Storm Cursed

by Patricia Briggs

  Unconcerned by the gore, he picked the body up, sans head, and slung it over his shoulder. The dislocated leg flopped, and the broken back made the body move oddly.

  “I’d leave you the body, too,” he told me, “but I’d have to explain to the missus that I went hunting and didn’t bring back food for the family. The head should be enough to ID him.”

  He glanced again at the disembodied head, a shadow of regret on his face. I wondered if he had known the other goblin, or if he was just regretting the necessity of killing one of his own.

  He looked up and saw that I was watching, then muttered, “The eyes are the best part.”

  I stared at him.

  He saluted me with his serious-eyed grin, took a step back, and disappeared—gone from sight and sound.

  Ben said, “Huh.” After a moment, when the scent of the goblin king faded into nothing, he said, “Well, sod off, then, and bon appétit.”

  “He might have been joking,” I said without conviction. I liked Larry, but that didn’t mean I understood him.

  2

  Gruesome as it was, I had to admit the head was easier to pack into the Jetta than a whole body would have been, especially since there was no upholstery or carpet in the space where (hopefully) someday a backseat would reside.

  I wrapped the head in the blue tarp that I’d been using to keep the interior of the Jetta dry (the seal on one of the windows and the trunk was gone). I’d throw the tarp away as soon as I got rid of the head. Tarps are cheap.

  I managed to handle the gruesome object without dousing myself in blood. My clothing had actually fared pretty well under the circumstances. There was a rip in the shoulder of my shirt—and it was possible that had happened in the fight and not when I’d changed to coyote. But my underpants were undamaged, except for the dirt I’d had to shake out. I’d even found both of my socks and shoes.

  With the head stowed away, I settled into the driver’s seat of the Jetta and mentally crossed my fingers. When it started on the first try, I was a bit surprised.

  I muttered, “So far, so good.” I tend to talk to cars—not only when I drive them, but when I work on them. I don’t know that it helps, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

  Before I could put the car in gear, the passenger door opened and Mary Jo plopped into the seat beside me.

  “Who do you suppose he was talking about?” Mary Jo said as she looked around for the seat belt. She tipped her head back to show she meant the dead goblin when she said “he” rather than any of the other choices.

  “There isn’t a seat belt on the passenger side yet,” I told her. “And which of them was talking about who? And don’t you have your own car to drive?”

  She quit fussing and settled in. “Ben’s going to arrange for someone to pick it up. Ben’s allergic to law enforcement, so I got elected to accompany you. And as far as the ‘which of them was talking about who’ . . . first, it should be ‘about whom.’ Second, didn’t you notice that the goblin was nattering on about someone, a ‘she’ who told him he should come here? That we’d give him protection from the humans?”

  “Oh, those whos,” I said. Let Mary Jo try to figure out if it should be those “whoms” or “whos”—though for the record, I was pretty sure I was right this time. “I’d ask our passenger, but he’s not talking.”

  I thought about the rest of what she’d said—and the way she’d settled into my car as if she had no intention of getting back out.

  I said, “I don’t need company. Thank you for the thought, but, as I said, there is no seat belt for your seat yet. I would rather not drive up to the sheriff’s office with someone sitting illegally in my car that—if examined by a stickler—might not be legal to drive.”

  I must not have gotten quite the right amount of unfelt gratitude in my voice because she laughed. “Look. Adam will not be happy if we let you go by yourself.”

  She brought out the Alpha card, and we both knew she was right. If I made her get out—and I wasn’t sure I could do that—I could very well be getting her into trouble.

  But it was my job to protect the pack, not theirs to protect me. “I thought you were still flying under the radar about being a werewolf,” I said. “Won’t some of the people at the sheriff’s know you in your firefighting identity?”

  Just because some of the werewolves were out didn’t mean that all of them were. For instance, Auriele aka Lady Mockingbird was a teacher, and we weren’t sure just how well the school district would take knowing she changed into a werewolf. Her husband, Darryl, Adam’s second, had been outed when fighting that troll on the Cable Bridge. He worked for a think tank with all sorts of government secrets for which he needed clearance. He’d run into a few bumps on that—though he’d gotten through.

  Mary Jo shrugged. “I told my department and everyone in it after the troll incident.” Her body language was casual, but I could smell her contentment. “They took it better than I expected, actually.” She grinned a little self-consciously, a more open expression than any I’d seen from her since Adam and I had become a committed couple. “They quit giving me crap about being a weak woman. Now they’re trying to figure out just how quick and strong I am.”

  Hazing? I wondered. But she didn’t seem unhappy about it so I let it go.

  “Okay,” I told her. “Just remember, if we get pulled over because you don’t have a seat belt on, you are an adult and so the ticket belongs to you.”

  She snorted. “I think that’s only when there is a seat belt to wear.”

  She might have been right. I guessed that if a police car pulled me over, they might be more concerned with the disembodied head than whether Mary Jo was wearing a seat belt. I’d given her an out, reminded her what she risked—that was all I was responsible for.

