Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  “Be careful,” he told me, finally. “Remember, the walkers may have taught vampires to fear them, but there are still lots of vampires, and only one walker.”

  He hung up.

  “He’s right,” Zee told me. “Don’t get too cocky.”

  I laughed. It came out sounding tired and sad. “You saw my trailer, Zee. I’m not going to get cocky. None of your people know where he is?”

  Zee shook his head. “Uncle Mike is looking into it, but he has to be careful. If we find anything, we’ll tell you.”

  The phone rang again, and I answered without looking at the number. “Mercy.”

  “You need to get over here.” Kyle spoke very softly, as if he didn’t want anyone to overhear him—but he was in a werewolf ’s house.

  “They can hear you,” I told him. I could hear Darryl saying something in Chinese. It was a very bad sign that Darryl was speaking Chinese because he only did that when he was really ticked off. “I’ll be right over.”

  I turned toward Zee.

  “I’ll work the shop today—and tomorrow, maybe longer,” Zee said. “And you won’t pay me.”

  When I started to object, he raised one hand. “No. I cannot hunt Littleton, but I can help this much.”

  Fixing the trailer was already turning next month into a macaroni-and-cheese month. If Zee donated his time, at least it wouldn’t be a ramen noodle month. I kissed his cheek again and ran for my car.

  Remembering the fate of the wolf who’d tailed me yesterday, I drove exactly five miles an hour over the speed limit down the highway. Getting a ticket would eat up a lot of time.

  My cell phone rang again as I drove past the traffic cop who was parked on the other side of the bridge over the train tracks. This time the phone call was from Tony.

  “Hey, Mercy,” he said. “I got all six messages. What did you need?”

  “Is there anyway you could get me a list of all the violent incidents the police were called to over the past month? I need it for all the Tri-Cities, not just Kennewick.”

  “Why?” The friendliness had left his voice.

  “Because there might be something causing them, and it might help stop it if I can find out where the incidences are taking place.” I watch TV. I’ve seen the way the police track serial killers—at least in detective shows. It made sense that demon-caused problems might center around the demon. Stefan had apparently run into success using that method.

  If I ever become a serial murderer, I’ll be very careful to kill people in a pattern that centers around a police station—and not my home or work.

  “We have a map,” he told me as I turned down Adam’s road and put my foot down. Sure the speed limit on the road was thirty-five but I’d never seen a police officer out here. “Why don’t you come over to the station and I’ll show it to you—if you answer a few questions.”

  “All right,” I said. “I have a few errands to run first. Can I meet you in an hour or so?”

  “I’ll be here,” he said, and hung up.

  Honey opened the door of Adam’s house before I got to the porch.

  “They’re upstairs,” she said unnecessarily. Darryl was still saying something rude in Chinese.

  No, I don’t speak Chinese, but some things don’t require translation.

  I ran up the stairs with Honey on my heels.

  “I talked Darryl into coming downstairs after Kyle called you,” Honey said. “But just a few minutes ago Warren tried to get out of bed and Kyle yelled at him. So Darryl went back up.”

  I’d have asked for more details—like why Warren and Darryl were arguing in the first place, assuming it wasn’t Kyle and Darryl—but there wasn’t time.

  The guest room door was open. I stopped just outside and took a deep breath. When you walk into a room with two angry werewolves (and I could hear two growls), it is a good idea to be calm. Anger just exacerbates the situation—and fear can make both of them attack you.

  I shoved the last thought to the back of my mind, tried to think serene thoughts, and walked in.

  Warren had shifted into his wolf form—and he looked no better than he had last night. Splatters of his blood crusted the sheets, the walls and the floor.

  Darryl was still in human form and was struggling with Warren. It looked like he was trying to hold him in the bed.

  “Lie down,” he roared.

  In the pack, Darryl outranked Warren, he was Adam’s second and Warren, Adam’s third. That meant Warren had to do what Darryl told him to.

