“I’m headed off with Tony for a bit. Don’t burn down the garage or run off the customers while I’m gone.”
Tad glanced from Tony’s face to mine, and said mildly, “Is it okay if I call in a few strippers to put on a show and charge it to the garage? I’ve been thinking it might pull in some more customers.”
“Sure,” I said as I stepped out of my overalls: in the interest of time, I didn’t bother to retreat to the bathroom. I was wearing a full set of clothes underneath anyway. “Just make sure Christy makes it over in time for the show so she can tell the pack what kind of place I run here. Oh, and tell her I took off with a hot-looking man.”
He grimaced. “Yeah, sorry about that.”
She’d called yesterday, and, knowing how I felt about her, Tad had told her that I’d gone out for a run. Tad doesn’t usually lie, though since he is only half-fae, he can, and he is a fair hand at misdirection. I had been in the garage bay, and he’d answered my cell in the office, where I’d left it.
Next thing I know, I was getting a call from Adam, who was mad because he thought that I had been running without protection. Grocery stores and other public places were unlikely spots for kidnapping the Alpha’s wife. Running I had to do with company for safety’s sake. I regretted it, but I understood the necessity.
I’d explained that Tad had been mistaken when he talked to Christy. I took the blame for it—thus putting myself firmly in the wrong. The pack figuratively—maybe literally, for all I know—patted Christy on the head for being so worried about my well-being.
“Not your fault,” I told Tad—Christy would have found something else to make me look bad anyway. “Though this time you might mention that the handsome man is an armed police officer who will keep me safe as a fox in a henhouse.”
Tad gave me a mock salute while I followed Tony out.
“Trouble?” Tony asked.
“Adam’s ex-wife has a stalker, so she is living with us until we can figure out what to do about him,” I told him as matter-of-factly as I could manage.
He stopped and looked at me, and finally lost the odd distance I’d sensed—as if I’d been a stranger he’d been sent to fetch. Maybe he was worried that Ihadhad a hand in Gary Laughingdog’s escape.
“Adam’s ex-wife is living with you?” he asked incredulously.
“Her stalker is dangerous,” I told him. “We are pretty sure he killed a man and burned down the building her condo was in. Until someone can find him and arrest him, Christy is staying with us because even a violent man might hesitate to face off with a pack of werewolves.”
I had added the “arrest him” part because it sounded good. I was pretty sure at this point that any arrest would be postmortem. Maybe it had been a mistake because something in the last sentence put the distance right back between us.
“I can see that,” he said, and continued walking to his car.
I followed and, when he opened the passenger door for me, I got in. We sat in front of the garage for a minute, and I waited for him to ask me about Gary Laughingdog’s escape from prison.
“I saw what you became,” he said instead. “Over at Kyle Brooks’s house, when the body that was in the trunk of the car broke out, and you and Adam tried to chase it down.”
I looked at him. Yep. That cat was out of the bag for sure. I’d changed into my coyote shape to go chase after a zombie and had forgotten about all the people watching. Tony hadn’t been the only one who’d gotten an eyeful. I’d grown used to having more people know what I was and hadn’t even thought about what I was doing and who I was doing it in front of.
In most ways, it wouldn’t matter if I shouted out that I was a coyote shapeshifter, a walker, to the whole world. I wasn’t alone anymore. In other ways, though, it was possibly disastrous. If the public realized that the fae and the werewolves were just the top of the anthill of Other that lived hidden among the human population, it could be bad. Bad for humans and bad for everyone else, too.
“Yes?” I said. It was a question because we weren’t sitting in the car just so I could confess to being a coyote shapeshifter.
“I asked Gabriel about it.”
Gabriel had been my right hand in the garage before he went to college, and Tony had been infatuated with Gabriel’s mother for as long as I’d known him.
“He told me something about what you are.” Tony met my eyes. “You aren’t human.”
“No,” I agreed slowly. “Not completely.”
He huffed an unhappy breath. “If there was someone in the pack murdering humans, would you cover for him?”
I sucked in a breath. “You have a body?”
“You didn’t answer the question.” His reply had answered mine, though.
“If we had someone going around killing people for the fun of it,” I said, “I’d tell Adam.”
“And what would Adam do?”
