Jesse is safe. You are safe. It’s all right, Mercy. You didn’t think I was going to die of old age, did you?

It was a joke, graveyard humor. Werewolves never died of old age because they didn’t age. But he had no business making a joke like that. Not now, not ever.

Anger roared through me and carried with it a tidal wave of terror because Adam had given up.

No. He told me. I haven’t given up anything. But the pack comes first. While they concentrate on me, the pack is working to free themselves. When I die, I can take the poison with me, and our pack will be strong enough to protect themselves. I love you, Mercy.

I absorbed what he said. He’d found something he could do. I’d seen him draw upon the pack to force silver out of his body. Apparently it worked in reverse. He was drawing the silver from that damned concoction Doc Wallace’s son had created. When he was finished, he’d be dead—but the pack would be free.

I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t respond. Adam intended to die.

Are you not my daughter, whispered another voice, Coyote’s voice, so quiet I almost missed it. Had I not been caught in that first moment of shock when everything goes quiet before the pain begins, I would not have heard it.

Coyote never loses, Coyote told me. Because I change the rules of the games my enemies play. What are the rules of your game?

Adam hadn’t heard that other voice. I knew because he still hovered over me, his mouth soft with our kiss, a terrible good-bye in his eyes. He’d found a solution to the game that his enemies played, found a way to win, because Adam was competent like that. The cost was too high.

“Find another way to win,” I said, my voice hoarse.

There is no other way, he said. I love you.

But I’d been talking to myself and not to him. I pulled him back down to me.

He cooperated because he had no idea I was changing the rules of the game on him. I was not Coyote’s daughter, not quite. But that was okay because being almost Coyote’s daughter in my dream would be enough.

Adam’s lips came down upon my own and I opened my mouth. Looking into his eyes, I pulled the things that were killing him into me, swallowing down the silver that was poison to him and nothing to me.

He didn’t understand at first, but when he did, he struggled, but it was my dream, not his. In this dream, I wasn’t a coyote shapeshifter trying to hold a werewolf, I was Coyote’s almost daughter, and I had all the strength of the world in my arms.

“Mine,” I told him, though my mouth was still fastened to his. “Mine.”