Night Broken

by Patricia Briggs

  I mouthed “Joel” to Adam because no one else was looking at my face. His muzzle dropped, then rose in a nod. He agreed. Guayota had been here, there was no disguising his scent, but Joel had killed the dogs and desecrated his own house.

  It was Adam who noticed that one of the two remaining kennels was occupied. He drew my attention to the kennel on the end, with an empty kennel between it and the dead dogs. I put my hand on the latch, and something growled from inside the doghouse.

  “Don’t open that,” said Lucia, her voice sounding hoarse as if she’d been crying, though her cheeks were dry. “Cookie is not very friendly with humans yet.”

  I pulled my hand back.

  “Cookie, come,” she said. “Good girl.”

  The dog in the doghouse didn’t come, though she moved around, and her growl increased in volume and general unhappiness.

  I suppose that for people who don’t turn into a coyote, growls might all be the same. But not for me. This growl said, “I’m scared and willing to kill you because I think you are going to hurt me.”

  I raised an eyebrow at Adam. He whined softly, telling the dog that no one here was going to hurt her. It might have been more convincing without all of the dead dogs.

  “We need to get out of here,” Laughingdog said, bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet. “If he comes back, he might just finish the job.”

  He looked at me, and I saw that he was frightened and wanted nothing more than to leave us here and never come back. It wasn’t cowardice, any more than the dog hiding in the doghouse was a coward.

  This was an expression brought on by experience—an understanding that said bad things happened, and the best way to survive was to leave as quickly as possible. I don’t know what his life had taught him to bring on that look, but I could tell he was holding on by a fingernail.

  “Can’t leave any innocents behind,” I told him. “That would be wrong. And even if it weren’t wrong, it would be dumb. I think that the deaths of these dogs gave Guayota power. No sense leaving him another dog to kill.”

  “She’s not coming out,” Lucia said. She stood up. “We got her three days ago. Humane Society got her because her owner’s neighbors turned him in for beating on his dog.” She laughed, a sad, broken sound, as she looked down on her dog. “I ranted for an hour after I saw her. Swore that if I could hit a button and destroy the human race, I’d do it in a heartbeat. You know what my Joel said? He said, ‘Niña, most people are good people. Take this dog. A lot of good people worked to save her. People noticed, they called the police. The police brought in the Humane Society, and they took her—risked getting bitten so that she could have a better life. Lots of people working to undo the work of one bastard. You know what that means? Lots more good people out there than bad.’”

  “It also means bad people’s works are stronger than good people’s,” murmured Gary, but he spoke quietly. I don’t think Lucia heard him.

  While the people were talking, Adam had been talking, too. The dog, Cookie, had quieted, her growls becoming whines. I figured that Laughingdog had been right about needing to get out of here and that Adam had done enough to make it possible. I opened the cage and snagged a lead and collar from a hook on the front of the cage.

  I sat down on the ground in front of the doghouse. “Okay, Adam. Get her to come out.”

  He whined at her again and ended with something as close to a bark as werewolves get. She crawled out of the doghouse, and I found myself whining in sympathy.

  She wasn’t ever going to win any dog shows, wouldn’t have even before someone had hit her hard enough to blind her on one side. She was a mutt. The German shepherd was pretty obvious in the shape of her head, but there was something else that gave her a heavier body. Malamute maybe. Maybe even some wolf.

  She carried her head canted because of the blind eye, trying to see out of one eye and get the information she’d gotten out of both. Her tail was down, not quite tucked, and she uttered little anxious growls until she saw me. Then she barked and drew her lips back from her teeth.

  I stayed where I was.

  I could see when her nose first cued her in that there was something odd about me. She froze, the snarls dying in her throat. That’s when Adam moved in and touched her nose with his.

  It wasn’t anything a real wolf or a human could have done. He used pack magic and let her feel the weight of his authority and the protection he represented. She leaned against him and sighed.

