"Maybe I wasn't," I agreed. "Or maybe you didn't used to try to order me around. I'm not a member of your pack or Bran's pack. I'm not a werewolf. You have no right to dictate to me as if I were."
He grunted, and we drove a while more in silence.
Finally, he said, "Have you had lunch?"
I shook my head. "I thought I'd stop in Sandpoint. It's grown since last time I drove through there."
"Tourists," said Samuel in disgust. "Every year there are more and more people." I wondered if he was remembering what it had been like when he'd first been there.
We stopped and got enough fried chicken to feed a Little League team-or two werewolves, with a little left over for me. Adam ate again with restrained ferocity. Healing was energy-draining work, and he needed all the protein he could get.
When he was finished, and we were back on the road, with Samuel once again in the front, I finally asked, "What happened the night you were attacked? I know you've told Bran and probably Samuel, too, already-but I'd like to know."
Adam wiped his fingers carefully on the damp towelette that had come with our chicken-apparently he didn't think it was finger-lick'n good. "I'd pulled the pack in to introduce Mac, and to tell them about your adventures with his captors."
I nodded.
"About fifteen minutes after the last of them left, about three-thirty in the morning, someone knocked on the door. Mac had just managed to regain his human form, and he jumped up to answer the door." There was a pause, and I adjusted the rearview mirror so I could see Adam's face, but I couldn't read his expression.
"I was in the kitchen, so I don't know exactly what happened, but from the sounds, I'd say they shot him as soon as he opened the door."
"Which was stupid," commented Samuel. "They'd know you had to hear the shots-even a tranq gun makes a pretty good pop."
Adam started to shrug-then stopped with a pained expression. "Damned if-excuse me, Mercedes-I'll be darned if I know what they were thinking."
"They didn't kill him on purpose, did they?" I said. I'd been thinking, too. A gun with silver bullets is a much more certain thing than a dart full of experimental drugs.
"I don't think so," Samuel agreed. "It looked like a massive allergic reaction to the silver."
"There was silver in the dart Mercedes found? Just like Charles thought?" asked Adam.
"Yes," said Samuel. "I've sent the dart off to the lab along with a sample of Mac's blood for proper analysis, but it looks to me as though they combined silver nitrate with DMSO and Special K."
"What?" I asked.
"Special K is Ketamine," Adam said. "It's been used as a recreational drug for a while, but it started out as an animal tranquilizer. It doesn't work on werewolves. Silver nitrate is used to develop film. What's DMSO?"
"Silver nitrate is a convenient way to get silver in a solution," Samuel said. "It's used to treat eye infections, too-though I wouldn't recommend it for a werewolf."
"I've never heard of a werewolf with an eye infection," I said, though I understood his point.
He smiled at me, but continued to talk to Adam. "DMSO-Dimeythyl Sulfoxide. It has a lot of odd properties, but the one of most interest here is that it can carry other drugs with it across membranes."
I stared at the road ahead of me and put my right hand in front of the heater to warm it. The seals on my windows needed replacing, and the heater wasn't keeping up with the Montana air. Funny, I didn't remember being cold on the way over. No room for simple discomfort when you are trying to save someone, I guess.
"There was something in chem lab my freshman year," I said. "We mixed it with peppermint oil and put a finger in it-I could taste peppermint."
"Right," said Samuel. "That's the stuff. So take DMSO and mix it with a silver solution, and presto, the silver is carried throughout the werewolf's body, poisoning as it goes so that the tranquilizer, in this case, Ketamine, goes to work without interference from the werewolf metabolism that would normally prevent the drug from having any effect at all."
"You think Mac died from the silver rather than an overdose of Ketamine?" asked Adam. "They only shot him twice. I took at least four hits, maybe more."
"The more recent exposure you have to silver, the worse the reaction," said Samuel. "I'd guess that if the boy hadn't spent the last few months in their tender care being dosed up with silver, he'd have made it just fine."
"Obviously the silver nitrate and the Ketamine are relatively easily obtainable," Adam said after a while. "What about this DMSO?"
"I could get it. Good stuff is available by prescription-I'd bet you could buy it at any veterinary supply, too."
