Storm Cursed (A Mercy Thompson Novel) Read online

  Titles by Patricia Briggs

  The Mercy Thompson Series

  MOON CALLED

  BLOOD BOUND

  IRON KISSED

  BONE CROSSED

  SILVER BORNE

  RIVER MARKED

  FROST BURNED

  NIGHT BROKEN

  FIRE TOUCHED

  SILENCE FALLEN

  STORM CURSED

  The Alpha and Omega Series

  ON THE PROWL

  (with Eileen Wilks, Karen Chance, and Sunny)

  CRY WOLF

  HUNTING GROUND

  FAIR GAME

  DEAD HEAT

  BURN BRIGHT

  MASQUES

  WOLFSBANE

  STEAL THE DRAGON

  WHEN DEMONS WALK

  THE HOB’S BARGAIN

  DRAGON BONES

  DRAGON BLOOD

  RAVEN’S SHADOW

  RAVEN’S STRIKE

  Graphic Novels

  ALPHA AND OMEGA: CRY WOLF: VOLUME ONE

  ALPHA AND OMEGA: CRY WOLF: VOLUME TWO

  Anthologies

  SHIFTER’S WOLF

  (Masques and Wolfsbane in one volume)

  SHIFTING SHADOWS

  ACE

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 2019 by Hurog, Inc.

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ACE is a registered trademark and the A colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Briggs, Patricia, author.

  Title: Storm cursed / Patricia Briggs.

  Description: First Edition. | New York: Ace, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018061045 | ISBN 9780425281291 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780698195820 (ebook)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.R53165 S76 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018061045

  First Edition: May 2019

  Cover art by Daniel Dos Santos

  Cover design by Judith Lagerman

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To the next generation:

  Genevieve, Dylan, and Wren.

  With faith and trust and fairy dust—

  I wish you all your own happy thoughts that you might fly.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  No book is written in a vacuum, and this one is no exception. All the faults, mistakes, and annoying things are my fault, but the following people have done their best to make this a good book: (in alphabetical order) Linda Campbell, Michelle Kasper, Ann Peters (aka Sparky), Kaye Roberson, Amy J. Schneider, and Anne Sowards.

  Part of the fun of writing is going out and making new friends. This book owes much to Sheriff Jim Raymond and the rest of the good people at the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office who kindly allowed Sparky and me to tour their office. In particular, Commander Rick Rochleau, who patiently answered lots and lots of questions and gave me insight into how the sheriff’s office might interact with a pack of werewolves. He got himself permanently on my people-I-call-when-I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing list.

  And, of course, Susann and Michael Bock have once again given Zee his magic (and his German). I am so glad that Michael decided to e-mail me about my bad German all those years ago.

  Thank you, my friends.

  CONTENTS

  Titles by Patricia Briggs

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  One by one,

  Two by two,

  The Hardesty witches

  Are traveling through.

  With a storm of curses,

  They call from their tomes;

  They will drink your blood

  And dine on your bones.

  —CHILDREN’S JUMP ROPE RHYME, OVERHEARD IN 1934 IN RHEA SPRINGS, TENNESSEE

  1

  “So what did you do, Mary Jo?” called Ben in his crisp British accent.

  Mary Jo shut her car door and started toward us and toward the mountainous metal barn that Ben and I waited beside. She gave Ben a quelling frown, and waited to speak until she had come up to us.

  She asked, “What do you mean, what did I do?”

  It was a little chilly, made more so by a brisk wind that blew a bit of hair I’d failed to secure in my braid into my eyes. The Tri-Cities don’t cool off at night with quite the thoroughness that the Montana mountains I’d grown up with did, but night usually still kills the heat of day.

  Ben bounced a little on his toes—a sign that he was ready and eager for violence. I could sense that his attention, like mine, was mostly on the barn, even though his eyes were on Mary Jo. “I killed Mercy three times in a single session of Pirate’s Booty the night before last. I think that’s why she woke me up to come out hunting tonight.” He glanced at me and raised an eyebrow in an open invitation to address the situation.

  Okay, that’s not exactly what he said. As usual he spiced his language with profanity, but unless he spouted something truly amazing I mostly edited it out.

  “You passed up the opportunity to gain a hundred Spanish doubloons in order to kill me that last time,” I told him, unable, even days later, to keep the indignation out of my voice. In the fierce high-seas computer-generated battles the werewolf pack delighted in, a hundred Spanish doubloons was a treasure trove of opportunity for more or better weapons, supplies, and ship repairs. Only a homicidal maniac would give up a hundred doubloons to kill someone.

