Aiden was in the front seat, looking like he should have had a booster chair. Joel, in his presa Canario dog form, took up the space between Warren and Aiden on the bench seat with some of him left over to spill onto the floor. It didn’t look comfortable, but Joel smiled at me anyway. Compared to his tibicena form, the presa Canario looked positively friendly.
“Heading to Benton City to burn some miniature goat zombies?” I asked.
Warren shook his head. “No, ma’am. Mary Jo had a disposal company come haul the dumpster out to the Richland landfill. We’ll turn the goats to ash out of sight and away from anything else that might catch fire.”
Yep. Mary Jo was competent. Too bad for her, because this was not how to get off my emergency call list.
“Then we come back here,” Warren said. He grimaced. “There are some things we need to burn here, too. But not until you check things out and the boss gets the okay from Elizaveta.”
“Bad?” I asked. “I mean, I know that Elizaveta’s family is all dead.”
He glanced at Aiden and sighed. “I think this gives ‘bad’ a new low.”
Aiden frowned at him. “I lived in Underhill, Warren. I don’t know what you all think you are protecting me from.”
“Just because you’ve seen bad things doesn’t mean you have to see any more,” said Warren with dignity.
I waved Warren off and got back in the Jetta. I hadn’t really needed to ask him if it was bad at Elizaveta’s house. My answer was in the massing of the pack. It was a Wednesday, and most of the people here should have been at work. Adam wouldn’t have called them all just to deal with bodies. He must have been worried that the people who had killed Elizaveta’s family might be coming back.
I parked the Jetta next to Adam’s SUV. Before I got out, Adam was beside my car.
He wrapped his arms around me and lifted me off my feet, his face buried in the crook of my neck as if he hadn’t seen me for a decade instead of . . . at lunchtime yesterday. I could feel his chest lift as he breathed in my scent and it made me do the same to him. Musk and mint and Adam. Yum.
He put me on the ground, started to release me, then thought better of it (that might have had something to do with the grip I had around his waist). He bent down and kissed me.
His kiss told me a lot of things. It told me he loved me. The careful tightness of his grip told me that he was too tired to trust his control. The desperation . . . our sex life is very good and enthusiasm is a normal part of it, but that kiss was more like the ones I got when we were both naked and ready rather than a “hello, am I glad to see you” kind of kiss. So the desperation told me that whatever they’d found in Elizaveta’s house had disturbed him a great deal.
I kissed him back, trying to give him whatever he needed from me. At least that was my motivation at first. After about five seconds it wasn’t about anything other than his hands on my skin, my hands on his, the taste of his mouth, and the scent of his rapidly aroused body.
I felt the buzz of electric connections sitting up and taking notice of his strong hand on the back of my neck and the shape of his body against my hips. He was hot against my bare skin where my shirt was rising up and exposing my midriff. Even through the thickness of my jeans, I could feel his warmth.
I loved it.
Adam laughed softly against me, running his lips over my neck, biting down lightly on the tendon, and sending shivers right down to my toes. Then he took my lips again.
“Don’t give in to the nudge!” called Paul urgently. “You know you’ll regret it!”
“Quick,” said Zack, “does anyone have any of that essential oil stuff that Jesse’s friend’s mom sold Mercy?”
Adam stifled another laugh, this one a laugh of self-amusement mixed with frustration as he pulled back. He steadied me and waited for his own breath to calm down.
“The nudge always wins,” he murmured to me. “Thank God.”
“Just not right here and now,” I murmured back.
I should have been appalled, I suppose. Here we were in public, in full view of a good percentage of the pack, in front of what I was pretty sure was a murder scene.
But I’ve learned that there are always terrible things, and sometimes it is very important to grasp what joy and beauty you can, whenever you can. And Adam is beautiful, inside and out. Better than that—he is mine.
Adam is average height, and that’s the only average thing about him. Even back when I disliked him heartily, I never denied that he was about the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen. Even married and mated, at odd moments I was surprised by the sheer power of his looks.
I think it was because normally, his looks are not the things that make me love him. I love his intelligence, his care for his pack—and even for me. Though I have to admit that I chafe under his protectiveness sometimes. I spent a lifetime taking care of myself; I did not need protection. Still, when I was facing vampires, trolls, or the IRS (my business had just gotten that dreaded audit letter), Adam was the person I most wanted at my side.
