Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson Read online

  “There’s a burnt-out house here,” he told Moira, who had ducked down when he did. “It must have burned down a couple of years ago, because I don’t smell it.”

  “Hidden,” she commented.

  “Someone’s had tents up here,” he told her. “And I see the remnants of a campfire.”

  “Can you see the boat from here?”

  “No, but there’s a path I think should lead down to the water. I think this is the place.”

  She pulled her hand away from his arm. “Can you go check it out without being seen?”

  “It would be easier if I do it as a wolf,” Tom admitted. “But I don’t dare. We might have to make a quick getaway, and it’ll be a while before I can shift back to human.” He hoped Jon would be healthy enough to pilot in an emergency—but he didn’t like to make plans that depended upon an unknown. Moira wasn’t going to be piloting a boat anywhere.

  “Wait,” she told him. She murmured a few words and then put her cold fingers against his throat. A sudden shock, like a static charge on steroids, hit him—and when it was over, her fingers were hot on his pulse. “You aren’t invisible, but it’ll make people want to overlook you.”

  He pulled out his HK and checked the magazine before sliding it back in. The big gun fit his hand like a glove. He believed in using weapons: guns or fangs, whatever got the job done.

  “It won’t take me long.”

  “If you don’t go, you’ll never get back,” she told him, and gave him a gentle push. “I can take care of myself.”

  It didn’t sit right with him, leaving her alone in the territory of his enemies, but common sense said he’d have a better chance of roaming unseen. And no one tackled a witch lightly—not even other witches.

  Spell or no, he slid through the wet overgrown trees like a shadow, crouching to minimize his silhouette and avoiding anything likely to crunch. One thing living in Seattle did was minimize the stuff that would crunch under your foot—all the leaves were wet and moldy without a noise to be had.

  The boat was there, bobbing gently in the water. Empty. He closed his eyes and let the morning air tell him all it could.

  His brother had been in the boat. There had been others, too—Tom memorized their scents. If anything happened to Jon, he’d track them down and kill them, one by one. Once he had them, he’d let his nose lead him to Jon.

  He found blood where Jon had scraped against a tree, crushed plants where his brother had tried to get away and rolled around in the mud with another man. Or maybe he’d just been laying a trail for Tom. Jon knew Tom would come for him—that’s what family did.

  The path the kidnappers took paralleled the waterfront for a while and then headed inland, but not for the burnt-out house. Someone had found a better hideout. Nearly invisible under a shelter of trees, a small barn nestled snugly amidst broken pieces of corral fencing. Its silvered sides bore only a hint of red paint, but the aluminum roof, though covered with moss, was undamaged.

  And his brother was there. He couldn’t quite hear what Jon was saying, but he recognized his voice . . . and the slurring rapid rhythm of his schizophrenic-mimicry. If Jon was acting, he was all right. The relief of that settled in his spine and steadied his nerves.

  All he needed to do was get his witch . . . Movement caught his attention, and he dropped to the ground and froze, hidden by wet grass and weeds.

  • • •

  Moira wasn’t surprised when they found her—ten in the morning isn’t a good time to hide. It was one of the young ones—she could tell by the surprised squeal and the rapid thud of footsteps as he ran for help.

  Of course, if she’d really been trying to hide, she might have managed it. But sometime after Tom left it had occurred to her that if she wanted to find Samhain, the easiest thing might be to let them find her. So she set about attracting their attention.

  If they found her, it would unnerve them. They knew she worked alone. Her arrival here would puzzle them, but they wouldn’t look for anyone else—leaving Tom as her secret weapon.

  Magic called to magic, unless the witch took pains to hide it, so any of them should have been able to feel the flames that danced over her hands. It had taken them longer than she expected. While she waited for the boy to return, she found a sharp-edged rock and put it in her pocket. She folded her legs and let the coolness of the damp earth flow through her.

  She didn’t hear him come, but she knew by his silence whom the young covenist had run to.

