Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  Adam snorted. “That’s one way to put it.” To my relief he’d stayed where we’d been, sinking face down into the mat.

  “Even with my willpower, his lure was too great,” I said melodramatically, complete with wrist to forehead. If I made a joke of it, he’d never realize how truthful I was being.

  A slow smile spread across her face and she quit looking like she was ready to bolt back into the house. “Dad’s kind of a stud, all right.”

  “Jesse,” warned Adam, his voice muffled only a little by the mat. She giggled.

  “I have to agree,” I said in overly serious tones. “Maybe as high as a seven or eight, even.”

  “Mercedes,” Adam thundered, surging to his feet.

  I winked at Jesse, held my gi top over my left shoulder with one finger, and strolled casually out the back door of the garage. I didn’t mean to, but when I turned to shut the door, I looked back and saw Adam’s face. His expression gave me cold chills.

  He wasn’t angry or hurt. He looked thoughtful, as if someone had just given him the answer to a question that had been bothering him. He knew.

  I was still shaking as I gingerly climbed over the barbed wire fence between Adam’s land and mine.

  All my life I’d blended in with those around me. It is the gift of the coyote. It’s what helps us survive.

  I learned early how to imitate the wolves. I played by their rules as long as they did. If they pushed it beyond reasonable limits because they thought I was less than they, being coyote rather than wolf, or because they were jealous that I did not have to heed the moon’s call, then all bets were off. I played my strengths to their weaknesses. I lied with my body and eyes, licking their boots—then tormenting them in whatever way I could come up with.

  Wolf etiquette had become a game to me, a game with rules I understood. I thought I was immune to the stupid dominance/submission thing, immune to the Alpha’s power. I’d just had a very visceral lesson that I was not. I didn’t like it. Not at all.

  If Jesse hadn’t come in, I would have surrendered myself to Adam, like some heroine from a 1970s series romance, the kind my foster mother used to read all the time. Ick.

  I walked across my back field until I stood beside the decrepit Rabbit that served as my parts car, as well as my means of getting back at Adam when he got too dictatorial. If he looked out his back window, it sat right in the center of his field of view.

  I’d pushed it out of the garage several years ago when Adam had complained about my mobile home spoiling his view. Then, every time he bothered me, I made it uglier. Right now it was missing three wheels and the rear bumper, all stored safely in my garage. Big red letters across the hood said FOR A GOOD TIME CALL followed by Adam’s phone number. The graffiti had been Jesse’s suggestion.

  I dropped down in the dirt beside the Rabbit and leaned my head against the fender, trying to figure out why I’d suddenly been overwhelmed with the desire to submit to Adam. Why hadn’t I felt like this before—or had that been why I’d run so hard? I tried to think back, but all I remembered was worrying about getting so involved with another werewolf.

  Could he have made me submit to him on purpose? Was it physiological or parapsychological, science or magic? If I knew it was going to happen, could I resist it?

  Who could I ask?

  I looked at the car parked in the driveway. Samuel was home from his shift at the ER.

  Samuel would know, if anyone did. I’d just have to figure out how to ask him. It was a testimony to how shaken up I was that I got to my feet and headed home with the intention of asking one werewolf, who had made it plain that he was only waiting to make his move on me, about the way another werewolf had made me desire him. I’m not usually that dumb.

  I was already beginning to have doubts about the wisdom of my plans by the time I reached the front porch. I opened the door and was met by a frigid blast of air.

  My old wall unit had been able to keep my bedroom about ten degrees cooler than the outside, which was all right with me. I like hot weather, but most of the wolves had trouble with it, which is why Samuel had installed the new heat pump and paid for it. A considerate roommate, he usually left the temperature where I set it.

  I took a look at the thermostat and saw that Samuel had punched it down as far as it would go. It wasn’t forty-two degrees inside, but it was trying. Pretty decent effort considering it was over a hundred degrees outside and my trailer had been built in 1978 before the days of manufactured homes with good insulation. I turned it to a more reasonable temperature.

