Night Broken (Mercy Thompson #8)(42)

“I had a late lunch.” I continued on to the kitchen. “And then there were all those dead people afterward. Hard to keep the smell out of my head.”

That shut her up. I think that all the talk about the dead bodies really had bothered her. I was letting her make me petty.

I kept my movements slow and even as I scraped my plate off into the garbage. I loaded my dishes into the dishwasher and walked with deliberate steps up the stairs; by then Darryl was carrying the narrative. I didn’t run, didn’t even move with speed, but every step was in as direct a line with my bedroom as I could manage. I shut the door behind me and caught a deep breath.

If her stalker didn’t kill Christy soon, she might just drive me to it. At this point, I wasn’t even certain how much of it was her fault and how much of it was me being jealous. Not of Adam, Adam belonged to me, soul and wolf. If it were just Adam, I’d have more control. It was the pack.

Pack magic, I’d learned, was real. And if enough of the pack wanted you to do something, it was difficult not to do it. When I hadn’t been aware of it, some members of the pack had made Adam and me have a fight. They couldn’t do that anymore, but I could feel them pressing upon me. I suspected that if enough of them wanted me out of the pack badly enough, they would succeed. What I didn’t know was what that would do to Adam, but I was certain it wouldn’t be good.

I walked over to my chest of drawers and unfastened the chain around my neck and set it down, so I could look at it. It had been a graceful piece of jewelry when I’d only had the lamb on it. Even my wedding ring—which I wore on my finger only on formal occasions because I didn’t want to lose a finger when something caught on my ring while I was at work—was beautiful. The engagement ring had a single, large, pear-cut diamond. My wedding ring was plainer, just two small yellow topazes Adam said were the same color as my eyes when I went coyote. The rings had been brazed together so that the topazes flanked the diamond.

It was the dog tag that turned the necklace from jewelry to statement. The tag hadn’t been pretty to start with, and after nearly four decades of wear and tear, it was battered and rough. Adam wore the other tag at all times.

Symbols.

I closed my hand on Adam’s dog tag as the door to the bedroom opened and quietly shut again. Adam’s arms came around me, and he bent so he could put his head on my shoulder. There was a mirror on the top of the dresser, so I could see his face—and his eyes in the mirror met mine.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

He smiled, a peaceful expression that lightened suddenly with mischief. “For keeping the peace. You don’t think that I don’t know you could wipe the floor with a lightweight like Christy? You battled with Bran when you were just a kid and came out on top. Christy? She’s not a tithe on Bran.”

I snorted. “I don’t know where you get your information, but I didn’t win any battles with Our Lord and Master Bran Cornick who is the Marrok. No one does. That’s why he’s the Marrok.”

He snorted back. “That’s not what Bran says.”

“Then he’s doing it for his own reasons,” I told him. “Don’t put too much weight on his stated opinion. More than likely he’s just trying to get you to do something you don’t want to do.”

“Peanut butter,” Adam said, deadpan.

“He made my foster mother cry,” I said.

“Eggs.”

“That didn’t work so well,” I told him. “But I did learn not to arm my enemies.”

“Shoes.”

Shocked, I turned around, so I could see his face instead of just the reflection. “No one knows about the shoes. Bran doesn’t know.” I hadn’t thought that Bran knew about the shoes.

“I don’t know if Bran does,” Adam said. “Samuel said that he and Charles cooperated to keep Bran guessing because he was really enraged about the shoes.”

Charles had covered for me? I’d known that Samuel had seen me and not said anything—but I hadn’t known about Charles. Truth was that in my heart of hearts I’d been a lot more scared of Bran’s son Charles than I’d ever been scared of Bran. I just never believed that Bran would really hurt me. Charles … Charles would do whatever he had to. I was still more scared of Charles than Bran, but not as scared because Adam had my back.

“The shoes were not the brightest idea I’ve ever had,” I admitted. “But I was provoked.”

I met Adam’s eyes, and we stared at each other for a minute, then I started to snicker. He laughed and pulled me into his body. I relaxed—and it felt like the first time I’d relaxed since Christy came to stay with us.

“The shoes didn’t really have anything to do with Bran,” I told him.

“Leah is his mate,” he said. “Of course it had something to do with Bran. Especially when he couldn’t figure out who was stealing her shoes.”

I laughed again, tried to stop, while I said, “Only one shoe.”

“One of each pair. At a time. Forty-three shoes gone over a five-week period. Sometimes two or three shoes in the same day. Not a scent trace to be found. Just like a wizard had conjured them away.”

I blinked away tears and tried to stop laughing. It wasn’t that funny—it was the release of the tension that had been building up for days. “I actually can’t remember what it was Leah did, specifically. But I’m sure it was something worse than making me Enemy Number One because I let her tablecloth get stained.”