Winter Lost

She waved a hand at me again. “No. No. I’m done with that. I don’t want you dead anymore.” She shook her head. “As long as we never have to clean up dead water fae glop again. The clothes I wore still smell like rotting fish and I’ve washed them three times.”

I was beginning to enjoy this sloshed version of Mary Jo—though the effect of whatever Uncle Mike had provided for her seemed to be coming and going.

“I suppose I’m not dead for the same reason you aren’t dead,” I told her.

She raised her eyebrows in mute question.

“Because no one has managed to kill me yet.” I’d meant to be funny. But a chill drifted over my skin and I remembered lying in the dirt while Bonarata walked away from Adam and me. I changed the subject. “But you asked me why I married Adam. I married him because I wanted to.”

“Okay,” she said. “I know that. But you’d spent most of your life trying to get away from us, from werewolves and our business. Why did you marry Adam—no. Before that. Why did you agree to be his mate in the first place? The cost to you, to your way of life, was so high—and you knew that it would be.”

That. He hadn’t asked. But he hadn’t needed to, really. I’d been lost and struggling and Adam had thrown me a lifeline that had saved me. But it had also hurt, and completed the process of burning to ashes the quiet, safe life I’d built for myself. I didn’t know if I owed Mary Jo that answer. I didn’t talk about that time, even to Adam.

“It wasn’t his good looks,” my mouth said dryly before I’d made up my mind to speak.

My mate was movie-star beautiful. The kind of looks that, if he chose to emphasize them, would have stopped people in the street. I thought they were part of what made him so dangerous—a distraction for his enemies.

There was a brief silence.

“Do you know,” she said, sounding almost surprised, “I believe you.”

She shook her head and murmured, “This is the wrong way to go about this.” She slurred the last “this” and looked surprised. Frowning, she took a gulp of the cider, then squared her shoulders. “Renny asked me to marry him.”

Renny was a deputy with the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office. He was so in love with Mary Jo it made me feel like songs should start spontaneously playing anytime they were together.

“Okay,” I said carefully. Because she hadn’t sounded happy about it.

Her hands tensed and her eyes lightened with her wolf again.

“He is human,” she said. “If this were a few years ago, that would be okay. But we’re under siege now. We have to keep our territory safe for everyone. That means our whole pack—and anyone we love—is a target. The bad guys already went after Renny once, and there are more and bigger bad guys all the time.”

As if in answer, my phone rang. I flinched. But I picked it up and looked at the caller ID.

“Ben,” said Mary Jo, who must have seen my phone’s face as I moved it. “You should answer.”

“I’ll call him back,” I said, hitting the red button so my phone shut up.

My phone chimed with an incoming message from Ben. I glanced at it.

Fuck you, woman. We know who called you. Who do you think you’re trying to fool? Don’t be a silly twat.

I sighed, then turned my attention to the problem at hand.

“Mary Jo,” I said. “Tell me about Renny.”

“He’s going to die if he keeps hanging around with me—and now he thinks we should get married,” she said, a growl in her voice. She must have heard it, too, because she took a calming breath, and when she continued, she sounded steadier. “I never minded not having children—I didn’t want them in the first place. But Renny should have, I don’t know, twenty kids. He volunteers for Big Brothers and for the Special Olympics. He teaches tae kwon do for kids at the Martin Luther King Center.”

I was not surprised.

“You told him no,” I said.

She nodded, looked away from me, then after a moment wiped her eyes. When she looked back at me, those wet eyes were also yellow.

“I love him,” she said. “Who wouldn’t? Of course I told him no. It was the right thing to do. It was. And now I can’t sleep or eat.”

That was bad. Werewolves need to eat. I gave a quick thought to her behavior since I’d come into the room and rapidly replaced “ticked off at a dunk in the outhouse and a little drunk” with “sleepless sad werewolf who had too much to drink without eating properly,” and I shoved her bowl of stew at her.

“Eat that right now,” I said in the voice of authority that I no longer always had to borrow from Adam.

She gave me a startled, uncomprehending look—as if I’d responded in Cornish or Mandarin or something. I gave the bowl another push.

“Eat.”

I waited until she’d taken a couple of bites, then asked her, “How long since you turned down Renny?”

“A couple of days,” she said, and from the way she said it, I thought she could probably have given me the hours and minutes.

She settled down to eat in earnest. I ate mine, too. It was good stew, and after I’ve been terrorized, I’m usually hungry.