Night Broken (Mercy Thompson #8)(62)

She paled, pulled out her cell phone, and dialed. Instead of Joel’s voice telling her to leave a message, we all heard the recording advising her that the customer who had the number she dialed was not available. He’d either powered his cell phone off, run it out of battery, or destroyed it.

“We have told you quite a story,” I told Lucia. “I swear to you that the danger is real. If you don’t wish us to keep you safe, I understand. If you don’t believe us, that’s okay, too. But I think you need to find a safe place to be for a few days until we can destroy Guayota.”

“I’m not sure that’s possible,” Laughingdog murmured, and I kicked him under the table even though I didn’t think Lucia had heard.

She put her phone back in her purse with shaking hands. “I live in a city with werewolves and fae. How much more is it to believe in volcano gods?”

She wiped her face, and I saw that she was clearing the skin beneath her eyes. “My dogs like you.” It wasn’t as much of a non sequitur as it sounded like. “I don’t want to believe you. If I believe you, then this … thing has my husband.” She gave me a brief, tight smile, and her voice was raw. “What can I do to help him?”

“We don’t know,” Adam said. “We are working on it. First, we’d like to get you somewhere safe.”

She examined his face, then looked at me. “Okay,” she said. “Let me stop at home and put extra food out for the dogs and get a few things packed. I am going to have to be there in the morning to feed them. Even if I could find someone willing to feed the dogs—and we have a real basket case in the rehab kennel right now—I could not ask anyone to come by if something dangerous might be hunting.”

“Good enough,” said Adam.

The dogs were silent again when we stopped at Lucia and Joel’s home. She’d already gotten out of her car when Adam stopped the SUV behind her. I hopped out to make sure she didn’t go in alone, and that’s when I smelled it.

“Blood,” I said quietly to Adam, and shut the SUV door and sprinted over to Lucia.

“Hold on.” I caught her arm and stopped her about two body lengths from the front door. “Shhh.” I couldn’t hear anything, but he’d been here. Along with the blood, I could smell his magic and a faint, burnt scent like scorched hair.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” I lied, because if she was like Joel, the fact that her dogs were in trouble would mean I’d have to sit on her to keep her out. “We’re going to wait here for Adam. He’s changing, and it’ll take a while, be patient. If I’m panicking for nothing, it won’t matter, but if there’s something here, I’d rather face it with a werewolf.”

“Changing. You mean changing into a werewolf?”

“That’s right.” Only then did I realize that the reason I knew that was because of our mate bond. He hadn’t said anything to me before I sprinted to Lucia.

“If you want to, you can go wait in your car.” I didn’t think she would, but it was worth trying. In her car, she might have a chance to get away if things went south.

“Is it because your brother is Native American?” she asked.

My eyes were good in the dark, and I was looking so hard they ached, but all I saw were a few bats and a squirrel. It took a moment to realize that I really didn’t have any idea what she was talking about.

“Is what because he is Native American?” I asked.

“Sorry,” she said. “When I’m nervous I forget to say everything out loud. Is he psychic because he is Native American?”

“As far as I know, Native Americans are no more psychic than anyone else,” I told her. “My father, though, he was…” Was what? Coyote? “A bull rider in rodeos, but in his spare time he hunted”—vampires—“demons. He was something of a shaman, and some of that followed his children.”

“You don’t have visions?”

“No.” I turned into a coyote and saw ghosts.

“You speak of him in the past tense,” she said. Lucia asked questions when she was scared, I got that, I did that sometimes, too. More often I talked. Sometimes I laughed. It was better than crying, and it made me look braver than I was.

I nodded. “My father died. The bad guys got him.” Coyote lived. Coyote always lived. The human guise he’d wrapped around himself because he was bored, the man my mother had fallen in love with, he had died.

The SUV door opened, and it was too soon for it to be Adam.

“I’m taking my chances out here,” Gary Laughingdog said. “I got nothing against werewolves, but when they are changing…”

“Just as well,” I told him. “They get pretty grumpy.”

Gary lifted his head and smelled the air. He glanced at me, and I nodded, knowing he was smelling Guayota for the first time. He grimaced. “Just so you know, kid,” he said. “I usually run when the bad things start happening.”

“Me, too,” said Lucia, and Gary and I exchanged quick grins because she was lying.

The sound of the SUV’s door opening had us all turning to look.

Adam was beautiful as man and as wolf. His wolf isn’t huge, not like Samuel’s or Charles’s wolves are, but he is substantial and graceful. He flowed out of the vehicle without making a sound, a blue-gray wolf with black markings. He raised his head and looked at the house.