Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

tinted dark to protect the books from sun damage. Gilt lettering on the biggest window labeled it: BREWSTER’S LIBRARY, USED AND COLLECTIBLE BOOKS.
    There were no lights behind the shades in the windows, and the door was locked. I put my ear against the glass and listened.
    In my human shape, I still have great hearing, not quite as sharp as the coyote’s, but good enough to tell that there was no one moving around in the store. I knocked, but there was no response.
    On the window to the right of the door was a sign with the hours the shop was open: ten to six Tuesday through Saturday. Sunday and Monday hours by appointment. The number listed was the one I already had. Six had come and gone.
    I knocked on the door one last time, then glanced at my watch again. If I skirted the speed limit, I’d have ten minutes before the wolf was at my door.

    MY ROOMMATE’S CAR WAS IN THE DRIVEWAY, LOOKING right at home next to the ’78 single-wide trailer where I lived. Very expensive cars, like true works of art, shape the environment to suit themselves. Just by virtue of being there, his car made my home upper-class—no matter what the house itself looked like.
    Samuel had the same gift of never being out of place, always fitting in, while at the same time he conveyed the sense that here was someone special, someone important. People liked him instinctively, and trusted him. It served him well as a doctor, but I was inclined to think it served him a little too well as a man. He was too used to getting his way. When charm didn’t cut it, he used a tactical brain that would have done credit to Rommel.
    Thus, his presence as my roommate.
    It had taken me a while to figure out the real reason he’d moved in with me: Samuel needed a pack. Werewolves don’t do well on their own, especially not old wolves, and Samuel was a very old wolf. Old and dominant. In any pack except his father’s, he would be Alpha. His father was Bran, the Marrok, the most überwerewolf of them all.
    Samuel was a doctor, and that was more than enough responsibility for him. He didn’t want to be Alpha; he didn’t want to stay in his father’s pack.
    He was lone wolfing it, living with me in the territory of the Columbia Basin Pack, but not part of it. I wasn’t a werewolf, but I wasn’t a helpless human, either. I’d been raised in his father’s pack, and that was close to being family. So far he and Adam, the local pack’s Alpha—and my lover—hadn’t killed each other. I was moderately hopeful that would continue to be the case.
    â€œSamuel?” I called as I rushed into the house. “Samuel?”
    He didn’t answer, but I could smell him. The distinctive odor of werewolf was too strong to be just a leftover trace. I jogged down the narrow hall to his room and knocked softly at the closed door.
    It was unlike him not to acknowledge me when I got home.
    I worried about Samuel enough to make myself paranoid. He wasn’t quite right. Broken, but functional, I thought, with an underlying depression that seemed to be getting neither better nor worse as the months passed. His father suspected something was wrong, and I was pretty sure the reason Samuel was living with me and not in his own house in Montana was because he didn’t want his father to know for certain how badly broken Samuel really was.
    Samuel opened his door, looking his usual self, tall and rangy: attractive, as most werewolves are, regardless of bone structure. Perfect health, permanent youth, and lots of muscle are a pretty surefire formula for good looks.
    â€œYou rang?” he said in an expressionless imitation of Lurch, dropping his voice further into the bass register than I’d ever heard him manage. We’d been watching a marathon of The Addams Family on TV last night. If he was being funny, he was all right. Even if he wasn’t quite meeting my eyes, as if he might be worried about what I’d see.
    A purring Medea was stretched across one shoulder. My little Manx cat gave me a pleased look out of half-slitted eyes as he stroked her. As his hand moved along her back, she dug in her hind claws and arched her tailless butt into the air.
    â€œOuch,” he said, trying to pull her off, but she’d gotten her claws through his worn flannel shirt and was hooked onto him tighter than Velcro—and more painfully, too.
    â€œUhm,” I told him, trying not to laugh.