Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson Page 36

  The second-story window, the bedroom window, was open, and I jumped through it from the ground. I landed with a thud, but my victim, like Nadia, didn’t wake up. I needed this one awake. So I made more noise, letting my claws tick on the hardwood floor.

  It wasn’t hard. I was very, very angry.

  “Wha—”

  He turned on the light, but I was already out in the hall. Just around the corner. I made a little more noise.

  He grumbled, “Damned mice.”

  He walked into the hallway where I waited for him.

  • • •

  I crawled into bed, exhausted, weary to my soul.

  “Warren?” He pulled me close. “Baby, you’re freezing.”

  If he asked, I would tell him.

  “Can you sleep?”

  I nodded.

  “Fine, tell me about it in the morning.”

  I took the comfort he offered gratefully.

  • • •

  We were awakened by the ambulance.

  Kyle went out to find out what he could while I showered. He came in while I was drying off.

  “Mr. Francis died of a heart attack last night.” He had an odd expression on his face. Hard not to feel some relief, I guessed—and harder not to feel guilty over it. “I guess we won’t be getting any more notes.” He frowned at me, then donned his lawyer face. “Warren?”

  Among the health issues our neighbor had retired with was a weak heart. Much easier to explain a heart attack than death by wild animals. This was the twenty-first century after all, not the nineteenth.

  “I’d have gotten more satisfaction if I could have sunk my teeth into him,” I told Kyle, rubbing the towel over my hair with a little more force than necessary. “Apparently he decided that you’d never be a neighbor he could cow properly. He hired Nadia, Elizaveta’s niece, to kill you.”

  “Mr. Francis?” Kyle said incredulously. I pulled the towel off my head to see him standing slack-jawed. “Mr. Francis hired a witch to make a zombie to kill me?” After a moment, he shook off his shock. “I thought for sure it would be Nyelund.”

  “Covington said she’d pay for half if we told her who hired someone to kill you,” I told him. “It was Sullivan who shot me”—Kyle looked at the red mark on my shoulder that was all that was left of the wound—“but he won’t be a threat to anyone anymore.”

  Nadia broke Sullivan—but she’d aimed that magic at me, too. I wasn’t supposed to think about Kyle anymore, I was supposed to leave off the investigation with the feeling that everything would be all right. And I wasn’t supposed to remember the magic she’d worked to ensure that result. She’d spent so long teaching everyone to underestimate her, she’d overestimated herself.

  Kyle frowned at me. “Tell me.”

  So I told him about Sean Nyelund while I got dressed. I paced restlessly and told him about Nadia while he sat on the bench at the foot of the bed and watched me.

  “Justice was served, Warren,” he said when I finished. “I’m sorry it had to be you who served it.”

  “I’m not,” I told him. I’d only done what I needed to protect my own. I’d do it again.

  He smiled a little as if he knew something I didn’t. “If you say so.”

  “She was right,” I said.

  “Who was?”

  “Nadia. She said the red dress might be useful in finding out who’d killed Toni McFetters.”

  He reached up and caught my hand, pulling me down to sit beside him.

  “You liked her,” he told me.

  “She had a prom photo in her house.” On top of the curio cabinet. “Toni’s husband had taken Nadia to her high school prom. That red dress Toni was wearing? It was Nadia’s prom dress; so were the pearls and shoes, near as I could tell. He’d taken her to the prom and hardly remembered her.” She’d remembered him, though. I’d expected to have to search her house for Toni’s missing belongings or, if that hadn’t worked, wake Nadia up and question her. She’d made things easy for me.

  “Elizaveta only objected that she’d exposed herself as a witch to the humans,” Kyle said. “If you hadn’t told her that, she would have left Nadia alone. You didn’t have to kill her.” He put his arm around me. “Tell me that’s not what you’re thinking now. Tell me that’s not what is bothering you.”

