Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  Inside, with the missing section of wall behind me, it didn’t look so bad: a big, empty tavern after a couple of football teams had gotten drunk and partied all night. Teams with really big players, I thought, looking at the beam that the snow elf had taken out with his head—elephants, maybe.

  Adam, fully in human form again, sat with his back against the stage riser on the far side of the room, his arms folded over his chest. Somone had found him a pair of cutoffs to wear. Not like he was angry ... just closed-up.

  Next to him were two of his other wolves, Paul and one of Paul’s cronies. Paul looked sick, and the other man, whose name escaped me, was curled around a very still form.

  I couldn’t see who it was, but I knew. Mary Jo’s car in the parking lot told me. There was blood all over all of them. Adam’s hands were covered, as was Paul’s shirt. The other man was drenched in it.

  The wolves weren’t the only ones bleeding. There seemed to be a triage of sorts going on at the opposite end of the building. I recognized the woman who had cut her hair to free herself, but she seemed to be one of the aid-givers rather than a victim.

  Adam looked up and saw me, his face very bleak.

  There was glass on the floor, and my feet were bare—but it would have taken more than that to keep me from them.

  Paul’s friend was sobbing. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to. I’m so sorry.” He was rocking the body he held, Mary Jo’s body, as he apologized over and over again.

  I couldn’t get close to Adam without wading between Paul and his friend. I stopped while still out of reach. It didn’t seem like a really good idea to give Paul an easy target just yet.

  Uncle Mike had followed me in, but he’d gone to the other huddle of beings in that too-empty room first, and when he came over to us, he had the shorn woman in tow. Like me, he stopped before he intruded on their space.

  “My apologies, Alpha,” he said. “My guests are entitled to an evening of safety, and someone broke hospitality to bespell your wolves. Will you let us repair the damage if we can?” He waved at Mary Jo.

  Adam’s face changed from grim to intent in about half a breath. He stood up and took Mary Jo from the wolf who held her. “Paul,” he said, when the man wouldn’t let go.

  Paul stirred and took his friend’s hands, pulling them away. The man ... Stan, I thought, though it might have been Sean, jerked once, then collapsed against Paul.

  In the meantime, the woman was protesting in a rapid flow of Russian. I couldn’t understand the words, but I heard her refusal clearly in her face and body language.

  “Who are they going to tell?” Uncle Mike snapped. “They’re werewolves. If they go to the press and reveal that there’s a fae who can heal mortal wounds, we can go to the press and tell the interested humans just how much of the horrors of the werewolf have been carefully hidden from them.”

  She turned to look at the wolves, a snarl on her face—and then she just stopped when she saw me. Her pupils dilated until the whole of her eyes were black.

  “You,” she said. Then she laughed, a cackling sound that made the skin on the back of my neck crawl. “Of course it would be you.”

  For some reason the sight of me seemed to stop her protests. She walked to Mary Jo, who hung limply from Adam’s curled arms. Like the snow elf had before her, the fae shed her glamour, but hers dripped from her head and down to her feet, where it puddled for a moment, as if it were made of liquid instead of magic.

  She was tall, taller than Adam, taller than Uncle Mike, but her arms were reed-thin, and the fingers that touched Mary Jo were odd. It took me a moment to see that each one had an extra joint and a small pad on the underside, like a gecko’s.

  Her face ... was ugly. As the glamour faded, her eyes shrank and her nose grew and hung over her narrow-lipped mouth like the gnarled limb of an old oak.

  From her body, as the glamour cleared away, a soft violet light gathered and flowed upward from her feet to her shoulders, then down her arms to her hands. Her padded fingers turned Mary Jo’s head and touched her under the chin where someone (probably Paul’s repentant friend) had ripped out her throat.

  The light never touched me ... but I felt it anyway. Like the first light of the morning, or the spray of the salt sea on my face, it delighted my skin. I heard Adam draw in a sharp breath, but he didn’t look away from Mary Jo. After a few minutes, Mary Jo’s tank top started glowing white in the pale purple light of the fae’s magic. The blood that had made it look dark in the dimmed lights of the bar was gone.

