Luke nodded at me, lips disapproving, but went back to his job obediently enough.
“Some of the pack like to forget who you are when Adam isn’t around,” Honey said softly. “I’ll have a discussion with Luke.”
I gave her a sharp look she didn’t see because she was watching Luke. Honey didn’t like being dominant—she avoided situations in which her natural temperament showed through. I’d thought Honey didn’t like me at all. So why had she just decided, out loud, to squelch Luke?
I opened the locker and collected the Vanagon’s keys. I walked out the prison door a free woman, but it wasn’t until I turned the van out onto the freeway that I really relaxed.
“So all you have to do to summon Coyote is be interesting,” Honey mused. “Shouldn’t take you long.”
“You could stake me out naked in the desert near an anthill,” I suggested.
She shook her head. “I don’t do clichés. Besides, Adam might object.”
My phone rang.
“Could you see who that is?” I asked.
She picked it up off the floor between our seats and, after a glance at the readout, answered it. “Adam, it’s Honey,” she said. “Mercy is driving.”
“Why hasn’t she picked up her phone for the past hour?” he asked.
She held the phone my direction and raised one eyebrow in inquiry.
“I’ve been in prison,” I said in a sad voice. And left it at that. Honey flashed a grin at me, the expression startling because I was so used to the reserve she’d been carrying around with her.
There was a brief silence. “Okay,” Adam said. “Was your undoubtedly brief sojourn the cause of your phone call earlier today? Christy said you didn’t leave a message.”
“Christy answered your cell phone, and you thought Mercy should leave a message?” Honey’s voice let everyone know exactly what she thought of that.
“No,” said Adam with gently emphasized patience. “I thought that she should have told Christy to give me the phone.”
“You were unavailable,” I told him.
Silence followed. Unhappy silence. And then I remembered who the enemy was and what she wanted to do to Adam and me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I let her get to me. But not to the point I did something stupid, I promise. I called Honey, and she came with me to see a man about summoning Coyote. Hank gave me his name. It was safe enough.”
Adam made a man sound that could have meant anything, but I took it to mean that we were okay again. When he used actual words, the subject wasn’t Christy anymore. “What did you learn from Hank’s contact?”
A lot. Important things I didn’t want to talk about on the phone. So I gave him the least of it. “He doesn’t summon Coyote because he’s pretty sure that’s the stupidest thing anyone could do. But apparently Coyote has a habit of showing up when he finds one of us—his descendants—interesting.”
Adam laughed ruefully. “Shouldn’t take you long, then.”
“That’s what I told her,” Honey said.
“Any word on the fire?” I asked.
“Arson is confirmed,” Adam said, “though there seems to be some confusion about the accelerant used. Whatever it was, it got really hot, really fast.”
“Do you think he’s done this kind of thing before?” I asked.
“The fire investigator seemed to think so. We’re looking for suspicious fires tied to an overzealous lover. We’re also looking at the European angle. There’s another trail, too. Warren got descriptions of this man’s dogs out of Christy. Looks like they are some sort of mastiff. She said they were valuable and difficult for anyone except Juan—her stalker—to handle.”
“That doesn’t sound like a mastiff,” I told him. “There’s a guy in the Montana pack who was breeding all sorts of big dogs. The mastiffs were mostly big sweeties.”
“I’m not sure she’d know a poodle from a sheepdog. But Juan Flores apparently took special pleasure in pointing out that both of his dogs outweighed Christy, who is a hundred and ten pounds.”
Hah. Christy was at least twenty pounds heavier than that.
“Hah.” Honey snorted with derision. “Christy is at least one thirty or one thirty-five.”
“Big dog,” I said.
Adam laughed. “I’ll let you know if there is anything new, and Mercy?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t do anything too interesting.”
He disconnected before I could reply.
“Don’t underestimate Christy,” Honey said. “She’s not nearly as helpless as she pretends to be.”
“I know that,” I said. I glanced at Honey, then looked back at the road. “I thought you liked her.”
She growled. “Helpless bitch had the whole pack—Adam included—hopping to her tune. Couldn’t mow the lawn, change a tire, or carry her own laundry up the stairs. Even Peter fell for it, and he usually had better sense. She didn’t like Warren—I thought at the time she was worried he was going to make a play for Adam, but mostly, I think, he didn’t fall over himself to be her slave. Darryl’s helpless against her, but at least he knows it. All that might not have been too bad, but she played them all off each other. I had my own private celebration when she left Adam.”
Her lips twisted. “I don’t like you,” she told me, but there was a lie in her voice, and she stopped talking, looking almost surprised. She started again, her tones softer than they had been. “I don’t enjoy change,” she said. “And you are change, Mercy. I am comfortable with the old ways, and you are tossing them aside whenever they don’t suit you, while Adam looks on with satisfaction. But one thing I’ve always known is that you were trying your best to make things better. Christy, she looked out for herself first. I don’t imagine that has changed. Only a fool would say the same about you—though I frequently disagree with your methods and goals.”
I cleared my throat. “So. Do you want to see a man about some dogs?”
5
I pulled into Joel’s driveway, and our presence was announced by a chorus of barking fit to wake the dead. Joel might work in the vineyards and fix cars as a hobby, but dogs were his passion. He and his wife bred, showed, and trained dogs. I figured that he might be able to help us figure out what kind of dogs Christy’s stalker had. It was a shot in the dark, but I was willing to do anything to shorten Christy’s time in my house. I’d called Joel, and he’d told me to meet him at home.