Mercy Thompson 8: Night Broken

by Patricia Briggs

  “Thank you for the heads-up,” I said.

  “Probably he’s just gone walkabout. Show up with another name in ten or twenty years. He does that.”

  “Walkabout?” I said doubtfully. “Isn’t that an Aussie Aboriginal term?”

  “An Indian is an Indian, Mercy, no matter what continent they come from,” he said with a grin in his voice. Before I could disagree, he disconnected.

  So I wasn’t surprised when the police showed up in the afternoon.

  “Mercy.”

  “Tony?” I looked up from the Passat I was working on. There was something wrong with the injectors, but it was intermittent, and I was afraid that meant it was electronic—and probably something to do with the computer. And that would explain why the car’s computer hadn’t been able to tell me what was going on.

  “Mercy, I need you to clean up and come talk to me.”

  I blinked at the tightness in his voice and focused on his face. Trouble, that expression said, and in response, I backed out of the job, pulling bolts and pieces out of my pockets and putting them on the car where they wouldn’t be lost. I peeled off the latex gloves and tossed them.

  “Tad?” I said.

  The sound of the crawler’s hard wheels on pavement signaled his emergence from under the Vanagon he was repairing.

  “I’m headed off with Tony for a bit. Don’t burn down the garage or run off the customers while I’m gone.”

  Tad glanced from Tony’s face to mine, and said mildly, “Is it okay if I call in a few strippers to put on a show and charge it to the garage? I’ve been thinking it might pull in some more customers.”

  “Sure,” I said as I stepped out of my overalls: in the interest of time, I didn’t bother to retreat to the bathroom. I was wearing a full set of clothes underneath anyway. “Just make sure Christy makes it over in time for the show so she can tell the pack what kind of place I run here. Oh, and tell her I took off with a hot-looking man.”

  He grimaced. “Yeah, sorry about that.”

  She’d called yesterday, and, knowing how I felt about her, Tad had told her that I’d gone out for a run. Tad doesn’t usually lie, though since he is only half-fae, he can, and he is a fair hand at misdirection. I had been in the garage bay, and he’d answered my cell in the office, where I’d left it.

  Next thing I know, I was getting a call from Adam, who was mad because he thought that I had been running without protection. Grocery stores and other public places were unlikely spots for kidnapping the Alpha’s wife. Running I had to do with company for safety’s sake. I regretted it, but I understood the necessity.

  I’d explained that Tad had been mistaken when he talked to Christy. I took the blame for it—thus putting myself firmly in the wrong. The pack figuratively—maybe literally, for all I know—patted Christy on the head for being so worried about my well-being.

  “Not your fault,” I told Tad—Christy would have found something else to make me look bad anyway. “Though this time you might mention that the handsome man is an armed police officer who will keep me safe as a fox in a henhouse.”

  Tad gave me a mock salute while I followed Tony out.

  “Trouble?” Tony asked.

  “Adam’s ex-wife has a stalker, so she is living with us until we can figure out what to do about him,” I told him as matter-of-factly as I could manage.

  He stopped and looked at me, and finally lost the odd distance I’d sensed—as if I’d been a stranger he’d been sent to fetch. Maybe he was worried that I had had a hand in Gary Laughingdog’s escape.

  “Adam’s ex-wife is living with you?” he asked incredulously.

  “Her stalker is dangerous,” I told him. “We are pretty sure he killed a man and burned down the building her condo was in. Until someone can find him and arrest him, Christy is staying with us because even a violent man might hesitate to face off with a pack of werewolves.”

  I had added the “arrest him” part because it sounded good. I was pretty sure at this point that any arrest would be postmortem. Maybe it had been a mistake because something in the last sentence put the distance right back between us.

  “I can see that,” he said, and continued walking to his car.

  I followed and, when he opened the passenger door for me, I got in. We sat in front of the garage for a minute, and I waited for him to ask me about Gary Laughingdog’s escape from prison.

  “I saw what you became,” he said instead. “Over at Kyle Brooks’s house, when the body that was in the trunk of the car broke out, and you and Adam tried to chase it down.”

