Smoke Bitten: Mercy Thompson: Book 12

by Patricia Briggs

  Aiden’s room was in the basement, so I just continued down the next set of stairs. He lived in what had previously been the pack’s safe room because Adam and his happy contractor (who said that fixing the damage routinely experienced by our house from a pack of werewolves had already paid for his kids’ college and was working on his grandchildren’s) had decided that it would be the easiest room in the house to fireproof. Aiden tended to have nightmares, and when he did, sometimes he started fires. There was a fire extinguisher in every room of the house and two in the main basement—one of them near the stairs, and the other on the wall next to Aiden’s bedroom.

  Construction had begun on another safe room in the far end of the basement. Werewolf safe rooms kept everyone else safe from the occupant (presumably an out-of-control werewolf) instead of the other way around like safe rooms in human houses were intended to do.

  A safe room started out as a cage constructed from silver-coated steel bars. Then it would be covered with drywall and turned into a fairly normal-looking room because cages don’t help anyone calm down. Our new safe room was still in the cage stage.

  Aiden’s door showed its origins in that it was solid metal, but it no longer locked from the outside. I knocked on it twice.

  Aiden opened the door. His hair stuck out in medium-brown swirls as it tended to when he got upset, because he ran his fingers through it and occasionally would grab and twist. Sometime since I’d left the house, he’d changed his clothes and cleaned up.

  As soon as he had the door open, Aiden started apologizing.

  “I am so sorry, Mercy. I had no idea Tilly was planning on this.”

  “Not your fault,” I told him. “When an ancient powerful force of magic decides to do something, people like you and me don’t get much of a say in it.”

  He didn’t look as though I’d relieved him of guilt. “If you hadn’t let me stay—”

  “We like you,” I told him. “We’ll take you how you come.”

  I’d told him that before. He was, I thought, starting to believe it.

  He took a breath, then frowned at me doubtfully. “Ancient powerful forces of magic and all?”

  “Yup. You’re in good company in this family.” I gave him a rueful smile. “Joel is possessed by a volcano spirit. I have Coyote, who likes to show up and make trouble whenever he chooses. Even Adam comes with Christy baggage that just keeps on giving.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You are all cursed, and I fit right in.”

  I laughed. Aiden learned fast. Anyone listening in would never think that he’d been trapped for who knows how long in that magical land and had only popped out just a few months ago. Jesse credited it to her tutoring with the aid of Netflix.

  “I did come down to ask about Underhill’s door,” I said.

  He nodded. “I already talked to Adam a little about it. She told me she put it there …”

  He frowned trying, I knew, to recall Underhill’s exact words. Exact words were important to the fae—and Underhill, as far as I’d been able to tell, followed the rules that governed the fae. “She said, ‘I need a door to Mercy’s backyard. I miss you. The fae aren’t playing nice and I don’t want to owe any of them anything.’”

  “Why would she owe the fae anything?” I asked.

  Aiden shrugged. “I don’t know. But it wasn’t specific, so maybe it was something she said to distract me from the fact that she put a doorway in our backyard.”

  “Can anyone else use the doorway?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Me and Underhill. I made her spell it that way as soon as I saw it. She guards her doorways pretty zealously anyway, but there are monsters in Underhill and sometimes we get out.”

  “Yep, well, there are monsters on this side of Underhill’s doors, too,” I told him briskly. “Don’t get feeling too special.”

  He started to smile at me—and then his gaze grew suddenly intent. “Mercy, what happened?”

  “My eyes aren’t swollen anymore,” I said, a little indignant. “I spent time with a cold washcloth.”

  He reached up and put a hand briefly on my face—his hand was warm. “Your eyes are sad, Mercy. Washcloths can’t help that.”

  I told him about my neighbors. I included the jackrabbit and the ghost. I left out my interlude with Adam.

  “Their deaths hurt you,” Aiden said when I finished. “I am sorry for your loss.” Frowning, he leaned against the door. “There are a few things that can use a bite—use that blood contact to make people do their will. Vampires, for instance.”

