The Mercy Thompson Collection

by Patricia Briggs

  “Hey, Stefan,” I told it. “This is Mercy. I’m headed to Montana today. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Probably late this week. I’ll give you a call.” I hesitated, but there really wasn’t a good way to say the next part. “I had to haul a dead body in your van. It’s fine; Elizeveta Arkadyevna cleaned it. I’ll explain when I get back.”

  Mentioning Elizaveta reminded me of something else I needed to do. Adam’s house was on the end of the road, but it was clearly visible from the river. Someone would notice that the couch was sitting in the flowerbeds and call the police if the mess wasn’t cleaned up soon.

  I had her number on my phone, though I’d never had occasion to use it before. I got her answering machine and left a message telling her there was a mess at Adam’s house, there had been a dead man on my porch, Jesse was missing, and I was taking Adam, who was wounded, somewhere he’d be safe. Then I closed the phone and put it away. I didn’t know what happened at Adam’s house, but that didn’t stop me from feeling guilty and responsible. If I hadn’t interfered last night when the two bullies came to find Mac, would everyone still be alive? If I’d sent Mac to Montana, to the Marrok, rather than letting Adam take him, what would that have changed?

  Taking Mac to the Marrok had never even occurred to me. I hadn’t contacted Bran since he’d sent me away from the pack, and he’d returned the favor. I took a quick glance behind my seat at the blue tarp concealing Mac’s body. Well, I was bringing Mac to him now.

  I found myself remembering the shy grin Mac had worn when I told him my name. I wiped my cheeks and fiercely blinked back further tears, but it was no use. I cried for him, for his parents and his brother who didn’t even know he was dead. Doubtless they were all sitting beside their phones, waiting for him to call again.

  I was coming down the grade into Spokane before more pressing worries distracted me from grief and guilt: Adam began stirring. My fear that Adam would die was instantly overwhelmed by the worry that he’d heal too fast.

  I still had well over two hundred miles to go, most of it two-lane mountain highway meandering through dozens of small towns at twenty-five miles an hour. The last sixty miles was on a road marked “other” on the state highway map—as opposed to highway or road. As I recalled, it was gravel most of the way. I figured it would take me at least four more hours.

  Dominant wolves heal faster than the submissive wolves. By my rough estimate, it would be no more than two days before Adam was recovered enough to control his wolf—which would be capable of mayhem long before that. I needed Bran before Adam was mobile, and, if he was stirring already, I was going to be lucky if I made it.

  When I hit Coeur d’Alene, where I’d have to leave the interstate for highway, I gassed up then drove to the first fast-food burger place I found and bought thirty cheeseburgers. The bemused teenager who started handing me bags through the service window peered curiously at me. I didn’t explain, and she couldn’t see my passengers because of the van’s curtains.

  I parked in the restaurant’s parking lot, snatched a couple of the bags, stepped over Mac, and began stripping the buns off the meat. Adam was too weak to do more than growl at me and snatch the cheese-and-catsup-covered meat as fast as I could toss it to him. He ate almost twenty patties before he subsided into his previous comalike state.

  The first few flakes of snow began falling on us as I took the highway north.

  I drove into Troy, Montana, cursing the heavy wet snow that had distracted me so I missed my turnoff, which should have been several miles earlier. I topped off my gas tank, got directions, chained up, and headed back the way I’d come.

  The snow was falling fast enough that the snow crews hadn’t been able to keep up with it. The tracks of the cars preceding me were rapidly filling.

  The gas station clerk’s directions fresh in my mind, I slowed as I crossed back over the Yaak River. It was a baby river compared to the Kootenai, which I’d been driving next to for the past few hours.

  I watched the side of the road carefully, and it was a good thing I did. The small green sign that marked the turnoff was half-covered in wet snow.

  There was only one set of tracks up the road. They turned off at a narrow drive and, after that, I found my way up the road by driving where there were no trees. Happily, the trees were dense and marked the way pretty clearly.

