“I know,” I told him, the thought of how badly he’d been hurt momentarily erasing my sleepiness.

“Mercy’s a coyote, she’ll be okay.” Warren winked at Adam, then he said, “Just make sure you grab the cat on your way out.”

“What cat?” asked Christy. “I don’t like cats.”

“Lock your bedroom, then,” I told her. “She can open the doors. If she knows you don’t like her, she’ll try to follow you everywhere.”

I wiggled my fingers at Adam and trotted up the stairs with a little smile warming my heart. So I’d been spiteful, but the look on Christy’s face had been worth it. Tomorrow, I vowed, I’d be a better person. But tonight, I would enjoy my spite.

Jesse’s light was on. I almost just went to bed—I was seriously tired, and if I hit the hay right that moment, I’d get five and a half hours of sleep.

But I knocked lightly at the door.

“Who is it?” Jesse asked.

“Me,” I said, and opened the door when she invited me in.

Jesse was stretched out on her bed with schoolbooks scattered around and her headphones dangling around her neck. One of the earpieces was caught in the patch of purple hair just in front of her left ear. She didn’t look up when I came in.

“I’m just heading to bed,” I told her. “You might consider going to sleep sometime before you have to get up, too.”

“Why did you let her do that to you?” Jesse asked tightly, without looking at me. She wrote a few numbers down in the notebook in front of her.

I shut the door and came farther into the room. I had to pick my path. My nose would have told me if there were any rotting food, but there was sure as heck everything else scattered all over the floor. My room used to look sort of like this before I moved in with Adam. Now I itched to pick up the dirty clothes and throw them in her clothes hamper. After I dumped out the eclectic collection of stuff already in it.

“Do what to me?” I asked absently. She had a cricket bat sticking out the top of the hamper. Why a cricket bat? She didn’t play cricket. Not as far as I knew, anyway.

“Dinner was my fault,” Jesse said, effectively jerking my attention back to her, where it belonged. “She wanted to make BLTs, and I didn’t see any harm in it until you came home, and she was inviting people over, deciding we’d eat in the dining room, and giving orders left and right.”

“Dinner was good,” I said. “I’ve never had homemade mayonnaise before. And your mother is welcome to invite whomever she wishes to dinner—especially if she is cooking it.”

Jesse sat up and tossed her pencil on the bed. She wiped her eyes.

“You know,” she said hotly. “You understand people, Mercy. You know how power works—I’ve seen you with the pack. Why did you let her take control without even fighting back?”

I sat down on the bed beside her without touching her and let air out in a huff. With the air I gave up my night of rolling in my spite. For Jesse, I could be a better person right now.

“Your mom is scared,” I said honestly. “She invited this handsome prince into her life and now a man is dead because of it. She had to ask for help from your father after she’d told the world she didn’t need him. She had to come here, to the home she built, and know that it isn’t hers anymore, that I’ve taken her place.”

“She chose that,” Jesse all but hissed.

I patted her leg. “Yes, she did. That makes it hurt more rather than less.” I gave her a rueful smile. “I always hate having to relive my mistakes, I don’t know about you.” Jesse’s expression eased, so I continued to defend Christy. “She’s scared—ashamed of how she left both of you, ashamed of how poorly she’s filled the role of being your mother. So she’s trying to control something. She knows cooking, knows she’s good at it.”

“And you let her do it,” Jesse said slowly. “Because you feel sorry for her?”

I nodded, glad that she couldn’t tell if I lied or not. Then I heaved a sigh because I tried not to lie to Jesse any more than I lied to her father. I might make exceptions in the case of their safety, but never just to make myself look better.

“That’s part of it,” I said. “I’d like to think that it was the biggest part of it because that makes me look better. Confident even. But part of it is also this—can you see me trying to compete with your mother in the kitchen while she’s at her Suzy Homemaker best? I’d just look stupid—and that’s what she was prepared for.”

