Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson Page 44

  It was Ariana’s fault, after all. If she’d been stronger, braver, more something, then Mercy would have been freed with the rest of them. They had been looking for her now, to no avail, for two weeks.

  If she had thought about it very long, Ariana would have given the Silver Borne to the fairy queen right from the start. It was an artifact of power—but owning it was more curse than blessing because it drained the powers of any fae who happened to get too close. They always thought there was some secret magic, some spell she’d put on it to allow her to siphon off the magic.

  There wasn’t. But fae don’t give up advantage easily—so it made them unwilling to believe any other fae would do so, either.

  She was paying too much attention to her dowsing and not enough attention to where she was going. She stepped around a half-downed fence and found herself face-to-face with a pair of werewolves. She’d known they were out here somewhere—hadn’t she just noticed their cars? But she knew that they had been told about her, told to avoid her, and she hadn’t seen any sign of them except for their cars since she’d started searching.

  She froze, unable to move, unable to do anything about the black entity that crawled up her spine and took over her body. Magic coiled in her hands, and the beast who rode her waited for them to attack.

  A gloved hand covered her eyes, another wrapped itself around her, pinning her arms to her sides. But before panic took her entirely, a voice said, Samuel’s voice said, “Run away. Get out of here, now.”

  His body was so warm along her back. Familiar warmth, though it had been a very long time since she had last felt it. She could smell the scent of his skin. But she could also feel the beast’s magic waiting eagerly for the beast to direct it.

  Frantically, she reminded the beast who Samuel was and that he wouldn’t hurt them. The beast relaxed against Samuel, mesmerized by the sound of his breath . . . and it slept. Ariana sucked in a deep breath of air.

  “Stupid,” she told him harshly. “That was so stupid. What were you thinking? It could have killed you, and I wouldn’t have been able to stop it.”

  He left his hand over her eyes and put his lips against her ear. His breath was hot as he spoke. “That’s my job, Ariana. The beast that lives inside of you is not so different from the one who lives inside of me. It knows when it meets a more dominant predator. It knows that I would never hurt you—or allow you to be hurt.”

  “It’s a beast,” she hissed. “It knows nothing.”

  “It knows me,” he told her soothingly.

  His lips brushed her ear as his arms eased from around her. Maybe it had been an accident, that touch of lips.

  He stepped back from her, touched his finger to his forehead, and walked off.

  Several times in the days to follow, she caught glimpses of him. She was sure it was deliberate. Sometimes he was in human skin, but twice he was the great white wolf she’d only seen three times before. Once when he’d attacked her, once on the day he’d left, and once when he’d come back and killed her father’s hounds—centuries ago, but she knew him. Huge and white and dangerous, he stalked a parallel path to hers, pretending he wasn’t watching her.

  It made her smile.

  Snow fell and temperatures plummeted and still they searched. The only wolf she saw was Samuel, but she heard their mournful cries on the wind as she patiently walked a new route.

  She smelled the coffee before she saw him, waiting for her next to a three-sided animal shelter. He gave her a foam cup of strong dark coffee, still uncomfortably hot.

  “Samuel,” she said. He looked tired and gaunt. She wondered where he was staying—he’d lived, she thought, in the house that had burned down.

  “Adam doesn’t think this is working,” he said with a nod to the open field. “My da is flying up tomorrow.”

  “Your da?” she said. “I thought he died.”

  Samuel shook his head. “No. Not exactly, though it took me a long time to find him and bring him home.”

  She was curious but didn’t want to bring up bad memories. She took a sip to stop her mouth, then thought of something. She frowned. “Bran, right? Your da’s name was Bran. Samuel Cornick, Bran’s son. Bran Cornick the Marrok?”

  He smiled. “That’s the one. He’s an old dog and has some canny tricks. We’re hoping he can contact her when the rest of the pack has failed.” He must have seen her doubt. “My da is a werewolf—but his ma was a witch. And witchblood generally breeds true.”

  They stood there for a while, sipping coffee in the lee of the old animal shelter.

  “How did you know when my father’s hounds came for me?” she asked. “I would have called you, but I had no magic to do it with. The beast inside of me could have called you by burning your hair, but it didn’t because I still have it.”

  “Do you?” he asked, his cup arrested only half-lifted to his mouth.

  She felt the corner of her lips turn up despite herself. “Yes. I saw them come and the beast rose up—leaving me with only scattered memories.” Her momentary happiness retreated in the face of the past. “I remember his hounds beating at the door of my home as we cowered, my terrorized beast and I. Then the howls of a wolf. I saw you, a brief glimpse of you that the beast tried to hide from me. You were standing, bloodied and triumphant, my father’s hounds dead at your feet. And then I have nothing until days later. The beast destroyed anything you’d left behind and tried to take my memories of you. I only found them later.”

