River Marked

by Briggs, Patricia

  “Oh.” I thought about it for a while. “That’s pretty good. Not quite up to my slowly eroding Rabbit, but you get points for that.”

  Adam was a neat and tidy person, the kind of man who walks into a room and straightens the paintings. For years I used the junker car in my backyard to exact revenge for high-handed orders I had to follow. Had to follow because they weren’t just high-handed—they were smart. When I was particularly annoyed, I’d remove tires—never all four—and leave the trunk open or one of the doors, just to bother him.

  He, evidently, had run around naked to bother me. I thought about that a moment more.

  “Thank you for the years of entertainment,” I said.

  “No trouble,” he responded in a serious voice. “Now that we’re married, are you finally going to do something with that car? Like tow it away or store it somewhere out of sight?”

  I took a deep breath—and my lungs seemed to be working just fine with the awful my-father-who-wasn’t-my father lump in my stomach gone.

  “I’ll think about it,” I told him. “Maybe you should put it on your What I Want for Christmas List?”

  “You okay now?” he asked.

  “Okay.”

  He tightened his arms and lifted me off my feet. “Mercy?” he growled into my ear.

  I wrapped my legs around his waist. “Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”

  Adam could have died last night. I could have died twenty minutes ago. I wasn’t willing to waste a moment more.

  At some point in the night he kissed my pawprint tattoo and laughed. “Did you really tell Coyote this was a wolf print?”

  “To you, it is a coyote print,” I said firmly. “For him, it is a wolf print. Only I and my tattoo artist know for sure.”

  I WOKE IN THE MORNING TO THE SOUND OF ADAM’S stomach growling under my ear.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Too many changes and not enough food.”

  I patted his hard belly and kissed it. “Poor thing,” I told it. “Doesn’t Adam treat you right? No worries. I’ll go feed you.”

  My head bounced when Adam laughed.

  “Let’s go find someplace to eat breakfast and get some groceries.” And then he proved that even when he was distracted, he still listened to me. “And some clothes for you.”

  WHILE I WAS DRESSING, I NOTICED THE NUMBER WRITTEN on the palm of my hand and remembered I was supposed to make a phone call.

  “Yes?” Jim’s voice was wary.

  “Coyote told me to call you,” I told him. “He said that you wouldn’t believe that he was real unless I did.”

  The man on the other side of the phone didn’t even breathe.

  Adam grinned at me as he buttoned up his shirt.

  “How is your husband?” Jim asked politely.

  “He’s fine.” Even the red mark was gone. How fast a wound healed varied from wolf to wolf and wound to wound. As Alpha, Adam tended to heal even faster than most. I’d expected that to change since we were so far from the pack, but evidently it hadn’t.

  “How are Hank’s head and Benny’s foot?” I asked.

  “Hank is okay. Once we got him away from you, he seemed to recover a bit. Though he has a concussion, it’s not a bad one.” He cleared his throat. “Fred told the doctor Hank took a fall. The doctor seemed to think it might involve a pipe or tire iron, but Hank told him it was a fall, too. Fred is keeping an eye on him. Benny has been tranquilized ever since he tried to get up and leave the second time. He seems perfectly happy.”

  “So we’re meeting you at Stonehenge? Coyote seemed pretty sure something could be done for Hank.”

  “You are very casual about meeting Coyote,” he said. “Maybe we both just had a dream.”

  “You’re the medicine man,” I told him. “You should know better than that—and be casual, too.” Maybe that wasn’t fair. “Eventually, anyway. I’m married to a werewolf, and I’ve met Baba Yaga. At least Coyote doesn’t fly around in a giant mortar.”

  “Baba Yaga? No. I don’t want to know.” Jim sighed. “Maybe I should go back to teaching school about crazy people instead of being one. Yes. I’ll see you and your husband at Stonehenge at midnight. The memorial is supposed to be closed after dark, but I have a few contacts. Indian sacred ceremonies usually works, but I have a few more tricks up my sleeve if I need them.”

  ADAM DIDN’T APPROVE OF WAL-MART.

