He hesitated, started to say something, then hesitated again.
“What is it?” I asked.
“What are you?” he said. “You aren’t fae or werewolf.”
“I’m a shifter—Native American style,” I told him. “Better known as a walker. I change into a coyote.”
His eyes widened and, finally, rose to examine every inch of me. “I’ve heard of your kind,” he said finally. “Always thought they were a myth.”
I smiled at him and gave him a salute. “A few years ago, and that would have been the pot calling the kettle black, Mr. Drummond.”
Zack Drummond didn’t show up at five fifteen. Five thirty saw me fretting because the Beetle wasn’t done, and I’d promised it would be finished at eight the next morning.
“Go home, Mercy,” said Tad, who was on his back working on the undercarriage of the Beetle. “Another hour, and I’ll have it buttoned up and done.”
“If I stayed, it would shave fifteen minutes off,” I told him.
One of his booted feet waggled at me. “Go home. Don’t let that bitch steal your man without a fight.”
“You don’t even know her.”
He slid back out from under the car, his face more oil-colored than not. Ears sticking out a little, his face just this side of homely—by his choice. His father was Siebold Adelbertsmiter. Tad’s mother had been human, but his father’s blood had gifted him with glamour and, from things he’d said, a fair bit of power.
“I know you,” he told me. “I’m betting on you. Go home, Mercy. I’ll get it done.”
He’d been working in this shop when he was just a kid. He might be thirteen years younger than me, but he was at least as good a mechanic.
“Okay,” I said.
In the oversized bathroom, I stripped out of my overalls and scrubbed up. The harsh soaps that cut through the grease and dirt have never bothered my skin—which is good because I use them a lot. Not even industrial soap could get out all the ingrained dirt I had on my hands, but my skin tones hid most of that.
A glance in the mirror had me unbraiding my hair. I ran a comb through it—braiding it when it was wet gave it a curl it didn’t have normally. Nothing was going to turn me into a girly girl, but the curls softened my appearance a little.
I was almost out the door, and Tad was back under the Beetle, when he said, “When Adam’s ex drives you into making sweet things with chocolate, just remember I like my brownies with lots of frosting but no nuts.”
I opened the front door to the smell of bacon and the sound of sizzling meat.
Adam, Jesse, and I shared kitchen duties, taking turns making dinner. Tonight was supposed to be Jesse’s night, but I wasn’t surprised that the only person in the kitchen was Christy. Her back was to me as she cooked in the kitchen she’d designed.
She’d been angry, her daughter had told me, that Adam had insisted on moving all the way out to Finley instead of building in one of the more prestigious neighborhoods in West Richland or Kennewick. He’d given her free rein in the house to make up for the fact that he’d wanted the house next to my trailer because Bran, who ruled all the weres in this part of the world, had told him to keep an eye on me. In addition to ruling hundreds and maybe thousands of werewolves, Bran had been the Alpha of the pack my foster father, Bryan, had belonged to. That had occasionally left Bran with delusions that he had a right to interfere with my life long after I’d left Montana and his pack behind.
Christy was shorter than me by a couple of inches, about the same size as Jesse. The body in the blouse and peasant skirt was softly curved, but not fat. Her hair, brown when I’d last seen her, was now blond-streaked and French-braided in a thick rope that hung to her hips.
“Could you find some paper towels, Jesse?” she asked without turning around. “They’ve been moved, and I have bacon ready to come out of the frying pan.”
I opened the cabinet that held the paper towels exactly where she probably had put them on the day she first moved in. I hadn’t changed the organization of the kitchen. Too many people were already using it, so it made more sense for me to learn where everything was than for me to reorganize it to my tastes.
So Christy’s kitchen was exactly as she’d left it—still hers in spirit if not in truth. Her presence in my kitchen felt like an invasion in a fashion that the Gray Lord who’d been here in the wee hours of the night had not, despite his intentions.
Christy knew I wasn’t Jesse, I could smell her tension—which was sort of cheating, so I didn’t call her on it. Also, accusing her of lying right off the bat didn’t seem like a good way to make peace with her.
“Paper towels,” I said as peaceably as I could manage, setting them down on the counter beside the stove.
She turned to look at me, and I saw her face.
“Holy Hannah,” I said before she could say anything, distracted entirely from my territorial irritation. “Tell me you shot him or hit him with a two-by-four.” She didn’t just have a shiner. Half her face was black with that greenish brown around the edges that told you it hadn’t happened in the last twenty-four hours.
She gave me a half smile, probably the half that didn’t hurt. “Would a frying pan be okay? Not as effective as a baseball bat, but it was hot.”
“I would accept a frying pan,” I agreed. “This”—I indicated the side of my face that corresponded to her damaged cheek with my fingers—“from the guy you’re running from?”
“It wasn’t my aunt Sally,” she said tartly.
“You go to a doctor with that?” I asked.
She nodded. “Adam made me go. The doctor said it would heal okay. He gave me a prescription for pain meds, but I don’t like to take prescriptions. Maybe tonight if I can’t sleep.”
The front door opened, and I didn’t have to back out of the kitchen to see who it was; Adam had a presence I could feel from anywhere in the house.
