3

Mercy

And here I am, standing naked before the unlocked freezer door.

TO GIVE MYSELF ANOTHER CHANCE TO THINK, I FOLDED the nasty rags that a day ago had been comfortable schlepping-around-in-the-house-and-playing-pirate clothes. Now they could have been costuming for a zombie movie—or, I supposed, a particularly bloody pirate adventure. I tucked my underwear inside the shirt.

I took another look at my ribs, but there wasn’t so much as a scar left behind. That was some healer Bonarata had. He’d used her on me when he’d thought I was powerful, that he might turn me into an ally. I wouldn’t let his earlier care delude me into believing that he didn’t, now, think that it would be more convenient to have me dead.

I was achy and sore but nothing too bad. My wrist, where the cuff, the witch’s bracelet, had poked little holes in my skin, was itchy, but the dots were smaller than they had been. When I touched my toes, when I jogged in place, nothing hurt enough to interfere with my movement. Even the shaky, light-headed feeling had mostly subsided. Maybe it had been the lingering effects from being unconscious for so long, or maybe it was a side effect of the cuff’s magic. I was good to go.

Part of me wanted to wait. I knew what I faced, more or less. In many ways, my whole childhood and adolescence had consisted of pitting my wits and thirty-five-pound coyote self against werewolves, some of which weighed north of three hundred pounds. All that experience told me that my chances were pretty much even against Bonarata’s werewolf. Even odds weren’t really very good odds against death-by-werewolf.

But most of one summer, the Marrok’s terrifying son Charles had taken me on as a student, though I hadn’t realized that was what he’d done until many years later. At the time, I’d thought it was a punishment for wrapping the Marrok’s new car around a tree.

Right now, Charles’s voice rang in my ears, as if it had curled up into some corner of my mind until I needed it.

“If you are taken by your enemies,” he said, “don’t wait to escape. The hour you are taken is when you will be at your strongest. Time gives them the opportunity to starve you, to torture you, to break you and make you weak. You have to escape as soon as you can.”

Pretty intense stuff to say to a teenager you were teaching to do oil changes and rotate tires, but Charles was like that. It was part of what made him so scary.

Standing in front of the metallic door, I wondered if he’d had some prescience, some vision of me in my present circumstance—or if he’d just been passing on advice because everyone should know what to do if they were kidnapped. With Charles, it was hard to tell. His advice was good; now was the time to attempt to escape.

Even, I added to myself as I touched the invitingly unsecured door, if they expect you to try it. Even if they have set it up so they could kill you without accepting blame.

Another thing that Charles would say was that standing around staring at the door wasn’t accomplishing anything useful except giving me time to scare myself.

Unencumbered by clothes, I opened the heavy freezer door and emerged into a moonlit garden. A light breeze, just this side of chilly, caressed my bare skin and brought a host of unfamiliar scents. I stepped over the doorway—and truthfully, despite the play Bonarata had made that there was something important about that space—I didn’t expect to feel anything.

But my ears popped as if I’d just dropped a thousand feet, and magic shivered across my skin, scratching like spider legs. I froze for a heartbeat, but when that was all that happened, I took a cautious step forward.

There was packed gravel under my feet and a roof over my head, held up by huge old timbers. At first I thought it was some sort of porch around the building I’d just left, but the covered part was bigger than the building. It was more carport-sized, with two adjacent sides open. The building was the long, closed side, and the end of the building met a yellow, stuccoed wall.

The freezer end of the building tucked into the corner next to the wall and took up about a third of the building. The other two-thirds looked like long-abandoned horse stalls.

The building, roofed area, and wall were all set in a large walled garden that held rows of grapes and fruit trees. Ivy climbed the ten-foot walls.

On the opposite corner of the garden was a huge house in the shape of an “L” that appeared as hoary as the building at my back. The whole place looked as though someone had tried very hard, with better-than-average luck, to re-create the set of a movie that had taken place in Italy. I assumed it was to make Bonarata feel at home in a strange land.

I couldn’t get any sense of what lay outside the walls—there were no towering mountains, but it didn’t feel like the Tri-Cities, either. The air smelled different; it was cooler, and the air was damp.

Maybe I was in Yakima or Walla Walla. I hadn’t spent a lot of time in Yakima, but Walla Walla’s air wasn’t as dry as the Tri-Cities’, and it was cooler.

I took another step away from the doorway, and I quit worrying about where I was when I felt . . . something. Someone.

Heart pounding with hope, I looked back at the open doorway. I let my eyes become unfocused, then I could see it—a ring of magic that stretched along the edge of the building and disappeared around the open edge and, on the side with the wall, slipped under the stones like an electric cable made of magic, or a circle of magic.

Bonarata hadn’t lied. I was a better prisoner inside that circle than I was outside it. Because outside it, the bonds that tied me to Adam—and to the pack—were functioning again. Sort of, anyway.

I reached out with my soul, down the familiar path that had so recently been blocked by silence. I reached for Adam.

