Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  “Ja,” he said; then he turned and saw my face. “Devil, demon—English is an imprecise language in these things. There are things that serve the Great Beast of Christian scripture. Greater and lesser spirits, demons or devils, and they all serve evil. The greater servants are bound away from our world, but can be invited in—just as vampires cannot enter a home without an invitation.”

  “All right,” I took a deep breath. “What else do you know.”

  Zee reached up and put his hand on the pipe. “Not much, Liebchen. The few men I’ve encountered who claimed to be sorcerers were nothing but demon-bait when I met them.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “The difference is who’s holding the reins.” The exhaust pipe began glowing a bright cherry red under Zee’s hand. “Demons serve only one master well, and those who forget it tend to become enslaved rather quickly. Those who remember might stay in control a while longer.”

  I frowned at him. “So all the demon-possessed start out as sorcerers?”

  Zee shook his head. “There are many kinds of invitations, intentional and not. Sorcerer, demon-possessed, it doesn’t matter. Eventually the demon is in control.”

  The exhaust pipe made a loud noise and popped back out to its proper shape. Zee met my gaze. “This creature is playing with the vampires, Mercy. Stay out of its business. The seethe is better equipped to deal with such than you are.”

  By five thirty, I was elbow deep in a Vanagon tune-up so I had Gabriel close up the office and tried to send both him and Zee off. My battered face made them more reluctant than usual to leave me working alone, but I persuaded them to go at last.

  While Zee had been there, I’d kept the big air conditioner running and the garage doors shut, but, unlike the werewolves, I enjoy the summer heat. So once I was alone, I turned off the cool-air and opened up the bay doors.

  “Does that help?”

  I looked up and saw that the customer from earlier in the day was standing in the open bay door.

  “Tom Black,” he reminded me.

  “Does what help?” I asked wiping off my hands and taking a sip of water from the bottle balanced precariously on the car’s bumper.

  “Humming,” he said. “I was wondering if it helped.”

  There was something about the way he said it that bothered me—as if he was a good friend of mine instead of someone I’d exchanged a few words with. His earlier remark about white belts didn’t make him a martial artist, but his body movement as he walked into my garage did.

  I kept my expression polite, though the coyote in me wanted to lift my lip. He was invading my territory.

  “I hadn’t realize I was humming,” I told him. “This is the last car I’m working on today.” I knew it wasn’t his car, because it was one I worked on regularly. “If Gabriel didn’t call you, then we probably won’t get to your car until tomorrow.”

  “How did a pretty woman like you get to be a mechanic?” he asked.

  I tilted my head so I could see him better out of my good eye. Gabriel had told me that if I had kept an ice pack on it longer it wouldn’t have swollen up so badly. On good days, my looks were passable, today hideous and awful were more apt.

  If we had been on neutral territory, I’d probably have said something like, “Gee, I don’t know. How’d a handsome man like you get to be such a pushy bastard?” But this was my place of work and he was a customer.

  “Same as all the other pretty mechanics, I expect,” I said. “Listen, I have to get this finished up. Why don’t you call tomorrow morning and Gabriel will have an estimate for when you can expect your car to be done.”

  I walked forward as I said it. The motion should have pushed him back, but he held still so I had to stop or get too close to him. He smelled of coconut sunscreen and cigarette smoke.

  “Actually I picked my car up earlier,” he said. “I came by tonight to talk to you.”

  He was human, but I saw the same predatory look in his eyes that the wolves had when they were off on a hunt. Being in my own garage had made me feel too safe and I’d let myself get too close to him. I had weapons a plenty in the form of wrenches and crowbars, but they were all out of reach.

  “Did you?” I said. “Why?”

  “I wanted to ask you how you liked dating a werewolf. Did you know he was a werewolf when you started dating him? Did you have sex with him?” His voice acquired a sudden razor edge.

  It was such a shift in topic that I blinked stupidly at him for a moment.

