Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  “Uh-huh.” I pulled around an RV as we chugged up a small hill. It’d pass me on the downhill side, but I had to take my passing pleasures where I could—Vanagons are not speed demons. One of these days I was going to put a Subaru flat six in it and see what that would do. “Before you yell at me for not telling you about the vampires, you should know that I am risking a ticket by talking to you while I drive. Do you really want me to get a ticket for letting you yell at me?”

  He gave a reluctant laugh, so I supposed he wasn’t too upset. “You’re still on the road? I thought you left this morning.”

  “Fixed a shift linkage in a Ford Focus at that rest stop near Connell,” I told him. “Nice lady and her dog were stuck after having a clutch job done by her brother-in-law. He hadn’t tightened down a few bolts, and one of them fell off. Took me an hour or so before we found someone who had a bolt and nut the right size.” And I had the oil stains across my shoulders and the grit in my hair to prove it. In my Rabbit I kept a towel to put on the ground. I also kept a selection of useful car bits. It was going to be a while before my Rabbit was up and running.

  “How is Mary Jo?”

  “She’s sleeping for real now.”

  “Bran helped?”

  “Bran helped.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “You be careful ghost hunting—and don’t let Stefan bite you.”

  There was just a little edge to the last.

  “Jealous?” I asked. Yep. The RV passed me on the downhill.

  “Maybe a little,” he said.

  “Don’t be. We’ll be fine. Ghosts aren’t as dangerous as crazy vampire ladies.” I couldn’t help the anxiety that crept into my voice.

  “I’ll be careful—and Mercy?”

  “Uhm?”

  “Consider yourself yelled at,” he purred, then hung up.

  I grinned at the phone and closed it.

  AMBER’S DIRECTIONS TO HER HOUSE HAD BEEN CLEAR and easy to follow. The relief in her voice when I’d called that morning made me want to believe she really had a ghost problem and wasn’t part of some secret vampire conspiracy to get me somewhere I’d be easier to kill. Despite Bran’s assurances that it was unlikely Marsilia would ship me off to Spokane, I was still feeling ... not paranoid, really. Cautious. I was feeling cautious.

  Zee had agreed to work the shop while I was gone. I probably could have gotten him to work cheaper than usual because he was still feeling guilty about stuff that wasn’t his fault. Cheaper would mean I could eat peanut butter instead of ramen noodles for the rest of the month, but I didn’t think any of it was his fault.

  He had talked to Uncle Mike about the crossed bones on my door. Definitely vampire work, he told me. The bones meant that I had broken faith with the vampires and was no longer under their protection—and anyone offering me aid of any kind was likely to find themselves on the wrong side of the vampires as well. The broad interpretation of that was horrifying. It meant that people like Tony and Sensei Johanson were at risk, too.

  It meant that it was probably a good thing that I get out of town for a few days and figure out how to limit the number of victims Marsilia could claim.

  Amber lived in a Victorian mansion complete with a pair of towers. The brick porch had been freshly tuck-pointed, the gingerbread work around the roof edge and the windows bore a new coat of paint. Even the roses looked ready for magazine display.

  Frowning at the leaded glass glistening in the sun, I wondered when I’d last cleaned the windows in my house. Had I ever cleaned the windows? Samuel might have.

  I was still thinking about it when the door opened. A startled boy gawked at me, and I realized I hadn’t rung the doorbell.

  “Hey,” I said. “Is your mom home?”

  He recovered quickly and gave me a shy look out of a pair of misty green eyes under long, thick eyelashes, and turned to ring the bell I hadn’t.

  “I’m Mercy,” I told him, while we waited for Amber to emerge from the depths of the house. “Your mom and I went to school together.”

  His wary look deepened, and he didn’t say anything. So I guessed she hadn’t told him anything.

  “Mercy, I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.” Amber sounded harassed and not at all grateful, and that was before she saw what I looked like—covered in old oil and parking-lot dirt.

  Her son and I turned to look at her.