  I put the Jetta in gear—the clutch was stiff so it took a little effort. We puttered off the field and onto the bumpy dirt road: a werewolf, a coyote shapeshifter, and a goblin’s head.

  I called Tad. No Bluetooth in the Jetta so I had to break the law to do that, too. Seat belt and cell phone—in for a penny, in for a pound.

  “Mercy?” he said, sounding groggy. “What’s up?”

  “I’m delivering a goblin’s head to the sheriff’s office. I don’t think they’ll be worried about me getting out in time to make it to work this morning.”

  Tad grunted. “Anyone I know?”

  I had to stop and wait before turning onto a better class of graveled road because there was a line of cars speeding past. You know you’re in a hotbed of agriculture when there is a traffic jam at four in the morning on a gravel road. They were trying to beat the heat that was supposed to be over a hundred degrees by midafternoon.

  “I don’t know who you know,” I told him grumpily. I hated being late to work. The traffic didn’t make me happier, either. “He killed a policeman and a child, and he’s dead now.”

  Tad snorted. “Jeez. Grouchy much? No worries, Mercy. I can handle it until you get in. You need to hire someone else to answer phones, though, if you need me to keep twisting a wrench.”

  “Let’s get through a couple of months first,” I told him. “I hate to hire someone if we’re not making enough to pay ourselves.”

  “Optimist,” accused Tad, and then he disconnected.

  Traffic finally allowed me to continue our journey. Eventually we made it to a paved road that was much less busy. I breathed a sigh of relief because the shocks on the car had not been a priority for me before now. “I wonder what he meant when he said he was the first of thirty.”

  “Who?” Mary Jo asked.

  I’d been talking to myself—which probably was rude, so I didn’t admit that to Mary Jo. Instead I tilted my head toward our backseat (if there had been a seat) passenger. “Him. He bragged about being the first of thirty. Maybe ‘a first of thirty.’”

  “The goblins were soldiers, right
? In the various fae wars. Maybe they divided themselves up into groups of thirty.”

  She said it as if it were common knowledge. I’d never heard it before and I’d had a book written about the fae by the fae. I started to ask her about that, but she kept talking.

  “Or,” she said, wiggling in her seat, “maybe there were once thirty tribes of goblins and he was chief. He’s dead now, so it hardly matters. Mercy, you need to do something about this seat. It sucks.”

  I frowned at her. “This is a Wolfsburg Edition. That’s an original leather seat.”

  “It’s broken,” she said. “It tilts to the outside. I’d be more interested in who sent him here.”

  “She,” I muttered, wondering if I could fix the seat or if I was going to have to get a new one. It looked like it was pristine, but Mary Jo was the first person I’d had sit in it. Hopefully it was just a bad weld. “The goblin said ‘she.’”

  “I don’t like it when troublesome fae get sent to our territory,” Mary Jo grumped, wiggling until her seat made a thump-thump sound. “It makes me wonder who else they may have sent.”

  “And why,” I agreed. “If you keep moving that seat, it might give up altogether and you’ll be sitting with our other passenger in the back.” She snorted, but quit wiggling. Thoughtfully I continued, “At least it was a ‘she.’”

  She lifted an eyebrow.

  “That means it wasn’t Coyote. Anyone other than Coyote I can deal with.”

  She hissed like a scalded cat—and I didn’t think she had even met Coyote. “You know better than to tempt the fates like that. There are thousands of things and people out there that are worse than Coyote.” No, she had never met Coyote. “Knock on wood,” she demanded.

  I grinned, because she really sounded panicked. “Feeling superstitious, werewolf?”

  She turned so that she could sneer at me—and her seat broke loose, tipping her abruptly toward the door. She smacked her head into the window.

  “Looks like you took care of knocking on wood,” I observed serenely. “I don’t think it was that important, but hey . . .”

  She growled at me.

  I patted the cracked dashboard and murmured to the car, “I think we are going to be good friends.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The tarp had been old, and apparently it had a few places that weren’t leakproof.

  It might be a trick getting into the sheriff’s office with it dripping blood. The Franklin County Sheriff’s Office was located in the heart of downtown Pasco in the county courthouse complex, and even though it was still very early, there were a few people out and about.

  I looked at the little building that served as the secure entrance into the complex and realized it was closed.

  I don’t know why that thought was the nickel in the gumball machine that made my common sense start working. But it finally occurred to me, as I gripped the top of the Jetta’s door so I could lean down and examine the tarp a little more closely, that I might be in trouble.

  I have never had difficulty understanding the rules of living as a human. Nor had I had difficulty understanding the rules the werewolves who had raised me lived by—or the supernatural community as a whole. Granted, I did a better job of living by human rules, but I’d been older when I started—and I didn’t have Bran Cornick, the überking of the werewolves, trying to shove the rules down my throat.

  What I understood for the first time, contemplating that bloody tarp, was that I seldom had to deal with both sets of rules at the same time. It had made sense, by werewolf rules, that the renegade goblin should die. Even if we had apprehended him, I don’t think any jail would have held him for long. And what he would have done to the population of prisoners in the meantime didn’t bear thinking on.