I love his honesty, his temper, his dedication to his word and his duty. I love his humor, the way it creases the edges of his eyes and softens the usual hard line of his mouth.
Yep, I have it bad.
We leaned against each other for a few seconds more, and then he stepped back reluctantly.
“Okay,” he said to me, his hands lingering on my shoulders (I found that my hands were reluctant to let go of him, too). “Back to business.”
“Yep,” I said. “Okay. Back to business.” I pulled my shirt down to cover my belly and then stood at mock attention. “I’m ready.”
He nodded. “I need you to go into Elizaveta’s house and see if you can find out if the person who created your miniature zombie goats in Benton City is the person who killed all of Elizaveta’s family. And if it isn’t, see if you can pick up anyone else’s scent.” He frowned. “Look for the magic that is left, Mercy, and see what it tells you. Look for strangers.”
“I can do that,” I told him slowly. “Just because I can’t pick out our zombie-making witch’s magic doesn’t mean it isn’t there, though. Differentiation between magic users isn’t something I’ve done. I don’t know that I’ve felt the magic of all of Elizaveta’s people.”
He nodded. “I need you to keep your eyes open while you go through the house. Tell me what you think.”
I frowned at him. I could tell something had really bothered him about what he’d found in there. Something more than all of the dead bodies. “Elizaveta isn’t a black witch—there is a stench to that.” She skirted the line pretty hard, but we’d know if she had started practicing black magic.
“Yes,” Adam said, and I relaxed a little.
Elizaveta and I were on shaky terms, but there was real affection between her and Adam. She liked him because he spoke Russian with a Moscow accent, and because, when she flirted with him, he flirted back. He liked her because she reminded him of some relative of his mother’s, an aunt I think, who came to visit them when he was nine or ten. I didn’t want Adam hurt.
“It’ll work best in my coyote form,” I told him and then added, because I didn’t want him to worry, “I’ve been bouncing back and forth capturing goats this morning. I can change again”—I could feel that—“but I’m not sure I can change back right away.”
He nodded. “Okay. I don’t think that time is so much of a factor that what you have to say can’t wait a couple of hours.”
What was it that he expected me to find?
“You coming with?” I asked.
He shook his head with a faint smile. He stepped back from me, finally, and I felt the loss of his touch. I’d been neck-deep in the craziness of reopening my garage. He’d been busy attending all his secret, hush-hush, middle-of-the-night meetings. We hadn’t had as much time together over the past few weeks as I was used to.
“If I come in, I might prejudice what you see,” he said. “Sherwood will go with you.” He glanced around and nodded to the peg-legged man who was in the middle of a quiet discussion with some other pack members.
Sherwood started over to us, his gait smooth in spite of the peg leg. He had a better prosthetic, and with that one on no one would ever have thought he was missing a leg. But most of the time when he thought there might be some action, he wore the peg leg, because the artificial limb was a lot more delicate and correspondingly more expensive.
“Sherwood?” I asked. Asking him to go into a witch’s house was unkind, I thought. It hadn’t been that long ago that he’d been discovered three-legged and half-crazed in a cage in a black witch’s den.
Adam said, “Sherwood knows the dangers better than anyone else here. I trust him to keep you safe.”
I looked up into Sherwood’s face with its wolf-wild eyes and said, “I thought you didn’t remember anything of your captivity?”
“Apparently some things are imprinted in my skin,” he said, his voice a few notes darker than usual. “Like the—” He broke off, shivered, and shook his head. “Never mind.”
“As soon as you’re done, we’ll gather the dead,” Adam told me. “Warren will bring our firestarters back with him as soon as he can. I’ve spoken to Elizaveta and told her we need to burn the bodies. She wasn’t convinced until I told her about the goats. She said that if there is a necromancer with that much power to burn running around, she’d rather her family be turned to ash than become another witch’s puppet.”
There was something in his voice that concerned me. But I let it lie. I’d find out soon enough what had turned this from a tragedy for our pack’s witch into something more.
* * *
• • •
Going into a house full of dead bodies wasn’t on the top ten of my bucket list. Going into a witch’s house with dead bodies was even lower on my scale of happy.