  It wasn’t. Not quite. I was thinking that she had attacked Kyle and part of me would have been happier if I’d eaten her. It had taken more will than I’d thought I had not to eat the old man next door, who was even more to blame than Nadia.

  I stared at Kyle. I know that the wolf must have been showing through, but he didn’t flinch, didn’t drop his eyes.

  “She was escalating,” he said. “She killed for money and learned to like it. She killed Toni because Toni and her husband jogged past her house every day and they were happy. She tried to kill me because we are happy.”

  He thought I was a hero. He needed to know better.

  “I killed two people last night,” I told him. “Premeditated murder.” I swallowed, but told him the other part of it, too. “I enjoyed it.”

  He kissed me. When he was finished, he told me, “You’re a werewolf—a predator. A skilled killer, but not an indiscriminate one. So am I. If my prey is still writhing when I’m finished, it doesn’t make me any less a predator.”

  I looked at him and he gave me a crooked grin. “Ready to get rid of that apartment yet?”

  I laughed and leaned into him.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Just maybe.”

  REDEMPTION

  I knew, as soon as I brought Ben onstage in Moon Called, what his history was. I had to know so that his actions remained logically consistent throughout the series—though I didn’t know if I would ever bring them to light.

  I am not an outline writer. The one book that I did write with a real, honest-to-goodness outline was really difficult for me to finish—since I already knew the ending, I didn’t feel that drive that usually pumps me through the last half of the book. That doesn’t mean I don’t do any planning on the large scale, but it makes for some interesting events on the small. Toward the end of Iron Kissed, Mercy is hurt. Adam, torn by guilt and unwilling to hurt her more, leaves Mercy—but not unguarded. Now who, I thought, should he send to guard Mercy? Warren was too . . . predictable. I could have sent one of the women. But, on a whim, I threw in Ben. What followed took me totally by surprise in the best of all possible ways—Ben was the perfect person.

  Ben is in the process of change. We mere mortals have only seventy or so years in which to get over the bad things that have happened to us—and the bad things we’ve done. I found an event that would be pivotal for Ben—and a chance to bring in some of the weird and absurd things my husband ran into in his years as a DBA (database administrator) for a huge government contractor.

  I would, in the interest of fairness, like to point out that although the IT (information technology) field is, for whatever reason, heavily dominated by men, Ben’s company, thanks to government hiring incentives, has many competent women in both the DBA and programming departments. But this is told (mostly) from Ben’s viewpoint, and Ben has issues with women in general, so his viewpoint is a little skewed.

  The events in “Redemption” take place between Frost Burned and Night Broken.

  “Hello, you have reached the Prophet support line. This is Bob, how may I help you?” said a cheery voice with a distinctively Indian accent, and Ben snorted.

  For some reason, the database company thought it would sound better to give their overseas customer-service reps American names. Ben didn’t call the general number anymore, bouncing himself up the ladder of help-desk services a few tiers by using the personal number of a competent IT rep (IT stands for “information technology”—techspeak for people who know which end of a computer is up), so he could converse with someone who co
uld actually do something. “Bob” was pretty sharp.

  “Hey, Rajeev,” Ben said. “It’s me over here in Washington State. I need to talk to you about this f . . .” He drew in a deep breath and counted to ten. “Ducky. This ducky new package your company sold ours.”

  “Ben?” Rajeev asked a little uncertainly. “Is this Ben?”

  Rajeev and he had known each other, by phone, for a long time.

  “It’s me,” Ben confirmed.

  “Ducky?”

  Thanks to Ben, Rajeev knew more English swearwords than all of his buddies in India combined—which explained his tentative greeting.

  “I have a bet,” Ben told him. “No swearing for a week. There’s a bottle of eighteen-year-old scotch in the balance.” Werewolves might not get drunk, but that didn’t affect the flavor, or even the initial hit of a good, old, smoky scotch. It wasn’t that he couldn’t buy his own bottle of scotch, but the bet was with his Alpha—it was the principle of the thing.

