Smoke Bitten

by Patricia Briggs

  “You get hurt a lot,” he said softly.

  I couldn’t read his body language or his tone, which was unusual. But where he was standing was oddly shadowed, the strong light from the window obscuring the lower half of his face.

  “This was my choice,” I told him. “Me or Makaya. My nose or her life—it wasn’t even a difficult decision.”

  Adam grunted and disappeared into the bays, where he’d hidden the real controls to the surveillance system. Good to know that if I wanted to shut the system down, I’d have to go looking for the secondary controls . . .

  I wanted to say something more to him. Something that would feel better than that last exchange did. Still, Adam was pretty good at communication—better than I was. Maybe I just needed to give him some space. Resolutely I turned my attention to the files.

  We fixed maybe fifteen cars on a good day with all three of us working. That didn’t count the parts we sold, but it wasn’t an insurmountable number. It took me about ten minutes to find the right bill, but only because we hadn’t put the year and model of the car in the computer.

  But the notes jibed with what I remembered.

  Generator not charging, does not respond to polarizing. Recommend new generator. Customer agrees.

  The bill was complete with address and phone number. He’d paid with a credit card in the name of John Leeman, his address was out in north Richland near the Uptown Mall, an area with a lot of apartments, and looked suspiciously like the false address that had been used to register the plates on the truck. But the phone number could be useful.

  “Got it,” I said, and told Adam the date of the bill. “Time stamp on the charge is eleven twenty-eight.”

  Adam grunted.

  He sounded odd.

  “Adam?”

  “What did you want to talk to me about, Mercy? That we couldn’t talk about at home?” He was speaking so softly I could barely make out his words—and my hearing was coyote-good.

  “I have a few insights I wanted to share about the werewolves we are facing,” I told him cautiously.

  There was a long pause. I didn’t want to conduct a serious discussion with him in there and me out in the office. I set the keyboard on top of the counter and bent to heft the monitor.

  “I thought you might want to discuss last night.”

  The monitor skidded on the counter as I set it back where it belonged, so I thought I might have misheard him. “Last night?”

  Locking up Ben? But he made it sound as if something had happened that needed discussion. Something personal. Oh.

  “Are you talking about the reason you made me an apology breakfast sandwich? Thank you, by the way.” I had everything put away in the office. I could have headed into the bays to talk to him, but I hesitated, my instincts keeping me right where I was.

  “I put you in danger,” he said.

  I loved Adam and trusted him in a way I’d never trusted anyone. I had never been afraid of him. Not really. Okay. He was a werewolf—but this was different. It was the way his voice was traveling out of the darkness. My heartbeat picked up.

  “I put myself in danger,” I told him. “You certainly had nothing to do with my broken nose today.”

  He didn’t answer. Aching cold shivered through me like a blade drawn through my chest—and it wasn’t an emotion, it was my mating bond, our mating bond. I reached out for it in that place where I could see the ties that bound me.

  I understood that no one else in the pack had a place like that they could go. I supposed my place, my otherness, had something to do with the fact that the first time I beheld the pack bonds was when a fairy queen locked me into my own head while she held me imprisoned. The Marrok, possibly with the help of a rogue fae walking stick, used the bonds to locate me. In the process, he pulled me someplace where he could show me the spiritual and magical ties I bore. Over time, I had learned how to get there on my own. Mostly this otherness had a dreamlike quality in that it was changeable and responsive to my subconscious. But in some ways, it was more real than any other place I had ever been.

  The pack bonds were still there. This time there were no lights, but they were still bright-colored and festive Christmas garlands strung in all directions as if they were part of a giant spider’s web. Sometimes I perceived the wolves in the pack as rocks or bricks. Once, they were flowers, and I never did figure out why. But this time the bonds just stretched out into the darkness. If I’d needed to know which was which, I could have grabbed one and yanked on it, but for now, none of those were the bond I was looking for.

  The bond I usually tried not to pay too much attention to was there as well. Visually that one changed a lot more than the other bonds. Even so, another time it would worry me that the tie that existed between me and Stefan was a gossamer black weaving that looked as though a good wind would blow it away. Not that I enjoyed being bound to a vampire, even Stefan—but that frailty didn’t say good things about my friend and his battle with the smoke weaver.

  Sometimes the most important thing I looked for, here in the otherness, was the last thing I found. The bond between Adam and me was wrapped securely around my waist—where it burned me with its cold. The cord itself had changed from the thick red cord I’d last seen to something like a flexible cable made of ice.

  I blinked that image away and stood once more in my garage office, feeling neither enlightened nor reassured. Having our bond turn to ice, even if only in the imagery of my other place, could not possibly be a good thing.

  “Adam?” I said cautiously, not moving from where I stood behind the counter. “What are you doing to our bond? I don’t like it.”

  “You need to get out of here.”

  That wasn’t Adam. That was the wolf speaking from Adam’s throat. I heard a ripping noise.

  “Adam, are you okay?” I asked, ignoring the wolf’s advice.

