Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly

by Patricia Briggs

  “You spoil them,” she told me in a dismissive tone. “So it is your problem to deal with. You must pay the price.”

  I pulled the two bags of cookies from where I’d hidden them in my jacket. “Here,” I gasped, holding them out over the horde’s reaching hands toward their mother. “Take them quick before the monsters get them. Protect them with your life.”

  Sylvia took the bags and tried to hide her smile as I wrestled with little pink-clad bodies that squealed and squeaked. Okay, there weren’t a hundred of them; Gabriel had five little sisters. But they made enough noise for ten times that many.

  Tia, whose name was short for Martina, the oldest girl, frowned at us all. Sam, sitting beside her, had been abandoned for the possibility of a cookie. He seemed amused, more amused when he caught my wary glance.

  “Hey, we’re doing all the work,” Rosalinda, the second-oldest said. “You chicas start scrubbing right this moment. You know you won’t get cookies until Mamá says.”

  “Sissy got one,” Maia said.

  “And that is all anyone will get until it is clean,” proclaimed Tia piously.

  “You’re no fun,” Sofia, the middle girl, told her.

  “No fun,” agreed Maia with her bottom lip sticking out. But she couldn’t have been too upset because she bounced away from me to crawl back onto Sam, her fingers clutching his collar. “My puppy needs a cookie.”

  Sylvia frowned at Sam, then at me. “You have a dog?”

  “Not exactly,” I told her. “I’m watching him for a friend.” For Samuel.

  The wolf looked at Sylvia and wagged his tail deliberately. He kept his mouth closed, which was smart of him. She wouldn’t be happy if she got a good look at his teeth—which were bigger than any dog’s I’ve ever seen.

  “What breed is it? I’ve never seen such a monster.”

  Sam’s ears flattened a bit.

  But then Maia kissed him on the top of his head. “He’s cute, Mamá. I bet I could ride him in the fair, and we would win a ribbon. We should get a dog. Or a pony. We could keep it in the parking lot.”

  “Uhm, maybe he’s a Great Pyrenees mix?” I offered. “Something big.”

  “Abominable Snow Dog,” suggested Tia dryly. She rubbed Sam briskly under one ear.

  Sylvia sighed. “I suppose if he hasn’t eaten them yet, he won’t.”

  “I don’t think so,” I agreed cautiously. I looked at Sam, who seemed perfectly fine, more relaxed than I’d seen him since I walked into the storeroom at the hospital.

  Sylvia sighed again, theatrically, her dramatically large eyes glittering with fun. “Too bad. It would be much less trouble if I had a few less children, don’t you think?”

  “Mamá!” came the indignant chorus.

  “There aren’t as many as there seem to be when they are running around shrieking,” I told her.

  “I’ve noticed. When they are asleep, they are a little bit cute. It’s a good thing, or none of them would have survived this long.”

  I looked around. They’d already been working for a while. “You know, people are going to walk in—and turn around and walk back out because they won’t recognize the place. Are Gabriel and Zee in the shop?”

  “Sí, yes, they are. Thank you for the use of your car.”

  “No troubles,” I told her. “I don’t need it right now. And you can do me a favor and tell me about anything you notice is wrong with it.”

  “Besides the steering wheel popping off?”

  I grimaced. “Yep.”

  “I will do so. Now you and that . . . elephant you brought . . . need to go into the shop so my little monsters can get back to work.”

  Obediently, I lifted Maia off the wolf. “Let’s go to work,” I told him.

  Sam took two steps with me, then lay down in the center of the office with a grunt. He stretched out on his side and closed his eyes.

  “Come on, S—” I bit my lip—what was the name Samuel kept on his collar? Right. “Come, Snowball.”

  He opened a single white eye and stared at me.

  I swallowed. Arguing with dominant wolves could have unpleasant results.

  “I will watch the puppy,” declared Maia. “We can play cow-girls, and I will teach him to fetch. We shall have a tea party.” She wrinkled her nose. “And then he won’t get all dirty playing with the greasy cars. He doesn’t like being dirty.”

  Sam closed his eye as she patted him on the nose.

