Shifting Shadows

by Patricia Briggs

  “Well,” said Stella, “no one is going to think you look like a cuddly grandma.”

  The woman laughed, her face lighting up with a cheer so genuine that Stella thought she might have liked her if only the laughter didn’t showcase her fangs. “The boy talked, did he? I thought for sure he’d hold his tongue, if only to keep his own secrets. Either that or broadcast it to the world, and then you and I wouldn’t be in this position.”

  She gave Stella a kindly smile that showed off a charmingly mismatched pair of dimples. “I am sorry you had to be involved. I tried to get you out of it.”

  But Stella had been dealing with people a long time, and she could smell a fake a mile away. The laughter had been real, but the kind concern certainly wasn’t.

  “Separating your prey,” Stella said. She needed to get the vampire into the room, where her father could drop on top of her, but how?

  The vampire displayed her fangs and dimples again. “More convenient and easier to keep the noise down,” she allowed. “But not really necessary. Not even if you are a”—she took a deep breath—“werewolf.”

  The news didn’t seem to bother her. Stella fought off the feeling that her father was going to be overmatched. He’d been a soldier and then a mercenary, training his own sons and then grandsons. Surely he knew what he was doing.

  “Hah,” sneered Devonte in classic adolescent disdain. “You aren’t so tough. I nearly killed you all by myself.”

  The vampire sneered right back, and on her, the expression made the hair on the back of Stella’s neck stand up and take notice. “You were a mistake, boy. One I intend to clear up.”

  • • •

  David crouched motionless, waiting for the sound of the vampire’s voice to indicate she had moved underneath him.

  Patience, patience, he counseled himself, but he should have been counseling someone else.

  • • •

  If the vampire’s theatrics scared Stella, they drove Devonte into action. The bed he tried to smash her father with rattled across the floor. He must have tired himself out with his earlier wizardry because it was traveling only half as fast as it had when he’d tried to drive her father through the wall.

  The vampire had no trouble grabbing it . . . or throwing it through the plaster wall and into the hallway, where it crashed on its side, flinging wheels, bedding, mattress, and pieces of the arcana that distinguished it from a normal bed.

  She was so busy impressing them with her Incredible Hulk imitation, she didn’t see the old blue-gray chair. It hit her squarely in the back, driving her directly under the panel Devonte had cracked.

  “Now,” whispered Stella, diving toward the hole the vampire had made in the wall, hoping that would be out of the way.

  Even though Devonte’s chair had knocked the vampire to her knees, Stella’s motion drew her attention. The thing was fast, and she lunged for Stella in the same motion she used to rise. Then the roof fell on top of her, the roof and a silently snarling red-gold wolf with claws and fangs that made the vampire’s look like toys.

  For a moment she was twelve again, watching the monster dig those long claws into her mother’s lover and she froze in horror. The woman looked frail beneath the huge wolf’s bulk—until she pulled her legs under him and threw him into the outer wall, the one made of cinder blocks and not plaster.

  With an inhuman howl, the vampire leaped upon her father. She looked nothing like the elegant woman who had walked into the room. In the brief glimpse she’d had of her face, Stella saw something terrible . . . evil.

  “Stella, behind you!” Devonte yelled, hopping of the bed, his good arm around his ribs.

  She hadn’t been paying attention to anything except the vampire. Devonte’s warning came just a little late and someone grabbed her by the arm and jerked her roughly around—Linnford. Gone was the urbane smile and GQ posture; his face was lit with fanaticism and madness. He had a knife in the hand that wasn’t holding her. She reacted without thinking, twisting so his thrust went past her abdomen, slicing through fabric but not skin.

  Something buzzed between them, hitting Linnford in the chest and knocking him back to the floor. He jerked and spasmed like a skewered frog in a film she’d once had to watch in college. The chair sat on top of him, balanced on one bent leg, the other three appearing to hover in the air.

  It took a moment for her to properly understand what she was seeing. The bent chair leg was stuck into his rib cage, just to the left of his sternum. Blood began spitting out like a macabre fountain.

  “Honey?” Hannah Linnford stood in the doorway. Like Stella, she seemed to be having trouble understanding what she was seeing.

  Muttering, “Does no one remember to shut the security doors?” Stella pulled the mini-canister of Mace her youngest brother had given her after the mugging incident out of her pocket and sprayed it in the other woman’s face.

  If she’d been holding Linnford’s knife, she could have cheerfully driven it through Hannah’s neck: these people had taken one of her kids and tried to feed him to a vampire.

  Thinking of her kids made Stella look for Devonte.

  He was leaning against the wall a few feet from his bed, staring at Linnford—and his expression centered Stella because he needed her. She ran to him and tugged him to the far corner of the room, away from the fighting monsters, but too close to the Linnfords. Once she had him where she wanted him, she did her best to block his view of Linnford’s dying body. If she could get medical help soon enough, Linnford might survive—but she felt no drive to do it. Let him rot.

  Mace can in hand, she kept a weather eye on the woman screaming on the floor, but most of her attention was on the battle her father was losing.

