It wasn’t anything a real wolf or a human could have done. He used pack magic and let her feel the weight of his authority and the protection he represented. She leaned against him and sighed.

I stood up, slipped the collar on her and the lead, and she gave me no trouble, though she tried not to look at me more than she had to. Adam stayed with her. I looked at Gary, then down at Lucia, and he nodded, took her arm, and helped her to her feet.

We left the dogs’ bodies because we did not have time to bury them, though it felt to me as though we should have done something. But in times of war, the care of the dead is outweighed by the need for survival.

I opened the back door of the SUV, and Adam jumped in, followed by the dog. I released her leash as soon as she was in but watched to make sure it didn’t snag anywhere until she settled. Adam hopped over the seat and lay down in the luggage compartment. The battered dog followed him and curled up on the opposite side of the SUV. She put her head down with a sigh, and I shut the door.

Gary had taken Lucia to her car. He held out his hand, and she put her keys in it with the same sort of sigh of surrender that Cookie had given.

He looked at me. “We’ll follow you.”

Because Lucia was occupied opening the door, I mouthed Do you have a license? at him.

He just gave me a wink and a sly smile and got behind the wheel of Lucia’s car.

9

Honey’s house was farther out than Adam’s and mine. It was maybe a little bit bigger.

There is something to the cliché that the older immortal creatures are wealthy. Not always, certainly. Warren was almost two hundred years old, and when I met him he was working at a Stop and Rob without two thin dimes to rub together. I didn’t know how old Honey was—we’d never been that friendly—but Peter had had at least a couple of centuries, maybe more, and he’d accumulated real wealth. He’d worked as a plumber for the past twenty or thirty years, and that hadn’t hurt anything, either.

Honey had sold the business after his death and was talking about going back to school. She didn’t need a job for money, but she needed something to do—something more than random trips to visit prisons with me.