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four-letter-laced vocabulary seldom did. But he didn’t let me pull his face up so I could see it.
    “Where are you hit?”
    “Tranq. Arse.” That one wasn’t as clear, but I could understand him and assumed the last word was a location and not an epithet, though with Ben it was a risky call.
    “No. Not the tranq.” A tranquillizer dart wouldn’t have left him bleeding this much later. “Someone shot you, Ben. Where?”
    Jesse aimed the flashlight. “Leg,” she said. “Just above his right knee.”
    He wouldn’t let me go, so Jesse sliced through the fabric of Ben’s khakis with the box cutter. Gabriel took the flashlight and got a good look at the wound.
    “In and out,” he said, sounding calm, though his face paled and took on a greenish tinge.
    It hadn’t healed, so either whoever had shot him was using silver bullets—or the silver in the tranquilizer mixture was slowing his healing. Whichever way, we needed to get the bleeding stopped.
    “Telfa pad,” I told Jesse. “It’s important not to use anything that might stick on the wounds.” Ben’s skin could grow over it if he started to heal as fast as he should be healing. “Then gauze, then vet wrap. We’ll pack up, go to Samuel’s, and hope that he’s home.”
    Samuel Cornick, who was both a doctor and a werewolf, would know best what to do for Ben. He wasn’t answering his phone, either, so he’d probably gotten the message from Bran. He also wasn’t pack. There was a good chance that he’d been overlooked when they, whoever “they” were, had gathered up the rest of the wolves. I hoped desperately that he’d been overlooked.
    I needed to get Ben to Samuel, then I needed to get help—which hopefully would also be accomplished at Samuel’s. I needed to find Adam, the pack, check on the other wolves who hadn’t been at Thanksgiving—and make sure that no one else had been taken or hurt, like Warren’s boyfriend or Mary Jo’s fellow firefighters.
    If our enemies had known to find Mary Jo and Warren, then they knew more than they should about who was a werewolf and who was not. If they were humans—and Ben would have told me if he’d noticed that they were anything else—and they were willing to kidnap damn near thirty wolves, then they were either crazy, planning on killing everyone all at once, or at least armed and very, very dangerous. And they might be feds, despite Ben’s recollection of Adam accusing them of lying.
    “Can you stand?” I asked Ben, when Jesse had finished making a pretty good job of the bandage.
    He grunted.
    “We’ve got to get out of here. If they knew enough to get Warren and Mary Jo, we’ve got to assume they know about this place.”
    “Danger,” he said, sounding bad again. “In danger. You.” That thought seemed to inspire him because with a sound that was more wolfish than human, he stood up, then sort of sagged until he was draped over me.
    “It’s not the leg,” he said, overenunciating a little. “It’s the drug. Weak. Weak. Weak.” He was tensing up, his eyes bright gold with the wolf’s drive to protect itself. No predator likes to be weakened and vulnerable.
    “It’s all right,” I told him firmly, because it was important that he believe me. If he didn’t, he’d get aggressive, and we would have even more trouble. “You are among friends. Gabriel, grab the keys to the Mercedes parked in the garage and help me get Ben to the car.”
    Marsilia’s dark blue Mercedes, an S 65 AMG, was parked inside my garage lest anyone walk by the parking lot and decide to key the paint or toss a rock. It was three months old, here to get its first oil change, and I could have bought a second shop for less than its sticker price.
    “The AMG?” Gabriel said, though he retrieved the keys as he spoke. “You’re going to let Ben bleed all over a Mercedes AMG?”
    “He’s already bleeding all over a Mercedes,” Jesse said dryly. Then she turned to me. “Wait a minute. The AMG? That AMG?