Moon Called

"It's the silver," said Shawn, awed. "That's why the shirt is turning gray. Fu-I mean, damn. Damn. He's sweating silver. Damn."

Adam didn't look away from me, though he flinched subtly at the sound of Shawn's voice. His blazing gold eyes held mine, somehow hot and icy at the same time. I should have looked away-but it didn't seem like a dominance contest. It felt like he was using my eyes to pull himself up from wherever the drugs had forced him. I tried not to blink and break the spell.

"Mercy?" His voice was a hoarse whisper.

" C'est moi, c'est moi, 'tis I," I told him. It seemed appropriately melodramatic, though I didn't know if he'd catch the reference. I shouldn't have worried.

Unexpectedly, he laughed. "Trust you to quote Lancelot rather than Guinevere."

"Both of them were stupid," I told him. "Arthur should have let them marry each other as punishment and gone off to live happily on his own. I only like Camelot for the music." I hummed a bit.

The mundane talk was working. His pulse was less frantic, and he was taking deep, even breaths. When his eyes went back to normal we'd be out of trouble. Except, of course, for the small matter of a warehouse full of enemies. One trouble at a time, I always say.

He closed his yellow eyes, and momentarily I felt cut adrift and abandoned until I realized he was still holding my wrist as if he were afraid I'd leave if he let go.

"I have the mother of all headaches," he said, "and I feel like I've been flattened by a steamroller. Jesse's safe?"

"I'm fine, Dad," she said, though she obeyed the urgent signal I made with my free hand and stayed where she was. He might have sounded calm, but his scent and the compulsive way he was holding on to my wrist contradicted his apparent control.

"Bruised and scared," I said. "But otherwise unhurt." I realized that I actually didn't know that and gave Jesse a worried glance.

She smiled, a wan imitation of her usual expression. "Fine," she said again, this time to me.

His sigh held relief. "Tell me what's been going on."

I gave him a short version-it still took a while to tell. Except for when I told him about David Christiansen's invasion of my home, he kept his eyes shut as if it hurt him to open them. Before I finished he was twisting uncomfortably.

"My skin is crawling," he said.

"It's the silver that's bothering you." I should have thought of that earlier. Touching his shirt with my free hand, I showed him the gray metal on my index finger. "I've heard of sweating bullets before, but never silver." I started to help him remove his shirt when I realized he couldn't run around naked with Jesse here. "I don't suppose you have any extra clothes, Shawn? If that silver stays against his skin it'll burn him."

"He can have my shirt," he said. "But I can't leave to get clothes; I'm on guard duty."

I sighed. "He can have my sweatpants." The T-shirt I was wearing hit me halfway down my thighs.

Shawn and I stripped Adam as quickly as we could, using the shirt to wipe most of the silver off his skin before covering him in my sweats and Shawn's green T-shirt. Adam was shivering when we finished.

The thermos cup had dumped its sticky contents all over the floor when I dropped it, but both it and the thermos had survived. I had Jesse pour hot coffee down her father as fast as he'd drink it, and, with something to focus on, she steadied. When the coffee was done, she fed him the raw roast from the Ziploc bags without turning a hair.

I was worried because Adam was so passive, not a state I'd ever seen him in before. Samuel had said prolonged exposure to silver increased sensitivity. I thought about Adam's headache and the seizures and hoped lycanthropy was enough to allow him to heal.

"You know," said Shawn thoughtfully, "for someone who wants this one to fight the head wolf in a month, Gerry's not taking very good care of him."

I was frowning at him when I heard the door open.

"Hey, Morris," said the stranger as he opened the door, "the boss wants to see you and-" His eyes traveled to Adam and Jesse and he stopped speaking and went for his gun.

If I had been alone, we'd have all been dead. I didn't even think to pull my weapon, just stared in shock, belatedly realizing that Shawn hadn't bolted the door when he'd come in. Shawn's gun popped quietly three times in rapid succession, putting a neat triangle of red over the intruder's heart, making little more noise than someone opening a can of pop. He was shooting a small-caliber automatic with a silencer.

The wounded man fell slowly to his knees, then forward onto his face. I pulled my SIG at last and took aim.

"No," Adam said. "Wait." He looked at his daughter. "You told me you weren't hurt-is that true?"

Jesse nodded resolutely. "Just bruises."

"All right, then," he said. "Mercy, we're going to try to leave as many alive as possible-dead men tell no tales, and I want to know exactly what's been going on. We'll be gone before this man heals enough to be a danger. Leave him be."

"He's not dead?" asked Shawn. "The captain says you can kill werewolves with lead."

Not being in the habit of taking on werewolves, Christiansen's men hadn't had silver ammunition, and my supply was limited. Silver bullets are expensive, and I don't go out hunting werewolves on a regular basis. Only Co

"You have to take out the spinal column if you want to kill a werewolf without silver," I told him. "And even then…" I shrugged. "Silver ammo makes wounds that don't heal as fast, gives them a chance to bleed out."

"Damn," Shawn said, with a last look at the bleeding werewolf he'd shot. He took out a cell phone and dialed in several numbers.

"That'll let everyone know we're on the move," he told me when he'd finished, tucking the small device back into his pants pocket. "We've got to get out of here now. With any luck they'll assume someone's out on the range and won't pay attention to my shots. But someone's going to miss Smitty, and we need to be out of here when they do." Then he got down to business and organized our retreat.

I put the SIG back in its holster and took out the. 44 magnum. I didn't have a holster for it so I'd just have to carry it. I shoved the extra magazine for the SIG into my bra because I didn't have any better place to store it.

We dragged the wounded werewolf out of the doorway, then Shawn and Jesse got Adam to his feet. Shawn because he was the strongest of us, Jesse because I knew how to shoot a gun. I went out the door first.

This part of the warehouse was set apart from the main room. The offices had been set into a section half the width of the building, and below me was a bare strip of cement wide enough for two trucks to drive side by side. Leaning over the railing to check beneath the stairway, I could tell that there was no one nearby, but I couldn't see very well into the rest of the building because of the racks of giant crates.

As soon as the others were out of the room and onto the landing, I ran down ahead of them to the second-floor landing, where I could guard their descent. Shawn's plan was that we were going to try to get Adam to the cars. One of Gerry's men drove a classic Chevy truck that Shawn said he could hot-wire faster than he could put a key in the ignition.

I tried to control my breathing so I could listen, but the warehouse was silent except for my comrades coming down the stairs and the ringing in my ears that could have obscured the movements of an army.

There was a garage door right next to the offices, the kind that is double-wide and double-high so a semi can drive through it. Shawn told me it was kept padlocked from the outside, and Gerry had shot the motor that opened it when he'd decided to keep Jesse in one of the offices here where he could control who had access to her. We'd have to make our way back toward the other side of the warehouse and go out a person-sized door, which was the only one unlocked.