  Ben gave me a wicked grin, an expression mostly empty of the bitter edge all of his expressions had once contained. “I was merely staying in character. Sodding Bart enjoys killing more than money, love. That’s why his kill score is third on the board, just behind Captain Wolf and Lady Mockingbird.”

  Captain Wolf Larsen, stolen from the titular character of Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf, is the nom de guerre of my mate and the pack Alpha. Lady Mockingbird, who was up by fifteen kills on everybody, teaches high school chemistry in her alter ego as Auriele Zao. She is a scary, scary woman. I’ve been
told her high school students think so, too.

  Ben’s gaze, swinging back to Mary Jo, paused on the dark maw that gaped in the front of the huge metal barn, the only building within a mile of where we stood.

  It was either very late at night or very early in the morning, depending on which side of sleep you were on. Dawn wasn’t yet a possibility, but the waxing moon was strong in the night sky. The entrance to the barn was big enough to drive a pair of school buses through at the same time, and at least some of the ambient light should have made its way into the interior of the barn.

  Ben considered the barn for a second or two, then turned a sharp grin on Mary Jo. “Mercy just confirmed why I’m here. What did you do to win the crappy job lottery?”

  “Hey,” I said, “before you all feel too sorry for yourselves, remember I’m out here, too.”

  “That’s because you’re in charge,” Mary Jo said, her voice distracted, her eyes on the barn. “Bosses need to jump in the outhouse with the grunts occasionally. It’s good for morale.”

  Mary Jo wore a T-shirt that read Firefighters Like It HOT, the last word written in red and gold flames. The shirt was loose like the sleep pants she wore, but her clothes didn’t disguise her muscular warrior’s body.

  She looked away from the barn, turning her attention to Ben. “Maybe I owe this . . . opportunity to the way I treated her before Adam put his foot down.” She tilted her head toward me, a gesture that, like Ben’s raised eyebrow, asked for my input. She didn’t meet my eyes as she once would have.

  I was growing resigned to the way the pack dealt with me since my mate had declared me off-limits to anything but the utmost of respect on pain of death. By consensus, they mostly deferred to me, as if I were a wolf dominant to them.

  It felt wrong and awkward, and it made the back of my neck itch. What did it say about me, I wondered, that I was more comfortable with all the snide comments and personal attacks than with gracious subservience?

  “Wrong,” I told her.

  I pointed at Ben. “Killing me instead of getting rich is bad. Consider yourself punished.”

  I looked back at Mary Jo. “Ben is a simple problem with a simple solution. You are a stickier mess and this is not punishment. Or not really punishment. This”—I waved around us at the early-morning landscape—“is so you quit apologizing about the past for something you meant wholeheartedly at the time. And would do again under the same circumstances. Your apology is suspect—and annoying.”

  Ben made an amused sound, sounding relaxed and happy—but he was bouncing on the balls of his feet again. “That sounds about right, Mary Jo. If she were really getting back at you for all the trouble you caused her—it might land you on the List of Mercy’s Epic Revenge. Like the Blue Dye Solution or the Chocolate Easter Bunny Incident. Getting called out at the butt-crack of dawn doesn’t make the grade.”

  “So all I have to do is quit apologizing and you’ll stop calling me out at three in the morning to chase goblins or hunt down whatever that freak thing we killed last week was?” she asked skeptically.

  “I can’t promise that,” I told her. Mary Jo was one of the few wolves I could count on not to increase the drama or violence of a situation. “But it will . . .” Must be truthful. I gave her a rueful shrug. “It might mean I stop calling you first.”

  “Epic,” she said with a wry glance at Ben. “Epic it is. I think I will probably quit apologizing.” Then she said, “I suppose I’ll find some other way to irritate you.”

  Hah! I’d been right—her apologies had been suspect. I had always liked Mary Jo—even if the reverse was not true.

  She looked at the barn again and sighed heavily. “Have you spotted the goblin in there?”

  She didn’t bother trying to be quiet—none of us had been. Our prey could hear at least as well as any of us. If he was in there, he’d have heard us drive up. I was still learning about the goblins and what they could do, but I did know that much.

  “No,” I said.

  “Do you think he’s still in there?” she asked.

  “He’s still in there,” I said. I held out my arm so they could see the hair rise as I moved it closer to the barn. “If he weren’t, there wouldn’t be so much magic surrounding it.”

  Mary Jo grunted. “Is it my imagination, or is it too dark in the barn?”

  “I think I remember this,” said Ben thoughtfully, peering into the barn. His clear British accent had the weird effect of making everything he said sound a little more intelligent than it really was, an effect that he conscientiously—I was convinced—canceled by adding the kinds of words responsible for whole generations of people who knew what soap tasted like. “You know—the whole seeing-fuck-all-in-the-dark thing?”

