Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly Read online

Only then did it occur to me that I did not hear the thrum of his heart or the whisper of his breath.

  I heard a car start up and took my eyes off the werewolf in time to see the black SUV squeal out of the parking lot and turn toward me. The big car wobbled as the driver fought his speed and his turn. His headlights blinded me momentarily—but I’d already seen my escape route and took it blind.

  He slowed a minute, as if he considered stopping by the body on the street, but then the V-8 roared, and the SUV picked up speed.

  He narrowly avoided hitting the lamppost I’d dodged behind. I couldn’t tell if Mac was in the car or not. I watched the SUV’s taillights until it turned onto the highway and blended in with the traffic there.

  I walked to the werewolf just to be certain—but he was well and truly dead.

  I’d never killed anyone before. He shouldn’t have been dead. Werewolves are hard to kill. If he had bothered to stanch the wound, or if he hadn’t chased me, the wound would have healed before he could bleed out.

  The taste of his blood in my mouth made me ill, and I vomited beside the body until the taste of bile overwhelmed anything else. Then I left him lying in the middle of the road and ran back to the garage. I needed to check on Mac before I took on the task of dealing with the dead werewolf.

  To my relief, Mac was leaning on Stefan’s van when I loped into the parking lot. He held a gun loosely in his hand, the barrel bent.

  “Mercy?” he asked me, when I approached, as if he expected me to talk.

  I ducked my head once, then darted around the front of the garage where I’d left my clothes. He followed me. But when I shifted back, and he saw that I was naked, he turned his back to let me dress.

  I pulled on my clothing quickly—it was cold out. “I’m decent,” I told him, and he faced me again.

  “You have blood on your chin,” he said, in a small voice.

  I wiped it off with the bottom of my T-shirt. I wasn’t going shopping tonight, so it didn’t matter if I got blood on my clothes. Don’t throw up again, I told myself sternly. Pretend it was a rabbit. It hadn’t tasted like rabbit.

  “What are you?” he asked. “Are you one of theirs? Where is . . . is the wolf?”

  “He’s dead. We need to talk,” I told him, then paused as I collected my scattered thoughts. “But first we need to get the dead werewolf out of the street. And before that, I guess we should call Adam.”

  I led him back to the office—this time turning on the light. Not that either of us needed it for anything other than comfort.

  He put his hand on top of mine when I reached for the phone. “Who is Adam, and why are you calling him?” he asked.

  I didn’t fight his hold. “The local Alpha. We need to get the body out of the road—unless you want both of us disappeared into some federal laboratory for science to pick over for a few years before they decide they can learn more from us dead than alive.”

  “Alpha?” he asked. “What’s that?”

  He was new.

  “Werewolves live in packs,” I told him. “Each pack has an Alpha—a wolf strong enough to keep the others under control. Adam Hauptman is the local Alpha.”

  “What does he look like?” he asked.

  “Five-ten, a hundred and eighty pounds. Dark hair, dark eyes. I don’t think he has anything to do with your wolves,” I said. “If Adam wanted you, he’d have you—and he’d have found you a lot sooner. He can be a jerk, but competence is his forte.”

  Mac stared at me, his brown eyes looking yellowish in the fluorescent lighting of my office. Truth to tell, I was surprised he was still in human form because watching one wolf change tends to encourage others. I met his gaze calmly, then dropped my eyes until I was looking at his shoulder instead.

  “All right,” he said, slowly removing his hand. “You saved me tonight—and that thing could have torn you apart. I’ve seen them kill.”

  I didn’t ask when or whom. It was important to take action in the right order to avoid worse trouble. Call Adam. Remove body from the middle of the street where anyone could see it. Then talk. I punched Adam’s number from memory.

  “Hauptman,” he answered, with just a touch of impatience, on the fourth ring.

  “I killed a werewolf at my garage,” I said, then hung up. To Mac’s raised eyebrows I said, “That will get a faster reaction than spending twenty minutes explaining. Come on, you and I need to get the body off the street before someone spots it.” When the phone rang, my answering machine picked it up.