  “Hello, Father,” she told him, rising to her feet. “We have much to talk about.”

  • • •

  She didn’t look like a captive, Tom thought, watching Moira walk to the barn as if she’d been there before, though she might have been following the sullen-looking half-grown boy who clomped through the grass ahead of her. A tall man followed them both, his hungry eyes on Moira’s back.

  His wolf recognized another dominant male with a near-silent growl, while Tom thought that the man was too young to have a grown daughter. But there was no one else this could be but Lin Keller—that predator was not a man who followed anyone or allowed anyone around him who might challenge him. He’d seen an Alpha or two like that.

  Tom watched them until they disappeared into the barn.

  It hurt to imagine she might have betrayed him—as if there were some bond between them, though he hadn’t known her a full day. Part of him would not believe it. He remembered her real indignation when she thought he believed she was part of Samhain, and it comforted him.

  It didn’t matter, couldn’t matter. Not yet. Saving Jon mattered, and the rest would wait. His witch was captured or had betrayed him. Either way, it was time to let the wolf free.

  The change hurt, but experience meant he made no sound as his bones rearranged themselves and his muscles stretched and slithered to adjust to his new shape. It took fifteen minutes of agony before he rose on four paws, a snarl fixed on his muzzle—ready to kill someone. Anyone.

  Instead he stalked like a ghost to the barn where his witch waited. He rejected the door they’d used, but prowled around the side, where four stall doors awaited. Two of them were broken with missing boards; one of the openings was big enough for him to slide through.

  The interior of the barn was dark, and the stall’s half walls blocked his view of the main section, where his quarry waited. Jon was still going strong, a wild ranting conversation with no one about the Old Testament, complete with quotes. Tom knew a lot of them himself.

  “Killing things again, Father?” said Moira’s cool disapproving voice, cutting though Jon’s soliloquy.

  And suddenly Tom could breathe again. They’d found her somehow, Samhain’s Coven had, but she wasn’t one of them.

  “So judgmental.” Tom had expected something . . . bigger from the man’s voice. His own Alpha, for instance, could have made a living as a televangelist with his raw fire-and-brimstone voice. This man sounded like an accountant.

  “Kill her. You have to kill her before she destroys us—I have seen it.” It was Molly, the girl from Jon’s message.

  “You couldn’t see your way out of a paper bag, Molly,” said Moira. “Not that you’re wrong, of course.”

  There were other people in the barn, Tom could smell them, but they stayed quiet.

  “You aren’t going to kill me,” said Kouros. “If you could have done that, you’d have done it before now. Which brings me to my point: Why are you here?”

  “To stop you from killing this man,” Moira told him.

  “I’ve killed men before—and you haven’t stopped me. What is so special about this one?”

  • • •

  Moira felt the burden of all those deaths upon her shoulders. He was right. She could have killed him before—before he’d killed anyone else.

  “This one has a brother,” she said.

  She fel
t Tom’s presence in the barn, but her look-past-me spell must still have been working, because no one seemed to notice the werewolf. And any witch with a modicum of sensitivity to auras would have felt him. His brother was a faint trace to her left—something his constant stream of words made far more clear than her magic was able to.

  Her father she could follow only from his voice.

  There were other people in the structure—she hadn’t quite decided what the cavernous building was: probably a barn, given the dirt floor and faint odor of cow—but she couldn’t pinpoint them, either. She knew where Molly was, though. And Molly was the important one, Kouros’s right hand.

  “Someone paid you to go up against me?” Her father’s voice was faintly incredulous. “Against us?”

  Then he did something, made some gesture. She wouldn’t have known except for Molly’s sigh of relief. So she didn’t feel too bad when she tied Molly’s essence, through the gum she still held, into her shield.

  When the coven’s magic hit the shield, it was Molly who took the damage. Who died. Molly, her little sister, whose presence she could no longer feel.

