Smoke Bitten: Mercy Thompson: Book 12 Page 4

  It didn’t look that much like a snakebite, anyway. What it really looked like was a rabbit bite. I have had my fair share of rabbit bites—when I am a coyote, rabbits are fair game. But Dennis wasn’t a coyote shapeshifter, and they didn’t have rabbits.

  For some reason I thought of the jackrabbit I’d seen, the one my coyote had taken notice of because there was something wrong about it. Had it been headed in this direction? Maybe.

  Could it have been infected with rabies? Rabies was a disease that rabbits could carry, I knew. Other than being traumatized by Old Yeller when I was a child, I didn’t have any experience with it. Dogs, I thought, at least in Old Yeller’s case, foamed at the mouth and bit people. It seemed like a long way from that to causing someone to kill his wife and then shoot himself.

  Deciding it was unlikely that venom or rabies was the culprit, I resumed my examination for some chemical cause. I closed my eyes and inhaled, looking for the scent of alcohol, drugs of some sort—or illness. Despite my care, my nose touched Dennis’s skin as I inhaled.

  Magic filled my nose, burned into my sinuses, and brought tears to my eyes as I jerked back from the burn. I opened my eyes as I lost my balance, narrowly avoiding falling onto Dennis’s body—which glowed with the magic that still bit at my nose like menthol oil.

  Adam was of the opinion that it wasn’t really my nose that allowed me to detect magic—otherwise he and the other werewolves would be able to smell it, too. He thought that my perception of magic felt like a scent to me because I had no other way of processing it, a sort of synesthesia. He may have been right, but that didn’t change that it was mostly my nose that told me when there was magic around.

  Usually, though, with magic that affected me this much, I’d have been able to smell it from the front door—maybe from the road. My fingers buzzed with it, my nose burned—and to my eyes, Dennis’s whole body glowed. I didn’t understand why I hadn’t noticed it until I smelled Dennis’s skin. No. Until I touched his skin. A lot of magic reacted to skin on skin.

  Given that there was a brand-new door to Underhill in my backyard, not a quarter of a mile away, my initial suspicion would have been that it was fae magic at work. But it didn’t smell like fae magic.

  I can sort witchcraft from fae magic, werewolf from vampire magic. This wasn’t anything I was familiar with. I had once gone to an exhibit of South American artifacts, and the whole room they were displayed in smelled like magic I’d never sensed before—dark and complex. The magic in Dennis’s dead body was closer to that than to fae magic. Though not an exact match. It also reminded me of the magic that I’d scented around a sorcerer who had made a bargain with a demon—and a little, very little, like Underhill herself. No, not like Underhill—but there was some of the same lingering feel to it that I’d felt the whole time I’d spent in Underhill—something primordial.

  I didn’t know what it was. I did know what it wasn’t. It wasn’t witchcraft. It wasn’t fae—though that was a little less definite. Some of the fae shared far less similarity to each other than I did to a milk carton. It didn’t smell like the magic I had sensed from any fae I had encountered, anyway. With a nod to the faint resemblance to something about Underhill—and I wasn’t sure that Underhill counted as fae—it was not an exact match to any kind of magic I’d ever run into before. It certainly hadn’t belonged to Dennis because he hadn’t had a molecule of magic to call.

  “No, Anna,” I murmured, though she wasn’t here that I could tell. “It wasn’t Dennis who killed you.” It had been, I was sure, given how well I knew Dennis, whatever had left so much magic in him.

  I got to my feet and moved away from the body until my hands quit tingling, and then I went in search of Anna. I found her in the kitchen, collapsed on the white tile floor. She had fallen face-first, her blood pooling around her. At the edge of the dark pool was a white-handled French chef’s knife.

  When I touched her body, it was still warm, and there was no bloom of the magic that saturated Dennis. Feeling confident that I’d found everything I was going to discover on my own, I pulled out my phone and called 911.

