Bone Crossed (2 page)

“I’m fine,” I said, though in fact, once distance had released me from the safety he brought with him, I was aware of a sick churning in my stomach.

Adam turned so he was facing the window, his back to me. “No, you’re not. Remember, you can’t lie to a wolf, love.” He let out a breath of air too forcefully to be a sigh. He rubbed his hair briskly, trying to get rid of excess energy. Obligingly, it stuck up in small curls that he usually kept too short to look anything but neat and well-groomed. “Who am I talking about?” he asked, though I didn’t think the question was directed at me. “This is Mercy. Getting you to talk about anything personal is like pulling teeth at the best of times. Getting you to talk to a stranger ...”

I hadn’t thought myself particularly closemouthed. Actually, I’d been accused of having a smart mouth. Samuel had told me more than once that I’d probably live longer if I learned to bite my tongue occasionally.

So I waited, without saying a word, for Adam to decide what he wanted to do.

The room wasn’t cold, but I was shivering a little anyway—it must be nerves. If Adam didn’t hurry up and do something, though, I was going to be throwing up in the bathroom. I’d spent too much time worshipping the porcelain goddess since Tim had made me overdose on fairy juice to view the thought with any equanimity.

He wasn’t watching me, but he didn’t need to be. Emotions have a scent. He swung back to look at me with a frown. He took in my state with one comprehensive look.

He swore and strode back to me, wrapping me in his arms. He pulled me tight against him, making low, soothing sounds in the back of his throat. He rocked me gently.

I took a deep breath of Adam-scented air and tried to think. Normally, this wouldn’t be difficult for me. But normally I wasn’t all but naked in the arms of the hottest man I knew.

I’d misunderstood what he’d wanted.

To double-check, I cleared my throat. “When you said you needed my answer to your claim today—you weren’t actually asking for sex?”

His body jerked involuntarily as he laughed, rubbing his jaw against my face. “So, you think I’m the kind of person who’d do something like that? After what happened just last week?”

“I thought that’s what it took,” I mumbled, feeling my cheeks heat up.

“How
long did you spend in the Marrok’s pack?”

He knew how long. He was just making me feel stupid. “Mating wasn’t something everyone talked to me about,” I told him defensively. “Just Samuel ...”

Adam laughed again, one of his hands on my shoulder, the other moving in a light caress on my butt, which should have tickled but didn’t. “I just bet he was telling you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth right then.”

I tightened my grip on him—somehow my hands had landed on his lower back. “Probably not. So all you needed was my agreement?”

He grunted. “It won’t help with the pack, not until it’s for real. But with Samuel out of the way, I thought you’d be able to decide if you were interested or not. If you weren’t interested, I could regroup. If you agreed to be mine, I can wait until Hell freezes over for you.”

His words sounded reasonable, but his scent told me something else. It told me that my reasonable tones had soothed his worries, and his mind was now on something other than our discussion.

Fair enough. Being this close to him, feeling his heat against me, feeling his heartbeat race because he wanted me ... someone told me that knowing someone desires you is the greatest aphrodisiac. It was certainly true for me.

“Of course,” he said, still in that curiously calm voice, “waiting is much easier in abstract than reality. I need you to tell me to back off, all right?”

“Mmm,” I said. He brought a cleanness with him that washed the feel of Tim off my skin far better than the shower did—but only when he touched me.

“Mercy.”

I lowered my hands, sliding them beneath the waistline of his jeans and digging my nails lightly into his skin.

He growled something more, but neither of us was listening. He turned his head and tilted it. I expected serious and got playful as he nipped at my lower lip. The roughness of his teeth sent tingles to my fingertips, zings past my knees and down to my toes. Potent things, Adam’s teeth.

I brought my suddenly shaking hands around to worry at the button on his jeans, and Adam jerked his head up and put a staying hand on mine.

Then I heard it, too.

“German car,” he said.

I sighed, slumping against him. “Swedish,” I corrected him. “Four-year-old Volvo station wagon. Gray.”

He looked at me in surprise that quickly turned to comprehension. “You know the car.”

I moaned and tried to hide in his shoulder. “Damn, damn. It was the newspapers.”

“Who is it, Mercy?”

