Mercy Thompson 8: Night Broken (26 page)

She led the way back into her kitchen and did a double take when she saw Gary. “I thought you were in—”

Honey hadn’t been with us when we’d discussed his jailbreak and my seeing him at the crime scene in Finley. Apparently no one had mentioned it to her.

“I decided to follow you,” he broke in with a good-old-boy smile before she could say the “prison” word. “The most intriguing, most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I thought, if she would just
look
at me, I would never need to eat again because that look would sustain me for the rest of my life.”

“Do those kinds of lines ever really work?” Honey asked coolly, having gotten over her surprise. She glanced at Lucia and warmed her expression as she gave the rest of us a discreet nod. She wouldn’t talk about the jailbreak in front of anyone else. “Lucia, come with me, and I’ll get you set up.”

“What do you want me to do with Cookie?” When Honey looked blank, Lucia clarified. “With the dog?”

Honey looked at the battered dog, glanced at me, then went to her cupboard and pulled out a mixing bowl. “We’ll send someone out for dog food in the morning. There’s a bathroom off the bedroom you’ll be in, and we’ll fill this with water there.”

The two of them left, and I caught Gary by the arm before he could follow.

“You’d better cool your jets,” I told him, because although he might have interrupted her to stop her from blurting out where she’d last seen him, there had been real intent in his flirting—as there hadn’t been when he’d been messing around with Kyle and Zack. “Honey will wipe the floor with you.”

His eyes went half-mast, and his voice dropped in evident pleasure. “I know.”

I threw my hands up in the air. “You’ve been warned. Don’t come looking for sympathy here.”

The outside door opened, and Adam came in. He stomped the dirt off the bottom of his shoes on the mudroom mat with determined slowness. I recognized the careful movement as an attempt to keep his still-agitated wolf under control.

His calmness in the back of the SUV had been more of the same: my wolf didn’t like being helpless when someone he felt responsible for was in trouble. Joel had done some work for Adam, and that was enough to make him Adam’s responsibility.

I leaned against a counter and relaxed deliberately. Gary raised an eyebrow, looked toward the mudroom. Then he proved he was a lot better at reading people than he liked to pretend because he copied my position on the far side of the kitchen from the mudroom. He left a lot of space between me and him.

Adam came into the kitchen after he was satisfied with the state of his shoes. He saw Gary and me, and came over and leaned on the counter, too, close enough to me that his body pressed against my side.

He focused his gaze toward the opposite wall, where a cabinet displayed antique dishes, very carefully not looking at Gary on the other side of me.

I broke the silence. “Tad,” I said, because it should have occurred to me earlier to warn him.

“I called before I came inside. Tad said he’d take the opportunity to visit his father,” Adam told me. “Guayota is welcome to try to find him in Fairyland.” He frowned. “I’m not sure how voluntary his going is; it sounded like someone noticed him using magic, and he has to go talk to them.”

“Can he get back out again?” I didn’t bother to hide my anxiety.

“Tad didn’t think it would be an issue, not with his father there. Though he said if we don’t talk to him in a week or so, we might see what we can do to break him out.”

Zee would be hard to hold if he didn’t want to stay somewhere. He’d gone to the reservation voluntarily—hostilely voluntarily, but voluntarily nonetheless. “Maybe not,” I said.

We subsided into silence again.

Adam said, “Guayota has Joel. Only a man who had those dogs’ trust could have killed them, sacrificed them that way, one after another without their fighting back.”

“I know,” I agreed.

“You think that he’s found a way to turn Joel into one of his dogs, the tibicenas, like the one you killed who turned back into a man.”

“I do.”

He bowed his head and growled. It took him a few moments to find his words again. “Joel is a good man. He would never have killed, have
sacrificed
those dogs of his, given any kind of choice. He’d have killed a person before he killed those dogs.”

“Agreed.” Anyone who’d talked to Joel about his dogs knew that.

“We hit the trail at Joel’s backwards,” Adam told me. “Joel and Guayota went to the kennel first. Joel killed the dogs, then, in the shape of one of the tibicenas, he destroyed his bedroom.”

