“No, I figured it out earlier, when your scent trail disappeared into nothing. Mostly. The walking stick just meant my suspicions were correct.” Adam closed his fingers on my shoulder, not quite hard enough to hurt. “Don’t do that again,” he said. “My heart can’t take it.”
“I didn’t intend to do it the first time,” I half whined. I would have all-the-way whined, but it was suddenly too difficult to whine. Why was it that I could run and run—but a minute or so after I stopped, I couldn’t breathe anymore?
I could happily have stayed safe in Adam’s arms all night if it weren’t for the fact that I was covered with sweat, and I had to straighten and give my diaphragm a fighting chance to force my lungs to start working properly.
I stood up, and Adam’s hand loosened, sliding from my shoulder to my arm until he had my hand.
“I’ll certainly try not to wander off with Coyote again without your knowing about it. But ‘try’ is all I’ve got,” I told Adam when I had control of my breath again.
He looked up at me. There was heat in his gaze—there is always some spark of heat when Adam looks at me, but there was also need that was deeper than sexual. I could see the shadow caused by worry, possessiveness, and a vulnerability that allowed him, the Alpha wolf, to stay on the ground when I was standing. That vulnerability (and the possessiveness) meant that Adam would never let me leave him, as he’d let Christy leave him.
I didn’t like him vulnerable to anything, even to me. I pulled on Adam’s hand, and he stood up.
“I love you, too,” I told him, and he smiled because he’d let me see what he felt. I cleared my throat. “I think Coyote was trying to help.”
Gary made a derogatory noise. When I looked at him, he was staring down the road. He didn’t trust in his safety, even when the danger couldn’t be heard or scented. I wondered if he wanted to be safe, or if he was more like Coyote. Like me, he was covered with sweat, but he seemed to be breathing better than I was. He must have stayed in good shape while he was in prison.
“Where did Coyote take you?” Adam asked. He had kept my hand.
“Let’s go find someplace to sit down,” I said. I needed a shower more than I needed to sleep—and I needed to sleep, now that the adrenaline charge was dying down, like a bee needed flowers.
Honey had a picnic table in her backyard. Sitting on the table, Gary and I took turns telling Adam what had happened. I don’t know why Gary sat on the table, but I was still so jumpy that I didn’t want to chance trapping my legs if we had to run again. Adam paced. I envied his energy: he hadn’t been chasing after Coyote all night.
Before we’d gotten very far in our narrative, Darryl, then Mary Jo, joined us. Mary Jo gave me a full glass of water. I drank half of it and dumped the other half over my head to rinse away the sweat that was still dripping into my eyes with stinging force. The water helped my eyes but not my cheek.
“You can turn into a coyote between one breath and the next,” said Mary Jo when I got to the bit about running from the tibicenas. “I’ve seen you do it. You are faster that way, so why didn’t you change when the tibicenas were chasing you?”
“Clothes,” said Gary. “You try changing when you’re wearing your clothes, and the next thing you know, you’re tangled up in your jeans.”
“At least you don’t have a bra,” I agreed sourly.
“While you were out running around, you got an interesting phone call,” Adam told me, pulling my cell phone out of his back pocket. He hit a button. “Wulfe wants to talk to you.”
I put it up to my ear. If he’d said that last before he’d hit the button, I’d have objected. Jumpy and exhausted are not a good state for talking to Wulfe, Marsilia’s right-hand vampire. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been trying to kill me—and Marsilia, the vampire who ruled all the vamps in the Tri-Cities. There was an outside chance that Wulfe had actually been trying to protect Marsilia, but I had no trouble assigning him as much villainy as seemed to want to cling to him—and a bit more.
“Mercy?” Wulfe’s voice was enough to wake me right up.
“You wanted to talk to me?” I wished I had more of Mary Jo’s glass of water left.
“Mercy,” he whispered. “Mercy. I can still taste you in my mouth.” I pulled the phone away from my ear because I didn’t want his voice that close to me. “I long for your blood on my tongue, little coyote-girl.”
