Silver Borne mt-5 Read online

  I limped stiffly to the bathroom. One hot shower later I could move again. And even if my clothes were on their second day—and smelled of blood and smoke and all—I felt ready to face the morning. After a little dithering, I put my shoulder holster back on.

  I didn’t feel any urgent need to go armed—but I didn’t have anywhere to put the SIG out of harm’s way either. Adam probably had a gun safe around somewhere, but I didn’t know where it was. So I wore the shoulder harness under my T-shirt, which was loose enough to conceal it. I’d have a hard time drawing the gun, but that shouldn’t matter: it was loaded with lead bullets, and the house was full of werewolves. If I had to draw the gun, I was probably dead anyway.

  On that cheery thought, I left the bedroom and shut the door quietly behind me. The lovely smell of sausage and butter pulled me into the kitchen.

  Darryl was cooking.

  Auriele grinned at my expression. “Sundays,” she said with satisfaction, “he cooks, and I wash dishes. Mostly we end up here at Pack Central, and when Darryl cooks, everyone stops by. It’s a pretty big job.”

  The way werewolves eat, it certainly was. A big job that was one of those little things that pulled a pack together: Sunday breakfasts at Adam’s house.

  “If you’re doing dishes while he cooks, does he do the dishes when you cook?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Darryl said, serving each of us a plate of sausage, eggs, hash browns, and French toast with a snap that looked awfully professional, and returned to the stove. “Not that enlightened.”

  She smiled at his back. “He vacuums, though.” And Darryl made an irritated noise.

  “Have you seen Ben?” I asked, then said, involuntarily, “This is really good.” The French toast was spiked with real vanilla, cinnamon, and a host of other things, including authentic bitter-sweet maple syrup.

  “Mmmm.” Auriele nodded, taking a bite of her hash browns. “He cooked his way through grad school.”

  “Made good money at it, too,” Darryl agreed. “Ben’s been down, eaten breakfast, and gone. He’ll be back soon. I called Zee last night.”

  I set down my fork. “What did he say?”

  “Nothing, if you are going to let my good food go cold.”

  I took a hasty bite, and he went back to cooking—and talking. “I played last night’s ransom call back to him, and he picked me clean of everything you told us. Then he said he’d see what he could do. He called an hour or so ago and told me to tell you he’d be over here as soon as he could. It might be a couple of hours, though, so stall the villainess if she wants you to move before he gets here.”

  “How did he sound?”

  “Grumpy. Coffee or orange juice?”

  “Water is fine.”

  His eyebrows went up.

  “Uh-oh,” Auriele said, but she was smiling.

  Darryl was not. “Are you implying that my coffee is not the best in four counties? Or my fresh-squeezed orange juice is less than perfect?”

  Jesse breezed in and squealed. “Oh my goodness, Darryl is cooking. I’d almost forgotten it was Sunday. Orange juice, please.” She glanced at me and laughed. “Mercy doesn’t do orange juice or coffee,” she said, grabbing a glass out of the cupboard and filling it out of the pitcher Darryl had set out. “So sad. More orange juice for me.”

  She was being cute and upbeat, but there were dark circles under her eyes. She took the plate Darryl handed her and sat down next to Auriele.

  “So,” she said. Her pink hair helped her cheerful act—hard to look sad with pink hair—even if her eyes were a little pink, too.

  “How are we going to save Gabriel?”

  “Have you ever noticed that everyone who knows Mercy eventually needs saving?” asked Mary Jo as she walked into the kitchen.

  I was going to have to do something about Mary Jo. I took another bite of French toast and put the fork down on the plate. Sooner was probably better than later.

  I stood up. “Excuse me,” I said to Darryl. To Jesse I said, “I’m borrowing your bedroom—any complaints?”

  She stared at me a moment. “No?” she said, her voice rising as if her answer were a question. Which maybe it was.

  “Your stereo is pretty effective at keeping voices from being overheard by all the werewolves in this house. And from the noise coming from downstairs, there are a lot of werewolves here.”

  “It’s Darryl’s cooking,” said Auriele, sounding a little apologetic.

