Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly Read online

  Adam took the digital camera from me and snapped a few pictures from different angles, then tucked it back in its case and slung it over his shoulder.

  “I’ll get it back to you as soon as I get these pictures off it,” he promised absently as he took the paper and ink stamp and, rather expertly, rolled the limp fingers in the ink, then on the sheet of paper.

  Things moved rapidly after that. Adam helped Elizaveta’s grandson deposit the body in the luxurious depths of the trunk of her car for disposal. Elizaveta did her mumbles and shakes that washed my garage in magic and, hopefully, left it clean of any evidence that I’d ever had a dead man inside. She took Mac’s clothing, too.

  “Hush,” said Adam, when Mac growled an objection. “They were little more than rags anyway. I’ve clothes that should fit you at my house, and we’ll pick up more tomorrow.”

  Mac gave him a look.

  “You’re coming home with me,” said Adam, in a tone that brooked no argument. “I’ll not have a new werewolf running loose around my city. You come and learn a thing or two, then I’ll let you stay or go as you choose—but not until I’m satisfied you can control yourself.”

  “I am going now; it is not good for an old woman like me to be up this late,” Elizaveta said. She looked at me sourly. “Don’t do anything stupid for a while if you can help it, Mercedes. I do not want to come back out here.”

  She sounded as if she came out to clean up my messes on a regular basis, though this was the first time. I was tired, and the sick feeling that killing a man had left in my stomach was still trying to bring up what little was left of my dinner. Her sharpness raised the hackles I was too on edge to pull down, so my response wasn’t as diplomatic as it ought to have been.

  “I wouldn’t want that, either,” I said smoothly.

  She caught the implied insult, but I kept my eyes wide and limpid so she wouldn’t know whether I meant it or not. Insulting witches is right up there on the stupid list with enraging Alpha werewolves and cuddling with a new wolf next to a dead body: all of which I’d done tonight. I couldn’t help it, though. Defiance was a habit I’d developed to preserve myself while growing up with a pack of dominant and largely male werewolves. Werewolves, like other predators, respect bravado. If you are too careful not to anger them, they’ll see it as a weakness—and weak things are prey.

  Tomorrow I was going to repair old cars and keep my head down for a while. I’d used up all my luck tonight.

  Adam seemed to agree because he took Elizaveta’s hand and tucked it into the crook of his elbow, drawing her attention back to him as he escorted her back to her car. Her grandson Robert gave me a lazy grin.

  “Don’t push the babushka too hard, Mercy,” he said softly. “She likes you, but that won’t stop her if she feels you aren’t showing her proper respect.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m going home to see if a few hours of sleep won’t curb my tongue before it gets us into trouble.” I meant to sound humorous, but it just came out tired.

  Robert gave me a sympathetic smile before he left.

  A heavy weight leaned against my hip and I looked down to see Mac. He gave me what I imagined was a sympathetic look. Adam was still with Elizaveta, but Mac didn’t seem to be having trouble. I scratched him lightly behind one pricked ear.

  “Come on,” I told him. “Let’s lock up.”

  This time I remembered to grab my purse.

  chapter 4

  Home at last, I decided that there was only one remedy for a night like this. My stash of dark chocolate was gone, and I’d eaten the last gingersnap, so I turned on the oven and pulled out the mixing bowl. By the time someone knocked at my door, I was pouring chocolate chips into the cookie dough.

  On my doorstep was a sprite of a girl with Day-Glo orange hair that sprang from her head in riotous curls, wearing enough eye makeup to supply a professional cheerleading squad for a month. In one hand she held my camera.

  “Hey, Mercy. Dad sent me over to give you this and to get me out of the way while he dealt with some pack business.” She rolled her eyes as she handed me the camera. “He acts like I don’t know enough to stay out of the way of strange werewolves.”

  “Hey, Jesse,” I said and waved her inside.

  “Besides,” she continued as she came in and toed off her shoes, “this wolf was cute. With a little stripe here—” She ran her finger down her nose. “He wasn’t going to hurt me. I was just rubbing his belly and my father came in and had a cow—oh yum, cookie dough! Can I have some?”