  “There is a department store back in The Dalles,” he said with a touch of grimness as we walked through the doors into the warehouselike building.

  “Do they still call them department stores?” I wondered aloud, then shrugged it off. “Doesn’t matter. Wal-Mart is the Happy Shopping Grounds for the financially challenged. And those who ruin clothing on a daily basis. I don’t care about ripping up five-dollar T-shirts. And destroying twenty-dollar jeans hurts less than eighty-dollar jeans.”

  He growled, and I really looked at him.

  The bright lights over our heads flickered and gave his skin a slightly green cast. That was the fault of the cheap bulbs, but the tension in his neck and the hunted expression were different. Too many strangers, too many smells, way too many sounds. A paranoid person—or an Alpha wolf—might feel like he couldn’t make sure no one blindsided him in a place like Wal-Mart.

  “Hey,” I said, coming to a stop. “How about I shop here, and you head over to the grocery store and grab some food. I’ll shop in peace, and you can pick me up in forty-five minutes?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not leaving you here alone.”

  “The only thing that wants to kill me is in the river,” I told him, trying to keep my voice down, but the woman pushing a cart past us gave me an odd look. “I’ve been shopping at Wal-Marts for most of my life, and I’ve never been assaulted in one.” I narrowed my gaze at him though I kept it focused on his chin. “As long as it’s not demons, fae, or sea monsters, I can also take care of myself pretty well. I’m not helpless.” And suddenly it mattered very much that he not treat me like some ninny who needed to be protected at all times, someone who would stand around waiting to be rescued.

  He saw it in my face, I think, because he took a deep breath and looked around. “Okay. Okay.”

  I stood on my tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”

  He kissed me back. Not on the cheek. By the time I’d recovered enough to process information, he was striding out the door, and everyone in view was staring at me.

  I flushed. “We just got married,” I announced, then felt even stupider, so I hurried to escape in the aisles.

  The Wal-Mart in Hood River wasn’t as big as any of the three in the Tri-Cities. But it had jeans and shirts, and that was all I was worried about.

  I grabbed four dark-colored T-shirts and three pairs of jeans in the proper size and headed for the dressing rooms. I didn’t need to try on the T-shirts, but I never buy jeans without putting them on first. It doesn’t matter what size they say they are—some of them are shaped differently than others.

  The lady working the dressing rooms gave me a bored look, handed me a plastic “6” and a “1,” and sent me in. Apparently, they were out of “7”s.

  The only other occupant of the rooms was a harried mother and her teenage daughter arguing about how tight the girl’s jeans were. They stood in the larger area in the center of two rows of small rooms in front of the big mirror.

  “They are fine, Mom,” the girl said in the long-suffering tones used by put-upon teens everywhere, probably back to the dawn of time.

  “You’ll sit down and the seat will split, just like happened to your aunt Sherry when we were in high school. She has never gotten over it.”

  “Aunt Sherry is a . . . Well, anyway, I am not Aunt Sherry. These are mostly Lycra, Mom. They’re supposed to fit tight. Look.”

  I squeezed past the girl, who was doing deep knee bends.

  I found an empty room, then tuned them out. I don’t know about normal folks, but if I wanted to, I could have listened in on the conversations of eve
ryone in the store. I’d had to learn early to ignore them or I’d have gone crazy. Adam paid attention to all that noise because he worried about safety, but I wasn’t worried enough to put up with the discomfort.

  The first pair of jeans had a puzzling bulge halfway down my thigh on the left leg. I tried turning around to see if it was just my imagination, but the left-leg bulge stayed where it was.

  The teenager and her mother had left the changing rooms when I went out to look in the bigger mirror, so I had the whole thing to myself. Unless I’d mysteriously gained a lump on the side of my thigh, there was a problem with these jeans.

  I went back into my room and pulled them off. Then I checked in the smaller mirror to make sure that I hadn’t suddenly mutated. To my relief, without the jeans, my thighs looked like a matched pair. The river mark was still curled around my calf—I’d have to remember to ask Coyote if he could get rid of that one, too.

