Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  For a moment I thought the obvious. I’d warned Gabriel to be careful with Jesse and explained the downside of dating the Alpha’s daughter. He’d heard me out and solemnly promised me that he’d behave himself.

  Then I realized that under the streaks of makeup were the faint marks of new bruises. And part of what I’d thought was more mascara was actually a trickle of dried blood that ran from one nostril to her upper lip. One bare shoulder had a patch of road rash that still had gravel in it. No way that Gabriel had done that—and if he had, he wouldn’t be living now.

  Damn, I thought, growing cold. Someone was going to die today.

  Gabriel’s submissive posture must have been a reaction to something Adam had done, because as I watched him, he straightened his shoulders and lifted his gaze to Jesse’s father’s face. Not a really smart move with an enraged Alpha, but brave.

  “Did you know them, Gabriel?” I couldn’t see Adam’s face, but his voice told me that his eyes would be bright gold.

  I took another step into the room and a wave of his power almost sent me to my knees—as it did all of Adam’s wolves, who fell to the floor almost as one. The motion made me actually look at them and realize that there weren’t as many as I’d originally thought. Werewolves have a tendency to fill up the spaces in a room.

  There were only four. Honey, one of the few women in Adam’s pack, and her mate had their heads bowed and were holding each other’s hands in a white-knuckled grip.

  Darryl kept his face up and expressionless, but there were a few drops of perspiration on the mahogany skin of his forehead. Chinese and African blood ran in his veins and combined in a rather awesome mixture of color and feature. By day he was a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; the rest of the time he was Adam’s second.

  Next to Darryl, Ben looked as pale as his hair and almost fragile—though that was deceptive because he was tough as nails. Like Honey, he’d been gazing at the floor, but just after he’d dropped to the floor, he looked up and gave me a rather frantic look that I had no idea how to interpret.

  Ben had fled England to Adam’s pack to avoid questioning in a brutal multiple rape case. I was pretty sure he was innocent…but it says something about Ben that he’d have been my first suspect also.

  “Daddy, leave Gabriel alone,” said Jesse with a shadow of her usual spirit.

  But neither Adam nor Gabriel paid attention to her protest.

  “If I knew who they were and where to find them, sir, I wouldn’t be here now,” Gabriel said in a grim voice that made him sound thirty. “I’d have dropped Jesse off with you and gone after them.”

  Gabriel had grown up the oldest male in a house that had more than a passing acquaintance with abject poverty. It had made him driven, hardworking, and mature for his age. If I thought him reckless for going out with Jesse, I thought Jesse very wise for choosing him.

  “Are you all right, Jesse?” I asked, my own voice more of a growl than I’d planned.

  She looked up with a gasp. Then jumped up from her seat, where she’d been trying not to lean too close to Gabriel and give her father a target for his anger. She ran to me, burying her face in my shoulder.

  Adam turned to look at us. Being a little better versed in prudence than Gabriel (even if I used it only when it suited me), I dropped my gaze to Jesse’s hair almost immediately, but I’d seen enough. His eyes blazed just this side of change, icy yellow, pale like the winter morning sun. White and red lines alternated on his wide cheekbones from the force he was using to clench his jaws.

  If a news camera ever captured a shot of him looking like this, it would ruin all the spin-doctoring the werewolves had been doing over the last year. No one would ever mistake Adam in such a fury for anything except a very, very dangerous monster.

  He wasn’t just angry. I’m not sure there is an English word for just how much rage was in his face.

  “You have to stop him,” Jesse murmured as quietly as she could in my ear. “He’ll kill them.”

  I could have told her that she couldn’t whisper quietly enough that her father wouldn’t hear, not when he was in the same room with us.

  “You protect them!” he roared in outrage and I saw what little humanity he was clinging to disappear into the anger of the beast. If he hadn’t been as dominant, if he hadn’t been Alpha, I’m not sure he wouldn’t have already changed. As it was, I could see the lines of his face begin to lose their solidity.

  That’s all we needed.

