“Pack bond says he’s fine,” Adam said. “Just worn-out. Maybe another couple of sandwiches?”

I made food—at this rate I was going to have to go shopping again. When I brought the food into the living room and set it on an end table, Sherwood was sitting up again.

He squinted at the food and began to eat like a . . . well, like a ravening wolf.

“I remember that,” he growled. “Whatever that was.” Then he looked a little sick and he quit eating. When he spoke again his voice was soft and uncertain. “Unsettling to have that inside me all this time. To know that it is there, all of it, waiting for me.”

I didn’t think he was talking about his wolf.

“What will come, will come,” Adam said. “That’s enough for now.”

Sherwood gave a derisive half laugh. “Right.”

“You saved the day,” Adam told him firmly. “Let it go.”

“Apparently that is something I’m good at.” Despite the self-directed bitterness of his words, when Sherwood gave another half laugh, this time it was genuine.

“Okay?” Adam asked.

“All right,” Sherwood said. To prove it, he started eating again.

Adam gave me a rueful look. “I planned on matters going a little differently, but I still have to discuss some things with you.” He turned to Sherwood. “And you, too. It feels a little anticlimactic after all of this—” He tipped his head toward the mess that started at the top of the stairway to the upstairs and continued in a trail of interesting stains and broken things down toward the basement. “But it is still important—in the long run, it might be more important.”

I swallowed, because Sherwood wasn’t the only one chowing down. Adam had not eaten—and he should because he’d changed back and forth, fought a zombie werewolf thingie, and healed himself really quickly. “You need to eat,” I told him.

“I ate while you were in the shower,” he said. “I promise.”

I glanced at Sherwood, who raised both eyebrows to Adam but then nodded.

“I’m not doubting his word,” I said with dignity. “But it’s my privilege to make sure while he’s looking out for everyone else that he looks out for himself, too.”

Adam moved the few inches between where he stood and where I sat on a little round ottoman. He leaned down and kissed me.

When he straightened up, he didn’t move away. “So,” he said, “the late-night meetings I’ve been having are the forerunner of meetings between the government and the Gray Lords. No one really expects firm results, but it is the first nonhostile negotiation.”

Sherwood pursed his lips. “So why are you telling just Mercy and me? Why not the whole pack?”

“Neither of you appears on the list of active members of the Columbia Basin Pack that someone presented to my old friend General Gerald Piotrowski,” Adam said dryly. His voice was especially dry when he said “my old friend.”

“The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?” asked Sherwood.

I was impressed that he knew who Piotrowski was. Not many people could tell you who the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was, let alone the vice chairman. And Sherwood was an amnesiac who didn’t remember his own name—unless he was attacked by zombie werewolves, apparently—so in-depth knowledge about the government wasn’t something I’d have expected of him. Heck, I had a degree in history so I was supposed to be interested in things like that, and I didn’t know who the participants on the Joint Chiefs were.

“That’s the one,” agreed Adam. “And factually, it was you, Mercy, and Zack.”

“Someone has an old list of who is in the pack,” I said. “And maybe they missed me because I’m not a werewolf; I shouldn’t be pack, except in an auxiliary sense.” Something chilled in my veins, foreboding maybe. “The group of rogue Cantrip agents that kidnapped the pack in order to make you go assassinate their target had a list, didn’t they?” Last November, at the same time that Frost had been trying to take over Marsilia’s territory.

Adam put a hand on my shoulder and let it rest there. “I think that it’s the same list. I don’t know if they got it from the rogue group, the rogue group got it from them, or someone gave it to both parties.”

“I was,” I said slowly, “under the impression that it was Frost who gave the rogue agents that list.”

Adam gave me a quick nod. “That’s what I thought, too.”

“Is it important where their information came from?” asked Sherwood.

“Not to the immediate discussion,” Adam agreed. “But maybe for later investigation. I’ll see to it that Charles gets word—maybe he can figure it out.”

“Okay,” said Sherwood. “So why is it important that Mercy and I aren’t on this list?”

Adam gave me a very apologetic look. “Because the rest of the pack is going to be playing bodyguards for the governmental delegation.”

I twisted so I could look up into Adam’s face. “Can we do that? In a meeting between the government and the fae. Aren’t we supposed to be . . . I don’t know . . . neutral?”

“Yes,” said Adam. “At least if we are to keep to the spirit of the bargain. But the pack isn’t attacking the fae, just trying to keep the humans safe—from all threats.” He didn’t sound happy. “If the fae don’t attack us, we won’t attack them—and that is the essence of our agreement.”

“How did you get maneuvered into splitting hairs that fine?” Sherwood asked.

“How did the pack get wrangled into Hauptman Security business?” I asked. Because it had been HS business that had kept him in late-night meetings recently, not pack business. There were pack members who worked for Adam’s company and more who could be called in to substitute if needed. But most of the pack had their own careers elsewhere, and that was how Adam liked it.

“Remind me to fire the head of my contracts department in New Mexico,” Adam told me. There was heat in his voice that made firing the better of two options for the person in question.

“Okay,” I said.

Adam shook off his anger and continued briskly. “A contract with a small government project gave the US government access, not to Hauptman Security, but to ‘Hauptman Security and all of its adjunct personnel’—which is a phrase that snuck into our government contracts about two years ago so it didn’t raise any flags.”

“The pack isn’t adjunct to Hauptman Security,” I said.

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” Adam agreed. “But on this ten-thousand-dollar contract, on page forty-eight, ‘adjunct personnel’ was defined as anyone under my aegis.”

Sherwood rocked back in his chair. “The pack.”

“So the rest of the pack is on guard duty?” I said.

“Protection,” Adam agreed. “This will be pretty high-level. The secretary of state, the vice president, the Senate majority leader, and a few other key people are all coming here with their staff to meet with a triumvirate of Gray Lords. They are trying to put together an agreement that will define the relationship of the fae to the human government of the United States that won’t lead to genocide.”

“Genocide of fae or humans?” asked Sherwood.

“Both,” I told him, because I could do that math. “Or either.”

“And they had to blackmail you into playing bodyguard?” Sherwood asked.

Adam gave him a wolf smile. “Funny that you noticed right off that it is a bad idea. It took me two days and a call to a friend who was fishing in Alaska at the time to convince the general of that.”

The friend was probably the retired military man—someone who’d known what Adam was—who had been in charge of hiring Adam (not Adam’s company, which was strictly security) over the years. I knew that Adam had done a lot of contract work for the government during the Cold War era. I was pretty sure that had included some assassinations, but Adam never talked about what he’d done. All of that had stopped by the time Adam and I had become more than acquaintances, so I didn’t know who his “friend” was.

Sherwood grunted. “That little contractual nudge took a lot of planning.” He said it with regrettable admiration.

“Why didn’t they just hire Hauptman Security?” I asked. “And ask if you could pull the pack into it?”

Adam grunted. “Some of the people in the government want a better guarantee than my word and a paycheck. Because I’m a monster.”

“Wow,” said Sherwood. “A blackmailed monster is just what I’d want guarding my back.”

“Insulting,” I said.

Adam gave me a wry grin. “Exactly. At any rate, we have ironed out a deal. Mercy, you will be in charge of orchestrating the meeting—where and when.” I gave him a horrified look, which he ignored. “I give you Sherwood and Zack as your muscle. The pack will do guard duty for the government and get paid royally for it. When this is done, I’ll get a better contracts lawyer.” He sighed. “Or go back to reading every damned contract myself, which is how I used to do it.”