Silver Borne

There might be a TV reality star somewhere who would point a gun at a cute little girl, but not while he was being filmed. The man behind him had been his cameraman—I could see the camera on the ground where it had been dropped when Heart landed on the second man with all his two-hundred-plus pounds of muscle.

If he’d come here hunting werewolves, he’d have figured out what Sam was right away. There’s a bit of wolf magic that encourages humans to see a dog instead of a wolf, but it is only a little bit of magic, and if someone is looking—they’ll see a wolf and not a dog.

So. How much to admit. I’d already paused too long to deny what Sam was. “He likes kids,” I said instead. “Gentle as a puppy.”

Sylvia had been murmuring to her kids, but her voice stopped at my words. There was a short silence, then the littlest one went off like a fire truck, a high-pitched fire truck. At a guess, Sylvia had just snatched her daughter away from the big bad wolf.

“I have a warrant for him,” continued Heart, wincing a little. I couldn’t tell if it was the volume that bothered him or the pitch, which was approaching ultrasonic.

I raised my eyebrows and indicated the gun with a jerk of my chin. “Wanted dead or alive?”

Samuel wasn’t out. And the only one I was worried about coming after Samuel would never send a bounty hunter. It would be Bran who killed him, when and if the time came. Heart’s warrant couldn’t be for Samuel.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out what werewolf people would expect to find around my place of work: Adam.

How a bounty hunter got a warrant for him, when, to my knowledge, Adam was in good standing as a law-abiding citizen, I didn’t know. I was vague on bounty-hunter lore, but I was pretty sure that they mostly hunt down people who are wanted for bail-skipping, and then the bail bondsmen pay them a percentage of the bail money they would have otherwise lost.

The Ke

“You’re mistaken,” I told Kelly Heart, Bounty Hunter, keeping my eyes on him no matter how much I wanted to look at the man who had just closed the door of his new truck. “There aren’t any werewolves around here who have a warrant out for their arrest.”

“I’m afraid you’re wrong,” Kelly told me kindly. Against my will, I was impressed by him. He was calm and cool while lying on his back like a turtle—on top of his cameraman, who was scared out of his mind and focused on the mouth of the gun I held.

Another truck door opened and closed—Adam had someone with him. The wind didn’t favor me, so I couldn’t tell who it was. And I wasn’t going to be stupid and look. Not that I really thought the bounty hunter was a threat anymore. At least, not a threat to the children behind me.

I could hear the woman in the T-shirt saying in a frantic voice, “Don’t make her shoot again, Kelly. Forty bucks. Forty bucks those cost. Each.”

“Don’t worry,” I called to her. “You can dig them out, and they’ll look just about like what they do now. You might even be able to reuse them.” Silver doesn’t deform as easily as lead, which makes it a lousy ammunition—unless you’re shooting at werewolves.

“She doesn’t seem too worried about you,” I told Kelly with mock sympathy as Adam walked toward us. “I guess silver bullets are harder to find than bounty hunters who look good in black leather.”

He smiled. “She thinks so. Look, can I get up? I promise not to try anything, but I outweigh Joe here by a hundred pounds. If I lie on him much longer, he might stop breathing.”

“Go ahead and put up the gun, Mercy,” said Adam. “Get it out of sight before the police are here. It’ll be easier that way. We might even get out of this without anyone getting arrested.”

My will broke at the sound of his voice, and my head turned with as much inevitability as a sunflower turning its face to the sun.

Adam was in a three-piece suit with a Mickey Mouse tie his daughter had bought him for Christmas—and he managed to look much, much more dangerous than the man on the ground. I’d known he would come, even after this morning’s conversation.

I’d hurt him, and still he’d come when the security cameras he had posted all over the place at my garage told him I was in trouble. I’d never doubted for a minute that he would come; Adam is staunch and true, like the tin soldier in the old children’s story. Stauncher and truer than I, who’d pushed him away to save Samuel.

“Sylvia called Tony. The police might already know about the gun.”

“Even so,” said Adam. “People make mistakes when there are guns about.”

Kelly didn’t want to take his eyes off me while I was holding a gun on him, but he was caught up in the same spell everyone in Adam’s sphere found themselves in. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the bounty hunter’s face turn to Adam, who’d come up from the side so as not to put himself in my line of fire if Kelly had popped up and started ru

“Right,” the bounty hunter said. “Just put down the gun, Ms. Thompson. As this gentleman suggests.” Maybe he thought Adam would be more reasonable than I was. Kelly Heart wouldn’t understand what the bright gold flecks in Adam’s eyes meant.

“I came here to bring in a werewolf I have a warrant for,” he told Adam, and I could tell he believed it. “I saw the werewolf with the kid and thought there would be trouble.”

He was telling the truth—he’d told the truth to me, too. I fumbled a little, putting the safety on the unfamiliar gun. With Adam here, who needed a gun?

Zee came up and held out his hand. “I’ll take it and make it disappear,” he told me.

Heart rolled off his cameraman, keeping his hands up as he eased himself to the side. He was still mostly paying attention to me, as if I were the threat and not Adam. I ratcheted my estimate of his intelligence downward.

Adam slipped on a pair of sunglasses—but he kept his gaze on the bounty hunter as Heart came to his feet. Adam took a step back when Heart offered a hand to his cameraman, and his foot crunched on something.

Adam knelt, a graceful movement, over in a moment. When he stood up, he was holding the camera.

“I’m afraid this didn’t survive the fall.”

The cameraman made a moaning sound as if someone had hit him. He snatched the camera and tucked it against his belly as if that could somehow make it better.

Adam looked at the cameraman, then beyond him to the van, where Heart’s people were frantically conferring. He glanced at Ben. When he had the other werewolf’s attention, he motioned toward the van with his chin. As simply as that, he let Ben know that he wanted him to go keep tabs on Heart’s crew. Adam didn’t leave things to chance, and he wouldn’t ignore possible hostiles on the other side of the parking lot.

“I am sorry for scaring you,” Kelly told me, sincerely. This time he was lying. “And for upsetting the children.” He wasn’t worried about that either. I wondered how many people actually believed that sincere act.

A pair of police cars, followed by Tony’s truck, pulled into the parking lot.

“No sirens,” said Adam. “Probably Tony didn’t tell them about the gun.”

Sam stepped around me, making me bump into the door. I dropped one hand and wrapped it in the ruff of his neck—no way was I stupid enough to grab his collar. My touch was a request, not an order . . . but Sam had already stopped beside me. He surveyed the approaching police from the top of the steps, a position that was higher than theirs.

Sam, Heart paid attention to. He glanced longingly at Zee—because the gun was out of sight—and took a step away from the werewolf.

“This is a misunderstanding,” he said in a voice designed to carry to the approaching police. “My fault.”

I saw the moment the first officer on the scene recognized him because his eyes rounded, and his voice was a little awed as he told the older patrolmen who followed him, “It’s all right, Holbrook, Monty. It’s Kelly Heart, the bounty hunter from TV.”