  This man didn’t smell like a fanatic—hatred has its own scent. When Zee first came out, there was a group of people who’d marched around the shop with placards. Some of them came out one night and spray painted FAIRYLAND in angry red letters across my garage doors.

  Tom Black smelled intense—as if the answers to his questions really mattered to him.

  Outside, a small-block Chevy 350 pulled into my lot and I recognized its purr. With the last of my trepidation gone, I realized there was only one reason for the questions he’d asked.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Hell,” I said in disgust. “You’re a reporter.”

  Some of the werewolves coming out deliberately attracted attention on the Marrok’s orders: heroes from the military or police and fire departments and a couple of movie stars. Adam was not one of them. I could see why someone would send a reporter out sniffing around him, though. Not only was he an Alpha, but he was a pretty Alpha. I couldn’t wait to hear what Adam would say when he found out someone was poking into his love life.

  “I can make you rich,” Black told me, encouraged, I think, by my smile. “When I’m through with you, you’ll be as much of a celebrity as he is. You can sell your story to the networks.”

  I snorted. “Go away.”

  “Problems, Mercy?” The deep, Texas drawl caused the reporter to spin on his heel. I guess he hadn’t heard Warren and his companion walk into the garage.

  “No problems,” I told Warren. “Mr. Black was just leaving.”

  Warren looked like an ad for “Real Western Cowboys,” complete with worn boots and battered straw hat. He was entitled: he’d been a real cowboy in the old West when he’d been Changed. He was my favorite of Adam’s wolves and beside him was Ben, a recent import from Great Britain—and the leading candidate for my least favorite werewolf. Neither of them had been among the “outed” wolves, not yet. In Ben’s case, probably never. He’d narrowly escaped arrest in his native land and had been quietly shipped off to America to disappear.

  The reporter took out his wallet and held out his card. I took it because my mother taught me to be polite.

  “I’ll be around,” he said. “Call me if you change your mind.”

  “I’ll do that,” I told him.

  Both werewolves turned to watch him leave. Only after his car was well away did they turn their attention back to me.

  “I like what you’ve done to your face,” Ben said, tapping his eye.

  He may have saved my life once and taken a bullet for Adam, but that didn’t mean I had to like him. It wasn’t just that he’d been sent to Adam’s pack to keep him from being questioned in connection with a series of violent rapes in London. I believe in innocent until proven guilty. Rather it was the qualities that had caused the London police to look in his direction in the first place: he was a petty, nasty, and violent man. Everything he said came out like a sneer or a threat, all in this nifty British accent. If he were just a hair nicer, I might have talked to him just to hear his voice, like him or not.

  “I wasn’t the one who decorated my face, but thanks anyway.” I went back to the van to button it up for the night. I’d lost the momentum that was keeping me working, and all I wanted to do was find someplace to sleep. Someplace without a vampire dead in the closet. Damn it. Where was I going to sleep?

  “What are you two doing here?” I asked Warren as I closed the back hatch of the van.

  “Adam said we’re to stay with you until you hear from the vampir
es—he thinks it will be sometime soon after dark. He doesn’t want you to face them alone.”

  “Don’t you have to work tonight?” Warren worked graveyard at an all night gas station/convenience store not too far from my home—he had gotten Samuel a job there when he moved in with me.

  “Nah, quit last week. They had another manager changeover and this one wanted to clean house. So I thought I’d quit before I was fired.” He paused then said, “I’ve been doing some work for Kyle. It pays better part-time than the convenience store did full-time.”

  “With Kyle?” I asked hopefully.

  I’ve known Warren for a long time and had met maybe a dozen of his boyfriends. Most of them hadn’t been worth knowing—but I liked Kyle. He was a hotshot lawyer, a terrific dresser, and a lot of fun. They’d been living together for a while when Kyle finally found out Warren was a werewolf. Kyle moved out. I knew they’d dated a few times since, but nothing more serious.

  Warren dropped his eyes. “Mostly just some surveillance and, once, guard duty for a woman who was afraid of her soon-to-be ex-husband.”

  “Kyle’s afraid of us,” said Ben, showing his teeth in a sharp grin.

