“Sounds good,” I managed. Hayne gave me a nod and turned to go. “Hayne?” I called after him. He turned back. “How do you know Kirsten?”

The guy was reasonably quick with the cheerful expressions, but the smile that spread across his face then was new and sort of mysterious. “She didn’t tell you?” he replied. “I was her first husband.”

The door clicked shut behind him before I could get my mouth closed again.

When Hayne’s footsteps had receded, I plopped down in the armchair and listened to the house. It was wonderfully quiet. I wished I had someone to ask about Hayne and Kirsten—I knew she was currently married to a guy named Paul Dickerson, a normal human who did…well, something with money. I had always sort of dismissed him as just the Darren to her Samantha, and I’d had no idea that she’d been married before. And to Hayne, who looked more than anything like a pleasant-mannered mercenary who smiled a lot. And had bite scars on both wrists.

After a few minutes, though, even the promise of good gossip couldn’t distract me, and my thoughts returned to my present situation. The library was gorgeous, but I was still irritated at being dumped in a safe room while everyone else went out and tried to stop Olivia and her partner. What could they be planning with the thing they’d stolen, the Transruah? Was I going to die? Would she just make me her slave, and I’d spend the rest of my life chained in her basement as her pet? I shuddered. That was worse than death. But Jesse would never let that happen…unless she convinced him that I was dead or something. Was it too much to hope that if she took me, he wouldn’t stop looking until he found a body?

I pulled out my phone and called Caroline on her cell phone. Obviously the bar is open late, but as the office manager Caroline works a pretty normal 9:00 to 6:00 schedule, so I figured she’d be up.

“Scarlett!” she said cheerfully. Then her voice lowered. “Will told me about Olivia and that car accident thing. I’m so sorry, babe. How are you holding up?”

This is what I love about Caroline: she’s just so warm. Everything she says, Molly might say too, but with Molly it’s like she’s testing the material, trying out a role, or trying to remember what a human should act like. Caroline is just naturally sunny and sincere. Or she’s the best actor in a town full of pretty good actors. Either way, there’s something comforting about her.

“I’m okay,” I lied. “What’s going on with the bar? Another fight?”

We chatted for a while about the latest werewolf drama, which involved two wolves getting into a brawl over something neither of them would admit to. “Eli and I have been discussing what the stupidest reason for a fight could be,” Caroline confided. “It’s hard for us”—meaning the wolves—“to get drunk, so it couldn’t be just ‘you looked at me weird’ or something. I’m thinking maybe local politics, like, school board–type stuff. Eli thinks it’s a reality TV show.”

I was enjoying the distraction, but the mention of Eli brought me back to my current situation. I wanted to ask Caroline if he’d said anything about our night together, but I couldn’t stand how stupid it sounded in my head, much less coming out of my mouth. But she picked up on my sudden silence. “Are you and Eli fighting again?” Caroline said softly.

“Fighting’s not the right word,” I said uncomfortably. I had absolutely no skill or experience at this kind of girlfriends-sharing thing. I’d been hanging out with Caroline some more, though, and was starting to get the hang of at least trying. “I just…wanted him to understand something, and he just doesn’t.”

“Let me guess,” Caroline predicted. “It has to do with Olivia.”

“Yup.”

“And him wanting to protect you.”

“Yup.” She of all people could understand: as the sigma, Caroline is the least-powerful werewolf in the LA pack, which means the rest of the wolves protect her like a baby sister. She understood the idea of being protected for what you are instead of being loved for who you are. But she didn’t pry, which is another reason I love her. “Hang in there, babe,” she said sympathetically. “It’s all gonna work out.”

It wasn’t necessarily that I believed her, but like I said, there was just something comforting about Caroline, and I suddenly felt just a little better. “Thanks, Caro.” We hung up, and I turned the phone over in my hands. It was weird, having a friend in LA who was so…normal. Of course, it was just like me that my most normal friend was a werewolf, but still, making friends with Caroline had been one of the more positive things I’d done in the last year.

In need of a new distraction, I hopped up and made for the bookshelves. I don’t know what I expected Dashiell or Beatrice to read, but the selection on the shelves was surprisingly eclectic. There were a lot of history books, but only involving events before the nineteenth century, which was when Dashiell, anyway, had been turned. Maybe reading about historical events that had happened within his lifetime pissed him off. Or maybe he figured he already knew all of it. There was plenty of fiction, both Pulitzer Prize–type literature and some mass-market thrillers. I noticed that there weren’t any horror books, which I suppose made sense for the same reasons the lack of recent history did. Also missing were romance novels and erotica, but pretty much every other genre was represented. The fiction was organized by author’s last name, I noticed, but the nonfiction was organized chronologically by subject, so a book on the Black Plague that had been written in 2003 was placed before a book about the Revolutionary War written in 1998. For a second I toyed with the idea of switching around a couple of books, just to mess with Dashiell, but I managed to resist the urge just in case Beatrice was the one who organized the reading material.