  But Warren, hurt and confused, his human half submerged under the wolf, had forgotten that he was supposed to submit to Darryl’s authority. It should have been an instinctive thing. That Warren wasn’t listening to Darryl meant one thing—Darryl wasn’t really more dominant, Warren had been faking it all along.

  Under these circumstances it was a very, very bad thing. A wounded werewolf is dangerous, the wolf nature superceding the human control—and a werewolf is a very nasty creature. Much, much nastier than his natural counterpart.

  The only reason Warren hadn’t killed everyone in the house was because he was half dead and Darryl was very, very strong.

  Kyle was standing against a wall, as far as he could get from the bed. His purple silk dress shirt was ripped and the skin under it torn and dripping blood. The expression on his face was worried, but he didn’t smell of fear or anger.

  “You’re the highest ranking wolf,” Honey whispered. “I told Kyle to call you when Darryl just seemed to irritate Warren. He was all right with Kyle until a few minutes ago.”

  Hadn’t I just told Bran that I outranked Darryl? But Honey, like the rest of Adam’s wolves, knew I wasn’t really Adam’s mate—and even if I was, my authority would be law—not real. Not as real as it would take to help Warren control his wolf. But Honey watched me with faith in her eyes, so I had to try.

  “Warren,” I said firmly. “Lie down.”

  If I was the most surprised person in the room when Warren subsided immediately, Darryl was a close second. I’ve always thought it was stupid, the way female pack members take their rank from their mate. I thought it was one of those dumb things that the wolves’ human halves tacked onto nature to make life difficult, something the human part of the werewolves paid attention to, not the wolf.

  Darryl slowly let go of Warren and sat on the end of the bed. Warren lay limply where he’d been, his splendid brown coat ragged and coated with blood, some old, some fresh.

  “Well,” I said, to cover up my confusion. “It’s a good sign that he can shift—and he’ll heal faster in this form.” I looked at Kyle. “Did he say anything about why Samuel and Adam left?”

  “No,” Kyle frowned at me. “What did you do?”

  I shrugged. “Werewolf politics,” I told him.

  “How did you do this when I could not?” Darryl asked.

  I looked over and saw that his dark eyes had lightened to yellow—and he was staring at me.

  “Not my fault,” I told him. “Adam didn’t even ask me before he claimed me as mate before the pack—I certainly didn’t think it was anything more than a way to keep me from getting eaten. As far as dominance goes, you and Warren will have to sort things out when Adam gets back.” I looked back at Kyle and asked him again, “How badly are you hurt?”

  Kyle shook his head. “Just a scratch.” He raised his face to me. “Am I going to howl at the moon, too?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not that easy to become a werewolf. He’d have had to nearly kill you. A scratch wouldn’t do it.”

  Kyle was a lawyer—nothing showed on his face. I couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed. Maybe he didn’t know either.

  “We’re going to have to move him down to the safe room,” I told Darryl.

  The safe room was a room in the basement that was reinforced to withstand a full grown werewolf. If Darryl wasn’t dominant enough to make sure Warren stayed quiet, the cell was the only alternative.

  “We can leave him on
the mattress,” suggested Honey. “Darryl and I can carry him down the stairs.”

  Which is what we did. Kyle and I followed, and I explained what we were doing as quickly as I could.

  Warren didn’t object to being imprisoned, but we had trouble keeping Kyle from following him.

  “He didn’t hurt me on purpose,” he said, standing just inside the cell door. “I was trying to help Darryl keep him down.”

  “It’ll get worse before it gets better,” I told him.

  “He didn’t hurt me before.”

  Which let everyone in the room, except Kyle, know just how much Warren cared about him. Even a crazed werewolf won’t harm his mate.

  “I don’t want to have to explain to Warren why we let him eat you,” I said. “Look, you can sit in this couch right here and stay all day.”

  There was a little sitting room outside the cell, with a couch, matching easy chair, and big-screen TV.

