River Marked

by Briggs, Patricia

  Abruptly, there was a popping noise, and Stefan was gone. I knew he could teleport though he seldom did it in front of me. Both of his people jerked reflexively, so I guessed they hadn’t seen him do it much, either. I dusted off my hands and turned to Rachel.

  “Where is Naomi?” I asked. I couldn’t see her letting things get into this state.

  “She died,” Rachel told me. “Marsilia broke her, and we couldn’t put her back together. I think that was the final straw for Stefan.” She glanced up the stairway. “How did you do that?”

  “He doesn’t want me to get the cattle prod,” I told her.

  Her arms were wrapped around herself, her mutilated hand clearly visible. She was bruised, bitten, battered—and she said, “We’ve been so worried about him. He won’t talk to any of us, not since Naomi died.”

  Poor Stefan had tried to curl up and die because Marsilia had sold him out—and he’d done his best to take the remnants of his menagerie with him. And Rachel was worried about him.

  About him.

  “How many of you are left?” I asked. Naomi had been a tough lady. If she was gone, she wouldn’t have been the only one.

  “Four.”

  No wonder they looked bad. Four people couldn’t feed a vampire all by themselves.

  “He’s been going out hunting?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think he’s been out of the house since we buried Naomi.”

  “You should have called me,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Ford from the ground, his voice deep enough to echo. His eyes were closed. “We should have.”

  Now that he wasn’t attacking me, I could see that he was thin, too. That couldn’t be good in a man transitioning from human to vampire. Hungry vampire fledglings have a tendency to go out and find their own food.

  Stefan should have fixed this before it got so bad.

  If I’d had a cattle prod, I might have been tempted to use it, at least until the stairs creaked and I looked up to see Stefan coming down. I have a dusty degree in history for which I’d sat through a number of films of the Third Reich, and there were men who’d died in the concentration camps who were less emaciated than Stefan in the bright green Scooby-Doo T-shirt he’d filled out just fine when I’d seen him wear it a few months ago. Now it hung from his bones. Cleaned up, he looked worse than he had at first.

  Rachel said that Marsilia had broken Naomi. Looking at Stefan, I thought that she’d come very close to breaking him, too. Someday, someday I would be in the same room with Marsilia with a wooden stake in my hand, and, by Heaven, I would use it. If, of course, Marsilia were unconscious, and all of her vampires were unconscious, too. Otherwise, I’d just be dead because Marsilia was a lot more dangerous than I was. Still, the thought of sinking a sharp piece of wood into her chest through her heart gave me great joy.

  To Stefan, I said, “You need a donor before we go out? So no one pulls us over and makes me take you to the hospital or the morgue?”

  He paused and looked down at Rachel and Ford. He frowned, then looked puzzled and a little lost. “No. They are too weak. There aren’t enough of them left.”

  “I wasn’t talking about them, Shaggy,” I told him gently. “I’ve donated before, and I’m willing to do it again.”

  Ruby eyes gazed hungrily at me before he blinked twice, and they were replaced with eyes like root beer in a glass with the sun shining behind it.

  “Stefan?”

  He blinked. It was an interesting effect: ruby, root beer, ruby, root beer. “Adam won’t like it.” Ruby, ruby, ruby.

  “Adam would donate himself if he were here,” I told him truthfully, and rolled up my sleeve.

  He was feeding on the inside of my elbow when my cell phone rang. Rachel helped me dig my phone out of my pocket and opened it. I don’t think Stefan even noticed.

  “Mercy, where the hell are you?”

  Darryl, Adam’s second in command, had decided it was his job to keep me in line when Adam was gone.

  “Hey, Darryl,” I said, trying not to sound like I was feeding a vampire.

  My eyes fell on Ford, who had never risen from the floor but was staring at me with eyes that looked like polished yellow gems—citrine, maybe, or amber. I didn’t remember what color his eyes had been a few minutes ago, but I think I would have remembered the funky eyes if they’d been there then. He was getting very close to becoming vampire, I thought. Before I could get too scared, Darryl’s voice interrupted my thoughts.

  “You left for Kyle’s house an hour ago, and Warren tells me you aren’t there yet.”

