“They sound like they’re getting closer,” Gary said. I wished he hadn’t, because I’d been thinking the same thing.
“I thought Coyote was going to divert them.” My voice was breathy because I didn’t have much air to spare.
“Right,” said Gary. “Just like he diverted the police when I ended up in jail. I think we’re the intended diversion here.”
“He dumped me in a river where there was a monster killing things,” I told him.
“There you go. That’s the Coyote I know and hate.”
The woods and brush thinned, and we were running on the hill down to the gravel road we’d traveled before.
“Which way?” said Gary.
I looked frantically, but there was nothing to distinguish one direction from another. Although the moon had been in the sky when we ducked into the tunnel of brush, there was no sign of her now. I felt down the pack bonds and the bond I shared with Adam. Though I could tell they were somewhere, I got no sense of where they were in relation to me. The connection was foggy, as if they were a lot farther away than an hour’s walk.
“You pick,” I said, as we hit the bottom of the hill—and he jerked my hand and pulled me to the right.
I made the mistake of looking up the hill and caught sight of one of the tibicenas cresting the top—the female. She saw us and bayed twice before plunging down the hillside after us. I quit looking back and concentrated on running—and on hoping that she didn’t give that cry we’d heard before, the one that had frozen me in my tracks.
“Isn’t that walking stick supposed to take you home?” Gary asked. “Why don’t you say the magic words? ‘There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.’”
Where did he get enough breath to be sarcastic? If he wasn’t being sarcastic, then he didn’t know fae artifacts as well as I did.
“They aren’t Dorothy’s ruby slippers,” I said. “Fae artifacts have a mind of their own, and this one is particularly contrary.”
I’d turned my head to glance at him, and I noticed that there was a house in the distance—the first house I’d seen all night.
“Look, Gar—” I ran full tilt into something solid planted right in front of me. I lost my balance, and my feet skidded sideways to tangle with Gary’s. Everyone fell, tumbling and rolling on a gravel driveway because Gary and I had been running really fast. And the solid thing hadn’t been a tree, like I thought, it had been Adam.
“Hi,” I said, panting, sprawled out on top of my husband, who’d done the chivalrous thing and taken the brunt of the fall. “A funny thing happened when I went to get a glass of water.” He smelled so good, warm and safe and Adam.
Coyote had dumped Gary and me right in front of Honey’s house, at the exact spot where my husband stood … had been standing until I hit him running full out when he wasn’t expecting an attack from the ether.
Still lying flat on his back, Adam looked over at the walking stick that had missed clocking him in the head by an inch, maybe less. Coyote hadn’t fixed the walking stick entirely, or possibly at all, because I got the distinct impression that the walking stick had tried to hurt Adam but hadn’t quite managed it. I tightened my hand on the old wood, and the impression faded until it was only a stick in my hand. The effect Adam had on me was such that it was only then I remembered that I should be afraid.
I lifted my head and listened as hard as I could. But I couldn’t hear them.
“Are they still following us?” I asked urgently.
“We’re not dead,” said Gary, who hadn’t moved from his prone position on the ground. “I’d guess that we lost them when we got dumped back here. It’s too much to say that we’re safe, not when Himself is about—but safe for now.”
“I take it you met with Coyote?” Adam said politely as he sat up so I was sitting on him instead of lying on him and glanced at Gary. “Both of you?”
Gary got up and started pulling goathead thorns out of his arm. “I hate Coyote,” he said without aiming the remark at anyone.
I ignored Gary and answered Adam. “Was it the walking stick that gave it away?” I asked with mock interest that would have worked better if I weren’t still trying to catch my breath. My heart was beating so hard that the force of my pulse almost hurt.
“No, I figured it out earlier, when your scent trail disappeared into nothing. Mostly. The walking stick just meant my suspicions were correct.” Adam closed his fingers on my shoulder, not quite hard enough to hurt. “Don’t do that again,” he said. “My heart can’t take it.”
“I didn’t intend to do it the first time,” I half whined. I would have all-the-way whined, but it was suddenly too difficult to whine. Why was it that I could run and run—but a minute or so after I stopped, I couldn’t breathe anymore?
I could happily have stayed safe in Adam’s arms all night if it weren’t for the fact that I was covered with sweat, and I had to straighten and give my diaphragm a fighting chance to force my lungs to start working properly.
I stood up, and Adam’s hand loosened, sliding from my shoulder to my arm until he had my hand.
“I’ll certainly try not to wander off with Coyote again without your knowing about it. But ‘try’ is all I’ve got,” I told Adam when I had control of my breath again.
