Gary stared intently at him for a moment, then shrugged, letting the tension in his body slide away. “I guess it doesn’t matter to me. I could tell you that I got drunk, stole a car—though I’m pretty sure that was Coyote, but I was drunk, so who knows. Then I stole four cases of two-hundred-dollar Scotch—I’m pretty sure that might have been Coyote, too, but all I remember is watching him opening one of the bottles. Finally, I parked the car in front of the police station and passed out in the backseat with all but one of the bottles of Scotch until the police found me the next morning. That I am sure was Coyote. If I told you all of that, it would be true.”
He looked at Kyle, his eyes narrowed in a way that told me his head was still hurting. “However, the real reason I went to prison was because a few months before I woke up in front of the police station, I slept with the wife of the man who was later my state-appointed lawyer. I didn’t know that he knew I slept with his wife until after I was serving my sentence, when another of his clients was happy to tell me.” Gary closed his eyes. “That the car we stole was a police car didn’t help.”
Gary laughed, winced, then said, “The funny part is that I had not had a drink of alcohol since I went on a five-day bender in 1917 and woke up to find I’d volunteered for the army.” He smiled and moved his arm back over his eyes. “It’s not safe, you see, to get drunk when Coyote might be watching.”
“He’s telling the truth,” I said, after it became obvious that Gary was through talking.
“And you escaped because you knew that we were about to get hit with some kind of volcano god when we were expecting Mr. Flores the stalker,” Kyle said.
Gary grunted. “I didn’t know about Mr. Flores. All I knew was that Mercy was trying to get an artifact back from Coyote. But then somehow this volcano manitou was going to kill someone, and it was connected to Mercy.” He looked at me and then away. “And Mercy was my sister.”
Kyle rubbed his face, drew in a breath, and looked at the curtain covering the window. Then he said, with a sigh, “Plausible deniability, eh?”
“If you didn’t know Gary had escaped from prison, you couldn’t be held responsible,” I said. “Warren was pretty mad at us for putting you into a situation that could hurt you like that. Adam told him that he’d take care of you and see that you wouldn’t get hurt.”
“And if you go with the pack to deal with Guayota,” Kyle said to Gary, “Warren survives.”
Gary shook his head very slowly, like it hurt. “Not how it works. All I know is that if I don’t go, they all die. Maybe if I go, we all of us die much more horribly than they would have otherwise.” He moved his arm so he could see Kyle’s face and grimaced. “Yes. I recognize that expression. Anyone who deals with Coyote wears that expression eventually. And no, I don’t know why my going makes a difference.”
Kyle stretched his neck to relieve tension and gave a miserable half laugh. “I suppose if Warren’s possible death makes me feel like this, I should give him the benefit of the doubt, right?”
“People make mistakes,” I said. “Even people we love.”
“Hell of it is, I’m not sure where the mistake was,” said Kyle.
“Not killing Coyote the first time I saw him,” said Gary. “Not that he’d have stayed dead, but I think the experience might have made the rest of my life more bearable.”
“Kyle,” I said. “I love you like a brother. Go out and make up with Warren before he heads out to try to get himself killed.”
Christy made dinner with Lucia’s and Darryl’s help: baked herb-and-flour-encrusted stuffed chicken. I ate it and had seconds. It was very good—and right now I was too scared to be jealous.
Honey didn’t have a table big enough to seat the whole pack—and Adam had called the whole pack together. Samuel and Ariana showed up toward the end of dinner.
Elizaveta could have made a spell to make one werewolf resistant to Guayota’s elemental fire magic—her term, not mine—but she would have needed a piece of his hair or fingernails. If I’d stuck Guayota’s finger in my pocket, she could have used that, but I didn’t think we’d have much luck getting it back from the police.
Ariana said she could help. With fireproofing, not finger-stealing.
We all settled down in the big upstairs room to see what she had to offer. She and Samuel stood in front of the big-screen TV.
Dr. Samuel Cornick was tall, compelling but not handsome, and when I was sixteen, I’d thought he was the love of my life. He’d thought I was someone who might be able to give him children that lived. It was a relationship that was doomed to make neither of us happy, and his father, the Marrok, had seen it before we’d fully committed tragedy and so had sent me away. For a long time, I’d compared every man I met to Samuel—Adam was the only one who had stood up to the comparison.
