She gave first me, then Warren, for whom she’d always had a soft spot, a savage smile. “Yes, boss,” she said.

Me. I thought hard at Adam—and I knew he heard me. Pick me. If everyone who goes is going to die anyway, why not pick me?

I need you to survive, he answered me without speaking, without looking at me. I need to know you survive.

I need you to survive, too, I thought, but I tried not to send it to him. There was a faint chance he’d listen—and what if one werewolf instead of a coyote made a difference? What if I was the reason he died? So I kept silent.

“I’m sorry,” said Christy suddenly, before Adam could name anyone else.

Adam gave her a tender look that she didn’t deserve. God help us and keep us from receiving what we deserve—it was a favorite saying of my foster father, Bryan.

“It’s not your fault, Christy,” Adam said. “It is just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

She got up from the couch where she was sitting next to Auriele. “No. Not that, Adam. I’m sorry that I wasn’t strong enough to live your life. I left you—you would never have left me.” She looked at me and looked away. The tears on her face weren’t crocodile tears, they were the real, unattractive thing complete with runny nose. She still was beautiful. “I’m glad I left, for your sake. You found someone who can stand beside you. I couldn’t live with what you are, but that’s my problem, not yours.” She looked down, then straight into his eyes. “I love you.”

If she hadn’t done that last part, I would have kissed her—figuratively speaking—and cried friends. There are some things that honest, honorable people don’t do to the people they love. They don’t propose marriage on TV. They don’t bring home small cuddly animals without checking with their spouses first. And they don’t tell their ex-husband they love him in front of a crowd that includes their daughter and his current wife right before he goes off to almost certain death. It didn’t help that most of us could tell that she wasn’t lying.

Adam said, “Thank you.” As if she’d given him a great gift. But he didn’t tell her what, exactly, he was thanking her for.

She caught the ambiguity. She gave him a rueful smile and sat down. Auriele hugged her fiercely.

I pulled my legs up and wrapped my arms around them.

Maybe they won’t die, I thought. Maybe something Gary does keeps them from dying.

All this time, since the first time he kissed me, I’d been worried about growing old, about leaving Adam alone. And it turned out that it was going to be the other way around.

“Paul,” Adam said. Paul’s name wasn’t a surprise, not like Honey’s.

Paul nodded, looked at Warren, shook his head, and said, “Yes, boss,” with graveyard humor. Paul had tried to kill Warren once because Warren was the wolf just above him in rank and because Warren was g*y. Now he was going out to a battle that Adam didn’t think they would come back from, and he, like Honey, was telling Warren that he had his back. People can change.

“George.”

“Yes, boss,” said the quiet policeman.

Maybe I should have kept the walking stick. It had worked against a vampire, against the river devil—surely the river devil had been as powerful—more powerful with its ability to remake the world—and it had been the walking stick that had brought it down.

“Mary Jo?” he asked.

“Fighting fires is what I do,” she told him. “Yes, boss.”

Mary Jo loved my mate, too. She’d protect him if she could. I was glad that she was going. My grief was so huge that I had no room for jealousy.

The walking stick … was made of wood and silver, and no matter how magical it was, wood was wood. I had no doubt that someone could throw it into a campfire and it would emerge unscathed, but a campfire was not a volcano. If the walking stick could do some great magic that would kill a fire elemental like Guayota, Coyote would have told me. I was pretty sure Coyote would have told me.

“Alec?” I didn’t know Alec as well as I did some of the other wolves. He was a friend of Paul’s, and Paul didn’t like me much.

Maybe Coyote would have told me if the walking stick could kill Guayota. He’d told me that mortal means could not harm the tibicenas when in their tibicena form. Did he mean that the walking stick might?

“Yes, boss.”

I was pretty sure that the walking stick had served Coyote’s purpose by showing me what lay within the tibicenas. If it would have been effective against them, he’d have told me—or couched it in some kind of riddle that I’d still be puzzling out when one of the tibicenas killed me.

“That’s enough,” said Adam. “If Ariana has more magic when she has dealt with us, then I will call for more volunteers.”

Because of her fear of the wolves, Ariana worked with them one at a time, in the kitchen. I thought Samuel was going to go with her, but he came and sat next to me instead.

