Blood Bound (Mercy Thompson #2)(20)

I walked forward as I said it. The motion should have pushed him back, but he held still so I had to stop or get too close to him. He smelled of coconut sunscreen and cigarette smoke.

"Actually I picked my car up earlier," he said. "I came by tonight to talk to you."

He was human, but I saw the same predatory look in his eyes that the wolves had when they were off on a hunt. Being in my own garage had made me feel too safe and I'd let myself get too close to him. I had weapons a plenty in the form of wrenches and crowbars, but they were all out of reach.

"Did you?" I said. "Why?"

"I wanted to ask you how you liked dating a werewolf. Did you know he was a werewolf when you started dating him? Did you have sex with him?" His voice acquired a sudden razor edge.

It was such a shift in topic that I blinked stupidly at him for a moment.

This man didn't smell like a fanatic-hatred has its own scent. When Zee first came out, there was a group of people who'd marched around the shop with placards. Some of them came out one night and spray painted fairyland in angry red letters across my garage doors.

Tom Black smelled intense-as if the answers to his questions really mattered to him.

Outside, a small-block Chevy 350 pulled into my lot and I recognized its purr. With the last of my trepidation gone, I realized there was only one reason for the questions he'd asked.

I narrowed my eyes at him. "Hell," I said in disgust. "You're a reporter."

Some of the werewolves coming out deliberately attracted attention on the Marrok's orders: heroes from the military or police and fire departments and a couple of movie stars. Adam was not one of them. I could see why someone would send a reporter out sniffing around him, though. Not only was he an Alpha, but he was a pretty Alpha. I couldn't wait to hear what Adam would say when he found out someone was poking into his love life.

"I can make you rich," Black told me, encouraged, I think, by my smile. "When I'm through with you, you'll be as much of a celebrity as he is. You can sell your story to the networks."

I snorted. "Go away."

"Problems, Mercy?" The deep, Texas drawl caused the reporter to spin on his heel. I guess he hadn't heard Warren and his companion walk into the garage.

"No problems," I told Warren. "Mr. Black was just leaving."

Warren looked like an ad for "Real Western Cowboys," complete with worn boots and battered straw hat. He was entitled: he'd been a real cowboy in the old West when he'd been Changed. He was my favorite of Adam's wolves and beside him was Ben, a recent import from Great Britain  -  and the leading candidate for my least favorite werewolf. Neither of them had been among the "outed" wolves, not yet. In Ben's case, probably never. He'd narrowly escaped arrest in his native land and had been quietly shipped off to America to disappear.

The reporter took out his wallet and held out his card. I took it because my mother taught me to be polite.

"I'll be around," he said. "Call me if you change your mind."

"I'll do that," I told him.

Both werewolves turned to watch him leave. Only after his car was well away did they turn their attention back to me.

"I like what you've done to your face," Ben said, tapping his eye.

He may have saved my life once and taken a bullet for Adam, but that didn't mean I had to like him. It wasn't just that he'd been sent to Adam's pack to keep him from being questioned in connection with a series of violent rapes in London. I believe in innocent until proven guilty. Rather it was the qualities that had caused the London police to look in his direction in the first place: he was a petty, nasty, and violent man. Everything he said came out like a sneer or a threat, all in this nifty British accent. If he were just a hair nicer, I might have talked to him just to hear his voice, like him or not.

"I wasn't the one who decorated my face, but thanks anyway." I went back to the van to button it up for the night. I'd lost the momentum that was keeping me working, and all I wanted to do was find someplace to sleep. Someplace without a vampire dead in the closet. Damn it. Where was I going to sleep?

"What are you two doing here?" I asked Warren as I closed the back hatch of the van.

"Adam said we're to stay with you until you hear from the vampires-he thinks it will be sometime soon after dark. He doesn't want you to face them alone."

"Don't you have to work tonight?" Warren worked graveyard at an all night gas station/convenience store not too far from my home-he had gotten Samuel a job there when he moved in with me.

"Nah, quit last week. They had another manager changeover and this one wanted to clean house. So I thought I'd quit before I was fired." He paused then said, "I've been doing some work for Kyle. It pays better part-time than the convenience store did full-time."

"With Kyle?" I asked hopefully.

I've known Warren for a long time and had met maybe a dozen of his boyfriends. Most of them hadn't been worth knowing-but I liked Kyle. He was a hotshot lawyer, a terrific dresser, and a lot of fun. They'd been living together for a while when Kyle finally found out Warren was a werewolf. Kyle moved out. I knew they'd dated a few times since, but nothing more serious.

Warren dropped his eyes. "Mostly just some surveillance and, once, guard duty for a woman who was afraid of her soon-to-be ex-husband."