Honey was thoughtfully silent on the drive back to her house. I stopped in her driveway, and she opened the door. But she stayed in the van for a moment as she looked at her house. “Maybe I need to get a dog,” she said.
Between the prison trip and Lucia’s help with the dogs, I managed to come home very late on Tuesday and escaped quality Christy-time, for the most part. Though I hadn’t planned to, I left before breakfast was made the next morning. I had a last-minute fix Wednesday night that kept me nearly an hour later than usual. The thought occurred to me that if I could avoid home long enough, maybe I wouldn’t have to talk to her before she left.
I went home, confident I’d be too late for dinner, but when I came in the door, Christy met me with a smile.
“You are in luck,” she told me. “Adam had an errand to run so I waited dinner for him. You have about fifteen minutes to shower.” She wrinkled her nose.
“Thanks,” I said, as if she hadn’t just sent me off to clean up. I’d intended to shower because I was sweaty and dirty. I wasn’t going to behave like I was thirteen and refuse to do it because she’d told me to. No matter how strong the impulse.
I was in my bathroom, pulling off my clothes, when I heard Adam come into the bedroom. I didn’t want to have him see how agitated she’d made me, so I just continued to get ready to shower.
“Three days since Christy got here, and we’ve made no progress, Mercy.” Adam’s voice came, slightly muffled, from the bedroom. “It’s not that Juan Flores doesn’t leave traces—it’s that none of them mean anything. It’s starting to look as though he might really be someone dangerous. My connections with the DEA tell me that they have ten Juan Floreses on their watch list—none of them up high enough in the money to be Christy’s Juan Flores.”
He neared the bathroom, and I heard him open a drawer. “They say it might mean that he’s not a drug trafficker, or that he’s so big no one talks about him. I’ve worked it out with a few of my people so I can work from home until we find him.” He paused, then said in a low voice, “You should know that Christy asked me to stay home because she doesn’t feel comfortable with the wolves if I’m not here.”
I turned on the shower to let it warm up as well as give me a chance to think about what I wanted to say to Adam. But when I turned, I was confronted by a large plastic see-through box covered with sparkly pink rhinestones that held a huge collection of makeup. Christy’s makeup was in my bathroom, on my counter, next to my sink. At least, I thought, she hadn’t put it next to Adam’s sink.
“Don’t we have another bathroom upstairs that Christy could use to store her makeup?” I asked.
There was a long silence, then Adam said, “There wasn’t room for her stuff and Jesse’s stuff in the smaller bathroom.” Another pause. “I told her you wouldn’t mind.”
I got in the shower and stuck my head under the hot water, so I couldn’t say anything I would regret. Coyotes weren’t as territorial, as a rule, as werewolves, but we still had our hard lines. Having Christy flouncing in and out through my bedroom into my bathroom crossed one of my hard lines. I washed my hair and tried to let things, the ugly, unpleasant things I was feeling, slide down the drain with the rest of the grime that had covered my skin.
The shower door opened, and Adam stepped in.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I shook my head and leaned against him. The feel of his skin next to mine went a long way toward restoring my equanimity.
“She probably asked you if I’d mind,” I said. “And managed to imply that only a small-minded, petty person could possibly object to her husband’s ex-wife moving her makeup into the larger, brighter bathroom. If you told her she couldn’t, then you’d have been implying that I was a petty, mean-spirited person.”
“And jealous,” he added. “I’m sorry.”
I shook my head. “I love you,” I told him. “I love the man you are. But her makeup is not staying here. I won’t have her in our bedroom. In our bathroom. But I will take care of it.” I smiled at him. “I don’t care if she calls me jealous or petty. Not your worry. So still no real information on Flores?”
“No,” he said, soaping up his hands and starting to wash himself off briskly. “The Reno pack sent a couple of wolves to talk to the hotel where Christy met Flores. Turns out he comes there every year about the same time, checks in under different names for which he has ID—but that is apparently not unusual despite government regulations. There’s an actor who regularly checks in there under the name of the secret identity of the last superhero he played. But the staff remembers him because of the dogs—and confirmed that whatever name he’s registered as, he still goes by Juan Flores.”
I had followed Adam’s example and scrubbed myself down as he talked. I even managed to soap my hair and condition it before the magnetic draw of Adam’s skin forced me to touch him.
“He can speak native-quality Spanish, but his accent is weird,” Adam told me, but his voice was a little unsteady, and he braced himself against the corner of the shower. “Not from Spain, Puerto Rico, Cuba, or Mexico. The Argentinian maid said he sounded Colombian. The Colombian maid said maybe Venezuelan, and he used very old-fashioned—”
“Old-fashioned what?” I asked, letting my mouth follow my hands.
“Mmmm,” Adam answered.
Someone knocked on the bathroom door. “Hurry up, Mercy,” Auriele said briskly. “Christy’s made her famous Szechuan chicken, but it needs to be eaten right now.”
I backed away, and Adam snarled soundlessly.
“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”
On the way down for dinner, I collected Christy’s things and set them down in front of her door.
“You aren’t going to talk to her?” Adam asked.
“I don’t need to,” I told him. “She’ll get the message.” If I had to give it again, she’d be buying new makeup and a new case. But I was pretty sure this would be enough.
I always start work early—a habit formed in summers when the afternoon sun can heat the garage ten degrees hotter than the triple-digit figures outside. But Thursday morning, I had left home while the sky was still dark just to get away from the breakfast Christy had been in the process of making. Nothing horrible had happened at dinner, but I didn’t want to repeat it, either. Tad didn’t show up at work until almost an hour after I did.
“No brownies?” he asked.
“Christy has taken over my kitchen,” I told him as I wrote the last check for the garage’s bills. “No stress relief for me. No chocolate for you.”
