"Not after it's been in your mouth," I told her. I gave her another spoon, finished mixing in the chips, and began dropping cookie dough on the pans.
"Oh, I almost forgot," she said, after another bite, "my father sent the camera with a message. It was needlessly cryptic, but I knew you'd tell me what it meant. Are you ready?"
I put the first pan in the oven and started loading the next one. "Shoot."
"He said, 'Got a hit. Don't fret. He was a hired gun. " She waved her empty spoon at me. "Now explain it to me."
I suppose I should have respected Adam's need to protect his daughter, but he was the one who sent her to me. "I killed a man tonight. Your father found out who he was."
"Really? And he was a hit man? Cool." She dropped the spoon in the sink next to the first one, then boosted herself up to sit on my counter and conducted a rapid question and answer session all by herself. "Was that what you called him about earlier? He was fit to be tied. How come you called Dad? No wait. The man you killed was a werewolf, too, wasn't he? That's why Dad took off so fast. Who is the wolf he came back with?" She paused. " You killed a werewolf? Did you have a gun?"
Several. But I hadn't brought one with me to the garage.
She had paused, so I answered her last two questions. "Yep and nope."
"Awesome." She grinned. "Hey, how'dja do it?"
"It wasn't on purpose," I told her repressively. I might as well have tried holding back a tidal wave with my bare hands, it would have had as much effect.
"Of course not," she said. "Not unless you were really pi-" I raised an eyebrow and she changed the word without slowing down. "-ticked off. Did you have a knife? Or was it a crowbar?"
"My teeth," I told her.
"Ewwe-" She grimaced briefly. "Nasty. Oh, I see. You mean that you took him on while you were a coyote?"
Most humans only know about the fae-and there are still a lot of people who think that the fae are just a hoax perpetrated by the government or on the government, take your pick. Jesse, however, as the daughter of a werewolf, human though she was, was quite aware of the "Wild Things" as she called them. Part of that was my fault. The first time I met her, shortly after the Alpha had moved his family next to my home, she'd asked me if I were a werewolf like her father. I told her what I was, and she nagged me until I showed her what it looked like when I took my other form. I think she was nine and already a practiced steamroller.
"Yep. I was just trying to get his attention so he'd chase me and leave Mac-that's the striped werewolf-" I imitated her finger-down-the-nose gesture. "He is pretty nice," I told her. Then, feeling I had to play adult in fairness to her father, I said, "But he's a newbie, and his control isn't terrific yet. So listen to your father about him, okay? If Mac bit you or hurt you, it would make him feel awful, and he's had a bad enough time of it already." I hesitated. It really wasn't my business, but I liked Jesse. "There are a few of your father's wolves that you really do need to stay away from."
She nodded, but said confidently, "They won't hurt me, not with my father. But you mean Ben, don't you? Dad told me to stay out of his way. I met him yesterday when he stopped by." She wrinkled her nose. "He's a snark-even if he has that cool British accent."
I wasn't certain what a snark was, but I was certain Ben qualified.
We ate the cookies as they came out of the oven, and I gave her a loaded plate covered with tinfoil to take back with her. I went out to the porch with her and saw a sales-lot of cars parked at Adam's house. He must have called in the pack.
"I'll walk you home," I said, slipping on the shoes I kept on the porch for when it was muddy.
She rolled her eyes, but waited for me. "Really, Mercy, what'll you do if one of the pack decides to bother us?"
"I can scream really loud," I said. "That's if I don't decide to use my newly patented technique and kill him, too."
"That's right," she said. "But I'd stick to screaming. I don't think that Dad would like it if you started killing his wolves."
Probably none of them would harm a hair of her head, just as she thought. I was almost sure she was right. But one of the cars I could see was Ben's red truck. I wouldn't leave a fifteen-year-old alone if Ben was around no matter whose daughter she was.
No one bothered us as we walked through my back field.
"Nice car," she murmured, as we passed the donor Rabbit's corpse. "Dad really appreciates you setting it out here for him. Good for you. I told him the next time he annoyed you, you were likely to paint graffiti on it."
"Your father is a subtle man," I told her. "I'm saving the graffiti for later. I've decided that the next time he gets obnoxious, I'll take three tires off." I held my hand out and canted it, like a car with one wheel.
She giggled. "It would drive him nuts. You should see him when the pictures aren't hanging straight on the walls." We reached the back fence, and she climbed cautiously through the old barbed wire. "If you do decide to paint it-let me help?"
