Storm Cursed

by Patricia Briggs

  The pizza man, one hand raised to knock at the closed door, turned a startled gaze at me. I supposed he hadn’t heard us until I yelled.

  “Bomb,” corrected Paul, who had spent ten years in the SWAT unit of a large city back east. He’d never told me which one—we just didn’t talk that much.

  The pizza man screamed, “Open the goddamned door, you freaks!” And, with a panicked look at my rapid approach, he did something with the pizza box.

  The world stopped in a roar of sound and light.

  One moment I was upright and running, the next I was facedown on the rough hotel carpet, struggling to breathe. The air was full of dust and my lungs didn’t want to work because of the heavy weight on top of me. Pain and loss shivered down the pack bonds with the even heavier weight of our dead.

  Our dead.

  “Paul,” I tried to say.

  Though the lifeless weight of him on my back didn’t move, I felt the touch of his fingers on my cheek. They were warm, which I knew was weird.

  They should have been cold. The touch of the dead is usually cold.

  “Heyya, lady,” Paul said, his voice gentler than I’d ever heard it. “You’ll tell him, right?”

  “Paul,” I said. “No.”

  He laughed. “Yes, you will. You’re fair like that.” There was a little pause and he said a bit wistfully, “Tell Mary Jo that I loved her, okay?” Then he made a sharp sound. “No. No. That wouldn’t be right. Just make sure they all know what I did. So they will think well of me. I’d like that.”

  And then Paul was gone, even though his body lay on top of me, the smell of him, of his blood, all around me.

  7

  It took Adam, Kelly, and Luke a while to dig me out of the debris. By that time, Paul’s extremities had cooled and his blood had stopped flowing over my skin. When they pulled Paul’s body off me, we were stuck together with his blood.

  Maybe it was shock or the shot the EMT people gave me, but I was pretty loopy. I remember the faces of the EMT people dealing with two unhappy wolves (Kelly and Luke had both shifted to dig rubble), which varied from terror to fascination. But other than that, I don’t remember getting from the hotel to the hospital.

  In the emergency room, I collected information a little haphazardly, as people came in and out of my cubby, and as I was hauled out for X-rays. Some of the people were pack, some were the nonpack who worked for Adam, but a few of them were strangers who looked like alphabet agency types. The fog increased after they decided I didn’t have a head injury and gave me something stronger.

  I woke up to an unfamiliar voice.

  “—twenty-five years old. Grad student in viticulture at WSU.”

  “What does making wine have to do with making bombs?” That was Kelly. So I must have dozed off long enough ago that he’d had time to shift back. He sounded indignant, as if people who grew plants (like he did) should not contemplate blowing up hotels. It struck me as funny.

  The bed moved a little, so I pried open my eyes.

  A grim-faced man was sitting on the end of my bed. Apparently disaster makes us all friends because it was the caustic Secret Service guy from the meeting, now a little more battered and dusty.

  He said, “Nothing. But growing up in a family with a demolition business does. I don’t know what the connection with Ford is, but the FBI is working on that.”

  “Ford?” I asked; my voice came out a little wobbly.

  Adam leaned in to look at me. He was seated on a rolling, backless chair pulled up to my bed. He and his clothing were filthy with blood and dirt, but his face and hands were clean.

  It made me aware that sometime between when I was last functioning and now, I’d been stripped out of my blood-soaked clothing and put in a clean hospital gown. Parts of me were clean and parts of me were horrid. I smelled like gunpowder, muck, and Paul’s blood.

  Adam touched my face with gentle fingers. “Back with us again, I see,” he said. “How do you feel?”

  “Floaty,” I said, instead of telling him I wanted to crawl out of my skin to get Paul’s blood off me. “Floaty” was true, too. “It’s nice. What does the bomber have to do with trucks?”

  He smiled—it was a real smile, though his face was tired. “Not much, sweetheart. But Ford is the name of Rankin’s man. Right now it looks like he’s the one who arranged for the bombing.”

