Mercy Thompson 8: Night Broken

by Patricia Briggs

  “I had a fae artifact,” I told him. “I gave it to Coyote, and now the fae want it back. Yesterday.”

  There was a short silence, then Hank said, “I thought the fae were shut up in their rez for the foreseeable future.”

  “Apparently some of them are still out and about,” I told him after an on-the-fly decision that I owed no loyalty to Beauclaire and the rest of the fae folk. Besides, Hank wouldn’t spread it around.

  Hank huffed a laugh at my dry tone. “Politicians never have to follow their own laws, right? Jeez, kid. Don’t do trouble by half, do you? Let me ask around a little more pointedly, and I’ll get back to you, tomorrow latest.”

  I ended the call feeling the sharp edge of panic. It looked like getting in touch with Coyote was going to be more difficult than I’d anticipated. I hadn’t really thought Hank would know how to contact Coyote, but I’d been counting on talking to Gordon, who would.

  Tad asked, “Who wants the walking stick?”

  “Alistair Beauclaire,” I told him.

  Tad blinked. “Dad was wondering what he was doing flitting in and out and about the reservation without an apparent purpose. I wouldn’t have thought that the walking stick was important enough for a Gray Lord, though.”

  I shrugged. “Who can predict the fae? Not even the fae as far as I’ve been able to see. Your dad knows that Beauclaire isn’t a fan, right?”

  Tad gave me an oddly gentle smile. “Beauclaire would kill my father in an instant if he weren’t too noble to take out the whole rez and Walla Walla at the same time. Outside of massive, wholesale destruction, my father is more than a match for him.”

  I took a breath. “Did your father really kill Lugh?”

  Tad went back to the job at hand, but he nodded. “As my father tells it, Lugh was old, powerful, and starting to get scary. Really scary. Started out as a hero and was turning into something a lot different.”

  He gave me a sly look as he pulled out the battery and set it aside. “Of course, my father wasn’t a white knight back then, either. He killed Lugh because he was more interested in making a cool weapon than killing someone who might be a danger to the world—but, as he likes to point out, it served both purposes, so he is happy to take credit. The fae world heaved a sigh of relief, shook their collective and disorganized finger at my dad, and then went about their business.”

  My phone rang again, and the caller ID said it was Hank.

  “That was fast.”

  “I have a name,” said Hank. “Gary Laughingdog. He is a coyote walker like you. Maybe he can help you—word is that he has Coyote’s ear when he needs it.”

  “Do you have a phone number?”

  “He is locked up at the Coyote Ridge facility in Connell. You’ll have to go see him there.”

  “In jail?” I asked.

  I heard the smile in Hank’s voice. “He is not a violent criminal, Mercy. But he has little respect for the law or personal property, and that lands him in trouble from time to time. This time it landed him in prison for two years, of which he has served eight months. He likes women, has a reputation with them.” There was a little pause, and Hank said, “Most of the coyote walkers have trouble with the law.”

  “At least they don’t have trouble passing elementary school like the hawk walkers,” I said because Hank liked to tease and could take as good as he gave.

  Hank was laughing when he disconnected.

  “Do you know how to visit someone in prison?” asked Tad.

  “Do you?”

  He shook his head. “No. When they locked up my dad, he wouldn’t let me come home.”

  “Adam will know,” I said, and dialed him.

  “Adam Hauptman’s phone,” said Christy. “Can I help you?”

  “Is Adam there?” I asked. There would, I knew, be a good explanation of why Christy was answering Adam’s phone—especially since he’d told her not to answer her own phone. I’d noticed before, when she wasn’t living in my home, that Christy always had good reasons for doing the wrong thing, reasons that made everyone look stupid for questioning her.

  “Yes,” she said. “But he can’t come to the phone right now.”

  “I see.”

  “Is this Mercy?” she said brightly. “I didn’t know it was you. He’s on the house phone talking to the arson investigator. Can I give him a message?”

  I couldn’t tell across phone lines, but I was pretty sure she was lying about not knowing it was me calling in the first place. My name would have scrolled across the caller ID.

  “No,” I said. “It’s all right.”

