Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  “Mine,” he told me. “You aren’t Stefan’s.”

  The dry grass crackled under my head, and the coarse dirt made a noise like sandpaper that echoed behind my eyes. I licked my lips and tasted blood. Adam’s blood.

  The Alpha’s blood and flesh ... pack.

  “From this day forward,” said Adam, his voice pulling me out of wherever I had been. “Mine to me and mine. Pack and only lover.” There was blood on his face, too, and on the hands he touched my face with.

  “Yours to you, mine to me,” I answered, though it was a dry croaking voice that made the noise. I didn’t know why I answered, other than the old “shave and a hair cut” involuntary response. I’d heard this ceremony so many times, even if he’d added the “only lover” part.

  By the time I remembered why I shouldn’t do it, what it meant, it was already too late.

  Magic burned through me, following the path of that bit of flesh—and I cried out as it tried to make me other than I was, less or more. Pack.

  I felt them all through Adam’s touch and Adam’s blood. His to protect to govern. All of them were mine now, too—and I theirs.

  Panting, I licked my lips and stared at Adam. He let me go, coming to his feet and taking two steps away from me where I lay against the side of the old car. He’d bitten his forearm savagely.

  “He can’t have you,” he told me, his gold eyes telling me the wolf was still speaking. “Not now. Not ever. I don’t owe him that.”

  Belatedly, I realized what had happened. I wiped my mouth with my wrist to give myself time to think. My wrist was pink with Adam’s blood.

  Stefan was awake ... and somehow he’d invaded my mind. It had been his panic attack I’d felt.

  All dead... I had a sick, sick feeling that I knew who he meant. I’d met some of the people, human people who fed Stefan. Had learned how horribly vulnerable they were if something happened to the vampire who fed off them and protected them.

  I glanced at the setting sun. “It’s a little early for a vampire to be up, isn’t it?” I asked.

  Time for everyone to calm down. Me, included.

  My sense of the pack was fading, but it would never completely go away. Not now that Adam had made me pack. It was more usual to do it in a full pack meeting, but the pack wasn’t required. Just a bit of the Alpha’s flesh and blood and an exchange of vows.

  I hadn’t thought it possible to induct someone who wasn’t a werewolf. I certainly hadn’t thought that he could make me pack. Magic works oddly on me sometimes, and at others I’m pretty much immune to it. But from the results I could feel, it had worked just fine this time.

  Adam had turned and stood with his back to me, his shoulders hunched, his hands fisted at his side. He didn’t answer my question, but said stiffly, “I’m sorry for that. I panicked.”

  I put my forehead down on my knees. “There’s been a lot of that going around recently.”

  I heard the dry grass crunch as he walked back to me. “Are you laughing?” he sounded incredulous.

  I looked up at him. The last rays of the sun silhouetted him in golden rays and obscured the expression on his face. But I could see shame in the set of his shoulders. He’d made me pack without asking me—without asking the pack either, though that wasn’t strictly necessary, just traditional. He was waiting for me to yell at him as he felt he deserved.

  Adam was used to paying for the consequences of his choices—and sometimes the choices were hard ones. He’d been making a lot of hard choices for me lately.

  Stefan had been so far in my head that I had smelled like him. And Adam had made me pack to save me. He was prepared to pay the price—and I was pretty sure there would be a price extracted. But not by me.

  “Thank you, Adam,” I told him. “Thank you for tearing Tim into small Tim bits. Thank you for forcing me to drink one last cup of fairy bug-juice so I could have use of both of my arms. Thank you for being there, for putting up with me.” By that point I wasn’t laughing anymore. “Thank you for keeping me from being another of Stefan’s sheep—I’ll take pack over that any day. Thank you for making the tough calls, for giving me time.” I stood up and walked to him, leaning against him and pressing my face against his shoulder. “Thank you for loving me.”

  His arms closed around me, pressing flesh painfully hard against bone. Love hurts like that sometimes.

