Page 20 of Winter Lost

I sighed, then turned my attention to the problem at hand.

“Mary Jo,” I said. “Tell me about Renny.”

“He’s going to die if he keeps hanging around with me—and now he thinks we should get married,” she said, a growl in her voice. She must have heard it, too, because she took a calming breath, and when she continued, she sounded steadier. “I never minded not having children—I didn’t want them in the first place. But Renny should have, I don’t know, twenty kids. He volunteers for Big Brothers and for the Special Olympics. He teaches tae kwon do for kids at the Martin Luther King Center.”

I was not surprised.

“You told him no,” I said.

She nodded, looked away from me, then after a moment wiped her eyes. When she looked back at me, those wet eyes were also yellow.

“I love him,” she said. “Who wouldn’t? Of course I told him no. It was the right thing to do. It was. And now I can’t sleep or eat.”

That was bad. Werewolves need to eat. I gave a quick thought to her behavior since I’d come into the room and rapidly replaced “ticked off at a dunk in the outhouse and a little drunk” with “sleepless sad werewolf who had too much to drink without eating properly,” and I shoved her bowl of stew at her.

“Eat that right now,” I said in the voice of authority that I no longer always had to borrow from Adam.

She gave me a startled, uncomprehending look—as if I’d responded in Cornish or Mandarin or something. I gave the bowl another push.

“Eat.”

I waited until she’d taken a couple of bites, then asked her, “How long since you turned down Renny?”

“A couple of days,” she said, and from the way she said it, I thought she could probably have given me the hours and minutes.

She settled down to eat in earnest. I ate mine, too. It was good stew, and after I’ve been terrorized, I’m usually hungry.

Two days. She knew better than to let her wolf starve for two days, especially when the full moon was so recent. She was lucky she hadn’t gone after one of her own team or the boy who’d fallen into the outhouse.

She needed more calories than she’d find in a single bowl of stew, no matter how filling. “Stay there,” I told her. “I’m going out for more food.”

I got up and opened the door to find Uncle Mike standing there like the Addams Family butler, with another, larger bowl of stew and a sliced loaf of bread with butter on the side.

I did not squeak in surprise.

Uncle Mike smiled, amused. “Any good tavern keeper knows when his guests are hungry.” Which was his version of “You rang?”

I took the tray from him and wondered how much else he could tell about his guests. I swallowed my discomfort. “I appreciate the food,” I said, which was not quite a thank-you.

He glanced at the table and said, “Drink the rest of that glass, Mercy.”

“Yessir,” I said dryly.

Unbothered by my sarcasm, he nodded. I backed into the room, shutting the door between us and the green man. I put the food on the table, took Mary Jo’s empty bowl, and set it on the tray and the tray on the floor because there was no room for it on the table.

“Renny asked you to marry him, and you broke up with him instead,” I said.

I picked up the glass and drank some more of Uncle Mike’s magic-spiked cider. More of my headache slid away, allowing some of the tension in my shoulders to release, too.

“I told him we were done.” Mary Jo looked miserable even as she dug into the larger bowl.

There were other humans in our pack, mates of werewolves. But they predated our ascent—or descent, depending upon your view—into our current job of being the protectors of the Tri-Cities. Mary Jo had been absolutely right that anyone associated with our pack had a target painted on their back. We’d been able to safeguard our vulnerable members, but none of the humans currently in our pack were adrenaline junkies like Renny. His job required the willingness to run toward danger when everyone with a lick of common sense would run away. He wasn’t going to stand back and let the werewolves keep him safe.

My phone rang and, distracted by Mary Jo, I picked it up.

“This is Mercy,” I said.

A soft dark laugh rang in my ear.