He held out my keys and, careful not to touch his hand, I took them from him. He smiled as if I'd done something interesting and I realized I shouldn't have been so careful. If I had felt nothing for him, touching his hand wouldn't have bothered me. Living among normal humans, I'd forgotten how difficult it was to hide anything from werewolves.
"Good night, Mercy," he said.
Then he was gone, and the room felt emptier for his leaving it. I'd better go in the morning, I thought, as I listened to the snow squeak under his feet as he walked away.
I was busy reading page fourteen for the third time when someone else knocked on the door.
"I brought dinner," said a man's pleasant tenor.
I set the book down and opened the door.
A sandy-haired young man with a nondescript face held a plastic tray loaded with two plastic-wrapped sub sandwiches, a pair of styrofoam cups of hot chocolate, and a dark blue winter jacket. Maybe it was the food, but it occurred to me that if Bran looked that much like the cliche of a delivery boy, it was probably on purpose. He liked to be unobtrusive.
He gave me a small smile when I didn't step away from the door right away. "Charles told me that Adam is going to be fine, and Samuel made a fool of himself."
"Samuel apologized," I told him, stepping back and letting him into the room.
The kitchenette had a two-burner stove, six-pack-sized fridge, and a small, Formica-covered table with two chairs. After tossing the coat on the bed, Bran set the tray on the table and rearranged the contents until there was a sandwich and cup on each side.
"Charles told me that you didn't have a coat, so I brought one. I also thought you might like something to eat," he said. "Then we can discuss what we're to do with your Alpha and his missing daughter."
He sat down on one side and gestured for me to take the other seat. I sat and realized I hadn't eaten anything all day-I hadn't been hungry. I still wasn't.
True to his word, he didn't talk while he ate and I picked. The sandwich tasted of refrigerator, but the cocoa was rich with marshmallows and real vanilla.
He ate faster than I did, but waited patiently for me to finish. The sandwich was one of those huge subs, built to feed you for a week. I ate part of it and wrapped the rest in the plastic it had come in. Bran had eaten all of his, but werewolves need a lot of food.
My foster mother had liked to say, "Never starve a werewolf, or he might ask you to join him for lunch." She'd always pat her husband on the head afterward, even if he was in human form.
I don't know why I thought of that right then, or why the thought tried to bring tears to my eyes. My foster parents were both of them almost seventeen years dead. She died trying to become a werewolf because, she'd told me, every year she got older and he didn't. There are a lot fewer women who are moon called, because they just don't survive the Change as well. My foster father died from grief a month later. I'd been fourteen.
I took a sip of cocoa and waited for Bran to talk.
He sighed heavily and leaned back in the chair, balancing it on two legs, his own legs dangling in the air.
"People don't do that," I told him.
He raised an eyebrow. "Do what?"
"Balance like that-not unless they're teenage boys showing off for their girlfriends."
He brought all four legs back on the flour abruptly. "Thank you." Bran liked to appear as human as possible, but his gratitude was a little sharp. I took a hasty sip of cocoa so he wouldn't see my amusement.
He put his elbows on the table and folded his hands. "What are your intentions now, Mercy?"
"What do you mean?"
"Adam's safe and healing. We'll find out how your young friend was killed. What are you planning to do?"
Bran is scary. He's a little psychic-at least that's what he says if you ask. What that means is that he can talk to any werewolf he knows, mind to mind. That's why Charles was able to be his spokesperson out in the woods. Bran uses that ability, among others, to control the North American packs. He claims it is all one way, that he can make people hear him but not the other way around.
The pack whisperers say he has other abilities, too, but no one knows exactly what they are. The most common rumor is that he really can read minds. Certainly he always knew who was responsible for what mischief around the town.
My foster mother always laughed and said it was his reputation for knowing everything that allowed him to appear infallible: all he had to do was walk through the room and see who looked guiltiest when they saw him. Maybe she was right, but I tried looking innocent the next time, and it didn't work.
"I'm leaving in the morning." Early, I thought. To get away without talking to Samuel again-but also to get started looking for Jesse.
Bran shook his head and frowned. "Afternoon."
I felt my eyebrows rise. "Well," I said gently, "if you knew what I was going to be doing, why didn't you just tell me instead of asking?"
