Adam smiled, but his eyes were worried.

9

BECAUSE MAKAYA WAS IN THE CAR WITH US ON THE way home, and I didn’t want to scare her, I didn’t talk to Adam about Fiona or how Lincoln had been bitten. He knew what I knew, because I’d talked to him about it on the phone when I’d called him from Kelly’s house. There were still some important implications that we should discuss—but it would have to wait until we got home.

So for the ride home, I stayed quiet, nursing my broken nose, as Auriele organized a pack bunk-up on her phone. Bunk-up was one step shy of “everyone to the Batcave”—our house being the Batcave. Bunk-up meant that the wolves stayed in groups of two to four and avoided going anywhere alone.

I wasn’t sure how a bunk-up was going to keep anyone safe from the smoke weaver—though it probably would be effective against Fiona’s band, at least in the short run. But I didn’t say anything. What else could we do?

We could pull the human families of the pack into our home; we’d done that when the witches had become a problem. But we had too many werewolves to take them all into our home for long—and if we did, there was no way to lock the doors to keep them in and the smoke weaver out. Packed in like that for more than a few hours, we’d start having fights. Our wolves needed freedom to move. We literally could not do what the fae and the vampires had done to protect themselves. We also could not do it figuratively. We were the protectors of the Tri-Cities. It was our job to face the scary bad things—if we retreated, we left the field to the villains.

We arrived home and the mass chaos of too many people in too small a space was whipped into shape by the combined efforts of Auriele, Hannah, and Jesse. I tried to get Adam’s attention a couple of times—but he kept retreating with different people to confer in his office, where Ben couldn’t hear them. But also where there wasn’t enough room for me, not even on his desk.

“You look like you hurt,” Adam told me. “I know you have some things we need to discuss. I’ll come up as soon as I can. Take a bag of frozen peas and lie down. I’ll find you as soon as I have the security schedules lined out.”

We had ice packs, but I liked frozen peas better. They were gentler on swollen tissue. Frozen peas on my poor nose was a good idea, and finding a quiet place sounded amazing. I grabbed a bag from the freezer and went to our bedroom and shut the door.

Our bedroom was more or less soundproofed—not like Adam’s office, where the soundproofing was a serious thing. If the bedroom door was shut and the house was quiet, the werewolves could hear noise from the bedroom but probably not actual conversation. With the mass chaos in the house, being overheard was not a consideration.

I pulled out my phone and dialed a number by memory.

“Mercy.”

Just hearing the Marrok’s voice took a chunk of stress out of my day. Not that he couldn’t return the stress and add stomach-acid-producing interest, but just now he was the person I needed to talk to the most.

“We are in trouble,” I told him. Then considered who I was talking to and said, “Not anything we can’t handle.”

“I feel as though you should amend that,” Bran said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have called me.”

I thought of the vampires and the fae locking themselves away. And Ben down in the basement pretending there was nothing wrong.

Before anyone could stop them, Kelly’s kids had boiled down to the basement, where the electronic toys waited. And they had found Ben in the cage. Ben had dutifully admired Makaya’s bright pink casts, adorned with hot-glued glitter and plastic gemstones thanks to Jesse. And he’d begged us all with his eyes to get the kids upstairs before he lost it again.

We hadn’t quite made it, but Jesse told Makaya that Ben was playing.

Makaya had put her head down on Darryl’s shoulder (for all that he was scary as anything, kids loved Darryl) and said sadly, “Maybe I would have laughed like he wanted but that man scared me today. I don’t want to be scared again for a while.”

Yes, so maybe we were having trouble handling it.

“Okay. Let’s say that I have some concerns,” I hedged. “I think you might help with a couple of them.”

“You have some wolves invading your territory,” he said.

That photo montage and information organization had been mostly Charles. I would have known that even if I hadn’t heard Adam talking to him. Charles handed out information that was useful, organized, and succinct. But if Charles knew about our invaders, so would Bran.

Bran was more Socratic when delivering aid. “Adam,” he might have said, “where do you think you should go looking for information? If I were you I might look at … Texas.”

Which was why Adam had gone to Charles for help and not Bran. Well, that and Bran had formally washed his hands of our pack as a necessary step in the experiment of a werewolf pack being the neutral party while the humans and the fae worked out how they were going to live in the same world together. Our pack had to be independent so that if matters didn’t go well, we wouldn’t drag every werewolf in North and South America into a war with the fae or the humans—or both.

