in and toed off her shoes, "this wolf was cute. With a little stripe here-" She ran her finger down her nose. "He wasn't going to hurt me. I was just rubbing his belly and my father came in and had a cow - oh yum, cookie dough! Can I have some?"
Jesse was Adam's daughter, fifteen going on forty. She spent most of the year with her mother in Eugene-she must be in town to spend Thanksgiving with Adam. It seemed a little early to me for that, since Thanksgiving wasn't until Thursday, but she went to some private school for brilliant and eccentric kids, so maybe her vacations were longer than the public schools'.
"Did you dye your hair especially for your father?" I asked, finding a spoon and handing it to her with a healthy glob of dough.
"Of course," she said, taking a bite, then continuing to talk as if her mouth weren't half-full. "It makes him feel all fatherly if he can complain about something. Besides," she said with an air of righteousness, "everyone in Eugene is doing it. It'll wash out in a week or two. When I was tired of the lecture, I just told him he was lucky I didn't use superglue to put spikes in like my friend Jared. Maybe I'll do that next vacation. This is good stuff." She started to put her spoon in the dough for another round, and I slapped her hand.
"Not after it's been in your mouth," I told her. I gave her another spoon, finished mixing in the chips, and began dropping cookie dough on the pans.
"Oh, I almost forgot," she said, after another bite, "my father sent the camera with a message. It was needlessly cryptic, but I knew you'd tell me what it meant. Are you ready?"
I put the first pan in the oven and started loading the next one. "Shoot."
"He said, 'Got a hit. Don't fret. He was a hired gun. " She waved her empty spoon at me. "Now explain it to me."
I suppose I should have respected Adam's need to protect his daughter, but he was the one who sent her to me. "I killed a man tonight. Your father found out who he was."
"Really? And he was a hit man? Cool." She dropped the spoon in the sink next to the first one, then boosted herself up to sit on my counter and conducted a rapid question and answer session all by herself. "Was that what you called him about earlier? He was fit to be tied. How come you called Dad? No wait. The man you killed was a werewolf, too, wasn't he? That's why Dad took off so fast. Who is the wolf he came back with?" She paused. " You killed a werewolf? Did you have a gun?"
Several. But I hadn't brought one with me to the garage.
She had paused, so I answered her last two questions. "Yep and nope."
"Awesome." She grinned. "Hey, how'dja do it?"
"It wasn't on purpose," I told her repressively. I might as well have tried holding back a tidal wave with my bare hands, it would have had as much effect.
"Of course not," she said. "Not unless you were really pi-" I raised an eyebrow and she changed the word without slowing down. "-ticked off. Did you have a knife? Or was it a crowbar?"
"My teeth," I told her.
"Ewwe-" She grimaced briefly. "Nasty. Oh, I see. You mean that you took him on while you were a coyote?"
Most humans only know about the fae-and there are still a lot of people who think that the fae are just a hoax perpetrated by the government or on the government, take your pick. Jesse, however, as the daughter of a werewolf, human though she was, was quite aware of the "Wild Things" as she called them. Part of that was my fault. The first time I met her, shortly after the Alpha had moved his family next to my home, she'd asked me if I were a werewolf like her father. I told her what I was, and she nagged me until I showed her what it looked like when I took my other form. I think she was nine and already a practiced steamroller.
"Yep. I was just trying to get his attention so he'd chase me and leave Mac-that's the striped werewolf-" I imitated her finger-down-the-nose gesture. "He is pretty nice," I told her. Then, feeling I had to play adult in fairness to