Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  “It’s all right,” I told him. “You were probably right. I found Mac dead and Adam almost in the same shape—and I panicked.” I walked to the bed and sat on it, because it was as far away from him as I could get in the motel room. Only then did I dare to look at him again. “My apology is years overdue. I should have talked to you before I left. I should have told you I’d decided to go to Portland.” But I was afraid I might do something stupid like shoot you or, worse, cry—but he didn’t need to know that part.

  The humor that usually touched his face leaked away, leaving behind neutral wariness, as if he were watching for a trap. “My father told me he’d spoken to you and persuaded you to go to your mother’s house instead of running off with me,” he said.

  “How long did you wait for me?” After Bran had caught us necking in the woods and told me he was sending me to Portland, Samuel had decided that he’d take me away with him instead. I was supposed to sneak out and meet him in the woods a mile or so from my house. But the Marrok knew, he was like that. He told me why Samuel wanted to take me as his mate—and it hadn’t been for any reason I could accept.

  So while Samuel waited for me, Charles was driving me down to Libby to catch the train to Portland that morning instead.

  Samuel looked away from me without answering.

  In his own way, Samuel was the most honorable person I’d ever known—something that made his betrayal hurt worse because I knew that he’d never meant me to believe he loved me. He’d told me he would wait for me, and I knew he’d waited long after he’d realized I wasn’t going to come.

  “That’s what I thought,” I said in a small voice. Damn it, he shouldn’t still affect me this way. I found that I was taking deeper breaths than I normally did, just to breathe in his scent.

  “I should have told you I’d changed my mind,” I told him, clinging by my fingernails to the threads of what I needed to tell him. “I’m sorry for abandoning you without a word. It was neither right nor kind.”

  “Father told you to go without talking to me again,” Samuel said. He sounded detached, but he’d turned his back on me and was staring at a damp spot on the rug near his boots.

  “I am not of his pack,” I snapped. “That has always been made perfectly clear to me. It means I didn’t have to obey Bran then. I shouldn’t have, and I knew it at the time. I’m sorry. Not for leaving, that was the right decision, but I should have told you what I was doing. I was a coward.”

  “My father told me what he told you.” His voice started calmly enough, but there was a tinge of anger weaving itself through his words as he continued. “But you should have known all of that already. I didn’t hide anything.”

  There was no defensiveness in his voice or in his posture; he really didn’t understand what he’d done to me—as stupid as that made him in my eyes. It was still good, somehow, to know that the hurt he’d caused me had been unintentional.

  He turned, his eyes met mine, and I felt the zing that had once been as familiar as his face. Part of it was attraction; but part of it was the power of a dominant wolf. The attraction brought me to my feet and halfway across the room before I realized what I was doing.

  “Look, Samuel,” I said, coming to an abrupt halt before I touched him. “I’m tired. It’s been a rough day. I don’t want to fight with you over things that are long past.”

  “All right.” His voice was soft, and he gave a little nod to himself. “We can talk more tomorrow.”

  He put his coat back on, started for the door, then turned back. “I almost forgot, Charles and Carl took the body—”

  “Mac,” I told him sharply.

  “Mac,” he said, gentling his tone. I wished he hadn’t done that, because his sympathy brought tears to my eyes. “They took Mac to our clinic and brought back your van. Charles gave me the keys. He would have returned them himself, but you left the room too quickly. I told him I was coming to deliver an apology, so he gave them to me.”

  “Did he lock the van?” I asked. “I’ve a pair of guns in there, loaded for werewolves—” Mention of the guns reminded me of something else, something odd. “Oh, and there’s a tranquilizer dart of some sort that I found near Adam when I moved him.”

  “The van’s locked,” he said. “Charles found the dart and left it at the lab because he said it smelled of silver and Adam. Now that I know where you found it, I’ll make sure to look it over carefully.”

  “Mac said someone was using him to experiment on,” I told him. “They’d found some drugs that worked on werewolves, he said.”

  Samuel nodded. “I remember you telling us that.”

