“We die during the day,” said Stefan. “But Max was very old. He was capable of all sorts of things, and it would not surprise me to know that he could walk in the day. I only met him once—a long time before Nosferatu. He attended one of the festas of the Master of Milan, the Lord of Night, without invitation. It was odd to see so many powerful people cower before one unwashed, poorly dressed, amazingly ugly man. I saw him kill a two-hundred-year-old vampire with a look—just disintegrated her to dust with one glance because she laughed at him. The Lord of the Night, who was her master, was very old and powerful, even then—and he did not voice an objection though she was the youngest of his get and dear to him.”
“Is Schreck still alive?” Warren asked.
“I don’t know,” said Stefan, and added, half under his breath, “I don’t want to know.”
“Was he always that ugly, or did he get worse with age?” asked Kyle. Kyle was beautiful, and he knew it. I was never certain if he was really vain, or if it was one of a dozen things that he used to camouflage the sharp mind behind the pretty face. I suspected it was both.
Stefan smiled. “That’s the question that haunts the older vampires. One doesn’t ask questions about age, but we can tell, more or less. Wulfe is probably the oldest vampire—other than Max—I’ve ever met. Wulfe is not ugly or monstrous.” He paused, then continued thoughtfully, “at least not on the outside.”
“Maybe he was fae or part fae,” I ventured. “Some of them are very ... unusual-looking.”
“I have never heard that about him,” said Stefan. “But who would know?”
Warren hit the play button and, somehow, knowing that Max Schreck, who had played the original Count Orlok, had been a nightmare for vampires, made the movie a lot scarier—and it had had plenty of that going for it anyway. Only Warren seemed impervious to the effect.
When the movie was over, he glanced at Stefan. “Vampire,” he said without insult, “why don’t you come down to the kitchen with me while these two look through Kyle’s amazing library of video wonder for something that will keep Mercy from speeding all the way home.”
“Hey!” I said indignantly.
He grinned at me as he rose from the floor to stretch, his lanky body reaching for the ceiling under Kyle’s admiring eyes. Warren wasn’t as pretty as Kyle, but he wasn’t Max Schreck, either, and he knew he was playing for an audience. Maybe Kyle wasn’t the only one who was vain.
“Hey, yourself, Mercy,” Warren said. “How about we do a second movie? Stefan’s used to staying up late, and you have no Adam to go home to. You two find something else, and Stefan and I will refill the popcorn bowls.”
Kyle waited until Warren and Stefan were downstairs before saying, “Stefan looks hungry. You think Warren is going to feed him before bringing him back?”
“I think,” I said, “that might be a good idea. He already had a bite of me today and was starting to look at you like you might be dinner. I don’t think Warren would let Stefan feed from you if he asked, and you consented. Werewolves are possessive that way. Probably better if Warren does it. Being a werewolf with a pack, Warren won’t end up Stefan’s good friend Renfield.”
Kyle grimaced.
“Don’t start the conversation if you don’t want an honest answer,” I told him, hopping out of the chair and perusing one of the bookcases stuffed with Blu-rays, DVDs, and VHS tapes.
When Warren and Stefan came upstairs, it was obvious to me that Stefan had fed again. He was moving with something close to his usual grace.
“Don’t you have Bride of Frankenstein?” he asked, when Kyle held up The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra as our pick for the second movie. “Or Father of the Bride? Four Weddings and a Funeral?” He glanced at me. “Maybe The Butterfly Effect?” Yep, he was feeling better.
I threw a pillow at him. “Just shut up. Shut. Up.”
Stefan caught the pillow, tossed it back to me, and laughed.
“What’s up?” asked Kyle.
I buried my head in the pillow. “My mother has given up on doves for the wedding and—though I didn’t know they were in contention—apparently pigeons. She wants to release butterflies and balloons instead.”
Warren looked properly appalled, but Kyle laughed.
