River Marked

by Briggs, Patricia

“Like the fae,” he murmured, “your mother doesn’t lie. Just leads you where she wants you to go willy-nilly, all for your own good. If it helps, you are not alone; she came to me with a coyote pup to raise, and look what happened to me. At least you don’t owe her a hundred dollars.”

  “Serves you right for betting against my mother,” I told him, as the music drew to a close, and he led me across to Adam.

  Bran stopped just short, pulled me back against him, and frowned at Adam—and let the weight of his authority be felt throughout the chapel. Bran could disguise what he was, and he usually did so, appearing as a wiry-muscled young man of no particular importance. Every once in a while, though, he let the reality of what he was out. Bran was an old, old wolf and powerful. He ruled the wolves in our part of the world, and no one in this room, not even the humans, would wonder that he could make Alpha wolves obey him. The organ music faltered under the weight of it and stuttered to a halt.

  “Pup,” he said into the sudden silence, “today, I’m giving you one of my treasures. You see that you take proper care of her.”

  Adam, not visibly cowed, nodded once. “I’ll do that.”

  Then the threat of what Bran was disappeared, and he became once more an unremarkable young-looking man in a nicely cut gray tux. “She’ll turn your life upside down.”

  Adam smiled and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw my mother fan her face—Adam cleans up very nicely and, in a tux, is breathtaking even without the smile.

  “She’s been doing that this past ten years, sir,” he said. “I don’t imagine it will change anytime soon.”

  Bran let me step forward, and Adam took my hand.

  “Have you lost any money lately?” I whispered.

  “Do I look stupid?” he whispered back, raising my hand to his lips. “I have to sleep sometime. I didn’t know about this until your mom called me at my hotel after she gave you the butterfly call. She apparently has been talking to Jesse for a couple of weeks. You and I were the last to know.”

  I stared at him, then looked at the mirthful gaze of Pastor Arnez. Have to wait for a funeral, indeed.

  “I didn’t bet anything, either,” the pastor whispered to me.

  “Most people,” said Adam thoughtfully—and loud enough that even the audience members without preternatural gifts could hear him—“have surprise birthday parties. You get a surprise wedding.”

  And, almost as if they were coached—which at least a dozen people later assured me was not the case—they all shouted, “Surprise!”

  In the brief silence that followed, one of the helium balloons popped and its remains, including a silk butterfly, fell down to the floor behind the minister. If it was an omen, I had absolutely no idea what it meant.

  THERE WAS AN IMPRESSIVE ARRAY OF FOOD AND drink in the church basement, and I took the opportunity to corner my little sister Nan.

  “How come you got to elope, and I get a surprise wedding?” I asked her.

  She grinned at me. “You have cake on your chin.” She reached over and wiped it off—looked around for a napkin, then stuck her finger in her mouth to clean it off.

  “Ick,” I told her.

  She shrugged. “Hey, at least I didn’t lick my fingers first. Besides, it’s good frosting, a pity to waste it. And, in answer to your question, I eloped before Mom and my new mother-in-law killed each other. A surprise wedding like this would have left bodies on the ground. You got a surprise wedding because Mom, Bran, and ... a few others were feeling guilty.”

  “Guilty,” I said. “You have to have a conscience to feel guilt. I don’t think Mom is capable of it.”

  Nan giggled. “You might be right. The bet thing wasn’t our fault anyway; it’s yours.”

  I raised my eyebrows in disbelief. “My fault?”

  “It started when we all noticed that you would get this—this deer-in-the-headlights look on your face as we discussed the wedding, and we started to play you a little because it was pretty much impossible to resist.”

  There had been a few commiserating phone calls from my sister. I narrowed my eyes at her, and she flushed guiltily.

  “The bet just sort of happened,” she continued. “One day, Dad said, ‘Ten to one she bolts with Adam before you get to the wedding date.’ ”

  “Dad was in on it?” I seldom called my stepfather “Dad.” Not that I didn’t adore him—but I’d been sixteen when I first met him, though he and Mom had been married for almost twelve years at that point. I started calling Curt by his first name and never got in the habit of calling him anything else.

