Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  I was in coyote form and hightailing it at top speed down the road before he landed. Bits of clothing scattered behind me as I ran. I tripped once when my foot caught in my bra, but I rolled with it and shed the bra in my fall.

  He could have had me then, but I think he was enjoying the chase. It must have been the reason he didn’t just go back and get the Porsche. It might take him a minute to shrink down so he could get into it, but the car was a lot faster than I was, and it could run forever.

  I had to stay on the road until it crossed the canal. Otherwise it was too far for me to jump across and I wasn’t swimming anything with a water fae of some kind after me.

  As soon as I was past it, I dodged down the road that paralleled the canal, running toward the river. I jumped through the fence behind the first house and tore through the field. By the time their dog noticed me and began barking an alarm, I was in the next field over and running through grass taller than I was. After a half mile of running, I slowed to a trot.

  The ground was soft and there were horses and cows in the fields. A donkey chased me through its paddock with murderous intent, but I just picked up the pace until I could jump out of its paddock. Horses mostly don’t care about coyotes, nor do cows. Chickens run, but donkeys hate us every one.

  When I heard hoofbeats behind me, I thought maybe the donkey had jumped its fence—until the horse I’d just passed let out a terrified squeal.

  Kelpies could take on the form of a horse, I thought as I moved back into top gear.

  I learned that whatever Fideal was, he didn’t like railroad tracks. Though he could cross them, they slowed him down and made him shriek with evident pain. Finley has lots of railroad tracks and, after that, I crossed them wherever I could without slowing down my headlong run for Adam’s house.

  On the flats Fideal was faster than I was, but he couldn’t get through or over obstacles as quickly as I could. I scrambled over a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence that surrounded one of the big industrial compounds and wished it were iron. The barbed wire at the top made it a little interesting, but I managed.

  The fence bent down under his weight and I heard the metal groan as the fence collapsed. It slowed him down. So I avoided the open gate and scrambled over the fence on the other side of the compound, too.

  Though I hadn’t turned, the river had, and I had to run about a half mile along the shore past several old barges that had been tied up along the shoreline. He gained on me until I found the big hedge of blackberries.

  This was part of one of my usual trails and over the years I’d built a path under the bushes and so I could run almost unhindered. Fideal, being a lot bigger, didn’t have that luxury.

  When I cleared Adam’s fence, I couldn’t hear Fideal behind me so I changed as I ran. I mistimed it a bit and stumbled painfully to my knees in Adam’s gravel driveway. Darryl’s car was there, and Honey’s Toyota. The little red Chevy truck belonged to Ben.

  “Adam!” I yelled. “Trouble on the way!” My legs didn’t want to work right as a single pair instead of two pairs, and I stumbled as I tried to regain my feet and run at the same time.

  By the time I was on the porch, Darryl had the front door open. I fell again and this time I just rolled until I hit the outside of the house, just under the big picture window.

  “Some kind of water fae,” I told him, panting hard and coughing with the force of my breathing. “Might look sort of like a horse or some hooved animal. Or it could be a swamp thingy as big as Adam’s SUV. A monster with fangs.”

  I must have sounded like a ninny, but it didn’t faze Darryl.

  “You keep bothering the monsters, Mercy, and someday something’s going to eat you.” He sounded calm and cool as he kept his eyes on the fence I’d jumped over. He had a big automatic in one hand—he must carry concealed because I hadn’t noticed him holding one when he opened the door.

  “Oh, I hope not,” I said in between gasps. “I don’t want to be eaten. I’ve been counting on the vampires to kill me first.”

  He laughed, though it wasn’t that funny. “Everyone else is changing,” he told me, and he didn’t mean clothes. But I could feel them, so he didn’t need to tell me. “How far behind you is this thing?”

  I shook my head. “Not far. I led it into the blackberries, but—There! There! From the river.”

  Darryl shifted his aim and began firing at the thing that emerged from the black water and trailed over Adam’s groomed gravel beach.