It didn’t quite work. Not the way it should have.

I could feel him at the edge of my awareness, but that was it. Maybe the wreck had done something—or the drugs or magic that had kept me quiet until they got me here. Maybe it was some kind of witchcraft or magic I wasn’t resistant to right now, or that the circle was still affecting me. Maybe there was another circle around the whole property.

But I could tell that Adam was alive. Hopefully he could do the same. I’d examine the bonds more carefully later. Right now, I had to work on survival, because I could smell the distinctively musky mint of the werewolf’s scent.

“You might as well come out,” I said to Lenka the werewolf. That way I’d know where she was, and I could head for the garden wall in a direction that gave me a head start. “I know you’re there.”

She’d meant for me to scent her. She wanted me afraid. A low growl filled the air—soft enough not to be heard in the house. I think it was supposed to be scary, too—which it was, but not because I was afraid of the sound of her voice.

I remembered her crazy eyes and was scared. Fear was good. Fear would make my feet faster.

“I live with werewolves,” I reminded her. “Hiding doesn’t make you more frightening.”

The wolf who rounded the corner of the walled side of the roofed area was too thin, and her fur coat was patchy. But her movement was easy, and the fangs she showed me as she snarled were plenty long.

I’d grown up hearing the old wolves talk about how much more satisfying it was to eat something while its heart pumped frantically from terror. Some of the old wolves who came to live out their last years in the Marrok’s pack were not kind.

“Hi, there,” I told her casually—and then I bolted for the wall surrounding the yard.

I smell mostly human to a werewolf’s nose, especially if I haven’t recently been running around on coyote feet. Human is a smell with enough variability that unless they know what I am, werewolves mostly chalk up the bit of odd in my smell to that. Vampires, I don’t know as well.

I was betting that the vampires here didn’t know what I was. That they thought I was human. I’d very carefully left it out of the mini biography I’d given Bonarata, and it wasn’t widely known. My best-case scenario was that she would think I was a human woman trying to run for her life, penned inside the yard because, outside of a few martial artists and acrobats, the walls were enough to keep most people in.

I don’t get super strength or scary points. But speed is my friend, and I caught her flat-footed because she thought one thing was happening when it was really something else. She thought I was running from her—and I was just trying to get up some speed.

I ran for the wall. I don’t know what she thought I was doing, but she chased me hard for most of the distance. But as I approached the giant stone wall that surrounded the grounds, she slowed, anticipating that I would be stopped by it.

A few months ago, a bunch of the pack had been at Warren’s house watching a Jackie Chan movie—I don’t remember which one because we were having a marathon—and Jackie just ran up a wall like magic. Warren had a wall around his backyard. Someone stopped the movie, and we’d all gone out and tried it. A lot.

The werewolves had gotten moderately proficient, but my light weight and speed had made me the grand champion. The trick is to find a corner and have enough speed to make it to the top.

Instead of stopping at the wall, I Jackie-Channed it up the stone surfaces and leaped over. I caught the werewolf totally by surprise.

I don’t expect Bonarata and she watched old martial arts movies together. It didn’t seem like that kind of relationship.

Her pause meant that the wolf, who could have caught me because as agile as I’d learned to be imitating Jackie Chan, going up was still slower than going forward, had missed her chance. I didn’t intend to give her another.

I changed to coyote as I came off the top of the wall. I’m not a were-anything. It takes them time to change from human to wolf. I could do it—well, in this case I could do it in the time it took me to drop off the wall.

I landed on four feet, running as fast as I could down a narrow road that was walled on both sides. I had no idea where I was, but out was a good direction, and I didn’t hesitate as I headed one way. Nor did I slow or look behind me.

I didn’t need to. My ears told me when she landed on the outside of the wall. I could hear her running behind me, her claws giving her better purchase on the ground than mine did. Werewolves had huge freaking claws, and she was using them to give herself traction like the big cats do.

Experience had taught me that I was faster than most werewolves. Most, but not all. It was my bad luck that she wasn’t one of the slower ones. She was closing in on me by inches.

I watched for a cross street, a change of some sort that would allow me to use my small size to my advantage, but there were only stone walls and stucco walls and cement walls and tall, solid gates. So I ran as fast as I could and hoped that I had more endurance, that her sprint would slow faster than mine.

I don’t know how long we ran through the night streets. On a moon hunt, the pack would run for four or five hours at a time, for the sheer joy of it—so, outside of a few lingering aches from the wreck, I was in good shape. Better than she was, half-starved as she appeared.

Certainly in better shape than I would have been after being Bonarata’s guest for weeks. I’d have to thank Charles if I made it out of this alive.

Eventually, condition counted. I started to pull away from her, very, very slowly. About that time, the walls on either side of the road fell away, and I found myself running along a country lane with vineyards rising on gentle hills on both sides. There were still fences, but that was okay, I could deal with fences—vineyards were a godsend. There are vineyards all over the Tri-Cities. I know about vineyards and werewolves and coyotes.

