“It smelled a little like Underhill—but not like Underhill,” I told him. “I suppose it could be something that came through her door. But it also smelled a little like that vampire who was also a sorcerer. More that than Underhill. It didn’t smell fae to me.”
“He was bitten,” said Anna, walking beside us.
“Bitten by what?” I asked her. “Was it the rabbit?” I was going to end up with my house haunted. Maybe I could make that a feature and rent it out as an Airbnb.
Adam didn’t ask me who I was talking to—he’d gotten used to it. Instead he said, “You’re going to end up with Anna haunting you if you aren’t more careful.”
“Most of them haunt places, not people,” I said uneasily. Because I knew of at least one case in which a person was haunted. That one had had some fae magic thrown in to help the weirdness along, but there was magic afoot here, too.
Anna hadn’t answered me. She was scuffing her shoes in the dirt and squinting up at the sky. “Looks like rain,” she said.
The skies were clear. Maybe they looked different if you were dead.
“Smoke.” Dennis’s voice in my ear made me jump.
I turned around, but he wasn’t visible. And Anna was gone, too.
“What?” asked Adam.
I shrugged, but unease left over from that whispering voice in my ears made me look around.
“I think I’m going out hunting a jackrabbit tonight,” I told him. Finding the rabbit would make me feel better. I was still pretty sure it was just an ordinary rabbit—but I wanted to make certain. I thought I would have noticed something that could pour that kind of magic into Dennis, notice it with more than the mild interest my coyote self had evinced. But then I hadn’t sensed the magic in Dennis’s body until I’d touched it.
“Did you get a reply?” asked Adam. “About what bit Dennis? I assume it was Dennis who was bitten.”
I nodded. “I don’t know that he was answering me. He just said, ‘Smoke.’ They are both gone now—not that ghosts are good at communication.”
“How can you be bitten by smoke?” asked Adam. “And why would that mean that you need to go hunting jackrabbits?”
I explained about the rabbit I’d seen and how the marks on Dennis’s wrist looked like a rabbit bite. We had reached the porch of my little house by the time I finished. Adam opened the door I’d left unlocked without saying anything about it.
“Anna told me, ‘He was bitten.’ I am assuming she was talking about Dennis—especially since I saw the bite myself. But that might not have anything at all to do with her death, just a leftover thought. It was Dennis who said, ‘Smoke.’ Then they both left. I don’t know if one had to do with the other.”
Adam closed the door behind us but didn’t step farther into the house. He bowed his head for a moment before meeting my eyes.
“I am sorry,” he said. “I know I hurt you today. I have been angry and short-tempered and I took it out on you. On you and Jesse.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk about this. What is up with you? Why the shutdown of our bond? Why no time together? Why no—” I was trying to keep my voice clinical, but if I’d said “no making love,” I would have had trouble doing it. So I said, “—sex?” And my voice wobbled a little anyway.
He nodded, as if he’d been waiting for those questions.
“The short answer is that I don’t know,” he said. “But something is wrong.” He thumped his chest.
I frowned at him. “With your wolf?”
He shook his head, but then said, “Maybe? It doesn’t feel like that—though the wolf is part of it.”
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“See?” he said. “It doesn’t make sense out loud.”
“Is it me?”
He huffed out a humorless laugh. “I promise that this is not an ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ speech.” His eyes brightened to gold. “I won’t let you go.”
“Not your choice,” I told him. “But as it happens, you’d have a hard time shaking me off. You are mine, and I’m pretty stubborn about things like that.”
His whole body relaxed with an odd shudder. He closed his eyes. My stomach settled for the first time in a few days. We could work this out.
And then he said, in a voice that was not his own, “You’d leave if you knew what was inside me.”
The wolf, I thought, after a weird moment. It was just Adam’s wolf. We’d spoken a time or two. But it hadn’t sounded quite right for the wolf.
“Nope,” I told him—wolf and man. “Not happening.”
