Adam dropped his hold on Tad and me, grabbed his ears, and snarled. I knew exactly how he felt—and I knew what to do. I dashed into the office, hopped onto the counter, and snagged the stool as I jumped. I set the stool on the counter and climbed on top with speed and balance hard won with practice. Reaching up to the ceiling, I popped the battery out of the alarm.
Blessed silence fell. Relative silence, broken by things that were still rolling onto the floor and the sirens that were closer now. In the parking lot, a car engine purred to life, then revved hard as someone drove off with a squeal of rubber on asphalt. I looked out the window and saw Juan Flores’s rental car speeding away.
Tad was swearing in German. Some of the words I recognized, but even the ones I didn’t echoed my own sentiment exactly.
“Stupid,” he said to me, his eyes horror-struck. “I am so stupid. Er war Erd und Feuer.”
“English,” murmured Adam.
“Earth and fire,” said Tad without pause. “Earth and fire—and I trapped him and forgot what he was.”
Earth.
Tad clenched his fist and pulled at something invisible with enough force that it caused his muscles to stand out on his arms. With an almost-human shriek, the aluminum that had encased Flores peeled back, revealing a cavernous hole where the cement floor of my garage had once been.
Adam’s head came up, and he measured the sound of the sirens. “Stay here,” he said, and hopped down into the hole. He was gone less than a minute before he was back.
He looked at Tad. “You need to be out of here before those sirens get close. Can you change your appearance so no one will recognize you?”
Tad nodded.
“Change shape, then,” Adam said. “You understand that it won’t just be the police coming here. Even the dumbest cop is going to see that there was magic afoot here. We’re going to have government agents, and if they get a glimpse of what you can do, they are going to want you. You are too powerful for anyone to let you run around loose: human, shapeshifter, or fae. No one but your dad knows exactly how powerful you are—let’s leave it like that.”
Tad changed like I do—between one breath and the next. He was a little taller than usual and a lot handsomer. He looked clean-cut and real. I wondered if he’d stolen the appearance from someone or if he practiced in front of a mirror.
“That’s good,” said Adam. “Go.”
“Thank you,” I told him.
He grinned, and Tad’s grin looked odd on the stranger’s face. “You aren’t supposed to thank the fae, Mercy. You’re just lucky I like you.” Then he strolled casually outside and away.
Adam pulled out his cell phone. “Jim. Get rid of all copies of the feed to Mercy’s garage after I hit Flores with the engine. Blur or get rid of anything that shows Mercy’s assistant after he left when she closed up.”
“Got it.”
He hung up the phone and looked at me. He’d seen it faster than I had. Tad was incredibly powerful to do what he’d done. He was also young, and with his father locked away in Fairyland (the Ronald Wilson Reagan Fae Reservation’s less respectful nickname), he was vulnerable: no one but family could know what he was. I looked at the sheet of aluminum, now crumpled and torn aside. It could have been an airplane or a tank or … We needed to keep him safe.
“The hole goes underground out to the parking lot.”
“He told me his name was Guayota,” I said—and that’s when I saw the naked dead man lying on the floor where a dead dog should have been.
I blinked twice, and he was still there, belly down, but his head turned to the side so I could see the single bullet hole in his forehead. My bullet hole.
“Adam?” I said, and my voice was a little high.
He turned his head and saw the man, too. “Who is that?”
“I think,” I said slowly, “I think that’s the dog I shot.” I remembered that too-intelligent, ancient gaze.
“I saw it on my laptop on the way over,” Adam said. “You shot a dog.”
“It wasn’t a dog.” I gave a half-hysterical hiccough. “They’ll arrest me for murder.”
“No,” Adam said.
“Are you sure?” I sounded a little more pathetic than usual. My face hurt. My garage was in ruins that would make my insurance company run to find their “Acts of God not covered” clause. I’d killed a dog that had turned into a naked dead guy, and someone had thrown a finger at me.
“Flores essentially ate your gun, so no weapon for ballistics,” Adam said. “And you were attacked in your garage.” He didn’t say any more out loud, but I heard what he left unspoken. There wasn’t a member of the local police department who hadn’t seen or at least heard of the recording of what had happened to me in this garage before, if only because the imagery of Adam’s ripping apart the body of my assailant left a big impression.
His arms closed around me, and we both looked at the dead man. He looked like someone’s uncle, someone’s father. His body was spare and muscled in a way that looked familiar. Werewolves don’t have extra fat on their bodies, either. They burn calories in the change from human to wolf and back, and they burn calories moving because a werewolf doesn’t have the proper temperament to be a couch potato.
“Sweetheart,” Adam said, his voice a sigh as the first official car pulled into my parking lot. “It was clear-cut self-defense.”
I closed my eyes and leaned against him.
“Hands up,” said a shaky voice. “Get your hands up where I can see them.”
