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Mercedes Athena Thompson Hauptman, what are you thinking of? You can’t let Ben bleed all over
Marsilia’s
Mercedes.”
    “Marsilia the vampire queen?” Gabriel choked. “Mercy, that’s just stupid. Take my car.”
    “She’s not a queen, she’s the Mistress of the seethe,” I corrected him. “That car seats four and doesn’t scream VW mechanic on the run with wounded werewolf.” What I didn’t say, because I didn’t want to panic anyone, was that because the vampires were a lot like the CIA crossed with the Mob, the Mercedes also had bulletproof glass. More importantly, if we were really dealing with an attack by a government agency, this car was clean of tracking devices. Between me and Wulfe—the magic-using vampire who served Marsilia—all the tracking gadgets that were routinely attached to new cars all the way down to the RFID tags on the tires had been disabled.
    And right now I had bigger things to worry about than offending Marsilia, scary though she was.
    Get Ben to Samuel, who could treat what was wrong with him.
    Take Jesse and Gabriel to someplace safe.
    Find whoever had taken my mate and get him back.
    Adam’s pain was a roar in my heart, and I was going to make everyone who hurt him pay and pay.
    It was like triage. Decision one—preserve those who were safe. Decision two—retrieve the rest. Decision three—make the ones who took them regret it.
    On that thought, I ran back into the office. At Adam’s request, I’d taken to keeping my 9mm Sig in the safe. Being married to the local pack Alpha gained me some notoriety, and it made Adam feel better knowing I was armed. I shoved two spare (loaded) magazines into my purse and grabbed the extra box of silver ammunition. If I’d had a nuclear bomb, I’d have grabbed it, too—but I would make do with what I had.
    Jesse had settled in the back with Ben. Smart girl. Ben knew Gabriel well enough under normal circumstances, but Jesse smelled like Adam. Ben couldn’t sit in the front with me because the combination of drug and wound made him too volatile, and he was too strong for me to wrestle with while I was driving. Jesse had also found an old blanket to cover the seat.
    I backed the Mercedes out of the garage and waited for Gabriel to close the door and get in.
    “Your eyes are gold, Mercy,” said Gabriel as he slid into the front seat. “I didn’t know they did that.”
    Neither had I.
    Samuel lived about twenty minutes from my garage, but it felt like hours. The temptation to put my foot down on the accelerator was strong. Marsilia’s car topped out at 250 mph—I had also, at her request, taken care of the electronic governor that limited the car to more human-reflex-safe speeds. But there were a lot of cops out even at this rarefied and still-dark hour because the shopping crowds were starting to increase again. I needed to avoid getting pulled over as long as I had a man with a gunshot wound in the back seat.
    At sixty miles per hour, we purred slowly along the side of the river to Samuel’s house in Richland.
    Before I’d married Adam, Samuel had been my roommate. He still came by to visit a lot. A wolf, especially a lone wolf, needed the presence of others. Though Adam was Alpha and Samuel was very dominant, they had a cautious friendship.
    Samuel had a condo in Richland right next to the river, where land prices were at a premium. He could care less what his home looked like—he had lived with me in my elderly fourteen-by-seventy trailer for two years, more or less, without much complaint—but he loves the water. What he paid for that condo could have bought a huge house anywhere else in town.
    The complex was less than ten years old, built of stone and stucco and groomed to within an inch of its life. I parked the Mercedes in front of Samuel’s garage, left my comrades in the car, and knocked at the door.
    No one answered. I put my forehead against the cold surface of the fiberglass door and listened, but I could hear