  He held out my keys and, careful not to touch his hand, I took them from him. He smiled as if I’d done something interesting and I realized I shouldn’t have been so careful. If I had felt nothing for him, touching his hand wouldn’t have bothered me. Living among normal humans, I’d forgotten how difficult it was to hide anything from werewolves.

  “Good night, Mercy,” he said.

  Then he was gone, and the room felt emptier for his leaving it. I’d better go in the morning, I thought, as I listened to the snow squeak under his feet as he walked away.

  I was busy reading page fourteen for the third time when someone else knocked on the door.

  “I brought dinner,” said a man’s pleasant tenor.

  I set the book down and opened the door.

  A sandy-haired young man with a nondescript face held a plastic tray loaded with two plastic-wrapped sub sandwiches, a pair of styrofoam cups of hot chocolate, and a dark blue winter jacket. Maybe it was the food, but it occurred to me that if Bran looked that much like the cliché of a delivery boy, it was probably on purpose. He liked to be unobtrusive.

  He gave me a small smile when I didn’t step away from the door right away. “Charles told me that Adam is going to be fine, and Samuel made a fool of himself.”

  “Samuel apologized,” I told him, stepping back and letting him into the room.

  The kitchenette had a two-burner stove, six-pack-sized fridge, and a small, Formica-covered table with two chairs. After tossing the coat on the bed, Bran set the tray on the table and rearranged the contents until there was a sandwich and cup on each side.

  “Charles told me that you didn’t have a coat, so I brought one. I also thought you might like something to eat,” he said. “Then we can discuss what we’re to do with your Alpha and his missing daughter.”

  He sat down on one side and gestured for me to take the other seat. I sat and realized I hadn’t eaten anything all day—I hadn’t been hungry. I still wasn’t.

  True to his word, he didn’t talk while he ate and I picked. The sandwich tasted of refrigerator, but the cocoa was rich with marshmallows and real vanilla.

  He ate faster than I did, but waited patiently for me to finish. The sandwich was one of those huge subs, built to feed you for a week. I ate part of it and wrapped the rest in the plastic it had come in. Bran had eaten all of his, but werewolves need a lot of food.

  My foster mother had liked to say, “Never starve a werewolf, or he might ask you to join him for lunch.” She’d always pat her husband on the head afterward, even if he was in human form.

  I don’t know why I thought of that right then, or why the thought tried to bring tears to my eyes. My foster parents were both of them almost seventeen years dead. She died trying to become a werewolf because, she’d told me, every year she got older and he didn’t. There are a lot fewer women who are moon called, because they just don’t survive the Change as well. My foster father died from grief a month later. I’d been fourteen.

  I took a sip of cocoa and waited for Bran to talk.

  He sighed heavily and leaned back in the chair, balancing it on two legs, his own legs dangling in the air.

  “People don’t do that,” I told him.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Do what?”

  “Balance like that—not unless they’re teenage boys showing off for their girlfriends.”

&nb
sp; He brought all four legs back on the flour abruptly. “Thank you.” Bran liked to appear as human as possible, but his gratitude was a little sharp. I took a hasty sip of cocoa so he wouldn’t see my amusement.

  He put his elbows on the table and folded his hands. “What are your intentions now, Mercy?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Adam’s safe and healing. We’ll find out how your young friend was killed. What are you planning to do?”

  Bran is scary. He’s a little psychic—at least that’s what he says if you ask. What that means is that he can talk to any werewolf he knows, mind to mind. That’s why Charles was able to be his spokesperson out in the woods. Bran uses that ability, among others, to control the North American packs. He claims it is all one way, that he can make people hear him but not the other way around.

  The pack whisperers say he has other abilities, too, but no one knows exactly what they are. The most common rumor is that he really can read minds. Certainly he always knew who was responsible for what mischief around the town.

  My foster mother always laughed and said it was his reputation for knowing everything that allowed him to appear infallible: all he had to do was walk through the room and see who looked guiltiest when they saw him. Maybe she was right, but I tried looking innocent the next time, and it didn’t work.

