2

WE STOPPED AT A STEAK HOUSE FOR DINNER FIRST.

He’d left the bloodstained coat and formal shirt in the car and snagged a dark blue T-shirt from a bag of miscellaneous clothes in the backseat. He’d asked me if he looked odd wearing a T-shirt with tuxedo pants. He couldn’t see the way the shirt clung to the muscles of his shoulders and back. I reassured him, truthfully—and with a straight face—that no one would care.

It was Friday night, and business was brisk. Happily, the service was fast.

After the waitress took our orders, Adam said, a little too casually, “So what did you see in your vision?”

“Nothing embarrassing,” I told him. “Just one time when I brought cookies over to you.”

His eyes brightened. “I see,” he said, and his shoulders relaxed a bit, even if his cheeks reddened. “I was thinking about that.”

“We okay?” I asked him. “I’m sorry I intruded.”

He shook his head. “No apologies necessary. You’re welcome to whatever you pick up.”

“So,” I said casually, “your first time was under the bleachers, huh?”

He jerked his head up.

“Gotcha. Warren told me.”

He smiled. “Cold and wet and miserable.”

The waitress plunked our food down in front of us and hurried on her way. Adam fed me bites of his rare filet mignon, and I fed him some of my salmon. Food was good, company better, and if I had been a cat, I’d have purred.

“You look happy.” He took a sip of his coffee and stretched out a leg so his foot was against mine.

“You make me happy,” I told him.

“You could be happy all the time,” he said, eating the last bite of baked potato, “and move in with me.”

To wake up next to him every morning… but… “Nope. I’ve caused you enough trouble,” I told him. “The pack and I need to come to… détente before I’m moving in. Your home is the den, the heart of the pack. They need a place where they feel safe.”

“They can adjust.”

“They’re adjusting as fast as they can,” I told him. “First there was Warren—did you hear that after you let him in, several other packs have allowed gay wolves to join, too? And now there’s me. A coyote in a werewolf pack—you have to admit that’s quite a lot of change for one pack to take.”

“Next thing you know,” he said, “women will have the vote or a black man will become president.” He looked serious, but there was humor in his voice.

“See?” I pointed my fork at him. “They’re all stuck in the eighteen hundreds, and you’re expecting them to change. Samuel likes to say that most werewolves have all the change they can deal with the first time they become wolf. Other kinds of change are tough to force on them.”

“Peter and Warren are the only ones who’ve been around since the eighteen hundreds,” Adam told me. “Most of them are younger than I am.”