Smoke Bitten: Mercy Thompson: Book 12 Read online

  “Were you injured?” asked Adam.

  “No, boss,” said Warren. “Kyle kept the big bad wolves from hurting me. Even though I told him to stay inside and call you.”

  “Four to one,” said Kyle clearly. “They didn’t have a chance.” He lied, but he didn’t intend anyone to believe it. “But how many times am I going to get an opportunity to shoot someone without consequences?”

  Warren made a noise. I couldn’t tell if it was a growl or a purr. “Got to go, boss. Gotta talk sense into someone.”

  I TRIED TO CALL STEFAN TWICE THAT NIGHT. THE SECOND time I left a message on his phone. He didn’t return my call.

  7

  I GOT HOME LATE FROM WORK ON SATURDAY. LUCIA had saved me dinner, which I ate by myself. That’s not to say that I was alone.

  We were keeping an extra werewolf at the pack home because of the various threats—though since the night Kyle had shot one of the wolves, we had seen neither hide nor hair of the outsiders be they werewolves, smoke beasts, or vampires. Tonight our extra werewolf was Ben. He sat at the kitchen table opposite me while I ate and told me an incident in the ongoing efforts of the subversive IT personnel (which included computer programmers, system operators, and database administrators) to play mind games with the unfortunate corporate minions who were supposed to be in charge.

  In this episode they’d (I was pretty sure that the unnamed perpetrator of most of these was Ben himself) adjusted the e-mail of one of the most disliked executives so that every e-mail he sent out also sent a copy to his wife and his boss. These e-mails included X-rated love letters between the executive and one of the HR people. Ben assured me—with example encounters as proof—that it couldn’t happen to a nicer pair of people. Since this had just happened today, the final outcome was yet to be determined.

  He made me laugh, which was the point, I think, before he left me to go do some work he’d brought with him.

  Jesse had some friends over and, after Ben left, they twice made forays into the kitchen for sustenance. They made popcorn and had to come back for it. On both incursions, Jesse’s friend Izzy kept giving me oddly apologetic looks. But I was too distracted by my own growing misery to worry about what Izzy had to apologize for.

  Despite my initial victory, Adam had resumed his efforts to stay out until after I had to go to bed. He’d slept in the guest room the last few nights so as not to wake me up. My misery was complicated by my absolute conviction that if Adam didn’t want to make an effort, it didn’t matter what I did. A relationship was a two-way street. I would fight—but he had to fight, too.

  Jesse’s friends went to their various homes. Jesse went to bed. And after a half an hour of internal debate, I gave up on Adam and followed her example.

  I don’t know what made me glance out the window as I was getting ready to go to bed.

  Wulfe was stretched out on the roof of my parts car. He’d placed small LED lanterns on the four corners of his chosen stage—all had been set to the night-vision-saving red light. The Rabbit was a small car, so Wulfe’s legs and bare feet dropped down the windshield.

  And there went any chance that I was going to sleep anytime soon.

  I was pretty sure he was naked, but it was hard to tell because the naughty bits were covered by a large piece of white cardboard. There was a picture drawn on the cardboard—a crudely drawn red flower with two leaves at the bottom of a long stem that looked remarkably like the pieces of anatomy that the cardboard was covering. Wulfe had died when he was still a teenager. His pale hair framed a face that would never grow old but also would never fulfill the promise of his not-quite-mature features. He looked younger than Jesse.

  I wasn’t sure of the effect that he’d intended his theatrical staging to have on me—but I was pretty sure he hadn’t intended to make me sad.

  The vampire saw me looking at him and blew me a kiss just as someone knocked on my door.

  “A minute,” I said, grabbing my robe and wrapping myself in it.

  It was Ben.

  “Mercy,” he said. “Is there any legitimate reason for Wulfe to be running around outside? I’m catching his scent all over.” Apparently, he hadn’t seen Wulfe’s passion play on my Rabbit.

  It was a sign of how much Wulfe bothered him that he didn’t use any swear words at all.

  “He’s stalking me,” I told him. I’d forgotten that Wulfe hadn’t been one of the threats Adam had presented to the pack.

