Smoke Bitten

by Patricia Briggs

  My official hours didn’t start until noon on Saturday, but I had some cars to finish up and a boatload of paperwork. After a recent IRS audit, I was religious about my paperwork. In the end, I owed them $452.00, which they had graciously rounded down from $452.34. But at one point, before I finally located a box of receipts where I’d used it to balance a transmission, they had claimed I owed them a little over six thousand dollars. Which meant, my accountant (Lucia) pointed out, if I could have found the other missing box, the government would probably have owed me money.

  So off to work I needed to go.

  I felt better after a shower and some painkiller to ease away the ache of repeated vigorous nighttime activity. I paused as I was brushing my teeth. I never used to have to resort to painkillers. Was I getting old? Or had Adam started to use sex to make up for the fact he was keeping our bond closed down?

  Hmm.

  When I got to the garage, it was still early enough that the lights in the parking lot were on. I waved to the camera and imagined Carlos or Butch—or Adam—waving back. The office, when I let myself in, smelled overwhelmingly of gasoline.

  I grimaced. Fuel odors were par for the course when running a garage—and at least gasoline was volatile and would clear pretty quickly once I opened the bay doors.

  I’d parked a ’62 Mercedes convertible in the garage last night for safekeeping, and I assumed that was where the fuel smell was coming from. It belonged to a local car collector, the prize of his collection, and it was in for its annual checkup. It wasn’t surprising that it had developed a fuel line problem. Even the best auto engineers in the world didn’t factor in better than a half century of use.

  It was a little odd that Adam hadn’t called me about it when he’d been here earlier to check the security system—but he knew I was planning on coming in early. And he knew that he’d left me short of sleep.

  I was smiling as I tucked my purse in the safe and locked it. The safe was on the floor under the counter and my back twinged as I stood up. I stretched, touched my toes, and the ache dissipated. The stiff muscles clinched it, though. I would start with finding the fuel line problem, and that would give me plenty of opportunity to work out any lingering stiffness before I started on paperwork.

  I turned on the stereo and found a soft-rock station. I hummed along with “Spirit in the Sky,” a song nearly as old as the ’62 Mercedes, as I opened the door to the bays.

  “Hello, Mercedes Thompson,” Fiona said. “We have some business to conduct.”

  She’d been waiting on the far side of the garage, where she had a clear shot at me. And she was standing in classic shooter position with—if I was not mistaken—Adam’s carry gun in her hands.

  I took a moment to assess the situation.

  A gas can had been overturned near the door, leaving a puddle of gasoline—designed to keep me from scenting an intruder. To keep Adam from realizing that he wasn’t alone, too. In the corner where the real brains of the security system lurked, Adam lay unmoving on the ground.

  He wasn’t dead, I told my panicking soul. I would know if he were dead.

  “If you cooperate,” she said, “I will not kill either of you today.

  “There is a chair,” she said. “Go sit down.”

  A couple of weeks ago I’d pulled one of the sturdy metal chairs from the office into the bays—I couldn’t remember offhand just why. She had set it in front of the lift in bay one. And on the ground around it were cuffs and chains that looked very businesslike.

  I glanced again at Adam—he was breathing.

  “Don’t worry, your mate is alive. He’ll stay that way if you follow my directions.” She wasn’t lying.

  “What did you do to him?” I asked.

  “Ketamine and silver,” she said. “A little trick I learned along the way.”

  “Gerry Wallace has a lot to answer for,” I said. Gerry had been the first to concoct a tranquilizer that would work on werewolves. But I felt a little better. The tranquilizer could be fatal if the silver concentration was too great. But Adam was an Alpha werewolf. It would take a lot of the tranquilizer to kill him.

  “Sit in the chair, Mercy.”

  If I did that, all of my options were gone.

  “The alarm glitches were you,” I said, to engage her in conversation.

  “There is a reason that ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ is a classic,” she answered. “I have a way with electronics.” She nodded toward the corner where Adam and the heart of the surveillance system lay. “The video is currently playing a loop—after it replayed a segment of Adam coming in and leaving from a few days ago. His people won’t know that there is anything wrong until they don’t see you come in at noon.”

  “But you needed more than just to game the security system,” I said. “This is not only your taking advantage of an opportunity. You had to watch us, track our habits—without anyone in a pack of werewolves noticing.” I put a little admiration in my voice.

  There is very little that arrogant people like more than an appreciative audience. At the moment, I didn’t really care about reasons or methods; I was trying to buy time. I didn’t know what I would do with it yet—that depended upon her and whatever opportunities she gave me.

  “That was trickier,” she acknowledged. “And more boring. Your house is supposed to be the home of a werewolf pack—so why are you teaching some kid to read? If I had to listen to another hour of ‘H is for horse,’ I’d have to shoot someone. Do you know that you have a baby vampire who likes to watch your house?”

  “Yes,” I told her.

  I’d thought she had watched us, but she’d done one better. She had bugged our house. Those lessons with Aiden took place in the kitchen, the heart of the home. But she hadn’t managed to bug all of it, I didn’t think. We didn’t talk about Wulfe a lot because we didn’t want to worry the pack, but he made sure that he didn’t go unnoticed. Two days ago, I know that Adam and I had talked about Wulfe in our bedroom. If she had overheard us—or come face-to-face with him—she would never have referred to him as a “baby vampire.”

