Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson 12)

Adam’s SUV would have a change of clothes. Probably not footwear, but he had made his own bed and he could lie in it.

Second step: drive home and …

I had to put the washcloth on my eyes again. My hands were still shaking. If he had pulled that trigger … I could have been alone again.

Maybe ten minutes later, Adam knocked on the door. “Mercy? Are you planning on taking up residence in there?”

“Might as well,” I bit out. “My mate is an idiot.”

After I said it, I knew that those two things didn’t go together, except that I really had needed to say that last.

“Yes,” he agreed. “So why don’t we go home and you can punish me by telling everyone there how you feel.”

I froze. “We can’t do that,” I told him. “We have an invasion and a killer bunny. They need you invulnerable.”

“God,” he said with feeling, “are they going to be disappointed if that’s what they need.”

Then he laughed, and it sounded a little like I felt—shaky and damaged. Yes, tonight had altered the game board a little, but no one had won, yet. There was a soft thump as his forehead (I was pretty sure) hit the door.

“Elizaveta cursed you,” I told him.

“I know,” he admitted.

“How long have you known?” I asked gently. He and I both knew exactly how much anger was behind my tone. I had, after all, learned that from him.

“That is a complicated question.”

Holding a conversation through a closed door was stupid. I wasn’t afraid of him—and if I didn’t open the door, I would never be able to go home and pull the blankets over my head. I unlocked the door and opened it.

He was his usual gorgeous self, no monster to be seen. He was also naked as a jaybird. His unclothed and glorious body might have distracted me had he not looked at my face and winced.

I would have liked to think that he’d flinched from my wrath. But I was pretty sure it was the damage to my face. Just as well I’d been able to hide most of the bruising on the rest of me with the shirt.

“How complicated?” I asked.

“The wolf knew,” he said. “But I didn’t know until he told you.”

Just after my neighbors had died.

“And you kept it to yourself afterward because why?” I asked—more sharply than I meant to. But we had people who could help with witch curses, Bran and Zee—we even had Wulfe. The one thing that I knew about witch curses was that ignoring them—as tonight had made obvious—didn’t make them get better.

He looked away from me.

I was going to tell him exactly how smart I thought that keeping this to himself had been. I opened my mouth, and hesitated. Hadn’t he … hadn’t we been through enough today? He was going to have to put on his clothes and go back to the pack house and pretend that everything was okay. That he was fit and ready to face off with … heaven help us, Fiona. And the killer bunny. And Wulfe and whatever else decided to rain down on our heads because the universe was just generous like that.

He couldn’t afford to let anyone but me see the mess he was in. Because our pack was short of people to do the job we had to do. They were bearing up wonderfully for the most part—but the pressure wasn’t going to let up anytime soon.

“So,” I said, to change the subject. “Why did you want to get me alone to talk to me?”

“Because I thought you’d called Bran for advice, and he’d told you to get away from me.”

I blinked at him, utterly flummoxed. “What?”

He spoke more slowly. “Because I thought you’d called Bran for advice, and he’d told you to get away from me.”

“Funny guy,” I said. “I heard you the first time. I just never thought that you would utter such absolute … drivel.”

“It seemed logical at the time,” he said.

“Huh,” I growled at him. “What in the world makes you think that even if Bran told me to leave you, that that would be something I would ever do?”

And that started the waterworks again. I hated to cry—in this case it felt manipulative, as if I were punishing him somehow—when that was the furthest thing from my mind at the moment. I wiped my eyes with the bottom of my shirt—and caught my nose.

“Damn it,” I growled, batting away his hands.

“I’m cursed,” he said mildly. “It interferes with my thinking. Stop that. You’re hurting yourself.”

Both were true. I stopped trying to wipe my eyes with my shirt and used my hands instead.

I wasn’t going to cut him any slack on his muddled thinking, curse or no curse. He thought I was going to tell him I was leaving him. And then I put it together with his actions tonight.

“So your thinking was that I was going to tell you I was leaving you—so you were going to kill yourself and save me the trouble?”

His face went still. Then he said, “It sounds so stupid when you say it that way.”

“Good,” I snapped. I started to pinch my nose—Bran style—and Adam caught my hand.

He kissed my knuckles (which was pretty brave when he knew how much I wanted to hurt him) and folded my hand in his. “Don’t do that,” he said. “You’ll hurt yourself again.” He sighed. “I think I’ve done enough of that today.”

It echoed my earlier thought about him, that he’d been through enough today. I took a deep breath.

“This is maybe not the best time to hash this out,” I said.

“Agreed,” he said, his voice heartfelt. “What did you want to talk to me about? Or is that another minefield?”

It took me a moment to remember.

I held up a finger. “Bran thinks that we, that you, need to kill Fiona at first opportunity.”

“Fiona?” he said blankly, as if he’d forgotten who she was.

“Fiona,” I said. “Apparently she went rogue a while ago. Started selling her skills to whoever paid her. Bran thought that she died in a deal gone bad while she was working with some witches. You should maybe call Bran and talk to him about her.” He wasn’t taking my calls. “Bran has decided what we need to do with our invading wolves. Harolford is on the kill list, but less urgently so. Kent Schwabe is a question mark, but he’d like us to save Chen and the Palsics.”

“I’ll talk to him,” he told me.

He was still naked. It was distracting me—though I didn’t think he knew that yet.

I held up a second finger. “He told me that we should talk to Underhill about the smoke weaver.”

Adam’s eyebrow raised. “And that is a revelation how?”

“He told me to ask her about the bargain Underhill has with him or that she had with him. He told me to bribe her with something sweet that I’ve cooked myself. And he told me to approach her like we have a common problem and not like she released someone who killed innocents and now holds two people I care about in his thrall.”

“Okay,” he said. “That’s useful.”

I held up a third finger. “And he told me that if you kept shutting me out, I should blow up our mating bond.”

“Excuse me?”

“He hung up and won’t answer my calls,” I said. “I have no idea what he meant. Just what he said.”