Samuel’s mate, Ariana, stood in his shadow. Where he drew the eye, even in a crowded room, she could go unnoticed. Her hair was blond, her eyes gray, her skin clear, and her entire aspect unremarkable. But that was a fae thing. Being too beautiful or too ugly made someone interesting, and mostly, the fae would rather go unnoticed. I’d seen what she really looked like under her glamour, and she was spectacularly beautiful.
“Okay,” she said when everyone was in the room. She held Samuel’s hand with white-knuckled strength because she was afraid of us, all of us. To say she had a canine phobia was a masterly understatement. “I command earth, air, fire, and water—though not as well as I once did. That I command fire means that I can protect you, some of you, from this demon-god. I don’t know how many I can spell. I think it unlikely that I can do more than ten, but probably at least five. Adam, you should pick the ones you need to take with you in order of the most useful in battle.”
Adam nodded and stood up, but before he could speak, Samuel said, “I’m going, and she’s already tried out the spell on me.”
Adam gave him a look.
“This is not my pack,” Samuel said to Adam’s unspoken comment. “But Mercy is part of my family by my choice, and that makes you, by extension, my brother by marriage. I’m going. You don’t get a choice.”
So the fear I’d seen in Ariana’s eyes hadn’t just been because she was in a roomful of werewolves.
Adam said, “I would not have asked, but I’m very glad to have you on our side.”
Then he looked around the room, his gaze touching each of us as he spoke. “Guayota is our enemy. He is not our enemy because he hurt one of our own, though he has. He is not our enemy because he violates our territory, though that is also true. He is not our enemy because he attacked my mate. He is not even our enemy because he is evil. He is our enemy because he kills those who cannot protect themselves against him. Because he will not stop until someone stops him.”
He paused and took a deep breath. “I have seen him fight—and so have you. I am not sure this is a fight we can win. But there is one thing I do know, and that is that we will not, we cannot, wait around until he kills another innocent. We might die fighting him, but if we do not try and stop him, we are already defeated.”
The room was silent and at the same time it echoed with the power of his words.
He looked at Darryl. “We don’t always see things the same way, but you have always put the pack first and foremost. I have fought Guayota, and I tell you that without Tad’s help, he would have defeated me. Ariana can make us invulnerable to his heat—but you saw the video. I don’t know that he can be killed, or if he can, how it might be done. I have spoken to Bran, and if we fail here tonight, then he will send Charles. But Guayota invaded my territory. This is my fight. You should also know that Ariana told me what she could and could not do, and I’ve had time to think. Darryl, I need you to protect the pack if this fight doesn’t go well.”
He looked around at the whole room, and we were all silent, even Lucia, Jesse, and Christy, who were not pack, even Darryl, who wanted to protest. We were silent because he wanted us to be so, and he was the Alpha. His eyes lingered on mine, and if there was grief in them, I think it was only our mating bond that let me see it. He didn’t think he was going to survive this—or he’d have taken Darryl with him.
“I will take the walker Gary Laughingdog, who brings a prophecy that he must come,” Adam said into the silence. “Then myself. The rest of you are volunteers. Feel free to say no because the estimate that Ariana gave me was six wolves. If you would rather not die tonight, or rather wait until another night, there is no shame. Warren?”
Warren drawled his “Yes, boss” without hesitation.
The wolves stirred and began to howl. Emerging from human throats, it was not as pure or carrying as it would have been out of the wolves, but the emotion was the same. There was respect and a celebration of his bravery in accepting and in the honor of being chosen to fight beside his Alpha.
It took Warren entirely by surprise. He grabbed Kyle’s hand and held on as his eyes brightened with tears that threatened to spill over.
Warren had spent most of his very long life alone, when wolves are meant to live in packs. I’d first met him while he worked at a gas station near here. I’d introduced him to Adam—who I resented at the time but couldn’t help but respect. As Gary had said, Adam was what an Alpha should be, and I’d known it. Adam had welcomed Warren into the pack, but the pack had taken him in with mixed feelings.
Their support told him that there were no mixed feelings left. Not at this moment.
When the howl faded, Adam said, “Honey?”
There was another stir in the pack; this time it was more shock than approval. Women didn’t fight, not in traditional packs. Honey was now unmated, which should have left her rank at the lowest of the pack, even below Zack, our new submissive. But Honey wasn’t a submissive wolf, not even close.
Honey didn’t need their approval. She raised her chin, looked at me—because Adam’s call had as much to do with me as it did with the pack. She’d resented it when I had refused to leave the traditional relegation of women alone. She’d liked that being married to Peter meant she was low-ranking.