  “I never was human,” I told him. “I’ve always been able to see pretty well in the dark.” After I said it, I had a thought.

  There was a faint chance that the goblin’s magic was affecting our eyesight rather than just spreading an illusion of darkness over the interior of the barn. I looked away from the barn to make sure my eyes were functioning as they should.

  There was nothing but open fields around us, a couple of old wooden posts set into the ground as if they had once been part of a fence, and in the distance, a few miles away, I could see the new neighborhood of McMansion farmettes that I’d passed driving here.

  Mesa, where we all now stood, was a little town of about five hundred people that was in real danger of being swallowed in the outward creep of Pasco’s ever-growing population. It is flatter than most of the area around the Tri-Cities, with an economy primarily based in growing dryland wheat, hay, and cattle.

  The town name is pronounced Meesa, not Maysa—which, even after all the years I’ve lived in the Tri-Cities, still strikes me as wrong. With so many Hispanic people living here, you’d think we would be capable of pronouncing a Spanish word correctly instead of borrowing from the ridiculous dialogue of a Star Wars character, right? But Meesa it is.

  “Cain’s hairy titties,” muttered Ben, joining me in my observation of the rural setting. “What hermit was so misguided in life that he was hanging around this peopleless landscape at the bell end of the night and happened to see a freaking goblin disappear into a hay barn? And for that matter, goblins are city denizens like me. What the shagging hell is it doing out here?”

  “No one living was here when it came,” I told him in a sinister voice.

  He gave me a look.

  In a confidential whisper I said, “I talk to dead people.”

  He scowled at me. I wasn’t lying but he knew me well enough to know that I was pulling his leg. He stared up at the barn with narrowed eyes. He snorted.

  “Bollocks, Mercy. There’s cameras here.”

  I don’t think he actually saw them—I hadn’t spotted any yet. But Ben was a computer nerd; when in doubt, his brain focused on electronics.

  “A surveillance system connected to the owner’s iPhone,” I confirmed, dropping my dramatic pose. “Apparently there was a party involving underage participants and several kegs of alcohol that ended up with a mess and several thousand dollars of damage. Thus the cameras and a motion sensor were installed. They made the farmer happy by interfering in two underage keggers, and tonight they alerted the owner of the barn that he had an uninvited guest. He called me.”

  “And you called us,” said Mary Jo dryly. “Thank you for that.”

  I grinned at her and gave her my best John Wayne impression. “It’s a dirty job, ma’am, but someone has to do it.”

  “Where’s Adam?” asked Ben suddenly. “He wouldn’t send you out alone after a goblin, not even a half-arsed, hay-shagging knob who doesn’t know any better than to keep to the city like a civilized goblin should.”

  Like me, the whole pack had been learning about goblins, and gaining a new respect for them.

  I shrugged. “He wasn’t
home when the call came. Top secret meetings. I left a message on his voice mail.”

  “A meeting at this hour?” asked Mary Jo.

  “Goes with his job,” I told her.

  Adam, my mate, was not only the Alpha of our local werewolf pack, but he owned a security firm with two bases of operation that mostly did hush-hush government contracts. Meetings that went overnight were unusual—but not unheard-of. The past month there had been seven of them.

  He couldn’t tell me anything about the meetings—and that bothered him more than it bothered me. I didn’t need to know who or what he was securing for whom. I knew my husband. He would never do anything he considered immoral, and that was good enough for me. Danger was a given—but he was military trained and a werewolf. He was as capable of protecting himself as anyone I knew.

  Yes, I was scared anyway. But he was scared about some of the things I got involved in, too. We’d both gone into this relationship, this marriage, with our eyes wide open.

  As long as he didn’t want to keep secrets from me, I could deal with it when he had to.

  “Ben had a good question,” Mary Jo told me. “Why is a goblin hiding out in a barn in Mesa?”

  “Running from justice,” I said. “Probably. Do you remember all the headlines last week about the monster that killed that police officer out in Long Beach, California?”

  “Goblin,” said Ben thoughtfully. “I remember. His face was plastered all over the news. Are we sure this is that goblin?”

  I pulled out my cell phone and showed him the snapshot of the goblin’s face that the farmer’s camera had caught. The area around the front of the barn had been pretty well lit before the goblin destroyed the security light.

  There had been a camera when the goblin killed the cop, too. That video, grainy and indistinct, had been played over and over again on the news. The actual killing had been off-screen, but the goblin’s face and inhumanity had been unmistakable.

  Mary Jo peered around Ben and I tilted the screen to her.