  She still looked like a show dog, but her eyes were stressed. “Chad, this is my friend who is going to help us with the ghost.” As she spoke, her hands flew in a graceful dance, and I remembered Charles had said her son had some sort of disability: he was deaf.

  She turned her attention to me, but her hands still moved, letting her son know what she was saying. “This is my son, Chad.” She took a deep breath. “Mercy, I’m sorry. My husband has a client coming over for dinner tonight. He didn’t tell me until just a few minutes ago. It’s a formal dinner ...”

  She looked at me, and her voice trailed off.

  “What?” I said letting sharpness creep into my voice at the insult. “Don’t I look like I’m up to a formal dinner? Sorry, the stitches in my chin don’t come out for at least a week.”

  Suddenly she laughed. “You haven’t changed a bit. If you didn’t bring anything suitable, you can borrow something of mine. The guy who’s coming is actually pretty well house-trained for a cutthroat businessman. I think you’ll like him. I’ve got to do some inventorying and run to the grocery store.” She tilted her head so her son could see her mouth. “Chad, would you take Mercy to the guest room?”

  He gave me another wary look, but nodded. As he went back inside the house and started up the stairs, Amber told me, “I’d better warn you, my husband is pretty unhappy about the ghost. He thinks Chad and I are making it up. If you could manage not to mention it at dinner in front of his client, I’d appreciate it.”

  THERE WAS A BATHROOM ACROSS FROM THE ROOM I WAS staying in. I took my suitcase and went in to scrub up. Before I stripped off my grimy shirt, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

  Sometimes ghosts only appear to one sense or another. Sometimes I can only hear them—sometimes I can smell them. But the bathroom smelled like soap and shampoo, water, and those stupid blue tablets some people who didn’t have pets put in their toilets.

  I didn’t see anything or hear anything either. But that didn’t keep the hair on the back of my neck from rising as I pulled off my shirt and stuffed it into the plastic compartment in my suitcase. I scoured my hands until they were mostly clean and brushed the dirt out of my hair and rebraided it. And all the while I could feel someone watching me.

  Maybe it was only the power of suggestion. But I cleaned up as fast as I could anyway. No ghostly writing appeared on the walls, no one appeared in the mirror or moved stuff around.

  I opened the bathroom door and found Amber waiting impatiently right in front of the door. She didn’t notice that she’d startled me.

  “I have to take Chad to softball practice, then do some shopping for dinner tonight. Do you want to come?”

  “Why not?” I said with a casual shrug. Staying in that house alone didn’t appeal to me—some ghost hunter I was. Nothing had happened, and I was already jumpy.

  I took shotgun. Chad frowned at me, but sat in back. I didn’t think I impressed him much. No one said anything until we dropped Chad off. He didn’t look happy about going. Amber proved that she was tougher than me because she ignored the puppy-dog eyes and abandoned Chad to his coach’s indifferent care.

  “So you decided not to become a history teacher,” Amber said as she pulled away from the curb. Her voice was tight with nerves. The stress was coming from her end, I thought—but then she’d never been relaxing company.

  “Decided isn’t quite the word,” I told her. “I took a job as a mechanic to support myself until a teaching position opened ... and one day I realized that even if someone offered me a job, I’d rather turn a wrench.” And then, because she’d given me the opening, “I thought y
ou were going to be a vet.”

  “Yes, well, life happened.” She paused. “Chad happened.” That was too much honesty for her though, and she subsided into silence. In the grocery store, I wandered away while she was testing tomatoes—they all looked good to me. I bought a candy bar, just to see how much she’d changed.

  Not that much. By the time she’d finished lecturing me on the evils of refined sugar, we were almost back to the house. She was feeling a lot more comfortable—and she finally told me more about her ghost.

  “Corban doesn’t believe we’re haunted,” she told me as she threaded her way through the city. She glanced at my face and away. “I haven’t actually seen or heard anything either. I just told him I had, so he’d leave Chad alone.” She took a deep breath and looked at me again. “He thinks Chad might do better at a boarding school—a private place for troubled kids that a friend of his recommended.”