I slipped through the bars of an ornate steel gate and ran along the length of the first row of grapes. I think she knew what I was planning—maybe she’d hunted smaller prey in this very vineyard before—because she sped up and closed the distance I’d opened between us. But, once again, she was too late.

I would have hated to face her if she’d been in top condition, if she hadn’t been half-crazy. But if she hadn’t been Bonarata’s pet . . . mistress . . . something, she wouldn’t be trying to kill me.

Grapes are grown in rows. The path between rows is kept clear, and it is easy to run through the vineyard from that direction. But the grapevines are trained to spread tidily on a wire or rope fence, so running through the vines themselves is difficult—unless you are a coyote. The fence the vines are grown along leaves plenty of space for a coyote to slip through between strands.

I turned into the vineyard.

After the second row, I got a feeling for the spacing and didn’t have to slow or shorten my stride as I ran through the gracefully draped vines.

The werewolf was a lot bigger than I was. She had to jump every row. It wasn’t the additional effort that won the race for me—it was just that every time she jumped was that much time she wasn’t propelling herself forward. It slowed her down, and it required more energy.

She was moving roughly ten times as much mass as I was, which hopefully would tire her out faster, though that didn’t seem to be happening with any appreciable speed, even given her poor condition. I kept waiting for her to break down the row and run on the road beside the vineyard instead, where her speed would be less hampered than mine was. But she just kept following me as if she was incapable of more tactical thinking.

By the time I reached a road again, ducking beneath the tall hedge-and-fence that the werewolf would have to vault over, I’d gained nearly forty yards. This road traveled straight uphill for about a half mile, then, from the sign on the verge, intersected with another road.

The last steep bit I managed by ignoring my tiredness and occupying myself with the very important decision of whether to continue straight or turn left or right. My life hung in the balance, but I had nothing to draw upon to make the decision an informed one. The high hedge lined both sides of the road I was traveling on, and I could not even see the new road.

I hesitated a moment . . . one second and two, right at the intersection. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the satisfaction in her eyes. My indecision had given her the hunt. She was still stronger than I was, and the long uphill stretch had eaten most of the lead that the vineyard had given me.

She was so busy seeing me as her prize, she didn’t pay attention to anything else. So when I bolted across the intersection, she did, too—and the bus that I’d waited for hit her and rolled over the top of her with both sets of wheels.

I turned right, the direction the bus had come from, and kept going. Behind me, I heard the bus slow and stop. I hoped that she was dead—or dead enough to leave the bus driver and the people riding in it safe.

After a while, I heard the engine sound change as the bus pulled out again and headed away on its original course. I dropped from a sprint to a jog. She might still be alive, but she wasn’t going to be chasing me again until she’d had time to heal. Without a pack, it was going to take her a few hours at least.

It was still dark, though, and there was the possibility that the vampire hadn’t left his—what? lover? food?—to kill me on her own. I needed to find a safe place. I needed to contact Adam. I needed to eat something. Not necessarily in that order. Water, the most immediate need, I found in a trough set out for some cows. They watched me curiously, but I didn’t alarm them.

I thought about cutting through their pasture and into more vineyards, but I wanted to go home. Following the road until I found a familiar setting seemed to be a better choice. The road I followed was, other than the small cow pasture, bordered on either side by vineyards until civilization crept very slowly back in, but not in any useful fashion.

I traveled for another hour or four, until the first rays of the next day dawned, without finding anyplace that seemed safe. I think if I hadn’t been so tired, I might have done something smart, like changing into a human and going looking for help. Though maybe not. Bonarata would not be kind to any human who thwarted his will and helped me—that was his reputation, anyway. Instead of looking for help, I found railroad tracks and followed them for a while, exhaustion leaving me very focused on putting more miles between me and the vampires. On getting away safely. A train seemed like a very good idea.

In the end, I didn’t take a train. I found the station, right on the edge of where village turned into tight-packed city. As I was trying to figure out just how to jump on a train without anyone’s seeing me—pack magic could make people not pay attention to me only as long as I didn’t do anything too interesting—I realized that there was an easier ride to be had.

The small train station shared space with a bus terminal. There was, not ten feet from where I’d emerged from the tidy bushes surrounding the whole space, a bus with the luggage doors open on both sides. Even as I noticed it, attendants closed the doors on the far side.

I jumped in the near side and scrambled over bags and suitcases before dropping into an empty space and stillness. I lay there panting as quietly as I could until the doors closed. Five minutes later, the bus lumbered forward in a wave of diesel fumes, and I took a deep breath.

Safe.

Relief washed over me, and I put my head down. I slept.

—

I DREAMED OF ADAM.

I sprawled awkwardly over a chair shaped for a person in my coyote body, my muzzle on Adam’s lap. His strong hand rested on my back. I moved so I could see his face: he looked tired. I think we were on an airplane—which made no sense at all. But it was only an impression. Everything except for Adam was pretty vague in the way that dreams sometimes are.

“There you are,” he said. “What in . . . what did you get yourself into this time?”

