Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  I’d needed Samuel to be home so I could ask him about how things worked. Adam doubtless knew, but I wanted to go into this conversation knowing how to approach him.

  If Adam thought one of his pack members was trying mind-influencing tricks on me . . . I wasn’t certain what the rules were for something like that. That was one of the things I wanted to find out from Samuel. If someone was going to die, I wanted to make sure I approved, or at least knew about it before I pulled the trigger. If someone was going to die, I might just keep this to myself and create a suitable punishment of my own instead.

  I’d have to wait until Samuel got back from work. Until then, maybe I’d just keep a good hold on the walking stick and hope for the best.

  I stayed out on the little rocky beach watching the river in the moonlight as long as I dared. But if I didn’t get back before Ben realized I was gone, he’d call out the troops. And I just wasn’t in the mood for a pack of werewolves.

  I stood up, stretched, and started the long run back home.

  WHEN I ARRIVED AT MY BACK DOOR, BEN WAS PACING back and forth in front of it uneasily. When he saw me, he froze—he’d started realizing something was wrong, but until he saw me, he hadn’t been sure I wasn’t there. His upper lip curled, but he didn’t quite manage a snarl, caught as he was between anger and worry, dominant male protective instincts and the understanding that I was of higher rank.

  Body language, when you know how to read it, can be more expressive than speech.

  His frustration was his problem, so I ignored him and hopped through the dog door—much, much too small for a wolf—and straight to my bedroom.

  I changed out of my coyote form, grabbed underwear and a clean T-shirt, and headed for bed. It wasn’t horribly late—our date had been very short, and my run hadn’t taken much longer. Still, morning came soon, and I had a car to work on. And I had to be in top form to figure out just how to approach Samuel so he wouldn’t tell Adam what I was asking.

  Maybe I should just call his father instead. Yes, I decided. I’d call Bran.

  I WOKE UP WITH THE PHONE IN MY EAR—AND THOUGHT for a moment that I’d completed the task I’d decided upon before falling asleep, because the voice in my ear was speaking Welsh. That didn’t make any sense at all. Bran wouldn’t speak freaking Welsh to me, especially not on the phone, where foreign languages are even harder to understand.

  Muzzily, I realized I could still almost remember hearing the phone ring. I must have grabbed it in the process of waking up—but that didn’t explain the language.

  I blinked at the clock—I’d been asleep less than two hours—and about that time I figured out whose voice was babbling to me.

  “Samuel?” I asked. “Why are you speaking Welsh? I don’t understand you unless you talk a lot slower. And use small words.” It was kind of a joke. Welsh never seems to have small words.

  “Mercy,” he said heavily.

  For some reason my heart started beating hard and heavy, as if I were about to get some very bad news. I sat up.

  “Samuel?” I addressed the silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Come get—”

  He fumbled the words, as if his English were very bad, which it wasn’t and never had been. Not as long as I’d known him—which was most of my thirty-odd years of life.

  “I’ll be right there,” I said, jerking on my jeans with one hand. “Where?”

  “In the X-ray storeroom.” He barely stumbled over that phrase.

  I knew where the storeroom was, on the far end of the emergency room at Kennewick General, where he worked. “I’ll come for you.”

  He hung up without saying anything more.

  Something had gone very wrong. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be catastrophic if he was going to meet me in the storeroom, away from everyone. If they knew he was a werewolf, there would be no need for storerooms.

  Unlike Adam, Samuel was not out to the public. No one would let a werewolf practice medicine—which was probably smart, actually. The smells of blood and fear and death were too much for most of them. But Samuel had been a doctor for a very long time, and he was a good one.

  Ben was sitting on my front porch as I ran out the door, and I tripped over him, rolling down the four steep, unyielding stairs to land on the ground in the gravel.

  He’d known I was coming out; I hadn’t tried to be quiet. He could have moved out of my way, but he hadn’t. Maybe he’d even moved into my way on purpose. He didn’t twitch as I looked up at him.