  4

  I’D HAVE LOVED TO STAY THERE FOREVER, BUT AFTER A few minutes, I felt the cold sweat break out on my forehead and my throat started to close down. I stepped back before I had to do something more forceful in reaction to the aversion to touch that Tim had left me with.

  Only when I was no longer pressed against Adam did I notice we were surrounded by pack.

  Okay, four wolves doesn’t a pack make. But I hadn’t heard them come, and, believe me, when there are five werewolves (including Adam) about, you feel surrounded and overmatched.

  Ben was there, a cheerful expression that looked just wrong on his fine-featured face, which was more often angry or bitter than happy. Warren, Adam’s third, looked like a cat in the cream. Aurielle, Darryl’s mate, appeared neutral, but there was something in her stance that told me she was pretty shaken up. The fourth wolf was Paul, whom I didn’t know very well—but I didn’t like what I did know.

  Paul, the leader of the “I hate Warren because he’s gay” faction of Adam’s pack, looked like he’d been sucker punched. I thought I’d just given him a new most-hated person in the pack.

  Behind me, Adam laid his hands on my shoulders. “My children,” he said formally, “I give you Mercedes Athena Thompson, our newest member.”

  Much awkwardness ensued.

  IF I HADN’T FELT HIM EARLIER, I WOULD HAVE THOUGHT Stefan was still unconscious or dead or whatever from the sun. He lay stiffly on the bed in the cage, like a corpse on a bier.

  I turned the light on so I could see him better. Feeding had healed most of the visible damage, though there were still red marks on his cheeks. He looked fifty pounds lighter than he’d been the last time I’d seen him—too much like a concentration camp victim for my peace of mind. He’d been given new clothes to replace his filthy, torn, and stained ones, the ubiquitous replacement clothing every wolf den had lying around—sweats. The ones he wore were gray and hung off his bones.

  Adam was conducting what was rapidly developing into a full pack meeting in his living room upstairs. He’d looked relieved when I’d excused myself to see Stefan—I thought he was worried someone would say something that might hurt my feelings. In that he underestimated the thickness of my hide. People I cared about could hurt my feelings, but almost complete strangers? I could care less about what they thought.

  Wolf packs were dictatorships, but when you’re dealing with a bunch of Americans brought up on the Bill of Rights, you still had to step a little carefully. New members were generally announced as prospective rather than as faits accomplis. A little care would have been especially appropriate when he was doing something as outrageous as bringing a nonwerewolf into the pack.

  I’d never heard of anyone doing that. Nonwerewolf mates weren’t part of the pack, not really. They had status, as the mates of wolves, but they weren’t pack. Couldn’t be made into pack with fifty flesh-and-blood ceremonies—the magic just wouldn’t let a human in. Apparently my coyoteness was close enough to wolf that the pack magic was willing to let me in.

  Probably Adam should have discussed bringing me in with the Marrok, too.

  Cars were pulling up in front of the house, more of the pack. I could feel the weight of them, their unease and confusion. Anger.

  I rubbed my arms nervously.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Stefan in a quiet, sane voice that would have reassured me more if he’d moved or opened his eyes.

  “Besides Marsilia?” I asked him.

  He looked at me then, his lips curving faintly. “That’s enough, I suppose. But Marsilia isn’t the reason this house is filling with werewolves.”

&nbs
p; I sat on the thickly carpeted basement floor and leaned my head against the bars of the cage. The door was shut and locked, the key that sometimes hung on the wall across the hallway gone. Adam would have it. It didn’t matter though. I was pretty sure Stefan could leave anytime he chose—the same way he’d appeared in my living room.

  “Right.” I sighed. “Well that’s your fault, too, I expect.”

  He sat up and leaned forward. “What happened?”

  “When you jumped inside my head,” I told him, “Adam took offense.” I didn’t tell him exactly how everything had played out. Prudence suggested Adam wouldn’t be pleased with me if I shared pack business with a vampire. “What he did—and you’ll have to ask him, I think—brought the pack down on his head.”