“It’s a new trend, Mercy,” he said. “Right up your alley because it’s supposed to be based on an Indian legend. The story is that if you catch a butterfly and whisper your wish to it, then let it go, that the butterfly will take your request to the Great Spirit. Since you released the butterfly, when you could have killed or captured it, the Great Spirit will be inclined to view your request favorably.”
“I am doomed,” I told the pillow. “Doomed to butterflies and balloons.”
“At least it isn’t pigeons,” observed Warren practically.
2
“SO WHAT DID YOU DO TO DARRYL?” ADAM ASKED AS he shut the driver’s-side door of my Rabbit.
Usually I drove the Rabbit, but Alpha wolves don’t deal well with commercial airline travel. Having to trust some stranger to fly the plane had left Adam with a need for control, so when his daughter Jesse and I picked him up from the airport, he got to drive.
“I didn’t do anything to Darryl,” I protested.
Adam gave me a long look before he backed out of the parking spot and drove toward the exit of the airport parking lot.
“I stopped by Stefan’s on the way to movie night,” I said. “Adam, Stefan is in real trouble. He’s lost a lot of his menagerie, and he hasn’t replaced them. They’re dying; he was dying.”
Adam reached out for my arm and turned it so he could see the inside of my elbow. I looked at the flawless skin with interest, too.
“Mercy,” Adam said, as Jesse snickered in the backseat. “Quit screwing around.”
“It’s on the other arm,” I told him. “Just a couple of marks. In a day or so, they’ll be gone. You know it won’t hurt me. Our mate bond and the pack keeps him from connecting to me the way he would a human.”
“No wonder Darryl was upset,” Adam told me as he pulled up to the ticket booth behind another car. “He doesn’t like vampires.”
“Stefan needs to gather more people into his menagerie,” I said. “He knows it, I know it—but I can’t tell him so.”
“Why not?” asked Jesse.
“Because a vampire’s menagerie is made up of victims,” Adam answered. “Most of them die very slowly. Stefan’s better than the average vampire, but they are still victims. If Mercy encourages him to go out hunting, she’s telling him that she approves of what he’s doing.”
“Which I don’t,” I said staunchly. The driver of the car in front of us was arguing with the ticket lady. I picked at the seam of my jeans.
“Except that it’s Stefan,” Adam said. “Who’s not such a bad guy for a vampire.”
“Yeah,” I agreed soberly. “But he’s still a vampire.”
The lady in the ticket booth apparently won the argument because the driver handed her his credit card. I noticed that the ticket lady had a bouquet of helium balloons beside her; in the center was a Mylar balloon that said, “Happy Birthday, Grandma!”
“I have a request,” I told Adam, as he handed the parking ticket to the lady in the booth.
“What’s that?” He looked exhausted. This was his second trip this month to the other Washington on the opposite side of the country, and it was wearing on him. I hesitated. Maybe I should wait until he’d gotten a good night’s sleep.
In the backseat of the Rabbit, Jesse giggled. She was a good kid, and we liked each other. Today, her hair was the same dark brown as her father’s. Yesterday, it had been green. Green is not a good hair color on anyone. After three weeks of hair that looked like rotting spinach, I think she finally agreed with me. When I got up this morning to go to work, she was in the process of dyeing it. The brown was somewhat more unexpected than the green had been.
“Hush, you,” I told her with mock sternness. “No cracks from the peanut gallery.”
“What do you need?” Adam asked me.
I already felt better with him home—the restless anxiety that was my constant companion when he was away had left and taken with it my panicky trapped feeling, too.
The lady in the parking booth nodded and waved us on because we’d timed Adam’s flight right and had only been there fifteen minutes—still in the free-parking time allotment.
The balloons beside her made my stomach clench, especially the gold ones.
“I want to get married,” I told him, as Adam put the Rabbit in gear, and we put the balloons behind us.
He tilted his head and eyed me briefly before turning his attention back to the road. Likely his nose was giving him a taste of what I was feeling. Most strong feelings are vulnerable to detection when you live with werewolves. My nose was good, too, but all it told me was that he’d had a woman sitting next to him on the flight home, because her scent clung to his sleeve. Often our mating bond allowed us to know what the other was feeling or, more rarely, thinking, but it wasn’t working that way right now.
