I could smell Stefan.
It wasn't that he smelled bad-he just smelled like himself, sort of vampire and popcorn. But I couldn't get his statement about being dead during the day out of my head. Ugh. There was no way I was going to be able to sleep with a dead man in my closet.
"Thanks, Stefan," I told him glumly as I heaved my sore body out of bed. If I couldn't sleep, I might as well go to work. I opened the door to the living room, expecting it to be empty, since Samuel had been up all night, too.
Instead he was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee with Adam, the local Alpha werewolf, who happened to live on the other side of my back fence.
I hadn't heard Adam come in. Once Samuel started sharing my house, I'd become careless. I should have realized that he would come over as soon as Samuel called him, though-and, of course, Samuel had to call him about the bloodbath at the hotel. Adam was the Alpha, and responsible for the welfare of all the werewolves in the area.
They both looked at me when I opened my door.
I was tempted to turn around and go back into my bedroom with the dead man in my closet. Now, I'm not very vain. If I'd ever been, making my living covered in various grease and dirt mixtures would have cured me quickly. Still, I wasn't up to facing two sexy men when I had one eye swollen mostly shut and half of my face black and blue.
Stefan, being dead, was unlikely to notice what I looked like-and I'd never dated Stefan. Not that I was dating either Adam or Samuel at the present.
I hadn't dated Samuel since I was sixteen.
I've known Samuel for as long as I can remember. I grew up in the Marrok's pack in northwestern Montana, a werewolf pack being as close to what I was as my teenage mother could find. It was just chance that her great uncle belonged to the Marrok. Lucky chance, I'd come to believe. A lot of werewolves would just have killed me outright-the way a wolf will kill a coyote who invades his territory.
Bran, the Marrok, in addition to being the ruler of all the North American wolves, was a good man. He placed me with one of his wolves and raised me almost as if I belonged. Almost.
Samuel was the Marrok's son. He'd been there for me as I struggled to live in a world with no place for me. I'd been raised by the pack, but I wasn't one of them. My mother loved me, but I didn't belong in her mundane human world either.
When I was sixteen, I'd believed I'd found my home in Samuel. Only when the Marrok showed me that Samuel wanted children-and not my love, did I finally understand I had to make my own path in life rather than finding someone else's to join.
I'd left Samuel and the pack and hadn't seen either again for more than fifteen years, almost half my life. All that changed last winter. Now, I had the Marrok's cell phone number on my speed dial, and Samuel had decided to move to the Tri-Cities. More specifically, he had decided to move in with me.
I still wasn't quite sure why. Fond of it as I am, my home is a single-wide trailer as old as me.
Samuel, being a doctor, is used to a slightly higher standard of housing. Granted his paperwork nightmare had taken a long time to settle. Only the month before had he at last gotten his license to practice medicine in Washington as well as Montana and Texas. He'd given up his job as a night clerk at an all night convenience store and begun working in the emergency room at the hospital in Kennewick. Despite the increase in his income, he hadn't shown any sign of leaving. His temporary stay in my house had turned into six months and some change.
I'd refused him at first.
"Why not with Adam?" I'd asked. As Alpha of the local werewolf pack, Adam was used to having short-term guests and he had more bedrooms than I did. I didn't ask why Samuel didn't buy his own house-Samuel had already told me that he'd spent too much time alone the past few years. Werewolves don't do well on their own. They need someone, pack or family, or they begin to get odd. Werewolves who get odd tend to end up dead-and sometimes take a lot of other people down with them when they go.
Samuel had raised his eyebrows and said, "Do you really want us to kill each other? Adam is the Alpha-and I'm a stronger dominant than he is. Now we've both lived long enough to control ourselves up to a point. But, if we're living together, sooner or later, we'd be at each other's throat."
"Adam's house is only a hundred yards from mine," I told him dryly. Samuel would have been right about any other wolf, but Samuel made his own rules. If he wanted to live in peace with Adam, he could manage it.
"Please." His tone was as far from pleading as it was possible to get.
"No," I told him.
There was another, longer pause.
"So how are you going to explain to your neighbors that there is a strange man sleeping on your front porch?"