  “She was only trying to protect you, your beast,” Samuel said. “You shouldn’t be so harsh to her.”

  “How did you know?”

  Samuel looked away. “My wolf thought you were our mate,” he said. “I didn’t know it then, but he forged ties of wolf magic between us. You would have had to accept them before the ties became permanent, but until you rejected us, they bound me to you. I felt your terror and it took me three days to find you. When I had killed the hounds, she opened the door, a woman with your face and black eyes, terrified of the hounds—and of me. She asked me to go and never come back—and her words broke our bond.” His voice was bleak. He took a deep breath and turned back to her with a ready smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “But that was a long time ago. And she had reason to fear me, didn’t she? I’d made her kill someone she loved.”

  They drifted back into silence. She didn’t know what he thought about, but she considered the compassion he had for the beast who had nearly destroyed them both when it had killed Haida. The events had been, as Samuel had said, a long time ago. But she had let her fears, born back in the past, endanger a woman who did not deserve it.

  “The wind has picked up,” Samuel told her reluctantly. “We’d better go.”

  She shivered, looked at his tired face, and said, “Come home with me tonight. Let me feed you.”

  He frowned at her. “I don’t need to be taken care of, Ariana.”

  “Don’t you?” She smiled into her coffee. “Don’t we all? Come home with me. We can pretend we are wise old things while we eat. In the night, we can hold each other and believe that your da can fix my mistake.”

  He dropped his cup on the ground and rounded on her so quickly she dropped hers, too. He was faster than she remembered—and fiercer as he growled, “This is not your fault.”

  “Is it not?” she asked. “I made the Silver Borne. I failed the contest that would have let us all free.”

  “Your strength saved all of us except for Mercy,” he said. “I salute your bravery.”

  “My failure,” she spit, suddenly angry. “You cannot put me on a pedestal of memory. I am not perfect. Not strong. Not beautiful.” She dropped the glamour that made her look human, let the clothes fall away so he could see her as she really was.

  He took off his coat and wrapped her in its warmth. He squeezed her shoulders, then took a few steps away and gave her his back. “I tried to
kill myself a few weeks ago, Ariana. Time . . . so much time, centuries and centuries of time, and nothing that mattered to me, no one to whom I mattered. So many people I have loved, and most of them are dead. I have been struggling for decades to rid myself of this malaise of time, and I gave up. If it had not been for the wolf who lives inside of me, I would not have known that had I only held out for a few days more . . .” He turned to look at her. “I would have missed you. And I have waited for so long, Ariana. I looked and looked. Then I went on with my life, all the while knowing that you were missing from it.”

  “You don’t know me,” she said roughly, her throat closed at the thought that he might have been gone.

  “No,” he said with simple honesty. “And yet I have loved you forever.”

  Tears welled in her eyes when she would have sworn that nothing could bring her to cry.

  “And you are brave and stalwart,” he said. “I will challenge any who say differently. For you still care, still love, and fear has no hold on your heart.” He kissed her hand. “I see you now with the experience of centuries, not the clouded eye of a chained prisoner. And my eyes tell me exactly what they told me before. You bring hope into my life when I thought there was none to find.”

  She reached out her hand and he took it.

  “So”—she cleared her throat—“that’s a yes to dinner, then?”

  Outtake from

  NIGHT BROKEN

  This is the second outtake, and it comes from Night Broken. Just after writing the very last scenes of Night Broken, I dreamed this scene. When I woke up, I tried to see if there was any way I could work it into the end. Frost Burned had had a whole chapter from Adam’s point of view, after all. But it was too short to be a full chapter. Even if it had been longer, and if I’d put a chapter from his viewpoint at the end, I’d have had to do the same thing at the beginning, or the book would have felt unbalanced to me. And there was no reason for Adam to have a chapter at the beginning. So, reluctantly, I tabled this scene.

  When my husband asked for a happy scene for Samuel and Ariana in this book, I decided that meant there was room for another outtake, too. This bit comes at the very end of the book, so be aware that there are spoilers for Night Broken herein.

  Kennewick General Hospital

  He joked with her, flirted a little, and teased. And when he could bear it no more, he excused himself to go down and get some food.

  She had been dying.

  It was supposed to have been him.

  He walked down the hospital halls toward the cafeteria, seeing and hearing nothing. Samuel had showed him the X-rays. Her neck had been broken—nothing they could do. If she lived, she might be able to move her head a little. But she would not live through the night.