  “It’ll only be for the day,” Darryl said, his voice still a little growly, making me glad we weren’t closer to a full moon. “He’ll be well enough to be on his own tonight.”

  Warren and his wolf might have accepted me as Adam’s mate, but I doubted Darryl did—and finding out that Warren was dominant to him was going to make him touchy for a while. A long while.

  We left Warren in the cell, with Kyle leaning against the silver-coated bars. It wasn’t the smartest place for him to wait, but at least he wasn’t inside.

  “I have to go,” I told Darryl, once we were upstairs. “I’m still trying to locate Adam and Samuel. Can you handle it from here?”

  He didn’t answer me, just stared down toward the cell.

  “We’ll be all right,” said Honey, softly. She stroked Darryl’s arm to comfort him.

  “They won’t accept him as second,” Darryl said.

  He was probably right. That Warren had survived being a homosexual werewolf as long as he had was a tribute to his strength and intelligence.

  “You can sort it out with Adam when he gets back,” I said. I glanced at my watch. I had just enough time to call Elizaveta before I left for the police station.

  I didn’t leave a third message on her answering machine. It might have annoyed her.

  When I got off the phone, Darryl said, “Elizaveta left town after Adam found Warren. She said it was too dangerous for her to be here. If the demon got too close to her, it might be able to jump from Littleton to her, which, she told us, would be a disaster. She gathered her family and took a trip to California.”

  I knew that Elizaveta wasn’t a Wiccan witch. Her powers were inherited and had nothing to do with religion. That she was so afraid of a demon told me that she had already had some dealings with the powers of darkness—otherwise the demon wouldn’t have been able to take her over without an invitation.

  “Damn it,” I said. “I don’t suppose you have any ideas on how to kill Littleton.”

  He smiled at me, his teeth very white in the darkness of his face. “Eat him,” he said.

  “Very funny.” I turned to leave.

  “Kill the vampire and the demon goes away,” he told me. “That’s what the witch told Adam. And you kill a vampire by staking him, cutting off his head and then burning him.”

  “Thank you,” I told him, though it was nothing I didn’t know. I’d been hoping Elizaveta would have some knowledge of the demon that would make it easier to kill Littleton.

  After I shut the door behind me, I heard Darryl say, “Of course, eating him would work, too.”

  The Kennewick police station was not too far from my shop, right next to Kennewick High. There were a bunch of high schoolers crowded into the small entryway, mobbing the pop machine. I waded through them to the glass fronted booth where a young man, who looked like he’d have been more at home with the kids on the other side, sat doing paperwork.

  He took my name and Tony’s, then buzzed me through the first door into an empty waiting room. I’d never been inside a police station before, and I was more intimidated than I’d expected. Nervousness always made me claustrophobic, so I paced back and forth in the air-conditioned room. It smelled strongly of whatever cleaner they’d used, though I expect that wouldn’t have bothered anyone with a less sensitive nose. Beneath the antiseptic smell, it smelled of anxiety, fear, and anger.

  I must have looked a little wild-eyed by the time Tony came to get me, because he took one look and asked, “Mercy, what’s wrong?”

  I started to say something, but he held up one hand. “Wait, this isn’t private. Come with me.” Which was just as well, because I wasn’t sure what I was going to tell him.

  As I followed him down the corridor, I decided that the problem with deciding to bend the rules was trying to figure out just how far I could bend them.

  The fae weren’t going to step in against Littleton, at least not yet. The werewolves, according to Uncle Mike and Bran, didn’t stand a chance. If the vampires were asking my help, it was a good sign they didn’t know what to do about him either.

  Bran had said that eventually sorcerers fall victim to their demon and all hell breaks loose. It just might be that the KPD would be the people on the front lines when that happened.

  On the other hand, if it ever got back to the seethe that I told the police about their existence, I might as well kill myself right now.

  Tony led me to a smallish office room, and shut the door behind us, closing out the sounds of the department. It wasn’t his office. Even if it hadn’t smelled like someone else, I could have told from the wedding picture on the desk. It was about thirty years old, and both of the smiling young people in it were blond.

