I blinked back tears at the wrongness of that.
“Some sacrifices are worth more than others,” said Gary.
Adam still didn’t look at Gary, but he nodded. “Whatever tore up that bedroom was a lot more lethal than the dog you shot. Bigger.”
“They are shapeshifters like Guayota.” It wasn’t a guess. I’d seen the size of the claws on the walls.
“There is probably no way to get Joel back,” Adam said.
I heard the guilt in Adam’s voice and knew that this was the issue at hand. I narrowed my eyes at him. I could argue all night about why he shouldn’t feel guilty about Joel and how we didn’t know enough about Guayota to know that Joel was lost. We had a lot of alternatives to explore before we gave up. But sometimes taking another tack worked better.
“If I hadn’t killed the male tibicena, then he wouldn’t have needed a replacement. If I hadn’t gone to talk to Lucia, maybe he wouldn’t have tracked down Joel.” Unless he had some way of finding the people who were tied to the Canary Islands.
“If you folks are done with me,” Gary said, “I think I’ll get going.”
Adam glanced at him. “You wait a moment.” To me he said, “You know it isn’t your fault.”
“I know it,” I agreed. “But if we’re accepting blame, I think that I’m closer to the cause than you are.”
He grunted irritably. “Fine.”
“Fine.”
Adam took a deep breath, and I could sense the cloak of civilization that he pulled over the beast who wanted to kill something, anything, because Adam and his wolf were united in their dedication to justice, and its defeat could send them off in a rage. He took a second breath, and the mantle settled more firmly in place.
To Gary he said, “You have been very helpful. Of course you can leave whenever you wish. Do you have a place to go?”
Gary spread his arms and shook his head. “I’m fine, man. I’m used to going my own way. Don’t take offense, but trouble is looking for the pair of you, and I’d rather be a long ways away.”
“Stay here for the night.” Adam looked tired. It wasn’t the time—it wasn’t much past midnight—it was all the dead dogs, the guilt he shouldn’t feel, and the effort of controlling himself. “We’ll get you money and maybe a ride out of here in the morning. On the run is tough. Take shelter when you can find it.”
“You don’t want me here,” said Gary. “You’ve got trouble, and I’ll just bring you more.”
“We have pizza coming in about fifteen minutes,” Honey said briskly, returning to the kitchen on the heels of Gary’s words. She’d probably heard Adam, too. “Eat. Stay the night—and then no one will stop you from running as far and as fast as you want.”
“I’m not a coward,” he said defensively. “Just prudent.”
He hadn’t cared what Adam and I thought of him.
Honey’s eyebrows rose. “I never said you were. I also don’t think you are stupid. Eat. Sleep. Run. Works better in that order because you can run faster on a full stomach and a real night’s sleep.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll leave tomorrow, thank you.”
It had been Honey, I thought, who had made him decide to stay. She was too smart not to see it, but she chose to ignore him.
Instead, she spoke to Adam. “Warren told us about what happened at Mercy’s garage tonight, and we’ve watched the video.” She looked at me and smiled but continued to talk to Adam. “When your security man brought the disc of Mercy’s fight with Guayota for you here, I thought it would be useful for all of us to see what we’re facing. I’ve got it running upstairs if you want to watch it again.”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “I watched enough of it while it was happening. Tomorrow is soon enough to see it again for me.”
Honey looked at me but spoke to Adam. “For a fragile almost human, she did well.”
“Any fight you live through is a fight well fought,” said Gary. “That said, I might wander upstairs and see what it is I’m running from.” There was a faint bitterness in his tone, and Honey looked at him. He raised both hands in surrender and grinned. “Tomorrow. Running from tomorrow. Tonight, I’m in the mood for a movie.” He turned around, winking at me along the way, and headed toward the stairway, almost bumping into Christy, who was just coming into the kitchen.
“Hey, pretty lady,” he said. He hesitated, but when she didn’t acknowledge him in any way, he just grinned and kept going.