  “He didn’t look troubled to me,” I said. “Aren’t ‘troubled’ kids usually doing drugs or beating on the neighbor’s kids?” Chad had looked like he’d rather have stayed home and read than go to play ball.

  Amber gave a nervous half laugh. “Corban doesn’t get along very well with Chad. He doesn’t understand him. It’s the old Disney cliché of a quarterback dad and bookworm son.”

  “Does Corban know he’s not Chad’s father?”

  She hit the brakes so hard that if I hadn’t been belted in, I might have become better acquainted with her windshield. She sat there in the middle of the road for a moment, oblivious to the honking horns around us. I was glad we were in a stout Mercedes rather than the Miata she’d driven to my house.

  “You forget,” I said blandly. “I knew Harrison, too. We used to joke about his eyelashes, and I’ve never see eyes like his since. Not until today.” Harrison had been her one true love for about three months until she dropped him for a premed student.

  Amber started forward again and drove for a little until traffic settled down. “I’d forgotten you knew him.” She sighed. “Funny. Yes, Corban knows he’s not Chad’s father, but Chad doesn’t. It didn’t used to matter, but I’m not so sure. Corban’s been ... different lately.” She shook her head. “Still, he’s the one who suggested I ask you to come over. He saw the article in the paper, and said, ‘Isn’t that the girl you said used to see ghosts? Why don’t you have her come over and have a look-see?”’

  I figured I’d been pushy enough, so I asked a question that was less intrusive. “What does the ghost do?”

  “Moves things,” she told me. “It rearranges Chad’s room once or twice a week. Chad says he’s seen the furniture moving around.” She hesitated. “It breaks things, too. A couple of vases my husband’s father brought over from China. The glass over my husband’s diploma. Sometimes it takes things.” She glanced at me again. “Car keys. Shoes. Some important papers of Cor’s turned up in Chad’s room, under his bed. Corban was pretty mad.”

  “At Chad?”

  She nodded.

  I hadn’t even met him, and I didn’t like her husband. Even if Chad was doing everything himself—and I had no evidence to the contrary—throwing him into reform school didn’t sound like the way to make things better.

  We picked up a morose Chad, who didn’t seem inclined to converse, and she quit talking about the ghost.

  AMBER WAS WORKING IN THE KITCHEN. I’D TRIED TO HELP but she finally sent me to my room to stay out of her way. She didn’t like the way I peeled apples. I’d brought a book from home—a very old book—with real fairy tales in it. It was borrowed and I’d have to return it soon, so I was reading as fast as I could.

  I was taking notes on kelpies (thought extinct) when someone knocked at my door twice and then opened it.

  Chad stood with a notebook and a pencil in hand.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He turned the notebook around and I read, “How much is my dad paying you?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  His eyes narrowed, and he ripped away that page and showed me the next one. Evidently he’d thought about this for a while. “Why are you here? What do you want?”

  I set my book aside and stared back at him. He was tough, but he wasn’t Adam or Samuel: he blinked first.

  “I have a vampire who wants to kill me,” I told him. Which I shouldn’t have, of course, but I wanted to see what would happen. Curiosity, Bran has told me more than once, might be as fatal for coyotes as it is for cats.

  Chad crumpled the paper and mouthed a word. Evidently he hadn’t expected that response.

  I raised my eyebrow. “Sorry. You’ll have to do better. I don’t lip-read.”

  He scribbled furiously. “Lyer” said his paper.

  I took his pencil, and wrote, “liar.” Then I gave him back his notebook, and said, “You want to bet?”

  He clutched his notebook to his chest and stalked off. I liked him. He reminded me of me.

  Fifteen minutes later his mother barged in. “Red or purple?” she asked me, still sounding frantic. “Come with me.”

  Bewildered, I followed her down the hall and into the master bedroom suite, where she’d laid out two dresses. “I only have five minutes before I have to put the rolls in,” she said. “Red or purple?”

  The purple had considerably more fabric. “Purple,” I said. “Do you have shoes I can borrow, too? Or do you want me to go barefoot?”