  I hastily plugged my ears in an attempt to save my hearing. Even with Adam’s porch light and my own night vision, I couldn’t really focus on the thing that Fideal had become. It was as though his body swallowed the light and left me with an impression of marsh grasses and water.

  The bullets slowed him a little, but I didn’t think they were doing enough damage to stop him. I’d caught my breath, even if my legs felt like they were made of rubber, and I had no intention of sitting here like bait.

  I started to get up and Darryl grabbed my arm and jerked me down as the big plate glass window over me shattered and a werewolf leaped over my head and landed on the porch railing ten feet away. He paused there, examining Fideal.

  “Careful, Ben,” I said. “It’s as fast as I am and it has great big teeth.”

  The lanky red werewolf glanced back and the porch gave a warning creak. Ben sneered at me, an expression infinitely more impressive with gleaming white fangs than it was when he did it as a human. He jumped off the porch and barreled silently into Fideal.

  A black wolf, tipped with silver like a reverse Siamese cat, jumped out behind him. He turned Adam’s eyes to me, where I sat covered in glass shards, and then looked at Darryl.

  “Right,” said Darryl, though I know Adam couldn’t talk to his pack while he was in wolf shape the way the Marrok could.

  Darryl dropped the gun he’d been firing continuously and picked me up gingerly. “Let’s get you off the glass. If you bleed to death, Adam’s going to make mincemeat out of Ben.”

  I looked down and realized that I was bleeding from small cuts all over my bare skin. I let Darryl carry me out of the glass and into the house before wriggling free.

  He let me go and started tearing off his own clothes.

  Another werewolf, this one tawny and beautiful, streaked by me, knocking me a step sideways. Honey. She was followed by another pair of wolves; one was brindled and the other gray. More of Adam’s pack, though I couldn’t have named either of them.

  “Mercy, what is that thing?” Honey’s husband, Peter, was still in human form. He saw my look and said, “Adam told me to stay human. I’m to get Jesse away if things go badly.”

  I quit paying attention to him when I heard a yelp from outside. It would have taken a lot of pain to wring a sound out of a wolf this close to the pack’s den. They were trained to fight silently so as not to attract undue attention. That yelp meant someone was badly hurt.

  I’d brought it here. I had to help fight.

  “Cold iron.” My voice jittered with adrenaline. “Salt won’t work on that one, I don’t think—and I’m a little short of underwear to turn inside out. No shoes. I need something steel.”

  “Steel?” asked Peter.

  I ignored him and ran into the kitchen and grabbed a French chef’s knife and a butcher knife out of the set of Henckels that Adam had paid a large fortune for. They weren’t stainless steel because regular, high-carbon steel holds a better edge. It also works better on fae.

  As I charged out of the kitchen, Honey’s husband landed at the base of the stairs, right in front of me. I think he’d just jumped down the whole thing—werewolves can do things like that. He held a sword in his hand.

  “Mercy,” he said. His voice sounded different than I’d ever heard it. His pleasant Midwest accent disappeared and he sounded vaguely German, not like Zee exactly, but close. “Adam bound me to watch over Jesse and not help.”

  Something hit the side of the house hard.

  A sword was better
than two little knives. “Can you use that thing?”

  “Ja.”

  As Adam’s declared mate, I could change his orders—though I’d have to answer for it if he got ticked off.

  “Go help. I’ll stay out of it and get Jesse out of here if it looks like it’s going badly.”

  He was gone before the last words left my mouth.

  I tried to look out the living room window, but the wraparound porch hid too much. Jesse’s room would have a better view—and she might have clothes that would fit me.

  I started up the stairs at a run, but by the time I hit the top, I was lucky to be walking. In coyote form, I can trot for hours, but sprinting is different. I just didn’t have any more running in me.

  Jesse must have heard me because she stuck her head out of her bedroom and then rushed over. “Can I help?”

