Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  I swore, though I usually tried not to do that in front of Adam, as he had the sensibilities of a man raised in the nineteen fifties when nice women didn’t swear. “I’m too tired for this. I’m going to shut up now.”

  He resumed combing my hair and I waited patiently until he was satisfied that he’d gotten all the glass out. He shut off the water and got out of the shower stall to grab a towel out of a cabinet beside the door. I looked at him then, while his head was turned away so there was no chance of catching his gaze. Though he’d taken his shirt off, he was dressed in a very wet pair of jeans and tennis shoes.

  As soon as he shifted his weight to turn, I dropped my eyes. He came back to the shower stall and dried me with a fluffy, sweet-smelling towel. It had spent too much time with a dryer sheet, so it wasn’t very absorbent, despite the thick nap. I bit my lip so I wouldn’t tell him so.

  This close to him, I could smell how near his temper was to the surface, so I kept my gaze on our feet and made myself stand submissively while he worked off his temper by taking care of me.

  I can fake submissive with the best of them. It’s a survival technique around werewolves.

  He paused when he came to my belly. He let the towel drop away and dropped to one knee until his face was on level with my navel. He closed his brilliant eyes and pressed his forehead against the vulnerable softness under my rib cage.

  The flesh of the belly is soft and sweet, unprotected. But my nose told me that he was definitely not thinking of food. For a breathless moment we both waited.

  “Samuel told me about your tattoo,” he said, his breath warm against my skin.

  Hadn’t he seen it before? Being very careful not to tease him meant that I kept my clothes on around him—so maybe not.

  “It’s a coyote paw print,” I told him. “I had it done when I was in college.”

  He raised his face until he was looking up at me. “It looks like a wolf print to me.”

  “Is that what Samuel said?” I asked. I wasn’t unaffected by the close contact—I couldn’t help but let the fingers of one hand slide through his hair. “What did he say? That I’d marked myself his property?” Oh, he wouldn’t lie, not to another werewolf; it doesn’t work. But a hint here and there was just as effective.

  Adam pressed his head against me until all I could see was the top of his head. His cheek and chin were prickly, which should have tickled or hurt, but that wasn’t the sensation that I was feeling. His hands slid up my legs to my rump, where they tightened, pulling me harder against his face.

  His lips were soft, but not as soft as his tongue.

  This was about to go one step further than I was ready for—and for a long moment I considered it. I closed my eyes. Maybe if it had been someone other than Adam, I’d have let him. But one of the things that the Marrok had taught me is that with werewolves you are always dealing with two sets of instincts. The first belonged to the beast, but the second belonged to the man. Adam wasn’t a modern man, content to hop from bed to bed. In his era you didn’t have sex unless you were married or getting married and I knew that he believed that.

  Having been the result of a casual night of sex and grown up belonging to no one—I believed that, too. Oh, I’d fooled around a bit, but I didn’t much anymore.

  Would it be so bad to be Adam’s mate? All that I had to do to let this relationship go one step more was nothing.

  “My college roommate had grown up helping her parents run their tattoo shop and she put herself through college by doing tattoos. I tutored her in a few subjects and she offered to give me the tattoo in return,” I told him, trying to distract one of us.

  “Still scared of me?” he asked.

  I didn’t know how to answer him because that wasn’t it, really. I was scared of the person I became around him.

  He sighed and leaned back until none of his skin touched mine before coming back to his feet. He tossed the damp towel on the floor and stepped back out of the stall.

  I started to get out, too.

  “Stay there.”

  He grabbed another towel and wrapped me in it. Then he picked me up and set me on the counter between the sinks.

  “I’m going to change out of this wet stuff and find something for your feet. There’s glass scattered all over downstairs and everywhere you walked. You stay on this counter until I get back.”

  He didn’t wait for my agreement, which was probably for the best as I would have choked on it. That last sentence would have made me bristle even if his tone of voice hadn’t been military-sharp. Why was it that I was always trying to handle the werewolves instead of the other way around?

