Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)(96)

The superintendent agreed that the circumstances were unusual and gave us a paperwork path to follow that would let Aiden start school. We managed to get it done (thanks to Kyle, who knew family law and could make it dance to his tune), and Aiden made it to the first day.

There were a few rough patches the first month of school, but Aiden finally settled in with a group of computer gamers. He still had those moments that reminded me that he was centuries older than he appeared, but mostly he looked happy.

I didn’t visit Stefan, but he called me twice and sounded nearly himself the second time. He said that the hope I’d given him was still helping him cope. I didn’t know what to say to that.

“I didn’t want to lose you,” I said, finally.

“Thank you,” he’d said. And he’d disconnected shortly thereafter.

The pack killed a pair of ghouls who had tried to settle in near Lourdes Medical Center in Pasco. Apparently hospitals are a favorite hunting ground of ghouls. We helped Marsilia roust a couple of itinerant vampires who tried to set up shop in West Richland. Renny started coming to Sunday breakfasts with Mary Jo and struck up an unlikely friendship with Ben, our candidate for wolf most likely to end up in jail. Anna’s ghost waved at me whenever I drove past my old place. I didn’t wave back.

Life happened. And we forgot to worry about Fiona.





14





I couldn’t sleep.

A heavy arm wrapped around my shoulders.

“Feeling restless?” The growl in Adam’s voice made my toes curl—they knew what that roughness meant and they liked it.

So did I.

“Yes,” I answered, my own voice a purr.

“I can help with that,” he promised. And boy did he.

His efforts were above and beyond to the point that when his phone rang in the middle of the night, I only woke up long enough to hear a bit of the conversation.

“—false alarm, probably, sir, cameras don’t—”

There was no stress in Adam’s employee’s voice and it didn’t sound urgent, so I went back to sleep.

I woke up when Adam patted my butt. I cracked my eye open suspiciously and he laughed.

“Not waking you up for that again—not that it wasn’t fun. But we have some equipment problems. The alarms at the garage are going off again, though the cameras aren’t showing anything.”

The system at my garage had been developing quirks over the last couple of weeks. His IT people couldn’t run it down closer than “an intermittent glitch.” Adam had finally ordered a whole new system, but it wouldn’t be in for a couple of weeks.

“I’m going to check in on that, then drive out to work and give my people a surprise visit.” He did those to keep his people on their toes. And to let them know that he wasn’t asking them to do anything he wouldn’t do—because on his surprise visits, he’d sometimes pick a random pair of guards and do their patrols with them. Sure enough he continued, “I’ll be out most of the day. I have a couple of new people to torment.”

I grunted at him.

“Why don’t you sleep in this morning?” he said.

“How is it that you are this cheerful?” I asked him plaintively. “You didn’t get any more sleep than I did.”

“I am male,” he said, and wiggled his eyebrows like the villain from a B horror movie. “Sex is better than sleep.”

“Go away,” I moaned, rolling over to bury my face in my pillow.

He laughed and started to do that.

“But kiss me first.”

He rolled me back over and did that, too.

When my alarm went off an hour later, I was really tempted to sleep in. Then I remembered that it was Saturday and I would be the only one at work.

Jesse and her friends were going to a concert in Seattle. Adam had fretted about security—so Jesse had called Tad and invited him along as her “muscle.” Which was all well and good, but it left me alone to mind the shop. I could have asked Zee to come in, but he had a project of some sort going on and told me not to bother him for a couple of weeks.

My official hours didn’t start until noon on Saturday, but I had some cars to finish up and a boatload of paperwork. After a recent IRS audit, I was religious about my paperwork. In the end, I owed them $452.00, which they had graciously rounded down from $452.34. But at one point, before I finally located a box of receipts where I’d used it to balance a transmission, they had claimed I owed them a little over six thousand dollars. Which meant, my accountant (Lucia) pointed out, if I could have found the other missing box, the government would probably have owed me money.

So off to work I needed to go.

I felt better after a shower and some painkiller to ease away the ache of repeated vigorous nighttime activity. I paused as I was brushing my teeth. I never used to have to resort to painkillers. Was I getting old? Or had Adam started to use sex to make up for the fact he was keeping our bond closed down?

Hmm.

When I got to the garage, it was still early enough that the lights in the parking lot were on. I waved to the camera and imagined Carlos or Butch—or Adam—waving back. The office, when I let myself in, smelled overwhelmingly of gasoline.

I grimaced. Fuel odors were par for the course when running a garage—and at least gasoline was volatile and would clear pretty quickly once I opened the bay doors.