The long way took me past the turn to Stefan’s house. I had decided that Adam could talk to Stefan. I slowed the car, giving it a bit more gas when it stuttered. I needed to do some fine adjustments still.

Without letting myself think too much, I turned the car and drove to Stefan’s house. I pulled into the driveway and parked next to the dust-covered VW bus that had been painted to match the Scooby-Doo Mystery Machine.

I got out of the Jetta but couldn’t make myself go to the house. Instead I wandered around the bus. Life-sized and stuffed, Scooby watched me sadly from the front passenger seat. His coat was getting sun faded.

Stefan opened his front door and walked out, stopping well clear of me, but close enough to engage. He didn’t say anything.

“Shame to let it sit there,” I said finally, not looking at him. “I’ve spent a lot of hours keeping her running. If you leave her there, she’s going to need rebuilding again.”

“I need to drain the gas tank and refill it before I drive it again,” he said. “I confess, the prospect is a little daunting.”

“Call Dale and have him tow it to the garage,” I suggested. Dale was one of the towing guys we both knew. One of the perks of driving old cars is getting to know towing guys. “You might air up the tires first, though; the right front tire is a little low.”

“And having you fix her is messy, too,” Stefan said. “If I pay you, Marsilia might take it into her head that you should be punished for charging me money. If I don’t pay you, I’m telling her that I consider myself a part of her seethe again—which I do not. I’m an ally, certainly. But never again will I owe her fealty.”

Marsilia ruled the vampires in the Tri-Cities. We had a long-standing agreement that I would provide whatever maintenance her cars needed and she would keep her vampires from attacking me. She had destroyed Stefan, who had been her loyal wingman, for her own needs. If that had been the extent of it, I thought Stefan would have forgiven her for that. But to do it, she’d gone after the people Stefan kept in his household to feed upon, his sheep. Most vampires would not have cared, but Stefan believed in taking care and responsibility for his people.

I pursed my lips, took a deep breath, and turned to face him. “How about an exchange of favors?” I proposed. “I came here for information—and I am happy to fix the Mystery Machine to get it.”

“What do you need?” he asked.

The yard light did a decent job of illuminating Stefan. He looked good. Back to his usual self, even. He was tall and lean, but not skinny now. And he looked entirely human again, something in the way he balanced on his feet and the energy with which he moved. For a while he’d moved more like a vampire—some of the very young or the very old have this odd jerkiness to their movements, like somewhere there might be a puppeteer making them move.

Stefan also looked like a cat contemplating a strange dog.

I laughed. “Nothing to put that look on your face. I just stopped in to ask a question. If we can turn that into an exchange that gets you out of a dilemma, that’s all the better.”

He relaxed fractionally. “What did you need to know? Or do we need privacy for it?”

“I just need to know whatever you can tell me about Frost. I don’t think that we need privacy.”

“Frost?” said Stefan. “He is dead, Mercy.” Then, very un-Stefan-like, he stumbled a little. “All the way dead, I mean.”

“I know that—I accomplished his demise,” I said, putting him out of his apparent misery. I’d have thought a vampire as old as he was would have gotten around the awkwardness of how to announce the extinction of a vampire. Maybe that awkwardness was more about what was between us, though. “Or at least I was there when Adam finished him off—but Adam wouldn’t have been there without me. However you’d prefer.”

Frost had been finished, I was pretty sure, before Adam got there to complete the business. But there was no arguing that Adam had ended Frost with absolute finality.

“But here’s the thing,” I said. “I stumbled into someone who smells a lot like Frost recently. Since it is the only identifier anyone has picked up in the whole mess, I decided it might help to get more information.”

“Today’s mystery?” asked Stefan.

And because he was a friend, and because Marsilia needed to know about the attack on Elizaveta’s family and I wasn’t about to call her, I told Stefan about my morning, stopping just after the werewolf zombie in the basement—and I tidied up the zombie wolf’s attack and end without much detail, leaving out Sherwood’s spectacular performance entirely. His secrets didn’t belong to me.

Unlike with Zee, I left out the upcoming meeting between the fae and the government. I would have been surprised if the vampires didn’t know about the meeting—the vampires had ties pretty high up in politics. But if they didn’t know, they weren’t going to learn about it from me.

I also didn’t tell him about the evidence that Elizaveta and her brood were working black magic—just as I had not told Zee. That was pack business. We paid her a retainer for her services. We had been supporting her while she tortured unwilling subjects for the power she used to aid us.

“Elizaveta’s family is gone?” he murmured.

I couldn’t tell what he felt about that.

“Yes.”

“And you and Adam were attacked by a zombie werewolf at your home and”—he did air quotes—“‘the werewolves took care of him.’”

“Not a lie,” I told him. I don’t lie very often, so I’d been very brief instead. “I can’t tell you things that aren’t mine to tell.”

He watched me for a moment, and then his face relaxed and he nodded. “Okay.” Looking away, he continued, “You could have called on me for help with the goblin.”

I knew what he meant. Just as I bore bonds to my mate and to our pack, I also had a bond to Stefan. Through it, he could control me, not just my actions, but my thoughts. He could take away my ability to make decisions for myself. All I could do was trust that he would not do that, that he would continue as he had since I’d asked for his help against another vampire.

That was why I’d been avoiding him.

He didn’t deserve my first response, so I kept my mouth shut until I could give him the real truth.

Finally I said, “I didn’t think about it. It was pack business, so I took a pair of werewolves. He was a goblin, so I called Larry.”

“Fair enough,” he acknowledged. “But it could have killed you when it came out of the barn. You are no match for a goblin. You could have called me.” And he could have come. Like his former Mistress, Marsilia, Stefan could teleport. I’d never heard of any other vampires who could do that.