Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  “What we don’t need right now is a murdering bastard running free around the Tri-Cities, using werewolves to kill people,” Bran said. He looked over my shoulder at his son. “Find the blackguard and eliminate him before he involves the humans, Samuel.” Bran was the only person I knew who could use words like “blackguard” and make them sound like swear words—but then he could have said “bunny rabbit” in that tone of voice and weakened my spine with the same shiver of fear.

  But I shivered more from the cold than fear. In the Tri-Cities it was still above freezing most days. It wasn’t particularly cold for November in Montana—for instance, my nostrils weren’t sticking together when I breathed, so it wasn’t ten below zero yet—but it was considerably colder than I was used to.

  “Where’s your coat?” asked Bran, his attention drawn to my chattering teeth.

  “I left it in the room,” I said. “It’s not mine.”

  “You are welcome to it.”

  “I’m out here now,” I said.

  He shook his head. “You’d better get going then, before you freeze to death.” He looked at Samuel. “Keep me apprised.”

  “Bran,” said Adam. “Thank you.”

  Bran smiled and brushed past me so he could reach in the van and take one of Adam’s battered hands in a gentle grip. “Anytime.”

  When he stepped back he shut the sliding door with just the right amount of push so it didn’t bounce back open. It had taken me three months to learn how to do it right.

  He reached into the pocket of his coat and gave me a card. It was plain white with his name and two phone numbers in simple black lettering. “So you can call me if you want to,” he said. “The top number is my cell phone—so you won’t have to risk talking to my wife.”

  “Bran?” I asked him impulsively. “What is it that Gerry is doing that is so important he can’t come home to be with Dr. Wallace?”

  “Feeling sorry for himself,” snapped Samuel.

  Bran put a hand on Samuel’s arm, but spoke to me. “Carter’s case is tragic and unusual. Usually when a wolf lives through the Change but doesn’t survive his first year, it is because the human cannot control the instincts of the wolf.”

  “I thought it was always a matter of control,” I told Bran.

  He nodded his head, “It is. But in Carter’s case it is not a lack of self-control, it is too much.”

  “He doesn’t want to be a werewolf,” said Samuel. “He doesn’t want to feel the fire of the killing instinct or the power of the chase.” For a moment the sun caught Samuel’s eyes, and they glittered. “He’s a healer, not a taker of life.”

  Ah, I thought, that rankled, didn’t it, Dr. Samuel Cornick? Samuel hadn’t been given to in-depth talks—although that might have been as much a function of my age as his inclination—but, I remembered that he had trouble, sometimes, because his instinct to heal was not as strong as his instinct to kill. He told me that he always made certain to eat well before performing any kind of surgery. Did he think that Dr. Wallace was the better man for choosing not to live with that conflict?

  “Unless Carter allows the wolf to become part of him, he can’t control it.” Bran’s mouth turned down. “He’s dangerous, and he gets more dangerous every moon, Mercy. But all it would take was for him to compromise his damn hardheaded morals just once, so he can accept what he is and he’d be fine. But if it doesn’t happen soon, it won’t happen at all. I can’t let him see another full moon.”

  “Gerry’s the one who talked him into Changing,” said Samuel, sounding tired. “He knows that the time is coming when someone is going to have to deal with Carter. If he’s here, it will be his duty—and he can’t handle that.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Bran, taking a deep breath. “I’ve done it before.” He moved the hand on Samuel’s arm to his shoulder. “Not everyone is as strong as you, my son.” There was a world of shared sorrow in his words and in his posture—and I remembered the three of Samuel’s children who hadn’t survived the Change.

  “Get in the van, Mercy,” said Samuel. “You’re shivering.”

  Bran put his hands on my shoulders and kissed me on the forehead, then ruined it by saying, “Let the boys take care of this, eh, Mercedes?”

  “Sure thing,” I said, stepping away from him. “Take care, Bran.”

  I stalked around the front of the bus. The only reason I wasn’t muttering under my breath was because the werewolves would all hear what I was saying.

