“Yes?” I said. It was a question because we weren’t sitting in the car just so I could confess to being a coyote shapeshifter.

“I asked Gabriel about it.”

Gabriel had been my right hand in the garage before he went to college, and Tony had been infatuated with Gabriel’s mother for as long as I’d known him.

“He told me something about what you are.” Tony met my eyes. “You aren’t human.”

“No,” I agreed slowly. “Not completely.”

He huffed an unhappy breath. “If there was someone in the pack murdering humans, would you cover for him?”

I sucked in a breath. “You have a body?”

“You didn’t answer the question.” His reply had answered mine, though.

“If we had someone going around killing people for the fun of it,” I said, “I’d tell Adam.”

“And what would Adam do?”

Silence hung between us. I’d known Tony a long time. Long enough, I decided, to tell him the real truth instead of sugarcoating it. “Adam would deal with it before the police could step in. The fae’s sudden retreat to the reservations has put the werewolves on trial in the court of public opinion. They—we—can’t allow a murderer to stand trial or continue to rampage.”

“Are you a werewolf?” he asked. “I mean a werewolf who turns into a coyote. A werecoyote.”

“There coyote.” I grinned at him and received a look. “No. I’m not a werewolf or werecoyote—which I have never heard of, by the way. I have a different kind of magic entirely. Native magic, not European like the werewolves are. Mostly turning into a coyote is about all I manage.” I wasn’t going to explain to him about the ghosts or my partial immunity to magic, which was nothing I could count on anyway. “It would be best if you didn’t tell everyone about what I can do, though. Best for the public, who don’t need to be looking at their neighbors and worrying if they are something from a horror show. If they think werewolves and fae are it, then everyone is safer.”

Tony nodded as if that thought had occurred to him, and he’d already been on board with keeping my secrets secret. “You included yourself with the werewolves, though.”

I shrugged. “I’m married to one—and he made me an official member of the pack.” Not just in name, but in fact—accepted by the pack magic that bound us all together. But Tony didn’t need to know that. Even less than shapeshifting coyotes did people need to know that there was such a thing as pack magic. “Where are you going with this, Tony?”

He looked away, not happy. He patted the steering wheel nervously. “I need to know if I can trust you.”