Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  The wind carrying Samuel’s scent was coming mostly from the west. The trees on that side were young firs, probably regrowing after a fire that must have happened a decade or so in the past. The firs were tucked together in a close-packed blanket that wouldn’t slow me at all, but a werewolf was a lot bigger than I.

  I scratched my ear with a hind foot and used the movement to get a good look behind me. There was nothing to see, so my stalker was far enough away for me to reach the denser trees. I put my foot down and darted for the trees.

  The wolf behind me howled her hunting song. Instinct takes over when a wolf is on the hunt. Had she been thinking, Leah would never have uttered a sound—because she was immediately answered by a chorus of howls. Most of the wolves sounded like they were a mile or so farther into the mountains, but Samuel answered her call from no more than a hundred yards in front of me. I altered my course accordingly and found my way through the thicket of trees and out the other side where Samuel had been traveling.

  He stopped dead at my appearance—I suppose he was expecting a deer or elk, not a coyote. Not me.

  Samuel was big, even for a werewolf. His fur was winter white, and his eyes appeared almost the same shade, an icy white-blue, colder than the snow I ran through, all the more startling for the black ring that edged his iris. There was plenty of room for me to dive under his belly and out the other side, leaving him between me and my pursuer.

  Before he had a chance to do more than give me that first startled look, Leah appeared, a gold-and-silver huntress, as beautiful as Samuel in her own way: light and fire where he was ice. She saw Samuel and skidded ungracefully to a halt. I suppose she’d been so hot on the chase she hadn’t been paying attention to Samuel’s call.

  I could see the instant he realized who I was. He cocked his head, and his body grew still. He recognized me all right, but I couldn’t tell how he felt about it. After the space of a deep breath, he turned back to look at Leah.

  Leah cringed and rolled onto her back—though as Bran’s wife she should have outranked Samuel. Unimpressed by the show, he curled his lips away from his fangs and growled, a deep rumbling sound that echoed in my chest. It felt just like old times: Samuel protecting me from the rest of the pack.

  A wolf howled, nearer than before, and Samuel stopped growling long enough to answer. He looked expectantly toward the north, and in a few minutes two wolves came into sight. The first one was the color of cinnamon with four black feet. He was a shade bigger even than Samuel.

  The second werewolf was considerably smaller. From a distance he could have passed as one of the wolves that had only this decade begun to return to Montana. His coat was all the shades between white and black, combining to make him appear medium gray. His eyes were pale gold, and the end of his tail was white.

  Charles, the cinnamon wolf, stopped at the edge of the trees and began to change. He was an oddity among werewolves: a natural-born werewolf rather than made. The only one of his kind that I have ever heard of.

  Charles’s mother had been a Salish woman, the daughter of a medicine man. She had been dying when Bran came across her, shortly after he arrived in Montana. According to my foster mother, who told me the story, Bran had been so struck with her beauty that he couldn’t just let her die, so he Changed her and made her his mate. I never could wrap my imagination around the thought of Bran being overcome by love at first sight, but maybe he had been different two hundred years ago.

  At any rate, when she became pregnant, she used the knowledge of magic her father had given her to keep from changing at the full moon. Female werewolves cannot have children: the change is too violent to allow the fetus to survive. But Charles’s mother, as her father’s daughter, had some magic of her own. She managed to carry Charles to term, but was so weakened by her efforts that she died soon after his birth. She left her son with two gifts. The first was that he changed easier and faster. The second was a gift for magic that was unusual in werewolves. Bran’s pack did not have to hire a witch to clean up after them; they had Charles.

  Bran, the smaller of the two wolves, continued on to where I stood awaiting him. Samuel stepped aside reluctantly, though he was still careful to keep between Leah and me.

  There was no sense of power about Bran, not like the one his sons and Adam carried—I’m not certain how he contained it. I’ve been told that sometimes even other werewolves, whose senses are sharper than mine, mistake him for a real wolf or some wolf-dog hybrid to account for his size.