Gravel shooshed, and headlights flashed on my window as the car turned into the driveway. “My mom,” I told him. “Her sense of timing is unreal. I should have realized she would read about ... about
it.”
I didn’t want to name what had happened to me, what I’d done to Tim, out loud. Not while I was mostly naked with Adam, anyway.

“You didn’t call her.”

I shook my head. I should have, I knew it. But it had been one of those things I just couldn’t face.

He was smiling now. “You get dressed. I’ll go stall her until you’re ready to come out.”

“There is
no way
I’ll ever be ready for this,” I told him.

He sobered, put his face next to mine, and rested his forehead against me. “Mercy. It will be all right.”

Then he left, shutting the door to my bedroom as my doorbell rang the first time. It rang twice more before he opened the outside door, and he wasn’t being slow.

I grabbed clothes and desperately tried to remember if we’d done the dishes from dinner. It was my turn. If it had been Samuel’s turn, I wouldn’t have had to worry. It was stupid. I knew that she could care less about the dishes—but it gave me something to do other than panic.

I’d never even considered calling her. Maybe in ten years I might feel ready.

I pulled on my pants and left my feet bare while I searched frantically for a bra.

“She knows you’re here,” Adam said on the other side of the door—as if he were leaning against it. “She’ll be out in a minute.”

“I don’t know who you think you are”—my mother’s voice was low and dangerous—“but if you don’t get out of my way right this instant, it won’t matter.”

Adam was the Alpha werewolf in charge of the local pack. He was tough. He could be mean when he had to—and he wouldn’t stand a chance against my mom.

“Bra, bra, bra,” I chanted as I pulled one out of the dirty-clothes basket and hooked it. I pulled the thing around so fast I wouldn’t be surprised to discover I’d given myself a rug burn. “Shirt. Shirt.” I ransacked my drawers and found and discarded two shirts. “Clean shirt, clean shirt.”

“Mercy?” called Adam, sounding a little desperate—how well I knew that feeling.

“Mom, leave him alone!” I said. “I’ll be right out.”

Frustrated, I stared at my room. I had to have a clean shirt somewhere. I had just been wearing one—but it had disappeared in my search for a bra. Finally, I pulled on a shirt that said
1984:
GOVERNMENT FOR DUMMIES on the back. It was clean, or at least it didn’t stink too badly. The oil smudge on the shoulder looked permanent.

I took a deep breath and opened the door. I had to duck around Adam, who was leaning against the door frame.

“Hey, Mom,” I said breezily. “I see you’ve met my—” What? Mate? I didn’t think that was something my mother needed to hear. “I see you’ve met Adam.”

“Mercedes Athena Thompson,” snapped my mother. “Explain to me why I had to learn about what happened to you from a newspaper?”

I’d been avoiding meeting her gaze, but once she three-named me, I had no choice.

My mother is five-foot-nothing. She’s only seventeen years older than me, which means she’s not yet fifty and looks thirty. She can still wear the belt buckles she won barrel racing on their original belts. She’s usually blond—I’m pretty sure it’s her natural color—but the shade changes from year to year. This year it was strawberry gold. Her eyes are big and blue and innocent-looking, her nose slightly tip-tilted, and her mouth full and round.

With strangers, she sometimes plays a dumb blonde, batting her eyelashes and speaking in a breathy voice that anyone who watched old movies would recognize from
Some Like It Hot
or
Bus Stop.
My mother has never, to my knowledge, changed her own flat tire.

If the sharp anger in her voice hadn’t been a cover for the bruised look in her eyes, I could have responded in kind. Instead, I shrugged.

“I don’t know, Mom. After it happened ... I stayed coyote for a couple of days.” I had a half-hysterical vision of calling her, and saying,
“By the way, Mom, guess what happened to me today...”

She looked me in the eyes, and I thought she saw more than I wanted her to. “Are you all right?”

I started to say yes, but a lifetime of living with creatures who could smell a lie had left me with a habit of honesty. “Mostly,” I said, compromising. “It helps that he’s dead.” It was humiliating that my chest was getting tight. I’d given myself all the self-pity time I would allow.

