Smoke Bitten

by Patricia Briggs

  It took a lot more steps than it should have to cover the distance to him. And each step was weighty, as if I were traveling much more than the ten or twelve feet that lay between Stefan and my bed. Like dreams, the otherspace was sometimes richly symbolic and sometimes just weird. The trick was in figuring out which kind of weirdness I was dealing with.

  As I neared Stefan, the carpet vanished between one step and the next, becoming the polished concrete of my garage auto bays, complete with the scratches from Adam’s monster’s claws. My bathrobe altered to jeans and a red T-shirt that said Scooby Snacks Forever in black letters across my chest. Little black bats began at the final “r” in “Forever” and concentrated over my left shoulder so that the shoulder of the shirt and left sleeve were black.

  I didn’t own a T-shirt like that. Why my subconscious thought I should be wearing something so Stefan-like, I didn’t know.

  Stefan himself was wearing all black, like a stagehand in a play. His eyes were closed and his face was tilted toward where the bay doors would have been if they had made an appearance here, but instead it was only inky blackness—like when I met Adam’s monster. There was a distant rumble of sound, and I forced myself to quit thinking about the monster.

  Instead, I knelt beside Stefan and put my hand on his shoulder. The result was explosive.

  He went from still to full speed in the blink of an eye, rolling away from me and up and onto his feet in what was obviously some sort of martial and practiced maneuver. But once on his feet he stood swaying, his hands to his face, covering his eyes.

  “Stefan?” I asked tentatively. Because I suddenly had the worrying thought that it might not be Stefan. The smoke weaver could take his shape.

  But as soon as the worry found me, I knew that whatever shape he wore in the real world, here in my otherness, he would still be the smoke weaver. And unless I summoned him, the smoke weaver could not visit me here.

  Stefan let his hands fall to his sides and gave me a wild look. “Go,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “No,” I told him patiently without rising to my feet. “It’s okay. This is my space. You can come here because you are invited.” I indicated the coffee-colored lace bond that was tied around my right ankle and stretched to his left ankle.

  He dropped to the ground as if his knees just quit working. If he’d been human, in the real world, and had fallen like that onto my concrete floor, he’d have been in agony. But it hadn’t seemed to have hurt Stefan—maybe because I hadn’t wanted Stefan hurt.

  We sat there for a moment, about four feet apart.

  Finally, he said, in a voice filled with wonder, “It’s so quiet here.”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  His fingers played with a small place on the floor where Adam’s claws had left a stuttering arc. “Sorry,” he said, seeming to gather himself together, a mask suitable for social interaction forming on his face. “It’s been a long time since it was quiet in my head.”

  “I need you to listen to me,” I told him.

  He looked up—and there was such . . . despair in his eyes. “I killed people, Mercy,” he told me. “Innocents in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ve done it before.” He opened his arms to remind me of what he was. “But I swore that I would never do so again. And until this, I kept my vow.”

  I crawled over to him and put my hand on his jaw. “Hang on, Stefan. I promise you that there is help coming if you can just hang on.”

  He said, sadly, “I am not a hero to be holding on for one minute longer.”

  I recognized the reference, though I couldn’t remember the author—someone German, I thought.

  “I disagree,” I told him. “Just hold on, Stefan. Help is coming.”

  He shook his head. “Marsilia won’t let me die by his hand,” he told me. “But he will not let me feed. I weaken moment by moment until soon, there will be no more of me.”

  I thought about that one. Then, wordlessly, I held out my arm to him.

  Stefan bit my wrist—and I let him, just as I had let him before. The feeding wasn’t real except as dreams were real, or powerful except as dreams were powerful. He didn’t drink blood from my veins—he drank strength, conviction, and hope.

  When he had finished, he kissed my wrist, then rubbed it with his thumbs until the small wounds disappeared. He looked up. “I don’t know whether to thank you or to curse you.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “As long as you hang on.”

  Much as an actor in an artsy one-act play might have done, he lay down on the ground and faded into the darkness that now surrounded me.

  I ran my finger over the same mark on the floor that Stefan had touched, feeling the roughness against my skin. I looked around and like the spotlight that lit where I sat, the bed was illuminated. I could see my mate lying asleep, his face turned away from me. Faintly, I could see the hulking monster curled around him like a lover.

  I got up and walked through the darkness to the bed. When I finally reached it, I climbed in and wrapped my body around Adam as if I could protect him from himself.

  “Hope,” I said out loud, because I didn’t have another pearl for him. “Hope, my love.” And then I closed my eyes and slept.

  * * *

  • • •

  Adam was still asleep beside me when I woke up the next morning. He didn’t stir when I got up and hastily pulled on clothes as quietly as I could—I didn’t see my bathrobe anywhere.

  I had made it all the way to the door when Adam said, with lazy satisfaction, “You should shower, Mercy. You smell like sex.”

  “I was trying to let you sleep,” I told him, coming back to the bed.

  He smiled without opening his eyes. “Go shower. I’ll sleep until you get out.” And as I walked to the bathroom he said, “Thank you.”

  “No, sir,” I said. “Thank you.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I took breakfast—eggs and bacon and French toast—down to Ben, who was still in wolf form.