  I started the van—it protested because of the cold, but not too much. I let it warm up while Bran said a few last words to Samuel.

  “How well does Bran know you?” asked Adam quietly. The noise of the engine and the radio would most likely keep the others from hearing us.

  “Not very well if he thinks that I’ll leave things to you and Samuel,” I muttered.

  “That’s what I was hoping,” he said, with enough satisfaction that I jerked around to look at him. He smiled tiredly. “Samuel’s good, Mercy. But he doesn’t know Jesse, doesn’t care about her. I’m not going to be good for much for a while: I need you for Jesse’s sake.”

  The passenger door opened and Samuel pulled himself up into the seat and shut the door.

  “Da means well,” Sam told me, as I started backing out, proving that he knew me better than his father did. “He’s used to dealing with people who listen when he tells them something. Mercy, he’s right, though. You aren’t up to dealing with werewolf business.”

  “Seems to me that she’s been dealing just fine,” Adam said mildly. “She killed two of them in as many days and came out of it without a scratch.”

  “Luck,” said Samuel.

  “Is it?” In my rearview mirror, I saw Adam close his eyes as he finished in almost a whisper. “Maybe so. When I was in the army, we kept lucky soldiers where they would do us the most good.”

  “Adam wants me to help find Jesse,” I told Samuel, putting my foot on the gas as we left Aspen Creek behind us.

  The conversation went downhill from there. Adam dropped out after a few pointed comments, and sat back to enjoy the fireworks. I didn’t remember arguing with Samuel much before, but I wasn’t a love-struck sixteen year-old anymore either.

  After I pointedly quit talking to him, Samuel unbuckled his seat belt and slipped between the front seats to go back and sit next to Adam.

  “Never argue with Mercy about something she cares about,” Adam advised, obviously having enjoyed himself hugely. “Even if she stops arguing with you, she’ll just do whatever she wants anyway.”

  “Shut up and eat something,” growled Samuel, sounding not at all like his usual self. I heard him lift the lid on a small cooler and the sweet-iron smell of blood filled the van.

  “Mmm,” said Adam without enthusiasm. “Raw steak.”

  But he ate it, then slept. After a while Samuel came back to the front and belted himself in.

  “I don’t remember you being so stubborn,” he said.

  “Maybe I wasn’t,” I agreed. “Or maybe you didn’t used to try to order me around. I’m not a member of your pack or Bran’s pack. I’m not a werewolf. You have no right to dictate to me as if I were.”

  He grunted, and we drove a while more in silence.

  Finally, he said, “Have you had lunch?”

  I shook my head. “I thought I’d stop in Sandpoint. It’s grown since last time I drove through there.”

  “Tourists,” said Samuel in disgust. “Every year there are more and more people.” I wondered if he was remembering what it had been like when he’d first been there.

  We stopped and got enough fried chicken to feed a Little League team—or two werewolves, with a little left over for me. Adam ate again with restrained ferocity. Healing was energy-draining work, and he needed all the protein he could get.

  When he was finished, and we were back on the road, with Samuel once again in the front, I finally asked, “What happened the night you were attacked? I know you’ve told Bran an
d probably Samuel, too, already—but I’d like to know.”

  Adam wiped his fingers carefully on the damp towelette that had come with our chicken—apparently he didn’t think it was finger-lick’n good. “I’d pulled the pack in to introduce Mac, and to tell them about your adventures with his captors.”

  I nodded.

  “About fifteen minutes after the last of them left, about three-thirty in the morning, someone knocked on the door. Mac had just managed to regain his human form, and he jumped up to answer the door.” There was a pause, and I adjusted the rearview mirror so I could see Adam’s face, but I couldn’t read his expression.

  “I was in the kitchen, so I don’t know exactly what happened, but from the sounds, I’d say they shot him as soon as he opened the door.”

  “Which was stupid,” commented Samuel. “They’d know you had to hear the shots—even a tranq gun makes a pretty good pop.”

  Adam started to shrug—then stopped with a pained expression. “Damned if—excuse me, Mercedes—I’ll be darned if I know what they were thinking.”