  Maybe because Adam’s other form had big claws and great big teeth.

  I could reach Jesse’s clothes without leaving the counter and so I ditched the towel and scrambled into the sweatpants and then the T-shirt. My T-shirts were the old-fashioned thick cotton kind, but Jesse wore fashionably thin ones that clung to every curve. Since my skin was still damp and the shirt was tight, I looked like a refugee from a wet T-shirt contest.

  I snagged the towel and used it to cover my assets just as Adam strode back in. He was wearing clean, dry jeans and a different pair of tennis shoes. He hadn’t bothered putting on a shirt: after two changes in under an hour, his skin must feel raw, like a bad sunburn. The shower wouldn’t have helped that.

  I focused on his feet and clutched the towel a little closer to my chest.

  To my surprise, he took a good look at me and laughed abruptly. “You look so meek. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you meek before.”

  “Looks are deceiving,” I said. “What I am is exhausted, scared, and stupid. I’m sorry I brought it here and endangered Jesse.”

  I watched his shoes as they approached the counter. He leaned close, enveloping me in his power and in his scent. His face rubbed against my hair, and the faint trace of stubble caught on the wet strands.

  “You have a few cuts on your scalp,” he said.

  “I’m sorry I brought him here,” I told Adam again. “I thought I could lose him in the chase, but he was too fast. He has another form, some kind of horse, I think, though I was too busy running to look.”

  His head stilled and he took a deep breath, assessing my mood.

  “Exhausted, scared, and stupid, you said.” He paused as if he were evaluating what I’d said. “Exhausted, yes.” If he could smell exhaustion, his nose was a lot better than mine, which I didn’t believe. “And I can catch a faint trace of fear, though the shower took care of most of that. But stupid I don’t believe. What else could you have done but bring it here where we could handle it?”

  “I could have led it somewhere else.”

  He tipped my chin back and forced me to look into his bright gold eyes. “You’d have died.”

  His voice was soft, but the wolf’s eyes were hot with the fire of battle.

  “Jesse could have died…you almost did.” For a moment I felt the gut-wrenching twist of seeing him disappear under the water.

  He let me hide my face against his shoulder so he couldn’t read my expression—but I felt the power that had been buzzing against my skin drop a notch. My reaction to his near-drowning pleased him.

  “Shh,” he said and one of his big, calloused hands slid under my hair and around the back of my neck to hold me against him. “I coughed up a gallon or two of river and am as good as new. Much better than I’d have been if you’d gotten yourself killed because you didn’t trust me to take care of one lone fae.”

  Leaving my head tucked against him was as dangerous as anything I’d done tonight, and I knew it. I just couldn’t seem to care. He smelled so good and his skin was so warm.

  “All right,” he said at last. “Let me take a look at your feet.”

  He did more than that. He washed them in hot water in the sink and scrubbed them with a brush he pulled out of a drawer that would have been uncomfortable even if my feet hadn’t been all cut up.

  To my yips, he purred a litt
le, but it didn’t slow down his scrub brush. Nor did I have a chance of pulling a foot out of his hand because he kept a firm grip on my ankle as he worked. He doused my feet in hydrogen peroxide and then dried them off with a dark towel.

  “You’re going to end up with bleached spots on the towel,” I told him, pulling my feet away.

  “Shut up, Mercy,” he said, catching an ankle and dragging me over until he could hold the foot with one hand and use the towel to wipe my foot off with the other.

  “Dad?” Jesse peered carefully around the door. When she got a good look at us, she trotted through the door and held out a cordless phone. “You have a phone call from Uncle Mike.”

  “Thanks,” he said and took the phone and tucked it against his ear. “Could you finish up here, Jesse? She just needs drying off, bandaging, and something on her feet before we let her out of here.”

  I waited until he took the phone out of the room and down the stairs before I grabbed the towel from Jesse, who was giggling.

  “If you could just see your face,” she told me. “You look like a cat in a bathtub.”