  “Ah.” In the following silence, Ben heard Rajeev calculating Ben’s chances for a moment before he recalled that someone might be monitoring the call for efficiency. “Good luck with that. You called with a problem?”

  Reminded of his troubles, Ben growled. “Yes. This program is a piece of . . . of junk. My boss says his boss thought it would be a s . . . spiffy idea to replace my program that does a . . . perfectly adequate job already with this . . . program. I expect the . . . nice gentleman in question is getting a f . . . fiddling kickback.”

  Rajeev laughed. “I think, my friend, that you might consider avoiding adjectives altogether.” There was the sound of keyboard keys clicking, then Rajeev sighed. “I see it. They have purchased the new release of Quotalk for your department. Your entire department.” There were things that he couldn’t say, or he’d lose his job. In the silence, Ben heard Rajeev’s unspoken dismay. What were they thinking selling this half-written spaghetti code to a customer who has never offended us? But Rajeev would never say such a thing over the phone because he, like Ben, needed his job.

  Rajeev cleared his throat, and said carefully, “We have been getting calls all week with this iteration of the program.” There was nothing wrong with Rajeev’s English except a thick accent—two thick accents, really, India by way of Great Britain. Ben didn’t have any trouble with it because he already had the British half himself.

  “Which is giving you trouble?” Rajeev continued, his voice carefully professional. “Is it the way the auto-installer doesn’t load or the way the program keeps overwriting your servlet container?” That was as close to sarcasm as Rajeev permitted himself. “I have a patch for the first, but the last is one we are still struggling with.”

  The Prophet database (of course, the whole IT—computer geek—world called it the For-Profit database) was well written, but all the programs the mother company tried to sell with it were garbage. Because the Prophet was the gold standard of databases, the company who owned it got to sit on that reputation for everything else. Ben was pretty sure that if the people doing the buying had also been the people who had to use the programs, his life would be a lot easier.

  As it was, once his company’s overlords bought the stupid add-ons, they made them mandatory. Happily for Ben, the security guys would call him a day before they conducted the mandatory just-to-make-sure-you-are-doing-as-you-are-told inspections of his hard drive so he’d have time to hide the unapproved programs he actually used somewhere else. Happy for the company, too, because if Ben actually had to use the crap—he arbitrarily decided that crap wasn’t a swearword—if he used the crap they mandated, nothing on any of the computers in the company would work.

  “I wrote a patch to defend my servlet container settings,” he told Rajeev. “I’ll send it to you. And why are your programmers still using servlets, anyway?”

  “To a man with a hammer,” said Rajeev wisely, “all problems look like nails. Thank you for your offer of help.”

  “No trouble,” Ben told him.

  Like his use of unapproved programs, sharing his code with someone who worked for another company was also against his company’s protocol. Code written by company IT personnel was supposed to be shown to marketing to see if it was a viable product. But geeks had to stick together. Also, if marketing ever decided to sell some of his code, he knew who would get stuck on a help desk for it—a business that would be as unpleasant for the customers as it would be for him: he would make certain of that. Happily, since Ben was officially a database administer, better known in the IT world as a DBA, the marketing department never thought to see if he also wrote his own programming.

  “How did you fix it, anyway?” asked Rajeev. “Our programmers have been trying to figure out a work-around for several days.”

  “The patch hides servlet container settings from your program,” Ben told him, “then reinstalls them once the program is up and running.” If Ben had enjoyed outthinking the stupid program, he didn’t have to admit it to anyone. “I figured out the install problem, too, thank you. It was the same problem another of Prophet’s products had, and I just modified my old patch. What I can’t fix is that the program won’t run unless the password is permanently set to PASSWORD and the username is permanently TEST. Since I’m working on databases that hold the US governmental secrets of the last hundred years, you’ll understand that is not acceptable.”

  There was a long silence. Then Rajeev said, very carefully “Someone hard-coded the passwords.”