  They fought like a pair of cats, coming together clawing and biting, almost too fast for her eyes to focus on, then, for no reason she could see, they’d retreat. After a few seconds of staring at each other, they’d go at it again. Unlike cats, they were eerily silent.

  The vampire’s carefully arranged hair was fallen, covering her face, but not disguising her glittering . . . no, glowing red eyes. Her arm flashed out in a jerky movement that was so quick Stella almost missed it—and the wolf twitched away with another wound that dripped blood: the vampire was still virtually untouched.

  The two monsters backed away from each other and the vampire licked her fingers.

  “You taste so good, wolf,” she said. “I can’t wait until I can sink my fangs through your skin and suck that sweetness dry.”

  Stella sprayed Hannah in the face again. Then she hauled Devonte out the door and away from the vampire, making regrettably little allowance for his broken ribs. Dead was worse than in pain.

  • • •

  It was working, David thought, watching the vampire lick his blood off her fingers. Though he was mostly focused on the vampire, he noticed when Stella took the boy out of the room. Good for her. With the vampire’s minions here, one dead and one incapacitated, she shouldn’t have trouble getting out. He hoped she took Devonte to her home—or any home—where they’d be safe. Then he put them out of his mind and concentrated on the battle at hand.

  He’d met a vampire or two, but never fought one before. He’d heard that some of them had a strange reaction to werewolf blood. She seemed to be one of them.

  He could only hope that her bloodlust would make her stupid. He’d heard that vampires couldn’t feed from the dead. If it wasn’t true, he might be in trouble.

  He waited for her to come at him again—and this time he stepped into her fist, falling limply at her feet. She hit him hard, he felt the bone in his jaw creak, so the limp fall wasn’t hard to fake. He’d wait until she started feeding and the residual dizziness from her blow left, then he’d take her.

  She fell on him and he waited for her fangs to dig in. Instead she jerked a couple of times and then lay still. She wasn’t br
eathing and her heart wasn’t beating—but she’d been like that when she walked into the room.

  “Papa?”

  Stella was supposed to be safely away.

  He rose with a roar, making an audible sound for the first time so the vampire would pay attention to him and leave his daughter alone. But the woman’s body rolled smoothly off of him and lay on the floor—two wooden chair legs stuck through her back.

  “Are you all right? Jorge left the security door open. I knew it when the Linnfords came in. We broke the legs off Jorge’s chair, and Devonte used whatever he used to toss the furniture around to drive them into her back.”

  The soldier in him insisted on a full and quick survey of the room. Linnford was dead, the abused chair the obvious cause of death. A woman, presumably his wife, sobbed harshly, her face pressed into Linnford’s arm: a possible threat. Stella and Devonte were standing way too close to the vampire.

  They’d killed her.

  For a moment he felt a surge of pride. Stella didn’t have an ounce of quit in her whole body. She and the boy had managed to take advantage of the distraction he’d arranged before he could.

  “Everyone was gone, Jorge and everyone.” He looked at the triumph in Stella’s face, not quite hidden by her worry for her friends.

  She thought the vampire was finished, but wood through the heart didn’t always keep the undead down.

  “Are you all right?” Stella asked. And then when he just stared at her, “Papa?”

  He’d come here hoping to play hero, he knew, hoping to mend what couldn’t be mended. But the only role for him was that of monster, because that was the only thing he was.

  He pulled the sheet off the bed and ripped it with a claw, then tossed it toward Linnford’s sobbing woman. Stella took the hint and she and Devonte made a rope of sorts out of it and tied her up.

  While they were working at that, he walked slowly up to the vampire. Stella had called him Papa tonight, more than once. He’d try to hold on to that and forget the rest.

  He growled at the vampire: her fault that he would lose his daughter a second time. Then he snapped his teeth through her spine. The meat of her was tougher than it should have been, tougher than jerky and bad-tasting to boot. His jaw hurt from the hit he’d taken as he set his teeth and put some muscle into separating her head from her body.

  When he was finished, the boy was losing his last meal in the corner, an arm wrapped around his ribs. Throwing up with broken ribs sucked: he knew all about that. Linnford’s woman was secured. Stella had a hand over her mouth as if to prevent herself from imitating Devonte. When she pulled her eyes away from the vampire’s severed head and looked at him, he saw horror.

  He felt the blood dripping from his jaws—and couldn’t face her any longer. Couldn’t stay while horror turned to fear of him. He didn’t look at his daughter again as he ran away for the first time in his long life.

  • • •

  When he could, he changed back to human at the home of the local werewolf pack. They let him shower, and gave him a pair of sweats—the universal answer to the common problem of changing back to human and not having clothes to put back on.

  He called his oldest son to make sure that Stella had called him and that he had handled the cleanup. She had remembered, and Clive was proceeding with his usual thoroughness.

  Linnford was about to have a terrible car wreck. The vampire’s body, both parts of it, were scheduled for immediate incineration. The biggest problem was what to do with Linnford’s wife. For the moment she seemed to be too traumatized to talk. Maybe the vampire’s death had broken her—or maybe she’d come around. Either way, she’d need help, discreet help from people who knew how to tell the difference between the victim of a vampire and a minion and would treat her accordingly.

