Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(46)

I shrugged, though I agreed wholeheartedly with his assessment. It just wasn’t useful to run around shrieking in fear. “So far, Ben, all that he’s done is save my life.”

Ben opened his mouth, then frowned at the window. “Where’s that light coming from?” he muttered, and not to me. He pushed his way into the bedroom and stalked up to the window. He stared out for a few seconds and then pulled down the blinds. He gave me an unreadable look and pulled the blinds down on the other windows, too.

He walked back to me and, in a very gentle voice, swore for a solid thirty seconds without repeating himself once.

When he wound down, he said, “Mercy, he can walk right into this house because some damn fool brought him in when we thought he was dying.”

“I think he might have been able to come in anyway,” I said. “Even if a vampire is unconscious, you have to invite them into your home or they can’t come. Ogden says he did not invite him in, not that he remembers, anyway.”

Ben said, “I don’t know that I’m comfortable with you sleeping up here alone. Where is Adam?”

“Darned if I know,” I told him. There must have been something in my voice because his face softened.

“What is up with him?” Ben asked. “He has been a right bastard these past few weeks.”

There was a sudden wary look in his eye at the tail end of his sentence—as if he had been thinking awhile about how to bring it up. But he hadn’t really expected to bring it up just now.

“I know as much as he does,” I told Ben firmly. The pack didn’t need to know that neither of us really understood what was going on. “I’m not going to discuss it with anyone else.”

“Private,” he said, with a nod. There was relief in his posture. It was enough for him that he believed that I knew what was wrong. “I get that. Do you want me to go drive the vampire off?”

There was not a sparrow’s chance in hell that Ben’s going out to drive Wulfe away would end up with Wulfe leaving. But I could find a galaxy’s worth of scenarios where that ended in disaster.

“No,” I said. “I think he’s just playing right now. Testing us, maybe. I don’t want to do anything that makes him think that we are taking him seriously.” And that gave me an idea.

I pulled a blanket out of the hall closet—one of those fuzzy ones sold at Costco. This one was wine red, suitable for a vampire. I’d never had it on my bed. I think the last one to use it had been Christy, so it wouldn’t smell like me or Adam. Vampires have keen senses and I wanted to be very careful about the message I was sending with this blanket.

“Here,” I said, shoving it at Ben. “Take this out to Wulfe. Tell him I . . . no. Tell him we don’t want him to get cold.”

Ben took the blanket, but as I spoke, he’d frozen in place. He frowned at me a moment, then shook his head and finally grinned. “He doesn’t know who he is messing with.”

That Ben thought I was a match for Wulfe was nice—but it might be dangerous for him to continue to hold that misapprehension.

“He scares the socks off me,” I told Ben seriously. “He should scare the socks off you, too. Don’t underestimate him. Don’t let him lure you into thinking he is harmless. Or that Adam or I or even the Mistress of the vampire seethe can keep him from doing anything he decides to do. Take him the blanket, and get back into the house. If we keep him amused, then he won’t have to kill anyone out of sheer boredom.”

His face grew sober. “I get that,” he said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

He left and I waited for him to return. I wanted to watch out the window, but I was afraid that if I gave him an audience, Wulfe might do something horrible. I’d seen him do horrible things before.

Instead I went down to the kitchen and pulled out a bowl. I needed to get to sleep, but I wasn’t going to manage that for a while. I mixed up chocolate chip cookies. Just a double batch.

I heard the murmur of Lucia’s voice in the suite she shared with Joel. There was no answering voice—Joel had not managed to shift to human for the past few days.

Aiden’s fire had rekindled itself, but it wasn’t up to normal levels yet and he hadn’t been able to quiet the volcano spirit enough to allow Joel to emerge. That was a little disheartening because we’d been hoping that Joel had been gaining more control. Apparently, Aiden had been getting better at shutting Joel’s fire down instead. At least Joel had been able to stay in his presa Canario form so we didn’t have to worry about him burning down the house inadvertently.

The sounds of me making food in the kitchen lured Medea out of whatever dark corner she’d been sleeping in. She hovered around my ankles because she knew that hopping on the counters was forbidden. I gave her a small dab of dough before I mixed in the chocolate chips and walnuts. She purred as she ate, and the sound soothed me. Cats are good company when you are sad or worried.

Walnuts were a matter of contention in the pack, but I liked them and I was making these for me. I needed chocolate because Adam wasn’t here. And because it was taking a very long time for Ben to walk out and hand over a blanket.

Adam’s SUV purred into our driveway about the same time that the back door opened and Ben walked in sans blanket.

“What took so long?” I asked, trying not to listen to Adam’s door shut. Now that Adam was actually here, I was nervous. What if he was unhappy when he saw me? I didn’t want the sight of me to make Adam unhappy.