Smoke Bitten

by Patricia Briggs

  One of Adam’s arms wrapped around her waist, holding her to him, his hand flat against the small of her back.

  He liked to hold me like that, protective and possessive.

  His other hand cupped her face, then threaded through her long silky hair on its fatal journey to the back of her head.

  As his fingers tightened, her eyes, which had been closed to savor his kiss, flashed open and comprehension slid across her face. In that second, when she knew she was going to die, magic slid from her mouth and into his.

  Her magic carried her voice, her words, into him. You are the monster you think yourself to be.

  He broke her neck, stepping away from her, allowing her body to fall away. But he put distance between them too late. Her death-gift sank into him, disappearing beneath his skin as he looked up and fell into parade rest.

  Waiting, I remembered, for my judgment. I reached out for him and the scene faded away. My fingers brushed the stage and it altered under my touch, becoming the stump of a tree that some giant saw had cut more or less flat. The wood bit my finger and a drop of blood welled and landed on the stump.

  This was my otherness, formed of things I knew. My stomach tight, I looked at the wolf and asked, “Was that something I saw, but didn’t—” That night had been one horror after another, I’d been so tired by that point. “—didn’t pay attention to?”

  It is what was, the wolf said, seeming a little less substantial than he had before.

  He said, He was lost in that moment, for he believed the truth of her words before she gave them to him. His voice faded, growing softer. Twice born those words, his and then hers. So they took hold in his belief and made it true.

  I walked around the tree stump and knelt beside him. He was smaller now, the size of a German shepherd maybe.

  “What’s happening to you?” I asked.

  He is becoming, answered the wolf tiredly. I am unmaking.

  I pulled another gemstone out of my mouth. This one was an amethyst about the size of a marble, uncut and rough-sided. I took it and spoke to it, too. When I was finished, I held it out to the wolf, who eyed it.

  What do you have for me? he asked.

  “It won’t work if I tell you,” I said, following my instincts. “Eat it.”

  He opened his mouth and consumed the purple stone. I waited, but there seemed to be no effect for good or ill. Maybe it would take time—real time, not otherness time.

  He was no bigger. He didn’t move his body, had not moved anything but his head the whole time we’d been here.

  But his voice was steady when he asked, What did you do to the bond?

  I looked at the bond then. The tie that bound me to Adam was now the same color and texture as the scabby red skin that covered Adam’s monstrous form. I touched it and the skin-like surface was rough under my fingertips. My wounded finger left a thin trail of blood behind that melted into the bond, which did not change again. Blood is one of those things, like words, that have unexpected power. The bond was ugly, but it did not look fragile.

  “Well,” I told him, “I didn’t blow it up.” I’d intended the pearl to blow it up until that last second before it touched the bond. I didn’t want to lose Adam, and I wasn’t willing to risk breaking our bond—and the pearl had looked so hopeful.

  “But maybe,” I said, “I instilled a little common sense and logic into the situation.”

  What words did the pearl hold? he asked.

  I took a breath and the otherworld faded to nothing. I was back in the auto bay with Adam and a gun that was moving quickly toward his head.

  “You are mine,” I told him, using the same words I’d given the pearl. “I can’t stop you from using that gun. But you know what?”

  I was so angry at him. As if the whole time I’d been in that otherness, anger had been filling the real me from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head and it was spilling out my mouth—as that pearl had done.

  “It doesn’t matter if you live or die—you are still mine,” I bit out. “Alpha werewolf, nightmare creature—I don’t care. But don’t you forget who I am. You gave yourself to me, and now you can’t get away.” I took a step closer to him and jutted out my chin. “You die, and I will drag your butt back from the afterlife kicking and screaming. But let me tell you, mister. If you are dead, you’ll just have to watch us get hurt—without being able to do a damn thing about it. Because you will be dead and helpless and I won’t let you go. And. Every.” I pointed my finger at him, stabbing him with it figuratively the way I was tempted to do it literally. “Single. Day. I will say, ‘I told you that you would regret pulling that trigger, you bastard. I told you so.’”

  I was shaking with rage when I finished saying the words I had sent inside our bond with the pearl. How dare he? How dare he try to kill himself?

  He’d lowered the gun at some point during my speech. There was an odd expression on his face.

  “Bastard,” I said again, though I had intended to stop after I told him the words I’d sealed into that pearl.

  But the single word didn’t provide any relief for what I felt. I stomped my foot like a two-year-old. My eyes burned and tears formed . . . tears of something huge, bigger than grief, bigger than rage, and they burned down my face.

  “Go talk to Bran, you said.” I was enraged at the thought. He’d given me words like a pat on the head—something to make him feel as though he weren’t leaving me alone. “Fuck that. You just try to leave me, you bastard, see how far that gets you—” I might have devolved into incoherence after that.

  Adam put the gun slowly down on the counter. He tried to uncock it, but his oversized hands equipped with oversized claws apparently weren’t up to that, so he pointed the muzzle away from us both. I realized (and this didn’t lessen my anger one iota) that if I’d listened to him and replaced the gun in the safe with a 1911 instead of the Redhawk, he wouldn’t have been able to even try to kill himself with it because it would have been too small.