  Warren looked at him and Ben quit smiling.

  “You’ve obviously never met Kyle,” I told Ben. “Anyone who’s been a divorce lawyer as long as Kyle isn’t afraid of much.”

  “I lied to him,” Warren told me. “Thing like that will stick in a man’s craw.”

  It was time to change the subject. Ben might be subdued for the moment, but it wouldn’t last.

  “I’m going to wash up and change,” I said. “I’ll be right back out.”

  “Samuel said you didn’t get any sleep last night,” Warren said. “You have a few hours before the vampires can call on you. Should we stop and pick up some dinner, then head out to your house so you can get a little sleep?”

  I shook my head. “Can’t sleep with a dead man in my closet.”

  “You killed someone?” asked Ben with interest.

  Warren grinned, the expression leaving little crinkles next to his eyes. “Nope, not this time. Samuel said Stefan had to spend the day in Mercy’s closet. I’d forgotten about that. Do you want to catch a little shut-eye at my place? No dead people there.” He glanced at Ben. “At least not yet.”

  I was tired, my face hurt, and I was coming down off the adrenaline rush the reporter had caused. “I can’t think of a thing that sounds better. Thanks, Warren.”

  Warren’s place was in Richland, half of a two-story duplex that had seen better days. The interior was in better repair than the outside, but it still had that college-student aura defined by lots of books and secondhand furniture.

  The spare bedroom Warren put me in smelled of him—he must have been sleeping in there rather than the room he’d shared with Kyle. I found his scent comforting; he wasn’t lying dead in the closet. I had no trouble falling asleep to the quiet sounds of the two werewolves playing chess downstairs.

  I woke in the dark to the smell of peppers and sesame oil. Someone had gone out for Chinese. It had been a long time since lunch.

  I rolled out of bed and scrambled down the stairs, hoping that they hadn’t eaten everything. When I got to the kitchen, Warren was still dividing Styrofoam-packaged food onto three plates.

  “Mmm.” I said, leaning against Warren to get a better look at the food. “Mongolian beef. I think I’m in love.”

  “His heart’s occupied elsewhere,” said Ben from behind me. “And even if it weren’t he’s not interested in your kind. But, I’m available and ready.”

  “You don’t have a heart,” I told him. “Just a gaping hole where it should have been.”

  “All the more reason for you to give me yours.”

  I pounded my forehead against Warren’s back. “Tell me Ben’s not flirting with me.”

  “Hey,” said Ben sounding hurt. “I was talking cannibalism, not romance.”

  He was almost funny. If I liked him better, I’d have laughed.

  Warren patted me on the top of my head and said, “It’s all right, Mercy. It’s just a bad dream. Once you eat your food it will all go away.”

  He dumped the last of the rice on one of the plates. “Adam called a few minutes ago. I told him you were sleeping and he said not to wake you up. He told me Stefan left your house about a half hour ago.”

  I glanced out the window and saw that it was already getting dark.

  Warren saw my glance and said, “Some of the old vampires wake up early. I don’t think you’ll get a call before full dark.”

  He passed out the filled plates and handed us silverware and napkins to go with them, then shooed us back out of the kitchen to the dining room.

  “So,” said Ben after we’d been eating for a few minutes. “Why don’t you like me, Mercy? I’m handsome, clever, witty…. Not to mention I saved your life.”

  “Let’s not mention that again,” I said, shoveling spicy meat in around my words. “I might get ill.”

  “You hate women,” Warren offered.

  “I do not.” Ben sounded indignant.

  I swallowed, raised an eyebrow, and stared at him until he looked away. As soon as he realized what he’d done he jerked his chin back up so his eyes met mine again. But it was too late, I’d won, and we both knew it. With the wolves, things like that mattered. If I ever met him alone in a dark alley, he might still eat me—but he’d hesitate first.

  I gave him a smug smile. “Anyone who’s talked to you for longer than two minutes knows you hate women. I think that I can count on the fingers of one hand the times you’ve actually said the word ‘women’ and not replaced it with an epithet referring to female genitalia.”

