Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

sixteen—and he was who-knows-how-old.
    It was not really as bad as it sounded. He grew up at a time when women married much younger than sixteen. It’s hard on the older werewolves to adjust to modern ways of thinking.
    I wish I could hold it against him, though. It would help me keep in mind that he still only wanted me for what I could give him: children who lived.
    Werewolves are made, not born. To become a werewolf, you need to survive an attack so vicious that you nearly die—which allows the werewolf ’s magic to defeat your immune system. Many, many of the werewolf ’s kin who try to become werewolves themselves die in the attempt. Samuel had outlived all of his wives and children. Those children of his who had attempted to become werewolf had all died.
    Female werewolves can’t have children; their pregnancies spontaneously abort during the moon’s change. Human women can have children with werewolves, but they can only carry to term the babies who have only human DNA.
    But I was neither human, nor werewolf.
    Samuel was convinced I’d be different. Not being moon called, my changes aren’t violent—or even really necessary. I once went three years without shifting to my coyote self. Wolves and coyotes could interbreed in the wild, why not werewolves and walkers?
    I don’t know what the biological answer to that is, but my answer is that I didn’t care to be a broodmare, thank you very much. So, no Samuel for me.
    My feelings for Samuel should have been neat and tidily put in the past—except that I hadn’t entirely been able to convince myself that all I felt for him was the lingering warmth anyone would feel for an old friend.
    Maybe I’d have come to some conclusion about Samuel who had, after all, been living in my home for better than half a year, if it hadn’t been for Adam.
    Adam had been the bane of my existence for most of the time I’d lived in the Tri-Cities, where he ruled with an iron hand. Like the Marrok, he had a marked tendency to treat me like one of his minions when it suited him, and like a human stray when it didn’t. He was high-handed, to say the least. He’d declared me his mate before the pack—and then had the gall to tell me it was for my own protection, so his wolves wouldn’t bother me, a coyote living in their territory. Once he said it, it was so—and nothing I could say would change it in the eyes of his pack.
    Last winter, though, he had needed me, and it changed things between us.
    We went on three dates. During the first one I had a broken arm and he’d been very careful. On the second, he and his teenage daughter, Jesse, took me to the Richland Light Opera Company’s presentation of The Pirates of Penzance . I’d had a great time. On the third date my arm had been almost healed and there had been no Jesse, no middle school auditorium to cool any passionate impulses we might have had. We went dancing and only his daughter waiting for him at his home, and Samuel waiting for me at mine, had kept our clothes on.
    After he’d taken me home, I recovered enough to be scared. Falling in love with a werewolf is not a safe thing to do—but falling in love with an Alpha is worse. Especially for someone like me. I had fought too long to belong to myself, to allow myself to fall into line with the rest of his pack.
    So the next time he called to take me out, I was unexpectedly busy. Avoiding someone who lives next door requires a lot of effort, but I managed. It helped that when the werewolves became public, Adam’s time was suddenly taken up with trips back and forth between Washington D.C. and the Tri-Cities.
    Though he was one of the hundred or so werewolves who’d revealed themselves to the public, Adam wasn’t one of Bran’s front men—he didn’t have the temperament for being a celebrity. But after working with the government for forty-odd years, first in the military and later as a security consultant, he’d developed a network of contacts as well as an understanding of politics that made him invaluable to the Marrok—and to the government as they tried to decide how to deal with yet another group of preternatural creatures.
    Between his schedule and my clever avoidance tactics I hadn’t seen him for almost two months.
    Even to my monocular gaze, he was beautiful, more beautiful than I remembered him being. I wanted to linger on his