Coyotes, like werewolves, are territorial - and this gun-toting jerk had barged into my place as if he had every right to be here.
"Are the police on their way?" I asked Sylvia, as she hung up the phone. My voice was shaking with adrenaline and anger, but my hands were still very steady.
"He says he'll be here in five. He also said that it would be a good thing to have backup. So there will be some other police as well."
I smiled widely at the bounty hunter, showing my teeth like any good predator. "Tony is a police officer. He's known these kids since they were in diapers. He's not going to be happy with you." Tony was also hopelessly in love with Sylvia - though I didn't think she knew that.
There was a movement to my right, and I snuck a quick glance to see Zee and Gabriel coming out the garage door. They must have gone back around. Zee had a crowbar in one hand and held it like another man might hold a sword. Gabriel had -
"Zee," I squeaked. "Tell him to put the torque wrench back and grab something that won't cost me five hundred dollars if he hits someone with it."
"Won't cost five hundred," said Zee, but as I glanced over again, he nodded at the white-faced Gabriel, who looked at what he held as if he'd never seen it before. The boy slipped back into the garage as Zee said, "It wouldn't break it - you'd just have to get it recalibrated."
"We have a whole garage worth of tools - pry bars, tire irons, and even a hammer or two. There's got to be something better than my torque wrench he could have grabbed."
"Listen, lady," Kelly Heart said in a calm, soothing voice. "Let's take a deep breath and discuss this a moment. I didn't mean to scare anyone. That little girl was about to get mauled by a werewolf."
Truth.
It didn't surprise me. Talking to Zee had steadied me, and I'd had a moment or two to think.
There might be a TV reality star somewhere who would point a gun at a cute little girl, but not while he was being filmed. The man behind him had been his cameraman - I could see the camera on the ground where it had been dropped when Heart landed on the second man with all his two-hundred-plus pounds of muscle.
If he'd come here hunting werewolves, he'd have figured out what Sam was right away. There's a bit of wolf magic that encourages humans to see a dog instead of a wolf, but it is only a little bit of magic, and if someone is looking - they'll see a wolf and not a dog.
So. How much to admit. I'd already paused too long to deny what Sam was. "He likes kids," I said instead. "Gentle as a puppy."
Sylvia had been murmuring to her kids, but her voice stopped at my words. There was a short silence, then the littlest one went off like a fire truck, a high-pitched fire truck. At a guess, Sylvia had just snatched her daughter away from the big bad wolf.
"I have a warrant for him," continued Heart, wincing a little. I couldn't tell if it was the volume that bothered him or the pitch, which was approaching ultrasonic.
I raised my eyebrows and indicated the gun with a jerk of my chin. "Wanted dead or alive?"
Samuel wasn't out. And the only one I was worried about coming after Samuel would never send a bounty hunter. It would be Bran who killed him, when and if the time came. Heart's warrant couldn't be for Samuel.
It didn't take a genius to figure out what werewolf people would expect to find around my place of work: Adam.
How a bounty hunter got a warrant for him, when, to my knowledge, Adam was in good standing as a law-abiding citizen, I didn't know. I was vague on bounty-hunter lore, but I was pretty sure that they mostly hunt down people who are wanted for bail-skipping, and then the bail bondsmen pay them a percentage of the bail money they would have otherwise lost.
The Kennewick Police Department wasn't very far away. Even so, the first vehicle in my parking lot was Adam's. He parked his truck in front of the van, blocking it where it was.
"You're mistaken," I told Kelly Heart, Bounty Hunter, keeping my eyes on him no