  Luke, back on guard duty, shook his head as I walked by him. “He hasn’t eaten anything since yesterday morning.”

  I frowned and approached the cage. I started to tell Ben that he needed to keep up his strength—and remembered Stefan, and what he’d said. I remembered how the last time I’d come down here, Ben had ignored me. But the time before that—when I knew it had been our Ben speaking—that time he hadn’t wanted me anywhere near him.

  Ben would be telling me to leave.

  Instead of addressing Ben, I said, conversationally, “It takes a long time to starve a werewolf to death. As they grow more desperate for food, their wolf takes over from the man. I wonder if you can hold the wild beast you will be letting loose.” I slid the plate through the long, narrow opening designed for that purpose and left Ben’s breakfast in front of him. “If you can, it will take a lot of magic. You couldn’t even hold me.”

  Ben’s wolf gave me a baleful glare—but he got up and ate the food. He ate the second plate I brought down, too. And then he curled up with his back to the room and I couldn’t help but remember how Adam’s wolf had taken the same position when I fed him the amethyst. I hadn’t seen the wolf since.

  “Hope,” I told Ben. I said it to myself, too.

  I did some laundry—the sheets and bedding had gotten oil-stained. I didn’t flinch at the knowing looks that were sent my way by everyone from Kelly to Medea. The cat might have been my imagination, but she purred from her perch on top of the warm, clean bedding. She didn’t stop even when I lifted her off so I could fold them.

  Adam worked from his office most of the morning, but he came up to the laundry room as I folded the last of the sheets.

  “Have you been getting the looks, too?” I complained.

  He laughed and took the folded sheets from me. “If you hadn’t issued your invitati
on so that the whole household overheard, you might have avoided some of this.”

  I was pretty sure if I hadn’t issued the invitation in front of the whole house, he wouldn’t have taken me up on it. I grabbed the comforter, rolled it together until it made a manageable bundle, and said, “Sure I would have.”

  He laughed again and followed me as I took the comforter back to our bedroom. “How about I take you away from all of this for an hour or so. Want to go out to lunch?”

  Get out of the house filled with werewolves with sharp ears and noses—and one werewolf trapped in a cage. I liked the hustle and bustle and organized chaos. But getting away from the pleased and knowing looks?

  “That would be amazing,” I told him.

  12

  The food at the restaurant we’d decided upon was good, but it was the river view that brought people here. We took an outside table on the deck, which hung out over the water, and we weren’t the only ones who chose to brave possible bugs for the sunshine and river-freshened air.

  The temperature had subsided as it sometimes did late in the summer. A few days ago, it had been in the triple digits, but this afternoon it was in the mideighties with a light breeze off the water. I saw a couple of people in light jackets and sweaters—ridiculous on the face of it. But the sudden drop in temperatures affected some people more than others.

  Neither Adam nor I were wearing sweaters—I was a little chilled, but werewolves don’t feel the cold as much. I’d seen them run around naked in the middle of a Montana winter without so much as a shiver. Hot weather bothered them, but not cold.

  Out in the late-summer sun, wearing a button-up shirt I’d bought him, Adam looked more relaxed than I’d seen him in a while. He also looked gaunt. He’d lost maybe ten or fifteen pounds over the last week. Werewolves need fuel for shapeshifting. I suspected that the monster needed even more fuel. Adam was eating, but he was burning it all.

  “Hey, Mercy,” said someone I didn’t know as they passed by our table on the way out. “I read about your car accident. I’m so sorry—I’ve broken my nose a couple of times. It really sucks.”

  One of the problems with being a local celebrity was that the newspaper and TV stations tended to cover any excitement. It provided an opportunity to frighten the daylights out of people, but also to do some PR. From the sounds of it, my Jetta’s fate had been used for the latter.

  “I liked that car,” I told him with a friendly smile. “I’ll be fine, but we’re having a private funeral for the car on Wednesday.”

  I’d said that last to be funny. We’d had a funeral for my old Rabbit, but the Jetta would actually just end up in my parts car graveyard without ceremony—though I might say a few words over her.

  “Good to hear,” he said, and then his partner pushed him on with a nod to us and a “Let them eat, dear” to him.

  When they left, I said, “I didn’t know the local news caught my high jinks with the car.”

  Adam grunted. “Someone interviewed the police officers and got an official version. They called us, and my office sent a press release to all the news organizations. All of which downplayed the injuries so that your car’s death was the biggest news. Kept it off the front page of the newspaper and in the last five minutes of on-air news.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Do you want me to keep you up on when you make the news?” he asked. “One of my guys in the office tracks it for me—all the reporters have his name and contact information.”

  “Like a movie star’s promotional manager,” I said, fluttering my eyelashes at him. “Assistant to Mr. Hauptman.”

  He laughed. “I’ll tell him you said so. His main job is being big and scary to reassure clients we can protect them. He seems to be enjoying schmoozing the press—it’s a different look for him. He tells me that he’s just waiting until one of them actually sees him.”

  “Butch?” I asked incredulously. “Butch is your PR guy?”

  Butch was six-eight and over three hundred pounds of ex–football player and Marine. Aided by some facial scarring, he could compete with Darryl for scary.

