Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson Page 43

  “Not when you come outside to work with me,” said Lisa positively. “I’ve never seen you wear any jewelry.”

  His face went slack with realization. “This is going to sound weird.” He looked back at the house, where the curtains were fluttering through the broken window. “Okay, not as weird as today has been. But weird enough. I didn’t want to wear it around you, Lisa. It never felt right. I haven’t worn it since you came inside the house—and I always wear it.”

  “Love,” observed Zack quietly, “is a good antidote to a lot of foul magic. Leastwise that has been my experience.”

  “So,” Lisa asked, her naked face turned to Rick. “What do we do next?”

  I walked over to my van and popped open the back hatch. Inside, I found a nice steel pry bar. “I find the pendant and break it—according to my expert friend.”

  “What she said,” Zack reminded me because he’d overheard both sides of the call, “was that breaking it usually stopped the problem—but that there could be a backlash when the item broke.”

  “Where is it?” I asked Rick, ignoring Zack for the moment.

  “In my bedroom.” He glanced up at the broken window. “Up there.”

  • • •

  I talked Rick and Lisa into staying outside. Rick wasn’t happy about it but conceded that unless he did, Lisa wasn’t going to stay outside. And Lisa, I thought, was the one in real danger.

  Zack and I, pry bar in hand, walked back in the front door—and nothing happened. No weird effects, no weird sounds. No dead women. Nothing.

  By the time we walked up the stairs, everything felt pretty anticlimactic. I was basing my whole plan of attack on the smell of bubble gum and ozone—and the intuition of a fae-gifted man who thought his mother had killed his wife.

  Zack made me let him walk into the room first. When nothing happened, I followed him in. The room was huge, with a walk-in closet beside the door and a bathroom on the far wall. A king-sized four-poster bed dominated the room in dark splendor. Beside it, the nightstand held nothing but an alarm clock that was blinking twelve.

  “It was supposed to be on the nightstand, right?” Zack asked.

  And all hell broke loose.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Zack as I crouched beneath a library table along one wall. It was one of the few pieces of furniture that hadn’t started attacking us.

  Zack had grabbed a silver tea tray and was using it as a shield and baseball bat. It beat my table because it was metal and more solid—and he could move without losing his protection.

  The corner of a drawer managed to hit him in the shoulder pretty good, despite his mad tray-wielding skills.

  “Tired of this,” he said, shaking out his shoulder. “Finding anything in this mess is going to take an act of God.”

  Abruptly, the flurry of thrown objects subsided.

  I rolled out from under the table, and Zack walked in front of me, tray at the ready.

  “I’ve got an idea,” I said, thoughtfully. “Let’s walk around the room and see what happens.”

  “I have a better idea,” Zack said. “We both go outside. Call Elizaveta and set her on this problem.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to owe the witch any favors.” She worried me, truth be told. Witches aren’t my favorite people to deal with—and Elizaveta raised my hackles.

  “She is being paid,” Zack pointed out.

  “For pack matters. This has nothing to do with the pack,” I told him. “If this doesn’t work, we’ll rethink.”

  “All right,” he said reluctantly. “Shall we try near the bed first?”

  He took two steps toward the bed, and a paperweight flew at him. He caught it—and I got hit by a candlestick I hadn’t seen coming because I was watching Zack. It hit me in the ribs with brutal force.

  Luckily, Zack was distracted and hadn’t seen it fly at me. I grabbed it as it fell and held it casually in the hand that wasn’t holding the pry bar—as if I’d just picked it up so I would have a weapon in both hands. I tried not to make a sound because if Zack knew I was hurt, he’d grab me and take me outside to wait with the other two, and I had a strong feeling that I was going to have to be the one who confronted the dead woman.

  One thing that shapeshifting into a coyote had taught me was that I should listen to my instincts, even if common sense said that Zack was better suited to take on a poltergeist and find the amulet.

