Night Broken (Mercy Thompson #8)(67)

The two of them left, and I caught Gary by the arm before he could follow.

“You’d better cool your jets,” I told him, because although he might have interrupted her to stop her from blurting out where she’d last seen him, there had been real intent in his flirting—as there hadn’t been when he’d been messing around with Kyle and Zack. “Honey will wipe the floor with you.”

His eyes went half-mast, and his voice dropped in evident pleasure. “I know.”

I threw my hands up in the air. “You’ve been warned. Don’t come looking for sympathy here.”

The outside door opened, and Adam came in. He stomped the dirt off the bottom of his shoes on the mudroom mat with determined slowness. I recognized the careful movement as an attempt to keep his still-agitated wolf under control.

His calmness in the back of the SUV had been more of the same: my wolf didn’t like being helpless when someone he felt responsible for was in trouble. Joel had done some work for Adam, and that was enough to make him Adam’s responsibility.

I leaned against a counter and relaxed deliberately. Gary raised an eyebrow, looked toward the mudroom. Then he proved he was a lot better at reading people than he liked to pretend because he copied my position on the far side of the kitchen from the mudroom. He left a lot of space between me and him.

Adam came into the kitchen after he was satisfied with the state of his shoes. He saw Gary and me, and came over and leaned on the counter, too, close enough to me that his body pressed against my side.

He focused his gaze toward the opposite wall, where a cabinet displayed antique dishes, very carefully not looking at Gary on the other side of me.

I broke the silence. “Tad,” I said, because it should have occurred to me earlier to warn him.

“I called before I came inside. Tad said he’d take the opportunity to visit his father,” Adam told me. “Guayota is welcome to try to find him in Fairyland.” He frowned. “I’m not sure how voluntary his going is; it sounded like someone noticed him using magic, and he has to go talk to them.”

“Can he get back out again?” I didn’t bother to hide my anxiety.

“Tad didn’t think it would be an issue, not with his father there. Though he said if we don’t talk to him in a week or so, we might see what we can do to break him out.”

Zee would be hard to hold if he didn’t want to stay somewhere. He’d gone to the reservation voluntarily—hostilely voluntarily, but voluntarily nonetheless. “Maybe not,” I said.

We subsided into silence again.

Adam said, “Guayota has Joel. Only a man who had those dogs’ trust could have killed them, sacrificed them that way, one after another without their fighting back.”

“I know,” I agreed.

“You think that he’s found a way to turn Joel into one of his dogs, the tibicenas, like the one you killed who turned back into a man.”

“I do.”

He bowed his head and growled. It took him a few moments to find his words again. “Joel is a good man. He would never have killed, have sacrificed those dogs of his, given any kind of choice. He’d have killed a person before he killed those dogs.”

“Agreed.” Anyone who’d talked to Joel about his dogs knew that.

“We hit the trail at Joel’s backwards,” Adam told me. “Joel and Guayota went to the kennel first. Joel killed the dogs, then, in the shape of one of the tibicenas, he destroyed his bedroom.”

“Yes,” I agreed. The destruction in the house hadn’t been Guayota. If he’d been as angry as the animal who had attacked that room, he’d have burned the place to ashes. “He was hunting his wife, and she wasn’t there. He responded like a territorial animal in a rage.” Rage at Guayota redirected at the things he loved most.

I blinked back tears at the wrongness of that.

“Some sacrifices are worth more than others,” said Gary.

Adam still didn’t look at Gary, but he nodded. “Whatever tore up that bedroom was a lot more lethal than the dog you shot. Bigger.”

“They are shapeshifters like Guayota.” It wasn’t a guess. I’d seen the size of the claws on the walls.

“There is probably no way to get Joel back,” Adam said.

I heard the guilt in Adam’s voice and knew that this was the issue at hand. I narrowed my eyes at him. I could argue all night about why he shouldn’t feel guilty about Joel and how we didn’t know enough about Guayota to know that Joel was lost. We had a lot of alternatives to explore before we gave up. But sometimes taking another tack worked better.

“If I hadn’t killed the male tibicena, then he wouldn’t have needed a replacement. If I hadn’t gone to talk to Lucia, maybe he wouldn’t have tracked down Joel.” Unless he had some way of finding the people who were tied to the Canary Islands.

“If you folks are done with me,” Gary said, “I think I’ll get going.”

Adam glanced at him. “You wait a moment.” To me he said, “You know it isn’t your fault.”

“I know it,” I agreed. “But if we’re accepting blame, I think that I’m closer to the cause than you are.”

He grunted irritably. “Fine.”

“Fine.”

Adam took a deep breath, and I could sense the cloak of civilization that he pulled over the beast who wanted to kill something, anything, because Adam and his wolf were united in their dedication to justice, and its defeat could send them off in a rage. He took a second breath, and the mantle settled more firmly in place.