River Marked

by Briggs, Patricia

  “Tell me,” said Benny.

  So I did. At some point—near where I was trying to climb up the river devil, I think—Adam sat on the floor next to the chair and leaned his forehead against my thigh. There was another chair in the room, so I wasn’t quite sure why he was sitting on the floor. The drugs had fuzzed our bond, so it took me a moment to feel the sick fear that racked him.

  “Walking stick?” asked Calvin, distracting me from Adam’s distress.

  I blinked at him. I couldn’t remember if the walking stick was supposed to be a secret or not.

  “It’s an old fae artifact that attached itself to her while she was risking her neck to save a fae she knows,” Adam muttered, and I could tell he wasn’t happy about remembering me trying to save Zee, either.

  “He was a friend,” I reminded him.

  “She does stuff like this all the time?” asked Calvin, looking at Adam with respect.

  Adam lifted his head, and his eyes were yellow again—but his voice was only a little rough. “To be fair, it’s usually not her fault. She doesn’t start things.”

  “But it looks like she finishes them,” said the woman holding Benny’s hand. I was going to jump out on a long limb and assume that she was his wife. I must have said that aloud because she nodded. “Yes. I am. I have to thank you and your husband for saving Benny.”

  “He saved himself,” I said in surprise. “Didn’t someone tell you the story? He was smart.”

  “And lucky,” said Benny. “If you hadn’t found me when you did, I’d have died.”

  I leaned forward. “Did they tell you what your sister said to me?”

  “Jim did,” said Calvin.

  “Did she want me to put flowers from her to Mom on the grave, or from me to Fai . . . to my sister?” Benny’s voice was a little fuzzy. Maybe they were giving him painkillers, too.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “Maybe you should do both.”

  “Would you finish the story?” Calvin asked, a little plaintively. “You’d just dropped the last knife and stabbed the river devil with a fae artifact that turned into a spear.”

  “Right.” So I told them how its heart had turned to ice, and the walking stick burned my hand. “And then I swam back to shore.”

  “With a broken leg?” asked Adam.

  “Pretty neat trick, huh,” I said smugly.

  “Really good drugs.” Calvin’s voice was dry.

  Adam’s face was hidden against my leg again. This time he had one hand wrapped around my good ankle. The other hand dug into the tile on the floor. The tile cracked with a pop.

  “You’re going to cut yourself,” I chided him.

  He lifted his head. “You are going to be the death of me.”

  I sucked in my breath. The sudden surge of fear I felt at that thought broke through the happy glaze I’d been enjoying. “Don’t say that. Adam, don’t let me do that.”

  “Shh,” he said. “I’m sorry. Don’t cry. It’s all right.” He rose to kneel beside me, wiping my cheeks with his thumbs. “Werewolves are tough, Mercy. I’m not the one who almost died tonight.” He sucked in a breath. “Don’t you do that ever again.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose,” I wailed miserably. “I didn’t want to almost die.”

  “It’s the drugs,” said Benny wisely. “They make me say things wrong, too.”

  “So what happened to the—what did you call them?—otterkin?” asked Calvin.

  Since I’d already told them about the walking stick, I told them about what it had done to the otterkin and what the otterkin had said about it.

  “You can ask Zee what he thinks.” Adam had regained enough control that his eyes were his usual chocolate brown. He regarded me a moment, and added, “Later, when you are not quite so happy. He might not understand about the good drugs.”

  “He might not understand about me killing one of the last six otterkin. There were supposed to be seven, but I think the river devil ate one of them when she woke up.” I yawned. “I don’t think killing them was quite what Uncle Mike had in mind when he told us to check up on them.”

  “I don’t know,” said Adam. “Uncle Mike can be pretty oblique when he wants to.”

  “The Gray Lords might come after me.” I frowned at Adam. “That might come back to bite the pack. The Gray Lords aren’t always very precise about where they aim their wrath.”

  “If the wrath of the Gray Lords lands on the pack, I’m happy to claim the credit for it. You killed one of them, and I killed the rest.” Fierce satisfaction sizzled in his voice.