Coyotes can’t talk.

“Mercy,” he said.

Sometimes I have been known to use the not-talk thing to my advantage. He sounded like he was mad at me. I was tired. The pads on the bottom of my feet, tough enough to run over the desert, had not fared so well running over blacktop all night. My shoulder hurt, my jaw hurt, my heart hurt. I was stuck in a luggage compartment without food. My stomach was pretty sure my throat had been cut.

I put my muzzle back on his lap and closed my eyes.

He was very still for a moment.

“Not doing so good, huh?” he said softly, running his hands over my sides gently before he touched both sides of my face in a caress that was both soothing and possessive. “Sorry. I’ve been fuc . . . very worried.” Adam doesn’t swear in front of women or children if he can help it—a product of a childhood in the fifties or abnormally good manners, take your pick.

He bent over me, put his head down on top of mine, and I heard him inhale as if he were breathing me in. “Are you okay?”

I wiggled a little closer to him, but I didn’t open my eyes.

Apparently that was enough of an answer, because he exhaled and relaxed. “All right, then,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I know.”

He sat up, but his hands stayed on me. “You just disappeared, sweetheart. We found the SUV and the stolen semi that hit it. Found your blood on the seat—that was rough, because, Mercy, it was a lot of blood. But we couldn’t find you. The gas station was deserted. We think the clerk belonged to the vampires. That they had been waiting for you to go there by yourself. It was so close to home, you’d feel safe—and that would give them a chance to act.

“We might have been at a dead end, but things really got interesting when we talked to Marsilia.”

I raised my head and looked at him, but he was staring at something I couldn’t see.

“She’d gotten an e-mail,” he told me. “Implying that you were being held to persuade her to present herself before the . . .” He stopped here. “I am informed that speaking his name or title might allow him to eavesdrop because we are speaking via a witch’s spell rather than our bond. Do you know who I mean?”

I nodded, disconcerted by the idea of a witch spell. Adam’s hands tightened painfully.

“Does he have you?” Adam asked urgently, and I shook my head.

“You got away? Where are you? Are you all right? Are you safe?” he asked.

I would have said something then. But I was in coyote form—and I didn’t have the faintest idea how to answer any of his questions.

His nostrils flared, and he frowned at me. “I smell diesel. I thought it was just you . . . but, Mercy, are you on a bus?” he asked.

But he was gone before I could answer, the quiet dream blown to bits by the abrupt sound of hissing brakes. The noise and rough jolting brought me back to the dark underbelly of the luggage compartment, which was a cold substitute for Adam’s lap. I stood up. My legs had trouble compensating for the wallow as the bus rolled over speed bumps, curbs, bodies, or something that lifted up one side, then the other a couple of times.

I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep. Not very long, I thought. I would have been stiffer if it had been more than a half hour or so—not long enough to be safe from the Lord of Night. I waited, and when the bus stopped, I readied myself.

When the luggage doors opened, I dashed out as quickly as I could. The bus attendant cried out as I ran by him, but this was a huge station, and I quickly lost myself among the buses and passengers towing luggage.

A man reading a book crossed my path, and I slowed down, walking at his heel for a dozen yards until the pack magic settled lightly around me and I became less interesting. I could feel the lessened pressure at the back of my neck as people quit looking at me. Pack magic would help, but I’d have to do my best to blend in because it was weak.

We moved past a bright yellow bus just as a woman reached up to close the cargo area but paused as something caught her attention. It was too good a chance to miss. I broke smoothly away from the man I’d been trailing and slipped unseen into the luggage compartment. I found a pair of big beige duffel bags and stretched out between them, just another beige lump to human eyes. The luggage-bay doors closed.

I stayed still until the bus was moving, then stayed still some more as it turned a corner and picked up speed. I had to stay still, or I was afraid I would lose my battle with panic.

I’d assumed that the Lord of Night had taken me to Yakima or Walla Walla. Both were within a reasonable travel distance of the Tri-Cities, and both had gently rolling hills and vineyards. When I’d been running my hardest to stay ahead of the werewolf, I hadn’t been paying attention to much beyond generalities.

But the voices at the bus station hadn’t been speaking English. They’d been speaking Italian.

I wasn’t in Yakima or Walla Walla; I wasn’t in Washington or even in the US. The Lord of Night had taken me to Italy, and that was the reason I couldn’t reach Adam or the pack through the various bonds I had to them as soon as I was free of Bonarata’s magic circle.

I wasn’t sure how far Italy was from my home, but my liberal arts education told me that the world was roughly twenty-five thousand miles around and that Italy was about a quarter of the world away. I called it six thousand miles, give or take a thousand miles.

I was in the belly of a bus in Italy, alone, naked, and penniless.

Also without a passport.

In a place that a coyote was likely to be noticed because coyotes aren’t exactly native to Europe.

I thought a little more and added “can’t speak the language” to my woes. I’d never traveled out of the country—except that summer road trip to Mexico with Char, my college roommate. Char spoke fluent Spanish, so my bits and pieces hadn’t made me completely helpless. I put my head down and felt sorry for myself for a long while.