He gave me a small smile. "If you wait until afternoon, Adam will be ready to travel, and Samuel should know something about how your young man... Alan MacKenzie Frazier died. He's staying up tonight to perform the autopsy and run tests in the lab."
He leaned forward. "It's not your fault, Mercy."
I spilled the cocoa all down the front of my T-shirt. "Sh-" I bit off the word. Bran didn't approve of swearing. "You can read minds."
"I know the way your mind works," Bran said, with a little smile that managed to be not quite smug. But he was quick enough retrieving a roll of paper towels stored under the sink and handed them to me as I held my shirt away from my body. The cocoa was still hot, though not scalding.
As I mopped myself up at the sink, he continued, "Unless you've changed more than I can believe, if something happens, if someone gets hurt, it must be your fault. I had the story from Adam, as far as he knows it, and it had nothing to do with you."
"Hah-you can read minds. He's in wolf form, and can't talk," I said. I'd done the best I could with the shirt, but I wished I had an extra change of clothing.
Bran smiled. "He's not now. Sometimes the change helps us heal faster. Usually we change from human to wolf, but the other way works as well. He was not happy with Samuel." Bran's smile deepened. "He spent his first words chewing him out. Told him that second-guessing the man in the field was an amateur's mistake. He said he'd rather not have someone who didn't know what they were doing 'mucking about' with his wounds. He also said that you had more guts than sense sometimes." Bran tipped his styrofoam cup in my direction. "As it happens I agree-which is why I asked Adam to keep an eye on you for me when you moved into his territory."
Ah, I thought and tried not to look as devastated as I felt. So Adam had been ordered to look after me? I had rather thought that the odd relationship we had was based on something else. Knowing that Bran had told him to watch me changed the shading of every conversation we'd ever had, lessened it.
"I don't like lies," said Bran, and I knew I'd failed to keep the pain of his revelation from my face. "Not even lies of omission. Hard truths can be dealt with, triumphed over, but lies will destroy your soul." He looked as though he had personal knowledge of it. "That distaste leads me to meddle where perhaps I should step back."
He paused, as if to let me speak, but I had no idea where he was going with this.
He sat down and took another sip of cocoa. "There were those who thought the truth of Bryan's death should be kept from you." Bryan had been my foster father.
I remembered waking up shortly after Christmas to Bran's low-key voice in the kitchen. When I came out of my room, Bran told me that the police had found Bryan's body in the Kootenai River.
Suicide is difficult for werewolves. Even silver bullets don't always defeat the wolf's ability to heal itself. Decapitation is effective, but rather difficult to achieve in a suicidal situation. Drowning works very well. Werewolves are very densely muscled; they tend to have a difficult time swimming even if they want to, because, like chimpanzees, they have too much muscle and not enough fat to float.
"Some of the pack would have told you that Bryan had an accident." Bran's voice was contemplative. "They told me that fourteen was too young to deal with a suicide, especially on top of the death of Bryan's mate."
"Her name was Evelyn," I told him. Bran had a tendency to dismiss the humans around him as if they didn't exist. Samuel once told me that it was because humans were so fragile, and Bran had seen too many of them die. I thought that if I could handle Evelyn's death when I was fourteen, then, by hang, Bran could, too.
He gave me a quelling look. When I didn't look down as protocol demanded, his lips turned up before he hid them with the cup.
"Evelyn, indeed," he said, then sighed. "When you chose to live alone, rather than go to your mother, I agreed to that, too. You had proven your mettle to me; I thought you had earned the right to make your own choices." His eyes roved around the room. "Do you remember the last time you and I talked?"
I nodded and sat down finally. Even if he wasn't insisting on protocol tonight, it felt awkward to be standing while he was sitting in the chair.
"You were sixteen," he said. "Too young for him-and too young to know what it was that he wanted from you."
When Bran had caught Samuel kissing me in the woods, he'd sent me home, then shown up the next morning to tell me that he'd already spoken with my real mother, and she would be expecting me at the end of the week. He was sending me away, and I should pack what I wanted to take.
I'd packed all right, but not to go to Portland; I was packed to leave with Samuel. We'd get married, he'd said. It never occurred to me that at sixteen, I'd have trouble getting married without parental permission. Doubtless Samuel would have had an answer for that as well. We'd planned to move to a city and live outside of any pack.