“Yes,” he agreed. Then he relaxed, as if we’d stepped back into something he knew. “So we did. Twenty-four hours.” He gave me an enigmatic smile that did not belong on the face of a child.
The safe room was next door to the clinic. We both heard the crack of breaking bones. I froze, my stomach clenched. Adam’s control was back in place because I had felt nothing through our link.
Aiden jumped like a startled cat and showed the whites of his eyes.
“Our Alpha’s shoulder healed wrong,” I told him, feeling sick. “They had to rebreak it.”
We both listened to the silence. “Tough man,” he said, finally.
“Oh, yes,” I agreed. “If you’ll excuse me?”
“Of course.”
But Warren stopped me as I headed to the clinic. Before I could say “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” I found myself chopping vegetables while Warren and his very-human partner, Kyle, barbecued hamburgers outside. We were setting up a barbecue dinner because, evidently, in between sadistic-but-necessary medical procedures, Adam had called for a meeting of the pack.
—
In the front of the meeting room, the only spot of the room clear of chairs, Adam settled one hip on the library table that usually held whatever notes he’d brought with him. Tonight there weren’t any notes. If we were going to talk about Aiden and my offer of sanctuary to anyone who came to us for help, I guess he wouldn’t need notes, would he? My stomach was clenched. I was causing trouble for him again.
Medea hopped on the table and stropped her stub-tailed body against Adam, claiming him in front of the room of werewolves. He rubbed her under her chin absently, his attention elsewhere.
The meeting room was upstairs, adjacent to the family bedrooms. I’d asked Adam why he hadn’t put it downstairs with the rest of the public rooms.
“A pack needs to be family,” he’d said simply. “If I don’t welcome them into my life, into my home, there will always be a distance between us. They need to trust me, to trust that I will take care of them—how can they do that if I treat them like business associates?”
The meeting room was packed with chairs, the kind you see in a high school band room or at a hotel banquet. More or less comfortable to sit in and strong enough to hold a heavy person, but stackable so we could get them out of the way if we needed to.
Adam glanced at his watch, so I knew he was waiting for a few latecomers. He looked almost normal except for the grim tint to his mouth that I blamed on his shoulder. He moved both arms freely, but I knew it must still hurt. As Alpha, he could draw upon the whole pack for power, so he healed faster than any of the rest of the werewolves. But he’d been hurt pretty badly.
I hadn’t had a chance to talk to him, though. If I were a paranoid person, I’d have said he had been avoiding me. I worried that he resented me for making him have this meeting.
Next time I felt the urge to make pronouncements, I’d set down the stupid walking stick before I opened my mouth. I wasn’t sure, even now, that it had been the walking stick’s fault. I wasn’t certain I’d been wrong—but I did know I’d been overly theatric.
Beside me, Warren patted my leg. Warren, bless him, had saved a spot for me right by the door—so I could escape first, he’d told me. But also, I thought, beside him, to show his support for me when I came under fire.
“Didn’t the pack used to have meetings a lot more often than we do now?” I asked him. “We have pack breakfast Sundays, but other than that, or some emergency, the whole pack only meets before the full-moon hunt. But I seem to remember a lot more meetings when I used to only live on the other side of the back fence.”
Warren laughed soundlessly; I could feel his body shake next to me.
“Oh, meetings,” he said after a moment. “Yes, there were meetings. You can always tell if Adam is ticked off with the pack by the number of meetings we have. Some days, when someone was really stupid, we had meetings twice on the same day. I think it’s his military background. There are a lot of us who are grateful to you for keeping him happy—saves on our gas bill, and some of us even have time for date nights once in a while. Or hobbies.”
I saw Adam’s lips quirk before he blanked his face again. Etiquette among werewolves was that you tried to ignore private conversations. But like everyone else in the room, he could hear us just fine.
Ben entered with Zack and Joel, both of whom still looked a little shaky, but Zack was by far the most battered. The hit with the Miata had fractured his pelvis and four ribs. Werewolves are tough, but Zack was as far from an Alpha as he could get; he’d be in pain for days yet. Ben kept a hand under Zack’s arm. The cool expression on Ben’s face meant that he was still working as their . . . babysitter? Escort? Something. On his own, he might still have decided to make sure they were safe, but he’d have had his happy mask on and come in making rude comments designed to get a rise out of someone. Under orders, he tended to be much more businesslike, especially lately.