  The silence was so deep that I started when Adam spoke, his voice gravelly as it sometimes got when he was changing into his wolf form. I could usually smell the magic gathering when one of the wolves was changing form—but my nose was broken. For all that Adam maintained that I wasn’t really smelling magic, that I was just interpreting it as a scent, I couldn’t tell if he was really changing or not without my nose working.

  “When you spoke to Bran, did you talk to him about me, Mercy mine?”

  That didn’t sound like any tone I’d ever heard from Adam. It didn’t sound like Adam or the wolf.

  I remembered the way Ben had sounded. Had the smoke weaver bitten Adam?

  The creature hadn’t been able to fool me for more than a few minutes when he’d been using Ben. And my instincts, which had never steered me wrong so far, told me that this had nothing to do with the smoke weaver. Stefan’s bond in my otherness, I now remembered, though I hadn’t noticed at the time, had an odd odor—just like the jackrabbit. It had smelled like the smoke weaver. Apparently even with a broken nose I could smell when I was in that other place.

  The bond between Adam and me had still smelled . . . tasted like us. This, whatever this was, was about whatever had been troubling Adam long before the smoke weaver had escaped.

  “I asked you a question,” he growled from the depths of the big space beyond the office door. “Did you go to Bran with the trouble you are having? With me?” The last was a roar that sounded more wolf than human and hurt my ears with the sudden volume.

  I didn’t answer, didn’t know how to answer.

  “Mercy?” The soft question came out singsong, emerging from the echoing bays, sounding more menacing than the blast of sound that had preceded it.

  I didn’t think that telling him yes would be smart right then. But I wouldn’t lie to him. And I didn’t think this was a conversation we should be having while I cowered behind a counter that would be no barrier against a werewolf.

  This is Adam, I reminded myself. W
hatever his troubles, whatever was happening to him, he would not hurt me if he could help it. He was in trouble and I had to help him.

  I walked to the door to the bays. Inky darkness stretched out endlessly in front of me. I can see in the dark pretty well, but my eyes were adjusted to the relative light of the office, and the bays were as dark as a cave. I reached for the lights.

  Adam said, “Don’t.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked. I couldn’t use my nose, and the sound effects of the empty bays kept me from pinpointing where Adam was.

  “You should leave,” he said, his voice gritted, almost vicious. “God damn it, Mercy.” Desperate. “Obey me for once in your life and get the fuck out of here.”

  I heard him open the under-the-counter gun safe that held a loaded gun. However cautious I was around agitated werewolves, I was absolutely certain that Adam wasn’t about to shoot me.

  I hit the light.

  10

  I expected to see Adam, gun in hand.

  I did not expect him to be eight or nine feet tall, looking like something horrible had happened to his change from human to wolf. I’d seen him in an in-between stage before, a blend between wolf and human that was oddly graceful, no matter how frightening. This wasn’t that.

  This was a monster.

  His skin was red and mottled with oversized veins standing out like tree roots on the forest floor. The only hair or fur on his body was a strip that started at the back of his neck and ended at the top of his hips. Even his pinned, oversized ears and his tail were bare.

  His hulking shoulders bulged unnaturally and supported disproportionately long arms ending in clawed hands so massive that they made the big Ruger Redhawk look like a child’s toy from a bygone era. I had no idea how he’d managed to open the gun safe with those hands.

  His torso gave a nod to a humanoid shape in that it was upright, but it was too long and bent too much, as if weighed down by those shoulders. His hips and legs were shaped more like a wolf’s and ended in paws that were two or three times the size of his own wolf’s.

  The claws on his toes scored the concrete floor. By those marks, I could track him backward to the pile of clothes, which looked as though something had exploded in them. They weren’t ripped—they were confettied—including the heavy leather combat-type boots.

  He had, I noted, taken a direct path straight to the gun safe.

  His face was a nightmare version of a werewolf’s face, like something dreamed up by a comic book illustrator who was more worried about making something look scary than how viable what he drew was.

  Adam’s massive lower jaw was undershot and more like a bulldog’s than a wolf’s, but it was wider than the upper jaw, too. The whole muzzle was too long for the width of his face.

  Werewolves have lots and lots of big sharp teeth—but Adam’s teeth now would have done credit to a T. rex. They were black and looked as though you could drop a piece of paper on one and end up with two pieces. I could see most of his teeth because his lips were pulled back in a snarl.

  But the most disturbing thing was his eyes. They were entirely human, entirely Adam’s eyes, trapped within the monster. And that was just wrong, because when a werewolf takes his wolf form, the first thing to change is his eyes.

  Ugly. He was ugly.

  I stood frozen, my hand on the light switch.

  He ducked and twisted his head impossibly and let out a sound that was part scream and part wail, impossibly high-pitched with a bass rumble that followed behind and sent my hindbrain into fits. He took an aggressive step toward me and then two slow steps backward.

  “After,” he said—and his voice was oddly clear, emerging from that mouth. Werewolves couldn’t talk in their wolf form. Like the eyes, his ability to speak just made this form more wrong. “Go to Bran. Follow his advice.”

  And my stunned brain remembered why I’d been so worried about Adam having a gun.