  I looked down to see what caused the consternation in her face. It wasn’t my nakedness. She’d grown up with werewolves, and shapeshifters can’t afford too much modesty. For the wolves, the change is a slow process and it hurts; if they are tearing up clothing as they change, it just hurts that much worse. Makes them even grumpier than usual—so mostly they take their clothes off first.

  No, it wasn’t my nakedness; it was the blood. I was covered with it.

  Appalled, I looked behind me at the carpet that was stained with my blood all the way up the stairs. “Darn it,” I said. “That’s going to be expensive to clean.”

  I heard a roar that shook the house and quit worrying about the carpet. I let go of the railing that I’d been using to hold me up and stumbled over to Jesse’s window, which was opened wide. She’d pulled the screen off the window already. With the knives still in each hand, I crawled out and down onto the roof of the porch, where I could see what was going on.

  The werewolves were badly battered. Ben was crumpled against Adam’s SUV and there was a huge dent in the quarter panel just above him.

  Darryl circled the fae, his brindled coat fading into the shadows. If he hadn’t been moving, I don’t know that I’d have seen him at all. Adam perched on the fae’s back, his front paws raking through the fronds like a giant cat’s, but I couldn’t tell how much damage he was doing. Honey and her husband were working as a team. She’d harry the fae with quick leaping nips until he turned to her and her husband would take advantage of its inattention to dive in and rake it with his sword.

  From my vantage point, I could hear Peter mutter, “Can’t find flesh in all this seaweed.”

  “I can’t tell if they’re winning or losing,” Jesse said as she climbed through the window. She threw her comforter over me and knelt near the edge of the roof.

  “I can’t either,” I started to say, but I stopped halfway through the last word as a wave of magic brushed painfully over me and dumped me on my rump.

  “Careful,” I yelled to the wolves below. I was up and on the edge of the roof as quickly as I could manage—which was just in time to see the fae make an incredibly quick move across the stretch of beach and into the inky river. Adam was still on his back.

  Werewolves can’t swim. Like chimpanzees, they have too little fat: they are too dense to float. My foster father had committed suicide by walking into a river.

  I started to jump off the roof. I could have changed in midair, and on four legs I’d have been in the water in seconds—but I’d promised to watch Jesse. Just because a promise becomes desperately inconvenient doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep it.

  Peter dropped his sword and waded into the river without wasting an instant. The porch light showed me his head as it disappeared under the water.

  Jesse’s hand closed over mine in a bone-crushing grip.

  “Come on, come on,” she muttered, then let out a yip of joy as Peter reemerged, towing a coughing and sputtering wolf in his wake.

  I sat down and buried my face in my hands in relief.

  chapter 10

  “You are covered with blood and glass,” Jesse snapped at me as she helped me drag my tired bones over the windowsill. “All that blood isn’t going to do anything to help the wolves calm down.”

  “I have to go down and check,” I insisted doggedly, not for the first time. “Some of them are hurt and it’s my fault.”

  “They enjoyed every minute of that fight and you know it. It’ll take them a bit to calm enough to be safe anyway. Dad’ll come up when he’s fit to talk. You get in the shower before you ruin the carpet.”

  I looked down and saw that I was still trailing blood. My feet started to throb as soon as I noticed.

  With a little more prodding on Jesse’s part, I shuffled off to the shower (in Adam’s bedroom, since the hall shower was still exposed to the world). Jesse stuffed a pair of old sweats and a T-shirt that told everyone that I loved New York into my arms and shut the bathroom door behind me.

  With the excitement done, I was so tired I could hardly move. Adam’s bathroom was decorated in tasteful browns that somehow managed to escape being bland. His ex-wife, whatever her other faults—and they were many—had excellent taste.

  While I waited for the shower to warm up, I glanced in the full-length mirror that covered the wall between the shower and the his-and-her sinks—and despite the guilt of bringing the fae down upon Adam’s unsuspecting pack—I had to grin.

