River Marked

by Briggs, Patricia

  Some of the trails were easy, even handicap accessible. Not too far from Multnomah, those all went away, and the fun started in earnest. The top of the mountain is a little more than four thousand feet above the trailhead, and not much of that climb is gentle.

  I HEARD THE CRYING BEFORE I SAW THEM. THINKING someone was in trouble, I broke into a jog up the trail, and Adam ran behind me.

  “Honey, I can’t carry you.” The woman’s voice was on the edge of tears. “I just can’t. You have to be a big boy and help me, Robert.”

  There followed a boy’s voice, unintelligible to me and interspersed with sobs.

  Around a bend in the trail we came upon two very upset people. A frazzled woman in her forties and a boy with a tear- and dirt-streaked face.

  “Hey,” I said. “Sounds pretty rough. What can we do to help?”

  She started to refuse help—and then her eyes fell on Adam and lit up with avarice. I sympathized with her entirely—but was happier when I realized it was the strength of his back she was excited about and not his pretty face.

  Her son was not nearly as excited as his mother. Robert, his mother informed us, was eight, but he had Down’s syndrome and was as wary of strangers as most two-year-olds. He wasn’t happy about the idea of Adam hauling him down the mountain to the parking lot.

  While his mother tried to reason with him, Adam got down on one knee and looked the boy in the eye. He didn’t say anything at all. But after almost a full minute, the boy nodded, and when Adam stood up, he climbed onto Adam’s back without another protest. He still wasn’t happy about it, but he knew who was in charge.

  “Well,” said Robert’s mother, flabbergasted.

  “Adam’s good at giving orders,” I told her truthfully. “Even without saying anything.”

  So Adam carried one very tired and cranky eight-year-old boy who had a sprained ankle down the trail while the boy’s even-more-tired mother thanked him all the way.

  “I didn’t know it would be so steep,” the boy’s mother said to me, when Adam stretched his legs a little and got ahead of us. I thought it was to stop her incessant thanks, but maybe I was being uncharitable.

  “Robert was so tired of being in the car. Eugene is still a long way, and I thought it might be nice if he ran off some energy; then he would sleep the rest of the way. I hope your young man doesn’t hurt himself. Robert weighs almost eighty pounds.”

  “Don’t worry,” I assured her. “Adam was in the army. He can carry an eighty-pound pack down the mountain. That’s also why he knows the difference between a twisted ankle, a sprained ankle, and a break.”

  I wasn’t going to tell her that he was a werewolf who could probably carry us all down if he could figure out a good way to make a manageable bundle of us. Adam was out to the public, but neither Robert nor his mother looked like people who could deal with werewolves at this point in their trip. The army part was true—they didn’t need to know that his army life was back in the Vietnam era.

  “Get his ankle X-rayed anyway,” advised Adam, who’d had no trouble hearing us. “I’m not a doctor, and sprains can be tricky.”

  By the time we made it down to the parking lot, Robert had recovered except for an exaggerated limp. His mother had lost the desperate edge to her voice. She thanked us again, and Robert gave Adam a wet kiss on his cheek.

  “My hero,” I told Adam, as they drove away. “You done here? Or would you mind going back up again?”

  To my intense pleasure, Adam and I hiked for another couple of hours, then ate in Hood River. I’d never spent so much time with him without interruption. Here, there was no other demand on either of us.

  I loved it. Loved watching the alertness fade and the strain of taking care of the pack, of me, of his daughter, of his business just wash away from his face and his body.

  Usually, Adam looked like a man well into his thirties—though werewolves don’t age at all. By the time we returned to the campground, he’d lost ten years of care and looked not much older than his daughter. Laughter lit his face in a way that I’d never seen before.

  I had done this. Me. Okay, me and God’s waterfalls and mountainside forest. Even though it had seemed I couldn’t get through a day without throwing him in the middle of my hot water. Even though he’d had to fight vampires, demons, and waterlogged fae because of me. Even though he’d had to fight his own pack, I was good for Adam.