“You gave up control of the house to her,” Jesse said as if it were a terrible and wrong thing. “And couldn’t get it back?”

I snorted. “You obviously grew up in a werewolf pack, kid. Werewolves don’t know everything. Giving her power down there did not hurt mine. This is not her home, and a dozen gourmet dinners aren’t going to change that. If she is scared and needs to feel in control over dinner, I can give her that because I don’t have a creep chasing after me. Ultimately, she cannot take over this house because it belongs to your father, and he is mine.”

“Give her an inch, and she’ll take a mile,” warned Jesse.

I nodded. “That may be. But it will be okay; your mother is a good person.”

Jesse snorted.

“She’s a good person. She loves you.” I closed my eyes because I didn’t want to say the next bit very much. “She even loves your father still.” I could see it in her body language. “She’s a good person, but she is a weak person, too. She can’t take care of anyone else because she’s too busy taking care of herself.” I yawned, and Jesse nudged me.

“Go to bed, Mercy,” she said with a smile.

I got up and stretched. “We good?” I asked.

She nodded. “We’re good.”

Adam was holding the wall up outside Jesse’s bedroom when I opened the door.

“Good night, Jesse,” he said. “Your mom is already in bed.”

“Night, Dad,” Jesse said, dumping the stuff on her bed on the floor with all the other Jesse debris. “Turn out my light, okay?”

I hit the switch and shut the door.

“How long have you been there?”

He put his warm hand on the back of my neck and hauled me to our bedroom.

“Long enough to hear you defend Christy to Jesse—so, might I add, did Christy. I sent her to bed after you called her a Suzy Homemaker because she took offense at that.”

I shut our door, closing us in away from Christy. If she heard something she didn’t want to tonight, it was her own fault. I turned around, and Adam leaned against me, pushing me backward until the wall pressed into my shoulder blades.

“You are the opposite of Christy,” he told me seriously.

I raised my eyebrows. “You don’t thinkI’d ask for help if I acquired a stalker?”

His hard belly vibrated against mine as he laughed silently. “Maybe. Just maybe, and only if you thought someone else might be at risk. But I wasn’t talking about that.” He kissed me until the pulse in my neck jumped against his thumb. “She’s too busy taking care of herself to take care of anyone else, you said. That’s about the best description of Christy I’ve ever heard. You? You are too busy taking care of everyone else to take care of yourself.”

He kissed me again, then put his head down to whisper in my ear. “I like your way better.” And then he nipped my ear and slapped my hip lightly and stepped away.

“Morning comes early,” he said lightly. “Let’s get some sleep.”

“Adam,” I said quietly, hoping Christy couldn’t hear. “That whole spiel I told Jesse about why I didn’t set Christy on her ear tonight? I thought that up later. At the time, the real reason was the second one I admitted to, that I couldn’t do it without looking like a vindictive, insecure witch.”

He laughed, a soft sound shared by just the two of us. “I saw,” he said. “Christy boxed you in, and you skated through as gracefully as possible. Don’t worry, love, this was just round one, and she had the advantage with that shiner on the side of her face to gather sympathy. My money’s on you for the finish.”

4

“That bad, eh?” said Tad when he came through the door of the shop that next morning.

“She made breakfast,” I told him, looking down at the parts order I was putting together to hide my expression until I could make it more cheery. I turned two sets of spark plugs into four, stretched my mouth into an appropriate shape, and looked up at Tad. “Homemade blueberry muffins. I brought you some.” I nodded to the basket on the counter next to the till.

He shook his head. “Lots of teeth in that expression for a smile, Mercy.” He snagged one out of the top, took a quick bite, and paused. Gave me a humor-filled sympathetic look and took another, bigger bite. When he finished, he looked at me and snatched another muffin. “How long is she going to be here? And would she be interested in dating a half-fae younger man who is currently working for minimum wage?”

