In the end, I didn’t take a train. I found the station, right on the edge of where village turned into tight-packed city. As I was trying to figure out just how to jump on a train without anyone’s seeing me—pack magic could make people not pay attention to me only as long as I didn’t do anything too interesting—I realized that there was an easier ride to be had.
The small train station shared space with a bus terminal. There was, not ten feet from where I’d emerged from the tidy bushes surrounding the whole space, a bus with the luggage doors open on both sides. Even as I noticed it, attendants closed the doors on the far side.
I jumped in the near side and scrambled over bags and suitcases before dropping into an empty space and stillness. I lay there panting as quietly as I could until the doors closed. Five minutes later, the bus lumbered forward in a wave of diesel fumes, and I took a deep breath.
Safe.
Relief washed over me, and I put my head down. I slept.
—
I DREAMED OF ADAM.
I sprawled awkwardly over a chair shaped for a person in my coyote body, my muzzle on Adam’s lap. His strong hand rested on my back. I moved so I could see his face: he looked tired. I think we were on an airplane—which made no sense at all. But it was only an impression. Everything except for Adam was pretty vague in the way that dreams sometimes are.
“There you are,” he said. “What in . . . what did you get yourself into this time?”
Coyotes can’t talk.
“Mercy,” he said.
Sometimes I have been known to use the not-talk thing to my advantage. He sounded like he was mad at me. I was tired. The pads on the bottom of my feet, tough enough to run over the desert, had not fared so well running over blacktop all night. My shoulder hurt, my jaw hurt, my heart hurt. I was stuck in a luggage compartment without food. My stomach was pretty sure my throat had been cut.
I put my muzzle back on his lap and closed my eyes.
He was very still for a moment.
“Not doing so good, huh?” he said softly, running his hands over my sides gently before he touched both sides of my face in a caress that was both soothing and possessive. “Sorry. I’ve been fuc . . . very worried.” Adam doesn’t swear in front of women or children if he can help it—a product of a childhood in the fifties or abnormally good manners, take your pick.
He bent over me, put his head down on top of mine, and I heard him inhale as if he were breathing me in. “Are you okay?”
I wiggled a little closer to him, but I didn’t open my eyes.
Apparently that was enough of an answer, because he exhaled and relaxed. “All right, then,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I know.”
He sat up, but his hands stayed on me. “You just disappeared, sweetheart. We found the SUV and the stolen semi that hit it. Found your blood on the seat—that was rough, because, Mercy, it was a lot of blood. But we couldn’t find you. The gas station was deserted. We think the clerk belonged to the vampires. That they had been waiting for you to go there by yourself. It was so close to home, you’d feel safe—and that would give them a chance to act.
“We might have been at a dead end, but things really got interesting when we talked to Marsilia.”
I raised my head and looked at him, but he was staring at something I couldn’t see.
“She’d gotten an e-mail,” he told me. “Implying that you were being held to persuade her to present herself before the . . .” He stopped here. “I am informed that speaking his name or title might allow him to eavesdrop because we are speaking via a witch’s spell rather than our bond. Do you know who I mean?”
I nodded, disconcerted by the idea of a witch spell. Adam’s hands tightened painfully.
“Does he have you?” Adam asked urgently, and I shook my head.
“You got away? Where are you? Are you all right? Are you safe?” he asked.
I would have said something then. But I was in coyote form—and I didn’t have the faintest idea how to answer any of his questions.
His nostrils flared, and he frowned at me. “I smell diesel. I thought it was just you . . . but, Mercy, are you on a bus?” he asked.
But he was gone before I could answer, the quiet dream blown to bits by the abrupt sound of hissing brakes. The noise and rough jolting brought me back to the dark underbelly of the luggage compartment, which was a cold substitute for Adam’s lap. I stood up. My legs had trouble compensating for the wallow as the bus rolled over speed bumps, curbs, bodies, or something that lifted up one side, then the other a couple of times.