"So they'd need a doctor?" I asked.
But Samuel shook his head. "Not for the veterinary supply. And I'd expect you could get it fairly easily from a pharmacy, too. It's not one of the drugs they'd track carefully. I'd expect they could make as much of their cocktail as they wanted to without much trouble."
"Great." Adam closed his eyes, possibly envisioning an invading army armed with tranquilizer dart guns.
"So they killed Mac," I said when it became apparent that Adam wasn't going to continue. "Then what happened?"
"I came charging out of the kitchen like an idiot, and they darted me, too." Adam shook his head. "I've grown used to being damn near bulletproof-served me right. Whatever they gave me knocked me for a loop, and when I woke up, I was locked up, wrist and ankle in cuffs. Not that I was in any shape to do anything. I was so groggy I could barely move my head."
"Did you see who they were?" I asked. "I know one of them was the human who accompanied the werewolf I killed at the garage. I smelled him in Jesse's room."
Adam shifted on the bench seat, pulling a little against the seat belt.
"Adam." Samuel's voice was quiet but forceful.
Adam nodded and relaxed a little, stretching out his neck to release the build-up of tension. "Thank you. It's harder when I'm angry. Yes, I knew one of them, Mercedes. Do you know how I became a werewolf?"
The question seemed to come from left field-but Adam always had a reason for everything he said. "Only that it was during Vietnam," I answered. "You were Special Forces."
"Right," he agreed. "Long-range recon. They sent me and five other men to take out a particularly nasty warlord-an assassination trip. We'd done it before."
"The warlord was a werewolf?" I asked.
He laughed without humor. "Slaughtered us. It was one of his own people who killed him, while he was eating poor old McCue." He shut his eyes, and whispered, "I can still hear him scream."
We waited, Samuel and I, and after a moment Adam continued. "All the warlord's people ran and left us alone. At a guess they weren't certain he was really dead, even after he'd been beheaded. After a while-a long while, though I didn't realize that until later-I found I could move. Everyone was dead except Spec 4 Christiansen and me. We leaned on each other and got out of there somehow, hurt badly enough that they sent us home: Christiansen was a short-timer, anyway, and I guess they thought I was mostly crazy-raving about wolves. They shipped us out of there fast enough that none of the docs commented about how quickly we were recovering."
"Are you all right?" asked Samuel.
Adam shivered and pulled the blankets closer around himself. "Sorry. I don't talk about this often. It's harder than I expected. Anyway, one of my army buddies who'd come back to the States a few months earlier heard I was home and came to see me. We got drunk-or at least I tried. I'd just started noticing that it took an awful lot of whiskey to do anything, but it loosened me up enough that I told him about the werewolf.
"Thank goodness I did because he believed me. He called in a relative and between them they persuaded me that I was going to grow furry and kill something the next full moon. They pulled me into their pack and kept everyone safe until I had enough control to do it myself."
"And the other man who was wounded?" I asked.
"Christiansen?" He nodded. "My friends found him. It should have been in time, but he'd come home to find that his wife had taken up with another man. He walked into his house and found his bags packed and his wife and her lover waiting with the divorce papers."
"What happened?" asked Samuel.
"He tore them to pieces." His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. "Even in that first month, if you get angry enough, it is possible to Change."
"I know," I told him.
He gave me a jerky nod. "Anyway, they managed to persuade him to stay with a pack, who taught him what he needed to know to survive. But as far as I know he never did join a pack officially-he's lived all these years as a lone wolf."
A lone wolf is a male who either declines to join a pack or cannot find a pack who will take him in. The females, I might add, are not allowed that option. Werewolves have not yet joined the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first, as far as women are concerned. It's a good thing I'm not a werewolf-or maybe it is a pity. Someone needs to wake them up.
"Christiansen was one of the wolves who came to your house?" I asked.
He nodded. "I didn't hear him or see him-he stayed away from me-but I could smell him. There were several humans and three or four wolves."
"You killed two," I told him. "I killed a third." I tried to remember what I'd smelled in his house, but I had only been tracking Jesse. There had been so many of Adam's pack in the house, and I only knew some of them by name. "I'd know the man, the human, who confronted Mac and me earlier that night, but no one else for certain."