  I stood up, slipped the collar on her and the lead, and she gave me no trouble, though she tried not to look at me more than she had to. Adam stayed with her. I looked at Gary, then down at Lucia, and he nodded, took her arm, and helped her to her feet.

  We left the dogs’ bodies because we did not have time to bury them, though it felt to me as though we should have done something. But in times of war, the care of the dead is outweighed by the need for survival.

  I opened the back door of the SUV, and Adam jumped in, followed by the dog. I released her leash as soon as she was in but watched to make sure it didn’t snag anywhere until she settled. Adam hopped over the seat and lay down in the luggage compartment. The battered dog followed him and curled up on the opposite side of the SUV. She put her head down with a sigh, and I shut the door.

  Gary had taken Lucia to her car. He held out his hand, and she put her keys in it with the same sort of sigh of surrender that Cookie had given.

  He looked at me. “We’ll follow you.”

  Because Lucia was occupied opening the door, I mouthed Do you have a license? at him.

  He just gave me a wink and a sly smile and got behind the wheel of Lucia’s car.

  9

  Honey’s house was farther out than Adam’s and mine. It was maybe a little bit bigger.

  There is something to the cliché that the older immortal creatures are wealthy. Not always, certainly. Warren was almost two hundred years old, and when I met him he was working at a Stop and Rob without two thin dimes to rub together. I didn’t know how old Honey was—we’d never been that friendly—but Peter had had at least a couple of centuries, maybe more, and he’d accumulated real wealth. He’d worked as a plumber for the past twenty or thirty years, and that hadn’t hurt anything, either.

  Honey had sold the business after his death and was talking about going back to school. She didn’t need a job for money, but she needed something to do—something more than random trips to visit prisons with me.

  I pulled into her driveway, where there were already five or six cars including Kyle’s new Jag in the parking area in the front, so I drove around behind the house and parked by the pasture in back. Peter had been a cavalry officer, and he’d kept his love of horses. There were two of them inside the fence. One had raised its head to watch me park, but the other one kept its head down, ripping up grass as fast as it could.

  I let Adam and Cookie out, catching her leash as she exited. She looked more exhausted than aggressive now, and she waited by my side as Gary pulled in beside me. Adam gave me a look and hopped back into the SUV. He’d gotten out so that Cookie would, but he intended to change shape back to human before he went into the house.

  Lucia was looking as though she’d reached the end of her rope, so I decided to leave Adam to it.

  “Come on inside,” I told them. “Adam will join us in a minute.”

  Honey’s house was stucco, as most upscale houses in the Tri-Cities are. In the dark, it looked white, but I knew that it was a pale shade of gray set off with dark gray trim. The rear-porch lights were on, so I led our procession to the back door into a mudroom.

  I kicked off my shoes, and so did Lucia, who was only wearing sandals. She looked like a good, strong wind would blow her over. The dog was subdued, and I hoped she’d stay that way until Adam got through changing.

  “Both of you stay here just a moment and take this.” I handed the leash to Lucia. “I’ll go find Honey and see if she doesn’t have a room to put you in. No sense in throwing yo
u to the wolves tonight.”

  “Joel is never coming back.” Her voice was stark.

  “Too early to tell,” Gary said. “It doesn’t look good, but saying ‘it’s over’ before it actually is will make certain the outcome.”

  It sounded like he had matters in hand, so I went in search of Honey. I started toward the living room but heard noise upstairs; it sounded like cheering.

  The whole upper floor of Honey’s house was one room. She and Peter had used it for parties, but one wall was set up with a projection screen so it could be used as a theater. From the sounds I was hearing, she must have set up a movie or something … I didn’t hear a sound track or anything but the voices of various pack members saying things like—“look at that jump, exactly as much effort as necessary and not an inch too high” and “triple tap, double tap, and hop.”

  It was that last one, uttered in Darryl’s voice and rough in satisfaction that made me apprehensive. I entered the room, which was filled with a dozen or so people, in time to hear Auriele say, “Fragile my aching butt. How did she manage to avoid his swing and hit him with the gun? I wish we had this from a slightly different angle.”