“We don’t have any idea on how to kill this thing,” Samuel said. “Ariana tells me that as far as she knows, the only way to kill a primitive elemental like Guayota would be to destroy his volcano, and even then, he would not die for centuries.”

“El Teide is the third highest volcano in the world,” I told him, pressing my cheekbone into my knees. The burn reminded me that turning to my other cheek would have been smarter. “I think it’s a little beyond our capabilities. Killing the tibicenas, his two giant dogs, might do it. But you can only kill their mortal forms, when they look like mostly normal dogs instead of polar-bear-sized monsters. I suspect they are not going to be fighting werewolves in their mortal forms.”

“Ariana would come with us,” he told me, “but she doesn’t have the power she once had, not even a tenth of it. And fire-dogs are too close to her nightmares; there is no guarantee that she wouldn’t do as much damage to us as she would to Guayota and his beasts.”

“I’d come with you,” I said, “but Adam doesn’t want me to die, and for some reason, he seems to think that’s his decision to make.”

Samuel hugged me. “Don’t mourn us until we’re dead,” he said.

“I’ll spit on your graves,” I told him, and he laughed, the bastard.

“Nice,” said Adam, crouching in front of me. “I had to watch you go up against the river devil.”

“That sucked, too,” I told him without looking up from my knees. “But we had a plan that we thought might work.”

“Based on a story,” he said roughly. “It wasn’t a plan; it was a suicide mission.”

I looked up and met his eyes. I didn’t say, So is this. He knew it; it was in his eyes.

“Honey has made her suite available to us,” he said. “Will you come?”

I unlocked my fingers from around my legs and rose out of Samuel’s embrace and went into Adam’s.

“Yes, please,” I whispered.

No one in the room spoke, but they watched us leave, knowing where we were going, and I didn’t care.

Honey’s suite was a bedroom, office, and bathroom, all done in shades of cool gray. It surprised me until I remembered that this had been Peter’s room, too. The gray suited the man he’d been.

We didn’t speak. All of the words had already been said. When he stripped my clothes off me, I noticed that Honey kept her house a little cooler than ours because I was cold—or maybe that was just fear.

Naked, I took off Adam’s clothes and folded them as I set them down, as if taking care with his clothing might show him how much I longed to take care of him. Unusually, his body was slow to awaken, and so was mine—but that was okay because this was about saying good-bye. About impregnating my skin with his scent so that I would have him with me after he was gone. About remembering exactly—exactly—what the soft skin just to the side of his hip bone felt like under my fingertips and under my lips. It was about love and loss and the unbearable knowledge that this could be the last time. Was probably the last time.

I could feel Ariana’s magic on him, and I hoped that it would be enough to keep him safe.

He lay on his back on Honey’s bed and pulled me on top of him as he’d done the first time we’d made love. He let me touch him until his body was shuddering, and sweat rose on his forehead. He pulled my face up to his and kissed me tenderly despite the speed of his pulse.

“My turn,” he whispered. I nodded, and he rolled me beneath him and returned the favor, seeking out his favorite places and the ones where I was most sensitive. He brought me to climax, then lay with his head on my stomach, his arms around me, catching his breath before he started to build the pace again.

We ended as we’d begun, with me on him, watching his face as I moved on him and he in me. The expressions he wore told me to speed up or slow down until his bright yellow eyes opened wide, and he grabbed my hips and helped me take us both where we were going.

I lay down on him and put my face in his neck, and if I cried, I didn’t show him my tears. He ran his hands up and down my back until I could pretend I hadn’t been crying.

“I suck at this,” I told him. “I suck at words when they count.”

He smiled at me. “I know.”

“I understand,” I told him. “I understand why you have to go and why I have to stay. I think that you are doing the right thing, the only thing you can do. I wish…” My stomach hurt and it would have been kindness to put me out of my misery, but I wasn’t going to share that with Adam.

I know, he said.

“You weren’t supposed to get that,” I told him.

“I know that, too,” he said, his voice tender. “You should know that you can’t hide things from me.”

“Good,” I said, my voice fierce. “Good. Then you know, you know I love you.”

We showered the sweat off our bodies in Honey’s shower, wordless. His hands were warm, and he was patient with my need to touch and touch. I wished futilely that this time would last forever, but eventually he turned off the water and we dressed.