Bone Crossed

Adam was conducting what was rapidly developing into a full pack meeting in his living room upstairs.

He'd looked relieved when I'd excused myself to see Stefan—I thought he was worried someone would say something that might hurt my feelings. In that he underestimated the thickness of my hide. People I cared about could hurt my feelings, but almost complete strangers? I could care less about what they thought.

Wolf packs were dictatorships, but when you're dealing with a bunch of Americans brought up on the Bill of Rights, you still had to step a little carefully. New members were generally a

I'd never heard of anyone doing that. Nonwerewolf mates weren't part of the pack, not really. They had status, as the mates of wolves, but they weren't pack. Couldn't be made into pack with fifty flesh-and-blood ceremonies—the magic just wouldn't let a human in. Apparently my coyoteness was close enough to wolf that the pack magic was willing to let me in.

Probably Adam should have discussed bringing me in with the Marrok, too.

Cars were pulling up in front of the house, more of the pack. I could feel the weight of them, their unease and confusion. Anger.

I rubbed my arms nervously.

"What's wrong?" asked Stefan in a quiet, sane voice that would have reassured me more if he'd moved or opened his eyes.

"Besides Marsilia?" I asked him.

He looked at me then, his lips curving faintly. "That's enough, I suppose. But Marsilia isn't the reason this house is filling with werewolves."

I sat on the thickly carpeted basement floor and leaned my head against the bars of the cage. The door was shut and locked, the key that sometimes hung on the wall across the hallway gone. Adam would have it. It didn't matter though. I was pretty sure Stefan could leave anytime he chose—the same way he'd appeared in my living room.

"Right." I sighed. "Well that's your fault, too, I expect."

He sat up and leaned forward. "What happened?"

"When you jumped inside my head," I told him, "Adam took offense." I didn't tell him exactly how everything had played out. Prudence suggested Adam wouldn't be pleased with me if I shared pack business with a vampire. "What he did—and you'll have to ask him, I think—brought the pack down on his head."

He frowned in obvious puzzlement, then slow comprehension dawned. "I am sorry, Mercy. You weren't meant to… I didn't mean to." He turned his head away. "I'm not used to being so alone. I was dreaming, and there you were, the only one left with a tie of blood to me. I thought I dreamed that, too."

"She really had them all killed?" I whispered it, remembering some of what he'd given me while he'd been in my head. "All of your…" Sheep wasn't really PC, and I didn't want to tick him off, even if sheep is what all the vampires called the mundane humans they kept to feed off. "All of your people?"

I knew some of them, and liked one or two. For some reason, though, rather than the faces of the people I'd met living, it was the young vampire Da

Stefan gave me a sick look. "Disciplining me, she said. But I think it was revenge as much as anything. And I can feed off them from a distance. She wanted me starving when I landed at your feet."

"She wanted you to kill me."

He nodded jerkily. "That's right. And if you hadn't had half of Adam's pack at your house, I would have."

I thought of the obstinate look on his face. "I think she underestimated you," I told him.

"Did she?" He smiled, just a little, and shook his head.

I leaned my head back against the wall. "I'm…" Still angry with you didn't cover it. He was a murderer of i

"So Marsilia knows I killed Andre, and you and Wulfe covered it up?"

He shook his head. "She knows something—she didn't talk much to me. It was only me she punished, so I don't think she knows about Wulfe. And maybe not me…" He looked at me from under the cover of his bangs, which had grown in the last day—I'd heard a heavy feeding could cause that. "I got the feeling I was being punished by association. I was the seethe's contact with you. I was the reason she went to you for help and gave you permission to kill Andre's pet. I was the reason you succeeded. You are my fault."

"She's crazy."

He shook his head. "You don't know her. She's trying to do what is best for her people."

The Tri-City seethe of vampires had mostly been in the area before the towns were established. Marsilia had been sent here as punishment for sleeping around with someone else's favorite. She'd been a person of influence, so had come here with attendants—mostly, as far as I knew, Stefan, Andre—the second vampire I'd killed—and a really creepy character named Wulfe.

Wulfe, who looked like a sixteen-year-old boy, had been a witch or wizard as a human, and sometimes dressed like a medieval peasant. I supposed he could be faking it, but I suspected that he was older than Marsilia, who dated from the Renaissance, so the clothes fit.

Marsilia had been sent here to die, but she hadn't. Instead, she'd seen to it that her people survived. As civilization began to grow, life in the seethe became easier. The fight for survival mostly a thing of the past, Marsilia had settled into a decades-long period of apathy—I'd call it sulking. She had only just begun to take an interest in things going on about her, and as a result, the hierarchy of the seethe was restless. Stefan and Andre had been loyal followers, but there were a couple of other vamps who hadn't been so happy to see Marsilia up and taking charge. I'd met them: Estelle and Bernard, but I didn't know enough about vampires to figure out how much of a threat they were.

The first time I met Marsilia, I'd kind of admired her… at least until she'd enthralled Samuel. That had scared me. Samuel's the second-most-dominant wolf in North America, and she and her vampires took him… easily. That fear had grown with every meeting.

"Not to be argumentative, Stefan," I said. "But she's bug-nuts. She wanted to create another of those… those things that Andre made."

His face closed down. "You don't know what you are talking about. You have no idea what she gave up when she came here, or what she has done for us."

"Maybe not, but I met that creature, and so did you. Nothing good could ever come of making another one." Demonic possession isn't a pretty thing. I inhaled and tried to control my temper. I didn't succeed.

"But you are right. I don't know what makes her tick. I don't know you, either."

He just looked at me, expressionlessly. "You play human very well, driving around like Shaggy in your Mystery Machine. But the man I thought you were could never have killed Andre's victims like that."

"Wulfe killed them." He was making a point, not defending himself. It made me angry; he should feel the need to defend himself.

"You agreed to it. Two people who had already been victimized enough, and you two snapped their necks as if they were nothing more than chickens."

About that time he got angry, too. "I did it for you. Don't you understand? She would have destroyed you if she'd known. They were nothing, less than nothing. Street people who would have died on their own anyway. And she would have killed you!" He was on his feet when he finished.

"They were nothing? How do you know? It wasn't like you had a conversation with them." I stood up, too.