“Yes,” I agreed. The destruction in the house hadn’t been Guayota. If he’d been as angry as the animal who had attacked that room, he’d have burned the place to ashes. “He was hunting his wife, and she wasn’t there. He responded like a territorial animal in a rage.” Rage at Guayota redirected at the things he loved most.

I blinked back tears at the wrongness of that.

“Some sacrifices are worth more than others,” said Gary.

Adam still didn’t look at Gary, but he nodded. “Whatever tore up that bedroom was a lot more lethal than the dog you shot. Bigger.”

“They are shapeshifters like Guayota.” It wasn’t a guess. I’d seen the size of the claws on the walls.

“There is probably no way to get Joel back,” Adam said.

I heard the guilt in Adam’s voice and knew that this was the issue at hand. I narrowed my eyes at him. I could argue all night about why he shouldn’t feel guilty about Joel and how we didn’t know enough about Guayota to know that Joel was lost. We had a lot of alternatives to explore before we gave up. But sometimes taking another tack worked better.

“If I hadn’t killed the male tibicena, then he wouldn’t have needed a replacement. If I hadn’t gone to talk to Lucia, maybe he wouldn’t have tracked down Joel.” Unless he had some way of finding the people who were tied to the Canary Islands.

“If you folks are done with me,” Gary said, “I think I’ll get going.”

Adam glanced at him. “You wait a moment.” To me he said, “You know it isn’t your fault.”

“I know it,” I agreed. “But if we’re accepting blame, I think that I’m closer to the cause than you are.”

He grunted irritably. “Fine.”

“Fine.”

Adam took a deep breath, and I could sense the cloak of civilization that he pulled over the beast who wanted to kill something, anything, because Adam and his wolf were united in their dedication to justice, and its defeat could send them off in a rage. He took a second breath, and the mantle settled more firmly in place.

To Gary he said, “You have been very helpful. Of course you can leave whenever you wish. Do you have a place to go?”

Gary spread his arms and shook his head. “I’m fine, man. I’m used to going my own way. Don’t take offense, but trouble is looking for the pair of you, and I’d rather be a long ways away.”

“Stay here for the night.” Adam looked tired. It wasn’t the time—it wasn’t much past midnight—it was all the dead dogs, the guilt he shouldn’t feel, and the effort of controlling himself. “We’ll get you money and maybe a ride out of here in the morning. On the run is tough. Take shelter when you can find it.”

“You don’t want me here,” said Gary. “You’ve got trouble, and I’ll just bring you more.”

“We have pizza coming in about fifteen minutes,” Honey said briskly, returning to the kitchen on the heels of Gary’s words. She’d probably heard Adam, too. “Eat. Stay the night—and then no one will stop you from running as far and as fast as you want.”

“I’m not a coward,” he said defensively. “Just prudent.”

He hadn’t cared what Adam and I thought of him.

Honey’s eyebrows rose. “I never said you were. I also don’t think you are stupid. Eat. Sleep. Run. Works better in that order because you can run faster on a full stomach and a real night’s sleep.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll leave tomorrow, thank you.”

It had been Honey, I thought, who had made him decide to stay. She was too smart not to see it, but she chose to ignore him.

Instead, she spoke to Adam. “Warren told us about what happened at Mercy’s garage tonight, and we’ve watched the video.” She looked at me and smiled but continued to talk to Adam. “When your security man brought the disc of Mercy’s fight with Guayota for you here, I thought it would be useful for all of us to see what we’re facing. I’ve got it running upstairs if you want to watch it again.”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I watched enough of it while it was happening. Tomorrow is soon enough to see it again for me.”

Honey looked at me but spoke to Adam. “For a fragile almost human, she did well.”

“Any fight you live through is a fight well fought,” said Gary. “That said, I might wander upstairs and see what it is I’m running from.” There was a faint bitterness in his tone, and Honey looked at him. He raised both hands in surrender and grinned. “Tomorrow. Running from tomorrow. Tonight, I’m in the mood for a movie.” He turned around, winking at me along the way, and headed toward the stairway, almost bumping into Christy, who was just coming into the kitchen.

“Hey, pretty lady,” he said. He hesitated, but when she didn’t acknowledge him in any way, he just grinned and kept going.

Christy went right for Adam as if none of the rest of us were there.

