Silver Borne mt-5

by Patricia Briggs

  “It wasn’t like that. She was safe enough; she left with Samuel. There’s nothing I could do that would protect her better than Samuel could.”

  “So why didn’t you stop the arsonists?”

  Arsonists? There had been arsonists?

  “I wasn’t ordered to protect her place. She wasn’t in there.”

  Ben smiled in such satisfaction that I realized he hadn’t known there were arsonists either. “Who were they, Mary Jo?”

  “Fae,” she said. “No one I knew. Just more trouble she’s bringing to my pack’s door. If they wanted to burn down Mercy’s house, what did I care?” She looked at me, and said viciously, “I wish they’d burned it up with you in it.”

  “Ben!”

  How he managed to stop his hand before it hit her face, I don’t know. But he did. She’d have wiped the floor with him afterward. She might be nominally below him in the pack hierarchy, but that was only because unmated women were at the bottom of the pack.

  She wanted to fight him. I could see it in her face.

  I couldn’t move with Adam mostly on my lap. “That’s enough.” I kept my voice soft.

  Ben was panting, his hands shaking in rage . . . or pain. His hands were really damaged.

  “He could have died,” Ben said to me, his voice rough with the wolf. “He could have died because this—” He stopped himself.

  And the violence was gone from Mary Jo’s posture as quickly as if someone had hit a switch. Her eyes brightened with tears. “Don’t you think I know that? He came running from the house, calling her name. I tried to tell him it was too late, but he just pulled the wall apart and jumped through the hole he’d made. He didn’t even hear me.”

  “He’d have heard you if you told him she wasn’t in there,” said Ben, unaffected by the tears. “I was right behind him. You didn’t even try. You could have just told him she was alive.”

  “Enough,” I said. Adam’s change was nearly finished. “Adam can settle this himself later.”

  I looked over at Sam. “Two changes is bad when there’s tissue damage, right? It heals wrong.” The human ear I could see was scarred, and the top half of Adam’s head from his eyebrows up seemed to be as well. He must have had a wet towel or something over his head to cover his face, but it had fallen down at some point and hadn’t protected his scalp.

  Sam sighed.

  The doctor had been listening to Mary Jo’s story with fascination—I bet he watched soap operas, too. “I’m sorry,” he told me, sounding it. “Unless you have some means of effectively restraining him, I cannot treat him here. I won’t risk my staff.”

  “Can we have a room, then?” I asked.

  Time wasn’t our friend. We could take him back to his house and take care of him . . . but once Mary Jo had reminded me of the danger he’d be in wounded, in the middle of his pack, I really didn’t want to take him back there and hurt him.

  Sam caught my eye and looked down the line of curtained rooms to the one I’d retrieved him from.

  I looked back at the doctor. “A real room would be best. Could we use the X-ray storage room?”

  The doctor frowned, but Jody came to my rescue. “This is Doc Cornick’s Mercy,” she said. “She’s dating Adam Hauptman, the pack Alpha.”

  “Who is lying in my lap,” I told them. “I’m sorry. If it were anyone except for Adam who was hurt, we could make sure your personnel were safe—but Adam’s the only one who could keep a lid on it reliably. You are right not to risk your people. But I’ve got a couple of wolves here—Mary Jo’s an EMT—and we can manage on our own. If it weren’t urgent that we get started, I’d just take him home. But if we don’t do something soon, the scars will be permanent.”

  His feet were the worst. Wholly human and . . . I could see bone under blackened skin. He was unconscious, sweaty, and four shades paler than usual.

  “What can we get you?” Fournier asked.

  “A stretcher,” said Mary Jo. She looked at Sam, waiting for him to take over. Then she realized that in this place he couldn’t possibly show them he was a werewolf. I don’t think she had noticed the full extent of Samuel’s problem yet. She just turned to the doctor and started speaking medical gibberish.

  A gurney appeared, and Ben lifted Adam out of my lap and onto it. A host of hospital personnel showed up and emptied the X-ray storage room of boxes—with very little respect for the existing organization. Someone was going to be upset about that. Dr. Fournier was paged to the third floor and left with the same brisk efficiency with which he seemed to manage everything—including werewolves in his ER.