  After considering my words carefully, I said, “For the past few months we have had the government trying to bug our house on a regular basis. Adam does a daily sweep for bugs. How did you manage?”

  I didn’t mention the fact that there were werewolves in and out of the house at all hours. She could not have done it without magic—and I didn’t remember her being able to use magic. Bran would have mentioned that when I talked to him. And magic . . . magic worried me. I thought about how she had called me by my married name that afternoon at Kelly’s house. She had known me by my maiden name. If she and her group of lost wolves were searching for a pack to take over, I was not important except as a weakness to exploit. But, in retrospect, I realized she had looked at me like someone addressing a target.

  “Not all listening devices are electronic,” she told me. “I know a witch who specializes in surveillance.”

  Suddenly I was a lot more concerned about why Fiona was still here than I had been a few seconds ago. I reevaluated our interactions with Fiona and her pack, adding in witches, and some patterns started to make sense. A wolf trying to take over a pack would not make an alliance with a fae creature—which was why none of the rest of her wolves had known about the smoke weaver. Witchcraft explained why the goblins hadn’t found Fiona or her people. Bran had told me that Fiona was selling her services to the highest bidder—and the witches certainly had reason to want revenge. Or worse. I had a bad feeling about why Adam and I weren’t dead.

  Fiona smiled at me; her expression would have been friendly if I hadn’t been able to see her eyes. “Now that you have finished flattering me, go sit in that chair or I shoot Adam in the head. In that case, I’ll have to kill you immediately, too, or risk getting caught by your pack. If you cooperate, I will not kill him. I know you can hear that I’m telling
the truth. Now, you have three seconds. One . . .”

  I sat in the chair. But not because she had started counting. Adam was coming around—I felt the draw on the pack bonds as he started fighting off the effects of the tranq.

  I pulled the chair sideways a little so that it gave me a better view of Adam. Hopefully she’d think that was the only reason I’d done it. But it meant that while she was dealing with me, her back would be mostly toward him. I wanted her attention on me, though I didn’t think she’d ignore him entirely. If he moved, she’d react. But there was a good chance that she would trust the drug. That tranq was nasty business—but Adam had encountered it before.

  “Funny,” she said. “But I don’t care which direction you face.”

  I raised my eyebrows and turned the chair to face Adam directly.

  “Put on the ankle chains,” she said.

  The ankle cuffs were nylon and looked to be standard-issue. With them on, I could use my legs with the same grace as the average mermaid on land. I deliberately fumbled with them to give Adam more time. The power that he was pulling made me dizzy. That draw alone was going to alert the pack that something was wrong. Almost as soon as I thought that, Adam’s phone rang. Fiona’s time had just been limited; all I had to do was keep her occupied until someone figured out where we were.

  “And now the wrist cuffs.”

  She had used two old-fashioned metal handcuffs, attaching each one to opposite chair legs. The bracing on the chair legs ensured that the cuff wouldn’t just slide off if I tipped the chair upside down.

  She knew I wasn’t a werewolf. Nylon cuffs wouldn’t hold a werewolf at all. The metal handcuffs would last longer—and really tick off the werewolf who broke them, because breaking them would hurt. She knew that I could change into a coyote. She had called me “Bran’s little coyote pet.” But she didn’t understand what I was, because otherwise she would know that the cuffs, any cuffs designed to hold a human, were worse than useless. Maybe she thought that it would take me a while to change shapes—the way it took a werewolf time.

  As soon as I had the handcuffs on, she walked up to me. She bent down to tighten the cuffs on my ankles. Then, smiling, she pulled a collar out and wrapped it around my neck. It fit tightly enough that it was decidedly uncomfortable. I heard chain rattle as she attached that to the back of the chair. Unlike the cuffs, the collar would hold me, coyote or no, so maybe she hadn’t underestimated me as much as I thought she had.

  “Coyote’s daughter, Kent told me,” she said. “That explains a lot—like why Bran decided out of the goodness of his heart to let bleeding-heart Bryan adopt you. I wonder what Coyote did for Bran for the Marrok to make a deal like that.”

  I was pretty sure that it was my mother who had pushed Bran into accepting responsibility for me. But Fiona didn’t know my mother, so I could see why she would look for someone else. Bran wasn’t known for his soft heart.

  “Kent?” I asked.

  “He’s one of mine,” she told me. “Witchbound to my service like Sven was.” She gave me a thoughtful look that I’d seen on other people’s faces before. So I had my abs tight when she punched me in the stomach.

  It hurt anyway. But she was a werewolf; if she had wanted to, she could have killed me with that blow.

  “Hardesty family paying you?” I asked when I could breathe. I didn’t want it to be them, especially when Fiona seemed interested in keeping me alive. I had close-up knowledge of the kinds of things black witches did with living victims, and I didn’t know of any witches blacker than the ones in the Hardesty family.