  “Hey, he’s not that bad,” Warren said. “Sometimes he calls them cows or whores.”

  Ben pointed a finger at Warren—I guess his mother never taught him better manners. “There speaks someone who doesn’t like…” He actually had to pause and change the word he was going to use. “…er women.”

  “I like women just fine,” Warren told him gathering the last of his scattered rice into a pile so he could get it on his fork. “Better’n I like most men. I just don’t want to sleep with them.”

  My cell phone rang, and I inhaled, pulling a peppercorn into my windpipe. Coughing, choking, and eyes watering, I found my phone and waved it at Warren so he could answer it while I gulped water.

  “Right,” he said. “We’ll have her there. Does she know where it is?” He caught my eye and mouthed “seethe.”

  I nodded my head and felt my stomach clench. I knew where it was.

  Chapter 4

  We drove through open wrought-iron gates and into a brightly lit courtyard in front of the huge, hacienda-style, adobe house that served as home for the Tri-Cities’ seethe. Warren pulled his battered truck behind a BMW in a circular drive that was already full of cars.

  Last time I’d been here, I’d come with Stefan. He’d taken us by the back way into a smaller guest house tucked into the backyard. This time we walked right up to the front door of the main house and Warren rang the doorbell.

  Ben sniffed the air nervously. “They’re watching us.” I smelled them, too.

  “Yes.” Of the three of us, Warren was visibly the least worried. He wasn’t the kind of person to stew about things that hadn’t happened yet.

  It wasn’t being watched that bothered me. What would happen if the vampires didn’t believe me? If they believed that Stefan had really lost control, the way he remembered doing, they would execute him. Tonight. The vampires would not tolerate anyone who threatened the safety and secrecy of their seethe.

  Not being a vampire, my word wouldn’t be worth much here—they might not listen to me at all.

  I’d never been certain how Stefan really felt about me. I’d been taught that vampires aren’t capable of affection for anyone other than themselves. They might pretend to like you, but there would always be an ulterior motivation for their actions. But even if he wasn�
�t my friend, I was his. If his death were my fault, because I didn’t say or do something right…I just had to do everything right, had to make them listen to me.

  The door opened wide, making a curious groaning noise. There was no one in the entryway.

  “And cue the scary music,” I said.

  “They do seem to be pulling out all the stops,” agreed Warren. “I wonder why they’re trying so hard to intimidate you.”

  Ben had settled down a bit, probably because Warren was so calm. “Maybe they’re scared of us.”

  I remembered the vampires I’d seen last time I was here and thought Ben was wrong. They hadn’t been afraid of Samuel. I’d seen Stefan lift his VW Bus without a jack, and the seethe was chock-full of vampires. If they wanted to tear me apart they could, and there wouldn’t be a damn thing Warren or Ben (if he felt like it) could do to stop it. They weren’t afraid of us. Maybe they just liked to frighten people.

  Warren must have thought the same thing because he said, “Nah, they’re just playing with us.”

  We entered the house cautiously, Warren first, then me, and Ben took up the rear. I’d have been happier with Ben in front of me. He might be willing to take a bullet for Adam, but me, I was pretty sure, he’d have been just as happy to eat.

  There was no one in the entryway, or the small sitting room it led into, so we continued down the hall. One side of the hall had three doors with arched tops, all closed, but the other side opened into a very large, airy room with a high ceiling and recessed lights. The walls were covered with brightly colored paintings, some of them spanning floor to ceiling. The walls were painted a soft yellow shade that made it feel bright and cheerful even though there were no windows.

  The floor was made of dark clay tiles in a variety of reddish browns. Light, neutral-colored woven rugs were scattered about almost at random. Three couches and five comfy-looking chairs, all a rather startling shade of coral that somehow managed to blend into the rest of the southwestern feel, were set in a loose semicircle around a large wooden chair, that looked as though it ought to have been sitting in a gothic mansion, rather than surrounded by all the sunny colors of the room.