  I touched the curve of his jaw with my broken hand. “Good. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the body count that’s going to be attributed to the monster is actually theirs. It sounded like they’d been eating people anyway.” She had been feeding them, the otterkin had told me. And they had been feeding her. A lot of the fae had at one time or another eaten human flesh. I suspected that the otterkin were the people-eating kind of fae. “They were bound not to hurt anyone in the swimming area of that campground—and they moved away from there.”

  “Who is Uncle Mike, and what are the Gray Lords?” asked Calvin.

  “You might as well tell him,” I told Adam. “He’s a medicine man and ought to know things like that.”

  ADAM DROVE US BACK TO THE CAMPGROUND. ONCE there, he wrapped me in a blanket in the passenger seat of the truck, which he’d left running with the air-conditioning on. The air-conditioning was for me, and I was pretty sure the blanket was for him—the shield that he wished he could put around me, Jesse, and the pack, so we wouldn’t come to harm.

  “We could wait until tomorrow to leave,” I told him. “You look tired. I’m not as bad as I look.”

  He kissed me. “Mercy,” he said, “you are every bit as bad off as you look. I was there when they did the repair work. The drugs they gave you in the hospital are going to wear off before long, and the replacements aren’t nearly as good. I want you home when that happens. This campground is crawling with reporters and all sorts of official personnel who want to study the Columbia River Monster. I really don’t want to spend a night here. But most importantly”—he made a sound that was half a sigh and half a laugh, then whispered in my ear—“I’m afraid of what will happen if we stay one more day on our honeymoon. We’ll give it six months, and I’ll take you somewhere—San Diego, New York—hell, even Paris, if that’s where you want to go. But I need to get you home today.”

  He shut the door and went out to pack up our campsite. I dozed a little before the sound of a truck woke me up. There had been lots of cars and trucks driving in and out—Adam hadn’t bothered to shut the gate after we’d left for the hospital. But the rumble of this engine was familiar. I had to blink several times to clear my vision and confirm it was in fact Jim Alvin’s truck. He stopped several times along the way to our campsite, talking to various officials. He had a smile on his face, so I expect they were people he knew.

  He parked his truck, then stopped to talk to Adam for a while, too. Finally, he came to the truck I was in and opened my door.

  He took a good look and whistled through his teeth. “Calvin told me he thought you’d done it by the skin of your teeth—and I think that might be the only skin you have left.”

  “Have you seen Coyote?” I asked.

  The smile in his eyes died. “No. But you know that he’ll either show up again or else he’s off in the other camp playing with his friends. Coyote always comes out all right in the end.”

  “Other camp?”

  “With the people who have gone before him,” he said.

  “What about Gordon Seeker?”

  “It will work out all right in the end, Mercy.” He hit the side of the doorframe lightly with a knuckle. “I wanted to thank you for doing what I couldn’t.”

  I blinked at him a bit, sorting through my muddled thoughts until I found the one I wanted. “It took us all.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “But I still have two good legs and most of
my skin.”

  “’Sall right,” I assured him earnestly. “I’m not feeling any pain right now.”

  He looked at me intently, then smiled. “What tribe are you from, Mercedes Athena Thompson Hauptman?”

  “Blackfeet,” I told him, the answer coming automatically. “Who told you about the Athena part?”

  He smiled mysteriously. “Some things are better kept secret. Blackfeet, eh? Are you sure it’s not Blackfoot?”

  I frowned at him.

  “I think you are taking something precious home with you from this trip,” he told me. “Remember who you are. Good dreams, Mercy. I’ll call you if I see Gordon or Coyote if you will do the same.”

  “All right.” I closed my eyes because they wouldn’t stay open any longer. “If your car doesn’t work, bring it on by.”

  He laughed and shut the door.

  ADAM WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE DRUGS: BOTH THAT THEY would wear off and that the replacements in the amber plastic bottles wouldn’t do as good a job.

  “Next time I go out to kill monsters,” I told him as we came into town, “you should do a better job of stopping me.”