I had gone to Bran because I wasn’t looking for loads of information—I needed advice. Advice was Bran’s best thing.

“One of the invading wolves is Fiona,” I told him. I wasn’t actually sure of her last name, but I didn’t need it.

Bran inhaled, then said, “She’s dead.”

“Nope,” I said. “I just saw her tiny as life about three … no, five hours ago. Time flies when you are in the emergency room.” And I shouldn’t have said that last.

“Are you all right?” he demanded.

“Yes.”

“Mercy.”

“Jeez,” I complained, feeling about four. “I broke my nose running my car into a possessed wolf who was hurting one of the pack’s children. Because I broke my nose, she only has a broken wrist and ankle, and the wolf is dead. I’m all right with the results of today.”

“Semantics,” he growled.

“Truth,” I told him. “What can you tell me about Fiona?”

“Stay away from her,” he said.

I hoped he could hear my eyes rolling. “That’s what you told me when I was fourteen. I was hoping for something more useful now that I’m an adult and she’s trying to take over my pack.”

“Don’t roll your eyes at me,” he snapped. “And you were fifteen.”

I looked at the phone. “You remember how old I was?” I asked incredulously.

“It was the day Charles glitter-bombed my office,” Bran said darkly. “Of course I remember.”

“Charles?” There was no way. “Charles glitter-bombed your office.” Cold, scary, efficient, deadly—those were words that suited Charles. That the term “glitter bomb” and Charles’s name were in the same sentence was dumbfounding except maybe in something like “Charles discovered the glitter-bomber’s secret identity and hanged her by her toenails to teach the other people who stole her idea never to do that ever again.”

“Why did he glitter-bomb your office?” I asked.

“It was something I said,” Bran told me. “And not your business. What do you know about Fiona?”

“You told me to stay away from her,” I said, “which left me insatiably curious.”

“Of course it did,” Bran returned dryly. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Like a carrot in front of a horse,” I agreed. “But no one knew very much. She was your assassin that you sent out to do work that Charles wouldn’t do.”

“Yes,” agreed Bran.

“That she is as deadly as Charles.”

“Differently deadly,” he said. “Charles or Adam could take her in a fight. But she won’t engage them unless she has to. She will use people … Charles told me that there were six wolves invading your territory. Since he didn’t mention Fiona—and he would have—are there any others you know of?”

“No. The only ones I have personally seen are James and Nonnie Palsic,” I told him. “Oh. And Lincoln Stuart, but he doesn’t count because he is dead.”

“He is the one you killed?”

“He’s the one I hit with my car. I would have shot him, but there were too many onlookers. James Palsic killed him.” I could see that I had the choice of telling Bran what happened today one sentence at a time, or I could tell him the whole story. Actually, I was probably better off throwing everything into the mix in order to save time.

“I think,” I told him, “that I really need to start with the jackrabbit.”

“If that is what you think,” he said. “Then by all means, start with the jackrabbit.”

He was utterly silent while I was talking—so I really didn’t know how he persuaded me to tell him about Wulfe when I hadn’t intended to. Or Adam’s growing problem with whatever it was that was making him shift without meaning to and that was causing him to close down our mating bond. Or that was what Adam had implied as the reason for closing down our mating bond— sometimes just talking about something out loud pointed out information I’d missed.

I did manage to keep to myself that cold feeling I’d awoken to last night, when only Adam and I had been in the room. I know what it feels like to be the subject of a hunt. To be prey. It could have been my imagination, despite the I’m-sorry breakfast sandwich.

When I finally finished up with Ben scaring Makaya in the basement, I was a little hoarse. I waited for Bran’s response. It took long enough that I checked my phone to make sure we were still connected. I’d feel pretty stupid if I’d spent the last hour talking to myself.

“Bran?” I asked. “Are you still there?”

“Tell Adam to kill Fiona, whenever and wherever he gets a chance,” he answered briskly. “She is selling her services to the highest bidder. She doesn’t share her money with a team, so the others are probably useful tools. She does not make a good ally for anyone or anything she is not terrified of. If she has made, as you are concerned about, an alliance with the smoke weaver—proceed with caution.”