All this time, since the first time he kissed me, I’d been worried about growing old, about leaving Adam alone. And it turned out that it was going to be the other way around.

“Paul,” Adam said. Paul’s name wasn’t a surprise, not like Honey’s.

Paul nodded, looked at Warren, shook his head, and said, “Yes, boss,” with graveyard humor. Paul had tried to kill Warren once because Warren was the wolf just above him in rank and because Warren was gay. Now he was going out to a battle that Adam didn’t think they would come back from, and he, like Honey, was telling Warren that he had his back. People can change.

“George.”

“Yes, boss,” said the quiet policeman.

Maybe I should have kept the walking stick. It had worked against a vampire, against the river devil—surely the river devil had been as powerful—more powerful with its ability to remake the world—and it had been the walking stick that had brought it down.

“Mary Jo?” he asked.

“Fighting fires is what I do,” she told him. “Yes, boss.”

Mary Jo loved my mate, too. She’d protect him if she could. I was glad that she was going. My grief was so huge that I had no room for jealousy.

The walking stick … was made of wood and silver, and no matter how magical it was, wood was wood. I had no doubt that someone could throw it into a campfire and it would emerge unscathed, but a campfire was not a volcano. If the walking stick could do some great magic that would kill a fire elemental like Guayota, Coyote would have told me. I was pretty sure Coyote would have told me.

“Alec?” I didn’t know Alec as well as I did some of the other wolves. He was a friend of Paul’s, and Paul didn’t like me much.

Maybe Coyote would have told me if the walking stick could kill Guayota. He’d told me that mortal means could not harm the tibicenas when in their tibicena form. Did he mean that the walking stick might?

“Yes, boss.”

I was pretty sure that the walking stick had served Coyote’s purpose by showing me what lay within the tibicenas. If it would have been effective against them, he’d have told me—or couched it in some kind of riddle that I’d still be puzzling out when one of the tibicenas killed me.

“That’s enough,” said Adam. “If Ariana has more magic when she has dealt with us, then I will call for more volunteers.”

Because of her fear of the wolves, Ariana worked with them one at a time, in the kitchen. I thought Samuel was going to go with her, but he came and sat next to me instead.

“We don’t have any idea on how to kill this thing,” Samuel said. “Ariana tells me that as far as she knows, the only way to kill a primitive elemental like Guayota would be to destroy his volcano, and even then, he would not die for centuries.”

“El Teide is the third highest volcano in the world,” I told him, pressing my cheekbone into my knees. The burn reminded me that turning to my other cheek would have been smarter. “I think it’s a little beyond our capabilities. Killing the tibicenas, his two giant dogs, might do it. But you can only kill their mortal forms, when they look like mostly normal dogs instead of polar-bear-sized monsters. I suspect they are not going to be fighting werewolves in their mortal forms.”

“Ariana would come with us,” he told me, “but she doesn’t have the power she once had, not even a tenth of it. And fire-dogs are too close to her nightmares; there is no guarantee that she wouldn’t do as much damage to us as she would to Guayota and his beasts.”

“I’d come with you,” I said, “but Adam doesn’t want me to die, and for some reason, he seems to think that’s his decision to make.”

Samuel hugged me. “Don’t mourn us until we’re dead,” he said.

“I’ll spit on your graves,” I told him, and he laughed, the bastard.

“Nice,” said Adam, crouching in front of me. “I had to watch you go up against the river devil.”

“That sucked, too,” I told him without looking up from my knees. “But we had a plan that we thought might work.”

“Based on a story,” he said roughly. “It wasn’t a plan; it was a suicide mission.”

I looked up and met his eyes. I didn’t say, So is this. He knew it; it was in his eyes.

“Honey has made her suite available to us,” he said. “Will you come?”

I unlocked my fingers from around my legs and rose out of Samuel’s embrace and went into Adam’s.

“Yes, please,” I whispered.

No one in the room spoke, but they watched us leave, knowing where we were going, and I didn’t care.

Honey’s suite was a bedroom, office, and bathroom, all done in shades of cool gray. It surprised me until I remembered that this had been Peter’s room, too. The gray suited the man he’d been.

We didn’t speak. All of the words had already been said. When he stripped my clothes off me, I noticed that Honey kept her house a little cooler than ours because I was cold—or maybe that was just fear.

Naked, I took off Adam’s clothes and folded them as I set them down, as if taking care with his clothing might show him how much I longed to take care of him. Unusually, his body was slow to awaken, and so was mine—but that was okay because this was about saying good-bye. About impregnating my skin with his scent so that I would have him with me after he was gone. About remembering exactly—exactly—what the soft skin just to the side of his hip bone felt like under my fingertips and under my lips. It was about love and loss and the unbearable knowledge that this could be the last time. Was probably the last time.

I could feel Ariana’s magic on him, and I hoped that it would be enough to keep him safe.

He lay on his back on Honey’s bed and pulled me on top of him as he’d done the first time we’d made love. He let me touch him until his body was shuddering, and sweat rose on his forehead. He pulled my face up to his and kissed me tenderly despite the speed of his pulse.

“My turn,” he whispered. I nodded, and he rolled me beneath him and returned the favor, seeking out his favorite places and the ones where I was most sensitive. He brought me to cl**ax, then lay with his head on my stomach, his arms around me, catching his breath before he started to build the pace again.

We ended as we’d begun, with me on him, watching his face as I moved on him and he in me. The expressions he wore told me to speed up or slow down until his bright yellow eyes opened wide, and he grabbed my h*ps and helped me take us both where we were going.

I lay down on him and put my face in his neck, and if I cried, I didn’t show him my tears. He ran his hands up and down my back until I could pretend I hadn’t been crying.

“I suck at this,” I told him. “I suck at words when they count.”

