Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

impossible for anyone to overhear us.”
    All the precautions weren’t really necessary. With this many people in Adam’s house, no one, no matter how good their hearing was, could really listen from one room to the next—there were simply too many conversations going on. But the stereo made our privacy virtually certain.
    â€œWhat do you want?” she asked, not moving from the center of the room.
    I leaned against the wall next to the window and crossed my arms over my stomach. It felt wrong to be in this position. I’ve been a solitary person my whole life. Even when I lived in Aspen Creek with the Marrok’s pack, even then I’d really been alone, a coyote among wolves. But Adam needed his pack behind him—and because of me, they weren’t. If I was going to be the problem, I owed it to him to be part of the solution. So I was going to see if all those times I watched the Marrok twist people in little knots would allow me to use his techniques to achieve the same results.
    I smiled at her. “I want you to tell me what your problem with me is. Right here, right now, where there is no one else to interfere.”
    â€œ You are the problem, Mercedes,” she snapped. “A scavenger coyote among wolves. You don’t belong here.”
    â€œOh, come on. You can do better than that,” I goaded her. “You sound like you’re Jesse’s age—and Jesse doesn’t sound like that.”
    Her eyes veiled as she considered what I said.
    â€œAll right,” she said after a minute. “Point to you. First problem—you let Adam rot for two years after he claimed you as his mate. And during that two years our pack fell apart because Adam could barely keep himself calm—and was nearly useless at helping anyone else keep their wolf in check.”
    â€œAgreed,” I said. “But I have to point out in my defense that Adam never asked me if I wanted to be his mate during that time—or before he declared it in front of the pack. He never asked me either before or after. I wasn’t a pack member—and his declaration was to keep the rest of the wolves away—so I didn’t even find out about this until well after it happened. Even then, no one told me the consequences until just a few months ago, and as soon as I figured out what was happening to the pack and to Adam because of that claim, I made a decision.”
    â€œHow kind of you,” she snapped, her eyes brightening with temper. “To become Adam’s mate for the pack’s sake.”
    â€œPoint to me,” I told her calmly. “The choice I made had nothing to do with the problems in the pack—all Adam needed was an answer, and ‘no’ would have worked just as well to set the pack back in order. I agreed because . . . because he’s Adam.” Mine, whispered a voice in my head, but I was pretty sure that it was my own voice.
    â€œSecond problem,” she said between gritted teeth. “It was your invitation to the stray that led to Adam being almost killed and Jesse kidnapped.”
    â€œNope.” I shook my head. “You can’t lay that one on me. That was werewolf business from beginning to end. I got involved because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. No more, no less. Point to me.”
    â€œI disagree,” she said. She was standing in the classic “at ease” position, I noticed, like a soldier. I wondered if it was something Adam taught them while he had them in training because, to my knowledge, Mary Jo had never been in the military.
    â€œFine,” I said, shrugging. “It’s a free country. You can feel as you wish.”
    â€œYou can’t deny who nearly got our third killed when the demon came to town, you and your connection to the vampires,” she said.
    Her voice was cool, her heartbeat steady. Warren wasn’t important to her; Ben had been right. She hadn’t even called him by name because she felt the rank was more valuable than the man.
    â€œOnce it was known that there was a demon in town, it was inevitable that the wolves would have to go after it,” I told her. “And you could care less about Warren, so don’t pretend you were concerned about him.”
    That had her head up and her eyes on me. She actually looked a little worried. She had been trying to pretend that she wasn’t one of the wolves that Warren bothered.
    â€œWarren is