River Marked

by Briggs, Patricia

  I’m not sure if Fred or Jim had moved toward us when Gordon called them over, but they stayed back out of the way after I told them to. However helpful in getting the bullet out, unconscious was not a good sign. I found an explanation for it when I turned his head and discovered a bloody cut along his temple where the second shot had creased him.

  It was already healing, so that bullet, at least, had been lead. Even so, if Hank had hit Adam in the forehead with it, it still stood a good chance of killing him. I owed Fred because I wouldn’t have been fast enough.

  I stroked my fingers over Adam’s face, where he would smell me and know that I was watching out for him, then turned to watch what Gordon was doing. Adam was conscious; I could feel it. But he was trusting me to help him while he did his best to keep his body alive. Even if the first bullet had been lead, it needed to come out, or Adam would be sicker than a kid at Halloween for days until it festered out.

  It was about then that I realized the knife Gordon was using wasn’t some sort of fancy thing, painted black to make it look military. It was an honest-to-goodness obsidian knife. Stone knives, I remembered inconsequentially from Anthropology 101, were both sharper and more fragile than most steel knives. More important to me than the oddity of the knife was that Gordon looked like he knew what he was doing.

  “Remove many bullets?” I asked, just to be sure. I scrambled in the bags until I found the surgical kit and a probe and a pair of forceps.

  He gave them a look when I held them up for him. “Usually do this with my fingers,” he told me.

  Infection wasn’t a concern with werewolves—or apparently to Gordon.

  “A probe and forceps do less damage when you have to go in deep,” I told him firmly. “I can do it if you don’t want to.”

  I had so far in my life avoided pulling bullets out of people, and had no illusions that I’d be good at it. But me with forceps would be better than Gordon’s fingers.

  He gave me a gap-toothed grin and took the probe.

  “Have to work quickly on a werewolf,” I told him.

  “Healing pretty fast,” he grunted, sliding the instrument into the wound he’d reopened with the odd little knife. “Good news, I think, as long as we get the bullet out.”

  “Dominant werewolves do,” I said. “And they don’t come much more dominant.” Thank goodness. Despite his earlier words, he looked like he knew what he was doing. “You’ve used a probe before.”

  He switched hands, holding the probe with his left and taking the forceps with his right. “Only a hundred or two,” he said, closing his eyes. “Got it. It’s up against his shoulder blade.”

  A silver bullet doesn’t mushroom like a lead bullet does. If it had made it all the way through Adam, it would have left a neat hole going in and an equally neat hole going out. The bullet Gordon pulled out of Adam was squashed and had doubtless bounced around inside and torn up muscle and organs. More painful but infinitely less lethal.

  As soon as Gordon’s hand was out, I dried my hands on my jeans and hauled out my phone to call Samuel.

  “Who are you calling?” asked Gordon.

  “A doctor friend of mine,” I told him. “And his.”

  A hand wrapped around the phone, and Adam said hoarsely, “Don’t. Not until we know what’s going on.” He sat up, using his stomach muscles and not his arms. He didn’t do it for effect—moving his shoulder would be painful for a while yet.

  He looked at Gordon. “Thanks for the surgery. That felt like the fastest extraction I’ve had.”

  Gordon raised an eyebrow. “Do you find yourself saying that often? If so, I advise a different lifestyle.”

  Adam smiled to acknowledge Gordon’s point, but when he spoke, it was on another subject. “You said something last night about river marked—about how Mercy wouldn’t be a good slave. What’s special about that mark? Did the river devil do it?”

  He hurt; I could feel just how much. But he wasn’t going to show it in public.

  “River marked,” Gordon said. He looked over to where Fred was exploring the back of Hank’s head. “I do see why you are asking. There was once a place where a band of Indians lived. ‘Don’t go to that village; they are marked by the river,’ the people would say. ‘If you go there, you will not come back. They will feed you to the river.’ All the people of that village wore a brown mark on their bodies, and they obeyed the hungry river in all things. I’ve forgotten the rest of the story.”