  I looked at him. Yep. That cat was out of the bag for sure. I’d changed into my coyote shape to go chase after a zombie and had forgotten about all the people watching. Tony hadn’t been the only one who’d gotten an eyeful. I’d grown used to having more people know what I was and hadn’t even thought about what I was doing and who I was doing it in front of.

  In most ways, it wouldn’t matter if I shouted out that I was a coyote shapeshifter, a walker, to the whole world. I wasn’t alone anymore. In other ways, though, it was possibly disastrous. If the public realized that the fae and the werewolves were just the top of the anthill of Other that lived hidden among the human population, it could be bad. Bad for humans and bad for everyone else, too.

  “Yes?” I said. It was a question because we weren’t sitting in the car just so I could confess to being a coyote shapeshifter.

  “I asked Gabriel about it.”

  Gabriel had been my right hand in the garage before he went to college, and Tony had been infatuated with Gabriel’s mother for as long as I’d known him.

  “He told me something about what you are.” Tony met my eyes. “You aren’t human.”

  “No,” I agreed slowly. “Not completely.”

  He huffed an unhappy breath. “If there was someone in the pack murdering humans, would you cover for him?”

  I sucked in a breath. “You have a body?”

  “You didn’t answer the question.” His reply had answered mine, though.

  “If we had someone going around killing people for the fun of it,” I said, “I’d tell Adam.”

  “And what would Adam do?”

  Silence hung between us. I’d known Tony a long time. Long enough, I decided, to tell him the real truth instead of sugarcoating it. “Adam would deal with it before the police could step in. The fae’s sudden retreat to the reservations has put the werewolves on trial in the court of public opinion. They—we—can’t allow a murderer to stand trial or continue to rampage.”

  “Are you a werewolf?” he asked. “I mean a werewolf who turns into a coyote. A werecoyote.”

  “There coyote.” I grinned at him and received a look. “No. I’m not a werewolf or werecoyote—which I have never heard of, by the way. I have a different kind of magic entirely. Native magic, not European like the werewolves are. Mostly turning into a coyote is about all I manage.” I wasn’t going to explain to him about the ghosts or my partial immunity to magic, which was nothing I could count on anyway. “It would be best if you didn’t tell everyone about what I can do, though. Best for the public, who don’t need to be looking at their neighbors and worrying if they are something from a horror show. If they think werewolves and fae are it, then everyone is safer.”

  Tony nodded as if that thought had occurred to him, and he’d already been on board with keeping my secrets secret. “You included yourself with the werewolves, though.”

  I shrugged. “I’m married to one—and he made me an official member of the pack.” Not just in name, but in fact—accepted by the pack magic that bound us all together. But Tony didn’t need to know that. Even less than shapeshifting coyotes did people need to know that there was such a thing as pack magic. “Where are you going with this, Tony?”

  He looked away, not happy. He patted the steering wheel nervously. “I need to know if I can trust you.”

  “For some things,” I told him seriously. “You can trust me not to leave p
eople helpless against a monster. A human monster or a werewolf monster. I don’t help bad guys—even if they are someone I thought I liked or felt some loyalty to. Bad guys need to be stopped.”

  That, apparently, had been the right thing to say.

  “Okay,” he said with sudden assurance. “Okay. Yes.” He turned on the car and pulled out with a squeal, switching on his lights but not his siren. “We need your help with something.”

  And that’s all he said. But that “something” took us past the old Welch’s factory, past the WELCOME TO FINLEY sign, past the road to my house that used to only be Adam’s house and once was Adam and Christy’s house. The semirural cluster of houses grew momentarily denser near the high school, then thinned again. We followed the main road miles farther on, out to where croplands took over from small ranchettes, turned down a rutted dirt road, and pulled in next to five police cars and an ominously unlit ambulance gathered along the edge of a hayfield.

  I got out slowly as an angry man in a suit broke away from where a group of police officers were gathered and boiled over to Tony’s car, glanced at me, and flushed even hotter with the rage that covered … fear and horror.

