Only when I was no longer pressed against Adam did I notice we were surrounded by pack.
Okay, four wolves doesn't a pack make. But I hadn't heard them come, and, believe me, when there are five werewolves (including Adam) about, you feel surrounded and overmatched.
Ben was there, a cheerful expression that looked just wrong on his fine-featured face, which was more often angry or bitter than happy. Warren, Adam's third, looked like a cat in the cream. Aurielle, Darryl's mate, appeared neutral, but there was something in her stance that told me she was pretty shaken up.
The fourth wolf was Paul, whom I didn't know very well - but I didn't like what I did know.
Paul, the leader of the "I hate Warren because he's g*y" faction of Adam's pack, looked like he'd been sucker punched. I thought I'd just given him a new most-hated person in the pack.
Behind me, Adam laid his hands on my shoulders. "My children," he said formally, "I give you Mercedes Athena Thompson, our newest member."
Much awkwardness ensued.
IF I HADN'T FELT HIM EARLIER, I WOULD HAVE THOUGHT Stefan was still unconscious or dead or whatever from the sun. He lay stiffly on the bed in the cage, like a corpse on a bier.
I turned the light on so I could see him better. Feeding had healed most of the visible damage, though there were still red marks on his cheeks. He looked fifty pounds lighter than he'd been the last time I'd seen him - too much like a concentration camp victim for my peace of mind. He'd been given new clothes to replace his filthy, torn, and stained ones, the ubiquitous replacement clothing every wolf den had lying around - sweats. The ones he wore were gray and hung off his bones.
Adam was conducting what was rapidly developing into a full pack meeting in his living room upstairs.
He'd looked relieved when I'd excused myself to see Stefan - I thought he was worried someone would say something that might hurt my feelings. In that he underestimated the thickness of my hide. People I cared about could hurt my feelings, but almost complete strangers? I could care less about what they thought.
Wolf packs were dictatorships, but when you're dealing with a bunch of Americans brought up on the Bill of Rights, you still had to step a little carefully. New members were generally announced as prospective rather than as faits accomplis. A little care would have been especially appropriate when he was doing something as outrageous as bringing a nonwerewolf into the pack.
I'd never heard of anyone doing that. Nonwerewolf mates weren't part of the pack, not really. They had status, as the mates of wolves, but they weren't pack. Couldn't be made into pack with fifty flesh-and-blood ceremonies - the magic just wouldn't let a human in. Apparently my coyoteness was close enough to wolf that the pack magic was willing to let me in.
Probably Adam should have discussed bringing me in with the Marrok, too.
Cars were pulling up in front of the house, more of the pack. I could feel the weight of them, their unease and confusion. Anger.
I rubbed my arms nervously.
"What's wrong?" asked Stefan in a quiet, sane voice that would have reassured me more if he'd moved or opened his eyes.
"Besides Marsilia?" I asked him.
He looked at me then, his lips curving faintly. "That's enough, I suppose. But Marsilia isn't the reason this house is filling with werewolves."
I sat on the thickly carpeted basement floor and leaned my head against the bars of the cage. The door was shut and locked, the key that sometimes hung on the wall across the hallway gone. Adam would have it. It didn't matter though. I was pretty sure Stefan could leave anytime he chose - the same way he'd appeared in my living room.
"Right." I sighed. "Well that's your fault, too, I expect."
He sat up and leaned forward. "What happened?"
"When you jumped inside my head," I told him, "Adam took offense." I didn't tell him exactly how everything had played out. Prudence suggested Adam wouldn't be pleased with me if I shared pack business with a vampire. "What he did - and you'll have to ask him, I think - brought the pack down on his head."
He frowned in obvious puzzlement, then slow comprehension dawned. "I am sorry, Mercy. You weren't meant to... I didn't mean to." He turned his head away. "I'm not used to being so alone. I was dreaming, and there you were, the only one left with a tie of blood to me. I thought I dreamed that, too."
"She really had them all killed?" I whispered it, remembering some of what he'd given me while he'd been in my head. "All of your..." Sheep wasn't really PC, and I didn't want to tick him off, even if sheep is what all the vampires called the mundane humans they kept to feed off. "All of your people?"
I knew some of them, and liked one or two. For some reason, though, rather than the faces of the people I'd met living, it was the young vampire Danny I remembered, his ghost rocking in the corner of Stefan's kitchen. Stefan hadn't been able to protect him either.
Stefan gave me a sick look. "Disciplining me, she said. But I think it was revenge as much as anything. And I can feed off them from a distance. She wanted me starving when I landed at your feet."
"She wanted you to kill me."
He nodded jerkily. "That's right. And if you hadn't had half of Adam's pack at your house, I would have."
I thought of the obstinate look on his face. "I think she underestimated you," I told him.
"Did she?" He smiled, just a little, and shook his head.
I leaned my head back against the wall. "I'm..." Still angry with you didn't cover it. He was a murderer of innocents, and here I was talking to him, worried about him. I didn't know how to complete that thought, much less the sentence, so I went on to something else.
"So Marsilia knows I killed Andre, and you and Wulfe covered it up?"
He shook his head. "She knows something - she didn't talk much to me. It was only me she punished, so I don't think she knows about Wulfe. And maybe not me..." He looked at me from under the cover of his bangs, which had grown in the last day - I'd heard a heavy feeding could cause that. "I got the feeling I was being punished by association. I was the seethe's contact with you. I was the reason she went to you for help and gave you permission to kill Andre's pet. I was the reason you succeeded. You are my fault."
"She's crazy."
He shook his head. "You don't know her. She's trying to do what is best for her people."
The Tri-City seethe of vampires had mostly been in the area before the towns were established. Marsilia had been sent here as punishment for sleeping around with someone else's favorite. She'd been a person of influence, so had come here with attendants - mostly, as far as I knew, Stefan, Andre - the second vampire I'd killed - and a really creepy character named Wulfe.