  With everything out, there was room, if only just, for all of us, the gurney, and the tray of tools Jody brought in.

  “Fournier isn’t as good as Doc Cornick when things go bad.” Jody gave me a sharp look as Mary Jo and Ben maneuvered Adam to the center of the little room, and I wondered if she was thinking about how many werewolves I seemed to know and connecting it to the fact that I was Samuel’s roommate. If so, she didn’t seem to be hysterical at the thought of all the werewolves who were here at the moment, so maybe she’d keep quiet about her suspicions.

  “Fournier didn’t get hurt,” I said. “He didn’t make anything worse. That’s good enough for me.”

  “Do you need help?” she asked bravely.

  I smiled at her. “No. I think that Mary Jo can handle it.” I’d have rather had Jody and the doctor, but Adam wouldn’t thank me for putting humans at risk. Like Jody, I’d really rather have had Samuel . . . who had disappeared from my side.

  “It’s not a sterile environment, but it sounds like that’s not important.”

  “No,” I told Jody distractedly. Where had Sam gotten to? “Werewolves deal with germs better than people do. Looks like they’re ready to go.”

  I closed the door, took a deep breath, and turned to Mary Jo. “Do you know what to do? I have to find Sam.”

  “I’m here.” Samuel was naked as the day he was born, and sweating freely from the speed of his change. His skin was filthy with dust and fae blood—a condition he was remedying with a bucket of water and a towel that must have been among the things Mary Jo had required. His eyes were gray, a shade or two lighter than normal, but the other wolves would doubtless put it to changing. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Samuel,” I said.

  But he looked away and took up something that looked like a scrub brush, with stiff bristles. “I need you to hold him down. Ben, lie across his hips. Mary Jo, I’ll tell you where I need you. Hands will be the worst, so we’ll start with them.”

  “What about me?” I asked.

  “You talk to him. Keep telling him we’re helping him with this torture. If he hears you and believes you, he won’t fight us as hard. I’ll give him some morphine. It won’t help much or for long, so we’ll need to move fast.”

  So while Samuel scrubbed the dead skin and almost-healed scabs off Adam with a stiff-bristled brush, I talked and talked. The burns had killed tissue that had to be removed. Once it was gone, the raw wounds would heal cleanly and without scars.

  Adam kept going into coughing fits. When they’d happen, everyone backed off and let him cough until he spit up blood with great hunks of black in it. Ben had a few of those fits, too, but he rode them out while still keeping his weight on Adam.

  Every so often, Samuel would stop and dose Adam with more morphine. The worst of it was that Adam never made a noise or struggled against the people holding him down. He just kept his eyes on mine while he sweat and his body shook with small tremors that grew and subsided with whatever Samuel did.

  “I thought you were dead,” he said, his voice a bare rasp while Samuel moved from his hands to his feet. It didn’t seem to hurt as much—at a guess there weren’t a lot of nerves left. He’d jumped into a burning building barefoot to save me.

  “Stupid,” I said, blinking hard. “As if I’d die without taking you with me.”

  He smiled faintly. “Was it Mary Jo who betrayed us
at the bowling alley?” he asked, proving he hadn’t been entirely unaware of what had been going on while he was changing.

  Both of us ignored the pained sound Mary Jo made.

  “I’ll ask her later.”

  He nodded. “Better—” He quit talking, and his pupils contracted despite the morphine he’d been given.

  He arched up and twisted so he could press his face into my belly, making a noise somewhere between a scream and a growl. I held him there while Samuel snarled at Ben and Mary Jo to hold him still.

  Another shot of morphine, and Samuel moved us all around. Ben across Adam’s legs—“And don’t think I haven’t noticed your hands, Ben. You’re next up.” Mary Jo on one arm, just above the elbow. Me on the other.

  “Can you hold him?” asked Samuel.

  “Not if he doesn’t want me to,” I told him.

  “It’ll be all right,” Adam said. “I won’t hurt her.”

  Samuel smiled tightly. “No, I didn’t think you would.”

  When Samuel started on Adam’s face with the brush, I had to close my eyes.

  “Shh,” Adam comforted me. “It’ll be over soon.”