He looked up at me. There was heat in his gaze—there is always some spark of heat when Adam looks at me, but there was also need that was deeper than sexual. I could see the shadow caused by worry, possessiveness, and a vulnerability that allowed him, the Alpha wolf, to stay on the ground when I was standing. That vulnerability (and the possessiveness) meant that Adam would never let me leave him, as he’d let Christy leave him.
I didn’t like him vulnerable to anything, even to me. I pulled on Adam’s hand, and he stood up.
“I love you, too,” I told him, and he smiled because he’d let me see what he felt. I cleared my throat. “I think Coyote was trying to help.”
Gary made a derogatory noise. When I looked at him, he was staring down the road. He didn’t trust in his safety, even when the danger couldn’t be heard or scented. I wondered if he wanted to be safe, or if he was more like Coyote. Like me, he was covered with sweat, but he seemed to be breathing better than I was. He must have stayed in good shape while he was in prison.
“Where did Coyote take you?” Adam asked. He had kept my hand.
“Let’s go find someplace to sit down,” I said. I needed a shower more than I needed to sleep—and I needed to sleep, now that the adrenaline charge was dying down, like a bee needed flowers.
Honey had a picnic table in her backyard. Sitting on the table, Gary and I took turns telling Adam what had happened. I don’t know why Gary sat on the table, but I was still so jumpy that I didn’t want to chance trapping my legs if we had to run again. Adam paced. I envied his energy: he hadn’t been chasing after Coyote all night.
Before we’d gotten very far in our narrative, Darryl, then Mary Jo, joined us. Mary Jo gave me a full glass of water. I drank half of it and dumped the other half over my head to rinse away the sweat that was still dripping into my eyes with stinging force. The water helped my eyes but not my cheek.
“You can turn into a coyote between one breath and the next,” said Mary Jo when I got to the bit about running from the tibicenas. “I’ve seen you do it. You are faster that way, so why didn’t you change when the tibicenas were chasing you?”
“Clothes,” said Gary. “You try changing when you’re wearing your clothes, and the next thing you know, you’re tangled up in your jeans.”
“At least you don’t have a bra,” I agreed sourly.
“While you were out running around, you got an interesting phone call,” Adam told me, pulling my cell phone out of his back pocket. He hit a button. “Wulfe wants to talk to you.”
I put it up to my ear. If he’d said that last before he’d hit the button, I’d have objected. Jumpy and exhausted are not a good state for talking to Wulfe, Marsilia’s right-hand vampire. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been trying to kill me—and Marsilia, the vampire who ruled all the vamps in the Tri-Cities. There was an outside chance that Wulfe had actually been trying to protect Marsilia, but I had no trouble assigning him as much villainy as seemed to want to cling to him—and a bit more.
“Mercy?” Wulfe’s voice was enough to wake me right up.
“You wanted to talk to me?” I wished I had more of Mary Jo’s glass of water left.
“Mercy,” he whispered. “Mercy. I can still taste you in my mouth.” I pulled the phone away from my ear because I didn’t want his voice that close to me. “I long for your blood on my tongue, little coyote-girl.”
Creepy. Of all the creepy people and monsters I’ve encountered—and a lot of monsters are pretty creepy—Wulfe is the one who gets to me the worst. I think it’s because he scares me the most. I had been thinking about drinking, and he started talking about it, as though he was reading my mind. He does that kind of thing a lot. He knows it bothers me, and that just encourages him.
“And I can see you turning to dust in the middle of the afternoon under the hot summer sun,” I told him, trying to sound bored. I did a pretty good job. Exhaustion and boredom sound a lot alike. “If your dream comes true, then mine gets to come true, too.”
“Life is not so fair, Mercy,” he said, and someone in the same room with him made a noise.
Any adult who has ever watched a porn flick knows that noise. It’s the one that real people don’t make unless they are faking something.
“If you just called to flirt, I’m hanging up.”
He drew in a shaky breath, then moaned.
I hung up.
“Who was that, and why was he having phone sex with you?” asked Gary.
“I need to wash my brain,” muttered Darryl. “Next time I see that vampire, I’m going to squish him like a bug.”
“I feel violated,” I said, half-seriously.
The phone rang, and I set it on the table. It rang again, and we all looked at it.
Adam picked it up and hit the green button on the screen.
“Mercy, you spoil all my fun,” Wulfe said, sounding less psychotic and more petulant. “You keep killing my playmates. It’s only fair that you take their place.”
I don’t know which playmates he was talking about. Andre? Frost? Frost was the last vampire I’d killed.
“No,” said Adam, as if Wulfe had been asking a question.
“I told you I’ll only talk to Mercy,” said Wulfe, dropping into singsong. “I know something you don’t know.”
“What?” asked Adam.
“I have news about a man who was looking for a house this week with room for his dogs. He paid cash. Lots of cash.”
“Where?” asked Adam.