  “Okay.” I couldn’t quite remember which of the men in the meeting was Rankin’s man. Rankin was one of the Democrats, included because he was on the House committee on fae and supernatural affairs. That committee had undergone so many name changes over the past few years that I couldn’t, right off the top of my head, come up with what it was officially called. I knew it wasn’t the Tinker Bell Committee, which is what most people called it.

  The filth and the blood and the dust that everyone was wearing told me that it was probably still the day of the bombing. The position of the sun told me that it wasn’t more than a few hours later.

  “What’s the situation?” I asked Adam.

  I didn’t have to spell out for him what I needed.

  “Paul is dead. The bomber is dead,” he said.

  “Did you—” I glanced hurriedly at the Secret Service guy, who glanced blandly back at me. This was why I didn’t drink. Too many minefields.

  “I didn’t kill the bomber, no,” Adam said, his voice a little harsh. “I didn’t need to because he did it for us.”

  “How about everyone else?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

  “We got tossed around a little. The windows went and we lost chunks of ceiling and wall. No one was seriously hurt—Abbot has a broken arm. The rest of us just got bumps and bruises.”

  “Luke broke his shoulder,” Kelly added. “But it healed up. Adam sent him home with Darryl.”

  Translation: Luke was too worn out by the healing to change back to human and too upset by the bombing to be trusted out in public without a wolf dominant enough to make him mind.

  “Okay,” I said. I looked at the Secret Service guy. “If the bomber died at the scene, how did you figure out—” I was still not at the top of my game because I had to run down truck brands until I came up with the right one. Not Dodge or Chevy. “—Ford was responsible?”

  “I missed all but the end of it,” said the Secret Service guy regretfully. “I was too busy not dying and then scrambling out from under Kelly—thank you. But as soon as he realized he was alive, Ford started screaming that it was fifteen minutes early.”

  “Abbot got the whole thing on his cell phone,” said Adam.

  “We contacted Representative Rankin,” said the Secret Service guy. “You’ll be surprised to know that he was shocked and appalled.”

  The Secret Service guy sounded honestly regretful when he added, “Unfortunately, I think that shock was real, at least. I’d love to pin this to that slimy toad. But it’s likely that the whole thing rests on Ford.”

  “What is your name?” I asked. “I can’t just keep calling you the Secret Service guy.”

  “Judd Spielman,” he said.

  “Cool,” I said, leaning forward earnestly. “Paul saved me.”

  “And there she goes again,” murmured Kelly. “We know, Mercy. You’ve told us a time or two.”

  I turned to look at him—he was somewhere behind Adam—but I ended up burying my face against Adam’s chest. It felt so good I stayed there.

  When I lifted my head, the Secret Service guy whose name was Judd Spielman was gone from the end of the bed. Instead, inexplicably Tory Abbot was there in an immaculate suit that was slightly different from the one he’d worn in the meeting. The lines in his face were a little deeper, and he had a splint on his left arm.

  He was saying, “—hadn’t panicked we’d all have been dead and he’d have been alive.”

  It felt like I’d just blinked and he’d appea
red out of nowhere, but his presence wasn’t the only change in the room. Everything was a little grubbier than it had been—the white sheets had acquired dirty smudges.

  Adam was cleaner, though. His hair was wet and he was in different clothing. Kelly was gone, and Warren sat on the windowsill, looking out at the setting sun.

  “I hate drugs,” I said muzzily. “My mouth is dry.”

  “I don’t blame you,” said Adam, kissing my forehead. Warren got off the window ledge and brought a glass of water with a straw. “And they won’t be giving you any more. Looks like you sustained lots of cuts and bruises but nothing major.”

  “Probably,” said Warren, going back to the window.

  “Probably,” agreed Adam smoothly. “Having a hotel dumped on top of someone isn’t usually something people walk away from, so they’re keeping you here for a couple more hours to be sure.”

  “You’re driving them batty,” said Warren. “Because a hotel fell on you and you should be dead. They can’t figure out why you aren’t.”