“No chocolate?” he said, leaning on the counter. “That’s terrible.” He waited hopefully, and when I didn’t say anything more, he asked, “So what did she make for us today?”
I waved him at the brown paper bag sitting next to my keyboard.
He sniffed, then opened it. “Cinnamon rolls?”
“You can eat these in here,” I said, and licked the last envelope closed. “Eat them both. They have Christy cooties.”
“The muffins were good,” he said. “So was the apple pie. I guess I can do without chocolate if the alternative is cinnamon rolls.” There was sympathy in his voice if not his words.
“Blasphemer,” I told him. “There are no cinnamon rolls better than chocolate.”
He sniffed again. “These might be.”
I left him to it and retreated to go work on cars. In my garage, I ruled without question—and had since Zee had retreated to the fae reservation. Her makeup case wasn’t going to end up in my garage.
But as soon as I put Christy out of my mind, I started fretting over my inability to find Coyote. I’d been pretty optimistic after Honey had grilled Gary Laughingdog. But I hadn’t had any brainstorms about how to be interesting enough to attract Coyote’s attention.
Last night I’d resorted to yelling Coyote’s name to the open air (well away from home to make sure no werewolves would hear me making an idiot out of myself). I’d tried talking to Coyote as if he were in the same room to see if he would come out of hiding—and wondered if I was going to have to mastermind a bank heist in order to attract his attention.
I was contemplating criminal activities when Hank called. I peeled off the stupid latex gloves, so I didn’t get grease on my phone. Christy had done that much for me: since I started wearing the gloves—my phone was staying cleaner.
“Hey, Hank,” I said.
“You talk with Gary?”
Something in his voice had me straightening my spine. “Yes.”
“Hope you got the information you needed.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Last night or this morning, Laughingdog escaped. One of his relatives called me to see if I thought you might have had something to do with it.”
“No,” I said. I wondered who Gary Laughingdog’s relatives were and if they might be able to tell me how to get in touch with Coyote. “I don’t think so. Did you know that he has some kind of foresight?”
“Yes,” said Hank. “And much joy he’s ever gotten from it. Gets him into trouble and never out, he says. You think he saw something and broke out?”
“I don’t know him well enough to say that,” I said. “He had a couple of visions while we were there. Mostly a bunch of nonsense—” But he’d known Honey’s name. “Something to the effect of Coyote’s”—I remembered that odd pronunciation—“somebody’s children … breaking the night with their cries. I don’t know anyone else besides the two of us who qualify. Maybe he saw something that made his escape necessary.”
“And maybe Coyote’s kin don’t do well in lockup,” Hank said. “No more than does anyone, but Coyote was always good at getting out of places he didn’t want to be. Anyway, you can expect to see police sometime. They’ll talk to everyone on his visitors list, and there are about four of us up in the Yakama Nation and you. He’s not big-time, but breaking out might make him more important to them. They don’t like being thwarted.” “They,” I knew, referred to the authorities of whatever flavor. Hank didn’t like people who could tell him what to do—and he avoided them by being a very law-abiding citizen.
“Thank you for the heads-up,” I said.
“Probably he’s just gone walkabout. Show up with another name in ten or twenty years. He does that.”
“Walkabout?” I said doubtfully. “Isn’t that an Aussie Aboriginal term?”
“An Indian is an Indian, Mercy, no matter what continent they come from,” he said with a grin in his voice. Before I could disagree, he disconnected.
So I wasn’t surprised when the police showed up in the afternoon.
“Mercy.”
“Tony?” I looked up from the Passat I was working on. There was something wrong with the injectors, but it was intermittent, and I was afraid that meant it was electronic—and probably something to do with the computer. And that would explain why the car’s computer hadn’t been able to tell me what was going on.
“Mercy, I need you to clean up and come talk to me.”
I blinked at the tightness in his voice and focused on his face. Trouble, that expression said, and in response, I backed out of the job, pulling bolts and pieces out of my pockets and putting them on the car where they wouldn’t be lost. I peeled off the latex gloves and tossed them.
“Tad?” I said.
The sound of the crawler’s hard wheels on pavement signaled his emergence from under the Vanagon he was repairing.
“I’m headed off with Tony for a bit. Don’t burn down the garage or run off the customers while I’m gone.”
Tad glanced from Tony’s face to mine, and said mildly, “Is it okay if I call in a few strippers to put on a show and charge it to the garage? I’ve been thinking it might pull in some more customers.”
“Sure,” I said as I stepped out of my overalls: in the interest of time, I didn’t bother to retreat to the bathroom. I was wearing a full set of clothes underneath anyway. “Just make sure Christy makes it over in time for the show so she can tell the pack what kind of place I run here. Oh, and tell her I took off with a hot-looking man.”
He grimaced. “Yeah, sorry about that.”
She’d called yesterday, and, knowing how I felt about her, Tad had told her that I’d gone out for a run. Tad doesn’t usually lie, though since he is only half-fae, he can, and he is a fair hand at misdirection. I had been in the garage bay, and he’d answered my cell in the office, where I’d left it.
Next thing I know, I was getting a call from Adam, who was mad because he thought that I had been running without protection. Grocery stores and other public places were unlikely spots for kidnapping the Alpha’s wife. Running I had to do with company for safety’s sake. I regretted it, but I understood the necessity.
I’d explained that Tad had been mistaken when he talked to Christy. I took the blame for it—thus putting myself firmly in the wrong. The pack figuratively—maybe literally, for all I know—patted Christy on the head for being so worried about my well-being.
“Not your fault,” I told Tad—Christy would have found something else to make me look bad anyway. “Though this time you might mention that the handsome man is an armed police officer who will keep me safe as a fox in a henhouse.”
Tad gave me a mock salute while I followed Tony out.
“Trouble?” Tony asked.