Darryl kept his face up and expressionless, but there were a few drops of perspiration on the mahogany skin of his forehead. Chinese and African blood ran in his veins and combined in a rather awesome mixture of color and feature. By day he was a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; the rest of the time he was Adam's second.
Next to Darryl, Ben looked as pale as his hair and almost fragile - though that was deceptive because he was tough as nails. Like Honey, he'd been gazing at the floor, but just after he'd dropped to the floor, he looked up and gave me a rather frantic look that I had no idea how to interpret.
Ben had fled England to Adam's pack to avoid questioning in a brutal multiple rape case. I was pretty sure he was innocent...but it says something about Ben that he'd have been my first suspect also.
"Daddy, leave Gabriel alone," said Jesse with a shadow of her usual spirit.
But neither Adam nor Gabriel paid attention to her protest.
"If I knew who they were and where to find them, sir, I wouldn't be here now," Gabriel said in a grim voice that made him sound thirty. "I'd have dropped Jesse off with you and gone after them."
Gabriel had grown up the oldest male in a house that had more than a passing acquaintance with abject poverty. It had made him driven, hardworking, and mature for his age. If I thought him reckless for going out with Jesse, I thought Jesse very wise for choosing him.
"Are you all right, Jesse?" I asked, my own voice more of a growl than I'd planned.
She looked up with a gasp. Then jumped up from her seat, where she'd been trying not to lean too close to Gabriel and give her father a target for his anger. She ran to me, burying her face in my shoulder.
Adam turned to look at us. Being a little better versed in prudence than Gabriel (even if I used it only when it suited me), I dropped my gaze to Jesse's hair almost immediately, but I'd seen enough. His eyes blazed just this side of change, icy yellow, pale like the winter morning sun. White and red lines alternated on his wide cheekbones from the force he was using to clench his jaws.
If a news camera ever captured a shot of him looking like this, it would ruin all the spin-doctoring the werewolves had been doing over the last year. No one would ever mistake Adam in such a fury for anything except a very, very dangerous monster.
He wasn't just angry. I'm not sure there is an English word for just how much rage was in his face.
"You have to stop him," Jesse murmured as quietly as she could in my ear. "He'll kill them."
I could have told her that she couldn't whisper quietly enough that her father wouldn't hear, not when he was in the same room with us.
"You protect them!" he roared in outrage and I saw what little humanity he was clinging to disappear into the anger of the beast. If he hadn't been as dominant, if he hadn't been Alpha, I'm not sure he wouldn't have already changed. As it was, I could see the lines of his face begin to lose their solidity.
That's all we needed.
"No, no, no," Jesse chanted into my shoulder, her whole frame shaking. "They'll kill him if he hurts someone. He can't...he can't..."
I don't know what my mother intended when she sent me to be fostered with the werewolves on the advice of a cherished great-uncle who was a werewolf. I don't know that I could have given away my child to strangers. But I'm not a teenage single parent working a minimum wage job who'd discovered her baby could change into a coyote pup. It had worked out for me - at least as well as most people's childhoods. And it had left me with a certain skill for managing enraged werewolves, which was a good thing, my foster father had told me often enough, since I sure had a talent for enraging them.
Still, it was easier to deal with them when I wasn't what had set them off. The first step was to get their attention.
"That's enough," I said in firm, quiet tones that carried right over the top of Jesse's voice. I didn't need her warning to know that she was right. Adam would hunt down and kill whoever did this to his daughter, and damned be the consequences. And the damned consequences would be fatal to him, and maybe to every werewolf anywhere.
I raised my eyes to meet Adam's fierce gaze and continued more sharply. "Don't you think you've done enough to her? What are you thinking? How long has she been here and no one has cleaned her wounds? Shame on you."
Guilt is a wonderful and powerful thing.
Then I turned, hauling Jesse, who stumbled in surprise, over to the stairs. If Darryl hadn't been in the room, I couldn't have left Gabriel. But Darryl was smart, Adam's second, and I knew he'd keep the boy out of the line of fire.
Besides, I didn't think Adam would stay in the living room for very long.
We made it only about three steps before I felt Adam's hot breath on the back of my neck. He didn't say anything, just stalked us all the way up to the upstairs bathroom. There seemed to be about a hundred steps more than the last time I'd come up here. Anything feels longer when you have a werewolf behind you.
I sat Jesse down on the closed lid of the toilet and glanced back at Adam. "Go get me a washcloth."
He stood in the doorway for a moment, then turned and punched the door frame, which buckled. Maybe I should have said "please." I gave a worried glance upward, but other than a little plaster dust, the ceiling seemed unaffected.
Adam stared intently at the splinters that were splattered with blood from his split knuckles, though I don't think he really saw the damage he'd done.