“I was under the impression that we are getting married,” he said cautiously.
“Now, Dad.” Jesse stuck her head between the bucket seats of my Rabbit. “She wants to get married now. Her mom called on Friday and has given up on the doves—”
“I thought you’d already told her no doves?” Adam asked me.
“—and the pigeons,” his daughter continued on blithely.
“Pigeons?” said Adam thoughtfully. “Pigeons are pretty. And they taste pretty good, too.”
I hit him in the shoulder. Not hard, just enough to acknowledge his teasing.
“—but finally decided that butterflies would be better,” continued Jesse.
“Butterflies and balloons,” I told Adam. “She wants to release butterflies and balloons. Two hundred balloons. Gold ones.”
“I expect she’s trying to get Monarch butterflies if she wants gold balloons,” Jesse said helpfully.
“Monarch butterflies,” said Adam. “Can you imagine the poor things trying to figure out their migration route from the Tri-Cities?”
“She has to be stopped before she destroys the ecosystem,” I told him, only half-joking. “And I can only think of one way to do it. My sister eloped under the pressure of planning her wedding with my mother. I guess I can, too.”
He laughed—and looked a lot less tired.
“I love your mother,” he said with honest satisfaction that lowered his voice to a purr. “I suppose preserving the Tri-Cities’ ecosystem is a valid reason for jumping the gun. Let’s get married, then. I have my passport with me. Do you have your birth certificate, so we can get the license, or do we need to go home first?”
IT WAS A LITTLE MORE COMPLICATED THAN THAT, SO IT took us two days to get married. Eloping just isn’t as quick as it used to be unless you live in Vegas, I guess. Of course, we still might have made it in one except that I insisted on Pastor Arnez doing the honors. He’d had a funeral and two weddings to work us around.
Adam had lost a lot of things fighting in Vietnam. His humanity and belief in God were just a few of them, he told me. He wasn’t thrilled about a church wedding, but he couldn’t really object without admitting that it was anger, not disbelief, he felt about God. I was just as glad to avoid that argument for a while.
We meant the ceremony to be a small thing, Adam, Jesse, and me, with a pair of witnesses. Peter, the pack’s lone submissive, stopped in at the house at just the right time and so was pressed into service as a witness. Zee, my mentor, who would step in and run my business while we were gone on our impromptu honeymoon, was thus brought into our plans almost immediately and claimed the privilege of second witness. Despite rumor, the fae have no trouble going into a church of whatever denomination or religion. It is the steel that the early Christian church brought along with it that was deadly to the fae, not Christianity itself—though sometimes the fae forget that part, too.
Somehow, though, word got out among the pack, and most of them managed to be at the church on Tuesday morning by the time Jesse and I drove in. Adam was coming separately with Peter in a nod to tradition. He had had to stop for gas, so Jesse and I arrived first, and when we parked, there were a lot of familiar cars in the lot.
“Word travels fast,” I said, getting out of the car.
Jesse nodded solemnly. “Remember when Auriele was trying to throw a surprise party for Darryl? We might have managed to keep the pack out of this if we could have gotten it done yesterday. Do you really mind?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t mind. But if we have a lot of people here, Mom’s going to feel bad.” My stomach began to tighten with stress. One of the reasons to have a planned wedding was to avoid hurting people’s feelings. Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea after all.
When we walked into the church, though, it became obvious that more than just the pack had found out. Uncle Mike greeted us at the door—I supposed Zee had told him. Looking over his shoulder, I saw that the old barkeeper had brought a few other fae, including, somewhat to my dismay, Yo-yo Girl, whom I’d last seen eating the ashes of a fairy queen. Yo-yo Girl wasn’t really her name, which I had never learned, just what she’d been doing the first time I’d met her. She was dangerous, powerful, and looked like a ten-year-old girl with flowers in her hair, wearing a summer dress. She smiled at me. I think she knew how much she scared me and thought it was funny.
