Adam nodded and relaxed a little, stretching out his neck to release the build-up of tension. "Thank you. It's harder when I'm angry. Yes, I knew one of them, Mercedes. Do you know how I became a werewolf?"
The question seemed to come from left field--but Adam always had a reason for everything he said. "Only that it was during Vietnam," I answered. "You were Special Forces." "Right," he agreed. "Long-range recon. They sent me and five other men to take out a particularly nasty warlord--an assassination trip. We'd done it before."
"The warlord was a werewolf?" I asked.
He laughed without humor. "Slaughtered us. It was one of his own people who killed him, while he was eating poor old McCue." He shut his eyes, and whispered, "I can still hear him scream."
We waited, Samuel and I, and after a moment Adam continued. "All the warlord's people ran and left us alone. At a guess they weren't certain he was really dead, even after he'd been beheaded. After a while--a long while, though I didn't realize that until later--I found I could move. Everyone was dead except Spec 4 Christiansen and me. We leaned on each other and got out of there somehow, hurt badly enough that they sent us home: Christiansen was a short-timer, anyway, and I guess they thought I was mostly crazy--raving about wolves. They shipped us out of there fast enough that none of the docs commented about how quickly we were recovering."
"Are you all right?" asked Samuel.
Adam shivered and pulled the blankets closer around himself. "Sorry. I don't talk about this often. It's harder than I expected. Anyway, one of my army buddies who'd come back to the States a few months earlier heard I was home and came to see me. We got drunk--or at least I tried. I'd just started noticing that it took an awful lot of whiskey to do anything, but it loosened me up enough that I told him about the werewolf.
"Thank goodness I did because he believed me. He called in a relative and between them they persuaded me that I was going to grow furry and kill something the next full moon. They pulled me into their pack and kept everyone safe until I had enough control to do it myself."
"And the other man who was wounded?" I asked. "Christiansen?" He nodded. "My friends found him. It should have been in time, but he'd come home to find that his wife had taken up with another man. He walked into his house and found his bags packed and his wife and her lover waiting with the divorce papers."
"What happened?" asked Samuel.
"He tore them to pieces." His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. "Even in that first month, if you get angry enough, it is possible to Change."
"I know," I told him.
He gave me a jerky nod. "Anyway, they managed to persuade him to stay with a pack, who taught him what he needed to know to survive. But as far as I know he never did join a pack officially--he's lived all these years as a lone wolf."
A lone wolf is a male who either declines to join a pack or cannot find a pack who will take him in. The females, I might add, are not allowed that option. Werewolves have not yet joined the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first, as far as women are concerned. It's a good thing I'm not a werewolf--or maybe it is a pity. Someone needs to wake them up.
"Christiansen was one of the wolves who came to your house?" I asked.
He nodded. "I didn't hear him or see him--he stayed away from me--but I could smell him. There were several humans and three or four wolves."
"You killed two," I told him. "I killed a third." I tried to remember what I'd smelled in his house, but I had only been tracking Jesse. There had been so many of Adam's pack in the house, and I only knew some of them by name. "I'd know the man, the human, who confronted Mac and me earlier that night, but no one else for certain."
"I'm pretty sure they intended I stay out until they'd done whatever they came for, but their whole plan was a botch job," Adam said. "First, they killed Mac. Obviously, from their attempt to take him at your shop, they wanted him, but I don't think they meant to kill him in my house."
"They left him on my doorstep," I said.
"Did they?" Adam frowned. "A warning?" I could see him roll the thought around and he came up with the same message I had. "Stay out of our business, and you won't end up dead."
"Quick thinking for the disposal of a body they didn't know they were going to have," I commented. "Someone drove to my house to dump his body and was gone when I came outside. They left some people at your house who took off hell-bent-for-leather, probably with Jesse. I made it to your house in time to kill the last werewolf you were fighting." I tried to think about what time that was. "Four-thirty in the morning or thereabouts, is my best guess."
Adam rubbed his forehead.
Samuel said, "So they shot Mac, shot Adam, then waited around until Mac died. They dropped the body at your house--then Adam woke up, and they grabbed Jesse and ran, leaving three werewolves behind to do something--kill Adam? But then why take Jesse? Presumably they weren't supposed to just die."
"The first wolf I fought was really new," I said slowly. "If they were all that way, they might have just gotten carried away, and the others fled because they couldn't calm them down."
"Christiansen isn't new," said Adam.
"One of the wolves was a woman," I told him. "The one I killed was a buff color--almost like Leah but darker. The other was a more standard color, grays and white. I don't remember any markings."
"Christiansen is red-gold," Adam said. "So did they come to kidnap Jesse in the first place or was her kidnapping the result of someone trying to make the best of a screwup?"
"Jesse." Adam sounded hoarse, and when I glanced back at him I could see that he hadn't heard Samuel's question. "I woke up because Jesse screamed. I remember now."
"I found a pair of broken handcuffs on the floor of your living room." I slowed the van so I didn't tailgate an RV that was creeping up the side of the mountain we were climbing. I didn't have to slow down much. "Silver wrist cuffs--and the floor was littered with glass, dead werewolves, and furniture. I expect the ankle cuffs were around there somewhere." I thought of something. "Maybe they just came to get Mac and maybe punish Adam for taking him in?"
Samuel shook his head. "Mercy, you they might leave warnings for-- or try to teach a lesson. A pack of newbie werewolves--especially if they're headed by an experienced wolf--is not going to tick off an Alpha just to `punish' him for interfering in their business. In the first place, there's no better way I can think of to get the Marrok ticked off. In the second place there's Adam himself. He's not just the Columbia Basin Alpha, he's damn near the strongest Alpha in the US, present company excluded, of course."