  “Marsilia would never permit it.”

  Aiden shook his head. “Not Marsilia’s seethe. The ones in Underhill wouldn’t owe her any fealty.”

  Like the rest of us, his thoughts had immediately gone to the door in our backyard when looking for a culprit.

  “There are vampires in Underhill?”

  Aiden said, “Everything you’ve told me about your neighbors’ deaths could have been done by the fae. Other than a few of the less powerful fae—and creatures like the goblins, whose control of glamour is different—they could all take on the form of a jackrabbit. And while the fae don’t use blood as often as, say, the witches do, there is a lot of magic in blood. But you told me that it didn’t smell like fae magic to you. That still leaves other options. When the fae were driven out, there were still servants, curiosities like me, and prisoners left behind in Underhill. Tilly opened the prisons when she exiled the fae who were their caretakers. Most of the prisoners were—or had been—fae, but not all of them were. There are some weird things roaming around. Weirder even than I am.” He shivered.

  I was still stuck on vampires. “Vampires? Really? In Underhill? That’s like finding coyotes in ancient Egypt.”

  “There weren’t coyotes in Egypt, right?” he asked.

  “Not unless Coyote—” I held up a hand. “Sorry. Let’s get back to the idea that something escaped from Underhill through the door in our backyard and killed my friends.” I had a thought powered by his tales of creatures set free by Underhill. “How many escapees could there have been?”

  “If something escaped, it would have had to be before I found the door,” he said. “I could believe that one creature escaped—but she doesn’t like to lose her captives.”

  “It wasn’t there when I got home,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “That makes multiple escapees even less likely.”

  “Would she know if something escaped?” I asked. “And more importantly, would she know which something escaped?” And hopefully give us more information on what it was and how to kill it.

  He nodded. “I think so. But she will know that I’ll be mad at her over it—so getting her to tell us if something escaped will be hard. I’ll call her and see what she will tell me. It might take a while for her to answer.”

  He didn’t mean that he’d use the phone.

  “Okay,” I said. “Thank you.” I started to go, then paused. “I should let you know that Adam and I are going out hunting jackrabbits.”

  He frowned. “I think I should come along,” he said. “Just in case. Let me get my tennis shoes on.”

  BY THE TIME WE WENT BACK UPSTAIRS, ADAM WAS waiting for us in his wolf form.

  “I talked to Aiden. He agrees it might be something escaped from Underhill,” I told Adam. “He has decided to come help.”

  Adam looked at Aiden, who gave him a cool look and said, “You are lethal, no doubt. Mercy is quick. But I lived in Underhill for a long time, and I made some friends there as well as enemies. Some of them … I know what they did in Underhill, but I have no idea what they could do out here. Magic works differently out here. Maybe we’ll run into someone I know and we can chat. And if not—well, most things burn when I want them to.”

  Adam huffed a reluctant agreement. We didn’t like using Aiden as a weapon. He was under our protection, not the other way around.

  But he was right—he knew things we didn’t.

  “Okay,” I said. “But i
f I say run, you run.”

  He gave me a look. It was probably not a look of agreement. Who was it that said leadership is a matter of never giving orders that you know will not be obeyed? I figured that his silence was the best I was going to do.

  I stepped into Adam’s office to change. Modesty was a thing that I’d left behind a long time ago, but Aiden looked like a kid. Unless there were dying people involved, I would strip naked out of his sight.

  Once I was changed into my coyote self, Aiden let Adam and me out of the kitchen and closed the door behind us. They followed me through the backyard. Night had fallen and the stone fence looked strange in the light of the waxing moon, out of place and mysterious. We all climbed through the old barbed-wire fence instead of climbing over the stone.

  I HAD THOUGHT THAT I REMEMBERED EXACTLY WHERE the jackrabbit had been. But though I could smell a mouse somewhere nearby—and Adam scared up a pair of rabbits of the regular variety following the only rabbit trail we could find—there were no jackrabbits.

