“Wait . . . you’re leaving?” I asked, genuinely confused. I’d expected Will to be angry with me, but I didn’t think he’d actually blow me off, not with a dead body.
“Yes,” he said shortly. “Esmé’s watching the bar, and she has to pick up her kids.” I had met Esmé, a short, pretty werewolf in her mid-thirties who had gotten married young, had kids young—and then had been turned into a werewolf when she and her husband were attacked during a camping trip to Canada. Her husband hadn’t survived, but Esmé had made it through the change, and suddenly found herself a thirty-year-old widow with three kids and never enough money. With Will’s office manager, Caroline, dead and his bartender, Eli, in hiding, I understood why Esmé was picking up shifts at his bar, Hair of the Dog.
But not why the bar needed to be open. “Couldn’t you just put up your Closed for Private Party sign?” I asked. I’d seen it a couple of times when Will had emergency pack business.
“Health inspector’s coming tonight. Too late to reschedule.” His voice was coming out as a growl now, his words in terse short sentences. This was not a good sign. Will’s control is excellent. If he was struggling to keep it together . . . he was either really upset, or the body was in really bad shape, and the smell of it was pushing at his self-restraint. Or both.
I kept my voice calm and careful. “Is anyone else at your place?” Will’s place served as the pack’s home base; all the werewolves spent a lot of time there. I’d been there myself twice, both times to clean up blood after werewolf fights.
“No. House is empty. I’ll leave the front door open.”
“Okay, I’m on it,” I said. Will just grunted and hung up. I looked at the phone, shaking my head. Shit. I glanced up at Molly, who was patiently holding out my jacket.
Only a week earlier, my psychotic ex-mentor, Olivia, had been running amok in LA. Olivia had a thing for controlling people, and I was the toy she wanted most for her collection. So she’d come after me and mine, hoping to break me down in every way she could. Olivia had sent cookies laced with wolfberry to Hair of the Dog, where my friend Caroline and my sometimes-friend-with-benefits Eli both worked. Caroline and Eli were werewolves, and giving them wolfberry is basically like giving a regular human a truckload of PCP and a bunch of stabby weapons.
I hadn’t been with them when they were poisoned, but I’d seen the fallout. Caroline had died that night, shot with silver by Will when he couldn’t keep her from attacking the poor humans who’d been at the bar. Eli had lost control so completely that he’d killed two people. Plagued by guilt, he’d begged Will to shoot him too, but I wouldn’t let him. Instead, I’d done something I was not supposed to be able to do: I’d focused my power outward and changed Eli back into a human. Permanently.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, honest.
I’d passed out afterward, possibly from changing him, or possibly as a result of the confrontation with Olivia, when she’d poisoned me with illegal chemotherapy drugs and made me fight an enormous man-shaped clay demon. What can I say, we had some issues. At any rate, it sent me into . . . well, a bit of a coma.
When I woke up a few days later, I’d felt the vertigo before I even opened my eyes, a nauseous sensation as though someone had scrambled gravity within the boundaries of my own skin. It took me a few attempts just to open my eyes because pulling up my eyelids was like trying to hold up the bottom of a curtain with a stick. When my eyes finally focused, I saw a bunch of medical supplies on a little table next to me. The table and the wallpaper behind it were familiar, and after a moment I put together that I was in my own bed, in my own bedroom at Molly’s house.
Will was in a folding chair next to my bed, bent over a cell phone. He looked terrible. Which was startling in itself, because werewolves don’t really look terrible. There are many downsides to being a werewolf, but one of the few advantages is that the werewolves practically hum with good health. They have a high metabolism and natural athleticism, and they don’t get sick or suffer minor ailments like pimples or cold sores. Most of them don’t even have bad hair days; they’re that healthy. When they’re in my presence, some of that sheen dulls a little, but they still look like the picture of wellness.
But Will looked as terrible as I’d ever seen any werewolf look. His tan dress pants and Hair of the Dog polo shirt looked slept-in, and his unremarkably brown hair was greasy and sticking out in weird directions. There were new hollows under his eyes, and even sitting in a chair, he looked like he was struggling to stay upright.
I must have shifted or something, because he looked up from the phone. “You’re awake,” he noted.
“Will,” I mumbled. The vertigo had eased a little bit, but trying to put words together was like trying to do magnetic poetry upside down. “What happened to you?” I managed.
“The pack,” he said heavily. “The pack is falling apart.”
I don’t know what I was expecting him to say, but that wasn’t it. “Why?”
Will looked at me patiently for a moment, but when I didn’t speak, he sighed and said, “Because you cured Eli.”
It came back to me then, in a rush: the witch murders, the mentor-turned-vampire, the scarred witch in the white lab coat. Her pet golem. And Eli.
I had changed Eli back into a human.