“You should leave.” This time I was sure it was the wolf who spoke. “It would be safer for you.” And then Adam’s yellow eyes opened, but he gave a half laugh. “Yes, I know, that just guaranteed you are going to stick around until bodies start dropping.”
“Are bodies going to start dropping?” I asked.
“Mercy,” he said. “I don’t trust myself. I’ve been a werewolf for longer than you’ve been alive, and it’s been decades since I’ve had trouble with it. But now I wake up and I’m in my wolf’s shape—without remembering how I got there.”
Two weeks ago, I thought. He’d been a wolf when I woke up. I’d just assumed that he’d had a restless night; we both were prone to those after the witches. Sometimes on bad nights we’d go out for a run—on two legs or four. I’d thought he’d decided to let me sleep. It had been after that night that the odd distance he’d forced between us had happened; it might have been right after that night.
He saw me remember and nodded. “Yes. That time. But it doesn’t feel like the wolf is trying to take over. I know how to control that.”
“We cannot keep the people around us safe from ourselves,” growled his wolf.
I couldn’t find it in myself to be frightened of Adam—though I remembered clearly the look in his eyes when I confronted him on the stairs. He hadn’t hurt me then—and he would never hurt me. But I wasn’t the one who needed convincing.
“Is it something to do with the witches?” I asked tentatively.
“I don’t think so,” said Adam. “It doesn’t feel like magic.”
“Yes,” contradicted the wolf—startling Adam.
It was pretty weird having a three-way conversation when there were only two of us in the room. Adam and his wolf were usually more integrated than this.
“Okay, then,” I said. “Do we believe your wolf? It was something the witches did?” They had made him obey them—it was a gift one of the Hardesty witches had. One of the nightmares Adam had after that night was that under the witch’s orders, he killed me or Jesse.
Adam shook his head. “I don’t think he knows anything I don’t.”
“Okay,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I agreed. “Now that we have all that out in the open, how about you open up our mating bond?”
“No,” Adam said with emphasis. “I don’t want this spilling out on you.”
“No,” agreed the wolf.
“All of what spilling out on me?” I asked.
Adam flattened his lips.
“Adam?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
He backed up against the door when I tried to put a hand on his shoulder. I raised both my eyebrows and stalked forward until he was flat against the wall and I pressed myself against him.
He could have pushed me away. Instead I could feel him try to pull himself back, as if he wished his body could dissolve through the door so we would no longer touch.
He turned his head from me, his eyes … ashamed.
“To hell with that,” I muttered. He was only about four inches taller than I was, which meant that if he was trying to keep his lips away from me, there was still a lot of him I could reach. I kissed the skin under his jaw, soft but for the bristly hint of beard growing in. Then I rested my face against his neck and just breathed.
Gradually, his breathing matched mine and his body relaxed, melting into mine. Finally, his arms wrapped around me.
“I
’m sorry,” he told me, his lips on my temple. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I told him. “Fix it.”
His chest huffed with a silent laugh, though the expression in his eyes hurt me. “I don’t know how.”
“Figure it out,” I told him. “The first step might be letting me in.” And I tugged lightly on the mating bond between us so he would be in no doubt about what I meant.
“No,” he said adamantly. “There are things …”
“What kind of things?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Just things.” His arms tightened around me and we stood, wrapped around each other like two children in the dark.
But he would not let me in.
3
I WENT UPSTAIRS WITH THE INTENTION OF WASHING up, but as I walked past Jesse’s room, I hesitated. Light edged the bottom of her door. I knocked.
“Who is it?” she asked.
“Me,” I said, then, in case she thought Adam was with me, “just me.”
“Come in,” she said.
I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t a completely cleaned room (though the carpet still needed vacuuming and some spot stain remover). It was dark outside, but I wouldn’t have thought we’d been away from the house long enough for Jesse to have accomplished tidy in her room—but here it was. She took on her room once a month, and she was about a week out from her usual weekend cleaning frenzy.
