“Friendship?” I said.

“Not all relationships look alike,” he said.

“Indeed,” I agreed. “Are we friends?” I probably should have waited until I’d had a good night’s sleep before calling him, I thought. That was not a safe question.

He laughed. “Perhaps tentative allies? Definitions are not always useful, are they? Mercedes, thank you for dealing with the smoke weaver. We will open our gates at dawn and allow our people to go about their business.”

He had thanked me. I wasn’t sure what that meant.

“Good,” I said.

I called Marsilia next, but she did not pick up the phone. Five minutes later she called Adam.

He told her basically the same story I’d just conveyed to Beauclaire—edited for the audience.

“Ah, that explains Stefan’s sudden improvement,” she told him. “We despaired of his survival the past few nights, but he held on.”

I remembered how bad he had been when I’d seen him in my otherness. “Can we go see him?”

She heard me. “No. He wouldn’t want you to see him this way. I will call you as soon as he is better—or should he worsen again.”

And I had to be satisfied with that.

Like Stefan, Ben didn’t just step back into who he had been before the weaver had taken him. Being in someone else’s power was pretty much a reliving of his worst nightmare. He had four weeks of vacation time built up at work, and he took those and stayed with us.

The goblins found Harolford’s body in a shallow grave near the river. Dead from a silver bullet wound, presumably Libby’s. I asked, but all of the witnesses were pretty sure that Fiona could not have known who it was that shot him.

The goblins did not bring us the body. They texted photos to Adam’s phone. When Adam asked what they’d done with it, Larry the goblin king laughed and said, “Finders keepers,” before he disconnected.

Fiona was still a problem.

We stayed on high alert and bunked up for the three days following the banishing of the smoke weaver. But when Charles called with news that Fiona had been sighted in Wichita, Adam told everyone to go back to normal.

“People can only stay alert for so long,” he told me. “And she is only one werewolf.”

“Charles is only one werewolf,” I told him, and he laughed.

Adam was doing … “better” was the wrong word. More stable was probably closer to the answer. There had been no further appearances of the monster, and when the moon hunt came, Adam wore his wolf’s form just as he usually did.

But I had seen his wolf fading, and I worried. The pack was uneasy, though no violence broke out. Adam still would not open our bond. But he put back on some of the weight he had lost and he did not seem to be getting worse, so I bided my time. I had a date circled on the calendar—and if matters did not change, I was going to have another conversation with Bran.

A month went by. Jesse started school and began looking for an apartment. Aiden started school, too.

We enrolled him in sixth grade, which was a compromise. He would look younger than most of his schoolmates but not so much so as to be an outcast. Tutoring by Jesse and the pack had brought his math skills up to high school level, but his reading skills were below sixth-grade level. The translation spell did not help him read or write in English.

We had none of the paperwork for him, but Adam and I sat down with the school district superintendent and told him the whole story, a heavily edited version of the whole story. We didn’t tell him about the fire, just that we’d found Aiden in Underhill, where he’d been trapped for a very long time. We didn’t tell him that Aiden could burn the school down if he wanted to. I figured that most kids in sixth grade could burn down a school if they wanted to anyway—they would just have to work a little harder at it than Aiden would.

The superintendent agreed that the circumstances were unusual and gave us a paperwork path to follow that would let Aiden start school. We managed to get it done (thanks to Kyle, who knew family law and could make it dance to his tune), and Aiden made it to the first day.

There were a few rough patches the first month of school, but Aiden finally settled in with a group of computer gamers. He still had those moments that reminded me that he was centuries older than he appeared, but mostly he looked happy.

I didn’t visit Stefan, but he called me twice and sounded nearly himself the second time. He said that the hope I’d given him was still helping him cope. I didn’t know what to say to that.

“I didn’t want to lose you,” I said, finally.

“Thank you,” he’d said. And he’d disconnected shortly thereafter.

The pack killed a pair of ghouls who had tried to settle in near Lourdes Medical Center in Pasco. Apparently hospitals are a favorite hunting ground of ghouls. We helped Marsilia roust a couple of itinerant vampires who tried to set up shop in West Richland. Renny started coming to Sunday breakfasts with Mary Jo and struck up an unlikely friendship with Ben, our candidate for wolf most likely to end up in jail. Anna’s ghost waved at me whenever I drove past my old place. I didn’t wave back.

Life happened. And we forgot to worry about Fiona.

14

I COULDN’T SLEEP.

A heavy arm wrapped around my shoulders.

“Feeling restless?” The growl in Adam’s voice made my toes curl—they knew what that roughness meant and they liked it.

So did I.

“Yes,” I answered, my own voice a purr.

“I can help with that,” he promised. And boy did he.

His efforts were above and beyond to the point that when his phone rang in the middle of the night, I only woke up long enough to hear a bit of the conversation.

“—false alarm, probably, sir, cameras don’ t—”

There was no stress in Adam’s employee’s voice and it didn’t sound urgent, so I went back to sleep.

I woke up when Adam patted my butt. I cracked my eye open suspiciously and he laughed.

“Not waking you up for that again—not that it wasn’t fun. But we have some equipment problems. The alarms at the garage are going off again, though the cameras aren’t showing anything.”

The system at my garage had been developing quirks over the last couple of weeks. His IT people couldn’t run it down closer than “an intermittent glitch.” Adam had finally ordered a whole new system, but it wouldn’t be in for a couple of weeks.

“I’m going to check in on that, then drive out to work and give my people a surprise visit.” He did those to keep his people on their toes. And to let them know that he wasn’t asking them to do anything he wouldn’t do—because on his surprise visits, he’d sometimes pick a random pair of guards and do their patrols with them. Sure enough he continued, “I’ll be out most of the day. I have a couple of new people to torment.”

I grunted at him.

“Why don’t you sleep in this morning?” he said.

“How is it that you are this cheerful?” I asked him plaintively. “You didn’t get any more sleep than I did.”

“I am male,” he said, and wiggled his eyebrows like the villain from a B horror movie. “Sex is better than sleep.”