  We went to the Cathers’ house and sniffed around the garden. I found a rabbit trail, but it was crossed and recrossed by a dozen people walking over it. I finally found a bit of it that led off the property, and the three of us set off through fields and backyards to find out if it was a jackrabbit.

  Rabbits of all kinds smelled like rabbits. I could tell one individual rabbit from another—but to my nose there was no difference between a Flemish giant and a cottontail.

  As soon as the trail took us through private property belonging to other people, Adam called pack magic to make us harder to notice. I didn’t argue; people shoot at coyotes and I had the buckshot scars on my backside to prove it. The danger was reduced because it was night—but there were three of us, and a 250-pound werewolf and a boy weren’t as good at stealth as a coyote was.

  Rabbits don’t travel in straight lines, and this one had rambled all over. Our bit of hometown was a patchwork quilt of large fields and once-large fields broken up into odd-shaped properties with homes ranging from 1960s trailers to modern mansions and everything in between, as well as a few industrial plants on the river.

  We passed by or through hayfields, marijuana farms, organic farms, berry farms, and a few small vineyards, though the best vineyard country is on the other side of the Tri-Cities, and we ran through a lot of backyards, too. There were horses, cows, goats, chickens—all of whom ignored us, wrapped as we were in pack magic. The cats saw through the magic, as did the foxes. But they only watched our passing without sounding any alerts.

  At one point we jumped into a backyard that was full of old cars. Most of them were rotted husks, with kochia, tackweed, and Virginia creeper growing up through the old floorboards—but there was a row of cars next to the house that were covered in tarps, and one of them …

  I ducked my head low and tried to see under the tarp without being too obvious about it. Adam nipped me lightly on the hip and Aiden laughed. A light went on in the house and we all scrambled to get out of the yard before the back porch light turned on.

  Fortunately, there was a break in the fence big enough for Aiden to get through, and even more fortunately, that was the hole the rabbit had used to get out, too.

  Trailing prey by scent for long takes a lot of concentration, even when there aren’t mysterious tarps hiding what I was pretty sure was an old Karmann Ghia. Adam and I started trading off who was following the trail every ten minutes or so.

  Rabbits are usually more territorial than this one was. I’d trailed rabbits in circles before, but never such a long trail over new territory. We didn’t run into any old trails where the rabbit crossed its own path, as it would if this were its usual haunts. It made me think we might be on the right track.

  The trail eventually took us across a road and into Two Rivers Park, a swath of green space along the river where the Snake joined the Columbia. Two Rivers wasn’t all that far from our home, but we hadn’t taken anything like a direct route here. Some of the park is groomed for picnics and recreation, but a fair bit is left wild with trails shared by equestrians and hikers. That was the part that the rabbit led us to.

  Aidan stopped by a big sagebrush. “Hey. Over here,” he said. “I think I’ve found your rabbit. Parts of him, anyway.”

  We trotted over to him but we didn’t get quite there before we discovered something else. I froze, but Adam growled, the silvery ruff around his neck rising up, as did the hair along his spine.

  I changed into human. I was taking a chance because we weren’t out of sight of the road, but it was dark. Humans would need more light than that to see that I was naked. Nonhumans probably wouldn’t care.

  Aiden could see just fine in the dark. But we needed to communicate and it was a lot faster for me to change than for Adam to do it. He could, if the occasion warranted, pull on the pack for power to make the change more quickly, but then he’d be stuck walking home naked. A lovely sight, sure, but also illegal.

  “Werewolves,” I told Aiden. “Strangers.” I glanced at Adam when I said this. I didn’t know the three wolves I’d scented, but he was older than I and had traveled more among the werewolves. He knew a lot more of them than I did.

  Adam just looked at me.

  “Strangers to me, but Adam knows them.” And he wasn’t happy about it.

  “Invaders,” said Aiden.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  “Is this your rabbit?” Aiden asked me, gesturing at the bits of dead cottontail he’d found. It wasn’t the jackrabbit, for sure. But we hadn’t been certain we were following the jackrabbit’s trail.

  My nose isn’t as good in human shape. I glanced at Adam, who stuck his nose closer to the rabbit—and shook his head.

