Gary kept reacting when I claimed him as a relative. I wasn’t sure whether he was happy, unhappy, or just surprised by it. I just ignored him and continued on. “He told us that Guayota needs a connection to his home to function here. I think the dogs are that connection. Now that one of them is dead, he needs a replacement. I think the coincidence was that I came to ask you about the dogs.” Maybe, if there was some kind of deeper connection between Joel and Guayota, maybe it wasn’t such an odd thing that Joel was working with dogs. “I think, I believe, that your husband meets Guayota’s need for a descendant of the islands—and there are probably not a lot of Canary Islanders in the Tri-Cities. I think he’s taken your husband and is forcing him to become one of his tibicenas.”

She paled, pulled out her cell phone, and dialed. Instead of Joel’s voice telling her to leave a message, we all heard the recording advising her that the customer who had the number she dialed was not available. He’d either powered his cell phone off, run it out of battery, or destroyed it.

“We have told you quite a story,” I told Lucia. “I swear to you that the danger is real. If you don’t wish us to keep you safe, I understand. If you don’t believe us, that’s okay, too. But I think you need to find a safe place to be for a few days until we can destroy Guayota.”

“I’m not sure that’s possible,” Laughingdog murmured, and I kicked him under the table even though I didn’t think Lucia had heard.

She put her phone back in her purse with shaking hands. “I live in a city with werewolves and fae. How much more is it to believe in volcano gods?”

She wiped her face, and I saw that she was clearing the skin beneath her eyes. “My dogs like you.” It wasn’t as much of a non sequitur as it sounded like. “I don’t want to believe you. If I believe you, then this … thing has my husband.” She gave me a brief, tight smile, and her voice was raw. “What can I do to help him?”

“We don’t know,” Adam said. “We are working on it. First, we’d like to get you somewhere safe.”

She examined his face, then looked at me. “Okay,” she said. “Let me stop at home and put extra food out for the dogs and get a few things packed. I am going to have to be there in the morning to feed them. Even if I could find someone willing to feed the dogs—and we have a real basket case in the rehab kennel right now—I could not ask anyone to come by if something dangerous might be hunting.”

“Good enough,” said Adam.

The dogs were silent again when we stopped at Lucia and Joel’s home. She’d already gotten out of her car when Adam stopped the SUV behind her. I hopped out to make sure she didn’t go in alone, and that’s when I smelled it.

“Blood,” I said quietly to Adam, and shut the SUV door and sprinted over to Lucia.

“Hold on.” I caught her arm and stopped her about two body lengths from the front door. “Shhh.” I couldn’t hear anything, but he’d been here. Along with the blood, I could smell his magic and a faint, burnt scent like scorched hair.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” I lied, because if she was like Joel, the fact that her dogs were in trouble would mean I’d have to sit on her to keep her out. “We’re going to wait here for Adam. He’s changing, and it’ll take a while, be patient. If I’m panicking for nothing, it won’t matter, but if there’s something here, I’d rather face it with a werewolf.”

“Changing. You mean changing into a werewolf?”

“That’s right.” Only then did I realize that the reason I knew that was because of our mate bond. He hadn’t said anything to me before I sprinted to Lucia.

“If you want to, you can go wait in your car.” I didn’t think she would, but it was worth trying. In her car, she might have a chance to get away if things went south.

“Is it because your brother is Native American?” she asked.

My eyes were good in the dark, and I was looking so hard they ached, but all I saw were a few bats and a squirrel. It took a moment to realize that I really didn’t have any idea what she was talking about.

“Is what because he is Native American?” I asked.

“Sorry,” she said. “When I’m nervous I forget to say everything out loud. Is he psychic because he is Native American?”

“As far as I know, Native Americans are no more psychic than anyone else,” I told her. “My father, though, he was…” Was what? Coyote? “A bull rider in rodeos, but in his spare time he hunted”—vampires—“demons. He was something of a shaman, and some of that followed his children.”

“You don’t have visions?”

“No.” I turned into a coyote and saw ghosts.

“You speak of him in the past tense,” she said. Lucia asked questions when she was scared, I got that, I did that sometimes, too. More often I talked. Sometimes I laughed. It was better than crying, and it made me look braver than I was.