Creepy. Of all the creepy people and monsters I’ve encountered—and a lot of monsters are pretty creepy—Wulfe is the one who gets to me the worst. I think it’s because he scares me the most. I had been thinking about drinking, and he started talking about it, as though he was reading my mind. He does that kind of thing a lot. He knows it bothers me, and that just encourages him.
“And I can see you turning to dust in the middle of the afternoon under the hot summer sun,” I told him, trying to sound bored. I did a pretty good job. Exhaustion and boredom sound a lot alike. “If your dream comes true, then mine gets to come true, too.”
“Life is not so fair, Mercy,” he said, and someone in the same room with him made a noise.
Any adult who has ever watched a porn flick knows that noise. It’s the one that real people don’t make unless they are faking something.
“If you just called to flirt, I’m hanging up.”
He drew in a shaky breath, then moaned.
I hung up.
“Who was that, and why was he having phone sex with you?” asked Gary.
“I need to wash my brain,” muttered Darryl. “Next time I see that vampire, I’m going to squish him like a bug.”
“I feel violated,” I said, half-seriously.
The phone rang, and I set it on the table. It rang again, and we all looked at it.
Adam picked it up and hit the green button on the screen.
“Mercy, you spoil all my fun,” Wulfe said, sounding less psychotic and more petulant. “You keep killing my playmates. It’s only fair that you take their place.”
I don’t know which playmates he was talking about. Andre? Frost? Frost was the last vampire I’d killed.
“No,” said Adam, as if Wulfe had been asking a question.
“I told you I’ll only talk to Mercy,” said Wulfe, dropping into singsong. “I know something you don’t know.”
“What?” asked Adam.
“I have news about a man who was looking for a house this week with room for his dogs. He paid cash. Lots of cash.”
“Where?” asked Adam.
“Oh dear,” Wulfe said. “You don’t think I’m going to tell you, do you? I could have told you an hour ago.”
Adam looked at me. I took the phone. Coyote said that Guayota and his dogs had killed again tonight. This wasn’t just about Christy anymore. Guayota needed to be stopped.
“It’s me,” I said. “But if you keep screwing with us, I’ll call Stefan and see if he can’t figure out what your news is.”
Marsilia, the mistress of the local vampire seethe, was courting Stefan with as much delicacy as a Victorian gentleman courted his chosen lady. He’d been her most loyal follower for centuries, and she’d broken the ties between them with brutal thoroughness in order to maintain control of her seethe. Now that he was finally talking to her again, if he asked her for information, she’d give it to him. Even if it was for me.
There was a little silence on the line. Then Wulfe said, sounding hurt, which was absurd, “I have no reason to help you, Mercy. One of my sheep brought me some interesting-for-you information. But if you aren’t going to be nice, you don’t get it.”
Vampires.
“Nice how?” I asked.
“Come to my house tonight,” he purred. “You remember where it is, right? I’ll give you my information if you play well enough.”
“She isn’t going alone,” said Adam.
“Oh no,” agreed Wulfe. “Nothing says fun like an Alpha werewolf. Just you two, though.”
I was going to be a zombie for the meeting with the
lawyer and the cops tomorrow. Adam would have to do all the talking for me—he’d had about ten minutes more sleep than I had. But if Wulfe knew something, anything that would give us an advantage over Guayota, we needed to find out what it was. In less than a week, he’d killed who knows how many people. The official report, according to Adam’s private investigator in Eugene, was that four had died in the fire Guayota had started in Christy’s condo. There were all those women in the field in Finley and however many he’d killed tonight. Coyote had said Guayota wouldn’t stop until he was stopped.
“Fine,” I said. “Give me time to shower, and we’ll be there.” I hung up my phone and looked at the time.
“When’s daylight?” I asked.
“About three hours,” Adam said. “About a half an hour before we’re scheduled to meet with the lawyer.”
“I could take Warren or Darryl,” I said. “You could sleep and go meet with the lawyers. I’d join you later for the police and keep my mouth shut. Possibly drool on your shoulder and snore.”
He shook his head. “No. I’ll drool and snore on you, too. The one thing that is not going to happen is you visiting the court jester of the evil undead alone.”