  “Samuel? Why’d you turn the temperature down so low?” I called, dropping my gi top on the couch.

  There was no reply, though he had to have heard me. I walked through the kitchen area and into the hallway. Samuel’s door was mostly shut, but he hadn’t closed it all the way.

  “Samuel?” I touched the door and it opened a foot or so, just enough that I could see Samuel stretched out on his bed, still in his hospital scrubs and smelling of cleanser and blood.

  He had his arm over his eyes.

  “Samuel?” I paused in the doorway to give my nose a chance to tell me what he was feeling. But I couldn’t smell the usual suspects. He wasn’t angry, or frightened. There was something…he smelled of pain.

  “Samuel, are you all right?”

  “You smell like Adam.” He took his arm down and looked at me with wolf eyes, pale as snow and ringed in ebony.

  Samuel isn’t here today, I thought, trying not to panic or do any other stupid thing. I had played with Samuel’s wolf as a child, along with all the other children in Aspen Springs. I hadn’t realized how dangerous that would have been with any other wolf until I was much older. I would have felt better now, if those wolf eyes had been in the wolf body. Wolf eyes on a human face meant the wolf was in charge.

  I’d seen new wolves lose control. If they did it very often, they were eliminated for the sake of the pack and everyone who came in contact with them. I’d only seen Samuel lose control once before—and that was after a vampire attack.

  I sank down on the floor, making certain my head was lower than his. It was always an interesting feeling, making myself helpless in front of someone who might tear my throat out. Come to think of it, the last time I’d done this it had been with Samuel, too. At least I was acting out of self-preservation, not some buried compulsion to submit to a dominant wolf—I was faking it, not submitting because of some damn buried instinct.

  After I told myself that, I realized it was true. I had no desire to cower before Samuel. Under other, less worrisome circumstances, I’d have been cheered up.

  “Sorry,” Samuel whispered, putting his arm back over his eyes. “Bad day. There was an accident on 240 near where the old Y interchange was. Couple of kids in one car, eighteen and nineteen years old. Mother with an infant in the other. All of them still in critical condition. Maybe they’ll make it.”

  He’d been a doctor for a very long time. I didn’t know what had set him off with this accident in particular. I made an encouraging sound.

  “There was a lot of blood,” he said at last. “The baby got pretty cut up from the glass, took thirty stitches to plug the leaks. One of the ER nurses is new, just graduated from the community college. She had to leave in the middle—afterward she asked me how I learned to manage so well when the victims were babies.” His voice darkened with bitterness that I’d seldom heard from him before as he continued, “I almost told her that I’d seen worse—and eaten them, too. The baby would have only been a snack.”

  I could have left, then. Samuel had enough control left not to come after me—probably. But I couldn’t leave him like that.

  I crawled cautiously across the floor, watching him for a twitch of muscle that would tell me he was ready to pounce. Slowly I raised my hand up until it touched his. He didn’t react at all.

  If he’d been a new wolf, I’d have known what to say. But helping new wolves through this kind of situation had been one of Samuel
’s jobs in the pack I’d grown up in. There was nothing I could say that he didn’t already know.

  “The wolf is a practical beast,” I told him, finally, thinking it might have been the thought of eating the baby that bothered him so much. “You’re more careful what you eat. You aren’t likely to pounce on the operating table and eat someone if you aren’t hungry.” It was almost word for word the speech I’d heard him use with the new wolves.

  “I’m so tired,” he said, raising the hair on the back of my neck. “Too tired. I think it is time to rest.” He wasn’t talking about physically.

  Werewolves aren’t immortal, just immune to age. But time is their enemy anyway. After just so long, one wolf told me, nothing matters anymore and death looks better than living another day. Samuel was very old.

  The Marrok, Samuel’s father, had taken to calling me once a month to “check on things,” he said. For the first time it occurred to me that he hadn’t been checking on me, but on his son.