  The fae jerked her hands away. “It is done,” she told Adam. “I have healed her body, but you must give her pulse and breath. Only if she has not yet gone on will she return—I am no god to be giving life and death.”

  “CPR,” translated Uncle Mike laconically.

  Adam dropped to his knees, set Mary Jo on the ground, and tilted her head back and began.

  “What about brain damage?” I asked.

  The fae turned to me. “I healed her body. If they inspire her heart and lungs soon, there will be no damage to her.”

  Paul’s friend was sitting at Adam’s side, but Paul got up and opened his mouth.

  “Don’t,” I said urgently.

  His eyes flashed at being given an order by me. I should have just let Paul do it, but I was part of the pack now, willy-nilly—and that meant keeping the pack safe.

  “You can’t thank fae,” I told him. “Unless you want to live the rest of your very long life in servitude to them.”

  “Spoilsport,” said the fae woman.

  “Mary Jo is precious to our pack,” I told her, bowing my head. “Her loss would have left a wound for many months to come. Your healing is a rare and marvelous gift.”

  Mary Jo gasped, and Paul forgot he was angry with me. He wasn’t anything special to her or she to him. She was sweet on a very nice wolf named Henry, and Paul was married to a human I’d never met. But Mary Jo was pack.

  I would have turned to her, too, but the fae held my eyes. Her thin-lipped mouth curved into a cold smile. “This is the one, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” agreed Uncle Mike cautiously. He was a friend, usually. His caution told me two things. This fae might hurt me, and Uncle Mike, even in the center of his power, his tavern, didn’t think he could stop her.

  She looked me up and down with the air of an experienced cook at Saturday Market, examining tomatoes for blemishes. “I thought there would not be another coyote so rash as to climb the snow elf. You owe me nothing for this, Green Man.”

  I’d heard Uncle Mike called Green Man before. I still wasn’t sure exactly what it meant.

  And when the fae reached those long fingers out and touched me, I wasn’t worried about much other than my own furry hide.

  “I did it because of you, coyote. Do you know how much chaos you have caused? The Morrigan says that is your gift. Rash, quick, and lucky, just like Coyote himself. But that old Trickster dies in his adventures—but you won’t be able to put yourself back together with the dawn.”

  I didn’t say anything. I’d thought her to be just another of the Tri-Cities fae, denizens (mostly) of Fairyland, the fae reservation just outside of Walla Walla, built either to keep us safe from the fae, or the fae safe from the rest of us. Her healing Mary Jo had given me a clue—healing with magic is no common or weak gift among the fae.

  Uncle Mike’s caution told me she was scary powerful.

  “We’ll have more words at a later date, Green Man.” She looked back at me. “Who are you, little coyote, to cause the Great Ones such consternation? You broke our laws, yet your defiance of our ruling has been greatly to our benefit. Siebold Adlebertsmiter is innocent and all the trouble was caused by humans. You must be punished—and rewarded.”

  She laughed as if I was pretty amusing. “Consider yourself rewarded.”

  The light that had continued to swirl around her feet uneasily stirred and darkened until it was a dark stone circle about three feet around and six inches thick.
It solidified under her feet, lifting her half a foot in the air like Aladdin’s carpet. The sides curved upward and formed a dish—the memory of an old story supplied the rest. Not a dish but a mortar. A giant mortar.

  And she was gone. Not the way that Stefan could go, but just so swiftly my eyes couldn’t follow her. I’d seen a fae fly through solid matter before, so it wasn’t a surprise that she did so. Which was good, because I’d just had one terrible surprise, I didn’t need any more.

  The first rule about the fae is that you don’t want to attract their attention—but they don’t tell you what to do once you have.

  “I thought Baba Yaga was a witch,” I told Uncle Mike hollowly. Who else would be flying around in a giant mortar?

  “Witches aren’t immortal,” he told me. “Of course she’s not a witch.”

  Baba Yaga is featured in the stories of a dozen countries scattered around Eastern Europe. She’s not the hero in most of them. She eats children.

  I glanced over at Adam, but he was still focused on Mary Jo. She was shaking like someone on the verge of hypothermia, but seemed to be alive still.