  He wasn’t going to hurt her.

  I took a deep breath. “I think he likes the music,” I told Sylvia.

  She huffed. “I think you want him out of your way.”

  “Maia wants to babysit,” I said. “It’ll keep her occupied.”

  Sylvia looked at Sam thoughtfully. She shook her head at me but didn’t fuss when I left him lying there.

  Zee had shut the door between the office and the shop—he’s not fond of Latin music. So when I went in, I closed it behind me, too.

  4

  THE FIRST THING I HEARD WHEN I EMERGED FROM THE bathroom with my working overalls on was Zee swearing in German. It was modern German because I could understand about one word in four. Modern German was a good sign.

  The Buick was in the first bay. I couldn’t see Zee, but from the direction of his voice, he was under the car. Gabriel was standing on the far side of the vehicle; he looked up when he heard me come in, and relief flashed across his face.

  He knows Zee is . . . well, not harmless, but that Zee won’t hurt him. But Gabriel is too polite—and as a result he has to put up with a lot more of Grumpy Zee than I do.

  “Hey, Zee,” I said. “I take it that you can fix it, but it’ll be miserable, and you’d rather haul it to the dump and start from scratch.”

  “Piece of junk,” groused Zee. “What’s not rusted to pieces is bent. If you took all the good parts and put them in a pile, you could carry them out in your pocket.” There was a little pause. “Even if you only had a small pocket.”

  I patted the car. “Don’t you listen to him,” I whispered to it. “You’ll be out of here and back on the road in no time.”

  Zee propelled himself all the way under the car so his head stuck out by my feet.

  “Don’t you promise something you can’t deliver,” he snarled.

  I raised my eyebrows, and said in dulcet tones, “Are you telling me you can’t fix it? I’m sorry. I distinctly remember you saying that there is nothing you can’t fix. I must have been mistaken, and it was someone else wearing your mouth.”

  He gave a growl that would have done Sam credit, and pushed himself back under again, muttering, “Deine Mutter war ein Cola-Automat!”

  “Her mama might have been a pop machine,” I said, responding to one of the remarks I understood even at full Zee-speed. “Your mama . . .” sounds the same in a number of languages.

  “But she was a beauty in her day.” I grinned at Gabriel. “We women have to stick together.”

  “Why is it that all cars are women?” he asked.

  “Because they’re fussy and demanding,” answered Zee.

  “Because if they were men, they’d sit around and complain instead of getting the job done,” I told him.

  It was a relief to do something normal. In my garage, I was in control . . . Well, Zee was really in charge when he came in. Even though I’d bought the shop from him and now paid him to come in, we both knew who was the better mechanic—and he’d been my boss for a long time. Maybe, I thought, handing him sockets size ten and thirteen, that was the real relief. Here I had a job I knew how to do and someone I trusted giving me orders, and the result would be a victory for goodness and order. Fixing cars is orderly—unlike most of my life. Do the right thing, and it works. Do the wrong, and it doesn’t.

  “Verdammte Karre,” Zee growled. “Gib mir mal—”

  The last word was garbled as something heavy went thump, thump, bang.

  “Give you what?” I asked.

  There was a long silence.

 
; “Zee? Are you all right?”

  The whole car rose about ten inches off the jacks, knocking them over on their sides, and shook like an epileptic. A wave of magic rose from the Buick, and I backed away, one hand locked in Gabriel’s shirt so he came with me as the car returned all the way to the ground with a bang of tires on pavement and the squeak of protesting shocks.

  “I feel better now,” said Zee in a very nasty tone. “I would be even happier if I could hang the last mechanic who worked on it.”

  I knew that feeling—ah, the unparalleled frustration of mismatched bolts, miswired sending units, and cross-threaded parts left for me to discover: things that turned what should be a half-hour job into an all-day event.

  Gabriel was pulling against my hold as if he wanted to get farther from the car. His eyes were wide, the whites showing all the way around his irises. I realized, belatedly, that it might be the first time he’d seen Zee really work.