  “I can see why,” I said. “I’d appreciate it if you would guard my plate until I come back.” I looked at Mary Jo. “You. Come with me.”

  And without looking behind me, I led the way up the stairs to Jesse’s room. I walked into Jesse’s room and turned on her stereo until it was almost painfully loud. The CD wasn’t something I’d have chosen to listen to, but it was loud, and that was all I was interested in.

  “Shut the door,” I told Mary Jo. I was almost surprised she’d just followed me up as I’d asked.

  Face blank, she did as I’d requested.

  “Okay. Now, if you come over here by the window, it’s almost impossible for anyone to overhear us.”

  All the precautions weren’t really necessary. With this many people in Adam’s house, no one, no matter how good their hearing was, could really listen from one room to the next—there were simply too many conversations going on. But the stereo made our privacy virtually certain.

  “What do you want?” she asked, not moving from the center of the room.

  I leaned against the wall next to the window and crossed my arms over my stomach. It felt wrong to be in this position. I’ve been a solitary person my whole life. Even when I lived in Aspen Creek with the Marrok’s pack, even then I’d really been alone, a coyote among wolves. But Adam needed his pack behind him—and because of me, they weren’t. If I was going to be the problem, I owed it to him to be part of the solution. So I was going to see if all those times I watched the Marrok twist people in little knots would allow me to use his techniques to achieve the same results.

  I smiled at her. “I want you to tell me what your problem with me is. Right here, right now, where there is no one else to interfere.”

  “You are the problem, Mercedes,” she snapped. “A scavenger coyote among wolves. You don’t belong here.”

  “Oh, come on. You can do better than that,” I goaded her. “You sound like you’re Jesse’s age—and Jesse doesn’t sound like that.”

  Her eyes veiled as she considered what I said.

  “All right,” she said after a minute. “Point to you. First problem—you let Adam rot for two years after he claimed you as his mate. And during that two years our pack fell apart because Adam could barely keep himself calm—and was nearly useless at helping anyone else keep their wolf in check.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “But I have to point out in my defense that Adam never asked me if I wanted to be his mate during that time—or before he declared it in front of the pack. He never asked me either before or after. I wasn’t a pack member—and his declaration was to keep the rest of the wolves away—so I didn’t even find out about this until well after it happened. Even then, no one told me the consequences until just a few months ago, and as soon as I figured out what was happening to the pack and to Adam because of that claim, I made a decision.”

  “How kind of you,” she snapped, her eyes brightening with temper. “To become Adam’s mate for the pack’s sake.”

  “Point to me,” I told her calmly. “The choice I made had nothing to do with the problems in the pack—all Adam needed was an answer, and ‘no’ would have worked just as well to set the pack back in order. I agreed because . . . because he’s Adam.” Mine, whispered a voice in my head, but I was pretty sure that it was my own voice.

  “Second problem,” she said between gritted teeth. “It was your invitation to the stray that led to Adam being almost killed and Jesse kidnapped.”

  “Nope.” I shook my head. “You can’t lay that one on me. That was werewo
lf business from beginning to end. I got involved because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. No more, no less. Point to me.”

  “I disagree,” she said. She was standing in the classic “at ease” position, I noticed, like a soldier. I wondered if it was something Adam taught them while he had them in training because, to my knowledge, Mary Jo had never been in the military.

  “Fine,” I said, shrugging. “It’s a free country. You can feel as you wish.”

  “You can’t deny who nearly got our third killed when the demon came to town, you and your connection to the vampires,” she said.

  Her voice was cool, her heartbeat steady. Warren wasn’t important to her; Ben had been right. She hadn’t even called him by name because she felt the rank was more valuable than the man.

  “Once it was known that there was a demon in town, it was inevitable that the wolves would have to go after it,” I told her. “And you could care less about Warren, so don’t pretend you were concerned about him.”

  That had her head up and her eyes on me. She actually looked a little worried. She had been trying to pretend that she wasn’t one of the wolves that Warren bothered.