  “We do,” said Ben. “We have four discs. This one is Garage Cam One. There’s also Outside Cam One, Office Cam One, and Garage Cam Two.”

  They were running the video of my fight with Guayota on Honey’s projection system; the screen was even bigger than I remembered. The image was a little grainy, but I watched myself, larger than life, trip over the crowbar and land on my butt. In the background, the dog had already morphed into a man.

  Most of the pack was there. I picked out Christy, Auriele, Darryl, Warren, Kyle, Ben, Zack, Jesse, Mary Jo, and Honey at a glance. Most of them were so focused on what they were watching that they didn’t notice me come in. Christy, half-turned away from the screen, saw me, but I couldn’t read her face.

  The screen went blank, and there was a collective groan.

  “Play it again.” Mary Jo’s voice was harsh. “I want to see that first part in slow motion. Where she figures out that he’s not human.”

  I cleared my throat, and the room fell silent. “Honey? Is there a bedroom where I can put Lucia? Guayota paid her a visit, and she’s pretty fragile. We brought her here to be safe.”

  “Lucia?” Honey got up from one of the couches scattered around the room, all facing vaguely in the direction of the screen on the wall. “That’s the woman who told us about the dogs, right?”

  I nodded, taking a half step back because once I’d spoken, they’d all twisted around in their seats to look at me, and they were watching me with intent. To Honey I said, “Her dogs are dead, and her husband’s missing—she needs some time to regroup and a safe place to be, so we brought her here. Some clothes to sleep in and to wear tomorrow would also be nice.”

  “Damn, lady,” said Zack, looking at me from the corner of his eye. “Damn, but you don’t have any quit in you at all.”

  “Takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’,” said Warren. “That’s our Mercy.”

  Christy’s face was still unreadable, but she was watching me with her shoulders tight. Her eyes met mine for a moment, and I saw a flash of shame before she looked down and away.

  “Why didn’t you run?” asked Mary Jo, pulling my attention away from Christy. “You could have gotten away.”

  “Because I thought he was human,” I told her, all but squirming. I felt like they’d all seen me naked, though all they’d done was watch a video I’d known was running while I fought Guayota. I wanted to get out of there, but Mary Jo was waiting for more of an answer. “By the time I figured out that he wasn’t human, it was too late, and I was trapped in the garage. Where did you get that disc, anyway?”

  “One of Adam’s security team dropped them off,” said Honey. “I thought it would be a good thing to see this man in action before we had to face him.” Honey got up and went to the projector system. I thought she was going to turn it off, but she hit REPLAY, then grabbed my arm and urged me back down the stairs while a larger-than-life-sized me got the gun out from under the counter and waited for Guayota.

  “Do them good to see it again,” Honey said as we started down. “They like to dismiss you as a liability. Let them see you fight.”

  “I’d have lost if Adam and Tad hadn’t shown up,” I told her.

  “That lot, most of them, would have lost when the dog started his attack,” she said, unperturbed. She gave me a laughing glance. “What I really wish, though, is that there had been a camera at your house when Adam tore a strip off Christy when she wasted time playing stupid games with his phone when you were calling for help. I’d pay a lot of money to have gotten to see that.”

  “She wouldn’t have done it if she’d known I was in danger,” I told her—and it felt odd to be defending Christy.

  “Maybe not,” said Honey, “but I’d sure have liked to have been there to see Adam dressing her down. He never did before. She was too good at making everything someone else’s fault.”

  She led the way back into her kitchen and did a double take when she saw Gary. “I thought you were in—”

  Honey hadn’t been with us when we’d discussed his jailbreak and my seeing him at the crime scene in Finley. Apparently no one had mentioned it to her.

  “I decided to follow you,” he broke in with a good-old-boy smile before she could say the “prison” word. “The most intriguing, most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. I thought, if she would just look at me, I would never need to eat again because that look would sustain me for the rest of my life.”