I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep. Not very long, I thought. I would have been stiffer if it had been more than a half hour or so—not long enough to be safe from the Lord of Night. I waited, and when the bus stopped, I readied myself.
When the luggage doors opened, I dashed out as quickly as I could. The bus attendant cried out as I ran by him, but this was a huge station, and I quickly lost myself among the buses and passengers towing luggage.
A man reading a book crossed my path, and I slowed down, walking at his heel for a dozen yards until the pack magic settled lightly around me and I became less interesting. I could feel the lessened pressure at the back of my neck as people quit looking at me. Pack magic would help, but I’d have to do my best to blend in because it was weak.
We moved past a bright yellow bus just as a woman reached up to close the cargo area but paused as something caught her attention. It was too good a chance to miss. I broke smoothly away from the man I’d been trailing and slipped unseen into the luggage compartment. I found a pair of big beige duffel bags and stretched out between them, just another beige lump to human eyes. The luggage-bay doors closed.
I stayed still until the bus was moving, then stayed still some more as it turned a corner and picked up speed. I had to stay still, or I was afraid I would lose my battle with panic.
I’d assumed that the Lord of Night had taken me to Yakima or Walla Walla. Both were within a reasonable travel distance of the Tri-Cities, and both had gently rolling hills and vineyards. When I’d been running my hardest to stay ahead of the werewolf, I hadn’t been paying attention to much beyond generalities.
But the voices at the bus station hadn’t been speaking English. They’d been speaking Italian.
I wasn’t in Yakima or Walla Walla; I wasn’t in Washington or even in the US. The Lord of Night had taken me to Italy, and that was the reason I couldn’t reach Adam or the pack through the various bonds I had to them as soon as I was free of Bonarata’s magic circle.
I wasn’t sure how far Italy was from my home, but my liberal arts education told me that the world was roughly twenty-five thousand miles around and that Italy was about a quarter of the world away. I called it six thousand miles, give or take a thousand miles.
I was in the belly of a bus in Italy, alone, naked, and penniless.
Also without a passport.
In a place that a coyote was likely to be noticed because coyotes aren’t exactly native to Europe.
I thought a little more and added “can’t speak the language” to my woes. I’d never traveled out of the country—except that summer road trip to Mexico with Char, my college roommate. Char spoke fluent Spanish, so my bits and pieces hadn’t made me completely helpless. I put my head down and felt sorry for myself for a long while.
Then I pulled on my big-girl pants (which were figurative at this point) and started dealing with the situation as it stood. In front of me and behind me was the solution to my nakedness problem, and I had no room to be squeamish.
I shifted back to my human self and started opening luggage.
It took me a while to find someone who was reasonably close to me in size. I didn’t want to strand her with not enough clothes, so I took the bare minimum. I’d found a notebook and pen in someone else’s duffel bag and left a note and the a
ddress and phone number of Adam’s business as well as a detailed list of what I’d taken from the suitcase—a copy of which I kept. I found a pair of tennis shoes that fit in another suitcase, along with twenty euros. There had been maybe two hundred euros in the suitcase, but my conscience, already pushed to the brink, could only deal with twenty. I left a note for her, too.
I had no idea how long this bus ride was going to be—though the luggage suggested that most people weren’t planning on a short trip. Even so, I hurried, so that I wouldn’t be caught in the middle of my theft.
I found an empty backpack—not a sturdy can-hold-all-your-college-textbooks kind of pack, more of an I-don’t-want-to-carry-a-purse-and-think-pink-lace-and-flowers-are-pretty pack. I thought it was pretty, too—if not really appropriate to anyone over the age of seven. But my coyote self could carry it, and it would hold the fruits of my heist job, so I took it.
Stealing was quick. Writing all the notes took a lot longer. I was tucking the last note in when I noticed an e-reader sticking out of a compartment in the suitcase I’d taken the shoes from.