  “Warren is worth ten of you,” I told her. “He’s here when he’s needed, and he doesn’t do his best to undermine Adam whenever his orders are inconvenient.” I waved off her impending argument because I was saving the discussions of her more recent activities until later, when I’d broken her down enough to answer my questions. “Back to business. What else?”

  “It’s your fault I died,” she said. “Poor Alec—when he tore my jugular he didn’t know what hit him. None of us did. The vampires targeted us because of you.”

  The vampires had set a trap at Uncle Mike’s, the local tavern where the fae and assorted other supernatural people went to relax. They’d laid a spell that drove anything with ties to wolves to bloodshed. Mary Jo’s bad luck that she and two other werewolves—Paul and Alec—had gone there on the wrong night. By the time Adam and I got there, Mary Jo was dead. But apparently if you die when there is a Gray Lord present, at least when one particular Gray Lord is present, dead isn’t as permanent as it might otherwise have been.

  “Point to you,” I said, deliberately relaxing against the wall so she could see it didn’t bother me in the slightest. I can’t lie with my mouth, but sometimes body language does it for me. “I’d tell you that accepting the blame for the bad guys is a stupid thing to do—the proper people to blame for your almost death are the vampires. But if I hadn’t been dating Adam, they wouldn’t have targeted the wolves, so I suppose you could be justified in blaming me.”

  I waited for her to look up again, so I could read her face. When she looked at me, her control was back in full. There were two things that could explain her sudden dislike of me. The first one was the incident at Uncle Mike’s, but she wasn’t angry enough about it. Which left me with the second—I’d hit her with that when it would do me more good.

  “But,” I told her, “if I accept the blame, I’d like to point out that I’m also the reason you are still standing here. The Gray Lord healed you because she thought she owed me a favor.”

  She sneered. “I hope to God that someone does you that kind of favor someday. It hurt . . . It still hurts. Some days I can’t feel different body parts.”

  I’d known about that, and it worried me though the fae had given her word that Mary Jo would be back to normal. I expect that she’d left out the word “eventually” because Mary Jo’s suffering didn’t really matter to the fae.

  “Next time, I’ll tell her not to bother bringing you back,” I promised. I tapped my foot and wondered how far I really wanted to push this. Some of it depended upon what role I wanted to take in the pack. Just then I was channeling my inner Bran, using the techniques I’d grown up watching the Marrok use, techniques that came so easily to me it made me a little uncomfortable—I don’t see myself as a manipulative person. For the moment, though, I set that aside and considered the case at hand.

  “Figure out the results you want and do what you can to get them” was one of Bran’s favorite sayings. Well, then, exactly what results did I want?

  Part of that really depended upon how much of her recent activities were directed at me and how much at Adam. I found that I could excuse her actions against me, but I was less inclined to be forgiving about Adam.

  I remembered that look she’d given me when I was sitting on the floor of the hospital with Adam changing in my lap—Adam, who’d damn near burned to death trying to rescue me because she hadn’t told him I was safe. The look that said she’d have been happier with him dead than with him on my lap.

  Had that been a momentary thing, or had her anger that Adam was mine become a force driving her past the point of no return?

  “Mary Jo,” I said pleasantly, “you and I know all of that is garbage. It is all true, or mostly, but it isn’t why you are so angry with me.”

  Her chin jerked up.

  “Adam is mine,” I told her. “And you can’t handle it. Does it bother you that I’m a coyote? That we have sort of an extreme case of an interracial—in our case maybe even cross-species—mating? Darryl is African and Chinese, and Auriele is Hispanic, and they don’t seem to bother you.” It wasn’t that I was a coyote shifter that bothered her. I knew it. I just wondered if she knew it. It did bother some of the pack; maybe Auriele and Darryl bothered some of them, too. If so, those pack members were smart enough to keep it to themselves.

  Mary Jo tightened her lips but didn’t say anything.

  “How long have you wanted him?” I asked her. “You had all these years since Jesse’s mother left.”

