"You didn't see Kyle?" I asked.
"I didn't see him. I don't have your nose to follow a scent, and I didn't want them to know I was watching. They were just a little too alert for my comfort. I could smell blood, though. I don't know whose it was."
I would. He waited, and I considered.
"Let's go around back," I said. "I can slip in through the back porch; there's a dog door Kyle put in for Warren. I can check out the house and call you in when I find him."
"I think that sending you into the house alone is the stupidest of our many options," said Stefan repressively. "Ben should be at the front door, you should go to the back - and wait in the yard, Mercy - and I will go in."
The oldest and most powerful vampires acquire names that define their most prominent characteristic. Stefan's name among his kind was the Soldier. This was the sort of situation in which he excelled. I felt the relief of having an expert make the calls.
"They are only human," Stefan said, and there was a familiar look in his face, though I was more used to seeing it on the wolves: hunger. "I will kill them, and Ben will kill any who get past me. You can let us know if anyone tries to get away out the back, and we will kill them, too."
Stefan had always liked people. I hadn't noticed before that he also enjoyed killing them. Maybe that was part of the new, more vampiric Stefan.
So much for letting someone else make the calls.
"We don't need to kill them," I pointed out reasonably. "As you said, they are only human, and there are only two."
"That we know of," he said.
"We don't know anything about them," I told him. "We aren't even certain that the two men in Kyle's living room have anything to do with the people who took the pack."
Stefan raised an eyebrow - he was right. Who else would they be?
"We don't know who is backing them or what their endgame is," I continued doggedly. "We don't even know if Kyle is there. What I do know is that we can't go in to kill."
Stefan frowned at me. "I forget that you are too young to remember the lessons of Vietnam. Go in to win, Mercy, or do not go in at all. How many people are out here who could help Adam?"
"Us," I said wretchedly, then added, "Maybe Ariana, though she was pretty freaked-out when we left." I knew what he was saying. I did.
By that logic, we should leave Kyle to his fate. But I wasn't just Adam's wife, I was his mate. That made me second in rank - and that meant I had to protect the pack. It meant that I especially had to protect the weakest members first. We had already lost Peter. Kyle needed to be protected - and we could do it without killing everyone.
"These people have taken down an entire pack of werewolves, Mercy," Stefan said coolly. "We cannot afford to take risks, or we might throw away the game trying to find out what they have done with Kyle." He lost the distant-vampire thing when he said Kyle's name. Stefan liked Kyle, who was snarky and happy to argue tactics in Scooby-Doo episodes as if defending a doctoral thesis. "If they are waiting at Kyle's, whom do you think they want? The only people important to Adam they don't have are you, Ben, and Jesse. And there is this: if they see me, if they understand what I am and do not die before they can tell their superiors over their communication devices, then we will lose more than just Kyle this night."
People don't know about the vampires. Oh, they know the stories - Bram Stoker and all his ilk made good use of the old legends. But they think they are just stories. The problem, for the vampire, is that now that the fae and the werewolves have admitted what they are, people are ready to believe that the old stories might be true. If Stefan was the vampire who gave those legends new life, Marsilia would kill him. I understood why he thought killing the enemy was the best way.
Part of me even agreed with him about killing them all. These people had killed Peter and taken Adam and put my world into danger.
"Kyle is human, and they were not worried about leaving Peter dead," Stefan said, saying what I didn't want to hear. "Kyle is less valuable than Peter was. He only matters to you and Warren. Adam would not kill someone, risk the werewolves' standing in the human world, for Kyle. A hostage is a lot more work than a dead body, Mercy. There is a real chance Kyle is already dead. If you aren't willing to kill - you need to leave them alone."
"If Kyle is dead" - and didn't that suck to say - "we still need to know it. I don't think he is; I think I'd feel it through the pack bonds because Warren is as mated to him as Honey was to Peter." That thought steadied me. I'd felt Honey's grief - still did, for that matter.
"We are going in after Kyle - and, Stefan, we can't leave a pile of bodies behind. We can hide your part in this. I'll tell everyone that you are a weird kind of werewolf if I have to. But people know about Kyle and Warren. Warren doesn't advertise what he is, but it will come out because he doesn't hide it, either. The bad guys - whoever they are - want Adam to kill an important man in a public way, so that the werewolves are blamed. I have the distinct impression that the last part is as important as the first. If we leave piles of dead bodies in our wake, we'll be accomplishing at least half of what the people who started this want." I sucked in a breath. "I do not enjoy helping my enemies."
Stefan frowned at me. He could just go in and kill them all, regardless of what I said. But his name was the Soldier - not the Killer or the Commander. (Yes, those are real vampires. I'm told that we're lucky they don't live anywhere near here.) Stefan had ceded me leadership because this was my problem.
So I was in charge, but I wasn't dumb enough to think that made me competent - I needed Stefan for that. Fine. I wouldn't authorize killing them all, but there should be other options.
"Could we go in quietly to check and see if we can find Kyle?" I asked. "I might be able to scent him from outside. If he's not here, we can leave them waiting for no one. If he is there, maybe we can get him out without killing people."
He shook his head. "Mercy. They have already proved themselves capable of taking a werewolf pack. Kill them or leave."
I glanced down at Ben; he was in no shape for battle. The danger wasn't just that his wound would slow him, and they could hurt him more easily, though that was part of it. If Ben killed tonight, wounded and shaken by Peter's death, he could lose control of his wolf and never regain it.
"We might be under attack by the government," I told Stefan. "We can't afford to lose the moral high ground. As long as we don't do any harm, the public will support us and force the government to back down. We're not going in to kill everyone in sight.