  Ben’s eyebrows shot to his hairline. “Excuse the fuck out of me? Could you repeat that?”

  And he was back to normal.

  “He told us that he is stalking me,” I said again, though I knew Ben had heard me perfectly well the first time.

  “Okay,” he said, then added a few sentences creatively spiced with expletives that boiled down to, “That would have been a good thing to let your security know in advance, don’t you think?”

  He was right, and I had thought about it. “Adam didn’t tell the pack,” I told him. “So I didn’t know if he wanted it to be kept secret or not, and he hasn’t been around to ask.”

  Ben tightened his lips and I decided without proof that he was upset with Adam, too. I knew that the pack was watching the two of us with concern. But Adam wasn’t the issue right now.

  “Wulfe hasn’t made any aggressive moves so far,” I told Ben—reminding myself at the same time. “In fact, he’s the one who dumped me in the river to break the smoke demon … smoke beast’s hold on me, which saved my life.” The last thing I wanted was Ben going out and picking a fight with Wulfe. Werewolves were tough, no doubt, but Ben was not in Wulfe’s weight class. So I said, lamely, “Maybe he doesn’t intend any harm.”

  “Saint Elmo’s hairy ass he doesn’t intend any harm,” Ben exploded. “If Wulfe is following you around, it’s not to sell you magazine subscriptions. Fucking hell, Mercy.”

  I shrugged, though I agreed wholeheartedly with his assessment. It just wasn’t useful to run around shrieking in fear. “So far, Ben, all that he’s done is save my life.”

  Ben opened his mouth, then frowned at the window. “Where’s that light coming from?” he muttered, and not to me. He pushed his way into the bedroom and stalked up to the window. He stared out for a few seconds and then pulled down the blinds. He gave me an unreadable look and pulled the blinds down on the other windows, too.

  He walked back to me and, in a very gentle voice, swore for a solid thirty seconds without repeating himself once.

  When he wound down, he said, “Mercy, he can walk right into this house because some damn fool brought him in when we thought he was dying.”

  “I think he might have been able to come in anyway,” I said. “Even if a vampire is unconscious, you have to invite them into your home or they can’t come. Ogden says he did not invite him in, not that he remembers, anyway.”

  Ben said, “I don’t know that I’m comfortable with you sleeping up here alone. Where is Adam?”

  “Darned if I know,” I told him. There must have been something in my voice because his face softened.

  “What is up with him?” Ben asked. “He has been a right bastard these past few weeks.”

  There was a sudden wary look in his eye at the tail end of his sentence—as if he had been thinking awhile about how to bring it up. But he hadn’t really expected to bring it up just now.

  “I know as much as he does,” I told Ben firmly. The pack didn’t need to know that neither of us really understood what was going on. “I’m not going to discuss it with anyone else.”

  “Private,” he said, with a nod. There was relief in his posture. It was enough for him that he believed that I knew what was wrong. “I get that. Do you want me to go drive the vampire off?”

  There was not a sparrow’s chance in hell that Ben’s going out to drive Wulfe away would end up with Wulfe leaving. But I could find a galaxy’s worth of scenarios where that ended in disaster.

  “No,” I said. “I think he’s just playing right now. Testing us,
maybe. I don’t want to do anything that makes him think that we are taking him seriously.” And that gave me an idea.

  I pulled a blanket out of the hall closet—one of those fuzzy ones sold at Costco. This one was wine red, suitable for a vampire. I’d never had it on my bed. I think the last one to use it had been Christy, so it wouldn’t smell like me or Adam. Vampires have keen senses and I wanted to be very careful about the message I was sending with this blanket.

  “Here,” I said, shoving it at Ben. “Take this out to Wulfe. Tell him I … no. Tell him we don’t want him to get cold.”

  Ben took the blanket, but as I spoke, he’d frozen in place. He frowned at me a moment, then shook his head and finally grinned. “He doesn’t know who he is messing with.”

  That Ben thought I was a match for Wulfe was nice—but it might be dangerous for him to continue to hold that misapprehension.

