He waited, then said in a soft voice, “Mercy, he had to do this.”
“Of course he did,” I said, still frozen on Adam’s lap.
He leaned sideways and grabbed his cell phone off his desk. I started to get up, but his arm wrapped around my middle. He hit a button on the phone.
“Yes,” said Darryl.
“We’re on our own,” Adam told him.
“I felt that,” Darryl said, “and you warned us. I’ll let the pack know.”
“Tell them they can leave if they want to,” he said.
Darryl laughed. “Like that will happen. After your performance tonight, you couldn’t pry anyone out of this pack with a crowbar and a bucketful of dynamite, as Warren would say. No worries, we’ve got this.”
Adam disconnected and set the phone back on the desk.
“I suppose,” I said, my voice more wobbly than I liked, “that it’s a good thing you yanked the pack’s chain. If it’s going to be us against the world, we better all be fighting the enemy instead of each other.”
My stomach felt like I’d been kicked. Bran wasn’t my father, wasn’t even my foster father, but he had raised me just the same. “You knew this was going to happen?”
“I thought it might.” Adam relaxed back against his seat and pulled me more tightly against him.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Not your fault,” he said.
“Uhm.” I considered the progress of events again. “Yes, it is.”
He shook his head. “Nope. If you hadn’t given notice to the fae—what would they do next? I’m not willing to allow them to prey upon our town.” He paused. The Tri-Cities are three towns . . . and a bunch of small towns tucked right up against them. “Towns. Our towns.” He growled, and I made a sympathetic noise. He said, finally, “Our territory.” That sounded right.
Bran might have cut me loose, but Adam would never do that. Adam was mine, and I was his. Sometimes I chafed a little at all the belonging I’d been doing lately: belonging to Adam, to Jesse, to the pack, and having them belong to me in return. Oddly, the responsibilities of taking care of them didn’t bother me at all; only being taken care of brought out my claustrophobic reactions. I had spent most of my life being independent, and it took an effort to have to answer to other people, no matter how much I loved them. Loved him.
Right now, belonging felt a lot better than being alone. The last time Bran had abandoned me, I’d been alone.
“Are you done being mad at me?” Adam asked. He was changing the subject for me, I knew. There was nothing more to be said about Bran.
“I wasn’t really mad at you,” I told him. It wasn’t a lie, because it had been myself I’d really been angry with. “You’d have known if I’d really been mad.”
“For a good time, call—” he said, and I gave a watery laugh and put my forehead against his shoulder—his good shoulder.
The old VW still sat facing the backyard of this house, looking more and more disreputable every day. Once, Adam threatened to have it towed, and Jesse—not me—told him, seriously, that it was a bad idea.
“As long as Mercy has that way to torment you,” she’d told her father, “you’ll know where it’s coming from. If you get rid of that now, you’ll never know what to watch out for.”
“She just wants to save it because she likes the bunny she painted on the trunk last week,” I’d said.
Adam had laughed, and the wreck stayed where it was, with “For a Good Time Call” followed by Adam’s phone number scrawled across it for anyone (in our backyard) to see.
“I am not mad at you,” I told him. “But you should be aware that if you try to keep me away from you when you are hurt again, I will take you down when you least expect it.”
“Seriously,” he said, “I didn’t expect it to work.”
I lifted my head and looked at him. Maybe I hadn’t been the only one I disappointed when I hadn’t hunted him down in the infirmary. “I thought you were mad at me,” I said. “I mean—look what I did when you couldn’t defend the pack. I agreed to protect a boy that the fae had sent a troll after, and to cap it off, I told the world that we would protect the whole Tri-Cities from whomever and whatever. I figured that you needed time to cool down. I didn’t realize how bad it was—though I knew it was bad enough—until I talked to Warren later. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have let your anger, however righteous, keep me away.”
“You stayed away because you thought I was mad?” he said, sounding . . . smug. Which was better than hurt.
“I stayed away because you wanted me to stay away,” I growled at him. “That’s not going to happen again.”
He hugged me hard. “Good,” he said, his voice muffled in my hair. “Don’t let it happen again.”
“We’ll be okay, right?” I said. If I’d been sitting on anyone else’s lap, I’d have been embarrassed by how little my voice was.
“You and I,” he said, “will always be okay. I can’t promise anything more.”
“Me, either,” I told him. “So what do we do about Aiden?”
—
What we could do, evidently, was let him sleep.
Tad was sitting on the floor in the rec room directly in front of the lockup-room door (which was shut, not locked). Cookie was curled up next to him, asleep. His legs were crossed in front of him, and they held a battered laptop. He had earphones in, and his fingers made castanet sounds on the keyboard. His mouth was moving silently. Reading his lips and making some educated guesses, he was saying, “Come on, come on, come on. I’ve got this, see? And boom, boom, boom. Like that, suckers. Just like that.”