  I looked like something out of a bad horror flick. Naked, I was covered from fingertip to elbow and toe to knee with marsh muck: it always amazes me how much swamp there is in the Tri-Cities, which is pretty much a desert. The rest of me sparkled, as though I’d covered myself with some glitter lotion instead of having a window broken over my sweat-covered body. Here and there were larger chunks of glass that dripped off me every time I moved—my hair was littered with them.

  And everywhere, I was covered with tiny cuts that oozed blood. I picked up my foot and removed a largish splinter that was responsible for the small pool of blood that was growing around me. All the cuts were really going to hurt tomorrow. Not for the first time, I wished I healed like the werewolves did.

  Steam began to rise from the shower and I trudged in and shut the glass door behind me. The water stung and I hissed as it hit tender bits—then swore when I stepped on another shard of glass, probably one of the ones that had fallen out of my hair as soon as the water hit me.

  Too tired to fish the glass out, I leaned against the wall and let the water pour over my head and relief rolled over me with it, robbing my knees of their last bit of starch. Only the fear that I’d sit on glass and cut something more dear than my feet kept me from sinking to the tiled shower floor.

  I took inventory.

  I was still alive, and with the possible exception of Ben, so were the werewolves. I closed my eyes and tried not to think of the red wolf lying in the grass. Ben would probably be all right. Werewolves can take a lot of damage and there had been the others to keep the fae off him while he was helpless. He’d be all right, I reassured myself—but it didn’t matter. Somehow I was going to have to work up the energy to get out of the shower and check.

  The bathroom door opened, and I felt the wash of Adam’s power.

  “There’s a Porsche sitting in the middle of Finley Road, right in front of Two Rivers Park,” I said, though I hadn’t remembered it until just that moment. “Someone’s going to hit it and get killed if it doesn’t get moved.”

  The door opened again and there was a quiet murmur of voices.

  Even over the drowning spray of the water, I heard someone say, “I’ll take care of it.” Honey’s husband again, I thought, because the werewolves can’t talk in their wolf shape and he was the only one who had stayed human. Some of the wolves could have changed back by now—but without a good reason to do so, they’d probably just stay wolves for the night. Except for Adam.

  Changing so quickly to fight the fae I’d brought him, the actual fight, then changing back in under an hour weren’t going to leave him in a cheerful mood. I hoped he’d eaten something before he came up here—chan
ging cost a lot of energy and I’d rather he not be hungry. I was bleeding too much for that to be good.

  Telling Adam to take care of Fideal’s car was supposed to have given me enough time to get out of the shower and wrap up in a towel, but I couldn’t work up the energy to do anything but stand in the shower stall.

  The big glass door swung open, but I didn’t look up. Adam didn’t say anything, but turned me with his hands on my shoulders so I was facing the showerhead. I bowed my head farther and took a step forward so the spray hit the top of my head rather than my face.

  He must have picked up a comb, because he started to comb my hair free of glass. He was being very careful not to touch me anywhere else.

  “Watch it,” I said. “There’s glass all over the floor.”

  The comb hesitated and then resumed its task. “I have my shoes on,” he said. The rumble of his growl told me that the wolf wasn’t far away no matter how human or gentle the hands that worked through my hair were.

  “Is everyone all right?” I asked, though I knew he needed quiet now.

  “Ben’s hurt, but nothing that won’t heal by morning—and nothing he doesn’t deserve after jumping through the window. Glass is heavy and sharper than a guillotine’s blade. He’s lucky he didn’t cut his own throat—and luckier still that all you have are cuts.”

  I could feel the anger vibrate through him. Werewolves, in their wolf form, are not always angry—just as a grizzly bear is not always angry: it only seems like it. If what Honey had told me was correct, Adam’s temper was even more uncertain than usual. The fight wouldn’t have helped it.

  All that meant I couldn’t cover my own uncertain state by pricking his temper—it wouldn’t be fair to him. Damn it.

  I was too tired to be playing the kind of games that kept werewolves calm—and keep him from knowing just how scared I had been at the same time.

  “I’m not hurt,” I said. “Just tired. That fae could run.”

  He growled at the mention of his recent opponent, and it wasn’t a human sound.