11
Wulfe’s house was in a housing development that had been an orchard ten years ago. The houses in this one almost escaped that “we were all designed by the same architect and you can pick one of three house plans” sameness. It had been in place long enough for hedges and greenery, but not quite long enough for big trees.
The neighborhood was firmly middle-class, with mobile basketball hoops in front of the garage doors in driveways and swing sets in the backyards. The people who lived right next door to Wulfe had a giant cedar kid’s activity center—it was way too huge to be merely a swing set—and an aboveground swimming pool in their side yard. The side yard right next to Wulfe’s house. Those hadn’t been there the last time I’d visited.
Wulfe’s neighbors had a yappy little dog that started barking as soon as we pulled into Wulfe’s driveway. No lights turned on, and I bet that it yapped at cars driving by, cats trespassing in its yard, and bugs flying past the window. There is nothing more useless than a watchdog that barks at normal things the same way it does at a thief at the door.
“This is where Wulfe’s home is?” asked Adam, turning off the engine.
“I know,” I told him. “Blew my mind, too.”
He looked at the swimming pool. “I feel as though I need to warn them about what occupies the house next door.”
“If it helps,” I said. “They are probably the safest people in the Tri-Cities. He’s not going to feed so close to home—and you can bet that nothing else is, either. Unless their yappy dog drives Wulfe crazy; then all bets are off.”
Adam shook his head and hopped out of the SUV. I jumped out of my side, too. I couldn’t see the ghosts. Vampires’ lairs always have ghosts, but they only show up when the vampires are asleep. I could feel them like a dozen eyes watching me from the shadows.
I met Adam in front of the house and let him approach and knock on the door while I kept an eye out behind us for an ambush. The man who opened the door had a line of big hickeys on his neck and wore nothing but a pair of jeans. When Adam wore nothing but his jeans, it was sexy; this guy was just disturbing. He wasn’t fat, but there was no muscle on him, just loose skin and softness where muscle should be, as though someone had siphoned all the muscle out and left him … dying. His eyes were dead already.
He didn’t really look at us. All of his attention was focused behind him even though his eyes were on us. “My master says you are to follow me,” he told us.
We entered the house. Though it looked spotlessly clean, the interior of the house smelled. I remembered that from the first time I had visited here, but it was worse than I remembered, as if I’d filtered some of it out in my memories. My nose caught the charnel-house odors of blood, meat, feces, urine, and that odd smell of internal organs. Faintly but pervasively, I could smell an underlying scent of something rotting.
Adam took point, and I followed, watching behind us as I had on the porch. Wulfe’s sheep led us into the kitchen, where we were treated to the sight of Wulfe lying down on top of one of those 1950s chrome and green Formica kitchen tables. There were three chairs that matched the table: two of them were knocked over, and the third was tucked in where it belonged on the side of the table where Wulfe’s head was.
Like the guy who was ushering us into the house, Wulfe was naked from the waist up. Wulfe had been about fifteen when he was made a vampire, old enough to hint at the man he would never become. His ribs showed, and his skin was almost powder white, a shade paler than his hair. Last time I’d seen Wulfe, his hair had been buzzed, but it was longer now, maybe half an inch long, and it had been shaped.
He lay faceup, back slightly arched and eyes closed. One foot, wearing a purple Converse tennis shoe, was flat on the table, pushing his knee up. The other leg was outstretched, that foot bare and pointed like a ballet dancer’s. He’d painted his toenails green, and they matched the color of the Formica tabletop. I didn’t know if that was on purpose or not.
The light over the dining-room table was on, and someone had put daylight bulbs in the fixture because the tabletop looked more like an operating table than a place people might sit down and eat breakfast.
“Wulfe,” Adam said dryly. “It’s what’s for dinner.”
“Yes!” Wulfe said, suddenly sitting cross-legged and facing us. “See, Bryan? I told you he would get it!”
“Actually, you said she would get it, master,” the man who’d let us in said.
Wulfe looked at him thoughtfully. “Am I still allowing you opinions?”