  “Of course not.” My youngest sister, Ruthie, trotted up with a cookie in one hand. Nan, tall and soft-featured, took after her father; Ruthie was a miniature of Mom. Which meant she was tiny, gorgeous, and pushy. “Dad was appalled at what he’d started. Nan, Mom, and I all were the first to bet, but Bran got in on it pretty early on.”

  She casually snagged a glass of punch off the table, and I snagged it out of her hands and put it back.

  “Not twenty-one yet,” I told her.

  “Next month,” she whined.

  I smirked at her. “You bet on my wedding. You don’t get any favors.” I straightened up. I had a sudden, delightful idea. “Wolves,” I said, and reinforced my call with a touch on the pack bonds I was only just getting the hang of. I didn’t have to speak loud, either. All over the church the wolves, all wearing their human faces, perked up and turned toward me. “My sister Ruthie isn’t twenty-one yet. No alcohol for her.” Then, in case she didn’t get it, I told her, “You go anywhere near that punch or any other alcohol today, my wolves are going to interfere.”

  Ruthie stamped her foot and looked at Nan. “You just wait. You bet, too. She’ll get back at you, and I’m going to be the one smirking.” She stalked off with an offended air while Nan and I watched.

  Nan shook her head. “Some poor man is going to end up with her.”

  I laughed. “He’ll never know what he’s gotten himself into. Curt still thinks our mother is a sweet thing who needs his protection, and he’s perfectly happy about it.” I remembered belatedly that I was supposed to be mad at her. I frowned. “Enough about Mom and Ruthie. You were going to tell me how you went from bet to surprise wedding.”

  “Well,” she said, “like I said, it is your fault. When she saw how stressed you were getting about it, Mom offered to do the whole thing for you.” She laughed at the look on my face. “I know. Terrifying thought, isn’t it? But you obviously weren’t going to enjoy planning it yourself, either.”

  She slanted a thoughtful look at Bran, who was talking animatedly with my stepfather. My stepfather was a dentist. Bran ruled werewolves. I didn’t want to know what they had in common to get that excited about.

  “So, anyway, we started egging you on,” Nan said, “just for fun—and the betting got just a little more serious. As soon as the money at stake got over twenty bucks, Mom’s competitive instincts overruled her motherly ones. The date Mom picked for your elopement was tomorrow. So she planned the butterfly-and-pigeon thing, but I guess about then she started feeling bad about robbing you of a real wedding. She decided to plan the wedding without you anyway. Which proves she must have a conscience, if a little underdeveloped. She enlisted Jesse as her woman on the ground and got this wedding together with her usual efficiency.” Nan took a big swallow of alcoholic punch, and her eyes watered.

  “I am so glad Todd and I eloped,” she said sincerely. “There was no way to salvage the wreckage. But I think that you deserved this, and I’m very happy for you.” She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. Then she whispered, “He is really, really a hottie. How did you manage that?”

  “Brat,” I told her, and gave her a hug. “Todd’s not exactly chopped liver.”

  She smiled smugly and took another sip. “No, he’s not.”

  “He could be,” said Ben from behind me, his British accent giving him a civilized air that he didn’t deserve. “Do you want him to be chopped liver, darling?”<
br />
  I turned, making sure I was between Ben and Nan. “My sisters are off-limits,” I reminded him.

  A flash of hurt came and went on his face. With Ben, it was even odds whether the emotion was genuine or not—but my instincts told me it had been. So I continued in a mock-chiding tone, “Ruthie is too young for you, and Nan is married to a very nice man. So be good.”

  Nan had caught the flash of hurt, too, I thought. She was softer than our mother, more like her father in temperament as well as looks. She couldn’t stand to have anyone hurting and not do anything about it.

  She sighed dramatically. “All the pretty men, and I’m tied to just one.”

  Ben smiled at her. “Anytime you want to change that ...”

  I poked him in the side—he could have slipped out of the way, but he didn’t bother.

  “Okay,” he said, backing away with exaggerated fear. “I’ll be good, I promise. Just don’t hurt me again.”

  He was loud enough that all the people around us looked at us.