I was pretty sure most e-readers had Internet capability, even old ones like this one. I added it to the list of things I owed the nice woman who was going to be short a pair of tennis shoes, too, when she arrived at her destination. I was sorry for it, but I’d make it up to her as soon as I could. If I could.
If I couldn’t, if I didn’t get myself out of this, Adam would know I would want these people compensated for the things I took.
I packed everything in the flowery backpack and pulled it into the far corner of the bus. Then I changed back into the coyote and curled up in the corner, the metal of the bus’s walls on either side of me.
I’d grown used to feeling safe again, ever since Adam and I had become a couple. Okay, vampires, trolls, and a host of other villains that ranged from terrifying to scary had tried to kill me on a fairly regular basis, but Adam had my back. I hadn’t realized how much I craved it until it was gone. Again.
I’d thought I was safe before. I’d left most of the supernatural behind me when I’d left the Marrok’s pack at sixteen. I’d gone to college, had decided that being a mechanic suited me better than teaching. For nearly ten years, I had lived in my trailer, had gone to work every day, and no one had tried to kill me. I’d felt like I didn’t need anyone at my back. Not even when my world had started to fill with the affairs of the supernatural community had I lost my ability to find a place of safety—a home.
But no one is really safe. Not ever. Afterward, after I picked up the pieces and glued them back together with a bit of hope and trust and fairy dust, I’d found another place to be home and safe.
I paused in momentary horror. Had I married Adam just so I could feel safe? The panic lasted only for a moment, because I knew better. I’d had hours and hours of counseling with a pretty awesome counselor. Part of it was to address some bad things that had happened, but part of it was so that I could choose Adam—because I chose him and not because I knew that anything that came after me would have to go through him.
But still . . . I had thought I was safe.
The Lord of Night had come to my home ground and taken me there, then hauled me to Italy as if the pack, as if all of my allies, were no obstacle at all. He’d extracted me as cleanly as if I’d hopped on his airplane—because no way had he brought me here on a commercial plane—of my own volition.
I’d had some time to think while I ran. My current version of why Bonarata had brought me here went like this: he’d wanted to bring me here, thinking that I was Marsilia’s, because the thought that Adam and the pack could be cooperating without her being in charge just never occurred to him. I was a piece on a chessboard he’d decided Marsilia was the queen of. He’d taken me, who Wulfe had told him was the most powerful of Marsilia’s associates, to show her how powerless she was. I don’t know what he’d have done if I were the werewolf he’d originally thought me. But his little pet werewolf was enough to make me wary. She’d smelled off, smelled sick—the kind of sick that made my coyote decide something wasn’t good to eat.
I had other versions of why Bonarata had stolen me—but none of them made sense, including that one. Bonarata was smarter than that; he had to be to have lived as long as he had.
I really was certain that Marsilia was involved somehow. There had been something about the way he’d looked at me when he told me he hadn’t wanted to kill Marsilia, so he hadn’t broken the bond I shared (supposedly) with her.
I shivered, though the bus wasn’t particularly cold and my summer fur coat could have protected me in the heaviest blizzard likely to fall in Lombardy.
He’d thought that I was bound to Marsilia.
I hated that the word for what the vampires did to their victims was the same word that described what was between Adam and me, between the pack and me.
My understanding, from the things I’d learned since Adam and I were bound as mates, was that all magical bonds are formed from the same sort of magic. Humans have those kinds of bonds, too—but theirs are softer and more fragile. Breakable.
Like most things, pack bonds and mate bonds could be twisted, but by their nature, they encouraged empathy because they are emotional links. They were bonds between equals—even the bond between the pack and its Alpha. The Alpha had a job to do, but it didn’t make him more important than the most submissive of the wolves in the pack. Adam was of the opinion that he was less important. We agreed to disagree.