Christy went right for Adam as if none of the rest of us were there.
“This is your fault,” she said viciously. “I felt so horrible, bringing my troubles here, and it was your fault.”
“Careful,” I murmured, but she didn’t pay any attention to me—which was foolish of her.
“I should have known when Troy was killed.” It took me a second to figure out who Troy was, I’d never heard the name of her boyfriend who’d been killed. “The only time bodies start appearing around me is when there are werewolves involved,” she continued.
“Juan Flores isn’t a werewolf,” I said, but again I spoke quietly, and she didn’t appear to have heard me.
Adam didn’t say anything. He took a deep breath and just—accepted what she said. It was the first time I’d ever seen a real fight between them. Watching him as she spewed guilt all over him, I realized that he enjoyed our fights almost as much as I did. When we fought, he roared and stalked and fought back. He didn’t let his face go blank and wait to be hit again. Being willing to accept responsibility for the well-being of others was part of being Alpha, part of who Adam was, and she was very, very good at using that against him.
Tears leaked artfully down her face. “I tried. I tried, then I had to run. But I can’t get away from you, can’t get away from the monsters. They follow me wherever I go, and it is your fault.”
Adam wasn’t going to defend himself. Honey wrapped her arms around her stomach and turned away. Honey believed herself to be one of the monsters, too, and so Christy’s venom spread over Honey as well.
Enough.
“Adam didn’t make you go sleep with some complete stranger because he was handsome and rich,” I said coolly, but this time at full volume. There wasn’t a wolf in the house who hadn’t heard Christy, so they could listen to me, too.
“Stay out of this,” she snapped at me, wiping futilely at her cheeks. “This isn’t your business.”
“When you blamed Adam, whose only fault that I can see is that he has poor taste in wives, you made it my business,” I told her.
Honey cleared her throat. “You do know you are one of his wives, right?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Happily, he doesn’t know how bad off he is with me—and I intend that he never will.”
Life came back into Adam’s eyes with a wicked glint, and I saw a hint of his dimple. Better, I thought, better.
Christy knew she’d lost control of the scene. Her eyes narrowed at me, and she lost the tears. “Juan came after me because of Adam.”
“You slept with a complete stranger,” I said. “Not Adam’s fault you”—Jesse had come down the stairs, with Ben and Darryl trailing behind her, so I didn’t call Christy a slut—“made a poor choice.”
“He was a friend of my best friend,” she said. “Rich, charming, and handsome, he wasn’t a ‘complete stranger.’ I had no way to tell that he was a monster.”
“You didn’t know enough about him for Warren to find him. You didn’t know where he lived, what country he was from. I bet you didn’t even check to see if he was married or not before you chased after him. How long did you know him before you hopped into bed with him? An hour?”
It probably wasn’t fair to use what Jesse had told me about her mother’s dating habits against Christy, but she hadn’t been playing fair, either. The tears had been cheating, and when she’d realized just how many of the pack had started to filter into the kitchen behind her, she would doubtless use them again.
“He approached me,” she said defens
ively—not to mention falsely.
“Are you stupid? How long did you live with the wolves?” I asked her incredulously. “You do know that most of the people in this room can tell that you are lying, right?”
Stupid. She wasn’t stupid, just self-absorbed and unwise. She didn’t like people thinking badly of her, so she lied.
I stalked away from her, incensed that most of me wanted to play fair instead of just ripping her to shreds the way she’d ripped into Adam. It felt disloyal to Adam. It felt like I might be letting her manipulate me into feeling sorry for her.
As I turned back toward Christy, I saw Jesse standing a little behind her. Jesse was Christy’s daughter, and I wouldn’t do anything to hurt Jesse. With a good reason not to destroy my enemy, I paced back until I was face-to-face with Christy again.
“Look.” I tried to keep my voice gentle. “No one cares if you sleep with a football team, none of whom you know and all of whom are half your age.” I repeated it so she could hear the truth in my words. “We don’t care.”