  Tony sat on the edge of the desk, set a manila file folder he’d been carrying beside him, and waved me vaguely to one of the chairs against the wall. “You look like something the cat dragged in,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Rough morning.”

  He sighed and tapped his finger on the folder. “Would it help if I told you I have here a report from a concerned citizen who called in at 7:23 this morning. It seems that her nice young neighbor, one Mercedes Thompson, had to fire her rifle in order to drive off a bunch of hooligans last night or early this morning. One of our patrolmen stopped by to see the damage.” He gave me a somber look. “He took pictures.”

  I gave him a wry smile. “I was surprised at how bad it was when I saw it this morning, too.”

  “Is this because someone saw you talking to me yesterday?”

  It would have solved a lot of problems if I let him think that—but I prefer not to lie. Especially when that lie might start a fae-hunt.

  “No. I told my neighbors it was probably just kids—or someone angry with my work.”

  “So they came after your trailer with can openers? How long were they there before you came after them with the rifle?”

  “Am I under arrest?” I asked brightly. Shooting a rifle where I lived might be illegal, I’d never checked it out.

  “Not at this time,” he said carefully.

  “Ah,” I settled back in the uncomfortably chair. “Blackmail. How fun.” I tried to see the best way through this. Honesty was always the best policy.

  “Okay,” I said finally, having decided how much I could tell him. “You were right. There is something that’s causing people to become violent. If I tell you what it is, however, I won’t live to see tomorrow. Also, even if you know what it is, you won’t be able to do anything to stop it. It is not a werewolf, and not a fae. Nor is it human, though it might appear that way.”

  He looked…surprised. “We were right?”

  I nodded my head. “Now, let me tell you this. It came last night and ripped my trailer to pieces, but it couldn’t come in because I didn’t invite it. You have to invite evil into your home—that’s one of the rules. I shot it four times with my Marlin 444, loaded with silver. I hit it at least three times without even slowing it down. You need to stay away from it. Right now it’s in hiding. The rise in violence is just a—a side effect.
If you bring it out into the open, there will be a lot more bodies. We’re trying to contain it without getting anyone killed. Hopefully very soon.”

  “Who is ‘we’?” he asked.

  “Some acquaintances of mine.” I looked him square in the eye and prayed that he’d leave it there. The heavy emphasis I used was straight out of a gangster movie. He didn’t have to know how underpowered we were; the police would be even more helpless than Andre and I.

  “I promise I won’t lie to you about the preternatural community,” I told him. “I may leave things out, because I have to, but I won’t lie to you.”

  He didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all. He tapped his fingers unhappily on the top of the desk, but in the end, he didn’t ask more questions.

  He got off the desk and walked over to a cabinet mounted in the wall behind my chair. I moved when he opened it and pushed back the doors to reveal a white board in the center and corkboards on the inside of each door. On one of the corkboards someone had pinned up a map of the Tri-Cities and covered it with roundheaded colored pins. Most of the pins were green, some were blue, and a double handful were red.

  “This isn’t all of them,” he said. “A couple of weeks ago a few of us wondered if there was a pattern to the violence, so we pulled all reports of violence since April. The green pins are usual stuff. Property damage, arguments that get a little hot and someone calls them in, someone bangs his girlfriend around. That kind of stuff. Blue is where someone ended up in the hospital. Red is where someone ended up dead. A few of them are suicides.” He put a finger on a cluster of red near the highway in Pasco. “This is the murder-suicide at the motel in Pasco last month.” He moved his hand to a green pin all by itself near the east edge of the map. “This is your trailer.”

  I looked at the map. I’d expected to get a list of addresses, but this was exactly what I needed—and not. Because there was no pattern I could see. The pins were scattered evenly around the Tri-Cities. Denser where the population was heavier, light in Finley, Burbank, and West Richland where there weren’t so many people. There was no neat ring of pins like you see in the movies.