"Broke my f-"
"Ladies present," chided the man who held me in an implacable grip that was as gentle as a mother holding her babe. His voice had the same soft drawl that sometimes touched Adam's voice. "No swearing."
"Broke my freaking nose then," said the first voice dryly, if somewhat muffled-presumably by the broken nose.
"It'll heal." He ignored my attempts to wriggle out of his hold. "Anyone else hurt?"
"She bit John-Julian," said the first man again.
"Love nip, sir. I'm fine." He cleared his throat. "Sorry, sir. It never occurred to me that she'd have training. I wasn't ready."
"It's water under the bridge now. Learn from it, boy," my captor said. Then he leaned down and, in a voice of power that vibrated down my spine, said, "Let us chat a little, hmm? The idea is not to hurt you. If you hadn't struggled, you wouldn't even have the bruises you do now. We could have hurt you much worse if we had wanted to." I knew he was right-but it didn't make him my best friend.
"What do you want?" I asked in as reasonable a tone as I could manage, flattened, as I was, on the floor beneath a strange werewolf.
"That's my girl," he approved, while I stared at the floor between my couch and end table, about two feet from my left hand, where Zee's dagger must have fallen when I went to sleep last night.
"We're not here to hurt you," he told me. "That's the first thing you need to know. The second is that the werewolves who have been watching your house and the Sarge's have been called off-so there's no one to help you. The third is-" He stopped speaking and bent his head to take a deeper breath. "Are you a were? Not a werewolf. You don't smell right for that. I thought it might just be the cat-never had a cat-but it's you that smells like fur and the hunt."
"Grandpa?"
"It's all right," the werewolf answered, "she's not going to hurt me. What are you, girl?"
"Does it matter?" I asked. He'd called Adam "Sarge"-as in "Sergeant"?
"No," he said. He lifted his weight off me and released me. "Not in the slightest."
I rolled toward the couch, and grabbed the dagger, shaking it free of sheath and belt. One of the intruders started forward, but the werewolf held up a hand and the other man stopped.
I kept moving until I was crouched on the back of the couch, the dagger in my hand and my back to the wall.
The werewolf's skin was so dark the highlights were blue and purple rather than brown. He knelt on the floor where he'd moved as soon as he let me up. He wore loose khaki pants and a light blue shirt. At another gesture, the two men backed up farther, giving me as much room as they could. They were lean and tough-looking and like enough to be twins. Like the werewolf, they were very dark-skinned. Between skin tone, general build, and that "Grandpa," I was betting that they were all related.
"You're Adam's army buddy," I told the werewolf, trying to sound relaxed, like it made me think he might be on my side, like I didn't know that he'd been involved in the debacle at Adam's house. "The one who was Changed with him."
"Yes'm," he said. "David Christiansen. These are my men. My grandsons, Connor and John-Julian." They nodded as he said their names. John-Julian was rubbing his shoulder where I'd gotten a good grip with my teeth, and Connor was holding a wad of tissue to his nose with one hand while the other held my Kleenex box.
"Mercedes Thompson," I told him. "What do you want?"
David Christiansen sat down on the floor, making himself as vulnerable as a werewolf could get.
"Well, now, ma'am," he said. "We've gotten ourselves into something of a fix, and we're hoping you can help us out of it. If you know who I am, you probably know I've been a lone wolf by choice since the Change."
"Yes," I said.
"I never finished high school, and the military was all I knew. When an old buddy recruited me for a mercenary troop, I was happy to go. Eventually I got tired of taking orders and formed up my own troop." He smiled at me. "When my grandsons resigned their commissions and joined us, I decided to quit fighting other people's wars for them. We specialize in extracting kidnapped victims, ma'am. Businessmen, Red Cross, missionaries, whatever, we get them out of the hands of the terrorists."
My legs were getting tired, so I sat down on the back of the couch. "What does this have to do with me?"
"We find ourselves somewhat embarrassed," the werewolf said.
"We're on the wrong side," said the man who'd answered to John-Julian.
"Gerry Wallace came to you," I whispered, as if a loud noise would destroy my sudden comprehension. It was David's talking about being a lone wolf that had done it. Lone wolves and Dr. Wallace meant Gerry, the Marrok's liaison with packless wolves. "He told you that Bran intended to tell the world about the werewolves." No wonder Gerry was too busy to spend time with his father.
"That's right, ma'am," agreed David. He frowned at me. "You aren't a werewolf, I'd swear to it, so how do you know so much about us-" He broke off his speech as a look of sudden comprehension came into his face. "Coyote. You're the girl who turns into a coyote, the one raised by the Marrok."
"That's me," I said. "So Gerry talked to you about Bran's decision to bring the werewolves out into the public?"
"Bran is abandoning the wolves to the humans, just like the Gray Lords did their people," said Connor of the bloody nose. My strangeness evidently took second place to his indignation toward Bran. "He's supposed to protect his people. Someone needed to challenge him before he could do it."