"I'm pretty sure they intended I stay out until they'd done whatever they came for, but their whole plan was a botch job," Adam said. "First, they killed Mac. Obviously, from their attempt to take him at your shop, they wanted him, but I don't think they meant to kill him in my house."
"They left him on my doorstep," I said.
"Did they?" Adam frowned. "A warning?" I could see him roll the thought around and he came up with the same message I had. "Stay out of our business, and you won't end up dead."
"Quick thinking for the disposal of a body they didn't know they were going to have," I commented. "Someone drove to my house to dump his body and was gone when I came outside. They left some people at your house who took off hell-bent-for-leather, probably with Jesse. I made it to your house in time to kill the last werewolf you were fighting." I tried to think about what time that was. "Four-thirty in the morning or thereabouts, is my best guess."
Adam rubbed his forehead.
Samuel said, "So they shot Mac, shot Adam, then waited around until Mac died. They dropped the body at your house-then Adam woke up, and they grabbed Jesse and ran, leaving three werewolves behind to do something-kill Adam? But then why take Jesse? Presumably they weren't supposed to just die."
"The first wolf I fought was really new," I said slowly. "If they were all that way, they might have just gotten carried away, and the others fled because they couldn't calm them down."
"Christiansen isn't new," said Adam.
"One of the wolves was a woman," I told him. "The one I killed was a buff color-almost like Leah but darker. The other was a more standard color, grays and white. I don't remember any markings."
"Christiansen is red-gold," Adam said.
"So did they come to kidnap Jesse in the first place or was her kidnapping the result of someone trying to make the best of a screwup?"
"Jesse." Adam sounded hoarse, and when I glanced back at him I could see that he hadn't heard Samuel's question. "I woke up because Jesse screamed. I remember now."
"I found a pair of broken handcuffs on the floor of your living room." I slowed the van so I didn't tailgate an RV that was creeping up the side of the mountain we were climbing. I didn't have to slow down much. "Silver wrist cuffs-and the floor was littered with glass, dead werewolves, and furniture. I expect the ankle cuffs were around there somewhere." I thought of something. "Maybe they just came to get Mac and maybe punish Adam for taking him in?"
Samuel shook his head. "Mercy, you they might leave warnings for-or try to teach a lesson. A pack of newbie werewolves-especially if they're headed by an experienced wolf-is not going to tick off an Alpha just to 'punish' him for interfering in their business. In the first place, there's no better way I can think of to get the Marrok ticked off. In the second place there's Adam himself. He's not just the Columbia Basin Alpha, he's damn near the strongest Alpha in the US, present company excluded, of course."
Adam grunted, unimpressed with Samuel's assessment. "We don't have enough information to make an educated guess at what they wanted. Mac's dead, either accidentally or on purpose. They half killed me, and they took Jesse. The human you knew implies that it has something to do with Mac's story-and Christiansen's presence implies it has something to do with me. I'll be darned if I know what Mac and I have in common."
"Mercy," said Samuel.
"I forgot to tell you that I joined the secret society of villains while I was away," I told Samuel, exasperated. "I am now trying to put together a harem of studly, muscle-bound werewolves. Please. Remember, I didn't know Mac until he dropped in my lap sometime after the villains screwed up his life."
Samuel, having successfully baited me, reached over and patted my leg.
I just happened to glance at Adam's face, and I saw his eyes lighten from chocolate to amber as his gaze narrowed on Samuel's hand before I had to return my eyes to the road to make sure the RV ahead of me hadn't slowed down again. There were four cars trailing slowly behind us up the mountain.
"Don't touch her," whispered Adam. There was a shadow of threat in his voice, and he must have heard it, too, because he added, "Please."
The last word stopped the nasty comment I'd readied because I remembered that Adam was still hurt, still struggling to control his wolf, and the conversation we'd been having hadn't been designed to calm him.
But it wasn't my temper I should have been worried about.
Samuel's hand turned until his fingers spanned the top of my thigh, and he squeezed. It wasn't hard enough to hurt. I'm not certain Adam would have even noticed except that Samuel accompanied it by a throaty half growl of challenge.