Then I pulled on my big-girl pants (which were figurative at this point) and started dealing with the situation as it stood. In front of me and behind me was the solution to my nakedness problem, and I had no room to be squeamish.

I shifted back to my human self and started opening luggage.

It took me a while to find someone who was reasonably close to me in size. I didn’t want to strand her with not enough clothes, so I took the bare minimum. I’d found a notebook and pen in someone else’s duffel bag and left a note and the address and phone number of Adam’s business as well as a detailed list of what I’d taken from the suitcase—a copy of which I kept. I found a pair of tennis shoes that fit in another suitcase, along with twenty euros. There had been maybe two hundred euros in the suitcase, but my conscience, already pushed to the brink, could only deal with twenty. I left a note for her, too.

I had no idea how long this bus ride was going to be—though the luggage suggested that most people weren’t planning on a short trip. Even so, I hurried, so that I wouldn’t be caught in the middle of my theft.

I found an empty backpack—not a sturdy can-hold-all-your-college-textbooks kind of pack, more of an I-don’t-want-to-carry-a-purse-and-think-pink-lace-and-flowers-are-pretty pack. I thought it was pretty, too—if not really appropriate to anyone over the age of seven. But my coyote self could carry it, and it would hold the fruits of my heist job, so I took it.

Stealing was quick. Writing all the notes took a lot longer. I was tucking the last note in when I noticed an e-reader sticking out of a compartment in the suitcase I’d taken the shoes from.

I was pretty sure most e-readers had Internet capability, even old ones like this one. I added it to the list of things I owed the nice woman who was going to be short a pair of tennis shoes, too, when she arrived at her destination. I was sorry for it, but I’d make it up to her as soon as I could. If I could.

If I couldn’t, if I didn’t get myself out of this, Adam would know I would want these people compensated for the things I took.

I packed everything in the flowery backpack and pulled it into the far corner of the bus. Then I changed back into the coyote and curled up in the corner, the metal of the bus’s walls on either side of me.

I’d grown used to feeling safe again, ever since Adam and I had become a couple. Okay, vampires, trolls, and a host of other villains that ranged from terrifying to scary had tried to kill me on a fairly regular basis, but Adam had my back. I hadn’t realized how much I craved it until it was gone. Again.

I’d thought I was safe before. I’d left most of the supernatural behind me when I’d left the Marrok’s pack at sixteen. I’d gone to college, had decided that being a mechanic suited me better than teaching. For nearly ten years, I had lived in my trailer, had gone to work every day, and no one had tried to kill me. I’d felt like I didn’t need anyone at my back. Not even when my world had started to fill with the affairs of the supernatural community had I lost my ability to find a place of safety—a home.

But no one is really safe. Not ever. Afterward, after I picked up the pieces and glued them back together with a bit of hope and trust and fairy dust, I’d found another place to be home and safe.

I paused in momentary horror. Had I married Adam just so I could feel safe? The panic lasted only for a moment, because I knew better. I’d had hours and hours of counseling with a pretty awesome counselor. Part of it was to address some bad things that had happened, but part of it was so that I could choose Adam—because I chose him and not because I knew that anything that came after me would have to go through him.

But still . . . I had thought I was safe.

The Lord of Night had come to my home ground and taken me there, then hauled me to Italy as if the pack, as if all of my allies, were no obstacle at all. He’d extracted me as cleanly as if I’d hopped on his airplane—because no way had he brought me here on a commercial plane—of my own volition.

I’d had some time to think while I ran. My current version of why Bonarata had brought me here went like this: he’d wanted to bring me here, thinking that I was Marsilia’s, because the thought that Adam and the pack could be cooperating without her being in charge just never occurred to him. I was a piece on a chessboard he’d decided Marsilia was the queen of. He’d taken me, who Wulfe had told him was the most powerful of Marsilia’s associates, to show her how powerless she was. I don’t know what he’d have done if I were the werewolf he’d originally thought me. But his little pet werewolf was enough to make me wary. She’d smelled off, smelled sick—the kind of sick that made my coyote decide something wasn’t good to eat.

I had other versions of why Bonarata had stolen me—but none of them made sense, including that one. Bonarata was smarter than that; he had to be to have lived as long as he had.

I really was certain that Marsilia was involved somehow. There had been something about the way he’d looked at me when he told me he hadn’t wanted to kill Marsilia, so he hadn’t broken the bond I shared (supposedly) with her.

I shivered, though the bus wasn’t particularly cold and my summer fur coat could have protected me in the heaviest blizzard likely to fall in Lombardy.

He’d thought that I was bound to Marsilia.

I hated that the word for what the vampires did to their victims was the same word that described what was between Adam and me, between the pack and me.

My understanding, from the things I’d learned since Adam and I were bound as mates, was that all magical bonds are formed from the same sort of magic. Humans have those kinds of bonds, too—but theirs are softer and more fragile. Breakable.