Not only that, she’d had time to dye her hair—and freshen her makeup.
With her newly teal hair still wet, lip gloss and eyeliner intact, Jesse was sitting cross-legged on her neatly made bed, where she had been reading something on her phone. She set her phone aside when I came in and motioned for me to shut the door. It didn’t guarantee privacy, but it did mean that any werewolf in the house wouldn’t overhear us whether they wanted to or not.
Her eyes were puffy, but her lips quirked up. “I thought I’d try rage-cleaning. You are right, it does help. You were also right when you warned me I should tell them up front about changing schools.”
“To be fair,” I said, “I didn’t expect this level of fireworks—and I’m not sure it would have been any better if you had told them both the day you made the decision.”
“It might have kept Mom from bringing Auriele into it,” Jesse said.
I snorted. “You underestimate your mother’s ability to get people to perform in the Stupid Olympics for her.”
“Hah,” she said. “Maybe.”
“I didn’t come up to talk about that,” I said, waving my hand. “From what Adam said, all of the offending parties have apologized for being stupid without proving they won’t be stupid again. Which is all you can expect from people who are basically truthful.”
She smiled. “To be fair, Mom can get me to compete in the Stupid Olympics, too. I can’t afford to be too judgmental. But if someone is keeping achievement award points, for the record, I think Auriele won, hands down.” Her mouth tightened, but she continued, “So what did you come up here for?”
“Gabriel left you a note when he moved out of my place.” I held out the key to the house and then tossed it on the bed. “Your father didn’t see it, I don’t think. I left it where it was and didn’t open it.”
Her face paled and her nose reddened. She wiped her eyes carefully so as not to smudge her eyeliner. I could have told her that was a lost cause. “This day just couldn’t get any better,” she muttered.
“I never challenge the fates that way,” I told her.
She smiled absently and focused on my face. “Did you and Dad have a fight?”
I glanced at the mirror on the top of her bureau. Jesse wasn’t the only one who looked like she’d spent some time crying.
Damn it.
“Not as such,” I said.
I caught myself before I told her that Adam was working out some issues—though he’d been frustratingly unclear about exactly what those issues were. I wasn’t going to invite her into our marriage any more than I’d discuss things with Zee and Tad.
“I hope you set him straight,” Jesse told me. “He’s been unreasonable and grouchy for long enough.”
“Can’t argue with that,” I muttered, wondering if I was breaking my rule about involving Jesse in my relationship with her dad if she was the one doing the commenting.
“So why have you been crying?” Jesse asked. “Did he say something?”
No. At least not the way she meant it. Her father was shutting me out, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. That had been only one of the reasons I’d broken down and cried all over Adam tonight.
I said, “Dennis and Anna Cather are dead.” And I teared up again, damn it, this time for my friends.
We hadn’t done a lot together after Adam and I got married. Part of that had been the change in proximity. Though Adam’s house was no farther from theirs than my old one had been, it was on a different street—no more driving past their house every day on the way to work and waving at them as they ate breakfast on their front porch. Like me, they had been early risers.
Mostly, though, I’d limited our interactions out of concern for them. For years I’d flown under the radar of the bigger nasties around. Once I’d married Adam, flying low had no longer been an option. I was exposed to the supernatural community—and even among normal people I drew attention. I didn’t want to give the bad guys any more targets than necessary, so I’d restricted the amount of time I spent among people who couldn’t defend themselves from the kinds of enemies I now attracted—like the Hardesty witches as only the most recent example.
I don’t know why I hadn’t considered that angle on their deaths earlier. I’d been thinking it had something to do with Underhill’s door. Had the Cathers been targeted because they were connected to me?
Jesse jumped off the bed to hug me. “Mercy. Oh jeez. Anna and Dennis? What happened? Car wreck?”
She hadn’t known them well, but she knew who they were.