  “Check Hank,” Adam said, his voice only a little more breathy than normal. “He didn’t strike me as the shoot first and negotiate later kind of person. Even those crazy jarheads usually need a reason to pull the trigger.”

  Fred didn’t protest the slur, just stripped off Hank’s jeans and shirt—and found a dark brown oozing sore across Hank’s back that looked a lot like what my calf had looked like before Gordon and his salve had come along.

  I jerked up my pant leg. “Looks like what I’ve got.”

  “Could have happened when he was coming onshore with our boat last night,” said Jim. “He didn’t say anything about getting hurt—but Hank’s like that. Coyote walkers are immune to the effects?”

  Gordon grunted. “This coyote walker, evidently.”

  And when Hank groaned and started to move, Jim added, “I have a rope in the truck.” And he jumped up to get it.

  “We don’t want the pack here,” Adam said very quietly to me, explaining why he hadn’t let me call Samuel, I thought. “First—wolves don’t do well in water. Second—just think what this thing could do if he controlled a pack of werewolves.”

  “Wouldn’t pack magic stop that?” I asked. If the river devil could control Hank, another walker, maybe it wasn’t the walker part of me that had kept it from doing that to me. Maybe it was the pack—or even my mate bond with Adam.

  Adam shook his head. “Maybe. But I’m not willing to risk it. Not unless things get a lot more desperate.”

  “You heal fast,” said Jim neutrally as he returned with a rope.

  “Werewolves do,” I said—and remembered that one of the side effects of rapid healing was an even larger than usual need for food. Adam needed to eat meat—lots of it, the rawer the better. He was holding on to his control, which couldn’t be easy, with his wound exposed to all of these possibly hostile strangers. Alpha wolves can’t afford that kind of weakness. He hid his pain well, but they all knew he’d been shot and they could see the blood.

  “I’ll get some food,” I told him.

  “No,” Adam said, holding on to my arm before I could go. “Not yet. We’ll get this meeting over with first.”

  He didn’t want to betray any more weakness among these people. I supposed I could understand it, but it didn’t make me happy. But he was Alpha, and I was his mate. I’d argue with him in private . . . Okay, who was I kidding? I’d argue with him in front of the pack. But not in front of strangers. Not when he was hurt, anyway.

  He glanced at the others, who were mostly working on restraining Hank with Jim’s rope. Gordon had gone over to supervise the others.

  Adam raised his good hand to me, and said quietly, “Give me a hand up.”

  I did, and tried not to show how much strength it required to get him on his feet. He walked—only a little stiffly—to the picnic table and leaned a hip on it. Apparently, he was satisfied with the job Fred was doing because he didn’t say anything until Fred had finished hog-tying his brother.

  It is difficult to tie up a person so he can’t escape. When I was about ten, a whole bunch of us kids in Aspen Creek, inspired by some movie or other, spent a whole month tying one another up at recess with jump ropes until Bran came and put a stop to it. He probably wouldn’t have bothered if we hadn’t left Jem Goodnight tied to the swing set after the bell rang. We felt pretty justified because Jem told us that no girl could tie him up in such a way that he couldn’t get out of it. “Girls,” he’d pronounced, “can’t tie knots.”

  It had taken us three recesses to get i
t right, but after a half hour of working on it, it had taken Bran’s knife to finally free Jem. I could tie knots, girl or no. Bryan, who’d once been a sailor on the tall ships with sails, had worked with me since I first tied my own shoes.

  Adam’s phone rang, and he glanced at the screen before he answered it. With a grimace he opened it, and said, “I’m fine, Darryl. Just a misunderstanding.” Pack bonds could be a nuisance sometimes, like when Adam had been shot and didn’t want the pack to come running.

  “You’re hurt,” said Darryl’s voice, and I think the only person who didn’t hear him was Jim.

  “It’s minor.”

  “Felt like you got shot,” Darryl said dryly. “I know what a bullet feels like. You had a misunderstanding on your honeymoon that resulted in your getting shot? We could be there in a couple of hours.”

  “It was a misunderstanding,” growled Adam, speaking slower, as if that would make Darryl more compliant. “Stay where you are. I’ll call you in if I need you.”