“Hey, honey,” said Christy. “I’ve got BLTs going on the stove. They’ll be done in about ten minutes if you want to go upstairs and get cleaned up.” She glanced at me, and said, “Oops. Sorry, just habit.”
“No worries,” I said pleasantly, as if she hadn’t bothered me at all when she’d called my husband by an endearment—then could have shot myself because I saw the satisfaction in her face. My reaction had been too controlled to be real, and she’d caught it.
“Maybe you could set the table?” she asked lightly.
As if it was still her kitchen, her house to rule.
“I need to get out of these clothes,” I said. “You should ask Jesse to set the table since you took over her job tonight. We might have one more for dinner—a new wolf in town.”
I left before she could reply and rounded the corner for the stairs to see Adam. He walked with me up the stairs.
“Any luck hunting down the guy who hit her?” I asked, stripping off my clothes once we were in our bedroom. Even though my overalls absorbed most of the mess of mechanicking, the clothes I wore under them reeked of oil and sweat.
“No. It’s not that we can’t find people named Juan Flores, it’s that there are too many Juan Floreses,” he told me. “John Smith would be easier, though it helps that he doesn’t look like most Juan Floreses. He’s around six feet tall with blond hair; she said his English was good. He has an accent, but she doesn’t think it was Mexican or Spanish, despite his name.”
“She met him in Eugene?”
He shook his head. “Reno. She was out partying with some friends. He was a friend of a friend. Rich—with cash—not just credit cards. He talked about Europe like he was very familiar with it, but he didn’t tell her if he was living there or if he just traveled there a lot.”
“Cash means real money,” I said. “Not just someone pretending to be wealthy.”
“Probably,” Adam agreed.
“Did she call the police when he hit her?”
“She called them before he broke into her apartment and started hitting her. He left when he heard the sirens, though it might have been the frying pan she hit him with.” There was admiration in his voice, and I did my best not to flinch. Of course he was proud of her. It takes guts to fight back effectively after a hard hit to the head. “The police didn’t have any better luck than I’m having running the name he gave her.”
Adam stripped off his tie and unbuttoned the cuffs of his dress shirt impatiently. “Later that night, someone mugged the man she went out with after she returned to Eugene. Broke his neck and took off with his wallet. She’s sure it was Flores, that stealing his wallet was just a cover. The police are undecided but told her that she might find somewhere else to be while they ran down leads.”
“If her boyfriend is responsible, he kills pretty competently,” I said, pulling on clean jeans, which were in a drawer with a stack of other clean jeans.
I’d gotten used to keeping my clean clothes folded in drawers and dirty clothes in a hamper in the closet. Adam had gotten used to calling me when he was going to be late from work. I had learned that it was those things, compromise in the form of phone calls and folded clothes, that cemented the bedrock of a relationship. I wondered what habits Adam and Christy had left over from their marriage.
“I thought so, too,” Adam said, unaware of the twist of my thoughts. “My sources say that the kill was clean. Not so clean it couldn’t have been an accident—but unusual in a mugging, especially in Eugene, which isn’t exactly a hotbed of that kind of crime. So maybe he spent some time in the military.”
“Or as an assassin or crime lord,” I said.
Adam snorted as he pulled on a faded green t-shirt that said I HEART COYOTES. Yet another sign that folding my clean clothes wasn’t too big a price to pay to make him happy. He didn’t have any I HEART CHRISTY shirts—or I would have burned them already. “You have an overactive imagination.”
“Says the werewolf,” I told him. Instead of my usual after-work t-shirt, I changed into a fitted shirt in a shade of lavender that looked good against my skin and showed off the muscles on my arms. Christy wouldn’t know that it was any different from what I usually wore. I didn’t have her soft curves, so I’d emphasize what I did have.
“You got my text about Zack Drummond, right?” The lavender contrasted nicely with my brown eyes. Maybe I should put on eye shadow? “Seems like a nice guy. Thought walkers like me were a myth.”
Adam grinned at me. “I think you’re pretty special, too.”
I kissed his cheek and rested in his arms for a moment before I broke away to find socks and shoes. No eye shadow. Christy wouldn’t know I didn’t wear makeup unless we were going out, but everyone else would. I usually went barefoot in the house, too, but with Christy in the kitchen, bare feet felt too vulnerable.
“Warren’s coming over tonight to grill Christy about her stalker and see if he can learn anything useful.”
“Good,” I said. “Cool.”
Warren had been working as a private detective for a while. He was smart about people, and he’d gotten good at finding secrets. But that wasn’t why I was pleased. Warren was my friend, and Christy didn’t like him. That left dinner tonight stacked in my favor—not that I really thought I needed the advantage.
We went downstairs just as a knock sounded on the door.
Christy dodged past us, and said over her shoulder, “I invited Mary Jo to join us for dinner.”
I decided that I was going to have to get rid of the chip on my shoulder, or the next week or so was going to be unbearable. Christy cooked dinner. She was welcome to invite anyone to dinner, especially one of the wolves who had a standing invitation to the Alpha’s table at any time anyway. Mary Jo was Christy’s friend.
Christy was acting as though my house were still hers. It wasn’t. But as long as she kept her actions to those acceptable in any guest, there wasn’t a lot I could do to fix it without appearing to be jealous, insecure, and petty. So I’d swallow my first reactions and deal, until it was time to set her straight.