  The second fit better, no odd bulges, and my butt didn’t look bigger than it ought to in them—but it had fake pockets on the front. I use my pockets. No-pocket jeans are only slightly less irritating than thong underwear.

  The third pair didn’t fit as well as the second one had, but they had pockets that worked. I could live with them. If they bothered me too much, I’d just wear them to work until they were ripped and greasy enough I didn’t feel bad throwing them away.

  I had fifteen minutes to pay and get out to the parking lot. I hung up the rejects and pulled my own pants on. I buttoned them just as something dropped onto my shoulders, knocking me to my knees. I caught a glimpse of a blade in the mirror and grabbed the hand that held it even as I fell.

  I jerked my head back hard and pulled the hand forward at the same time—connecting with some body part that was also hard, a chin, I thought, though I couldn’t be sure. Her chin, because it was a woman’s body that had hit me. I slammed her wrist on the wooden bench along the back wall, and the brass-bladed knife fell out of her hand.

  I dropped my hold on her, grabbed the knife, and tossed it back up through the hole in the ceiling she’d come from: I didn’t want to be caught with a knife in Wal-Mart. I was the wife of the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack—knife fighting was not an acceptable activity. If she tried to crawl back up there and get it, I’d use the time to run out to the main store, where cameras could catch me defending myself against an armed foe.

  “You leave her be,” she said. “Finders, keepers. She belongs to us.”

  The river devil? I thought, but I had no chance to ask her.

  She ignored the knife and threw herself at me. I let her momentum pull me to my feet and carry us into the larger area between the changing rooms. The big mirror showed me her face—it was the odd woman who’d been staring at Adam and me the day before yesterday at the restaurant. I’d been right. She had been fae—more specifically water-type fae, because she smelled of it. Dollars to doughnuts, she was one of the otterkin.

  She fought like an otter, too. Coming in close—inner circle—fast and furious, trying for my throat with fingernails and teeth. Fortunately for me, we were not in the water, and she was not an otter but a fae—though she smelled like both.

  Glamour has never made sense to me. It is a kind of magic the fae use to change their appearance. According to Zee, the ability to use glamour is what makes a fae a fae instead of some other kind of thing that uses magic. Glamour is an illusion—but not. Because with glamour, a twenty-five-pound otter is a hundred-and-forty-pound woman.

  Tactics that work really well for an otter don’t work as well for a human, not even a human with a knife—particularly since I have a brown belt in karate. I was not helpless. The thought that Adam would never again let me out without a keeper if I got hurt made me determined to win this fight.

  In the couple of minutes we engaged, I ended up with a bunch of bruises—including what was going to be an awesome shiner from where she ran me into a doorknob—a split lip, and a bloody nose. On the other hand, I broke her nose, and while she grabbed it, I got a really good kick into her ribs. If she didn’t have a broken rib out of it, she had one or two cracked ones, which should slow her down some.

  I heard the footsteps behind me and the flushed face of the formerly bored changing-room lady appeared. At the sight of us, she exclaimed, “What’s going on here?”

  The otterkin woman screamed—not in terror but in anger. Then she turned into an otter and ran up the wall into the ceiling and was gone.

  As the fae woman’s scent faded from here to was here, I turned to the clerk. Her mouth was opened unattractively as she stared up at the ceiling.

  “You don’t get paid enough to deal with this,” I told her firmly. I didn’t borrow authority from Adam for fear that it would worry him, but I know how it sounds and can imitate it when I have to.

  “She’s gone and won’t be back.” I looked around, and except for a dent in the drywall where her knee had hit the wall, there wasn’t any extra damage. There was blood all over, but I was betting that Wal-Mart had cleaners to get all sorts of things out of their carpets.

  I grabbed the jeans I wanted as well as the T-shirts. I put the darkest T-shirt up to wipe my nose. It hadn’t been a hard hit, and it had mostly stopped bleeding.

  “I’ll just go pay for this,” I said. “You can put those other jeans back where they go, then call someone in to clean up.”