He'd have done it, too-so I let him move in.
I told him that the first time he flirted with me, he'd be out on his ear. I told him that I didn't love him anymore, though it might have had more effect if I had been entirely certain of that myself. It helped that I knew that he didn't love me, hadn't loved me when he tried to elope with me when I was sixteen-and he was who-knows-how-old.
It was not really as bad as it sounded. He grew up at a time when women married much younger than sixteen. It's hard on the older werewolves to adjust to modern ways of thinking.
I wish I could hold it against him, though. It would help me keep in mind that he still only wanted me for what I could give him: children who lived.
Werewolves are made, not born. To become a werewolf, you need to survive an attack so vicious that you nearly die-which allows the werewolf's magic to defeat your immune system. Many, many of the werewolf's kin who try to become werewolves themselves die in the attempt. Samuel had outlived all of his wives and children. Those children of his who had attempted to become werewolf had all died.
Female werewolves can't have children; their pregnancies spontaneously abort during the moon's change. Human women can have children with werewolves, but they can only carry to term the babies who have only human DNA.
But I was neither human, nor werewolf.
Samuel was convinced I'd be different. Not being moon called, my changes aren't violent-or even really necessary. I once went three years without shifting to my coyote self. Wolves and coyotes could interbreed in the wild, why not werewolves and walkers?
I don't know what the biological answer to that is, but my answer is that I didn't care to be a broodmare, thank you very much. So, no Samuel for me.
My feelings for Samuel should have been neat and tidily put in the past-except that I hadn't entirely been able to convince myself that all I felt for him was the lingering warmth anyone would feel for an old friend.
Maybe I'd have come to some conclusion about Samuel who had, after all, been living in my home for better than half a year, if it hadn't been for Adam.
Adam had been the bane of my existence for most of the time I'd lived in the Tri-Cities, where he ruled with an iron hand. Like the Marrok, he had a marked tendency to treat me like one of his minions when it suited him, and like a human stray when it didn't. He was high-handed, to say the least. He'd declared me his mate before the pack-and then had the gall to tell me it was for my own protection, so his wolves wouldn't bother me, a coyote living in their territory. Once he said it, it was so-and nothing I could say would change it in the eyes of his pack.
Last winter, though, he had needed me, and it changed things between us.
We went on three dates. During the first one I had a broken arm and he'd been very careful. On the second, he and his teenage daughter, Jesse, took me to the Richland Light Opera Company's presentation of The Pirates of Penzance. I'd had a great time. On the third date my arm had been almost healed and there had been no Jesse, no middle school auditorium to cool any passionate impulses we might have had. We went dancing and only his daughter waiting for him at his home, and Samuel waiting for me at mine, had kept our clothes on.
After he'd taken me home, I recovered enough to be scared. Falling in love with a werewolf is not a safe thing to do-but falling in love with an Alpha is worse. Especially for someone like me. I had fought too long to belong to myself, to allow myself to fall into line with the rest of his pack.
So the next time he called to take me out, I was unexpectedly busy. Avoiding someone who lives next door requires a lot of effort, but I managed. It helped that when the werewolves became public, Adam's time was suddenly taken up with trips back and forth between Washington D.C. and the Tri-Cities.
Though he was one of the hundred or so werewolves who'd revealed themselves to the public, Adam wasn't one of Bran's front men-he didn't have the temperament for being a celebrity. But after working with the government for forty-odd years, first in the military and later as a security consultant, he'd developed a network of contacts as well as an understanding of politics that made him invaluable to the Marrokand to the government as they tried to decide how to deal with yet another group of preternatural creatures.
Between his schedule and my clever avoidance tactics I hadn't seen him for almost two months.
Even to my monocular gaze, he was beautiful, more beautiful than I remembered him being. I wanted to linger on his Slavic cheekbones and his sensuous mouth, damn it. I jerked my gaze to Samuel-which was hardly safer. He wasn't as pretty, but that didn't matter to my stupid hormones.
Samuel broke the silence first. "Why aren't you in bed, Mercy?" he drawled. "You look worse than the accident victim I had die on the table last week."
