Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(26)

“What’s the meeting about?” she asked.

“Jesse doesn’t know?” Warren asked.

“Jesse was a smart person,” I told him. “She came in and went to bed last night so she didn’t hear about how we found a nasty creature that might be some sort of boogeyman for the fae and another nasty creature who has decided to take up stalking me for a hobby. If she’d gotten up earlier this morning, I would have told her all about it then. But now we have to go have a meeting.”

Jesse raised her eyebrow in interest.

“Don’t worry, though,” I said, even though I’d made the whole situation sound funny so she wouldn’t be worried. “The stalker saved me from the evil nasty.”

“That’s just wrong,” Jesse said with a grin.

“I know, right?” I shook my head. “But that’s not why the whole pack got called in. Or that’s not the only reason why. There’s a strange group of wolves nosing into our territory.”

Warren stiffened. “Invaders?”

I shrugged. “Looks like. Adam’s been on the phone to various old friends all night putting together a possible list of suspects. He plans on introducing our guests to all of us digitally before we meet them.”

“Aiden went into the meeting,” Jesse said carefully.

As a rule, pack meetings were for pack members only. Aiden was there so he could inform the pack about our escapee from Underhill.

“Since the pack is the reason you had to shuffle your life around,” I told her, “I’d guess that you have a place in our meetings. Come on in if you want to—it will save me having to tell you everything again, anyway.”

“Awesome,” she said.

Warren looked at Jesse and gave a solemn shake of his head. “I thought you had more sense. I, for one, have always been grateful for the meetings I have not attended. But if’n you want to come in with us, I guess I’m a big enough shield that none of the others will try to drive you out.”

“Except Dad,” she said in a small voice.

I narrowed my eyes at the door. “He’s abject in misery and wallowing in guilt after falling into Christy’s”—I glanced at Christy’s daughter and exchanged “trap” for—“situation. He won’t object.”

She looked down at herself. “I’m in pajamas.”

“Go change,” I said. “We’ll wait.” I glanced at my watch. “You have three minutes.”

She jumped into her room and shut the door.

“Why?” Warren asked me.

“She deserves to be involved,” I said. “She’s making life-defining decisions because of the pack. Likely all three of our current crises will affect her one way or the other.”

“And because it will drive Auriele to distraction,” said Jesse, emerging from her room now clad in jeans and a shirt sporting a cat with an innocent look and a tail emerging from its mouth with the words Got Mouse? underneath. “Mercy is sneaky that way. Maybe I am, too.” She twirled. “Do I look ready for the vengeance games?”

I decided that the mouse T-shirt was calculated. Though we weren’t going to play cat-and-mouse games with anyone. I was not unaware that Auriele was going to squirm at the sight of Jesse, but that wasn’t the reason I’d included her.

I couldn’t stand to see her isolated. Not this morning, anyway.

Warren looked at me.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and opened the door with fifteen seconds to spare.

And if I found Auriele’s face before I stepped aside so Jesse could enter? Maybe making Auriele squirm a little didn’t bother me at all.

From the front of the room, Adam looked up from his notes. He saw Jesse—and smiled at her. His smile widened when he saw me. Like Warren, he looked worn-out. I was pretty sure that he hadn’t gotten any sleep at all last night.

“By my count, that’s all of us,” I told him.

“George isn’t here,” said Elliot, one of the more dominant wolves in the room. He was a big man, massive if not as tall as Warren. Like several of the other wolves, he worked for Adam’s security company. Ex-military, I knew, but I didn’t think his military service had been in the last hundred years.

Elliot had bet one dollar on Sherwood being Rasputin, the mad monk of Russia. Which was ridiculous because there were photos of Rasputin and he didn’t look anything like Sherwood. Which I had told him at the time.

Elliot had grinned at me. “It’s the eyes,” he’d said. “You can tell by the eyes.”

Which meant that he was, like several of the others, putting out bets to tease Sherwood. Sherwood, when he’d seen it, had grunted, then said something in Russian. I’m not sure what it had meant, but it had sounded exasperated.

Unlike others, I didn’t put any stock in Sherwood’s prowess in Russian being a clue to who he had been. Adam spoke Russian, and he’d been born in Alabama. Bran, as far as I could tell, spoke every language on the planet—if sometimes in archaic versions. Living centuries gave a wolf plenty of time to become fluent in any language they wanted to make the effort to learn.

New languages would be especially easy for Sherwood to acquire. He wouldn’t need a large vocabulary because he didn’t talk a lot.