  “I’m leaving in the morning.” Early, I thought. To get away without talking to Samuel again—but also to get started looking for Jesse.

  Bran shook his head and frowned. “Afternoon.”

  I felt my eyebrows rise. “Well,” I said gently, “if you knew what I was going to be doing, why didn’t you just tell me instead of asking?”

  He gave me a small smile. “If you wait until afternoon, Adam will be ready to travel, and Samuel should know something about how your young man . . . Alan MacKenzie Frazier died. He’s staying up tonight to perform the autopsy and run tests in the lab.”

  He leaned forward. “It’s not your fault, Mercy.”

  I spilled the cocoa all down the front of my T-shirt. “Sh—” I bit off the word. Bran didn’t approve of swearing. “You can read minds.”

  “I know the way your mind works,” Bran said, with a little smile that managed to be not quite smug. But he was quick enough retrieving a roll of paper towels stored under the sink and handed them to me as I held my shirt away from my body. The cocoa was still hot, though not scalding.

  As I mopped myself up at the sink, he continued, “Unless you’ve changed more than I can believe, if something happens, if someone gets hurt, it must be your fault. I had the story from Adam, as far as he knows it, and it had nothing to do with you.”

  “Hah—you can read minds. He’s in wolf form, and can’t talk,” I said. I’d done the best I could with the shirt, but I wished I had an extra change of clothing.

  Bran smiled. “He’s not now. Sometimes the change helps us heal faster. Usually we change from human to wolf, but the other way works as well. He was not happy with Samuel.” Bran’s smile deepened. “He spent his first words chewing him out. Told him that second-guessing the man in the field was an amateur’s mistake. He said he’d rather not have someone who didn’t know what they were doing ‘mucking about’ with his wounds. He also said that you had more guts than sense sometimes.” Bran tipped his styrofoam cup in my direction. “As it happens I agree—which is why I asked Adam to keep an eye on you for me when you moved into his territory.”

  Ah, I thought and tried not to look as devastated as I felt. So Adam had been ordered to look after me? I had rather thought that the odd relationship we had was based on something else. Knowing that Bran had told him to watch me changed the shading of every conversation we’d ever had, lessened it.

  “I don’t like lies,” said Bran, and I knew I’d failed to keep the pain of his revelation from my face. “Not even lies of omission. Hard truths can be dealt with, triumphed over, but lies will destroy your soul.” He looked as though he had personal knowledge of it. “That distaste leads me to meddle where perhaps I should step back.”

  He paused, as if to let me speak, but I had no idea where he was going with this.

  He sat down and took another sip of cocoa. “There were those who thought the truth of Bryan’s death should be kept from you.” Bryan had been my foster father.

  I remembered waking up shortly after Christmas to Bran’s low-key voice in the kitchen. When I came out of my room, Bran told me that the police had found Bryan’s body in the Kootenai River.

  Suicide is difficult for werewolves. Even silver bullets don’t always defeat the wolf’s ability to heal itself. Decapitation is effective, but rather difficult to achieve in a suicidal situation. Drowning works very well. Werewolves are very densely muscled; they tend to have a difficult time swimming even if they want to, because, like chimpanzees, they have too much muscle and not enough fat to float.

  “Some of the pack would have told you that Bryan had an accident.” Bran’s voice was contemplative. “They told me that fourteen was too young to deal with a suicide, especially on top of the death of Bryan’s mate.”

  “Her name was Evelyn,” I told him. Bran had a tendency to dismiss the humans around him as if they didn’t exist. Samuel once told me that it was because humans were so fragile, and Bran had seen too many of them die. I thought that if I could handle Evelyn’s death when I was fourteen, then, by hang, Bran could, too.

  He gave me a quelling look. When I didn’t look down as protocol demanded, his lips turned up before he hid them with the cup.

  “Evelyn, indeed,” he said, then sighed. “When you chose to live alone, rather than go to your mother, I agreed to that, too. You had proven your mettle to me; I thought you had earned the right to make your own choices.” His eyes roved around the room. “Do you remember the last time you and I talked?”