  I SAT ON THE LAWN BY THE HOLE DENNIS HAD DUG AND watched the police carry out their business. Adam showed up about the time the coroner’s office carried Anna’s body out of the house.

  He stood beside me, watching the proceedings without speaking for a while. It seemed to me that he was trying to figure out what to say, rather than playing any kind of power game.

  I thought of him, of all of the ways that he had risked his life since I’d met him. The image that had come to me earlier when I’d thought of my old home burning, the memory of Adam’s burned body in the hospital, lingered still. He had thought I was inside the inferno and nothing could stop him from diving in to find me. He’d nearly died to save me—and werewolves are hard to kill.

  That man, that man I had to believe in. I had to believe that there was something going on that I did not understand—yet. Something that would explain why my mate was keeping me shut out of his life right now. Something other than the possibility that he didn’t want me anymore.

  I hadn’t done more than glance up at Adam when he’d come over. I hadn’t even explained what had happened. It said a lot about our current relationship that he hadn’t asked me. How had we come to this? How had I let this happen? Because a relationship is a two-way street. It took both of us to let it get this bad.

  I might not have been looking at him, but I felt him there, tense with uncertainty—even if our bond was shut down tight, I could still feel that much. It was not any lack of love, I decided, with the memory of his burned body fresh and real in my head, that had mangled our relationship.

  Adam did not desert the people he loved. And he loved me. I would have faith that there was nothing wrong we could not fix.

  I reached out and wrapped my hand around his ankle.

  “Did you find them?” Adam asked, as if my touch had forced words out of his mouth. His voice was gruff.

  I glanced toward my other side, where Anna’s ghost worked in her garden, pulling weeds only she could see.

  “Sort of,” I told him. “Anna found me.”

  “Murder?” he asked. He knew about me and ghosts.

  “Oh yes,” I said.

  The muscles in his leg tightened. “And you didn’t call me?”

  Hurt, I thought—and an edge of anger. Too bad for you, I thought without sympathy. I might love the man, but that didn’t mean there weren’t consequences for the way he’d been acting.

  “The danger was gone,” I told him—and then wondered if I was right about that. Since I try not to lie to Adam, even by omission, without good reason, I added, “As far as I could tell.”

  And when that last increased the tension in his calf muscle, I wasn’t the least bit sorry. Petty of me, maybe—but I’d learned in a hard school that I couldn’t let a werewolf, especially a dominant werewolf, get away with pushing me around.

  I told him what I knew, starting with Anna’s appearance in the living room of my manufactured house and ending with my calling the police. By the last bit, he’d calmed down about my not calling him. He didn’t know the Cathers very well. He didn’t go out making friends with the neighbors; he had enough to do running his company and the werewolf pack. I didn’t know the neighbor up the road from the pack house, either, for much the same reason, though I did make sure to send them something—flowers, candy, fruit baskets—every time there was a disturbance at our house. My relationship with the Cathers predated my relationship with Adam.

  “Detective Willis was not best pleased with my entering the residence before they got here,” I told him, finishing my story. “But I don’t think he was serious about charging me with obstruction of justice.”

  He gave another grunt, this one sounding a little amused. He hadn’t commented on the magic that had permeated Dennis’s body, or my possible imminent arrest, but the amusement was promising. I thought it was safe to change the subject.

&n
bsp; “So are you going to kill Auriele?” I asked. “Or did you figure out a way around it?”

  “Darryl should have his own pack,” Adam said, which wasn’t a yes. But it also wasn’t a no.

  It was my turn to grunt. That made him laugh a little, though it was somber amusement, nothing that would draw attention when people were carrying bodies out of a house.

  “Auriele was only a weapon Christy aimed at you,” Adam told me, his tongue apparently loosened by my imitation of his usual grunt. “Extenuating circumstance enough that I decided it wasn’t going back on my word to let her live. I explained to Auriele that it was time to practice some better judgment about what Christy has to say. The next time …” He sighed. “Hard to punish her for something I fell for as well. Of course you wouldn’t tell Jesse what to do. Of course she would use you as a sounding board before she confronted Christy or me. And it was Jesse’s place to inform both me and Christy.”