  He took my bandaged hand and kissed it. “I promised you that I wouldn’t do that. Next time, pick a monster who doesn’t live in a river or ocean, and I’ll be more help.”

  “Okay.” I paused and thought about it. “I don’t want a next time.”

  He sighed. “Me, either.”

  If I could have moved without moaning, I’d have leaned against him. I settled for leaving my hand on his thigh where he’d put it.

  “But if there is,” I told him, “and evidence suggests that there will be—I’d rather fight monsters with you than with anyone else I can think of.”

  “I have a confession to make,” he told me. “I wanted to wait until you were a little closer to your usual fighting weight, but I don’t think it will work.”

  “You found a cute waitress, and now you want a divorce,” I said.

  He laughed. “No. But I’ll look for one at the next available opportunity.”

  “Cool. I found a handsome nurse, but I think he liked you better than he liked me.”

  “Seriously,” he said. “I did something I shouldn’t have.”

  I was still feeling a little muddled, so I’m not sure if my sudden insight came from our mating bond or from the fact that he sounded a little too much like my mother did when she told my little sister that she’d found her diary and read it. Since I’d told Nan that she shouldn’t write anything down she didn’t want someone to read, I’d been surprised by how upset my mother was. Turned out that Nan figured that if someone was going to sneak and read her diary, they deserved what they got. It took her about ten minutes to convince Mom she wasn’t dealing drugs to pay for her abortion.

  “You read the letters,” I said, doing my best to sound offended.

  “I read the letter you wrote to me.”

  I yawned, and it sort of ruined my pretense of indignation. I patted whatever part of him I could reach. “That’s okay,” I told him. “It had your name on it.”

  We drove for a while more before he spoke again. “I love you, too.”

  I smiled at him without opening my eyes. “I know you do.”

  I dozed a little, and, before I knew it, we’d pulled into Adam’s driveway. Someone would have to back the thing out, but it wouldn’t be me, so I decided not to worry about it.

  The screen door opened, and Jesse bubbled out.

  “Dad. Hey, Dad. Why’re you home early? Someone from your office came and left a big package that says it’s a wheelchair in the garage. Is that what it is? Why did we get a wheelchair?”

  I opened my door and contemplated the difficulties of making it down to the ground while Adam hugged Jesse. If we’d been in my Rabbit, I could have gotten out on my own, because my Rabbit doesn’t have a three-and-a-half-foot drop to the ground. Not that it would have done me much good, though. I wasn’t going anywhere on my own anyway.

  Jesse looked up, and her jaw dropped. “Dad,” she said in a horrified voice, “what did you do to Mercy?”

  UNCLE MIKE WAS NOT HAPPY WHEN I CALLED HIM THE next morning and told him we killed all the otterkin. He did listen when I told him what they had done, though. I gave him an inventory of the damage to my person (I’d quit taking anything but over-the-counter painkillers and was feeling whiny).

  “How many stitches?” he asked when I was through.

  “One hundred and forty-two,” I told him. “And four staples. And all of them itch.”

  It wasn’t so bad when I had a distraction. Since I couldn’t do anything, that meant talking to people. I was home alone right now—which was why I’d decided to call Uncle Mike and fill him in.

  “And do you know, when you have a broken hand and a giant cut under your arm, crutches don’t work, and neither does a wheelchair unless you have a minion to wheel you around. My good hand is burnt, so I can’t even turn circles.”

  “I think I’ll pitch it to the Gray Lords as suicide by werewolf,” he said after a long moment of silence. “Anyone who hurts you in front of Adam is too stupid to live anyway.”

  “Adam only killed five of them. I killed the other one.” I paused. “Okay, not quite. I was holding the walking stick when it killed him.”

  There was a long pause. “Oh?”

  I told him about using the walking stick to kill the river devil, what the otterkin had told me afterward, and how the walking stick had killed him.

  “You quenched Lugh’s walking stick in the blood of an ancient Native American monster?”

  “I screwed up?”