  I recognized the look though I hadn’t seen it from him before. I was a coyote mated to their Alpha, and they were darned sure I wasn’t good enough.

  “You heard about the fight tonight,” I told him.

  He laid his ears back and put his nose on his front paws.

  “Then someone should have told you that they were using the pack bonds to mess with my head.” I hadn’t meant to say anything about it until I had a chance to talk to Samuel, but falling down the stairs had robbed me of self-control.

  He stilled, and the look on his body was not disbelief, it was horror.

  So it was possible. Damn. Damn. Damn. I’d hoped it wasn’t, hoped I was being paranoid. I didn’t need this.

  Sometimes it felt like both the mate and the pack bonds were doing their best to steal my soul. The analogy might be figurative, but I found it nearly as frightening as the literal version would have been. Finding out that someone could use the whole mess to make me do things was just the flipping icing on the cake.

  Fortunately, I had a task to take my mind off the mess I was in. I stood up and dusted myself off.

  I had planned on waiting and talking to Adam directly, but there were some advantages to this scenario, too. It would be a good idea for Adam to know that some of the pack were . . . active about their dislike of me. And if Ben told him, he couldn’t read my mind to figure out that I wasn’t weirded out only by the mind control, but also by the whole bond thing, pack and mate.

  I told Ben, “You tell Adam what I said.”

  He would. Ben could be creepy and horrible, but he was almost my friend—shared nightmares do that.

  “Give him my apologies and tell him I’m going to lie low”—Adam would know that meant stay away from the pack—“until I get a handle on it. Right now, I’m going to get Samuel, so you’re off duty.”

  3

  I DROVE MY TRUSTY RABBIT TO KGH AND PARKED IN the emergency lot. It was still hours before dawn when I walked into the building.

  The trick to going wherever you want unchallenged in a hospital is to walk briskly, nod to the people you know, and ignore the ones you don’t. The nod reassures everyone that you are known, the brisk pace that you have a mission and don’t want to talk. It helped that most of the people in triage knew me.

  Through the double doors that led to the inner sanctum, I could hear a baby crying—a sad, tired, miserable sound. I wrinkled my nose at the pervading sour-sharp smell of hospital disinfectant, and winced at the increase in both decibels and scent as I marched through the doors.

  A nurse scribbling on a clipboard glanced up at my entrance, and the official look on her face warmed into a relieved smile. I knew her face but not her name.

  “Mercy,” she said, having no trouble with mine. “So Doc Cornick finally called you to take him home, did he? About time. I told him he should have gone home hours ago—but he’s pretty stubborn, and a doctor outranks a nurse.” She made it sound like she didn’t think that should be the proper order of things.

  I was afraid to speak because I might thrust a hole into whatever house of cards Samuel had constructed to explain why he had to go home early. Finally, I managed a neutral, “He’s better at helping people than asking for help.”

  She grinned. “Isn’t that just like a man? Probably hated to admit he trashed that car of his. I swear he loved it like it was a woman.”

  I think I just stared at her—her words made no sense to me.

  Trashed his car? Did she mean h
e had a wreck? Samuel had a wreck? I couldn’t picture it. Some werewolves had trouble driving because they could be a little distractible. But not Samuel.

  I needed to get to Samuel before I said something stupid.

  “I better—”

  “He’s just lucky he didn’t get hurt worse,” she said, and turned her eyes back to whatever she was writing. Apparently she could carry on a conversation at the same time, because she continued. “Did he tell you how close he came? The policeman who brought him in said that he almost fell into the water—and that’s the Vernita bridge, you know, the one on Twenty- four out in the Hanford Reach? He’d have died if he made it over—it’s a long way down to the river.”

  What the heck had Samuel been doing all the way out at the bridge on the old highway north of Hanford? That was clear on the other side of the Tri-Cities and then some, and nowhere near any possible route between our house and the hospital. Maybe he’d been running out in the Reach, where people were scarce and ground squirrels plentiful. Just because he hadn’t told me that he was going out hunting didn’t mean he hadn’t. I wasn’t his keeper.

