Smoke Bitten

by Patricia Briggs

  “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.

  “It smelled a little like Underhill—but not like Underhill,” I told him. “I suppose it could be something that came through her door. But it also smelled a little like that vampire who was also a sorcerer. More that than Underhill. It didn’t smell fae to me.”

  “He was bitten,” said Anna, walking beside us.

  “Bitten by what?” I asked her. “Was it the rabbit?” I was going to end up with my house haunted. Maybe I could make that a feature and rent it out as an Airbnb.

  Adam didn’t ask me who I was talking to—he’d gotten used to it. Instead he said, “You’re going to end up with Anna haunting you if you aren’t more careful.”

  “Most of them haunt places, not people,” I said uneasily. Because I knew of at least one case in which a person was haunted. That one had had some fae magic thrown in to help the weirdness along, but there was magic afoot here, too.

  Anna hadn’t answered me. She was scuffing her shoes in the dirt and squinting up at the sky. “Looks like rain,” she said.

  The skies were clear. Maybe they looked different if you were dead.

  “Smoke.” Dennis’s voice in my ear made me jump.

  I turned around, but he wasn’t visible. And Anna was gone, too.

  “What?” asked Adam.

  I shrugged, but unease left over from that whispering voice in my ears made me look around.

  “I think I’m going out hunting a jackrabbit tonight,” I told him. Finding the rabbit would make me feel better. I was still pretty sure it was just an ordinary rabbit—but I wanted to make certain. I thought I would have noticed something that could pour that kind of magic into Dennis, notice it with more than the mild interest my coyote self had evinced. But then I hadn’t sensed the magic in Dennis’s body until I’d touched it.

  “Did you get a reply?” asked Adam. “About what bit Dennis? I assume it was Dennis who was bitten.”

  I nodded. “I don’t know that he was answering me. He just said, ‘Smoke.’ They are both gone now—not that ghosts are good at communication.”

  “How can you be bitten by smoke?” asked Adam. “And why would that mean that you need to go hunting jackrabbits?”

  I explained about the rabbit I’d seen and how the marks on Dennis’s wrist looked like a rabbit bite. We had reached the porch of my little house by the time I finished. Adam opened the door I’d left unlocked without saying anything about it.

  “Anna told me, ‘He was bitten.’ I am assuming she was talking about Dennis—especially since I saw the bite myself. But that might not have anything at all to do with her death, just a leftover thought. It was Dennis who said, ‘Smoke.’ Then they both left. I don’t know if one had to do with the other.”

  Adam closed the door behind us but didn’t step farther into the house. He bowed his head for a moment before meeting my eyes.

  “I am sorry,” he said. “I know I hurt you today. I have been angry and short-tempered and I took it out on you. On you and Jesse.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk about this. What is up with you? Why the shutdown of our bond? Why no time together? Why no—” I was trying to keep my voice clinical, but if I’d said “no making love,” I would have had trouble doing it. So I said, “—sex?” And my voice wobbled a little anyway.

  He nodded, as if he’d been waiting for those questions.

  “The short answer is that I don’t know,” he said. “But something is wrong.” He thumped his chest.

  I frowned at him. “With your wolf?”

  He shook his head, but then said, “Maybe? It doesn’t feel like that—though the wolf is part of it.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him.

  “See?” he said. “It doesn’t make sense out loud.”

  “Is it me?”

  He huffed out a humorless laugh. “I promise that this is not an ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ speech.” His eyes brightened to gold. “I won’t let you go.”

  “Not your choice,” I told him. “But as it happens, you’d have a hard time shaking me off. You are mine, and I’m pretty stubborn about things like that.”

  His whole body relaxed with an odd shudder. He closed his eyes. My stomach settled for the first time in a few days. We could work this out.

  And then he said, in a voice that was not his own, “You’d leave if you knew what was inside me.”

  The wolf, I thought, after a weird moment. It was just Adam’s wolf. We’d spoken a time or two. But it hadn’t sounded quite right for the wolf.

  “Nope,” I told him—wolf and man. “Not happening.”

  “You should leave.” This time I was sure it was the wolf who spoke. “It would be safer for you.” And then Adam’s yellow eyes opened, but he gave a half laugh. “Yes, I know, that just guaranteed you are going to stick around until bodies start dropping.”