  “That’s right,” I said, sounding astonished. “Look at that. I’m not at Warren’s yet.”

  “Smart-ass,” he growled.

  Darryl and I had this love-hate thing going. I start to think he hates me, and he does something nice, like save my life or give me a cool pep talk. I decide he likes me, and he rips me a new one. Probably I just confuse the heck out of him, and that’s okay, because the feeling is mutual.

  Darryl, of all of Adam’s wolves, hates vampires the most. If I told him what I was doing, he’d be over here with reinforcements, and there would be bodies on the floor. Werewolves make everything more complicated than necessary.

  “I’ve lived without babysitters for thirty-odd years,” I told him in a bored voice. “I’m sure I can manage to get to Kyle’s house without one.” I was getting a little dizzy. Lacking another method, I tapped Stefan on the head with the hand I held the cell phone in.

  “What was that?” asked Darryl, and Stefan gripped my arm harder.

  I sucked in my breath because Stefan was hurting me—and realized that Darryl had heard that, too.

  “That was my lover,” I told Darryl. “Excuse me while I finish getting him off.” And I hung up the phone.

  “Stefan,” I said. But it was unnecessary. He let me go, backed up a few steps, and knelt on one knee.

  “Sorry,” he growled. His hands rested on the ground in front of him, fisted tight.

  “No trouble,” I told him, glancing at my arm. The small wounds were sealed, healing quickly from his saliva. I’d learned more about vampires over the past year or so than I’d known the rest of my life. Ignorance had been bliss.

  I knew, for instance, that because of my bonds with Adam, there would be no repercussions from letting Stefan feed from me again. A human without that protection who was food for the same vampire more than once could become a pet—as all the people in the menagerie were: dependent upon the vampire and ready to follow any orders he might give them.

  My cell rang, and, with both of my hands available to me, I took the time to check the number: Darryl. Okay, there might be repercussions to letting Stefan feed from me, but they would have more to do with Darryl tattling on me to Adam than they did with Stefan. I hit a button on the side of my phone, so it quit ringing.

  “I’ve gotten you into trouble,” said Stefan.

  “With Darryl?” I asked. “I can get myself into trouble with Darryl on my own just fine—and hand his butt to him if he steps too far out of line.”

  Stefan came to his feet, tilted his head, and gave me a little smile—suddenly looking much more like himself. “You? Miss Coyote versus the big bad wolf? I don’t think so.”

  He was probably right.

  “Darryl isn’t my keeper,” I told him stoutly.

  He snorted. “No. But if something happens to you while Adam is away, it is Darryl who will bear the blame.”

  “Adam isn’t that stupid,” I said.

  He waited.

  “Jeez Louise,” I told him, and called Darryl back.

  “I’m fine,” I said to him. “I thought Stefan might need a night out and stopped by to pick him up. I’ll call you from Kyle’s driveway, then you can call Adam and tell him I made it safely. You can also tell him that as long as I don’t have crazy fairy queens, swamp monsters, or rapists with delusions of grandeur after me, I can take care of myself.”

  Darryl sucked
in his breath. I supposed it was the rapist remark, but I was done flinching about it. The man was dead, and I’d killed him. The nightmares had mostly stopped, and when they emerged, I had Adam to fight them with me. Adam is a very good man to have beside you in a fight, even if all you are fighting is a bad memory.

  “You forgot demon-possessed vampires,” said Stefan into the silence. Vampires, like werewolves, can hear private phone conversations—so can I, actually. I’ve become quite fond of text messaging since I moved into Pack HQ.

  “So she did,” said Darryl. His voice had softened to molasses and gravel. “We try to give you the air you need to breathe, Mercy. But it is hard. You are so fragile and—”

  “Rash?” I offered. “Stupid?” I have a newly minted brown belt in karate, and I fix cars for a living. Only in comparison to a werewolf am I fragile.

  “Not at all,” he disagreed, though I’ve heard him call me both rash and stupid as well as a number of other unflattering things. “Your ability to survive anything that gets thrown at you sometimes leaves the rest of us swallowing ulcer medication for days afterward. I don’t like the taste of Maalox.”