  * * *

  WARREN ARRIVED NOT LONG AFTER THAT. TOO LATE to help with Adam, but he and Mary Jo held on to Ben while Samuel scrubbed his hands free of black skin and blisters. He hadn’t changed twice and started healing wrong, but it was still bad enough.

  Adam had closed his eyes and was resting while I stood with my hands wrapped around his upper arm, one of the places where he hadn’t lost any skin. The connection between us hadn’t reset yet, and I had to rely on my senses to tell me what he felt. It surprised me, given how unhappy I’d been with that bond, that I missed the connection when it was gone. My ears told me that he wasn’t fully asleep, just catnapping.

  Ben wasn’t as quiet as Adam had been, but he was obviously doing his best to keep his cries down. Finally, he sank his teeth into Warren’s biceps and dug in.

  “Attaboy,” Warren drawled without flinching. “Go ahead and chew some if it helps. Too far from the heart to do me much harm. Dang, but I hate fires. Guns, knives, fangs, and claws are tough—but fires are the worst.”

  Adam’s hands looked like raw hamburger, but at least they didn’t look like burnt hamburger—and one of them reached over and closed over my fingers. I tried to let go of him, but he opened his eyes and held on to me.

  “Okay, that’s it,” Samuel said, and he stepped back from Ben. “Sit him down on the stool and leave him alone a bit.”

  “I brought an ice chest filled with beef roasts,” Warren said. “It’s out in the truck, so we can feed them.”

  Samuel jerked his head up. “Your Alpha was in trouble, and you stopped and went grocery shopping?”

  Warren smiled with cool eyes while blood dripped to the floor from the arm Ben had gnawed on. “Nope.”

  Samuel stared at him—and Warren gazed at the wall beyond him without backing down a bit. He might like Samuel, but Samuel wasn’t his Alpha. He wouldn’t cede the lone wolf the right to question his actions.

  I sighed. “Warren. Why do you have an ice chest filled with roast on hand?”

  The cowboy turned to me and gave me a wide smile. “Kyle’s idea of a joke. Don’t ask.” A light blush bloomed on his cheekbones. “The freezer and the fridge are already full at Kyle’s house. We put them in the ice chest out in the garage to take back to my apartment, where I have an empty freezer, but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet.” He looked toward Samuel. “Bit snappy, aren’t you?”

  “He’s waiting for Mercy to start in on him,” said Adam. His voice was faint, but, hey, we all had good hearing. “And Mercy is wondering if she should do it with all of us listening in or not.”

  “What’s Mercy got on you?” asked Warren. When it was obvious Samuel wasn’t going to answer, Warren looked at me.

  I was watching Samuel.

  “I just can’t do it any longer,” he said, finally. “It’s better to go now, before I hurt someone.”

  I was too tired to put up with his garbage. “The hell you can’t. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night,’ Samuel. ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ ” He’d helped me memorize that poem when I was in high school. I knew he’d remember.

  “ ‘Life’s but a walking shadow,’ Mercy, ‘a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.’ ” He countered my Dylan Thomas with Shakespeare, spoken with as much weary bleakness as any stage actor ever managed. “ ‘It is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying . . .nothing .’ ” He said the last word with a bite of bitterness.

  I was so angry I could have hit him. Instead, I clapped my hands in mock appreciation.

  “Very moving,” I said. “And stupid. Macbeth killed his overlord and followed his ambition, bringing misery and death to everyone involved. Your life is worth more, I think, than his was. More to me—and to every patient who crosses your path. Tonight, it was Adam and Ben.”

  “Count me in on that,” said Warren. He might not have been in on the cause of the conversation, but any wolf would have caught the gist of what we were talking about. “If you hadn’t been here when that demon got ahold of me not so long ago, I’d be dead.”

  Samuel’s reaction was not what I expected. He ducked his head and snarled at Warren, “I am not responsible for you.”

  “Yes, you are,” said Adam, opening his eyes.

  “That chap your hide?” suggested Warren gently. He shrugged. “People die. I know that; you know that. Even wolves like us die. Fewer people die when you are around. Those are the facts. Being upset about them don’t make them false.”