  The road twisted up and down the narrow river valley, and I was grateful for the four-wheel drive. Once, a couple of black-tailed deer darted in front of me. They gave me an irritated glance and trotted off.

  It had been a long time since I’d been that way—I hadn’t even had my driver’s license then. The road was unfamiliar, and I began to worry I’d miss my turn. The road divided, one-half clearly marked, but the other half, the one I had to take, was barely wide enough for my van.

  “Well,” I told Adam, who was whining restlessly, “if we end up in Canada and you haven’t eaten me yet, I suppose we can turn around, come back, and try again.”

  I’d about decided I was going to have to do just that, when I topped a long grade and saw a hand-carved wooden sign. I stopped the van.

  Aspen Creek, the sign read in graceful script, carved and painted white on a dark brown background, 23 miles. As I turned the van to follow the arrow, I wondered when Bran had decided to allow someone to post a sign. Maybe he’d gotten tired of having to send out guides—but he’d been adamant about keeping a low profile when I left.

  I don’t know why I expected everything to be the same. After all, I’d changed a good deal in the years since I’d last been there. I should have expected that Aspen Creek would have changed, too. I didn’t have to like it.

  The uninitiated would be forgiven for thinking there were only four buildings in Aspen Creek: the gas station/post office, the school, the church, and the motel. They wouldn’t see the homes tucked unobtrusively up the draws and under the trees. There were a couple of cars in front of the gas station, but otherwise the whole town looked deserted. I knew better. There were always people watching, but they wouldn’t bother me unless I did something unusual—like dragging a wounded werewolf out of my van.

  I stopped in front of the motel office, just under the Aspen Creek Motel sign, which bore more than a passing resemblance to the sign I’d followed to town. The old motel was built the way the motor hotels had been in the middle of the last century—a long, narrow, and no-frills building designed so guests could park their vehicles in front of their rooms.

  There was no one in the office, but the door was unlocked. It had been updated since I’d been there last and the end result was rustic charm—which was better than the run-down 1950s tacky it had been.

  I hopped over the front desk and took a key marked #1. Number one was the Marrok’s safe room, specially designed to contain uncooperative werewolves.

  I found a piece of paper and a pen and wrote: Wounded in #1. Please Do Not Disturb. I left the note on the desk where it couldn’t be missed, then I returned to the van and backed it up to the room.

  Getting Adam out of the van was going to be rough no matter what. At least when I dragged him into it, he’d been unconscious. I opened the reinforced metal door of the motel room and took a look around. The furnishing was new, but sparse, just a bed and a nightstand that was permanently fixed against the wall—nothing to help me get a werewolf who weighed twice what I did out of the van and into the room without hurting one or the other of us. There was no porch as there had been at Adam’s house, which left almost a four-foot drop from the back of the van to the ground.

  In the end I decided calling for help was better than hurting Adam worse. I went back to the office and picked up the phone. I hadn’t called Sam’s number since I’d left, but some things are just ingrained. Even though he was the reason I’d left here, he was the first one I thought to call for help.

  “Hello,” answered a woman’s voice that sounded completely unfamiliar.

  I couldn’t speak. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been coun
ting on hearing Samuel until I heard someone else’s voice instead.

  “Marlie? Is there something wrong at the motel? Do you need me to send Carl?” She must have caller ID, I thought stupidly.

  She sounded frantic, but I recognized her voice at last, and felt a wave of relief. I don’t know why Lisa Stoval was answering this number, but the mention of Carl and the sudden tension in her voice cued me in. I guess she had just never sounded cheerful when she talked to me.

  Some things might have changed, but some things I had just forgotten. Aspen Creek had a population of about five hundred people, and only about seventy were werewolves, but I seldom thought about the human majority. Lisa and her husband Carl were both human. So was Marlie, at least she had been when I left. She’d also been about six years old.

  “I don’t know where Marlie is,” I told her. “This is Mercedes, Mercedes Thompson. There’s no one in the motel office. I’d really appreciate it if you’d send Carl down here, or tell me who else to call. I have the Alpha from the Columbia Basin Pack in my van. He’s badly wounded, and I need help getting him into the motel room. Even better would be if you could tell me how to get ahold of Bran.”

