It took a subjective hour, probably no more than five or six minutes, but I managed the shift. I lay on the floor panting, too tired to move, and waited for my eyes to focus. How, I wondered, did the werewolves put up with this or worse every change? There were a lot of things that made me happy to be what I was instead of a werewolf.
“Okay, then,” Adam said. “Let’s get you something to wear.” I heard him run up the stairs.
By the time he dumped clean clothes on my stomach, I was sitting up. I was going to need a nap soon, but I wasn’t going to go to our bed smelling like Elizaveta’s house—even a pigsty smells better than black magic. Shower first, nap second. But all that had to wait for the interrogation.
I sorted out the clothes and started to put them on.
“Wait,” Adam said, crouching beside me. He ran a light hand over a tender spot on my shoulder—and I winced.
“Oh,” I said. “That must have been the goblin.” I didn’t remember getting the bruise or scrape Adam had found, but it hadn’t been the goats.
One of the goats had kicked me in the shin, and another had bitten me in the arm. The arm was bruised, but I’d knocked the little goat loose before he’d broken the skin. Getting bitten by a zombie wouldn’t make someone turn into one, I was pretty sure, though getting bitten by something that was dead might result in the mother of all infections. But I knew they hadn’t gotten the shoulder, so that must have happened when I was fighting the goblin.
Adam leaned his forehead against my uninjured shoulder and wrapped his hands around both of my arms. The weight of him was bracing against my back.
“I wish,” he said, his voice muffled a little against my skin, “that you healed as quickly as one of the pack. I wish I didn’t need you to go fight goblins and zombie goats because I am stuck in stupid meetings with idiots.”
“Miniature zombie goats,” I corrected. “Or miniature goat zombies. The ‘miniature’ is important. ‘Zombie goats’ just sound satanic.”
His hands tightened on my upper arms. “I am so grateful that you are quick and smart. That you work at staying alive, Mercy. But I worry that someday that won’t be enough.”
“I worry about you, too,” I told him. “But I would rather worry than try to make you into a . . . an accountant or something.”
My stepfather was a dentist. I had, for years, wondered if part of his appeal to my mother was that he was as unlike the danger-seeking bull rider who had been my father (he had also been Coyote, but she didn’t know that part) as she could find.
Adam laughed, but there wasn’t a lot of humor in it. “For nearly ten years, you led a quiet, blameless life. Danger didn’t visit on a daily basis. I keep looking for the cause. For the reason all hell broke loose in your life. I can’t escape that the impetus might have been me.”
I shook my head firmly. “No. You didn’t start the weird stuff. You were just there to help when bad things began happening. The boy, Mac, who came to my door, that had nothing to do with you.”
Alan MacKenzie Frazier’s appearance had broken a nearly decade-long peace, when I had repaired cars and mostly ignored and been ignored by most of the rest of the supernatural world. Mac had been a ragged harbinger of trouble to come. Poor boy, he’d been dead more than three years.
“If there is a need for someone to blame,” I said, “I choose to blame Coyote. That’s what Gary”—my half brother—“does. He says that nine times in ten he is right. And the one time left over might be Coyote’s fault, too, it’s just that he didn’t leave enough evidence to pin it on him.”
Adam hugged me. “Okay, okay.” He sighed, and there was enough guilt in his sigh that I was pretty sure he didn’t ascribe to my perspective.
He rubbed my arms lightly. “You’re getting goose bumps.” He released me and stood up. “You need to get dressed, tell me all about what you noticed at Elizaveta’s house—”
“Dead people,” I told him.
“—besides dead people,” he continued smoothly. “And then you need to go shower and rest.”
I sighed. “Nope.” Because as the ache of the return to my human self subsided, I realized that a nap was not in my near future. “After my debriefing, I need to shower and head to work. No rest for the wicked.”
He started to say something, then put his hands up in the air. “Okay. But I’ll bring pizza home for dinner.”
Today was my turn to cook.
“Deal,” I said.
He helped me to my feet and I let him. My hands felt clumsy and I was off-balance and had to lean on him to drag on my jeans. My hair smelled horrid—or at least smelled more horrid than the rest of me did. And I kept getting a whiff of Robert. I didn’t want to think about, let alone smell like, Elizaveta’s grandson. I pulled my hair back from my face and rebraided it. It didn’t help much, but at least it wasn’t brushing against my skin every time I moved.
He watched me get dressed with what some people might think was solely an appreciative eye. They just didn’t share a mate bond with Adam. My husband gave the lie to that old adage that men have only one idea in their heads at a time and usually that one thing was sex.
Part of him was cataloging my bruises. Part of him was noticing how wobbly I was. Part of him was worrying about things he couldn’t change. And part of him was thinking about sex.
I gave that part of him a wiggle of my hips, and he laughed.
“Hey,” he said. “No fair teasing when you know if you made it to horizontal, you’d be asleep before I got to first base.”
I stuck my tongue out at him.
“Careful,” he warned. “Or someone will take you up on your offer.” Then, with a quick, rueful smile, he switched gears. “So what did you find at Elizaveta’s?”
“What were you looking for?” I asked as I buttoned my jeans.
I pulled my shirt over my head instead of unbuttoning it, then paid for that bit of laziness with having to struggle when one of the shirtsleeves wouldn’t turn out properly.
Adam helped me get untangled. “Just tell me whatever you noticed.”
“Well, you know about the black magic, obviously,” I said. “It was all of them. All of the dead people were black practitioners—even Militza.”
No wonder Jesse had gotten a funny feeling about her. Maybe if she’d kept giving Militza rides, though, we’d have discovered what had been going on in our own backyard.
“What do you think about Elizaveta?” he asked. “Could she have lived in that house, with all of her family practicing black magic, and still be a gray witch?”