“The walking stick,” said Adam after a moment. “It only follows Mercy.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “One of the things it can do is show us the way home. That might be useful in Underhill.”
“Every boarding party needs its guide to light the way, its wizard to defeat the magic, and a tank to kill everything that tries to stop the party,” Jesse said. She had been playing too much ISTDPBF with the pack lately, and it was affecting her thinking. She looked at her father. “The tank is not sacrificial.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” said Adam with only a little irony in his voice.
“You come home, Daddy,” she told him. “I love my mother, but if I have to live with her for very long, one of us will commit a homicide. And you bring Mercy and the pip-squeak back.”
“Am I the wizard or the guide?” I asked our captain.
“Aiden is fire touched,” she told me after considering the matter. “You can only turn into a coyote. So he’s the wizard, even though he has to guide the party in. You guide the party out. And Dad makes sure you all get out alive.”
“Next time,” said Aiden, who’d been learning the fine art of playing pirate on computers, too, “I want to be the tank.”
—
Jesse came with us.
“No one will touch her,” Zee told Adam, breaking into the middle of the heated after-breakfast discussion. “I will be there. Tad will be there. Nothing will happen to her.”
Zee and Tad had shown up in the middle of the night, neither of them willing to talk about what they’d been doing. Since Baba Yaga had sort of told me already, I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know.
“What do you mean, you’ll be there?” asked Adam.
“Underhill doesn’t like our kind,” Zee said. “So we won’t follow you in. But Tad and I will come with you, we will watch over Jesse and see that nothing befalls her. I agree that Underhill is no place for someone who is wholly human.” He glanced at Aiden, who grimaced and nodded emphatically. “But Jesse is no longer a child. It is her right to witness what her father does.”
The Alpha wolf and the Dark Smith held each other’s eyes.
“Daddy?” asked Jesse.
The Alpha stare-down broke up with neither participant a winner or loser.
“Please?” she said.
“Fine,” Adam huffed, because Jesse’s awesome, seldom-used secret power was that she had her father wrapped around her little finger.
“Now that that’s settled,” I said, “we should go.”
I took my dishes to the sink and stopped to kiss Adam’s cheek as I passed him. I would have moved on, but he held me against him for a moment. He smelled of me, of our early-morning lovemaking, and of the pack. But mostly he smelled like himself: mint and musk and Adam.
We loaded ourselves in Adam’s SUV. I took the middle of the front while Jesse took shotgun, leaving Aiden, Zee, and Tad to sort themselves out in the backseat. As Adam backed the SUV out of its parking space, I saw Joel, in human form, leaning against the frame of the front door. He wasn’t happy at being left behind, but that was an argument Adam had won.
Ben, who had listened in, had quipped lightly, “You know you’ve got a good Alpha when everyone beats each other up trying to throw themselves in the tar pit after he jumps in.” But he’d patted Joel on the shoulder, and said, “Enough. We all know you’re willing—and if you weren’t, there are a dozen of us who would have his back if he needed it. He appreciates it, but you’re distracting him from what he needs to do.”
And so Joel had given in. He watched us drive off with an unhappy expression on his face, but he would wait. He was pack; he knew he was valued, that he had purpose. That didn’t mean he had to be happy about obeying orders, just that he obeyed. Which is why he mostly fit in the pack a lot better than I did. Suggestions I might follow: I had trouble with orders.
It was still dark out as we pulled into the road. Adam’s shoulder against mine was warm. For an accidental moment, I caught his thoughts.
It was just a visual of my face, lit by the blue light of the dash. It wasn’t the face I saw in the mirror every day. He thought I was beautiful. He was worried for me.
I saw his hands tighten on the wheel and put my hand on his thigh. I don’t think he knew I’d caught what he was thinking. I was lucky he wasn’t thinking I should lose a few pounds or clean under my nails better. Or how gorgeous that early-morning jogger we just passed was (and she was).
“Adam?” I asked.
He didn’t answer, still lost in his thoughts.
“Hey, Adam,” I said again.
“Woolgathering,” he told me with a faint smile.
I grinned at him. “An appropriate activity for a wolf.”
“Did you need something?” he asked.
For this trip to be done. For all of us to be home and safe.
“No,” I said lightly. “Or if I did, I’ve forgotten what it was.”
Silence fell in the SUV again. It was early. I wiggled to get comfortable—the center seat was more suited to a child than an adult. From the backseat, the scent of fear was getting stronger.
To distract him—because it wasn’t Zee or Tad who was worried—I asked, “So, Aiden, what do you think we’ll find in Underhill?”
“Underhill,” said Aiden stoically. He was afraid, but he also smelled resigned, like the rabbit who knew it was dead and quit struggling. The confidence he’d shown us last night was gone. He cleared his throat, and said, “Sometimes the terrain is forest or desert, sometimes it’s a snowy mountaintop or an ocean so deep, you can’t find the bottom. If you blink, it can change—but it doesn’t matter where you are, Underhill is always there.” His voice tightened. “Watching.”