Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson

by Patricia Briggs

  He still had the chair and his smile had grown to a wide, white grin. “Very nice, boy. But I’m not your enemy.” He glanced up at the clock on the wall and shook his head.

  “Someone ought to reset that thing. Do you know what time it is?”

  No more furniture moved. Her father made a show of taking out his cell phone and looking at it. “Six thirty. It’s dark outside already. How badly did you hurt it with that chair I saw in the photo?”

  Devonte was breathing hard, but Stella controlled her urge to go to him. Her father, hopefully, knew what he was doing. She shivered, though she was wearing her favorite wool suit and the hospital was quite warm. How much of the stories she’d heard about vampires was true?

  Devonte released a breath. “Not badly enough.”

  On the tails of Devonte’s reply, her father asked, “Who taught you not to talk at all, if you have a secret to keep?”

  “My grandmother. Her mother survived Dachau because the American troops came just in time—and because she kept her mouth shut when the Nazis wanted information.”

  Her father’s face softened. “Tough woman. Was she the Gypsy? Most wizards have at least a little Gypsy blood.”

  Devonte shrugged, rubbed his hands over his face hard. She recognized the gesture from a hundred different kids: he was trying not to cry. “Stella said you’re a werewolf.”

  Her father cocked his head as if he were weighing something. “Stella doesn’t lie.” Unexpectedly he pinned Stella with his eyes. “I don’t know if we’ll have a vampire calling tonight—it depends upon how badly Devonte hurt it.”

  “Her,” said Devonte. “It was a her.”

  Still looking at Stella, her father corrected himself. “Her. She must have been pretty badly injured if she hasn’t come here already. And it probably means we’re lucky and she is alone. If there were others, they’d have come yesterday or the day before—they can’t afford to let Devonte live with what he knows about them. Vampires haven’t survived as long as they have by leaving witnesses.”

  “No one would have believed me,” Devonte said. “They’d have locked me up forever.”

  That made her father release her from the grip of his gaze as he focused his attention on Devonte. The boy straightened under the impact—Stella knew exactly how he felt.

  “Is that what Linnford told you when his neighbors came running to see why there was so much noise?” her father asked gently. “Upscale apartment dwellers aren’t nearly as likely to ignore odd sounds. Is that why you threw around so much furniture? That was smart, boy.”

  Devonte was nodding his head—and he straightened a little more at her father’s praise.

  “Next time a vampire attacks you and you don’t manage to kill it, though, you shout it to the world. You may end up seeing a psychologist for the rest of your life—but the vampires will stay as far from you as they can. If she doesn’t come tonight, you tell your story to the newspapers.” Her father glanced at Stella and she nodded.

  “I know a couple of reporters,” she said. “‘Boy Claims He Was Attacked by Vampire’ ought to sell enough papers to justify a headline or two.”

  “All right, then.” Her father returned his attention to her. “I need you to go out and find some wood for us: a chair, a table, something we can make stakes out of.”

  “Holy water?” asked Devonte. “They might have a chapel here.”

  “Smart,” said her father. “But from what I’ve heard, it doesn’t do enough damage to be worth running it down. Go now, Stella—and be careful.”

  She almost saluted him, but she didn’t trust him enough to tease. He saw it, almost smiled, and then turned back to Devonte. “And you’re going to tell me everything you know about this vampire.”

  Stella glanced in the room next to Devonte’s, but, like his, it was decorated in early Naugahyde and metal: no wood to be found. She didn’t bother checking any more but hurried to the security door—and read the note taped to it.

  “No, sir. She lived with them—they told me she was Linnford’s sister.” Devonte stopped talking when she came back.

  “Jorge’s been called away, he’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Her father considered that. “I think the show’s on. No wooden chairs?”

  “All the rooms in this wing are like this one.”

  “Without an effective weapon, I’ll get a better chance at her as a wolf than as a human. It means I can’t talk to you, though—and it will take a while to change back, maybe a couple of hours.” He looked away, and in an adult version of Devonte’s earlier gesture, rubbed his face tiredly. She heard the rasp of whisker on skin. “I control the wolf now—and have for a long time.”

  He was worried about her.

  “It’s all right,” she told him. He gave her the same kind of keen examination he’d given Devonte earlier and she wondered what information he was drawing from it. Could he tell how scared she was?

  His face softened. “You’ll do, my star.”

  She’d forgotten that he used to call her that—hated the way it tightened her throat. “Should I call Clive and Steve?”

  “Not for a vampire,” he told her. “All that will do is up the body count. To that end, we’ll stay here and wait—an isolation ward is as good a place to face her as any. If I’m wrong, and the guard’s leaving isn’t the beginning of her attack—if she doesn’t come tonight, we get all of us into the safety of someone’s home, where the vampire can’t just waltz in without invitation. Then I’ll call in a few favors and my friends and I can take care of her somewhere there aren’t any civilians to be hurt.”

  He looked around with evident dissatisfaction.

  “What are you looking for?” Devonte asked so she didn’t have to.

  “A place to hide.” Then he looked up and smiled at the dropped ceiling.

  “Those panels won’t support your weight,” she warned him.