  I took Stefan’s bus because loading something large into a bus is just easier than loading it into my little Rabbit. The bus smelled of Mac, and I realized he’d not lied to me when he said he had a place to spend the night. He’d been sleeping in it for a couple of nights at least.

  The bus was without brakes until we fixed it, but I managed to get it to drift to a stop next to the body. Mac helped me get it in the bus, then dashed back to the garage while I drove. When I arrived, he had the garage open for me.

  We set the dead man on the cement floor next to the lift, then I parked the bus back where it had been and pulled down the garage bay door, leaving us inside with the body.

  I walked to the corner farthest from the dead werewolf and sat down on the floor next to one of my big tool chests. Mac sat down next to me, and we both stared across the garage at the corpse.

  Half-changed, the body looked even more grotesque under the harsh lighting of the second bay than it had under the streetlight, like something out of a black-and-white Lon Chaney movie. From where I sat I could see the slice in his neck that had killed him.

  “He was used to healing fast,” I said, to break the silence. “So he didn’t pay attention to his wound. But some wounds take longer to heal than others. He didn’t know any more than you do. How long have you been a werewolf?”

  “Two months,” Mac said, leaning his head back against the tool chest and looking at the ceiling. “It killed my girlfriend, but I survived. Sort of.”

  He was lucky, I thought, remembering the suppositions I’d had while overhearing his phone call earlier. He hadn’t killed his girlfriend after all. He probably wasn’t feeling lucky though, and I wasn’t going to tell him that it could be worse.

  “Tell me about your life afterward. Where did those men come from? Are you from the Tri-Cities?” I hadn’t heard of any suspicious deaths or disappearances in the last six months.

  He shook his head. “I’m from Naperville.” At my blank look, he clarified. “Illinois. Near Chicago.” He glanced at the body, closed his eyes, and swallowed. “I want to eat him,” he whispered.

  “Perfectly natural,” I told him, though I have to admit I wanted to move away from him. Heaven save me, stuck with a new werewolf in a garage with fresh meat was not anyone’s idea of safe. But we had to wait here until Adam came. It could have been worse: it could have been nearer the full moon, or he could have been as hungry as he’d been that first day.

  “Deer not only tastes better, it’s easier to live with afterward,” I said, then reflected that it might be better to talk about something other than food. “What happened to you after that first attack? Did someone take you to a hospital?”

  He looked at me a moment, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He said, “After . . . after the attack, I woke up in a cage in someone’s basement. There was someone in the room and when I opened my eyes, he said, ‘Good, you’ll live. Leo will be happy to see it.’ ”

  “Wait,” I said. “Leo. Leo. Chicago.” Then it came to me. “Leo James? Looks as though he ought to be a Nordic skiing champion? Tall, long, and blond.”

  Leo was one of the Chicago Alphas—there were two of them. Leo held territory in the western suburbs. I’d met him once or twice. Neither of us had been impressed, but then, as I said, most werewolves don’t take kindly to other predators.

  Mac nodded. “That sounds right. He came down the stairs with the first guy and another man. None of them would talk to me or answer any of my
questions.” He swallowed and gave me an anxious glance. “This shit just sounds so weird, you know? Unbelievable.”

  “You’re talking to someone who can turn into a coyote,” I told him gently. “Just tell me what you think happened.”

  “All right.” He nodded slowly. “All right. I was still weak and confused, but it sounded like Leo was arguing money with the third guy. It sounded to me like he sold me for twelve thousand dollars.”

  “Leo sold you for twelve thousand dollars,” I said, as much to myself as to Mac. My voice might have been matter-of-fact, but only because Mac was right: it was unbelievable. Not that I thought he was lying. “He had one of his wolves attack you and your girlfriend and when you survived, he sold you to someone else as a newly turned werewolf.”

  “I think so,” said Mac.

  “You called your family this afternoon?” I asked. I smiled at his wary look. “I have pretty good hearing.”

