Mercy Thompson 01-05 - THE MERCY THOMPSON COLLECTION

worth ten of you,” I told her. “He’s here when he’s needed, and he doesn’t do his best to undermine Adam whenever his orders are inconvenient.” I waved off her impending argument because I was saving the discussions of her more recent activities until later, when I’d broken her down enough to answer my questions. “Back to business. What else?”
    â€œIt’s your fault I died,” she said. “Poor Alec—when he tore my jugular he didn’t know what hit him. None of us did. The vampires targeted us because of you.”
    The vampires had set a trap at Uncle Mike’s, the local tavern where the fae and assorted other supernatural people went to relax. They’d laid a spell that drove anything with ties to wolves to bloodshed. Mary Jo’s bad luck that she and two other werewolves—Paul and Alec—had gone there on the wrong night. By the time Adam and I got there, Mary Jo was dead. But apparently if you die when there is a Gray Lord present, at least when one particular Gray Lord is present, dead isn’t as permanent as it might otherwise have been.
    â€œPoint to you,” I said, deliberately relaxing against the wall so she could see it didn’t bother me in the slightest. I can’t lie with my mouth, but sometimes body language does it for me. “I’d tell you that accepting the blame for the bad guys is a stupid thing to do—the proper people to blame for your almost death are the vampires. But if I hadn’t been dating Adam, they wouldn’t have targeted the wolves, so I suppose you could be justified in blaming me.”
    I waited for her to look up again, so I could read her face. When she looked at me, her control was back in full. There were two things that could explain her sudden dislike of me. The first one was the incident at Uncle Mike’s, but she wasn’t angry enough about it. Which left me with the second—I’d hit her with that when it would do me more good.
    â€œBut,” I told her, “if I accept the blame, I’d like to point out that I’m also the reason you are still standing here. The Gray Lord healed you because she thought she owed me a favor.”
    She sneered. “I hope to God that someone does you that kind of favor someday. It hurt . . . It still hurts. Some days I can’t feel different body parts.”
    I’d known about that, and it worried me though the fae had given her word that Mary Jo would be back to normal. I expect that she’d left out the word “eventually” because Mary Jo’s suffering didn’t really matter to the fae.
    â€œNext time, I’ll tell her not to bother bringing you back,” I promised. I tapped my foot and wondered how far I really wanted to push this. Some of it depended upon what role I wanted to take in the pack. Just then I was channeling my inner Bran, using the techniques I’d grown up watching the Marrok use, techniques that came so easily to me it made me a little uncomfortable—I don’t see myself as a manipulative person. For the moment, though, I set that aside and considered the case at hand.
    â€œFigure out the results you want and do what you can to get them” was one of Bran’s favorite sayings. Well, then, exactly what results did I want?
    Part of that really depended upon how much of her recent activities were directed at me and how much at Adam. I found that I could excuse her actions against me, but I was less inclined to be forgiving about Adam.
    I remembered that look she’d given me when I was sitting on the floor of the hospital with Adam changing in my lap—Adam, who’d damn near burned to death trying to rescue me because she hadn’t told him I was safe. The look that said she’d have been happier with him dead than with him on my lap.
    Had that been a momentary thing, or had her anger that Adam was mine become a force driving her past the point of no return?
    â€œMary Jo,” I said pleasantly, “you and I know all of that is garbage. It is all true, or mostly, but it isn’t why you are so angry with me.”
    Her chin jerked up.
    â€œAdam is mine,” I told her. “And you can’t handle it. Does it bother you that I’m a coyote? That we have sort of an extreme case of an interracial—in our case maybe even cross-species—mating? Darryl is African and Chinese, and Auriele is Hispanic, and