  “Are bodies going to start dropping?” I asked.

  “Mercy,” he said. “I don’t trust myself. I’ve been a werewolf for longer than you’ve been alive, and it’s been decades since I’ve had trouble with it. But now I wake up and I
’m in my wolf’s shape—without remembering how I got there.”

  Two weeks ago, I thought. He’d been a wolf when I woke up. I’d just assumed that he’d had a restless night; we both were prone to those after the witches. Sometimes on bad nights we’d go out for a run—on two legs or four. I’d thought he’d decided to let me sleep. It had been after that night that the odd distance he’d forced between us had happened; it might have been right after that night.

  He saw me remember and nodded. “Yes. That time. But it doesn’t feel like the wolf is trying to take over. I know how to control that.”

  “We cannot keep the people around us safe from ourselves,” growled his wolf.

  I couldn’t find it in myself to be frightened of Adam—though I remembered clearly the look in his eyes when I confronted him on the stairs. He hadn’t hurt me then—and he would never hurt me. But I wasn’t the one who needed convincing.

  “Is it something to do with the witches?” I asked tentatively.

  “I don’t think so,” said Adam. “It doesn’t feel like magic.”

  “Yes,” contradicted the wolf—startling Adam.

  It was pretty weird having a three-way conversation when there were only two of us in the room. Adam and his wolf were usually more integrated than this.

  “Okay, then,” I said. “Do we believe your wolf? It was something the witches did?” They had made him obey them—it was a gift one of the Hardesty witches had. One of the nightmares Adam had after that night was that under the witch’s orders, he killed me or Jesse.

  Adam shook his head. “I don’t think he knows anything I don’t.”

  “Okay,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I agreed. “Now that we have all that out in the open, how about you open up our mating bond?”

  “No,” Adam said with emphasis. “I don’t want this spilling out on you.”

  “No,” agreed the wolf.

  “All of what spilling out on me?” I asked.

  Adam flattened his lips.

  “Adam?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  He backed up against the door when I tried to put a hand on his shoulder. I raised both my eyebrows and stalked forward until he was flat against the wall and I pressed myself against him.

  He could have pushed me away. Instead I could feel him try to pull himself back, as if he wished his body could dissolve through the door so we would no longer touch.

  He turned his head from me, his eyes . . . ashamed.

  “To hell with that,” I muttered. He was only about four inches taller than I was, which meant that if he was trying to keep his lips away from me, there was still a lot of him I could reach. I kissed the skin under his jaw, soft but for the bristly hint of beard growing in. Then I rested my face against his neck and just breathed.

  Gradually, his breathing matched mine and his body relaxed, melting into mine. Finally, his arms wrapped around me.

  “I’m sorry,” he told me, his lips on my temple. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” I told him. “Fix it.”

  His chest huffed with a silent laugh, though the expression in his eyes hurt me. “I don’t know how.”

  “Figure it out,” I told him. “The first step might be letting me in.” And I tugged lightly on the mating bond between us so he would be in no doubt about what I meant.

  “No,” he said adamantly. “There are things . . .”

  “What kind of things?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Just things.” His arms tightened around me and we stood, wrapped around each other like two children in the dark.

  But he would not let me in.

  3

  I went upstairs with the intention of washing up, but as I walked past Jesse’s room, I hesitated. Light edged the bottom of her door. I knocked.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  “Me,” I said, then, in case she thought Adam was with me, “just me.”

  “Come in,” she said.

  I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t a completely cleaned room (though the carpet still needed vacuuming and some spot stain remover). It was dark outside, but I wouldn’t have thought we’d been away from the house long enough for Jesse to have accomplished tidy in her room—but here it was. She took on her room once a month, and she was about a week out from her usual weekend cleaning frenzy.

  Not only that, she’d had time to dye her hair—and freshen her makeup.

  With her newly teal hair still wet, lip gloss and eyeliner intact, Jesse was sitting cross-legged on her neatly made bed, where she had been reading something on her phone. She set her phone aside when I came in and motioned for me to shut the door. It didn’t guarantee privacy, but it did mean that any werewolf in the house wouldn’t overhear us whether they wanted to or not.

  Her eyes were puffy, but her lips quirked up. “I thought I’d try rage-cleaning. You are right, it does help. You were also right when you warned me I should tell them up front about changing schools.”