I hadn’t intended on walking formally up the aisle. But as people started to arrive, Samuel—werewolf, previous roommate, and long-time-ago boyfriend—pulled me aside and gave me a bouquet of white and gold flowers.
He pulled my hair away from my left ear and bent down to whisper, “My, but you are going to have your hands full with Jesse, aren’t you? A little over three days, and she has the whole thing organized.”
“Three?” I said. “We just decided to elope yesterday.”
He smiled at me and kissed my forehead. “I heard about it on Saturday.” Before Adam returned from the East Coast.
I glanced at Jesse—who smiled brightly at me, and mouthed, “Surprise.” Then I took a real look around. While we waited for Adam, the church foyer had been acquiring a festive air as people brought out boxes with flowers and wide white ribbons—and if I wasn’t mistaken, a few of the fae were using magic to add their own touch.
I wore my wedding dress, purchased the month before. I’d thought it would be odd, with such a quick ceremony, but since I already had the dress—a great frothy thing from the waist down and formfitting white silk on top with narrow sleeves—Jesse had decided I should wear it. And Jesse had chosen to wear her bridesmaid gown because “What else would I wear?” I hadn’t been suspicious at all, probably because I loved the dress and would have accepted any excuse to wear it.
Someone opened the chapel doors so people could go sit down, but there were a lot of people already seated. Not just wolves and fae—I could see some of Adam’s business contacts and some of my regular customers at the garage. Gabriel, my right hand at the garage, and Tony, my contact with the Kennewick Police Department, were sitting next to each other. I took a step closer to the chapel, trying to see everyone Jesse had made come to my elopement. There were a lot of them.
Samuel held me back as the foyer emptied until it was just us, Jesse, and Darryl—and the organ began to play Wagner.
Jesse, on Darryl’s arm, led the procession toward the mouth of the sacrament hall. She paused there, to let my sisters Nan and Ruthie, who’d evidently been hiding just inside the chapel doors where I couldn’t see them, lead the way, escorted by Warren and Ben, another of Adam’s wolves.
At the front of the chapel, Adam waited for me next to the minister.
I blinked back tears, sniffed—and Samuel dropped my arm.
I looked over to see what he was doing, but another man had taken his place.
“Zee wanted to have the honor of giving you away,” said Bran, Samuel’s father, the Marrock who ru
led all the wolves anywhere I was likely to ever go, and the Alpha of the Montana-based wolf pack who had raised me. “But I had prior claim.”
“They argued for a good while,” Samuel whispered. “I thought there would be blood on the floor.”
I glanced in the church and realized that a lot of the Montana pack I’d grown up with were here. Charles, Samuel’s brother, sitting next to his mate, smiled at me. Charles seldom if ever smiled.
About that time, humiliatingly, I started to cry.
Bran leaned closer as we walked slowly, and said in a bare whisper that didn’t carry beyond us, “Before you start feeling overwhelmed by how nice we all are to do this for you, you really should know a few things. It all started with a bet ...”
When we lined up in the front of the church, as smoothly as if we’d practiced it, Bran was right: I wasn’t overwhelmed anymore. Nor was I crying. Nan, Ruthie, and Jesse stood on my side of the church, along with Bran, who still had my hand. Darryl, Warren, and Ben lined up on the other side, next to Adam.
My mother, the traitor seated in the front row of pews, sent my stepfather up to pin a silk Monarch butterfly on my bouquet. He kissed my cheek, exchanged a nod with Bran, then sat back down at my mother’s side. My mother gave me a delighted smile and looked nothing at all like the nefarious plotter she was.
“Balloons,” I mouthed at her, raising an eyebrow to show what I thought of her subterfuge.
She discreetly pointed up—and there, clinging to the ceiling, were dozens of gold balloons with silk butterflies tied to the strings.
At my side, Bran laughed—no doubt at my dumbfounded expression.
River Marked Page 3