  “He scares the socks off me,” I told Ben seriously. “He should scare the socks off you, too. Don’t underestimate him. Don’t let him lure you into thinking he is harmless. Or that Adam or I or even the Mistress of the vampire seethe can keep him from doing anything he decides to do. Take him the blanket, and get back into the house. If we keep him amused, then he won’t have to kill anyone out of sheer boredom.”

  His face grew sober. “I get that,” he said. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  He left and I waited for him to return. I wanted to watch out the window, but I was afraid that if I gave him an audience, Wulfe might do something horrible. I’d seen him do horrible things before.

  Instead I went down to the kitchen and pulled out a bowl. I needed to get to sleep, but I wasn’t going to manage that for a while. I mixed up chocolate chip cookies. Just a double batch.

  I heard the murmur of Lucia’s voice in the suite she shared with Joel. There was no answering voice—Joel had not managed to shift to human for the past few days.

  Aiden’s fire had rekindled itself, but it wasn’t up to normal levels yet and he hadn’t been able to quiet the volcano spirit enough to allow Joel to emerge. That was a little disheartening because we’d been hoping that Joel had been gaining more control. Apparently, Aiden had been getting better at shutting Joel’s fire down instead. At least Joel had been able to stay in his presa Canario form so we didn’t have to worry about him burning down the house inadvertently.

  The sounds of me making food in the kitchen lured Medea out of whatever dark corner she’d been sleeping in. She hovered around my ankles because she knew that hopping on the counters was forbidden. I gave her a small dab of dough before I mixed in the chocolate chips and walnuts. She purred as she ate, and the sound soothed me. Cats are good company when you are sad or worried.

  Walnuts were a matter of contention in the pack, but I liked them and I was making these for me. I needed chocolate because Adam wasn’t here. And because it was taking a very long time for Ben to walk out and hand over a blanket.

  Adam’s SUV purred into our driveway about the same time that the back door opened and Ben walked in sans blanket.

  “What took so long?” I asked, trying not to listen to Adam’s door shut. Now that Adam was actually here, I was nervous. What if he was unhappy when he saw me? I didn’t want the sight of me to make Adam unhappy.

  “I will trade information for cookie dough,” Ben bargained—so it wasn’t anything bad that had kept him.

  I got a clean spoon from the silverware drawer, dipped it into the dough, then held it out toward him. When he reached to take it, his long sleeve slipped down to reveal two small red marks on his wrist. And from those two marks, faint wisps of smoke emerged. Aiden had identified our foe from the smoke that had, apparently, emerged from my wounds after the rabbit had bitten me. At the time, I’d been too busy trying not to die to pay attention to much of anything else.

  I now understood what Aiden had been talking about. My heart stopped. Ben had been bitten by the smoke beast.

  I pretended not to see the marks, hoping that my sudden terror went unnoticed, blended as it was with the adrenaline already racing in my veins after the sight of a naked Wulfe on the roof of my old Rabbit.

  I didn’t know enough to save Ben. Not nearly enough. I knew the smoke beast took over its victims’ bodies and piloted them. I knew that it used those victims to kill others to gain power—and that it then killed its puppet and could shape itself into a copy of that person. I had no idea what it wanted or why. I had no idea how to save someone bitten by the beast—and if I couldn’t figure it out, Ben was lost. And I didn’t know that I could bear a world without our foul-mouthed wolf.

  First problems first, I decided. First problem was to survive the next few minutes. Ben was a werewolf. That meant he was stronger than I was—and he outweighed me. Unlike George, Ben was significantly slower than I was. Maybe I could get him to chase me into the river.

  I heard Adam’s footsteps on the porch, but Ben, licking the spoon clean, seemed oblivious. I gave a hard, panicked tug on my mating bond and the sound of Adam’s approach stopped. I had to hope that he had understood that there was something wrong.

  “Want some with chocolate chips?” I asked.

  He handed the spoon back to me. I dumped in a bag of chips and stirred with my bigger spoon before dipping his teaspoon in the mix—ignoring sanitary issues in favor of keeping him distracted.

