Having two good legs, I managed to get out of his way, but that put me in the middle of the street. And closer to the Palsics and the oddly familiar woman.
James Palsic said, “Would you mind if I took care of him?”
I couldn’t tell if he was asking me.
“Put him in the back of the truck,” the woman with the familiar voice ordered. “We’ll figure out what to do with him when we get back.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
I put the gun up in the air so I wasn’t aiming at anyone and backed up a dozen feet down the middle of the road, so it didn’t put me any closer to the enemy. Auriele, who had given Makaya to her mother, put herself in front of the little family. I wondered if I should tell them what was wrong with Lincoln.
Palsic stalked past me and said something in a Romance language that wasn’t Spanish or Italian—Portuguese maybe, or Romanian. It sounded sorrowful and resolute. He avoided Lincoln’s attack, and the maneuver put him at the damaged werewolf’s back. With a quick and easy movement he picked up the struggling werewolf.
“Don’t let him bite you,” I told him—and he raised an eyebrow at me.
“Don’t intend to,” he said.
“Kill him,” said Nonnie.
“There are about six cell phones pointed at us through windows,” James told her. He didn’t seem to be having trouble keeping Lincoln’s mouth away from him.
“I said we will decide what to do when we get back.” There was ice in the other woman’s voice—and for some reason that made everything click.
I had met her before, in the Marrok’s office. I’d been cleaning it after Bran had been the victim of a glitter bomb. For some reason he’d blamed me—even though I’d only been responsible for the first three or four of the things. Someone who was not me had been gutsy enough to break into Bran’s office and suspend the glitter bomb over his desk. Bran was not interested in my defense—though he must have known I wasn’t lying—so I got to clean the room. It did not take much glitter to make a real mess.
Bran must have forgotten about it—or else he’d assumed that it would only take a half hour or so to clean up. He clearly hadn’t expected to find me there, two hours later, when he came in with a tiny blond woman with a sweet face. But he’d introduced us and explained about the glitter bomb to her—which, as I recall, she’d had very little reaction to. He’d sent me off so they could conduct their business.
He’d summoned me back a few hours later. His room was absolutely sparkle-less, which was more than could be said about me. He had apologized—told me the real culprit had confessed (without telling me who it was) and cleaned the room. Then he told me that if I ever saw Fiona again, to steer clear of her.
It had made an impression—because he’d never warned me about another werewolf like that. Because she was so small—smaller than I had been at fourteen or fifteen. And because her eyes had been a cold, clear green—not the green of hazel eyes. But like someone with light blue eyes had put in green-tinted contacts. I’d never seen anyone with eyes that color.
I later learned that she was one of a group of wolves that Bran used to keep the werewolves in order. Charles was only the most obvious and feared one. But Charles had limits—he knew right from wrong. This woman did exactly what she was told, and enjoyed assassin work the most.
“Fiona,” I said, and she turned to focus on me. From this distance I couldn’t see her eye color beyond that they were light. Her hair was dark, not blond, but her body language was the same.
“Mercy Hauptman,” she said, without smiling. “Bran’s little coyote pet.”
“How unexpected,” I said—though clearly she was not surprised to find me here. “Are you still …” I couldn’t think of how to phrase it.
“Running errands,” she said.
“Still running errands for Bran?” I asked, using her phrase.
She shook her head. “No, actually. I found my mate and changed my ways.”
“Not Lincoln Stuart,” I said, more to let her know that she wasn’t the only one who knew their enemies than because I thought there was a chance that it was Lincoln. She’d have been a lot more concerned about Lincoln than she was if he had been her mate. “And the Palsics are mated to each other.”
James, still standing beside my car with the struggling Lincoln in his arms, met my eyes.
“Adam remembered you,” I told him. Let them think we’d had eyes on them, too, instead of good intel from Charles.
Fiona gave me a sharp smile. “Sven Harolford is my mate, Mercedes Thompson … Hauptman. We are here to take over your pack. We will allow Hauptman to take three wolves with him—and you. You should be grateful.”