  “How long have you felt this way?” I asked, inching my way up onto his bed, slowly so I didn’t startle him. “Did you leave Montana because you couldn’t hide this from Bran?”

  “No. I want you,” he said starkly moving his arm so I could see that his eyes had changed back to human grey-blue.

  “Do you?” I asked, knowing that it wasn’t completely true. “Your wolf might still want me, but I don’t think you do. Why did you leave the Marrok to come here?”

  He rolled away, giving his back to me. I didn’t move, careful not to crowd him. I didn’t back away either, just waited for his answer.

  Eventually it came. “It was bad. After Texas. But when you came back to us, it went away. I was fine. Until the baby.”

  “Did you talk to Bran about it?” Whatever it was. I put my face against the small of his back, warming him with my breath. Samuel would see suicide as cowardice, I tried to reassure myself, and Samuel hated cowards. I might not want to love Samuel—not after the way we’d once hurt each other—but I didn’t want to lose him either.

  “The Marrok knows,” he whispered. “He always does. Everyone else believed I was the same, just like always. My father knew something was wrong, that I wasn’t right. I was going to leave—but then you came.”

  If Bran couldn’t fix him, what was I supposed to do?

  “You left the pack for a long time,” I said, feeling my way. He’d left the pack shortly after I had, over fifteen years ago. He’d stayed away for most of those fifteen years. “Bran told me you went lone-wolf in Texas.” Wolves need their pack, or else they start to get a little strange. Lone wolves were, in general, an odd bunch, dangerous to themselves and others.

  “Yes.” Every muscle in his body tensed, waiting for the blow to fall. I decided that meant I was on the right track.

  “It’s not easy being alone, not for years.” I scooted up a little until I could wrap myself around him, tucking my legs behind his. I slipped the arm I wasn’t lying on around his side and pressed my hand over his stomach, showing him that he wasn’t alone, not while he lived at my house.

  He started to shake, vibrating the whole bed. I tightened my arm, but I didn’t say anything. I’d gone as far as I was willing to go. Some wounds need to be pricked so they can drain, others just need to be left alone—I wasn’t qualified to know the difference.

  He wrapped both of his arms over the top of mine. “I hid myself from the wolves. I hid among the humans.” He paused. “Hid from myself. What I did to you was wrong, Mercedes. I told myself I couldn’t wait, I couldn’t take the chance that another would take you from me. I had to make you mine so my children would live, but I knew I was taking advantage of you. You weren’t old enough to defend yourself from me.”

  I rubbed my nose against his back in reassurance, but I didn’t speak. He was right, and I respected him too much to lie.

  “I violated your trust, and my father’s, too. I couldn’t live with it: I had to leave. I traveled to the far corner of the country and became someone else: Samuel Cornick, college freshman, fresh off the farm with a newly minted high school diploma. Only on the night of the full moon did I allow myself to remember what I was.”

  The muscles under my hands convulsed twice. “In med school, I met a girl. She reminded me of you: quiet with a sneaky sense of humor. She looked a little like you, too. It felt like a second chance to me—a chance to do it right. Or maybe I just forgot. We were friends at first, in the same program at school. Then it became something more. We moved in together.”

  I knew what was coming, because it was the worst thing I could think of that could have happened to Samuel. I could smell his tears, though his voice was carefully even.

  “We took precautions, but we weren’t careful enough. She got pregnant.” His voice was stark. “We were doing our internships. We were so busy we hardly had time to say ‘hello’ to each other. She didn’t notice until she was nearly three months pregnant because she assumed that the symptoms were from stress. I was so happy.”

  Samuel loved children. Somewhere I had a picture of him wearing a baseball cap with Elise Smithers, age five, riding him as if he had been a pony. He’d thrown away everything he believed in because he thought I, unlike a human or werewolf, could give him children who would live.

  I tried not to let him know I was crying, too.