  Fiona smiled. “I understand you had a run-in with them recently. They are very unhappy with you. I might have been offered a reward should you die and a bigger reward for a live capture. They don’t know what you are, Mercy—I haven’t told them yet. But they know that you were the key in the deaths of their people—and they think that you might have been the one responsible for destroying a treasure that had taken them generations to build.”

  Zombies.

  “Charles will hunt you down,” I told her, and she flinched. She was afraid of Charles.

  She should have been afraid of Adam. He had quit drawing power from the pack.

  “The witches pay well enough that I can hide for generations if I need to—and they have promised protection, too.” She gave me a sisterly smile. “But you and I know how far to trust the word of a black witch. I have some value for them, too; they like to play with werewolves. Too much to ever put myself in their power.”

  If she had let them witchbond people to her, she was already in their power. I didn’t exactly know what she meant by the term, but I knew witches.

  “Kent told you what happened with the smoke weaver?” I asked her. It didn’t matter to me, but I needed to keep her attention on me. “Bastard. I trusted him.” True enough to keep her from reading a lie. But the bite in my voice was fake—I didn’t want her knowing that I was wasting time.

  Something rose silently from the place where Adam had been lying. Something too big.

  Oh, my love, what did you do?

  But I knew. He’d had to pull everything he could to wash the silver and ketamine out of his system. He would not have been able to pull more to increase the speed of his shift usefully. Not to mention that she would have noticed if he had tried to shift to his wolf form—it was not a subtle thing. An unarmed human form against a werewolf with his own gun—the odds were not optimal. He’d have taken them, but he had another option.

  I did not think it had taken him ten seconds to change from human to monster.

  “Fucking Rumpelstiltskin,” Fiona said. “What is the world coming to when you have to make deals with a damned fae and he turns out to be Rumpelstiltskin?”

  “Rumpelstiltskin” was the last word Fiona ever said. A giant nightmarish monster landed on her from fifteen feet away and ate her neck in the same motion. The gun went off because she’d had her finger on the trigger. She was dead by then, but the gun had been pointed at me and the bullet hit me in the arm.

  The monster that had been Adam dragged Fiona’s body back into the corner with all the useless surveillance electronics and settled in to feed. Growling defensively, as if I might try to take his prey away.

  I didn’t need to see his eyes to know that Adam wasn’t home. Adrenaline is the enemy of control for a werewolf, and Adam had had to build up adrenaline to fight the tranquilizer, even with the pack’s help. He’d changed without a moment to spare for gathering his thoughts, centering himself. If he had changed to his wolf, I would have been surprised if Adam had managed to hang on to control under the circumstances. But that would have been okay. I was the mate of Adam and his wolf; neither of them would ever hurt me.

  I did not think I shared that link with the monster.

  I shifted to coyote and lost the wrist and ankle cuffs, but my neck was pretty much the same size in either form. I shifted back and found that the monster was staring at me. The sound of the cuffs hitting the floor must have attracted his attention.

  He inhaled, nostrils flaring. I didn’t know if he could smell my blood over the scent of gasoline. I met his eyes briefly—silver and bright like the moon—then quickly looked away and down.

  He didn’t make any sound, but I felt him come over to me. His nose touched the top of my head and trailed to my neck. I raised my chin and tilted my head, giving him free access to the pulse that beat wildly there. I was breathing in shallow, openmouthed pants because I was so scared.

  I could smell Adam on him—but I could not smell the wolf. Just a sour musk that smelled like rage and hatred and witchcraft. It had grown stronger since I’d last met it. I had made a mistake in not calling Bran sooner.

  Something warm and wet hit the top of my shoulder. Drool.

  He bit my neck. If I hadn’t been wearing that collar, I’d have been dead. I think there must have been silv
er in it because he yipped and then roared at me. I kept my eyes closed because I didn’t want my last sight to be this creature, born of witchcraft and self-hatred. But he retreated back to his meal.

  He was so precise in his movements, the chair hadn’t even skidded on the floor. He’d bent the collar and it restricted my breathing now. The arm that had been shot wouldn’t obey me. But I raised my free arm and felt around the collar. I found the latch—and the lock.

  With two good hands and a lockpick I could have opened that thing up in a few seconds. If wishes were horses . . .

  I could feel the stirring in the pack bonds—the rise of alarm. They would come here soon, and they would be able to take this monster down—if they worked together. If they didn’t hesitate because it was Adam. But some people would die.

  And I would be dead before they got here, because though he was eating again, his face was toward me, his eyes focusing on my exposed abdomen.

  Blow up the bond, Bran had told me. And then refused to explain what he meant. And he’d given me that advice without a full explanation of the extent of the problem.

  It wasn’t like I had a lot of options.

  I closed my eyes again, because I couldn’t do this with the monster staring at me. Then I put myself in the place where I could see the bonds.

  The pack bonds exploded into sound, as if I’d stepped into a firehouse in the middle of an all-hands three-alarm fire. I told them, “Not now—hush.” And the otherness quieted.

  I stood ankle-deep in a creek so cold it made my feet ache; the bond I shared with Stefan was still wrapped around one ankle and I felt his attention on me even though it was daylight and he should be dead for the day. I could have called him to me, I thought. Stefan would not hesitate when faced with the monster my mate had become.