There was a sudden wary look in his eye at the tail end of his sentence—as if he had been thinking awhile about how to bring it up. But he hadn’t really expected to bring it up just now.
“I know as much as he does,” I told Ben firmly. The pack didn’t need to know that neither of us really understood what was going on. “I’m not going to discuss it with anyone else.”
“Private,” he said, with a nod. There was relief in his posture. It was enough for him that he believed that I knew what was wrong. “I get that. Do you want me to go drive the vampire off?”
There was not a sparrow’s chance in hell that Ben’s going out to drive Wulfe away would end up with Wulfe leaving. But I could find a galaxy’s worth of scenarios where that ended in disaster.
“No,” I said. “I think he’s just playing right now. Testing us, maybe. I don’t want to do anything that makes him think that we are taking him seriously.” And that gave me an idea.
I pulled a blanket out of the hall closet—one of those fuzzy ones sold at Costco. This one was wine red, suitable for a vampire. I’d never had it on my bed. I think the last one to use it had been Christy, so it wouldn’t smell like me or Adam. Vampires have keen senses and I wanted to be very careful about the message I was sending with this blanket.
“Here,” I said, shoving it at Ben. “Take this out to Wulfe. Tell him I … no. Tell him we don’t want him to get cold.”
Ben took the blanket, but as I spoke, he’d frozen in place. He frowned at me a moment, then shook his head and finally grinned. “He doesn’t know who he is messing with.”
That Ben thought I was a match for Wulfe was nice—but it might be dangerous for him to continue to hold that misapprehension.
“He scares the socks off me,” I told Ben seriously. “He should scare the socks off you, too. Don’t underestimate him. Don’t let him lure you into thinking he is harmless. Or that Adam or I or even the Mistress of the vampire seethe can keep him from doing anything he decides to do. Take him the blanket, and get back into the house. If we keep him amused, then he won’t have to kill anyone out of sheer boredom.”
His face grew sober. “I get that,” he said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
He left and I waited for him to return. I wanted to watch out the window, but I was afraid that if I gave him an audience, Wulfe might do something horrible. I’d seen him do horrible things before.
Instead I went down to the kitchen and pulled out a bowl. I needed to get to sleep, but I wasn’t going to manage that for a while. I mixed up chocolate chip cookies. Just a double batch.
I heard the murmur of Lucia’s voice in the suite she shared with Joel. There was no answering voice—Joel had not managed to shift to human for the past few days.
Aiden’s fire had rekindled itself, but it wasn’t up to normal levels yet and he hadn’t been able to quiet the volcano spirit enough to allow Joel to emerge. That was a little disheartening because we’d been hoping that Joel had been gaining more control. Apparently, Aiden had been getting better at shutting Joel’s fire down instead. At least Joel had been able to stay in his presa Canario form so we didn’t have to worry about him burning down the house inadvertently.
The sounds of me making food in the kitchen lured Medea out of whatever dark corner she’d been sleeping in. She hovered around my ankles because she knew that hopping on the counters was forbidden. I gave her a small dab of dough before I mixed in the chocolate chips and walnuts. She purred as she ate, and the sound soothed me. Cats are good company when you are sad or worried.
Walnuts were a matter of contention in the pack, but I liked them and I was making these for me. I needed chocolate because Adam wasn’t here. And because it was taking a very long time for Ben to walk out and hand over a blanket.
Adam’s SUV purred into our driveway about the same time that the back door opened and Ben walked in sans blanket.
“What took so long?” I asked, trying not to listen to Adam’s door shut. Now that Adam was actually here, I was nervous. What if he was unhappy when he saw me? I didn’t want the sight of me to make Adam unhappy.
“I will trade information for cookie dough,” Ben bargained—so it wasn’t anything bad that had kept him.
I got a clean spoon from the silverware drawer, dipped it into the dough, then held it out toward him. When he reached to take it, his long sleeve slipped down to reveal two small red marks on his wrist. And from those two marks, faint wisps of smoke emerged. Aiden had identified our foe from the smoke that had, apparently, emerged from my wounds after the rabbit had bitten me. At the time, I’d been too busy trying not to die to pay attention to much of anything else.
I now understood what Aiden had been talking about. My heart stopped. Ben had been bitten by the smoke beast.
I pretended not to see the marks, hoping that my sudden terror went unnoticed, blended as it was with the adrenaline already racing in my veins after the sight of a naked Wulfe on the roof of my old Rabbit.
I didn’t know enough to save Ben. Not nearly enough. I knew the smoke beast took over its victims’ bodies and piloted them. I knew that it used those victims to kill others to gain power—and that it then killed its puppet and could shape itself into a copy of that person. I had no idea what it wanted or why. I had no idea how to save someone bitten by the beast—and if I couldn’t figure it out, Ben was lost. And I didn’t know that I could bear a world without our foul-mouthed wolf.
First problems first, I decided. First problem was to survive the next few minutes. Ben was a werewolf. That meant he was stronger than I was—and he outweighed me. Unlike George, Ben was significantly slower than I was. Maybe I could get him to chase me into the river.
I heard Adam’s footsteps on the porch, but Ben, licking the spoon clean, seemed oblivious. I gave a hard, panicked tug on my mating bond and the sound of Adam’s approach stopped. I had to hope that he had understood that there was something wrong.
“Want some with chocolate chips?” I asked.
He handed the spoon back to me. I dumped in a bag of chips and stirred with my bigger spoon before dipping his teaspoon in the mix—ignoring sanitary issues in favor of keeping him distracted.
Adam hadn’t just come in through the door, so I had a reasonable hope that I’d warned him enough. But what would allow him to connect my warning to Ben?
Ben closed his eyes, absorbing the buttery-sweetness-and-bitter-chocolate combination. Was there a difference in his expression? Or was it just that I knew that someone else might be home inside Ben’s head that made me think so?
Could I be mistaken? Was this Ben?
“So what’s the information you owe me?” I asked when his eyes opened again.
He took a step closer to me and I had to fight my instincts that would have sent me scuttling to the far side of the kitchen.
“What do you want to know?” he asked, his voice flirty. The British accent was the same, but the rhythm of speech was wrong. And there were no swear words for me to edit out.
“Was Wulfe actually naked?” I asked.
“Wolves are usually naked,” he said as if he were joking.
“For sure,” I agreed easily.
Upstairs a soft shshing of a window sliding up. I knew it was Jesse’s window, but if someone wasn’t familiar with the sounds of the house, maybe it would just blend into the various creaks and groans that were the normal sounds of any house. I didn’t know if Ben would know what that sound meant. I didn’t know how much of Ben’s memories the beast who had bitten him would have.