Like most things, pack bonds and mate bonds could be twisted, but by their nature, they encouraged empathy because they are emotional links. They were bonds between equals—even the bond between the pack and its Alpha. The Alpha had a job to do, but it didn’t make him more important than the most submissive of the wolves in the pack. Adam was of the opinion that he was less important. We agreed to disagree.

The bond between a vampire and his victim (I say his because the vampire who owned me—and that was exactly the right word—was a him) put the vampire in the driver’s seat. The vampire could, if he so chose, make his pet do anything, feel anything. Whenever the vampire decided to, he could take away his victim’s free will—and the victim might not even know.

The Kiss doesn’t always work. Stefan told me that it was almost impossible to take a werewolf the way they could take humans because of the pack bonds. That Bonarata had succeeded in doing so had added to his legend. There were people who were difficult to break. But given time, a strong vampire could control most any human he wanted to.

Stefan told me he didn’t know if that was true between us—but that he would not test it. I trusted Stefan.

Even so, Stefan owned me. He had saved my life by claiming me, and I’d agreed to it. But I’d thought it was broken, gone. Thought my ties to Adam and the pack had erased it, because Stefan had wanted me to believe it.

Apparently, because I’d taken the bond willingly, it wasn’t something Stefan could break even if he wanted to. Knowing Stefan as I did, I was willing to believe that.

The Lord of Night had tried to break it and failed. Or so he said.

My heartbeat picked up, and my mouth dried as I opened it and panted in fear. Of course he would lie. He lied a lot. I couldn’t remember now if I’d been watching for lies while he spoke of the bond I shared with a vampire. I’d been paying attention to the jealousy he’d displayed. Had he lied? Was he, even now, in my head, waiting to give me orders?

To take me from Marsilia would have been a better lesson than to have his wolf kill me trying to escape. I had only his word that he hadn’t done it.

Hadn’t I done what he wanted when I escaped? I’d known he wanted me to try it. What if he hadn’t wanted me to die at the fangs of his pet werewolf as I’d first thought? What—what if this was his plan? That I’d escape, think I was free, get back to the pack—and destroy them because I belonged to Bonarata. That story, unfortunately, made better sense than some sort of unrequited jealousy as a motivation.

Had Bonarata broken the tie between Stefan and me? Had he been able to do something that Stefan couldn’t? Was I a slave of the Lord of Night?

Since learning it still existed, I had never tested the bond between Stefan and me. Just the thought of that tie made me wake up in a cold-blooded sweat, understanding exactly how a trapped wolf could chew off a paw to escape.

The bus continued to rumble at a consistent speed, unimpressed by my panic. I needed to find the bond between Stefan and me and make sure Bonarata hadn’t done something to it—something that would turn me into his creature.

I didn’t even really know how to look. But even as I thought that—I knew I had a stepping-off place. After Adam brought me into the pack bonds, I’d had a bad incident because a couple of the members of the pack were able to manipulate me through them. After that, Adam taught me how to deal with pack magic and the bonds. Part of that process was learning to “see” the bonds in my head.

I closed my eyes and, after a fairly tough and lengthy struggle, calmed down enough to find the light meditative state Adam had taught me to help me negotiate the pack bonds—as well as the mate bond between him and me.

Eventually, I stood on the battered stage of my old high school—the one in Portland. The floor was lit by a single spotlight, the one just over the control booth that sat in the middle of the balcony seats. I knew it was there, but, caught in the spotlight’s glare, I couldn’t see it.

The boards under my feet had been polished at one time, but years of student productions, of rolling the risers and the piano in and out, had left the old floor scarred and rough under my bare feet. Though I was wearing my coyote shape in real life, here in my mind, I was looking for human things, so I was in my human shape, naked, because naked made me feel vulnerable, and I couldn’t seem to find the safe space I needed to allow me to go clothed.

Darkness gathered at the edges of the stage and covered the auditorium in shadows that my eyes couldn’t penetrate. But I wasn’t here to explore my memory of high school.

I looked down at myself and patted the tattoo on my belly for a minute. There was nothing magical about the tattoo. It was just a paw print—a coyote paw print no matter what Adam said. But it centered me—it was at the center of me, a symbol of the coyote within. My fingers came down for the hundredth or two hundredth time—and hit a thick rope that wrapped all the way around me.

It was a rope that should have been too big to tie around me, but, as my perceptions of it changed, clarified, I could see that it wove around my upper torso like a bulletproof vest, if bulletproof vests were made of silk rope. I could not feel its weight, but here in that place between waking and sleep, it was warm and comforting—and it stretched into a gray mist that had somehow gathered in the darkness surrounding me.

I bent my head and pulled the rope to my nose. It smelled like Adam, and I touched it to my cheek. Under my hand, it felt alive and well—I could, faintly, feel Adam’s resolve, his stress and his fear. Gently, I let the rope fall away from my hands. I was not looking for my mate bond.