  There was a pause. “Let me talk to Mercy.”

  “Who is Alpha?” Adam’s voice was a low threat.

  “You are,” I told him, and snatched the phone out of his hand. “But this is payback for your making poor Darryl watch out for me when you were in D.C. Hey, Darryl. He got shot with a .38 in the shoulder, lead. We’re not sure exactly what’s going on right now other than the excitement is over for the night. If we need you, we’ll call you. Right now, that’s looking like it might not be a really good idea.”

  “Boss man is okay?”

  “Grumpy,” which was shorthand for hurt, which I wouldn’t say, and Darryl would understand that. Wolves never admit how badly they’re hurt. “But he’s okay. We are safe and not in need of rescue.”

  “Good enough. I’m keeping the bags packed in case something changes.”

  “How’s Jesse?” I asked. “Has she been throwing parties and living wild?” Jesse made a good change of topic because both Adam and Darryl relaxed as soon as Darryl responded.

  “She dyed her hair orange, and it has these glittering purple strings in it,” he said, sounding moderately aghast and intrigued at the same time. “I figured since she does it when Adam is in charge, he wouldn’t kill me. Does she know that too much dyeing could make her hair turn green?”

  I snorted. “Her hair was green. Did you miss it?”

  “I forgot,” he said. “Maybe not having kids is a good idea after all. Tell the boss all is okay here.”

  “Will do,” I said. “Good night.”

  I handed the phone back to the wolf who was my mate. “They’ll stay home.”

  He put his phone away without a word, but I could see his dimple peeking out. Jesse’s disconcerting the intellectual and physical giant who was Adam’s second was pretty funny to think about.

  “Sorry,” Adam said to the others. “Urgent business, unless you want to be neck-deep in werewolves.”

  “He knew you were hurt?” Fred asked.

  “He’s pack,” Adam told him. Then, maybe to forestall questions about things Bran didn’t want the public to know about werewolves, he continued briskly, “Here’s what we need to figure out about whatever is in the river. How much harm is this creature doing? We don’t really have a lot of data to go on other than a lot of scary talk about monsters. As the sole representative of monsters here, it is my . . . obligation to make certain we are looking at this with a balanced perspective. I am sorry that Benny’s sister was killed and Benny injured. However, people are injured by”—he hesitated—“bear attacks, too. Just because something is dangerous does not make it evil. Was it defending its territory? Are we correct that it is a single beast? How intelligent is it? Can we bargain to keep people safe? Should we kill the last or near last of its kind because it has killed a woman and hurt her brother? Is there a way to salvage this situation with no more deaths?”

  When you are a werewolf, I thought, it’s a little hard to point at another predator, and shout, “It’s a scary monster, kill it! Kill it!” I rubbed my calf though it wasn’t itching at the moment.

  Hank’s eyes were open, but he didn’t say anything or look at anyone. Instead, he stared at the river with such intensity that I shivered.

  “I have a friend in River Patrol,” said Fred. “I can find out how many casualties there have been in the river.” He looked at Gordon. “Is there any story about how someone is freed from this mark?”

  Gordon shook his head. “I do not know. But I will ask around.” He looked at Adam. “It is not something you can bargain with, Mr. Hauptman. It is Hunger.”

  “I’m a werewolf,” Adam told him. “People would have said that about me a century ago, too.”

  “This,” said Gordon, “is nothing so benign as a werewolf or a grizzly bear.”

  Fred, kneeling on the ground next to his hog-tied brother, frowned suddenly at Gordon. “I thought you’d come with them”—he tipped his head toward the trailer, so he meant Adam and me—“until you named yourself Calvin’s grandfather. But Calvin Seeker’s father’s father is dead. I know his mother’s father. How is it you are his grandfather?”

  Gordon smiled, the gap in front making him look as harmless as I was suddenly certain he wasn’t. “I’m an old man,” he told Fred. “How should I remember this?”

  “I’ll vouch for Gordon,” said Jim, though he didn’t sound enthusiastic or certain of it. “And so will Calvin. I think we ought to get Hank to the hospital, where they can check him. He doesn’t seem to be tracking very well.”