  Jesse was Adam’s daughter, fifteen going on forty. She spent most of the year with her mother in Eugene—she must be in town to spend Thanksgiving with Adam. It seemed a little early to me for that, since Thanksgiving wasn’t until Thursday, but she went to some private school for brilliant and eccentric kids, so maybe her vacations were longer than the public schools’.

  “Did you dye your hair especially for your father?” I asked, finding a spoon and handing it to her with a healthy glob of dough.

  “Of course,” she said, taking a bite, then continuing to talk as if her mouth weren’t half-full. “It makes him feel all fatherly if he can complain about something. Besides,” she said with an air of righteousness, “everyone in Eugene is doing it. It’ll wash out in a week or two. When I was tired of the lecture, I just told him he was lucky I didn’t use superglue to put spikes in like my friend Jared. Maybe I’ll do that next vacation. This is good stuff.” She started to put her spoon in the dough for another round, and I slapped her hand.

  “Not after it’s been in your mouth,” I told her. I gave her another spoon, finished mixing in the chips, and began dropping cookie dough on the pans.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” she said, after another bite, “my father sent the camera with a message. It was needlessly cryptic, but I knew you’d tell me what it meant. Are you ready?”

  I put the first pan in the oven and started loading the next one. “Shoot.”

  “He said, ‘Got a hit. Don’t fret. He was a hired gun.’ ” She waved her empty spoon at me. “Now explain it to me.”

  I suppose I should have respected Adam’s need to protect his daughter, but he was the one who sent her to me. “I killed a man tonight. Your father found out who he was.”

  “Really? And he was a hit man? Cool.” She dropped the spoon in the sink next to the first one, then boosted herself up to sit on my counter and conducted a rapid question and answer session all by herself. “Was that what you called him about earlier? He was fit to be tied. How come you called Dad? No wait. The man you killed was a werewolf, too, wasn’t he? That’s why Dad took off so fast. Who is the wolf he came back with?” She paused. “You killed a werewolf? Did you have a gun?”

  Several. But I hadn’t brought one with me to the garage.

  She had paused, so I answered her last two questions. “Yep and nope.”

  “Awesome.” She grinned. “Hey, how’dja do it?”

  “It wasn’t on purpose,” I told her repressively. I might as well have tried holding back a tidal wave with my bare hands, it would have had as much effect.

  “Of course not,” she said. “Not unless you were really pi—” I raised an eyebrow and she changed the word without slowing down. “—ticked off. Did you have a knife? Or was it a crowbar?”

  “My teeth,” I told her.

  “Ewwe—” She grimaced briefly. “Nasty. Oh, I see. You mean that you took him on while you were a coyote?”

  Most humans only know about the fae—and there are still a lot of people who think that the fae are just a hoax perpetrated by the government or on the government, take your pick. Jesse, however, as the daughter of a werewolf, human though she was, was quite aware of the “Wild Things” as she called them. Part of that was my fault. The first time I met her, shortly after the Alpha had moved his family next to my home, she’d asked me if I were a werewolf like her father. I told her what I was, and she nagged me until I showed her what it looked like when I took my other f
orm. I think she was nine and already a practiced steamroller.

  “Yep. I was just trying to get his attention so he’d chase me and leave Mac—that’s the striped werewolf—” I imitated her finger-down-the-nose gesture. “He is pretty nice,” I told her. Then, feeling I had to play adult in fairness to her father, I said, “But he’s a newbie, and his control isn’t terrific yet. So listen to your father about him, okay? If Mac bit you or hurt you, it would make him feel awful, and he’s had a bad enough time of it already.” I hesitated. It really wasn’t my business, but I liked Jesse. “There are a few of your father’s wolves that you really do need to stay away from.”

  She nodded, but said confidently, “They won’t hurt me, not with my father. But you mean Ben, don’t you? Dad told me to stay out of his way. I met him yesterday when he stopped by.” She wrinkled her nose. “He’s a snark—even if he has that cool British accent.”