  Bran didn’t have a telephone at his home—or hadn’t when I left. For all I knew he had a cell phone now.

  Lisa, like most of the women of Aspen Creek, had never liked me. But she wasn’t one of those people who let a little thing like that get in the way of doing what was right and proper.

  “Bran and some of the others have taken the new wolves out for their first hunt. Marlie’s probably holed up somewhere crying. Lee, her brother, was one of the ones who tried to Change. He didn’t make it.”

  I’d forgotten. How could I have forgotten? The last full moon of October, all of those who chose to try to become werewolves were allowed to come forward. In a formal ceremony they were savaged by Bran, or by some other wolf who loved them, in the hopes that they would rise Changed. Most of them didn’t make it. I remembered the tension that gripped the town through October and the sadness of November. Thanksgiving had a different meaning to the residents of Aspen Creek than it did for the rest of America.

  “I’m sorry,” I said inadequately, feeling rawly incapable of dealing with more dead youngsters—I remembered Lee, too. “Lee was a good kid.”

  “I’ll send Carl.” Lisa’s voice was crisp, denying me the right to grieve or sympathize. She hung up without saying good-bye.

  I avoided thinking—or looking at the tarp that covered Mac—while I sat in the van waiting for help. Instead, I fed Adam the remaining hamburgers while we waited. They were cold and congealed, but it didn’t seem to bother the wolf. When they were gone, he closed his eyes and ignored me.

  At long last, Carl pulled up next to me in a beat-up Jeep and climbed out. He was a big man, and had always been more of a man of action than words. He hugged me and thumped me on my back.

  “Don’t be such a stranger, Mercy,” he said, then laughed at my look of shock and ruffled my hair. I’d forgotten he liked to do that, forgotten the easy affection he showed to everyone—even Bran. “Lisa said you have Adam here and he’s in bad shape?”

  Of course he’d know who the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack was. Adam’s pack was closest to Aspen Creek.

  I nodded and opened the back of my van so he could see what we were dealing with. Adam looked better than he had when I first put him in the van, but that wasn’t saying much. I couldn’t see the bones of his ribs anymore, but his coat was matted with blood and covered with wounds.

  Carl whistled through his teeth, but all he said was, “We’ll need to tie his jaws shut until we get him in. I’ve got something we can use in the Jeep.”

  He brought an Ace bandage and we wound it round and round Adam’s muzzle. The wolf opened his eyes once, but didn’t struggle.

  It took a lot of grunting, a few swear words, and a little sweat, but the two of us managed to get Adam out of the van and into the room. Once we had him on the bed, I made Carl get back before I unwound the bandage and freed the wolf. I was fast, but even so, Adam caught my forearm with an eyetooth and drew blood. I jumped back as he rolled off his side and struggled to stand—driven to defend himself against the pain we’d caused him.

  “Out,” Carl said, holding the door for me.

  I complied and we shut the door behind us. Carl held it shut while I turned the key in the dead bolt. Unlike most motel rooms, this dead bolt operated by key from both sides—for just such situations. The windows were barred, the vents sealed. Number one served as prison and hospital on occasion: sometimes both.

  Adam was safe—for now. Once he’d regained a little more strength things could still get problematical unless I tracked down Bran.

  “Do you know where Bran took the new wolves?” I asked, shutting the back hatch of the van. Carl hadn’t asked me about Mac—he didn’t have a wolf’s nose to tell him what was in the tarp—and I decided that Mac could ride with me for a while longer. Bran could decide what to do with his body.

  “You don’t want to go after him, Mercy,” Carl was saying. “Too dangerous. Why don’t you come home with me. We’ll feed you while you wait.”

  “How many wolves are left in town?” I asked. “Is there anyone who could resist Adam’s wolf?”

  That was the downside of being dominant. If you did go moonstruck, you took everyone who was less dominant with you.

  Carl hesitated. “Adam’s pretty weak yet. Bran will be back by dark.”

