Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson #5)(46)

"He was unconscious when I left," Mary Jo told Ben, half-apologetically. "I came out to see if I could find someone to help him - we'd been here for a while. I didn't realize I'd been away long enough for him to change."

"Not so long," I said. "I saw the ambulance pass us. You can't have been here more than a half hour, and it takes about half of that for him to complete the change. Whose bright idea was it to bring Adam to the hospital in his condition anyway?"

It had been Mary Jo's. I could see it in her face.

"All he needed was the dead flesh peeled off," she said.

A really, really painful procedure - and no painkillers work on werewolves for long. It was such a bad idea that we all stared at her, all of us who knew, anyway - Ben, Sam, and I. Adam was preoccupied with his change.

"I didn't realize how bad it was," she defended herself. "I thought it was just his hands. I didn't see his feet until we were already in the ambulance on the way over here. If it had just been his hands, it would have been okay."

Maybe. Probably.

"I thought you and Samuel were dead," she said. "And that left it my problem as the pack medic. And as medic and as my Alpha's loyal follower, I deemed the hospital the safer option."

She'd just lied.

Not about Adam being safer at the hospital than home. With the recent upheavals, she was probably right that a badly wounded Adam wasn't safe with the pack in his condition. They'd tear him apart and apologize and maybe even feel bad afterward. But that first statement . . .

Maybe she thought we were too overwrought to notice - and Ben was sometimes not as aware of subtle cues as some of the other wolves. But maybe Mary Jo didn't realize that I could tell when she was lying as well as any of the wolves could have.

"You knew we weren't in the house," I said slowly. And then the light dawned about what that meant. "Did Adam send you out to keep watch over me while he met with the others? Did you see us leave?"

She had. It was in her face - and she didn't bother denying it. She might be able to lie to the humans in this room, but not to the rest of us.

"Why didn't you tell him?" asked Ben. "Why didn't you stop him before he went into the fire?"

"Answer him," I said.

She met my eyes for a long count of three before finally dropping them. "I was supposed to follow you if you left. Make sure you didn't get hurt. But you see, I think everyone would be better off if one of the vampires had killed you."

"So you chose to defy Adam's orders because you disagreed with him," said Ben. "He picked you to watch Mercy because he trusted you to take care of business while he dealt with the pack - and you betrayed that trust."

I was grateful that Ben kept talking.

Mary Jo was one of the people in Adam's pack I'd thought was my friend. Not because a debt the fae owed me had kept her from dying a little while ago . . . I suspected that had been a mixed blessing, like most fairy gifts. But we'd spent a lot of hours in each other's company because Adam liked to use her as a guard when he felt I needed one.

Mary Jo wanted me dead. That was what that look had been about.

It was such a shock that I might have missed her answer to Ben's question if she hadn't sounded so defensive.

"It wasn't like that. She was safe enough; she left with Samuel. There's nothing I could do that would protect her better than Samuel could."

"So why didn't you stop the arsonists?"

Arsonists? There had been arsonists?

"I wasn't ordered to protect her place. She wasn't in there."

Ben smiled in such satisfaction that I realized he hadn't known there were arsonists either. "Who were they, Mary Jo?"

"Fae," she said. "No one I knew. Just more trouble she's bringing to my pack's door. If they wanted to burn down Mercy's house, what did I care?" She looked at me, and said viciously, "I wish they'd burned it up with you in it."

"Ben!"

How he managed to stop his hand before it hit her face, I don't know. But he did. She'd have wiped the floor with him afterward. She might be nominally below him in the pack hierarchy, but that was only because unmated women were at the bottom of the pack.

She wanted to fight him. I could see it in her face.

I couldn't move with Adam mostly on my lap. "That's enough." I kept my voice soft.

Ben was panting, his hands shaking in rage . . . or pain. His hands were really damaged.

"He could have died," Ben said to me, his voice rough with the wolf. "He could have died because this - " He stopped himself.

And the violence was gone from Mary Jo's posture as quickly as if someone had hit a switch. Her eyes brightened with tears. "Don't you think I know that? He came running from the house, calling her name. I tried to tell him it was too late, but he just pulled the wall apart and jumped through the hole he'd made. He didn't even hear me."

"He'd have heard you if you told him she wasn't in there," said Ben, unaffected by the tears. "I was right behind him. You didn't even try. You could have just told him she was alive."

"Enough," I said. Adam's change was nearly finished. "Adam can settle this himself later."