  He sighed. “What else was there to be doing? If you hadn’t used it, you’d be dead—and there would be a monster loose eating people. But there’s no denying that it’s not a good thing. Violence begets violence—especially when there’s magic involved.”

  “What should I do with it?”

  “What can you do? Try not to kill anyone else with it.”

  “Can I give it to you?” It wasn’t that I was afraid of it—I didn’t even know what was wrong with it. It was that I had failed to keep it safe. It should go to someone who would take better care of it.

  “We tried that before, remember?” Uncle Mike said. “It didn’t work.”

  “The oakman used it to kill a vampire. Why didn’t that do anything to it?”

  “I don’t know,” Uncle Mike said. “But if I were to guess, it would be because it wasn’t the oakman’s walking stick—it was yours. Intent and ownership are pretty powerful magic.”

  “Oh.” I remembered the last thing I needed to talk to him about. “About your trailer. Do you have a favorite body shop? If not, I know a few people.”

  SIX DAYS LATER I WAS CHANNEL SURFING IN THE BASEMENT TV room when I heard someone set foot on the top of the stairs.

  “Go away,” I said.

  I was tired of everyone, which was ungracious of me. But I don’t like being dependent—it makes me cranky. I needed someone to carry me upstairs and downstairs. I needed someone to help me outside and inside. I even needed someone to help me into the bathroom because none of the bathroom doors were big enough for a wheelchair. It hadn’t been so bad when Adam was here, but he’d had to leave two days ago and tend to some disaster in Texas. He wouldn’t have gone, except that it had something to do with some hush-hush government installation, and he was the only one in the company with high enough clearance to deal with it.

  Today was particularly grim as I’d gone to a doctor’s appointment where I’d hoped to get a walking cast—and instead had been told I had to stay off the leg entirely for at least two weeks. Warren had carried me and my wheelchair down the stairs and then proceeded to hover. I finally asked him to leave me alone in a manner that I’d have to apologize for when I was through feeling sorry for myself—and when Jesse got home from her date, because I’d left my cell phone in my coat, which was upstairs in the kitchen. The only phone in the basement was down three stairs. To
top it off, my leg had objected to all the abuse and now wouldn’t quit throbbing. The acetaminophen wasn’t cutting it. So I was sitting in front of the TV with my eyes leaking, and I didn’t want any witnesses.

  The feet on the stairs just kept coming. I was supposed to be alone in the house, but Adam’s house generally had pack members showing up at all hours anyway.

  “I said—”

  “Go away,” said Stefan. “I heard you.”

  He didn’t increase his speed, which was kind of him because it let me wipe my eyes before he could see me.

  “I’d turn around,” I said with some bitterness, “but my doctor tells me that I’ve been damaging my hands, and I’ll have scarring if I keep it up. So I can’t even make the damned thing go in circles anymore.”

  Stefan stepped around in front of me and turned off the TV so the room was shrouded in darkness. He crouched so he was eye to eye with me.

  “Warren called me as soon as the sun set,” he said, brushing my hair back from my face with his thumbs. “He said—and I quote—‘It’s time to pay up, Stefan. We’ve been trying, but we’re all out of options.’”

  I raised my chin. “I’m fine. You can tell Warren they can all have the rest of the week off. They don’t have to stick around and cater to me. I’ll be fine.” I’d figure out a way to get me and my bent leg cast in and out of the bathroom myself. Somehow.

  “Mercy,” he said gently. “It’s not that they don’t want to help—they can’t. You’ve told them all to leave you alone. With Adam gone, you’re the highest power in the pack, and they can’t gainsay you. Warren told me that they were down to leaving you with pack members he couldn’t be happy about.”

  That had never occurred to me. And explained why Auriele and Darryl hadn’t been back, even after I’d sent them an e-mail apologizing for yelling at them. I know e-mail apologies are lame, but it was the only way I could be sure not to grump at them some more.

  “You need to tell them they can come back to the house and talk to you—and help you do whatever you need. Just as you would help them if they needed it. Warren asked me to explain that they certainly understand the need to snap and snarl a bit.”