  “Paul saved me,” I told Adam.

  He kissed me again. “I know, love.”

  “Why does she keep saying that?” Warren asked. “Does she have a concussion?”

  “He asked me to,” I told Warren with drug-born earnestness. “He touched my cheek and asked me to make sure that everyone knew that when push came to shove, he was a hero.”

  “He died instantly,” said Abbot, not ungently. “He couldn’t have asked her to do anything.”

  “I see dead people,” I told him.

  “Hush,” Adam said.

  “That’s why I don’t like hospitals very much,” I continued. “Paul died and the only thing he wanted me to tell people was that he saved me.” I paused. “He didn’t want me to tell Mary Jo he loved her.”

  “You see dead people?” asked Abbot, his voice arrested.

  “Let’s just give Abbot time to brief us, okay?” Warren said. “You’re talking nonsense, Mercy.”

  I nodded—which hurt my neck, my shoulders, and my left toe, so I stopped.

  “Your wife talks to ghosts?” Abbot asked.

  “P-p-please!” I told him earnestly in the voice of Roger Rabbit—or as close to it as I could get. “Only when it’s funny.”

  “Go to sleep,” Adam told me.

  I closed my eyes and listened until we were all alone. But I must have slept a little because when I woke up, Judd Spielman the Secret Service guy was back. This time he had taken the same seat that Abbot had used.

  “The FBI say that the bomb was expertly constructed. From the brass caps to the detonation wiring.” Spielman was wearing clean clothes, too. Instead of another suit, though, he’d gone for jeans and a T-shirt. It made him look tougher—the shiner didn’t hurt that impression, either. Some people (me) get a black eye and people ask, “Hey, who beat you up?” Other people (Spielman) get a black eye and people say, “Where did they bury the other guy?”

  Adam doesn’t get shiners.

  “Goes with him being raised by a demolition expert,” said Adam.

  “Guess the kid was bright and paid attention.” Spielman’s tone was ironic. “But I wouldn’t have sounded as admiring as my contact did. The boy killed two people, including himself. I asked them, if he was such a genius, why wasn’t he working for his parents’ company? They told me that he didn’t like to take orders. So his father encouraged him to go into another line of work before he killed someone—hence the viticulture. His family didn’t quite say it, but my guy in the FBI says that he started to get radical and his family shipped him out west to get him away from all of that.”

  “Well, that worked,” said Warren.

  “Like dumping a drowning boy into the ocean,” agreed Spielman. “He came here and joined the local Bright Future chapter, dated a few girls from that group. Then he brought a new girl for a couple of weeks. Word from the Bright Future people is that those two said something about being tired of belonging to a useless group who didn’t do anything but talk and paint graffiti—a charge BF denies, for the record. They quit coming. My guy is checking to see if they found another, more radical group, or if they headed off on their own.”

  “Any word on the connection to Ford?” I asked.

  The whole room turned to look at me—apparently they hadn’t noticed that I’d started paying attention again. Adam’s hand tightened on mine.

  “Apparently Ford was a friend of the kid’s family,” Spielman said. “I understand that right at the moment, past tense is the correct verb form. The kid’s father is ready to do murder.”

  “Why now?” asked Adam suddenly. “This was a meeting of—you’ll forgive me—minions. Why didn’t he wait until the key players were in place?”

  “Because Ford had been dating Senator Campbell’s youngest daughter before she broke it off,” Spielman said heavily. “Apparently he was worried that if Campbell was killed, Stephanie would move back to Minnesota and he would lose his chance to get her back.”

  “Wow,” I said, a little awed by the . . . wrongness of that thinking. “That’s special.”

  “How do you know that?” Warren asked.

  “Ford is talking like someone put a nickel in him,” said Spielman. “I have no idea why. I don’t see how announcing that he did it for the good of mankind because we shouldn’t be bargaining with the fae, we should be nuking them out of existence, is going to help him in court. He is sounding more like someone campaigning for president than someone facing time behind bars for bombing a government meeting.”