  I don’t know how old he is. All I know is that he was old when he came to this continent to work as a fur trapper in the late eighteenth century. He’d traveled to this area of Montana with the Welsh cartographer David Thompson and settled to live with his Salish mate.

  He padded up to me and touched his muzzle behind my ear. I didn’t have to sink submissively to be lower than he, but I hunched down anyway. He took my nose between his fangs and released it, a welcome and a gentle chiding all in one—though I wasn’t certain what he was chiding me for.

  Once he released me, he stalked past Samuel and stared down at his wife, still lying in the snow. She whined anxiously and he bared his teeth, unappeased. It seemed that even though he’d once asked me to leave, I wasn’t to be viewed as fair game.

  Bran turned his back on her to look at Charles, who had completed his transformation and stood tall and human. Charles’s features were pure Salish, as if the only thing that he’d gotten from his father was the ability to change.

  I’ve been told that the Native Americans were shy about their bodies. It was certainly true of Charles. He’d used his magic to clothe himself and stood garbed in fur-lined buckskins that looked as if they had come out of another century.

  I, like most shapeshifters, was nearly as comfortable naked as clothed—except in the middle of November, high up in the Rockies of Montana with a chill Canadian wind blowing from the northwest and the temperature beginning to drop as the snow quit falling at last. And as soon as Charles started to speak, I was going to have to become human so I could talk to him.

  “My father bids you welcome to the territory of the Marrok,” Charles said, his voice carrying the flat tones of his mother’s people with just a hint of the Welsh lilt Bran no longer spoke with unless he was really angry. “He wonders, however, why you have chosen now to come.”

  I took human form, quickly kicked snow away from me, then knelt to keep myself lower than Bran. I sucked in my breath at the chill of the wind and the snow under my shins. Samuel moved between me and the worst of the wind. It helped, but not enough.

  “I came on pack business,” I told them.

  Charles raised his eyebrows. “You come smelling of blood and death.” Charles had always had a good nose.

  I nodded. “I brought the Columbia Basin Alpha here. He’s been badly wounded. I also brought the body of another wolf, hoping someone here could tell me how he died and who killed him.”

  Bran made a soft sound, and Charles nodded. “Tell us what is necessary now. You can give us the details later.”

  So I told them what I knew, as succinctly as possible, beginning with Mac’s story, as he had told it to me, and ending with Mac’s death, Adam’s wounds, and Jesse’s kidnapping. By the time I was finished, my teeth were chattering, and I could barely understand myself. Even when I shifted back into coyote form, I couldn’t quite warm up.

  Bran glanced at Samuel, who gave a woof and took off at a dead run.

  “Bran will finish the hunt with the new ones,” Charles told me. “It is their first hunt, and should not be interrupted. Samuel is going back to take care of Adam—He’ll take a shorter route than the automobiles can manage, so he’ll be there before us. I’ll ride back with you and take care of your dead.”

  On the tail end of Charles’s words, Bran trotted off into the forest without looking at me again. Leah rose from her submissive pose, growled at me—like it was my fault she’d gotten herself in trouble—and followed Bran.

  Cha
rles, still in human form, strode off in the direction of the cars. He wasn’t talkative at the best of times and, with me still four-footed and mute, he didn’t bother to say anything at all. He waited politely on the passenger side of the van while I transformed again and dove into my clothes.

  He didn’t object to my driving as Samuel would have. I’d never seen Charles drive a car; he preferred to ride horseback or run as a wolf. He climbed into the passenger seat and glanced once behind him at the tarped body. Without commenting, he belted himself in.

  When we got back to the motel, I pulled in at the office door. Carl was in the office with a red-eyed young woman who must be the missing Marlie, though I couldn’t see the six-year-old I’d known.

  “Mercedes needs a room,” Charles told them.

  Carl didn’t question him, just handed me a key. “This is on the side away from the road, as far from #1 as we get.”

