quite true,” Adam said. “He tried to say something when he figured out Mercy was here. I didn’t understand the language he used.”

“Not words,” I said with emphasis, because the memory of the sound that had left my brother’s lips still freaked me out. “It wasn’t words. It felt like the opposite of speaking.”

They all stared at me.

Honey frowned at me. Somewhat cautiously she asked, “Is that some more of what the Soul Taker left you with, Mercy?”

I hadn’t thought so. Most of what I had noticed had been the sometimes overwhelming sensitivity to magic and unwanted insights into people. But once she asked, it seemed more probable than not. I shrugged uncomfortably.

“Huh.” Honey frowned again. “He smells like magic to you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“My dad is coming,” Tad said. “If he can’t sort it out, he should be able to point us in the right direction.”

She nodded. “Okay. Let’s get some food and water into him.”

“Good luck with that,” I said.

Adam had been right to call Honey.

Gary was easier with her than he had been with me, once he’d figured out who she was. And when he was unwilling to move, she just picked him up and moved him. He didn’t fight her the way he had Adam. Eventually she got him up the stairs and into the kitchen.

He sat, his back to the bay of windows, with the table between him and the rest of the room. He was hollow-eyed and twitchy, but he ate whatever food we set before him—though only with one hand. With the other, he kept a fierce hold on Honey’s hand, as if to remind himself she was still there. Periodically he’d glance around the room, but hunger kept most of his attention on his food.

I couldn’t figure out why he was that hungry. He didn’t look like he’d been missing meals. When I shifted back and forth between human and coyote, I got hungry like that. Working magic was draining. I wondered if he’d been shifting a lot—or if he was using magic to try to resist whatever made him smell of foreign magic.

Jesse had put together a couple of steak sandwiches from leftovers while Honey got him into the kitchen. When he fell onto them with ravenous hunger, she and Tad set out to build an omelet of epic proportions full of whatever odd ingredients were in the fridge. In the midst of their chopping, the front door opened in a fierce whirl of wind and weather—evidently the fat snow had given way to wind and sleet while we were downstairs.

My brother in safe hands, I headed to the front door to find Zee, coatless and soaked to the skin, standing in the doorway with iridescent silver eyes. For a moment he looked like a stranger—as if the forces driving the storm drew out his magic. Even though I knew he still wore his everyday glamour, I saw the malevolent and powerful fae that his magic disguised. The familiar if rain-drenched T-shirt clinging to his skin appeared to me as though it was a finely worked chain mail shirt.

I blinked and he turned to push the door closed. When he turned back, he swiped his wet white hair out of his face with an impatient hand, and when I saw his eyes again, they were a more familiar color and intensity. Everything about him had toned down now that the storm was firmly sealed outside.

“Where’s your brother?”

He looked, now, as he had in the garage, wiry and tough—dried out by age to sinew and bone, a grumpy old mechanic feared only by people who didn’t change their oil regularly.

Wordlessly I waved him in the right direction. He carried authority in his wake with the same ease that my husband did. Familiar and safe.

But in the back of my head, I knew that was not really true. Or not always true.