  “What about that bag,” I asked. “What if someone picks it up from the river?”

  “A few minutes of running water will remove any magic from a spell set in fabric,” Uncle Mike told me.

  “It was a trap for the wolves,” I told him. I knew that because it had tasted like vampire. “No one else except for the mobile mountain was affected ... Why him and none of the rest? And what in the world is a snow elf? I’ve never heard of one.” As far as I’d ever known, “elf” was one of those generic terms coined by mundanes as a way to refer to the fae.

  “The government,” said Uncle Mike, after a moment to consider what he wanted to tell me (getting the fae to share information is harder than getting a drop of water from a stone), “requires us to register and tell them what kind of fae we are. So we chose something that appeals to us. For some it is an old title or name, for others ... we make it up, just like the humans have made up names for us for centuries. My favorite is the infamous ‘Jack-Be-Nimble.’ I don’t know what that is, but we have at least a dozen in our reservation.”

  I couldn’t help but grin. Our government didn’t know they had a tiger by the tail—and the tiger wasn’t going to tell them anytime soon. “So he made up the snow elf bit?”

  “Are you going to argue with him? As to why the bag aimed at the wolf worked—”

  “I have another true form,” said a soft, Norse-accented voice behind me. There weren’t very many people who could sneak up on me—my coyote senses keep me pretty aware of my environment—but I sure hadn’t heard him.

  It was the snow elf, or whatever he was, of course. He was a couple of inches shorter than me—which he could have fixed as easily as Zee could have gotten rid of his bald spot. I supposed someone whose true form—at least one of them—was ten feet tall didn’t mind being short.

  He looked at me and bowed, one of those abrupt and stiff movements of head and neck that brings to mind martial artists. “I’m glad you are fast,” he said.

  I shook the hand he held out to me, which was cool and dry. “I’m glad I’m fast, too,” I told him with honest sincerity.

  He looked at Uncle Mike. “Do you know who set it? And if it was aimed at the werewolves or at me?”

  Adam was listening to the conversation. I wasn’t sure how I knew, because it looked like he was totally involved with his battered wolves. But there was something in the tension of his shoulders.

  Uncle Mike shook his head. “I was too concerned with getting it away from you. Berserker wolves are bad enough, but a berserker snow elf loose in downtown Pasco is something I don’t want to see.”

  I knew. The bag had smelled of vampire.

  The snow elf knelt beside Mary Jo and touched her shoulder. Adam pulled her gently away, setting her in Paul’s lap, and put himself between her and the snow elf.

  “Mine,” he said.

  The elf raised his hands and smiled mildly, but there was a bite to his words. “No harm, Alpha. I meant no trouble. My days of roaming the mountains with a wolf pack at my beck and call are long over.”

  Adam nodded, keeping his eyes on the enemy. “That may be. But she is one of mine. And I am not one of yours.”

  “Enough,” said Uncle Mike. “One fight a night is good enough. Go home, Ymir.”

  The kneeling elf looked at Uncle Mike, and the skin grew tight around his eyes for a moment before he smiled brightly. I noticed that his teeth were very white, if a little crooked. He stood up, using just the muscles of his thighs, like a martial artist. “It has been a long night.” He made a slow turn that encompassed not just Uncle Mike, the wolves, and me, but everyone else in the room—who I just realized were all watching us ... or maybe they were watching the snow elf. “Of course it is time to go. I’ll see you all.”

  No one said anything until he was out of the building.

  “Well,” said Uncle Mike, sounding more Irish than usual. “Such a night.”

  MARY JO WAS MOVING BUT STILL DAZED WHEN WE GOT her outside. So Adam instructed Paul and his friend (whose name, as it happened, was Alec and not Sean or Stan at all) to take her to Adam’s house. Paul packed Mary Jo in the back of her car with Alec and started to get in.

  He looked at my feet. “You shouldn’t be out here barefoot,” he told the ground. Then he shut the car door, turned the key as he turned on the lights, and left.

  “He meant thank you,” said Adam. “I’ll say it, too. I can think of a lot of things I’d rather do than try to defend Paul from Baba Yaga.”

