“Good,” Jim said. “I want you to know that we are behind you, you and your wolves. We’ve got your back. And right now I’ve got all sorts of our most expensive equipment keeping watch on Kyle Brooks’s house, and we have people following Mercy. We haven’t been able to locate Jesse. Brooks told us Jesse was safe.”
“Yes. Good. I’ll stop in tomorrow, and we’ll call a meeting to discuss how we should proceed.”
“Do you want us to tell your wife that you’re okay?” Jim asked.
Adam looked down at the dark stains on his hands. “No. I’ll tell her when we’re really out of here.”
“All right. We’ll keep her safe.”
The pack had left the last kill finally and crowded into the previously adequately sized room as he hung up the phone.
Honey, nearly as blood-splattered as he was because her fur held on to it better than his skin did, came forward with her head and tail low. The closer she came, the faster she moved. When she reached him, she dropped to the ground and leaned against him hard enough that if he had not been braced for it, he would have staggered.
No, he thought as he bent down to rest his hand on the top of her head, and looking over his battered pack, he did not regret killing these people.
“Tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forests of the night,” he told them in a burst of exhaustion-driven fancifulness. “What immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”
Warren leaned against the doorway, and said, “We’re not tigers, we’re werewolves, boss. God didn’t make us, nohow. Just ask the dead guys where we come from.” Despite the drawl and deliberately poor grammar, the exhaustion and pain turning his skin haggard, his eyes were sharp.
Darryl made a noise that might have been a growl if Adam hadn’t heard his second’s real growls. Darryl reached over and gave Warren’s hair a rough caress, an unusual sign of affection from the pack’s second.
“Dead guys don’t get an opinion,” Darryl told everyone. “We’re the good guys. That we’re scary doesn’t mean we’re the villains.”
7
7
Dominant werewolves are control freaks and do not enjoy being passengers in cars. Asil was no exception. He put on his seat belt, closed his eyes, and sat tense and unhappy as I drove toward Kennewick.