  “Yes.”

  “You need to get him on the air,” I said. “No one will pay attention to a few werewolves if they can follow Butch around.”

  “Do you want me to tell him to keep you updated?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know I should track that on my own, but . . .” I shrugged. “If I can get a heads-up, I won’t react to people like a goldfish.” I opened my eyes wide and made bubble-blowing motions with my mouth to illustrate my point. “It isn’t a good look for me.”

  “I have to agree,” he told me with an appreciative grin. “Especially with the tape on your nose.”

  I had forgotten all about the tape somehow between the mirror in my bathroom and the front door of the restaurant. Now I remembered. And the way the bruising on my left eye was darker and bigger than the one on my right. It gave me a lopsided appearance.

  Self-consciously, I glanced around at the tables where people were studiously not looking at us: the very handsome—if too thin—man and the lopsided woman, who had just been making goldfish faces. Maybe, if they didn’t know Adam, they would just think that slender was his normal build.

  “I think you are beautiful no matter how much tape is on your nose,” he said consolingly.

  He wasn’t lying. There was a reason why—even though he had shut down our bond; now turned into a terrifying monster instead of a beautiful, terrifying werewolf; and could be completely unreasonable at times—I loved him to bits.

  “I know a good optometrist who can help you with that,” I told him, and he smiled at me.

  “So everyone knows about the car wreck,” I said, because I couldn’t say, Let me take you to Bran and have him fix you. I wasn’t sure Bran could fix him—and I knew that he wouldn’t go as long as the smoke weaver and Fiona’s wolves were still running around.

  “Better that than everyone wondering if I beat you up,” he replied.

  “Hah,” I agreed.

  The waitress came and took our orders. She didn’t even widen her eyes at the size of Adam’s—we’d eaten here before.

  After she left, I said, “I don’t know why it’s so different eating here than it is eating on the river shore by our house.”

  “We could clear the river area and put up picnic tables down on the shore,” Adam said. “But I like it better the way it is.”

  “With weeds and rocks and mud for all the river wildlife to use,” I agreed.

  “And,” said Adam, raising his water glass to me, “here we have a chance to eat an intimate meal without the pack interrupting four times an hour.”

  “With the added benefit that neither of us has to cook,” I said lightly. How could it be an intimate lunch when Adam still had our mating bond locked down tighter than a miser’s penny jar?

  I knew about the monster he’d been hiding, and he still wouldn’t let me in.

  Conscious that we were under surveillance by the curious, we avoided talking about the smoke weaver, the intruding werewolves, or Wulfe. Instead we discussed Jesse’s plans for school and whether she should get an apartment near the campus in Richland, which would give her some independence and a lot less daily travel time.

  “Larry’s people,” said Adam, meaning the goblins, “would probably keep a close watch on her and alert us if there are any problems—as long as we pay them.”

  “We have a number of werewolves who live in Richland near the school,” I said. “That way if there was trouble, someone could get to her over there pretty darn quickly. The question is, would Jesse want to do that?”

  “Let’s see,” said Adam, and he texted her, his mouth quirked up, knowing that whatever her decision on the matter, Jesse would be excited to consider it.

  He liked making Jesse happy. I wanted him to be happy, too.

/>   “Have you thought about talking to Bran or Charles about what Elizaveta did?” I asked very quietly so no one else would hear.

  This was neither the time nor place for that question, but I was so worried about him. He stopped texting and the small smile left his face. He didn’t look at me. “I called Charles yesterday. I was going to tell you about it last night, but . . .”

  He smiled ruefully, his eyes carefully on a cormorant on the river. If he’d had good news, he’d have been looking at me.

  “Charles,” Adam continued, “told me that witchcrafted spells usually dissipate when the witch dies, which we all know already. Death curses are a lot more difficult to deal with. He’ll look into it and get back to me.”

  “Okay,” I said. I’d been hopeful that Charles would know what to do. Tonight I’d call Bran—assuming he was taking my calls again—lay everything on the table, and see what he said. Maybe he’d have more useful advice than “blow up the bond” if he knew what was really going on.

  I wasn’t sure I’d tell Adam before I called Bran. Better, maybe, in this case, to ask forgiveness than permission. I was already feeling guilty in advance because of Adam’s weird reaction to the last call I’d made to Bran—and wasn’t that interesting.

  Adam had gone back to his texting, so he didn’t see my assessing gaze. Maybe I was only feeling like this was a private, hush-hush matter because Adam was treating it that way. As if getting whammied by a scary and powerful witch was something to be ashamed of. He knew better than that. It must be something the curse was doing to him.

  An e-mail came through on my phone. I checked it—it was from Ariana. Short and sweet, it read:

  I agree with your conclusions. Bargaining is a thing of rules, especially for the lesser fae, with balance being the most important part. Bargains, properly made, are complicated things. Above all else, a proper bargain is balanced. Each party gets something they want that is of equal value. I save your life—you give me your firstborn child. That is a balance. You give me your bubble gum, I give you my balloon. That is also balanced. Unbalanced bargains have no power—and you need a bargain with power. Good luck, my friend.