  Adam pushed his way through the pack and ruffled Ben’s hair as he went by him. “Behave, Ben.”

  The Ben I’d first met would have snarled and pulled away from the affectionate scold. This one grinned at me, and said, “Not if I can help it, I won’t,” to Adam.

  I liked Ben. But if I catch him alone in a room with Ruthie or Jesse, I will shoot him without hesitation. He’s better than he was when he first came to Adam’s pack, but he’s not safe. Some part of him still hates women, still looks upon us as prey. As long as that is true, he needs watching.

  “I have someone I’d like you to meet,” Adam told me, with a nod to Nan.

  He took my hand and led me past the giant wedding cake. It was a beautiful thing of blue and white flowers and silver bells—and despite having been cut and served to everyone here, it was still huge. Someone else had ordered it for another wedding and hadn’t paid for it, which was the only way—Jesse had told me—that she’d managed the cake. Whoever had originally ordered it must have been planning a much bigger wedding than this one. I glanced at the crowded basement and tried to imagine a bigger wedding.

  “Quick, now,” Adam told me, and tugged me out the side door and up the back stairs. “We’re escaping.”

  We made it out to the parking lot without seeing anyone else. Adam’s truck, inexplicably attached to a huge goosenecked travel trailer that looked bigger than the mobile home I’d lived in until this winter, when the fairy queen burned it to the ground, awaited us, poised for a quick getaway.

  “What’s the hurry?” I asked, as Adam boosted me in through the driver’s side, got in behind me, and started the truck before he had the door closed.

  “Some of the fae have an odd idea of bride send-offs,” he explained, as I wiggled over to the passenger seat and he guided the truck out of the parking lot, “including, according to Zee, kidnapping. We decided not to chance Bran’s feelings should such a thing happen, and Zee promised to run interference for us until we were off.”

  “I forgot about that.” And I was appalled because I knew better. “Bran and Samuel are probably more of a danger than any of the fae,” I told him. “Someday, I’ll tell you about some of the more spectacular wedding antics Samuel’s told me about.” Some of them made kidnapping look mild.

  I belted in, helped him to put on his own seat belt, and glanced behind us again. “In case you didn’t notice, there’s something very big stuck to the back of your truck.”

  He smiled at me, his eyes as clear and happy as I’d ever seen them. “And that’s my surprise. I told you I’d plan the honeymoon.”

  I blinked at the trailer. “Bring your own motel room along?” It loomed over us, taller than the truck—which was plenty tall on its own—taller and wider, too, with sections along the sides that were obviously intended to pop out. “I’m pretty sure it’s bigger than my old trailer.”

  Adam glanced over his shoulder and huffed a laugh. “I think it might be. This is the first I’ve seen of it. Peter and Honey took the truck and hitched it up.”

  “Is it yours?”

  “No. I borrowed it.”

  “I hope we’re not going anywhere with little windy roads,” I said. “Or small parking lots.”

  “I thought we’d spend the night in this really neat truck stop I know of in Boardman, Oregon,” Adam said, guiding it onto Highway 395 southbound. “The smell of diesel and the hum of big engines to accompany our first night together as man and wife.” He laughed at my expression. “Just trust me.”

  We did stop in Boardman to change out of our wedding clothes. Inside, the trailer was even more amazing than outside.

  Adam unhooked the billion bitty buttons that ran from my hips to my neck. A billion bitty buttons from my elbows to my wrists still awaited. They required two hands to unbutton, so all I could do was look around the trailer with awe. “It’s like a giant bag of holding. Huge on the outside, but even bigger on the inside.”

  “Your dress?” he said, sounding intrigued.

  I snorted. “Very funny. The trailer. You know about bags of holding, right? The nifty magic items that can hold more things than would ever really fit in bags of their size?”

  “Really?”

  I sighed. “The make-believe magic item from Dungeons and Dragons.” I craned my neck around, and said, “Don’t tell me you haven’t played D and D. Is there some rule that werewolves can’t indulge?”

  He leaned his forehead against my shoulder and laughed. “I may have been born in the Dark Ages”—actually he’d been born in the fifties, though he looked like he was only in his midtwenties; being a werewolf halts and reverses the aging process—“but I have played D and D. I can tell you for certain that Darryl has never indulged, though. Paintball is his game.”