“And the horse you rode in on,” I groused at him without heat. “Until she’s safe, I suppose—though she’s making noises about moving here. I hope she was just saying that to torment me, but…” I shrugged. “I don’t think she’ll be looking for anyone”—other than Adam—“for a while. This guy she’s on the run from beat her up, and it is seriously looking like he killed another man she was dating, then burned down the building her condo was in.”

Tad took a third muffin and ate it in two bites. His voice was muffled with food when he said, “Nasty piece of work, him. Are you up for this?”

I shrugged. “Sure. If it gets too bad … how would you like a roommate?”

“If she can cook like this, okay by me.”

“I was talking about me,” I told him. I was joking. But there was a cold knot in my stomach anyway.

He came around the counter and kissed the top of my head. “Poor Mercy. Let’s go fix something you know how to fix. It’ll make you feel better.”

When I’d met Tad, a little over ten years ago, he’d only been a kid, and he’d been running this shop himself because his dad had gone on a two-month drinking binge after Tad’s mom had died of cancer. He’d been nine going on fifty then, and the only thing that had changed since was that someone had rubbed off the bright and shiny cheer that had been his gift to the world. If I ever found out who had done it, I might sic a werewolf pack on them.

So it didn’t surprise me that Tad was right. I found the short that kept a ’62 Bus from Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Banging along the road in an hour and a half. Electrical shorts—common in old cars—were a bugger to hunt down. I’d once spent forty hours to find one that had taken me two minutes to fix after I found it. An hour and a half was good news. By the time I buttoned the Bus up, I was nearly upbeat.

Still no calls from anyone who might know how to reach Coyote. If I didn’t hear from them by tonight, I’d drive over tomorrow and leave Tad to keep the shop going. Losing some production time would suck—but not as much as whatever would happen if Beauclaire came looking for his walking stick, and I didn’t have it for him.

Just after lunch, one of my car guys stopped in. Keeping old cars running is my living, but there are hobbyists out there, too. I have a couple of guys and a grandmother who liked to come in and talk shop. Most of the time, they have questions for me, and sometimes I learn something, too. But really, it was about people who had car addictions looking for someone to talk with about their passion.

Joel Arocha showed up while I was elbow-deep in grease working on a Jetta that had been going through as much oil as gas for about ten years. Joel (pronounced Hoe-el in the Spanish style) was Hispanic, but his accent was Southwestern USA. He was my age, more or less, but the sun had weathered his skin so he looked a little older. He was about my size and weight, too. One of those tough, tough men who were all muscle and rawhide.

He worked in the vineyards, ten-hour days this time of year, with random days off. In the winter, he worked reduced hours and took other jobs to fill in. Last year I’d introduced him to Adam, and he’d done some fill-in security jobs. In his not-so-copious spare time, Joel was restoring a Thing, VW’s version of a jeep, and he liked to chat with me while I worked.

Usually, Joel and I talked cars, but today he had other things on his mind.

“—so this guy comes by my house this morning, knocks on my door to see if we had any pit bulls for sale—and then he points at my wife’s prizewinning bitch, and says, ‘Like that one.’” Joel set the part he’d come to pick up on the nearest counter and leaned against it while he watched me work.

“That’s a problem?” I asked, because he was obviously pretty hot about it. I knew werewolves, not dogs, at least not at his level.

He nodded. “It told me right up front I was dealing with someone who didn’t know anything about dogs. Aruba—that is Arocha’s White Princess Aruba to you—is an American Staffordshire terrier. Amstaffs look a bit like the American pit bull, but any dog fancier can tell the difference. Someone had apparently told him we had pit bulls, and he needed one to guard his house and do some fighting for him—and he gives me a wink.” Joel grimaced. “A wink. Freaking dog fighters. They think it makes them macho to take their loyal dogs and get them all chewed up. To me, it just shows that they aren’t worthy of having a dog. I told him not right now and asked him for his number, in case something turned up.” Joel handed me an extension for my ratchet before I could reach for it.