He leaned forward and sipped his cocoa without touching the hot cup.

“It’s instant,” I apologized. “My stash of spicy real stuff went up with the house.” I wished I hadn’t said it as soon as the words were out of my mouth. I had been doing just fine at forgetting that out in the darkness beyond the kitchen windows, my house was a pile of black scraps.

“It’s chocolate,” Ben said. “At this point, that is sufficient.”

Silence fell, and I remembered that I was supposed to be running this. It reminded me in an odd way of the time I’d had to take over my sister’s Girl Scout troop when my mother had been sick. Fourteen preteen girls, a tableful of werewolves—there were certain monstrous similarities.

I ran my hands over my face. “So what else needs to be dealt with before we can go to bed?”

Darryl folded his big hands on the table. “The fire marshal hasn’t made it out yet—but the firemen seemed pretty convinced it was the wiring. The fire started near the fuse box in the hall. Apparently, the old manufactured homes sometimes go up like that, especially the first few weeks the heating system kicks in in the winter.” He glanced at me. “Do we accept that, or have you been riling people up again?”

He might owe his ebony skin and his size to his African father, but he could do Chinese inscrutable better than anyone I’d ever met who was wholly Chinese instead of just half. It was hard to tell whether he meant the last sentence as a joke or a justifiable criticism.

“It was the fae,” I said with a sigh, bumping the nearest table leg halfheartedly with my ankle.

“What—all of them?” asked Ben humorously. I slid down in my chair so I could reach past Jesse and kicked his foot, which was more satisfying.

“No, not all of them,” I said, after he yipped with mock pain.

“You just bring us one damned thing after another don’t you, Mercy,” said Mary Jo, looking out the window.

“Bitch,” said Ben. It seemed to be his word of the day—which was better than the usual assortment. He hadn’t actually sworn much around me that day, if I didn’t include the time while Samuel was fixing his hands. And if the only words that counted were the ones that got movies an “R” rating. I wondered if it was coincidental, if he was trying to improve himself—or if I hadn’t spent enough time with him.

Mary Jo’s lip curled. “Suck-up.”

“You have some nerve throwing stones,” he told her, “when you just sat there and watched them set fire to Mercy’s house.”

“What?” said Darryl in a very, very soft voice.

But Mary Jo wasn’t listening to Darryl. Instead, she half rose to her feet and leaned on the table, threatening Ben. “So what? You think I should have taken on a bunch of unknown fae for her?”

Auriele stood up and gave the table a hard shove, pinning Mary Jo against the wall behind her with a bang that must have hurt. If someone didn’t know her very well, I suppose it might be possible to underestimate Auriele. She was delicately built, as some Hispanic women are, and looked as though she’d never gotten her beautifully manicured hands dirty.

Most of the pack would rather have Darryl mad at them than Auriele.

Darryl’s mate’s voice was frozen as she asked, “You just watched a bunch of fae burn down the house of a pack member?”

I’d picked my cocoa up off the table when it moved and managed to save Jesse’s, too. With my hip, I altered the trajectory of the table just enough to make certain that it didn’t hit Jesse. Darryl caught Ben’s cup—he’d finished his own. So it was only Mary Jo’s and Auriele’s cocoa that spilled across the table and down on the floor.

Into the tense silence of that moment, the interruption of my ringing phone seemed decidedly welcome. I thumped the two mugs I held down onto the table and pulled the phone out of my pocket.

I didn’t recognize either the number or the area code. Usually, I recognize the number of people who call me in the middle of the night.

“Hello?”

“Mercedes Thompson, you have something that belongs to me. I have something that belongs to you. Shall we play?”

I hit the speaker button and set the phone in the middle of the table. Of course, everyone except for Jesse could have overheard the call anyway—but with all of us listening full volume, maybe someone would hear something different. My cell was relatively new, and I’d paid extra to get one with good sound quality.

Darryl pulled out his phone—one of those miniature computers with every gadget known to man—hit the screen a couple of times, and set it next to mine. “Recording,” he mouthed.

“Everything I have went up in flames last night,” I told my unknown caller, and after I said it, the truth of that hit me again. Poor Medea. I set my jaw with determination that this person—who sounded female to me, though a female with a deep smoker’s voice—would never hear the pain she’d caused me. Assuming that this was one of the fae who set the fire.

“It wasn’t there,” she said—and I was growing more confident it was a “she.” Her next words made me certain that she was one of the fae, too. “It would have revealed itself in fire or in death. We watched it burn, watched the fire eat your life, and what you took from Phineas Brewster wasn’t in the coals or in the ashes.”

Fae often say things that sound odd to human ears. I’ve found myself spouting Zee’s sayings and having people stop to look at me.

“In fire or in death,” I said, repeating the phrase that had sounded like a quote of some kind.

“It reveals itself when the one who holds it dies or if it burns,” she clarified impatiently.

“Your bounty hunter seemed like the kind of man who gets things done,” I said. “Why didn’t you have him kill me instead of relying on backup?” Growing up with werewolves has taught me several ways of controlling the situation without being too aggressive. Asking a question a little off topic is one way of doing it—and if the question is hidden as another question, my chances of getting information are even better.

“Kelly?” she said, her voice incredulous. But she knew who I was talking about. She must be the fae who’d created the incident that had almost gotten Maia hurt. “Kelly would never hurt a woman. But the police wouldn’t have believed it.”

There was a tone to the woman’s voice that told me she knew Kelly Heart personally—and felt a veiled contempt for something in him that she thought was a weakness.

“I take it I am speaking to the one who calls herself Daphne Rondo?” I’d remembered the missing producer’s name because she shared the first with Scooby Doo’s token cute girl and it had caught my attention. I phrased the question carefully because the fae cannot lie—and it probably wasn’t her real name. Mostly the fae don’t give their true names to anyone.

“Sometimes,” she said, but she didn’t like it that I’d figured her out. She could have refused to answer, of course, but that would have been as good as an answer anyway. A fae who wasn’t Kelly Heart’s missing producer would take great pleasure in informing me I was mistaken.

“Mr. Heart is worried about you,” I told her. And then could have bitten my tongue. This woman did not deserve to know about his concern—she’d sent him here to die. If Adam had believed that Kelly had killed me, he would have personally seen to Heart’s death. Anyone who knew I was dating the local Alpha would understand that much—it was why she had contrived to set the bounty hunter up. “He’d feel differently if he knew what you planned for him.”

“If he knew what I was after, he would support me with his whole heart,” she said with sudden passion that told me she had her doubts, and they bothered her. “He is my soldier, and he follows my orders.”

I’d heard that kind of talk before and felt my lips curl in anger—on behalf of a stranger who’d mainly just ticked me off . . . but mostly for a friend of mine, Stefan, another soldier who’d been used too hard and had finally broken.