  I dried my feet and then opened the box of bandages Adam had set on the counter next to me. “I can dry my own damn feet,” I snarled. “Sit here, stay here.”

  I was sitting between the sinks so there was room on the far side of the one nearest the door for Jesse to hitch a hip on it and half sit. “So why did you listen to his orders?”

  “Because he just saved my bacon and I don’t need to rile him more than he already is.” There were only three cuts that needed bandages, all of them on my left foot.

  “Come on,” she said. “Admit it, you enjoyed him fussing over you just a little bit.”

  I gave her a look. When she didn’t back down, I turned my attention to peeling the paper off a bandage so I could stick it on my foot. I wasn’t going to admit to anything. Not with Adam just downstairs where he might overhear something I didn’t want him to hear.

  “How come you’re wearing a towel?” she asked.

  I showed her and she giggled. “Whoops. I forgot you wouldn’t have a bra. I’ll get a sweatshirt for you to wear over that.”

  When she was safely gone, I smiled to myself. She was right. There is something about having someone take care of you, even when you don’t need it—maybe especially when you don’t need it.

  Something else made me happier, though. Even though Adam was on edge, even though he’d been issuing orders left and right, I hadn’t felt that desire to do whatever he asked me that was part of his magic as the Alpha. If he could manage that under these circumstances…Perhaps I could be his mate and keep myself at the same time.

  Jesse’s shoes, which Adam had brought in for me, were too small, but in addition to the sweatshirt, she managed to scrounge up a pair of flip-flops that worked.

  Honey’s husband walked in the door as I came down the stairs, Honey, as gorgeous in wolf form as she was in human, at his side. He gave me a friendly smile when he saw me.

  “I didn’t find the Porsche, but your Rabbit was off the side of the road with the keys in the ignition. I couldn’t start it, so I locked it up.” He handed me the keys.

  “Thanks, Peter. Fideal must have gone back for his car. That means he wasn’t badly hurt.” I’d been going to head over to my house, but with Fideal running around, it didn’t sound like such a good idea.

  Peter obviously shared my displeasure at the fae’s state of health. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The steel would have done it, I think, but I couldn’t find his body under all the fronds.”

  “How is it that you’re so comfortable with the sword?” I asked. “And why did Adam have a sword here anyway?”

  “It’s my sword,” Jesse said. “I got it at the Renaissance Faire last year and Peter’s been teaching me how to use it.”

  He smiled. “I was a calvary officer before I Changed,” he explained. “We used guns, of course, but they weren’t accurate. The sword was still our first weapon.” He sounded as he always had, his Midwest accent firmly back in place.

  He’d been Changed during the Revolutionary War era or a little before, I thought, to use guns but rely on swords. That would make him, other than maybe Samuel and the Marrok himself, the oldest werewolf I’d ever met. Werewolves might not die of old age, but violence was part and parcel of their way of life.

  He saw my surprise. “I’m not a dominant, Mercy. We tend to last a little longer.” Honey pushed her face under his hand and he rubbed her gently behind her ears.

  “Cool,” I said.

  “Fideal is in safe hands,” said Adam from behind me.

  I turned to see him replacing the phone in its base on the kitchen counter.

  “Uncle Mike assures me that it was a mistake—an overeagerness on the part of Fideal to carry out the Gray Lords’ orders.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “He told me he was hungry for human flesh. I guess that could be overeagerness.”

  He looked at me and I couldn’t read his face or his scent. “I talked to Samuel earlier. He’s sorry to have missed the excitement, but he’s at home now. If Fideal follows you home, he’ll have Samuel to contend with.” He waved his hand around. “And there are plenty of us here to come to your aid.”

  “Are you sending me home?” Was I flirting? Damn it, I was.

  He smiled, first with his eyes and then his lips, just a little, just enough to turn his face into something that made my pulse pick up. “You can stay if you’d like,” he said, flirting right back. Then, a wicked light gleaming in his eyes, he went one step too far. “But I think there are too many people around for what I’d like you to stay for.”