  “My brother. His cell phone.” He swallowed. “It’s broken. No caller ID. I had to let them know I was alive. I guess the police think I killed Meg.”

  “You told him that you were after her killer,” I said.

  He gave an unhappy laugh. “Like I could find him.”

  He could. It was all a matter of learning to use his new senses, but I wasn’t going to tell him that, not yet. If Mac did find his attacker, chances were Mac would die. A new werewolf just doesn’t stand a chance against the older ones.

  I patted his knee. “Don’t worry. As soon as we get word to the right people—and Adam is the right people—Leo’s a walking dead man. The Marrok won’t allow an Alpha who is creating progeny and selling them for money.”

  “The Marrok?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Like I told you, except for the occasional rogue, werewolves are organized into packs under an Alpha wolf.”

  It used to be that was as organized as werewolves got. But the only thing it takes to be Alpha is power, not intelligence or even common sense. In the Middle Ages, after the Black Plague, the werewolf population was almost wiped out along with real wolves because some of the Alphas were indiscreet. It was decided then that there would be a leader over all the werewolves.

  “In the US, all the packs follow the Marrok, a title taken from the name of one of King Arthur’s knights who was a werewolf. The Marrok and his pack have oversight of all the werewolves in North America.”

  “There are more of us?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Maybe as many as two thousand in the US, five or six hundred in Canada, and about four hundred in Mexico.”

  “How do you know so much about werewolves?”

  “I was raised by them.” I waited for him to ask me why, but his attention had drifted toward the body. He inhaled deeply and gave an eager shudder.

  “Do you know what they wanted with you?” I asked hurriedly.

  “They told me they were looking for a cure. Kept putting things in my food—I could smell them, but I was hungry so I ate anyway. Sometimes they’d give me shots—and once when I wouldn’t cooperate they used a dart gun.”

  “Outside, when you were talking to them, you said they had others like you?”

  He nodded. “They kept me in a cage in a semitrailer. There were four cages in it. At first there were three of us, a girl around my age and a man. The girl was pretty much out of it—she just stared and rocked back and forth. The man couldn’t speak any English. It sounded like Polish to me—but it could have been Russian or something. One of the times I was taking a trip on something they pumped in me, I woke up and I was alone.”

  “Drugs don’t work on werewolves,” I told him. “Your metabolism is too high.”

  “These did,” he said.

  I nodded. “I believe you. But they shouldn’t have. You escaped?”

  “I managed to change while they were trying to give me something else. I don’t remember much about it other than running.”

  “Was the trailer here in the Tri-Cities?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I couldn’t find it again, though. I don’t remember everything that happens when. . .” His voice trailed off.

  “When you’re the wolf.” Memory came with experience and control, or so I’d been told.

  A strange car approached the garage with the quiet purr common to expensive engines.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, when I stood up.

  “Don’t you hear the car?”

  He started to shake his head, but then paused. “I—yes. Yes, I do.”

  “There are advantages to being a werewolf,” I said. “One of them is being able to hear and smell better than the average Joe.” I stood up. “It’s turning into the parking lot. I’m going to look out and see who it is.”

  “Maybe it’s the guy you called. The Alpha.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not his car.”

  chapter 3

  I slipped through the office and opened the outside door cautiously, but the smell of perfume and herbs hanging in the night air told me we were still all right.

  A dark Cadillac was stretched across the pavement just beyond Stefan’s bus. I pushed the door all the way open as the uniformed chauffeur tipped his hat to me, then opened the car’s back door, revealing an elderly woman.

  I stuck my head back in the office, and called, “It’s all right, Mac. Just the cleanup crew.”

  Keeping the humans ignorant of the magic that lives among them is a specialized and lucrative business, and Adam’s pack kept the best witch in the Pacific Northwest on retainer. Rumors of Elizaveta Arkadyevna Vyshnevetskaya’s origins and how she came to be in the Tri-Cities changed on a weekly basis. I think she and her brood of grandchildren and great-grandchildren encouraged the more outrageous versions. All that I knew for certain was that she had been born in Moscow, Russia, and had lived in the Tri-Cities for at least twenty years.