  “No, but this is a hospital and this is the old wing. I bet they have a cable ladder for their computer and electric cables . . .” As he spoke, he hopped on the empty bed and pushed up a ceiling panel to take a look.

  “What’s a cable ladder?” Stella asked.

  “In this case, it’s a sturdy aluminum track attached to the oak beam with stout hardware.” He sounded pleased as he replaced the ceiling panel he’d taken out. “I could hide a couple of people up here if I had to.”

  He was a mercenary, she remembered, and wondered how many times he’d hidden on top of cable ladders.

  He moved the empty bed away from the wall and climbed on it again and removed a different panel. “Do you think you can get this panel back where it belongs after I get up here, boy?”

  “Sure.” Devonte sounded thoroughly pleased. If anyone else had called him “boy,” he’d have been bristling. He was already well on the way to a big case of hero worship, just like the one she’d had.

  “Stella.” Her father took off his red flannel shirt and laid it on the empty bed behind him. “When this is over, you call Clive, tell him everything, and he’ll arrange a cleanup. He knows who to call for help with it. It’s safer for everyone if people don’t believe in vampires and werewolves. Leaving bodies makes it kind of hard to deny.”

  “I’ll call him.”

  Without his shirt to cover him, she could see there was no softness in him. A few scars showed up gray on his dark skin. She’d forgotten how dark he was, like ebony.

  As he peeled off his sky-blue undershirt, he said, with a touch of humor, “If you don’t want to see more of your father than any daughter ever should, you need to turn your back.” And she realized she’d been staring at him.

  Devonte made an odd noise—he was laughing. There was a tightness to the sound and she knew he was scared and excited to see what it looked like when a man changed into a werewolf. For some reason she felt her own mouth stretch
into a nervous grin she let Devonte see just before she did as her father advised her and turned her back.

  • • •

  David didn’t like changing in front of anyone. He wasn’t exactly vulnerable—but it made the wolf edgy and if someone decided to get brave and approach too closely . . . well, the wolf would feel threatened, like a snake shedding its skin.

  So to the boy he said quietly, “Watching is fine. But wait for a bit if you want to touch . . .” He had a thought. “Stella, if she sends the Linnfords in first, I’ll do my best to stay hidden. I can take a vampire . . .” Honesty forced him to continue. “Maybe I can take a vampire, but only with surprise on my side. Her human minions, if they are still human enough to walk in daylight, are still too human to detect me. Don’t let them take Devonte out of this room.”

  He tried to remember everything he knew about vampires. Once he changed, it would be too late to talk. “Don’t look in the vampire’s eyes, don’t let her touch you. Unless you are really a believer, don’t plan on crosses helping you out. When I attack, don’t try and help, just keep out of it so I don’t have to worry about you.”

  Wishing they had a wooden stake, he knelt on the floor and allowed himself to change. Calling the wolf was easy, it knew there was a fight to be had, blood to be shed, and in its eagerness it rushed the change as if called by the moon herself.

  He never remembered exactly how bad it was going to hurt. His mother had once told him that childbirth was like that for women. That if they remembered how bad it was, they’d lack the courage to face the next time.

  But he did remember it was always worse than he expected, and that somehow helped him bear it.

  The shivery, icy pain slid over his bones while fire threaded through his muscles, reshaping, reorganizing, and altering what was there to suit itself. Experience kept him from making noise—it was one of the first things he learned: how to control his instincts and keep the howls, the growls, and the whines inside and bury them in silence. Noise can attract unwanted attention.

  His lungs labored to provide oxygen as adrenaline forced his heart to beat too fast. His face ached as teeth became fangs and his jaw extended with cheekbones. His eyesight blurred and then sharpened with a predatory clarity that allowed him to see prey and enemy alike no matter what shadows they tried to hide in.

  “Cool,” said someone. Devonte. He-who-was-to-be-guarded.

  Someone moved and it attracted his attention. Her terror flooded his senses like perfume.

  Prey. He liked it when they ran.

  Then she lifted her chin and he saw a second image, superimposed over the first. A child standing between him and two smaller children, her chin jutting out as she lifted up a baseball bat in wordless defiance that spoke louder than her terror and the blood.

  Not prey. Not prey. His. His star.

  It was all right then. She could see his pain—she had earned that right. And together they would stop the monster from eating the boy.

  For the first few minutes after the change, he mostly thought like the wolf, but as the pain subsided, he settled back into control. He shook off the last of the unpleasant tingles with the same willpower he used to set aside the desire to snarl at the boy who reached out with a hand . . . only to jerk back, caught by the strap on his wrist.

  David hopped onto the bed and snapped through the ballistic nylon that attached Devonte’s cuff to the rail and waited while the boy petted him tentatively with all the fascination of a person touching a tiger.

  “That’ll be a little hard to explain,” said Stella.

  He looked at her and she flinched . . . then jerked up her chin and met his eyes. “What if the Linnfords ask about the restraint?”

  It had been the wolf’s response to seeing the boy he was supposed to protect tied up like a bad dog, not the man’s.

  “They haven’t been here,” said Devonte. “Unless they spend a lot of time in hospital prison, they won’t know it was supposed to be there. I’ll cover the cuff on my wrist with the blanket.”

