And finally, for Richard Peters, who provided “Sodding Bart” with his new favorite swearword.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due to all of those people who have helped with the writing of this book: Collin Briggs, Mike Briggs, Linda Campbell, Caroline Carson, Dave Carson, Katharine Carson, Deb Lenz, Ann Peters, Kaye Roberson, Bob and Sara Schwager, and Anne Sowards.

As always, the mistakes that remain are mine.

Dear Reader,

For the best reading experience, please pay attention to Mercy’s notes at the beginning of each chapter. Fair warning—the timeline is not completely linear. My imaginary friends made me do it.

All best,

Patricia Briggs

1

Mercy

This wasn’t the first time chocolate got me in trouble.

I DIED FIRST, SO I MADE COOKIES.

They were popular fare on Pirate night, so I needed to make a lot. Darryl had gotten me a jumbo-sized antique mixing bowl last Christmas that probably could have held the water supply for an elephant for a day. I don’t know where he found it.

If I ever filled the bowl entirely, I’d have to have one of the werewolves move it. It ate the eighteen cups of flour I dumped into it with room for more. All the while, piratical howls rose up the stairway from the bowels of the basement.

“Jesse—” Aiden began, raising his voice to carry over an enthusiastic if off-key whistling rendition of “The Sailor’s Hornpipe.”

“Call me Barbary Belle,” my stepdaughter, Jesse, reminded him.

Aiden might have looked and sounded like he was a boy, but he hadn’t been young for a very long time. We had assimilated him, rather than adopted him, as he was centuries older than Adam and me put together. He was still finding some things about modern life difficult to adjust to, like the live-action-role-playing (LARP) aspect of the computer-based pirate game they were playing.

“It only works right if you think of me as a pirate and not your sister,” Jesse said patiently. Ignoring his response that she wasn’t his sister, she continued, “As long as you call me Jesse—that’s who you think of when you interact with me. You have to believe I’m a pirate to make it a proper game. The first step is to call me by my game name—Barbary Belle.”

There was a pause as someone let out a full-throated roar that subsided into a groan of frustration.

“Eat clamshells, you sodding buffoon,” Ben chortled. His game name was Sodding Bart, but I didn’t have to think of him that way because I was dead, anyway.

I got out my smaller mixing bowl, the one that had been perfectly adequate until I married into a werewolf pack. I filled it with softened butter, brown sugar, and vanilla. As I mixed them together, I decided that it wasn’t that I was a bad pirate, it was that I had miscalculated. By baking sugar-and-chocolate-laden food whenever I died first, I’d succeeded in turning myself into a target.