Iron Kissed (Mercy Thompson #3)(27)
Author: Patricia Briggs

He wasn’t just angry. I’m not sure there is an English word for just how much rage was in his face.

"You have to stop him," Jesse murmured as quietly as she could in my ear. "He’ll kill them."

I could have told her that she couldn’t whisper quietly enough that her father wouldn’t hear, not when he was in the same room with us.

"You protect them!" he roared in outrage and I saw what little humanity he was clinging to disappear into the anger of the beast. If he hadn’t been as dominant, if he hadn’t been Alpha, I’m not sure he wouldn’t have already changed. As it was, I could see the lines of his face begin to lose their solidity.

That’s all we needed.

"No, no, no," Jesse chanted into my shoulder, her whole frame shaking. "They’ll kill him if he hurts someone. He can’t…he can’t…"

I don’t know what my mother intended when she sent me to be fostered with the werewolves on the advice of a cherished great-uncle who was a werewolf. I don’t know that I could have given away my child to strangers. But I’m not a teenage single parent working a minimum wage job who’d discovered her baby could change into a coyote pup. It had worked out for me – at least as well as most people’s childhoods. And it had left me with a certain skill for managing enraged werewolves, which was a good thing, my foster father had told me often enough, since I sure had a talent for enraging them.

Still, it was easier to deal with them when I wasn’t what had set them off. The first step was to get their attention.

"That’s enough," I said in firm, quiet tones that carried right over the top of Jesse’s voice. I didn’t need her warning to know that she was right. Adam would hunt down and kill whoever did this to his daughter, and damned be the consequences. And the damned consequences would be fatal to him, and maybe to every werewolf anywhere.

I raised my eyes to meet Adam’s fierce gaze and continued more sharply. "Don’t you think you’ve done enough to her? What are you thinking? How long has she been here and no one has cleaned her wounds? Shame on you."

Guilt is a wonderful and powerful thing.

Then I turned, hauling Jesse, who stumbled in surprise, over to the stairs. If Darryl hadn’t been in the room, I couldn’t have left Gabriel. But Darryl was smart, Adam’s second, and I knew he’d keep the boy out of the line of fire.

Besides, I didn’t think Adam would stay in the living room for very long.

We made it only about three steps before I felt Adam’s hot breath on the back of my neck. He didn’t say anything, just stalked us all the way up to the upstairs bathroom. There seemed to be about a hundred steps more than the last time I’d come up here. Anything feels longer when you have a werewolf behind you.

I sat Jesse down on the closed lid of the toilet and glanced back at Adam. "Go get me a washcloth."

He stood in the doorway for a moment, then turned and punched the door frame, which buckled. Maybe I should have said "please." I gave a worried glance upward, but other than a little plaster dust, the ceiling seemed unaffected.

Adam stared intently at the splinters that were splattered with blood from his split knuckles, though I don’t think he really saw the damage he’d done.

I had to bite my lip to keep from saying something sarcastic like "Now that was helpful" or "Trying to keep the local carpenters in work?" When I get scared, my tongue gets sharp – which is not an asset around werewolves. Especially werewolves who are mad enough to take out doorways.

Jesse and I both waited, frozen, then he screamed, a sound more howl than human, and he hit the door frame again, and this time he took out the whole wall, his fist pushing through the remnants of the frame, the next two wall studs, and all the drywall between.

I risked a glance behind me. Jesse was so scared I could see the whites all the way around her eyes. I suspect she could have seen mine if she were looking at me instead of her father.

"Talk about overprotective fathers," I said in a suitably amused tone. The lack of fear in my voice surprised me as much as anyone. Who’d have thought I was such a good actor?

Adam straightened and stared at me. I knew he wasn’t as large as he looked – he wasn’t that much taller than me – but in that hallway he was plenty big.

I met his gaze. "Could you get me a washcloth, please?" I asked as pleasantly as I could manage.

He turned on his heel and stalked silently toward his bedroom. Once he was out of sight, I realized that Darryl had followed us up the stairs. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, letting out two long breaths. I tucked my cold hands in my jeans.

"That was too damn close," he said, maybe to me, maybe to himself. But he didn’t look at me as he pushed himself upright with a shrug of his shoulders and headed back down the stairs, taking them two at a time in a manner more common among high school boys than doctors of physics.

When I turned back to Jesse, she held a gray washcloth to me with a shaking hand.

"Hide that," I said. "Or he’ll think I sent him away just to get rid of him."

She laughed, as I’d meant her to. It was wobbly, and stopped abruptly when a cut broke open on her lip. But it was a laugh. She’d be all right.

Because I didn’t really care if he knew I’d sent him on a useless errand, I took the washcloth and used it to thoroughly clean the scrape on her shoulder. There was another road rash on her back just above the waistline of her jeans.

"You want to tell me what happened?" I asked, rinsing the washcloth to get rid of the gravel on it.

"It was dumb."

I raised an eyebrow. "What? You thought you’d add some more color to your complexion so you punched yourself a couple of times and then skidded on the pavement?"

She rolled her eyes, so I guess I wasn’t as funny as all that. "No. I was at Tumbleweed with some friends. Dad brought me over and dropped me off. I was supposed to get a ride back, but there were too many kids to fit in Kayla’s car when we got to the parking lot. I’d forgotten my cell phone at home, so I started walking back to find a place to call."

She stopped talking. I handed her the washcloth so she could do her own face. "I’ve been running cold water over it; it should feel okay on your bruises. I think your dad will feel better if you get cleaned up a bit. You’ll look pretty bad tomorrow, but most of the bruising won’t show for a couple hours yet."

She looked in the mirror and gave a gasp of dismay that reassured me that most of the damage was surface. She hopped off the toilet and opened the medicine cabinet and pulled out makeup remover.

"I can’t believe Gabriel saw me looking like this," she muttered, dismayed, as she scrubbed at the mascara on her cheeks. "I look like a freak."