  Something hit the door, and we both jumped.

  “He took them up to the Lover’s Canyon,” Carl told me, giving in to the obvious. “Be careful.”

  “Bran will have control of the new ones,” I told him. “I’ll be all right.”

  “I’m not worried about them. You left enemies behind you, girl.”

  I smiled tightly. “I can’t help what I am. If they are my enemies, it was not by my choice.”

  “I know. But they’ll still kill you if they can.”

  The lovers were a pair of trees that had grown up twined around each other near the entrance to a small canyon about ten miles north of town. I parked next to a pair of old-style Land Rovers, a nearly new Chevy Tahoe, and a HumVee—the expensive version. Charles, Bran’s son, was a financial genius, and the Marrok’s pack would never be begging on street corners. When I left here, I’d had ten thousand dollars in a bank account, the result of part of my minimum wage earnings invested by Charles.

  I stripped off my clothes in the van, jumped out into knee-deep snow, and shut the door. It was colder up in the mountains than it had been in Troy, and the snow had a crust of hard ice crystals that cut into the bare skin of my feet.

  I shifted as fast as I could. It might have been safer to go as a human, but I didn’t have the right kind of clothing on for a winter hike in Montana. I am not absolutely sure there is a right kind of clothing for a winter hike in Montana. Running as a coyote, I don’t mind the cold all that much.

  I’d grown used to city scents and sounds. The forest scents were no less strong, just different: fir, aspen, and pine instead of exhaust, fried grease, and humans. I heard the distinctive rat-a-tat of a woodpecker, and, faintly, the howl of a wolf—too deep to be that of a timber wolf.

  The fresh snow, which was still falling, had done a fair job of hiding their tracks, but I could still smell them. Bran and his mate, Leah, both had brushed against the bough of a white pine. Charles had left tracks where the ground was half-sheltered by a boulder. Once my nose drew me to the right places, I could see where the old snow had been broken by paws before the snow had begun, and the tracks weren’t difficult to follow.

  I hesitated when the wolves’ tracks began to separate. Bran had taken the new wolves—there seemed to be three of them—while his sons, Charles and Samuel, and Leah, Bran’s mate, broke off, probably to hunt up game in the hopes of chasing it back to the rest.

  I needed to find Bran to tell him what had happened, to get his help for Adam—but I followed
Sam’s trail instead. I couldn’t help it. I’d been in love with him since I was fourteen.

  Not that I am in love with him now, I assured myself, following his tracks down an abrupt drop and back up to a ridgetop where the snow wasn’t as deep because the wind periodically swept it clean.

  I was only a teenager when I last saw him, I thought. I hadn’t spoken to him since then, and he hadn’t tried to contact me either. Still, it had been his number I had called for help. I hadn’t even thought about calling anyone else.

  On the tail of that thought, I realized the forest had fallen silent behind me.

  The winter woods were quiet. The birds, except for a scattering of nut hatches, cedar waxwings, and a few others like the woodpecker I’d heard, had gone south. But there was an ominous quality to the silence behind me that was too heavy to be only winter’s stillness. I was being stalked.

  I didn’t look around, nor did I speed up. Werewolves chase things that run from them.

  I wasn’t really frightened. Bran was out there somewhere, and Samuel was even nearer. I could smell the earth-and-spice musk that belonged to him alone; the wind carried it to me. The tracks I was following had been laid several hours ago. He must have been returning the way he’d come; otherwise, he’d have been too far away for me to scent.

  The new wolves were all with Bran, and the one following me was alone: if there had been more than one, I would have heard something. So I didn’t have to be worried about the new wolves killing me by mistake because they thought I was a coyote.

  I didn’t think it was Charles stalking me either. It would be beneath his dignity to frighten me on purpose. Samuel liked playing practical jokes, but the wind doesn’t lie, and it told me he was somewhere just ahead.

  I was pretty sure it was Leah. She wouldn’t kill me no matter what Carl had implied—not with Bran sure to find out—but she would hurt me if she could because she didn’t like me. None of the women in Bran’s pack liked me.