  Stella nodded her head thoughtfully. “All right. And if things get bad, at least this way you can run. He’s right, it’s better if the restraint is off.”

  David let them work it out. He launched himself off Devonte’s bed and onto the other—forgetting that Devonte was already hurt until he heard the boy’s indrawn breath. David was still half operating on wolf instincts—which wasn’t very helpful when fighting vampires. He needed to be thinking.

  Maybe it had only been the suddenness of his movement, though, because the boy made the same sound when David hopped through the almost-too-narrow opening in the ceiling and onto the track in the plenum space between the original fourteen-foot ceiling and false panels fitted into the flimsy hangers that kept them in place. The track groaned a little under his sudden weight, but it didn’t bend.

  “My father always told us that no one ever looks up for their enemy,” Stella said after a moment. “Can you replace the panel? If you can’t, I—”

  The panel he’d moved slid back into place with more force than necessary and cracked down the middle.

  “Damn it.”

  “Don’t worry, no one will notice. There are a couple of broken panels up there.”

  • • •

  She couldn’t see any sign that her father was hiding in the ceiling except for the bed. She grabbed it by the headboard and tugged it back to its original position, then she did the same with the chair.

  She’d forgotten how impressive the wolf was . . . almost beautiful: the perfect killing machine covered with four-inch-deep, red-gold fur. She hadn’t remembered the black that tipped his ears and surrounded his eyes like Egyptian kohl.

  “If you’ll get back, I’ll see what I can do with the wall,” said Devonte. “Sometimes I can fix things as well as move them.”

  That gave her a little pause, but she found that wizards weren’t as frightening as werewolves and vampires. She considered his offer, then shook her head.

  “No. They already know what you are.” She gathered her father’s clothes from the bedspread and folded them neatly. Then she stashed them—and the plastic bag with Devonte’s clothes—in the locker. “Just leave the wall. We only need to hide the werewolf from them, and you might need all the power you’ve got to help with the vampire.”

  Devonte nodded.

  “Right, then.” She took a deep breath and picked up her catchall purse from the floor where she’d set it.

  Her brothers had made fun of her purses until she’d used one to take out a mugger. She’d been lucky—it had been laden with a pair of three-pound weights she’d been transporting from home to work—but she’d never admitted that to her brothers. Afterward they’d given her Mace and karate lessons, and quit bugging her about the size of her purse.

  Unearthing a travel-sized game board from its depths, she said, “How about some checkers?”

  Five hard-won games later she decided the vampire either wasn’t coming tonight, or she was waiting for Stella to go away. She jumped three of Devonte’s checkers and there was a quiet knock on the door. She turned to look as Jorge, the cop who’d gotten babysitting duty today, poked his head in.

  “Sorry to leave you stuck here.”

  “No problem. Just beating a poor helpless child at checkers.”

  She waited for him to respond with something funny—Jorge was quick on his feet. But his face just stayed . . . not blank precisely, but neutral.

  “They need you down in pediatrics, now. Looks like a case of child abuse, and Doc Gonzales wants you to talk to the little girl.”

  She couldn’t help the instincts that brought her to her feet, but those same instincts were screaming that there was something wrong with Jorge.

  Between her job and having a brother on the force, she’d gotten to know some of the cops pretty well. Nothing bothered Jorge like a chi
ld who’d been hurt. She’d seen him cry like a baby when he talked about a car wreck where the child hadn’t survived. But he’d passed this message along to her with all the passion of a hospital switchboard operator.

  In the movies, vampires could make people do what they wanted them to—she couldn’t remember if the people were permanently damaged. Mostly, she was afraid, they just died.

  She glanced down at her watch and shook her head. “You know my rules,” she said. “It’s after six and I’m off shift.”

  Her rules were a standing joke with her brothers and their friends—a serious joke. She’d seen too many people burn out from the stress of her job. So she’d made a list of rules she had to follow, and they’d kept her sane so far. One of her rules was that from eight in the morning until six in the evening she was on the job; outside of those hours she did her best to have a real life. She was breaking it now, with Devonte.

  Instead of calling her on it, Jorge just processed her reply and finally nodded. “All right. I’ll tell them.”

  He didn’t close the door when he left. She went to the doorway and watched him walk mechanically down the hall and through the security door, which he’d left open. Very unlike him to leave a security door open, but he closed it behind him.

  “That was the vampire’s doing, wasn’t it?” she asked, looking up.

  The soft growl that eased through the ceiling was somehow reassuring—though she hadn’t forgotten his reservations about how well he’d do against a vampire.

  She went back to Devonte’s bed and made her move on the board. Out in the hall the security door opened again, and someone wearing high heels click-clicked briskly down the hall.

  Stella took a deep breath, settled back on the end of the bed, and told Devonte, “Your turn.”

  He looked at the board, but she saw his hand shake as whoever it was in the hallway closed in on them.

  “King me,” he said in a fair approximation of triumph.

  The footsteps stopped in the doorway. Devonte looked over her shoulder and his face went slack with fear. Stella inhaled and took her first look.