  I wasn’t certain what a snark was, but I was certain Ben qualified.

  We ate the cookies as they came out of the oven, and I gave her a loaded plate covered with tinfoil to take back with her. I went out to the porch with her and saw a sales-lot of cars parked at Adam’s house. He must have called in the pack.

  “I’ll walk you home,” I said, slipping on the shoes I kept on the porch for when it was muddy.

  She rolled her eyes, but waited for me. “Really, Mercy, what’ll you do if one of the pack decides to bother us?”

  “I can scream really loud,” I said. “That’s if I don’t decide to use my newly patented technique and kill him, too.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “But I’d stick to screaming. I don’t think that Dad would like it if you started killing his wolves.”

  Probably none of them would harm a hair of her head, just as she thought. I was almost sure she was right. But one of the cars I could see was Ben’s red truck. I wouldn’t leave a fifteen-year-old alone if Ben was around no matter whose daughter she was.

  No one bothered us as we walked through my back field.

  “Nice car,” she murmured, as we passed the donor Rabbit’s corpse. “Dad really appreciates you setting it out here for him. Good for you. I told him the next time he annoyed you, you were likely to paint graffiti on it.”

  “Your father is a subtle man,” I told her. “I’m saving the graffiti for later. I’ve decided that the next time he gets obnoxious, I’ll take three tires off.” I held my hand out and canted it, like a car with one wheel.

  She giggled. “It would drive him nuts. You should see him when the pictures aren’t hanging straight on the walls.” We reached the back fence, and she climbed cautiously through the old barbed wire. “If you do decide to paint it—let me help?”

  “Absolutely,” I promised. “I’ll wait here until you’re safely inside.”

  She rolled her eyes again, but grinned and sprinted for her back porch. I waited until she waved to me once from Adam’s back door and disappeared inside.

  When I took the garbage out before I went to bed, I noticed that Adam’s place was still full of cars. It was a long meeting, then. Made me grateful I wasn’t a werewolf.

  I turned to go into my house and stopped. I’d been stupid. It doesn’t matter how good your senses are if you aren’t paying attention.

  “Hello, Ben,” I said, to the man standing between me and the house.

  “You’ve been telling tales, Mercedes Thompson,” he said pleasantly. As Jesse had said, he had a nifty English accent. He wasn’t bad-looking either, if a trifle effeminate for my taste.

  “Mmm?” I said.

  He tossed his keys up in the air and caught them one-handed, once, twice, three times without taking his eyes off mine. If I yelled, Adam would hear, but, as I told him earlier, I didn’t belong to him. He was possessive enough, thank you. I didn’t really believe Ben was stupid enough to do something to me, not with Adam within shouting distance.

  “ ‘Stay here a moment, Ben,’ ” Ben said, with an exaggeration of the drawl that Adam’s voice still held from a childhood spent in the deep South. “ ‘Wait until my daughter has had a chance to get to her room. Wouldn’t want to expose her to the likes of you.’ ” The last sentence lost Adam’s tone and fell back into his own crisp British accent. He didn’t sound quite like Prince Charles, but closer to that than to Fagan in Oliver.

  “I don’t know what you think it has to do with me,” I told him with a shrug. “You’re the one who got kicked out of the London pack. If Adam hadn’t taken you, you’d have been in real trouble.”

  “It wasn’t me that done it,” he growled ungrammatically. I refrained from correcting him with an effort. “And as for what you have to do with it, Adam told me you’d warned him to keep Jesse out of my way.”

  I didn’t remember doing that although I might have. I shrugged. Ben had come to town a few months ago in a flurry of gossip. There had been three particularly brutal rapes in his London neighborhood, and the police had been looking in his direction. Guilty or not, his Alpha felt it would be good to get him out of the limelight and shipped him to Adam.

  The police hadn’t anything to hold him on, but after he’d emigrated the rapes stopped. I checked—the Internet is an amazing thing. I remembered speaking to Adam about it, and I warned him to watch Ben around vulnerable women. I’d been thinking about Jesse, but I didn’t think I’d said that explicitly.