  “What the hell are you thinking? Bringing her here?”

  I didn’t know him, but he knew me. Adam was something of a local, if not a national, celebrity—good looks are not always a good thing. That meant that lots of people I’d never met knew who I was.

  “We need her,” Tony told him. “If what you told me was right and this was something other than human. She can tell us what it was.”

  I caught a scent that bothered me, but it wasn’t coming from the direction of the group of police officers. Frowning, I turned in a slow circle to pinpoint it. I glanced at Tony, but he was busy arguing with the other man, so I wandered off in the direction my nose told me to, away from the cluster of officials.

  The ground was more uneven than I would have thought a hayfield would be, maybe because it was alfalfa and not grass hay. I had to watch my step as I walked along the edge of where grass had been cut. The growing crop of hay was only about five inches high—the length of a lawn that had been left a week too long. Off the cultivated field, I’d have been wading through the weeds that ruled where the ground was too rocky to be farmed.

  A short distance ahead in that too-rough-to-harvest rocky area, a copse of cottonwoods grew where the ground dropped down in a natural drainage. They’d probably been planted as a windbreak because we weren’t near enough to the Columbia River for the growth to be natural. By my reckoning, the source of the things I smelled seemed to be coming from the same general area.

  Tony and the man had quit arguing to follow me.

  “Where are you going, Mercy?” Tony called.

  “Something smells bad over here,” I told him. Blood and feces is bad, right?

  I left the tilled ground and broke through the edging ring of opportunistic alfalfa into cheatgrass that released spiky-painful seedpods into my tennis shoes and socks as soon as I’d traveled about two steps. I followed the too-sweet, unmistakable scent of freshly opened organs and blood to a small clearing under the trees—and stopped, appalled.

  “Holy shit,” the stranger who knew me said in reverent tones. Then he shouted one of those words that don’t mean anything except “pay attention” and “come” and are designed to carry over battlefields.

  This was not a battlefield, or even the remains of a battlefield. It was the remains of a slaughter.

  Bodies, blood, and pieces were scattered here and there and mixed, so it took me a moment to parse exactly what I saw. I finally decided to go with heads, because heads are difficult to eat, and the charnel-house mess was definitely missing parts and maybe whole bodies. Five … no, six people, all women, two dogs—a German shepherd and something small and mixed-breed—a horse, and some other big animal whose head was either missing or might have been under something.

  I have a strong stomach—I hunt rabbits, mice, and small birds while wearing my coyote skin, and I eat them raw. Before this, I would have said that lots of things make me squeamish, but fresh bodies not so much. This was so far beyond anything I’d ever seen that I flinched, looked away, then turned back to stare because part of me was sure that it couldn’t have been as bad as I first thought. It was worse.

  Had someone in the pack done this? Or rather, given the volume of meat eaten, had several someones in the pack done this?

  “These haven’t been here long,” I said into the silence behind me because I had to say something, do something. “Probably only since yesterday. It’s only spring, but even so, something would have started rotting in a day or so, and I don’t smell much putrefaction.”

  I took a step forward to see better, and Tony grabbed my arm.

  “Crime site,” he said. “We haven’t processed this. We didn’t know about this one.” He looked around. “This isn’t a make-out site, and there’s no reason for people to be walking around here. Probably wouldn’t have seen it until the guy who called us about the first body in his field came upon this by accident, too.”

  “How did she know it was here?” asked the angry man who knew who I was.

  “I could smell them,” I told him simply. “I’ve got a good nose—being the mate of a werewolf can bring unexpected benefits.” Both were true, just not the way I implied.

  “Clay Willis, this is Mercy Hauptman. Mercy, Clay Willis,” said Tony. “Clay’s the investigator in charge. We had one body I wanted you to take a look at because it looked like it’s been eaten by something. Our guy said maybe werewolves. That kill is older than this one”—he paused and took a breath—“than these are by more than a day.”