I smiled back at her, centering my weight over my feet. I was in no shape to fight, between broken nose and sore ribs, but I wasn’t going to let her see that.
“Shivering in my boots, here,” I told her. Fiona was probably a game changer. We had a lot of wolves in our pack who had killed people. But we didn’t have any killers—wolves who enjoyed murder. I didn’t want Fiona in our pack. “You won’t take my advice, but you should move on. If you need a refuge from Gartman and his pack, Bran will help you.”
“No,” said Fiona, a faint bitterness in her voice. “He won’t. James? What are you waiting around for? Get Lincoln in the truck.” She turned around and stalked back to the truck herself.
James nodded to me as he passed by with Lincoln. I stared at him, trying to fix his features in my head. I knew what he looked like from Adam’s picture. But I couldn’t get a lock on his face.
James tossed the other wolf ungently into the back of the truck. Onlookers who did not have supernatural hearing wouldn’t have heard the pop as he broke Lincoln’s neck in the middle of that toss.
“Idiot,” snapped Fiona. “Who do you think gives the orders around here?”
He stared at the truck bed for a long moment, tension in his body. Then he turned back to me.
“I told them,” he said in a soft voice. “No children. And Fiona and Sven sent him here anyway.” He looked at Fiona. “He did not find this place on his own. He’s been so wild that he could barely put his own clothes on.” He met my gaze.
I felt a spark. There was a little pop in my head, like when my ears depressurized. A zing of magic darted down my spine—and I could see his face at last.
Fiona said, “We thought he was stable. Today he was better.” And she’d sent a wolf here to cause havoc. To Kelly’s house where there were children.
I looked back at James. “Green Beetle,” I said to him. “Nicely restored. You needed a new generator.”
He’d come into the shop a couple of weeks ago—and I hadn’t even noticed he was a werewolf. Hadn’t remembered his features or recognized him when Adam had shown his face to the pack. More worrisome, Zee had been working with me that day—and he hadn’t noticed that James was a werewolf, either. Adam’s information was wrong. James Palsic’s ability to go unnoticed was definitely magic. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t work on me anymore.
He smiled at me, a genuine, open smile. Which felt a little odd coming from an enemy werewolf who had just killed one of his compatriots.
“That’s right,” he said. “Nice shop you have there.”
“I’ve closed it temporarily,” I told them. “Because you folks are not the monsters we are worried about just now.”
“Having trouble with the fae?” asked Fiona. “You should let us handle them.”
I smiled at her and debated telling her that the smoke beast had already taken one victim from her people. “Not all the fae—they have locked themselves in the reservation because this one, this one they are afraid of.”
“Sirens are getting closer,” Nonnie said. “If you really don’t want to meet the human authorities until later, Fi, we should get going right now.”
They listened to her and got in the truck without another word. They drove off just as flashing lights rounded the corner I’d taken at sixty. The police c
ruiser took it considerably slower than I had. The truck passed them, took a right turn, and disappeared from view.
And I wondered why Fiona had asked me about the fae. There were vampires here—and other things that defied classification. Had she known about the bite?
THEY SET MY NOSE AT THE HOSPITAL. AS SOON AS the medical professionals left me to my own devices, I decamped and went looking for Makaya. I found Auriele and Kelly waiting in one of the other emergency bays and wandered in.
“Nice shirt,” said Auriele.
Mine had made me look like an extra from a horror movie because broken noses bleed. So I’d been issued a hospital top. The hospital issue was a pale beige color that made my Native-toned skin look greenish. Solemnly I turned around so she could get a good look at the open back.
“I don’t think I’ll be setting any fashion trends soon,” I told her. “Makaya in X-ray?”
“Yes,” Auriele nodded. “Hannah went with her. She’ll let them stitch her up in another room as soon as Makaya is taken care of. Makaya is pretty traumatized and wanted her mother.”