  I dodged around Honey’s husband and out the door, the flip-flops making little snapping sounds that didn’t cover up Adam’s final comment. “I like your tattoo, Mercy.”

  I made sure that my shoulders were stiff as I stalked away. He couldn’t see the grin on my face…and it faded soon enough.

  From the porch I could see the damage the fight had done to both the house and the SUV. That dent in the side of the shiny black vehicle was going to be expensive to fix. The side of the house had taken some damage, too, and I didn’t know how much it would cost to repair. When I’d had to have the siding replaced on my trailer, the vampires had picked up the tab.

  I started adding up the cost of the fight. I didn’t know exactly what Fideal had done to my car, but it was going to take hours to fix, even if I could scrounge all the parts off the dead Rabbit presently annoying Adam in my back field. And somewhere I was going to have to come up with money to pay off Zee (and I really didn’t want to borrow it from Samuel)—unless Zee had been playing some elaborate game to keep me from investigating the murder.

  I rubbed my face, suddenly tired. I’d kept mostly to myself since I left the Marrok’s pack when I was sixteen. The only problems I’d stuck my nose into had been my own. I stayed out of werewolf business and Zee kept me out of his. Somehow in the past year all that careful management had gone to hell.

  I wasn’t sure that there was a way back to my old peaceful existence, or if I even wanted it. But my new lifestyle was starting to get expensive.

  A piece of gravel slid between the flip-flop and my sore foot and I yelped. It was getting painful, too.

  Samuel was waiting for me on the porch with a mug of hot chocolate and an expert glance that checked for wounds.

  “I’m fine,” I told him, scooting past the open screen door and snagging the cocoa on the way. It was instant, but the marshmallows were just what I needed. “Ben’s the one who got hurt, and I think I saw Darryl limping.”

  “Adam didn’t ask me to come over, so neither of them must have been hurt very badly,” he said, shutting the door. When I sat on a chair in the living room, he sat on the couch across from me. “Why don’t you tell me about tonight. Like how you happened to get chased by the Fideal.”

  “The Fideal?”

  “It used to live in a bog and eat straying children,” he told me. �
��You’re a little older than its usual fare. So what did you do to tick it off?”

  “Nothing. Not a darn thing.”

  He made one of those sounds he used to let me know he wasn’t buying my story.

  I took a long drink. Maybe another viewpoint would notice something I had missed. So I told him most of it—leaving out only what had gone on between Adam and me after I’d gotten into the shower.

  As I talked, I noticed that Samuel looked tired. He loved working in the emergency room, but it took a toll. Not just the odd hours, though they could be bad enough. Mostly it was the stress of keeping control when surrounded by blood and fear and death.

  By the time I finished my story, he looked better. “So you went to a Bright Future meeting, hoping to find someone else who might have killed this guard, and ran into a bunch of college kids—and a fae who decided that eating you would be fun.”

  I nodded. “That’s about it.”

  “Could the fae have been the killer?”

  I closed my eyes and pictured Fideal’s fight with the werewolves. Could he have ripped a man’s head off his shoulders? “Maybe. But he didn’t seem concerned about the investigation.”

  “You said that he was angry you were at the meeting. Could he have been worried that you were closing in on him?”

  “That might have been it,” I said. “I’ll call Uncle Mike and see if there’s any reason Fideal might have wanted the other fae dead. He certainly knew O’Donnell—and the more I find out about him, the odder it seems that someone hadn’t killed him years ago.”

  Samuel smiled a little. “But you’re not convinced the Fideal did it.”

  I shook my head. “He’s put himself on the top of my list, but…”

  “But what?”

  “He was so hungry. Not for sustenance, though that was part of it, but for the hunt.” Samuel the werewolf would understand what I meant. “I think that if Fideal had killed the guard, O’Donnell’s death would have been different. He’d have been found drowned, or eaten, or never found at all.” Putting it into words made it more than a suspicion. “I’ll call Uncle Mike and see what he thinks, but I don’t believe it was Fideal.”