  I’d seen him ticked off, in pain, in sorrow. It was indescribably better to see him happy.

  “What?” he asked, finishing the second of his nine-ounce steaks, medium rare. “Why are you looking at me that way?”

  The trendy little restaurant that occupied the old Victorian intimidated me a little, not that I’d let anyone, including Adam, see it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything, except possibly my mother, intimidate Adam. But it was more than that.

  He fit here. He’d fit out running around in the trails—and packing the little boy down the mountainside. For someone like me, who’d had to fight to make my own place because I didn’t fit anywhere, he was ... Well, the truth of the matter was that he fit me, too.

  Though, from their sideways looks, a lot of the rather affluent diners eating there obviously didn’t think so. Adam might be going casual in jeans and a T-shirt, but he still looked like he just stepped off a modeling job. I looked like I’d been hiking all day even though I’d pulled the leaves out of my hair in the restaurant bathroom.

  I sighed theatrically, resting my chin on my cupped hands and bracing my elbows on the table. “You are too gorgeous, you know?” I said it just loud enough that the people who’d been watching us surreptitiously could hear me.

  Unholy laughter lit his eyes—telling me he’d been noticing the looks we’d been getting. But his face was completely serious, as he purred, “So. Am I worth what you paid for me, baby?”

  I loved it when he played along with me.

  I sighed again, a sound that I drew up from my toes, a contented, happy sound. I’d get him back for that “baby.” Just see if I didn’t.

  “Oh, yes,” I told our audience. “I’ll tell Jesse that she was right. Go for the sexy beast, she told me. If you’re going to shell out the money, don’t settle.”

  He threw back his head and laughed until he had to wipe tears of hilarity off his face. “Jeez, Mercy,” he said. “The things you say.” Then he leaned across the table and kissed me.

  A while later he pulled back, grinned at me, and sat back in his chair.

  I had to catch my breath before I spoke. “Best five bucks I ever spent,” I told him fervently.

  HE WAS STILL LAUGHING WHEN HE BUCKLED HIS SEAT belt. “It’s a good thing that we don’t live in Hood River,” he said. “I’d never be able to show my face in that restaurant again. Five bucks. Jeez.” Adam was a gentleman raised in the fifties. He tried really hard not to swear in front of women.

  “I thought it was pretty cool when that little old lady tried to give you a twenty,” I said, and set him off again.

  “The thing that spooked me”—he drove back out on the highway toward our campground—“was that woman at the table next to us, who looked like she bought the whole act, even after everyone else was laughing.”

  Ah, Creepy Lady. She’d watched us both with her eyes wide and her jaw open, and still her expression managed to be blank. I was betting she was either a total psychopath—or fae, which was sometimes the same thing. I could have gone closer for a good sniff—I’ve learned what fae smell like—but it was my honeymoon. I didn’t want to know.

  “I’m never going to be bored with you around,” Adam told me. The funny thing was that he sounded happy about it.

  “WANT TO GO FOR A RUN?” ADAM ASKED, HOPPING OUT of bed a few hours later.

  We’d lain down to rest after our travels. Not much resting had taken place, but I wasn’t going to complain. Still, every bone in my body was Jell-O, and he wanted to go run?

  “Ungh,” I said. That was the best I could do.

/>   He grinned at me. “You can drop the act.”

  I waved a weak hand at him.

  “I bet I catch a rabbit before you do,” he said.

  Oh. He meant a run. We’d gotten back to the campground about dusk, so it was full dark. Full dark meant that in the unlikely event that someone saw Adam as werewolf, they’d think he was a dog—helped along by pack magic that let people see what they expected to see. The magic works in broad daylight, too, but darkness helps.

  “Well, why didn’t you say so,” I grumped at him as I vaulted off the bed. I was wearing half a T-shirt—the left half—and my socks. The other half of my shirt was on the far side of the trailer. I was going to take an hour and clean the trailer really well before we returned it to its owner or I’d risk being embarrassed.

