Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson #5)(47)
Author: Patricia Briggs

Her eyes veiled as she considered what I said.

"All right," she said after a minute. "Point to you. First problem – you let Adam rot for two years after he claimed you as his mate. And during that two years our pack fell apart because Adam could barely keep himself calm – and was nearly useless at helping anyone else keep their wolf in check."

"Agreed," I said. "But I have to point out in my defense that Adam never asked me if I wanted to be his mate during that time – or before he declared it in front of the pack. He never asked me either before or after. I wasn’t a pack member – and his declaration was to keep the rest of the wolves away – so I didn’t even find out about this until well after it happened. Even then, no one told me the consequences until just a few months ago, and as soon as I figured out what was happening to the pack and to Adam because of that claim, I made a decision."

"How kind of you," she snapped, her eyes brightening with temper. "To become Adam’s mate for the pack’s sake."

"Point to me," I told her calmly. "The choice I made had nothing to do with the problems in the pack – all Adam needed was an answer, and ‘no’ would have worked just as well to set the pack back in order. I agreed because . . . because he’s Adam." Mine, whispered a voice in my head, but I was pretty sure that it was my own voice.

"Second problem," she said between gritted teeth. "It was your invitation to the stray that led to Adam being almost killed and Jesse kidnapped."

"Nope." I shook my head. "You can’t lay that one on me. That was werewolf business from beginning to end. I got involved because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. No more, no less. Point to me."

"I disagree," she said. She was standing in the classic "at ease" position, I noticed, like a soldier. I wondered if it was something Adam taught them while he had them in training because, to my knowledge, Mary Jo had never been in the military.

"Fine," I said, shrugging. "It’s a free country. You can feel as you wish."

"You can’t deny who nearly got our third killed when the demon came to town, you and your connection to the vampires," she said.

Her voice was cool, her heartbeat steady. Warren wasn’t important to her; Ben had been right. She hadn’t even called him by name because she felt the rank was more valuable than the man.

"Once it was known that there was a demon in town, it was inevitable that the wolves would have to go after it," I told her. "And you could care less about Warren, so don’t pretend you were concerned about him."

That had her head up and her eyes on me. She actually looked a little worried. She had been trying to pretend that she wasn’t one of the wolves that Warren bothered.

"Warren is worth ten of you," I told her. "He’s here when he’s needed, and he doesn’t do his best to undermine Adam whenever his orders are inconvenient." I waved off her impending argument because I was saving the discussions of her more recent activities until later, when I’d broken her down enough to answer my questions. "Back to business. What else?"

"It’s your fault I died," she said. "Poor Alec – when he tore my jugular he didn’t know what hit him. None of us did. The vampires targeted us because of you."

The vampires had set a trap at Uncle Mike’s, the local tavern where the fae and assorted other supernatural people went to relax. They’d laid a spell that drove anything with ties to wolves to bloodshed. Mary Jo’s bad luck that she and two other werewolves – Paul and Alec – had gone there on the wrong night. By the time Adam and I got there, Mary Jo was dead. But apparently if you die when there is a Gray Lord present, at least when one particular Gray Lord is present, dead isn’t as permanent as it might otherwise have been.

"Point to you," I said, deliberately relaxing against the wall so she could see it didn’t bother me in the slightest. I can’t lie with my mouth, but sometimes body language does it for me. "I’d tell you that accepting the blame for the bad guys is a stupid thing to do – the proper people to blame for your almost death are the vampires. But if I hadn’t been dating Adam, they wouldn’t have targeted the wolves, so I suppose you could be justified in blaming me."

I waited for her to look up again, so I could read her face. When she looked at me, her control was back in full. There were two things that could explain her sudden dislike of me. The first one was the incident at Uncle Mike’s, but she wasn’t angry enough about it. Which left me with the second – I’d hit her with that when it would do me more good.

"But," I told her, "if I accept the blame, I’d like to point out that I’m also the reason you are still standing here. The Gray Lord healed you because she thought she owed me a favor."

She sneered. "I hope to God that someone does you that kind of favor someday. It hurt . . . It still hurts. Some days I can’t feel different body parts."

I’d known about that, and it worried me though the fae had given her word that Mary Jo would be back to normal. I expect that she’d left out the word "eventually" because Mary Jo’s suffering didn’t really matter to the fae.

"Next time, I’ll tell her not to bother bringing you back," I promised. I tapped my foot and wondered how far I really wanted to push this. Some of it depended upon what role I wanted to take in the pack. Just then I was channeling my inner Bran, using the techniques I’d grown up watching the Marrok use, techniques that came so easily to me it made me a little uncomfortable – I don’t see myself as a manipulative person. For the moment, though, I set that aside and considered the case at hand.

"Figure out the results you want and do what you can to get them" was one of Bran’s favorite sayings. Well, then, exactly what results did I want?

Part of that really depended upon how much of her recent activities were directed at me and how much at Adam. I found that I could excuse her actions against me, but I was less inclined to be forgiving about Adam.

I remembered that look she’d given me when I was sitting on the floor of the hospital with Adam changing in my lap – Adam, who’d damn near burned to death trying to rescue me because she hadn’t told him I was safe. The look that said she’d have been happier with him dead than with him on my lap.

Had that been a momentary thing, or had her anger that Adam was mine become a force driving her past the point of no return?

"Mary Jo," I said pleasantly, "you and I know all of that is garbage. It is all true, or mostly, but it isn’t why you are so angry with me."

Her chin jerked up.

"Adam is mine," I told her. "And you can’t handle it. Does it bother you that I’m a coyote? That we have sort of an extreme case of an interracial – in our case maybe even cross-species – mating? Darryl is African and Chinese, and Auriele is Hispanic, and they don’t seem to bother you." It wasn’t that I was a coyote shifter that bothered her. I knew it. I just wondered if she knew it. It did bother some of the pack; maybe Auriele and Darryl bothered some of them, too. If so, those pack members were smart enough to keep it to themselves.