  David made a few calls, and got the number of a very private sanitarium run by a small, very secret government agency. The price wasn’t bad—all he had to do was rescue some missionary who was related to a high-level politician. The fool had managed to get kidnapped with his wife and two young children. David’s team would still get paid, and he’d probably have taken the assignment anyway.

  By the time he called Clive back, his sons had located a few missing hospital personnel and the cop who’d been guarding the door. David heard the relief in Clive’s voice: Jorge was apparently a friend. None of the recovered people seemed to be hurt, though they had no idea why they were all in the basement.

  David hung up and turned off his cell phone. Accepting the offer of a bedroom from the pack Alpha, David took his tired body to bed and slept.

  • • •

  Christmas Day was coming to a close when David drove his rental to his son’s house—friends had picked it up from the hospital for him.

  Red and green lights covered every bush and railing as well as surrounding all the windows. Knee-high candy canes lined the walk.

  There were cars at his son’s house. David frowned at them and checked his new watch. He was coming over at the right time. He’d made it clear that he didn’t want to intrude—which was understood to mean that he wouldn’t come when Stella was likely to be there.

  He’d already have been on a flight home except that he didn’t know how to contact Devonte. He tapped the envelope against his leg and wondered why he’d picked up a Christmas card instead of just handing over his business card. Below his contact information he’d made Devonte an open job offer beginning as soon as Devonte was eighteen. David could think of a thousand ways a wizard would be of use to a small group of mercenaries.

  Of course, after watching David tear up the vampire’s body, Devonte probably wouldn’t be interested, so more to the point was the name and phone number on the other side of the card. Both belonged to a wizard who was willing to take on a pupil; the local Alpha had given it to him.

  Clive had promised to give it to Devonte.

  David had to search under the giant wreath on the door for the bell. As he waited, he noticed that he could hear a lot of people inside, and even through the door he smelled the turkey.

  He took a step back, but the door was already opening.

  Stella stood in the doorway. Over her shoulder he could see the whole family running around preparing the table for Christmas dinner. Devonte was sitting on the couch reading to one of the toddlers that seemed to be everywhere. Clive leaned against the fireplace and met David’s gaze. He lifted a glass of wine and sipped it, smiling slyly.

  David took another step back and opened his mouth to apologize to Stella . . . just as her face lit with her mother’s smile. She stepped out onto the porch and wrapped her arms around him.

  “Merry Christmas, Papa,” she said. “I hope you like turkey.”

  ROSES IN WINTER

  Kara never appeared in any of the Mercy books, but her father’s appeal to Mercy for help in Blood Bound struck a chord in readers. I never go to a book-signing event where someone doesn’t ask about her. I knew that she went to Aspen Creek with the Marrok’s pack, and I expected her to show up in the Alpha and Omega novels. That’s what I told people. But she didn’t come to Aspen Creek until after the events in Cry Wolf and Hunting Ground. And then Fair Game jumped ahead because I needed the events at the end of the book to happen between River Marked and Frost Burned. Which meant that if I was going to tell Kara’s story, I’d have to do it in a short story.

  The events in this story take place between Bone Crossed and Silver Borne.

  Asil smelled the intruder as soon as he opened the door of his greenhouse, but he made no sign of it.

  Kara Beckworth was the Marrok’s current puzzle. She’d been attacked when she was only ten and was the youngest survivor either Asil or Bran had ever heard of—and between them they covered a lot of years. Her parents had done the best they could, but their only source of information was from a half-mad, antisocial lone wolf whose greatest
skill was that he never did anything to attract the Marrok’s attention, so he could be left to live his life in peace.

  He’d told Kara’s parents they should let him kill her. When they’d refused, he’d told them to keep her away from other werewolves. So every full moon, her parents had kept her locked in a cage and, when she’d reacted as most young things who had been locked in a cage would react, decided that werewolves had no control of themselves. Before she could prove them right, or succeed in killing herself—something she hadn’t had enough knowledge to accomplish—her father had used his skills as a reporter to find more useful help. Eventually, that had landed Kara and her father here in Aspen Creek, Montana.

  Asil turned on the water and began to dampen his tomato starts as he considered his response to the intrusion. Most of the greenhouse was on drip lines, but he preferred to do some of the work himself—and he’d learned that repairing a drip line was nearly as time-consuming as watering it all himself anyway and considerably less satisfactory. The temptation in this age was to automate too much and ruin his own fun.

  “I know you know I’m here,” Kara said defensively.

  “Good,” he said without looking up from what he was doing. “I would hate to think you were stupid.”

  “I should be in school,” she said, a little more aggressively.

  Full moon in two days, close enough to make her restless, is what he thought. Hard to sit in a classroom with the moon singing in your veins, especially when she was so young. But he wasn’t subversive enough, quite, to tell her that.

  “So why are you here instead?” He kept his eyes on his plants—which were only barely sprouts. They had a while to go before they would be plants.

  “I like greenhouses,” she said.

  Ah—not a lie. Refreshing in a child of, what? Twelve or thirteen, he thought.