Like Warren, I’d been gaining a few surreptitious glances. But it was Zack’s fellow victorious teammate, Joel, who breached the leave-me-alone I was projecting as hard as I could.
Joel pulled out Adam’s chair and sat in it. He examined my face without speaking. He was the one who’d decided to join me; he could start the conversation.
After a few minutes, he said, “You’re angry about something.”
“Very,” I lied.
I wouldn’t have tried to lie to one of the werewolves. But Joel was the other pack member who wasn’t a werewolf (besides me). His senses were a little different, and he was new at the whole supernatural business.
I’d known Joel (pronounced the Spanish way, though he didn’t get upset when people said it wrong) on a casual basis longer than I’d known anyone in this room, though he was nearly the newest member of the pack. My day job was as a VW mechanic, and he’d been fixing up old wrecks since long before I’d run the shop.
He’d found himself, by an accident of ancestry, the target of an ancient god, and the incident had left him possessed by or in possession of the spirit of a tibicena—a volcano canid (“dog” wasn’t quite the right word for it). For months he’d been unable to regain his human shape for long enough to resume a normal life. Luckily for everyone, he had been able to keep the sizzling tibicena at bay most of the time, leaving him wearing the body of a black-brindled presa Canario, a beast nearly as intimidating as most werewolves.
He’d been doing better lately, though. Last week, he and his wife had moved from pack headquarters (Adam’s and my house) back into their newly renovated home—taking with them our rescued-from-Underhill boy, Aiden, to keep everyone safe. Aiden was gifted with fire, and he could help if Joel lost control.
“You are not angry,” said Joel, frowning at me like I was a recalcitrant engine mount—a puzzle to be solved. “That was a lie.”
So much for it being easier to lie to Joel than to one of the werewolves.
“I am a little angry,” I said.
He examined me closely. “All right,” he said slowly. “That wasn’t a lie. Who are you angry with?”
I didn’t answer because there wasn’t a truthful answer that didn’t sound like I was thirteen. Only adolescents can say things like “fate” or “the world” and not feel like cringing afterward. By the time a person was my age, they should know that life isn’t fair and quit pretending that it ought to be. If I wanted to be truthful, I’d lost my anger at Adam, to which I’d been clinging, after about ten minutes of watching him tend our pack.
He would always try to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders alone. If I didn’t like it, I shouldn’t have picked him as my mate.
Joel and I had been speaking very quietly and there was a lot of noise in the room—music, laughter, chattering. But now he turned his face so that no one could see it.
“I know who hit you,” he said.
It took me a second to realize he thought I was upset about the Pumpkin Incident, because I’d all but forgotten about it. “It’s not that,” I said. “And unless you judge that the hit was deliberate—in which case we are dealing with an entirely different matter—don’t tell me.” I thought about it and said, “Actually even if you think it was deliberate, keep it to yourself. I’ll figure out who it is eventually, and they will pay.” And that would be better than if Adam found out someone had deliberately hurt me.
Joel grinned and there was a spark of red in his eye. “I’ve been enlightened about your perfect revenges. Jesse told Aiden, who told me that there was a spectacular incident involving a chocolate Easter bunny. You’ve been hiding your light under a barrel.”
I mistrusted that spark in his eye; the tibicena could be malicious. We were in a mostly wooden building, and Aiden wasn’t here to draw out the fire. I had no doubt that Uncle Mike could control a normal fire, but I’d prefer not to have to find out if he could handle the tibicena.
“We don’t talk about the Easter Bunny Incident,” I told him earnestly. “And it was Easter bunnies. It’s not my fault that laxatives come in chocolate flavor.”
Truthfully, I was a little on the fence about the Easter Bunny Incident. The result had been perfect and satisfying. But my adult self figured if the bunnies had laid out the werewolves, they could have actually killed someone, especially if one of my victims had decided to pass a chocolate bunny on to some mortal child.
As an adult, I preferred to be more measured and prudent, at least sufficiently prudent not to kill anyone I didn’t mean to. But the Easter Bunny Incident had persuaded the whole of the Marrok’s pack to quit messing with me. Everyone except Leah, the Marrok’s mate.
Joel laughed, as I’d intended him to, and the red spark in his eye receded.
Awesome, I thought. One disaster at a time was always a good thing.
“I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall,” he said. Before he could say anything more, someone called out his name. He gave me a rueful smile and headed in that direction.
That was also good. Because he hadn’t asked me what was bothering me if it wasn’t getting hit by a pumpkin. I didn’t want to tell him that I was scared. Evidently he hadn’t smelled it on me, either—which was why I was concentrating on my anger, juvenile though it was. Hopefully that would fool sharper senses than Joel’s.
I wasn’t alone long. Ben, fair hair and blue eyes lending a deceptively harmless air to his face, was the next to approach me. He pulled up a third chair to my two-chair table, to avoid taking Adam’s. Ben had been a wolf long enough not to encroach on Adam’s territory, even if it was just a chair.
Ben had, at one time, been the most dangerous of Adam’s wolves. Not because he was the most powerful but because he was the most likely to lose control and kill someone. He’d been sent to the Columbia Basin Pack to get him out of trouble in the UK, and anything requiring that much distance indicated that whatever he’d done, it hadn’t been good. Not bad enough, in someone’s judgment, for him to have been eliminated, but not far off. He’d been getting better over the past couple of years, both more stable and more happy.
Even so, like Adam, he’d had a rough few months. He’d stayed awhile with us, recovering from being possessed by a smoke dragon, moving back to his home only a couple of weeks ago. He seemed to be okay, but he’d lost about fifteen pounds he didn’t need to lose, and he wasn’t gaining it back.
“Observe me gutted,” he said. His aristocratic English accent had been softening, and I hadn’t realized just how much until it returned in force. “It was I.”