  I looked down at the #18 stamped on the key. “Don’t you know that you’re not supposed to put the room number on the key anymore?” I asked.

  “We don’t have much trouble with burglary,” Carl said, smiling. “Besides, I know you spent a couple of years working here. Except for number one, there are only three different locks for all the rooms.”

  I smiled at him and tossed the key up once and caught it. “True enough.”

  Charles opened the door for me as we left. “If you’ll get your luggage and give me your car keys, I’ll take care of the body.”

  I must have looked surprised.

  “Don’t worry,” he told me dryly. “I’ll have Carl drive.”

  “No luggage,” I told him. I pulled out my keys and gave them to him, but caught his hand before he pulled away. “Mac was a good man,” I told him. I don’t know why I said it.

  Charles didn’t touch anyone casually. I had always thought he rather despised me, though he treated me with the same remote courtesy he used with everyone else. But he put his free hand on the back of my head and pulled my forehead briefly against his shoulder.

  “I’ll take care of him,” he promised as he stepped back.

  “His full name was Alan MacKenzie Frazier.”

  He nodded. “I’ll see that he is treated well.”

  “Thank you,” I told him, then turned and walked toward my room before I could start to cry again.

  chapter 6

  There was a pile of National Geographics and a paperback mystery stacked neatly on the nightstand. As I recall, the reading material was put there originally to make up for the absence of a TV. When I’d cleaned rooms here, you couldn’t get reception so far in the mountains. Now there was a dish on top of the motel and a small TV positioned so you could watch it either from the bed or the small table in the kitchenette.

  I wasn’t interested in watching old reruns or soap operas so I flipped desultorily through the magazines. They looked familiar. Maybe they were the same stack that had been here when I’d last cleaned this room: the newest one was dated May of 1976, so it was possible. Or maybe random stacks of National Geographics have a certain sameness gained from years of appearing in waiting rooms.

  I wondered if Jesse were lying in a hospital somewhere. My mind flashed to a morgue, but I brought it back under control. Panic wouldn’t help anyone. I was doing the best that I could.

  I picked up the lone book and sat on the bed. The cover was not prepossessing, being a line drawing of a Wisconsin-style barn, but I opened it anyway and started reading. I closed it before I’d read more than the first sentence. I couldn’t bear sitting here alone, doing nothing.

  I left the room. It was colder than it had been, and all I had was my T-shirt, so I ran to number one. I had the key in the pocket of my jeans, but when I tried the door, it opened.

  Adam lay on top of the bed on his side, his muzzle wrapped with a businesslike strap. Samuel was bent over him wearing a pair of jeans, plastic gloves, and nothing else. It was a measure of my concern for Adam that my eyes didn’t linger. Charles, leaning against the wall, glanced at me but said nothing.

  “Shut the door,” Samuel snapped, without looking up. “Damn it, Mercy, you should have set the break before you threw him in the car and drove all day—you of all people know how fast we heal. I’ll have to rebreak his leg.”

  Samuel had never yelled at me before. He was the least volatile male werewolf I’d ever met.

  “I don’t know how to set bones,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself. But he was right. I knew werewolves heal incredibly fast—I just hadn’t thought about what that meant as far as broken bones were concerned. I hadn’t even known his leg was broken. I’d been stupid. I should have just called Darryl.

  “How much training does it take to set a leg?” Samuel continued with barely a pause. “All you have to do is pull it straight.” His hands were gentle as they stretched out Adam’s leg. “He’d have had someone with medic training in his pack. You could have called for help if you didn’t have the guts for it yourself.” Then to Adam he said, “Brace yourself.” From my position by the door, I couldn’t see what he did, but I heard a bone snap, and Adam jerked and made a noise I never want to hear again.

  “I was worried that someone from his pack was involved in the attack,” I whispered. “Adam was unconscious. I couldn’t ask him. And they don’t have anyone strong enough to control Adam’s wolf.”

  Samuel glanced back at me, then swore. “If all you can do is snivel, then get the hell out of here.”