“This is your fault,” she said viciously. “I felt so horrible, bringing my troubles here, and it was
your
fault.”

“Careful,” I murmured, but she didn’t pay any attention to me—which was foolish of her.

“I should have known when Troy was killed.” It took me a second to figure out who Troy was, I’d never heard the name of her boyfriend who’d been killed. “The only time bodies start appearing around me is when there are werewolves involved,” she continued.

“Juan Flores isn’t a werewolf,” I said, but again I spoke quietly, and she didn’t appear to have heard me.

Adam didn’t say anything. He took a deep breath and just—accepted what she said. It was the first time I’d ever seen a real fight between them. Watching him as she spewed guilt all over him, I realized that he enjoyed
our
fights almost as much as I did. When we fought, he roared and stalked and fought back. He didn’t let his face go blank and wait to be hit again. Being willing to accept responsibility for the well-being of others was part of being Alpha, part of who Adam was, and she was very, very good at using that against him.

Tears leaked artfully down her face. “I tried. I tried, then I had to run. But I can’t get away from you, can’t get away from the monsters. They follow me wherever I go, and it is your fault.”

Adam wasn’t going to defend himself. Honey wrapped her arms around her stomach and turned away. Honey believed herself to be one of the monsters, too, and so Christy’s venom spread over Honey as well.

Enough.

“Adam didn’t make you go sleep with some complete stranger because he was handsome and rich,” I said coolly, but this time at full volume. There wasn’t a wolf in the house who hadn’t heard Christy, so they could listen to me, too.

“Stay out of this,” she snapped at me, wiping futilely at her cheeks. “This isn’t your business.”

“When you blamed Adam, whose only fault that I can see is that he has poor taste in wives, you made it my business,” I told her.

Honey cleared her throat. “You do know you are one of his wives, right?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Happily, he doesn’t know how bad off he is with me—and I intend that he never will.”

Life came back into Adam’s eyes with a wicked glint, and I saw a hint of his dimple.
Better,
I thought,
better.

Christy knew she’d lost control of the scene. Her eyes narrowed at me, and she lost the tears. “Juan came after me because of Adam.”

“You slept with a complete stranger,” I said. “Not Adam’s fault you”—Jesse had come down the stairs, with Ben and Darryl trailing behind her, so I didn’t call Christy a slut—“made a poor choice.”

“He was a friend of my best friend,” she said. “Rich, charming, and handsome, he wasn’t a ‘complete stranger.’ I had no way to tell that he was a monster.”

“You didn’t know enough about him for Warren to find him. You didn’t know where he lived, what country he was from. I bet you didn’t even check to see if he was married or not before you chased after him. How long did you know him before you hopped into bed with him? An hour?”

It probably wasn’t fair to use what Jesse had told me about her mother’s dating habits against Christy, but she hadn’t been playing fair, either. The tears had been cheating, and when she’d realized just how many of the pack had started to filter into the kitchen behind her, she would doubtless use them again.

“He approached me,” she said defensively—not to mention falsely.

“Are you stupid? How long did you live with the wolves?” I asked her incredulously. “You do know that most of the people in this room can tell that you are lying, right?”

Stupid. She wasn’t stupid, just self-absorbed and unwise. She didn’t like people thinking badly of her, so she lied.

I stalked away from her, incensed that most of me wanted to play fair instead of just ripping her to shreds the way she’d ripped into Adam. It felt disloyal to Adam. It felt like I might be letting her manipulate me into feeling sorry for her.

As I turned back toward Christy, I saw Jesse standing a little behind her. Jesse was Christy’s daughter, and I wouldn’t do anything to hurt Jesse. With a good reason not to destroy my enemy, I paced back until I was face-to-face with Christy again.

“Look.” I tried to keep my voice gentle. “No one cares if you sleep with a football team, none of whom you know and all of whom are half your age.” I repeated it so she could hear the truth in my words. “We don’t care.”

Christy went pale in genuine hurt, making me reexamine what I’d just said.

“That doesn’t mean that we don’t care if one of them hurts you. That’s another matter entirely. Call us, and we’ll go take care of it. But you have to quit flinging blame around.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” she said, quietly, believing it. But then she aimed her venom at me and increased the volume. “Not my fault. It wasn’t.”