  The gun safely dealt with (as safely as a loaded and cocked gun could be dealt with, anyway), Adam started walking toward me. He did it slowly, cautiously, as if he were afraid of me.

  Or more probably, under the circumstances, because he was worried that his unusual form might scare me—or revolt me as it evidently did him.

  Slowly he wrapped those too-long arms around me and hauled me to him, lifting me so my face could press against his neck. I was still yelling at him.

  “Shhhh,” he said. “Sorry. You’re right. Of course you’re right.”

  “I’ll monster you,” I growled.

  “Of course you will,” he soothed. But there was something in his voice.

  I was so mad I wouldn’t have been surprised if I gave him steam burns. “Are you laughing at me?”

  “Maybe—” he began, and then choked. His arms jerked convulsively.

  He set me down on my own feet abruptly. Took a step back and then dropped to the concrete on his hands and knees. He didn’t make any noise as he transformed from monster to human, but it was so fast it must have hurt. Under other circumstances, the popping and crunching sounds of bones doing something that bones aren’t really designed to do might have made me feel sorry for him. Made me worry for him. But I was still too . . . too something.

  He wasn’t dying—anything else he did was his own problem.

  I stalked to the gun, uncocked it, and put it back in the safe. I closed the safe door and stalked back past him and into the bathroom. I shut the door behind me and grabbed a washcloth to wipe my eyes and stopped when I saw myself in the mirror.

  Holy cow.

  My usually brown skin was blanched until it looked green. The two black eyes that had been oncoming after the accident were definitely bruised, and my nose was swollen with a trickle of blood dried on my upper lip. There was another bruise along the cheek next to the w
hite scar that usually looked sort of like war paint. But now that I looked like an extra from The Walking Dead, it just completed the effect.

  “I see your monster,” I muttered, turning on the water. “And raise you another one.” I leaned closer to the mirror. “Brainssss.”

  As I held the washcloth under the flow, I tipped my chin to see if I looked better from another angle. Huh. There was a bruise and a friction burn on my neck where the seat belt caught me before it let me go too soon. I pulled back my shirt and . . . wowza.

  I’d been in worse wrecks—and I’d been hurt worse in them. But I didn’t remember looking worse after a collision. No wonder Adam had been on edge. Well, that and apparently Elizaveta had gotten him with a curse as she died.

  I didn’t know what to do about that curse. I’d bought us some more time, I thought. Bran might have an idea or two . . . but I was a little leery of contacting him after Adam’s over-the-top reaction. And Bran was weird about witchcraft. Maybe I’d call Charles; Charles had his own sort of magic.

  I put the washcloth against my eyelids—very careful of my nose—and waited for a while. When I pulled the washcloth away, my eyes were still red like I’d been wearing bad contacts for a week, but they felt better. I wiped the blood off my lip.

  I was tired of all the emotion. I didn’t want to open the door. I wanted to magically wake up tomorrow with the relationship between Adam and me reset to a normal place. My heart hurt.

  I tried to think of a logical path to get home and in bed. First step: get in the car. But Adam, assuming he was changing back to his human form, which was what it had looked like, would be naked.

  Tad had clothes here that might fit Adam, but werewolves could be funny about wearing someone else’s clothing—especially if that someone wasn’t pack. On a good day, maybe it would have worked. This day had been a whole bad year all by itself.

  Adam’s SUV would have a change of clothes. Probably not footwear, but he had made his own bed and he could lie in it.

  Second step: drive home and . . .

  I had to put the washcloth on my eyes again. My hands were still shaking. If he had pulled that trigger . . . I could have been alone again.

  Maybe ten minutes later, Adam knocked on the door. “Mercy? Are you planning on taking up residence in there?”

  “Might as well,” I bit out. “My mate is an idiot.”

  After I said it, I knew that those two things didn’t go together, except that I really had needed to say that last.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “So why don’t we go home and you can punish me by telling everyone there how you feel.”

  I froze. “We can’t do that,” I told him. “We have an invasion and a killer bunny. They need you invulnerable.”

  “God,” he said with feeling, “are they going to be disappointed if that’s what they need.”

  Then he laughed, and it sounded a little like I felt—shaky and damaged. Yes, tonight had altered the game board a little, but no one had won, yet. There was a soft thump as his forehead (I was pretty sure) hit the door.

  “Elizaveta cursed you,” I told him.

  “I know,” he admitted.

  “How long have you known?” I asked gently. He and I both knew exactly how much anger was behind my tone. I had, after all, learned that from him.

  “That is a complicated question.”

  Holding a conversation through a closed door was stupid. I wasn’t afraid of him—and if I didn’t open the door, I would never be able to go home and pull the blankets over my head. I unlocked the door and opened it.

  He was his usual gorgeous self, no monster to be seen. He was also naked as a jaybird. His unclothed and glorious body might have distracted me had he not looked at my face and winced.

  I would have liked to think that he’d flinched from my wrath. But I was pretty sure it was the damage to my face. Just as well I’d been able to hide most of the bruising on the rest of me with the shirt.

