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

  Asil shrugged.

  “Someday, you aren’t going to come back from a kill,” Bran said intently.

  “Some risks are worth taking,” Asil told him. “Did you hear that Kara’s dad is bringing her mom to visit?”

  Bran’s face gentled. “Yes. I heard. Kara told me, too.”

  IN RED, WITH PEARLS

  When I received the invitation to do a private detective story for the George R. R. Martin/Gardner Dozois anthology Down These Strange Streets, Warren had just started to work for his boyfriend, Kyle, as a private detective. Of course, the story had to be Warren’s.

  Because I write the Mercy books from Mercy’s point of view, her impressions of people are all that I can show. To Mercy, Warren seems to be the least intimidating of the werewolves. This is largely because they are friends but partially because she sees him as a kind, caring, and gentle man—which he is. But he is also a very dominant and gay werewolf who has survived more than a century when most gay werewolves do not (my werewolves are still, for the most part, caught in the mores of a hundred years ago). Warren is bone-deep tough and practical—and here, for the first time, he gets to tell the story.

  The events of “In Red, with Pearls” happen between Silver Borne and River Marked.

  I’m real good at waiting. I reckon it’s all the time I spent herding cows when I was a boy. Kyle says it’s the werewolf in me, that predators have to be patient. But Kyle knows squat about herding cows. I’d say he knows squat about predators, too, but he’s a lawyer.

  I stretched out my legs and put the heels of my boots on the desk of Angelina the Receptionist and Dictator of All Things Proper at Brooks, Gordon, and Howe, Attorneys at Law. Angelina would have thrown a fit if she’d seen my feet propped up where anyone could just walk in and see me.

  “Image, hijo,” she’d said to me when I started working for the firm. I kinda liked it when she called me hijo. Though I was a lot older than any son of hers could possibly be—she didn’t know that.

  She’d given me a disapproving look. “It is all about image. Your appearance must be just so to get the clients to spend their money, Warren. They like expensive offices, lawyers in suits, and private detectives in fedoras and ties—it tells them that we are successful, that we have the skills to help them.”

  I’d told her I’d wear a fedora when the cows came home wearing muumuus and feather boas. I consented, however, to wearing ties to work and to playing nicely during office hours, and she was mostly happy with that.

  Office hours had been officially over for a good while, the tie was in my back pocket, and Angelina was gone for the day. I’d have been gone for the day, too, but one of Kyle’s clients had come bursting in all upset and he’d taken her into his office and was talking her down.

  Kyle was usually the last one out of the office. This time it was a sobbing client who suddenly decided that the jerk who’d slept with her best friend was actually the love of her life and she didn’t really want to divorce him, just teach him a lesson. Tomorrow it would be a mound of paperwork that would only take him a few minutes to straighten up and a few minutes would stretch into a few hours. He tended toward workaholism.

  I didn’t mind. Kyle was worth waiting a bit for. And, like I said, I’m pretty good at waiting anyhow.

  A noise out in the hall had me pulling my feet off the desk just before the outer door opened and a young woman in a sleek red dress with a big string of pearls around her throat entered the office in a wave of Chanel No. 5; she was stunning.

  “Hey,” she said with a big smile and a dark breathy voice. “Are you Kyle Brooks?” Her ears had pearls in them, too. Her hands were bare, though I could see that she’d recently been wearing a wedding ring. Dating a divorce attorney makes me notice things like that.

  “No, ma’am,” I told her. “After hours here. Best you try him tomorrow.”

  She leaned over Angelina’s desk and the low-cut dress did what sleek little dresses are built to do in such circumstances. If I ran that way, I might have counted it a treat for the eyes. “I have to find Kyle Brooks.”

  She was close enough that the feel of her breath brushed my face. Mostly mint toothpaste. Mostly.

  “Well, now,” I said, standing up slowly and sauntering around the desk as if I found her all sorts of interesting. Which I all-of-a-sudden surely did. “Just what do you want with Kyle, darlin’?”

