“Damn straight,” I growled, borrowing a phrase from my cowboy friend Warren. “So why did you fall for it?”

He didn’t answer my question. Instead he said, “Auriele apologized to Jesse. I’m not sure that took. Punishment enough maybe, for Auriele. At least as far as opening Jesse’s mail is concerned. She isn’t often in the wrong.”

True.

“I apologized to Jesse, too,” he said. “I think that went over better.”

“You didn’t open her mail,” I told him. “And Jesse knows how her mother works.”

“And that’s why she accepted my apology,” Adam agreed. “And why she talked to you about school before she brought it to me or her mother.”

“Jesse could have avoided all of this if she’d discussed matters with you before she talked to her mother,” I told him. “But Christy was easier. She’d only be hurt because Jesse wasn’t moving to Eugene. You were going to be hurt because you, and your position as Alpha of our pack, are the reason she doesn’t have more choices about where to go to school.”

Adam grunted again.

The coroner’s van pulled out of the driveway with the two bodies inside. As Anna continued to work in her flower bed, some of the real weeds got pulled. Only strong ghosts affect the physical world like that. Maybe she would haunt her own house instead of mine. I could hope.

“I can’t afford to lose Darryl now,” Adam said. “I talked to him alone about that. I apologized because, especially after this incident, he should be cut loose to get his own pack. Do you know what he told me?”

“He likes his job here,” I said, because I’d talked to Darryl about this a few weeks ago. “As far as the one with the salary is concerned, he could probably work remotely if he couldn’t find a job wherever his new pack would be located. It’s not like think tanks are available in every town. But he doesn’t want to work remotely, because he likes to meet face-to-face with his team and with the people who use his team’s work.” Like me, a werewolf gets a lot of information from scent and subtle body language cues.

“And—” I glanced up at Adam. This part Darryl hadn’t said, but I knew him. “He really loves the action our pack has been facing. He’s an adrenaline junkie. A new pack might be interesting until he got settled in, but I don’t think there is a pack in the US, other than maybe the Marrok’s, that is in for as exciting a time as ours.”

“That’s more than he said, but I think you have it right.” He smiled. It wasn’t exactly a happy smile, but it wasn’t one of those smiles I’d been getting lately that weren’t really smiles. He reached down and held out his hand.

“You are making me really uncomfortable sitting at my feet,” he told me.

“And you’re starting to get funny looks from the cops,” I said, taking his hand.

He laughed as he pulled me up. It was a quiet laugh—and this time I think he consciously pulled it down to suit the circumstances.

“Thank you,” he said when I was standing.

“I can just see the headlines,” I told him. “Alpha Wolf Makes Wife Kneel at His Feet.”

His mouth quirked up. “Don’t forget the ‘Human Wife’ part of that. There are still a lot of people who think you are my sex slave.”

“You wish,” I told him to the last part. “And it would be ‘Human? Wife.’” I lifted my voice on the end of “human,” so he could hear the question mark.

The newspapers had indeed begun to question just how human I was. That was a problem because one of the reasons the pack had been accepted so easily by the mundane population of the Tri-Cities was that people viewed me as one of them. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out that I wasn’ t—strictly speaking—human. But I hoped that by then, they’d be happy with us because we were the good monsters who protected them from the bad ones.

“Back to our previous conversation,” I said, “we get to keep Darryl and Auriele.”

I was sorry when the slight smile slid away from his face and his expression regained its grim neutrality.

He said, “Or at least we put that off for another day. Auriele understands what she nearly caused to happen, though I don’t think she is apologetic about anything except for hurting Jesse. And that she still believes is your fault.”

I blew out a breath. “Figures.”

“You haven’t asked me about Aiden and Underhill,” he said.

“Do I want to know?” I asked.

Before he could answer me, Detective Willis approached. Willis was moderately tall, and graying, and carried himself like someone who’d been in a few fights. He was closer to retirement age than to his rookie years, but not by much. He was one of those men who used his size and his anger to intimidate people he thought needed intimidation, but he was capable of toning his presence down to gentleness when caring for trauma victims. He was smart, dedicated—and we got along all right for the most part.