  I hung up and stared at my phone for a while. Adam had gone to work this morning the same time I had. He’d called in some of the wolves to watch over Christy. So why was he home, and why did she have his phone?

  “I’d make you some brownies,” I told Tad. “But she’s always in my kitchen.”

  The expression on his face was compassionate. “I expect that the jail has a web page with phone numbers of people who can help you figure out how to visit the guy you need to see.”

  Coyote Ridge Corrections Center is a minimum- and medium-security facility just outside of Connell, which is about an hour’s drive north of the Tri-Cities. It’s a little town of about five thousand inhabitants, not including those who are incarcerated in the prison.

  I didn’t go alone.

  I glanced at my passenger and wondered if I’d made the right choice. Not that there were a lot of pack members who’d have been free to head out on short notice, especially now that Adam was keeping four wolves at our house all the time.

  Honey had lost weight since her husband’s death, and she hadn’t been fat to begin with. She’d cut her honey-colored hair into a severe style that framed her face with its newly hollowed cheekbones. With that and her body reduced to muscle and bone, she should have looked hard, but instead she looked fragile.

  She hadn’t said a word to me since I picked her up in my Vanagon. Not even to ask where we were going.

  I’d told her I needed someone to come with me on an errand, and she hadn’t asked any questions. I’d decided it was a subtle defiance—following the letter of the law that said I was in charge without actually making an effort to be useful. But either driving or twenty minutes of distance from Christy cheered me to more optimistic possibilities. Maybe Honey just didn’t know what to say.

  Or maybe she liked Christy more than she liked me, too.

  “I had a fae artifact follow me home,” I told her. I couldn’t remember if she’d known about the walking stick. I’d tried not to talk about it too much. “It wouldn’t stay with any of the fae I tried to give it to. Which would have been fine except that it started to get bloodthirsty, so I found a safe place for it. Night before last, I was visited by a Gray Lord who informed me that it would be a good idea if I retrieved it and gave it back to him.”

  “You gave the walking stick to Coyote,” she said. And when I looked at her, she raised a cool eyebrow. “You were raised among wolves. I’d think you’d know well enough how fast and thoroughly gossip travels in the pack.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I don’t know how to get ahold of Coyote in a hurry. In my experience, he just shows up when he chooses. So I called around and got the name of another walker who might know how to find him before the fae decide to destroy the Tri-Cities in retribution.”

  She looked at me, frowned, and sat up straighter. “You were trying to joke—but you really believe they might destroy the whole town.”

  “Not they,” I said, remembering that instant when the glamour thinned, and he’d snarled at the cat. “He. And yes, I think the fae are capable of anything. I’d have given them the stupid walking stick a long time ago if it would have let me.”

  “Was it Zee?”

  I shook my head. “Zee’s not a Gray Lord. Close, I think, but not. This was Alistair Beauclaire, the man responsible for the fae retreat to the reservations.”

  “Good,” she said. “I like Zee.” />
  She was quiet for a few miles. “Where are we going?”

  “To Connell,” I told her. “To visit someone who might know how to find Coyote.”

  She glanced down at the clothes she was wearing—rose slacks and a blue silk blouse. She buttoned the blouse another two buttons and began to shed jewelry. “They won’t let you bring a weapon on-site,” she said. “Not even in your car.”

  Interesting that she knew the rules for visiting someone in prison.

  “I left the gun in the safe at the shop,” I told her. “And they don’t need to know that you are a weapon.”

  She smiled a little, and her eyes warmed.

  The parking lot had a deserted feel. Coyote Ridge could hold nearly three thousand prisoners—apparently none of them had family or friends who were visiting today. Prison wasn’t like the hospital, I guess. Social obligation didn’t cover visiting friends and acquaintances in prison.

  Like the Tri-Cities, Connell is in the heart of the desert. Not a pretty desert with sand strewn with cactus and interesting, thorn-covered plants, but shallow rolling hills that look like they needed a shave for the stubbled growth of sagebrush and cheatgrass.

  Set firmly in that stark and unbeautiful desert canvas, the prison was a hostile collection of plain, rectangular buildings with cement walls and steel doors, chain-link fences topped with rolls of razor wire, and atmospheric hopelessness that lay like a weight over it all. We left everything in the van except our licenses and the keys I used to lock up.