  He frowned in obvious puzzlement, then slow comprehension dawned. “I am sorry, Mercy. You weren’t meant to ... I didn’t mean to.” He turned his head away. “I’m not used to being so alone. I was dreaming, and there you were, the only one left with a tie of blood to me. I thought I dreamed that, too.”

  “She really had them all killed?” I whispered it, remembering some of what he’d given me while he’d been in my head. “All of your ...” Sheep wasn’t really PC, and I didn’t want to tick him off, even if sheep is what all the vampires called the mundane humans they kept to feed off. “All of your people?”

  I knew some of them, and liked one or two. For some reason, though, rather than the faces of the people I’d met living, it was the young vampire Danny I remembered, his ghost rocking in the corner of Stefan’s kitchen. Stefan hadn’t been able to protect him either.

  Stefan gave me a sick look. “Disciplining me, she said. But I think it was revenge as much as anything. And I can feed off them from a distance. She wanted me starving when I landed at your feet.”

  “She wanted you to kill me.”

  He nodded jerkily. “That’s right. And if you hadn’t had half of Adam’s pack at your house, I would have.”

  I thought of the obstinate look on his face. “I think she underestimated you,” I told him.

  “Did she?” He smiled, just a little, and shook his head.

  I leaned my head back against the wall. “I’m...” Still angry with you didn’t cover it. He was a murderer of innocents, and here I was talking to him, worried about him. I didn’t know how to complete that thought, much less the sentence, so I went on to something else.

  “So Marsilia knows I killed Andre, and you and Wulfe covered it up?”

  He shook his head. “She knows something—she didn’t talk much to me. It was only me she punished, so I don’t think she knows about Wulfe. And maybe not me ...” He looked at me from under the cover of his bangs, which had grown in the last day—I’d heard a heavy feeding could cause that. “I got the feeling I was being punished by association. I was the seethe’s contact with you. I was the reason she went to you for help and gave you permission to kill Andre’s pet. I was the reason you succeeded. You are my fault.”

  “She’s crazy.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t know her. She’s trying to do what is best for her people.”

  The Tri-City seethe of vampires had mostly been in the area before the towns were established. Marsilia had been sent here as punishment for sleeping around with someone else’s favorite. She’d been a person of influence, so had come here with attendants—mostly, as far as I knew, Stefan, Andre—the second vampire I’d killed—and a really creepy character named Wulfe.

  Wulfe, who looked like a sixteen-year-old boy, had been a witch or wizard as a human, and sometimes dressed like a medieval peasant. I supposed he could be faking it, but I suspected that he was older than Marsilia, who dated from the Renaissance, so the clothes fit.

  Marsilia had been sent here to die, but she hadn’t. Instead, she’d seen to it that her people survived. As civilization began to grow, life in the seethe became easier. The fight for survival mostly a thing of the past, Marsilia had settled into a decades-long period of apathy—I’d call it sulking. She had only just begun to take an interest in things going on about her, and as a result, the hierarchy of the seethe was restless. Stefan and Andre had been loyal followers, but there were a couple of other vamps who hadn’t been so happy to see Marsilia up and taking charge. I’d met them: Estelle and Bernard, but I didn’t know enough about vampires to figure out how much of a threat they were.

  The first time I met Marsilia, I’d kind of admired her ... at least until she’d enthralled Samuel. That had scared me. Samuel’s the second-most-dominant wolf in North America, and she and her vampires took him ... easily. That fear had grown with every meeting.

  “Not to be argumentative, Stefan,” I said. “But she’s bug-nuts. She wanted to create another of those ... those things that Andre made.”

  His face closed down. “You don’t know what you are talking about. You have no idea what she gave up when she came here, or what she has done for us.”

  “Maybe not, but I met that creature, and so did you. Nothing good could ever come of making another one.” Demonic possession isn’t a pretty thing. I inhaled and tried to control my temper. I didn’t succeed. “But you are right. I don’t know what makes her tick. I don’t know you, either.”

  He just looked at me, expressionlessly. “You play human very well, driving around like Shaggy in your Mystery Machine. But the man I thought you were could never have killed Andre’s victims like that.”

