Tarnished by Rhiannon Held Page B

out the window, a smile banishing her residual frown. “Please don’t explode,” she said.
    Susan blinked. “What?”
    “There’s something you’re pent up about. I can smell it a mile away. Was there something you wanted to ask me?” Silver smoothed some flyaway strands of her fine hair down to her head, then gave Susan her full attention.
    “Have you ever killed anyone?” Susan blurted it out and immediately regretted it. If the werewolves were that dangerous, pissing one off with rude questions was a bad idea. But no matter how she tried to think of predators, she couldn’t reconcile the idea of a secret society of stone-cold killers with Tracy’s delight in modeling shows. “I don’t mean— But you talked about them killing me, and you’re the only one who seems halfway … well, someone I could ask—”
    “Halfway safe?” Silver smiled as she interrupted and saved Susan from digging herself deeper. She didn’t seem offended. “You’ll find many Were will automatically consider you weak too. I make it a policy to take the assumption and use it against them. You might want to do the same.” She looked out the window. “As to your question—yes and no.”
    Susan swallowed convulsively, trying to imagine how one could only sort of kill someone. Fortunately, Silver continued before she had time to come up with anything graphic. “The man who did this to me.” She took the wrist of her bad arm and laid it over her lap. In the uncertain light, the raised texture of the scars extending upward from the elbow showed better than the color. “Poured the fire into my blood and killed all my pack. Dare and I killed him together when he returned for me.”
    Susan picked a side street and pulled over in front of a house. Only the upstairs lights were on at this time of night. She shoved the car into park and allowed herself two breaths of openly staring at the scars. The scars themselves didn’t look so bad, but the limp stillness of the arm itself was upsetting on a subconscious level. “You’re serious?” she demanded. “This is how Weres—Were?—live?”
    “No more than most humans live that way.” Silver scooted in her seat and tucked one leg up. Despite the relaxed position, Susan got the sense that she wasn’t entirely comfortable talking about that incident. “If not for the monster, I wouldn’t have killed anyone. Dare would, but that’s his job. To do that kind of thing so others can keep their hands clean.”
    “So is he the one—”
    Silver growled and took Susan’s chin in a strong grip. “No one is planning to kill you at the moment, I swear upon the Lady. Dare has too much honor for it. If someone else tries, defend yourself. I’ll show you how. You have no wild self for me to see the sharpness of her teeth or strength of her jaw, but humans have that spark. They just keep it somewhere hidden.” Silver released Susan’s chin and tapped a fingertip somewhere around her solar plexus. “But I think Death sees it. He hasn’t said I should stop wasting my time on you, which is telling.”
    Susan choked a little. “Death?” Half of that hadn’t made any sense, and she was starting to doubt her choice of source for Were information. Wild self? Was this werewolf stuff, or was this Silver?
    Silver looked away as if embarrassed. “Death walks with me. We were lonely, he and I. Me without my wild self, and Death without the Lady. You don’t need to worry. He doesn’t deal with humans.”
    Susan turned off the engine to avoid wasting fuel and turned on the dome light to supplement the watery orange glow of the streetlight down the street. Crazy or not, this woman was offering to protect her—teach her to protect herself, even. Teach a man to fish and all that. Something in Susan’s gut-level read of Silver told her to accept. All right, then. Fair enough. The first thing to do seemed to be to start collecting information.
    Susan tried to formulate her next question. What Silver