  “I’m safe. I’m fine.” Except for a few bruises from my encounter with the piano—and, as I took a step, a little dizziness from blood loss. Darryl wouldn’t catch my little fib, though. While he can smell a lie as well as most any werewolf, he wasn’t the Marrock, who could pick up my lies before they left my mouth, even over the phone. Besides, I was mostly safe—I eyed Ford a little warily, but he still hadn’t moved from where Stefan had thrown him.

  “Thank you,” Darryl said. “Call me when you are at Kyle’s.”

  I hung up. “I think I liked it better when the pack would have been happy to see me dead,” I told Stefan. “Are you ready to go?”

  Stefan reached a hand down and pulled Ford to his feet—and then shoved him up against a wall. “You leave Mercy alone,” he said.

  “Yes, Master,” said Ford, who hadn’t struggled at all when Stefan pushed him around.

  All hint of violence dropped from Stefan’s body, and he leaned his forehead into the bigger man’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I will fix this.”

  Ford reached up and patted Stefan on the shoulder. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course you will.”

  I admit I was surprised that Ford could say more than “Ogg smash.”

  Stefan backed away from him and looked at Rachel.

  “Is there food in the kitchen?”

  “Yes,” she told him. Then she swallowed, and said, “I could make hamburgers and feed the others.”

  “That would be good, thank you.”

  She nodded, gave me a small smile, and headed for the depths of the house—presumably to the kitchen, with Ford trailing behind her like a big puppy, a really big puppy with sharp teeth.

  We walked out the door, and Stefan looked around at the remnants of his lawn. He paused beside the van, shook his head, and followed me to my car. He didn’t say anything until we were on the highway along the Columbia.

  “Old vampires are subject to fugues,” he told me. “We don’t handle change as well as we did when we were humans.”

  “I grew up in a werewolf pack,” I reminded him. “Old wolves don’t deal with change very well, either.” Then, just in case he thought I was sympathizing with him, I added, “Of course, usually they don’t bring down a bunch of people who depend upon them.”

  “Don’t they?” he murmured. “Funny. I thought that Samuel almost brought down a lot of people with him.”

  I downshifted and passed a grandmother who was going fifty in a sixty-mile-an-hour zone. When the roar of the Rabbit’s little diesel engine relieved enough of my ire, I shifted back up a gear, and said, “Point to you. You are right. I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner.”

  “Ah,” said Stefan, looking down at his hands. “You would have come if I had called.”

  “If you had been in any shape to call for help,” I told him, “you probably wouldn’t have needed it.”

  “So,” he said, changing the subject. “What are we watching tonight?”

  “I don’t know. It’s Warren’s turn to pick, and he can be kind of unpredictable. We watched the 1922 version of Nosferatu the last time he chose, and before that it was Lost in Space.”

  “I liked Lost in Space,” Stefan said.

  “The movie or the TV series?”

  “The movie? Right. I had forgotten about the movie,” he said soberly. “It was better that way.”

  “Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.”

  He looked at me, then frowned. “Orange juice will help with the headache.”

  So I was waiting in the line at a drive-thru, having ordered two orange juices and a burger at Stefan’s insistence, when my phone rang again. I assumed it was Darryl fussing again, so I answered it without looking at the display. Someday I’m going to quit doing that.

  “Mercy,” said my mother, “I’m so glad I got in touch with you. You’ve been hard to reach lately. I needed to tell you that I’ve been having trouble with the doves. I can find people who have pigeons, but the man who had the doves just disappeared. I found out today that he apparently also had fighting dogs and is doing a few years behind bars.”

  My headache got abruptly worse. “Pigeons?” I’d told her no doves. Doves and werewolves are just a ... Anyway, I’d told her no doves.

  “For your wedding,” said my mother impatiently. “You know, the one you are having this August? That’s only six weeks away. I thought I had the doves under control”—I was sure I had told her no doves—“but then, well, I wouldn’t want to give money to someone involved in dogfights anyway. Though maybe it wouldn’t bother Adam?”

  “It would bother Adam,” I said. “It bothers me. No doves. No pigeons, Mother. No fighting dogs.”

  “Oh good,” she said brightly. “I thought you’d agree. It comes from an Indian legend, after all.”