  “Wulfe killed them.” He was making a point, not defending himself. It made me angry; he should feel the need to defend himself.

  “You agreed to it. Two people who had already been victimized enough, and you two snapped their necks as if they were nothing more than chickens.”

  About that time he got angry, too. “I did it for you. Don’t you understand? She would have destroyed you if she’d known. They were nothing, less than nothing. Street people who would have died on their own anyway. And she would have killed you!” He was on his feet when he finished.

  “They were nothing? How do you know? It wasn’t like you had a conversation with them.” I stood up, too.

  “They would have had to die anyway. They knew about us.”

  “There we disagree,” I told him. “What about your vaunted power over human minds?”

  “It only works if the contact with us is very short—a feeding, no more than that.”

  “They were living, breathing people who were murdered. By you.”

  “How did you know that Mercy was at Andre’s?” Warren’s calm voice broke between us like a wave of ice water as he came down the stairs. He walked past me and used the key to open the cage door. “I’ve been wondering about that for a while.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Stefan.

  “I mean that we knew she’d found Andre because she told Ben, thinking he couldn’t tell anyone else because he’d not changed back from his wolf in all the time since the demon-possessed died. Ben changed so he could tell us, but we still couldn’t go after her because we didn’t know where Andre was. You had no way to know what she was doing. How did you know she was off killing Andre, just in time to cover up the crime?”

  Stefan made no move to come out of the cage. He folded his arms and leaned a shoulder against the bars instead as he considered Warren’s question.

  “It was Wulfe, wasn’t it?” I said. “He knew what I was doing because one of the homes I found was his.”

  “Wulfe,” said Warren slowly, after Stefan didn’t answer. “Is he the kind of man who would be outraged that Marsilia would call down a demon to infest a vampire? Would he want it stopped at the cost of Andre’s destruction? Go to you for help doing it?”

  Stefan closed his eyes. “He came to me. Told me Mercy was in trouble and needed help. It was only later that I wondered why he’d done it.”

  “You’ve had these thoughts already,” Warren said. “So what did you decide?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It’s always a good thing to know your e
nemies,” answered Warren in his lazy Texas drawl. “Who are yours?”

  Stefan gave him the look of a baited bear, all frustration and ferocity. “I don’t know.” He gritted out.

  Warren smiled coolly, his eyes sharp. “Oh, I think you do. You aren’t stupid; you aren’t a child. You know how these things work.”

  “Wulfe used me to get to you,” I said. “Then he told Marsilia what you’d done.”

  Stefan just looked at me.

  “With you and Andre out of the way, there is Wulfe, Bernard, and Estelle.” I rubbed my hands together and wondered if knowing what had happened would do Stefan any good. It wouldn’t change things, and knowing that he’d fallen into Wulfe’s trap wasn’t going to help Stefan now. Still, as Warren had said, it is a good thing to know your enemies. “And Bernard and Estelle, Marsilia already doesn’t trust them, right?”

  Stefan nodded. “They work against her where they can, and she knows it. They are of another’s making, given as gifts by a vampire not easily refused. She must take care of them, as she would any such gifts—but that doesn’t mean she has to trust them. Wulfe ... Wulfe is a mystery even to himself, I think. You believe Wulfe engineered this as a rise to power?” He looked away and didn’t speak for a minute, obviously thinking about what I’d said.

  Finally, he wrapped his hands around the bars of the open cage. “Wulfe already has power ... if he wanted more, it was his for the asking. But it looks like he had a part in my downfall for whatever reason suited him.”

  “If Marsilia knows that you helped when Mercy killed Andre, why isn’t Mercy dead?” Warren asked.

  “She was supposed to be,” Stefan said savagely. “Why do you think Marsilia starved me until I was no more than a ravening beast, then dropped me into Mercy’s living room? You didn’t think I did it myself, did you?”

  I nodded. “So she thought she’d get it all without cost to her or the seethe? If you’d killed me, she could have claimed you’d escaped while she was punishing you. Too bad you showed up in my house and killed me. But she underestimated you.”