Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(61)

Adam smiled, but his eyes were worried.





9





Because Makaya was in the car with us on the way home, and I didn’t want to scare her, I didn’t talk to Adam about Fiona or how Lincoln had been bitten. He knew what I knew, because I’d talked to him about it on the phone when I’d called him from Kelly’s house. There were still some important implications that we should discuss—but it would have to wait until we got home.

So for the ride home, I stayed quiet, nursing my broken nose, as Auriele organized a pack bunk-up on her phone. Bunk-up was one step shy of “everyone to the Batcave”—our house being the Batcave. Bunk-up meant that the wolves stayed in groups of two to four and avoided going anywhere alone.

I wasn’t sure how a bunk-up was going to keep anyone safe from the smoke weaver—though it probably would be effective against Fiona’s band, at least in the short run. But I didn’t say anything. What else could we do?

We could pull the human families of the pack into our home; we’d done that when the witches had become a problem. But we had too many werewolves to take them all into our home for long—and if we did, there was no way to lock the doors to keep them in and the smoke weaver out. Packed in like that for more than a few hours, we’d start having fights. Our wolves needed freedom to move. We literally could not do what the fae and the vampires had done to protect themselves. We also could not do it figuratively. We were the protectors of the Tri-Cities. It was our job to face the scary bad things—if we retreated, we left the field to the villains.

We arrived home and the mass chaos of too many people in too small a space was whipped into shape by the combined efforts of Auriele, Hannah, and Jesse. I tried to get Adam’s attention a couple of times—but he kept retreating with different people to confer in his office, where Ben couldn’t hear them. But also where there wasn’t enough room for me, not even on his desk.

“You look like you hurt,” Adam told me. “I know you have some things we need to discuss. I’ll come up as soon as I can. Take a bag of frozen peas and lie down. I’ll find you as soon as I have the security schedules lined out.”

We had ice packs, but I liked frozen peas better. They were gentler on swollen tissue. Frozen peas on my poor nose was a good idea, and finding a quiet place sounded amazing. I grabbed a bag from the freezer and went to our bedroom and shut the door.

Our bedroom was more or less soundproofed—not like Adam’s office, where the soundproofing was a serious thing. If the bedroom door was shut and the house was quiet, the werewolves could hear noise from the bedroom but probably not actual conversation. With the mass chaos in the house, being overheard was not a consideration.

I pulled out my phone and dialed a number by memory.

“Mercy.”

Just hearing the Marrok’s voice took a chunk of stress out of my day. Not that he couldn’t return the stress and add stomach-acid-producing interest, but just now he was the person I needed to talk to the most.

“We are in trouble,” I told him. Then considered who I was talking to and said, “Not anything we can’t handle.”

“I feel as though you should amend that,” Bran said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have called me.”

I thought of the vampires and the fae locking themselves away. And Ben down in the basement pretending there was nothing wrong.

Before anyone could stop them, Kelly’s kids had boiled down to the basement, where the electronic toys waited. And they had found Ben in the cage. Ben had dutifully admired Makaya’s bright pink casts, adorned with hot-glued glitter and plastic gemstones thanks to Jesse. And he’d begged us all with his eyes to get the kids upstairs before he lost it again.

We hadn’t quite made it, but Jesse told Makaya that Ben was playing.

Makaya had put her head down on Darryl’s shoulder (for all that he was scary as anything, kids loved Darryl) and said sadly, “Maybe I would have laughed like he wanted but that man scared me today. I don’t want to be scared again for a while.”

Yes, so maybe we were having trouble handling it.

“Okay. Let’s say that I have some concerns,” I hedged. “I think you might help with a couple of them.”

“You have some wolves invading your territory,” he said.

That photo montage and information organization had been mostly Charles. I would have known that even if I hadn’t heard Adam talking to him. Charles handed out information that was useful, organized, and succinct. But if Charles knew about our invaders, so would Bran.

Bran was more Socratic when delivering aid. “Adam,” he might have said, “where do you think you should go looking for information? If I were you I might look at . . . Texas.”

Which was why Adam had gone to Charles for help and not Bran. Well, that and Bran had formally washed his hands of our pack as a necessary step in the experiment of a werewolf pack being the neutral party while the humans and the fae worked out how they were going to live in the same world together. Our pack had to be independent so that if matters didn’t go well, we wouldn’t drag every werewolf in North and South America into a war with the fae or the humans—or both.

I had gone to Bran because I wasn’t looking for loads of information—I needed advice. Advice was Bran’s best thing.