I must have grabbed it in the process of waking up--but that didn't explain the language.
I blinked at the clock--I'd been asleep less than two hours-- and about that time I figured out whose voice was babbling to me.
"Samuel?" I asked.
"Why are you speaking Welsh? I don't understand you unless you talk a lot slower.
And use small words." It was kind of a joke.
Welsh never seems to have small words.
"Mercy," he said heavily.
For some reason my heart started beating hard and heavy, as if I were about to get some very bad news.
I sat up.
"Samuel?" I addressed the silence on the other end of the phone.
"Come get--" He fumbled the words, as if his English were very bad, which it wasn't and never had been.
Not as long as I'd known him-- which was most of my thirty-odd years of life.
"I'll be right there," I said, jerking on my jeans with one hand.
"Where?" "In the X-ray storeroom." He barely stumbled over that phrase.
I knew where the storeroom was, on the far end of the emergency room at Kennewick General, where he worked.
"I'll come for you." He hung up without saying anything more.
Something had gone very wrong.
Whatever it was, it couldn't be catastrophic if he was going to meet me in the storeroom, away from everyone.
If they knew he was a werewolf, there would be no need for storerooms.
Unlike Adam, Samuel was not out to the public.
No one would let a werewolf practice medicine--which was probably smart, actually.
The smells of blood and fear and death were too much for most of them.
But Samuel had been a doctor for a very long time, and he was a good one.
Ben was sitting on my front porch as I ran out the door, and I tripped over him, rolling down the four steep, unyielding stairs to land on the ground in the gravel.
He'd known I was coming out; I hadn't tried to be quiet.
He could have moved out of my way, but he hadn't.
Maybe he'd even moved into my way on purpose.
He didn't twitch as I looked up at him.
I recognized the look though I hadn't seen it from him before.
I was a coyote mated to their Alpha, and they were darned sure I wasn't good enough.