  “Damn straight,” I growled, borrowing a phrase from my cowboy friend Warren. “So why did you fall for it?”

  He didn’t answer my question. Instead he said, “Auriele apologized to Jesse. I’m not sure that took. Punishment enough maybe, for Auriele. At least as far as opening Jesse’s mail is concerned. She isn’t often in the wrong.”

  True.

  “I apologized to Jesse, too,” he said. “I think that went over better.”

  “You didn’t open her mail,” I told him. “And Jesse knows how her mother works.”

  “And that’s why she accepted my apology,” Adam agreed. “And why she talked to you about school before she brought it to me or her mother.”

  “Jesse could have avoided all of this if she’d discussed matters with you before she talked to her mother,” I told him. “But Christy was easier. She’d only be hurt because Jesse wasn’t moving to Eugene. You were going to be hurt because you, and your position as Alpha of our pack, are the reason she doesn’t have more choices about where to go to school.”

  Adam grunted again.

  The coroner’s van pulled out of the driveway with the two bodies inside. As Anna continued to work in her flower bed, some of the real weeds got pulled. Only strong ghosts affect the physical world like that. Maybe she would haunt her own house instead of mine. I could hope.

  “I can’t afford to lose Darryl now,” Adam said. “I talked to him alone about that. I apologized because, especially after this incident, he should be cut loose to get his own pack. Do you know what he told me?”

  “He likes his job here,” I said, because I’d talked to Darryl about this a few weeks ago. “As far as the one with the salary is concerned, he could probably work remotely if he couldn’t find a job wherever his new pack would be located. It’s not like think tanks are available in every town. But he doesn’t want to work remotely, because he likes to meet face-to-face with his team and with the people who use his team’s work.” Like me, a werewolf gets a lot of information from scent and subtle body language cues.

  “And—” I glanced up at Adam. This part Darryl hadn’t said, but I knew him. “He really loves the action our pack has been facing. He’s an adrenaline junkie. A new pack might be interesting until he got settled in, but I don’t think there is a pack in the US, other than maybe the Marrok’s, that is in for as exciting a time as ours.”

  “That’s more than he said, but I think you have it right.” He smiled. It wasn’t exactly a happy smile, but it wasn’t one of those smiles I’d been getting lately that weren’t really smiles. He reached down and held out his hand.

  “You are making me really uncomfortable sitting at my feet,” he told me.

  “And you’re starting to get funny looks from the cops,” I said, taking his hand.

  He laughed as he pulled me up. It was a quiet laugh—and this time I think he consciously pulled it down to suit the circumstances.

  “Thank you,” he said when I was standing.

  “I can just see the headlines,” I told him. “Alpha Wolf Makes Wife Kneel at His Feet.”

  His mouth quirked up. “Don’t forget the ‘Human Wife’ part of that. There are still a lot of people who think you are my sex slave.”

  “You wish,” I told him to the last part. “And it would be ‘Human? Wife.’” I lifted my voice on the end of “human,” so he could hear the question mark.

  The newspapers had indeed begun to question just how human I was. That was a problem because one of the reasons the pack had been accepted so easily by the mundane population of the Tri-Cities was that people viewed me as one of them. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out that I wasn’ t—strictly speaking—human. But I hoped that by then, they’d be happy with us because we were the good monsters who protected them from the bad ones.

  “Back to our previous conversation,” I said, “we get to keep Darryl and Auriele.”

  I was sorry when the slight smile slid away from his face and his expression regained its grim neutrality.

  He said, “Or at least we put that off for another day. Auriele understands what she nearly caused to happen, though I don’t think she is apologetic about anything except for hurting Jesse. And that she still believes is your fault.”

  I blew out a breath. “Figures.”