  “I should have let her have him,” I told Adam. “It would have made your life easier.”

  He grinned, then stretched his neck. “This could have been a very, very bad night.”

  I was looking over his shoulder at his SUV. “Would you settle for just a little bad? Your insurance doesn’t have an exception for snow elves, right?”

  It had looked all right at first, then I thought it just had a flat tire. But now I could see the right rear tire was bent up at a forty-five-degree angle.

  Adam pulled out his cell phone. “That doesn’t even register on my scale of bad tonight,” he told me. He put his free arm around my shoulder, pulling me against him as his daughter answered the phone. He wasn’t wearing a shirt.

  “Hey, Jesse,” he said. “It’s been a wild night, and we need you to come pick us up at Uncle Mike’s.”

  5

  “SOME DATE,” ADAM MURMURED. IT DIDN’T MATTER HOW quiet he was; we both knew that most of the pack was inside his house listening to us as we stood on his back porch.

  “No one could ever accuse you of being boring,” I said lightly.

  He laughed with sober eyes. He’d scrubbed up in the bathroom at Uncle Mike’s and changed as soon as we’d made it back to his house. But I could still smell the blood on him.

  “You need to see to Mary Jo,” I told him. “I need to go to bed.” She would survive, I thought. But she’d survive better with me at home and not disrupting the pack, who was forcing her to fight to live.

  He hugged me for not saying all of that out loud. He lifted me to my toes—clad in a pair of Jesse’s flip-flops—and set me back down. “You go scrub your feet clean first so none of those cuts get infected. I’ll send Ben over to watch your house until Samuel is satisfied with Mary Jo’s condition and goes home.”

  Adam watched from the porch as I walked home. I wasn’t halfway there when Ben caught up with me. I invited him in, but he shook his head.

  “I’ll stay outside,” he said. “The night air keeps my head clear.”

  I scrubbed my feet and dried them before I went to bed. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. But I woke up while the dark still held sway, knowing that there was someone in my room. Though I listened closely, I couldn’t hear anyone—so I was pretty sure it was Stefan.

  I wasn’t worried. The vampires, except Stefan, wouldn’t have been able to cross the
threshold of my home. Most anyone else would have woken Samuel.

  The air told me nothing, which was odd—even Stefan had a scent. Restlessly, I rolled onto my side and right up against the walking stick, which had taken to sleeping with me every night. Mostly it gave me the creeps when it did that—walking sticks shouldn’t be able to move about on their own. But tonight the warm wood under my hand felt reassuring. I closed my hand around it.

  “There’s no need for violence, Mercy.”

  I must have jumped because I was on my feet, stick in hand, before it registered just whose voice I was hearing.

  “Bran?”

  And suddenly I could smell him, mint and musk that told me werewolf combined with the certain sweet saltiness that was his own scent.

  “Don’t you have something more important to do?” I asked him, flipping on the light. “Like ruling the world or something?”

  He didn’t move from his spot on the floor, leaning against a wall, except to put his forearm over his eyes as light flooded the room. “I came here last weekend,” he said. “But you were asleep, and I didn’t let them wake you up.”

  I’d forgotten. In the hubbub of Baba Yaga, Mary Jo, the snow elf, and the vampires, I’d forgotten why he would have come to visit me personally. Suddenly I was suspicious of the arm he’d thrown over his eyes.

  That Alphas are protective of their packs is an understatement—and Bran was the Marrok, the most Alpha wolf around. I might belong to Adam’s pack just now, but Bran had raised me.

  “I already talked it all over with Mom,” I said defensively.

  And Bran grinned hugely, his arm coming down to reveal hazel eyes, which looked almost green in the artificial light. “I bet you did. Are my Samuel and your Adam hovering over you and giving you a bad time?” His voice was full of (false) sympathy.

  Bran is better than anyone I know, including the fae, at hiding what he is. He looked like a teenager—there was a rip in his jeans, just over the knee, and some ironic person had used a marker to draw an anarchy symbol just over his thigh. His hair was ruffled. He was perfectly capable of sitting around with an innocent smile on his face—and then ripping someone’s head off.