  Bran’s methods sucked. I watched her eyes darken with pain and wanted to kick myself. But she’d been at least partially responsible for Adam’s wounds. And I agreed with Warren about fire after watching Samuel scrub dead flesh from live. Mary Jo had been stupid. I was betting she hadn’t hurt Adam on purpose, but I had to know.

  I observed the anger that followed pain rise in her face and just watched her.

  “You are nothing,” she spit. “I’m nothing, too. That’s how I know. Adam deserves the best. A wolf strong and beautiful, a woman who is—”

  “More?” I suggested. “Smart, well-bred?”

  “Not a half-breed coyote,” she snapped. Her wolf was in her eyes, and her voice was raw. “Not a stupid mechanic or a freaking fireman. There isn’t even a proper word for what I am. Fireman. He needs someone soft, someone feminine.”

  “He deserves so much,” I said slowly. I had her, even though it made me sick. Coyotes aren’t cats; we don’t play with our prey. “I think he deserves a pack who has his back.”

  “I have his back,” she said. I couldn’t see her hands. Through all this she’d held to parade rest, and her hands were hidden behind her back. From the flex of her biceps I would bet that they were clenched in fists, and her voice wasn’t as hard and certain as she meant it to be. But her words told me what I’d been watching for, told me that she hadn’t wanted him dead. That made the rest of this both harder and easier. Harder because she was going to be hurting even more before this was over—easier because she would survive it.

  “You have his back, do you?” I kept my voice soft, my body relaxed. “Funny, I could have sworn that you just set him up to be killed.”

  “I got him out,” she said. “I ran in after him with Darryl and pulled him out.”

  “Not soon enough, Mary Jo,” I said. “He could have easily died in there.” I had to take a breath so I could maintain my relaxed posture. He could have died. But I had to keep up the momentum, make her listen to me, make her listen to herself.

  “Who was it that was out there with you?” I asked coolly. “Ben says whoever it was, he has to be more dominant than you. It wasn’t Warren or Darryl.” Ben would have noticed if Darryl hadn’t been at the meeting. He’d have said something to me because if it was Darryl who was running the show, it would have been too dangerous to hold
his tongue. The same was true of Auriele.

  “How does the pack run from there?” I watched her sweat. Ben was right that it was someone higher up. She was expecting me to name him soon, so not too far down the pack hierarchy. “Auriele. It wasn’t her either, was it? She likes Adam. She’d never send him into a burning building to rescue someone who wasn’t there.”

  She stiffened at the dig.

  “Then there is Paul.” That got her—wasn’t that interesting? But I knew better. “It wasn’t him, though. Adam doesn’t trust Paul at his back. He’d have kept him right here through the whole pack meeting.” Paul had been my pick for the jerk who’d influenced me at the bowling alley before I’d understood how angry Mary Jo was. He’d probably been Adam’s pick, too. Paul was still angry about losing a fight to Warren, and he’d put the blame on Adam for that. Like Ben, Paul was a bitter and difficult person who didn’t like many people. Mary Jo was one he did like, her and her boyfriend, Henry.

  I watched her face closely. She was worried I’d guess. Not Paul, then who? Further down the ranks things could get murky to an outsider as I had been and really still was. I ran the wolves I knew well through my head, then stopped. Henry? He was a nice guy. Smart and quick. A banker, I thought, but I wasn’t sure, something with finances. He would never—Hmm. “Never” was an awfully strong word.

  I wondered how Henry felt about Mary Jo’s crush on Adam.

  “Henry,” I said experimentally and watched her face whiten. Maybe she didn’t know how much she was telling me without opening her mouth at all. “Henry was out with you last night. Henry told you to leave the fae alone when they set my house on fire.”

  Jesse’s door opened, and Adam came in and shut it gently behind him. He was obviously stiff, and, from the set of his jaw and the tightness of the skin around his eyes, he was in pain as well. If I could see it, he was hurting a lot more than he showed. And the Alpha didn’t show weakness if he could help it.

  He was dressed only in a pair of gi bottoms that ended mid-calf, leaving the weepy wounds on his feet clearly visible. Oh, there were other bits in rough shape, but next to his feet, nothing looked all that bad.