Christy went pale in genuine hurt, making me reexamine what I’d just said.
“That doesn’t mean that we don’t care if one of them hurts you. That’s another matter entirely. Call us, and we’ll go take care of it. But you have to quit flinging blame around.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” she said, quietly, believing it. But then she aimed her venom at me and increased the volume. “Not my fault. It wasn’t.”
“Juan came after you because you slept with him, then you ran,” I told her, but then I started thinking about what that meant. “If you had waited and told him you weren’t interested, he might have left you alone.” I worked through the germ of the idea. “If he’d been leaving bodies everywhere he went, Warren would have figured it out. But there weren’t bodies, there weren’t fires until you ran.” I knew there hadn’t been bodies, because Warren had looked for bodies left the same way as his victims here in the Tri-Cities. Why hadn’t there been any other bodies? “That’s not your fault,” I told her, “but it is interesting.”
She stared at me, her fists clenched.
“Had your friend slept with him before?” I asked.
Christy was competitive. I knew, because Jesse talked to me, that Christy had slept with her best friend’s husband just to prove that she could. Maybe she’d done the same thing with her best friend’s lover, assuming that Flores had been her friend’s lover. I didn’t care. I just needed to know if Flores had slept with women other than Christy.
Christy didn’t answer, but her clear skin flushed pink, telling me I’d hit the mark. All the marks.
“He didn’t stalk her?”
“No,” she whispered. “He didn’t stalk her. One night, and he was done with her. She was pretty bitter about it. But she doesn’t have an ex-husband who is a werewolf.”
Guayota hadn’t sounded like he cared if Adam was a werewolf, he sounded like he wanted Christy back. Why stalk Christy and not her friend? What was different about Christy?
The question rang in my head while I answered the nasty venom in her last sentence. “The only thing Adam has to do with this is that you bragged about being an Alpha werewolf’s ex-wife to catch Juan’s attention.” Juan had known that Adam was a werewolf and that he was Christy’s ex-husband. Could have been that he’d researched it, but there was a hint of competitiveness in the way he’d confronted Adam. The kind of competitiveness that happens when a man’s lover brags about a previous lover.
She didn’t answer me, so I knew that my shot in the dark was right that time, too.
“This guy has nothing to do with werewolves,” I told her. Guayota hadn’t cared that Adam was a werewolf, hadn’t cared about Adam, really, except that he stood between Christy and Guayota and that he had been Christy’s husband. “Congratulations, Christy. You just met one of the weird things in the world that don’t fit neatly into the fae or werewolf category.”
“Weird like you,” said Christy.
“Well, yes,” I agreed. “I thought that went without saying. Weird things like me.”
“What are you, exactly?”
I hadn’t realized she didn’t know, but I wasn’t going to let her change the direction of the conversation. Not when I’d been getting some interesting information about Guayota, and not while Christy was still trying to make the situation be someone else’s, be Adam’s, fault.
“This isn’t about me,” I said. “Ask me some other time, and I’ll tell you. So you got Juan’s attention, and maybe because you know to look for odd things and don’t discount them the way someone who hadn’t been married to a werewolf might, you realized he wasn’t just some rich guy on the make, not just some guy at all. He scared you—but not because he was so possessive. He scared you the same way Adam scared you. If Juan Flores had been exactly what he presented himself as—a bored young businessman not opposed to sleeping with any pretty woman who threw herself in his path—it would have been okay. Instead, you got a man who was a lot more than he appeared to be on the surface. It scared you, and you ran.”
“He cut his hand,” she said, in a low voice. “And it healed like Adam’s cuts and bruises healed.”
I closed my eyes. She’d known he wasn’t human, she’d known, and hadn’t warned any of us.
“Why didn’t you tell me that?” asked Adam, sounding, of all things, hurt. “Did you think that we wouldn’t help you?”
I wasn’t hurt. My hands curled with the effort of not smacking her because she’d put everyone in danger—and hadn’t told us everything she knew.
