... a game...
Or maybe I did.
9
adam
Adam led Zee, George, and Tony to the Benton County Coroner’s Office, a small building set in the corner of the massive criminal justice center. Technically the grocery store murder victim’s body should have gone to the Franklin County Coroner’s Office, but Benton County had a specialist for supernatural crimes, so both the boy’s body and the witch’s body had been taken there.
“You okay?” George asked.
Adam nodded. It was as close to lying as he allowed himself. His wolf was very unhappy leaving Mercy behind in the SUV.
After she’d returned to her human shape, his mate had been unusually quiet and wracked with shivers. Normally he’d have said she was in shock—but normal went out the window when dealing with Mercy. She’d refused his offer to get food for her, and with the others in the car, he hadn’t pressed. When she’d proposed that she stay in the car because her feet hurt, he’d trusted her to know best how to take care of herself.
That had been a hard-fought battle. It was his nature, man and beast, to take care of the people around him. When he was courting Mercy, he’d come to the reluctant understanding that taking control of her life—even and maybe especially for her own good—was the opposite of care. Experimentally, he’d applied that understanding to his pack, and he’d seen it become healthier, stronger. Larry the goblin king had not been wrong when he said that Mercy was changing Adam and the pack.
Still, knowing that leaving Mercy when she asked him to was the right thing to do didn’t make it any easier.
Before abandoning her in the car, he’d wrapped Mercy in his coat because she was still shivering as if the SUV heater wasn’t blowing hot enough to boil water. He’d given her a look to let her know that he expected her to tell him what was going on as soon as she could. She’d nodded. And that unspoken promise had allowed him to shut her door and leave her behind.
Shivering.
There were a lot of reasons that she could be shivering like that. All the easy ones would have been something she could talk about in front of everyone. He frowned darkly.
Neither he nor his wolf was happy with her alone in the SUV. Something more bestial than his wolf stirred to life and brought a growl rising to his lips. He stopped that before it became audible.
Mercy still believed that Elizaveta the witch had called the malformed beast into being. Mercy had thought that when she broke the witch’s curse, the evil creature—who only resembled his wolf as a tank resembled Mercy’s beloved and deceased Rabbit—should have gone away. When it lingered, she had decided it would just need time to fade.
Adam knew better.
Elizaveta might have given it form, but that beast had been his for longer than Mercy had been alive, born when a God-fearing boy, who’d thought the world was mostly a good place peopled with mostly good folk, met a war in Southeast Asia. Adam had grown that beast to protect himself and used it to wade through scenes of such horror that, even though he’d lived as a werewolf for half a century, the memories still appeared in his worst nightmares. Adam had used the beast to follow orders that no moral being would have been able to carry out, because he knew that those orders were the right ones, no matter how horrific.
He had learned to control that monster, when other soldiers had given in to theirs. He’d killed some of those people—the man who hunted Vietnamese children after his platoon had been blown to bits by a shoeshine boy. The colonel who collected fingers. Adam didn’t even remember most of them, because their deaths had not bothered him and the graveyard in his soul was full to overflowing with the dead he did regret.
When Adam had first been bitten, controlling his wolf spirit had not been very difficult for him. He’d been staying on top of a far worse monster for a few years by then. His time in Vietnam had ended. He hadn’t needed the older, more primal beast, so he stuffed it in a cage and forgot about it until Elizaveta had freed it once more.
Adam was pretty sure it was here to stay this time. For a moment he flashed back to a night in Mercy’s garage when the beast had taken him by surprise and broken free.
Belief, he reminded himself fiercely, was important. He could control his monsters, both of them. And he’d use them to protect his pack, his territory. His mate.
“It is a bad sign when you growl, ja?” asked Zee.
“He’s good,” George said. “Hard to leave that little coyote when she’s having a bad time of it. Not like Mercy to stay behind when we go look at bodies. Maybe there’s a ghoul just waiting for us to leave her alone.” George was behind him, but Adam could hear the baiting grin in his voice. “He’s got to think like that. Tough to be the Alpha.” George thought Adam could control his monsters, too.
“Not helpful,” Adam told him, knowing George would hear the grateful lie in his voice. Having George voice his confidence was helpful.
“Not accurate,” said Tony firmly. “She’s armed. She’s dangerous. And she is sitting in the parking lot of the criminal justice center, not in an ancient graveyard in the middle of Transylvania.”
Which had been, more or less, the thought that had allowed Adam to leave her when she’d requested it of him.
Adam held the office’s door open and waited for the others to go in. George gave him a sympathetic glance as he passed by. George was a reliable wolf; he did as he was asked, made good decisions on his own, and took care of the people around him as best he could. He generally thought a lot more than he talked—which was a good thing for a policeman and a werewolf.
Tony Montenegro... Mercy had acquired Tony before Adam had met her. He was quick-witted, adaptable, and—although Adam had never seen him in action—moved like someone who had been in a lot of fights.
Tony’d been an undercover agent. According to Adam’s contacts, Tony had been in deep cover a few times, though not in the Tri-Cities. He’d helped to bring down drug traders and a couple of rings of human traffickers. Adam rather thought that Tony probably had his own version of Adam’s beast. If so, he carried it well.
Tony was the ideal person to be their liaison with the KPD because Tony knew when to lie and he did it well enough that not even his fellow police officers knew when he was doing it. It was hard to find a liar with personal integrity.