  Warren growled, “For murder.”

  Spielman’s face lost the blandly pleasant expression that seemed to be its default setting. “I know. I helped carry your man out.”

  Warren breathed deeply. “Sorry.”

  “Me, too,” said Spielman.

  “Paul—” I started to say, but Warren broke in.

  “Saved you,” the lanky cowboy said firmly. “On purpose. I never liked him, would not have thought he had it in him. I was wrong and he died a hero.”

  “You wouldn’t have survived if he hadn’t protected you,” Adam said. “We won’t forget what we owe him.”

  Eventually Spielman left with a couple of his people. The doctor came and told me I could go, but I shouldn’t make any life-changing decisions for a day or two.

  Warren headed to his truck as I climbed into the SUV under Adam’s assessing eye.

  “At least,” Adam said as he started the big diesel engine, “we know that this attempt had nothing to do with witches.”

  “No,” I told him. “Abbot smelled like the witch in Benton City. Not like Frost; I don’t think they are related. But the two of them use the same laundry soap, shampoo, and toothpaste—and he carries her scent, too, a little.”

  “Abbot,” said Adam slowly. “But not Ford.”

  “I couldn’t tell you which one of the government minion clones in that meeting was Ford,” I admitted. “And maybe the bombing was all this Ford guy in some sort of attempt to make sure that the government and the fae don’t reach any sort of agreement.”

  “But,” Adam said, “Ford is acting weirdly—and we have a witch who we think might be able to make mundane people do things.”

  “But,” I agreed. “I don’t know if it is only when the witch is present—or if it’s like the vampire thing.”

  “I’ll ask around,” Adam told me.

  * * *

  • • •

  I felt awful for the next four days. Nothing specific, just headachy and sore-muscled. When I went to the garage, Tad made me man the front desk while he worked on the cars. On the second day, Zee worked on the cars, too. On the third day, Dale brought Stefan’s bus over—and I stood up to the two overprotective louts and fixed her myself.

  There were things more painful than my sore muscles, like the press conference.
Luckily, I didn’t have to say much. The reporter was a woman, so she was much more interested in talking to Adam than to me. The debriefing by the FBI wasn’t fun, either. But in my hierarchy of painful things, Paul’s funeral and the tasks surrounding it topped them all.

  We had him cremated—and Sherwood went to watch while it was done. We weren’t going to let Paul be slipped out and donated to science while our backs were turned. Sherwood, I think, was more concerned that his body might be stolen and made into a zombie. Maybe it was just paranoia, but it gave us something to focus on.

  And there were more zombies.

  Our pack got called to Pasco to deal with a zombie cat—a stray this time, so at least there were no crying children. I didn’t go, but apparently there was quite a chase before Ben caught it. And then there was the cow.

  They didn’t call us in for the cow until it had already killed two people and injured a handful more. I wish I had gone for that one, but I had to settle for a secondhand account of Warren roping it from the back of his truck at thirty miles an hour. He secured the rope and had the driver hit the brakes. The resulting snap of the rope ripped the rotting head right off.

  Adam thought the witch—or witches, because we really weren’t sure—was playing with us.

  Adam dealt with the FBI, the Secret Service, and all of the hoopla that happens when you don’t actually die when a bomb goes off. The secret meeting wasn’t so secret anymore, and Bright Future, undeterred by their association with the bomber, held a sit-in at John Dam Plaza, a little park in the middle of Richland. I heard they gave out free ice cream cones.

  Ford died in custody. The public was being held in suspense but our new friend in the Secret Service told Adam that no one knew why he died. It wasn’t suicide, but it didn’t look like murder, either.

  After a couple of days, the news stories all concentrated on the upcoming meeting between the fae and the government. The bombing sort of faded to the background. After all, all of the bad guys died. They only had a driver’s license photo of Paul, and a few words from Adam about how he was a good and faithful employee—not enough to make a story out of Paul.