Asil tilted his head and smiled. "I do like you, Ms. Hauptman. You are not exactly what I expected, but I like you. By all means, come with us."
"What exactly are you going to settle?" asked Kyle, sounding a little hostile.
Asil examined him for a moment. "I won't hurt him, Mr. Brooks, but Ben is trying to protect Ms. Hauptman from me. There is no need, but he has to decide that himself. It will be a lot easier on him if we do this without an audience."
"It's okay," I told Kyle. "It's a good idea if we are likely to spend much time in each other's company." And I could question Asil without Agent Armstrong listening in - and he could question me.
"Guest room," suggested Kyle. "The one we were sleeping in. Apparently this house is low in rooms that are really possible to secure. Otherwise, you'll have to make do with a bathroom. Agent Armstrong and I can wait here."
I waved and took the lead out the door and up the stairs. Ben followed me as close as he could get without touching me, leaving Asil trailing behind us.
"Kyle Brooks is mated to your third," Asil said, as we hiked up the stairs, his voice thoughtful. "He is a lawyer. He was tied up and being tortured by a pair of professionals, and he managed to get himself loose and break one man's neck and knock out the other without killing him. Such an enterprising and ambitious thing for a human lawyer to do to a pair of men who make their livelihood from killing people. How wonderful that he managed it."
"Kyle Brooks has a black belt," I said very quietly. "He's in good shape and was rescued by a vampire friend of mine who killed the man who hurt Kyle and let the other live because I asked him not to kill everyone in sight."
There was silence on the stairs behind Ben and me.
"I believe I misheard," said Asil, who'd stopped on the stairs. "English is not my first, nor even my fifth, language. Did you say 'a vampire friend'"
"I did." I half turned to look at him as I stopped, too.
"The world," he said, "is a very strange place, and just when I thought I'd witnessed all the wonders it had to teach - here is another one. This 'vampire friend' of yours did it for a price?"
"He did it because he is my friend and Kyle's friend," I said.
"Impossible."
There was something in his voice that sent Ben surging up against my legs, which wasn't so bad - but then he bounced away like a ping-pong ball, and I almost lost my balance because I'd braced for his impact. I did lose my temper.
"Maybe for you," I snapped at Asil, turning to finish the last four-or-five-stair climb to the second floor. "Me? I have friends."
There was another of those speaking silences, then he laughed. "Please tell me I won't end up with eggs in my pillowcase or peanut butter on my car seat."
I threw up my hands involuntarily and turned to him to face him again. Walking backward, I said, "I was twelve. Don't you wolves have anything better to gossip about than things that happened twenty years ago?"
"Mi princesa," he told me, his voice deep and flirty, "I was in Spain and I heard about the peanut butter. Two decades are nothing, I assure you - we will speak of it a hundred years from now in hushed voices. There are big bad wolves all over the world who tremble at the sound of his name, yet a little puny coyote girl peanut-buttered the seat of Bran Cornick's car because he told her that she should wear a dress to perform for the pack."
"No," I said, getting hot about it again. I turned and stalked down the hall. "He said Evelyn - my foster mother - should know better, that she should have made sure I had a dress to wear. He made her cry." And that was the last time I consented to play the piano.
I opened the guest room door, and Asil paused until I looked at his face. "Yes," he said sincerely. "Such a one deserves peanut butter on the seat of his pants."
And that sincerity was the last straw. I put my hand over my mouth and leaned against the door and laughed. I was worried, tired, and it felt like every muscle in my body ached - and all I could see was the peanut butter on the back of the Marrok's elegant beige slacks and the expression on his face when he realized what had happened. I'd been hiding under bushes in my coyote shape downwind and everything - but he'd seen me anyway. Bran could always find me wherever I was hiding. He'd raised an eyebrow at me, and I'd run all the way home.
"He always knew when it was me," I said when I could speak.
Asil smiled; it was a warm and friendly smile. "He told me that gave you sorrow. You would scheme and plan so no one would know - and never realized that he didn't even have to investigate such an incident. 'Who else could it be?' he told me when I called him to ... discuss the incident. 'Can you imagine any of the pack putting peanut butter on the seat of my car to teach me a lesson?'"
"Huh." Such simple logic had been beyond me - and it just seemed right and proper that the Marrok would know everything, like Santa Claus with big sharp teeth. "He made me clean the whole car. It was worth it, though. He apologized to Evelyn, brought her flowers, too."
"He apologized," Asil said slowly, and I laughed, again, because Asil said it like he was storing up information to use to torment Bran.
"I needed that." I waved him into the room. "Thank you."
He glanced around the bedroom and took in the unmade bed and, his eyebrow rising ever higher, the puddle of now-solid silver on the floor. Then he said, "One thing I have always wondered is how Bran did not notice the smell of peanut butter on his so-expensive car's lovely brown leather upholstery."
"I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I put it on a paper plate with a little note that said, 'For the Marrok,' and set that on the dash of the passenger seat," I told him. "He was so busy looking at it that he didn't notice the seat until it was too late." I looked at the silver on Kyle's floor, too. They were probably going to have to replace the stone tile under it. "The eggs, though," I continued absently. "The eggs were a failure. They don't break when you want them to - the pillow cushions them too much, and they leave your victim with ammunition to use against you."
"Mercedes, tell me - " Asil walked around the end of the bed, which brought him closer to me, and Ben growled.