The man blinked at him.
“How long have you belonged to me, Bryan?”
Bryan had been the name of my foster father. There were lots of people named Bryan. It shouldn’t bother me so much that they shared a name, this man who was the victim of a vampire and my foster father.
“Two days?” Bryan sounded unsure.
“That’s right,” said Wulfe. “I let you think until the third night. What happens on the third night, Bryan?”
Bryan’s heartbeat picked up. For a moment I thought it was fear, but then I caught the scent of arousal. “You drink me dry,” he said in the same breathless voice that six-year-olds talk about Christmas.
“Go away, Bryan,” Wulfe told him. “Go sleep until tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” Bryan agreed, and hurried eagerly past Adam and me. After a moment, I heard a bedroom door slam.
“You feel sorry for him,” Wulfe accused me.
“You intended me to feel sorry for him,” I assured him. “Mission successful. What do you want in exchange for the address?” I couldn’t rescue the vampire’s victims without starting a war, and it was too late for this Bryan anyway. If I were sure that war would confine itself to Marsilia’s seethe and our pack, I might try it—but my connection to Bran and Marsilia’s to the Lord of Night who ruled vampires the way Bran ruled the werewolves held the danger of escalation. If there was a war between werewolves and vampires, everyone would lose.
Still, if one of their victims ever asked for help …
Wulfe lowered his eyes as if he were a little shy. “I want a drink, Mercy. Just a little sip.”
“No,” said Adam, and the word was echoed by another No—Stefan’s voice in my head.
I’d let Stefan bind me to him once, because another vampire had been feeding from me, and I didn’t want to belong to that one. Belonging to any vampire was bad—all anyone had to do was look at Wulfe’s victim, his Bryan, to understand that. Belonging to a vampire the other vampires called the Monster would have been worse than bad, so I’d asked Stefan for help and he’d tried. But Stefan’s hold had been broken when the Monster had taken me again. When he died, all of the ties between the vampires and me were gone. Stefan had told me so. I’d known him a long time, ten years and more. Until this moment, I’d have
sworn he wouldn’t lie to me.
I wanted to be shocked at proof that he’d lied—but … he’d spoken in my head a few months ago, when I was fighting the vampire Frost, who wanted to take the city from Marsilia. I’d been hoping it was a leftover effect, a glitch, something that wouldn’t happen again, so I hadn’t talked about it to him or Adam. When nothing else happened, I decided it wasn’t worth worrying about.
I’d evidently been wrong.
Adam heard that second no as well, because he looked at me, his eyes widening. Before he could say anything, though, Stefan was just suddenly there in the kitchen, standing between us and the vampire on the table.
There are some powers all vampires have. There are others that only a few gain as they age. Stefan could teleport. As far as I knew, he and Marsilia were the only vampires who could do that.
He had gained weight since I saw him just a month or so ago at one of the bad-movie nights Kyle and Warren hosted. Not enough to bring him back to where he’d been before Marsilia had nearly broken him, but close. He wore a dark blue t-shirt and faded jeans.
Wulfe started giggling as Stefan grabbed him by the throat and growled, “Mercy is off-limits.”
Shivers slid down my spine, and my knees weakened. All this time, Stefan had been listening in. Could he call me, too? Make me come to him, no matter what I wanted to do?
“No, she isn’t,” Wulfe said triumphantly. Stefan’s hold on his throat didn’t seem to be having any effect on his ability to talk. “She’ll never be off-limits to you, isn’t that right?”
“His tie to her was broken,” said Adam.
“It must have been a strong link,” said Wulfe, hanging limply from Stefan’s hands. “It must have been strong if the Monster couldn’t take it. But then a lot of people underestimate our Soldier, our Stefan. Even so, a stronger vampire than Stefan should be able to supercede the blood bond he has with you, Mercy—we could fix that for you. Who would you rather serve, Mercy—Marsilia or me?” Wulfe giggled some more.
“Stefan?” I asked, wanting Wulfe to be wrong about the tie between Stefan and me, but empirical evidence suggested otherwise.
Night Broken Page 24
