Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

I’m angry. Yes, I knew one of them, Mercedes. Do you know how I became a werewolf?”
    The question seemed to come from left field—but Adam always had a reason for everything he said. “Only that it was during Vietnam,” I answered. “You were Special Forces.”
    â€œRight,” he agreed. “Long-range recon. They sent me and five other men to take out a particularly nasty warlord—an assassination trip. We’d done it before.”
    â€œThe warlord was a werewolf?” I asked.
    He laughed without humor. “Slaughtered us. It was one of his own people who killed him, while he was eating poor old McCue.” He shut his eyes, and whispered, “I can still hear him scream.”
    We waited, Samuel and I, and after a moment Adam continued. “All the warlord’s people ran and left us alone. At a guess they weren’t certain he was really dead, even after he’d been beheaded. After a while—a long while, though I didn’t realize that until later—I found I could move. Everyone was dead except Spec 4 Christiansen and me. We leaned on each other and got out of there somehow, hurt badly enough that they sent us home: Christiansen was a short-timer, anyway, and I guess they thought I was mostly crazy—raving about wolves. They shipped us out of there fast enough that none of the docs commented about how quickly we were recovering.”
    â€œAre you all right?” asked Samuel.
    Adam shivered and pulled the blankets closer around himself. “Sorry. I don’t talk about this often. It’s harder than I expected. Anyway, one of my army buddies who’d come back to the States a few months earlier heard I was home and came to see me. We got drunk—or at least I tried. I’d just started noticing that it took an awful lot of whiskey to do anything, but it loosened me up enough that I told him about the werewolf.
    â€œThank goodness I did because he believed me. He called in a relative and between them they persuaded me that I was going to grow furry and kill something the next full moon. They pulled me into their pack and kept everyone safe until I had enough control to do it myself.”
    â€œAnd the other man who was wounded?” I asked.
    â€œChristiansen?” He nodded. “My friends found him. It should have been in time, but he’d come home to find that his wife had taken up with another man. He walked into his house and found his bags packed and his wife and her lover waiting with the divorce papers.”
    â€œWhat happened?” asked Samuel.
    â€œHe tore them to pieces.” His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “Even in that first month, if you get angry enough, it is possible to Change.”
    â€œI know,” I told him.
    He gave me a jerky nod. “Anyway, they managed to persuade him to stay with a pack, who taught him what he needed to know to survive. But as far as I know he never did join a pack officially—he’s lived all these years as a lone wolf.”
    A lone wolf is a male who either declines to join a pack or cannot find a pack who will take him in. The females, I might add, are not allowed that option. Werewolves have not yet joined the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first, as far as women are concerned. It’s a good thing I’m not a werewolf—or maybe it is a pity. Someone needs to wake them up.
    â€œChristiansen was one of the wolves who came to your house?” I asked.
    He nodded. “I didn’t hear him or see him—he stayed away from me—but I could smell him. There were several humans and three or four wolves.”
    â€œYou killed two,” I told him. “I killed a third.” I tried to remember what I’d smelled in his house, but I had only been tracking Jesse. There had been so many of Adam’s pack in the house, and I only knew some of them by name. “I’d know the man, the human, who confronted Mac and me earlier that night, but no one else for certain.”
    â€œI’m pretty sure they intended I stay out until they’d done whatever they came for, but their whole plan was a botch job,” Adam said. “First, they killed Mac. Obviously, from their attempt to take him at your shop, they wanted him, but I don’t think they meant to kill him in my house.”
    â€œThey left him on my doorstep,” I said.
    â€œDid they?” Adam frowned. “A