I blinked that image away and stood once more in my garage office, feeling neither enlightened nor reassured. Having our bond turn to ice, even if only in the imagery of my other place, could not possibly be a good thing.
“Adam?” I said cautiously, not moving from where I stood behind the counter. “What are you doing to our bond? I don’t like it.”
“You need to get out of here.”
That wasn’t Adam. That was the wolf speaking from Adam’s throat. I heard a ripping noise.
“Adam, are you okay?” I asked, ignoring the wolf’s advice.
The silence was so deep that I started when Adam spoke, his voice gravelly as it sometimes got when he was changing into his wolf form. I could usually smell the magic gathering when one of the wolves was changing form—but my nose was broken. For all that Adam maintained that I wasn’t really smelling magic, that I was just interpreting it as a scent, I couldn’t tell if he was really changing or not without my nose working.
“When you spoke to Bran, did you talk to him about me, Mercy mine?”
That didn’t sound like any tone I’d ever heard from Adam. It didn’t sound like Adam or the wolf.
I remembered the way Ben had sounded. Had the smoke weaver bitten Adam?
The creature hadn’t been able to fool me for more than a few minutes when he’d been using Ben. And my instincts, which had never steered me wrong so far, told me that this had nothing to do with the smoke weaver. Stefan’s bond in my otherness, I now remembered, though I hadn’t noticed at the time, had an odd odor—just like the jackrabbit. It had smelled like the smoke weaver. Apparently even with a broken nose I could smell when I was in that other place.
The bond between Adam and me had still smelled … tasted like us. This, whatever this was, was about whatever had been troubling Adam long before the smoke weaver had escaped.
“I asked you a question,” he growled from the depths of the big space beyond the office door. “Did you go to Bran with the trouble you are having? With me?” The last was a roar that sounded more wolf than human and hurt my ears with the sudden volume.
I didn’t answer, didn’t know how to answer.
“Mercy?” The soft question came out singsong, emerging from the echoing bays, sounding more menacing than the blast of sound that had preceded it.
I didn’t think that telling him yes would be smart right then. But I wouldn’t lie to him. And I didn’t think this was a conversation we should be having while I cowered behind a counter that would be no barrier against a werewolf.
This is Adam, I reminded myself. Whatever his troubles, whatever was happening to him, he would not hurt me if he could help it. He was in trouble and I had to help him.
I walked to the door to the bays. Inky darkness stretched out endlessly in front of me. I can see in the dark pretty well, but my eyes were adjusted to the relative light of the office, and the bays were as dark as a cave. I reached for the lights.
Adam said, “Don’t.”
“What’s going on?” I asked. I couldn’t use my nose, and the sound effects of the empty bays kept me from pinpointing where Adam was.
“You should leave,” he said, his voice gritted, almost vicious. “God damn it, Mercy.” Desperate. “Obey me for once in your life and get the fuck out of here.”
I heard him open the under-the-counter gun safe that held a loaded gun. However cautious I was around agitated werewolves, I was absolutely certain that Adam wasn’t about to shoot me.
I hit the light.
10
I EXPECTED TO SEE ADAM, GUN IN HAND.
I did not expect him to be eight or nine feet tall, looking like something horrible had happened to his change from human to wolf. I’d seen him in an in-between stage before, a blend between wolf and human that was oddly graceful, no matter how frightening. This wasn’t that.
This was a monster.
His skin was red and mottled with oversized veins standing out like tree roots on the forest floor. The only hair or fur on his body was a strip that started at the back of his neck and ended at the top of his hips. Even his pinned, oversized ears and his tail were bare.
His hulking shoulders bulged unnaturally and supported disproportionately long arms ending in clawed hands so massive that they made the big Ruger Redhawk look like a child’s toy from a bygone era. I had no idea how he’d managed to open the gun safe with those hands.
His torso gave a nod to a humanoid shape in that it was upright, but it was too long and bent too much, as if weighed down by those shoulders. His hips and legs were shaped more like a wolf’s and ended in paws that were two or three times the size of his own wolf’s.
The claws on his toes scored the concrete floor. By those marks, I could track him backward to the pile of clothes, which looked as though something had exploded in them. They weren’t ripped—they were confettied—including the heavy leather combat-type boots.
He had, I noted, taken a direct path straight to the gun safe.
His face was a nightmare version of a werewolf’s face, like something dreamed up by a comic book illustrator who was more worried about making something look scary than how viable what he drew was.
Adam’s massive lower jaw was undershot and more like a bulldog’s than a wolf’s, but it was wider than the upper jaw, too. The whole muzzle was too long for the width of his face.
Werewolves have lots and lots of big sharp teeth—but Adam’s teeth now would have done credit to a T. rex. They were black and looked as though you could drop a piece of paper on one and end up with two pieces. I could see most of his teeth because his lips were pulled back in a snarl.
But the most disturbing thing was his eyes. They were entirely human, entirely Adam’s eyes, trapped within the monster. And that was just wrong, because when a werewolf takes his wolf form, the first thing to change is his eyes.
Ugly. He was ugly.
I stood frozen, my hand on the light switch.
He ducked and twisted his head impossibly and let out a sound that was part scream and part wail, impossibly high-pitched with a bass rumble that followed behind and sent my hindbrain into fits. He took an aggressive step toward me and then two slow steps backward.
“After,” he said—and his voice was oddly clear, emerging from that mouth. Werewolves couldn’t talk in their wolf form. Like the eyes, his ability to speak just made this form more wrong. “Go to Bran. Follow his advice.”
And my stunned brain remembered why I’d been so worried about Adam having a gun.
I had a bare moment to figure out what to do. He was a soldier. That gun was going to go off and he would be dead. No hesitation, no fumble.
Worse than useless to wish that I’d been clearer when I told Bran that Adam and I were having troubles. Hard to get good advice from him when he didn’t have all the information.
Blow up the mating bond, Bran had said. Without those words, and if I hadn’t just inspected our bond, maybe I’d have tried something different. Maybe if there had been time to actually think about what to do, I’d have formed a clever plan. But all I had were my instincts. I needed time.
I stepped back into the otherness, where such a thing might be possible. Ever since this place had proven to be useful when I was lost in Europe, I’d been practicing. It was sort of like lucid dreaming, in that I could influence, both on purpose and by accident, what I found there—though that was not to say that I was in control. In this instance, needing time, I imagined a pocket of existence where time moved while no time passed in the real world.