  Her smile died and she looked worried. “I have to find him. I have to. Can you help me?”

  Kyle’s office was down the hall and in the back. I could hear the woman he was with talking at him as she had been for the past half hour.

  “Think I can,” I said, and led her the opposite direction, to the big conference room at the other end of the offices. “Stay right here for a couple of minutes,” I told her. “He’ll be right in.”

  She’d followed me docilely and stopped where I told her to. I shut the door on her and hightailed it back to Kyle’s office.

  I opened the door without knocking and ignored Kyle’s frown. “Would you do me a favor?” I asked, tossing him my cell phone. “Call Elizaveta—her number is under w.” Under witch; he’d figure it out, he was a smart man. “Tell her we have an incident, a her kinda incident, we’d like some help with. ’Scuse me, ma’am.” I tipped my nonexistent hat to his indignant client before turning back to Kyle. “Might be the kind of thing we should clear the offices for.”

  “Your kind of thing?” Kyle asked obliquely. Something supernatural, he meant.

  “That’s right.” I ducked out of his office and ran back to the conference room.

  “One minute seventeen,” the beautiful woman was saying when I rejoined her.

  She stopped counting when the door opened, her body tense. When she saw me, she frowned. “I need Kyle,” she said.

  “I know you do,” I told her. “He’ll be right here.” Hopefully not until after he got his client out safely and called Elizaveta Arkadyevna, my wolf pack’s contractual witch.

  I heard the front door of the office close and thought that I should have done something to make Kyle leave, too. But I hadn’t known how long our guest would have stayed put—probably exactly “a couple of minutes” from the sounds of it. Not enough time to get Kyle to do anything except call Elizaveta—which he’d done because I heard Elizaveta’s cranky voice; my cell phone distorted it just enough that with the door between us, I couldn’t tell what she was saying.

  I wasn’t the only one who heard it. The zombie turned its head to the door.

  My first clue about what the woman was had been that her breath had come out smelling fresh and oxygen-rich instead of dulled like someone’s who was really breathing would have. A vampire’s did the same thing, but she didn’t smell like a vampire, not even under the rich scent of the Chanel. The second was the way she’d obeyed what I’d told her. Zombies are supposed to be really cooperative as long as what you tell them doesn’t contradict what their master tells them to do.

  “Yes,” Kyle said from the hallway, closing in on the conference room. “This is Kyle Brooks. We’re at my offices. Fine, thank you.” The door popped open. “What’s—”

  The zombie launched itself at him.

  I knew it was going to do it as soon as Kyle named himself. I was ready when he opened the door. I’m damned fast and I thought I had a handle on it, but that thing was faster than I’d thought it would be. I grabbed its shoulders and yanked it back, so it missed its target. Instead of nailing Kyle’s throat, it latched onto his collarbone.

  “Sh—” he cried out, jerking back.

  “Stay still,” I told him sharply, and he froze, his eyes on me and not on the zombie gnawing on him.

  I don’t often use that tone of voice on anyone, and I hadn’t been sure it would work on a human. But if he tried to pull himself away, he was just going to do more damage to himself.

  I tr
ied not to think about the blood staining his shirt because I didn’t know if the witch needed the zombie still up and moving to tell who sent it after Kyle.

  And I was damned sure going to get whoever had sent it after Kyle.

  If I couldn’t tear the zombie apart, I had to avoid looking at Kyle’s blood. He helped. He didn’t look like a man in pain; he looked thoroughly ticked.

  “Get her off,” he gritted, while trying to do it himself. He may be slightly built, but he’s tough, is Kyle. But it had locked its jaw good and tight, and Kyle couldn’t budge it.

  I’d always assumed that taking on a zombie would pretty much be like fighting a human—one that was relentless and didn’t react to pain—but basically a human. When it moved on Kyle, it was moving a lot faster than I’d seen any mundane human move and now it was proving stronger, too.