“How bad is Hannah’s cut?” I asked.
“Long,” she said. “But not deep. It will need stitches at the top, but the bottom is okay. He cut her with that knife he pulled on you.”
I knelt to talk to Kelly. “How are you doing?”
His muzzle wrinkled up and he let out a low, angry growl.
“He walked in here on his own,” Auriele said. “But it wasn’t easy for him. I checked him over pretty thoroughly. I don’t think any of his bones were misaligned.”
She meant none of them would have to be rebroken.
Kelly was still growling.
“I know,” I said. “Me, too. Those people are not becoming members of our pack. But you have to stop growling now, before you scare someone.”
“They don’t intend to join us, remember,” said Auriele dryly. “They will let Adam take three of his people and you. Who are you going to pick?” She knew Adam and me well enough to know that wandering off and leaving the pack to someone else was not going to happen.
I snorted with more dismissal than I actually felt. “They have no chance now. If they wanted to take the pack from us, they shouldn’t have gone for Kelly’s home. No one will follow a wolf who allows children to be attacked.”
I stood up abruptly. “Adam is here.” I didn’t smell him. My bond was currently telling me nothing. But I heard his voice. At least my ears were working.
I stepped out of the alcove and looked around, finding him talking to a nurse. I’d called him as soon as the truck carrying Fiona and the Palsics had left and told him what had happened.
Adam had been about an hour’s drive away, out in the Hanford Area, nearly six hundred square miles of government access-restricted land surrounding the numerous nuclear reactors and reprocessing facilities being slowly deactivated and cleaned up. He’d known Kelly was hurt—had tried calling him. Then he’d called Darryl and Warren. Apparently, no one except Auriele and me had been alerted by the pack bonds—we had been the closest to the trouble. I was, once I’d had a chance to think about it, a little uncomfortable with what that said about the pack bonds—implying an intelligence at work that did not belong to anyone in the pack.
Darryl and Warren had arrived at Kelly’s not long after I got off the phone with Adam. They bundled up the other three kids—Sean and Patrick having been recalled—and took them to our house, where they should be safe. Safer, anyway.
Adam had said he would meet us at the hospital—and here he was, as promised.
I gave a soft whistle, and Adam looked up. He said something more to the nurse and then strode over.
He stopped in front of me and took my head in his hands. He looked gutted. Whatever weirdness was going on—it could not be what was between us. Because that face said that he cared what happened to me. He was being a stubborn bastard, trying to keep his troubles to himself. Maybe I’d wait until the rest of this—the stray wolves and the smoke weaver—were dealt with. But I wasn’t going to let him continue carrying whatever was bothering him alone.
“No worries,” I told the stubborn bastard. “I broke my nose on the steering wheel. Probably I’ll have two black eyes to go with it. But the good news is that my ribs aren’t broken or cracked, just bruised.”
“I’ll spend the next week telling the press I didn’t hit you,” he said, but he looked like he could breathe again.
“Good for you,” I said encouragingly.
He smiled wryly and kissed my forehead. “Do you think that your next car could have airbags?”
Retrofitting airbags was a fool’s game—and dangerous. It was a matter of pride for me as a mechanic that I drove an old car.
“I just need to quit hitting people with my cars and we’ll be good,” I told him.
“If only,” he murmured, “you don’t run into any more who need to be hit.” Proving he knew me. “I suppose I should be grateful that you aren’t under arrest.”
“Might have been,” I told him. “Except that Kelly’s neighbor came running out of his house. He’d caught most everything on his cell phone. Just wait until you see the part with Auriele making the grab for Makaya as I rammed Lincoln with the Jetta. It looks like a scene from Cirque du Soleil. The police decided I was justified and warned me not to do it again. I pointed out that I couldn’t do it again because the car is totaled—and was, at that moment, getting towed to my garage, where I can mine it for parts.”
Adam smiled, but his eyes were worried.