  “No, no, no,” Jesse chanted into my shoulder, her whole frame shaking. “They’ll kill him if he hurts someone. He can’t…he can’t…”

  I don’t know what my mother intended when she sent me to be fostered with the werewolves on the advice of a cherished great-uncle who was a werewolf. I don’t know that I could have given away my child to strangers. But I’m not a teenage single parent working a minimum wage job who’d discovered her baby could change into a coyote pup. It had worked out for me—at least as well as most people’s childhoods. And it had left me with a certain skill for managing enraged werewolves, which was a good thing, my foster father had told me often enough, since I sure had a talent for enraging them.

  Still, it was easier to deal with them when I wasn’t what had set them off. The first step was to get their attention.

  “That’s enough,” I said in firm, quiet tones that carried right over the top of Jesse’s voice. I didn’t need her warning to know that she was right. Adam would hunt down and kill whoever did this to his daughter, and damned be the consequences. And the damned consequences would be fatal to him, and maybe to every werewolf anywhere.

  I raised my eyes to meet Adam’s fierce gaze and continued more sharply. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough to her? What are you thinking? How long has she been here and no one has cleaned her wounds? Shame on you.”

  Guilt is a wonderful and powerful thing.

  Then I turned, hauling Jesse, who stumbled in surprise, over to the stairs. If Darryl hadn’t been in the room, I couldn’t have left Gabriel. But Darryl was smart, Adam’s second, and I knew he’d keep the boy out of the line of fire.

  Besides, I didn’t think Adam would stay in the living room for very long.

  We made it only about three steps before I felt Adam’s hot breath on the back of my neck. He didn’t say anything, just stalked us all the way up to the upstairs bathroom. There seemed to be about a hundred steps more than the last time I’d come up here. Anything feels longer when you have a werewolf behind you.

  I sat Jesse down on the closed lid of the toilet and glanced back at Adam. “Go get me a washcloth.”

  He stood in the doorway for a moment, then turned and punched the door frame, which buckled. Maybe I should have said “please.” I gave a worried glance upward, but other than a little plaster dust, the ceiling seemed unaffected.

  Adam stared intently at the splinters that were splattered with blood from his split knuckles, though I don’t think he really saw the damage he’d done.

  I had to bite my lip to keep from saying something sarcastic like “Now that was helpful” or “Trying to keep the local carpenters in work?” When I get scared, my tongue gets sharp—which is not an asset around werewolves. Especially werewolves who are mad enough to take out doorways.

  Jesse and I both waited, frozen, then he screamed, a sound more howl than human, and he hit the door frame again, and this time he took out the whole wall, his fist pushing through the remnants of the frame, the next two wall studs, and all the drywall between.

  I risked a glance behind me. Jesse was so scared I could see the whites all the way around her eyes. I suspect she could have seen mine if she were looking at me instead of her father.

  “Talk about overprotective fathers,” I said in a suitably amused tone. The lack of fear in my voice surprised me as much as anyone. Who’d have thought I was such a good actor?

  Adam straightened and stared at me. I knew he wasn’t as large as he looked—he wasn’t
that much taller than me—but in that hallway he was plenty big.

  I met his gaze. “Could you get me a washcloth, please?” I asked as pleasantly as I could manage.

  He turned on his heel and stalked silently toward his bedroom. Once he was out of sight, I realized that Darryl had followed us up the stairs. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, letting out two long breaths. I tucked my cold hands in my jeans.

  “That was too damn close,” he said, maybe to me, maybe to himself. But he didn’t look at me as he pushed himself upright with a shrug of his shoulders and headed back down the stairs, taking them two at a time in a manner more common among high school boys than doctors of physics.

  When I turned back to Jesse, she held a gray washcloth to me with a shaking hand.

  “Hide that,” I said. “Or he’ll think I sent him away just to get rid of him.”

  She laughed, as I’d meant her to. It was wobbly, and stopped abruptly when a cut broke open on her lip. But it was a laugh. She’d be all right.