  It didn’t so much try to get away from me as it did to get to Kyle. I’d have thought that would make it easier to subdue. Finally I got an arm wrapped all the way around its shoulders, pulling it tight against me. Then I could put my other hand to work on prying her teeth apart. Its teeth. Its jaw broke in the process—and I got my thumb gnawed on a little.

  Kyle staggered back, white to the bone, but he stripped off his shirt and wadded it against the hole she’d dug in him. “What is she?” he asked. “Why isn’t she bleeding more?”

  He was looking at it in quick glances. I understood. It wasn’t pretty anymore with its jaw hanging half off.

  “Zombie,” I told him a little breathlessly. It was now trying to get away from me, and that did make things a bit more difficult, but at least I wasn’t trying to pry it off Kyle.

  “Your business, then?” he said.

  Usually I’d agree; not even shark-sharp lawyers like Kyle were so exotic as to call for assassination by zombie—it was too flamboyant, too blatant. The witches and supernatural-priest types who could create zombies had never been hidden the way the werewolves used to be, but they lived among the psychics, Wiccans, and New Agers where the con artists and the self-deluded provided ample cover for a few real magic practitioners. They didn’t give up that cover lightly. Somebody would have had to have paid a lot for a zombie assassination.

  I shook my head. “Don’t know. Seems awfully set on you, either way.” The zombie hadn’t managed to get a limb free for the past few seconds, so I chanced turning my attention to Kyle. His wound worried me.

  “You get out Howard’s good malt,” I told him. “He keeps the key behind the third book on the top left shelf. Clean that wound out with it. It’s liable to have all sorts of stuff in its mouth.” I didn’t know much about zombies, but I knew about the Komodo dragon, which doesn’t need poison to kill its prey because the bacteria in its mouth do the job just fine.

  Kyle didn’t argue, and took himself out of the conference room. As soon as he was out of sight, the zombie started crying out something. Might have been Kyle’s name, but it was hard to tell, what with its jaw so badly mangled.

  I held on to it—by now I’d gotten a hold that prevented it from hitting me effectively or wiggling loose. That gave me the leisure to be concerned with other things. Kyle had shut the door gently behind him. I tried not to speculate about Kyle’s reaction, tried to wrap up the panic and bury it where it could do no harm. He’d seen weird things before, even if none of them had drawn blood.

  I could have destroyed the zombie and left it in the conference room for later retrieval with no one the wiser; could have hidden all of this from my lover as I used to do. But it had been different with Kyle from the beginning. The lies I’d told to him about who and what I was, lies that necessity dictated and time had made familiar, had tasted foul on my tongue when spoken to him. Now he knew my truths and I wouldn’t hide from him again. If he couldn’t live with who and what I was, so be it.

  But none of that was useful, so I forced my attention to the matter at hand. Who would send a zombie to kill Kyle? Was it something directed at me? The zombie was pretty strong evidence that it was someone from my world, my world of the things that live in the dark corners, and not Kyle’s; he was as human as it got.

  Still, I couldn’t think of anyone I’d offended so much that I’d made Kyle into a target. Nor, with the possible exception of Elizaveta herself—who was, as Winston Churchill said of her mother Russia, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”—could I think of who could even create a zombie in the Tri-Cities. Eastern Washington State was not a hotbed of hoodoo or voodoo.

  Maybe someone had hired it done? Hired an assassin, and the assassin had chosen the manner of death?

  Kyle had a lot more enemies than I did. When he chose to use it, his special gift was to make the opposing parties in a courtroom look either like violent criminals, or like complete idiots—and sometimes both. Some of them had quite a bit of money, enough to hire a killer, certainly.

  Maybe it wasn’t my fault.

  A zombie hit, though, screamed expensive, a lot more expensive than someone like Kyle would normally command. Which meant it was probably my fault.

  I heard Elizaveta arrive and stride down the hall to the conference room. The lack of talking led me to believe that Kyle was still cleaning up.

  Elizaveta opened the conference room door and entered like the Queen Mary coming to port in a wave of herbs and menthol instead of salt water, but with the same regal dominance, a regality accompanied by enough fabric and colors to do justice to a Gypsy in midwinter—and it was hotter than sin outside.