  “It’s okay. He’s through now, I think.” I let go of Gabriel’s shirt and patted his shoulder. “Zee, I think the last mechanic who worked on it was you. Remember? You replaced the wiring harness.”

  Zee rolled out headfirst again, and there was a black grease mark running from his forehead to his chin where something had rolled across his face. A spot of blood lingered on his forehead, and there was a lump on his chin. “You may shut up anytime you choose, Kindlein,” he advised me sharply. Then he frowned. “I smell cookies, and you look tired. What is wrong?”

  “I made cookies,” I told him. “I saved a bag in the car for you to take home. I brought more with me, but the horde is in possession.”

  “Good,” he said. “Now, what is robbing you of sleep?”

  He used to leave me alone. But ever since Tim . . . ever since I’d been hurt, he coddled me in his own way.

  “Nothing you can help me with,” I said.

  “Money?”

  “Nope.”

  He frowned, his white eyebrows lowering over his cool gray eyes.

  “Vampires?” He snapped it out. Zee didn’t like vampires, much.

  “No, sir.” I saluted his tone. “Nothing you can do anything about.”

  “Don’t you sass me, girl.” He glowered at me. “I—”

  One of Gabriel’s sisters screamed. I had a terrible vision of Sam chewing on one of the kids, and I was running.

  I had my hand on the door and the door mostly open when Tia shouted, “¡Mamá, Mamá, una pistola! Tiene una pistola.”

  Inside the office there were kids all over: hanging from shelving, standing on the six- inch sill at the bottom of the big window, on the floor wrapped around Sam.

  A man, a huge man with a nasty- looking automatic in a steady two-handed grip, stood in the doorway between the outside and the office, holding the door open with one black leather-booted foot. The rest of him was dressed in black, too, with some sort of bright yellow design on the left shoulder of his leather pseudomilitary jacket. The only outlier in his generally soldier-of-fortune appearance was the shoulder-length silver-threaded red hair that flowed from his head in a manner that would have done credit to a romance novel cover model.

  Just behind him, I caught a glimpse of another man, dressed in a button-up shirt and slacks. But the second man’s body language told me at a glance that it was only the first man, the man with the gun, who was a threat. The second man held something on his shoulder, but, beyond determining that it wasn’t a weapon, I ignored it and him to focus on the dangerous one.

  Sylvia held a broom in her hand, but she was frozen because the barrel of the gun was aimed right at the littlest Sandoval. Maia was locked onto Sam with both hands and screaming Spanish in a manner that might be overly dramatic if there hadn’t been an automatic pointed at her.

  I expect it was worry for her that kept the wolf motionless on the floor of the office, his eyes narrowed on the barrel of the gun as the skin over his muzzle moved in a soundless snarl.

  If I’d had time to be scared, it would have been then, looking at Samuel. At Sam. Already I could see the tightening of the muscles in his hindquarters that preceded an attack. Gun or not, Maia or not, he wasn’t waiting long.

  All of this I saw the first instant I opened the door, and I was moving even as I took in the scene. I snatched Sylvia’s broom, rounded the corner of the counter, and brought the broom handle down on the gunman’s wrists. It hit with a crack, knocking the gun loose before he, or anyone else in the room, had a chance to react to my entrance.

  Aside from turning into a coyote when I feel like it, my superpowers are limited to an inconsistent resistance to magic and a turn of speed that is a bit on the far side of humanly possible. From the time I heard the first scream, I used every ounce of speed I had.

  I swung at the man a second time, this time aiming at his body as if the broom were a Louisville Slugger, saying urgently, “Stay down, Sam.”

  All that karate was good for something, I thought, as the man grabbed the handle and jerked back. I let it go. Off balance because he was braced for resistance, he took a step back, and I kicked him in the stomach, knocking him down the stair and onto the blacktop outside. Not incidentally, he took the guy who’d been behind him with him to the ground.

  Now, if only the werewolf listens.

  I snatched up the gun our intruder had dropped on the floor and stepped into the doorway, holding the door open as he had, with one foot. I pointed the gun at the stranger’s face—and waited for the real terror to begin.

  But there was no roar behind me, no further screams as Sam shook off the air of civilization that made people look at him and think “pet” rather than “monster.”

