“How did he sound?”

“Grumpy. Coffee or orange juice?”

“Water is fine.”

His eyebrows went up.

“Uh-oh,” Auriele said, but she was smiling.

Darryl was not. “Are you implying that my coffee is not the best in four counties? Or my fresh-squeezed orange juice is less than perfect?”

Jesse breezed in and squealed. “Oh my goodness, Darryl is cooking. I’d almost forgotten it was Sunday. Orange juice, please.” She glanced at me and laughed. “Mercy doesn’t do orange juice or coffee,” she said, grabbing a glass out of the cupboard and filling it out of the pitcher Darryl had set out. “So sad. More orange juice for me.”

She was being cute and upbeat, but there were dark circles under her eyes. She took the plate Darryl handed her and sat down next to Auriele.

“So,” she said. Her pink hair helped her cheerful act—hard to look sad with pink hair—even if her eyes were a little pink, too.

“How are we going to save Gabriel?”

“Have you ever noticed that everyone who knows Mercy eventually needs saving?” asked Mary Jo as she walked into the kitchen.

I was going to have to do something about Mary Jo. I took another bite of French toast and put the fork down on the plate. Sooner was probably better than later.

I stood up. “Excuse me,” I said to Darryl. To Jesse I said, “I’m borrowing your bedroom—any complaints?”

She stared at me a moment. “No?” she said, her voice rising as if her answer were a question. Which maybe it was.

“Your stereo is pretty effective at keeping voices from being overheard by all the werewolves in this house. And from the noise coming from downstairs, there are a lot of werewolves here.”

“It’s Darryl’s cooking,” said Auriele, sounding a little apologetic.

“I can see why,” I said. “I’d appreciate it if you would guard my plate until I come back.” I looked at Mary Jo. “You. Come with me.”

And without looking behind me, I led the way up the stairs to Jesse’s room. I walked into Jesse’s room and turned on her stereo until it was almost painfully loud. The CD wasn’t something I’d have chosen to listen to, but it was loud, and that was all I was interested in.

“Shut the door,” I told Mary Jo. I was almost surprised she’d just followed me up as I’d asked.

Face blank, she did as I’d requested.

“Okay. Now, if you come over here by the window, it’s almost 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.

“What 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.”

“You are the problem, Mercedes,” she snapped. “A scavenger coyote among wolves. You don’t belong here.”

“Oh, 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.

“All 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.”

“Agreed,” 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.”

“How kind of you,” she snapped, her eyes brightening with temper. “To become Adam’s mate for the pack’s sake.”

“Point 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.

“Second problem,” she said between gritted teeth. “It was your invitation to the stray that led to Adam being almost killed and Jesse kidnapped.”

“Nope.” 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.”

“I 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.

“Fine,” I said, shrugging. “It’s a free country. You can feel as you wish.”

“You 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.

“Once 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.

“Warren is 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?”

“It’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.

“Point 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.”