Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

a bra. Finally, I pulled on a shirt that said 1984: GOVERNMENT FOR DUMMIES on the back. It was clean, or at least it didn’t stink too badly. The oil smudge on the shoulder looked permanent.
    I took a deep breath and opened the door. I had to duck around Adam, who was leaning against the door frame.
    â€œHey, Mom,” I said breezily. “I see you’ve met my—” What? Mate? I didn’t think that was something my mother needed to hear. “I see you’ve met Adam.”
    â€œMercedes Athena Thompson,” snapped my mother. “Explain to me why I had to learn about what happened to you from a newspaper?”
    I’d been avoiding meeting her gaze, but once she three-named me, I had no choice.
    My mother is five-foot-nothing. She’s only seventeen years older than me, which means she’s not yet fifty and looks thirty. She can still wear the belt buckles she won barrel racing on their original belts. She’s usually blond—I’m pretty sure it’s her natural color—but the shade changes from year to year. This year it was strawberry gold. Her eyes are big and blue and innocent-looking, her nose slightly tip-tilted, and her mouth full and round.
    With strangers, she sometimes plays a dumb blonde, batting her eyelashes and speaking in a breathy voice that anyone who watched old movies would recognize from Some Like It Hot or Bus Stop. My mother has never, to my knowledge, changed her own flat tire.
    If the sharp anger in her voice hadn’t been a cover for the bruised look in her eyes, I could have responded in kind. Instead, I shrugged.
    â€œI don’t know, Mom. After it happened ... I stayed coyote for a couple of days.” I had a half-hysterical vision of calling her, and saying, “By the way, Mom, guess what happened to me today...”
    She looked me in the eyes, and I thought she saw more than I wanted her to. “Are you all right?”
    I started to say yes, but a lifetime of living with creatures who could smell a lie had left me with a habit of honesty. “Mostly,” I said, compromising. “It helps that he’s dead.” It was humiliating that my chest was getting tight. I’d given myself all the self-pity time I would allow.
    Mom could cuddle her children like any of the best of parents, but I should have trusted her more. She knew all about the importance of standing on your own two feet. Her right hand was balled into a white-knuckled fist, but when she spoke, her voice was brisk.
    â€œAll right,” she said, as if we’d covered everything she was going to ask. I knew better, but I also knew it would be later and private.
    She turned her angelic blue eyes on Adam. “Who are you, and what are you doing in my daughter’s house at eleven at night?”
    â€œI’m not sixteen,” I said in a voice even I could tell was sulky. “I can even have a man stay all night if I want to.”
    Mom and Adam both ignored me.
    Adam had remained in position against my bedroom door frame, his body held a little more casually than usual. I thought he was trying to give my mother the impression that he was at home here: someone who had authority to keep her out of my room. He lifted an eyebrow and showed not even a touch of the panic I’d heard in his voice earlier. “I’m Adam Hauptman, I live on the other side of her back fence.”
    She scowled at him. “The Alpha? The divorced man with the teenage daughter?”
    He gave her one of his sudden smiles, and I knew my mom had made yet another conquest: she’s pretty cute when she scowls, and Adam didn’t know many people gutsy enough to scowl at him. I had a sudden revelation. I’d been making a tactical error for the past few years if I’d really wanted him to quit flirting with me. I should have smiled and smirked and batted my eyelashes at him. Obviously, a woman snarling at him was something he enjoyed. He was too busy looking at my mom’s scowl to see mine.
    â€œThat’s right, ma’am.” Adam quit leaning against the door and took a couple of steps into the room. “Good to meet you at last, Margi. Mercy speaks of you often.”
    I didn’t know what my mother would have said to that, doubtless something polite. But with a popping sound like eggs cracking on a cement floor, something appeared between Mom and Adam, a foot or so above the carpet. It was a human-sized something, black