  “Could have been a werewolf,” I acknowledged reluctantly. If a werewolf had done this, he needed to be stopped yesterday. But, I thought with some relief, if it had been one of our werewolves who had taken this much prey, he’d been in the grips of some kind of frenzy, and that would have translated itself to the pack bonds. We all knew, on moon hunts, when one of us took down prey. It wasn’t one of our pack.

  “I can’t tell for sure if it was werewolves from here. Maybe if I got closer.” If a werewolf had been around here, he’d taken a different route to the killing field because I couldn’t smell werewolf.

  “Just tell us what you see,” Tony suggested, and raised a peremptory hand to keep the other people spread out behind us quiet.

  I looked at the pile of bodies, trying to analyze what I saw rather than worry about it.

  “Someone,” I began slowly, “maybe several someones—” I stopped and changed my mind. “No, it was just one killer. He had dinner, then … a play day, maybe? Opportunistic kills? Some predators, like leopards, will bring all of their prey to one place, where they can feed later.” But it didn’t really feel like that.

  “Why not several someones?” Tony asked.

  I tried to work that out, but my instincts said one killer, and I couldn’t tell them that. When I made a frustrated sound, Tony said, “Just from the top of your head, Mercy.”

  “No sign of competition,” I said, finally, distilling what my instincts had told me. “When a pack hunts—” Someone behind me sucked in a breath.

  “Werewolf packs hunt at least once a month on the full moon,” I told them firmly. “Around here, we mostly hunt rabbits or ground squirrels. Other places, they hunt deer, elk, or even moose. Just like timber wolves do, though werewolves avoid domestic animals like cattle as a matter of course.”

  “Point taken,” said Willis, not sounding angry anymore, just tired.

  “When wolves hunt, there is a hierarchy. Someone directs, others follow. I don’t see any signs of that. No signs that someone got the good parts—” My voice wobbled because for all my experience with killing rabbits, they were rabbits. One of the women was wearing tennis shoes that looked like a pair Jesse had in her closet. I shut up for a second to recover.

  “Maybe another kind of predator would hunt differently.” I shrugged un
easily. “But I think this is the work of just one.”

  Only the horse and the other big animal—which had probably been a horse, too, because I thought I could pick out the start of a mane—had been disemboweled. Predators go for organ meats first. So why had he mutilated the other bodies beyond what he’d eaten? It had been deliberate and had nothing to do with eating because there was an intact dog leg about ten feet from me, and the dog was on the far side of the pile. I breathed in, but that didn’t help. The scent of blood held no trauma for me, but the stink of terror and … more faintly, pain.

  “I think you’ll find that at least some of them were mutilated while they were still alive,” I said in a low voice because I didn’t want it to be true. But my stomach cramped with knowledge that the smell of pain meant someone had hurt. It was faint because pain stops when someone dies.

  “A werewolf could do this?” asked Willis.

  “I told—” The wind shifted just a little, and I caught another scent. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to get below the smell of the dead.

  “Magic,” I said, with my eyes still closed. It was subtle, like a good perfume, but now that I knew its flavor, it was strong. Problem was, I had no idea what kind of magic I was scenting.

  “Fae?” asked someone who wasn’t Tony or Willis.

  I opened my eyes and shook my head. “Fae magic smells different than this. This isn’t witchcraft, either, though it’s closer to that than to fae magic.”

  “Witchcraft,” said Willis neutrally.

  I nodded. It wasn’t a secret; the witches had been hiding in plain sight for a hundred years or more. In places like New Orleans or Salem (Massachusetts, not Oregon), they were virtually a tourist attraction. That human culture dismissed the validity of their claims was something the witches I know thought was a delicious irony: when they had tried to hide, they had been hunted and nearly destroyed. In the open, they were viewed as fakes—and, even more usefully, a lot of the people claiming to be witches really were fakes.

  “But this wasn’t witchcraft,” I said again, in case he’d only been paying attention to part of what I’d told him. “Not any witchcraft I’ve smelled before, anyway. If you ask, Adam has someone he can send to check it out.” Elizaveta Arkadyevna was our pack witch on retainer. “She won’t agree to talk to you, but we can get the information for you if you would like.”