  “He didn’t say anything about danger to him,” I told her truthfully and followed it with a small lie designed to lead her into telling me more details. “I thought it was just the car.”

  “That’s Doc Cornick,” she snorted. “He wouldn’t let us do anything other than get the glass out of his skin—but just from the way he’s moving, you can tell he did something to his ribs. And he’s limping, too.”

  “Sounds like it was worse than he told me,” I commented, feeling sick to my stomach.

  “He went all the way through the windshield and was hanging on to the hood of the car. Jack—that’s the policeman—Jack said he thought that Samuel was going to fall off the hood before he could get there. The wreck must have dazed Doc because he was crawling the wrong way—if Jack hadn’t stopped him, he’d have gone over.”

  And then I understood exactly what had happened.

  “Honey? Honey? Are you okay? Here, sit down.”

  She’d pulled out a chair when I wasn’t watching and held it behind me. My ears were ringing, my head was down between my knees, and her hand was on my back.

  And for a moment, I was fourteen again, hearing Bran tell me what I’d already known—Bryan, my foster father, was dead—his body had been found in the river. He’d killed himself after his mate, my foster mother, had died.

  Werewolves are too tough to die easily, so there aren’t many ways for a werewolf to commit suicide. Since the French Revolution pretty much unpopularized the guillotine in the eighteenth century, self-decapitation just isn’t all that easy.

  Silver bullets have some difficulties, too. Silver is harder than lead, and the bullets sometimes blow right through and leave the wolf sick, in pain, and alive. Silver shot works a little better, but unless rigged just right, it can take a long time to die. If some busybody comes along and picks all the shot out—well, there’s all that pain for nothing.

  The most popular choice is death by werewolf. But that wouldn’t be an option for Samuel. Very few wolves would take up his challenge—and those that would . . . Let me just say I wouldn’t want to see a fight between Samuel and Adam. Even odds aren’t what suicidal people are looking for.

  Drowning is the next most popular choice. Werewolves can’t swim; their bodies are too dense—and even a werewolf needs to breathe.

  I even knew why he’d chosen the location he had. The Columbia is the biggest river in the area, more than a mile wide and deep, but the three biggest bridges over it—the Blue Bridge, the suspension bridge, and the interstate bridge—all have two heavy-duty guardrails. There is also a fair bit of traffic on those, even in the middle of the night. Someone is sure to see you go over and attempt a rescue. It takes a few minutes to drown.

  The bridge he’d chosen instead was not as heavily traveled and had been built before bridges were designed so that even morons would have a hard time driving off of them. The river is narrower at that point—which means deeper and faster—and the drop-off is . . . impressive.

  I could see it, Samuel on the nose of the car and the police officer running up. It had been sheer dumb luck that the only other vehicle on the road was a police car. If it had been an ordinary bystander, he might have been too fearful of his own safety to attempt a rescue, and would have let Samuel drown. But a policeman might just follow him in and try to rescue him. Might put his life at risk for Samuel.

  No, Samuel wouldn’t have fallen once the police officer found him.

  No matter how much he wanted to.

  My dizziness was fading.

  “You be happy,” he’d told me when I’d left on my ill- fated date. A wish for my life and not for the date.

  The jerk. I felt the growl rise in my throat and had to work to swallow it.

  “He’s all right,” the nurse assured me. I pulled my head out from between my knees and noticed on the way up that her name tag read JODY. “We got the glass out, and though he’s moving stiffly, he hasn’t broken anything major or he wouldn’t have lasted this long. He should have gone home, but he didn’t want to—and you know how he is. He never says no, but sends you on your way without ever saying yes either.”

  I knew.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her, standing up slowly so as to give the appearance of steadiness. “It just caught me off guard. We’ve known each other a long time—and he didn’t tell me it was anywhere near that bad.”

  “He probably didn’t want to scare you.”