He smiled at me. “I know.”

“I understand,” Itold him. “I understand why you have to go and why I have to stay. I think that you are doing the right thing, the only thing you can do. I wish…” My stomach hurt and it would have been kindness to put me out of my misery, but I wasn’t going to share that with Adam.

I know, he said.

“You weren’t supposed to get that,” I told him.

“I know that, too,” he said, his voice tender. “You should know that you can’t hide things from me.”

“Good,” I said, my voice fierce. “Good. Then you know, you know I love you.”

We showered the sweat off our bodies in Honey’s shower, wordless. His hands were warm, and he was patient with my need to touch and touch. I wished futilely that this time would last forever, but eventually he turned off the water and we dressed.

“Willis asked you to call the police if you figured out where Juan Flores was,” I said, jerking a comb through my hair.

Adam took the comb away and took over the job. His touch was gentle and slow, as if there were all the time in the world to do the job properly. As if untangled hair mattered.

“He did,” Adam said. “And I saw enough cannon fodder in ’Nam to last me a lifetime.”

He saw my flinch and paused in his combing to kiss me. Neither of us talked again until he set the comb aside.

“I love you,” I told him rawly. “And if you don’t come back, I will spit on your grave.”

He smiled, but not enough to bring on his dimple. “I know you do, and I know you will. Mercedes Athena Thompson Hauptman, if I have not said it, you should know that you brought joy into my life when I thought there was no joy left in the world.”

“Don’t,” I said, tears spilling over as I frantically scrubbed them away. “Don’t say things like that when I’m going to have to go out there and face all of them. Don’t you make me cry.” Again.

He smiled, this time with dimple, and mopped my face with the shirt he hadn’t put on yet. “You’re tough, you’ll deal,” he said. “And at least I didn’t leave you a letter.”

13

They left at dusk. Ariana had only managed to magic the wolves through Mary Jo, so Alec was with those of us who waved them out. When they were gone, most of the pack dispersed to their own houses. Lucia busied herself cleaning up the havoc that the pack had made of Honey’s house, and Christy and Jesse helped her. I understood the need to do something.

“Mercy.” It was Ariana, but it was something more, too, so I was careful to move slowly when I turned around.

“I have to go,” she said. “I wish … but I cannot stay with my magic depleted and so many wolves about.”

I wrapped my arms around myself. “I understand. Thank you, Ariana. You gave them a chance.”

She looked down. “I hope so,” she said in a low voice. “I hope so.”

I didn’t know what to say to her fear, not with mine so wild in my heart. So I watched her get into Samuel’s car and drive off, and tried not to remember that I knew the address.

I went back into the house through the back door. Christy was cooking with Lucia and Auriele. They looked like they were making enough food for an army, even though everyone was gone.

“Where’s Jesse?” I asked.

“Upstairs with Darryl,” Christy said. “She doesn’t want to talk to me, but maybe you’ll have better luck.” Christy looked tired and worried. Her eyes were red. I hoped mine weren’t. “If I had stayed here, where I was needed, everyone would be safe now.”

I wiped my hands over my face to cover whatever expression might have crossed it. She wasn’t trying to shut me out, she was trying to save Adam and the rest.

“If I had married a doctor, like my mother told me to, then I wouldn’t have Joel to grieve over,” Lucia said unexpectedly. She was good at being quiet and unobtrusive. “And that would be a waste. If you had stayed here, this might not have happened, but maybe you’d have gotten in a car wreck and died.” She shrugged. “It does no good to play with what-ifs.”

“Well said,” Auriele told her. “‘Play the hand you have,’ my papa liked to say.”

I left them to their conversation and trotted up the stairs, where I could hear a movie running quietly. Darryl sat on one side of the couch nearest to the TV and Jesse on the other.

I sat down in the middle. “So,” I said to Darryl, “do you think Korra is going to be as good an avatar as Aang?”

“Who’s Aang?” he asked.

“You started him with Korra?” I accused Jesse. “That’s not okay. It’s like reading the last chapter of the book first.”

“Honey doesn’t have The Last Airbender series,” Jesse said in a low voice. “It was Korra or bust.”

“I think I should check on the cooks,” Darryl said. He left with cowardly haste.

I reached over and turned up the volume of the show until I was pretty sure we had privacy.

“I like Korra,” Jesse told me in a melancholy voice. “She’s not perfect, but she tries hard.”

“Like your mom,” I said.

She nodded. “I love her.”

“And she loves you back,” I said.

She nodded. “She does. She’s not perfect, but she’s my mom, you know?”

“You’ve met my mother,” I told her, and she laughed. I loved my mom, too, but I was very glad she lived in Portland.

“I’m glad I have you and Dad,” she said. “That way, it’s okay that Mom is…”

Flaky? Selfish? Horrible?

“Mom,” she concluded.

We watched Korra for a while longer. Darryl rejoined us as soon as we turned the volume back down.

“I am not wanted in the kitchen,” he said. Darryl loved to cook. “Christy says that men can’t cook.”

“You’re a great cook,” Jesse told him.

He smiled at her, a gentle smile he saved for Auriele and Jesse. “I know. I’m better than any of them, but they won’t listen to me.”

“I think I like Korra better than Aang,” I said after we’d watched another five minutes. “She gets to go do things instead of waiting around for other people.”

“I hear you,” agreed Darryl.

“I think I’m going to go check on Medea,” I said.

With Lucia’s big dog in the house, we’d shut Medea in the tack room out in the stables. The horses in the pasture whinnied at me when I walked by. I threw them a couple of flakes of alfalfa hay, though there was plenty of grass in the pasture. A couple of extra flakes wouldn’t hurt them.

Medea greeted me with frantic purrs. I sat down on the wooden floor next to her and petted her, trying not to think.