With the intruders under control, I became aware that there were other people outside. Not customers these. They stood by a full-sized black van that managed to look wicked and elegant in a custom paint job.
There were three people - two (one man, one woman) dressed like the gunman, right down to the flowing locks, and a girl in a gray T-shirt and a headset. The van had the same yellow lettering that was on the man's jacket.
KELLY HEART, it said, I realized once I had leisure to read it, BOUNTY HUNTER. Underneath the yellow, in slightly smaller letters, it said: SATURDAYS AT 8PM CENTRAL TIME. CATCHING THE BAD GUYS, ONE AT A TIME.
"Smile," I said grimly to the people who had my back: Zee, Sylvia and her girls, and Sam. "We're on Candid Camera." Zee and Sam needed to know there were unfriendly cameras pointed at them.
"Now, just you calm down," said one of the people in black, the woman with bright yellow hair and red lipstick. As she started to talk, she began walking toward us briskly. "You'll want to put down that gun. It's just TV, lady, nothing to get excited about."
I don't take orders. Not from people invading my place. I sent a second shot into the pavement in front of her.
"Tanya, stop," shrieked the techie-girl. "Don't make her shoot again. Do you know what those silver bullets cost us?"
"You'll want to stop right there," I told them. Silver was for werewolves. They'd come hunting werewolves. "I was raised in the backwoods of Montana. I can hit a duck on the wing." Maybe. Probably. I'd never shot a duck in my life; I prefer hunting on all fours. "Where I come from, a gun is a weapon, not a TV prop, and if all the bad guys are dead, our side of the story is the only one that gets told. Don't make me decide that would be easier."
Tanya froze, and I pulled the barrel back to center on the man whose face was vaguely familiar once I knew he was a TV star. I was fighting against the growing urge just to pull the trigger and be done with it.
Coyotes, like werewolves, are territorial - and this gun-toting jerk had barged into my place as if he had every right to be here.
"Are the police on their way?" I asked Sylvia, as she hung up the phone. My voice was shaking with adrenaline and anger, but my hands were still very steady.
"He says he'll be here in five. He also said that it would be a good thing to have backup. So there will be some other police as well."
I smiled widely at the bounty hunter, showing my teeth like any good predator. "Tony is a police officer. He's known these kids since they were in diapers. He's not going to be happy with you." Tony was also hopelessly in love with Sylvia - though I didn't think she knew that.
There was a movement to my right, and I snuck a quick glance to see Zee and Gabriel coming out the garage door. They must have gone back around. Zee had a crowbar in one hand and held it like another man might hold a sword. Gabriel had -
"Zee," I squeaked. "Tell him to put the torque wrench back and grab something that won't cost me five hundred dollars if he hits someone with it."
"Won't cost five hundred," said Zee, but as I glanced over again, he nodded at the white-faced Gabriel, who looked at what he held as if he'd never seen it before. The boy slipped back into the garage as Zee said, "It wouldn't break it - you'd just have to get it recalibrated."
"We have a whole garage worth of tools - pry bars, tire irons, and even a hammer or two. There's got to be something better than my torque wrench he could have grabbed."
"Listen, lady," Kelly Heart said in a calm, soothing voice. "Let's take a deep breath and discuss this a moment. I didn't mean to scare anyone. That little girl was about to get mauled by a werewolf."
Truth.
It didn't surprise me. Talking to Zee had steadied me, and I'd had a moment or two to think.
There might be a TV reality star somewhere who would point a gun at a cute little girl, but not while he was being filmed. The man behind him had been his cameraman - I could see the camera on the ground where it had been dropped when Heart landed on the second man with all his two-hundred-plus pounds of muscle.
If he'd come here hunting werewolves, he'd have figured out what Sam was right away. There's a bit of wolf magic that encourages humans to see a dog instead of a wolf, but it is only a little bit of magic, and if someone is looking - they'll see a wolf and not a dog.
So. How much to admit. I'd already paused too long to deny what Sam was. "He likes kids," I said instead. "Gentle as a puppy."
Sylvia had been murmuring to her kids, but her voice stopped at my words. There was a short silence, then the littlest one went off like a fire truck, a high-pitched fire truck. At a guess, Sylvia had just snatched her daughter away from the big bad wolf.
"I have a warrant for him," continued Heart, wincing a little. I couldn't tell if it was the volume that bothered him or the pitch, which was approaching ultrasonic.
I raised my eyebrows and indicated the gun with a jerk of my chin. "Wanted dead or alive?"
Samuel wasn't out. And the only one I was worried about coming after Samuel would never send a bounty hunter. It would be Bran who killed him, when and if the time came. Heart's warrant couldn't be for Samuel.
It didn't take a genius to figure out what werewolf people would expect to find around my place of work: Adam.
How a bounty hunter got a warrant for him, when, to my knowledge, Adam was in good standing as a law-abiding citizen, I didn't know. I was vague on bounty-hunter lore, but I was pretty sure that they mostly hunt down people who are wanted for bail-skipping, and then the bail bondsmen pay them a percentage of the bail money they would have otherwise lost.