Smoke Bitten

by Patricia Briggs

  “No,” I told him. “Not now.”

  The bond around my waist was grotesque and repulsive, the red skin cracked open in places and oozing green slime.

  I opened my mouth and pulled out a diamond the size of a baseball. It had been faceted into a princess cut and was clear and flawless—and cold.

  I pressed my lips against it to warm it. And I told it the same thing I had told the wolf when I fed him the amethyst.

  “I love you,” I said.

  This was a place where words were powerful things, and feelings even more so. What I imbued that diamond with was more than the words I spoke—it was the huge ball of emotion that those words invoked in me: all the memories, the laughter, the joy.

  When I took my mouth away and looked at the gemstone again, it glowed with every color I could imagine. I cupped it in both of my hands and told it sternly, “I am going to feed you into my mating bond—and you are going to blow it wide open for me.”

  The pearl had been a soft thing; the diamond was a more suitable weapon. I used the pointed end—which was sharper than any reputable gem cutter would have left—to widen one of the damaged places in the mating bond. When I had a hole big enough, I shoved the gemstone inside. The slick green slime acted as lubricant, making my job easier. When the gemstone was entirely covered, I rubbed the poor bond apologetically as the green slime hardened, sealing the wound.

  “Not your fault,” I told it. “We’ll fix this.”

  I waited for a long time, watching the bump that was the gemstone slide toward Adam’s side of our bond. When it felt like the right time, I said, “Now.”

  And the world went white.

  * * *

  • • •

  I expected to wake up back in the garage, but that’s not what happened.

  I woke up lying on a stone table in a small . . . What was the proper term for a building that had a floor and ceiling but no walls, just archways that held up the roof? It had the form of a temple—though there was no sense of worship here.

  The floor and archways—and the stone table I occupied—were hewn from a tawny sandstone the color of a lion’s pelt. The whole building sparkled a little in the afternoon sun.

  I sat up. I was wearing something that looked very much like the toga I may or may not have worn to a toga party in my dorm when I was a freshman in college. It was the same color as the sandstone right down to the sparkle.

  I found that my hands and arms were bedecked with jewels. And there were gemstones on the sandals I wore, too. I stood up and walked over to the edge of the building, and a beautifully carved waist-high barrier appeared in front of me—as if it had always been there and I just hadn’t noticed it.

  The air was sweet-smelling and the temperature perfect. In the corner of the room on a small table was food and drink. Music began to play, something catchy from the big band era that Adam was still secretly fond of.

  “This is ridiculous, Adam,” I said.

  Because I was in Adam’s otherness—on the far side of our bond. I had no real way to be sure of it—I hadn’t thought that anyone else even had this weird place they could go to. But my instincts had never steered me wrong, and in the otherness, instincts were strong enough to feel like a guide through the weirdness. I was in Adam’s space and, even here, he was trying to protect me.

  Below the hill I was on, I could hear mortar fire. I’d never been on a battlefield—not an official battlefield—but I’d seen the movies. I knew what mortar fire sounded like.

  I kicked off the shoes, hitched a hip on the barricade, and landed on the hill beyond. The big band music accompanied me as I walked for about a mile on a path that kept trying to take me back up to the top of the hill.

  Finally, I stood still, put my hands on my hips, and said, “Adam, that’s enough.”

  Then I stepped off the path and began wading through the dense foliage. About four paces into the woods, the music quieted and a path formed under my bare feet. This path took me down into a valley filled with dead bodies.

  I picked my way through them. Some of them I knew. Paul. Mac. Peter. Others I’d seen pictures of. People from Adam’s military past. People who had worked for him. There was a whole section of people in Vietnam-era US military uniforms; some of them were missing body parts—and some of those had the parts they were missing stacked at their feet. Another section was filled with people I was pretty sure were Vietnamese—though that was not an ethnicity I had much experience with. Some of these were in uniform; some of them were not. Every face was unique. I had absolutely no doubt that every body corresponded to a person that Adam had killed—or he felt responsible for their death in some way. Adam organized his guilt in neat rows.

  And then there was the field of children—maybe twenty in all. Some of these had faces, but some were featureless, as if there was a blanket of skin hiding who they were.

  “That’s because I didn’t see all of their faces,” Adam told me. “The Vietcong used children—so did the South Vietnamese, for that matter. I don’t keep the adults whose faces I never saw—but the children were different.” He pointed to one faceless body. “That one was up in a tree, keeping us pinned down for two days. I shot him, but Christiansen was the one who found the body and told me our sniper had been a kid. I never saw his body—but I should have gone to find him myself. I was the one who killed him.” He gazed out at the row after row of his dead and said, “I owed it to that boy to look at what I had done, but I chose not to.”