  Despite his condition, Adam growled, swiveling his head to look at Samuel.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and left, closing the door tightly behind me.

  I’d spent twenty minutes staring at the first page of the mystery when someone knocked on the door. My nose told me it was Samuel, so I didn’t answer right away.

  “Mercy?” His voice was soft, just as I remembered it, with just a touch of Celt.

  If I left early in the morning, I could get a head start on looking for Jesse, I thought, staring at the door. Someone else could take Adam back when he was ready to travel. If I left early enough, I could avoid talking to Samuel altogether.

  “Mercy. I know you’re listening to me.”

  I stared at the door, but didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to talk to him. He’d been right. I had been useless—subjecting Adam to a six-hour drive because of a chance remark of Darryl’s, a remark that I was beginning to think meant nothing. Of course, as I’d told Samuel earlier, the pack would have had to bring Adam to Montana or at least send for a dominant until Adam could control himself—but they would have set his broken leg immediately. Darryl and the pack could be out looking for Jesse with Adam safely on the road to recovery if I hadn’t been so stupid.

  In my own world of engines and CV joints, I’d grown used to being competent. If Adam had been a car, I’d have known what to do. But in Aspen Creek, I’d always been not quite good enough—some things, it seemed, hadn’t changed.

  “Mercy, look, I’m sorry. If you didn’t know first aid, and you couldn’t trust his pack, there’s nothing else you could have done.”

  His voice was soft and sweet as molasses; but my mother once told me that you had to trust that the first thing out of a person’s mouth was truth. After they have a chance to think about it, they’ll change what they say to be more socially acceptable, something they think you’ll be happier with, something that will get the results they want. I knew what he wanted, what he had always wanted from me, even if—while he had been working on Adam’s injuries—Samuel, himself, had forgotten.

  “Adam tore a strip off me for being so hard on you,” he said, his voice coaxing. “He was right. I was mad because I don’t like hurting someone unnecessarily, and I took it out on you. Can I come in and talk to you instead of the door?”

  I rubbed my face tiredly. I wasn’t sixteen anymore, to run away from difficult things, no matter how attractive that option was. There were, I thought reluctantly, things I needed to say to him as well.

  “All ri
ght,” he said. “All right, Mercy. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  He had turned around and was already walking away when I opened the door.

  “Come in,” I said and shivered when the wind blew through my shirt. “But you’d better hurry. It’s colder than a witch’s britches out there.”

  He came back and stomped his feet hard on the mat, leaving behind clumps of snow before stepping inside my room. He took off his coat and set it on the table near the door, and I saw he’d found a shirt somewhere. They kept stashes of clothes around town, in case someone needed to dress quickly; unisex things mostly, like jeans, T-shirts, and sweats. The T-shirt he wore was a little small and clung to him like a second skin. If he’d had an extra ounce of fat or a little less muscle, it would have looked stupid, but he was built like a Chippendales’ dancer.

  His body was lovely, but I don’t know if anyone else would have called him handsome. He certainly didn’t have Adam’s strikingly beautiful features. Sam’s eyes were deeply set, his nose was too long, his mouth too wide. His coloring in human form was much less striking than his wolf: light blue-gray eyes and brown hair, streaked just a bit from the sun.

  Looking at his face, I wasn’t objective enough to decide how attractive he was: he was just Sam who had been my friend, my defender, and my sweetheart.

  I glanced away from his face, dropping my own so that he couldn’t read my anger—and whatever other emotion was hammering at me—until I’d gotten it under control. If he read the wrong thing into it, that wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t let him in to argue with him.

  “I didn’t think you were going to talk to me,” he said, with a shadow of his usual warm smile in his voice.

  “Me either,” I agreed grimly to my shoes—I wasn’t going to get through this if I had to look at him. “But I owe you an apology, too.”

  “No.” His tone was wary. Apparently he was too smart to believe my submissive gaze. “You have nothing to be sorry for. I shouldn’t have snapped your nose off earlier.”