  “To be fair,” I said, “I didn’t expect this level of fireworks—and I’m not sure it would have been any better if you had told them both the day you made the decision.”

  “It might have kept Mom from bringing Auriele into it,” Jesse said.

  I snorted. “You underestimate your mother’s ability to get people to perform in the Stupid Olympics for her.”

  “Hah,” she said. “Maybe.”

  “I didn’t come up to talk about that,” I said, waving my hand. “From what Adam said, all of the offending parties have apologized for being stupid without proving they won’t be stupid again. Which is all you can expect from people who are basically truthful.”

  She smiled. “To be fair, Mom can get me to compete in the Stupid Olympics, too. I can’t afford to be too judgmental. But if someone is keeping achievement award points, for the record, I think Auriele won, hands down.” Her mouth tightened, but she continued, “So what did you come up here for?”

  “Gabriel left you a note when he moved out of my place.” I held out the key to the house and then tossed it on the bed. “Your father didn’t see it, I don’t think. I left it where it was and didn’t open it.”

  Her face paled and her nose reddened. She wiped her eyes carefully so as not to smudge her eyeliner. I could have told her that was a lost cause. “This day just couldn’t get any better,” she muttered.

  “I never challenge the fates that way,” I told her.

  She smiled absently and focused on my face. “Did you and Dad have a fight?”

  I glanced at the mirror on the top of her bureau. Jesse wasn’t the only one who looked like she’d spent some time crying.

  Damn it.

  “Not as such,” I said.

  I caught myself before I told her that Adam was working out some issues—though he’d been frustratingly unclear about exactly what those issues were. I wasn’t going to invite her into our marriage any more than I’d discuss things with Zee and Tad.

  “I hope you set him straight,” Jesse told me. “He’s been unreasonable and grouchy for long enough.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” I muttered, wondering if I was breaking my rule about involving Jesse in my relationship with her dad if she was the one doing the commenting.

  “So why have you been crying?” Jesse asked. “Did he say something?”

  No. At least not the way she meant it. Her father was shutting me out, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. That had been only one of the reasons I’d broken down and cried all over Adam tonight.

  I said, “Dennis and Anna Cather are dead.” And I teared up again, damn it, this time for my friends.

  We hadn’t done a lot together after Adam and I got married. Part of that had been the change in proximity. Though Adam’s house was no farther from theirs than my old one had been, it was on a d
ifferent street—no more driving past their house every day on the way to work and waving at them as they ate breakfast on their front porch. Like me, they had been early risers.

  Mostly, though, I’d limited our interactions out of concern for them. For years I’d flown under the radar of the bigger nasties around. Once I’d married Adam, flying low had no longer been an option. I was exposed to the supernatural community—and even among normal people I drew attention. I didn’t want to give the bad guys any more targets than necessary, so I’d restricted the amount of time I spent among people who couldn’t defend themselves from the kinds of enemies I now attracted—like the Hardesty witches as only the most recent example.

  I don’t know why I hadn’t considered that angle on their deaths earlier. I’d been thinking it had something to do with Underhill’s door. Had the Cathers been targeted because they were connected to me?

  Jesse jumped off the bed to hug me. “Mercy. Oh jeez. Anna and Dennis? What happened? Car wreck?”

  She hadn’t known them well, but she knew who they were.

  I hugged her back and stepped away. “Stop that or I’ll turn into a wet noodle and I need to keep it together.”

  She gave me a sympathetic nod. “Boy, do I know how that feels. Joel sent his wife up. Lucia’s a hugger, which is awesome, but that’s why my eyes look like this. I managed to deflect her with helping me clean or else I’d still be bawling.” Which explained the mystery of how fast Jesse’s room had been cleaned. “What happened to Anna and Dennis?”

  “Magic,” I told her, and then I gave her the full story as I knew it. If there was something running around that could cause Dennis to kill Anna, I wanted everyone I cared about to know about it.

  “Witches?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Wrong kind of magic, I think. At least it doesn’t feel like any witchcraft I’ve ever been around. And there aren’t any witches around here anymore.” Not that we knew about, anyway. We’d killed them all. “It didn’t smell like fae magic, either.”

  “Well, that shoots down my other thought,” she said. “With a door to Underhill in our own freaking backyard, I thought maybe something other than Aiden’s dangerous best friend had come strolling out.”