Night Broken (Mercy Thompson #8)(70)

“This isn’t about me,” I said. “Ask me some other time, and I’ll tell you. So you got Juan’s attention, and maybe because you know to look for odd things and don’t discount them the way someone who hadn’t been married to a werewolf might, you realized he wasn’t just some rich guy on the make, not just some guy at all. He scared you—but not because he was so possessive. He scared you the same way Adam scared you. If Juan Flores had been exactly what he presented himself as—a bored young businessman not opposed to sleeping with any pretty woman who threw herself in his path—it would have been okay. Instead, you got a man who was a lot more than he appeared to be on the surface. It scared you, and you ran.”

“He cut his hand,” she said, in a low voice. “And it healed like Adam’s cuts and bruises healed.”

I closed my eyes. She’d known he wasn’t human, she’d known, and hadn’t warned any of us.

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” asked Adam, sounding, of all things, hurt. “Did you think that we wouldn’t help you?”

I wasn’t hurt. My hands curled with the effort of not smacking her because she’d put everyone in danger—and hadn’t told us everything she knew.

“I didn’t know there was anything else out there,” she said. “The fae are locked up where they belong. He wasn’t a vampire. I thought he was a werewolf.”

“Then why not tell us?” asked Mary Jo from the doorway of the kitchen.

Christy looked around and realized it wasn’t just Adam, Honey, and me who had been listening. Jesse, Ben, Darryl, and Auriele were in the kitchen, but behind them, in the doorway, in the little hallway beyond, and standing in the stairwell, the rest of the wolves had been a silent audience until Mary Jo had spoken.

“Because that would have meant that she put her foot in it,” I told Mary Jo, and everyone else. “Because, until she saw the video, she really did think he was a werewolf and that the reason he was coming after her was because she told him that Adam was her ex-husband, Adam the famous werewolf. She believed that knowing about Adam was why he came after her—as a strike at the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack. She thought that if she hadn’t told him about Adam, he wouldn’t have come after her. She thought it was her fault he knew her connection to Adam, and she didn’t want anyone to know that.” And she’d thought that if it hadn’t been for Adam, Juan Flores would have just let her run away—which made it Adam’s fault again. She believed it was Adam’s fault because otherwise she’d have to admit her guilt.

“But he wasn’t a werewolf,” Christy said. “So it wasn’t my fault he killed Troy, burned down my building, and killed all those women here.”

“No,” I said, tiredly. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault, Christy.

“Between your looks and running, you triggered some sort of psychotic episode. He fixated on you and gave chase. Not your fault.” I looked at her until she dropped her eyes. “Not Adam’s fault, either.”

Auriele bustled over and put her arm around Christy’s shoulders. “It was a good thing that you had us to run to,” she said. “Another woman might not have.”

“It is my fault,” said Christy, believing it because that was the attitude that would win over the most people. That was one of Christy’s gifts, her ability to shift her worldview whenever it was to her advantage. She turned her head into Auriele’s shoulder and burst into heavy sobs. “I was so stupid to trust him.”

Shoot me now, I thought. I’d known that she’d turn on the tears once she had the right audience. Jesse gave me a tense smile, then turned and slipped out of the kitchen and away from her mother’s theatrics.

I found Adam.

“I blame her,” I muttered grumpily, if softly. My voice hadn’t been quiet enough to escape wolf ears, but none of the people gathered around Christy looked my way—even with very good hearing you have to be listening first.

Adam kissed my head and dragged me closer until my back was tight against his front. He dropped his mouth to my ear. “Okay. As long as you keep in mind that just because you blame her doesn’t mean it is her fault.” Though he’d put his mouth to my ear, he didn’t bother whispering.

“Only if you remember that while she is drumming up sympathy for her heaping helping of guilt—she doesn’t really feel responsible,” I said. “Just for now responsible.”

“Sounds like you know our Christy as well as those of us who lived with her,” said Honey, leaning a shoulder lightly against both of us in a gesture of solidarity. She looked at the pack, and said, “Some of us, anyway.”

On the far side of the werewolf pack trying to comfort Christy, Ben shared a cynical smile with us. He wasn’t petting Christy, either.

The pizza guy came after that and broke up the comfort-poor-Christy party. Pizza places don’t usually deliver that far out in the boonies, but Honey, it turned out, had an arrangement with a place in Kennewick—an arrangement that included a huge tip for the driver and a surcharge on the pizza.

The food was a signal, and as soon as the last scrap of pizza was gone, everyone retreated to their Honey-assigned sleeping places. Adam and I got the formal living room. Jesse opted into the giant upstairs room with her mother, where they’d decided to watch some disaster film from the seventies that had just made it to video.