Adam came to his feet and crossed the living room in four long strides while I waited like a rabbit in a snare, knowing I should run, but unable to move. He stopped in front of me, whistling softly between his teeth as he examined the damage. When he leaned closer and touched my neck, I heard a noise from the kitchen.
Samuel had broken his coffee cup. He didn't look up at me as he set about cleaning the mess.
"Nasty," Adam said, drawing my attention back to him. "Can you see out of that eye?"
"Not as well as I see out of the other," I told him. "But I see well enough to tell that you aren't on your way to D.C. like you were supposed to be." He'd had to come back for Moon's Night, but I knew that he'd flown in yesterday afternoon and had been scheduled to fly out an hour ago.
The corner of his mouth kicked up, and I could have bitten off my tongue when I realized I'd just let him know that I was keeping track of his movements. "My schedule changed. I was supposed to fly out to Los Angeles a few hours ago. D.C. was last week and next week."
"So why are you still here?"
The amusement left his face and his eyes narrowed as he said curtly. "My ex-wife decided she is in love again. She and her new boyfriend headed off to Italy for an indefinite period. When I called, Jesse had already been alone for three days." Jesse was his fifteen-year-old daughter who had been living with her mother in Eugene for the summer. "I bought her a plane ticket and she should be here in a couple of hours. I told Bran I'm off duty. He'll have to shuffle politicians on his own for a while."
"Poor Jesse," I said. Jesse was one of the reasons I'd always respected Adam, even when he frustrated me the most. He'd never let anything, not business, not the pack, come before his daughter.
"So I'll be around for a while." It wasn't the words, it was the way he looked at me when he said them that forced me back a step. I hate it when that happens.
I decided to change the subject. "Good. Darryl's a great guy, but he's pretty hard on Warren when you aren't around."
Darryl was Adam's second and Warren his third. In most packs the two ranks were so close that there was always some tension between the wolves who held them, especially without the Alpha around. Warren 's sexual preferences made the tension even worse.
Being different among humans is hard. Being different among wolves is usually deadly. There aren't very many homosexual werewolves who survive for long. Warren was tough, self-reliant and Adam's best friend. The combination was enough to keep him alive but not always comfortable in the pack.
"I know," Adam said.
"It would help if Darryl weren't so cute," Samuel said casually as he crossed the living room to stand beside Adam.
Technically, he should have stood behind him, since Adam was the Alpha, and Samuel was a lone wolf, outside the pack hierarchy. But Samuel wasn't just any lone wolf, he was the Marrok's son and more dominant even than Adam if he'd wanted to push matters.
"I dare you to say that to Darryl," I challenged.
"Don't." Adam smiled, but his voice was serious. Though he spoke to Samuel, he'd never looked away from me. To me he said, "Samuel says you're going to need an escort to the vampire seethe sometime in the near future. Call me and I'll find someone to go with you."
"Thank you, I will."
He touched my sore cheek with a light finger. "I'd do it myself, but I don't think it would be wise."
I agreed with him wholeheartedly. A werewolf escort would serve both as a bodyguard and a statement that I wasn't without friends. The Alpha's escort would turn it into a power play between him and the vampires' leaders with Stefan caught in the middle.
"I know," I said. "Thank you."
I couldn't stay in that room with both men one more minute. Even a human woman could have drowned in the testosterone in the air, it was so strong. If I didn't leave, they were going to start fighting-I hadn't missed the way Samuel's eyes had whitened when Adam touched my cheek.
Then there was the need I had to bury my nose in Adam's neck and inhale the exotic scent of his skin. I looked away from him and found myself gazing into Samuel's white eyes. He was so close to turning that the distinctive black ring around the outside of his pupils was clearly visible. It should have scared me.
Samuel's nostrils flared-I smelled it, too. Arousal.
"I've got to go," I said, properly panicked.
I gave them a hasty wave as I scuttled out of the house, hastily pulling the door shut behind me. The relief of having a door between me and both men was intense. I was breathing hard, as if I'd run a race, adrenaline pushing the pain of the sorcerer's attack away. I took a deep breath of the morning air, trying to clear my lungs of werewolf, before heading out to my car.