“Generally speaking,” he said, “when either of you show up at a scene, it’s because something is afoot.” He stopped in front of us, his hands on his hips—but he knew better than to stare into Adam’s eyes. Instead he stared at me.

“My people tell me this looks like a classic murder-suicide,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Magic.”

He grimaced. “God damn it. I knew it had been too quiet around here.”

“I might believe it if Anna had stabbed her husband and then shot herself,” I told him. “But Dennis was possibly the least violent person I know.”

“And that’s why you think there was magic involved?” asked Willis, sounding hopeful.

“It is all over Dennis’s body,” I told him. “I’ve never seen anything like it. He is lit up with magic—I wouldn’t be surprised if someone could see him glowing from space.” A thought occurred to me. “You might want to be careful with his body.”

“Are you thinking witches and zombies?” asked Adam.

I shook my head. “Not witches, I don’t think. But there is a lot of magic in Dennis’s body—he wouldn’t want to hurt anyone else.” “I’ll speak to the coroner’s office,” said Willis. “Do you have any idea what got him?”

I shook my head.

“Of course you don’t,” he said. “And you wouldn’t tell me if you did.”

“I don’t,” I told him. “But you might be right about the last. Your guys aren’t exactly the stand-back-and-let-the-werewolves-take-care-of-it kind of guys. Some things a gun works just fine on—and some things you need grenade launchers for.”

“And werewolves are the grenade launchers?” He sounded a little amused. He didn’t argue about my assessment of his people.

“That’s about right,” said Adam mildly.

Willis glanced back at the house. “Murder-suicide would be a lot easier than unknown magical cause.”

“It wasn’t a murder-suicide,” I told Willis. “Don’t let their kids think that it was.”

He nodded, his mouth softening. “We’ll call it an ‘under investigation’ situation. When you figure out just what happened, we’ll let the family know.” He started to leave, but paused. “It looked to me like he was heading out that door when he killed himself.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” I said.

“You think he stopped himself from killing anyone else?” Willis didn’t sound like an experienced detective. He sounded like someone who needed to believe in good guys.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “But he picked up the gun after he killed Anna—and if whatever had him had just intended for him to kill himself, that knife could have done the job. Dennis was the kind of person who would have killed himself to prevent anyone else getting hurt.”

Willis nodded, as if I’d answered a question for him, then continued back to his car.

Adam and I left the Cathers’ house. I started off at an angle, heading home, but Adam veered toward my manufactured house. I gave him a puzzled look, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“I see that Underhill decided to redecorate the backyard,” I told him.

He growled low in his throat. “That gate has to stay for a year and a day,” he said. “Then she can remove it, if we still wish her to.”

I laughed, I couldn’t help myself—I think I was mostly just punchy. But there was something funny about the disgruntled way he repeated Underhill’s words.

“Holy doorways, Batman,” I said. “We have an entrance to Underhill in our backyard.”

He looked at me then, though he didn’t quit walking. “Are you sure that it wasn’t fae magic that caused Dennis to kill his wife?”

I quit laughing and looked at the border wall between Adam’s house … Adam’s and my house and my old place. The stone wall, even incomplete, looked better than the old barbed-wire fence had.

“I’ve never felt magic exactly like this,” I told Adam. “It didn’t feel fae.”

“Coincidences happen,” Adam said. But he didn’t say it like he believed it.

“It smelled a little like Underhill—but not like Underhill,” I told him. “I suppose it could be something that came through her door. But it also smelled a little like that vampire who was also a sorcerer. More that than Underhill. It didn’t smell fae to me.”

“He was bitten,” said Anna, walking beside us.

“Bitten by what?” I asked her. “Was it the rabbit?” I was going to end up with my house haunted. Maybe I could make that a feature and rent it out as an Airbnb.

Adam didn’t ask me who I was talking to—he’d gotten used to it. Instead he said, “You’re going to end up with Anna haunting you if you aren’t more careful.”