The bond between a vampire and his victim (I say his because the vampire who owned me—and that was exactly the right word—was a him) put the vampire in the driver’s seat. The vampire could, if he so chose, make his pet do anything, feel anything. Whenever the vampire decided to, he could take away his victim’s free will—and the victim might not even know.
The Kiss doesn’t always work. Stefan told me that it was almost impossible to take a werewolf the way they could take humans because of the pack bonds. That Bonarata had succeeded in doing so had added to his legend. There were people who were difficult to break. But given time, a strong vampire could control most any human he wanted to.
Stefan told me he didn’t know if that was true between us—but that he would not test it. I trusted Stefan.
Even so, Stefan owned me. He had saved my life by claiming me, and I’d agreed to it. But I’d thought it was broken, gone. Thought my ties to Adam and the pack had erased it, because Stefan had wanted me to believe it.
Apparently, because I’d taken the bond willingly, it wasn’t something Stefan could break even if he wanted to. Knowing Stefan as I did, I was willing to believe that.
The Lord of Night had tried to break it and failed. Or so he said.
My heartbeat picked up, and my mouth dried as I opened it and panted in fear. Of course he would lie. He lied a lot. I couldn’t remember now if I’d been watching for lies while he spoke of the bond I shared with a vampire. I’d been paying attention to the jealousy he’d displayed. Had he lied? Was he, even now, in my head, waiting to give me orders?
To take me from Marsilia would have been a better lesson than to have his wolf kill me trying to escape. I had only his word that he hadn’t done it.
Hadn’t I done what he wanted when I escaped? I’d known he wanted me to try it. What if he hadn’t wanted me to die at the fangs of his pet werewolf as I’d first thought? What—what if this was his plan? That I’d escape, think I was free, get back to the pack—and destroy them because I belonged to Bonarata. That story, unfortunately, made better sense than some sort of unrequited jealousy as a motivation.
Had Bonarata broken the tie between Stefan and me? Had he been able to do something that Stefan couldn’t? Was I a slave of the Lord of Night?
Since learning it still existed, I had never tested the bond between Stefan and me. Just the thought of that tie made me wake up in a cold-blooded sweat, understanding exa
ctly how a trapped wolf could chew off a paw to escape.
The bus continued to rumble at a consistent speed, unimpressed by my panic. I needed to find the bond between Stefan and me and make sure Bonarata hadn’t done something to it—something that would turn me into his creature.
I didn’t even really know how to look. But even as I thought that—I knew I had a stepping-off place. After Adam brought me into the pack bonds, I’d had a bad incident because a couple of the members of the pack were able to manipulate me through them. After that, Adam taught me how to deal with pack magic and the bonds. Part of that process was learning to “see” the bonds in my head.
I closed my eyes and, after a fairly tough and lengthy struggle, calmed down enough to find the light meditative state Adam had taught me to help me negotiate the pack bonds—as well as the mate bond between him and me.
Eventually, I stood on the battered stage of my old high school—the one in Portland. The floor was lit by a single spotlight, the one just over the control booth that sat in the middle of the balcony seats. I knew it was there, but, caught in the spotlight’s glare, I couldn’t see it.
The boards under my feet had been polished at one time, but years of student productions, of rolling the risers and the piano in and out, had left the old floor scarred and rough under my bare feet. Though I was wearing my coyote shape in real life, here in my mind, I was looking for human things, so I was in my human shape, naked, because naked made me feel vulnerable, and I couldn’t seem to find the safe space I needed to allow me to go clothed.
Darkness gathered at the edges of the stage and covered the auditorium in shadows that my eyes couldn’t penetrate. But I wasn’t here to explore my memory of high school.
I looked down at myself and patted the tattoo on my belly for a minute. There was nothing magical about the tattoo. It was just a paw print—a coyote paw print no matter what Adam said. But it centered me—it was at the center of me, a symbol of the coyote within. My fingers came down for the hundredth or two hundredth time—and hit a thick rope that wrapped all the way around me.