"When Samuel gets back from the hospital, he's going to spend the rest of the night at my house," Adam said without opening his eyes.
Samuel was my roommate, a doctor, and a lone wolf.
Adam's house was behind mine, with about ten acres between them--three were mine and the rest were Adam's.
"We have time to talk." "You look horrible," I said, not quite truthfully.
He did look tired, with dark circles under his eyes, but nothing short of mutilation could make him look terrible.
"Don't they have beds in D.C.?" He'd had to go to Washington (the capital--we were in the state) this weekend to clean up a little mess that was sort of my fault.
Of course if he hadn't ripped Tim's corpse into bits on camera, and if the resultant DVD hadn't landed on a senator's desk, there wouldn't have been a problem.
So it was partially his fault, too.
Mostly it was Tim's fault, and whoever had made a copy of the DVD and mailed it off.
I'd taken care of Tim.
Bran, the head-honcho werewolf above all of the other head-honcho werewolves, was apparently taking care of the other person.
Last year, I would have expected to hear about a funeral.
This year, with the werewolves barely having admitted their existence to the world, Bran would probably be more circumspect.
Whatever that would mean.
Adam opened his eyes and looked at me.
In the dimness of the room (he'd only turned on the small light on the little table by my bed), his eyes looked black.
There was a bleakness in his face that hadn't been there before, and I knew it was because of me.
Because he hadn't been able to keep me safe--and people like Adam take that pretty seriously.
Personally, I figured it was up to me to keep me safe.
Sometimes it might mean calling in friends, but it was my responsibility.
Still, he saw it as a failure.
"So have you made up your mind?" he asked.
Would I accept him as my mate, he meant.
The question had been up in the air too long, and it was affecting his ability to keep his pack under control.
Ironically, what happened with Tim had resolved the issue that had kept me from accepting Adam for months.
I figured if I could fight back against the fairy magic potion Tim had fed me, a little Alpha mojo wasn't going to turn me into a docile slave either.
Maybe I should have thanked him before I hit him with the tire iron.
Adam isn't Tim, I told myself.
I thought of Adam's rage when he'd broken down the door to my garage, of his despair when he persuaded me to drink out of that damned fae goblet again.
In addition to robbing me of my will, the goblet also had the power to heal--and I'd needed a lot of healing by that point.