The pack bonds were woven through my vest, the warp to Adam’s weave; fluffier than the silk that was my bond with Adam, my pack bonds came in the shape of colorful Christmas garlands. Far lighter than the bond between Adam and me, they sparkled and shimmered as I moved. They stretched out from me in a braided cable about half as big as the mate bond. Like that bond, the pack bonds disappeared in the mist of distance. When I touched them, I could feel, very faintly, the lives of the wolves on the other end.

But I wasn’t looking for the pack, either. I stood in as neutral a position as I could: feet apart, knees bent, arms at my sides, closed my dream-self’s eyes, and thought, Stefan. I pictured him in my head, a moderately tall man with dark hair and eyes, very Italian, I’d always thought him. His smile was warm, and his posture varied—when he paid attention, he slumped a little and stomped a little. When he didn’t, he had the same sort of ramrod-straight posture that Adam had—they’d both been soldiers as young men. He was a dangerous man who was able to put it aside and joke and laugh as he helped me repair his van. A powerful vampire who knew ASL and unself-consciously watched Scooby-Doo.

When I was done, I opened my eyes, and he stood in front of me—a statue without life.

I walked all the way around him, looking for something, anything, that tied us together. A sparkle teased at my senses, but I couldn’t find it—and was afraid I was making it up.

I closed my eyes again and ran my hands over my neck. After a few minutes, my fingers tangled in a necklace. It was gossamer fine and cool against my fingers. I searched for a clasp and found, instead, a small circle of metal that gathered the strands of necklace together, and attached to it was another chain.

I opened my eyes as my fingers followed the chain out far enough from under my chin that I could see it. A fine silver chain lay in my hands—and once I saw it, I could see that it led to the hands of the version of Stefan I had on my stage.

It looked so fragile—I tried to break it, but it wouldn’t break or bend, not with anything I could bring to bear on it in my mind. I fought and fought, pulling frantically on the necklace collar around my neck until blood stained the chain, running down it from my neck and from my fingers.

Shhh, said a cool voice. Shhh, you’re breaking my heart, cara.

I froze, then looked up from the now-heavy chain to my image of Stefan, which crouched next to me on the stage.

I promised, he told me. I promised not to tug on the leash. I promised. Don’t hurt yourself so. I keep my promises, Mercy.

His voice flowed over me—a friend’s voice. I was so alone. His voice was like a warm blanket over my nakedness. It gave me strength to allow my fingers to release the chain. I sat up.

My intention was to find the bond, I remembered, not to fight it. I took my terror, the atavistic fear of a trapped animal, and stuffed it back so I could think.

I’d been looking for it to make sure that it tied me to the right vampire.

“Who are you?” I asked him. “I need to be certain. The—” I remembered that Adam hadn’t used his name, so I switched it up a little. “Marsilia’s Master took me. I need to make sure that this”—I indicated the leash between us that now resembled a rusty lumber chain instead of fine jewelry—“is between you and me. That he didn’t break this bond and replace it with one of his own.”

Stefan sat back on his heels and tilted his head. “Fair question,” he said. “If he held your bonds, he could . . .” He frowned, then pulled a knife out of a pocket and sliced his palm. He pressed it against the chain he held, and the red drops landed on the metal. There were only five or six drops, but gradually the whole chain turned rust red. When those red links came close to me, I touched them—and the faded, cartoonish figure of Stefan solidified into the vampire himself.

His gaze traveled around at my stage and the fog, at the two cords that disappeared into the mist, and smiled at me. “Good to see you. This won’t last long, but while it does I have some things to tell you. Adam told us that you got away—keep running. Don’t trust anyone. We’ll find you, all right? We’re on our way to Italy. Once we are there, your ties to Adam should start working again, at least well enough for him to find you. He says that without the pack nearby, you should expect your ties to him and to the pack to remain weak until he is quite close. We can beat him, I think, Marsilia’s old Master, but only if you stay free. And don’t contact me this way again. He can’t, probably can’t, listen in, but he might be able to feel our conversation and follow the thread of it to you.”

He was still Bonarata; I knew that without Stefan’s using his name.

Stefan looked at the chain and said, “Really? This looks like something you’d find in a dungeon.”

I opened my mouth to explain about the necklace but changed my mind at the last moment and shrugged instead. “Scooby-Doo would be impressed.”

He smiled—and I was alone again, holding the fine chain that now disappeared into the mists.

I took two deep breaths and returned to the belly of the diesel beast that was carrying me to some unknown destination. We’d been traveling for a while. From the angle of the floor and the swaying as we turned one way, then the other, we were traveling through mountains. It was unlikely that I was going to find myself in Milan when the bus stopped. The farther I could manage to travel, the better off I’d be.

I was still tied to Stefan and not the Lord of Night.

Stefan was a vampire. He killed people to survive. It was true that he tried his best to keep them alive. It was true that he was funny and honorable. It was true that I liked him. But he was a vampire, and he owned me. The thought of that was enough for me to have to open my mouth and pant out my fear.

