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."
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.