  Someone, a young man, screamed Molly’s coven name—Wintergreen. And there was a flurry of movement where Moira had last sensed her.

  Moira dropped the now-useless bit of gum on the ground.

  “Oh, you’ll pay for that,” breathed her father. “Pay in pain and power until there is nothing left of you.”

  Someone sent power her way, but it wasn’t a concerted spell from the coven, and it slid off her protections without harm. Unlike the fist that struck her in the face, driving her glasses into her nose and knocking her to the ground—her father’s fist. She’d recognize the weight of it anywhere.

  Unsure of where her enemies were, she stayed where she was, listening. But she didn’t hear Tom; he was just suddenly there. And the circle of growing terror that spread around him—of all the emotions possible, it was fear that she could sense most often—told her he was in his lupine form. It must have been impressive.

  “Your victim has a brother,” she told her father again, knowing he’d hear the smugness in her tone. “And you’ve made him very angry.”

  The beast beside her roared. Someone screamed . . . Even witches are afraid of monsters.

  The coven broke. Children most of them, they broke and ran. Molly’s death followed by a beast out of their worst nightmares was more than they could face, partially trained, deliberately crippled fodder for her father that they were.

  Tom growled, the sound finding a silent echo in her own chest as if he were a bass drum. He moved, a swift, silent predator, and someone who hadn’t run died. Tom’s brother, she noticed, had fallen entirely silent.

  “A werewolf,” breathed Kouros. “Oh, now there is a worthy kill.” She felt his terror and knew he’d attack Tom before he took care of her.

  The werewolf came to her side, probably to protect her. She reached out with her left hand, intending to spread her own defenses to the wolf—though that would leave them too thin to be very effective—but she hadn’t counted on the odd effect he had on her magic. On her.

  Her father’s spell—a vile thing that would have induced terrible pain and permanently damaged Tom had it hit—connected just after she touched the wolf. And for a moment, maybe a whole breath, nothing happened.

  Then she felt every hair under her hand stand to attention, and Tom made an odd sound and power swept through her from him—all the magic Kouros had sent—and it filled her well to overflowing.

  And she could see. For the first time since she’d been thirteen, she could see.

  She stood up, shedding broken pieces of sunglasses to the ground. The wolf beside her was huge, chocolate-brown, and easily tall enough to leave her hand on his shoulder as she came to her feet. A silvery scar curled around his snarling muzzle. His eyes were yellow-brown and cold. A sweeping glance showed her two dead bodies—one burnt, the other savaged—and a very dirty, hairy man tied to a post with his hands behind his back, who could only be Tom’s brother Jon.

  And her father, looking much younger than she remembered him. No wonder he went for teens to populate his coven—he was stealing their youth as well as their magic. A coven should be a meeting of equals, not a feeding trough for a single greedy witch.

  She looked at him and saw that he was afraid. He should be. He’d used all his magic to power his spell—he’d left himself defenseless. And now he was afraid of her.

  Just as she had dreamed. She pulled the stone out of her pocket—and it seemed to her that she had all the time in the world to use it to cut her right hand open. Then she pointed it, her bloody hand of power at him.

  “By the blood we share,” she whispered, and felt the magic gather.

  “You’ll die, too,” Kouros said frantically, as if she didn’t know.

  “Blood follows blood.” Before she spoke the last word, she lifted her other hand from Tom’s soft fur that none of this magic should fall to him. And as soon as she did so, she could no longer see. But she wouldn’t be blind for long.

  • • •

  Tom started moving before her fingers left him, knocking into her with his hip and spoiling her aim. Her magic flooded through him, hitting him instead of the one she’d aimed all that power at. The wolf let it sizzle through his bones and returned it to her, clean.

  Pleasant as that was, he didn’t let it distract him from his goal. He was moving so fast that the man was still looking at Moira when the wolf landed on him.