  I had a bare moment to figure out what to do. He was a soldier. That gun was going to go off and he would be dead. No hesitation, no fumble.

  Worse than useless to wish that I’d been clearer when I told Bran that Adam and I were having troubles. Hard to get good advice from him when he didn’t have all the information.

  Blow up the mating bond, Bran had said. Without those words, and if I hadn’t just inspected our bond, maybe I’d have tried something different. Maybe if there had been time to actually think about what to do, I’d have formed a clever plan. But all I had were my instincts. I needed time.

  I stepped back into the otherness, where such a thing might be possible. Ever since this place had proven to be useful when I was lost in Europe, I’d been practicing. It was sort of like lucid dreaming, in that I could influence, both on purpose and by accident, what I found there—though that was not to say that I was in control. In this instance, needing time, I imagined a pocket of existence where time moved while no time passed in the real world.

  As soon as I entered, I knew that I’d only been partially successful. This gift of time was not infinite. Adam’s gun was still moving and I had only bought myself a little grace to do something about it.

  I could see our bond, still frozen, though this time I could see that there were deep fractures in the structure, awaiting just one hard hit to shatter into nothingness. It made me reluctant to move for fear I would shatter it. Bran had not said “shatter” or “cut,” either, for that matter. He had told me to blow it up.

  I just needed a bomb.

  I’d been reading a lot of fairy tales since I’d put the pack in the place of peacekeeper of the Tri-Cities. Fairy tales weren’t factual, for the most part. But there was a surprising amount of information to be gleaned from them.

  Since our Underhill escapee had started killing people, I’d read and reread a few more. The last fairy tale I’d read was the Perrault story “Diamonds and Toads,” where a girl is kind to an old woman at a well, and as a consequence, beautiful and valuable items spilled from her mouth every time she talked.

  In the otherness, as in dreams, what I perceived was influenced with apparent randomness by the things that I’d been doing or thinking about.

  Blow up the bond.

  I opened my mouth and took out the golf-ball-sized pearl that emerged. It wasn’t exactly a bomb, for all that it was round. How was I going to blow up our bond with it? The pearl was luminous, the color a reminder that white was not colorlessness—in being white, the pearl reflected all colors. It struck me as something hopeful, that pearl.

  Words are powerful things.

  I don’t know where that thought came from. Maybe something I’d read, or something someone had told me. Maybe it was just a universal truth that came to me in that moment.

  I brought the pearl up to my mouth and spoke to it. Then I took it and smashed it against the icy bond that stretched from my waist into the dark mist surrounding the little clearing I stood in. When the pearl hit, the bond cracked around it like the safety glass on my Jetta. I shoved the pearl inside and folded the cracked sheet of glass back around the hole. I wrapped my hands over where I’d damaged the bond, and it re-formed beneath my skin, becoming first smooth and then so cold I had to jerk my hands away.

  What did you say?

  I looked over and saw that a wolf whose gray coat, lighter on his back and darker on his face and feet, shimmered in the odd sourceless light of the otherness. He was curled up in the hollow of a tree growing on the edge of the mist. His tail wrapped around his body and draped over the top of his nose.

  He was too small, too thin, and I’d never seen him hide from anything—but I knew him for Adam’s wolf.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him. This was my otherness and I had not summoned him—or Adam—here.

  I’ve been driven out by the monster, he said, closing his eyes and starting to fade from my sight.

 
“Wolf!” I said, desperate to keep him with me. I was deathly afraid that when he disappeared, I would never see him again.

  Do you have a question for me? he asked.

  I opened my mouth to ask him something, anything to keep him here with me. And the words that came out of my mouth were: “What did the witch do?”

  Ah, he said, lifting up his head. That is a good question.

  Between us, separating us, a stage the size of a Manhattan apartment kitchen table rose until it was waist high. Mist from the edges of the clearing drifted to the top of the table and solidified until the witch Elizaveta and Adam stood facing each other upon the stage, both naked.

  From this perspective I was struck by how perfect they both were. Her body was tall and strong with beautiful pale skin that looked very like the pearl I’d held in my hands. Her hair was long and dark. She looked like some artist’s rendition of an idealized female. And Adam . . . was Adam.

  I’d seen this scene before but not from this observation point. Standing with the mists playing about their feet, they looked like something out of a Russian fairy tale—as if they belonged together.

  Do not, warned the wolf harshly. Such thoughts have power here. We cannot afford to feed her magic with your foolish insecurities.

  Right. I cleared my mind and tried to pay attention without judgment. There was something here that I needed to know.

  The first time I’d seen this, I’d been in a position to watch Adam’s face. This time I could see Elizaveta’s as she stepped into his space, leaning her tall, naked body against his. She tilted her head and bent forward to kiss him.

  Her lips touched his—and even though I knew what had happened and why, fierce possessiveness swept through me.

  He was mine. She had no right to touch him.

  Yes, said the wolf. We were yours.

  Are mine, I thought fiercely. Are.

  I didn’t say the words aloud, and I couldn’t tell if he’d heard me.