  I gripped my pry bar more tightly, tried to breathe in shallow breaths, and watched the pattern of activity. As soon as Zack neared the bed (overturned with the mattress on the far side of the room) more things flew into the air. Smaller items this time—more paperweights (someone evidently had a collection of the damned things), vases, figurines—but they were thrown hard and, as we approached the bed, with increased fury. Zack ducked and danced like a professional dodgeball player, and so did I. She couldn’t keep this up for much longer—ghosts have limits.

  I have spent a long time learning martial arts. If you spar too much and don’t actually fight, you get to the point where you attack with no intention of hitting anything. Every piece that came at us was intended to do damage. I could almost smell the desperate anger of each missile. Except for one.

  The little wooden box would have missed Zack’s head even if he hadn’t ducked. I watched it fly across the room and land in the open closet and roll under a shirt lying on the floor.

  The closet was between me and the door we’d come in from.

  I moved, and a shoe hit my side just where the candlestick had, and this time, I let out a pained yelp.

  “Mercy,” growled Zack, as I had known he would. “I can handle this. Please, please go. If Adam were here, he’d make you go.”

  “Fine,” I said, pressing my free arm against my ribs. I didn’t even have to act like it hurt—because it really did. “Fine. You know what you’re looking for, right?”

  “I was there when he told both of us,” Zack said dryly.

  “Okay,” I stumbled to my feet and tripped over some of the stuff on the floor. The movement hurt. A lot. But it also put me next to the closet.

  I used the pry bar to balance myself, feeling the ache in my just-healed left knee because I’d strained it when I fell. I turned as if to say one more thing to Zack and used the motion to hit the box as hard as I could with the pry bar. It shattered on impact. I had a momentary glimpse of a greenish stone, and I aimed my second strike at it. The steel—not as good as cold iron for dealing with the fae, but not a bad second choice—hit the pendant full force and turned it into jade shards.

  “What the—?” The barrage of things that had been in the air stopped, a brush dropping straight to the ground, though it had been on a quick trajectory for the middle of his back. He looked at me and saw the broken box under my pry bar.

  “You lied,” he said, astonished.

  “Nope,” I told him. “I don’t lie to werewolves, it’s too much trouble. I had every intention of going out with the others, though I think I’m going to need a hand to get there. I just thought I’d destroy the pendant before I did.”

  He shook his head. “I am glad you aren’t mine. You’re going to be dead before you’re forty.”

  “No,” rumbled my husband’s soft deep voice from the hallway. I could always tell when he was really mad: it was when his voice got really quiet. “I’m going to be dead before she’s forty.”

  He stuck his head through the doorway and took in the mess. He frowned at me. “There I was, talking to five cops at the same time, when Samuel called me from Ireland and told me that Ariana said you were about to get yourself killed. I might have a speeding ticket waiting for me when I get home—if they don’t show up here.”

  I’d made Adam break the speed limit. Adam always drove the speed limit.

  I tried to look like breathing didn’t hurt. A big drop of blood fr
om my forehead hit the carpet. It was probably a good thing the carpet was dark brown. “I’m not dead yet.”

  He closed his eyes and sagged against the door frame. Since he couldn’t see me with his eyes closed, I figured I was safe limping over to him. But he lifted an arm for me to duck under as soon as I got near, so trying to hide how badly I was hurt was probably a lost cause.

  “Are you finished here?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Zack said.

  “No,” I told them. “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay.” Adam nodded at Zack. To me he said, “Do we need to wait here, or is it okay to head downstairs?”

  Before I answered, there were sounds on the stairs.

  “She said wait outside,” said Lisa.

  “My house, my ghost,” Rick answered. “And it sounds like the worst is over, one way or another, anyway.”

  He walked through the doorway, Lisa trailing after him. She gave me an apologetic look. “He’s not used to following orders.”

  “No,” Rick said. “He isn’t. He also doesn’t like being talked about in the third person.” He took a good look at his bedroom and quit teasing Lisa. “Holy Roman Empire. What happened to my bedroom?” He paused, glanced around a little mournfully. “I liked that Tiffany lamp.”