Adam let go of me and put his hands up. I turned around, stepping away from Adam so they could tell I wasn’t armed. The man approaching us wasn’t in uniform, but his gun was out. His eyes weren’t on me, all of his attention was for Adam. Of course, it didn’t take a genius to figure out which one of us would be the bigger threat. If I looked like I felt, I looked tired, scared, and hurt—I put my hands up anyway.
“Mr. Hauptman?” said the armed man, stopping just inside the bay door but in the middle of the open space so that the Passat didn’t interfere with his ability to cover both of us. He was younger than me, and he was wearing slacks and a jacket and tie, which only made him look even younger. I noticed almost absently that true night had fallen in the short time between when I’d first thrown open the bay doors and now.
“Adam Hauptman?” he said again. His voice squeaked, and he winced.
“Keep your hands where we can see them,” said another, calmer voice. This one was dressed in a cheap suit and held his gun as though he’d shot people before. His eyes had that look that let you know he’d shoot right now, too, and sleep like a baby that night. “Agent Dan Orton, CNTRP. This is my partner, Agent Cary Kent. You are Adam Hauptman and his wife, Mercedes?”
Feds. I felt my lip curl.
“That’s right,” Adam agreed.
“Can you tell me what happened tonight?”
“You’re here in response to my call?” Adam asked instead of answering him.
“That’s right.”
“Then,” said Adam gently, “you already know some of it. I think we’ll call my lawyer before the rest.”
I’d have spent the night repeating what happened endlessly to a series of people who all would hope for the real story. I’ve done it before. With Adam present, neither of us said anything because they weren’t letting Adam call the lawyer.
Agent Orton of CNTRP, better known as Cantrip, and Agent Kent, the nervous rookie, wanted to arrest us on general principle because Adam was a werewolf, and there was a dead body on the ground. And, possibly, because they weren’t happy with our not talking to them.
Luckily, we were under the local police jurisdiction, barely, because Adam’s initial call had only told them that there was a man who might have been responsible for murder and arson trying to break in to my garage. Human attacking human, even if she was the wife of a werewolf, was not enough to allow Cantrip to take over the case.
We didn’t correct them when they speculated that our intruder was the dead man. We said nothing about a supernatural creature who could turn into a volcanic dog and cause earthquakes because Cantrip was dangerous. There were people in Cantrip who would love to see us just disappear, maybe into Guantanamo Bay—there were rumors, unsubstantiated, that a whole prison block was built to hold shapeshifters and fae. Maybe they would just report that we had escaped before they could question us and hide the bodies. Adam, because he was a monster, and me because I slept with monsters. When I’d shifted to coyote in front of Tony a few months ago, I’d also shifted in front of a Cantrip agent named Armstrong. He’d told me he wouldn’t say anything about it, and apparently, based on these two, he had not.
There were good people in Cantrip, too; Armstrong was a good person, so I knew that it wasn’t just a pretend thing—like Santa Claus. But a growing number of incidents between Cantrip and werewolves or the half fae who’d been left to defend themselves when the full-blooded fae disappeared indicated that the good agents were in a minority.
The fire department arrived on the heels of the Feds, took a good look around for hot spots (none), marveled at the “damned big hole in the floor,” and left with the promise of sending out someone to evaluate the scene in daylight. EMTs arrived while the fire department was still there.
One guy sat me down and looked me over with a flashlight while the younger Cantrip agent took it upon himself to make sure I didn’t make a break for it.
The EMT made a sympathetic sound when he looked at my burns. “I bet those hurt, chica,” he said. “I have good news and bad news.”
“Hit me,” I told him.
“Good news is that these all qualify as minor burns no matter how nasty they feel.”
“Bad news?”
“I think your cheek is going to scar. There’s some chance that it will fade, but you’ve got dark skin like me, and dark skin and burns aren’t a happy combination. Also, there’s nothing to do for the burns. If the air bothers them, you can try wrapping them, but that will only be easy to do with the burns on your hands. If you see any sign of infection, take yourself down to your regular doctor.”
“I can deal with scars,” I said with more confidence than I felt. Who knew I was vain about my face? I wasn’t beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, so I certainly hadn’t expected the pang I felt knowing I’d bear Guayota’s mark the rest of my life.
“It should look dashing,” he told me. “Just a pale streak, and you can make up all sorts of stories about how you got it. Frostbite on your third polar expedition. Dueling scar. Knife fight in the ghetto.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” His matter-of-fact tomfoolery settled me. Impossible to believe in volcanic dogs when this EMT was so calmly cracking jokes as he got over the heavy ground as lightly as he could.
“I do have some advice, before I let you go,” he told me.
“What’s that?”
“Chica,” he said seriously, “next time some firebug starts throwing burning things at you, run away.”