  She gave me a wild-eyed look. “Shoes I have, but not nylons.”

  “Amber,” I told her. “I will put on high heels for you. And I will wear a dress. But you aren’t paying me enough to wear nylons. My legs are shaved and tan, that’ll have to do.”

  “We can pay you. How much do you want?”

  I looked but couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. “No charge,” I told her. “That way I can leave when things get scary.”

  She didn’t laugh. I was pretty sure Amber used to have a sense of humor. Maybe.

  “Look,” I told her. “Take a deep breath. Find the shoes for me, and go put your rolls in the oven.”

  She did take a deep breath, and it seemed to help.

  When I went back to my room, Chad was there again with his notebook. He was staring at the walking stick on my bed. I hadn’t brought it with me, but it had come anyway. I wished I could ask it what it wanted from me.

  I picked it up and waited until he was looking at me so he could read my lips. “This is what I use to beat problem children with.”

  He clutched his notebook tighter, so I guessed his lipreading skills were up to par. I put the stick back on the bed. “What did you want?”

  He turned his notebook around and showed me a newspaper article that had been cut out and was taped to a page of his notebook. “Alpha Werewolf’s Girlfriend Kills Attacker” it said. There was a picture of me looking battered and dazed. I didn’t remember anyone taking pictures, but there were large chunks of that night I was pretty shaky on.

  “Yes,” I said, like my stomach didn’t suddenly hurt. “Old news.”

  He turned the page, and I saw he had another observation for me. “There R no vampyrs.” I guessed spelling wasn’t his strong suit. Even at ten, I’d been able to spell “are.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said. “Good to know. I guess I’ll go home tomorrow.”

  He dropped his hands to his sides, the notebook swaying back and forth with irritation like a cat’s tail. He knew sarcasm when he heard it, even if he was lip-reading it.

  “Don’t worry, kid,” I told him more gently. “I’m not a part of the plot to send you off to kid-prison. If I don’t see anything, it doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to see. And I’ll tell your father so, too.”

  He blinked his eyes furiously, hugged his notebook again. He lifted his chin—a smaller, less-stubborn version of his mother’s. And he left.

  AMBER TROTTED UP THE STAIRS DOUBLE TIME AND waved to me as she went past. I heard her knock, then open a door. “You need to clean up, too,” she told her son. “You don’t have to eat with us�
��there’s a plate in the microwave—but I don’t want you scuttling around trying to be unseen, either. You know how that irritates your father. So comb your hair, wash your hands and face.”

  I stripped off my clothes and pulled on the purple dress. It fit just fine—a little tight in the shoulders and snugger in the hips than I preferred, but when I looked at it in the full-length mirror, it looked just fine. Amber, Char, and I had always been able to trade clothes with each other.

  The heels were higher than was comfortable, but as long as we were staying in the house, they should be all right. Char’s feet had been smaller than Amber’s and mine. I brushed out my hair again, then French-braided it. A touch of lipstick and eyeliner, and I was good to go.

  I wished it was Adam I was about to eat with instead of Amber, her jerk of a husband, and some important client. It was enough to make me wish I had a plate in the microwave, too.

  6

  NEITHER OF THE TWO MEN WHO ENTERED THE HOUSE was handsome. The shorter man was slightly balding, with plump hands that had three thick gold rings on them. His suit was off-the-rack, but the rack had been expensive. His eyes were pale, pale blue, almost as pale as Samuel’s wolf eyes. The resemblance made me want to like him. He stood by almost shyly as the other man hugged Amber.

  “Hey, sweetie,” Amber’s husband said and, to my surprise, there was honest warmth in his voice. “Thank you for fixing dinner for us on such short notice.”

  Corban Wharton was striking rather than good-looking. His nose was too long for his broad face. His eyes were dark and wide-set—and smiling. There was something solid and reassuring about him. He was the kind of person that you’d want beside you in a courtroom. When he looked at me, he frowned briefly, as if trying to place who I was.

  “You must be Mercedes Thompson,” he said, holding out his hand.