Winter Lost

Two days. She knew better than to let her wolf starve for two days, especially when the full moon was so recent. She was lucky she hadn’t gone after one of her own team or the boy who’d fallen into the outhouse.

She needed more calories than she’d find in a single bowl of stew, no matter how filling. “Stay there,” I told her. “I’m going out for more food.”

I got up and opened the door to find Uncle Mike standing there like the Addams Family butler, with another, larger bowl of stew and a sliced loaf of bread with butter on the side.

I did not squeak in surprise.

Uncle Mike smiled, amused. “Any good tavern keeper knows when his guests are hungry.” Which was his version of “You rang?”

I took the tray from him and wondered how much else he could tell about his guests. I swallowed my discomfort. “I appreciate the food,” I said, which was not quite a thank-you.

He glanced at the table and said, “Drink the rest of that glass, Mercy.”

“Yessir,” I said dryly.

Unbothered by my sarcasm, he nodded. I backed into the room, shutting the door between us and the green man. I put the food on the table, took Mary Jo’s empty bowl, and set it on the tray and the tray on the floor because there was no room for it on the table.

“Renny asked you to marry him, and you broke up with him instead,” I said.

I picked up the glass and drank some more of Uncle Mike’s magic-spiked cider. More of my headache slid away, allowing some of the tension in my shoulders to release, too.

“I told him we were done.” Mary Jo looked miserable even as she dug into the larger bowl.

There were other humans in our pack, mates of werewolves. But they predated our ascent—or descent, depending upon your view—into our current job of being the protectors of the Tri-Cities. Mary Jo had been absolutely right that anyone associated with our pack had a target painted on their back. We’d been able to safeguard our vulnerable members, but none of the humans currently in our pack were adrenaline junkies like Renny. His job required the willingness to run toward danger when everyone with a lick of common sense would run away. He wasn’t going to stand back and let the werewolves keep him safe.

My phone rang and, distracted by Mary Jo, I picked it up.

“This is Mercy,” I said.

A soft dark laugh rang in my ear.

Mary Jo jerked up her head and stared at my phone.

“Hello,” I said in what I hoped was a disinterested tone. He didn’t usually call twice in one day. I found that I was terrorized out. Oddly, sitting across from Mary Jo steadied me, too. “Is there something I can do for you?”

A shivery tension filled the air. When silence answered me, I ended the call.

“He really defeated Adam?” Mary Jo asked in a smaller-than-usual voice.

My mate had cut his teeth in Vietnam and was one of the toughest werewolf fighters I had ever seen—and I’d grown up in the Marrok’s pack with the bunch of crazy werewolves he’d deemed too dangerous to inflict on any other Alpha. Adam was a born warrior.

“Yes,” I said. I tried not to picture my mate’s broken body on the ground, curled around an artifact that was trying to turn him into its slave. It had been so close.

Mary Jo looked at my phone.

“He found your number,” Mary Jo said heavily.

I shrugged. Worrying too much about it wasn’t useful, but shoving it to the side extracted its own toll. I wasn’t going to talk about Bonarata anymore.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You didn’t ask me to come here and tell you that you did the right thing in refusing Renny. You wanted me to argue with you, because I’m not any better armed against the bad guys than someone like Renny is.”

“Probably,” Mary Jo admitted.

“I can’t do that,” I said. “He is not equipped to deal with folks like—” I tapped the screen of my phone. I didn’t use Bonarata’s name any more than necessary.

She flinched but stiffened her spine and raised her chin.

“You didn’t come here to ask me why I accepted Adam as my mate,” I said. “I’m the wrong side of the equation. You came here to find out how Adam had the courage to take me as his mate.”

“Yes,” she said. “That.”

“I don’t know,” I answered her honestly. “I take great comfort knowing that Adam is very hard to kill. Bonarata left us that night thinking Adam would die—and he was wrong. I don’t know how Adam deals with the fact that I would not have survived the wounds he took that night.”

“You are hard to kill, too,” said Mary Jo. “You shouldn’t be, but you are.”

I wasn’t going to argue about that. It didn’t seem useful. Instead, I said softly, “Renny has a dangerous job. How are you going to feel if he gets shot trying to interfere in a domestic dispute or a standard traffic stop? Just because you don’t accept his marriage proposal, that doesn’t make him safe. It doesn’t mean that he won’t die in a car wreck on the way home tonight.”

The wolf in her eyes lit right up, and my phone rang.

“How are you going to feel then?” I asked.