  “You don’t like women,” I told him. “You are rude and abrasive. What do you expect him to do?”

  “Go home, Ben,” said a molasses-deep voice from just behind my right shoulder. I needed to get more sleep, darn it, if I was letting everyone sneak up on me.

  “Darryl,” I said, glancing back at Adam’s second.

  Darryl was a big man, well over six feet. His mother had been Chinese, Jesse had told me, and his father an African tribesman who had been getting an engineering degree at an American university when they met. Darryl’s features were an arresting blend of the two cultures. He looked like someone who should have been modeling or starring in movies, but he was a Ph.D. engineer working at the Pacific Northwest Laboratories in some sort of government hush-hush project.

  I didn’t know him well, but he had that eminently respectable air that college professors sometimes have. I much preferred him at my back to Ben, but I wasn’t happy being between two werewolves, whoever they were. I stepped sideways until I could see them both.

  “Mercy.” He nodded at me but kept his eyes on Ben. “Adam noticed you were missing and sent me to find you.” When Ben didn’t respond, he said, “Don’t screw up. This is not the time.”

  Ben pursed his lips thoughtfully, then smiled, an expression that made a remarkable difference to his face. Only for an instant, he looked boyishly charming. “No fuss. Just telling a pretty lady good night. Good night, sweet Mercedes. Dream of me.”

  I opened my mouth to make a smart comment, but Darryl caught my eye and made a cutoff gesture with his hand. If I’d had a really good comeback, I’d have said it anyway, but I didn’t, so I kept my mouth shut.

  Darryl waited until Ben started off, before saying brusquely, “Good night, Mercy. Lock your doors.” Then he strode off toward Adam’s.

  Between the dead wolf and Ben’s wish, I suppose I should have had nightmares, but instead I slept deeply and without dreams—none I remembered anyway.

  I slept with the radio on, because otherwise, with my hearing, all I did was catnap all night. I’d tried earplugs, but that blocked sound a little too well for my peace of mind. So I turned music on low to block the normal sounds of night and figured anything louder would wake me up.

  Something woke me up that morning about an hour before the alarm, but though I turned down the music and listened, all I heard was a car with a well-muffled Chevy 350 driving away.

  I rolled over to go back to sleep, but Medea realized I was awake and began yowling at me to let her out. She wasn’t particularly loud, but very persistent. I decided it had been long enough since Adam’s note that lett
ing her run wouldn’t make him feel like I was deliberately defying him. It would also buy me some quiet so I could catch that last hour of sleep.

  Reluctantly, I got out of my warm bed and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. Happy to have me up and moving, Medea stropped my shins and generally got in the way as I staggered blearily out of my room, across the living room to the front door. I yawned and turned the doorknob, but when I tried to open the door, it resisted. Something was holding it shut.

  With an exasperated sigh, I put my shoulder against the door and it moved a reluctant inch or so, far enough for me to catch a whiff of what lay on the other side: death.

  Wide-awake, I shut the door and locked it. I’d smelled something else, too, but I didn’t want to admit it. I ran back to my room, shoved my feet in my shoes, and opened the gun safe. I grabbed the SIG 9mm and shoved a silver-loaded magazine in it, then tucked the gun into the top of my pants. It was cold, uncomfortable, and reassuring. But not reassuring enough.

  I’d never actually shot anything but targets. If I hunted, I did it on four paws. My foster father, a werewolf himself, had insisted I learn how to shoot and how to make the bullets.

  If this was werewolf business, and, after the previous night, I had to assume it was—I needed a bigger gun. I took down the .444 Marlin and loaded it for werewolf. It was a short rifle, and small unless you took a good look at the size of the barrel. The lipstick-sized silver bullets were guaranteed, as my foster father used to say, to make even a werewolf sit up and take notice. Then he’d put a finger alongside his nose, smile, and say, “Or lie down and take notice, if you know what I mean.” The Marlin had been his gun.

  The rifle was a comfortable, fortifying presence when I quietly opened my back door and stepped out into the predawn night. The air was still and cold: I took a deep breath and smelled death, undeniable and final.