  “No,” I told Aiden. “This isn’t our rabbit. They left this one as a challenge and a test. We’re too close to pack headquarters; they wouldn’t have killed something unless they were investigating how well we patrol our territory.” I looked at Adam for confirmation.

  He growled, the sound rumbling deep in his chest. He bumped me with his shoulder, pushing me toward home.

  “But what about the jackrabbit?” I asked him.

  He gave me an impatient huff.

  “Something made Dennis kill his wife,” I said. And, damn it all, I teared up again. “That rabbit is a clue.”

  “How do you know that the rabbit we’ve been chasing is the jackrabbit you saw?” asked Aiden reasonably. “It could be any old rabbit. Do you smell magic? I don’t feel any.”

  I shook my head. He was right.

  “Even if it was that rabbit, Mercy … there is not, right now, any proof that the jackrabbit had anything to do with the killing of your friends. Though parts of Underhill are infested with jackrabbits—and the creatures that feed upon them—I don’t know of any killer bunnies.”

  I gave him a narrow look. “Is that a reference to Monty Python?” He grinned. “I like Monty Python. I understand the jokes. So if there is danger out here that isn’t related to whatever it is that attacked your friends, maybe we should listen to Adam and go home to regroup.”

  “Three wolves,” I muttered, though I knew better. “I’m not worried.”

  Adam gave me a look and I threw up my hands. “Yes, all right. Okay. I know. Where there are three, there could be more. We could be looking at a pack. And yes, I don’t want to meet a hostile pack when it is just you, me, and the firebrand.” I glanced out toward the river in the direction that the rabbit we’d been trailing had run. “But the rabbit we’ve been following isn’t acting like a normal rabbit and I want to know why.”

  Adam sneezed.

  “Home,” I told Aiden, resigned.

  Back in coyote form, I led the way home with Aiden in the middle and Adam following from behind. We took a more straightforward way home, but since we also went by road instead of through fields and backyards, I wasn’t sure it was any faster.

  “Do you feel that?” asked Aiden almost soundlessly. “Someone is watching us.”

&n
bsp; By the pricking of my thumbs, I thought, though in this form I didn’t really have thumbs. But Aiden was right, I could feel the hair on the back of my neck spark with the feeling that we were being observed. I glanced upward but didn’t see anything in the night sky except for stars.

  Adam huffed agreement and pushed us into a jog. We weren’t running away, but the faster pace might force the person or people—or rabbits—following us to break cover. It was harder to stay hidden at speed.

  We turned down the road that led to our house, and whatever or whoever was following us was still behind us. Adam waited until a small grove of big old trees hugged the road, and he disappeared into the shadows there without a sound. He must have pulled a little more pack magic out, because the ground around the trees was covered with crackling-dry leaves and even Adam wasn’t good enough to get through those without making some noise.

  Aiden and I kept to our jogging pace as if nothing were wrong—and a jackrabbit leaped out of the bushes and bit me on the neck, really sinking its teeth in.

  I snapped back at it and missed but gave chase as it bolted through the underbrush and into an alfalfa field. We both tunneled through the bushy stuff using the furrows where the alfalfa grew thinner. A werewolf—I could hear Adam crashing behind me—wouldn’t be able to run through this at the same rate.

  Jackrabbits are built for speed. They can run as fast as an ordinary coyote. I was not an ordinary coyote—and I was determined this rabbit wasn’t going to get away from me. I felt, faintly, as though there were a pressure on my head—like an incipient headache—but the sensation was lost in the greater drive of the hunt.

  I pounced and snapped my teeth on flesh and fur. I had it between my teeth, though it didn’t feel or taste quite right, not like a rabbit. And then it was gone. Not run away—gone. It turned from flesh into smoke in my mouth, an acrid-vinegary smoke that burned my lungs and tasted like the magic that had filled Dennis’s body.

  I dropped to the ground gasping and choking. My eyes burned and my throat felt like I’d tried to swallow a hot coal, and I curled up into a ball with the force of my coughing. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t …