But at least it was still Stefan and not Bonarata, not the Lord of Night.

Stefan’s bond had saved me again. Had I been free, I would probably belong to the other vampire right now. He could have used me to get whatever it was that he wanted from our pack and Marsilia. I could have been his Trojan horse.

As the bus rattled on, I continued to play with various people’s motivations as best I could. It wasn’t really a waste of time—the exercise made me feel like I was doing something.

Bonarata had taken me because Wulfe told him I was the most powerful person in the Tri-Cities.

Why had Wulfe done that? Maybe as a joke—but I didn’t think so. It was probable, Stefan had told me not too long ago, that Wulfe was in Marsilia’s seethe as a spy.

“But,” he’d told me with a wry smile, “I doubt that Bonarata would approve of Wulfe’s methods. In his own way, Wulfe is more devoted to Marsilia than any of her seethe, more devoted to her than to the Lord of Night. Wulfe is old and strange; who knows how his mind works?”

I had to agree about the strange, but I had some experience dealing with old and strange people. And I thought that Stefan might be well on target about how Wulfe served Marsilia and let Bonarata think Wulfe served him instead.

So Wulfe had thrown me under the bus in order to do what?

The first thing I thought of was that by taking me instead of, say, Stefan or one of Marsilia’s other vampires, all of the werewolves would be fighting to get me back. If Wulfe had given them Adam . . . I thought of Bonarata trying to get Adam and was pretty sure that it would not have gone smoothly. Someone would have died, maybe many someones. But me? Blindsided by a kidnapping done by vampires? I would not stand a chance. Not of avoiding capture—but I was good at surviving, wasn’t I?

And if I’d died—it wouldn’t mean much to Wulfe or Marsilia, either. Not as long as Adam never found out that Wulfe had set me up, anyway. Even so—Adam would take out Bonarata before looking to Wulfe.

That felt right. Felt like a move Wulfe might make. Once he knew that Bonarata was moving against Marsilia at last, he’d want to consolidate her power, to put the werewolves firmly at her back.

Wulfe knew that I was tied to Stefan. Would he know that Bonarata would have trouble breaking that tie? Yes, I thought. James Blackwood, the one the vampires called the Monster, had tried to break our bond and failed. If I came back from visiting Bonarata unharmed, Wulfe could set up some sort of test to discover if I were unwillingly working for Bonarata. Probably would do so if I managed to escape cleanly.

Somehow that made me feel better. Wulfe would have figured out if I had been made Bonarata’s pet.

So Bonarata, operating on Wulfe’s very Wulfe-like information, had found himself holding a weak female instead of Marsilia’s most powerful supporter. My tie to Stefan—that Bonarata thought was to Marsilia—meant he couldn’t use me as a puppet. So Bonarata was left with a useless hostage. If he killed me outright, Bran Cornick, the Marrok, would declare war. To Bran and to the world, I was one of those he’d sworn to protect. If he didn’t avenge me, he’d lose face.

But an accident—that would simplify things greatly. He forgot to lock the door, and his half-crazed werewolf pet had torn me to bits. So sad. Tragic, even. I bet he would look very apologetic.

His story would have worked to keep Bran off his back. Not that Bran would believe him—but without proof, Bran could not attack Bonarata with impunity. Bran couldn’t go after Bonarata without starting a war with the other vampires. Such a war invited complications and disasters that might make World War I look like the “jolly little war” the British thought they were marching to.

My death wouldn’t endear him to Adam, though. But neither would my kidnapping have. If he wanted to use our neutral zone, then my kidnapping didn’t make sense at all—but, I remembered, he’d been lying to me when he’d told me he was interested in a place where supernatural creatures and humans could interact safely.

The bus braked hard, then started up again, in a low gear that vibrated nastily in the luggage compartment, and I momentarily lost my train of thought. It wasn’t like I enjoyed picking apart the plans of supervillainous vampires. But the bus had been traveling for a long, long time, and it wasn’t like there was anything else going on. And there was the minor, inconsequential motivation that my life was in the balance.

No. Bran wouldn’t go after Bonarata without proof that left him clearly in the right. Adam might—but he didn’t have Bran’s resources. Bonarata wouldn’t be worried about Adam. He didn’t know Adam like I did.

For the moment, we had the upper hand. He’d underestimated me by a hairsbreadth, because that’s how close that chase with the werewolf had been. I’d escaped.

But he couldn’t allow me to stay free. He had to retake me to save face.

No.

He still needed me to die in order to save face—and to come out on top. He wouldn’t underestimate me again. I couldn’t afford to underestimate him, either.

I knew more about vampires than I’d ever wanted to. The old vampires operated like spiders—with webs strung all over their territory. A vampire like Bonarata probably had people all over Europe. It wouldn’t be hard to find me here. There weren’t a lot of coyotes in Europe, probably none outside a zoo. He’d have people looking for my coyote self.

I had to disappear.

I put my head down on my paws and tried to ignore the diesel fumes.