He shook his head. He looked up at me and stared for a moment as if eye contact would let him sort himself out. He started to speak a couple of times.

“They took everyone who was there?”

“Everyone,” he said. He put his head against me again. “Everyone there.”

It had been Thanksgiving. I exchanged a bleak look with Jesse. A lot of the pack was at the house.

“Honey and Peter and Paul and Darryl and Auriele.” He stopped naming wolves for a moment to take a breath. “Mary Jo. Warren.”

“Mary Jo wasn’t there,” I said. “Neither was Warren.” Warren and his boyfriend had put on a Thanksgiving dinner for their friends who didn’t have families to go home to. Being gay meant they had a number of friends with no welcoming families. Mary Jo, a firefighter, had been on duty.

“Smelled them,” growled Ben. Then he paused, his body tightening. “Said … they said, not Adam said. They said … ‘Come quietly no one gets hurt, Mr. Hauptman.’ Adam, he said, ‘I smell blood on your hands. Warren and Mary Jo. What have you done to my people?’ They said, ‘Federal agents,’ again. Said, ‘Here’s our ID.’”

He took in a big breath. “Adam said, he said, ‘ID is good. But you are not federal agents.’ Liars. Adam said they lied.”

I couldn’t tell if I was holding Ben or he was holding me.

“How did they find Mary Jo?” I asked. Mary Jo worried that she would lose her job if they knew what she was. If they knew about Mary Jo, knew about the tranquilizer, then someone knew too many of our secrets. It was a rhetorical question, I didn’t expect Ben to know the answer.

“Cell phones,” he told me. “Bran sent a text.”

“I got it,” I said. “I thought it meant that the phones weren’t safe to use.”

He shook his head. “Meant that someone was tracing our phones. GPS tracking. Charles has spiders.” Charles was the son of the Marrok, who ruled the werewolves. Among his wide array of talents were killing people, making money, and a scarily thorough understanding of technology—but not arachnids. Not that I knew of, anyway.

“Spiders?” I asked.

He huffed a laugh. “Spiders. Bits of code out looking. Watching out for things like that. Spyware in the phone-company logs. Think he might have someone on the inside. Warning came too late, though.”

“How did you escape?” I asked.

“I was upstairs.” His voice was getting closer to his usual enunciation, and he sounded more coherent. “Getting toilet paper for the fu—for the downstairs bathroom.” He made a noise, a half sob. I hugged him more tightly.

“Go ahead and swear,” I told him. “I promise not to tell Adam.”

He snorted. “Bad habit.” I couldn’t tell if he was talking about his swearing or me promising not to tell Adam.