"Absolutely," I promised. "I'll wait here until you're safely inside."
She rolled her eyes again, but grinned and sprinted for her back porch. I waited until she waved to me once from Adam's back door and disappeared inside.
When I took the garbage out before I went to bed, I noticed that Adam's place was still full of cars. It was a long meeting, then. Made me grateful I wasn't a werewolf.
I turned to go into my house and stopped. I'd been stupid. It doesn't matter how good your senses are if you aren't paying attention.
"Hello, Ben," I said, to the man standing between me and the house.
"You've been telling tales, Mercedes Thompson," he said pleasantly. As Jesse had said, he had a nifty English accent. He wasn't bad-looking either, if a trifle effeminate for my taste.
"Mmm?" I said.
He tossed his keys up in the air and caught them one-handed, once, twice, three times without taking his eyes off mine. If I yelled, Adam would hear, but, as I told him earlier, I didn't belong to him. He was possessive enough, thank you. I didn't really believe Ben was stupid enough to do something to me, not with Adam within shouting distance.
" 'Stay here a moment, Ben, " Ben said, with an exaggeration of the drawl that Adam's voice still held from a childhood spent in the deep South. " 'Wait until my daughter has had a chance to get to her room. Wouldn't want to expose her to the likes of you. " The last sentence lost Adam's tone and fell back into his own crisp British accent. He didn't sound quite like Prince Charles, but closer to that than to Fagan in Oliver.
"I don't know what you think it has to do with me," I told him with a shrug. "You're the one who got kicked out of the London pack. If Adam hadn't taken you, you'd have been in real trouble."
"It wasn't me that done it," he growled ungrammatically. I refrained from correcting him with an effort. "And as for what you have to do with it, Adam told me you'd warned him to keep Jesse out of my way."
I didn't remember doing that although I might have. I shrugged. Ben had come to town a few months ago in a flurry of gossip. There had been three particularly brutal rapes in his London neighborhood, and the police had been looking in his direction. Guilty or not, his Alpha felt it would be good to get him out of the limelight and shipped him to Adam.
The police hadn't anything to hold him on, but after he'd emigrated the rapes stopped. I checked-the Internet is an amazing thing. I remembered speaking to Adam about it, and I warned him to watch Ben around vulnerable women. I'd been thinking about Jesse, but I didn't think I'd said that explicitly.
"You don't like women," I told him. "You are rude and abrasive. What do you expect him to do?"
"Go home, Ben," said a molasses-deep voice from just behind my right shoulder. I needed to get more sleep, darn it, if I was letting everyone sneak up on me.
"Darryl," I said, glancing back at Adam's second.
Darryl was a big man, well over six feet. His mother had been Chinese, Jesse had told me, and his father an African tribesman who had been getting an engineering degree at an American university when they met. Darryl's features were an arresting blend of the two cultures. He looked like someone who should have been modeling or starring in movies, but he was a Ph. D. engineer working at the Pacific Northwest Laboratories in some sort of government hush-hush project.
I didn't know him well, but he had that eminently respectable air that college professors sometimes have. I much preferred him at my back to Ben, but I wasn't happy being between two werewolves, whoever they were. I stepped sideways until I could see them both.
"Mercy." He nodded at me but kept his eyes on Ben. "Adam noticed you were missing and sent me to find you." When Ben didn't respond, he said, "Don't screw up. This is not the time."
Ben pursed his lips thoughtfully, then smiled, an expression that made a remarkable difference to his face. Only for an instant, he looked boyishly charming. "No fuss. Just telling a pretty lady good night. Good night, sweet Mercedes. Dream of me."
I opened my mouth to make a smart comment, but Darryl caught my eye and made a cutoff gesture with his hand. If I'd had a really good comeback, I'd have said it anyway, but I didn't, so I kept my mouth shut.
Darryl waited until Ben started off, before saying brusquely, "Good night, Mercy. Lock your doors." Then he strode off toward Adam's.
Between the dead wolf and Ben's wish, I suppose I should have had nightmares, but instead I slept deeply and without dreams-none I remembered anyway.
I slept with the radio on, because otherwise, with my hearing, all I did was catnap all night. I'd tried earplugs, but that blocked sound a little too well for my peace of mind. So I turned music on low to block the normal sounds of night and figured anything louder would wake me up.