all-plastic gray chairs. They looked like adult-sized versions of those children’s outdoor picnic furniture, an effect that was not alleviated by the chessboard pattern on the top of the tables. I wondered if they could have gotten them in a less depressing color. I guess lifting the prisoners’ spirits wasn’t a priority.
There was room for seventy or eighty people in the room, but Honey and I and four guards were the only ones here. We sat down as directed and waited for them to get Gary Laughingdog.
It was a long wait.
He came eventually, escorted by a pair of guards, but without the complicated handcuffs and leg cuffs I’d been half expecting from TV shows.
He covered ground with the casual saunter of someone who had walked a lot of miles and could walk a lot more. He was lean and not overly tall. My first impression, skewed by too much time with werewolves, was that here in this bleak room, Laughingdog was in charge.
The guards knew they weren’t fully in control. I could see their unease by the tension in their shoulders and their general air of wariness that was too much for escorting a man who didn’t even rate handcuffs.
Gary looked full-blooded Native American to my eyes, though someone more experienced might have said differently. His skin was darker than mine, darker than Hank’s, too. He wore his thick, straight black hair shoulder length, just a few inches shorter than I wore mine. His rough-hewn features made him interesting rather than good-looking.
Gary Laughingdog was the very first coyote walker I’d ever met, and I looked for some resemblance to the face I saw every day in the mirror because we were related. All walkers are descended from the archetypal being whose shape they take. I found the likeness in his eyes, which were the same shape and exact color as the ones that I saw in the mirror every morning.
He pulled out the plastic chair with exaggerated care and sat down with all the circumspection of Queen Victoria at her royal breakfast. His smile lit his face as his eyes, flat and unaffected by the cheer and bonhomie of the rest of his expression, traveled from Honey to me, then back to Honey, where they stayed.
“Well, hel-lo, ladies,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
I looked up at the guards and raised my eyebrows at them. One of them walked away, and the other, after a wary glance that took in all of us, raised his eyebrows back at me. Luke was the other wolf from our pack. I jerked my chin, and he shrugged, raised his hands, and followed the first guard over to a position far enough from us that quiet talk couldn’t be overheard by a human. Luke would hear every word.
Gary leaned forward, licked his lips, and said, in a low, hungry voice, “Hey, little princess, what are you doing coming out to a place like this? Gotcha some kink for a man behind bars?”
Honey raised an eyebrow, and said coolly, “Bodyguard for my Alpha’s mate. And, although I haven’t eaten lunch yet, I prefer cooked chicken to raw human flesh—much as your words might tempt me.”
Gary took in a deep breath and shook his head in apparent wonder. “I thought there weren’t any female werewolves.”
She showed him her teeth in what someone else might have mistaken for a smile. “Ignorance is not unexpected.”
Instead of being insulted, Gary looked delighted. He opened his mouth to say something, but then his eyes focused just over Honey’s shoulder.
I knew what he saw.
I growled. A low sound that didn’t carry, but it caught Gary’s attention.
“She is mine,” I told him. “You say one thing that hurts her, and I will see to it that you never get out of here.” I didn’t have that kind of power, but I meant it anyway. And he knew darn good and well what the “one thing” was that I was talking about.
The mask of affability dropped off his face, and he met my eyes with a blank face. I let him see just how serious I was. If he told Honey that her dead mate’s ghost was following her around, I’d make sure he regretted it for the rest of his life.
The ghost that tagged along behind Honey wherever she went wasn’t really Peter, anyway, not now. Ghosts were only the remnant of the person left behind, bits and pieces of people that sometimes thought they were still alive.