  “How complicated?” I asked.

  “The wolf knew,” he said. “But I didn’t know until he told you.”

  Just after my neighbors had died.

  “And you kept it to yourself afterward because why?” I asked—more sharply than I meant to. But we had people who could help with witch curses, Bran and Zee—we even had Wulfe. The one thing that I knew about witch curses was that ignoring them—as tonight had made obvious—didn’t make them get better.

  He looked away from me.

  I was going to tell him exactly how smart I thought that keeping this to himself had been. I opened my mouth, and hesitated. Hadn’t he . . . hadn’t we been through enough today? He was going to have to put on his clothes and go back to the pack house and pretend that everything was okay. That he was fit and ready to face off with . . . heaven help us, Fiona. And the killer bunny. And Wulfe and whatever else decided to rain down on our heads because the universe was just generous like that.

  He couldn’t afford to let anyone but me see the mess he was in. Because our pack was short of people to do the job we had to do. They were bearing up wonderfully for the most part—but the pressure wasn’t going to let up anytime soon.

  “So,” I said, to change the subject. “Why did you want to get me alone to talk to me?”

  “Because I thought you’d called Bran for advice, and he’d told you to get away from me.”

  I blinked at him, utterly flummoxed. “What?”

  He spoke more slowly. “Because I thought you’d called Bran for advice, and he’d told you to get away from me.”

  “Funny guy,” I said. “I heard you the first time. I just never thought that you would utter such absolute . . . drivel.”

  “It seemed logical at the time,” he said.

  “Huh,” I growled at him. “What in the world makes you think that even if Bran told me to leave you, that that would be something I would ever do?”

  And that started the waterworks again. I hated to cry—in this case it felt manipulative, as if I were punishing him somehow—when that was the furthest thing from my mind at the moment. I wiped my eyes with the bottom of my shirt—and caught my nose.

  “Damn it,” I growled, batting away his hands.

  “I’m cursed,” he said mildly. “It interferes with my thinking. Stop that. You’re hurting yourself.”

  Both were true. I stopped trying to wipe my eyes with my shirt and used my hands instead.

  I wasn’t going to cut him any slack on his muddled thinking, curse or no curse. He thought I was going to tell him I was leaving him. And then I put it together with his actions tonight.

  “So your thinking was that I was going to tell you I was leaving you—so you were going to kill yourself and save me the trouble?”

  His face went still. Then he said, “It sounds so stupid when you say it that way.”

  “Good,” I snapped. I started to pinch my nose—Bran style—and Adam caught my hand.

  He kissed my knuckles (which was pretty brave when he knew how much I wanted to hurt him) and folded my hand in his. “Don’t do that,” he said. “You’ll hurt yourself again.” He sighed. “I think I’ve done enough of that today.”

  It echoed my earlier thought about him, that he’d been through enough today. I took a deep breath.

  “This is maybe not the best time to hash this out,” I said.

  “Agreed,” he said, his voice heartfelt. “What did you want to talk to me about? Or is that another minefield?”

  It took me a moment to remember.

  I held up a finger. “Bran thinks that we, that you, need to kill Fiona at first opportunity.”

  “Fiona?” he said blankly, as if he’d forgotten who she was.

  “Fiona,” I said. “Apparently she went rogue a while ago. Started selling her skills to whoever paid her. Bran thought that she died in a deal gone bad while she was wor
king with some witches. You should maybe call Bran and talk to him about her.” He wasn’t taking my calls. “Bran has decided what we need to do with our invading wolves. Harolford is on the kill list, but less urgently so. Kent Schwabe is a question mark, but he’d like us to save Chen and the Palsics.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” he told me.

  He was still naked. It was distracting me—though I didn’t think he knew that yet.

  I held up a second finger. “He told me that we should talk to Underhill about the smoke weaver.”

  Adam’s eyebrow raised. “And that is a revelation how?”

  “He told me to ask her about the bargain Underhill has with him or that she had with him. He told me to bribe her with something sweet that I’ve cooked myself. And he told me to approach her like we have a common problem and not like she released someone who killed innocents and now holds two people I care about in his thrall.”

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s useful.”

  I held up a third finger. “And he told me that if you kept shutting me out, I should blow up our mating bond.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He hung up and won’t answer my calls,” I said. “I have no idea what he meant. Just what he said.”

  “You did something to our bond, though,” he said slowly, and I felt a faint pull on the bond, a softening that, after a moment, stiffened back to where it had been.

  “I didn’t blow it up,” I told him.

  I decided not to tell him exactly what I had done.

  I’d been influenced by the pack bonds and hadn’t enjoyed the experience. Let him think that it was just me yelling at him that had made him put down the gun.

  He didn’t need to know that I’d sent those words through our mating bond in a pearl before I’d given them out loud. Maybe yelling alone would have worked. It would have if he’d been in a normal headspace—but if he’d been in a normal headspace, he wouldn’t have been trying to kill himself. I was hoping that the words I’d given him would linger. That they would keep him from doing anything rash until we had a chance to talk to someone.