I hugged her back and stepped away. “Stop that or I’ll turn into a wet noodle and I need to keep it together.”
She gave me a sympathetic nod. “Boy, do I know how that feels. Joel sent his wife up. Lucia’s a hugger, which is awesome, but that’s why my eyes look like this. I managed to deflect her with helping me clean or else I’d still be bawling.” Which explained the mystery of how fast Jesse’s room had been cleaned. “What happened to Anna and Dennis?”
“Magic,” I told her, and then I gave her the full story as I knew it. If there was something running around that could cause Dennis to kill Anna, I wanted everyone I cared about to know about it.
“Witches?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Wrong kind of magic, I think. At least it doesn’t feel like any witchcraft I’ve ever been around. And there aren’t any witches around here anymore.” Not that we knew about, anyway. We’d killed them all. “It didn’t smell like fae magic, either.”
“Well, that shoots down my other thought,” she said. “With a door to Underhill in our own freaking backyard, I thought maybe something other than Aiden’s dangerous best friend had come strolling out.”
“I wouldn’t rule anything out about Underhill,” I said darkly. “But it’s a lot harder to get out of Underhill than into her.” I looked at the key that Jesse had clenched in her fist—and thought about her going past Underhill’s door to get to my mobile home.
“I hate to say this,” I told Jesse, “but I think that maybe you might want to wait until daylight before you go over to the house to retrieve the letter.”
She shook her head. “Nah. I needed to get out of this house tonight, so I called some friends and we’re all going out to a movie. One of them has a thing for Tad. It’s doomed, but it’s not my place to tell her that. But that’s why I invited him, too. I’m working on the theory that exposure will cure her of her crush from afar. Anyway, Tad offered to take us all in his new old van.”
Tad had just finished a build on a VW bus; well, mostly finishe
d. Mechanically it was sound and the interior was completely redone, but he hadn’t decided on a paint job yet so it was still primer gray.
“He’s picking me up first,” Jesse told me. “He’ll be by in about fifteen minutes. I’ll have him stop at your house to pick up the letter.”
“Okay,” I said. If Tad couldn’t keep her safe, no one could. He was a good shoulder to cry on, too. “Have fun. Your dad and I are going out to chase rabbits.”
Finding the jackrabbit I’d seen was mostly an excuse to search. Something had hit Dennis with a lot of magic, and Dennis mostly just hung around his house, so whatever had happened had probably occurred nearby.
Jesse snorted; she knew that we weren’t hunting dinner. But she only said, “You two have fun killing cute fuzzy animals.”
I gave her a thumbs-up and headed out.
“Hey, Mercy?”
I stopped in the doorway and turned back.
“Be careful.”
“Always,” I told her—which might not have been entirely true.
Her laughter was a little sharp.
“I always try not to die,” I told her more truthfully.
“Okay,” she said. “And, hey, Mercy? Thanks for not reading Gabriel’s note.” There was an edge of bitterness I didn’t care for in her voice.
“Don’t give me too much credit,” I told her. “Your mother doesn’t willingly talk to me. If she did …” I shrugged. “She might have had me checking out his underwear drawer before I knew it.”
“Hah,” Jesse said, pointing at me. “I think you are the only person in this house who is totally immune to her.”
“That’s because I love you and I love Adam,” I told her in all seriousness. “That makes it impossible for me to love Christy.” That was probably more truth than I should have given her, but it had been a long day.
Her mouth turned sad. “Yeah,” she said. “I get that.”
________
I WASHED UP IN MY BATHROOM, RESTING A COLD washcloth on my eyes until they weren’t so puffy. I looked in the mirror and decided I was good enough, and headed downstairs.
I could hear Adam talking on the phone; I was pretty sure it was someone from work. Nothing important or he would have shut his office door. But if he was on his phone, then he wasn’t changing to his wolf. That gave me time to go talk to Aiden about the door to Underhill.
Smoke Bitten: Mercy Thompson: Book 12 Page 5