  Which reminded me. “Hey, Adam?” I dropped the half shirt on the floor and stood on one foot to take off a sock. “Who loaned us the trailer? The only people I know who could have afforded it are you, Kyle, or Samuel. Samuel would not be caught dead with something this ... bulky. You told me it isn’t yours. Did Kyle buy it in an attempt to compromise with Warren’s desire to go camping?”

  “Uncle Mike.”

  I froze, one foot in the air. “What?” He’d borrowed something from a fae?

  Adam steadied me with a hand on my shoulder. “I’m not wet behind the ears,” he told me, a little bite in his voice. “Uncle Mike called me and told me he’d heard I was planning on taking you camping and didn’t he have the sweetest little trailer we could take with us.”

  “You borrowed from Uncle Mike?”

  “Uncle Mike offered it ... Now, how did he phrase that? For services already rendered. You need to either get the sock off, Mercy, or put that foot down before you fall over.”

  I pulled the sock off and stood on my own two feet. “Fae never give you anything for nothing,” I said urgently. “Not even Zee, and he’s my friend.”

  The fae do things like make you pledge your firstborn child or your life’s blood for a piece of bubble gum, and make it sound like a good deal at the time.

  “When the fae who owns this campground called to offer it up about an hour before Uncle Mike called, I was pretty suspicious,” Adam told me.

  His voice had regained its usual relaxed tone, but he was irritated. I could tell by the way he stripped off his shirt. I could leave it alone ... but he didn’t know the fae the way I’d come to know them.

  “After Uncle Mike called,” he continued blandly, “I knew they wanted us here for some reason. I could have refused—I had reservations in San Diego—but I thought you’d enjoy this more than a hotel, and I knew I would.”

  I frowned at him.

  “I didn’t promise him anything,” Adam said with exaggerated patience. “You need to remember who you are now. They can’t just f—” He stopped speaking for a moment, then swallowed his temper with an effort—and not as much effect as he probably wanted because the bland tone deserted him entirely.

  “Mercy, they can’t mess with you without messing with me and the whole pack—and Samuel—and Bran—and Zee—and Stefan probably, for that matter. I don’t know what they want. Maybe they needed us to not go to San Diego—Uncle Mike mentioned San Diego specifically though I hadn’t told anyone where I was taking you. Maybe they needed us to stick closer to home. We werewolves are a potential ally against political attacks now since we are the only other supernatural group who admits its existence to the general public. Maybe there is something here—” He waved his hands to indicate the general area upon which the trailer sat. “It could be something as easy as using us as a deterrent to another fae who plans on destroying what Edythe has built here.”

  Edythe must be the fae who owned the place. Of course it was a fae who had set up this campground, with its big trees and supergreen grass.

  Adam was right. I’d forgotten that if the fae screwed with me, they were taking on the whole pack and then some. I was more than just a mechanic who fixed VWs and turned into a coyote because I had Adam, and I had friends. What a difference a year or two could make.

  If he’d stopped there, I wouldn’t have gotten mad. Maybe I’d even have conceded that he’d been right, and I shouldn’t have worried. But he didn’t leave it alone—because Adam might be gorgeous and smart, but he wasn’t perfect.

  “I suppose I could have driven myself crazy—” he bit out because our peculiar bond apparently wasn’t doing its thing. He didn’t know that I agreed with him. That he’d won. “Or more to the point,” he said, “I could have let you drive both of us crazy for the past few days speculating what nefarious plot Uncle Mike has hatched up—Uncle Mike, who has proved himself to be, at least, a valuable ally if you don’t consider him to be a friend. Or I could keep it to myself until your curiosity got the best of you and you asked so we could at least enjoy a couple days of our honeymoon before we started worrying about what the fu—” He was breathing harder now and had almost let that four-letter word all the way out.

  I leaned forward, kissed the white line on his cheek that came out like war paint whenever he clenched his jaw, and said lightly, “All you ever had to do was tell me you had it under control, dear.” I batted my eyes demurely. “I’m just the wife. I don’t have to strain my poor weak brain worrying about the fae because you are here to protect me.”