  “They didn’t kill him on purpose, did they?” I said. I’d been thinking, too. A gun with silver bullets is a much more certain thing than a dart full of experimental drugs.

  “I don’t think so,” Samuel agreed. “It looked like a massive allergic reaction to the silver.”

  “There was silver in the dart Mercedes found? Just like Charles thought?” asked Adam.

  “Yes,” said Samuel. “I’ve sent the dart off to the lab along with a sample of Mac’s blood for proper analysis, but it looks to me as though they combined silver nitrate with DMSO and Special K.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Special K is Ketamine,” Adam said. “It’s been used as a recreational drug for a while, but it started out as an animal tranquilizer. It doesn’t work on werewolves. Silver nitrate is used to develop film. What’s DMSO?”

  “Silver nitrate is a convenient way to get silver in a solution,” Samuel said. “It’s used to treat eye infections, too—though I wouldn’t recommend it for a werewolf.”

  “I’ve never heard of a werewolf with an eye infection,” I said, though I understood his point.

  He smiled at me, but continued to talk to Adam. “DMSO—Dimeythyl Sulfoxide. It has a lot of odd properties, but the one of most interest here is that it can carry other drugs with it across membranes.”

  I stared at the road ahead of me and put my right hand in front of the heater to warm it. The seals on my windows needed replacing, and the heater wasn’t keeping up with the Montana air. Funny, I didn’t remember being cold on the way over. No room for simple discomfort when you are trying to save someone, I guess.

  “There was something in chem lab my freshman year,” I said. “We mixed it with peppermint oil and put a finger in it—I could taste peppermint.”

  “Right,” said Samuel. “That’s the stuff. So take DMSO and mix it with a silver solution, and presto, the silver is carried throughout the werewolf’s body, poisoning as it goes so that the tranquilizer, in this case, Ketamine, goes to work without interference from the werewolf metabolism that would normally prevent the drug from having any effect at all.”

  “You think Mac died from the silver rather than an overdose of Ketamine?” asked Adam. “They only shot him twice. I took at least four hits, maybe more.”

  “The more recent exposure you have to silver, the worse the reaction,” said Samuel. “I’d guess that if the boy hadn’t spent the last few months in their tender care being dosed up with silver, he’d have made it just fine.”

  “Obviously the silver nitrate and the Ketamine are relatively easily obtainable,” Adam said after a while. “What about this DMSO?”

  “I could get it. Good stuff is available by prescription—I’d bet you could buy it at any veterinary supply, too.”

  “So they’d need a doctor?” I asked.

  But Samuel shook his head. “Not for the veterinary supply. And I’d expect you could get it fairly easily from a pharmacy, too. It’s not one of the drugs they’d track carefully. I’d expect they could make as much of their cocktail as they wanted to without much trouble.”

  “Great.” Adam closed his eyes, possibly envisioning an invading army armed with tranquilizer dart guns.

  “So they killed Mac,” I said when it became apparent that Adam wasn’t going to continue. “Then what happened?”

  “I came charging out of the kitchen like an idiot, and they darted me, too.” Adam shook his head. “I’ve grown used to being damn near bulletproof—served me right. Whatever they gave me knocked me for a loop, and when I woke up, I was locked up, wrist and ankle in cuffs. Not that I was in any shape to do anything. I was so groggy I could barely move my head.”

  “Did you see who they were?” I asked. “I know one of them was the human who accompanied the werewolf I killed at the garage. I smelled him in Jesse’s room.”

  Adam shifted on the bench seat, pulling a little against the seat belt.

  “Adam.” Samuel’s voice was quiet but forceful.

  Adam nodded and relaxed a little, stretching out his neck to release the build-up of tension. “Thank you. It’s harder when I’m angry. Yes, I knew one of them, Mercedes. Do you know how I became a werewolf?”

  The question seemed to come from left field—but Adam always had a reason for everything he said. “Only that it was during Vietnam,” I answered. “You were Special Forces.”