  Samuel loved Mercy, too. But he’d ushered all the others out of Mercy’s room and left Adam to his deathwatch.

  Adam had been prepared for her death. He’d kept his cool—mostly. When Coyote had come and curled up on the foot of her bed, he’d thought the old trickster was keeping watch, too. Samuel came back the next morning—and they’d taken new X-rays because Mercy was wiggling her toes.

  Adam stopped and realized he’d made it all the way to the cafeteria. It was evening, near dinnertime, and there was a short line.

  Someone bumped into him. Adam looked around and saw a Native American man with a familiar face. He wore a sky-blue tracksuit and had one of those pink frilly things girls use instead of rubber bands wound around the end of his braid. There was a little lamb on a chain suspended from the frilly thing.

  “Here,” said Coyote, handing him a white paper bag that smelled of peppers, tomatoes, and sour cream. “Take this. It is better than what they are serving today.”

  Adam took the bag, glanced in it, and said, “I’m going to get a couple of drinks, too. Do you want something?”

  “Anything but orange juice,” Coyote said.

  “Mercy doesn’t like orange juice, either,” Adam told him. He paid for three cranberry-apple juices and handed one to Coyote.

  “Mercy is a smart cookie,” Coyote told him. “Except when she is not. She acts from her heart, and that leads her to danger. She needs a brave man to run with her. Are you such a man, Adam Hauptman?”

  Shrewd eyes stared up into his, and Adam felt his wolf rise to answer the challenge.

  Instead, Adam opened his juice and drank it all. “I don’t like it when she’s hurt—and she would have died if it hadn’t been for you.”

  Coyote looked down modestly, then said, “She was doing my job when she was hurt, so I could help her live if she wanted to. I am an old, old coyote, Adam Hauptman, and the thought of challenging such a one?” He gave an exaggerated shiver. “No. No. Battles are for the young.” He opened his bottle and drank a sip, grimacing at the taste. “Too much corn syrup,” he said. “Don’t they know it will stunt my growth? Where was I? Ah yes. She almost died—that’s what life’s all about, you know. Death. Everyone dies.”

  “Except you,” Adam felt obliged to point out. He put a firm lid on his growing irritation at the pontificating. Coyote had saved Mercy. If he wanted to lecture Adam, Adam would listen all day.

  “Me?” Coyote eyed the bottle with little favor but took another drink anyway. “I die all the time. Mercy only gets this once. So I ask you again, are you brave enough?”

  Adam drew a breath, turned away to toss his bottle in the recycling bin—and Coyote was gone.

  “Stupid Coyote,” he said to the air. “Brave or cowardly, it doesn’t matter. Don’t you know that if it is a choice between having Mercy or giving her up, I will be whatever I have to be?”

  He took Mercy’s juice and the white bag of take-out Mexican and walked briskly back to Mercy’s room. He opened the door and drew in a breath.

  Mercy stood silhouetted in front of the window that let in the brilliant light of the setting sun. The red-and-orange rays lit up her hair, giving it rich red highlights and turning her skin to caramel. He could see the muscles in her arms and legs that were more defined than they had been a few months ago, now that he insisted she upgrade her self-defense techniques.

  She looked for a moment like a pagan warrior goddess—a goddess clad in one of those ridiculous open-back hospital gowns with some silly bunny-and-duck pattern running in vertical lines from hem to shoulder. She looked over at him.

  “Do I smell jalapeños?” she asked—and she overbalanced. The wheeled tripod that held her saline drip bag started to tip. He dropped the bag, kept the bottle, and caught her and everything else before disaster happened.

  “Heyya, handsome,” she said in a smoky voice that told him she was still pretty stoned from the pain medications. “Where’ve you been all my life?”

  “Right here,” he said. “Waiting for you.”

  “That’s a good line,” she told him. “But you stole it from a song, so it doesn’t count.”

  “And ‘Heyya, handsome. Where’ve you been all my life?’ is original?”

  Something hard dug into his foot, and he looked down to see the silver end of the walking stick on the toe of his boot. The walking stick hadn’t been there when he’d left.

  She saw his interest. “Look at what showed up late to the party,” she said, moving the stick up and waving it around. He ducked, caught her hand, and collected the walking stick in the hand that held the bottle.

  He picked her up, hauled her and her equipment over to the bed, and sat her down. It took a few minutes to untangle blankets, sheets, and various tubes that ended in Mercy’s skin, attached by needles. But eventually he settled her in. By the time he finished, though, she was asleep, the walking stick lying protectively at her side.

  He kissed her lips, smiling as she grumbled. Then he ate a burrito in the light of the setting sun and watched over his warrior mate.

  Briggs, Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson