Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  He nodded. “I stopped by his house before I came home. Much good as I did. Mostly I help people before they die. I’m not so helpful afterward.”

  “So what do you think?”

  He shrugged. “He’s doing whatever it is that vampires do during the day. Not sleeping, but something close to it. I expect he’ll rest tonight and through tomorrow day. Which is what anyone of common sense would tell you—and so Adam said. He declared me tired and useless, then sent me back over here to keep an eye on you in case Marsilia decides to try something else.”

  “‘Tired and useless,’ ” I said in mock sympathy. “And even that didn’t get you out of a job.”

  He grinned. “Adam seems to think you’ve declared yourself his. But, given his record of doing that without consulting you, I thought I’d ask you myself.”

  I raised my hands in helpless surrender. “What can I say. My mother thinks he’s hot. I have no choice but to take him. Besides, it’s a terrible thing to see a man crawling ... begging.”

  He laughed. “I bet. Go to bed, Mercy. Morning comes early.” He started down the hallway to his bedroom, then turned, walking backward. “I’m going to tell Adam that you said he begged you.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Then I’ll tell him that you accused him of lying.”

  He laughed. “Good night, Mercy.”

  I’d taken Adam for mine, chosen with my eyes and heart open. But Samuel’s laugh still made me smile. I loved Samuel, too.

  He worried me. Sometimes he seemed just like the old Samuel, funny and lighthearted. But I was pretty sure that a lot of the time he was just going through the motions, like an actor given a cue—“Enter downstage left and smile happily.”

  He’d come here, to stay with me, to try to get better—which was a good sign, like an alcoholic who goes to his first A.A. meeting. But I wasn’t sure if being here was helping him or not. He was old. Older than I’d known when I’d grown up in his father’s pack. And though werewolves don’t die of old age the way humans do, it can kill them just as effectively.

  Maybe if I could have loved Samuel differently. Maybe if Adam hadn’t been there. If I had taken Samuel as my mate as he’d wanted me to when he’d moved himself into my home, maybe it would have fixed him.

  He frowned at me. “What’s wrong?”

  But you can’t marry someone to fix him, even if you love them. And I didn’t love Samuel the way a woman should love her mate, the way I loved Adam. Samuel didn’t love me that way either. Close, but not quite. And except in horseshoes and hand grenades, close doesn’t count.

  “I love you, you know,” I told him.

  His face went blank for a moment. He said, “Yes. I do know.” His pupils contracted, and his gray eyes lightened to icy winter. Then he smiled, a sweet, warm thing. “I love you, too.”

  I went to bed with the distinct feeling that, this time, close might really be just enough to do the trick.

  SAMUEL WAS RIGHT—MORNING DID COME TOO EARLY I yawned as I turned my van onto the street where my shop was—and stopped dead in the middle of the road, all thoughts of sleep gone.

  Someone had taken spray paint and had fun last night all over my place of business.

  I took it all in, then drove slowly into the parking lot and parked next to Zee’s old truck. He came out of the office and walked up to me as I got out and shut the van’s door, a tallish, thinnish, graying man. He looked like he was in his late fifties or early sixties, but he was a lot older than that: never judge one of the fae by their outward appearance.

  “Wow,” I said. “You’ve got to admire their dedication. They must have been here for hours.”

  “And no one drove by?” Zee snapped. “No one called the polizei?”

  “Umm, probably not. There’s not a lot of traffic here at night.” Reading the graffiti made me realize that there were themes and insights to be gained from the canvas that someone had made of my garage.

  Green Paint, I was almost sure, was a young man whose thought patterns paralleled Ben’s if the words he used were any indication.

  “Look, he misspelled whore. I wonder if he did it on purpose? He spelled it right on the front window. I wonder which one he did first?”

  “I have called your police friend Tony,” Zee said, so angry his teeth clicked together as he spoke. “He was sleeping, but he will be here in a half hour.” He might have been upset on my account, but mostly, I thought, it was the state of the garage. It had been his business long before I bought it from him. Last week I’d have been angry, too. But so much had happened since then that this ranked pretty low on my list of worries.

  Red Paint had a more pressing agenda than Green Paint. Red had painted only two words: liar and murderer, over and over. Adam had installed security cameras so we’d know for sure, but I was betting Red Paint was Tim’s cousin Courtney. Tim had killed his best friend before he attacked me, and there just weren’t all that many people left who’d have gotten this worked up over his death.

  I could hear a car approaching. An hour later, when traffic started to build up with people headed to work, I wouldn’t have noticed. But it was quiet this early in the morning, so I heard my mother’s approach.

  “Zee,” I said urgently. “Is there any way you could hide this”—I waved my hands at the shop—“for a few minutes?”

  I didn’t know much about what he could and couldn’t do—outside of fixing cars and playing with metal, he didn’t use magic much in front of me. But I’d seen his real face once, so I knew his personal glamour was good. If he could mask his face, surely he could hide a bunch of green and red paint.

  He frowned at me in deep displeasure. You didn’t ask for favors from the fae—not only was it dangerous, but they tended to take offense. Zee might love me, might owe me for freeing him from a tight spot, but that would only take me so far.

  “My mother is coming,” I told him. “The vampires are after me, and I have to get her to leave. She won’t do it if she knows I’m in danger.” Then, because I was desperate, I played dirty. “Not after what happened with Tim.”

  His face stilled. Then he grabbed my wrist and pulled me with him so we were both standing closer to the garage.

  He put his hand on the wall next to the door. “If it works, I won’t be able to remove my hand without breaking the spell.”

  When Mom turned the corner, the graffiti was gone.

  “You’re the best,” I told him.

  “Make her leave soon,” he said with a grimace. “This is not my sort of magic.”

  I nodded and had started to walk to where Mom was parking her car when I saw the door clearly. Covered by red and green paint, it hadn’t been as noticeable. Someone with some artistic skill had painted an X on the door. In case I didn’t get the right idea, instead of two mere lines, the shape was formed by two bones. They were ivory with grayish shadows and just a faint blush of pink—not painted by a couple of self-righteous and irate kids with spray paint. All it was missing to keep it from Jolly Rogerhood was a skull.

  “You’d better hide that,” Zee said. “Magic won’t.”

  I put my back against the door and folded my arms.

  “So why don’t you think it’s running right?” I asked him as my mother walked over from her car, with Hotep on a leash.

  “Because it is old,” Zee told me, taking the cue I had given him. “Because it was not well designed in the first place. Because air-cooled engines need constant tinkering.”

  “I was—Hey, Mom.”

  “Margaret,” Zee said coolly.

  “Mr. Adelbertsmiter.” My mom didn’t like Zee. She blamed him for my decision to stay in the Tri-Cities and fix cars instead of finding a teaching job, something much more in line with the kind of work she thought I should be doing. Politeness done, she turned back to me. “I thought I’d stop by before heading home.” She couldn’t get too close though, because as soon as he caught my scent, Hotep growled and lowered his head aggressively: protecting my mom from the bad co
yote.

  “I’ll be fine,” I told her, curling my lip at the Doberman. I actually like dogs, but not this one. “Give my love to Curt and the girls.”

  “Don’t forget to work things out so you can come to Nan’s wedding.” Nan was my younger half sister, and she was getting married in six weeks. Luckily, I wasn’t part of the wedding party, so all I had to do was sit and watch.

  “I have it on the calendar,” I promised. “Zee’s going to take care of the shop for me.”

  She glanced at him, then back at me. “Fine, then.” She started to give me a hug, then gave Hotep a rueful look. “You need to teach him to behave like you did Ringo.”

  “Ringo was a poodle, Mom. A fight between Hotep and me wouldn’t end well for either of us. It’s all right. Not his fault.”

  She sighed. “All right. You take care of yourself.”

  “Love you. Drive carefully,” I told her.

  “I always do. Love you.”

  Zee was sweating by the time the car was out of sight. He took his hand off the building and the paint returned. “I didn’t do it for you,” he grouched. “I just didn’t want her hanging around longer than necessary.”

  We both stepped away from the door to look at the painting that was now mostly covered by a big, fat-lettered red “LIAR.” The paint of the crossed bones was thicker than the spray paint, so even though I couldn’t see most of the color, I could see the outline of it.

  “The vampires dropped Stefan in my living room last night,” I told him. “He was in pretty rough shape. Peter ... one of Adam’s wolves, thinks whoever did it was hoping Stefan would attack me and we’d both be out of the way. Stefan wasn’t in any shape to talk much, but what he did manage to convey was that Marsilia found out I killed Andre.”

  Zee traced his fingers over the bones and shook his head. “This might be vampire work. But, Mercy, you’ve been putting your little nose so many places it doesn’t belong; it could almost be anyone. I’ll talk to Uncle Mike—but I expect your best bet for information about it is Stefan, because it doesn’t feel like fae magic. How badly is Stefan hurt?”

  “If he were a werewolf, I think he’d be dead. You think this is magic?” It felt like that to me, but I was hoping I was wrong.

  Zee frowned. “For an evil bloodsucker, he’s not a bad sort.” High praise from Zee. “And yes, there is magic here, but nothing I’m familiar with.”

  “Samuel thinks Stefan will be all right.”

  Tony turned the corner in his unmarked car, which was discreetly police modified with extra mirrors, a few extra antennae, and a bar of lights along the back window, hidden from the casual eye by extra-dark glass. He slowed when he caught sight of the damage. He pulled up next to us and opened the door.

  “You decorating for Christmas early, Mercy?” Tony could blend in even better than I did. Today he looked like a Hispanic cop ... like the poster child for Hispanic cops, handsome and clean-cut. When he was playing drug dealer, he did it better than the real thing. I’d first met him playing a homeless man. There was nothing magic or supernatural about him, but the man was a chameleon.

  I glanced at the building again. He was right. If you didn’t pay any attention to the words, it had a sort of Christmasy look to it. The green paint tended to be short top to bottom but long front side to side. The red paint was fat and closed up. It looked sort of like garlands with red balls hanging down.

  There was even “Ho, ho, ho,” if you skipped around a little and deleted an “e” on the last “ho.” Our green painter had a limited vocabulary and occasionally mixed up a professional working woman with a garden implement.

  “Not really Christmasy thoughts,” I told Tony. “But the colors are right. Actually, if the white wasn’t so dingy, it would almost look festive—like that little Mexican restaurant in Pasco—the one with the really hot salsa.” The fresh colors made the original paint job look tired.

  “Your boyfriend still got surveillance video going?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know how to run it.”

  “I do,” said Zee. “Let’s go take a look.”

  I glanced at him. Vampires, remember? We don’t want the nice human cops to see the vampires.

  He gave me a bland look that clearly said, If the vampires were clumsy enough to get caught by the cameras, that was their problem. I couldn’t object out loud, but if the vampires made themselves obvious, it would be Tony who was in danger.

  Well, I thought as I led the way into the office, at least vampires looked like everyone else. As long as they didn’t display their fangs for the camera—or throw a car around—it was unlikely they’d be spotted for what they were. And if it was obvious ... Tony wasn’t stupid. He knew a lot about how the fae and the werewolves worked, and I knew he suspected that there were a lot more nasties still keeping quiet about themselves.

  While Zee played with the electronics, Tony looked at me.

  “How are you?” He smelled of worry, with a little of the metallic scent of protective anger.

  “Really tired of answering that question,” I replied blandly. “How about you?”

  He flashed his pearly whites at me. “Good for you. Do you think Bright Future did this?”

  If our minds kept working this much in sync, I’d pity poor Tony.

  “Sort of. I think this is Tim’s cousin’s work,” I told him. “She’s a member of Bright Future, but she didn’t do this under their banner. Everything was directed at me—not the fae.”

  “You want to press charges?”

  I sighed. “I’ll call my insurance company. I’m afraid they might force me to press charges in order to be reimbursed. I can’t afford to hire someone to repaint it unless I use my insurance, and I can’t take the time off work to repaint it myself.” I still had other things to pay for—the damage a fae who wanted to eat me had done to Adam’s house and car, for instance. And Zee had told me he was collecting the rest of what I owed him on the business. Fae cannot lie, and we hadn’t had time to work that out.

  “How about Gabriel’s family,” Tony suggested. “There are enough of them, and they could work after school. It would be cheaper than hiring professionals and ... I think they need the money.”

  Gabriel Sandoval was my man Friday, a high school student who came in weekends and late afternoons to do paperwork, answer phones, and do whatever else needed doing.

  I had a sudden vision of the shop being overrun with little Sandovals hanging from ladders and ropes. I’d let them loose in the office for cleaning, and it was almost hard to recognize the place—for a bunch of kids they were amazingly industrious. “That’s a good idea. I’ll have Gabriel call his mom as soon as he gets here.”

  “Here,” said Zee. He turned on the little security monitor and flipped a switch. The system that Adam had installed was slick and expensive. It ran on motion sensors, so we only had to watch it when there was something moving. Something first moved at 10:15; we watched a half-grown rabbit bop unhurriedly across the pavement out of sight. At midnight someone appeared at the door of the garage. It wasn’t two people with spray paint, so I was pretty sure it was whoever painted a pair of crossed bones on my door.

  His image was oddly shadowed, unrecognizable. The miscreant kept his face out of camera range—impressive since there was a camera placed just in front of the door to catch the face of anyone breaking in.

  The only thing the camera got a clear shot of was the gloves he wore—the old-fashioned kind: white with little buttons on the wrist. There were odd glitches in the pictures, jumps where the camera turned off because there was no movement for it to follow. By the timers, it took him forty-five minutes to paint the bones on my door—of which the cameras caught about ten minutes. Part of the missing time covered how the painter got there and how he left.

  I didn’t think he knew the cameras were there, and he still avoided them. Some supernatural creatures just don’t film well: by tradition, vampires are among them. The height was right for Wulfe, who would be my fir
st choice in any vampire magicking. Since Wulfe was the vampire who knew for certain that I’d killed Andre, he was also my top suspect for the informer who had told Marsilia about my crimes.

  The camera caught movement again.

  “Stop it,” Tony said.

  Two figures, still indistinct, froze on the edge of the lights of my parking lot, and the little numbers on the lower right of the screen read 2:08 A.M. Time had jumped almost a half hour from when the bone painter had last been there.

  “What was that all about?” he asked. “The person at your door?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. I almost said that his guess was as good as mine, but it wasn’t. “Maybe someone was trying to break in, but didn’t make it.” Impossible to tell what he’d been doing from the camera shot. “It doesn’t matter, though, because he obviously wasn’t the one who graffitied all over.”

  Tony stared at me. Cops were almost as good as werewolves at sensing lies. He turned abruptly and opened the door to examine it. Like Zee, he traced the crossed bones with a light finger.

  “Who have you been ticking off besides Bright Future? This looks almost like something the old Mob might do—classy, but designed to frighten the hell out of whoever received it.”

  I sighed, shrugged. “No one wanted me to get Zee out of the murder rap. But it’s not the kind of thing a fae would do—too visible. And a werewolf who was ticked off that badly would just attack. I’ve got some people who’ll look into it for me better than the police can.”

  Frowning, Tony made an irritated noise. “Is this another one of your ‘It’s too dangerous for you mere human cops?’”

  I rubbed my arms, but I wasn’t cold, just chilled. I was under no illusions. Marsilia could have just killed me, but she was playing. But no matter how playful the cat is, the mouse is just as dead in the end.

  And the end would be whenever she decided. The only question was how many people—how many of my friends—she decided to take down with me.

  Maybe I was panicking prematurely. Maybe she would settle for a punishment. Stefan was hers, there was no reason for the gut-deep feeling that he wouldn’t be the last to suffer for my sins. I didn’t know Marsilia well enough to make that kind of prediction.