  Guiltily, I shook my hair, and a few more fragments of colored glass fell on the floor. Zack had had time to mend, so the dark red spots on his naked chest that would have been bruises on someone else had faded to normal.

  “Your mama,” said Zack apologetically, “didn’t want us to smash that necklace.”

  He paused, and his nostrils flared.

  I smelled it too, ozone and bubble gum.

  “Mercy?” asked Adam, his body stiffening next to mine.

  “I thought it was too easy,” I told them. “The pendant was a focus, but ghosts don’t just—” I paused as a woman took form in the center of the room.

  Ghosts don’t just appear at nighttime, but they are scarier then—and maybe easier for people to believe in.

  “Can anyone else see her?” I asked quietly.

  Adam shook his head—and so did everyone else.

  “Rick?” I asked. “What’s your mother’s full name?”

  I don’t know that it mattered. But the fae thought it did, and I know that pack magic rides on identity; new pack members come in with their full names for the pack to recognize. As my brother Gary said, most of the Indian tribes don’t speak the name of the dead for fear that they’ll attract their attention—or make them linger.

  “Gina,” he said. “Gina Stephanie Albright. Is she here?”

  “She’s tiny,” I told him. I could see where Rick got his lack of height. “Dark hair, blue eyes.” She was staring at me.

  “That’s her.”

  She threw the knife so fast that if I hadn’t been half expecting something, and if I hadn’t been a fair bit faster than human, she’d have hit Lisa with it. As it was, I knocked it out of the air and stepped in front of Lisa. Adam followed my lead, and the other two men closed the holes until we had Lisa walled off.

  “Gina,” I said. “It’s time to sleep now.”

  She shook her head, looking at me with wide, innocent eyes. “That tramp. I thought he was safe. But that tramp, she has to die. You saw how she looks at my boy. She wants him—but she’ll only hurt him. He’s too unworldly, he doesn’t know that she’s a whore at heart. You’ll see.”

  “Gina”

  “It’s my job,” she screamed at me. The violence of her anger was sudden, like a flipped switch. “My child. I protect him, and he won’t leave.” She frowned at him, and as quickly as it had come, the rage was gone, and she was just sad. “They always leave. Mama says that men are weak and women are whores.” She looked at me with sudden intensity, and I became aware that Rick’s shoulder brushed mine. “Whore.”

  “Gina Stephanie Albright,” I told her. “It’s time for you to stop.” She was spirit without soul, so there would be no moving on for her—and I never lied to something that might know I was lying.

  She made no motion, but a pottery vase flung itself at my head. I knocked it away with the pry bar, took a deep breath, and pulled on my mate-tie to Adam, borrowing the absolute authority that he bore innately. And also that part of me that was Coyote, the part that allowed me to see ghosts when no one else could.

  “Gina Stephanie Albright,” I told her, filling my words with truth and command. “You have no power. You have no place. You will not hurt anyone ever again. You do not belong here. Go away.”

  Her face twisted in rage, and I could feel her push at the commands I had given her. But I could also feel the fade in the energy of whatever force it was that allowed her ghost to remain.

  “Whore,” she screamed at me. “Whore!”

  “Go,” I told her.

  And she was gone.

  • • •

  “So,” I told Adam as we drove home together—Zack had volunteered to take my van home. “I think that there’s no point in rebuilding the garage.”

  I’d told Rick and Lisa that I was pretty sure that the one ghost was gone and that the other would fade with a little time. I also told them that if they (or the neighbors) had any further trouble, they were welcome to call me. I had the distinct impression that “they” was the right pronoun, and Lisa wasn’t going to be going to her home anytime in the near future.

  “You don’t want to rebuild the garage.” Adam’s voice was very neutral, a statement, not a question.

  “I mean,” I said, trying to sound casual about it. Businesslike. “It’s not exactly a high-profit career—fixing cheap cars so they’ll run another year. It will cost a lot to rebuild—more than the business could earn in years. I’ve already sent in the call to have it leveled to the ground.”