  I walked out like I knew what I was doing and paid for the clothes—with cash so there was no awkward name-left-behind-at-the-scene-of-the-crime thing. The clerk was too occupied looking at my split lip to notice that one of the shirts was bloody. As I took the receipt, I noticed a general migration toward the changing room on the part of the employees. At least one of them looked old enough to be a person of authority.

  I smiled at the clerk and tried to look innocent, grab my bags, and make a quick getaway.

  “Honey,” said the cashier, who was half my age. “You get rid of that man. You don’t have to put up with being a punching bag.”

  “It was a woman,” I told her. “And you are absolutely right.”

  I walked briskly out of the store and kept going across the parking lot as I called Adam. “I saw a sandwich shop in the little mall above Wal-Mart,” I told him. “I’ll meet you there.”

  “It’s a little early for lunch,” he said. We’d eaten breakfast just before he’d dropped me off at Wal-Mart.

  “You’re a wolf,” I informed him. “You can eat anytime.”

  “What did you do?”

  I heard a siren and hoped that it wasn’t someone coming looking for me. I made my brisk walk a little brisker. “Got in a fight with my girlfriend, apparently.” I hung up before he could ask me anything else.

  The nice lady at the sandwich shop had been happy to fill a plastic bag with ice and accepted my story about a jealous girlfriend with a sympathetic ear (I kept my wedding ring hidden). She made me two large chicken sandwiches, and I paid for them and a pair of juices.

  When Adam drove up, I was watching the police cars at Wal-Mart—it must have been a slow day—with the ice bag wrapped in my new bloodstained black T-shirt. Bloodstains on a new black shirt were more a matter of texture and smell than color.

  “I think we ought to go back to the camp,” I told him.

  He pulled the ice down from my eye and took a good look before he let me put it back up again. Then he examined my hands, and brought my free hand up to his lips so he could kiss the bruises. He led me to the truck and buckled me in.

  It was a good thing that there weren’t many cars in the parking lot, or he’d never have gotten the big truck back out of it. I never had that problem with my Rabbit.

  He didn’t say anything, just drove the quarter of a mile toward the highway on-ramp in silence. I made it mostly to The Dalles before I broke.

  “I didn’t know anyone wanted to kill me when I made you leave me alone.”

  “I smelled fae,” he said neutrally—the sneak. That was why he’d kissed my knuckles
.

  “She jumped me in the changing room,” I told him reluctantly. I’d known after the doorknob hit my eye that I wasn’t going to be able to hide the fight from Adam. Not that I’d really been planning on keeping the attack secret; it had just been an option I’d wanted to keep open if I could. “I think it was one of the otterkin—and she was the weird lady from lunch the day before yesterday.”

  “Did you leave the body?” he asked.

  “No body,” I told him. “I wasn’t trying to kill her. And once I got rid of the knife, I was pretty sure she couldn’t kill me. She wasn’t any stronger than a normal human.” I thought a moment. “I don’t think so, anyway. As soon as the clerk came in, she glamoured back to otterkin and left through the ceiling. She might have used magic to get up there, but otters are pretty agile.”

  He squeezed his nose. Then he laughed. “I guess you proved your point,” he told me. “You can take care of yourself.”

  “I wonder why the otterkin are trying to kill me?” I said.

  “I don’t think that we’ll call in the fae to help us against the river devil,” said Adam. “I think the chances are that they may come down on the wrong side.”

  “You were thinking of asking the fae for help?” I squeaked. Help was even worse than a favor.

  He gave me an exasperated look. “I said I wasn’t.”

  “It sounded like you might have been before I was attacked.”

  “You’re trying to distract me,” he said. “You don’t need to. I’m not going to yell at you because you were attacked—especially since you won the fight.”

  “She ran away,” I said.

  “Without accomplishing her purpose. That’s losing in my book. Especially since you got rid of her knife before she stuck it in you.”

  I gave him a wary look, but he honestly didn’t appear upset.

  “Mercy,” he said, “in a fair fight between near equals, I’ll back you every time. It’s the demons, vampires, and river devils I worry about, and I’m working on that.”

  I could live with that if he could.