I nodded. “My father died. The bad guys got him.” Coyote lived. Coyote always lived. The human guise he’d wrapped around himself because he was bored, the man my mother had fallen in love with, he had died.

The SUV door opened, and it was too soon for it to be Adam.

“I’m taking my chances out here,” Gary Laughingdog said. “I got nothing against werewolves, but when they are changing…”

“Just as well,” I told him. “They get pretty grumpy.”

Gary lifted his head and smelled the air. He glanced at me, and I nodded, knowing he was smelling Guayota for the first time. He grimaced. “Just so you know, kid,” he said. “I usually run when the bad things start happening.”

“Me, too,” said Lucia, and Gary and I exchanged quick grins because she was lying.

The sound of the SUV’s door opening had us all turning to look.

Adam was beautiful as man and as wolf. His wolf isn’t huge, not like Samuel’s or Charles’s wolves are, but he is substantial and graceful. He flowed out of the vehicle without making a sound, a blue-gray wolf with black markings. He raised his head and looked at the house.

“Okay,” I said. “We’re going in. Adam will take the lead, then me, Lucia, and Gary will be rear guard.”

“You did hear me the first time, right?” Gary said.

“That’s why you are in the rear,” I told him. “To give us warning when the bad guys eat the rear guard.”

He laughed, then took a good look at the door and stopped. “Someone’s been inside,” he said.

Lucia had locked the door when we left for the restaurant, but that hadn’t stopped the interloper. The door had been forced, breaking the frame. Most of the damage was on the inside—apply enough inward force, and that happens.

Adam shouldered the door open and paused, then he kept going. I followed him, wishing for a gun, but I’d left my Sig Sauer in the safe at work and my .44 S&W at home. I hadn’t wanted to retrieve the Sig with all the police and Cantrip agents running around. Maybe I was going to start leaving a gun in each car, too.

Just inside the door, I understood exactly what had made Adam pause. Something had marked territory in the house. I wrinkled my nose. It wasn’t a dog. Or—and I thought about Zack’s complaint about his hotel room—a human peeing in the corner.

“If that is Guayota, I’m going to completely revise my opinion on the manners of primitive gods,” Gary whispered.

“You have heard some of the stories about Coyote, haven’t you?” I asked. True, I hadn’t heard any about him marking territory, but a lot of Coyote stories sound like something thought up in locker rooms by a bunch of horny teenage boys. I was pretty sure Coyote enjoyed those the most. Maybe they were all true.

Adam glanced back at us, and I caught the reproach. He didn’t chatter when he was scared. Adam was the man in charge. Wolf in charge. So if he wanted quiet, we’d better give it to him.

The blood smell had faded once we were in the house—so nothing had died here. I didn’t think. But the urine made it so rank—Lucia was coughing—that I couldn’t be sure.

Nothing alive in here. Tell her to get her things, and we’ll go back to the kennels. Adam’s voice slid into my head like warm honey.

I’d never told him how much I liked it, because, like telling him how sexy it was when he did sit-ups when I could see his bare stomach, it could never be unsaid. He had enough power over me already. He didn’t need to know how weak I was.

I love it when you talk this way to me, too, Adam told me.

“Adam says that whoever broke in is gone now,” I said, trying not to smile because it would be inappropriate. “We’ll have you pack something, then check on the dogs.” I didn’t tell her what I was afraid we’d find in the kennels. Free to run, they might have stood a chance against what I’d faced in my garage. But they hadn’t been free to run. “Where is your bedroom?”

“Second door on the left,” she said.

The door was closed, and I opened it because it was less likely to take damage if it was me than if it was Adam. Werewolves break things like doorknobs. As soon as I opened it, the smell of urine and musk quadrupled. I glanced inside. It looked as though a giant dog had torn the room to bits, piled everything up in the middle of the bed, and peed all over it. Which might have been exactly what happened.

I shut the door quickly. “Belay that plan,” I said. “We’ll find you some clothes at Honey’s.”

It’s not fun watching someone’s life get ripped to bits. Lucia didn’t ask what I’d seen in the room—her nose, human as it was, could smell it, too. She just raised her chin and turned around.

Gary kept his eyes down, careful not to make eye contact with me or Adam, and led the way back through the house. I wondered what I would have seen in his eyes if he’d let me look. Because he wouldn’t have hidden his eyes just to avoid offending someone; coyotes don’t run that way.