  The guards in the entrance building were professional and not unfriendly. They gave me a quarter to feed the locker where I put the keys to the Vanagon. They kept our driver’s licenses—the woman behind the counter did a double take at my name, but she didn’t otherwise say that she recognized it.

  Honey and I carefully avoided looking at Nat, one of the pack members who was a guard here—there were two wolves on staff, but I saw no sign of Luke. We signed in, and Nat took the clipboard from me, frowning when he saw the name of the man we were visiting. I don’t think anyone else noticed.

  We were escorted out of the building and into one of a series of parallel chain-link-enclosed paths into the prison itself. When the doors closed behind us, my pulse picked up, and Honey flinched. We showed our visitor badges to the guard behind the glass and walked into a room that looked like my high-school lunchroom.

  Dozens of gray plastic tables were set out, each with four all-plastic gray chairs. They looked like adult-sized versions of those children’s outdoor picnic furniture, an effect that was not alleviated by the chessboard pattern on the top of the tables. I wondered if they could have gotten them in a less depressing color. I guess lifting the prisoners’ spirits wasn’t a priority.

  There was room for seventy or eighty people in the room, but Honey and I and four guards were the only ones here. We sat down as directed and waited for them to get Gary Laughingdog.

  It was a long wait.

  He came eventually, escorted by a pair of guards, but without the complicated handcuffs and leg cuffs I’d been half expecting from TV shows.

  He covered ground with the casual saunter of someone who had walked a lot of miles and could walk a lot more. He was lean and not overly tall. My first impression, skewed by too much time with werewolves, was that here in this bleak room, Laughingdog was in charge.

  The guards knew they weren’t fully in control. I could see their unease by the tension in their shoulders and their general air of wariness that was too much for escorting a man who didn’t even rate handcuffs.

  Gary looked full-blooded Native American to my eyes, though someone more experienced might have said differently. His skin was darker than mine, darker than Hank’s, too. He wore his thick, straight black hair shoulder length, just a few inches shorter than I wore mine. His rough-hewn features made him interesting rather than good-looking.

  Gary Laughingdog was the very first coyote walker I’d ever met, and I looked for some resemblance to the face I saw every day in the mirror because we were related. All walkers are descended from the archetypal being whose shape they take. I found the likeness in his eyes, which were the same shape and exact color as the ones that I saw in the mirror every morning.

  He pulled out the plastic chair with exaggerated care and sat down with all the circumspection of Queen Victoria at her royal breakfast. His smile lit his face as his eyes, flat and unaffected by the cheer and bonhomie of the rest of his expression, traveled from Honey to me, then back to Honey, where they stayed.

  “Well, hel-lo, ladies,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  I looked up at the guards and raised my eyebrows at them. One of them walked away, and the other, after a wary glance that took in all of us, raised his eyebrows back at me. Luke was the other wolf from our pack. I jerked my chin, and he shrugged, raised his hands, and followed the first guard over to a position far enough from us that quiet talk couldn’t be overheard by a human. Luke would hear every word.

  Gary leaned forward, licked his lips, and said, in a low, hungry voice, “Hey, little princess, what are you doing coming out to a place like this? Gotcha some kink for a man behind bars?”

  Honey raised an eyebrow, and said coolly, “Bodyguard for my Alpha’s mate. And, although I haven’t eaten lunch yet, I prefer cooked chicken to raw human flesh—much as your words might tempt me.”

  Gary took in a deep breath and shook his head in apparent wonder. “I thought there weren’t any female werewolves.”

  She showed him her teeth in what someone else might have mistaken for a smile. “Ignorance is not unexpected.”

  Instead of being insulted, Gary looked delighted. He opened his mouth to say something, but then his eyes focused just over Honey’s shoulder.

  I knew what he saw.

  I growled. A low sound that didn’t carry, but it caught Gary’s attention.

  “She is mine,” I told him. “You say one thing that hurts her, and I will see to it that you never get out of here.” I didn’t have that kind of power, but I meant it anyway. And he knew darn good and well what the “one thing” was that I was talking about.