  There was no doubt of his guilt. He had confessed, eventually and sideways, to killing a child as well as killing the police officer. Justice had been unholy swift, maybe, but it had been his king who had carried out the sentence. All a little medieval, but that was the way of the fae and of werewolves.

  It had made sense, from a werewolf perspective, to take the head back to the police because they had jurisdiction over the crime the goblin had committed. Werewolves were all about order and authority. Moreover, the goblin king, who was de facto responsible for the miscreant goblin because they were the same species, had told me to do it. He had the right and the authority to determine that since the goblin had sinned against the humans, the humans should have the evidence that justice had been served, to wit, the head.

  Larry meant to use the dead goblin as a political gambit, a statement of power combined with a declaration that he was on the side of justice, if not the law. That he considered the murder of humans to be wrong. And all of that was well and good.

  But now I was standing near the heart of human justice—the courthouse. And from that human perspective . . . I frowned at the bloody tarp. Nothing of what I’d done made sense from a human perspective. Killing someone was a crime, even if the one you killed deserved it.

  I may not have killed the goblin—but . . . I wasn’t sure I could prove it. I’d bet a million bucks that Larry the goblin king would not be recognizable on the video feed from the barn. In fact, as I considered it, I was pretty sure that the cameras would have quit working the moment he was aware of them. It had been pretty dark about then—it was still pretty dark. If he had shown up at all, then he would have been little more than a shadowy figure.

  Only the four of us—Larry, Ben, Mary Jo, and I—knew that it hadn’t been I who’d killed the goblin. No one could prove it was, either . . . but oddly I didn’t trust human justice as much as I trusted the werewolves. Justice is easier when the judge, jury, and executioner can tell if the accused tells a lie.

  “Are you making friends with him?” growled Mary Jo from the sidewalk. “He’s probably not going to be a good conversationalist.”

  “I’m trying to figure out how I end up at work this morning,” I told her. “Instead of in jail.”

  Because I had done everything wrong. I should have called the sheriff’s office from the barn. I’d have liked to believe that the goblin king had magicked me into following orders. But I had just been caught up in what was right and proper on the magical side and forgotten that human law enforcement wasn’t going to think highly of this.

  She grunted. Then she squinted at the head a moment herself.

  “Well, damn,” she said in the voice of someone who has suddenly realized something. “Look what a stupid thing you did.”

  I looked at her and raised an eyebrow.

  She lifted her hands, palms up. “You’re the boss here, Mercy. I assumed you knew what you were doing.”

  I gave her a look and she broke down and laughed.

  “I know,” she said. “Me, too. He’s just got that kingly thing going. And maybe I was distracted trying to figure out if he is actually going to go cannibal or if he’s going to take the body back for some sort of ritual funeral or something. And . . . well, I guess I just don’t get fussed about dead people . . . dead anything, anymore. I forgot that our human counterparts aren’t going to feel the same way.”

  She looked around and sighed. She pulled out her phone and pressed some numbers on it.

  “What?” a groggy and grumpy voice said. Then, irritably, “I’m off today, Carter, not late again. Go screw yourself.”

  “This is Mary Jo,” she told him. “I need your official help.”

  There was a three-beat pause.

  “Mary Jo,” he said, sounding much more awake—but his voice was raw. “We’re done, you said. No more. Well, done is done.” And he disconnected.

  “Ex-boyfriend,” Mary Jo told me. “Renny’s a good guy, but he started to get too serious. I don’t do serious with the humans. Doesn’t seem fair.” She tried to sound hard and did a fair to middling job
of it, so I guessed it had hurt her, too.

  She pressed the numbers again.

  “Go away,” he said.

  “Official, Renny. I’m standing outside your place of work with Mercy Hauptman. We have a dead goblin’s head in the backseat of her car. We’d like to donate it to the coroner’s office through official channels. Since the head was made bodiless in Mesa, I kind of figured that might be up your alley.”

  He disconnected.

  Mary Jo gave her phone a look, started to press numbers again, but then her phone rang.

  “Goblin head?” Renny said. “Did you say a goblin head?”

  “I did,” she responded.

  There was a long pause.

  When he spoke again, his voice was all business. “If you are in the front parking lot, drive around the block to the back gate of the employee parking lot and wait for me. It’ll take me five to dress and another five to get there. I’m calling this in—so if you are screwing with me, I’ll see your supervisor.” And he clicked off without giving Mary Jo a chance to say anything.

  “Give him a severed goblin head, and he forgets all about how mad and hurt he is.” There was a little tightness around her eyes that I tried not to see, because Mary Jo didn’t want me to see her pain. So instead I paid attention to the sarcasm in her voice when she said, “Obviously, it was true love on his part.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Mary Jo’s ex, Deputy Alexander “Renny” Renton, turned out to be a fit man somewhere near my own age (midthirties) and a few inches over six feet tall. He had a good blank face, which he used as he gave the contents of the back section of my Jetta a thorough visual examination.

  Then he turned to study Mary Jo. His blank face intensified until it became broody.

  “A werewolf, huh?” he said finally.

  She tilted her head at him in mild inquiry. The expression on her face caused him to laugh ruefully.