  I reached out to hold Adam’s hand, but he stepped away from me. When I turned to face him, I was back on the top of the hill, in the building without walls, but this time there was no sunlight. A rainstorm thundered all around and I was not alone.

  Elizaveta Arkadyevna Vyshnevetskaya stood with one hand on the stone barrier, the other holding an apple from the plate on the little table. She, like me, was wearing a toga, but hers was burgundy. Most of the time that I had known her, she’d been an old woman. Here, as on the day she had died, she was young and beautiful.

  “He doesn’t keep me in his garden of failures,” she told me. “I wonder why that is.”

  “Because he does not regret your death,” I told her, but I knew as soon as I said it that it wasn’t quite right.

  “No,” she said. “Because you absolved him of my death.”

  “You think I am perfect,” said Adam’s voice behind me. “Beautiful, even. I need to be perfect for you.”

  “Or she won’t love you,” said Elizaveta, and here in the otherness her voice had a power that tried to seep into my bones. “She needs you to be her hero, Adam. As beautiful and perfect as your face. You don’t want to hurt her with your darkness, do you, Adam? And you carry so much ugly darkness inside you, don’t you?”

  “Buddy,” I said, turning my back to Elizaveta to face Adam, though leaving her behind me made my skin crawl. “If you think I believe that you are perfect, you’ve got another think coming.”

  He stood on the other side of the room, and I noticed that that corner of the building was falling apart. The roof was not even sufficient to keep the rain off him.

  Off the monster.

  He was bound—as I had been bound—to a metal chair, larger than the one in my garage to accommodate his size. And the bindings weren’t handcuffs and nylon leg cuffs; they were vines of thorns that smelled of black magic.

  “Don’t free me,” Adam said urgently. “I will destroy you; I destroy everything I touch.” He looked away from me. In a low voice he said, “I didn’t want you to see me like this.”

  Elizaveta walked behind him and bent down to whisper in his ear. I couldn’t hear what she said, but Adam looked at me and spoke. “You are so perfect, so strong, my Mercy. I don’t deserve you.”

  “Perfect?” I asked. I looked down at myself and realized that I was missing a few things.

  “Ahem,” I s
aid, addressing neither Adam nor Elizaveta, but the otherness that made this confrontation possible. “I survived the wounds that gave me my scars; I would like them back, please.”

  It felt as though a finger touched my skin with sparkly pain that faded quickly but left the marks of my life behind. When it was finished—and I deliberately chose not to hear the faint laughing cry that might have belonged to a coyote—I peeled off my toga and displayed my imperfect self to Adam.

  “I jump into things before I think about how it will affect other people,” I told him. “I am prickly and overreact when you try to protect me because I don’t want to trust anyone to have my back. I dislike your ex-wife and won’t make an effort to get along with her anymore—no matter how much easier that would make everyone’s life.”

  I took a deep breath. “I hurt you because sometimes I need to walk out on my own.” I frowned at him. “And I’m not going to change any of it—though it would make your life better.”

  “And you like to make me mad,” Adam said in a whisper. “Even though you know I’m dangerous when I’m mad.”

  I smiled at him and nodded. “Yes. That’s your fault, though. I wouldn’t do it if you weren’t so sexy when you’re mad. And I love the knowledge that no matter how angry you are, you would never hurt me.”

  Elizaveta bent to whisper in his ear again, but I took the walking stick in my hand. I noticed that it had made itself into a spear, as it sometimes did when I needed a sharp weapon. I thrust it into her, forcing her away from Adam. The spear sank deep, and blood the color of her toga bubbled out of the wound. I shoved her into the balustrade.

  “You are dead,” I told her. “Go away.”

  She tried to say something, and a viper fell out from between her lips followed by two asps, and then she faded away. The spear had no trouble killing the snakes. I liked snakes. If these hadn’t come from Elizaveta, I’d have let them be. But I didn’t want to leave anything of Elizaveta’s free to roam about in Adam’s otherness.

  I turned to Adam again—and the vines and the chair were gone, the smell of black magic replaced by pine with a hint of mint. But Adam still wore the monster’s guise, wounds weeping where the thorns of Elizaveta’s vines had dug in.

  “I am ugly inside,” he told me.

  “Me, too,” I said. “And I’m not as pretty as you are on the outside, either.”

  “I’m jealous and spiteful,” he said. “I don’t like it when men call you. When Bran calls you—or Beauclaire.”

  I nodded. “I’m jealous, too. And I think I outmatch you for spite. I hate that Christy was your wife and is Jesse’s mother.” I looked around and then grabbed his horrible hand and dragged him to the balustrade, still stained with Elizaveta’s blood.