  “You haven’t asked me about Aiden and Underhill,” he said.

  “Do I want to know?” I asked.

  Before he could answer me, Detective Willis approached. Willis was moderately tall, and graying, and carried himself like someone who’d been in a few fights. He was closer to retirement age than to his rookie years, but not by much. He was one of those men who used his size and his anger to intimidate people he thought needed intimidation, but he was capable of toning his presence down to gentleness when caring for trauma victims. He was smart, dedicated—and we got along all right for the most part.

  “Generally speaking,” he said, “when either of you show up at a scene, it’s because something is afoot.” He stopped in front of us, his hands on his hips—but he knew better than to stare into Adam’s eyes. Instead he stared at me.

  “My people tell me this looks like a classic murder-suicide,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “Magic.”

  He grimaced. “God damn it. I knew it had been too quiet around here.”

  “I might believe it if Anna had stabbed her husband and then shot herself,” I told him. “But Dennis was possibly the least violent person I know.”

  “And that’s why you think there was magic involved?” asked Willis, sounding hopeful.

  “It is all over Dennis’s body,” I told him. “I’ve never seen anything like it. He is lit up with magic—I wouldn’t be surprised if someone could see him glowing from space.” A thought occurred to me. “You might want to be careful with his body.”

  “Are you thinking witches and zombies?” asked Adam.

  I shook my head. “Not witches, I don’t think. But there is a lot of magic in Dennis’s body—he wouldn’t want to hurt anyone else.” “I’ll speak to the coroner’s office,” said Willis. “Do you have any idea what got him?”

  I shook my head.

  “Of course you don’t,” he said. “And you wouldn’t tell me if you did.”

  “I don’t,” I told him. “But you might be right about the last. Your guys aren’t exactly the stand-back-and-let-the-werewolves-take-care-of-it kind of guys. Some things a gun works just fine on—and some things you need grenade launchers for.”

  “And werewolves are the grenade launchers?” He sounded a little amused. He didn’t argue about my assessment of his people.

  “That’s about right,” said Adam mildly.

  Willis glanced back at the house. “Murder-suicide would be a lot easier than unknown magical cause.”

  “It wasn’t a murder-suicide,” I told Willis. “Don’t let their kids think that it was.”

  He nodded, his mouth softening. “We’ll call it an ‘under investigation’ situation. When you figure out just what happened, we’ll let the
family know.” He started to leave, but paused. “It looked to me like he was heading out that door when he killed himself.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” I said.

  “You think he stopped himself from killing anyone else?” Willis didn’t sound like an experienced detective. He sounded like someone who needed to believe in good guys.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “But he picked up the gun after he killed Anna—and if whatever had him had just intended for him to kill himself, that knife could have done the job. Dennis was the kind of person who would have killed himself to prevent anyone else getting hurt.”

  Willis nodded, as if I’d answered a question for him, then continued back to his car.

  Adam and I left the Cathers’ house. I started off at an angle, heading home, but Adam veered toward my manufactured house. I gave him a puzzled look, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “I see that Underhill decided to redecorate the backyard,” I told him.

  He growled low in his throat. “That gate has to stay for a year and a day,” he said. “Then she can remove it, if we still wish her to.”

  I laughed, I couldn’t help myself—I think I was mostly just punchy. But there was something funny about the disgruntled way he repeated Underhill’s words.

  “Holy doorways, Batman,” I said. “We have an entrance to Underhill in our backyard.”

  He looked at me then, though he didn’t quit walking. “Are you sure that it wasn’t fae magic that caused Dennis to kill his wife?”

  I quit laughing and looked at the border wall between Adam’s house … Adam’s and my house and my old place. The stone wall, even incomplete, looked better than the old barbed-wire fence had.

  “I’ve never felt magic exactly like this,” I told Adam. “It didn’t feel fae.”

  “Coincidences happen,” Adam said. But he didn’t say it like he believed it.