Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

carefully. New members were generally announced as prospective rather than as faits accomplis. A little care would have been especially appropriate when he was doing something as outrageous as bringing a nonwerewolf into the pack.
    I’d never heard of anyone doing that. Nonwerewolf mates weren’t part of the pack, not really. They had status, as the mates of wolves, but they weren’t pack. Couldn’t be made into pack with fifty flesh-and-blood ceremonies—the magic just wouldn’t let a human in. Apparently my coyoteness was close enough to wolf that the pack magic was willing to let me in.
    Probably Adam should have discussed bringing me in with the Marrok, too.
    Cars were pulling up in front of the house, more of the pack. I could feel the weight of them, their unease and confusion. Anger.
    I rubbed my arms nervously.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” asked Stefan in a quiet, sane voice that would have reassured me more if he’d moved or opened his eyes.
    â€œBesides Marsilia?” I asked him.
    He looked at me then, his lips curving faintly. “That’s enough, I suppose. But Marsilia isn’t the reason this house is filling with werewolves.”
    I sat on the thickly carpeted basement floor and leaned my head against the bars of the cage. The door was shut and locked, the key that sometimes hung on the wall across the hallway gone. Adam would have it. It didn’t matter though. I was pretty sure Stefan could leave anytime he chose—the same way he’d appeared in my living room.
    â€œRight.” I sighed. “Well that’s your fault, too, I expect.”
    He sat up and leaned forward. “What happened?”
    â€œWhen you jumped inside my head,” I told him, “Adam took offense.” I didn’t tell him exactly how everything had played out. Prudence suggested Adam wouldn’t be pleased with me if I shared pack business with a vampire. “What he did—and you’ll have to ask him, I think—brought the pack down on his head.”
    He frowned in obvious puzzlement, then slow comprehension dawned. “I am sorry, Mercy. You weren’t meant to ... I didn’t mean to.” He turned his head away. “I’m not used to being so alone. I was dreaming, and there you were, the only one left with a tie of blood to me. I thought I dreamed that, too.”
    â€œShe really had them all killed?” I whispered it, remembering some of what he’d given me while he’d been in my head. “All of your ...” Sheep wasn’t really PC, and I didn’t want to tick him off, even if sheep is what all the vampires called the mundane humans they kept to feed off. “All of your people?”
    I knew some of them, and liked one or two. For some reason, though, rather than the faces of the people I’d met living, it was the young vampire Danny I remembered, his ghost rocking in the corner of Stefan’s kitchen. Stefan hadn’t been able to protect him either.
    Stefan gave me a sick look. “Disciplining me, she said. But I think it was revenge as much as anything. And I can feed off them from a distance. She wanted me starving when I landed at your feet.”
    â€œShe wanted you to kill me.”
    He nodded jerkily. “That’s right. And if you hadn’t had half of Adam’s pack at your house, I would have.”
    I thought of the obstinate look on his face. “I think she underestimated you,” I told him.
    â€œDid she?” He smiled, just a little, and shook his head.
    I leaned my head back against the wall. “I’m...” Still angry with you didn’t cover it. He was a murderer of innocents, and here I was talking to him, worried about him. I didn’t know how to complete that thought, much less the sentence, so I went on to something else.
    â€œSo Marsilia knows I killed Andre, and you and Wulfe covered it up?”
    He shook his head. “She knows something—she didn’t talk much to me. It was only me she punished, so I don’t think she knows about Wulfe. And maybe not me ...” He looked at me from under the cover of his bangs, which had grown in the last day—I’d heard a heavy feeding could cause that. “I got the feeling I was being punished by association. I was the seethe’s contact with you. I was the reason she went to you for help and gave you permission to kill Andre’s pet. I was the reason you