Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

have.
    Samuel looked like a person you could trust—something about the hint of humor that lurked in the back of his deep-set eyes and the corner of his mouth. It was part of what made him such a good doctor. When he told his patients they were going to be fine, they believed him.
    His eyes locked on mine for a moment and the quirk of his mouth powered up to a smile.
    It warmed me to my toes, that smile: reminded me of a time when Samuel was my whole world, a time when I believed in a knight in shining armor who could make me happy and safe.
    Samuel knew it, too, because the smile changed to a grin—until he looked behind me. The pleasure cooled in his eyes, but he kept the grin, turning it on the rest of his audience. That’s how I knew for certain that the man who’d sat behind me was Adam.
    Not that I’d been in much doubt. The wind was coming from the wrong direction to give me a good scent, but dominant wolves exude power, and Adam—all apart from him being the Alpha—was nearly as dominant as they come. It was like having a car battery sitting behind me and being hooked up with a pair of wires.
    I kept my eyes forward, knowing that as long as my attention was on him, Samuel wouldn’t get too upset. I wished Adam had chosen to sit somewhere else. But if he’d been that kind of a person, he wouldn’t be an Alpha—the most dominant wolf in his pack. Almost as dominant as Samuel.
    The reason Samuel wasn’t the pack Alpha was complicated. First, Adam had been Alpha here as long as there had been a pack in the Tri-Cities (which was before my time). Even if a wolf is more dominant, it is not an easy matter to oust an Alpha—and in North America, that never happens without the consent of the Marrok, the wolf who rules here. Since the Marrok was Samuel’s father, presumably he could have gained permission—except that Samuel had no desire to be Alpha. He said that being a doctor gave him more than enough people to take care of. So he was officially a lone wolf, a wolf outside of pack protection. He lived in my trailer, not a hundred yards from Adam’s house. I don’t know why he chose to live there, but I know why I let him: because otherwise he’d still be sleeping on my front porch.
    Samuel had a way of making sure people did what he wanted them to.
    Testing the violin’s temperament, Samuel’s bow danced across the strings with a delicate precision won through years…probably centuries of practice. I’d known him all my life, but it wasn’t until less than a year ago that I’d found out about those “centuries.”
    He just didn’t act like an old werewolf. Old werewolves were uptight, easy to anger, and especially in this last hundred years of rapid changes (I’m told), were more likely to be hermits than doctors in busy emergency rooms with all that new technology. He was one of the few werewolves I knew who really liked people, human people or werewolf people. He even liked them in crowds.
    Not that he would have gone out of his way to perform at a folk music festival. That took a little creative blackmail.
    It wasn’t me. Not this time.
    The stresses of working in an emergency room—especially since he was a werewolf and his reaction to blood and death could be a little unpredictable—meant that he took his guitar or violin to work and played when he had a chance.
    One of his nurses heard him play and had him signed up for the festival before he could figure out how to get out of it. Not that he tried very hard. Oh, he made a lot of noise, but I know Samuel. If he really hadn’t wanted to do it, a bulldozer wouldn’t have gotten him up there.
    He tuned the violin with one hand while he held it under his chin and plucked with the other. A few measures of a song and the crowd sat forward in anticipation, but I knew better. He was still warming up. When he really started playing, everyone would know it: he came alive in front of an audience.
    Sometimes watching Samuel perform was more like a stand-up comedy act than a concert. It all depended on how he was feeling at the moment.
    It happened at last, the magic moment when Samuel sucked his audience in. The old violin made a shivering sound, like an old hoot owl in the night, and I knew he’d decided to be a musician today. All the quiet whispers stopped and every eye lifted to the man on the stage. Centuries of practice and being a