  “Right,” he agreed. “Long-range recon. They sent me and five other men to take out a particularly nasty warlord—an assassination trip. We’d done it before.”

  “The warlord was a werewolf?” I asked.

  He laughed without humor. “Slaughtered us. It was one of his own people who killed him, while he was eating poor old McCue.” He shut his eyes, and whispered, “I can still hear him scream.”

  We waited, Samuel and I, and after a moment Adam continued. “All the warlord’s people ran and left us alone. At a guess they weren’t certain he was really dead, even after he’d been beheaded. After a while—a long while, though I didn’t realize that until later—I found I could move. Everyone was dead except Spec 4 Christiansen and me. We leaned on each other and got out of there somehow, hurt badly enough that they sent us home: Christiansen was a short-timer, anyway, and I guess they thought I was mostly crazy—raving about wolves. They shipped us out of there fast enough that none of the docs commented about how quickly we were recovering.”

  “Are you all right?” asked Samuel.

  Adam shivered and pulled the blankets closer around himself. “Sorry. I don’t talk about this often. It’s harder than I expected. Anyway, one of my army buddies who’d come back to the States a few months earlier heard I was home and came to see me. We got drunk—or at least I tried. I’d just started noticing that it took an awful lot of whiskey to do anything, but it loosened me up enough that I told him about the werewolf.

  “Thank goodness I did because he believed me. He called in a relative and between them they persuaded me that I was going to grow furry and kill something the next full moon. They pulled me into their pack and kept everyone safe until I had enough control to do it myself.”

  “And the other man who was wounded?” I asked.

  “Christiansen?” He nodded. “My friends found him. It should have been in time, but he’d come home to find that his wife had taken up with another man. He walked into his house and found his bags packed and his wife and her lover waiting with the divorce papers.”

  “What happened?” asked Samuel.

  “He tore them to pieces.” His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “Even in that first month, if you get angry enough, it is possible to Change.”

  “I know,” I told him.

  He gave me a jerky nod. “Anyway, they managed to persuade him to stay with a pack, who taught him what he needed to know to survive. But as far as I know he never did join a pack officially—he’s lived all these years as a lone wolf.”

/>   A lone wolf is a male who either declines to join a pack or cannot find a pack who will take him in. The females, I might add, are not allowed that option. Werewolves have not yet joined the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first, as far as women are concerned. It’s a good thing I’m not a werewolf—or maybe it is a pity. Someone needs to wake them up.

  “Christiansen was one of the wolves who came to your house?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I didn’t hear him or see him—he stayed away from me—but I could smell him. There were several humans and three or four wolves.”

  “You killed two,” I told him. “I killed a third.” I tried to remember what I’d smelled in his house, but I had only been tracking Jesse. There had been so many of Adam’s pack in the house, and I only knew some of them by name. “I’d know the man, the human, who confronted Mac and me earlier that night, but no one else for certain.”

  “I’m pretty sure they intended I stay out until they’d done whatever they came for, but their whole plan was a botch job,” Adam said. “First, they killed Mac. Obviously, from their attempt to take him at your shop, they wanted him, but I don’t think they meant to kill him in my house.”

  “They left him on my doorstep,” I said.

  “Did they?” Adam frowned. “A warning?” I could see him roll the thought around and he came up with the same message I had. “Stay out of our business, and you won’t end up dead.”

  “Quick thinking for the disposal of a body they didn’t know they were going to have,” I commented. “Someone drove to my house to dump his body and was gone when I came outside. They left some people at your house who took off hell-bent-for-leather, probably with Jesse. I made it to your house in time to kill the last werewolf you were fighting.” I tried to think about what time that was. “Four-thirty in the morning or thereabouts, is my best guess.”

  Adam rubbed his forehead.

  Samuel said, “So they shot Mac, shot Adam, then waited around until Mac died. They dropped the body at your house—then Adam woke up, and they grabbed Jesse and ran, leaving three werewolves behind to do something—kill Adam? But then why take Jesse? Presumably they weren’t supposed to just die.”