  Samuel stalked away from us all. There wasn’t much room to get away, though, and he stopped with his head down. “I was hoping this could be easier, Mercy. But I forgot—you don’t do easy.” He turned around and met my eyes. When he spoke again, it was in that gentle patronizing tone I thought I’d cured him of a long time ago. “You can’t save me, Mercy. Not when I don’t want to be saved.”

  “Samuel,” said Adam in a demanding tone, much stronger than his condition allowed. He raised himself up on his elbows and stared at the other wolf.

  Samuel met Adam’s eyes . . . and I saw shock in his face for just an instant before he began to shift to wolf. It was a dirty trick, something Alphas—strong Alphas—could do, forcing the change on another wolf. I suspected that if Adam hadn’t caught Samuel by surprise, it would never have worked. Adam held Samuel’s gaze while we waited with bated breath. Fifteen minutes is a long time to hold still. And at the end of it, Samuel was gone, leaving the white-eyed wolf in his place. The wolf smiled at Adam.

  “Might not be able to save you, old son,” Adam said, lying back again and closing his eyes. “But I can buy us a little time to kick you in the butt hard enough you stop thinking about ‘tomorrow and tomorrow’ and start thinking about how much your butt hurts.”

  “Sometimes,” said Warren, “it’s real easy to see you were in the military, boss.”

  “Butt kicking being part and parcel of the service, both on the giving and receiving end,” agreed Adam, without opening his eyes.

  Mary Jo had been staring at Sam. “His wolf is in control,” she said, horrified.

  “Has been for a couple of days,” agreed Adam. “No bodies yet.”

  He didn’t know about the fae at the bookstore . . . but I wasn’t sure the fae counted. It had been a defensive killing rather than an uncontrolled killing spree, though Sam had nearly taken me as dessert afterward.

  Sam met my eyes thoughtfully, and I realized that he seemed . . . different, more expressive, than he had in Phin’s bookstore—just as I was used to seeing Samuel’s wolf. I’d thought he was getting more aggressive earlier, but I could see that he’d also been becoming . . . less Samuel, even less Sam. Our little disaster might have bought us a little more time.

  “Ah take it that the Marrok does not know about Samuel?” Warren broke the
silence, sounding very cowboy, very laid-back—which was usually a sign that he wasn’t.

  “Sort of,” I said. “I told him he didn’t want to know yet, and he believed me. But only on the condition that I’d talk to Charles. According to Charles, the good news is that if Samuel’s wolf was more independent of him, he’d have started causing mayhem right away. Bad news is that if we don’t get Samuel out of his funk soon, his wolf is going to fade, too.” As he had been doing. “And we’ll be left with a dead Samuel anyway, but only after a bonus of lots of other dead bodies.”

  “A regular Vikin’ funeral,” commented Warren.

  Mary Jo gave him a sharp look, which he returned.

  “Ah can read, as long as they’s lotsa good pictures,” he said, speaking even slower than usual and using a lot more Texas-cowboy grammar.

  “That’s my line,” I told Warren. “I resent your stealing it.”

  Ben laughed. But then asked, “How is fading different from just having the wolf in control?”

  Wolves are blunt creatures, mostly impatient with the softpedaling that the rest of the world considers politeness.

  “I gather Sam will turn all fang and no brain and will eventually just fall over dead,” I told them. “Probably less damage than what normally happens when the wolf is in charge. Especially since the wolf doesn’t stop until someone stops him. But not good.”

  “He’ll be easier to kill if it comes to it,” said Warren, recognizing the advantages. Samuel was old, powerful, and clever—if his wolf was half as smart, it would take Bran or Charles to take him. This way, any of us with a silver-loaded gun could do it.

  Sam didn’t seem bothered by the conversation. He half closed his eyes and snapped his teeth at Warren with mock fierceness. His ears were up, showing that he was only playing.

  They hurt my heart with their fierce full-on acceptance of reality.

  “Pack up, kids,” said Adam, with his eyes still closed. “It’s time to take this party home.”

  Home.

  I glanced worriedly at Warren. Adam would be up and functional in a day or two—thanks to nifty werewolf superpowers of healing. But the pack was still a mess.