  I didn’t need to be independent. I trusted Adam—and I could find other ways to be useful. If I decided I needed to earn my own money, I could find a job at Jiffy Lube and make more than I did at my garage.

  “Call came to the house phone while we were gone,” he said. “Jesse left a voice message on my phone a few hours ago. The new body-and-paint guy, Lee, says that he told you the Karmann Ghia you put the Porsche engine into was going to be a hit. He was quite clear that he thought you should have trusted him.” Lee had taken the Karmann to a concours in Southern California. “It apparently brought in twice the estimate at the auction—about $19,000.” Adam glanced at me, then away, the corner of his lip turning up. “Jesse told me to tell you that she is sure about the $19,000 and, yes, she asked him twice. Apparently the guy who lost the auction is sending you a good body to fix for him if you can do all the work for $12,000—which Lee has already assured him you and he could do. He’s bringing back two other commissions as well, so you should—I quote Jesse, who quoted him—‘get your ass in gear and find somewhere to work.’ Unquote.”

  Nineteen thousand dollars meant about $10,000 profit split between me, Kim the upholstery guy, and Lee—the new body-and-paint man. For work that had taken me about forty hours altogether. Not doctor’s wages, but not bad, either. I said a quiet prayer of thanks, not for the first time, that the Karmann had been getting painted and hadn’t been stuck in my garage when the disaster struck.

  “So,” Adam continued. “I took the liberty of telling our contractor to be ready to rebuild, and in the meantime you can work out of the pole barn. I’ll loan you the amount the insurance doesn’t cover.”

  “With interest,” I demanded.

  He pursed his lips, and said, “Of course. That makes sense. Charging my wife interest. What a smart idea.”

  “Hmm,” I said, and he grinned at me.

  He turned his head back to the road but pulled my hand to his lips and bit one of my knuckles with playful promise. “Besides. As long as forgotten deities, vampires, and kids with grudges stay away, mechanic
king is a much safer occupation than ghost hunting. I’m all about keeping you safe.”

  *dpgroup.org*

  Outtake from

  SILVER BORNE

  This is an outtake, a scene that I knew happened between the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters of Silver Borne, while all the people who care about Mercy are out looking for her. I had no good way to fit this into the book—given that Silver Borne is told strictly from Mercy’s viewpoint.

  I didn’t intend to ever write it down—it is not a story, really, just a scene. But my husband, after reading “Silver,” told me that I needed to remind readers that there was a happy ending to Samuel and Ariana’s story, even if it was a long time later.

  So for those of you who have not read Silver Borne, there are some spoilers in here.

  Ariana

  Somewhere between Walla Walla and the Tri-Cities in Washington State

  The snow had fallen overnight. Ariana pulled into a meadow that had turned into a parking lot. Two of the cars, like hers, were bare, but a big black SUV and a cherry red Mercedes were dusted with snow: Adam and Samuel had been here all night.

  Samuel was beside himself—and Adam . . . She couldn’t think about Adam for very long without pulling her beast from its rest. Adam was very, very scary. Zee said he wasn’t usually like this, that Adam was usually cool and controlled. But he’d been wounded and asleep when his mate went into a fairy queen’s Elphame to rescue a human boy. The boy and the rest of the rescue party had gotten out, but Mercy had stayed behind.

  Shortly thereafter, someone had broken the mate bond that held Adam to his mate—and though she had tried, Ariana hadn’t been able to use Adam or anything else of Mercy’s to find the Elphame. Mercy’s ties to the pack, to her real life, had been sundered.

  Ariana locked her car, pulled on her gloves, and began to walk a different direction than she had yesterday and the day before. She let her earth magic seep into the soil, reaching out to look for something that didn’t belong. Zee had been here before her; she could feel the touch of the iron-kissed fae on the land. If he hadn’t found the fairy queen’s lair, then the chances of her doing so were slim. But still she had to look.