  “I hit him pretty hard,” I said, almost apologetically, which was as good as I could do, given that he’d shot Adam. “I didn’t realize I’d grabbed my walking stick and not just some random stick until afterward.”

  “Understandable,” said Fred unexpectedly. “My wife would take a baseball bat to someone who shot me.”

  “Has,” said Jim. “I remember. It was Hank that time, too, wasn’t it?”

  “He didn’t mean to,” said Fred. “It was in Iraq—Desert Storm. I startled him on sentry-go, and he shot me. Meant I beat him back by a month. He showed up at my house to see how I was, and my Molly chased him around the front yard with my boy’s bat until she got him in the backside. Good thing it was a plastic bat, or Hank wouldn’t be walking now.”

  THEY LEFT. JIM, FRED, AND HANK TOOK JIM’S TRUCK with Hank bound and laid out as comfortably as possible in the truck bed, with his brother to steady him. I rode up with them to let them out, and by the time I got back, Adam was alone. He was standing up—I think because if he sat down, he was worried he couldn’t get up again.

  “Food,” I told him.

  But he shook his head. “No. Shower. Then food. After I eat, I’ll want to sleep. Can’t safely sleep covered in blood and risk the wolf waking up without me and panicking him.”

  He was worried that he’d be weak enough when he slept that he couldn’t control his wolf. For the wolf, all the blood would be all it took to wake up defensive and ready to fight. He had a point—the dark hid the worst of it, but there was no denying that he and I were covered in his blood.

  “Okay,” I said, and ran into the trailer to grab clean clothes and towels. I got back out and made him get in the truck because “I can’t carry you if you go down hard.” He didn’t argue much, which showed me how badly he was hurting.

  We showered together in the men’s room, because that was the direction he headed and, well, there was no one else in the campground, so what did it matter which side we went in? The men’s room was done in browns rather than greens, but it had the same huge shower stalls with big showerheads. By the end of the shower, he was leaning on me pretty heavily.

  “Maybe I should have just washed up with a wet cloth and changed clothes,” he admitted.

  The mark on his chest, where Gordon had opened a path to the bullet, was a dark, angry red, but it would heal as soon as the rest of the damage did. Shift to wolf, food, and sleep would see him right.

  “Mercy,” he said. “I
’ll be okay.”

  I controlled myself because he had enough to worry about without me setting his wolf off. “Sorry. I know you will.” I growled a little, not seriously, just enough so he knew I wasn’t happy. “I don’t like it that you are hurt. I like it even less that it could have been worse.”

  “Good.” He lifted his head into the water. “I’ll try to make sure that you always feel that way. My mother used to threaten to shoot my father.”

  He could barely stand up, and he was making jokes.

  I nipped his shoulder. “I can see why she might feel the urge. Tell you what. If you make me mad enough to aim a gun at you—I’ll aim for right between your eyes.”

  “So I won’t feel it?” he asked.

  I nipped him again, but gently, just a scrape of my teeth. “No. So the bullet will just bounce off your hard head.”

  He laughed. “Birds of a feather, Mercy.”

  If Hank had loaded his gun with silver, I might never have heard that laugh again.

  Two years ago, silver bullets meant someone had to make them—I’d made my share. After the wolves had come out, suddenly people could buy silver bullets at Wal-Mart. Cops were unhappy about it because silver works pretty slick as an armor-piercing round, but without legislation, anyone who wanted to spend thirty dollars on a bullet could get one. Hank had known what Adam was, and still his gun had been loaded with lead. To me that indicated that he hadn’t been planning on shooting Adam—or else he was really broke and couldn’t afford the thirty bucks.

  Another question occurred to me. Why had he shot Adam instead of Fred, Jim, Gordon, or me?

  Assuming he was under the control of the river devil or whatever it was, maybe he or it or they together had decided that the werewolf was the greatest threat. I could understand that reasoning at least as far as Fred and I were concerned. Who would worry about a hawk and a coyote when there was a werewolf in the party? Yo-yo Girl’s premonition indicated that Adam was important. Maybe the river devil knew why that was.