  “We were doing internships.” He was speaking quietly now. “It’s time consuming and stressful. Long irregular hours. I was working with an orthopedic surgeon, nearly a two hour drive from our apartment. I came home one night and found a note.”

  I hugged him harder, as if I could have stopped what happened.

  “A baby would have interfered with her schooling,” he said. “We could try again, later. After…after she was established. After there was money. After…” He kept talking but he’d dropped into a foreign tongue, its liquid tone conveying his anguish better than the English words had.

  The curse of a long life is that everyone around you dies. You have to be strong to survive, and stronger to want to do so. Bran had told me once that Samuel had seen too many of his children die.

  “That infant tonight…”

  “He’ll live,” I said. “Because of you. He’ll grow up strong and healthy.

  “I lived like a student should, Mercy,” he told me. “Pretending to be poor like all the other students. I wonder if she knew that I had money, would she still have killed my baby? I would have quit school to take care of the child. Was it my fault?”

  Samuel curled his whole body around my arm as if someone had punched him in the stomach. I just held him.

  There was nothing I could say to make it better. He knew better than I what the chances of his baby being born healthy had been. It didn’t matter, his child had never gotten any chance at all.

  I held Samuel while the sun set, comforting him as best I could.

  Chapter 6

  I left Samuel sleeping and made tuna fish sandwiches for dinner, something I could put in the fridge for him in case he awoke hungry, but he stayed in his room until past my bedtime.

  I set my alarm clock for a couple of hours later than my usual wake-up. Tomorrow was Saturday when I was officially closed. I had work to do, but nothing urgent, and Gabriel wasn’t scheduled to come in until ten.

  When I knelt for prayer before bedtime, I asked God to help Warren and Stefan catch the demon, as had become my usual plea. This time I added a prayer for Samuel as well. After a moment’s thought I prayed for Adam, too. I didn’t really think it was his fault that he turned me into a submissive ninny.

  Even though I was all set to wake up late (for me), I got up just before dawn because someone was tapping on my window. I pulled my pillow over my head.

  “Mercy.” My window’s assailant kept his voice down, but I knew it anyway. Stefan.

  I rubbed my eyes. “Are you asking for quarter? I’m not in a particularly merciful mood.” I can make fun of my name, but no one else can. Unless I’m in a really good mood. Or
if I start it first.

  I heard him laugh. “For quarters, perhaps. But I have no need to yield, if you are not assaulting me.”

  One of the nice things about Stefan was that he usually got my jokes, no matter how lame. Even better, he’d play along.

  “You need money?” I asked in mock surprise. “I can write you a check, but I only have a couple of dollars in cash.”

  “I need a place to sleep the day, love. Would you shelter me?”

  “All right,” I threw back my covers and started for the front door. There went my plans to sleep in.

  The sky was striped with the beginnings of sunrise when I opened the door.

  “Left it a little late, Stefan.” I said adding his name so that Samuel—who would have heard me open the door—wasn’t alarmed.

  Stefan didn’t appear to hurry, but neither did he waste much time standing on my doorstep.

  I hadn’t seen him since the night of his trial. He looked tired. His shoulders were slumped and he didn’t move with his usual effervescent energy. “I sent Daniel home, but I had a tip I had to check out. I thought I’d have time, but my powers lessen as dawn approaches and I found myself on your doorstep”—he grinned—“begging for mercy.”

  I escorted him to my bedroom door. “I thought Warren and Ben were working with you. Why didn’t you have them check it out?”

  “I sent them home earlier. They have jobs to do today, and even werewolves need sleep.”

  “They’re working on a Saturday?”

  “Warren has a job for his lawyer friend, and Ben had things to do that he couldn’t get done when everyone else was working.”

  Ben was a computer geek working at the Pacific Northwest Nation Laboratory which was affiliated in some arcane manner with the Hanford Nuclear Site. Darryl, Adam’s second, had gotten him the job—and from all accounts Ben was a pretty decent nerd. I think it surprised Darryl, who wasn’t accustomed to being surprised.