Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson 9)

It hadn’t felt like a long way when we were running for the bridge, but with two—possibly three—people who were hurt, it was too long. I’d have offered to run ahead and grab the SUV, but I knew that neither Adam nor Zee would have allowed it unless they were on their deathbeds.

Tad said somberly, “Hey, Mercy? I’m sorry it took us so long to come help with the troll. We didn’t know about it until we saw the traffic backed up. We’d taken refuge in one of the old warehouses in the Lampson scrap yard. I was headed out to find someone with a cell phone I could borrow to call you when I saw the troll.”

“No one died,” I told him, then corrected myself: “None of our pack died. If you hadn’t made it when you did, Adam and I would have been toast. You timed it pretty close, though.”

“It’s all in the timing,” he agreed—then grinned at me. “But close is still good.”

We walked slowly to the SUV, with its soft upholstery for sore bodies. And I felt Aiden’s eyes on me all the way.

Not quite hostile. Not quite. But, my coyote self was certain, not altogether friendly, either.

—

Our house wasn’t really a single-family dwelling. An Alpha’s house was the center of the pack, designed to be part meetinghouse, part hotel, part hospital. Sometimes it was just Adam, Jesse, and me who lived there, but Joel and his wife currently were living in the suite on the main floor. There were two extra bedrooms on the second floor, and I’d sent Zee to one and Tad to the other. Aiden had been, not ungently, settled in the safe room in the basement and told to make himself at home. The safe room had camera surveillance, and the doors were alarmed and lockable. When the doors were locked, the room would hold an out-of-control werewolf. Aiden had merely smiled at the doors.

“These locks won’t hold me,” he’d told me.

“You’re a guest, not a prisoner,” I said, more worried about Adam, who was in our mini-clinic getting checked out, than whether or not our guest liked his accommodations. “This is the last private room in the house. If you’d rather, you can sleep in the rec room, which is set up as a bunk room, too. But I’ll warn you that there are a number of pack who view those rooms as public property.”

“No,” he said after a moment, as if he was trying to figure out how to react. “This is fine. I was just warning you.”

“You gave your word,” I said. “And we gave ours.”

“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.