  I climbed on top of it, and the blood disappeared before it could touch my dirty bare feet. Balanced on top of the stone, with his big hand making sure I did not fall, I leaned over and kissed him.

  “I pick you,” I said—and the world dissolved around me.

  * * *

  • • •

  I sat in the stream in my own otherness. The water was really, really cold.

  A big gray wolf, his feet and muzzle much darker than the silvery fur on his back, waded in beside me. He put his muzzle on my shoulder.

  I wanted to tell you that I love you, too, he said.

  * * *

  • • •

  I blinked up at the shop light that was suddenly over my head.

  “Your arm is broken,” said Adam, his voice ferocious. “I have it wrapped to stop the bleeding, but as soon as Carlos gets here we’re taking you to the hospital.”

  “Fiona was working for the witches,” I said. His face filled my world, and I realized he was in his own human skin.

  “I know that,” he told me. “I heard.”

  “We need to tell Bran that Kent was witchbound, whatever that means.”

  “I will,” he said. “Shut up now. Save your strength.”

  “I love you even though you aren’t perfect,” I said.

  He met my eyes. “I know that.”

  “I’m not perfect, either,” I told him.

  “I know that, too,” he said, his voice growly.

  “You need to find some clothes to wear, and I think I’m in shock.” And I passed out before he could tell me that he knew that, too.

  * * *

  • • •

  About a week later I was sitting at the kitchen table and Adam sat down beside me and kissed my shoulder, the one connected to my unbroken arm.

  “Hmm,” I said, writing down the parts number from the catalog I was ordering from.

  The guy who ran this particular parts yard didn’t believe in the Internet, but he had parts that no one else carried. The order was made more difficult because I had to write everything down with my left hand.

  But mostly I kept writing because I could feel Adam’s amusement traveling through our mating bond. He was about to do something or tell me something that he thought was really funny.

  “Okay,” I said, looking up.

  His face was lit with laughter—and it looked good on him.

  “First,” he said, “I need to tell you that Izzy’s mother is very sorry. She didn’t realize that the client she was talking to is the sister of a reporter for a tabloid.”

  Izzy’s mother sold essential oils. I couldn’t imagine what she . . .

  “Butch apologizes,” Adam continued, “because when I told him to watch the newspapers and TV news—he did not consider tabloids until he caught one of our new guards reading one of them.”

  Adam set a stack of tabloid newspapers on the kitchen table in front of me. There must have been ten or twelve of them. The front page headline of the one on top said: Human(?) Wife Says Alpha Werewolf Is Sex Fiend, Seeks Help from Friend.

  And that wasn’t the worst one.

  I laughed until I cried. Then Adam picked me up, careful not to jostle my broken arm, and growled, “Nudge.”

  “Help,” I called as he carried me up the stairs. “My mate is a sex fiend. Help.”

  There was no help for me.

  * * *

  • • •

  Adam got called into work that night, so I was alone when the sounds of a guitar and a violin drifted through my closed window. I got up and shoved the window open—which would have been easier without the stupid broken arm.

  Sitting cross-legged on the hood of my old Rabbit parts car, Wulfe played a violin. In front of him, standing on the ground but with one foot on the bumper, Stefan played a guitar. They managed a pretty good version of “The Sound of Silence.” Small hesitations here and there made me think they hadn’t practiced it.

  When they were done, Wulfe slid off the car and took a bow with a flourish worthy of a Shakespearean actor. But it was Stefan’s grin, not Wulfe’s bow or the performance, that put a smile on my face as I closed the window.

  On the top of my chest of drawers, just as though it had always been there, the walking stick lay in its usual place.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to all of those who have helped make this book better: Collin Briggs, Linda Campbell, Dave and Katharine Carson, Ann Peters, and Kaye Roberson. They read this in rougher forms and sometimes at speed. Thanks also to my long-suffering editor Anne Sowards, copy editor Amy J. Schneider, Michelle Kasper, Alexis Nixon, Jessica Plummer, Miranda Hill, and the team at Penguin Random House, without whose skilled guidance this book would be much the less. Thank you to Susann and Michael Bock, who once again have furnished Zee and Tad with their German. (Zee is particularly happy not to be stuck with mine.) I am grateful for my friend Michael Enzweiler, who draws the wonderful and useful maps for my books. Finally, thank you to the readers who enjoy the journeys of my imaginary friends. As always, any mistakes are mine.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Patricia Brig
gs is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Mercy Thompson urban fantasy series (Storm Cursed, Silence Fallen) and the Alpha and Omega novels (Burn Bright, Dead Heat).

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