Night Broken (Mercy Thompson, #8)(66)
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 TriCities 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.”
They were running the video of my fight with Guayota on Honey’s projection system; the screen was even bigger than I remembered. The image was a little grainy, but I watched myself, larger than life, trip over the crowbar and land on my butt. In the background, the dog had already morphed into a man.
Most of the pack was there. I picked out Christy, Auriele, Darryl, Warren, Kyle, Ben, Zack, Jesse, Mary Jo, and Honey at a glance. Most of them were so focused on what they were watching that they didn’t notice me come in. Christy, half-turned away from the screen, saw me, but I couldn’t read her face.
The screen went blank, and there was a collective groan.
“Play it again.” Mary Jo’s voice was harsh. “I want to see that first part in slow motion. Where she figures out that he’s not human.”
I cleared my throat, and the room fell silent. “Honey? Is there a bedroom where I can put Lucia? Guayota paid her a visit, and she’s pretty fragile. We brought her here to be safe.”
“Lucia?” Honey got up from one of the couches scattered around the room, all facing vaguely in the direction of the screen on the wall. “That’s the woman who told us about the dogs, right?”
I nodded, taking a half step back because once I’d spoken, they’d all twisted around in their seats to look at me, and they were watching me with intent. To Honey I said, “Her dogs are dead, and her husband’s missing—she needs some time to regroup and a safe place to be, so we brought her here. Some clothes to sleep in and to wear tomorrow would also be nice.”