“What are you thinking?” I asked. “What idiot would put me in charge of a government meeting? I can’t organize a pack barbecue without Kyle. Why isn’t someone else doing it? Marsilia? Or one of the fae? Or one of the government people? I bet they do this all the time.”

“Kyle is a good idea,” said Adam, ignoring my objections. “I’ll see if he will consent to help us out. I can bill the government for him.” It sounded as though that last would make Adam very happy.

“Adam,” I said. “Why am I elected?”

“Because,” said Adam patiently, “you put us in charge of the TriCities, Mercy. Our pack. That means the fae will only meet with the government if our pack hosts the meeting. We need a representative of our pack to be an intermediary between the government and the fae. It’s lucky that the fae are willing to accept you.”

Sherwood, watching me, laughed. “Don’t worry, Mercy. We won’t actually have to do anything difficult. We’re just glorified messengers. All the decisions will be made by the government and the fae.”

I swallowed. It didn’t sound like an easy job. Adam’s hand cupped the back of my head.

“I believe in you, little coyote,” he whispered into my ear.

I gave him an annoyed huff. “I’m not going to start reciting ‘I think I can, I think I can’ anytime real soon now.”

Adam laughed and straightened back up. This time, his hand came off my shoulder. I missed it.

“I have every confidence that you could do just fine if we put you in charge of everything,” he told me. “But Sherwood is right. It is mostly a ceremonial position with a lot of running around. The government will make their own arrangements for lodging and”—he grimaced—“security. As will the fae. Mostly you will be in charge of finding a venue that’s acceptable to everyone. And, once we have the dates, you’ll reserve the meeting place, show up on time, and give a very short speech that probably both the fae and the government will insist on editing.”

“How will this play with the fae?” I asked. “Not my bit in this. I mean, really, how will they think about the pack playing security for the government? Not just how we’re going to spin it. We are supposed to be a neutral party, right?”

“I checked with Beauclaire,” Adam said. “Not all of my meetings have been with the government. He thinks we can squeak by.”

Beauclaire was a Gray Lord, one we had a working relationship with. As close to a working relationship as you could have with someone who, I had reason to believe, could raise the sea and bring down mountains.

“Whatever the public thinks,” I said, “the fae know that the only reason our compact works is because the fae want it to work. We don’t have the horsepower to make a real stand against the whole might of the fae. Or, probably, even one of the Gray Lords. Not without the support of the Marrok.”

“Which they don’t know that we have,” said Sherwood.

“Which we don’t have,” I said gently.

“He loves you,” Sherwood said, his voice certain.

I nodded. “He does.” Bran had more than demonstrated that he thought of me as a daughter. “But he loves the werewolves more. He has fought for centuries for them.” I sought for words and found them in an unexpected place. “To give them ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ He can’t help us without risking that.”

“He would risk the werewolves for you,” Adam said.

He had risked everything for me. That knowledge had healed a wound going back to when he had driven me from his pack, from the only home I’d ever known, when I was sixteen. Bran had not abandoned me.

But that was a dangerous secret. Only a few people knew what Bran had done, and we needed to keep it that way. The fae especially couldn’t know that Bran still felt responsible for me. They were a feudal society, for the most part. If they thought that our ties with Bran were still in place, then they would look upon our treaty with them as a treaty with all of the werewolves.

Our treaty with the fae had to stay small, only our territory, only our pack. That meant that Sherwood and the rest of the pack needed to believe we were on our own, too.

“Bran won’t help us,” I said firmly, believing it. Bran wouldn’t help us because he wouldn’t need to. “And that keeps him, and us, out of a power struggle between werewolf and fae that could escalate into a war that everyone loses. If we screw up here, the fae won’t go after the rest of the werewolves on the planet for it. Our separation from the other packs in North America makes everyone safer.”

Sherwood made a noise, but then said, “Therefore we don’t have the support of the Marrok. We only have ourselves to count on.”

It didn’t smell like he thought he was lying, precisely. That “therefore” was a wiggle word. He believed that the Marrok would help us if needed, but he understood that it would be a bad thing if other people thought so, too.

“And a treaty with the fae, in which they agree to abide by our rules within the bounds of our territory,” said Adam. “Beauclaire understood that guarding the humans is the business of my security firm, which has retained most of the members of my pack. He agrees that Mercy is acceptable to act as our liaison and our ringmaster. Since any fae who harms a human here is breaking the agreement the fae have signed, we, the pack, are not being put into a position where our honor would be compromised. Instead, Beauclaire assures me, I am a good businessman and dealmaker for getting the government to pay me to do something that we are already bound, by our word to the fae, to do anyway.”

Adam sounded a little bemused. I didn’t blame him. Being coerced didn’t sound like a smart business decision to me. But the fae had a twisted view of a lot of things.

“Are you charging them more, since they are taking not just your regular security detail but also most of the pack?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said. “I also added a premium for being a bunch of jack . . . rabbits.”

“You can say ‘jackass’ in front of me,” said Sherwood, batting his eyelashes.

“You swear in front of my wife again,” purred Adam, “and we’ll discuss what I will say in front of you.”

Sometimes I forgot how old my mate was. In most ways he was thoroughly modern. But he always opened the door for me, pulled out my chair at restaurants—and avoided swearing in front of me. None of which I minded.

Sherwood slid to the front of the couch—so he could get out of it in a hurry—and it wasn’t to run away. The events of this morning had left both werewolves on edge. It wasn’t beyond the pair of them to engage in what Adam liked to call “a good tussle” to blow off steam.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Does that mean that the government can force the pack to work for them whenever they want to?”

Adam said, “Point to you. That’s what the contract says, and it says it with no out date. However, I told them I would give in this one time—because of the importance of these negotiations. But I also told them that I’d take them to court to fight that contract if they didn’t add an addendum limiting them to this one time.”

“Slippery slope giving in to them at all,” said Sherwood.

“You make sure to fire that contract lawyer,” I told Adam. “Because the real problem if this came to a court battle isn’t privacy for the government; it’s making the fae think that we won’t keep our word.”

Adam nodded tiredly. “And if the government ever figures that out, it might give them the idea that if they want to get the best of us, they just need to go to Los Alamos, talk to one of my business directors, and get them to sign off on a contract with an obscure and useful clause.”

He took a breath and let it out. “The government, in the embodiment of Piotrowski, is anxious to move while the fae are willing to meet. It wasn’t in their interest to fight me. So I got more money and an addendum to that contract that ends any obligation my pack has to the government directly after the meeting is held. It isn’t always a bad thing that the government doesn’t know the fae as well as they might. As well as we do.”

We all fell silent, contemplating the complexities of a close personal relationship with the fae.

Finally, Adam slapped his hands together and dusted them. “But that’s a problem for another day. I think we have sufficient problems at hand.”

“Right?” I said. “How many of you think that the attack on Elizaveta has something to do with this meeting?”

We all raised our hands, including Adam.

“That goblin this morning could have been involved, too,” I said. “He told us that ‘she’ told him that he could come here, that we would keep him safe from the authorities—or words to that effect.”

“Checking our response time?” asked Sherwood.

I yawned. “Or exhausting our resources.”

“Or we are jumping to unwarranted conclusions,” cautioned Adam. “Getting from ‘she’ to ‘a witch’ to ‘the witches who attacked Elizaveta’s family’ is a leap of Olympian scale. And adding that this meeting has nothing to do with witches at all . . . and yet.”

“Right?” I said.

“Coincidences sometimes happen,” Sherwood said heavily. “But when they happen around witches, they aren’t usually coincidences.”

* * *