Night Broken (Mercy Thompson 8)

“It also means bad people’s works are stronger than good people’s,” murmured Gary, but he spoke quietly. I don’t think Lucia heard him.

While the people were talking, Adam had been talking, too. The dog, Cookie, had quieted, her growls becoming whines. I figured that Laughingdog had been right about needing to get out of here and that Adam had done enough to make it possible. I opened the cage and snagged a lead and collar from a hook on the front of the cage.

I sat down on the ground in front of the doghouse. “Okay, Adam. Get her to come out.”

He whined at her again and ended with something as close to a bark as werewolves get. She crawled out of the doghouse, and I found myself whining in sympathy.

She wasn’t ever going to win any dog shows, wouldn’t have even before someone had hit her hard enough to blind her on one side. She was a mutt. The German shepherd was pretty obvious in the shape of her head, but there was something else that gave her a heavier body. Malamute maybe. Maybe even some wolf.

She carried her head canted because of the blind eye, trying to see out of one eye and get the information she’d gotten out of both. Her tail was down, not quite tucked, and she uttered little anxious growls until she saw me. Then she barked and drew her lips back from her teeth.

I stayed where I was.

I could see when her nose first cued her in that there was something odd about me. She froze, the snarls dying in her throat. That’s when Adam moved in and touched her nose with his.

It wasn’t anything a real wolf or a human could have done. He used pack magic and let her feel the weight of his authority and the protection he represented. She leaned against him and sighed.

I stood up, slipped the collar on her and the lead, and she gave me no trouble, though she tried not to look at me more than she had to. Adam stayed with her. I looked at Gary, then down at Lucia, and he nodded, took her arm, and helped her to her feet.

We left the dogs’ bodies because we did not have time to bury them, though it felt to me as though we should have done something. But in times of war, the care of the dead is outweighed by the need for survival.

I opened the back door of the SUV, and Adam jumped in, followed by the dog. I released her leash as soon as she was in but watched to make sure it didn’t snag anywhere until she settled. Adam hopped over the seat and lay down in the luggage compartment. The battered dog followed him and curled up on the opposite side of the SUV. She put her head down with a sigh, and I shut the door.

Gary had taken Lucia to her car. He held out his hand, and she put her keys in it with the same sort of sigh of surrender that Cookie had given.

He looked at me. “We’ll follow you.”

Because Lucia was occupied opening the door, I mouthed Do you have a license? at him.

He just gave me a wink and a sly smile and got behind the wheel of Lucia’s car.

9

Honey’s house was farther out than Adam’s and mine. It was maybe a little bit bigger.

There is something to the cliché that the older immortal creatures are wealthy. Not always, certainly. Warren was almost two hundred years old, and when I met him he was working at a Stop and Rob without two thin dimes to rub together. I didn’t know how old Honey was—we’d never been that friendly—but Peter had had at least a couple of centuries, maybe more, and he’d accumulated real wealth. He’d worked as a plumber for the past twenty or thirty years, and that hadn’t hurt anything, either.

Honey had sold the business after his death and was talking about going back to school. She didn’t need a job for money, but she needed something to do—something more than random trips to visit prisons with me.

I pulled into her driveway, where there were already five or six cars including Kyle’s new Jag in the parking area in the front, so I drove around behind the house and parked by the pasture in back. Peter had been a cavalry officer, and he’d kept his love of horses. There were two of them inside the fence. One had raised its head to watch me park, but the other one kept its head down, ripping up grass as fast as it could.

I let Adam and Cookie out, catching her leash as she exited. She looked more exhausted than aggressive now, and she waited by my side as Gary pulled in beside me. Adam gave me a look and hopped back into the SUV. He’d gotten out so that Cookie would, but he intended to change shape back to human before he went into the house.

Lucia was looking as though she’d reached the end of her rope, so I decided to leave Adam to it.

“Come on inside,” I told them. “Adam will join us in a minute.”

Honey’s house was stucco, as most upscale houses in the Tri-Cities are. In the dark, it looked white, but I knew that it was a pale shade of gray set off with dark gray trim. The rear-porch lights were on, so I led our procession to the back door into a mudroom.

I kicked off my shoes, and so did Lucia, who was only wearing sandals. She looked like a good, strong wind would blow her over. The dog was subdued, and I hoped she’d stay that way until Adam got through changing.

“Both of you stay here just a moment and take this.” I handed the leash to Lucia. “I’ll go find Honey and see if she doesn’t have a room to put you in. No sense in throwing you to the wolves tonight.”

“Joel is never coming back.” Her voice was stark.

“Too early to tell,” Gary said. “It doesn’t look good, but saying ‘it’s over’ before it actually is will make certain the outcome.”

It sounded like he had matters in hand, so I went in search of Honey. I started toward the living room but heard noise upstairs; it sounded like cheering.

The whole upper floor of Honey’s house was one room. She and Peter had used it for parties, but one wall was set up with a projection screen so it could be used as a theater. From the sounds I was hearing, she must have set up a movie or something … I didn’t hear a sound track or anything but the voices of various pack members saying things like—“look at that jump, exactly as much effort as necessary and not an inch too high” and “triple tap, double tap, and hop.”

It was that last one, uttered in Darryl’s voice and rough in satisfaction that made me apprehensive. I entered the room, which was filled with a dozen or so people, in time to hear Auriele say, “Fragile my aching butt. How did she manage to avoid his swing and hit him with the gun? I wish we had this from a slightly different angle.”

“We do,” said Ben. “We have four discs. This one is Garage Cam One. There’s also Outside Cam One, Office Cam One, and Garage Cam Two.”