  “Yeah, he’s considerate like that.” My aching butt he was considerate. I’d kill him myself—and then he wouldn’t have to worry about suicide.

  “He said he was going to find a quiet place and rest for a minute,” Nurse Jody said, looking around as if he ought to appear from thin air.

  “He said I could find him in the X-ray storage room.”

  She laughed. “Well, I guess it is quiet in there. You know where it is?”

  I smiled, which is tough when you’re ready to skin someone.

  “Sure.” Still smiling, I walked briskly past curtained-off rooms that smelled of blood and pain, nodding to a med tech who looked vaguely familiar. At least the baby’s cries had muted to whimpers.

  Samuel had tried to commit suicide.

  I knocked on the storage-room door, then opened it. White cardboard file boxes were piled up on racks with a feeling of imposed order—as if somewhere there was someone who would know how to find things here.

  Samuel sat on the floor, his back against a stack of boxes. He had a white lab coat on over a set of green scrubs. His arms rested across his knees, hands limp and hanging. His head was bowed, and he didn’t look up when I came in. He waited until I shut the door behind me to speak, and he didn’t look at me then either.

  I thought it was because he was ashamed or because he knew I was angry.

  “He tried to kill us,” Samuel said, and my heart stopped, then began to pound painfully in my chest because I’d been wrong about the bowed head. Very wrong. The “he” he was talking about was Samuel—and that meant that “he” was no longer in charge. I was talking to Samuel’s wolf.

  I dropped to the ground like a stone and made damned sure my head was lower than the werewolf’s. Samuel the man regularly overlooked breaches of etiquette that his wolf could not. If I made the wolf look up at me, he’d have to acknowledge my superiority or challenge me.

  I change into a thirty-odd-pound predator built to kill chickens and rabbits. And poor silly quail. Werewolves can take out Kodiak bears. A challenge for a werewolf I am not.

  “Mercy,” he whispered, and lifted his head.

  The first thing I noticed was hundreds of small cuts all over his face, and I remembered Jody the nurse saying that they’d had to get the glass out of his skin. That the wounds weren’t healed yet told me that there had been other, more severe damage his body had to address first. Nifty—just a little pain and suffering to sweeten his
temper.

  His eyes were an icy blue just this side of white, hot and wild.

  As soon as I saw them, I looked at the floor and took a deep breath. “Sam,” I whispered. “What can I do to help? Should I call Bran?”

  “No!” The word left him in a roar that jerked him forward until he was crouched on both hands, one leg knee up, one leg still down on one knee.

  That one knee on the ground meant that he wasn’t, quite, ready to spring on me.

  “Our father will kill us,” Sam said, his voice slow and thick with Welsh intonation. “I . . . We don’t want to make him do that.” He took a deep breath. “And I don’t want to die.”

  “Good. That’s good,” I croaked, suddenly understanding just exactly what his first words to me had meant. Samuel had wanted to die, and his wolf had stopped him. Which was good, but left us with a nasty problem.

  There is a very good reason that the Marrok kills any werewolves who allow the wolf to lead and the man to follow. Very good reasons—like preventing-mass-slaughter sorts of reasons.

  But if Samuel’s wolf didn’t want them to die, I decided it was better he was in charge. For a while. Since he didn’t seem to want to kill me yet. Samuel was old. I don’t know exactly how old, but sometime before the Mayflower at least. Maybe that would allow his wolf to control himself without Samuel’s help. Maybe. “Okay, Sam. No calls to Bran.”

  I watched out of the corner of my eye as he tilted his head, surveying me. “I can pretend to be human until we get to your car. I thought that would be best, so I held this shape.”

  I swallowed. “What have you done with Samuel? Is he all right?”

  Pale ice blue eyes examined me thoughtfully. “Samuel? I’m pretty certain he’d forgotten I could do this: it has been so long since we battled for control. He let me out to play when he chose, and I left it to him.” He was quiet a moment or two, then he said, almost shyly. “You know when I’m here. You call me Sam.”