  Adam hadn’t just come in through the door, so I had a reasonable hope that I’d warned him enough. But what would allow him to connect my warning to Ben?

  Ben closed his eyes, absorbing the buttery-sweetness-and-bitter-chocolate combination. Was there a difference in his expression? Or was it just that I knew that someone else might be home inside Ben’s head that made me think so?

  Could I be mistaken? Was this Ben?

  “So what’s the information you owe me?” I asked when his eyes opened again.

  He took a step closer to me and I had to fight my instincts that would have sent me scuttling to the far side of the kitchen.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked, his voice flirty. The British accent was the same, but the rhythm of speech was wrong. And there were no swear words for me to edit out.

  “Was Wulfe actually naked?” I asked.

  “Wolves are usually naked,” he said as if he were joking.

  “For sure,” I agreed easily.

  Upstairs a soft shshing of a window sliding up. I knew it was Jesse’s window, but if someone wasn’t familiar with the sounds of the house, maybe it would just blend into the various creaks and groans that were the normal sounds of any house. I didn’t know if Ben would know what that sound meant. I didn’t know how much of Ben’s memories the beast who had bitten him would have.

  Jesse’s window was accessible from the porch roof—which was a security concern, but it was also an escape path if something bad was happening in the house. Adam had decided that risk and benefit balanced out. I listened, but no further noise emerged from upstairs. Either Adam had managed not to wake Jesse up, or she had realized that there was something going on.

  Ben held out the spoon to me again. I scooped up more dough and held it out. But this time he grabbed my wrist.

  “I have a secret,” he said.

  He wasn’t hurting me. I let my wrist lie limp in his grip.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I let you see the marks,” he told me. “I even made sure to mark this body when I was wearing the rabbit so that you would know what you were looking at.”

  “Why did you do that?” I asked.

  Was there a squeak on the stairs? I took a deep breath and smelled the smoke beast’s magic. It filled my lungs and I couldn’t smell anything else over it.

  “I wanted to see what you would do,” he said. “Why can’t I take you? I can kill you—I almost did the other night. But I am supposed to be able to take any but the most powerful of the lords of the fae. You are not fae at all. What are you?”

  “Chaos,” I told him.

  His e
yebrows furrowed and his eyes narrowed with the beginnings of anger. He would have said something more. But quick footsteps came up from the basement and Aiden bounded into the kitchen.

  The beast’s magic surged. Visions of that semi tractor melded with the concrete of the Pasco tunnel’s safety rail danced in my head. I didn’t know that he could do that to a living being—life affects magic. We might be just carbon compounds, but there was something about the state of living that was magical.

  But if the beast was amassing magic at the sight of Aiden, I wasn’t willing to wait to see what it could do. While he was distracted by Aiden, I twisted my wrist, grabbed his wrist with mine, and swiveled my hips to pull him off balance. At the same time, I kicked his knee as hard as I could. He grunted as his knee popped audibly and he released me involuntarily, and I let go and jumped back.

  There were a number of counters to that move—Ben knew them, but the creature controlling his body made no effort to use any defense. My attack had been quick and instinctive, and it had taken the beast by surprise. Impossible to say how much of Ben’s knowledge the beast had access to. Earlier he hadn’t known the difference between Wulfe and a wolf, but with the evidence I had I couldn’t assume that he couldn’t fight as well as Ben.

  I also didn’t know if he would feel pain occupying Ben’s body, but it didn’t matter much at that moment. The damage to Ben’s knee was a physical thing that slowed his body down.

  I grabbed for a weapon and came up with my marble rolling pin, but by the time I turned to face Ben again, Adam was there. I hadn’t heard him. I missed the first move, just heard the noise as Ben’s shoulder broke from a joint lock. As Ben fell, pushed by Adam’s hold, Adam brought his knee over and landed on the small of Ben’s back. I heard those bones crack, too.

  “It won’t hold him long,” said Adam, but I was already running. I jumped over them both and ran down the stairs to the cage that would be our safe room once construction wrapped it in more civilized trappings. But the cage itself was finished and the silver cuffs and chains were hanging from a hook on a post just outside it.