  Elizaveta rose from the depths of the big car with all the drama of a prima ballerina taking her bow. The picture she made was worth all the drama.

  She was almost six feet tall and little more than skin and bones, with a long, elegant nose and gray, penetrating eyes. Her style of dress was somewhere between babushka and Baba Yaga. Layers of rich fabrics and textures came down to her calves, all covered with a long wool cape and a worn scarf that wrapped around her head and neck. Her outfit wasn’t authentic, at least not to any period or place that I’ve heard of, but I’ve never seen anyone brave enough to tell her so.

  “Elizaveta Arkadyevna, welcome,” I said, walking past the bus to stand by her car.

  She scowled at me. “My Adamya calls and tells me you have one of his wolves dead.” Her voice had the crispness of a British aristocrat, so I knew she was angry—her usual accent was thick enough I had to make a real effort to understand her. When she was really angry, she didn’t speak English at all.

  “Werewolf, yes,” I agreed. “But I don’t think it is one of Adam’s.” Adamya, I had learned, was an affectionate form of Adam. I don’t think she’d ever called him that to his face. Elizaveta was seldom affectionate to anyone likely to overhear her.

  “I have the body in my shop,” I told her. “But there is blood all over here. The werewolf chased me with a torn artery and bled from here over to the storage facility, where he tore up the fence in two places before he bled to death out on the street. The storage facility has cameras, and I used Stefan’s bus”—I pointed to it—“to move the body.”

  She said something in Russian to her chauffeur, who I recognized as one of her grandchildren. He bowed and said something back before going around to open the trunk.

  “Go,” she told me, and flung her arms in a pushing gesture. “I will take care of the mess out here without your help. You wait with the body. Adam will be here soon. Once he has seen, he will tell me what he would have me do with it. You killed this wolf? With a silver bullet so I should look for casing?”

  “With my fangs,” I told her; she knew what I was. “It was sort of an accident—at least his death was.�
��

  She caught my arm when I turned to go into the office. “What were you thinking, Mercedes Thompson? A Little Wolf who attacks the great ones will be dead soon, I think. Luck runs out eventually.”

  “He would have killed a boy under my protection,” I told her. “I had no choice.”

  She released me and snorted her disapproval, but when she spoke her Russian accent was firmly in place. “There is always choice, Mercy. Always choice. If he attacked a boy, then I suppose it must not have been one of Adamya’s.”

  She looked at her chauffeur and barked out something more. Effectively dismissed, I went back to Mac and our dead werewolf.

  I found Mac crouched near the body, licking his fingers as if he might have touched the drying blood and was cleaning them off. Not a good sign. Somehow, I was pretty certain that if Mac were fully in control, he wouldn’t be doing that.

  “Mac,” I said, strolling past him and over to the far side of the garage, where we’d been sitting.

  He growled at me.

  “Stop that,” I said sharply, doing my best to keep the fear out of my voice. “Control yourself and come over here. There are some things you should know before Adam gets here.”

  I’d been avoiding a dominance contest, because my instincts told me that Mac was a natural leader, a dominant who might very well eventually become an Alpha in his own right—and I was a woman.

  Women’s liberation hadn’t made much headway in the world of werewolves. A mated female took her pack position from her mate, but unmated females were always lower than males unless the male was unusually submissive. This little fact had caused me no end of grief, growing up, as I did, in the middle of a werewolf pack. But without someone more dominant than he, Mac wouldn’t be able to take control of his wolf yet. Adam wasn’t there, so it was up to me.

  I stared at him in my best imitation of my foster father and raised an eyebrow. “Mac, for Heaven’s sake, leave that poor dead man alone and come over here.”

  He came slowly to his feet, menace clinging to him. Then he shook his head and rubbed his face, swaying a little.