If he wanted to wait while I showered, I figured I could walk with him.
I glanced at the sky and decided I had time to take a shower without risking Adam's being the first one to talk to Stefan.
I needed to find out what the artwork on my door meant--and to make sure that running would work.
Stefan might know, but neither question was something I wanted to ask in public.
I'd figure out how I was going to get him alone when the time came.
"Mercy," Adam said, breaking into my monologue about Karmann Ghias and air-cooled versus water-cooled engines as I turned into my drive.
He sounded both amused and resigned.
It was a tone I heard from him a lot.
"Hmm?" "Why did the vampires paint a pair of bones on your door?" "I don't know," I told him in a deliberately relaxed voice.
"I don't even know that it was the vampires.
The camera didn't catch who it was exactly.
Zee and I just figured it was the vampires because of Stefan.
He's going to check with Uncle Mike to be sure it wasn't a fae, though." "I won't let Marsilia hurt you," he told me in the quiet tones he used when making a vow of honor.
The wolves do that, some of the older ones, anyhow.
I wouldn't have thought Adam was one of them.
He was a 1950s model, stuck forever looking like he was in his midtwenties.
When I say older wolves, I mean a lot older than 1950, a couple of hundred years at least.
It's not that modern men don't have honor, just most of them don't think of it that way.
It gives them a flexibility that the previous generations didn't have.
Some of the old lobos take their vows very, very seriously.
What I wouldn't have given to be stupid enough to believe that Adam could promise that Marsilia wouldn't kill me-and even more to believe that he wouldn't kill himself trying to keep his word.
I wasn't resigned to my fate or anything like it, but if I had learned one thing being raised by werewolves, it was to keep a clear eye on probable outcomes and how to mitigate damage.
And if Marsilia wanted me dead ...
well that was just the most probable outcome.
Really probable.
Enough so that I could feel another stupid panic attack hovering.
My first today, if I didn't count a little shortness of breath once or twice.
"She's not dumb enough to attack me," I told him, opening my door.
"Especially once she hears I've officially accepted you as my mate.
That puts me under your pack's protection.