  I took a moment to breathe then, half-stunned by Sam’s restraint. It took me a moment to figure out what to do with the best-case scenario I’d been unexpectedly gifted with.

  I could hear noise behind me, but I ignored it. Zee was there; no enemy could come at me from that direction. The sobs and frightened voices softened and stopped. Sam wasn’t growling. I wasn’t sure if it was a good sign or not, but decided to think positively.

  “Sylvia, call the police,” I told her after a half second of consideration. We were in the right. And thanks to Adam, who littered my workplace with security cameras, we’d have proof. As an added bonus, there were no werewolf attacks to explain away. No reason for Sam to play any role in this at all. “Tell them what happened and ask them to hurry.”

  “Hey, lady, you don’t want to do that,” said the second man, breathlessly. He was beginning to struggle to get out from under the gunman—who was assessing me with cool eyes while his assistant kept talking. “You don’t want the police involved. This will go better the quieter we can keep it.”

  If he hadn’t sounded so patronizing, I don’t think I would have pulled the trigger.

  I shot to the side, far enough that there was no way it would hit either of them, near enough that the blacktop that was dislodged by the bullet hit them both.

  “I’d stay still if I were you,” I said, adrenaline making my voice shake. My hands, the important part, were steady.

  “I am calling Tony,” said Sylvia behind me in a low voice that the two men lying on their backs at the base of my steps wouldn’t hear. “That way there will be no mistakes made.” Her voice was calm and unhurried. All those years as a police dispatcher coming to her aid. Tony was my friend, Sylvia’s friend—and we both trusted him.

  With the intruders under control, I became aware that there were other people outside. Not customers these. They stood by a full-sized black van that managed to look wicked and elegant in a custom paint job.

  There were three people—two (one man, one woman) dressed like the gunman, right down to the flowing locks, and a girl in a gray T-shirt and a headset. The van had the same yellow lettering that was on the man’s jacket.

  KELLY HEART, it said, I realized once I had leisure to read it, BOUNTY HUNTER. Underneath the yellow, in slightly smaller letters, it said: SATURDAYS AT 8PM CENTRAL TIME. CAT
CHING THE

  BAD GUYS, ONE AT A TIME.

  “Smile,” I said grimly to the people who had my back: Zee, Sylvia and her girls, and Sam. “We’re on Candid Camera.” Zee and Sam needed to know there were unfriendly cameras pointed at them.

  “Now, just you calm down,” said one of the people in black, the woman with bright yellow hair and red lipstick. As she started to talk, she began walking toward us briskly. “You’ll want to put down that gun. It’s just TV, lady, nothing to get excited about.”

  I don’t take orders. Not from people invading my place. I sent a second shot into the pavement in front of her.

  “Tanya, stop,” shrieked the techie-girl. “Don’t make her shoot again. Do you know what those silver bullets cost us?”

  “You’ll want to stop right there,” I told them. Silver was for werewolves. They’d come hunting werewolves. “I was raised in the backwoods of Montana. I can hit a duck on the wing.” Maybe. Probably. I’d never shot a duck in my life; I prefer hunting on all fours. “Where I come from, a gun is a weapon, not a TV prop, and if all the bad guys are dead, our side of the story is the only one that gets told. Don’t make me decide that would be easier.”

  Tanya froze, and I pulled the barrel back to center on the man whose face was vaguely familiar once I knew he was a TV star. I was fighting against the growing urge just to pull the trigger and be done with it.

  Coyotes, like werewolves, are territorial—and this gun-toting jerk had barged into my place as if he had every right to be here.

  “Are the police on their way?” I asked Sylvia, as she hung up the phone. My voice was shaking with adrenaline and anger, but my hands were still very steady.

  “He says he’ll be here in five. He also said that it would be a good thing to have backup. So there will be some other police as well.”

  I smiled widely at the bounty hunter, showing my teeth like any good predator. “Tony is a police officer. He’s known these kids since they were in diapers. He’s not going to be happy with you.” Tony was also hopelessly in love with Sylvia—though I didn’t think she knew that.