“I didn’t know there was anything else out there,” she said. “The fae are locked up where they belong. He wasn’t a vampire. I thought he was a werewolf.”
“Then why not tell us?” asked Mary Jo from the doorway of the kitchen.
Christy looked around and realized it wasn’t just Adam, Honey, and me who had been listening. Jesse, Ben, Darryl, and Auriele were in the kitchen, but behind them, in the doorway, in the little hallway beyond, and standing in the stairwell, the rest of the wolves had been a silent audience until Mary Jo had spoken.
“Because that would have meant that she put her foot in it,” I told Mary Jo, and everyone else. “Because, until she saw the video, she really did think he was a werewolf and that the reason he was coming after her was because she told him that Adam was her ex-husband, Adam the famous werewolf. She believed that knowing about Adam was why he came after her—as a strike at the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack. She thought that if she hadn’t told him about Adam, he wouldn’t have come after her. She thought it was her fault he knew her connection to Adam, and she didn’t want anyone to know that.” And she’d thought that if it hadn’t been for Adam, Juan Flores would have just let her run away—which made it Adam’s fault again. She believed it was Adam’s fault because otherwise she’d have to admit her guilt.
“But he wasn’t a werewolf,” Christy said. “So it wasn’t my fault he killed Troy, burned down my building, and killed all those women here.”
“No,” I said, tiredly. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault, Christy.
“Between your looks and running, you triggered some sort of psychotic episode. He fixated on you and gave chase. Not your fault.” I looked at her until she dropped her eyes. “Not Adam’s fault, either.”
Auriele bustled over and put her arm around Christy’s shoulders. “It was a good thing that you had us to run to,” she said. “Another woman might not have.”
“It is my fault,” said Christy, believing it because that was the attitude that would win over the most people. That was one of Christy’s gifts, her ability to shift her worldview whenever it was to her advantage. She turned her head into Auriele’s shoulder and burst into heavy sobs. “I was so stupid to trust him.”
Shoot me now, I thought. I’d known that she’d turn on the tears once she had the right audience. Jesse gave me a tense smile, then turned and slipped out of the kitchen and away from her mother’s theatrics.
I found Adam.
“I blame her,” I muttered grumpily, if softly. My voice hadn’t been quiet enough to escape wolf ears, but none of the people gathered around Christy looked my way—even with very good hearing you have to be listening first.
Adam kissed my head and dragged me closer until my back was tight against his front. He dropped his mouth to my ear. “Okay. As long as you keep in mind that just because you blame her doesn’t mean it is her fault.” Though he’d put his mouth to my ear, he didn’t bother whispering.
“Only if you remember that while she is drumming up sympathy for her heaping helping of guilt—she doesn’t really feel responsible,” I said. “Just for now responsible.”
“Sounds like you know our Christy as well as those of us who lived with her,” said Honey, leaning a shoulder lightly against both of us in a gesture of solidarity. She looked at the pack, and said, “Some of us, anyway.”
On the far side of the werewolf pack trying to comfort Christy, Ben shared a cynical smile with us. He wasn’t petting Christy, either.
The pizza guy came after that and broke up the comfort-poor-Christy party. Pizza places don’t usually deliver that far out in the boonies, but Honey, it turned out, had an arrangement with a place in Kennewick—an arrangement that included a huge tip for the driver and a surcharge on the pizza.
The food was a signal, and as soon as the last scrap of pizza was gone, everyone retreated to their Honey-assigned sleeping places. Adam and I got the formal living room. Jesse opted into the giant upstairs room with her mother, where they’d decided to watch some disaster film from the seventies that had just made it to video.
“The upside of this,” Adam told me as we stood next to the air mattress, which had a fitted sheet already stretched over it, a pair of pillows, and a blanket, “is that we get this room to ourselves.”
I dropped down to sit on the mattress and gave him a look. “No door, no fun.” The sounds of the movie filtered down the stairs and into the room. Everyone in that room, everyone who was something other than human, at least, would hear whatever we said—or did—in here.