  “That’s what I’m seeing,” agreed Ben blandly.

  There was a very long pause. “I haven’t heard that complaint before,” Rajeev said. He considered his words some more, and said, “At least not on this program.” There was another pause. “Perhaps it is because no one else has made it that far yet. I will inquire of our programmers to see if there is a way to fix this and call you back.” He paused and said, “The username is TEST?”

  “That’s right,” Ben said.

  Rajeev sighed and hung up.

  Ben was still grinning when he sent the promised bit of code to Rajeev. Setting aside the task of making the new program behave until he got a call back, he continued his daily checklist to make sure all of his databases were running smoothly and likely to continue that way on aging servers with insufficient memory and slow processors. Galadriel was a crabby, high-maintenance server, and she’d been particularly cranky over the past few days. So he messed around with her, cleaning out a few old logs that were bogging her down.

  Around him, the sounds of a giant, cubicle-filled room told him the secrets of the universe—or at least the universe of his company. He didn’t really pay attention on a conscious level, but the part of him that wasn’t a top-flight computer guru stored up the interesting bits and absorbed them.

  Ben knew about the guy who was having an affair with three different women and a guy in marketing. He knew that one of the pretty young things in Web Applications was pregnant and wanted to divorce her husband before he found out because it wasn’t his child. Most people’s secrets were less salacious—things like surprise parties, wedding showers, and his DBA coworker who was running cosmetic sales from her work phone instead of doing her job. She was a crummy DBA, though, so that was okay because mostly what she did was make more work for the rest of them.

  It wasn’t that he was a busybody who needed to have an ear in everyone’s business—he didn’t care enough about other people to want to hear gossip. It was that he was a bloody werewolf and couldn’t help overhearing.

  All the main servers had names. Most of them were references to the usual geek favorites: Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Dr. Seuss characters. The only server name that was out of the ordinary was the server someone had named Tree a couple of years ago. Word was that on the eve of transferring to Washington, D.C., a DBA who never read anything but nonfiction had named it in a fit of defiance.

  Ben was in the
middle of coaxing a little more space out of Yertle when he heard the voice he’d been listening for carrying over the tops of the cubicles to his desk.

  Mel Dreyer was the DBA group secretary. Cute, perky, and seven stone soaking wet, she was everything he hated in a woman. Little-girl voice. Check. Sensitive. Check. Cried easily. Check. Scared to death of him. Double check.

  She was prey and brought up bad memories until it was all he could do to control his wolf when she was around.

  Right now, she was talking to Mark Duffy, IT Services Group Junior Vice Director. It had been Duffy’s voice Ben had been listening for.

  Ben pulled himself away from his task, grabbed a book off the top of his file cabinet, and stalked out of his cubicle. He allowed the wolf he kept balled up inside him out just enough to be scary but not enough to be dangerous, a more difficult balance than usual because the moon’s song was in his blood. Full moon was soon.

  Mel’s desk was at the entrance to the double row of DBA cubicles, but she didn’t get a whole cubicle. She was stuck out on the end of their row, so she could catch visitors before they invaded the DBA’s domain beyond her. They’d taken away two of the walls and left her vulnerable to whoever decided to pester her.

  Ben looked at the floor as he strode by the other cubicles of DBAs. He stretched his neck and heard the bones pop, a sign that the wolf was too prominent. Control, he thought at himself, don’t want to kill anyone. Even as he thought it, the dark inside him answered, Oh, didn’t he just. He knew what it was to feel the flesh part between his teeth and the taste of hot, fresh prey.

  He passed the last cubicle, and Duffy’s smell and cologne that reeked of chemicals assaulted Ben’s sensitive nose. He had no trouble curling his lips in a snarl.

  Duffy stood beside Mel’s desk, leaning over slightly until he hovered above her, a position of power. His expensive suit and haircut were designed to show anyone who looked that Mark Duffy was a man of consequence.