9
BECAUSE MAKAYA WAS IN THE CAR WITH US ON THE way home, and I didn’t want to scare her, I didn’t talk to Adam about Fiona or how Lincoln had been bitten. He knew what I knew, because I’d talked to him about it on the phone when I’d called him from Kelly’s house. There were still some important implications that we should discuss—but it would have to wait until we got home.
So for the ride home, I stayed quiet, nursing my broken nose, as Auriele organized a pack bunk-up on her phone. Bunk-up was one step shy of “everyone to the Batcave”—our house being the Batcave. Bunk-up meant that the wolves stayed in groups of two to four and avoided going anywhere alone.
I wasn’t sure how a bunk-up was going to keep anyone safe from the smoke weaver—though it probably would be effective against Fiona’s band, at least in the short run. But I didn’t say anything. What else could we do?
We could pull the human families of the pack into our home; we’d done that when the witches had become a problem. But we had too many werewolves to take them all into our home for long—and if we did, there was no way to lock the doors to keep them in and the smoke weaver out. Packed in like that for more than a few hours, we’d start having fights. Our wolves needed freedom to move. We literally could not do what the fae and the vampires had done to protect themselves. We also could not do it figuratively. We were the protectors of the Tri-Cities. It was our job to face the scary bad things—if we retreated, we left the field to the villains.
We arrived home and the mass chaos of too many people in too small a space was whipped into shape by the combined efforts of Auriele, Hannah, and Jesse. I tried to get Adam’s attention a couple of times—but he kept retreating with different people to confer in his office, where Ben couldn’t hear them. But also where there wasn’t enough room for me, not even on his desk.
“You look like you hurt,” Adam told me. “I know you have some things we need to discuss. I’ll come up as soon as I can. Take a bag of frozen peas and lie down. I’ll find you as soon as I have the security schedules lined out.”
We had ice packs, but I liked frozen peas better. They were gentler on swollen tissue. Frozen peas on my poor nose was a good idea, and finding a quiet place sounded amazing. I grabbed a bag from the freezer and went to our bedroom and shut the door.
Our bedroom was more or less soundproofed—not like Adam’s office, where the soundproofing was a serious thing. If the bedroom door was shut and the house wa
s quiet, the werewolves could hear noise from the bedroom but probably not actual conversation. With the mass chaos in the house, being overheard was not a consideration.
I pulled out my phone and dialed a number by memory.
“Mercy.”
Just hearing the Marrok’s voice took a chunk of stress out of my day. Not that he couldn’t return the stress and add stomach-acid-producing interest, but just now he was the person I needed to talk to the most.
“We are in trouble,” I told him. Then considered who I was talking to and said, “Not anything we can’t handle.”
“I feel as though you should amend that,” Bran said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have called me.”
I thought of the vampires and the fae locking themselves away. And Ben down in the basement pretending there was nothing wrong.
Before anyone could stop them, Kelly’s kids had boiled down to the basement, where the electronic toys waited. And they had found Ben in the cage. Ben had dutifully admired Makaya’s bright pink casts, adorned with hot-glued glitter and plastic gemstones thanks to Jesse. And he’d begged us all with his eyes to get the kids upstairs before he lost it again.
We hadn’t quite made it, but Jesse told Makaya that Ben was playing.
Makaya had put her head down on Darryl’s shoulder (for all that he was scary as anything, kids loved Darryl) and said sadly, “Maybe I would have laughed like he wanted but that man scared me today. I don’t want to be scared again for a while.”
Yes, so maybe we were having trouble handling it.
“Okay. Let’s say that I have some concerns,” I hedged. “I think you might help with a couple of them.”
“You have some wolves invading your territory,” he said.
That photo montage and information organization had been mostly Charles. I would have known that even if I hadn’t heard Adam talking to him. Charles handed out information that was useful, organized, and succinct. But if Charles knew about our invaders, so would Bran.
Smoke Bitten: Mercy Thompson: Book 12 Page 18