  Die, he thought as he buried his fangs in Kouros’s throat, drinking his blood and his death in one delicious mouthful of flesh. This one had moved against the wolf’s family, against the wolf’s witch. Satisfaction made the meat even sweeter.

  “Tom?” Moira sounded lost.

  “Tom’s fine,” answered his brother’s rusty voice. He’d talked himself hoarse. “You just sit there until he calms down a little. You all right, lady?”

  Tom lifted his head and looked at his witch. She was huddled on the ground, looking small and lost, her scarred face bared for all the world to see. She looked fragile, but Tom knew better, and Jon would learn.

  As the dead man under his claws had learned. Kouros died knowing she would have killed him.

  Tom had been willing to give her that kill—but not if it meant her death. So Tom had the double satisfaction of saving her and killing the man. He went back to his meal.

  “Tom, stop that,” Jon said. “Ick. I know you aren’t hungry. Stop it now.”

  “Is Kouros dead?” His witch sounded shaken up.

  “As dead as anyone I’ve seen,” said Jon. “Look, Tom. I appreciate the sentiment, I’ve wanted to do that anytime this last day. But I’d like to get out of here before some of those kids decide to come back while I’m still tied up.” He paused. “Your lady needs to get out of here.”

  Tom hesitated, but Jon was right. He wasn’t hungry anymore, and it was time to take his family home.

  ALPHA AND OMEGA

  Charles appeared in my life three-dimensional and in possession of an entire history. He stalked onto the pages of Moon Called, Bran Cornick’s younger son, and he told me who he was. He didn’t care that there were already far too many characters in the book—and that major characters needed to be introduced earlier. There he was.

  So I sketched in a bare-bones appearance and promised him his own story. When my editor asked me to write a novella for an anthology of four novellas (two from paranormal-romance writers, two from urban-fantasy writers), I told her I’d write her a story about Charles, Samuel’s younger brother. She read the story and asked if I thought I could write a series based on these characters—and the rest is history.

  The events in “Alpha and Omega” take place during the events in Moon Called.

  ONE

  The wind was chill and the cold froze the ends of
her toes. One of these days she was going to break down and buy boots—if only she didn’t need to eat.

  Anna laughed and buried her nose in her jacket, trudging the last half mile to her home. It was true that being a werewolf gave her greater strength and endurance, even in human form. But the twelve-hour shift she’d just finished at Scorci’s was enough to make even her bones ache. You’d think that people would have better things to do on Thanksgiving than go eat at an Italian restaurant.

  Tim, the restaurant owner (who was Irish, not Italian for all that he made the best gnocchi in Chicago), let her take extra shifts—though he wouldn’t let her work more than fifty hours a week. The biggest bonus was the free meal she got each shift. Even so, she was afraid she was going to have to find a second job to cover her expenses: life as a werewolf, she had found, was as expensive financially as it was personally.

  She used her keys to get into the entryway. There was nothing in her mailbox, so she got Kara’s mail and newspaper and climbed the stairs to Kara’s third-floor apartment. When she opened the door, Kara’s Siamese cat, Mouser, took one look at her, spat in disgust, and disappeared behind the couch.

  For six months she’d been feeding the cat whenever her neighbor was gone—which was often, since Kara worked at a travel agency arranging tours. Mouser still hated her. From his hiding place he swore at her, as only a Siamese could do.

  With a sigh, Anna tossed the mail and newspaper on the small table in the dining room and opened a can of cat food, setting it down near the water dish. She sat down at the table and closed her eyes. She was ready to go to her own apartment, one floor up, but she had to wait for the cat to eat. If she just left him there, she’d come back in the morning to a can of untouched food. Hate her he might, but Mouser wouldn’t eat unless there was someone with him—even if it was a werewolf he didn’t trust.

  Usually she turned on the TV and watched whatever happened to be on, but tonight she was too tired to make the effort, so she unfolded the newspaper to see what had happened since the last time she’d picked one up a couple of months ago.