  I nodded and sat down finally. Even if he wasn’t insisting on protocol tonight, it felt awkward to be standing while he was sitting in the chair.

  “You were sixteen,” he said. “Too young for him—and too young to know what it was that he wanted from you.”

  When Bran had caught Samuel kissing me in the woods, he’d sent me home, then shown up the next morning to tell me that he’d already spoken with my real mother, and she would be expecting me at the end of the week. He was sending me away, and I should pack what I wanted to take.

  I’d packed all right, but not to go to Portland; I was packed to leave with Samuel. We’d get married, he’d said. It never occurred to me that at sixteen, I’d have trouble getting married without parental permission. Doubtless Samuel would have had an answer for that as well. We’d planned to move to a city and live outside of any pack.

  I loved Samuel, had loved him since my foster father had died and Samuel had taken over his role as my protector. Bryan had been a dear, but Samuel was a much more effective defense. Even the women didn’t bother me as much once I had Samuel at my back. He’d been funny and charming. Lightheartedness is not a gift often given to werewolves, but Samuel had it in abundance. Under his wing, I learned joy—a very seductive emotion.

  “You told me that Samuel didn’t love me,” I told Bran, my mouth tasting like sawdust. I don’t know how he’d found out what Samuel had planned. “You told me he needed a mate who could bear his children.”

  Human women miscarry a little over half of the children they conceive by a werewolf father. They carry to term only those babies who are wholly human. Werewolf women miscarry at the first full moon. But coyotes and wolves can interbreed with viable offspring, so why not Samuel and me? Samuel believed that some of our children would be human, maybe some would be walkers like me, and some would be born werewolves—but they all would live.

  It wasn’t until Bran explained it all to me that I understood the antagonism Leah had toward me, an antagonism that all the other females had adopted.

  “I should not have told you that way,” Bran said.

  “Are you trying to apologize?” I asked. I co
uldn’t understand what Bran was trying to say. “I was sixteen. Samuel may seem young, but he’s been a full-grown adult as long as I can remember—so he’s what, fifty? Sixty?”

  I hadn’t worried about it when I had loved him. He’d never acted any older than I. Werewolves didn’t usually talk about the past, not the way humans do. Most of what I knew about Bran’s history, I picked up from my human foster mother, Evelyn.

  “I was stupid and young,” I said. “I needed to hear what you told me. So if you’re looking for forgiveness, you don’t need it. Thank you.”

  He cocked his head. In human form his eyes were warm hazel, like a sunlit oak leaf.

  “I’m not apologizing,” he said. “Not to you. I’m explaining.” Then he smiled, and the resemblance to Samuel, usually faint, was suddenly very apparent. “And Samuel is a wee bit older than sixty.” Amusement, like anger, sometimes brought a touch of the old country—Wales—to Bran’s voice. “Samuel is my firstborn.”

  I stared at him, caught by surprise. Samuel had none of the traits of the older wolves. He drove a car, had a stereo system and a computer. He actually liked people—even humans—and Bran used him to interface with police and government officials when it was necessary.

  “Charles was born a few years after you came here with David Thompson,” I told Bran, as if he didn’t know. “That was what . . . 1812?” Driven by his association to Bran, I’d done a lot of reading about David Thompson in college. The Welsh-born mapmaker and fur trader had kept journals, but he hadn’t ever mentioned Bran by name. I wondered when I read them if Bran had gone by another name, or if Thompson had known what Bran was and left him out of the journals, which were kept, for the most part, more as a record for his employers than as a personal reminiscence.

  “I came with Thompson in 1809,” Bran said. “Charles was born in the spring of, I think, 1813. I’d left Thompson and the Northwest Company by then, and the Salish didn’t reckon time by the Christian calendar. Samuel was born to my first wife, when I was still human.”

  It was the most I’d ever heard him say about the past. “When was that?” I asked, emboldened by his uncustomary openness.