Joel wouldn’t have that problem. No one would associate the volcanic tibicena with Joel’s human form.

“Yes.” Mary Jo opened the car door and got out again. The seat tried to follow her and she set it back into the car. “Stay there,” she told it. To me she said, “No worries, Mercy. I’ll figure out how to do it out of sight. I have all the tools I need.” She held up her cell phone. “Go do what you need to do, Mercy. I’ve got your back.”

* * *

? ? ?

Elizaveta Arkadyevna Vyshnevetskaya had a sprawling house just a few miles from my home.

She used to live in town. But after the neighbors complained about the sound of her granddaughter’s nightly oboe practicing, she moved out to a house on five acres. She leased the land to a hay company—they didn’t come out at night, so no one was around to be kept up by Elizaveta’s granddaughter practicing her oboe.

I was sure her granddaughter had an oboe and that it was just coincidence that bad oboe playing can sound remarkably like screaming.

I hadn’t lied to Adam; I didn’t know much about witches, and the more I learned, the less certain I was about what I did know. As I understood it, witches had power over living things. Magic practitioners who could work with inanimate objects were wizards.

Witches got power from things of spiritual consequence. These included life-changing events: birth, death, dying, but also lesser things like emotions. Sacrifice, willing or unwilling, was supposed to have an especially great effect. They also did a lot of their work using body parts, bodily fluids—blood, hair, spit. I was a little vague on how that worked exactly.

Though there were three different types of witches, they all started the same way—they were born with certain abilities. At some point after that, they chose what they were willing to trade for power, staying white or becoming gray or black.

White witches generated power from themselves and the environment around them. They were less powerful than the other two kinds. The black witches tended to view them as fast food (and I wasn’t sure about the gray witches, either). Most white witches were paranoid and secretive. I had only met a few of them.

Black witches were power hungry. They went for the big power boosts—death, yes. But torture-then-death generated more power from the same victim. They fed more easily off their own kind, but they could use any living being. They actively pursued victims with magical connections. That probably accounted for the fact that few supernatural communities tolerated witches who practiced black magic. That and the fact that anything that scared the humans—and black magic was difficult to keep hidden—was bad for everyone else.

Black witches were the most powerful of all witches.

Most of the witches I knew were gray witches. I wasn’t sure of the exact line between gray and black, not from the witches’ side, anyway. I could tell the difference from a good distance—black magic reeks.

I thought that the difference between black and gray had something to do with consent. A gray witch could cut off a person’s finger and feed on the generated power of the sacrifice and pain, as long as their victim agreed to it. I was pretty sure that a gray witch could make zombies, but these had smelled of black magic.

As soon as I drove past the wall of poplar trees that marked the border of Elizaveta’s property, I could see that there were a lot of pack vehicles at the house. As I approached, Warren’s old truck pulled out of the drive. He slowed as he saw me, stopping in the middle of the road.

Since there wasn’t anyone coming, I did the same. He rolled down his window. The Jetta’s driver’s-side window didn’t work yet. I got out of the car and walked to Warren’s truck.

Aiden was in the front seat, looking like he should have had a booster chair. Joel, in his presa Canario dog form, took up the space between Warren and Aiden on the bench seat with some of him left over to spill onto the floor. It didn’t look comfortable, but Joel smiled at me anyway. Compared to his tibicena form, the presa Canario looked positively friendly.

“Heading to Benton City to burn some miniature goat zombies?” I asked.

Warren shook his head. “No, ma’am. Mary Jo had a disposal company come haul the dumpster out to the Richland landfill. We’ll turn the goats to ash out of sight and away from anything else that might catch fire.”

Yep. Mary Jo was competent. Too bad for her, because this was not how to get off my emergency call list.

“Then we come back here,” Warren said. He grimaced. “There are some things we need to burn here, too. But not until you check things out and the boss gets the okay from Elizaveta.”

“Bad?” I asked. “I mean, I know that Elizaveta’s family is all dead.”

He glanced at Aiden and sighed. “I think this gives ‘bad’ a new low.”

Aiden frowned at him. “I lived in Underhill, Warren. I don’t know what you all think you are protecting me from.”

“Just because you’ve seen bad things doesn’t mean you have to see any more,” said Warren with dignity.

I waved Warren off and got back in the Jetta. I hadn’t really needed to ask him if it was bad at Elizaveta’s house. My answer was in the massing of the pack. It was a Wednesday, and most of the people here should have been at work. Adam wouldn’t have called them all just to deal with bodies. He must have been worried that the people who had killed Elizaveta’s family might be coming back.

I parked the Jetta next to Adam’s SUV. Before I got out, Adam was beside my car.

He wrapped his arms around me and lifted me off my feet, his face buried in the crook of my neck as if he hadn’t seen me for a decade instead of . . . at lunchtime yesterday. I could feel his chest lift as he breathed in my scent and it made me do the same to him. Musk and mint and Adam. Yum.

He put me on the ground, started to release me, then thought better of it (that might have had something to do with the grip I had around his waist). He bent down and kissed me.

His kiss told me a lot of things. It told me he loved me. The careful tightness of his grip told me that he was too tired to trust his control. The desperation . . . our sex life is very good and enthusiasm is a normal part of it, but that kiss was more like the ones I got when we were both naked and ready rather than a “hello, am I glad to see you” kind of kiss. So the desperation told me that whatever they’d found in Elizaveta’s house had disturbed him a great deal.

I kissed him back, trying to give him whatever he needed from me. At least that was my motivation at first. After about five seconds it wasn’t about anything other than his hands on my skin, my hands on his, the taste of his mouth, and the scent of his rapidly aroused body.

I felt the buzz of electric connections sitting up and taking notice of his strong hand on the back of my neck and the shape of his body against my hips. He was hot against my bare skin where my shirt was rising up and exposing my midriff. Even through the thickness of my jeans, I could feel his warmth.

I loved it.

Adam laughed softly against me, running his lips over my neck, biting down lightly on the tendon, and sending shivers right down to my toes. Then he took my lips again.

“Don’t give in to the nudge!” called Paul urgently. “You know you’ll regret it!”

“Quick,” said Zack, “does anyone have any of that essential oil stuff that Jesse’s friend’s mom sold Mercy?”

Adam stifled another laugh, this one a laugh of self-amusement mixed with frustration as he pulled back. He steadied me and waited for his own breath to calm down.

“The nudge always wins,” he murmured to me. “Thank God.”

“Just not right here and now,” I murmured back.

I should have been appalled, I suppose. Here we were in public, in full view of a good percentage of the pack, in front of what I was pretty sure was a murder scene.

But I’ve learned that there are always terrible things, and sometimes it is very important to grasp what joy and beauty you can, whenever you can. And Adam is beautiful, inside and out. Better than that—he is mine.

Adam is average height, and that’s the only average thing about him. Even back when I disliked him heartily, I never denied that he was about the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen. Even married and mated, at odd moments I was surprised by the sheer power of his looks.

I think it was because normally, his looks are not the things that make me love him. I love his intelligence, his care for his pack—and even for me. Though I have to admit that I chafe under his protectiveness sometimes. I spent a lifetime taking care of myself; I did not need protection. Still, when I was facing vampires, trolls, or the IRS (my business had just gotten that dreaded audit letter), Adam was the person I most wanted at my side.

I love his honesty, his temper, his dedication to his word and his duty. I love his humor, the way it creases the edges of his eyes and softens the usual hard line of his mouth.

Yep, I have it bad.