  I took a minute to picture Darryl playing paintball. “Scary,” I muttered.

  “You have no idea.”

  Adam rubbed his cheek against mine and went back to his task. “I could just pull this apart, instead of unbuttoning it,” he said ten minutes later. It was a serious offer, spoken in a hopeful-but-doomed voice.

  “You do, and you get to sew all the buttons back on,” I told him. “Jesse is planning on reusing this.”

  “Soon?” he asked.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Somehow,” he grumped, “that’s not as reassuring as it ought to be.”

  “Gabriel’s going to college in Seattle in the fall,” I reminded him. “I think you’re safe this year.” My right-hand man had a thing for Adam’s daughter, and right now he was living in the tiny manufactured home that the insurance had replaced my old trailer with. A situation that made them happy and Adam antsy. He liked Gabriel, but Adam was an Alpha werewolf—which put him off-the-scale protective of his daughter.

  Eventually, Adam managed the buttons. While I hung the dress up and put it in the closet (yes, there was a closet), Adam stripped off his tux and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. He didn’t often dress down that far. Except for when he was working out, usually slacks and a button-up shirt was as grubby as he got. My clean shirt and jeans were dressed up for me. I was a mechanic by trade, and it was a rare thing when my fingernails were clean. Somehow, we fit together anyway.

  He bought us milk shakes and burgers (one for me, four for him) from the nearby restaurant, filled the diesel tanks in his truck, and we were back on the road.

  “Are we going to Portland?” I asked. “Or Multnomah Falls?”

  He smiled at me. “Go to sleep.”

  I waited three seconds. “Are we there yet?”

  His smile widened, and the last of the usual tension melted from his face. For a smile like that I’d ... do anything.

  “What?” he said.

  I leaned over and rested my cheek against his arm. “I love you,” I told him.

  “Yes,” he agreed smugly. “You do.”

  THE COLUMBIA GORGE IS A CANYON THAT RUNS nearly eighty miles through the Cascade Mountains, with the Columbia Ri
ver cutting through the bottom. It is part of the border between Washington and Oregon. Most of the travel is on the main, divided highway on the Oregon side, but there is a highway on the Washington side that runs most of the length of the gorge. Though the western part of the gorge is a temperate rain forest, the eastern section is dry steppe country with cheatgrass, sagebrush, and breathtaking basalt cliffs that sometimes form columnar joints.

  Adam turned off the highway at Biggs and took the bridge back over the Columbia to the Washington side. That bridge is one of my all-time favorites. The river is wide, a mile or nearly so, and the bridge arches gracefully up and over the water to the town of Maryhill.

  It was founded by financier Sam Hill (as in “where in Sam Hill?”) in the early twentieth century. He’d envisioned a Quaker paradisaical farm community and named the town after his wife, Mary Hill. She might have thought it was cooler, I suspect, if it weren’t out in the middle of the desert with about two inches of soil. There isn’t much left of the town—a few small orchards, a couple of nearby vineyards, and a state-run campground—none of which made Maryhill special.

  But Sam Hill hadn’t stopped with the town. He built the very first WWI memorial, a full-sized replica of Stonehenge visible from the highway on the Oregon side of the river.

  We turned west once we were over the bridge, though, away from Stonehenge and Maryhill. After ten or fifteen minutes of driving down a narrow highway that cut its way along the desert-steppe country of the Columbia Gorge, we came to a campground. Though it was groomed to within an inch of its life, there was no one inside. Adam pulled in the driveway, took a card off the map holder on his sunshade, and swiped it though the control box next to the gate. A green light flashed, and the gate slid open.

  “We have it to ourselves,” he said. “I did some of the security here, and they told me we could stay even though it doesn’t officially open until next spring. I’m sure the shower in the trailer works, but the ones in the restrooms over there are a lot bigger.”

  I looked around the campground, where tall oaks and maples gave shade to the graveled RV spaces. The big trees weren’t natural for this part of the state, any more than the green, green grass—someone had spent a lot of time tending them.