Blood Bound

I stood under the hot spray until the water was cold.

CHAPTER 3

My bedroom was empty and the door to the closet was shut when I finally emerged from the bathroom. I glanced at the clock. Fifteen minutes to make it to the garage if I was going to open on time.

I was glad no one was there to hear me grunt and groan as I got dressed. No one alive to hear me, anyway.

Every muscle in my body ached, especially my right shoulder, and as soon as I bent down to pull on my socks and shoes, the battered side of my face started to throb. It would hurt me even more, though, if I lost customers because I wasn't open at my usual time.

I opened the bedroom door and Samuel looked up from where he'd been sitting on the couch. He'd been up all night, too; he ought to have gone to bed instead of waiting up to frown at me. He got up and pulled an ice pack out of the freezer.

"Here, put this on your face."

It felt good and I sagged against the doorway to enjoy the numbness it brought to my throbbing cheek.

"I called Zee and told him what happened," Samuel told me. "You can go to bed. Zee's pla

Siebold Adelbertsmiter, known to his friends as Zee, was a good mechanic, the best. He'd taught me everything I know, then sold the garage to me. He was also fae — and the first person I'd intended to go to for information on sorcerers.

Even though he sometimes filled in for me when I was sick, I hadn't even thought about calling him for help with the garage-proof that it would probably be better if I didn't try going to work today.

"You're swaying," said Samuel after a moment. "Go to bed. You'll feel better when you wake up."

"Thank you," I mumbled before shutting myself back in my room.

I flopped facedown on my bed, groaned because that hurt my face again. I rolled until I was more comfortable, covered my head with my pillow and dozed for a while, maybe for all of half an hour.

I could smell Stefan.

It wasn't that he smelled bad-he just smelled like himself, sort of vampire and popcorn. But I couldn't get his statement about being dead during the day out of my head. Ugh. There was no way I was going to be able to sleep with a dead man in my closet.

"Thanks, Stefan," I told him glumly as I heaved my sore body out of bed. If I couldn't sleep, I might as well go to work. I opened the door to the living room, expecting it to be empty, since Samuel had been up all night, too.

Instead he was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee with Adam, the local Alpha werewolf, who happened to live on the other side of my back fence.

I hadn't heard Adam come in. Once Samuel started sharing my house, I'd become careless. I should have realized that he would come over as soon as Samuel called him, though-and, of course, Samuel had to call him about the bloodbath at the hotel. Adam was the Alpha, and responsible for the welfare of all the werewolves in the area.

They both looked at me when I opened my door.

I was tempted to turn around and go back into my bedroom with the dead man in my closet. Now, I'm not very vain. If I'd ever been, making my living covered in various grease and dirt mixtures would have cured me quickly. Still, I wasn't up to facing two sexy men when I had one eye swollen mostly shut and half of my face black and blue.

Stefan, being dead, was unlikely to notice what I looked like-and I'd never dated Stefan. Not that I was dating either Adam or Samuel at the present.

I hadn't dated Samuel since I was sixteen.

I've known Samuel for as long as I can remember. I grew up in the Marrok's pack in northwestern Montana, a werewolf pack being as close to what I was as my teenage mother could find. It was just chance that her great uncle belonged to the Marrok. Lucky chance, I'd come to believe. A lot of werewolves would just have killed me outright-the way a wolf will kill a coyote who invades his territory.

Bran, the Marrok, in addition to being the ruler of all the North American wolves, was a good man. He placed me with one of his wolves and raised me almost as if I belonged. Almost.

Samuel was the Marrok's son. He'd been there for me as I struggled to live in a world with no place for me. I'd been raised by the pack, but I wasn't one of them. My mother loved me, but I didn't belong in her mundane human world either.

When I was sixteen, I'd believed I'd found my home in Samuel. Only when the Marrok showed me that Samuel wanted children-and not my love, did I finally understand I had to make my own path in life rather than finding someone else's to join.

I'd left Samuel and the pack and hadn't seen either again for more than fifteen years, almost half my life. All that changed last winter. Now, I had the Marrok's cell phone number on my speed dial, and Samuel had decided to move to the Tri-Cities. More specifically, he had decided to move in with me.

I still wasn't quite sure why. Fond of it as I am, my home is a single-wide trailer as old as me.

Samuel, being a doctor, is used to a slightly higher standard of housing. Granted his paperwork nightmare had taken a long time to settle. Only the month before had he at last gotten his license to practice medicine in Washington as well as Montana and Texas. He'd given up his job as a night clerk at an all night convenience store and begun working in the emergency room at the hospital in Ke

I'd refused him at first.

"Why not with Adam?" I'd asked. As Alpha of the local werewolf pack, Adam was used to having short-term guests and he had more bedrooms than I did. I didn't ask why Samuel didn't buy his own house-Samuel had already told me that he'd spent too much time alone the past few years. Werewolves don't do well on their own. They need someone, pack or family, or they begin to get odd. Werewolves who get odd tend to end up dead-and sometimes take a lot of other people down with them when they go.

Samuel had raised his eyebrows and said, "Do you really want us to kill each other? Adam is the Alpha-and I'm a stronger dominant than he is. Now we've both lived long enough to control ourselves up to a point. But, if we're living together, sooner or later, we'd be at each other's throat."

"Adam's house is only a hundred yards from mine," I told him dryly. Samuel would have been right about any other wolf, but Samuel made his own rules. If he wanted to live in peace with Adam, he could manage it.

"Please." His tone was as far from pleading as it was possible to get.

"No," I told him.

There was another, longer pause.

"So how are you going to explain to your neighbors that there is a strange man sleeping on your front porch?"

He'd have done it, too-so I let him move in.

I told him that the first time he flirted with me, he'd be out on his ear. I told him that I didn't love him anymore, though it might have had more effect if I had been entirely certain of that myself. It helped that I knew that he didn't love me, hadn't loved me when he tried to elope with me when I was sixteen-and he was who-knows-how-old.

It was not really as bad as it sounded. He grew up at a time when women married much younger than sixteen. It's hard on the older werewolves to adjust to modern ways of thinking.

I wish I could hold it against him, though. It would help me keep in mind that he still only wanted me for what I could give him: children who lived.

Werewolves are made, not born. To become a werewolf, you need to survive an attack so vicious that you nearly die-which allows the werewolf's magic to defeat your immune system. Many, many of the werewolf's kin who try to become werewolves themselves die in the attempt. Samuel had outlived all of his wives and children. Those children of his who had attempted to become werewolf had all died.