  Yep, I was ticked, too. He was patronizing me.

  I could still, however, admit when he was right: the fae certainly weren’t the ones he had to worry about.

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “That is not what I said. Don’t put words in my mouth.”

  I reached around him, popped the door of the trailer open, and changed into a coyote before he finished his sentence—and I was off and running.

  It would take a while before he could follow because werewolves take a lot longer to change. I supposed he could have chased after me in human form—but on two feet he’d never catch me, werewolf or not. Besides that, he was naked. The campground was rendered mostly private by topography and greenery, but it wasn’t completely private. Pack magic wouldn’t do anything to hide a naked man running across the campground.

  I took advantage of him and left before he could continue the argument.

  “DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE DOING, MARRYING an Alpha werewolf?” my mother had said a few months ago, as I drove us to yet another wedding-dress outlet in Portland. Who knew there were so many white dresses? Who knew there were so many horrible white dresses? The oddest thing was that it seemed like the worse the dress, the more expensive it was.

  “Yes, Mom,” I said, narrowly avoiding a brownish ’77 LTD being driven by a grandmother who could barely see over the dash. “I’ve known Adam for a long time. I know just what I’m getting myself into.”

  As if I hadn’t said anything, my mother said, “Any kind of alpha takes some serious managing. Werewolves are controlling bastards—and Alpha werewolves are worse than that. If you don’t watch it, you find that you are doing exactly what they tell you to.”

  There was an interesting snap in her voice, and I wondered how often Bran had gotten her to do what he wanted her to. Not as often as he wanted, I’d bet, but evidently more than she was happy about.

  “I know how to take care of myself.” I wasn’t worried. Adam was dominant—that was certainly true. But I’d more than proved to myself that I could hold my own against him if I needed to.

  “I know you do,” Mom said with satisfaction. “But remember, confrontations aren’t productive with an Alpha. You’ll just lose—or worse, make him lose control.”

  “He won’t hurt me, Mom.”

  “Of course not,” she said. “But a man like Adam, if he loses control, he’ll feel terrible. He’ll worry that he might have hurt you. Making him feel horrible isn’t what you want.” She paused, considered what she said, then modified it. “Unless it is useful for him to feel horrible, of course. Mostly, though, I’ve found that isn’t productive. Men who are miserable can be unpredictable.”r />
  I wondered if my stepfather knew how lucky he was that she felt it was in her best interests that he was happy instead of miserable. Probably he did; he was a smart man.

  “I am the queen of hit-and-run,” I told her. “All the satisfaction, none of the danger.”

  “Good,” she said. “Just make sure he doesn’t turn you into the good little wife. You’d manage it for a while—you were the ‘good little daughter’ in my house from the time you moved in until you went to college.”

  There was a little edge to her voice, as if I’d hurt her—which hadn’t been my intention at all. When I’d left Bran’s pack to live with my mother and stepfather, I’d been sixteen, and they’d already had a family without me. No. They’d had the perfect family without me. I hadn’t wanted to disturb them any more than I could help.

  “But if you try that in a marriage,” she continued, “the marriage will self-destruct eventually, and there will be casualties everywhere you look.”

  “Adam doesn’t want a good little wife,” I told her.

  “Of course not,” she said. But she didn’t know Adam that well, and I figured she was just humoring me, until she kept going. “But he was taught how to be a husband when it was assumed that his wife would be a combination cook/housekeeper/mother who would need him to provide and protect her. He knows in his head and his heart that you are an equal, but his instincts were instilled a long time ago. You are going to have to help him with that and be patient with him.”

  My mother would not be nearly as terrifying if she weren’t right so often.

  SO INSTEAD OF STICKING AROUND TO FIGHT WITH Adam, I ran to let us both cool off, and to let the hurt of his patronizing remarks ease so I could think. I can’t be patient when I’m mad—unless I’m waiting to get back at someone, and I wasn’t that mad. Not yet.