  The mask of affability dropped off his face, and he met my eyes with a blank face. I let him see just how serious I was. If he told Honey that her dead mate’s ghost was following her around, I’d make sure he regretted it for the rest of his life.

  The ghost that tagged along behind Honey wherever she went wasn’t really Peter, anyway, not now. Ghosts were only the remnant of the person left behind, bits and pieces of people that sometimes thought they were still alive.

  Something a vampire named Frost had done to Peter had kept Honey’s mate here for longer than usual, kept him soul-tied to earth when his body was dead. When I’d managed to release Peter and the others the vampire had harmed, Peter had lingered for a day and night before moving on to where souls go when the body is dead. But he’d left behind a lingering, sad-eyed ghost.

  It broke my heart a little when I saw his shade, and I’d be damned before Honey felt the same way.

  The other walkers I’d met hadn’t been able to see ghosts the way I could. It made sense that Gary Laughingdog, who was a coyote walker like me, would be able to see them as well. If I’d thought about it, I would have brought someone else here. Closed down the shop and taken Tad if I’d had to.

  “He can’t hurt me,” Honey told me. There was something odd in her voice, but I was too focused on the coyote on the other side of the table to decipher what it was.

  “Won’t hurt you,” said Gary Laughingdog, his voice softer than it had been; his eyes, which hadn’t left mine, were unfocused and a little dreamy. Softer than I’d seen them up to this moment. “Not on purpose. But there’s a change coming for you. I got a feel for change, and you’ll have a big one somewhere near you soon.” He half closed his eyes, and I felt a surge of magic that left my nose tingling and my eyes watering—it didn’t feel like fae magic, or witch or anything else I’d sensed before. Gary’s voice
lowered an octave. “Got some choices to make, sweet Honey. Choices.”

  I hadn’t told him Honey’s name. No one knew I’d brought her with me. Her coloring was honey-toned, though. Maybe it had just been an unexpectedly accurate guess. Honey wasn’t exactly an unusual endearment.

  I sneezed, and Gary’s eyes focused on me. He gave me a small smile, his eyes warm.

  “So, little sister,” he said to me. “What can I do for you?”

  “Why the change in attitude?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Word came only that coyote walker needs to talk to me,” he said with a shrug. “Usually my brother and sister walkers are con artists, thieves, and gamblers.” He tilted his head toward Honey. “Not too concerned with saving anyone’s hide except their own.”

  Honey wiggled in her seat in an un-Honey-like fidget.

  “What?” I said.

  “Mercy cares,” Honey said in that same funny voice she’d used before. She tapped a finger on the table. “She always cares.” This time it sounded more normal.

  “I saw it,” Laughingdog said. “And that’s why I am suddenly a lot more interested in being helpful than I was ten minutes ago. What do you need, child?”

  “Child?” I curled my lip, because letting a wolf get away with patronizing me would have been dangerous. A coyote was likely to be more annoying than dangerous, but in either case, it was better to stop it before it became a habit. Not that I expected to spend a lot of time with Gary Laughingdog; however, “better safe than sorry” was my phrase of the day.

  He raised a hand in surrender. “I’m a lot older than I look, older by a damn sight than you and your bodyguard, too. Something I can tell because of this thrice-dammed useless foresight gift He left me with when I was about your age.” He nodded at Honey. “Said He’d come by and take it back, but He hasn’t.”

  Beside me, Honey went still. Peter had been pretty old for a werewolf, at least two centuries. I didn’t know how old Honey was—and for the moment I didn’t care.

  Werewolves don’t age physically. I’d always assumed that, like my human mother, I’d have a normal life span, and Adam could live to be as old as … well, as Bran Cornick, the Marrok, who ruled the North American werewolves and sometimes talked casually about things that happened in the Middle Ages. Through Hank and his brother, I had met a few other walkers, and they seemed to come in all varieties of young and old. I had known couples, growing up, where the werewolf looked to be in his twenties, and his wife was dying of old age. I didn’t want to do that to my mate. I worried about Adam because he didn’t talk about it at all, and Adam was all about discussing problems he thought had solutions.