“Not killing Coyote the first time I saw him,” said Gary. “Not that he’d have stayed dead, but I think the experience might have made the rest of my life more bearable.”

“Kyle,” I said. “I love you like a brother. Go out and make up with Warren before he heads out to try to get himself killed.”

Christy made dinner with Lucia’s and Darryl’s help: baked herb-and-flour-encrusted stuffed chicken. I ate it and had seconds. It was very good—and right now I was too scared to be jealous.

Honey didn’t have a table big enough to seat the whole pack—and Adam had called the whole pack together. Samuel and Ariana showed up toward the end of dinner.

Elizaveta could have made a spell to make one werewolf resistant to Guayota’s elemental fire magic—her term, not mine—but she would have needed a piece of his hair or fingernails. If I’d stuck Guayota’s finger in my pocket, she could have used that, but I didn’t think we’d have much luck getting it back from the police.

Ariana said she could help. With fireproofing, not finger-stealing.

We all settled down in the big upstairs room to see what she had to offer. She and Samuel stood in front of the big-screen TV.

Dr. Samuel Cornick was tall, compelling but not handsome, and when I was sixteen, I’d thought he was the love of my life. He’d thought I was someone who might be able to give him children that lived. It was a relationship that was doomed to make neither of us happy, and his father, the Marrok, had seen it before we’d fully committed tragedy and so had sent me away. For a long time, I’d compared every man I met to Samuel—Adam was the only one who had stood up to the comparison.

Samuel’s mate, Ariana, stood in his shadow. Where he drew the eye, even in a crowded room, she could go unnoticed. Her hair was blond, her eyes gray, her skin clear, and her entire aspect unremarkable. But that was a fae thing. Being too beautiful or too ugly made someone interesting, and mostly, the fae would rather go unnoticed. I’d seen what she really looked like under her glamour, and she was spectacularly beautiful.