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.

“But,” 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.

“Next 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.

“Figure 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?

“Mary 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.

“Adam 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 they don’t seem to bother you.” It wasn’t that I was a coyote shifter that bothered her. I knew it. I just wondered if she knew it. It did bother some of the pack; maybe Auriele and Darryl bothered some of them, too. If so, those pack members were smart enough to keep it to themselves.

Mary Jo tightened her lips but didn’t say anything.

“How long have you wanted him?” I asked her. “You had all these years since Jesse’s mother left.”

Bran’s methods sucked. I watched her eyes darken with pain and wanted to kick myself. But she’d been at least partially responsible for Adam’s wounds. And I agreed with Warren about fire after watching Samuel scrub dead flesh from live. Mary Jo had been stupid. I was betting she hadn’t hurt Adam on purpose, but I had to know.

I observed the anger that followed pain rise in her face and just watched her.

“You are nothing,” she spit. “I’m nothing, too. That’s how I know. Adam deserves the best. A wolf strong and beautiful, a woman who is—”

“More?” I suggested. “Smart, well-bred?”

“Not a half-breed coyote,” she snapped. Her wolf was in her eyes, and her voice was raw. “Not a stupid mechanic or a freaking fireman. There isn’t even a proper word for what I am. Fireman. He needs someone soft, someone feminine.”

“He deserves so much,” I said slowly. I had her, even though it made me sick. Coyotes aren’t cats; we don’t play with our prey. “I think he deserves a pack who has his back.”

“I have his back,” she said. I couldn’t see her hands. Through all this she’d held to parade rest, and her hands were hidden behind her back. From the flex of her biceps I would bet that they were clenched in fists, and her voice wasn’t as hard and certain as she meant it to be. But her words told me what I’d been watching for, told me that she hadn’t wanted him dead. That made the rest of this both harder and easier. Harder because she was going to be hurting even more before this was over—easier because she would survive it.

“You have his back, do you?” I kept my voice soft, my body relaxed. “Funny, I could have sworn that you just set him up to be killed.”

“I got him out,” she said. “I ran in after him with Darryl and pulled him out.”

“Not soon enough, Mary Jo,” I said. “He could have easily died in there.” I had to take a breath so I could maintain my relaxed posture. He could have died. But I had to keep up the momentum, make her listen to me, make her listen to herself.

“Who was it that was out there with you?” I asked coolly. “Ben says whoever it was, he has to be more dominant than you. It wasn’t Warren or Darryl.” Ben would have noticed if Darryl hadn’t been at the meeting. He’d have said something to me because if it was Darryl who was running the show, it would have been too dangerous to hold his tongue. The same was true of Auriele.

“How does the pack run from there?” I watched her sweat. Ben was right that it was someone higher up. She was expecting me to name him soon, so not too far down the pack hierarchy. “Auriele. It wasn’t her either, was it? She likes Adam. She’d never send him into a burning building to rescue someone who wasn’t there.”

She stiffened at the dig.

“Then there is Paul.” That got her—wasn’t that interesting? But I knew better. “It wasn’t him, though. Adam doesn’t trust Paul at his back. He’d have kept him right here through the whole pack meeting.” Paul had been my pick for the jerk who’d influenced me at the bowling alley before I’d understood how angry Mary Jo was. He’d probably been Adam’s pick, too. Paul was still angry about losing a fight to Warren, and he’d put the blame on Adam for that. Like Ben, Paul was a bitter and difficult person who didn’t like many people. Mary Jo was one he did like, her and her boyfriend, Henry.

I watched her face closely. She was worried I’d guess. Not Paul, then who? Further down the ranks things could get murky to an outsider as I had been and really still was. I ran the wolves I knew well through my head, then stopped. Henry? He was a nice guy. Smart and quick. A banker, I thought, but I wasn’t sure, something with finances. He would never—Hmm. “Never” was an awfully strong word.

I wondered how Henry felt about Mary Jo’s crush on Adam.

“Henry,” I said experimentally and watched her face whiten. Maybe she didn’t know how much she was telling me without opening her mouth at all. “Henry was out with you last night. Henry told you to leave the fae alone when they set my house on fire.”

Jesse’s door opened, and Adam came in and shut it gently behind him. He was obviously stiff, and, from the set of his jaw and the tightness of the skin around his eyes, he was in pain as well. If I could see it, he was hurting a lot more than he showed. And the Alpha didn’t show weakness if he could help it.

He was dressed only in a pair of gi bottoms that ended mid-calf, leaving the weepy wounds on his feet clearly visible. Oh, there were other bits in rough shape, but next to his feet, nothing looked all that bad.

“I heard your voice,” he told me, pulling my eyes away from his feet and up to his face. “So I pressed my ear to the door, and even with the noise my daughter calls music blaring, I overheard what you said, Mercy.” He looked at Mary Jo, who had turned around to face him and lost her formal parade-rest stance. She just stood there, looking vulnerable.