Mom could cuddle her children like any of the best of parents, but I should have trusted her more. She knew all about the importance of standing on your own two feet. Her right hand was balled into a white-knuckled fist, but when she spoke, her voice was brisk.

“All right,” she said, as if we’d covered everything she was going to ask. I knew better, but I also knew it would be later and private.

She turned her angelic blue eyes on Adam. “Who are you, and what are you doing in my daughter’s house at eleven at night?”

“I’m not sixteen,” I said in a voice even I could tell was sulky. “I can even have a man stay all night if I want to.”

Mom and Adam both ignored me.

Adam had remained in position against my bedroom door frame, his body held a little more casually than usual. I thought he was trying to give my mother the impression that he was at home here: someone who had authority to keep her out of my room. He lifted an eyebrow and showed not even a touch of the panic I’d heard in his voice earlier. “I’m Adam Hauptman, I live on the other side of her back fence.”

She scowled at him. “The Alpha? The divorced man with the teenage daughter?”

He gave her one of his sudden smiles, and I knew my mom had made yet another conquest: she’s pretty cute when she scowls, and Adam didn’t know many people gutsy enough to scowl at him. I had a sudden revelation. I’d been making a tactical error for the past few years if I’d really wanted him to quit flirting with me. I should have smiled and smirked and batted my eyelashes at him. Obviously, a woman snarling at him was something he enjoyed. He was too busy looking at my mom’s scowl to see mine.

“That’s right, ma’am.” Adam quit leaning against the door and took a couple of steps into the room. “Good to meet you at last, Margi. Mercy speaks of you often.”

I didn’t know what my mother would have said to that, doubtless something polite. But with a popping sound like eggs cracking on a cement floor, something appeared between Mom and Adam, a foot or so above the carpet. It was a human-sized something, black and crunchy. It dropped to the floor, reeking of char, old blood, and rotten corpses.

I stared at it for too long, my eyes failing to find a pattern that agreed with what my nose told me. Even knowing that only a few things could just appear in my living room without using the door couldn’t make me acknowledge what it was. It was the green shirt, torn and stained, with the hindquarters of a familiar Great Dane still visible, that forced me to admit that this black and shrunken thing was Stefan.

I dropped to my knees beside him and reached out before snatching my hand back, afraid to damage him more. He was obviously dead, but since he was a vampire, that wasn’t as hopeless a thing as it might have been.

“Stefan?” I said.

I wasn’t the only one who jumped when he grabbed my wrist. The skin on his hand was dry and crackled disconcertingly against my skin.

Stefan has been my friend since the first day I moved here to the Tri-Cities. He is charming, funny, and generous—if given to miscalculations on how forgiving I might be about innocent people he killed trying to protect me.

It was still all I could do not to jerk away and rub off the feel of his brittle skin on my arm. Ick. Ick. Ick. And I had the horrible feeling that it was hurting him to hold on to me, that at any moment his skin would crack and fall off.

His eyes opened to slits, his irises crimson instead of brown. His mouth opened and shut twice without making any sound. Then his hand tightened on mine until I couldn’t have pulled free if I had wanted to. He sucked in a breath of air so he could talk, but he couldn’t do it quite right, and I heard air hissing out of the side of his ribs, where it had no business escaping from.

“She knows.” His voice didn’t sound like his at all. It was rough and dry. As he pulled my hand slowly toward his face, with the last of the air from that breath, he said intently,
“Run.”
And with those words, the person who was my friend disappeared under the fierce hunger in his face.

Looking into his mad eyes, I thought his advice was worth taking—too bad I wasn’t going to be able to break free to follow it. He was slow, but he had me, and I wasn’t a werewolf or vampire with supernatural strength to help myself out.

I heard the distinctive
clack
of a bullet chambering, and a quick glance showed me my mother with a wicked-looking Glock out and pointed at Stefan. It was pink and black—trust my mom to have a Barbie gun, cute but deadly.

“It’s all right,” I told her hastily—my mother wouldn’t hesitate to fire if she thought he was going to hurt me. Normally I wouldn’t worry about someone shooting at Stefan, vampires not being that vulnerable to guns, but he was in bad shape. “He’s on our side.” Hard to sound convincing when he was pulling me toward him, but I did my best.