  “What does?” I asked warily.

  “Butterflies,” she said airily. “It will be beautiful. Think of it. We could release helium balloons, too. Maybe a couple of hundred would do. Butterflies and gold balloons released into the sky to celebrate your new life together. Well,” she said, her voice brisk and determined, “I’d better get on it.”

  She hung up, and I stared at my phone. Stefan was convulsed in the passenger seat.

  “Butterflies,” he managed through bouts of helpless laughter. “I wonder where she found butterflies.”

  “Go ahead and laugh,” I told him. “It’s not you who is going to have to explain to a pack of werewolves why my mother is going to set loose butterflies—” I set him off in whoops again. It was too much to hope that it was one or two. No, my mother never did anything by halves. I pictured a thousand butterflies and, dear Lord help me, two hundred gold helium balloons.

  I leaned forward and banged my head on the steering wheel. “I’m eloping. I told Adam we should, but he didn’t want to hurt my mother’s feelings. Doves, pigeons, butterflies—we are going to end up with a plane with a banner and fireworks ...”

  “A marching band,” said Stefan. “And bagpipes with handsome Scottish pipers wearing nothing but their kilts. Belly dancers—there are a number of local belly-dancing troupes. Tattooed bikers. I bet I could help her find a dancing bear ...”

  I paid for my food while he was still coming up with new and wonderful additions to my wedding-day angst.

  “Thanks,” I told him, taking a big swig of orange juice, and drove back out into traffic. I hate orange juice. “You are such a big help. My new life’s ambition is to see to it that you and my mother are never alone in a room together until after Adam and I are married.”

  LAUGHTER AND BLOOD HAD REVIVED STEFAN SO much that beyond an observation by Kyle that “Someone needs to remember that the runway model look doesn’t even look good on runway models,” Kyle and Warren didn’t seem to notice anything wrong with Stefan. They also, tactfully, didn’t comment on the orange juice I normally wouldn
’t have touched with a ten-foot pole.

  We grabbed three huge bowls of microwave popcorn and headed up to the theater room. Kyle is a very successful lawyer; his house is big enough to have a theater room. Adam’s house has a theater room, too—but then, it is unofficial home to the whole pack. At any given time we have a couple of extra people sleeping over. Kyle’s house just has Kyle and Warren. Warren would be happy living in a tent out on the range. Kyle prefers Persian carpets, marble countertops, and leather chairs. It says something—I’m not sure what—that they are living in Kyle’s idea of home rather than Warren’s.

  Warren’s pick for our feature film turned out to be Shadow of the Vampire, a fictional movie about the making of Nosferatu. Someone had done a lot of research into the legends about the old film and played with them.

  At one point, watching Stefan’s intent face, I said, in a stage whisper, “You know, you are a vampire. You aren’t supposed to be scared of them.”

  “Anyone,” said Stefan with conviction, “who ever met Max Schreck would be scared of vampires for the rest of their lives. And they’ve got him dead to rights.”

  Warren, who was sitting on the floor in his favorite position—leaning back against Kyle’s legs—hit the pause button, sat forward, and twisted around so he could see Stefan, sitting on the other side of the couch. I, as the lone girl, got the big new recliner.

  “The movie has it right? Max Schreck really was a vampire?” Warren asked. Max Schreck was the name of the man who played the vampire in Nosferatu.

  Stefan nodded. “Schreck wasn’t his real name, but he used it for a century or two, so it will do. Scary old monster. Really scary, really old. He decided he wanted to be on film, and none of the other vampires felt like challenging him over it.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Kyle. “I thought that one of the complaints about Nosferatu was that all the scenes with Schreck were obviously filmed in daylight. Don’t you vampires all go to sleep in the daytime?”

  Kyle, as Warren’s lover, knew a lot more about the things that go bump in the night than most humans, to whom vampires were movie monsters, not men who wore Scooby-Doo shirts and lived in upscale houses in real towns. It wouldn’t be long, though, I thought, before vampires were outed. Werewolves had outed themselves a year and a half ago—though they were careful what they told the public. The fae had been out since the 1980s. People were gradually learning that the world is a scarier place than the scientific reasoning of the last few centuries had led them to believe.