Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(7)

He would always try to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders alone. If I didn’t like it, I shouldn’t have picked him as my mate.

Joel and I had been speaking very quietly and there was a lot of noise in the room—music, laughter, chattering. But now he turned his face so that no one could see it.

“I know who hit you,” he said.

It took me a second to realize he thought I was upset about the Pumpkin Incident, because I’d all but forgotten about it. “It’s not that,” I said. “And unless you judge that the hit was deliberate—in which case we are dealing with an entirely different matter—don’t tell me.” I thought about it and said, “Actually even if you think it was deliberate, keep it to yourself. I’ll figure out who it is eventually, and they will pay.” And that would be better than if Adam found out someone had deliberately hurt me.

Joel grinned and there was a spark of red in his eye. “I’ve been enlightened about your perfect revenges. Jesse told Aiden, who told me that there was a spectacular incident involving a chocolate Easter bunny. You’ve been hiding your light under a barrel.”

I mistrusted that spark in his eye; the tibicena could be malicious. We were in a mostly wooden building, and Aiden wasn’t here to draw out the fire. I had no doubt that Uncle Mike could control a normal fire, but I’d prefer not to have to find out if he could handle the tibicena.

“We don’t talk about the Easter Bunny Incident,” I told him earnestly. “And it was Easter bunnies. It’s not my fault that laxatives come in chocolate flavor.”

Truthfully, I was a little on the fence about the Easter Bunny Incident. The result had been perfect and satisfying. But my adult self figured if the bunnies had laid out the werewolves, they could have actually killed someone, especially if one of my victims had decided to pass a chocolate bunny on to some mortal child.

As an adult, I preferred to be more measured and prudent, at least sufficiently prudent not to kill anyone I didn’t mean to. But the Easter Bunny Incident had persuaded the whole of the Marrok’s pack to quit messing with me. Everyone except Leah, the Marrok’s mate.

Joel laughed, as I’d intended him to, and the red spark in his eye receded.

Awesome, I thought. One disaster at a time was always a good thing.

“I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall,” he said. Before he could say anything more, someone called out his name. He gave me a rueful smile and headed in that direction.

That was also good. Because he hadn’t asked me what was bothering me if it wasn’t getting hit by a pumpkin. I didn’t want to tell him that I was scared. Evidently he hadn’t smelled it on me, either—which was why I was concentrating on my anger, juvenile though it was. Hopefully that would fool sharper senses than Joel’s.

I wasn’t alone long. Ben, fair hair and blue eyes lending a deceptively harmless air to his face, was the next to approach me. He pulled up a third chair to my two-chair table, to avoid taking Adam’s. Ben had been a wolf long enough not to encroach on Adam’s territory, even if it was just a chair.

Ben had, at one time, been the most dangerous of Adam’s wolves. Not because he was the most powerful but because he was the most likely to lose control and kill someone. He’d been sent to the Columbia Basin Pack to get him out of trouble in the UK, and anything requiring that much distance indicated that whatever he’d done, it hadn’t been good. Not bad enough, in someone’s judgment, for him to have been eliminated, but not far off. He’d been getting better over the past couple of years, both more stable and more happy.

Even so, like Adam, he’d had a rough few months. He’d stayed awhile with us, recovering from being possessed by a smoke dragon, moving back to his home only a couple of weeks ago. He seemed to be okay, but he’d lost about fifteen pounds he didn’t need to lose, and he wasn’t gaining it back.

“Observe me gutted,” he said. His aristocratic English accent had been softening, and I hadn’t realized just how much until it returned in force. “It was I.”

“Who was you?” I asked.

“I hit you with the pumpkin.”

I met his eye. We stared at each other for all of twenty seconds before we broke. His lip twitched once. Then twice. And that was it. I laughed until my stomach hurt and tears welled.

“It wasn’t that funny,” he said, but he was laughing, too. He didn’t look at all dangerous.

“With a pumpkin,” I managed in a fair attempt at his accent because that made it more absurd somehow.

I needed a good laugh, and the hangdog expression on his face combined with the confession of pumpkin mayhem was priceless.

Honey, walking by with a pair of beers, shook her head. “Confessing, was he?” she asked me.

She must have gone home—or somewhere—to shower and change, too, because she was groomed back into her usual elegant self, complete with trousers and silk shirt. She was one of those women who knew how to wear makeup so that it drew your attention to her features and not to the makeup.

I nodded. “He hit me with a pumpkin,” I said, assuming a wide-eyed expression of astonishment to accompany my version of Ben’s English accent.

Ben was facedown on the table by this point, and he slapped it once. “With a pumpkin,” he agreed in a choked voice.

Honey grinned at the pair of us—the expression making her perfect face more human. “If I didn’t know better,” she said, “I’d ask what you’ve been drinking.” She looked at me. “Did you hear that Human Resources asked Ben to change how he answers his phone?”