  Because I didn’t really care if he knew I’d sent him on a useless errand, I took the washcloth and used it to thoroughly clean the scrape on her shoulder. There was another road rash on her back just above the waistline of her jeans.

  “You want to tell me what happened?” I asked, rinsing the washcloth to get rid of the gravel on it.

  “It was dumb.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “What? You thought you’d add some more color to your complexion so you punched yourself a couple of times and then skidded on the pavement?”

  She rolled her eyes, so I guess I wasn’t as funny as all that. “No. I was at Tumbleweed with some friends. Dad brought me over and dropped me off. I was supposed to get a ride back, but there were too many kids to fit in Kayla’s car when we got to the parking lot. I’d forgotten my cell phone at home, so I started walking back to find a place to call.”

  She stopped talking. I handed her the washcloth so she could do her own face. “I’ve been running cold water over it; it should feel okay on your bruises. I think your dad will feel better if you get cleaned up a bit. You’ll look pretty bad tomorrow, but most of the bruising won’t show for a couple hours yet.”

  She looked in the mirror and gave a gasp of dismay that reassured me that most of the damage was surface. She hopped off the toilet and opened the medicine cabinet and pulled out makeup remover.

  “I can’t believe Gabriel saw me looking like this,” she muttered, dismayed, as she scrubbed at the mascara on her cheeks. “I look like a freak.”

  “Yep,” I agreed.

  She looked at me, started to laugh, and then her face crumpled again. “Tuesday, I have to go to school with them,” she said.

  “They were Finley kids?” I asked.

  She nodded and went back to cleaning her face. “They said that they didn’t want a freak in their school. I’ve known—”

  I cleared my throat rather loudly, interrupting her—and she gave me a little smile. Her father could hear us, so it was better not to give him too many hints about her attackers. If they’d done more to her, I wouldn’t be so concerned for them. But the incident wasn’t worth people dying over it. What was needed was an education, not a murder. However, those boys needed to understand just how dumb attacking the Alpha’s daughter was.

  “I didn’t expect it at all. Not from them,” she said. “I don’t know what they’d have done if Gabriel hadn’t seen what was happening.” She gave me a smile then, a real smile that didn’t stop when she pressed the cold cloth against her lip, which was beginning to swell up pretty well. “You should have seen him. We were in that little parking lot behind the art gallery, you know, the one with the giant paintbrushes out front?”

  I nodded.

  “I guess Gabriel was walking on the little road below us and heard me cry out. He was up the hill and over the fence as fast as my father could have done it.”

  I doubted that—werewolves are fast. What I didn’t doubt was that the effect of being rescued by someone like Gabriel, who, with his velvety brown skin, his black eyes, and his fair share of muscle, was not exactly hard on the eyes at any time.

  “You know,” I told her with a conspiratorial smile, “it’s probably a good thing that he didn’t know who they were, either.”

  “I’ll find out,” said Gabriel behind my right shoulder.

  I’d heard him coming. Maybe I should have warned her, but he deserved to hear the hero worship in her voice. He wasn’t the only one in the hall, but the wolves, who’d all followed him up, were keeping out of Jesse’s sight.

  Gabriel gave me an ice pack and watched Jesse duck behind the washcloth to hide her blush. His face was set. “I could have caught up to them, but I wasn’t sure how badly hurt Jesse was. Cowards—” He started to spit, then realized where he was and restrained himself. “Takes a pair of real macho men to pick on a girl half their size.”

  He looked at me. “On the way home, Jesse said that she thought she’d been set up. Those girls she was with, one of them, the girl with the car, has a thing for one of the boys. And the boys knew where to wait for her. There aren’t many places you could beat someone up without people seeing them. They’d pulled her behind one of those big dumpsters. Someone put a lot of planning into this.”

  Finley High is a small school.

  “Do you want to transfer to Kennewick High?” I asked her, knowing that her father was listening from the bedroom. I couldn’t hear him, but I could feel his intent and see it in the stiff postures of the wolves. If we weren’t very careful, the whole pack would be after those stupid boys.