  “Do those kinds of lines ever really work?” Honey asked coolly, having gotten over her surprise. She glanced at Lucia and warmed her expression as she gave the rest of us a discreet nod. She wouldn’t talk about the jailbreak in front of anyone else. “Lucia, come with me, and I’ll get you set up.”

  “What do you want me to do with Cookie?” When Honey looked blank, Lucia clarified. “With the dog?”

  Honey looked at the battered dog, glanced at me, then went to her cupboard and pulled out a mixing bowl. “We’ll send someone out for dog food in the morning. There’s a bathroom off the bedroom you’ll be in, and we’ll fill this with water there.”

  The two of them left, and I caught Gary by the arm before he could follow.

  “You’d better cool your jets,” I told him, because although he might have interrupted her to stop her from blurting out where she’d last seen him, there had been real intent in his flirting—as there hadn’t been when he’d been messing around with Kyle and Zack. “Honey will wipe the floor with you.”

  His eyes went half-mast, and his voice dropped in evident pleasure. “I know.”

  I threw my hands up in the air. “You’ve been warned. Don’t come looking for sympathy here.”

  The outside door opened, and Adam came in. He stomped the dirt off the bottom of his shoes on the mudroom mat with determined slowness. I recognized the careful movement as an attempt to keep his still-agitated wolf under control.

  His calmness in the back of the SUV had been more of the same: my wolf didn’t like being helpless when someone he felt responsible for was in trouble. Joel had done some work for Adam, and that was enough to make him Adam’s responsibility.

  I leaned against a counter and relaxed deliberately. Gary raised an eyebrow, looked toward the mudroom. Then he proved he was a lot better at reading people than he liked to pretend because he copied my position on the far side of the kitchen from the mudroom. He left a lot of space between me and him.

  Adam came into the kitchen after he was satisfied with the state of his shoes. He saw Gary and me, and came over and leaned on the counter, too, close enough to me that his body pressed against my side.

  He focused his gaze toward the opposite wall, where a cabinet displayed antique dishes, very carefully not looking at Gary on the other side of me.

  I broke the silence. “Tad,” I said, because it should have occurred to me earlie
r to warn him.

  “I called before I came inside. Tad said he’d take the opportunity to visit his father,” Adam told me. “Guayota is welcome to try to find him in Fairyland.” He frowned. “I’m not sure how voluntary his going is; it sounded like someone noticed him using magic, and he has to go talk to them.”

  “Can he get back out again?” I didn’t bother to hide my anxiety.

  “Tad didn’t think it would be an issue, not with his father there. Though he said if we don’t talk to him in a week or so, we might see what we can do to break him out.”

  Zee would be hard to hold if he didn’t want to stay somewhere. He’d gone to the reservation voluntarily—hostilely voluntarily, but voluntarily nonetheless. “Maybe not,” I said.

  We subsided into silence again.

  Adam said, “Guayota has Joel. Only a man who had those dogs’ trust could have killed them, sacrificed them that way, one after another without their fighting back.”

  “I know,” I agreed.

  “You think that he’s found a way to turn Joel into one of his dogs, the tibicenas, like the one you killed who turned back into a man.”

  “I do.”

  He bowed his head and growled. It took him a few moments to find his words again. “Joel is a good man. He would never have killed, have sacrificed those dogs of his, given any kind of choice. He’d have killed a person before he killed those dogs.”

  “Agreed.” Anyone who’d talked to Joel about his dogs knew that.

  “We hit the trail at Joel’s backwards,” Adam told me. “Joel and Guayota went to the kennel first. Joel killed the dogs, then, in the shape of one of the tibicenas, he destroyed his bedroom.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. The destruction in the house hadn’t been Guayota. If he’d been as angry as the animal who had attacked that room, he’d have burned the place to ashes. “He was hunting his wife, and she wasn’t there. He responded like a territorial animal in a rage.” Rage at Guayota redirected at the things he loved most.