  I’d always thought that she must have been beautiful when she was young. Not a conventional beauty, something much more powerful than that. Now her nose looked hawkish and her eyes were too hard, but the power was still there.

  “Warren, my little cinnamon bun, what have you found?” She never spoke to me in Russian as she did Adam, who understood it; instead she translated the endearments that peppered her speech—probably because they made me squirm. Why would you compare a grown man to a sweet roll?

  I responded to her overblown presentation as I usually did, dipping down into my childhood accent—added to a bit by Hollywood Westerns. “Ah reckon it’s a zombie, ma’am, but I thought you oughta take a good look first.”

  She smiled. “What was it doing when you found it?”

  “It found me, ma’am. Lookin’ for Kyle.”

  “And you relocated its jaw for that, my little Texas bunny?” she asked archly.

  “No,” said Kyle from the doorway. His spare shirt hung over his shoulders, folded back to avoid possible contact with the blood from the liberally splattered towel he held to his collarbone. He smelled like whiskey, but not even a zombie attack could make him unpretty or completely destroy his composure. “He broke her jaw when he pulled her off me. You must be Elizaveta Arkadyevna Vyshnevetskaya. I’m Kyle Brooks.”

  She looked down at him—she is damn near as tall as I am. Her face was turned away from me, but Kyle had his lawyer face on, so I doubted her expression was friendly. The zombie’s noises increased and so did its struggles. The witch turned to look at it without addressing Kyle.

  “Quit playing and kill it,” she told me coolly. “Breaking its neck should be enough.” She’d never been happy with bringing humans into things she’d rather they be ignorant of. I guess she was trying to teach him and me a lesson.

  I didn’t like playing her game, but if she didn’t need the zombie running around, Kyle would be safer with it dead. More dead.

  I didn’t look at Kyle when I popped the thing’s neck. Its spine broke easily under my hand—which was what she’d wanted Kyle to see. I laid the limp body down on the conference table as carefully as I could, pulling the dress down over the dead woman’s thighs.

  Elizaveta turned her attention to the corpse, and I finally noticed that she wasn’t alone. Nadia’s gift was blending in—some of that was magic. I’d been occupied with the zombie, Kyle, and Elizav
eta, but I still should have noticed her.

  “Nadia,” I said, “thank you for coming.” Of all Elizaveta’s numerous family, I liked Nadia the best; she was quiet, competent, and smart. She also was, I understood, one of three of the family who were honest apprentices rather than dogsbodies who did Elizaveta’s bidding.

  The old woman’s grandson, who was supposed to inherit the family business, had been found to be jump-starting his career in a manner Elizaveta found embarrassing. He’d quietly disappeared. I figure in a few hundred years someone would discover his remains in a jar in Elizaveta’s basement.

  I’d shed no tears for him. He’d conspired to murder Bran Cornick, the Marrok who ruled the wolves in this part of the world—the man who made being a werewolf less of a nightmare than it might have been. Elizaveta was still mad at Bran for outing the wolves—I’d always secretly wondered if she’d been a part of that mess, too, if only by being complicit.

  Nadia lifted a pair of deep gray eyes to mine and smiled at me, light crow’s feet dispelling the illusion of youth that her fine-pored skin and gray-free, seal-brown hair gave her. But the appearance of youth was no great loss because her smile was big and sweet.

  “Warren,” she said. She’d been born in the Tri-Cities and not a hint of Russian accent touched her voice. “You look . . .”

  “Dressed up?” I said looking down at my slacks. “I’m working for Kyle’s firm and they are a bit upscale. I got to keep the boots, though. As long as I remember to polish ’em once in a while.”

  She flushed a little. “I didn’t mean to be rude, sorry. I didn’t know you were a lawyer.”

  “Nah,” I told her. “Kyle’s the lawyer.” I introduced her to him. She took the hand he held out and murmured her greeting. “I’m the gofer,” I told her, answering the question she hadn’t gotten around to yet.