  “Gabriel goes to Kennewick, and I know he has a lot of friends who will watch out for you. Or you could go to Richland, where Aurielle teaches.” Aurielle was another of Adam’s three female wolves, Darryl’s mate, and a high school chemistry teacher.

  Jesse whipped the washcloth off her face and gave me a look that reminded me that she was her father’s daughter. “I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction,” she said coldly. “But they won’t take me by surprise again. I fought like a girl because I couldn’t believe they were really going to hit me. I won’t make that mistake again either.”

  “You’ll have to start practicing aikido again, then,” said Adam, his voice as quiet and calm as if he hadn’t just thrown a hissy fit a few minutes ago. “You’re three years out of practice, and if you are only half their weight, you’ll have to do better than that.”

  He walked out of his bedroom, a dark blue washcloth in his hand. If his eyes had been darker, I’d have bought the calm facade. He’d managed somehow to stuff all that anger and Alpha energy down and out of sight. But I’d believe the cold yellow eyes before I believed the quiet voice. He handed me the washcloth, but his gaze was on Jesse.

  “Yes,” she said with grim determination.

  “She hurt them,” Gabriel said. “One of them had a bloody nose and the other was holding on to his side while he ran off.” He gave her an assessing look, which I was glad Adam didn’t see. “I bet they’re more hurt than she is.”

  Darryl cleared his throat, and when Adam looked at him, he said, “Send her with an escort to and from school.” Jesse was a general favorite. If Adam hadn’t been so enraged, there would have been a lot more growls from the wolves. Darryl’s eyes were lighter than they usually were, too. The gold was eerie in his dark face.

  “Send her with a werewolf,” I suggested, “in wolf form. For the first few days he can wait for her in front of the school, somewhere very visible.”

  “No,” said Jesse. “I won’t be a freak show.”

  Adam raised an eyebrow. “You’ll do as you’re told.”

  “It’s a territorial thing,” I told Jesse. “Even mundane people play those stupid games. They tried a power play and your father cannot just let it go. If he does, the harassment will get worse—until someone dies.” That’s what all the werewolf politics and posturing that I complained about so much really did, kept people alive.

  �
��You should call the police and the school and warn them,” said Honey. “So no one gets hurt.”

  “Do a show and tell,” suggested Gabriel. “Call Jesse’s biology teacher—or aren’t you taking a course in Current Affairs? That would be better. You can take your class out and give them an up-close and personal with a werewolf. Same effect but less embarrassing for Jesse.”

  Adam smiled, showing lots of teeth. “I like that.”

  Jesse brightened a little. “Maybe I can get extra credit.”

  “The school will never go for it,” Darryl said. “The liability is too great if something happened.”

  “I’ll check into it,” Adam said.

  Jesse was a little pale, but she wasn’t seriously injured. A hot shower would help with the soreness—and she needed to shower before her father calmed down enough to realize that she didn’t need to tell him who had attacked her. If I could get their scent, so could he.

  I made a dismissive gesture at the whole lot of them, Gabriel, Adam, and werewolves. “Go downstairs and work it out,” I told them. “I want to get a better look at some of Jesse’s bruises so I can make sure that she doesn’t need Samuel to come check her out.”

  I took Jesse by the hand. “We’ll use Adam’s bathroom…” I couldn’t actually remember if he had a bathroom, but I couldn’t imagine that this house didn’t have a master bedroom suite, and besides, he’d come out of it with a washcloth. “Since Adam has chosen to remodel this one.” Sure my tone was a little snide—but if he was irritated with me, he wasn’t going to be thinking about finding Jesse’s assailants.

  Jesse followed me through the crowded hallway and into Adam’s bedroom. There was an open door on the far side that could only be a bathroom. I tugged her into it and shut the door.

  Then I whispered, very, very quietly, “You need to shower and get rid of their scent before your father thinks of it—if he already hasn’t.”

  Her eyes widened. “Clothes?” she mouthed.